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.
Pig farming to theology
A potential career as a pig farmer was abandoned and he studied theology at King’s College, London and then Ridley Hall, Cambridge. Inspired there by charismatic John Sutton he offered himself to SAMS to serve in Argentina which he did for 12 years after learning Spanish in Cuernavaca, Mexico. After meeting a young vivacious girl in Margaret Thatcher’s constituency he married Gillian before heading off to Latin America. Deeply impacted by Francis and Edith Schaeffer (on one visit to L’Abri he helped Schaeffer turn his lectures into his first book The God Who Is There) he threw himself into teaching theology in revolutionary Buenos Aires, where he was once taken into custody to explain his book Jesucristo Revolucionario, printed with a red cover!
Work with John Stott
On returning to London at the end of the 1970s he helped John Stott set up LICC, training lay people to be missionary disciples in their own contexts. He served his second curacy in London, became Mission Theologian for CMS and travelled across the world learning from Christians on all continents whilst teaching on contextual missiology in many institutions and churches.
Kirk’s last decade of his career was as Dean of Mission in Selly Oak Bible College where the postgraduate department grew hugely under his guidance and many leading missiologists, church leaders and academics flourished. During his retirement he served as advisor to several pioneering theological institutions in Eastern Europe, wrote another dozen books and continued to preach and lead services around Lechlade to his dying day.
His Festschrift, Issues in Mission in Context, edited in his honour for his 75th birthday, shows the diversity of the subjects that he was interested in: hermeneutics, Christian discipleship, poverty and injustice, secularism, the place of Scripture in a pluralistic culture, science and faith, liberation theology, oppression and reconciliation, environmentalism, non-violence – and many more.
Family man
However, despite all his academic achievements he is best remembered as the faithful husband of Gillian, the caring father of Nicky, Alasdair and Daniel, and the loving grandfather of David, Joshua, Ariana and Charlie. Many have remarked on his ability to listen to others empathetically, his self-effacing humour and his Christian wisdom. He has been constantly described as a true gentleman.
One of Kirk’s relatives sums all this up well, saying: “Uncle Andrew was a spiritual father to me. I will always be thankful for his faith, his generosity of spirit, and his thoughtful, curious mind. He had a rare gift for holding Biblical truth and deep faith with grace – always expressed in a way that never offended, but instead invited reflection, drawing on his rich knowledge of Christianity. He encouraged me to keep pursuing God’s path in my life, and that encouragement has always stayed with me.” May his writings and life example continue that legacy into the lives of subsequent generations. Soli Deo Gloria (his family’s motto).
