As the build up to the next GA Season keeps moving, this past week brought another Moderator Designate announcement, this from the Church of Scotland.

Rev Susan Brown of Dornoch Cathedral.

The selection committee has decided and the Kirk has announced that The Rev. Susan Brown, minister of Dornoch Cathedral, will be the next Moderator of the General Assembly. She is a native of Penicuik, Midlothian, and did her ministerial training at New College, Edinburgh with a Bachelors degree and a post-Graduate Diploma in Ministry. Following her probationer work at St. Giles she was inducted at Killearnan on the Black Isle, near Inverness, where she served for 13 years. From there she moved up the coast a bit to Dornoch Cathedral where she has been for the past 19 years.

Rev. Brown has served the Kirk at the national level as the vice-convener for both the Ecumenical Affairs committee and currently the World Mission Council. She also served for ten years as a regular member of a lifeboat crew for a local association. And her love of the outdoors, and these days particularly golf, led her to write a spiritual reflection for each hole of the nearby Royal Dornoch course and these are included in the course guide and gained a bit of international attention. In 2011 she was appointed as Chaplain in Ordinary to HM the Queen.

Her husband Derek is also in the ministry, serving as a hospital chaplain in Inverness and as the lead chaplain for NHS Highland. They have two adult children, a son who is a novelist who was recently recognized by the Scottish Book Trust with a New Writers award, and a daughter who is a graduate in social anthropology.

Rev. Brown says of her moderatorial year:

My theme during the year will be walking alongside people. When you walk alongside people, you listen and you exchange stories. It gives us a chance to talk more deeply than when we are face to face.

This coming moderatorial year for Rev. Brown will have a number of anniversaries of note, not the least of which is the 50th anniversary of the ordination of women in the Church of Scotland. (For those counting, she will be the fourth woman to serve as Moderator of the Kirk GA.) The year will also include some significant centennial anniversaries related to WWI, including the commemoration of the armistice in just over a year’s time.

And finally, no biographical sketch of Rev. Brown would be complete without noting another distinction that she has, that of being the pastor that married the entertainer Madonna and Guy Ritchie and later baptizing their son Rocco.

Besides the Kirk article, there is significant mainstream and Christian media coverage of her appointment including The Scotsman, BBC Scotland, The Northern Times, Daily Record, and Premier Christianity.

Susan Brown can be followed on Twitter at @VicarofDornoch. And you can hear her preach on the Cathedral web site, although it appears on the current sermon is available and no online archive is available. Today’s sermon is based on the calling of Samuel in 1 Samuel 3:1-10 and you have to see a bit of self-reference in her second line “The story offers a great reminder of how God can, and will, use anyone at all – no matter how young or old, no matter how full of wisdom or yet to learn.”

And so, as Rev. Brown begins her preparation for the Assembly in May and her moderatorial year as a whole, we offer our congratulation, prayers and best wishes. And if everything falls into place, I am looking forward to being present in person for your installation and your time leading the Assembly. May God’s blessing be upon you and God’s Spirit granting you wisdom and strength for what lies ahead.