Methodist minister and controversial head of religious broadcasting at the BBC. An appreciation

REV Dr Colin Morris, who has died aged 89, was a Methodist minister in what was then Northern Rhodesia and is now Zambia, and a close friend of President Kenneth Kaunda who later became a controversial head of religious broadcasting at the BBC.

When he returned to the UK, he became minister at Wesley’s Chapel in London, and was a regular contributor to the BBC’s religious output, particularly television’s Heart of the Matter and Everyman, and Radio 4’s Thought for the Day. In one of his contributions he bitterly attacked the Conservative government led by Edward Heath for its draft Immigration Bill, which, he said, would have excluded Jesus from this country.

He became general secretary of the Methodist Church’s overseas division and in 1976 was elected president of the Methodist conference. He was closely involved in ecumenical affairs, and in 1965 was elected the first president of the United Church of Zambia. In the country’s first honours list he was decorated for services during the freedom struggle.

He trained for the Methodist ministry at Hartley Victoria College in Manchester. Ordained in 1956, he became minister of Chingola Free Church in the Copperbelt, where his support for black miners and his criticism of the conditions under which they worked stemmed not only from his socialist tendencies but from his intensely political reading of the Bible. He became deputy leader of the multi-racial Liberal Capacity and so attended the 1961 Lancaster House Constitutional Conference which produced the constitution which gave Africans majority rule.

Preaching in Cambridge’s University Church in the week Rhodesia declared itself a republic, he said “The white minority governments of Southern Africa and their supporters are prisoners of despair. When you are compelled to weave barbed wire around yourself as a protection against your fellow citizens, your security is a form of imprisonment – you can only shut others out at the price of shutting yourself in.” While the student congregation warmed to that, the same view expressed to his congregation in Rhodesia resulted in almost the whole of the white section of his congregation leaving.

He was a brilliant preacher who became known to a wider audience through his published sermons. They are full of his passion not only for communication but for his conviction that for faith to be real it had to be shown to be reasonable, relevant and related to all aspects of life, most especially the political. He had a great gift for clutching telling, powerful phrases apparently out of the air for he preached from the pulpit and spoke in BBC committees without notes but never without considerable thought and experience behind what he said.

When it seemed that the then chairman of the BBC governors wanted to sideline religious broadcasting on television, his then second-in-command Andrew Barr, later head of religious broadcasting in Scotland speaking at Dr Morris’s memorial service, said that he “spent days and nights working on a perfectly crafted defence of religious broadcasting for the BBC. It was a work of art from the man who had already drafted the religion section of Lord Annan’s 1977 report” (into the future of broadcasting.)

One of the aspects of his time as head of religious broadcasting at the BBC was his acceptance of the conventional view in parts of the corporation (as in some government circles) that it was the glue which helped hold the United Kingdom together.

So when BBC Scotland’s religious television department decided, with the blessing of the then top management at Queen Margaret Drive, that it would opt out of network religious programmes for considerable periods of time, the support for independency which had been crucial to Colin Morris’ political life played no part in his response. He came to Scotland and made it clear to staff and advisory committee alike that opting out weakened the case for religious broadcasting in the BBC as a whole, and would lead to a threat to its place in the schedules. Some wondered whether the man who had challenged political power in Rhodesia had himself succumbed to it in the corridors of television centre in White City.

One obituary notice said that Colin Morris “was not blessed with great social skills and could be a difficult man to get on with”. It is true he had little time for small talk, and he could address small groups as if he was addressing a public meeting. In a way however that stemmed from his deep down belief in public service broadcasting and the crucial place he believed religious broadcasting played in it. And because, at heart, he was always a preacher.

Colin Morris was married three times, and is survived by his wife Sandra. At one point during his time in charge of religious broadcasting, a group of conservative evangelicals in England ran a campaign for his resignation. That they were seen off is a tribute not only to the value placed on Colin Morris as head of religious broadcasting, but to the passionate defence made on his behalf by Bishop David Sheppard of Liverpool, a leading conservative evangelical.

JOHNSTON MCKAY