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The Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia has honoured the memory of Lesslie Newbigin on the eve of what would have been the late bishop's 100th birthday. In the final Ecumenical Centre chapel sermon he will preach prior to the end of his term as WCC general secretary, Dr Kobia celebrated Newbigin as "an admirable ecumenist" with an "enthusiasm for crossing cultural boundaries". The author of such works as "Can the West be Saved?", "The Other Side of 1984" and "The Gospel in a Pluralist Society", Newbigin is widely read and admired in ecumenical and evangelical circles.
Born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, on 8 December 1909 and educated at Cambridge University, Newbigin was sent by the Church of Scotland as a missionary to India. Active in the inter-confessional negotiations that led to the creation of the Church of South India, he served as a diocesan bishop of that church from 1947 to 1959. Elected general secretary of the International Missionary Council, he led that body as it merged with the World Council of Churches and continued thereafter as the WCC's associate general secretary. In 1965, the Church of South India recalled him to become bishop of Madras. Following his retirement, he returned to England, taught mission and ecumenics at Selly Oak College in Birmingham and was elected moderator of the General Assembly of the United Reformed Church. He died in London on 30 January 1998.
In his sermon, Samuel Kobia recalled this incident from Bishop Newbigin's life:
"I have told the story before of Lesslie Newbigin's visit to Elmina Castle in Ghana, where captured Africans were held by slave-masters before being shipped to the brutal markets of the New World across the Atlantic. Lesslie was appalled to see that the British colonizers had cut a hole in the floor of the castle's chapel so that they could keep watch over the slaves even while they themselves were at prayer. He later expressed his wish that, in contrition for this great crime of the past, an Archbishop of Canterbury or British prime minister might someday come to the chapel and kneel to ask forgiveness."