Dear Editor,
I greatly appreciated David Robertson’s forthright feature on the Church of Scotland’s decline It (September en). particularly grieves me too because of the debt my family owe to Scottish missionaries who came out to South Africa to help shepherd my Dutch-Afrikaner ancestors, scattered to the interior by overbearing British rule in Cape Town.
When my orphaned great-grandfather, also Charles, was left alone with his siblings after the untimely death of their father journeying through the veldt, the family were saved from extinction by passing Christians. Charles was brought up in the expansive Dutch Reformed Church parsonage of the Revd Andrew Murray Snr in Graaff Reinet.
