On 3 October 1843, the Chanonry Presbytery of the newly separate Free Church of Scotland licensed a young divinity student as a minister. John Kennedy had not yet finished his divinity course, having completed three of the four years, but the need for ministers was pressing, especially for those who were fluent in Gaelic. There were newly established Free Church congregations throughout the Highlands, and many were vacant charges seeking a minister, such as Dingwall, where Kennedy would shortly be called to his life's work as the first Free Church minister. In the Disruption of May 1843, the great majority of the members and adherents of the Established Church of Scotland in the Highlands had responded to the call of Thomas Chalmers to abandon the temporal properties of the Establishment in defence of the crown rights of Jesus Christ over His church. Thus the Highlands had participated enthusiastically in a truly national religious movement in 1843. But in the later years of the nineteenth century, a divergence became increasingly evident. The Highlands became known as the ‘chief bastion’ of Calvinism, in the face of the theological, critical and confessional revolutions that profoundly changed the face of Lowland evangelicalism. If John Kennedy began his ministry in 1843 as a mainstream Free Churchman, he ended it at his death in 1884 as a perceived hardliner and conservative, a leader of the so-called ‘Constitutionalist’ party that included the majority of the Highland Free Church. Yet it was others who had changed in their opinions, not him. The resulting divergence between the two regions was a formidable one, identified by one author as ‘a divide between two different cultures, two languages, two value-systems, two economic realities, and, more than anything else, two different forms of Christianity’.

This divergence in religious outlook requires explanation, as its scale can scarcely be exaggerated. Highland evangelicals like John Kennedy largely rejected any modification of Calvinistic theology, opposed Biblical higher criticism, maintained a commitment to the Establishment Principle, and objected to any proposal for loosening the strict confessional subscription required of office bearers in the Presbyterian churches. Many thousands of people eventually separated themselves from the national churches to form distinct and overwhelmingly Highland denominations committed to these principles: namely, the Free Presbyterian Church and the continuing Free Church after 1900.