49: Creative, Collaborative Mission with Graham Kings

Hosts: Brandon Nappi and Hannah Black

Guest: Bishop Graham Kings

Production: Goodchild Media

Instagram: @theleadersway.podcast

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Brandon: Hey, Hannah. 

Hannah:  Cheerio. I can’t even take myself seriously right now. Love it.

B:            Wow. I feel like you have a fresh and new way of greeting me every time we begin. 

H:           I know. 

B:            I’m here for it. 

H:           The language of my heart is to say, “Hey, Brandon,” but we’re talking to one of my British friends today.

B:            Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah. And do they really say that in the U.K.?

H:           Yeah. Yeah.? I knew–I was about to tell you, we knew one person who in earnest used the word cheerio. But beyond that, my only, contact is the cereal, and also a little sign at the end of It’s a Small World or maybe the beginning.

B:            Yeah. So I have a student of mine, in a preaching class recently, and they had this big bowl of Cheerios that they were eating in class, which is, you know, totally fine. 

H:           It’s a strong choice …

B:            And I asked her what sort of Cheerios were in. Yeah.

H:           Well, I was about to go with a honey nut question. What …

B:            Yep. No. No. They were eating just plain the plain Cheerios, and they said, “I’m not really sure that I like them, but I just keep eating them.” And I thought that is the most brilliant, accurate description of the plain Cheerio that I’ve ever heard. I’ll buy a box. I’ll eat it. I’m committed to eating it, but I’m not really sure. 

H:           It’s really like a cross between cardboard and Styrofoam. 

B:            But it has a kind of nostalgia to it that keeps me invested somehow.

H:           Right? Yeah. Smell or smells … tastes like memories. It tastes like memories. Mhmm.

Yeah. So, speaking of memory. So today’s episode, the conversation I had with Bishop Graham Kings, we talked a lot about mission and the Church Mission Society and things like this. And he has a really interesting perspective on that. But, oh my gosh, it’s been so difficult to grapple with students this semester about, like, our family history as the Episcopal Church–that we have of mission, because it’s so I mean, it’s, like, synonymous with colonization almost. So this was a really interesting conversation, like, trying to tease out what is there, and what’s maybe good and what’s maybe worth keeping around. And then you’ll be happy to hear we talked a lot about innovative ministry projects as, like, that’s what mission looks like today in the church. So that’s all to say, mission does not necessarily involve travel. And in fact, the most effective mission is probably, like, at your local somewhere. But I can’t resist a map moment. Can you? 

B:            Woah. I’m gonna be honest. I’m not so much a map person, but I’m open. 

H:           Oh my gosh. Okay. Let me just give you the top five countries and then the top five states.

B:            Okay. Oh, that kind of map moment. Yeah. I’m here for it.

H:            I’m not giving you, like, a geography lesson.

B:            A wave of geography terror just swept through my body. And I thought … 

H:           I’m not particularly good at geography. I’m never the one at trivia to get the geography question. That’s somebody named Luke. Like …

B:            I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed. Okay. Yeah. Tell us where, oh, wonderful listeners, are you listening from? This is always exciting. 

H:           This is actually really interesting because right now the top countries are, like, maybe exactly what a person would expect. Number five, New Zealand. Number four, Australia. Woo. Number three, oh, Canada. 

B:            Oh, Canada. 

H:           Second place, where today’s guest is tuning in from, The United Kingdom. And in first place, our very own country, The United States. Those United States … Virginia has fallen out of the top five. Massachusetts–oh, wait. I just can’t count. One, two, three, four, five. Just kidding. Okay. Michigan is sort of neck and neck with Virginia, but Virginia is number five. Massachusetts is coming in at fourth. California is third. 

B:            Coming in hot. 

H:           I will say California had usurped Connecticut. But now Connecticut has taken first, leaving New York in second place. So, I hope that stokes the fires of competition in our listeners. 

B:            As a native nutmegger, this is warming my heart. But just a message to some of our international friends. We see you out there. We wanna see more of you. South Africa, where are you? You could be doing better. 

H:           Yeah. They’re not even really on, like, the first page of countries at the moment. 

B:            South Africa, we expect more. 

H:           Taiwan’s doing pretty well. So is Poland, Singapore, Germany. I digress.

B:            Mhmm. Ireland. I want more. 

H:           Ireland. Where are you at? It’s a good point. It’s a good point. Speaking of travels and countries and places, we recorded this right after I came back from the Diocese of Texas, which meant that I was in … some kind of way. And I just wanna apologize ahead of time for referring to Yale as Cambridge.  And for referring to a pub called the Fort St. George, which I spent plenty of time in, in Cambridge as the Fort St. Worth, because I had just come home from Fort Worth. 

B:            Apparently too much time in that pub. Clearly.

H:           Oh my goodness.

B:            Well, we … we have great compassion, and we understand how one could confuse all these fancy-pants schools. 

H:           And pubs with cities in Texas. Okay. Well, speaking of the Fort St. George, one thing I used to do at the Fort St. George was to go to pub theology with Bishop Graham Kings, which is part of why we are friendsies. Let me tell you just a little bit about Bishop Graham Kings, and then we’ll get into it. Graham or Bishop Kings was ordained in 1980 and has served as a curate, a missionary, a theologian, a vicar, a bishop, and a mission theologian. He is now retired in Cambridge where he’s doing cool stuff like Pub Theology. He’s an honorary assistant bishop in the Diocese of Ely and senior research associate at the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide, which he founded in 1996. He’s done a lot of cool stuff, and we’re gonna get into a lot of those stories. So I’ll just kind of leave it there. And I hope you all enjoy. 

B:            Hi. I’m Brandon Nappi.

H:           Hi. I’m Hannah Black. And we’re your hosts on the Leader’s Way podcast. 

B:            A Yale podcast empowering leaders, cultivating spirituality, and exploring theology. 

H:           This podcast is brought to you by Berkeley Divinity School, The Episcopal Seminary at Yale.

               Welcome, Bishop Graham Kings, to the Leaders Way podcast. It’s really a joy to have you here. I’ve been hoping we could have this conversation for some time, so I’m really excited. 

Graham: Thank you. It’s great to be with you, Hannah.

H:           Well, so one of the reasons I’m excited to have you on this podcast is we think a lot in this space, in this community, about the idea of innovation and ministry. And we have a whole program, Brandon and I, where fellows come up with innovative ministry projects. And as I’ve been kind of thinking through what that means and what some examples might be, you come to mind because there’s so many things you’ve done that we could talk about. Some of them, and we don’t need to talk about all of these today (although we could), but there’s Vassa Day at Saint Andrews, Chesterton. There’s the Women in the Bible Project. There’s Oxford to Cambridge, sorry, Oxford to Cambridge with a Camel, which you told me about once while we were both in Cambridge. I also kind of wanna ask you about setting up Pub Theology type spaces, and that’s not even to mention Fulcrum or the Center for Christianity Worldwide in Cambridge. Just so many things. So maybe a place to start is, do you have advice for leaders who are interested in doing this kind of work to meet needs in their community and create things like this?

G:           Well, first of all, I’m delighted to be linked into Berkeley Divinity at School at Yale, again, because I was on sabbatical at Yale. 

H:           Yes, welcome back. 

G:           In the spring of ’98, and I used to work at Berkeley Divinity School. In terms of creativity and being involved, I think you just have to be aware of artists and work with them.

I got to know Sylvia Dimitrova who’s a Bulgarian icon writer, or painter. When I was vicar of Saint Mary’s Islington in February of2009, I saw her work on an exhibition at the business design center and phoned her and, and we had an exhibition in the crypt. Miriam, our middle daughter is an artist, and she curated the exhibition. And so I think in building friendships then ideas pop up. Yes, I think that’s the key thing.

H:           Yeah, so this is for the Women in the Bible Project, right? So tell us a little bit more about that one first. Tell us the story of the women in the bible. 

G:           Yes. Sylvia is from Bulgaria. She was brought over to England by Downside Abbey, which is a Catholic Abbey and a school to paint and, to write an icon of Saint Benedict. And she did it and it’s very beautiful. And she fell in love with the tutor there, Simon, and they got married. And she became a friend. And then Ali, for my fiftieth birthday, said I’d like to buy you a present and I’m happy to commission Sylvia to do whatever you want. And I’d known that there’s lots of paintings of Mary Magdalene on Easter day, but it’s Noli me tangere—”Don’t Touch Me.” And I set Sylvia to paint the face of Mary Magdalene the second she hears her name so that her faith and her face come alive. And she did amazingly. We commissioned her to do that. 

               And then she turned up at our party, my fiftieth birthday party at Saint Mary’s Islington with it, but she’d made it six times as big. She’d added the Jesus and then added the angels and the trees, and it was absolutely extraordinary. I’ve got a card of it here. It’s actually next door in our bedroom, the original. You can see that card. 

H:           Oh, that’s really gorgeous.

G:           And then I wrote a poem on it. And then, when I became Bishop of Sherborne, the Saint Mary’s Islington said we’d like to buy you a farewell present. And why don’t you commission her to do another one? So we decided on Lydia. And that’s actually just behind me.

And there’s a photograph of Lydia with Saint Paul here. And we chose Lydia because of purple. For a bishop. And so we decided, why don’t we make a whole series of seven women in the Bible. So it wasn’t originally a series. And then between 2003 and 2020, we commissioned her to paint seven paintings of women in the Bible. So we started with Magdalene and then Lydia and then Priscilla, which is above here. And then we went to the Old Testament. We went to Sarah. And Sarah has the face of my mother.

H:           Oh, wow. 

G:           Abraham has the face of my father. And that’s in our chapel downstairs. So that’s … And she does a lot of work on tradition. So she knew that at San Vitale in Ravenna in Italy, there was a mosaic–green mosaic of this. And so that’s why she’s got green, in that. So I then started doing a poem on each one. And then we did Miriam. Miriam is my middle daughter who’s the artist. And that’s got various time zones in it. So you’ve got baby Moses there and the burning bush and the crossing of the Red Sea. And Miriam’s face resonates– our Miriam’s face resonates with Miriam. And Ruth resonates with the face of our eldest daughter, Rosalind. This is Ruth and Boaz, Naomi and little Obed and that’s it. And then finally, the most complicated one, that’s Esther. 

H:           And so you’ve written a poem for each of these at this point as well?

G:           All seven poems, yes. And they’re part of this book, Nourishing Connections with Miriam on the front. And the paintings, four Old Testament are on the front, on the inside cover, three New Testament are on the inside back cover. And then Tristram Latchford, who’s a Cambridge Composer, but he was director of music at St. Chad’s Durham. I was a fellow at Durham University for three years. And he then said, Could I write anthems on your poems? Mhmm. I said, yes. That would be great! So he then, that was his PhD thesis, the seven anthems, at Johns Hopkins University, in The States. He created a choir, called Harmonicham and created a record company and recorded it. And so Tristan has done a recording here of all the seven anthems. And then we made a film of that.

So there’s actually five modes. So there’s the biblical text, In the beginning was the word, and everything is based on that. And then Alli and I worked with Sylvia to expound that word in the painting. And then my poem expounds the painting and the word, and Tristan’s anthem expounds the … my poem, the painting and the word. And then the film expounds all four. So, it’s great fun.

H:           That’s incredible. Could I convince you to share one of the poems with us? 

G:           Yes, that would be great actually. I’ll do Sarah, because it’s got a hymn at the end. I don’t write hymns. There’s 61 poems in this book and they’re … But, I’ll read it quickly. It’s got a hymn at the end and Tristan set it as a hymn. Well, they all begin with questions and then they answer them.  So it goes like this:

Who is this woman,

Eyes uplifted,

Elderly, beautiful,

Pondering, anxious,

Right hand responsive,

Stopping laughing,

Brow furrowed,

Fingers knobbly,

Left hand supportive,

Relaxed, accepting?

Who is this man,

Eyebrows surprised,

Mature, elegant,

Wondering, welcoming,

Left hand cupped

Near to heart,

Beckoning hearth,

Reckoned as righteous,

Right hand blessing,

Thickening calf?

Who are these visitors,

Arrayed in radiance,

Mysterious in difference,

Framed by bowing

Oaks of Mamre and

Tent of Meeting,

Together as three,

Emerging out of

Scintillating leaves

Merging as One?

Mother of Promise

Of people and nations,

Forever empty,

Who ceased to be

After manner of women,

Laughs to herself,

Then covers it up,

Eventually conceives,

Bears and believes

‘He who laughs.’

Father of Promise

Of people and nations,

As good as dead,

Who previously laughed,

Suggesting a son of

Slave girl instead,

Now furnishes

Nourishing relief,

Hope against hope,

Sealing belief.

Lord of Promise

Of people and nations,

Proclaiming astonishing

Fertility, fecundity,

Wonderfully righting

Wrongful response:

For incoherent jest,

Co-inherence sows.

From mature oaks,

An acorn grows.

H:           Lovely. Thank you. Gosh. Well, so since we’re talking about … is it Nourishing Mission? … Nourishing …

G:           Nourishing Connections is the name. 

H:           Nourishing Connections, but then there’s a subtitle?

G:           But I’ve done a book called … the subtitle is, Poetry. 

H:           Oh, okay. Okay.

G:           But I’ve done a book called Nourishing Mission, and I’m doing …with Nourishing Anglicans. Yes. So trilogy. Okay.

H:           Wow. Oh, I get it. There’s just so much that I wanna ask you about. What place does creativity have in your life? And has it had in your life as an active bishop and now, how does that fit within your spirituality and leadership?

G:           I used to write poems as a as a teenager. And then when we went to Kenya as missionaries for seven years, 1985 to ‘91, it was entering another culture that really got me writing again. Coming back and lecturing in Cambridge, in mission studies and founding the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide. Again, that was a cross-cultural thing. But we actually had the term in the fall of ’92 at Yale. And that crossed another culture. So what we discovered is that in crossing cultures, that’s where creativity comes. 

               As a bishop, you have a certain power of invitation. And I used that when I was Bishop of Sherburne in Dorset. Peter Kozminsky was a brilliant film director. He wasn’t so well known then as he is now, because he actually directed Wolf Hall, about Thomas Cromwell, which has been a great series on British television. But he’d done a series of four programs called “The Promise” about a young Jewish woman and the actor Claire Foy actually is in Wolf Hall as Anne Boleyn–was in this first series. And it’s about Israel/Palestine. And I was incredibly moved by that. So, she’s a young Jewish woman, has no idea about the Palestinian situation with Israel. But she gets conscientized by it. And she also has her grandfather’s diary from 1947. It’s brilliantly done. So I just phoned Peter Kozminsky out of the blue and said, look, I’m in touch with four different schools in sixth form of sort of age 16 to 18 in Sherburne. Would you like to come for a study day? And he said, yeah Sure. So we had an Israel/Palestine study day with three hundred sixth formers from four schools. Sherburne Boys, which is a public school, private school, girls, and then Griffin, which is a church of England secondary school, and then a Catholic school in Houston. And he came and led and showed clips of the film, and it was just extraordinary. And we made a film of that day.

               And then we had a service at Sherburn Abbey afterwards. But we invited a liberal Jewish rabbi to take part. We had a Muslim academic from Bournemouth University as well, and that was huge learning for me. So I think if you’re a priest or a bishop or a leader, be aware of artistic people. And if you have an idea, just try it out. It might not work. 

H:           Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s–I love that advice. What other kind of advice do you have? I know you were sharing with me you use or you kind of have echoing through your head some advice from Desmond Tutu about being a bishop. I’d love to hear a little more about that. 

G:           Yes. When I became a bishop, people said, how are you going to cope? And I thought, I need some advice on this. And I’d seen written that Desmond Tutu said, what you need is a day off a week, which is sacrosanct, and you need a quiet day a month, and you need a seven day retreat a year. And so that’s what I follow. And I’m now retiring in Cambridge. I still have a quiet day a month and I go to Launde Abbey in Leicestershire, and I pray and I write there. But I don’t quite need a day off a week because the diary is not quite so full. 

H:           It’s a different rhythm at this point. 

G:           It is. That’s right. Yes. And Ally and I, my wife and I, go on retreat. We go to St. Buenos, which is a Roman Catholic retreat center in North Wales. We’re silent for eight days. We have two … but we don’t talk to each other. So I think that rhythm is very, very important. 

H:           Yeah. Brandon and I keep seeing numbers and hearing stories that indicate that priests are just so burnt out, not to mention bishops. And this seems like one of the most important things we can carve out space for.\

G:           I think praying the daily office is very important, because you get chunks of scripture. And if you’re … if you’re not used–it’s worth looking at Cranmer’s lectionary, because you get huge chunks of scripture there. And Coverdale’s Psalms in the book of common prayer are extraordinary as well. 

H:           Speaking of our friend Cranmer, this is reminding me of one of the other things I really wanna make sure to ask you about, which is, a question I have related to the Anglican studies course I’m teaching at Berkeley right now, where we’re about to go through the interesting life of Olaudah Equiano–or Gustavus Vassa. Yes. And, of course, the very first thing I thought of was attending a Vassa day liturgical celebration at Saint Andrews Chesterton. And I was reflecting on this experience with my friend Hannah Fitch who said, oh, you gotta ask bishop Kings about, you know, how this came to be. We were speaking about mission a little bit earlier, and … of course, we have a troubled history as a denomination, to put it lightly. And so with these historical touch points, a lot of our seminarians or ordinands are really wrestling with “Once I’m in a leadership position, how do I tell these stories?” They want to tell these stories. How could this impact our liturgical life? How like, what touch points can we create? How do we remember? How do we reckon things like this? Could you tell us a story of how Vassa Day became a thing at Saint Andrews, Chesterton in Cambridge? 

G:           I came back from Kenya and was lecturing in Cambridge from ‘92. We went to a city centre church where I was an honorary curate as well and then I realized there was so many clergy there but our local church where we actually lived had one priest. So we started to go and then I noticed this plaque outside St Andrew’s Chesterton which is within Cambridge, it’s an ancient church and it said to Anna Marie Vassa, the daughter of Gustavus Vassa, the African. And it was beautiful. She was four years old, and she’s buried near this plaque. And then I didn’t know much about him. And his real name was Olaudah Equiano, and he was hugely involved in the abolitionist movement. He actually died in 1797 just after his wife died, and they had two children, Anna Marie Bassett and Joanna. And Anna Marie is buried there.

               And so I persuaded the vicar to have an annual service on the nearest the Sunday nearest the twenty-first of July. And then I did a program on BBC Radio 4 in ‘96 on three books in the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide. And I got E. K. Achebe, the son of Chinua Chebe, the great novelist, to read out because he was Igbo and Equiano was Igbo, to read out his interesting narrative. I’ve got it here. 

H:           Nice. Yeah. So we’re taking a field trip next week to the Rare Book Library here at Cambridge where we get to see a first edition. Yes. Oh, well, a first American edition. 

G:           Yes. So that had a huge effect on the abolitionist movement. And so we started in the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide. We then came to the church and EK read out the plaque as early he’d read out the extracts. And it’s a very beautiful plaque. And every year now we have a service outside and children, lay flowers there. 

H:           It’s gorgeous. 

G:           Basically, in 2023, they renamed the pedestrian and bike bridge near the church over the river Cam the Equiano Bridge. And, Philip Lockley, who’s now our new vicar at St Andrews Chesterton, read Fine Art as his first degree. And he’s got together a movement called the Equiano Family Project and creating a stained-glass window to Equiano and the whole family. So pray for that. We’re looking for an artist at the moment. 

H:           Yeah. Wow. That’s really exciting that the creativity hasn’t ceased. 

G:           No. And Cambridge was a center for the abolitionist movement. William Pittenger. Thomas Clarkson’s up the road at Wisbech. Wilberforce was at Saint John’s College and Grenfell Sharp was very important. Peter Peckard was the master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, was vice chancellor, and an essay prize helped Thomas Clarkson get involved in that. 

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H:           Do you have advice for priests who are interested in crafting liturgical celebrations that mark the Anglican Communion’s relationship with slavery or colonialism after going through this process? 

G:           Yeah. That’s a difficult question. 

H:           Well, yeah. That’s why I’m asking you.

G:           My mind goes back to when I was in Kenya. I worked with Bishop David Ettari, who’s an extraordinary brave figure and spoke out against the unconstitutional work of 

President Moy. President Moy wanted to get rid of the secret ballot and instituted voting by queuing. Now that’s terrible because people can see how you vote. And so he spoke out and he got attacked and actually had an assassination attempt on his life. But he was also very ecologically minded, and a cabinet minister had shaved a hill near us of trees in order to build hotels. And he found out the local minutes. Now we had a whole service overlooking that hill. And he asked our college, St Andrew’s College Kabare, to write a litany for that. So I sent the students to search through the scriptures about trees and they came up with various ideas and created a litany. It was said and prayed. One way to do it is rather than just you writing it, if you’ve got friends, you come together, how can we shape this? But it needs to be sensitive, and you need to get advice for it. 

H:           Yeah. Well, yeah, this theme of collaboration comes back again.

G:           It does. Yes. It really does. You know? 

H:           Another project that’s very collaborative and, again, I was thinking of you rather recently. Somebody asked me somebody with an MDiv who’s not, affiliated with Yale at this point, but lives in town said, where could I get together and talk theology with people? And I thought, we need a Pub Theology scene. Because, you know, I think once I’ve joined you at the Fort Saint Worth in Cambridge for beer and theology. How did that come about? And if I were a priest or a lay leader or whatever interested in getting a Pub Theology going, how do you do that? 

G:           Well, I always wanted to do it when I was at Saint Mary’s Islington from February to 02/2009. But actually, it developed when I was mission theologian in the Anglican Communion and lived in Bermondsey, later. And we had a wonderful pub right on the river. And I was drinking there once, and I suddenly thought it would be good to launch Beer and Theology here. And somebody who was in a parish just the literally the other side of the river, Thames, I knew. And I phoned him up and said, how about this? He said, yeah, let’s do it. And so, Fulcrum were involved in that and other networks in London and it gradually took off. There’s now been, I think, 67 of those. Yeah. We used to meet on a Friday, and it was– it’s very simple.

We would have a speaker speak for fifteen, twenty minutes, and we’d advertise it. We do it by email and social media. Anyone could join. So there was two items on the agenda: drink beer, whatever you drink, and discuss theology. 

H:           So you have a presenter present for fifteen minutes? Do they need a PhD in theology? Do they need to be a bishop? Do they need to …

G:           No. No. You start with groups and people you work with, and then it gets wider, and it gradually builds. And it was great for the pub because we had a regular room and people would … there would be a sign-up saying Beer and Theology and others would ask, Well, what’s going on here? And we would finish exactly–we’d start at 06:30 and end at 8, and then we would hang around and people would say, what’s going on? So it became sort of pre-evangelistic really.

And then I moved to retire with Ali to Cambridge. I was a missionary and a group there I handed over to three people, said you would have to start one there. So we started Beer and Theology Cambridge. Originally, it was on Zoom because in 2020 it was … And then we meet now at the Fort St. George. We meet six times a year from 8 to 9:30. And Hannah Fytche, your friend from Clare, she’s on the planning committee. So if you Google—Beer and Theology Cambridge, anyone can see what’s happening. 

H:           That’s great. That’s the kind of thing I can really see many people in this listening community being interested in getting going. 

G:           Yeah. 

H:           So, you know, once you’re settled, people get their drinks, somebody speaks for fifteen minutes Yeah. Then then what happens? What do you do as a leader? 

G:           Because they need to know who they’re talking to, people go around and say briefly who they are, then they speak, and then we divide into tables for fifteen, twenty minutes buzz groups. And then we come together for the rest of the time. The whole thing is an hour and a half. And it’s then a plenary. And we end exactly on time, but people can stay around.

H:           That’s great. 

G:           It is. It’s great fun, actually. 

H:           What kinds of topics have you had recently? 

G:           We’ve just had the Anglican University in South Sudan. And next time, we’ve got Holy Week in Luke, a professor of computer science doing God and coding. We had one on the Queen just after her funeral and things. And we try and combine men and women. We try and combine arts and science. But we make the titles sort of four-word, five-word titles. So it’s quite short. 

H:           That’s fantastic. 

G:           It’s very informal. And you have this–it’s not huge, but we have our own room there, and the pub know about it. 

H:           I love it. I hope somebody out there listening decides to give it a go. It’s a good time, and it’s so … 

G:           Franchise—we don’t charge franchise. Just do it.

H:           Yeah. It’s great. It’s great. Okay. I need to ask you about at least one more of these cool projects that you’ve kind of roamed around the Earth planting. And this one is about roaming. Tell me about Oxford to Cambridge with a camel. 

G:           Yes. That’s right. Well, I was at Hertford College Oxford and Selwyn College Cambridge. And I came to Faith Ford at Hertford in in January. And then in Kenya, one of our top students was Joseph Gal Gallo, who was a nomad, a camel-based-nomad from the north of Kenya. He was a gabbro. And he was brilliant and went on to Limuru, did a degree. And then he got funding to do a PhD in Cambridge and Professor David Ford supervised him. And one day I was walking along King’s Parade with him, and I pointed out King’s College. There’s the white Gibbs Building next to the chapel and there’s an archway underneath it here. I said, “That’s called the Jumbo Arch.” And above that lived Charles Simeon who was one of the founders of the church mission society and came to faith at King’s College Chapel. And he was a bachelor, and he gave a lot of money to CMS.

               And Joseph said, I don’t think that’s a jumbo arch. I think that’s the eye of a needle. Oh. Because Simeon was the camel that went right through the eye of a needle. And so he said, we need to put a camel through there. And I said, Okay. Let’s do it. So from that stupid idea, we had to turn it into reality. I was then going on sabbatical at Yale in the in the spring of ‘98 and I met somebody there who was involved in fundraising. He said, well, let’s bring some Americans involved. In the end, we had 12 Americans, 6-7 Kenyans. 

H:           Wow. Represent. 

G:           8 Brits. Yes. It was great. And we walked … Hertford College, Oxford sponsored us, we stayed there the night before; Selwyn College sponsored us. We got the vice chancellors involved, the vice chancellor of Oxford. We took a real camel into the centre of Oxford, Radcliffe Square, and then walked. It took six days. I said, Well, who’s gonna plan the route? And somebody said, Well, you need Basil Jakes. What does he do? Well, he walks across English countryside with tourists. 

H:           Okay. A little more collaboration, a little more perspective with him. 

G:           And then I tried to search where we could get a camel, an amazing animal to rent animals for adverts and films. We had to pay a thousand pounds a day, but you’ve got two camels for that because you need a spare. 

H:           Okay. Sure. A camel and an extra. 

G:           Then they said, you need a vet. So I said, well, who do you use? And they said, well, we use Taylor. So I phoned him, and he said, are you doing this for CMS? And I said, yeah. And all the money we were raising was going to the schools in Northern Kenya that the Kenyan bishop founded there, that Joseph Galgalo had taught him before he came to Kabare. But it was going through CMS, and it was celebrating two hundred years of the Church Mission Society. He said, are you doing this for CMS? And I said, yeah. He said, “Well, my mom was a member of the Church Mission Society. I’ll do it for free.” Oh my goodness. So he put the phone down and then he phoned back five minutes later, and he said, “I forgot to say I’m the flying vet and channel four, the TV company, are making a film about me. Would you mind if we filmed it?”

So I said, fine. 

               And then and then the Master of Selwyn, David Harrison said, actually, that day after you arrive when you’re meeting Prince Philip at the vet school, Desmond Tutu is flying in, because Prince Philip’s giving him an honorary degree tomorrow. Could Desmond Tutu come? So I said, “Yeah. But don’t tell anyone because Desmond Tutu might miss the plane or whatever.”

               So these 25 people, 12 Americans and others, had walked from Oxford to Cambridge near the camel for six days. We’re meeting Prince Philip, went through security. David Harrison phoned my phone and said we’ve got Tutu with you in five minutes. We didn’t have time to tell Prince Philip. We lined up. I was there. I was introduced. I introduced Joseph Gallo, and then Prince Philip saw Desmond Tutu. And this is all on film. He said, “Well, what are you doing here? And Tutu said, You’re giving me an honorary degree tomorrow. But it was …

H:           Wow. I feel like that’s not normal. 

G:           And we raised £50,000. Wow. That was 1999. And then last year, 2024, the twenty fifth anniversary, Faith Galgano, Joseph’s daughter is our goddaughter. She came over and she co-led a shorter walk, just nine miles, and we raised some money as well. 

H:           Oh, that’s really wonderful. And again, one of these creative projects that snowballed … 

G:           Yes. Collaborators entered the picture. It is. That’s a combination of establishment and wackiness that works.

H:           I … you know, I think the establishment could use a little more wackiness. You know, a theme that keeps bubbling to the surface is that of mission. And I know for many of my current students at Berkeley, it’s a complicated topic, and they’re not totally sure what to think because of the history that we’ve been mentioning. But what, after your life that’s been so rich with these international experiences of the Anglican Communion, what’s your kind of feeling or philosophy? Maybe it’s not that formal, but what’s your take on the church and mission at this point?

G:           Mission begins and ends with God, and this was key to Vatican II. There’s a document there, Gentes and Lumen Gentium, which says that God is–at the very heart of being of God, is mission. He’s a missionary God. And so God; mission begins with God. In eternity, God’s sends –has always been sending his Son, and the Holy Spirit has been proceeding from the Father and the Son. And in time, God sends his Son, and all the time, God sends his Holy Spirit. And so what we are doing in mission is following what God is already doing. And when we go to a new situation or a new parish, then we need to discover what God is already doing in that place, has been doing perhaps for some time, and joining in, with what he is already doing. And being creative and having your ideas open. 

               A key theologian for me was John V. Taylor who was general secretary of CMS, had been in Uganda and then became Bishop of Winchester. And he became a very good friend. I know his daughter Joanna Wood who has just given his journals, his typed travel journals, to the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide. He influenced me a lot. And he said that seeing and mission go together. And so yesterday, Saint Andrews Chesterton was on Isaiah 6, which is seeing and being sent. 

               So I think being aware of what God is doing in the past, having patience is very important. Donald Nichol, who is a great spiritual writer, said that hurry is a form of violence exercised upon time. Too often we just jump into something, and we want instant changes. But learning a language I think is crucial to mission. Soon after I was ordained … well, I was a curate at Saint Mark’s House and Saint Mark’s Kinsey Rice now, in an inner-city area. And there were Gujarati Asians there and West Indians. And it never crossed my mind to learn Gujarati, but that’s what I would do straight away. And I would encourage priests to learn local languages.

It’s very important in your parish. So we learnt Swahili first in Kenya. It’s not good to learn the language before you go, because you learn from the local people. We did that at language school in Nairobi, but we picked up Kikuyu, the local ethnic, mother tongue where we were. Then we went back and learned that as well.

               So I’m still preaching in Kikuyu. And, I’ve got a Kikuyu son-in-law, Miriam, our middle daughter actually married someone from Kabare. 

H:           It’s just amazing. And that that’s a really refreshing and generous definition that even makes me wonder whether Pub Theology and the Women in the Bible project and Oxford to Cambridge to the Camel are all actually mission. As much as anything else.

G:           Yeah. No. They definitely are. Mission is sharing the good news of Christ, evangelism, but it’s also acts of mercy and compassion, but it’s also political involvement to change the unjust structures. And those three interweave just as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit interweave. In the words of that poem of Sarah, they’re not incoherent. They are co-coherent. And the … our staple diet in in Kenya at Kabare was mataha, which is maize, beans, and potatoes mashed up together. So I sometimes use that as an illustration as well. And interestingly, maize and beans are grown in parallel rows because one takes nitrogen out of the soil, the other puts nitrogen into the soil.

H:           Oh, that’s a beautiful picture.

G:           I’ve got three little aphorisms. 

H:           Oh, yeah. Okay. 

G:           And one is, it takes the whole world to understand the whole gospel.

               Another is, there are always greater depths to be sought out, especially in art and creativity. So you can look at a work of art and people see new things in it. So when I use the Women in the Bible paintings–and I’ve used them on many ordinations, I’m doing Holy Week at Rochester Cathedral this year–people come up with new ideas. So there are always greater depths to be sought out. In Latin that goes semper profundum quaerere which we put in a slate above our chapel.

               And then the other one is a gift from Sam Gibbs who was a great friend of ours and was a medical missionary doctor in Tanzania and sadly died very early at the age of 67. And he said, “Graham, be like God, become completely human.” And I thought that was so extraordinary that I’ve got a– I’ve got a nephew who’s a lecturer in Latin, and he turned that into Latin, “Be like God, become completely human.’ And then for my seventieth birthday, Ally, my wife, made a t shirt out of it. So I’ve got the t shirt here. And it I don’t know if you can see that. Probably not. 

H:           Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. 

G:           Be like God. Become completely human.

H:           That’s really lovely. Well, could you pray a blessing over this community of listeners? 

G:           Yes. It’s wonderful to have joined with you. And as I say Yeah. This has been a real treat. I’ve loved it. And I go to Laund Abbey in Leicestershire, which is a retreat house once a month. And I went … last time I went, I wrote this little verse. It’s based on –I was meditating on Mark 6 where Jesus says “Come away” with his disciples. And he doesn’t get what he wants, actually, because the crowd go round and then he has to move and then there’s the feeding of the 5,000. But I wrote this, so let me pray this for all of you and for your listeners.                

               Come apart, to stay, to gather; come away, to pray together.

               Come awhile, unwind, recover. Come anew to find, discover. 

H:           Well, thank you so, so, so much. 

G:           Thank you, Hannah. It’s a joy to be with you.

H:           Thanks for listening to the Leaders Way podcast. You can learn more about this episode at berkleydivinity.yale.edu/podcast. Follow along with us on Instagram at theleadersway. podcast. 

B:            And you can rate and review us on your podcast app and be sure to hit follow, so you never miss an episode. And if you’d like this episode, please share it with a friend. 

H:           Until next time. 

B:            Peace be with you.