Luss Parish Church is all about homecoming.

Although the tiny village on the banks of Loch Lomond is home to only a little over one hundred people, according to figures from the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park more than 750,000 people visit Luss each year. Many of these visitors come from all over the world attracted either by the beauty of Loch Lomond and its surrounding hills or because they feel that Scotland is part of their heritage. The Church exists to meet these visitors, to welcome them and to make them feel part of Luss in the future. A Heritage and Visitors’ Centre has been created as a place for welcoming our visitors; as a result many keep in touch with us and return to visit us again.

Loch Lomond is a romantic place: for many from Glasgow it is where they come to relax. As a result it is where people have courted and got engaged, so, not unnaturally, it is where people often wish to get married. Luss Church is a beautiful wedding Church and is one which is delighted to welcome everyone. Many from overseas feel that they have Scottish blood in them, but not from a particular place – so Loch Lomond becomes the place and Luss the Church community which welcomes them home for their special day.

Loch Lomond is a very special place. As the Church community celebrates fifteen hundred years of continuous Christian presence it has chosen to mark this event by creating a community of young people from all around the world – a community in which young Scots can learn about other countries and develop their own self-confidence by sharing their country with similar folk from overseas. The project has created a Pilgrimage Pathway on the banks of Loch Lomond. This pathway speaks to visitors of the hopes and aspirations of those who have built it and has already become a modern place of pilgrimage. An accommodation building – the Pilgrim’s Palace – has been created, along with a range of ancillary facilities, to ensure that our young guests enjoy their stay and gain from it.

To support our work with these three groups of people – the seven hundred and fifty thousand visitors to our village each year, the more than one hundred couples who come to be married each year, and the young folk from several countries who come each year to be part of our international youth project – the Church has developed a sophisticated interactive web-site which is visited by many hundreds of people each day and which is at the heart of our international community. Accompanying this web-site is Luss TV, a thirty-minute web-based television programme of news and events about Luss which is broadcast on the internet each week. The equipment used to broadcast Luss TV is also used to broadcast wedding services live to the families and friends around the world of those who come to be married in Luss, enabling everyone to be present at the wedding. The weekly Church Service is also broadcast live around the world, enabling those who have come to Luss to continue to share with us and those who are yet to come to see what Luss is about.

Homecoming for us provides an opportunity to invite those who have been married here over the past years to return to Luss for a special celebration. It provides an opportunity for a gathering of all of the young people who have been part of our international youth project on the banks of Loch Lomond. It provides an opportunity to invite those who have visited Luss to return to renew their attachment to our village, and for those who live nearby in Glasgow it provides an opportunity to have a good reason to return to Luss to share in special events which we will plan for this special year. It provides a continuing opportunity to involve service chaplains to share in our services in Luss, thus speaking to those from Scotland who are far from home and whose thoughts are in Scotland and of their own homecoming, and it serves to remind us all of how fortunate we are to be at home in this beautiful country. As a small village in a spectacular place within Scotland’s first National Park with a historic Church and modern means of communication, we were particularly well-placed to take advantage of this new and exciting government initiative and to remind the world of what Scotland has to offer and will continue to celebrate it throughout our special year of 2010.