Kenneth Leech

Kenneth "Ken" Leech (15 June 1939 – 12 September 2015) was a British Anglican priest and Christian socialist in the Anglo-Catholic tradition.

Leech was born into a secular working-class family in Ashton-under-Lyne in greater Manchester. As a teenager he became a Christian and a socialist at the same time. A speech denouncing apartheid at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1956 by Trevor Huddleston, a priest of the Community of the Resurrection who had just returned from South Africa, had a particularly powerful impact on him. He would remember thinking, "If this faith could drive this man to oppose racism with such passion, perhaps it could drive me too."

Leech moved to the East End of London in 1958 when he began his studies for a degree in history at King's College London. This move, he later wrote, was the real turning point of his life. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1961 and then went to Trinity College, Oxford. After theological studies at St Stephen's House, Oxford, he was ordained to the priesthood in 1965. He served in urban London parishes afflicted by poverty and confronted issues of racism and drug abuse. After ordination, he served for two years as a curate at Holy Trinity Hoxton in the East End of London and then from 1967 to 1971 at St Anne's Soho.

While in Soho, Leech set up the Soho Drug Group (1967) which ministered to young addicts, many of whom had been drawn into prostitution. In 1969, at the instigation of and in conjunction with Anton-Wallich-Clifford and the Simon Community, he established the charity Centrepoint which became the United Kingdom's leading national charity tackling youth homelessness. From 1971 to 1974 he was chaplain and tutor in pastoral studies at St Augustine's College, Canterbury. In 1974 he became rector of St Matthew's Bethnal Green where he served until 1979. While at St Matthew's he became deeply involved in the struggle against the National Front and other racist and fascist groups. In 1974, with Rowan Williams (who became the Archbishop of Canterbury) and others, he founded the Jubilee Group, a network of Christian socialists in Britain and across the Anglican Communion, most of whom were Anglo-Catholics. In 1980 he became Race Relations Field Officer for the British Council of Churches Community and Race Relations Unit. The following year he was named Race Relations Field Officer of the Church of England's Board for Social Responsibility. He was director of the Runnymede Trust, a think tank dedicated to promoting ethnic diversity in Britain, from 1987 to 1990. From 1991 until 2004, when he retired from full-time parish ministry, he was community theologian at St Botolph's Aldgate, a church located at the intersection of the City of London and the East End. As archbishop, Rowan Williams awarded him a Lambeth doctorate.

...
Wikipedia