A calendar of other commemorations (with biographical notes)

4 Leonard Kentish martyr
Leonard Noel Kentish, Christian martyr (1907-1943)

Leonard Noel Kentish BA BD AFIA, was born in Richmond, Victoria, to Cecil and Alice (nee Jackson) Kentish in August 1907. When he was three years old his father led a group of 2oo Victorians as pioneer farmers to “The Gums” in southern Queensland to take up pastoral selections. Len’s father, a Methodist local preacher, conducted weekly services in their log house, assisted occasionally by clergy from Dalby or Tara. When the family left “The Gums” for Ipswich Len had successfully completed his primary schooling and two years at Dalby High School. In the Ipswich Methodist churches, he became a local preacher, leader and Sunday School teacher. While working as a State public servant in Brisbane he began accountancy studies and volunteered for Home Mission service.

After serving as Home Missionary at Mitchell, Len moved to Woodford as a candidate for ordination. There, in 1928, he met Violet Simpson, LTCL, AMusA, a qualified teacher of piano. The couple were engaged within 4 months. During the next four years Len resided in King’s College while studying Arts and Divinity in The University of Queensland. His fourth college year was marked by significant social, sporting and academic achievement as elected President of the college club. He served in Indooroopilly Circuit, assisting Rev Richard Pope in 1932 and 1933. After ordination in 1934, he and Vi married in Maryborough and transferred to the Townsville Circuit. In 1935 he was invited to fill an Overseas Missions ministerial vacancy in Darwin, the most cosmopolitan town in Australia, its population including many indigenous people. In Darwin he oversaw the building of a new parsonage and worked with Presbyterian minister, Chris Goy to create the Inter-Church Club which, at the outbreak of war became an important recreational canteen for servicemen.
In 1939 his interest in Aboriginal work accelerated with his transfer to the Goulburn Island mission as District Chairman. There he gained rapport with the indigenous people and began translating the New Testament into Maung. He volunteered as a Coastwatcher, in regular radio contact with the long-range transmitter HMAS Coonawarra. Under imminent threat of invasion following the bombing Darwin, Len planned the evacuation of the wives and children of his staff on five isolated stations in March 1942. In April he led to safety about 100 part-descent children, now numbered among the Stolen Generation.
As Chairman, Len Kentish planned to visit his remaining staff on their stations in 1943. When fuel rationing grounded the mission ketch, the navy maintained the transport of stores and personnel. Len embarked at Goulburn on HMAS Patricia Cam. He visited Milingimbi and Galiwin’ku (Elcho Island) and was on the way to Yirrkala when the ship was bombed by a Japanese floatplane, sinking it almost immediately. After a second bomb was dropped among survivors in the water, they were machine gunned for 30 minutes. The floatplane landed and captured Len at gunpoint. Those who made it to shore and survived were rescued and taken to Darwin.
After the war, it was learned that Len was imprisoned at Dobo in the Aru Islands, where he suffered beatings and starvation in futile enemy attempts to elicit information. When Allied aircraft targeted Dobo heavily for several consecutive days, in an act of frustration and possibly revenge, on 5 February, three Japanese officers took him to the edge of a bomb crater and beheaded him.
After the war, Vi learned of his fate by her persistent appeals through the press. Australian war graves and war crimes teams investigated, located his grave and arraigned three former Japanese officers for war crimes. Len’s body was reinterred at the Ambon Australian War Cemetery. The three Japanese officers were convicted by a war crimes court in Hong Kong. One was sentenced to death and two to life imprisonment. The Australian Government recognised Vi as a War Widow. Len was but one of many civilian victims of the inhumane brutality of war, unique as the only Australian captured by enemy forces in Australia during World War 2.
Kentish Court in Sinnamon Village and King’s College at St Lucia commemorate the name and service of Leonard Kentish, as does the Rabaul Coastwatchers’ Memorial. His name is listed as a missionary martyr in the UCA Centre for Ministry at North Paramatta and in the calendar of commemorations in Uniting in Worship 2. His story is graphically told in Eagle and Lamb (2017), written and published by his son, the Reverend Dr Noel Kentish, a Minister in Association in Indooroopilly Uniting Church, Brisbane.

www.lenkentish.com.au

– written by Noel Kentish


9 Dietrich Bonhoeffer Christian thinker
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 into a scholarly and academic family which, though not actively “church-going” was steeped in the humanitarian and liberal traditions that were prevalent in the Christian church within Germany in the later part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries. Like all his siblings, he was intellectually astute, was a talented musician and well grounded in the art and literature of his time. At the same time, he rejoiced in the love of family and friends, and appreciated deeply the beauties of the natural world.

He seemed to be set for an academic career, and became lecturer in Systematic Theology at Berlin University. In the 1930s, however, Bonhoeffer became an opponent of Hitler’s National Socialism in Germany. He quickly understood that the policies of this political movement focused on mere human endeavour and a complete denial of the presence and power of God. His opposition to the policies of Hitler led ultimately to his imprisonment and death.

Before that happened, however, Bonhoeffer became a leader in the Bekennende Kirche (the “Confessing Church” which was opposed to the pro-Nazi “German Evangelical Church”), and he participated in the preparation of the “Barmen Confession”. This document rejected the doctrines of the “German Evangelical Church” – that the church was subordinate to the state, and the Word and the Spirit were subordinate to the church – and reasserted the Lordship of Christ over the Church, and the submission of the Church to the Holy Spirit and Holy Scripture.

Bonhoeffer’s influence within the worldwide Church comes from his commitment to Christian discipleship as a fundamental component of Christian community. Even before his formal ministry began (in Barcelona in 1928) he had gathered a group of friends with whom he discussed issues of faith, including questions about the difference between religion founded on human experience and community based on living in the way of Christ. Following his martyrdom in 1945, friends in Germany, England and the United States took pains to ensure that his written works were made more widely available. Books like The Cost of Discipleship (a book of addresses on the Sermon on the Mount) and Life Together (a handbook of Christian community) provide insights into Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the ways in which we are called to follow Christ.

Bonhoeffer’s poems and prayers also provide the essence of his theology and faith. Together in Song provides a poem (song number 240: “All go to God when they are sorely placed”) in which Bonhoeffer brings together an awareness of our need for God, of God’s need for us, and of God’s grace in denying no-one the benefits of Christ’s death and resurrection.

And a section of a prayer recorded in Letters and Papers from Prison gives insight into Bonhoeffer’s confidence in and reliance on God’s presence and love:

O God, …

In me there is darkness,

But with you there is light.

I am lonely, but you leave me not.

I am feeble in heart, but you leave me not.

I am restless, but with you there is peace.

In me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience;

Your ways are beyond understanding, but

You know the way for me.

(language updated)

by Rev Graham Vawser

18 Kentigern Christian pioneer
St. Kentigern was born about 518 in Culross, Fife, Scotland, to Thenaw, the daughter of a British prince, Lothus. Kentigern, (the name means "head chief") was popularly known as St. Mungo, meaning "dear one". He is believed to have been brought up by St. Servanus at a monastery in Fife. His father's name is unknown.

At the age of 25, Kentigern began his missionary labours at Cathures, on the Clyde, the site of modern Glasgow. He was welcomed there by Roderick Hael, the Christian King, and laboured in the district for some thirteen years. He lived an austere life in a small cell where the Clyde and Molendinar rivers met. By his teaching and example many people converted to the Christian faith. The large community that grew up around him became known as clasgu, meaning "dear family". The town and city ultimately grew to be known as modern Glasgow.

About 553 a strong anti-Christian movement in Strathclyde compelled Kentigern to leave the district. He retired to Wales, and stayed with St. David at Menevia, later founding a large monastery in Llanelwy and serving as its first abbot. In 573, accompanied by many of his Welsh disciples, he returned to Scotland at the request of the king, after a battle secured the Christian cause. For eight years he continued his evangelical outreach to the districts of Galloway and Cumberland.

Finally, in 581 Kentigern returned to Glasgow, where he remained until his death in 603, continuing his work amongst the people.

Several miracles were attributed to him including restoring life to a bird that had been inadvertently killed, the discovery inside a fish he caught of the missing ring of the Queen of Cadzow, and the rekindling of a fire that he had been tending, but which had gone out. These events are commemorated in the Coat of Arms of the City of Glasgow. The fourth symbol is a bell, believed to have been given to Kentigern by the Pope, Gregory I.

St. Kentigern is buried in Glasgow on the spot where a beautiful cathedral dedicated to his honour now stands. He is remembered on 13 January each year, the anniversary of his death. His humble life, lived in the service of God, affected the lives of many people, particularly in Wales, Galloway and Cumberland in Scotland, in parts of the northwest of England, and, of course, in Glasgow. St. Kentigern is still remembered as a model of how we can make a difference in the lives of others.

Contributed by Sandra Batey
21 Joo Ki Chul & Korean Martyrs
In 1905 Japan annexed Korea as a first step as a first step in establishing a Japanese Empire in Asia. As time went by, the Japanese insisted that all Koreans should engage in acts of allegiance to the empire. This included in participating in rites in which they were required to engage in acts of obeisance at the Shinto shrines erected in each centre across the country. Many Korean Christians and most missionaries interpreted these acts of obeisance as worship of the Japanese Sun-god, and therefore as a breach of the First Commandment. They therefore resisted either passively or actively the Japanese demands. Co-incidentally this pressure from the Japanese attracted many Korean nationalists to the Christian Church.
Joo Ki Chul was born in Changwon in 1897, and grew up and learned the Gospel from the Australian missionaries who worked in the South-eastern province of the country. He became a Christian and was later trained and ordained as a Minister of the Gospel in the Presbyterian Church of Korea. He served in two major churches in the Province, and became an outspoken critic of the Japanese demand that all people do obeisance at the Shinto shrines. He was then called in 1937 to a large church in Pyong Yang, where his outspoken refusal to comply with the Japanese demands came under closer scrutiny. Over the next decade, Joo Ki Chul was imprisoned four times, the last time never to be released. He was tortured and abused, and finally died a martyr to his faith, in 1944. He could have compromised. He chose to follow his Lord, who had also refused to compromise.
Many other Korean Christians suffered imprisonment or death at the hands of the Japanese imperial authorities, or suffered in other ways in order to keep their worshipping communities together.

Five years after liberation from the Japanese in 1945, the North Korean army invaded the South. Many more leading Christians were murdered by the North Korean forces, or their sympathizers in the South, simply because they were Christians. Of these, perhaps the best known was another Presbyterian Minister – Rev Son Yang-won.

He had spent time in the Kwangju prison under the Japanese, inspired by the story of Rev Joo Ki Chul. He also wished for martyrdom but was released from prison at the end of the Japanese War, and became the pastor of the large leprosarium at Soonchun. Before the outbreak of the Korean War there were very active insurgents in the region. A group of them carried out murder and mayhem among the local Christian leaders. Two of those whom they murdered were sons of Pastor Son. Having been denied martyrdom himself, Pastor Son adopted the young man who had played the key role in the murder of his sons, rescued him from the hands of the anti-communist authorities bent on executing him, and raised him as his own son.
by Rev John Brown
22 Trevor Huddleston renewer of society
Born in 1913 into a privileged background and later an Oxford education, Trevor Huddleston sought Anglican ordination in 1937, then joined the Community of the Resurrection in the 1939. This religious order had been founded by Charles Gore, Bishop of Oxford, with the apostolic community depicted in the Acts in mind. Gore had also helped found the Christian Social Union, which focussed the energies of High Church Anglicans on questions of social justice.
The Community sent Huddleston to South Africa in 1943 for what were to be 13 fruitful and tumultuous years. Apartheid became official policy in 1948, although racial segregation practices were much older. Working as parish priest in the slum area of Sophiatown, Huddleston became one of the fiercest opponents of Apartheid. His opposition to the regime and his association with leaders of the African National Congress earned negative attention from the South African police and government.

For blacks, however, he was a marvel. Desmond Tutu remembers meeting him when aged nine, and the way Huddleston treated his mother who was cook at a women’s hostel:

“I was standing with her on the hostel veranda when this tall white man, in a flowing black cassock, swept past. He doffed his hat to my mother in greeting. I was quite taken aback; a white man raising his hat to a black woman! Such things did not happen in real life. I learned much later that the man was Father Trevor Huddleston”.
The Community recalled him to England in 1956, and although he had become a South African citizen, he was refused re-entry to his adopted homeland as long as Apartheid reigned.
The publication of his book Naught for Your Comfort, also in 1956, was instrumental in the world’s discovery of the scandal of Apartheid. Desmond Tutu (whose son Trevor was named after Huddleston) stated: “If you could say that anybody single-handedly made Apartheid a world issue then that person was Trevor Huddleston”.
For Huddleston, this scandal was a Gospel matter. He was utterly convinced that the God who had taken on human flesh in Jesus Christ, and offered his own life for the life of the world, demanded nothing less of him as a Christian and a priest than immersion in the struggle to assert the dignity of all persons.
Huddleston was drawn back at least to the African continent. He became Bishop of Masasi in Tanganyika (later Tanzania) in 1960, and served there for eight years before returning to England as Bishop of Stepney in London. Ten years there were followed by his election as Bishop of Mauritius, and concurrently Archbishop of the Province of the Indian Ocean.
He retired in 1983 and returned to England, where his energies were thrown into the Anti-Apartheid Movement, of which he became President. He was eventually to return to South Africa and had the joy of seeing his friend Nelson Mandela elected President of a democratic nation in 1994. Mandela has said that no white person had done more for South Africa. Trevor Huddleston died in 1998.
In Naught for Your Comfort Huddleston wrote:

“I trust in the mercy of God for my forgiveness. For He too is a Person. And it is His Person that I have found in Africa, in the poverty of her homes, in the beauty and splendour of her children, in the patience and courtesy of her people. But above all, I have found Him where every Christian should expect to find Him: in the darkness, in the fear, in the blinding weariness of Calvary. And Calvary is but one step from the empty Tomb”.

Rev Dr Andrew McGowan

22 Toyohiko Kagawa renewer of society
Kagawa – evangelist, social reformer, author and mystic
Toyohiko Kagawa (1888-1960) lived in a turbulent period of Japanese history – the time of rising militarism and deepening xenophobia.
Born to a mistress of an unsuccessful politician businessman and orphaned at four, he learnt resilience through a difficult childhood. He was brought up by the austere and resentful widow of his father in his ancestral village in Shikoku.
At sixteen he became a pacifist, influenced by Tolstoy’s writings; this coincided with Japan’s war against Russia. Toyohiko was beaten as a traitor by his fellow students and teachers alike. Christianity too was regarded with suspicion; he was disowned by his remaining family when baptized in the same year.
Kagawa became an evangelist, preaching on street corners. He focused on those forgotten by society and neglected by the churches – the urban poor. At twenty-one, at death’s door with tuberculosis, he had a mystical experience of healing, of “being enveloped by bright light”. This was a formative experience and his life took on a great sense of urgency.
He left his seminary for the Shinkawa slums in Kobe, living there for the next 14 years surrounded by disease, vermin, and overwhelming stench, harassed day and night by drunks and criminals demanding money. He was threatened with the sword and beaten, yet persisted with his pacifist stance, kneeling before his abusers in the posture of prayer - not a ministry for the faint hearted.
Kagawa was impatient with those who saw the faith as a mere collection of correct doctrines: the Kingdom of God is to be lived in every dimension of life. He became an entrepreneur for the poor, starting clinics, low-cost food outlets and cooperative factories in the slums. He organised trade unions, and led strikes in the Mitsubishi and Kawasaki Shipyards in 1921. He preached “Brotherhood Economics”, peaceful cooperation between capital and labour, based on the Cross of Christ. He later organised unions for share farmers and farm workers, as well as consumer cooperatives throughout Japan.
He was the author of 150 books, often drafted on toilet paper; in a five-year period from 1929 he held 1,859 evangelistic meetings. He made twelve overseas speaking tours, to Australia, the USA, Canada, Europe, China, India and the Philippines. He studied for two years at Princeton University, obtaining Master’s degrees in theology and Experimental Psychology.
Kagawa was jailed several times for his role in the union movement, yet during the Depression the Mayor of Tokyo invited him to head the city’s Social Welfare Bureau. He was jailed in 1940 for his apology to China for Japan’s attack, and in mid- 1941 led an unsuccessful peace mission to the USA.
During his Australian tour (1935), Fletcher Jones (an iconic Australian clothing brand) invited Kagawa to address workers at his Warrnambool factory. Jones, a Methodist, believed that “spiritual growth was achieved through productive and satisfying work, and the object of business should be social advancement rather than individual profit”. He visited Kagawa’s cooperatives the following year and proceeded to turn his business into a cooperative. By the 1970s, over 70% of shares were owned by the staff.
Kagawa remains a transnational inspiration for all who seek to live the Kingdom on earth.
Written By Rev Atsushi Shibouka




26 Mark witness to Jesus
(Evangelist, martyr, and first ‘Bishop of Alexandria’)

(Greek: Markos = polite, shining)

Almost all the early traditions assume that St Mark, author of the Gospel that bears his name, is also John Mark of Jerusalem and Mark the cousin of Barnabas — the occasional missionary companion of Barnabas and Paul (and perhaps also of Peter, according to Papias and Eusebius). Hippolytus of Rome’s list of the 70 disciples sent out by Jesus (Lk 10:1) includes these three Marks separately, but other early writers have them as the same person, who was perhaps born in Cyrene (in today’s Libya) before moving to Jerusalem (Acts 12:12).
The Gospel of Mark, thought by most scholars to be the earliest written account of Jesus still surviving, is a vivid, fast-moving account, often told in the present tense — although this is not reflected in our English translations. Mark is said to have compiled it out of the sermons and teaching of Peter, though he may also have been a participant in the Jerusalem events. Some have claimed that he wrote himself into the Gospel story as the young man who fled naked at Jesus’ arrest (Mk 14:51-2). If that is so, he may have performed another disappearing act when he left Barnabas and Paul in the lurch and headed back to Jerusalem instead (Acts 12:25; 13:5, 13), leading to a ‘sharp disagreement’ between the two Apostles when he wanted to join them again on a later journey (Acts 15:36–41).
The mysterious disappearances of ‘Mark’ don’t end there, but continue through history. The Gospel of Mark seems to have been used by both Matthew and Luke as a template for their longer and more popular accounts of Jesus, but then faded from view. The first known commentary on Mark dates from the 6^th Century (very late compared with the other Gospels), and early manuscripts of the Gospel are rare — only three papyrus fragments survive. The earliest full copies of Mark end at chapter 16 verse 8, with excited women fleeing the empty tomb “for they were afraid” — and various longer endings were then added in later manuscripts to ‘correct’ what seemed to some to be the ‘disappearance’ of a proper conclusion to Mark’s account.
The body of Mark — and not just the text — also disappears! Strong early traditions suggest that Mark founded the church in Alexandria, Egypt, and was martyred there around 68CE, when he was dragged by the neck around the streets until he died. In 828 CE, Venetian merchants ‘body-snatched’ the remains of St Mark from Alexandria (some say they took Alexander the Great’s remains by mistake!), so they could be installed (eventually) in San Marco Cathedral in Venice. In the 11^th Century they disappeared yet again when the Cathedral was rebuilt, and then mysteriously they were rediscovered some years later.
Traditionally, St Mark is Patron Saint of Alexandria, Venice, and barristers, and is seen as the founder of Christianity in Africa (and particularly, the Coptic Church of Egypt).
We might also suggest — given his remarkable history — that St Mark be seen as Patron Saint of ‘the second chance’, the young and impetuous, story-tellers and authors writing their first book, streakers (Mk 14:51-2), and the ANZACs (the Feast Day of St Mark is April 25).
By Dr Keith Dyer
28 Dorothy Soelle Christian thinker
“God, your Spirit renews the face of the earth.


Renew our hearts also


And give us your spirit of lucidity and courage.


For the law of the Spirit


Who makes us alive in Christ


Has set us free from the law of resignation.


Teach us how to live 


With the power of the wind and of the sun


And to let other creatures live.”
~ Dorothee Soelle

Dorothee Soelle was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1929.  As a child she played no personal role in the rise and fall of the Third Reich; she was fifteen when the war ended.  But as revelations unfolded about the full extent of the Nazi crimes she was filled with an “ineradicable shame”: the shame of “belonging to this people, speaking the language of the concentration camp guards, singing the songs that were also sung in the Hitler Youth.”  Her young adulthood was spent reflecting on the great question of her generation: How could this have happened?  The hollow answer of the older generation, that “we didn’t know what was happening,” impressed on her the duty to question authority, to rebel, and to remember “the lessons of the dead.”

The moral and existential challenge of her times led Soelle to study philosophy and, later, theology.  She was one of the principal authors of the so-called “political theology” – an effort to counter the privatized and spiritualized character of “bourgeois” religion through the subversive memory of Jesus and his social message.  In light of the Holocaust she was particularly critical of a “superficial understanding of sin” largely confined to personal morality.  “Sin,” she wrote, “has to do not just with what we do, but with what we allow to happen.”  Her initial challenge was to develop a “post-Auschwitz theology,” an understanding of God who does not float above history and its trauma but who shares intimately in the suffering of the victims.  Such an understanding of God defined, in turn, a new meaning of Christian discipleship.
A true prophet, Soelle did not simply denounce the way things were, but looked forward to a “new heaven and a new earth.”  Her theology was inflected with poetry and drew on her wide reading of literature and her love of music and art.  She bore four children from a first marriage.  The experience of motherhood strengthened her hope for the future, while reminding her that pain and joy are inextricably combined in the struggle for new life.  She met her second husband, at the time a Benedictine monk, when they collaborated as organizers of a “Political Evensong” in Cologne.  Beginning in 1968, this ecumenical gathering of Christians joined to worship and reflect on scripture in light of the political challenges of the day – whether the Vietnam War, human rights, or the campaign for social justice. 

It became a hugely popular event, regularly drawing up to a thousand participants.  The gatherings were controversial, however.  Their notoriety was among the factors that prevented Soelle – despite her thirty books – from ever receiving a full professorship in a German university.

Nevertheless, from 1975 to 1987 she spent six months each year as a professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York.  It was a particularly fruitful time for her, as she broadened her theological perspective in dialogue with feminism, ecological consciousness, and third-world liberation theologies.  She also continued to translate her theology into political activism – in solidarity with embattled Christians in Central and South America, in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and in particular in resisting the nuclear arms race.

The decision of NATO in 1979 to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Europe made her decide “to spend the rest of my life in the service of peace.”  She was arrested several times for civil disobedience and was tireless in challenging the churches to take action against what she saw as preparations for a new global holocaust.  In an address to the Geneva Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 1983 she began, “Dear sisters and brothers, I speak to you as a woman from one of the richest countries of the earth.  A country with a bloody history that reeks of gas, a history some of us Germans have not been able to forget.”  It was this experience that impelled her to raise a cry of alarm.  Never again should a generation of Christians employ the excuse that “we didn’t know” about plans and preparations for mass murder.

In her later writings she increasingly spoke of the need to join mysticism and political commitment.  She defined mysticism not as a new vision of God, “but a different relationship with the world – one that has borrowed the eyes of God.” Soelle died on April 17, 2003, at the age of seventy-three

by Robert Ellsberg