Scotland’s first female bishop, Rt Rev Anne Dyer, has pledged to restore trust within her church following allegations of bullying.

Suspended in 2022 and facing a disciplinary tribunal, the Scottish Episcopal Church's Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney was cleared when the church’s procurator decided there was insufficient public interest to proceed. She has since begun a phased return to work.

Speaking to BBC Radio Shetland, Bishop Anne expressed her desire to "move forward" and reflected on the prolonged and stressful nature of the process.

During her first visit to Shetland in three years, she acknowledged that things were not yet back to normal.

"I am visiting my priests, and people, and finding out how they are in their lives, but also wanting to hear from them about what they think God is doing in their churches," she said.

"The period of the process was extremely prolonged, it was stressful for absolutely everybody involved. There was a time when I thought it would never end, but thankfully it did. So, since October, we've been turning a corner and moving forward."

Bishop Anne emphasised the difficulty of quickly restoring strained relationships. "When any relationship is strained, you can't just automatically snap back to how things were previously," she said. "It wouldn't be right to pretend nothing has gone on, and nothing has been said."

"We are working hard at thinking about what it means to be reconciled and how professional mediation can help us address the issues we need to discuss in order to move forward. Most of those conversations are confidential, but they are taking place, and we are taking the healing very seriously indeed."

She welcomed the warm reception on her return and stressed the importance of healing strained relationships. She added: "I hope that they would hear me as well, that I want to respect our differences, because some of this is about differences, about opinions, on what the church should be like, and how we go about things, that our differences need to be respected, and they have my full assurance that I would do that."