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.

Patrick & Ninian, Christian pioneers

Patrick c390-c461

Patrick was born in Roman Britain. We know little about his life other than what is revealed in his Confession, his Letter to the soldiers of Coroticus, and the Breastplate of St. Patrick, which may have been written by him. All other knowledge is just legends. Accounts of Patrick’s life are so drawn-out (his own Confession) or overblown (later hagiography) that most of what we know about him can neither be proven nor discredited conclusively.

In the field of Celtic history, almost everything we read reflects a political point the author wishes to make. Bede, for example, makes no mention of Patrick. This omission tells us a lot about Bede. He was interested, following the Council of Whitby, in showing how those who had taken the Roman view regarding the date of Easter and the tonsure, were in his eyes correct; those who didn’t were clearly wrong. Bede had no place for Patrick.

Patrick himself was most likely British in origin, and, after being enslaved by an Irish warlord, and then escaping to the Continent, he returned to Britain before evangelizing Ireland. His mission was not to the British; he said his missionary impulse was fuelled by “a vision in my dreams of a man who seemed to come from Ireland—a vision like the apostle Paul’s at Troas.”

Patrick had been sent as a replacement for Palladius who had died shortly after his arrival in Ireland. Whereas Palladius, whose mission lasted about one year, was interested in those who were already Christians, Patrick, it seems, had a missionary zeal to convert the Scots (Irish). It is believed that Patrick embarked upon the first significant missionary endeavour in 432.

While Patrick does not appear to have represented Rome officially, his time on the Continent may have included monastic training; he appears to have studied at a monastery in Gaul. Patrick was ordained a priest and bishop, and this suggests he would have at least been exposed to current thinking and policies from the papacy.

He then travelled to Ireland, where over the course of several years, he converted thousands of people to Christianity, including several Irish kings. Anglo-Saxon warlords made the process very difficult for Patrick and his converts, however. Coroticus, a king from western Britain, swept in and did extensive damage in Northern Ireland, killing many Christians or taking them prisoner.

Irish monasticism as implemented by Patrick continued to grow nonetheless. This monasticism was very similar to that throughout Europe. This form of Monasticism was based on a diocesan approach but within a few years it had become a monastery-based model with a bishop being head of the monastery. Sometime after the death of Patrick the church in Ireland was reorganised on a thoroughgoing monastic basis. The chief person becomes the Abbot not the Bishop. Monasteries were often the only available means of obtaining a useful education.

It is worthwhile noting that Patrick denounced slavery during his life, and the practice was discontinued shortly after his death.

To mark St Patrick’s Day you could always sing the hymn attributed to him found in TiS 478 ‘I bind unto myself today the strong name of the Trinity’ or use the prayer below:

Christ be beside me,
Christ be before me,
Christ be behind me,
King of my heart.
Christ be within me,
Christ be below me,
Christ be above me,
never to part.

Christ on my right hand,
Christ on my left hand,
Christ all around me,
shield in the strife.
Christ in my sleeping,
Christ in my sitting,
Christ in my rising,
light of my life.

Christ be in all hearts thinking about me;
Christ be on all tongues telling of me;
Christ be the vision in eyes that see me;
in ears that hear me, Christ ever be.

Ninian

We know very little about Ninian and even then the ‘facts’ are disputed. He was reputedly the son of a chieftain who had converted to Christianity and he came from either Cumbria, or the South-West of Scotland. Christianity had spread during the time of Roman occupation and three Bishops from Britain had travelled to the Council of Arles in 314AD. Ninian, who would have been a Roman citizen, is said to have travelled to Rome to study. In Rome he was ordained and consecrated as a bishop, being sent back to his native Britain around 397AD, in order to evangelize his fellow Britons and take the Gospel to the Southern Picts, in what became, much later, Scotland.

Some historians believe that this work of conversion was done by Columba some 150 years later and not by Ninian. It is believed that Ninian was active from 397 to 431AD.

On arrival he is said to have had a monastery built on the north shore of the Solway Firth by masons from St. Martin’s Monastery in Tours, Gaul. This became known as the Great Monastery and it was from here that he, and those he gathered around him, set out on their missionary tours. It is possible that this building was known as Ad Candidam Casam, from the Latin meaning “At the White House”. It would appear to have been painted with a whitewash. It is possible that it was built with white stone, although this would have been unusual to that time. His monastery probably gave the name to the town now known as Whithorn.

The earliest reference to Ninian and to the White House is from Bede, in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, writing around 731AD, almost four hundred years later. In this he says that he is just passing on the knowledge that was traditional at the time of his writing. He does not claim that what he writes is factual. He tells us that Ninian called his monastery after St. Martin of Tours and it is possible that he had met Martin on his way back from Rome. Martin died in the same year that Ninian travelled back to Britain.

Part of Bede’s agenda was to say that Ninian had not been part of the Celtic Church, but loyal to the Roman way of being church.

The first history of Ninian was not written till the 12^th Century when Aelred, who was Abbot of the monastery at Rievaulx in Yorkshire, wrote his “Life of Saint Ninian”. By this time many monasteries and places associated with saints from the past had histories written in order to promote their Centre, in order to encourage the pilgrimage trade. It is thought that Aelred was asked by the Bishop of Galloway to write the history to promote his Bishopric.

In his history, Aelred says that Ninian performed a number of miracles both before and after his death. So it is possible that the history was to help secure his sainthood.

After the history was written, Whithorn and Ninian’s tomb, became a very important Centre of pilgrimage.

Written by Rev Peter Welsh

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.

Cyril & Methodius, Christian pioneer

The ninth century was perhaps the most active period of missionary activity in the Eastern (Orthodox) churches since apostolic times. Patriarch Photius chose two Greek brothers from Thessalonica, Constantine whose monastic name was Cyril, (826-869), and Methodius (?815-885) to initiate the conversion of the pagan Slavs – Moravians, Bulgarians, Serbs and Russians. They had grown up on the borders of these lands, and they knew the Slavonic language, amongst others. Cyril was a librarian and known as a philosopher; both were ordained priests. In 863 they set off for what is now the Czech lands with an invitation from the local prince and the blessing of the Byzantine emperor. In preparation for this venture, the brothers had translated the Gospels, the larger part of the New Testament and some of the Old, and the liturgical books into Slavonic, an enormous task, especially since they had to begin by inventing an alphabet, now known, in a developed form, as Glagolithic or Cyrillic. That is, they set out with the basic tools to build a church of peoples who did not know Christ. What is known as Church Slavonic is still the basic liturgical language of the Russian and related churches, and a great literature grew from it in the related languages.

Their methodology however was in contrast to that of Rome, whose missionaries had to teach their converts Latin before they could teach them anything else – and indeed there were clashes between missionaries of the two Christian centres. At this stage, however, the eastern and western wings believed themselves to belong to the one universal church, and the brothers travelled to Rome to place their mission under the Pope. Their exceptional approach and their church books received his blessing, but sadly, under that pope’s successor, and under German Catholic influence back in Moravia, the old Latin approach was enforced, and the saints’ work eradicated soon after Methodius died. However, the seeds had been sown, and bore fruit especially in Russia, Bulgaria and Serbia, whose rulers consciously chose Cyril and Methodius’s way. Rightly are they know as the ‘apostles of the Slavs’. Success took a long time, and was largely achieved by decision of tsars and princes. Some half-convinced Greek missionaries used Greek, which was no more understandable to the Bulgars than Latin; in Romania, a Latin-based culture, the Slavonic influence is still mixed with the Latin in the Orthodox Church.

The younger brother Cyril died in Rome (he became a monk in 868 just before his death on February 14th, 869) and is buried there. Methodius had been made a bishop by the pope (ca 870) for his return to Moravian lands after their embassy to Rome. He was imprisoned for two years by rival church authorities, and endured many years of theological and ecclesiastical disputes. He died in Moravia. Their pupils, however, carried on the work into further lands, paving the way for their declaration as co-Patrons of Europe, with St Benedict, by Pope John Paul II in 1980.

By Rev Dr Robert Gribben

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.

Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christian thinker

Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was unquestionably the most influential Protestant theologian of the nineteenth century, so much so that he has been called ‘the father of modern Protestant theology’. The word ‘modern’ here is a technical term. It does not mean the latest, but rather is a synonym for, in this case, a new theological system made necessary by the widespread collapse of classical theology initiated by the human centred strictures of the European Enlightenment, which had reduced religion to the knowledge of God in terms of arguments for his existence, or more exactly, to natural theology and to morality.

To this end, Schleiermacher began his apologetic (‘apologetic’ is a positive word meaning ‘making a statement on behalf of’) endeavour by publishing a book he called “ On Religion, Speeches to its Cultured Despisers” (1799). Here, he attempted to win back the educated classes to a serious encounter with religion, which he defines as ‘a sense and taste for the infinite’, a foundation independent of all theological dogma. He contended that religion was based on intuition and ‘feeling’, by which he meant not subjective emotion but an experience of ‘absolute dependence’, the impact of the universe upon us in the depths of our being which transcends subject and object. In this respect, Schleiermacher wanted to affirm that although Christianity is the highest of the religions, it is not the only true one.

In 1809 he became Dean of the theological faculty in the newly founded University of Berlin. By this time he was recognised as a stirring and convincing preacher. From 1819 he was chiefly occupied with his most important work, “The Christian Faith”. The title is significant; not “The Doctrine of God”, since what is positively given in the world is the Christian faith as such. That is to say, for Schleiermacher you do not first have to decide about the truths or untruths of religion in general or Christianity in particular. Rather we find Christianity given as an empirical fact in history, and only then do we have to describe the meaning of its symbols.

When he explains why he thinks Christianity is the highest manifestation of the essence of religion, Schleiermacher says it is because Christianity has two defining characteristics. The first is what he calls ethical monotheism, namely a dependence on God as the giver of the law which reveals the goal towards which we have to strive. The second is that everything is related to salvation by Jesus of Nazareth. Since this One possesses the fully developed religious consciousness, he does not need salvation. So he qualifies supremely as being the Saviour.

The import of Schleiermacher’s theology is that he subjects Christianity to a concept of religion which at least in intent is not derived from Christianity but from the whole panorama of world’s religions. Two significant consequences follow from this foundation, both exemplifying what are essentially the presuppositions of Modernity. First, his method is always to move from the general to the particular, and second, he insisted that knowledge and action are consequences of religious experience; they are not the essence of religion. It is readily apparent how successful Schleiermacher has been since these principles continue to inform modern Protestant liberal Christianity, despite their being radically called into question by the prevailing theological concerns of most of the twentieth century.

Contributed by Bruce Barber

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.

Simeon & Anna, witnesses to Jesus

Simeon and Anna appear in the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel. Forty days after his birth and according to the Law, Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem so the he might be named, and Mary could undergo the Rite of Purification of the mother.

When they entered the Temple, there were two people who recognised God’s son. Faith was not dead in Israel, there was still a remnant.

We are first of all introduced to Simeon. We are told he is a righteous and devout man who was waiting for God to deliver Israel. Luke tells us that Simeon had the Holy Spirit upon him and that he had been told he would not die before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. Therefore, the Holy Spirit had prompted him to come to the Temple because God’s Messiah had come.

Upon seeing Jesus, he took him in his arms and speaks a prophecy. This has become known as the ‘Nunc Dimittis’, from the first words of its Latin translation, ‘now dismiss’. Simeon was ready to die. He had seen the Messiah, God’s salvation.

Simeon was familiar with the scriptures and his insight flowed from this knowledge. He was referring to a passage from Isaiah about waiting for the restoration of Jerusalem; for the coming of the Messiah, the Christ, who God had promised. Jews of that time had taken the scriptural prophecies to mean that they, the Jews; either those who kept the Torah or those born Jews, would be saved, but they had not recognised that God spoke about him bringing salvation to the whole world, Jew and Gentile. In giving the prophecy of Simeon, Luke is letting his non-Jewish listeners know that Christ came to save all who believe. Simeon tells Mary that although the offer of salvation is for all peoples, it will not be received by everyone. Luke uses this theme throughout his Gospel.

The second person we meet is Anna. Anna means grace. She is called ‘Daughter of Penuel’. Penuel is the place where Jacob wrestled with the angel and means ‘I have seen Gods face, yet my life is preserved.’

Anna we are told is an elderly woman. She is either 84 years old or a widow for 84 years which would make her over 100 years old. She is described as a prophet and had given her life to prayer and fasting, both night and day. We are told she never left the Temple. Anna thanked God and then told everyone about the Messiah.

There is much we can learn from these two elderly saints. While the authorities carried on with their religious duties these two prayerful people recognised in Jesus that the Messiah had come to the Temple. Simeon tells us that the challenge of Christ causes people to reveal their true attitudes. Some will speak against the sign of God’s love, it searches their hearts, some will be scandalised by a salvation that can only be achieved by way of a cross.

Simeon can now depart this life in peace, but Anna wants everyone to know that the Messiah has come and had come for all who receive him.

Rev Peter Welsh

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.

Lesslie Newbigin, Christian thinker

The Right Reverend James Edward Lesslie Newbigin, CBE (1909-1998).

Newbigin was born 8 December 1909 in Northumbria (North Britain) to a devout Christian family. This was not a faith he shared, for during his time at boarding school he had “abandoned the Christian assumptions of [his] home and childhood.” This changed when he attended Cambridge University and became a member of the Student Christian Movement. At the end of his first year of study Newbigin spent his summer at a Quaker service center in South Wales, one that catered to the miners of the region. In the midst of the hardship he witnessed, Newbigin had a vision,

“a vision of the cross, but it was the cross spanning the space between heaven and earth, between ideals and present realities, and with arms that embraced the whole world. I saw it as something which reached down to the most hopeless and sordid of human misery and yet promised life and victory. I was sure that night, in a way I had never been before, that this was the clue that I must follow if I were to make any kind of sense of the world.”

Though a long quote, this vision became the central point of all that followed in Newbigin’s life and work.

Upon graduation from university, Newbigin became part of the SCM staff and here he met and married Helen Henderson (they would have three children). He would train for the ministry within the Presbyterian Church before becoming a missionary to India (1936). He served as a “district missionary” in Kanchipuram for the period of WWII and was instrumental in working towards the creation of the Church of South India. In 1947, he was appointed Bishop of Madurai and Ramnad.

Newbigin was instrumental in the ecumenical movement, working as General Secretary of the International Missionary Council (IMC) and drafter of many ecumenical statements. He was responsible for overseeing the integration of the IMC and the World Council of Churches (WCC). At the conclusion of his secondment to the WCC, Newbigin returned to India, and served as the Bishop in Madras until his retirement in 1975.

After returning to England, Newbigin taught theology of mission and ecumenical studies along with Hinduism at Birmingham University. He transferred his ordination to the United Reformed Church, and in 1980-88 became the minister of the URC, Winson Green, Birmingham. This church had had no minister for 40 years and was housed in a building that had stood condemned for 30 years. The neighbours were from the Indian subcontinent and the West Indies, and the church stood opposite the gates of HM Prison Birmingham. This experience confirmed for Newbigin the missionary context of western society.

Newbigin was the keynote speaker and bible study leader at the first (and only) National Conference of Australian Churches held in Melbourne February 1960. 350 attended the 10 day conference and 175 participants (46% of the total number) were members of Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational denominations in Australia. The conference signalled a renewed emphasis on the mission for the local congregation. In his closing remarks Newbigin stressed that the ecumenical encounter was, “for the sake of the gospel and the witness that you have to bear to the Australian nation.

The conference was timely and influenced the work of the Joint Commission on Church Union formed by the three denominations. The November 1962 report, The Church its Nature, Function and Ordering was a key document that led to the formation of the Uniting Church 15 years later. Members of the Joint Commission and participants in the conference included Alan Watson, J. F. Peter and John C. Alexander (Presbyterian), Frank Hambly, Hubert H. Trigge, and Bertram R. Wyllie (Methodist) and J. D. Northey (Congregational). Colin Williams and J. Davis McCaughey were also involved as conference members lived in at the 5 denominational colleges within the University of Melbourne. Harvey Perkins was conference secretary and with others continued to provide leadership in the ecumenical movement in the following decade.

Proposals for the united church included the recommendation that ordained ministers be named Presbyters, leadership to include bishops and that the consideration be given to forming a concordat with the Church of South India. It could be that Newbigin’s role as Bishop of the Church of South India contributed to this proposal. After further debate and consideration each of these proposals were not agreed to when the Basis of Union was adopted.

He initiated The Gospel and Our Culture Movement in the early 1980s, which would become better known as the missional church movement in the USA. Newbigin died in 1998, as one of the key and most creative ecumenical and missionary thinkers of the twentieth century. A prolific author, a good number of his books have stood the test of time, but if I had to recommend one as compulsory reading it would be his 1953 “Household of God.”

Rev Dr John Flett / Dean Eland

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.

Andrei Rublev, person of prayer

Very little is known for certain about the life of Rublev. The date of his birth is probably between 1360 and 1370. It is recorded that he died 29/1/1430, though even that is questioned. He was a Russian Orthodox monk, and it was the custom for iconographers to sign their work only as “A Monk of the Eastern Church”. Attention was to be focused on the subject of the icon, and not who painted (or wrote) it. Only a very few particularly talented and significant iconographers were remembered by name and their work identified. Rublev was certainly one of these.

He appears to have lived most of his life in the Trinity-St Sergius Monastery near Moscow. He may have come from a family of artisans, as the name Rublev comes from “Rubel” a particular tool in Russia. There is a legend that he was shy and calm by nature. The first reliable record is dated 1405, when he painted icons and frescoes in the Annunciation Cathedral, which still stands in the Kremlin in Moscow. Most of his work was destroyed. Although we know little about Rublev himself, we know a good deal about the turbulent times in which he lived. Warring princes destabilised the country, weakening it and making it vulnerable to invasion by Mongols and Taters. Plague swept through Russia early in the fifteenth century, and it was a time of brutality and corruption.

Rublev rose above all this to paint works that are marked by simplicity and peace. His most famous icon is the Old Testament Trinity, which is also adjudged by many as the greatest icon ever painted. It was done about 1410, and has a story of its own. Icons were protected by a finishing treatment of olipha (basically linseed oil), which darkened over time, and which, together with soot from candles and general dust and dirt, meant that a century after they were painted they were obscured. Rublev’s Trinity was over-painted several times in an attempt to preserve it, but eventually it was discarded.

In 1905 new techniques for cleaning old icons were developed, and some restorers happened upon this old board. A small test strip revealed exquisite work and it was sent to Moscow, where it lay until the revolution. In 1918 the first Minster for the Arts in the Communist government had it restored to its present condition and hung it in the Tretyakov Museum in Moscow, where it still resides, with several other undisputed works of the master. Apart from technique, the work of Rublev reveals deep insight into Orthodox theology and devotion. This is brought out in the film of his life made by Tarkovsky in 1966. The film was immediately suppressed by the Soviet Government, but was shown to great acclaim at the Cannes Festival of 1969. A censored version was then allowed into the Soviet Union, but it was cut even further for the American market in 1971. The version now available is disjointed, but shows Rublev as a man of prayer, deeply affected by the chaos of his time, and only rising to greatness after much suffering.

The Trinity icon depicts the Trinity as the three angels who appeared to Abraham at Mamre, and presents them as equal, bound together in a community of love. There is a space at the table so that person praying before this icon can be included in the life of heaven through the Eucharistic chalice that sits on the table.  This divine energy cannot be shaken, no matter what disasters may occur on earth. Surrounding all is God’s peace and light and life.

by Rev Dr Rob Gallacher

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.

Alan Walker, faithful servant

Born in Sydney in 1911 the eldest of two boys, he was proud of the Walker heritage. John Joseph Walker was sent to Australia in the early 1800s as a convict, as was a young woman Ann Gill who became his partner. Their son John was an unruly young man but was converted through a Methodist preacher in 1838. He joined the local Methodists and began to preach. Alan’s father was an evangelist and he responded to his father’s appeal to people to give their lives to Christ at a service at the Boolaroo Methodist Church. He became the youngest student ever to be admitted to theological training in 1930. Due to the financial situation he had to pay his way, which he did through a profitable fruit and vegetable run.

He did well at theological college and asked to do university studies at Sydney University which he did while serving brief terms at Hornsby, Croydon and with the Young People’s Department. Some key lay people at Croydon recognised his potential and offered to send him to England for a year to gain experience in ministry with leading ministers there. He was about to get married but they agreed he could take his new wife if he raised the cost of her fare. He was given a one-way fare and living expenses for three months. After that he was on his own financially. In 1938 he was enabled to spend time on the staff of each of the leading mission churches throughout the country. He was impacted especially by the ‘big three’ of English Methodism, namely Sangster, Soper and Weatherhead. During this time he went to Europe, witnessed a Hitler rally in Germany, and attended a Faith and Order congress in Switzerland where he met William Temple.

On returning to Australia he was appointed to Cessnock, a coal-mining town. He learned to understand the people and community he served, he made use of the mass media of radio and newspapers, as a pacifist he had to cope with controversy, and he developed links with the Trade Union movement. During this time he gained a master’s degree in sociology published as Coal Town: A Sociological Survey of Cessnock. Next he was appointed to Waverley.

There he continued to develop his media ministry, built a community centre with a range of programs and the congregation grew. He was chosen to represent the Methodist Church at the first assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1948 and the Australian government at the United Nations in New York in 1949.

He was asked to head up the Methodist Church’s “Mission to the Nation” which was launched in April 1953 in the Melbourne Town Hall. He travelled the nation speaking to huge crowds and attracting a great deal of media attention. A National Christian Youth Convention was held in January 1955 as part of the Mission to the Nation. He was then invited to the US to serve the Board of Evangelism of the Methodist Church for a year in 1956. This was followed by becoming visiting professor of evangelism at the Boston School of Theology for a semester and then returning to Australia by ship via Europe and the Suez Canal.

In 1958 he began as superintendent minister of the Central Methodist Mission in Sydney. He emphasised worship, social witness and evangelism as he sought to minister not just to the congregations but to the city. He instigated programs such as Teenage Cabaret, College for Christians, Singles Society and School for Seniors. The television program “I Challenge the Minister” gained high ratings. Vision Valley conference centre was established. The most notable development was Lifeline, the telephone counselling service that became a worldwide movement. In 1970 he became President of the NSW Methodist Conference, which included conducting “Newness NSW” missions and the Valley Festival. He was constantly in the media speaking on social issues, most notably opposing the war in Vietnam and Apartheid in South Africa. He had many overseas trips speaking to different groups: to the US in particular but also memorable ones to Southern Africa.

After 21 years at the Mission he became director of World Evangelism for the World Methodist Council from 1978 to 1987. He and his wife Win literally travelled the world proclaiming his holistic gospel that held together the personal and social dimensions of the gospel. This is best expressed in his most important book, The Whole Gospel for the Whole World (published by Abingdon in 1957). He wrote over 20 books and numerous articles especially the Easter and Christmas editorials for the Sydney Morning Herald. At an age when most people are retired he established the Pacific College (now Alan Walker College) of Evangelism at North Parramatta and served as principal until 1995 when he finally retired. He is remembered as a powerful speaker and leader who proclaimed Christ, spoke out on social issues, and established Lifeline. He was an evangelist, a prophetic voice and a person with a pastoral heart who became one of Australia’s living treasures. His voice and life are heard today in the need to keep evangelism and social justice, personal and social holiness together, along with worship and pastoral care.

Contributed by Chris Walker