27 minute read
“Mission in Bold Humility ” - Bernard Thorogood
- Bernard Thorogood Remembered
By Neil Thorogood1
Studying 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.
Dad’s studies were, as for so many of his generation, interrupted by national service. This meant the RAF, and postings to Egypt where he became involved in teaching. He was also confronted by the realities of colonialism, empire and the racism so embedded within them: “In Egypt the British maintained a colonial superiority and employed Egyptians in the meanest jobs, as cleaners, refuse collectors, sweepers, laundrymen. No attempt at personal understanding was envisaged, encouraged or allowed. Friendship was derided as impossible… Understanding our prejudices is the beginning of the process of healing. This was an important step for me as I started preparation for a life of ministry in another culture.”7
Returning to Glasgow, dad’s studies took a new turn. He worshipped at Elgin Place, and there he first saw Jannett, my mother: “…I spotted a lovely girl in the front line of the choir. I quickly applied to join the choir, solely to have the chance to take her home after choir practice. It was one of the best moves of my life.”8 Love having intervened, dad swapped from Oxford to Edinburgh for his theological studies. Dad had applied to the London Missionary Society as he left school at 17. Mum had grown up in Australia where her father was the office manager and accountant for the LMS’ Sydney office. Their calling to serve in the LMS was thus deeply shared; God’s work weaving their lives together and launching them across the world. Dad had suggested to the Society that they might send him to China. When the Society told them otherwise, mum and dad accepted without hesitation:
“Aitutaki, Cook Islands, was way off the map. It seemed almost a mythical destination, an Atlantis or Terre Incognita somewhere out in the distant blue. When we looked for it in the old Times Atlas at home it did not appear in the gazeteer. So the family, in a sleepy Sussex market town, passed the name around in puzzlement but also with a little sense of pride. They were despatching us to this distant address and something of the romance of it, the sheer magic, rubbed off on them and on the little church community where I had been a teenager. It was also magic for me, the point of discovery, the outworking of youthful dreams.”9 It was 1953. We would sail away from the Cook Islands in 1970. I was six when we left. My memories are foggy. I glimpse snapshots of afternoons swimming in the lagoon, climbing trees or waiting with my friends for the sugar cane to be cut so that we could chew it and for the mangoes to be ripe. I remember sitting with the women making beautiful patchwork bedspreads and being terrified of a school teacher who, I was convinced, despised the missionary’s kid. Dad’s reflections run to many, many pages. Reading them again now, I am struck by just how much he remembered. He was shocked by the senior missionary’s colonial attitudes which included being waited upon by a servant, driven around in the official mission car and never learning the local language. To dad, such attitudes could have no place, but echoed a past to confess and a present to transform.
Learning Rarotongan, closely related to Tahitian and Maori, was a major early task: “The prize, which the Missionary Society held out as the goal, was to speak the language so fluently that a local person, with eyes shut, would not know that it was an expatriate talking. I think I reached that point after four or five years…”10 Dad never lost the ability. Decades after leaving the islands he could switch from English almost without noticing to the delight of visitors from the Cooks we hosted and, in his later years, as he shared with Cook Islanders in Sydney and returned to Rarotonga on holidays that were also, I think, pilgrimages to roots he cherished and honoured.
Satire on the campaign to end the British slave trade: a Caribbean scene with enslaved Africans dancing happily watched by two white men and a white woman, while in the foreground an abolitionist admits to a man in military uniform that accounts of cruelty are merely the products of his own "vile imagination". May 1792. Source/Photographer https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_2007-7058-2. Permission (Reusing this file) © The Trustees of the British Museum, released as CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
7 B. Thorogood, A Minister’s Minutes, Xlibris Publishing, 2014, p. 17. 8 B. Thorogood, ibid., p. 11-12. 9 B. Thorogood, Polynesian Parish, unpublished manuscript. 10 ibid.
The old LMS mission house at Avarua where the Thorogoods lived. Image courtesy of Neil Thorogood.
Dad’s first book set a trend for much of his lifetime of writing. In 1960 the LMS published Not Quite Paradise. Dad combined his own sketches and maps with a text that tried to build bridges between the Cook Islands and congregations in the UK: “As a young missionary I have written a personal account of my field of service… My chief aim in daring to produce a book after only six years service in the islands is to make this romantic field a little more real. Our vision can be dimmed by the glamour of the South Pacific. My colleagues and friends in the Cook Islands Church would certainly support me in this, for only reality can direct the true proclamation of the Gospel… The Cook Islanders have given us their trust and friendship far more readily than we deserve. I hope that my picture of them will encourage respect and service in response.”11
That picture expanded with a move to Rarotonga and responsibilities teaching and training Cook Island ministers at Takamoa theological college. Dad and mum sailed on the LMS John Williams mission ships (6 and 7 in the series) on their slow and periodic voyages around the Cook Islands. One such trip carried our family away as we relocated to Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands, dad taking up ministerial training there. Then it was back for further service at Takamoa.
Dad’s reflections of these years are rich in detail, in stories, in people and in faith mutually shared. He often writes of the end of colonialism and of changing attitudes; a longing for independence and respect, of his own learning to reframe the missionary enterprise within himself and with the people he served alongside. These island years shaped us as a family. I have never been able to think of myself as a Christian, and of being part of the Body of Christ, without thinking instantly of being equally at home in the URC and CWM as the parts of the Church that I know and love. These Pacific islands shape me still. “The year 1970 began with a surprise – surprising then and still now as I think about it – in the form of a letter from the office of the missionary society in London, telling me that the General Secretary was in hospital after a stroke, was expected to do well, but would not be able to resume full time work, so they needed to appoint a helper who would, after a few months, become the successor, and they called on me to fill that role… It was surprising because I was not one of the senior missionaries in service at that time. There were many with longer experience, better qualifications and remarkable achievements… It was a daunting prospect, to exchange the tropical sunshine for the cold English spring and a commuter train to London… But we all took it as our marching orders and sailed on the Northern Star…”12
Thus, dad joined the staff at Livingstone House and began to learn of the LMS family that was far bigger than the islands he knew and loved, and of the 130 or so missionaries serving across the world. He began travelling as much as possible, hoping to visit every place the LMS shared in so that their contexts could become more real to him, and the distant London office might become less mysterious. Encounters across the world combined with many forces to write a radical emerging agenda that dad was shaped by and helped to shape. He knew, as many did, that all the churches within the LMS family: “…were capable of fulfilling what was known as the 3-Self Movement – self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating. This was not news. It had been accepted for thirty or forty years, but it had never pressed us urgently enough to promote a radical response. We now had to ask the questions, What is a mission board in London called to do? Is its work done? Pack up and go home? Just about this time the same questions were being raised from the other end of the relationship as we heard a plea for a ‘Moratorium on Mission’, led by some church leaders in Kenya, Thailand and Singapore. They were suggesting that for the churches to become fully and fruitfully part of their own community and culture, there needed to be a total withdrawal of expatriate colleagues; only so would the local churches feel free to express the faith in their own ways.” 13
Dad began to write what he described as “Thinking Pieces.” He asked questions and wondered about possibilities. Many, across the world, shared their wisdom, their hopes, their hurt, their fears. By now the LMS was the Congregational Council for World Mission. It was 1975: “In order to clarify the way ahead we invited representatives from the churches in the CCWM circle to gather in Singapore, with an open agenda on the future pattern of the mission enterprise. We were thankful that most of
11 B. Thorogood, Not Quite Paradise, London: LMS, 1960, Introduction. 12 B. Thorogood, A Minister’s Minutes, p. 59. 13 B. Thorogood, ibid., p. 87.
the churches sent a very senior officer who could speak from wide experience and knowledge. All participated well. There were strong voices from South Africa, Jamaica, Hong Kong, South India and Papua New Guinea. A consensus was reached that we in London should make a serious attempt to form a new Council for Mission in which all the churches would share responsibility for the enterprise, all would be givers, all would be receivers, all would be considered for staff positions, all might send missionaries, all would have a global view of God’s call. We took this serious proposition back with us to London, meditating on the plane how such a reform might be achieved.”14
The plan that emerged was published for the churches in the December that year. It was entitled Sharing in One World Mission. Dad sent me, not so long ago, his copy, along with various other pieces of writing he had found. With it, a little note: “I guess the Sharing in One World Mission plan is the most influential thing I have written. Whether it now stands up to examination, others will judge. But most is ephemeral and will fade gracefully away!”
That document says many things about mission, theology, the Church and the world: “No particular church has a private supply of truth, or wisdom or missionary skills. So within the circle of churches which we serve we seek to encourage mutuality.”15 “We believe that we become participants in mission not because we hold all the answers and all the truth, but because we are part of the body of Christ. All of us are searchers. We have glimpsed the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, and what we know we love. But there are varieties of Christian experience and of Christian community we have not entered. There are doubtless many ways in which Christ comes to men [sic] that we have never seen. Therefore, we seek a form of missionary organisation in which we may all learn from each other, for in that fellowship we believe that the Holy Spirit speaks to all through each.”16 “At this point in history it is important that we share power as widely as possible, that we hold as much as we can ‘in common’ and that we value the different ways of discipleship in which Christ leads others. We do not cease to use the resources we have for God’s service; but we cease to regard them as our own. Therefore a mutual sharing of gifts is necessary.”17
Thus was the Council for World Mission born, inaugurated in July, 1977. Dad worked on, exploring what it now meant to share in new ways. Looking back upon those years, he wrote: “I can only reflect that it was a challenging time at which to serve in international mission, a privilege to have a part in it, a big gallop from the small island communities I had known, and all with a sense that I was carried and empowered by many faithful people.”18 In 1972 Presbyterians and Congregationalists came together to form the URC, the church that has been home to me for most of my life. By 1978 the time had come to seek a new General Secretary for the young denomination. Dad was approached, and was inclined to say no. He felt his calling remained with CWM. The search committee disagreed: “A while later they sent Lesslie Newbigin to see me and we had our sandwich lunch together in my office as he set out the claims that my own Church had on me and why I might be the right person for the post. There could not have been a more persuasive messenger.”19
I remember dad once saying that it came as a surprise to discover that his calling led him to become a church bureaucrat! The URC’s London offices were his new base but dad needed to find as many ways as possible to get away from the desk and immersed in the contexts of the URC. I think of the many, many weekends when he was away, leading worship or attending meetings across the denomination. We had no car, so most of these travels depended upon public transport. Dad used the train to read and write. He would often come home late on a Sunday after a winter’s trip was delayed and he had shivered on a dark platform somewhere. Often, he stayed overnight, hosted by a minister or local church family. He loved such visits because he could glimpse something deeper of the story of the people whom he served. I don’t think he managed to visit every congregation, but I suspect he saw a great many. In recent years I would mention a visit of my own and dad would instantly remember the place and some of the people.
Connecting to everyone revealed itself in other ways. Dad only had to cope with email after he retired. Much of his work involved letters received in London. He always attempted to have each letter answered the day he received it; a little sign of respect for whoever had written. Whilst I constantly have to rewrite and sharpen, dad could go from his head to paper via a pen with almost no redrafting. He was well known in committees for being able to condense a complex, and even rambling, discussion into a clear summary statement that everyone could recognise. He would regularly write a reflective letter to all of the URC’s ministers and church secretaries, adapting a habit he had started whilst at CWM. I have a few. They range far and wide across global events, major URC programmes and ecumenical developments. They also dove deeply into his personal journey. In 1987 my mother fell ill. About a year later, the inoperable lung cancer killed her. Within months, dad wrote his regular letter to the URC: “But how do you give battle when the outlook is so grim, when the doctors offer no relief, and when it is plain that weakness increases day by day? I think the great weapons are unremitting love and care… It was a proper battle. Yet the enemy won and I cannot say that was directly the will of God…” 20
Mum’s death struck us hard. She and dad had been such a team, crossing the world together. “So ended 35 years of marriage leaving us deeply shaken. I felt adrift, the anchor gone. For it was only in the loss that I really acknowledged how Jannett had been the centre and strength of the family… I wish I had given thanks for that more often and long ago. Thanks, too, that the discovery of each other far back in Glasgow had led to such good travelling together in faith and service.”21
Dad was an early riser throughout his life. By the time we arrived for breakfast, dad would have spent an hour or two writing. Writing was a huge part of his ministry. There were countless papers and reports of course. But he relished writing a sequence of books that he published during his CWM and URC years22 . This was another way in which he could step from behind the desk, offering thoughtful theology for members of congregations to enjoy written in an engaging and often chatty style as if he was sharing a conversation. Yet the years of experience and encounter and the breadth of scholarship underpinned each page. Ecumenism in the UK and across the world became significant dimensions in dad’s URC years. For him the prayer of Jesus rang as a call to be honoured: “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one – I in them and you in me – so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”23 Mission and ecumenism flowed together.
Dad chaired the Executive Committee of the British Council of Churches. He helped oversee the BCC’s transformation into Churches Together in Britain and Ireland. Up until then, the Catholic Church had not belonged to the BCC: “I was privileged to preside at the meeting where the decision was made. We waited for Cardinal Hume to speak. When he did, in his careful, quiet way, he said that the Catholic Church in England would in future, in every place, and at every level, take its full part in the ecumenical organisation and programme. This was a great moment and signalled to me that my part in the BCC had been completed.”24
At the World Council of Churches Assembly in Vancouver dad was secretary to the Message Committee, responsible for the message the Assembly would send to the world. His memories of the 3,000-seater yellow and white worship tent never faded: “The most exciting moments of that Vancouver meeting were in the big tent. We were there for a prayer service on a late Saturday evening, preparing for the Holy Communion the next morning, when Desmond Tutu arrived. It was dramatic, for he had come straight from South Africa, in the middle of the struggle there. His powerful witness was a
shining light in that dark scene and his personality made us thankful to be in his company… He only spoke for a few minutes that midnight in Vancouver, but wanted us to know that the prayers of the world church were like ‘a fire around us defending us from all enemies.’”25
At Vancouver, dad was elected onto the WCC Central Committee; a body of 200 meeting every eighteen months to oversee the Council’s work. Work included tough debates about ongoing WCC support for the African National Congress as the ANC’s protests against apartheid grew more violent. There were visits to member churches: Hanover (including time with a Jewish Rabbi at Belsen); Moscow (celebrating the millennium of the Orthodox Church); Buenos Aires (just after the Falkland’s conflict and spending time with the mothers and grandmothers of those ‘disappeared’ under the generals). Ecumenism was woven deep into dad’s DNA. In 1991, the WCC published dad’s ecumenical reflections. He concludes: “The diversity of the approaches to God, the different understandings of his work in the world and the different perceptions of his saving act in Christ all are part of the present reality, not to be regularised by any church authority. The unity we seek has to be as visible as the differences. It has to be so plain in the way we order our common life in Christ that the world can see a people brought together before the cross. Our traditional labels need not be the only, the chief or eternal distinguishing marks. But we shall worship and work as people of one city to serve one world. Our unity we shall seek with humility. Our diversity we shall recognize with joy. This search is not a matter
Faith leaders confronting White racism in Charlottesville USA Aug 12th 2017
of sudden arrival, a ‘we’ve made it at last’, and not an occasion to boast of any local progress. I take it to be a permanent characteristic of the fellowship of Christ that we resist the forces that would pull us apart, constantly receive the diversity of human responses to the gospel and never cease to form patterns of unity. The prayer of Christ and the nature of God and the pain of a divided world all draw us along this way.”26
Sydney, Australia
I was ordained in Halifax, West Yorkshire, in September, 1992. Dad preached. In the July of that year he had served his last URC General Assembly. Retirement beckoned. He had arranged a new home near the England-Wales border. He wanted to slip away so that endless invitations to serve on URC committees would not chase him. Nor did he want, in any way, to be thought of as peering over the shoulder of his successor or my first steps into URC ministry.
“I’ve had my time and my chance,” he would say. Honours came his way though. He received an OBE and received a Lambeth Doctor of Divinity, both for services to the world Church. Dad very seldom made any mention of either, being embarrassed to draw attention to such things.
Romance, again, intervened as he retired. And, for sure, in this the providential love and care of God enfolded him. Joan was an old friend who had grown up with my mother and started work with her in Sydney. Having met up again when dad was at the WCC Assembly in Canberra at the start of 1991, a long distance courtship by phone and letter began. They married in Sydney and concluded that this was where they would write a new chapter. these final years. I think he must have written something every day! We have some of it. There was the extended aerogramme conversation in which he would ask a question which we answered a week later and he received a week later still. There were poems and prayers, often compiled into little books primarily as gifts for the congregation; a ministry beyond the Sunday service. He roamed widely across the pages of theology, exploring what he now understood of the Trinity and ecumenism, on the meaning of mission and worship, on suffering and the silence of God, on living simply, on the Creeds, on Paul’s letters, on salvation, on inter-faith dialogue, on being a missionary, on much more. Some became books for wider audiences, but much was just meant for the congregation and circle he loved. It was around 2009 that dad began to notice that Joan’s memory was slipping. Some years later, Alzheimer’s was diagnosed. Once again, dad travelled the road with one he loved as the struggles took their twists and turns. Eventually, he could not offer the care at home he knew Joan needed: “But my helplessness to give the support that was necessary led me to seek a residential care facility which would be within reach and offer both expertise and kind personal attention. That was a very hard decision, perhaps the hardest I have had to make. We found the right home where Joan does receive all the proper care, yet every day when I have visited and then shut the security door behind me, I feel a sense of guilt, as though I have imprisoned my dear wife.”28 He visited Joan several times a week every week until he ended up in hospital and then a care home himself short weeks before his death.
I think there was a final mission field dad walked. Into his own aging, in the sickness of family and the loss of loved ones, in the approach of his own death, dad wandered and wondered. We worked together on a little illustrated booklet for the URC; Old Grey Prayers: Prayers and Poems on Growing Older.29
It was a glorious final chapter for dad. Certainly, there was the heartache of leaving family and friends far away; dad made regular return visits until his health made that too hard and we managed a couple of trips to see them. But we could only rejoice in the way dad completely embraced a new context. He became an Australian citizen and transferred his ministry to the Uniting Church of Australia: “…I was invited to take a part-time pastoral ministry for a little congregation at Pymble Chapel, a former Methodist church in a sandstone building that holds about 50 people. I don’t know how good it was for the congregation but it was certainly good for me to care for such a small group, typical of so many today, where each person is known intimately. It was a splendid corrective to the General Secretary’s chair.”27At the larger Pymble Uniting Church, dad settled into being the most supportive retired minister he could possibly be, every bit at home in the pew but willing to preach and offer anything he could to support the mission and ministry around him. He found deep love and friendship; the Body of Christ as a profound home for one who left another home far away.
I cannot count the thousands of pages dad wrote in
Mum and Dad in the Cook Islands, Image courtesy of Neil Thorogood.
Within the many collections of prayers he shared with those Pymble congregations, the journey towards life’s ending is seen and known, honoured and accepted, offered into the hands of God. Here’s just one he titled “Nursing Home Gospel”: “Weakness does not mean defeat: another valuation is true, that aging brings us closer to victory. Dependence on others is not defeat: it is the opportunity to let them shine with skill and love.
Scrambled memory is not all loss but a photo album become a little untidy, and the good pictures are still there.
And shaky hands have not lost their meaning, for they still bear the touch of experience in every wrinkle.
O Jesus, why could you not grow old and show us the way? You died too young, as heroes do. We need you on the last journey. We want to know that we are with God and God is with us still.
And then we see it plain. This is your journey in these fragile people nearing their final days. This is Christ in old age.
Nursing Home – Emmanuel.”30
Finally
These are some of the things dad did and shared. For some reading this there may be your own memories rekindled as you were part of his life and in these stories. I hope you recognise something true. For others, this might be a glimpse into another world and time. I hope you can find something here that resonates still. I am very grateful to CWM for the invitation to share. Let the final word be his; a blessing from dad’s final book of prayers:
“Come, Holy Spirit, like the wind to fill our sails; Come like the fire to purify our motives; Come like fresh water to revive our tired faith; Come like the springtime to bring the new buds to life; Come like the joy of the feast to call us into fellowship with one another and with the Lord.”31
