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 PrintableVersion David Bentley-Taylor, 1915-2005Obituary‘The finest missionary speaker, I ever heard’, Martyn Lloyd-Jones was reported to have said, by one of the six speakers at the memorial service held in Hereford Baptist Church on February 19. ‘B-T’ died aged 90, after serving first in China, then in Java and then widely across the Middle East. It was moving to see his four tall sons lowering their father’s body into the grave in the Ballingham village cemetery later, with many Christian friends and neighbours gathered around them. The popular CIM speakers back in the 1950s were Leslie Lyall, Jim Broomhall and David ‘B-T’, all tall, front-row forward types. Those of us who were students then remember him as an extremely lively and attention-grabbing speaker. In a 17-point address (some of them only one sentence long) he included: ‘It may be difficult to go to the mission field for the first time: but it gets harder the second and third times’. One Japanese Christian leader once described him as ‘the American type of Englishman!’ and another as ‘a multimedia presentation — the eyes, the voice, the actions!’ He embodied an enthusiastic, lively adventurous faith in the Living God. Sailing for ChinaHe sailed with the China Inland Mission (CIM) on October 1 1938 (the day Neville Chamberlain declared ‘peace in our time’) with a party of 22 able young men nicknamed ‘the sons of the prophets’ of which he was the last surviving member. The group included Dr. Jim Broomhall, the China historian, and Dr. Chris Maddox, the highly decorated medical missionary in China, Thailand and Laos. B-T was sent initially for Mandarin language study and then to teach at the Chefoo School for missionary children in Shandung Province. Attending family prayers in the home of Stanley Houghton, later to become the Chefoo headmaster, B-T was deeply impressed by the participation of the five-year-old Felicity. There, too, he met and courted the school nurse Jessie Moore. Subsequently he was posted to Lanchow, Gansu Province, in the far west of China, a Muslim area where one of the doctors was Dr. Rupert Clarke, with whom he would enjoy fellowship later in East Java. During this period, together with a small group of CIM missionaries, including the gifted Elizabeth Fishbacher whose two brothers also served in CIM, he resigned in order to join the Little Flock of Watchman Nee (Nee Duo-Sheng). Subsequently, through the mediation of Leslie Lyall, he rejoined CIM, and married Jesse Moore in Shanghai in March 1941. Candidate secretaryIn 1944 they returned to the UK where David became Candidates Secre-tary for eight years at the old Newing-ton Green office site. A retired missionary used to tell the story that Jessie once cut a flaming lead to an electric iron with a pair of scissors ... ‘She ought to have died!’ But she didn’t! This post-war period was a crucial time when David’s responsibility was to help select and prepare the last CIM workers to enter China, and then from 1950 for what were then called ‘the new fields’. Subsequently, China now being closed, they returned to Asia in 1952 for a further ten years spent first briefly in Johore and then in East Java. Mandarin language enabled him to communicate with overseas Chinese, but now Indo-nesian too must be learned, and used. This enabled him to share in a remarkable evangelistic ministry alongside a Javanese pastor, Alex Pranoto, speaking night after night in Javanese villages, after the day had cooled down, preaching well after midnight in true Pauline fashion. The account of this widespread turning of Muslims to Christ was published in The Prisoner Leaps (1960) and The Great Volcano (1965). He subsequently wrote up the pioneer missionary to Java, Gottlob BrŸckner, in The Weathercock’s Reward (1967); and later a superb biography of Henry Martyn My Love must wait (1975), having gained access to the diaries of Lydia Grenfell, Martyn’s friend in Cornwall. David missed Fred Mitchell, the UK Home Director killed in a Comet disaster, and the General Director Bishop Frank Houghton, and felt that he never enjoyed quite the same close relationship with their successors. IFESIn 1947 he had been present at the Harvard Conference, which officially founded the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, and whenever back in Britain had continued as a popular speaker to IVF (UCCF) student groups all over the British Isles. In 1967 a new ministry developed speaking for IFES in 38 countries, and ultimately he became the first IFES Regional Secretary for the Arab world, ministering to struggling Christian student groups throughout the Middle East. Middle EastIn 1974 he was a leading figure in the merger of the former Middle East General Mission, the Lebanon Evangelical Mission, and the Arabic Literature Mission, becoming the International Secretary of the resulting Middle East Christian Outreach (MECO). Asked why they did not merge with the Red Sea Mission and BMMF (now Inter-Serve) while they were at it, he replied that merging three groups was difficult enough to achieve without adding any more! In 1980 he retired to his beloved Herefordshire, and continued writing. Sadly Jessie became unwell for some years, during which David cared for her with deep devotion until her death in 1993. Research and writingIn 1994 he married Felicity Houghton, whom he had met as the small daughter of the Chefoo School teacher all those years earlier. She had been for 34 years a pioneer of IFES student work in both Chile and Bolivia, and cared for David in his quieter closing years, during which he continued to research and write: Josephus: A Unique Witness (2000); Wordsworth in the Wye Valley (2001); My dear Erasmus (2002); and The Apostle from Africa: The Life and Thought of Augustine of Hippo (2002). The family spoke with great warmth of Felicity and her life with David. The memorial service was addressed by all four believing sons, and the central section of the church was filled with their families, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, 12 of whom had come across from Canada. It was a farewell to a much loved patriarch, whom all of us who knew him remember with warm affection and heartfelt gratitude to God. Michael Griffiths,
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