Bristo Church

Bristo Church was a Presbyterian church in the Bristo area of Edinburgh that, though it no longer stands, played a role of great importance in the history of the seceding churches of Scotland. Founded in 1741 as a Secession church, it was for nearly two centuries one of the most significant Dissenting congregations in the Scottish capital, the scene of momentous events in the story of Presbyterian dissent, and the worshipping home of some of Scotland's most famous missionaries. Although the building was demolished in 1967, the memory and the name of Bristo Church live on.

The church owed its origin to one of the great controversies of eighteenth-century Scotland: the question of patronage, the right of the Crown and landowners to impose a minister upon a congregation against its wishes. In 1732 the Crown used this right to install Patrick Wotherspoon as a minister of the West Kirk in Edinburgh against the wishes of the congregation, sparking a tumult. A "Praying Society" seceded in protest, joined the Associate Presbytery — the body formed by the first secession from the Church of Scotland — in 1738, and built their own church at Bristo in 1741, with the formidable Adam Gib as its first minister.

From the beginning Bristo was at the very centre of the history of Scotland's seceding churches. It was here, in 1747, that "The Breach" occurred — the split between the Burgher and Anti-Burgher factions of the Secession, over whether members might lawfully take a civic oath. For more than seventy years the two factions went their separate ways, until in 1820 they were reunited, fittingly, at Bristo, to form the United Secession Church; and in 1847 the first synod of the United Presbyterian Church — one of the great Presbyterian denominations of Victorian Scotland — was held here. The church was also deeply committed to mission, both at home and abroad, and among those who worshipped at Bristo were two of the most celebrated missionaries Scotland ever produced: Mary Slessor, the heroic missionary to Calabar in West Africa, and Robert Laws, the great missionary to Malawi.

The congregation's first meeting-house was a simple, low and narrow building, which was demolished in 1802 and replaced by a new neoclassical meeting-house, opened in 1804; the congregation's property also included Seceders' Land, a tall tenement that stood between the meeting-house and Bristo Street. In the great reunions of the Scottish churches, the congregation rejoined the Church of Scotland in 1929, but it was dissolved in 1937. The building afterwards passed to the University of Edinburgh, which used it as the Pollock Memorial Hall, until it was demolished, along with much of the old Bristo neighbourhood, from 1967, as the area was redeveloped for the expanding university. The name and tradition of the congregation have been carried on since 1940 by Bristo Memorial Church in the Craigmillar district of Edinburgh.

Though the building is gone, the site of Bristo Church lies in the heart of the University of Edinburgh's central area, in the Old Town of the city. Nearby are the historic buildings of the university, including the McEwan Hall and the Old College, the National Museum of Scotland, Greyfriars Kirk and its kirkyard, the Royal Mile and the Old Town, and the wider attractions of Edinburgh, one of the most beautiful capital cities in Europe.

From its foundation in 1741 in protest at patronage, through "The Breach" of 1747, the reunion of 1820 and the first United Presbyterian synod of 1847, its connection with the missionaries Mary Slessor and Robert Laws, and its eventual dissolution and demolition, Bristo Church gathers a remarkable chapter of Scottish religious history into its story. Though the building no longer survives, it remains a notable part of the history of Presbyterian dissent in Scotland — a congregation whose influence reached from the closes of Edinburgh to the mission fields of Africa, and whose name endures in the Bristo Memorial Church today.