Lesslie Newbigin

Lesslie Newbigin was nineteen and believed nothing. He had been sent at twelve to a Quaker boarding school at Reading because his father was a pacifist and wanted him nowhere near an Officer Training Corps, and he had come up to Queens' College, Cambridge, in the autumn of 1928 having quietly put his parents' faith down. Scripture lessons had been, in his own recollection, utterly boring. History was a machine. God, he decided, was no longer a tenable hypothesis.

In the summer of 1929 he went to the Rhondda Valley to work with the Quakers among miners who had no work. At a camp under canvas near the coast there was a night of drinking and fighting that he could not stop, and he went to his bed defeated by it. Lying awake, he saw the cross of Christ spanning the space between heaven and earth. He dated his conversion to that night, and he was the only witness to it; the account we have is the one he wrote down himself, more than fifty years later. He went back to Cambridge a Christian.

The next summer, at a student conference at Swanwick, he was praying alone in a tent when the thing happened again, and he could only report it in the passive voice: he had been told that he must offer for ordination. He had been ordered. He trained at Westminster College, Cambridge, under John Oman; he read Romans until it moved him out of the liberalism he had been taught; and he met Helen Henderson, who was doing the same student work in Scotland that he was doing in Glasgow. Her parents had been missionaries. When they offered themselves for India, they offered together, and the Church of Scotland accepted them together. He was commissioned in July 1936, married Helen in Edinburgh a month later, and sailed from Liverpool for Madras on 26 September, finishing his first book on the voyage.

India kept him for thirty-eight years. A bus accident broke his leg so badly that surgeons in Madras could not mend it and surgeons in Edinburgh nearly took it off. He went back. For seven years at Kanchipuram, one of the seven sacred cities of the Hindus, the scholars of the Ramakrishna Mission ashram invited him to a weekly group, and week by week they read the Śvetāśvatara Upanishad and the Gospel of St John in turn. He wrote almanacks for village catechists. And he sat, from 1942, on the committees negotiating the hardest ecumenical proposal of the century: that Anglicans, Methodists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians in South India should stop being four churches and become one.

They did it. On 27 September 1947, in the cathedral at Madras, the Church of South India came into being, and the congregation rose and burst into the Te Deum. Newbigin, who had expected to be passed over, had received a cable: "You are appointed bishop Church of South India Madura. We pray God's blessing." He was consecrated that day, thirty-seven years old, one of nine.

The union cost him. At the Lambeth Conference of 1958, a hundred and sixty bishops received Holy Communion at a service using the liturgy of the Church of South India, and full communion with the Anglican Communion was withheld from that church all the same. It was a disappointment he carried for the rest of his life. He wrote at the end of A South India Diary, addressing whoever had spent an hour or two in the company of this young Indian church, that what these Christians were called to confess might be simply this: "Christ is greater than all our confessions and that he can make us one, that the world may believe."

He was lent to the world church and then given back. From 1959 he served the International Missionary Council, and when it was folded into the World Council of Churches at New Delhi in 1961 he became the first director of its division of world mission, touring fifteen African countries, then the Pacific, then Latin America, then the Caribbean. As an editor he refused to let anyone drop the plural from the International Review of Missions. In 1965 he went back to India as Bishop of Madras. At sixty-five he reached the retirement age, declined the offer of an extension on the ground that an Indian should have the see, declined an assistant bishopric in Birmingham, and came home to Britain overland with Helen: two months through Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, past Ararat, through Erzurum and Cappadocia, then Tarsus and Ephesus and Smyrna and Istanbul, and on to Munich by the middle of May. In all that distance there was exactly one Sunday, in Cappadocia, where they could find no local Christians to worship with.

He was not finished. He lectured at Selly Oak, was received as a minister of the United Reformed Church, moderated its General Assembly, and wrote the books that made him famous in a second country: The Other Side of 1984, Foolishness to the Greeks, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. And in 1981, at seventy-two, a former bishop of two dioceses and a director of the World Council of Churches became the pastor of a small, struggling congregation opposite the prison at Winson Green in Birmingham, and stayed seven years.

He died on 30 January 1998, aged eighty-eight, of heart disease after a short illness. His friend Dan Beeby wrote afterwards of the two sermons he preached in intensive care a few hours before the end. He had ended the last chapter of one of his books by saying that true religion for secular man is the abiding in that consecration, and what he meant by consecration was Christ's own, offered for the sake of those he was sending into the world. He had spent sixty-nine years going where he was sent.