Andrew Shiland, D.D.

As I research the history of PCMK for our Mission Study, and a project Herb Reinke is organizing for the Presbytery, I'm learning a bit about our first pastor, the Rev. Andrew Shiland, who turns out to be much more interesting than the official church history would have it.

He was installed June 14, 1854 by the Presbytery of Bedford. (It was reported in the New York Times!) In the 70th-anniversary history of the church he is remembered as "of Scotch ancestry, of the old school, a student and schoolmaster, stern, of strong opinions and perhaps dictatorial, grounded in the doctrines of the Presbyterian Church and accepting them in toto, as a sermonizer to-day he would be considered dull but he was sound in doctrine and an earnest worker among his flock." (citing Dr. Harrison Teller)

Shiland wrote From Ocean to Ocean. With Notes and Observations on the Way, apparently based on a series of dispatches he sent back to a New York newspaper as he traveled across the country to attend a meeting of the 1892 General Assembly in Portland, Oregon. The book reveals a much more liberal, almost cavalier attitude.

He described attending worship in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, and observed, "I know of one minister, a D. D., who remained outside and refused to go in on the ground of conscientious scruples. He thought that his presence at the religious service of this queer people would lend countenance to Mormonism; I experienced no difficulty of that kind."

 He confesses that he skipped out on the Assembly to visit San Francisco, allowing others to decide the weighty matters of that Assembly related to the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy: the Briggs Case and the "Portland Deliverance."

"ON the 22d of May, at 10 P. M., we went on board the steamer State of California for San Francisco.

"I thought that the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the United States could manage the Briggs case, the Revision of the Creed and all other matters that might come before that venerable body without my presence. Although my name was called in the matter of voting as I did, dismissing the case of Dr. Briggs, I was not there to respond to it. "

As I reflect on these vignettes, I acknowledge that Dr. Shiland may have mellowed a lot after leaving Mount Kisco to serve first at Southampton on Long Island, and then in New York City. However he seems to demonstrate a singular independence of the denominational polity--something that has marked our congregation in some ways right up to the present! (I'm thinking here of our "More Light" stance.)

--Jack Lohr, Interim Pastor