And no one was more welcoming and friendly than Dr. Stanley Samartha, the first director of the DFI. To be sure, he had first to find out what kind of fish or fowl I was, and I was shrewdly examined about my experience as a missionary in Nigeria, my views about the Raj in India, and my competence as a theologian. Stanley always had serious reservations about missionaries, about the British, and about European theologians. But it seems I passed the test, and in Geneva in July 1979, a friendship began which has been one of the great privileges of my life. Happily I was able to tell Stanley what he meant to me on my last visit to India three years ago, and gladly respond to Dr Ucko’s request now to share some of my indebtedness to Stanley with a wider audience.

Sitting in his sunlit office in those July days of twenty-two years ago, Stanley spoke of his frustrations in his task of building up interfaith dialogue the Nairobi Assembly of the WCC was still a raw memory. There European theologians, together with some other first-world church people, had objected to visitors from other faith communities being allowed to address the Assembly, and it had seriously looked as though the infant work of the DFI was going to come to an abrupt end. But the voices of Russell Chandran of India and Lynn de Silva of Sri Lanka had saved the day. Stanley spoke to me with profound sadness of the failure of European theology to engage with the significance of other forms of faith. The shadows of Kraemer and Barth lay heavily upon the WCC community at that time, and Stanley was bruised (but unbowed) by the many verbal maulings he had had in Germany and in Britain and elsewhere by those who asserted the discontinuity between Christian faith and all other forms of religion. Then he turned to me with this challenge. You in Britain can do so much to put this right because you been have responsible for so much missionary work; the expansion of the Anglican Church, the Baptist Churches, the Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Churches, the Congregational Churches began in your islands. Also you in Britain have more theologians to the square mile than anywhere else on earth, and you have more former missionaries residing in your midst than anywhere else in the world.

I did not contradict him. To be sure Stanley was not asking us to bear the responsibility for either the old Roman Catholic theology of extra ecclesiam nulla salus (outside the church no salvation), and or for its Lutheran counterpart extra fidem nulla salus (outside faith no salvation): these had their origins in Rome and in Germany. But he was right in his assessment that British people must acknowledge that much of the negation of other people’s religious ways and practices had its origin within these offshore islands of Western Europe.

Thus was born the "Samartha mandate" for the work of our Committee in London. Travelling extensively throughout the British Isles I was able to enlist the help of scholars and theologians of all Churches I have mentioned, and indeed of smaller groupings like the Society of Friends and the Salvation Army. The great British missionary societies were already on my side: to their great and lasting credit they were the main financial supporters of the CRPOF, and many of their leaders had been instrumental in setting up the committee. Because of the Samartha mandate one of our first actions in CRPOF was to set up a Theological Issues Sub-Committee which produced a steady stream of theological reflection in the following years, all on the side of generous and sympathetic understanding of the faith of other men and women. I was also able to use Stanley's challenge in the "faith and order" and "mission and evangelism" circles of all the major British churches, and many notable statements were produced by the Church of England, the Episcopal Church in Scotland, the United Reformed Church, the Methodist Church and the Society of Friends. All this was a matter for considerable satisfaction to the man who had given this mandate to the British churches.

But Stanley also set me other challenges during my days with him in that summer of 1978. The near debacle in Nairobi had led to a fresh initiative within the WCC and a major consultation had been held in April 1977 in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The findings of this consultation had just been reworked as the first set of WCC Guidelines on dialogue with People of Living Faiths and Ideologies. (They were actually promulgated by the WCC in 1979 at its Central Committee Meeting in Kingston, Jamaica). While these Guidelines, with their theme "Dialogue in Community," were a major break-through for the Ecumenical Movement, Stanley expressed his concern to me that they were "theologically timid." They were unable to get beyond merely posing the central theological issues, i.e. what is the relationship between the universal creative and redemptive activity of God towards all humankind and God’s particular creative and redemptive activity in the history of Israel and in the person and work of Christ; are Christians to speak of God’s work in the lives of all men and women only in terms of hope that they might experience something of Him, or more positively in terms of God’s self disclosure; and would it ever be right and helpful to understand the work of God outside the church in terms of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

Furthermore would it ever be possible to find from the Bible criteria for the burgeoning new understandings of the relation of mission and dialogue.

Sitting in Stanley's office back in 1978 it seemed unlikely that we would ever get the ecumenical community to affirm emphatically and joyously the presence of God with all humanity. But then and there made an unspoken commitment to see how far the British Churches could go in producing just such an affirmation. This was a further aspect of the Samartha mandate. My own small contribution was to write a brochure to accompany the new Guidelines (called Why Dialogue? A First British Comment on the WCC Guidelines) in order to introduce them to the BCC Assembly in November 1979, taking up their unfinished issues and working through their unfinished theological business. The Guidelines were warmly welcomed in Britain and our BCC Assembly affirmed that the presence of people of different faiths was "within the gracious purposes of God." More to the point of this present article, I know that Stanley was delighted with the booklet and felt that he had found a real ally in his younger British colleague. For my part Stanley’s warm appreciation led to my further writings in this field, and I am delighted to pay tribute now to Stanley’s role in my own intellectual development.

The friendship begun in those days was deepened by many other meetings in different parts of the world: all have their own memories. I remember walking through a great basilica in Hungary, and Stanley murmuring beside me, "what has this to do with the Galilean?" I recall his sadly explaining to me in Bangalore that India was not a place for interfaith dialogue on the very day of Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s assassination. I remember his humble astonishment that a young Dutch scholar should have taken so much trouble to research the details of his life and to write a nearly exhaustive survey of his writings (I refer to Euwout Klootwijk’s excellent study of Samartha’s work, Commitment and Openness, 1992).

His last years were marked by failing eyesight but until his last illness he carried out his duties as a presbyter of the Church of South India in St Mark’s Cathedral in Bangalore, faultlessly reciting the service. The last time I shook his hand was in United Theological College, Bangalore, on the steps of the fine residential building which bears his name. I am very glad there is this lasting memorial in brick and mortar in that great academic centre in South India. But I know also that Stanley's vast contribution to interfaith understanding and the theology of religion will live on through his writings, and through his influence upon those of us who were honoured with his trust and friendship.