On a dark hillside above Inverness, Australian Mark Foley waited for a glimpse of the Northern Lights. He was chatting with a local person whose face he couldn’t quite make out in the darkness. Their conversation turned to church – Mark is a pastor – and his new acquaintance confessed he had no time for church or religion, but a great admiration for Jesus.
Mark is working with Inverness Baptist Church for a couple of months, while the Inverness minister Iain Morrison is preaching to his congregation, Grange Baptist in Adelaide. Pulpit exchanges like this often prove refreshing both for the pastors involved and their churches. While in Inverness, Mark is preaching a series of sermons revisiting the Bible’s whole, overarching story, and the place of Jesus in it.
• • • We chat about Mark’s life and faith, about his and his wife Robyn’s big-heartedness, fostering five children on top of their own biological family of five. We discuss Scottish and Australian churches. The latter do not have a high public profile - Australians are suspicious of all ‘institutions’.
Those which are lively and growing have, Mark says a focus on ‘faithful preaching and good biblical teaching’ which ‘equip Christians to be the most faithful followers of Jesus they can be’. Two strands run in parallel in Mark’s thinking. One is his conviction that the Bible is ‘authoritative, the ultimate authority in my life’.
But the Bible is not to be read like a scientific text boo.