Rev Peter Houston,
born March 1 1928, died January 18 2010
Peter Houston was a big man: big physically, with a big personality. He was minister of Renfrew Old Parish Church from 1963 until he retired in 1997. He was a powerful preacher with a fondness for lapsing into the Scots tongue for phrases which he thought more colourfully conveyed the meaning of their sometimes bland equivalent in English.
Houston came from a Church family; his father was an elder who took considerable interest in the Kirk (a word Peter Houston almost always used) and the administration of its affairs. He was born in Renton and educated at the Primary school there and at Dumbarton Academy. While training for the ministry at the University of Glasgow, he was student assistant and then probationer at the then Dumbarton Old Parish Church with the scholarly Church historian W M Campbell, and in December 1952 he was ordained and inducted to Craigneuk and Belhaven Church in Wishaw.
In 1963 he was called to Renfrew Old. He was always eager to point out that the establishment of a church in Renfrew by King David in 1136 predated by almost thiry years the foundation by Walter Fitzalan, steward of Scotland of one which was to become Paisley Abbey. There was always a competitive side to Peter Houston.
He was a minister who had a strong sense of liturgy and order in worship, and also acute pastoral sensitivity, able to cut through what someone said to what might lie hidden behind it. He was also a minister who did not restrict himself to nourishing the life of a congregation but was committed to work beyond it. He was for many years chaplain to Strathclyde Regional Fire Brigade, and firemen in stations across what was then a very large administrative area speak of his ability to get alongside them and understand the strains of their job.
Houston was also chaplain to Glasgow Airport. When STV made a series in the 1980s, Airport Chaplain, to run alongside their then God-slot programmes, it was reviewed in this paper by William McIlvanney, who wrote that “to make big issues out of trivia is to trivialise the big issues”. There was nothing trivial about Houston’s chaplaincy at Glasgow Airport. He conducted worship there frequently and was called upon to help in the sort of far from trivial crises which were experienced by staff and passengers alike. During a time of recession, and when the sort of industry which the Renfrew area had relied on was under threat, Houston’s criticism of economic policy and social conditions was trenchant. There were those who thought that perhaps Houston’s involvement beyond the life of his congregation accelerated its rate of decline at a time when the Church of Scotland’s membership was haemmorhaging rapidly, but he was always clear that he was called to be a parish minister rather than chaplain to a congregation. He played an important part in the life of Paisley Presbytery, of which he was Moderator for a year.
Peter Houston knew tragedy in his own family life. His daughter Mag died over twenty five years ago.
After he retired he went to live in Jamestown, close to where he was born and near where his daughter Liz is minister in Alexandria. She survives him along with Peter’s wife Nan.
Published in The Herald.