Meetings
The General Assembly usually meets for a week of intensive deliberation once a year in May. Ministers, elders and deacons are eligible to be "Commissioners" to the General Assembly. Typically a parish minister would attend the Assembly once every four years, accompanied by an elder from that congregation. The Assembly also has youth representatives and a few officials.
Meetings are usually held in the Assembly Hall on the Mound, Edinburgh. This was built for the Free Church in the 19th century and became the Assembly Hall for the reunited Church of Scotland after the union of 1929. The Moderator presides from the Moderator's chair. In front of him/her, the clerks to the Assembly and other officials are seated around a table in a fenced area popularly but unofficially known as the "playpen". Behind the Moderator is the throne gallery (used by the Monarch or the Lord High Commissioner), which can only be reached through a separate stairway not directly from the Assembly Hall; this symbolises the independence of the church from the Crown in matters spiritual, whilst recognising the status of the Monarch (both constitutionally and theologically).
The General Assembly can also meet elsewhere. A meeting of the Assembly was held in Glasgow to mark the city's status as European City of Culture. When the Scottish Parliament was instituted in 1999, the Assembly Hall was used by the Parliament until the new building at Holyrood was completed in 2004. During these years, the Assembly met in the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (1999) and the Usher Hall (2001); in the other years the Parliament temporarily moved out to allow the Assembly to use its own "home".
The General Assembly has its own Standing Orders. One particular example is Standing Order 54, which requires any proposal requiring additional expenditure to have been first considered by the Assembly's Stewardship and Finance Committee.
Read more about this topic: General Assembly Of The Church Of Scotland
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—Madonna [Madonna Louise Ciccione] (b. 1959)
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—Josephine Woodward, U.S. author. As quoted in Everyone Was Brave, ch. 3, by William L. O’Neill (1969)