Fr Hilary writes,
I was very sorry to read of the death of Revd Donald Reeves, on the eve of All Saints Day. He was one of the most extraordinary men I have ever met. He looked like an Old Testament prophet, and he acted like one.
I first met Donald in 1978, when he was running a course for the Urban Ministry Project, while Vicar of St Peter’s, St Helier, in Morden, South London. He shared with us the challenges of life in an inner-city housing estate and brought in a series of radical theologians to offer their reflections. The highlight of the programme was for each of us individually to live as a tramp in London for 3 days with only 50p in our pocket!
From Morden, Donald was asked by the Bishop of London to take over and close down the then moribund church of St James’s, Piccadilly, more used to society weddings than social activism. He promptly lost most of the congregation and set about creating what became the most vibrant and active parish church in Central London, open and welcoming to all, including those of other faiths, as well as the homeless who slumbered in the pews.
In the early 1990s, I was PTO at St Martin’s in the Fields, not 800 yards from St James’, and remember how we envied his faith and his courage. It was during this time, that his radicalism reached overseas, and, fed up with the cold war, he invited Soviet officers to engage with their opposite numbers in NATO, which famously led to Margaret Thatcher calling him “a very dangerous man” – the title for his later memoir.
Donald retired in 1998, aged 64. The story goes that he moved to Devon, with his long-term partner, artist Peter Pelz, and after sitting on the beach one morning, he decided his ministry was far from over, returned home, picked up his cassock and headed for Banja Luka in Bosnia, only 3 years after the end of the Bosnian war. Here he launched an organisation called the ‘Soul of Europe’, and, after much work and many visits, persuaded Banja Luka’s Orthodox Bishop, Catholic Bishop and Muslim Mufti to travel together to the Centre for Reconciliation in Coventry, UK. This breakthrough led to the Soul of Europe opening an office in Banja Luka and to the creation of the Banja Luka Civic Forum.
I was then working for an organisation that helped people in developing countries who wished to start up in business. I travelled to Banja Luka with Donald and Peter, and we set about establishing a programme to rebuild the small shops and manufacturing businesses that had once located around the 16th century Ferhadija Mosque, which along with 13 other mosques had been completely destroyed in the early 1990s. I soon discovered that this was only part of the task: his main aim was to rebuild the Mosque itself, which he described as ‘a jewel of the Ottoman Empire’. ‘Rebuilding the mosque’, said Donald, ‘will help to focus a deeply-divided community on the future – beyond the mess. I see Banja Luka as a city where one day Islam, Orthodoxy and Catholicism will flourish together.’ You can read about this stage of his life in his book, ‘A Tender Bridge – Journey to Another Europe’.
Having known and worked with Donald had a profound impact on my ministry, my beliefs and my life. I learnt from him that God is not to be locked up in the church, and rather than trying to ‘save’ people from the world by coming to church, our role should be to re-find an authentic way of God within the communities in which we live.
Picture above: Donald and I in Banja Luka, July 2002.
Read the Church Times on obituary here.
And in the Guardian, here.