“Mission in Bold Humility” - Bernard Thorogood Remembered By Neil Thorogood1
S
tudying for my MA in Contextual Missiology at Northern College, Manchester, back in the 1990s, David Bosch’s Transforming Mission2 was a core text for our first module. It has fed me ever since. Upon Bosch’s untimely death in 1992, colleagues and friends published a response to that book. They entitled it Mission in Bold Humility.3 That phrase, this coupling of attitudes, has remained a touchstone for me. I hope I can be bold as a follower of Jesus, and his humble witness and servant. Bosch wrote about the adventure of mission and the certainty of the Holy Spirit surprising and unsettling us at almost every step. Humility is called for: “It is, however, a bold humility – or a humble boldness. We know only in part, but we do know.”4 I have borrowed that evocative phrase to write about my father, Bernard. I think it rather wonderfully describes the man and the spheres of his life and ministry. In what follows, you will hear a son’s voice speaking of a father greatly loved and much missed. As much as I can, I want to let his voice come to you through things he published and many pieces written just for a few, or for himself. Throughout, he will simply be “dad”, for that is who he is to me. My closeness to his life and his dying makes this a deeply personal account. I know it cannot hold the critical edge that others will be able to. Having recently participated in CWM’s eDare online conversations I know how vital, urgent and challenging the critiques and reappraisals of CWM and its predecessors are.5 I welcome that rethinking and know that I have much work to do to better understand and repent of the devastating co-option of Christ to forces of empire, colonialism, exploitation, sexism and racism. Ministering, as I do, in Bristol, whose ships and merchants transported over half a million slaves from Africa, the legacies of the Transatlantic slave trade are all around; hauntingly so. Dad was part of some significant stories in mission, ecumenism and the life of the world Church for over sixty years. He is there in the archives. Assessing his contributions more objectively than I possibly can is a task awaiting others. Instead, this is the story I can tell.
To the South Pacific Islands Dad went to the University of Glasgow to begin the studies he hoped would lead to ordination in the Congregational Church and, from the beginning, service overseas: “To be a missionary sounds today a most bizarre ambition. It runs against all our values in a consumer society and a scientific mind-set. It has about it old assumptions of whites teaching blacks, a colonial superiority. But back in the 1940s that is what I set out to be, a minister in a foreign part of the world… My hope to become a minister overseas had to be tested and there was a process of preparation which began when I was 17 until my ordination at 25.”6 1
One of Bernard and Jannett Thorogood’s two sons; currently minister of Thornbury United Reformed Church and Trinity-Henleaze United Reformed Church, Bristol, UK.
2
D. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991.
3
W. Saayman & K. Kritzinger, eds., Mission in Bold Humility: David Bosch’s Work Considered, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996.
4
D. Bosch, op. cit., p. 489.
5
https://edare.cwmission.org/, accessed 03/11/21.
6
B. Thorogood, Pilgrims Together, an unpublished manuscript which, revised, was published as A Minister’s Minutes.
34 INSiGHT DECEMBER 2021
