Religious Heritage Innovator of the Year Award 2024

Scotland’s Churches Trust
December 2024

In a rather lovely end to another busy year for us, Scotland’s Churches Trust has been recognised as the “Religious Heritage Innovator of the Year 2024” by the Future for Religious Heritage (FRH).
This European cultural heritage award celebrates our ongoing project to develop a rapid church recording methodology, which has been adopted by groups of volunteers across the country to speedily record Scotland’s closing churches. This work has helped draw public attention to the significant cultural inheritance deposited in Scotland’s churches that is currently gravely endangered as hundreds of Scottish churches close their doors for good.
Our project records the hundreds of moveable items within each church, that will inevitably be dispersed, sold or lost as each closing building moves onto its next chapter. The pilot phase, supported by Historic Environment Scotland, to develop a rapid recording methodology ended in 2023 and we spent the last year mobilising and supporting a nationwide network of wonderful volunteer church recorders, who have, so far, recorded almost 50 Scottish churches.
The ongoing and future efforts of these wonderful local clusters of volunteers, documenting the thousands of unique items that have been gifted and deposited in Scotland’s churches by successive generations of communities right across the country, will ensure that a permanent record is created for anyone in the future with a research interest in these unique sites.

Our volunteers record everything they find within a church that might possibly be removed in the future, from the magnificent but fragile stained glass windows to the tiniest graffiti that is occasionally scrawled on the rear pews. From the impressive pipe organs, that are sadly often sold for scrap these days, to the historic war memorials and personal memorial dedications. No detail is overlooked, no drawer is passed-by, no cupboard goes unexamined.

Future for Religious Heritage (FRH) is an independent, non-faith, non-profit European network founded in 2011 and based in Brussels to promote, encourage and support the safeguard, maintenance, conservation, restoration, accessibility and embellishment of historic places of worship. Their Religious Heritage Innovator of the Year Award is an annual accolade celebrating transformative initiatives within Europe’s religious heritage sector. Our rapid recording methodology stood out among nominees for its scalable, community-driven approach to addressing the challenges of declining church attendance and closures.
The award also highlighted our project’s alignment with the European Commission’s Framework for Action on Cultural Heritage, particularly focusing on five specific attributes: inclusion, sustainability, resilience, innovation and cooperation. By working closely with local communities and the closing congregations and involving them wherever and whenever possible in the recording process, our project tries to foster a spirit of inclusivity that recognises the shared stewardship of Scotland’s religious cultural heritage. This also hopefully provides some small crumb of comfort too during the, oft-fraught and emotionally-charged, building closure process and ensures a richer and more valuable documentary record is created in the process.
Commenting on winning the award, Professor Adam Cumming, the Chairperson of our Board of Trustees, said:
“We want to thank the Future for Religious Heritage for this award. It is fantastic to see the hard work and dedication of our volunteers recognised so clearly. We also need to thank the various congregations for their support. This must be an ongoing task and is a fascinating voyage of discovery, learning more about, and documenting, our heritage. There is still so much to uncover!”

Scotland’s Churches Trust and its two parent charities, the Scottish Churches Architectural Heritage Trust and Scotland’s Churches Scheme, have been championing Scotland’s religious heritage for almost half a century. Our rapid church recording project, and the projects of all of the other wonderful finalists in this competition, drawn from right across Europe, illustrate just how fragile the immense cultural, artistic, genealogical, social and religious legacy located within our historic churches has become.
Our ambition to make a permanent, readily accessible public record of this unique cultural inheritance would simply not be possible without the Herculean efforts of the many wonderful volunteers across Scotland who have so-far stepped forward to help document these cultural artefacts. We want to say a HUGE thank-you to each and every one of them, along with the congregations who have allowed us to record their beautiful churches, our fellow finalists and the judges of the Future for Religious Heritage.

Unfortunately, our research has shown that there are several hundred more Scottish churches likely to close in the coming months. If you have read this blog and been thinking that you would like to get involved with our efforts to document this particularly endangered area of Scotland’s unique cultural heritage, before it too is lost to future generations, please get in touch.
There are now some well-established, fantastic volunteer recording groups in Inverclyde, Perthshire and Aberdeenshire, all looking for more members, and our small office team tends to record churches in and around Edinburgh and the Lothians. You would be very welcome to join any of these groups at their next recording visits, or we can hold an online training event to help you form a recording group in your area.
To find out more about our rapid recording methodology and the project itself, you can also download a copy of our Church Recorders’ Handbook here.