Obituary: Rev Donald MacLean, Free Presbyterian minister

Of vast presence and personality, MacLean was such a venerable Free Presbyterian fixture - a communicant member since November 1937, a minister for so long he began his trade beside colleagues ordained in the 19th century - that his passing is epochal.

Donald MacLean was born in the Gorbals in June 1915; his father was a son of Coigach, and his mother from Osgaig, Raasay, where there were regular holidays. (The little "Donnie" counted Sorley MacLean as a boyhood playmate.)

Raasay is, too, the birthplace of the Free Presbyterian Church - founded in 1893, in protest against theological declension - and, by 1915, this was a substantial though overwhelmingly Highland denomination.

The St Jude's congregation in Glasgow was then enormous, with over 1,000 worshippers, and each Sabbath the MacLeans walked from their tenement to sermon, morning and night - in all, a 16-mile tramp.

As a young man, he trained for accountancy in the employ of Thomas Galbraith, of standing in both commerce and statecraft: the first Lord Strathclyde and the patriarch of a Tory dynasty. He took a keen interest in this clever young man and had hopes of mentoring him in Unionist politics. MacLean certainly acquired much West End polish from Galbraith; but any parliamentary ambitions were derailed by the Second World War - MacLean was a first-lieutenant in the Royal Navy - and profound spiritual experience.

He was still only 19 when, under the preaching of his Lewis-born pastor Rev Roderick MacKenzie, coming to personal faith in Christ. And in 1945 MacLean was accepted as a student for the ministry. His training was intense, capped with a summer in a Skye manse where he endured a ruthless immersion-course in Gaelic - and to remarkable pulpit fluency.

Donald MacLean was ordained to the charge of Portree on 30 December, 1948. Of tireless energy and joyous preaching skills, he built up a neglected parish so effectively that he had latterly over 100 attending his midweek prayer meeting.(He was also wickedly christened "Frankie" by the local schoolboys; dashing and brillantined, MacLean did rather resemble a popular crooner of the day.)

Shortly after his ordination, MacLean married the gentle Grace MacQueen, from Daviot; she bore him four children and, through nearly 60 years of blissful union, was his strength and stay.

On 14 June, 1960, MacLean was inducted to his boyhood charge of St Jude's Glasgow, launching a notable 40-year pastorate. It proved one of the great teaching ministries anywhere in post-war Scotland. MacLean commanded the pulpit like the bridge of a battleship, with sweeping gesture and that extraordinary, surging voice; he spoke in perfect prose, from minimal notes.

Even by 1960, though, Donald MacLean led in other respects. He was for some years editor of the Young People's Magazine and, from 1958 to 1986, was the Church's theology tutor. This was sacrificial work; he trained dozens of ministers and outlived a distressing number. (Of the four students in his very first class, only one survives him.)

MacLean not only served three times as Moderator of Synod but - most unusually - from 1992, in two consecutive years, presiding at the Church's centenary event at Edinburgh in May 1993. He was also instrumental in the foundation of the Blythswood Tract Society in 1966, by a group of Glasgow students, though he never won proper credit for it and deplored its later subversion.

This reflected what, from the early 1970s, became a building ideological rift within the Free Presbyterian Church, between those determined to uphold what was already a distinctive, demanding witness (earnest, robustly Protestant, but profoundly Christ-centred) and those keener on a sort of gloopy, high-minded pietism.

There were big personalities on both sides and by the time MacLean in 1977 became Clerk of Synod - the most influential office in the Church - there was incessant confrontation. MacLean was not invariably right; and - never one to suffer fools gladly - he could be most abrasive. But to lead is to choose, to commit; and at the cost of vilification rather than compliments.

And these were desperate years. By the late 1980s, the Free Presbyterian Church was fighting for her soul, and this far more underpinned the Lord Mackay affair than the notional issue of the Mass. (There was not a bigoted bone in MacLean's body: for some years, he and the then-Archbishop Winning often shared a train home from Scottish Office consultancy in Edinburgh, and with great and jolly craic.) In the event - amid frightful publicity - Lord Mackay's suspension as a Free Presbyterian elder was confirmed by a whisper in 1989, and the Church split from top to bottom, with many adherents seceding to form the Associated Presbyterian Churches. It was a tough time.

In 1990, MacLean unexpectedly quit as Clerk of Synod.He wanted now to concentrate on the pulpit, especially the peripatetic round of communion seasons around a Church now rather short of ministers. He rationed his energies intelligently and thus held down the Glasgow pastorate until February 2000, only retiring once he could no longer drive.

MacLean nevertheless put in a stint as interim moderator of Fort William, preached frequently until surviving an unpleasant illness in 2006, and more occasionally thereafter and till almost the end.

MacLean oozed something uncommon in Highland Evangelicalism: a boundless optimism; that the best was yet to come. Yet each step back, in the face of inexorable old age, was taken at just the right time and with cheerful wisdom.

On the last retreat - in 2007, with Grace, to the Church's care-home in Inverness, he embraced it as a ministry itself, establishing himself as more president than resident and where tough old holiness and an emerging, playful streak endeared him to all. He bore Grace's death, in 2008, with extraordinary, spiritual serenity.

Mr MacLean had all his faculties to the end, dressed immaculately, and till recent weeks enjoyed the minimal morning walk - still as erect as the day he sailed out to fight the U-boats, and almost as handsome.

He never looked his age, never lost a majestic unflappability. In a telephone conversation only seven weeks ago, sharing memories of the Clydebank Blitz, he was as sharp and engaged as ever; the last illness was but a few gentle days.

In 1989, some of us thought that Rev Donald MacLean had only steered his Church on to the rocks. Over two decades later, with the APC sliding from obscurity into oblivion and with several of its ministers wilting into the Church of Scotland and ever more ridiculous positions (Lord Mackay's former Edinburgh minister, for instance, led a shameless manoeuvre in 2008 to shut down the General Assembly debate on homosexuality) the scale of what was at stake is now apparent.

The Free Presbyterians have survived; battered, but unbowed. The witness endures, unabashed. MacLean in the late Eighties held to that stand, and at high personal cost: but he was brave, and he was right.