Gathered and Scattered

This is just my noticing. Many of the former Presbyterian congregations try to distinguish themselves from the Congregationalists as a "gathered congregation". This is nonsense. All that gathered mean is that it is a church that is formed by a group of like minded people meeting together rather than one set up for an area. The fact is that ALL URCs are gathered. In fact all non-conformist congregations are gathered, technically even the Roman Catholics. Being a gathered church is the English norm.

What the Scots members are doing is contrasting being "gathered" with being a "parish" church in Scotland and therefore assuming that somehow therefore the Congregational churches which tend to be more local are somehow "parish".

What they actually need to distinguish is probably local, civic and specialist. Local are congregations whose audience is defined by being in a locality, civic are congregations that are defined as being the URC for a specific metropolis (about the nearest thing we have to Cathedrals but they are spread pretty randomly: Birmingham has one, Sheffield does, but Manchester doesn't and I don't think Leeds has one either. Some smaller places: Chesterfield, Doncaster, (Wakefield used to) have them as well. There is no coherent structure to where they are and where they aren't, they are town centre and will often act as a central church. Finally there are specialist churches, these are ones that have a specific bent to their behaviour, they may be into: healing, retreats and meditation, Social justice, gay rights. The local congregation tends to attract local people (although not all will be local), the civic congregation tends to attract people from around the town, and the specialist congregation has a wider spread yet.

Now the former Presbyterian Churches are often best set to become specialist congregations, they did attract people from a wider area; although I think the fact St Andrews Sheffield for many years had a member on the Isle of Skye was a bit extreme. The problem is they need to change their speciality, as being the "Scottish" is no longer a viable option (not since the 1970s).