At various times in his career as one of the most radical clerics in the Church of England, Donald Reeves, who has died aged 90, was called a very dangerous man by Margaret Thatcher and a dishy vicar by Jilly Cooper. The Rector of St James’s Church, Piccadilly, in the heart of the West End of London for 18 years between 1980 and 1998, he was a leading member of a cohort of progressive and socially engaged Anglican priests that crested in London in the 1970s and 80s.
A significant figure in initiatives for ecumenism and reconciliation between faiths, in the late 90s Reeves set up a charity, Soul of Europe, which worked particularly in the Balkans after the Bosnian war. If the creation of that body was partly a result of his frustration with the passivity of the Church of England, it was also a living out of his Christian principles.
Thatcher’s warning to her ministers followed an initiative in which Reeves invited political and even military personnel from the Soviet Union to meet their European counterparts to discuss securing peace at his rectory at a time of cold war tensions. It gave him the title for his memoirs, though Conservatives continued to attend and address meetings at St James’s. “I don’t think you are very dangerous at all,” Enoch Powell told him after one such occasion. Reeves actually got on quite well with Thatcher on a personal basis, although their politics were poles apart.
The only child of Henry, a garage owner in Chichester and his wife, Barbara, Donald showed a taste for clerical theatricality even as a child, when he was said to have preached sermons at the family cat. But neither of his parents were churchgoers, and were indeed horrified when he decided to seek ordination in his late 20s.
He was educated at Sherborne school in Dorset, and after national service as a junior officer in the Royal Sussex Regiment studied English literature at Queens’ College, Cambridge.
Once he had graduated he joined the British Council as a lecturer in Beirut, where he came across the so-far unexposed spy Kim Philby, and on his return to Britain studied for ordination at Cuddesdon Theological College near Oxford.
He served his curacy at a parish in Maidstone, Kent, before being recruited as a chaplain by Mervyn Stockwood, the bishop of Southwark, who was radical and privately gay, like Reeves himself. Stockwood was busily recruiting a cadre of liberal and able clerics to be members of the so-called “South Bank religion”, including a number, such as John Robinson, author of the bestseller Honest to God, who became bishops themselves.
In 1968 Stockwood encouraged Reeves to take a sabbatical working among young black civil rights activists at an urban ministry social project in Chicago: an experience that radicalised him and changed his life. He would become an evangelist for ethnic and gender equality, women’s ordination and gay rights in the church. His politics, his homosexuality and perhaps his controversialism precluded advancement in the Church of England.
Returning to south London, Reeves was made vicar of St Peter’s, a church set in a housing estate in Morden, and 11 years later moved to St James’s, Piccadilly, a then moribund church more used to society weddings than social activism. He promptly lost most of the congregation, one of whom told him: “We don’t want a vicar who has a beard.” It was such trendiness and a passing resemblance to the actor Terence Stamp, who lived in the parish, that prompted Cooper in her journalistic phase to describe him as a dishy vicar. What replaced the former parishioners was a more vibrant and active parish church, open and welcoming to all, including those of other faiths and vagrants slumbering out of the cold. All were welcome.
St James’s also became a gathering point for supporters of women’s ordination. The letters of complaint were batted away by Gerald Ellison, the bishop of London, who declined to interfere with Reeves’s ministry. Figures invited by him to speak at the church covered an eclectic range, not only Powell but also Norman Tebbit, Tony Benn and Desmond Tutu. Reeves enjoyed controversy, but managed to disagree with others without being personal. Fiercely attacked in the Daily Telegraph, he promptly invited his critic to lunch, and they became friends.
After taking early retirement Reeves set up Soul of Europe with his partner, the painter Peter Pelz, to promote inter-faith harmony and reconciliation. Most of the funds were raised by the couple themselves, who toured Britain and Europe speaking to a range of government organisations and individuals who might help them. One contact was the Duke of Westminster, who had served with Reeves in the army and offered to double any funding raised.
The charity’s most significant project was the rebuilding of the Ferhadija mosque at Banja Luka in Bosnia, which had been levelled by the Serbs in 1993 and was rebuilt by them with the aid of Turkish government money.
Reeves was made MBE in 2008. His books included Making Sense of Religion (1989) and The Memoirs of ‘A Very Dangerous Man’ (2009).
Soul of Europe is now likely to be closed following the cutting off of government funding, but its efforts were already drastically curtailed by the Covid pandemic, which threw Reeves into a depression from which he struggled to recover; Pelz, who survives him, was his carer at their home in Crediton, Devon.
• Donald St John Reeves, clergyman and campaigner, born 18 May 1934; died 31 October 2024
