An afternoon at the Christian Heritage Centre in Edinburgh challenges the popularity of the city’s ghost tours while giving people the chance to hear the good news of Jesus.
Paul-James Griffiths had the vision for a Christian Heritage Centre in Edinburgh some years earlier, and began the project by starting the Celtic Tour because he noticed that the Royal Mile had many ghost tours and other historical tours but had nothing that tells people about Edinburgh’s spiritual history. Paul and his colleague Phil dress up as St Cuthbert and John Knox respectively, and they tell the story of Christianity in Edinburgh from ancient times to the present day.
Thousands of visitors
There’s a short video telling the Spiritual History of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh in 11 languages with a gospel presentation at the end. The video project was the idea of Richard Fettes, one of the volunteers at the Centre, and was filmed and edited by Hugh Smith. To date more than 6,000 people from all over the world have been on the Celtic Tour.
Associated with the Celtic Tour is the Christian Heritage Centre itself, hosted by St Columba’s Free Church of Scotland at the top of the Royal Mile, where there are a series of panels telling the story, with translations in the most common languages encountered at the Centre. Each summer an average of over 10,000 visitors from all parts of the globe are welcomed by teams of volunteers. Christians have an ideal opportunity to present the good news of Christ in the context of the historical display.
St Columba’s Free Church itself is of great interest to visitors, being built shortly after the Disruption when the Free Church of Scotland was formed in 1843. It has some fascinating features such as the pulpit cover copied from a design in Milan Cathedral, and a hammer beam ceiling that replicates the one in the 1630 Parliament Hall.
Many eminent nineteenth-century individuals are to be found amongst the church’s ministers and members, including Dr Thomas Guthrie who set up the Ragged School movement for poor children, photographic pioneer David Octavius Hill, famous geologist Hugh Miller, and Sir James Young Simpson who pioneered public anaesthetics.
