Life Church

Life Church is a congregation of the Apostolic Church, a Pentecostal denomination, in the Southside of Edinburgh — worshipping in a simple Neoclassical building of 1813 on the corner of Davie Street and West Richmond Street whose history runs through one of the most gloriously intricate genealogies in Scottish church history: built for Auld Licht Anti-Burghers, it passed through six denominational identities before the Pentecostals arrived in 1930.

The building's first congregation was founded in 1806, when Thomas M'Crie the Elder — minister of Potterrow Anti-Burgher Secession Church, and famed as the biographer of John Knox — withdrew with most of his congregation from that denomination, in opposition to the moderate New Lichts then in the ascendancy. The seceders from the Secession remained at Potterrow until 1809, met at Carrubber's Close in the Old Town, and in May 1813 moved into a purpose-built meeting house in the Southside. In 1827 they were joined by a faction of Auld Licht Anti-Burghers who had opposed the creation of the United Secession Church in 1820, and in 1842 the Auld Licht Anti-Burghers joined other factions to form the United Original Secession Church — at a meeting held in this very building, which became the meeting place of the new church's synod. At M'Crie's death in 1835 the congregation had called as minister his son, Thomas M'Crie the Younger, continuing the family line.

The unions kept coming. The Original Secession Church united with the Free Church in 1852, and in 1858 the Davie Street congregation adopted the name McCrie Church in honour of its first two ministers. Reduced to a mission station in 1885, McCrie united with Roxburgh Free Church on 10 January 1886 at the encouragement of the Free Church's Presbytery of Edinburgh, the united McCrie-Roxburgh congregation keeping the McCrie buildings. Under the minister John McNeill — so popular a preacher that congregations soon outgrew the building — a new church was considered in 1888; but by 1910 McCrie-Roxburgh had the smallest membership of the five United Free churches in the Southside (the congregation having joined the United Free Church in the national union of 1900). After considering and rejecting union with Fountainhall Road and Craigmillar Park, the congregation united with Newington United Free Church on condition that the Davie Street buildings be kept as mission halls, holding its last service on 27 June 1920. When the United Free Church united with the Church of Scotland in 1929 and Newington became a parish church, the Davie Street buildings lay outside its territory — and in 1930 they were sold to the Apostolic Church, which has used them ever since.

The building itself, Category B listed since 1977, is a simple rectangle with a two-storey façade of five bays, the central bay slightly recessed, with double Doric columns in antis flanking the doorway — the columns possibly added around 1830. Inside, the sanctuary has a gallery on three sides and was recast in 1886 by George Washington Browne, the architect of Edinburgh's Central Library, who added an ornate ceiling; the ceiling was removed during roof repairs in 1981, when the building was refurbished.

Today Life Church subscribes to the Apostolic Church's statement of faith and pours its energy into the city: the congregation supports Soul Food, providing meals and hospitality for those in need, and the Bethany Christian Trust, the Edinburgh-based homelessness charity. Since 2018 it has been working through the planning process to extend the building — initial plans by architects Aitken Turnbull were withdrawn in June 2018, revised proposals with a two-storey rear and angular concrete colonnade were rejected in 2019, and further plans submitted in March 2021 feature a curved exterior wall with bronze fins dividing the windows. Two centuries after the strictest of Scotland's seceders raised its Doric columns, the old Auld Licht meeting house is full of Pentecostal singing — a denominational journey from Anti-Burgher to Apostolic that could only have happened in Edinburgh.