Kenneth Ross is a Church of Scotland mission partner assigned to Clèir Eilean Ì. He is based at Zomba Theological University in Malawi where he serves as Professor of Theology and Dean of Postgraduate Studies. He is no stranger to Clèir Eilean Ì since he was parish minister of Netherlorn in Argyll from 2010 to 2019. It took a lot to remove him from Argyll, but he could not resist the call to return to Malawi where he had earlier served in the late 1980s and 1990s. He was delighted when he was attached as mission partner first to the Presbytery of Argyll and now to Clèir Eilean Ì.

After growing up in Glasgow, studying in Edinburgh and enjoying his first parish ministry on the Shetland island of Unst, much of Ken’s life has been lived on the axis between Scotland and Malawi and in the border territory between the life of the church and the life of the academy. Today his day job is at the University, but he also serves as an associate minister in the rural parish of Bemvu, within the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian. 

Zomba Theological University is the successor body to the succession of colleges that aimed to train candidates for the ministry since the first Presbyterian ministers were ordained in Malawi in 1911. Today it is still training candidates for the ministry but also enrols many students with other careers in mind. Seeking to position itself in a changing higher education landscape in Malawi, ZTU gained Government approval to become a University in 2022. Essential to this new status is the development of postgraduate studies, which Ken has been leading since 2022. Visits to Clèir Eilean Ì in 2024 and 2025 resulted in a proposal for the Presbytery to support a scholarship for a Masters student at ZTU – an exciting prospect.