My father, Michael Newman, who has died aged 90, was the last Methodist minister to become principal of the National Children’s Home (NCH) and he presided over the first crucial steps in its transformation into the charity now called Action for Children.
The third child of Arthur Newman, also a Methodist minister, and Ida (nee Thompson), Michael was born at Warsop in Nottinghamshire. He trained for the ministry at Wesley House, Cambridge, after graduating in politics, philosophy and economics at St John’s College, Oxford. After a brief spell as tutor at Richmond College, London, he moved to circuit ministry in Horrabridge, Devon, where he oversaw the reunification of the Primitive and Wesleyan strands of Methodism, and welcomed ex-prisoners to breakfast following their release from Dartmoor.
His next posting was to Rhos-on-Sea in north Wales, where the church became so full that two Sunday morning services had to be started. In 1967, he moved to London where, as minister at the Church in the Orchard in Grange Park, Winchmore Hill, he also took on a role in ministerial further training, then becoming chaplain to the National Children’s Home and later its principal.
In 1990 he returned to rural circuit ministry in Ewyas Harold in the Golden Valley in Herefordshire where he took pastoral care of 10 tiny chapels. This happy experience encouraged him to retire to Clun, a similar community further north in the Shropshire hills, where he revelled in but also challenged traditional community life.
Michael was instrumental in bringing an international art exhibition to Clun’s tiny Methodist chapel in 2005. Called Jesus Laughing and Loving, this collection of paintings by artists from 18 countries gives their impressions of Jesus in many different settings – with tribal people, performing in a temple and enjoying a drink with male friends.
Michael also sought to bring religion out of the chapel and into the wider community, organising evening discussions on a wide range of difficult philosophical and ethical questions of life and faith in the local cafe and in the pub. These events were so popular, despite the seemingly dry subject matter, that people of all faiths and none were packed in like sardines.
Michael grew up during the second world war and was evacuated to the Lake District along with the whole of Ashville college, a Methodist boarding school based in Harrogate. This was followed by national service in the RAF in Scotland, where he grew to love the wildness of the landscape. He married Elisabeth Mouser in 1957 in Witney, Oxfordshire, where his father was the minister and Elisabeth’s (Samuel Mouser, a local farmer) was the circuit steward.
Family holidays were usually among the mountains or by the sea, latterly on the Llŷn peninsula and often in the company of some of his five children – Luke, John, Ruth, Stella and me - and 11 grandchildren, many of whom will remember him for his love of cooking sausages over a campfire on the beach.
He is survived by Elisabeth and his children and grandchildren.
