Before the building that we are in now was built, the site was home to two other church buildings. The first one of them was the Potter Row Church established in 1765. It was the result of a “walk-out” by a considerable proportion of the congregation at the nearby Lady Yester’s Church.
The walk out happened due to a disagreement between the Burghers and anti-Burghers over the level of patronage in appointing the church ministers. Following the disagreement, the Burghers eventually held a meeting in January 1765, where they agreed to establish the first “Relief Church” in Edinburgh. This decision has been called “one of the most significant protests in the struggle to achieve a balance between an orderly church government and a degree of freedom of thought and spiritual practice.” Another fascinating fact about this movement was that the Burghers were so strong in their conviction that they built and funded the construction of a church within one year of their initial meeting.
The first church building was able to accommodate 1200 people. The church welcomed very diverse people from different social strata: “From nobles to domestics, from magistrates to shop assistants, all had sufficient freedom of expression and responsibility for their own views and arguments to claim the rights they felt were their own”.
In the pictures you see the first six ministers that preached in this location over almost a hundred years, from 1766 to 1864. The first one of them was Rev James Baine. He was considered to be one of the most eloquent preachers of the time, and regularly preached to a full church during the 20 years of his time as the minister of the church. He was also very influential in liberalising many of the then prevailing religious attitudes and was an advocate of the right of self-determination for the church congregations. He was succeeded by James Struthers, who at that time was just 21 years old. Struthers was at first considered to be not as good as his predecessor, but relatively quickly he established his reputation and became equally as respected. During the time of Struthers’ ministry, in 1796, the church congregation decided to replace their building with a bigger one, accommodating up to 1650 people.
During the building of the second church, the congregation met in ‘The Circus’, a place of theatrical entertainment located at the head of Leith Walk. Rev. Struthers (the minister) was a contemporary of Lord Cockburn, the lawyer and diarist. Cockburn was to remark on the numbers of people to flock to the Circus to hear Struthers and on the unusual surroundings:
“It was strange to see the pit, boxes and galleries filled with devout worshipers and to detect the edges of scenes and other vestiges of the Saturday night, while a pulpit was brought to the front of the stage, on which there stood a tall, pale, well-dressed man earnestly but gently alluring the audience to religion by elegant declamation … (He was the only minister) who attracted people of good taste, not of his community, to his church, merely for the pleasure of hearing him preach.“
The new church building was opened in late 1798.
Following Struthers’ early death in 1807, the next 50 years saw successively the Rev. James Smith, the Rev. William Limont, the Rev. John French, and then the Rev. David McEwan.
