Most Presbyterians in America can name John Knox and maybe the year 1560, but beyond that, our understanding of the Scottish Reformation is limited. The church you belong to, your elders and your presbytery, your confessions, your conviction that no bishop and no king stands between a believer and Scripture, came from the rich history of conflict and division in Scotland. To walk through Scotland is to walk back through your own tradition. You see where the reformers argued, where the martyrs burned, where the Kirk decided what it would be.

Before the Reformation: Iona and the Celtic roots

Christianity reached Scotland long before Knox preached his fiery sermons. Ninian, in the fifth century, and Columba, in the sixth, established monastic communities in the Celtic style: places of evangelism, hospitality, care for the poor, and the patient copying of manuscripts. Columba’s community was on Iona, a small island off the west coast, and it became one of the most important Christian sites in the whole of the British Isles.

Iona is still a place of pilgrimage. Progressive Pilgrimage groups spend two or three nights on the island, worshiping in the restored Iona Abbey alongside the modern Iona Community. Our groups tour the abbey, the nunnery, and the village, with time set aside for quiet. Getting there is a full travel day by coach and two ferries, through Loch Lomond and the Trossachs to Oban, across the Isle of Mull to Fionnphort, and over the water to Iona. Early Celtic Christians called pilgrimage a kind of “white martyrdom”: leaving home and the familiar for the sake of the gospel.

This Celtic strand of the faith held until the late seventh century, when the Synod of Whitby gave priority to the Roman tradition. Through the Middle Ages the church in Scotland grew rich and powerful. By the sixteenth century it owned roughly half the country. That wealth, and the corruption that came with it, set the stage for what followed.

The Reformation: St Andrews, Edinburgh, and John Knox

Luther’s ideas crossed from the continent into Scotland in the 1520s, and the authorities moved quickly against the disruption. In 1525 the Scottish Parliament outlawed Protestant books. Three years later Patrick Hamilton, one of the first Scots to take up Luther’s teaching, was burned at the stake for heresy at St Andrews. In 1546 George Wishart, who had committed another of the era’s great offenses, teaching the Greek New Testament so people could read Scripture for themselves, was tried and burned at St Andrews as well. Wishart’s friend and sometime bodyguard was a priest named John Knox.

Knox quickly became the central figure of the Scottish Reformation. Captured at St Andrews Castle in 1547 and made a galley slave in France, later exiled to Geneva, he sat under John Calvin and absorbed a fully Reformed theology: not Lutheran, not Anglican, but Calvinist in doctrine, worship, and government. He carried it home in 1559. Within a year the Scottish Parliament had adopted the Scots Confession, drafted by Knox and five other ministers in four days, and Scotland was a Protestant nation. Knox died in 1572 and was buried in the kirkyard at St Giles’ in Edinburgh.

St Andrews is where the Reformation in Scotland began, and where its first martyrs died. Our groups visit the ruined cathedral and castle, the cobbled initials that mark where Hamilton and Wishart burned, and the university town where the argument first took hold.

Edinburgh is where the tour makes the Reformation concrete. Groups walk the Royal Mile, pass the John Knox House, and come to St Giles’ Cathedral, the High Kirk and the church most associated with Knox’s own preaching, for a tour and a short midday service. Nearby is Greyfriars Kirk, where a group can learn about the Reformation, the split between the Presbyterian and Anglican churches, and the neighborhood ministry the congregation runs today. Lunch is often at the Grassmarket Café, a social enterprise founded by Greyfriars; the Reformation’s concern for the poor and for education still shapes the congregation’s work. The day usually ends at Edinburgh Castle, where the civil wars of the Reformation were settled by treaty in 1573.

Glasgow: older stones, a living Kirk

Most Scotland pilgrimages begin in Glasgow. The first stop is often Govan Old Church, home of the Govan Stones, carved crosses and sarcophagi from the Viking age and evidence of Christian worship here centuries before the Scottish Reformation. Govan Old Church is also the parish of Rev. George MacLeod, founder of the new Iona Community. From there groups visit Glasgow Cathedral, called St Mungo’s after the city’s patron saint, and take a short walking tour of the center.

Glasgow is also where a group meets the living Kirk. If your group is in Glasgow on a Sunday, we can arrange worship at Govan and Linthouse Parish Church, a Church of Scotland congregation: sharing the service, meeting the minister, singing the same hymns your own church sings. The Kirk is not a museum. Its elders still govern. Its presbyteries still meet. It remains a living church.

Why this trip, for this church

The connection is concrete. The Presbyterian Church (USA) still names the three marks the Scots Confession set out: the true preaching of the Word, the right administration of the sacraments, and ecclesiastical discipline. Our Directory for Worship still moves through the Word gathered, proclaimed, and sent into the world. When your congregation sings the Doxology to Old Hundredth, you are singing a tune from Calvin’s Genevan Psalter. That history continues with the elected elders on your session, the presbytery that ordains your ministers: that structure was hammered out in the Books of Discipline in the decades after 1560.

A pilgrimage lets a congregation stand in the places where all of this took shape. It also raises harder questions, and Progressive Pilgrimage’s trips make room for them. The Scots Confession is severe toward Catholics and Jews in ways the modern church has to name and renounce, and the Reformation was as much a political power struggle as a religious one. Whether you reflect on this at St Giles’ or Edinburgh Castle, or once you return home, our trips make room for that reckoning and encourage your congregation’s continued reformation.

Planning your congregation’s pilgrimage

A Scotland pilgrimage typically runs eleven or twelve days: we recommend two nights in Glasgow, three nights on Iona, a couple of nights in the Highlands or around St. Andrews, with the balance in Edinburgh. Progressive Pilgrimage builds each trip around a particular group’s questions, so the balance of Reformation history, Celtic spirituality, and worship shifts depending on what your congregation most wants to explore. You can see current departures on the upcoming pilgrimages page.

If this sounds like a trip your church would enjoy, schedule a call with Eric.