The Rev Norwyn Denny obituary

Methodist pioneer of the inner-city Christian mission
The Rev Norwyn Denny
The Rev Norwyn Denny at a peace march in Liverpool in 1976. Photograph: Methodist Recorder

The Rev Norwyn Denny obituary

Methodist pioneer of the inner-city Christian mission

The Methodist minister the Rev Norwyn Denny, who has died aged 85, was a pioneer of the modern urban mission in Britain. His work in Notting Hill, west London, in the 1960s and 70s helped to lay the foundations for the wider church's often-controversial involvement in Britain's inner cities.

Spurred on by the socialist cleric Donald Soper, the Methodist church sent Denny and two other ministers, David Mason and Geoffrey Ainger, to work in Notting Hill, and thus create Methodism's first "team" ministry. The ministers and their families all lived in one house, bound together by common disciplines of prayer, vocation and study.

Denny and his colleagues arrived in Notting Hill shortly after the race riots of the late 1950s. They found a population that included significant numbers of West Indians and West Africans, who were often well-qualified but in poor jobs. Racketeering landlords provided slum housing, racial prejudice was rife, and policing less than helpful. Denny would often appear in court to speak for people – on one occasion for a West Indian woman the police had stopped as she carried home a borrowed vacuum cleaner.

Key to the team's approach was the concept of collaborative ministry, in which everyone in the church, lay and ordained, plus the community, should be involved. Denny was the organiser of a mixed bunch of people who threw themselves into putting the world to rights. It was, for example, a member of the team ministry, the Rev Bruce Kenrick, who began the charity Shelter in 1966.

The worshipping community created in Notting Hill was rooted in scripture and the world. It became a highly regarded model for what the church could do in a broken society. In 1982, Denny was elected president of his church's highest governing body, the Methodist Conference. In his presidential address, he signalled his feeling of unease "at being white, male, senior and middle-class in a conference similarly biased".

Denny was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk. His father was a railwayman and preacher as well as being a conscientious objector, for which he spent the first world war in Dartmoor prison. During the second world war, and for the same reason, Denny worked in a mental hospital. Peacemaking remained a passion for him.

In the 1960s and 70s, the talk among those seeking an appropriate way of being Christian was that of "servant ministry". Some theorised about it; Denny lived it. One story, retold for years, was of how he could be found cleaning the Notting Hill church toilets before the service early on a Sunday morning. He never asked anyone to do anything he was not prepared to do himself.

Another motivation for Denny's ministry was his understanding of the life of Christ: "Because of the sacrifice and commitment of Christ, the place of utter despair, terror, pain and evil becomes, 'a road to bring us nearer God'." 

From Notting Hill, Denny went in 1975 to Liverpool to lead Merseyside's Methodists as their chairman of district (a bishop in all but name). He worked closely with the Anglican Bishop David Sheppard and Roman Catholic Archbishop Derek Worlock, as well as the area's other free church leaders. Not believing in being put on a pedestal, he was unconcerned when, given the media's infatuation with episcopal titles, only Sheppard and Worlock were reported on rather than the whole group.

Denny's life represents a movement within the church that saved it, or at least parts of it, from becoming obsessed with itself, and which provided a critical – some would say prophetic – perspective on political life in the second half of the 20th century.

He believed he was at heart a radical but hoped, he said, to be a kind-hearted one. His wife, Ellen, and their three daughters survive him.

Norwyn Ephraim Denny, clergyman, born 23 October 1924; died 9 September 2010