West Port Experiment

A. C. Cheyne (1924-2006), a recognized Scottish Church History scholar summarizes the central ideas inherent in Chalmers’  “territorial parish.”  It was a “manageably small area housing a community of some two thousand souls who lived, worked and worshipped together, with a church and a school at its center and a minister and a kirk session to attend to both its spiritual and its temporal necessities: here, he argued, was the basic – he would even have said the redemptive – unit of Scottish society.  Here was the means of national regeneration.”   In my reading of Chalmers, I would suggest that he would say the preaching of the Gospel was the means.  Yet, he certainly saw the territorial parish as the most efficient vehicle for getting that Gospel preaching to every man, woman, and child.