Maxwelltown West Church

This Parish Profile is provided for the information of prospective candidates for our minister vacancy. You can download it in PDF format using this link or read it below:

The Presbytery Clerk has circulated advice that church services have been suspended until further notice.  This will also apply to all church organisations.

The new Contact magazine for March 2020 is now available. You can read it in full here.

Belated New Year Greetings to you all! I do hope you all enjoyed Christmas and welcomed in 2020. Writing this on a cold stormy winter’s day seems so far from the springtime which will be soon with us. Indeed it is a joy to see spring bulbs sprouting their green shoots up through the cold wet ground. So it is…

We had a fantastic start to our new Sunday bible study group, which the youngsters seem to be enjoying. Our first project has been to look at Genesis, and both Blair and Georgia have been breaking down and questioning what is contained there. They have been particularly interested in how long ‘a day’ was when the world was created and…

It was the great humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer, also a passionate organist, who once said ‘Thank God each time when you are privileged to sit before the organ console and assist in the worship of the Almighty.” Today, many churches in Scotland struggle to find someone to play the organ, assuming of course that the instrument…

It’s been a heartwarming experience to see how well the MaxWest Movies’ Film Nights have been progressing – judging by the numbers of people who ask us about the next screening it’s become a much-anticipated social experience. The general feeling is that around ten films, spread monthly over the period September to early May is about enough – as the…

What’s on around the churches, from December 1 until the first Sunday of Christmas at the end of the month. Join in and celebrate the coming of the Lord Jesus!

Looking Forward to 2020 – Rev. Sally Russell, Interim Moderator It is my hope and prayer for 2020 that the congregation of Maxwelltown West will continue moving forward and developing themselves and the work that goes on here. There are big changes ahead for the whole Church – not just the churches in Dumfries – and I see this as…

How quickly summer seems to come and go. As I write this, I am sitting with our log burner on for first time since April. Autumn has surely come. I do hope many of you had some of the summer sunshine and the wet days didn’t dampen or spoil your holiday. I have been asked to write about 2020: many…

To be a Pilgrim – David Johnson considers the benefits of a good walk. As a squeaky-voiced probationer chorister in Derby Cathedral choir, I loved singing “To be a Pilgrim”, also known as “Who would true valour see”. It is the only hymn that John Bunyan is credited with writing, sung to the tune “Monks’ Gate” by Ralph Vaughan Williams. I…

People often ask me if I get lonely when touring alone on my summer holidays, it’s by choice and not circumstance that I ride my high-powered BMW motorcycle without a visible pillion passenger. People think I may be lonely and therefore approach me and ask such thing as ‘where am I heading? Am I camping, and if so is the…

Greetings to you all.  I do hope that you have enjoyed some of the glorious summer sunshine and enjoyed a holiday away for a few days. Easter Day brought tragedy to our world in the awful Christian church bombings in Sri Lanka.  Over 250 people lost their lives, and over 500 injured, many with life changing injuries, whilst celebrating and…

The Martyr of the Solway memorial at Kippford is (was) a small wooden figure with red fishing-net hair, chained to a post in the Urr estuary.  It is (was) a memorial to the Wigtown Martyrs – two Covenanters, Margaret McLauchlan aged 63 and Margaret Wilson aged 18 (the young redhead represented in the painting “The Martyr of the Solway” by…