Bugles in Heaven

Some grieving over here, combined with massive gratitude. It's been a week of lively and poignant communications with friends and contacts in the light of this news.

Methodist Church announce Rev Dr Colin Morris' death

Preacher, author and broadcaster Rev Dr Colin Morris has died.

The past president of the Methodist Conference was head of religious broadcasting and controller of BBC Northern Ireland from 1987 to 1991.

He served as a missionary in Zambia and was elected as the first President of the United Church of Zambia.

The Rev Canon Gareth J Powell, Secretary of the Methodist Conference, said he was "one of the most effective and thoughtful communicators".

Outspoken

The Rev Dr Morris, who was born in Bolton, became known for his passionate and outspoken views on political and social issues.

He became a close friend of President Kenneth Kaunda, with whom he worked  during negotiations for Zambia's independence.

"In Colin, Methodism was faithfully and passionately represented but more than that - the gospel was proclaimed with integrity," added Rev Powell.

"He took the task seriously, was alert to the contexts in which he served, and above all he waited on God."

Sandy, Colin's wife, their immediate loved ones and all those who'll be closely involved in funeral and farewell gatherings are being firmly held in prayer here, far across the waters. And why wouldn't we? Colin headed up the British Methodist Church's Overseas Division for some memorable years during his ministry. His correspondence archive contains letters from the Methodist Church in Fiji. He was a prophet of many parts.

He was also my PhD subject. An unwilling one, self-confessed. 'I can't think why you're bothering', he used to say wryly, in the no-nonsense Lancashire tones that never left him, while handing me another carton of 'treasures' - unpublished manuscripts in various stages of completion, correspondence, newspaper clippings, cassette tapes, sermon skeletons, lectures, speeches and scribblings. These were logged and filed during the research - about 1000 items up to 2013 - and deposited at the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History with his knowledge and extraordinarily kind permission. There simply aren't words sufficient to  express my gratitude to him for this generosity.

The reason I bothered is below: expressed as well as I was able, in order to justify both conviction about the subject/project alongside sufficient, rigorous academic detachment. Colin would have been teasingly scathing about that sort of establishment requirement, considering it rather po-faced and pretentious. I knew just what he meant, but produced the goods anyhow rather than put the whole thing in jeopardy. It just meant sharing part of my Christian testimony basically, in the kind of way that wouldn't cause a PhD examiner to wrinkle their nose and tut too much. Here it is.

3.3.2   Looking Within

My personal interest in Colin Morris’s life and work needs to be declared. It is not detrimental to academic detachment: it rather represents a small background section in the jigsaw. There is nothing dramatically colourful that should grab attention but, like an indefinable piece of blue sky or green grass, it must be given its place in the totality of this project. 

In 1976, at the age of sixteen, I was confirmed at Plymouth Grove Methodist Church, Manchester. This rite of passage marked a serious personal commitment to the Christian faith. It was the year of Colin Morris’s Presidency of the Methodist Conference and his influence was everywhere. Northern, working class Methodism of which I was a part revered him, not least because of his Bolton roots. My own father, a committed, cradle Methodist with a living faith died suddenly two years later at the age of fifty-four. He had spoken frequently about Colin Morris and admired tremendously his preaching and principles. I respected my father and absorbed much from this. I read Include me Out! with its poignant story of the starving Zambian found dead on Morris’s doorstep, while I was in my teens and about to embark on a first theological degree in Manchester. Because of it, I wanted to change the world. I began by training to be a Methodist local (lay) preacher. How else? 

Vocationally and professionally since that period, my background has been in radio broadcasting, as a minister in the Methodist Church here in Britain - but ordained in the United Church of Zambia where I served on the Copperbelt from 1993-1998 - teaching in the field of global mission education at the Selly Oak Colleges and the Queen’s Foundation in Birmingham (2000-2009), and regularly preaching, speaking and broadcasting. There is no comparison whatsoever intended between the magnificent breadth, substance and reach of Dr Morris’s work and my own. To suggest so would be as ludicrous as it would be embarrassing. I am simply fascinated by the autobiographical points of connection: vocational, professional and geographical; entirely unplanned. 

3.3.3 Looking in totality 

In summary then, this study embraces and is energised by Creswell’s support of the biographical or life history approach to qualitative research and has applied his criteria to make a justifiable case. There is sufficient literature by or related to Morris who more than fulfils the requirement that the research subject should be ‘someone who has had a distinguished career, someone in the national spotlight…’  Accessible and available material about the subject from historical or present day sources Creswell sees as essential, and this is exactly what the Morris database affords. Drawing heavily on Denzin’s interpretive biography, Creswell’s four challenges for the interpretive biographer are regard as baseline principles for this study: the collection of extensive subject-related materials; the positioning of the subject historically and contextually within the larger trends in society or culture; the necessity of reading the life as a multi-layered phenomenon; and the writer-researcher being able to acknowledge her standpoint in the narrative.

Brinkmann, writing on the use of everyday life materials in interpretative qualitative research, is keen that researchers build on questions and problems that are of genuine interest to themselves. The Colin Morris Collection’s materials are somehow ‘everyday’ and unusual in equal measure, and my particular interest is in what they reveal about one human life-script which has been consistently able to traverse different territories and make radical, vocal impact. Or, how one ‘voice’ has managed to communicate its messages transcriptively into and out of many audiences and across competing cultures. The key to unlocking that question in the thesis is activated by conscious, radical, looking, listening, reading and questioning throughout. 

Colin, communicator par excellence, inspired me to road test a bit of new vocabulary. That was one of the things that caused mild examiner tutting and nose-wrinkling. I tried to put forward the case that he was able to communicate, with consummate skill, transcriptively; ie. across hugely varied scripts and spaces, and in doing so, brought a wealth of theory and resource to communicators within the Church and without. In the 'transcriptive space' of Colin's communications, scripts intertwine and interact, themes emerge, are reworked and reemerge, and the whole marketplace or dancefloor of scripts is wonderfully energetic and mutually creative. That was the gist, anyhow.

And now, since being in Fiji, it's been absolutely fascinating to reflect even more about  this notion, enriched by precious, intricate, indigenous Pacific understandings of communication, under the umbrella term talanoa. What I understand of talanoa is a miniscule drop in the vast ocean, but out of initial musings, and much encouraged by Pacific colleagues, transcriptive space met talanoa in this Conference article. I share it for your interest below, but primarily as a personal tribute to Colin. It wouldn't have happened without him. 

Neither would a whole lot of other things that have made the world a better place.

Bless you, Colin. Thank you, Lord. 

Here's that Conference article I mentioned. Should I have taken the carving knife to it?

Transcriptive Space meets Talanoa

A paper presented to the 14th Assembly of the International Association for Mission Studies. 11-17 August 2016, Seoul.

In the Education by Extension (Distance Learning) Department at the Pacific Theological College, we are often asked by students for a certified copy of their transcript. A transcript details someone’s educational achievement. We click the button on a departmental database and usually - because sometimes the spirit blows where it will in Microsoft Access - a neat summary of courses and credits appears. An accurate transcript is a precious piece of communication. It is much more than documentation. It can speak volumes: not least to the one who earned it; the human being, the very mind and heart, flesh and blood whose sweat and toil brought forth the words and got the grades. So precious is this unique piece of student communication that many universities are keen to boast about their watertight transcript stationery: a secure and personalised hologram, controlled watermarked paper, innovative and highly secure ink, verifiable numbering matrices and security infilling. Nobody messes with our transcripts, is the stern message.

The prefix ‘trans’ before ‘script’ is useful. It suggests a script that can move: not a piece of stationery that is stationary. It refers, in the academic sense of course, to the summary of achievement across a spectrum of learning. Someone has navigated their canoe through oceans of learning. ‘Well done!’ we say. Here’s a flag to nail proudly to your mast. But that flag-transcript, flying high, will inevitably catch the breeze and face the elements if the person’s voyage of discovery continues. Unchartered waters beckon; choppy seas, maybe. That flag-transcript can be raised aloft for sure: as a formal record of learning, it should not be tampered with. But for it to be any use in practical mission, the formal script cannot stay forever in the safe harbour of the issuing University and the student’s ornamental photo frame. The transcript needs to become powerfully transcriptive; credited learning able to live again and communicate afresh across multiple places and spaces. 

In recent years, I have researched the mission and ministry of someone who, I humbly propose, has operated transcriptively. (Ogden 2014). The Revd Dr Colin Morris, now in his eighties, permitted me within his own lifetime, and with breathtaking generosity, to scrutinise a huge range of published and unpublished documents and scripts emerging from his life of multiple identities and contexts. The Colin Morris Collection comprises about 1000 items, now held as a hard-copy collection in the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History.[1]

Allow me to introduce Dr Morris briefly, though briefly is hardly sufficient. Colin Morris was a Methodist ‘boy preacher’ in the 1930s, in the North of England. His family were from Salvation Army and Primitive Methodists roots. His father was a coal miner. They were down to earth, working class people. It was soon discovered that Colin Morris was a gifted communicator and could enthral a crowd as he preached in the open air, at a very young age. Much later, this communicator’s gifts in political and pulpit oratory led him into the British Methodist ministry and the mission field of Northern Rhodesia, later Zambia. His high profile role in the country’s freedom struggle, its movement towards Independence in 1964, his friendship with Dr Kenneth Kaunda and his own presidency of the newly formed United Church of Zambia are reasonably well documented, though in popular (Charlton 1968) not academic forms (Laird 1980). [2] Returning to England in 1970, he became Superintendent of Wesley’s Chapel, popularly known as the ‘Cathedral of Methodism’, in City Road, London, until his appointment in 1973 as General Secretary of the newly branded Methodist Church Overseas Division, previously the Methodist Missionary Society (Pritchard 2014:43). Inevitably, British Methodists were to choose him as their church’s president for a memorable and highly publicised one year term 1976-77. In 1978 Colin Morris joined the British Broadcasting Corporation as Head of Religious Television and was then, successively, Head of Religious Broadcasting and BBC Controller, Northern Ireland. Morris retired from the BBC in 1991 and until 1996 was Director of the Centre for Religious Communication in Oxford. He continues to write and reflect on major themes: mission, media, politics, prophecy, ethics and communications would be frequent favourites.

The territories of operation for Dr Morris have included the pulpit under fire, the radical political platform, the mission field, the global mission desk, the minister’s study, the broadcast studio and the busy newsroom. I contend that Morris operates most effectively in the transcriptive space these territories spawn as scripts converse, collide, intersect and reemerge. The broadcaster within Morris constantly dialogues with the preacher, the author within him converses with the lecturer and so on and so forth. Transcriptive space – a term I have coined - is of essence non-geographic: there is no locatable temple, no abiding city in which to dwell comfortably and permanently. It is communicative space where diverse yet related scripts converse. 

The point of this paper, emerging with immense gratitude from Morris’s work, is to offer the notion of transcriptive space, if useful, as a working tool for mission thinking and practice. It may not be. Of particular interest to me at present, understandably, are the faith and life ‘trans-scripts’ of my current context, the Pacific Theological College in Fiji, where Tuvalu meets Samoa; West Papua meets Kiribati; home islander meets distanced diaspora; mainstream church meets new religious movement and residential education meets distance learning. Converting and transforming encounters abound in the transcriptive space that is PTC. This may be when the received script of biblical literalism meets the current literature on climate change, for example, or when ordained women from one Pacific mainstream denomination encounter sisters from another Pacific mainstream denomination unable to pursue ordination because their denominational script; culturally, historically and ecclesiologically, has emerged differently. Just two examples of many.

When the transcriptive space notion travelled with me to a new life in Fiji in 2014, I wondered what might become of it, if anything? How God might use it, if at all? Almost immediately I found myself bathing in rippling tides of talanoa: the Pacific communicative concept and space common to many contexts. As a well-disciplined mission partner, I’d read a little about talanoa previously in the course of teaching mission studies and in preparation for the new ministry.[3] But when you’re in London, on the top deck of the bus, reading about talanoa as the icy-cold rain beats against the window and you shiver; it’s a world away from Suva, seated in community space, on precious woven mats, inhaling the sun-blessed fragrance of earth and ocean, engaging in talanoa. 

A tidy talanoa definition is almost impossible to pin down, but Jione Havea has written expansively on this theme.

Talanoa is a word used in several of the native languages in Oceania (also known as Pacific Islands) to refer to three interconnected events: story, act of telling (of memories, stories, longings and more), and occasion of conversation (teasingly and critically and usually informally). Talanoa is more than one or two of these, for talanoa is all three events – story, telling, conversation – together. Talanoa is a point of intersection, like a passage in a reef, through which currents and waves whirl with the rising and receding tides. (Havea 2010:11)

Talanoa as a point of intersection. Where whirling currents and waves meet. What a powerful Pacific optic impelling me to look again at so many aspects of Colin Morris’s ministry and mission. In the 1950s, for example, the scripts of Northern Rhodesia’s freedom campaigners intersected with Morris’s in such a profound way that they revolutionised the biblical exegesis and application that had previously informed his preaching, completely rewriting the scripts (Morris 1961:32-33). These were waves of change indeed. It was through life-changing talanoa – never called that of course – with passionate, articulate, black African leaders of the time: Sokota Wina, Godwin Lewanika, Lawrence Katilungu and, definitively, Kenneth Kaunda that Morris’s life scripts were transformed and transcribed (Kaunda/Morris 1980).[4] The vastness and complexity of all Morris had previously been exposed to and schooled in through Western philosophy, anthropology, theology and political science: the myriad words and ideas, took on flesh with intelligibility, simplicity and dignity in the form of those with whom he sat, ate, wrote and debated.

What else in these oh-so-tentative early explorations of talanoa and transcriptive space? Karlo Mila-Schaaf, writing on social work practice, draws on the Samoan socio-spatial concept of vä with reference to a number of Pacific thinkers. Vä, it seems, has room for both speech and space. She writes,

If we imagine that you and I are positioned on a map, vä is used to describe the nature of the terrain that lies between us. It is the ‘imagined’ space that we ‘feel’ as opposed to see. Ka’ili writes that: ‘Vä emphasises space in between. This is fundamentally different from the popular western notion of space as an expanse or an open area’ (Ka’ili, 2005: 89). As Albert Wendt writes, the vä is: ‘Not space that separates but space that relates’ (Wendt, cited in Refiti, 2002: 209). One can imagine or visualise the gardens and boundaries between people. Either they are tended and fruitful, or they are barren and unsafe. (Mila-Schaaf 2006:1)

In conversation with the Samoan concept of vä, transcriptive space is both focussed and enlivened. Perhaps, seen this way, it is less a performance stage on which competing players with their scripts jostle to be in the spotlight and more relational ground which allows for breathing space and transformational exchange. The terrain between our human life-scripts and that of others is perhaps not so vast after all, and not necessarily oppositional. Transaction and transcription for mutual benefit are possible. Colin Morris political campaigner and Colin Morris pulpit preacher can dig the same soil as they tend carefully the space in-between their scripts, anticipating new shoots and a mouth-watering harvest.

These Pacific-inspired thoughts are as yet few, and without polish. I have much to learn. Exposure at IAMS will refine them and help them to shine a little brighter. Thank you. [5]

Bibliography and references

Charlton, Leslie (1969). Spark in the Stubble. London: Epworth Press.

Havea, Jione (2010). Talanoa ripples: Across borders, cultures, disciplines. Pasifika@ Massey.

Laird, Doris., ‘Colin Morris, Modern Missionary.’ PhD diss., Florida State University College of Arts and Sciences, 1980.

Lilomaiava-Doktor, Sa'iliemanu. "Beyond" migration": Samoan population movement (Malaga) and the geography of social space (Vā)." The Contemporary Pacific (2009): 1-32.

Mila-Schaaf, Karlo. "Va-centred social work: Possibilities for a Pacific approach to social work practice." Social Work Review 18, no. 1 (2006): 8.

Morris, Colin (1961) The Hour After Midnight. London: Longmans.

Morris, Colin., ed (1980) Kaunda on Violence. London: Collins.

             Ogden, Valerie., ‘Information made Intimate.’ PhD diss. Spurgeon’s College/University of Wales. 2014

https://www.academia.edu/15099007/Information_made_Intimate.

Accessed 20 May 2016

Pritchard, John (2014). Methodists and their Missionary Societies. Farnham: Ashgate

Refiti, A. (2002). Making Spaces: Polynesian Architecture in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. In S. Mallon and P.F. Pereira (Eds.). Pacific Art Niu Sila: The Pacific Dimension of Contemporary New Zealand Arts. Te Papa Press: Wellington: 209-225

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[1] http://www.history.brookes.ac.uk/Research/Centre-for-Methodism-and-Church-History/Special-Collections/

Viewing by appointment.

             [2] With the exception of Doris Laird’s 1980 unpublished doctoral thesis, ‘Colin Morris, Modern Missionary’ covering the Northern Rhodesia-Zambia years only, and which I critique in Ogden, Valerie ‘Information made Intimate.’ 172-178.

[3] Discovering that there is an ever expanding contemporary and critical talanoa literature, not least in the area of academic research methodology. See for example, Fa‘avae, David, Alison Jones, and Linitā Manu‘atu. "Talanoa ‘i ‘ae Talanoa—Talking about Talanoa: Some dilemmas of a novice researcher." AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 12, no. 2 (2016) and Vaioleti, Timote. "Talanoa: Differentiating the talanoa research methodology from phenomenology, narrative, Kaupapa Maori and feminist methodologies."Te Reo 56 (2013): 191.

[4] See the preface to Kaunda on Violence (London: Collins, 1980).

[5] I express sincere thanks also for the conversations and colleagueship of our Oceanic and increasingly global faculty and learning community at the Pacific Theological College, Suva. www.ptc.ac.fj. You have in many ways fed this paper and its musings. I am wholly responsible for its inadequacies. Vinaka vakalevu. Tenkyu tumas. Fa’afetai tele lava.