“What led to that more than anything was a series of little slim biographies of missionaries that cost 6d. My mother started buying them for me and, after that, whenever I had the pocket money I would buy them for myself.”

As he grew up, that childhood ambition became a growing conviction that this was what he wanted to do with his life.

He fulfilled his ambition in the early 1970s when, shortly after he and wife Elizabeth married, the couple spent four years as missionaries in Nigeria.

Today missionary work is much criticised for interfering in and eroding local cultures, quite apart from any religious concerns critics may have. John, naturally takes a different view.

“While I respect those concerns, I think the Christian Gospel fits in any culture,” he said. “While it challenges anything in any culture that is contrary to its teachings, it does not require people to deny their essential cultural and ethnic traditions.”

The family’s missionary tradition could continue with youngest daughter Helen who, with her husband, has expressed interest in missionary work in South Africa.

John and Elizabeth have two other children, Sarah and Stuart, who were born in Nigeria, and a total of four grandchildren but, for the last four years, home has been Inverness where John is minister of Greyfriars Free Church.

He was recently announced moderator designate for the 2007 General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, a role which John confidently believes he is the first Shropshire lad to fill.

His main duty will be to chair the church’s general assembly in Edinburgh next May, but the post will also carry an ambassadorial role and could see John and Elizabeth travelling overseas to areas where the church is involved in mission work or has a relationship with other denominations.

Not that he has completely ignored overseas work during his time in Inverness. In September he was among a group of 11 from his congregation who went out to Peru to help lay the foundations of a new school.

It was Elizabeth’s family connections which influenced the couple’s decision to take up the post in Nigeria. Her great-uncle was already a missionary there and ultimately spent 50 years in the West African nation. He lived 30 miles south of Elizabeth and John, who would cycle down to see him in the dry season.

The couple arrived in Nigeria just a couple of years after the bitter Biafran War when the Ibo population of south-east Nigeria attempted to gain independence.

Though the conflict left a legacy of political and inter-tribal difficulties, inter-religious problems were not so apparent, John said.

The area where he and Elizabeth lived was almost evenly split between Christians, Muslims and followers of traditional beliefs and their Muslim neighbours got on well with the missionary couple.

“I absolutely loved it there,” John said. “I loved the people, the food and the simplicity of the life. When we started we had no electricity, no running water and we had no car for the first couple of years.”

From a place recovering from war, the Rosses travelled to one in the grip of violence when they returned to Elizabeth’s native Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles and in 1976 John became minister of a small and struggling Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Belfast.

“We had one young man who worshipped with us regularly who was shot by the IRA,” John recalled. “He was a solicitor and was mistaken for a detective coming out of a police station.

“We also had a number of policemen in the congregation and we were aware of the hazards that were involved.”

His denomination in Northern Ireland had links with the Free Church of Scotland and, in the early 1980s, that relationship gave the couple an opportunity to return to foreign missionary work with a Free Church mission in India.

“We were accepted and ready to go, but then the Prime Minister, Mrs Gandhi, was assassinated and all the entry requirements changed and our visa was turned down,” John said.

Rev John Ross and hie wife Elizabeth have spend a number of years on missionary work in various parts of the world. Pic: Northern Exposures

Yet the day of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 presented John with another opportunity when he was invited to join the board of Christian Witness to Israel (CWI), an organisation aimed at evangelising the Jewish community internationally.

“I didn’t realise that as one door was closing, another was opening,” he said.

In 1986 he moved to the CWI’s headquarters in Kent as first assistant to the general secretary, before taking over that role five years later. The CWI’s international mission saw John make regular trips abroad, including Israel, the USA and Hungary, where in 2001 he founded a Christian mission to the local Jewish community.

“At its peak, I was doing one long haul flight a month,” John added.

His interest in Jewish evangelism led him to complete a PhD on the subject and it was while he was working on this that he first came to Greyfriars.

“I was a little behind where I planned to be and at that point a Free Church minister friend, Donald K. MacLeod, was interim moderator of Greyfriars congregation while they were without a minister of their own,” John said.

“He told me they had access to a house and were looking for someone to supply preaching during the vacancy. The archive I was working on mostly was in Edinburgh, and is a lot nearer Inverness than Sevenoaks and my wife had gone to visit a missionary friend in Honduras, so I said yes.”

However, John was adamant his move to Inverness would be temporary.

“I was asked on my first day here if I would be open to a call and I said definitely not. But six weeks later the situation changed, and I found myself available,” John continued.

The church he arrived at had been at the centre of the internal problems which split the Free Church. It was the suspension of Greyfriars’ previous minister, Rev Maurice Roberts, which directly led to the formation of the breakaway Free Church (Continuing) and half the congregation had followed their minister out of the established Free Kirk.

“Many people had been deeply hurt by what had happened. Numbers had gone down very seriously,” John said.

However, the intervening years have seen Greyfriars make up the numbers lost, and John believes the Free Church as a whole has recovered from the schism.

“One of the things that period enabled the church to do was focus on its mission to the Scotland of today rather than perpetuate the traditions of the past. There’s a very different attitude in the Free Church of today. It is very concerned to be a witness to contemporary Scotland and the church is planting new congregations,” he said.

As he approaches his year as moderator, John sees the main challenge for his church to provide a contemporary witness to the Gospel in an increasingly secular Scotland.

“The central message doesn’t change, but the way that it is communicated needs to be in the context of today’s world,” he said.

He is well aware that the Free Church has a reputation as a dour, joyless kirk and acknowledges that, in the past, the denomination may have been its own worst enemy, but believes that at the start of the 21st century the true picture is somewhat different.

“It is a caricature, the impression most people have of the Free Church,” John said. “But when people come through the door of the church they meet warmth and friendliness and discover something else.”

c.macleod@inverness-courier.co.uk

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