My friend Peter Cruchley, who has died aged 59 of cancer, was a United Reformed Church minister in Cardiff over three decades. Later he went on to work for the Council for World Mission (CWM) in Singapore, where, among other things, he initiated what is now the Onesimus Project, dedicated to uncovering and addressing historical racial injustices, including involvement in slavery, in which the council in its previous identity as the London Missionary Society had been complicit.
He later became director of the commission on world mission and evangelism at the World Council of Churches in Switzerland, where he remained until his death. His writings on theology were widely published, including in the journal Practical Theology.
Peter was born in Epsom, Surrey, to missionary parents, Kathleen (nee Ambrose) and Ernest. At six weeks old he was taken to Mufulira in the copperbelt region of Zambia, where his mother and father were attached to the United Church of Zambia. In the early 1970s the family returned to Weoley Castle, south-west Birmingham, and after his education at Shenley Court school Peter went to Swansea University, where he graduated with a history degree.
He met Rhiannon Jones, a teacher, on a CWM mission programme, and they married in 1990. Peter trained for the ministry at the nonconformist Mansfield College, Oxford, and was ordained in the United Reformed Church in 1992 in the Ely district of Cardiff, a solidly working-class community.
While working as a minister he took a PhD at the University of Birmingham, which he completed in 1999, and two years later he became minister of the Beulah United Reformed Church in north Cardiff, a post he held for the next 15 years.
There he was a vivid presence with flamboyant clothes, ever-changing hair colour, a love of vintage cars and of live gigs in all their variety, from ska and punk to disco and indie. He delighted and perplexed his congregation in equal measure; whether by having an image of a graffiti Jesus sprayed on the church walls or in persuading them to perform the resurrection conga at Easter.
Peter’s relationship with Rhiannon ended in divorce in 2014. In 2016 he met and married Lena Borgers, a foreign language correspondent, and the couple left for Singapore, where Peter became mission secretary for mission development at the CWM. The Onesimus Project is ongoing, and has been expanded to look at modern-day slavery. Peter left CWM in 2022 to take up his post with the World Council of Churches in Geneva.
Across his life he demonstrated what the loving recognition of others might mean, giving space to the marginalised and tirelessly working for church and society to do the same.
He is survived by Lena, and by two daughters, Enfys and Eleri, from his first marriage, a grandson, Dylan, and two brothers, Alan and Steve.
