Former Camelon minister named as next Church of Scotland Moderator

The Reverend Sally Foster-Fulton spent four years as parish minister at Irving Parish Church and lived with her family in the manse in Dorrator Road from 1999.

She is married to fellow Church of Scotland minister, the Reverend Stuart Fulton, who spent seven years at Haggs Parish Church and is now the minister serving the parish of Newlands South Church in Glasgow. The couple have two adult daughters, Alex and Gracie.

And the Moderator Designate said that having recently become a grandmother it has "shifted her perspective and given new meaning" to her commitment to try and make the world a better place.

Mrs Foster-Fulton said she is looking forward to meeting and encouraging people involved in church work at local, national and international levels at a time of unprecedented challenge and opportunity.

She has been the head of Christian Aid in Scotland since 2016 and will take a year’s sabbatical to take up her role as the Kirk's ambassador at home and abroad for 12 months from next May.

The Moderator Designate said: "I'm excited about what the year will bring. I genuinely love and am inspired by the Church of Scotland and its people.

"Over the past years of the pandemic in the face of a global climate emergency and now a cost-of-living crisis, people across the Church have been stepping up and doing their very best to make an extraordinary impact in communities, locally, across our nation and in the world."

Born and raised in South Carolina in the USA, Mrs Foster-Fulton met her husband when they were both students at Columbia Theological Seminary, in Georgia.

When she came to Scotland, Mrs Foster-Fulton received an exchange scholarship to Glasgow University's Trinity College, where she completed her Divinity training.

After completing her BD, she worked as a chaplain at Falkirk and District Royal Infirmary and The Royal National Scottish Hospital in Larbert, before being accepted as a candidate for ministry in the Church of Scotland.

Ordained in 1999, her first charge was Irving Parish Church in Falkirk before in 2003 the couple took up the role of co-pastors for the PCUSA congregation in Seneca, South Carolina, and stayed for four years before returning to Scotland.

In 2007, Mrs Foster-Fulton was appointed associate minister at Dunblane Cathedral where she served for 10 years before taking up her current role at Christian Aid.

Mrs Foster-Fulton convened the Church and Society Council from 2012-2016 and helped advance the Church's work on human rights, climate justice and support for people struggling to overcome poverty in Scotland as well as overseas.

Over the years, she campaigned on behalf of detainees at Dungavel House immigration removal centre near Strathaven in South Lanarkshire and led the Church's work with ecumenical and interfaith partners to create networks of support for asylum seekers and refugees.

In the run up to the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum, she helped create space for respectful dialogue between campaigners on both sides of the debate.

The Moderator Designate said the Church of Scotland's voice on national and international issues has authenticity because it represents people working across the country to support and uplift local communities

She said she is proud of the support that local churches give to national and international partners.

"What church congregations do locally in their communities is critical. It is what gives the Church's voice validity when we speak truth to power.

"Sometimes we talk about local and international work as if it is an either or, but if there is one thing my work with the Church of Scotland, Christian Aid, this recent pandemic and the climate crisis has affirmed, is that we are all in this together.

"There is no separation between what we do for people in our global neighbourhood and what we do here at home.

"There is no them and us; there is just us and we have all got to look after one another."