CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: What do Northern Lights and Jesus have in common?
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.
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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 book, because the second strand is Mark’s sensitivity to mystery and wonder. ‘God is at work in profound ways that I’m not fully aware of,’ he tells me.
He describes people with no church background walking into Grange Baptist having had a ‘vision’ of Jesus, which had drawn them to the Bible. He speaks of the awareness of supernatural presences and the spiritual insights and sensitivity which aboriginal peoples contribute to the church.
He describes the aboriginal practice of ‘Dreaming’, the sharing of stories passed down for millennia which help people find their identity, and give them a story to inhabit as they ask: ‘What does this tell us about who we are?’
For us as Christians, rather than feeling we must spend time trying to prove, for example, that the Creation stories in the Bible are or are not historically true, we can ask: ‘What do these stories tell us about ourselves, and about God?’ It occurred to me that Mark’s sermon series in Inverness is a form of ‘dreaming’ - the retelling of an ancient story into which we are welcomed.
There’s a crowd up the hill looking for an Aurora - for mystery, beauty, meaning. And then the dancing dream of Jesus breaks through, shimmering in the night sky of our consciousness, and we can see one another’s faces.
