Spiritual Giants

I was doing some clearing out recently, sorting through some papers, and came across a letter from Lesslie Newbigin. It was a short note written to me because we share in common that we were both, at different times, ministers of Winson Green United Reformed Church in Birmingham. Lesslie, when he was minister, had the vision of that church uniting with the local Anglicans. Lesslie was a great person of vision, as I have been reminded more recently during a couple of ecumenical visits to the Diocese of Vellore in South India, which was previously part of the Diocese of Madras, including at the time when Lesslie was Bishop of Madras. People still spoke highly of him.

My letter was because the Winson Green vision became reality during my ministry there. In January 1994 we came together and, a year earlier in January 1993, joined in a service in which we made the commitment that was fulfilled a year later. Bishop Lesslie was the preacher at the 1993 service and my letter is a very brief note about those arrangements. Lesslie was defined by his vision of unity, but also his commitment to the local mission of the church. He was a missionary bishop, and a great model. One of the other papers was the order of service for the Birmingham gathering which gave thanks for his life which, very deliberately, took place in Winson Green and the organisation of which was something else in which I played a part.

I was therefore saddened, a couple of days or so later and today, to get the sad news of the death of Bernard Thorogood who, like Lesslie, would be one of the spiritual 'giants' to whom I have looked. Bernard, too, was a missionary, in his case in the Pacific Islands, and, later, the General Secretary of the Council for World Mission, including at the time when it re-modelled itself into its current forward-thinking partnership model. That included the point at which my ministry began, and I remember the impact on me of news from and about CWM in those days. In 1980 Bernard moved to be the General Secretary of the United Reformed Church, and so was in that post when I became a minister of the denomination in 1983, and for the next nine years, serving CWM as General Secretary from 1970 to 1980 and the URC as General Secretary from 1980 to 1992.

As we look to what "might" be something of a new church era, post coronavirus and lockdown, it is good to remember with thanksgiving the inspiration, commitment and challenges provided by the likes of Lesslie Newbigin and Bernard Thorogood.