Glasgow the Welcoming City 1 June 2025

It wasn’t the best of days for this core service in the calendar of Glasgow’s ecumenical events, with a significant number of Orange Order walks going through the city centre to Glasgow Cathedral around the time the service was due to start and making travel for participants difficult.

However, the commitment and determination of the musicians and singers – including the St Mungo Singers, St Mungo Ensemble, Salvation Army musicians, and adult and children’s choirs from the Ukrainian community – and others ensured a very prayerful and enriching service as attendees gained a space to reflect on the need for welcome and inclusion at this time of world-wide conflict and violence.

In her welcome, Deputy Lord Provost Cllr. Christy Mearns reflected on the origins of the Glasgow the Welcoming City service which had begun as a service to welcome visitors to the city but had then expanded to welcome all who came to make their home there.

She said it was great to be holding the service in this, the 850^th anniversary of the city becoming a Bishop’s Burgh, and she thanked Glasgow Churches Together for their pivotal role in establishing a number of key events in the city, including also the Carols for Peace service and the St Mungo celebrations.  Cllr Mearns concluded her welcome by recognising that there has perhaps never been a greater need in recent times to establish relationships and links, and to support the importance of inclusive values, a commitment to unity and the promotion of peace and hope.

In the opening prayers, the need for peace in Bethlehem (Glasgow’s twinned city), the West Bank and Gaza, Israel and Ukraine and all the other countries suffering violence, homelessness and poverty was central.  A greeting from the new Pope, Pope Leo XIV, was read, and its central message too was “Peace be with you!”

The choir of the Ukrainian Parish of the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ sang a beautiful and heartrending hymn for peace with its plea Keep safe, O Lord, we plead, those who cry out in love”, before the Gospel reading with its challenging opening words “Do not let your hearts be troubled”.

In her reflection after the Gospel, Rev. Janet Mathieson, Moderator of the Presbytery of Glasgow, mused on the challenges of arriving in a new city – a daunting, disorientating, even an uncomfortable experience.  The author of the first reading, from the Book of the Apocalypse, would have been familiar with how hard that life could be.  A preacher of a new religion, he had been exiled to Patmos and his future would have been uncertain.  But there he had experienced a vision of the new Jerusalem, the perfect city.

Her favourite verses of that vision were of the gates of the city never being shut by day and there being no night.  This meant that no-one could be shut out of the city and all would flourish.  She quoted the words of the late Pope Francis who spoke of the Sabbath of eternity where all would be at rest, and his longing for it.

Rev Janet put the challenge that this should not just be a vision for after death but something we should be working for here and now to build a holy city in praise of God who desires the wellbeing of all people.

We are called to welcome people and live in peace and unity.  There should be no place for rejection, sectarianism, or abandonment of those in need.  We here, in the Welcoming City, are called to model a different way of living at a time where so many cities are being destroyed.

As those present reflected on her words, the Ensemble played quietly and then the Children’s Choir “Volya” of St Mary’s Ukrainian School in Glasgow, sang a moving song of their dreams, drawn on paper, of peace and the end of the cruel war wracking their country.

The congregation responded to these dreams of peace with the singing of Carl Daw’s beautiful hymn O Day of Peace, set to the tune of Jerusalem, before the intercessions for the city, all who come to it, and for peace were read.

Each year, a collection is taken up at this service, and this year it was for the work of Refuweegee, a small Glasgow based charity which works to support asylum seekers and refugees who come to Glasgow.

The service finished with the praying of the Lord’s Prayer, a blessing by the church representatives present and the singing of the Canticle of Zechariah, otherwise known to many as the Benedictus.

There was then an opportunity for all present to mingle and chat in the Satinwood Suite over refreshments.

Let Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the Word