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.”