St John's Renfield Church

St. John's Renfield Church is a parish church of the Church of Scotland, serving Kelvindale in the west end of Glasgow, Scotland. It is within the Church of Scotland's Presbytery of Glasgow.

The church building is situated in Beaconsfield Road, Kelvindale (within the G12 postcode area). The church is visible from the Great Western Road. Gartnavel General Hospital, Gartnavel Royal Hospital and the Glasgow Nuffield Hospital are located nearby.

The history of the present St John's Renfield Church has its roots in three separate congregations reflecting the ecclesiastical, industrial and demographic fortunes of nineteenth and twentieth century Scotland.

The opening phase in the story dates back to 1819. Glasgow like other industrial towns was confronted with the appalling, overcrowded and insanitary living conditions engendered by the rapidly increasing population. A new Church, St John's Parish Church, was built on the corner of Bell Street and Macfarlane Street to serve the deprived Calton area.

Its first minister was the young Dr Thomas Chalmers who already had a considerable reputation as moral reformer and evangelical preacher and whose leadership during the Disruption in 1843 was to make him, in the words of Carlyle, "The chief Scotsman of his age." Chalmers had managed to persuade the Provost and Magistrates to appoint him as Minister to the new church in order to allow him to put into practice his unorthodox, evangelical ideas for alleviating the material and spiritual squalor generated by industrialism. Thanks to this approach, which became a model in its time, he hoped to bring about a moral change by fostering independence and by privileging personal contact, parochial care and schooling. Chalmers' Ministry had considerable success but was relatively short, for, in 1823, he was appointed to the chair of moral philosophy at St Andrews University. He was replaced first by Dr Patrick MacFarlan, and then by Dr Thomas Brown and the Church continued to prosper with a growing congregation until the great schism caused over the issue of "spiritual independence" and "patronage" which led to the Disruption and the creation of the new independent Free Church of Scotland*. On 14 May 1843, Dr Brown preached his last sermon in Macfarlane Street, and then, with the support of 1151 out of 1175 members of the congregation, left the church. Three days later, a new congregation was formed under the name of "Free St John's". Initially, without a place of worship, the congregation found a temporary location in Blackfriar's street, until, thanks to a subscription, sufficient funds were collected for a new Church to be built in George street in 1845, where "Free St John's" continued to prosper until 1922.

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