These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

Daniel Thambyrajah (D. T.) Niles, faithful servant

 Daniel Thambyrajah Niles (affectionately known as “D.T.”) was a gifted Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) Methodist minister who became internationally famous as an ecumenical leader, prolific author and public speaker. He delivered the keynote address at the First Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Amsterdam in 1948 and also spoke at the Second Assembly held at Evanston (USA) in 1954 and the Fourth in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1968. Niles was a giant of the ecumenical movement, holding high offices in the World Council, the National Christian Council of Ceylon and the East Asian Christian Conference (EACC). Though an ecumenist of global significance, he firmly believed that those involved in ecumenical work should maintain firm roots in the local church. At the time of his death when he was both a President of the WCC and the Chairman of EACC, he was also the Superintendent minister of St Peter’s Methodist Church (Jaffna) and Principal of Jaffna Central College.

Niles is probably best known today for the large number of hymns that he wrote, including the popular, “The great love of God is revealed in the Son” and “Father in heaven, grant to your children”, both of which are included in the Australian Hymn Book and Together in Song. Perhaps it is less well known that he was the author of many popular aphorisms: “Evangelism is witness. It is one beggar telling another beggar where to get food.” And then there is his startling challenge to complacent congregations: “The answer to the problems of our world is the answer that Jesus Christ provided, which is the Church.”

Niles lived simply and always considered his primary calling to be that of an evangelist and preacher—a witness to the living Christ as saviour. He challenged those who doubted that evangelism by the spoken word could still find a response and insisted that those who minister must judge their success not by how much service they have rendered but by how many have been led to God. He was explicitly Christocentric in faith and practice, insisting that those who speak about Jesus must learn to keep quiet about themselves. “The object of evangelism is conversion”, Niles declared, “conversion to Christ and personal discipleship to him.” Also involved in Niles’ understanding of conversion, was conversion to the Christian community and conversion to Christian ideas and ideals. The normal order of mission priorities, he explained, was threefold: a welcome to community, an invitation to discipleship and a transformation of values. “The pilgrimage of the individual Christian”, he insisted, “is held within and nurtured by the pilgrimage of the Christian community.” It is not surprising, therefore, that Niles quoted approvingly Karl Barth’s familiar pronouncement, “One cannot hold the Christian faith without holding it in the church and with the church.”

In one of Niles’s first books which he titled, Whose I Am and Whom I Serve (1939) he wrote “One of the primary needs of the Church today is to rediscover this mood [of hopefulness], not merely to rediscover our faith as such, but to re-discover it in its original mood of exhilaration, of challenge and high adventure, of expectant hope and triumphant deed.” Niles lived such a life of joyous commitment. In one of the last sentences he penned before his death in his memoir, The Testament of Faith (1972), Niles expressed this fundamental characteristic of the Christian life, “I rejoice in the Holy Spirit, His power, His assurance, His guarantees, His teachings, His fellowship, His guidance and His mission; we live by His gifts.” Perhaps the real measure of the man was his humility. It is best expressed in his book, Preaching the Gospel of the Resurrection (1953), “The work we do, during our life on earth is always that which somebody else has done. We begin where they have left off…There is a placard with the sign, ‘Move on’ which hangs over all our work.”

William W. Emilsen

These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

Priscilla/Prisca and Aquila, faithful servants

Priscilla (used by Luke in Acts) is a diminutive of Prisca (used by Paul), derived from priscus, Latin for “old or venerable”, a family or clan name. Aquila, more common, is Latin for “eagle”.

There are tantalisingly few references in the New Testament to Prisc(ill)a and Aquila. Paul knew both personally and refers to them twice. Writing to Corinth from Ephesus in the mid 50s CE, Paul includes them among the greetings: “The churches of Asia send greetings. Aquila and Prisca, together with the church in their house, greet you warmly in the Lord” (1 Cor 16:19). From this we glean that they are a couple, almost certainly married, who have a house in Ephesus of sufficient proportions to be able to host a congregation. A few years later in Corinth Paul writes to the Romans: “Greet Prisca and Aquila, who work with me in Christ Jesus, and who risked their necks for my life, to whom not only I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles” (Rom 16:3). The couple had moved to Rome in the interim and presumably hosted a house church there, too. They had been his co-workers putting their lives at risk for him in some unspecified danger. Here he reverses the order of names from the usual pattern of naming the husband first, a reversal also present in the brief greeting found in a later letter written in Paul’s name (2 Tim 4:19).

For writing Acts, possibly in the 80s CE, Luke appears to have had access to further information. He refers to Aquila in Corinth as “a Jew … a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla”, a tentmaker- or leatherworker like Paul, and who offered Paul hospitality and worked with him also in advocating the faith to local Jews and Greeks (Acts 18:2-4). Aquila had at some stage moved with Priscilla from Pontus in northern Turkey to Rome. Along with many other Jews they had been expelled from Rome by the Emperor Claudius, in 42 CE or 49 CE. One source, Suetonius, gives the reason as disturbances related to a “Chrestus”, a common misspelling of “Christus”. Aquila and Prisc(ill)a may well have been converted in Rome. After 18 months Paul left Corinth for Ephesus and they went with him (Acts 18:18). They gave Apollos instruction with additional information, who thereafter left for Corinth (Acts 18:26; 1 Cor 1:12). Here in Acts 18:18 and 26 Luke also reverses the names, listing Prisc(ill)a first, possibly reflecting her higher social status. Was she also more active (or effective)? Was Aquila ageing? We can never know. Clearly both achieved recognition. Hosting house churches inevitably gave key roles to women, who traditionally looked after what occurred at home, but in addition Prisc(ill)a was engaged in mission and teaching, a role later not open to women.

Later tradition identifies Aquila as one of the first bishops of Asia Minor and reports the martyrdom of both Aquila and Priscilla.

William Loader

These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

Peter and Paul, apostles

The commemoration of the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul in Rome brings together in death two figures who were sometimes at odds with each other in life. Paul recognised Peter as one of Jesus’ original disciples and a witness to the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:3–5), but also claimed that his own encounter with the risen Christ qualified him to join the ‘apostles’ (1 Corinthians 15:8–10). The relationship between these two leading figures in the early years of the Christian movement was marked by a degree of conflict. Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, speaks of a confrontation with Peter in Antioch. By stepping back from an earlier willingness to share table-fellowship with Gentiles, under pressure from colleagues in the Jerusalem church, Peter, in Paul’s eyes, acts hypocritically and in a way that is ‘not consistent with the truth of the gospel’ (see Galatians 2:11–14). As the context makes clear, it was this confrontation that led Paul to first formulate his understanding of justification that is based solely on Christ’s saving work (‘the faithfulness of Christ’) and that is received through faith (see Galatians 2:15–21). In Corinth, there also seem to have been tensions between Paul and sections of the church there that aligned themselves with the leaders of the Jerusalem church, including Peter (see 1 Corinthians 1:11–13).

This conflict, while central to the development of Paul’s theology, does not tell the whole story, however. Paul also indicates that, three years after his call to be the apostle to the Gentiles, he spent a fortnight with Peter, whom Paul regularly calls ‘Cephas’ (Galatians 1:18–20). A later visit to Jerusalem is also marked by co-operation and agreement (Galatians 2:1–10) as Peter and other Jerusalem leaders affirm Paul’s gospel and ministry. The ‘right hand of fellowship’ offered by Peter to Paul, stands as a fundamental gesture of their relationship. This more eirenic account of the relationship then becomes the basis for subsequent Christian accounts, notably that of Luke in the Acts of the Apostles, who strives to bring the two apostles into theological and historical alignment. A letter attributed to Peter commends the study of Paul’s letters, while recognising that ‘there are some things in them that are hard to understand’ (2 Peter 3:15–16).

In this way, Peter and Paul became regarded as the joint founders of the church in Rome. The New Testament gives us no information about their respective deaths. Luke ends his narrative with Paul in Rome under house arrest (Acts 28:30–31), but it is later tradition that describes his martyrdom, along with that of Peter, in the period of the so-called ‘Neronian persecution’. Graffiti in the catacombs of Rome from the 3^rd and 4^th centuries appeal to both apostles from the context of suffering: ‘Paul and Peter, pray for us all’.

Peter and Paul bear witness to both the unity and diversity of the Christian community in the earliest period. But the subsequent commemoration of their joint witness also points us to the things that bound them together. In the words of St Augustine, we remember ‘their faith, their lives, their labours, their sufferings, their confession of faith, their preaching’ (Augustine, Sermon 295).

Written by Rev Dr Sean Winter

These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

Evelyn Underhill, person of prayer

Evelyn Underhill was born in England in 1875 and was the only daughter of Sir Arthur and Lady Alice Underhill. Her father was a well known barrister in London, and Evelyn was brought up in a household steeped in the law. She did not go to school, but was educated at home. After completing her secondary schooling, she attended King’s College, London. During vacations, she travelled abroad, and was greatly attracted to Catholicism, and would have become a Catholic, but was put off by the Catholic Church’s antagonistic attitude to the Modernist trend in theology at the end of the 19th century.

In 1907, she became a member of the Anglican Church, aligning herself with the High Church of England tradition. In the same year, she married Hubert Moore, a barrister. They had no children.

Prior to becoming a member of the church, she had read the writings of the famous Christian mystics – people like Teresa of Avila, Augustine of Hippo, John of the Cross, Francis of Assissi, Walter hilton, Julian of Norwich and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. She became absorbed with Christian spirituality and Christian mysticism, and felt that the average Christian knew little about this side of Christianity. She had always liked writing, so she began to write about Christian spirituality and published a guide to Christian mysticism in 1911. Other books were to follow – books on prayer and worship, and new translations of the writings of Christian mystics for the ordinary person.

Her writings attracted a great deal of interest, and she was soon in demand as a speaker and spiritual guide. She began to conduct retreats and conferences and later gave radio talks. She was very conscious of the need to to keep a balance between the spiritual and physical elements of life – the necessary combination of Mary and Martha, she put it. As a result, she spent her mornings writing, and her afternoons visiting the sick and the poor.

Her writings are refreshing. Although she writes about deep spiritual matters, she uses unaffected illustrations which are easy to identify with. She had a gift for relating what she had to say to the lives of ordinary men and women. On one occasion, she drew a parallel between a Christian’s life and a two-story house. In this house, the upstairs rooms are the spiritual rooms – decorative and beautiful; the downstairs rooms are the practical, well-used rooms representing the physical side of our natures. The house is incomplete without both sorts of rooms. We cannot retreat to the upstairs rooms and ignore the fact that the kitchen downstairs is overrun with beetles and contains a stove that doesn’t work properly.

From all accounts, Evelyn Underhill was a lively person. She loved the outdoors and was passionate about yachting. She had a fondness for pets and indulged in bookbinding for a hobby. She was greatly mourned when she died in 1941.

by Rev Ross Mackinnon