Remembering Lesslie Newbigin

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Lesslie Newbigin, an English Presbyterian missionary to India who went on in 1947 to become one of the founders and a bishop of the (United) Church of South India, and subsequently general secretary of the International Missionary Council and associate general secretary of the World Council of Churches. Coincidentally, the Times newspaper on 5 December published an account of Newbigin's passage to India in which he recounts that as soon as the ship reached Suez on the voyage out all the Europeans aboard ship donned topees (pith helmets) and insisted that he go ashore to buy one: “Literally you were a cad if you didn’t wear a topee,” he recalled, years later. “It wasn’t just that you were silly, you were definitely, you know, you had gone native ... it was rather like having taken to meths drinking or something.”
In 1948 Newbigin attended the founding assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam as a consultant  and one of my favourite stories is his recollection of being chosen to be on the team to draft the final message of the WCC assembly:

It seemed simple  but was to prove an incredibly difficult and complicated operation. After three meetings our chairman (George Bell) picked two rival teams: Neill, Niles, Schlink and Kraemer as convenor; Nieburhr, Niemöller, Maury and me as convenor. As Niemöller was the possessor of a typewriter I spent a lot of time in his room and came to love and admire him enormously. Both teams were judged to have failed the test and a new group was appointed (Kathleen Bliss, Maury, Neill, and myself). Kathleen (an old friend from Cambridge) produced a draft which contained the famous words, "We intend to stay together", a gem that was to remain through all subsequent meetings as the only memorable word spoken by the assembly. We refined this but again the full committee rejected it. At 10 p.m. yet another team was picked - Berggrav, Bliss, Maury, Niebuhr, Visser 't Hooft, and me - and at 11 o'clock I was commissioned to write yet another draft. This was finished by 3.00 a.m., approved with amendments at breakfast by Maury and Wim, typed on Niemöller's machine for a meeting at 11 o'clock, accepted with some good amendments by 12.30, and retyped ready for translation and duplication by 2 o'clock ... This was my first experience of an exercise in which I was later to get more practice. I have often wondered whether the result is worth the effort. It certainly provides good training in various virtues: sheer physical endurance, and the readiness to see the products of much travail torn to shred's before one's eyes. Perhaps the results have some part to play in edifying the Church. And I do not think that we have yet found a better way of registering the points that we reach in our continuing struggle for unity.

(Lesslie Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda: An updated autobiography, St Andrew Press, Edinburgh, 1993, p. 113)

In 1959 Lesslie Newbigin became the General Secretary of the International Missionary Council and oversaw its integration in 1961 with the World Council of Churches, of which he became Associate General Secretary and Director of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism. He remained in Geneva until 1965, when he returned to India as Bishop of Madras, where he stayed until he retired in 1974. In the chapel of the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva yesterday, Lesslie Newbigin was remembered in the valedictory sermon of WCC general secretary Sam Kobia. Churches Together in Britain and Ireland are organizing a centennial conference on 11 December on the legacy of Lesslie Newbigin.

When Newbigin went back to Britain in 1974 he was offered a post with the Church of England (though originally a Presbyterian his episcopal ordination was recognised as being in the historic succession) but faithful to his roots he returned to the United Reformed Church, formed two years earlier as a union of English and Welsh Congregationalists and English Presbyterians. He taught at the Selly Oak Colleges and then from 1980 to 1988 as minister of an inner city church in Birmingham opposite the prison. As a teenager growing up in the United Reformed Church in the 1970s I felt affectionately bound to this "Reformed bishop" who when he was moderator of the URC general assembly 1978 to 1979 came to the assembly of the Fellowship of United Reformed Youth (later, when I was working for the European Parliamentary Labout Party I came across  his son, John, who was then an advisor for Neil Kinnock, Labour Party leader).


One of Lesslie Newbigin's  best-selling books was  "The Other Side of 1984", a slim publication in the Risk series of the World Council of Churches. It was an attempt to challenge the church to demonstrate an alternative to the assumptions of post-Enlightenment culture and offer an understanding of the human condition from a clear faith perspective, while not retuirning to a pre-Enlightenment world, as he explained here. All this may give the impression of a rather dour, austere man, of possibly conservative inclinations. This does not chime with my memories of Lesslie Newbigin, and the faith committments that impelled him to write "1984" also made him a formidable critic (as I remember it) of the Britain that had been created by Margaret Thatcher. One of my last memories of Lesslie Newbigin was of him attending the World Conference onMission and Evangelism in Salvador Bahia, Brazil in 1996, where he challenged the churches to address the current domination of the world by the “Western free-market culture”. His own report of that conference - not uncritical of the WCC - can be found here. He died on 30 January 1998.

The photo is from an online searchable database of writings and materials linked to Lesslie Newbigin that can be found at http://www.newbigin.net/