First Secession
exodus of churches from the Church of Scotland in 1733
The First Secession was an exodus of ministers and members from the Church of Scotland in 1733. Those who took part formed the Associate Presbytery and later the United Secession Church. They were often referred to as Seceders.
The underlying principles of the split focused upon issues of ecclesiology and ecclesiastical polity, especially in the perceived threat lay patronage represented to the right of a congregation to choose its own minister. These issues had their roots in seventeenth century controversies between presbyterian and episcopal factions in the Church of Scotland.
This was complicated by the fact that most ministers, by tradition, were the younger sons from the aristocratic families, and those same families were usually the local landowners. The local landowner therefore would often act as a "patron" to the church, not only through gifting of money, but through supply of their own relatives to fill the role of minister.
There were some ministers from more humble backgrounds, but these frequently found it hard to receive nomination for any post, lacking the family connections then required.
Unlike later schisms, where the country congregations were the main participants, the main advocates of the Secession Church were the town dwellers, and most large Scottish towns had a Secession Church.
History
The Church Patronage (Scotland) Act 1711 laid a bed of general unrest amongst the Church of Scotland, laying down set rules on how ministers were to be chosen and based on very non-Scottish ideas of feudal hierarchy, more a product of the Act of Union 1707 than of traditional Scottish approach to issues.
The public source identifies “First Secession” as exodus of churches from the Church of Scotland in 1733. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around First, Secession and exodus.
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This entry incorporates text from “First Secession” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.