by Mary Cullen

When Rt Rev Sally Foster-Fulton, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, met Pope Francis on a recent visit to Rome, she gave him a drawing by Edinburgh street artist Michael McVeigh entitled ‘Throwaway people’. In return, the pope sent a gift to the artist to thank him for his work. The exchange reflected a deep and shared commitment to challenge the systemic poverty that blights the lives of millions of people around the world.

The existence of such poverty is a political choice, the Moderator says firmly, and we need to ask ourselves as Christians what we are doing to challenge it.

Responding to injustice

A conversation with her revolves around the churches’ response to injustice and the need to work in partnership to bring about change. That, she suggests, is the role of the Christian: ‘the poorest and most vulnerable should be at the heart of our work’.

Born and raised in South Carolina, where she grew up in the Presbyterian Church of the United States, the Moderator studied at Columbia Theological Seminary and completed her Divinity training at the University of Glasgow. She was ordained in 1999.

As Convener of the Church and Society Council of the Church of Scotland from 2012 to 2016, she helped develop the church’s work on human rights, climate justice and support for people struggling to overcome poverty in Scotland and overseas. The experience, she said, exposed the reality of systemic structural poverty and the political choices which create it. They in turn raise the question of what we do to bring about change.

Priority areas

As Moderator, the Church’s commitment to priority areas is high on her agenda. A priority area is a community where deprivation rates fall within the bottom 5% across all social and economic indicators. The Church currently designates 64 congregations as priority areas, where parishes are offered a range of support and opportunities. They include staff advice, consultancy, and regular contact. There is a weekly online network meeting to share ideas and experience.

‘We start by looking at the assets of communities in these areas’, Rev Foster-Fulton says. ‘We look at their strengths and how people can be empowered, so that decision making is put back where it belongs, in the community. Priority areas are well resourced and are different in different areas.

‘One of the things they offer is the opportunity to work in partnership with other organisations. Faith communities need to do more partnership working, to come alongside people and support them. The church can offer space and volunteers’.

Running in parallel with the development of priority areas is the closure of church buildings. They are a legacy of the past – how to use them as assets today? They are a poor witness, observes the Moderator; we have too many empty buildings. In 2021, against a background of falling numbers of ministers and a decline in membership, the General Assembly tasked local churches with creating five year mission plans that would ensure congregations are properly equipped to share the Good News and serve their communities for the coming decades. Presbyteries began working with one another to create economies of scale by forming new, larger presbyteries. The number of presbyteries in Scotland is being reduced from 43 to around 10 -12.

We have to challenge our own narrative, the Moderator says, and ask how we might do things differently.

Mary Cullen is Editor of Open House