J. Andrew Kirk died on the first of January, at the age of 88, from an unexpected heart attack.
Kirk, an ordained Anglican minister for over 60 years, was a leading Evangelical missiologist in the second half of the 20th century, who was a co-founder of the influential Latin American Theological Fraternity (FTL in Spanish) as well as the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity (LICC). He wrote over 20 books, co-authored many more and wrote hundreds of journal articles; firstly as a New Testament scholar and then as a missiologist. His most important books were Liberation Theology: an Evangelical View from the Third World (1979), What is Mission? Theological Explorations (1999) and Being Human: An Historical Enquiry Into Who We Are (2019). Kirk visited and lectured in over a hundred countries and supervised postgraduate students from all the world’s continents.
Life-changing experience
Andrew Kirk was born into an upper-middle class family and went off to a prep school he hated and then to Harrow school. He didn’t distinguish himself academically there and was discouraged from going to university. However he had a life-changing experience when he did his National Service with The Black Watch regiment in Germany where he was a guard to infamous Nazi prisoners such as Hess, Speer and von Donitz. Despite all his school chapel services he hadn’t become a Christian, but with the encouragement of the regiment’s chaplain he surrendered his life to Jesus on a dusty barrack floor in Berlin and committed himself to following his new-found Saviour wherever He would lead.
