Stewart Todd was minister of St Machar’s Cathedral in Aberdeen, a respected liturgist and a chaplain to the Queen in Scotland. In his insistence on wearing clerical dress, his purple-prose style and adherence to his strict understanding of liturgy, he became an anachronism in a church whose ministers are often casually dressed, colloquial in speech and inclined to favour “all age worship” rather than formal orders of service.
Todd was, however, an influential figure in the development of the Church of Scotland’s worship in the 1970s. Every so often the church produced a Book of Common Order, which contained sample orders of service for the church’s worship. The use of these books was never mandatory, but when a version was published in 1979, with Todd the person most closely associated with it as the Convener of the General Assembly’s Committee on Public Worship, there was an outcry. The Church of Scotland at large has never been comfortable with Holy Communion being celebrated every Sunday, but Todd described worship involving preaching and the celebration of the Eucharist as “normative” and that it “best reflects the logic of the Gospel”. So incensed were those who believed their reformed heritage was being undermined, that a group of them, described as “the Presbyterian equivalents of the followers of Archbishop Lefebvre”, produced an alternative and extremely conservative Reformed Book of Common Order.
Stewart Todd was born in Alloa and educated at Stirling High School. He took an honours degree in Classics at the University of Edinburgh and then entered the divinity faculty in New College, where he graduated as Bachelor of Divinity. He was Hamilton Scholar in 1947 and Brown Downie Fellow in 1948; he taught elementary Greek to his fellow students. He spent a postgraduate year in the University of Basle and then became assistant minister of St Cuthbert’s Church in the West End of Edinburgh. In 1952 he was called to his first parish, Symington in Lanarkshire, and in 1960 to North Leith. In 1967 he became minister of St Machar’s Cathedral, where he stayed until he retired in 1993.
Todd’s early interest outside the parish ministry lay in translating theological works from their original German: Cullman’s Early Christian Worship, Koehler’s Old Testament Theology and Lohmeyer’s Lord of the Temple. He became increasingly involved in liturgical revision. He was a member of the two associations most closely associated with “high” worship in the Kirk, the Scottish Church Society and the Church Service Society. He was president of both. He chaired the Committee on Public Worship from 1974-78, was a member for 43 years of the Church Hymnary Trust, and involved with the production of a new hymnary for the Church of Scotland in 1973. From 1990 to 1995 he chaired the General Assembly’s Panel on Doctrine.
In 1980 Todd was elected Moderator of the Presbytery of Aberdeen, in 1992 Aberdeen University awarded him an honorary doctorate of divinity, and in 1992 he was appointed one of the chaplains to the Queen in Scotland. He retired in 1993 to the village of Buchlyvie in his native Stirlingshire.
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His wife and a daughter predeceased him. He is survived by two sons and a daughter.
The Rev Stewart Todd, Church of Scotland minister and Chaplain to the Queen in Scotland, was born on May 26, 1926. He died on September 2, 2009, aged 83