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It must have been a Thursday afternoon in Wesley House. I had a tutorial with a student who came to me from her first experience of Brian’s class on Methodist history and identity. She was in awe: “He’s so good,” she said, “it’s like being taught by… Mr. Methodism.” I knew what she meant – it was not just that Brian was so well informed about the Wesleyan tradition of which we are a part, he seemed to embody that tradition. But we give thanks today for someone who not only represented the Methodist tradition and not only used his great gifts as a scholar and a communicator to interpret and explain the tradition; we give thanks for a man who made an enormous contribution to the life of the Methodist Church, who helped to shape the Methodist Church in Britain as it had become by the turn of this century. Mr. Methodism.
He came, of course, from a Methodist family. There Brian learned what we now call a Methodist Way of Life and there too he learned that to be truly Methodist means to be an ecumenist. There is a plaque in memory of Brian’s father in St. Bride’s Church, commemorating his service as Vestry Clerk and his identity as a “stalwart Methodist”. Brian kept up the association with St. Bride’s; he served as one of the Guild Chaplains and preached there annually. It was a sign of his commitment to the close relationship between the Church of England and the Methodist Church, a relationship he did much to develop; he was a member of the conversations in the 1970s and continued to promote the cause of unity between the two Churches throughout his life. But more broadly, Brian served the cause of ecumenism in a host of ways. He was one of the architects of the Cambridge Federation of Theological Colleges, forging the links that bound Wesley House to its Anglican and United Reformed partners in worship, teaching and fellowship, and helping to bring into being a Federation that could later expand to embrace other traditions and curricula. He served on numerous ecumenical bodies and committees and he contributed time and again to ecumenical conversations, symposia and seminars. He longed for the unity of Christ’s Church, though he never saw that as an end in itself. Unity for Brian was a dynamic process that needed constantly to be questioned and criticised lest it became static, because he saw that only a dynamic process can enable the Church to be the Church in mission; only a dynamic process can witness to the mystery of the one true God in a complex and diverse world.
Brian knew that to be a Methodist Christian is to be called to mission to that world, to all that world, and therefore to live on a world map; he inhabited that by answering a call to serve overseas for a time. There is no story I find more remarkable of Brian than that of how he, Margaret and their daughters drove from Nairobi all the way to Cape Town to return to Britain by sea (“as one did,” Margaret would say). That adventure concluded a time that was seminal for the Church in Kenya. Brian had not only equipped many for ministry through his teaching at St. Paul’s; he had contributed to the transition of the Kenyan Church into an autonomous Conference through his work on the constitutional practice and discipline of the new Church. He was still a young minister at the time, but there would have been few others, if any, who would have had the secure foundation in the Methodist tradition, the clear understanding of order, and the ability to draft with limpidity that was needed to provide what was necessary to set a Church on its way to independence. Those gifts that he gave so generously in Kenya were apparent throughout his long involvement in the Oxford Institute, a body whose purpose and possibility he understood (and indeed helped to shape) as no one else could. Brian delighted in the breadth of scholarship and experience that the Institute brought together; he loved to learn from those whose Methodism was shaped by diverse cultures and whose emphases shone lights on different parts of a common tradition. And if he received much from the Institute, he gave as much to the Institute – as one of its organizers for nearly 40 years, as a regular contributor through papers and seminars, and as its official historian.
He told me once, though, that he never really thought of himself as an historian; his superb mastery of the discipline was self-taught. He was first a classicist and then primarily a Biblical scholar, teaching the New Testament from the Greek into his 80s. Those who were privileged to witness him explore a text would long remember the experience, though sometimes it was not the meaning of the text that provided the memories. Many years ago he gave a seminar on the passion narrative in Luke. It was for a district preachers’ group who gathered in a church hall; these were the days before mobile phones and Oremus and a significant number of us had not thought to bring a Bible. “There are some people” Brian said, as someone fetched and distributed pew Bibles, “some people who will arrive at the Great Banquet without their dentures.” It’s a line he used more than once, but it is more than a trademark Brian quip. Not to engage with the Bible as a Christian was, to Brian, to try to feast on the Bread of Life without teeth. Brian’s scholarship was immense, his preaching was inspiring and illuminating, his theology was careful and clear, and in it all the Bible was absolutely fundamental – the Bible carefully read, painstakingly explored, properly interpreted, and vitally applied. He would interrogate a text and ask questions of it; as he put it in the Bible Study he gave as President in the 1993 Conference, he got under the skin of the text in order and so doing would penetrate beyond what was culturally conditioned by the world of the text or expressed in our churchy language to discover what God has to say to God’s world.
Of course, interpreting the Bible opens up the possibility of disagreement – but Brian also knew that to be a Methodist is to be a person of a catholic spirit. Time and again in his writings, Brian wrestled with the tensions of unity in diversity. This side of eternity, we will not all agree, because if we did our grasp on truth would be even more limited than it is; therefore it is essential, as he would quote Mr. Wesley, that although we might not think alike we can love alike. 1993 was the year in which the Conference of the Methodist Church in Britain shifted significantly our understanding of same-sex relationships and committed the Church to a pilgrimage of faith and to living with contradictory convictions. For Brian, that was never about a casual latitudinarianism that would let anything go. It was a recognition that the Church of Christ can find itself unable to arrive at a common mind and yet continue together in mission and in communion. It was never going to be easy and the sheer hard work of Brian, and Susan as Vice-President, of visiting and talking and taking the criticism was essential. The Conference of 1992 which elected Brian and Susan knew just how divisive these questions were going to be and there was a huge swell of opinion that Brian was the person to steer the Church through. In his ninth year as Secretary, his eirenic spirit was clearly what the Conference needed.
It needed also the sense that it was in safe hands. The young minister who shaped the constitution of the Methodist Church Kenya had become the Methodist Church in Britain’s leading administrator; Brian knew and demonstrated that to be a Methodist Christian is to be, well, methodical, and it was a good job he was: he used to like to remind me that he had far less support in the office than his more recent successors have had. The Church depended greatly on his organizational skills. Those skills were far more than knowing the Standing Orders or being on top of a meeting agenda, however complicated; they were far more than enabling decisions to be made or bringing their execution to completion. In the early 1990s, Brian had to lead the Church through a complex process of reorganization which simplified the structure of the Church from seven divisions, each with its own board, to one Council and one Connexional Team. He also had to oversee the move of much of that Team from Central Hall and elsewhere into Methodist Church House. Those were massive undertakings. Now, of course, we have vacated the Marylebone Road premises. As we did so, we had to decide what of the mountains of records we needed to keep and of what we could safely dispose. I wrote to Brian to see if he had any advice; he professed that he would probably err on the side of keeping but warned me that in the sifting it would be easy to be distracted by some of the interesting nuggets of past correspondence. Amongst the records we found were boxes of letters from the time of the reorganization. Apparently, not all those who worked in the divisions that were being reorganized were wholeheartedly in favour of reconfiguration or of the change in their role. Brian’s responses were models of both diplomacy and clearsightedness. His mastery of the issue, his clarity about the big picture, and his sympathy with the reasons for disquiet came through in the briefest and most mundane of notes.
To Brian, good administration was also never an end in itself. He never lost sight of the underlying principle - that we exist not for ourselves but for God and for the world; organization is the servant of mission and good order is the enabling of the Church to minister effectively as an whole body. Part of Brian’s genius was to have an holistic view of the ministry of the Church that did not diminish the importance of any group. He was a passionate and consistent supporter of the ordination and promotion of women, privileged as President to follow the first woman to hold that office. And he was able to encourage the ministry of laypeople whilst never losing sight of the distinctiveness of the office to which he as a presbyter was called – the “principal and directing part” in the life of the Church. He achieved that holistic view because he never lost sight of the local; he never forgot that for most Methodists the local church is where ministry is exercised and the soul is fed. For much of his life, in three separate periods, that local church was Wesley in Cambridge, a church that he loved, where he and Margaret met in MethSoc, the place where he worshipped in his years at Wesley House and in retirement, a church where the gifts that he shared so widely were quietly and modestly offered, because there, no less than in more public ways, he lived out his call to serve his Lord and Saviour – a call to give himself in mission to God and to the world.
Now he has gone to his Lord at the end of his missionary journey. <italic>The Seventy returned with joy saying, “Lord, even the demons submit to us</italic>.” By any measure, Brian’s was a remarkable ministry. As he exemplified what it means to be a Methodist Christian, his ecumenical endeavours helped to vanquish the demons of disunity, his catholic spirit to vanquish the demons of division, his scholarship and erudition to vanquish the demons of ignorance, his administrative gifts to vanquish the demons of disorder, and his ministry in Kenya and to the world Church to vanquish the demons of colonialism. Yet, <italic>rejoice not that the demons submit – rejoice that your names are written in heaven</italic>. We rejoice that it has been our privilege to share the missionary journey with Brian. We rejoice in our memories of the dry humour that punctuated so many conversations, of the gracious and generous encouragement he gave to us of lesser talents who shared with him in ministry, of the wisdom that he has left behind which has so enhanced our understanding of the Church, of the Gospel, and of our Saviour. But more than that, we rejoice in the man that he was; we rejoice in the witness to Christ in word and in action; we rejoice in the importance that he placed on friendship and the close friendships he enjoyed; we rejoice in the love that he showed as an husband, father and grandfather. His ministry was grounded in and rose out of that settled life of love. Mr. Methodism? Perhaps. Brian Edgar Beck was so much more than that, and if he was Mr. Methodism it was precisely because he was so, so much more. We rejoice in faith that his name is written in heaven. Thanks be to God.
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Memorial Sermon - Brian Beck

Holiness

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Memorial Sermon - Brian Beck

Published Online: Dec 29, 2023

Page range: 121 - 123

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/holiness-2023-0019

© 2023 Jonathan Hustler, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.