Church minister;
Born November 3, 1916;
Died February 2, 2008.

JAMES (Bertie) Moffett, who has died aged 92, was one of the last (if not the last) surviving ministers of the Original Secession Church, which rejoined the Church of Scotland in 1956.

The third child of Thomas and Mina Moffett of Creevagh, County Monaghan, he came from farming stock and never lost his love of the land and the soil. Years later, as a husband and father, holidays were often spent under canvas in a field on a farm where he would help with the haymaking. Manse gardens, which occupied his mornings, flourished under his care.

After completing his early education at the model school in Monaghan, Moffett went to Magee University College, Londonderry, and from there to Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated with a BA in 1938.

Moffett's father was a lay preacher in the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Ireland, so it was perhaps no surprise that he felt drawn to the ministry. After completing his studies in divinity, he was licensed to preach in 1940, and came to Scotland in 1941 to serve as a locum in two congregations of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, first in Paisley, then in Loanhead.

In 1942, he was ordained as minister of the United Original Secession Church in Kilwinning and, in 1947, was called to the United Original Secession Church in Wellmeadow, Paisley. When the Original Secession Church came back into the Church of Scotland in 1956, Moffett became a minister of the Church of Scotland. In 1969, congregations at Wellmeadow and St George's East united to form the new charge of St Matthew's, where Moffett remained as minister until he retired in 1979.

Throughout his ministry, he was loyally supported by his wife, Mary. They had married in 1942 and, on retiring, moved to Montrose to a cottage with a large garden that Moffett enjoyed cultivating. As the years passed and Moffett, as he put it, was forced to "slow down to a gallop", the couple moved to the Clyde coast to be nearer their family.

His last days were spent in Buckreddan Care Centre in Kilwinning, where he died peacefully. So Moffett's life ended in the community where his ministry had begun, and in the very building where two of his four children were born, back in the days when the care centre had been a maternity nursing home.

Moffett was a diligent pastor. In his sermons he sought to relate the text of scripture to whatever was happening in the community or the wider world at the time. His death marks the loss of another link with the divisions of the church's past in Scotland.

He is survived by his wife, two daughters and two sons.