The Rt Revd Michael Doe and the Very Revd John Conway, write:

MARTIN CONWAY was a life-long campaigner for ecumenism. His professional life began in the late 1950s with the Student Christian Movement, from where he went to the World Student Christian Federation, in Geneva. He returned to London in 1967 to take over the higher-education desk at Church House, and then went back to Geneva as publications editor at the World Council of Churches (WCC). In 1974, he was appointed one of the new assistant general secretaries of the British Council of Churches (BCC), in charge of ecumenical affairs, which included faith and order issues, local ecumenism, and the youth unit.

At the BCC, his work on racial justice included the pioneering work of the Centre for Black and White Partnership, which was created partly to bring the Pentecostalists into the ecumenical movement. It laid the foundations for the recognition of Black-led or Black-majority churches and their full inclusion in the ecumenical instruments.

Martin was also instrumental in the Community of Women and Men in the Church project, at the BCC and the WCC, at a time when the ordination of women was a divisive issue in many denominations. Also at the BCC, Martin’s lifelong interest in China took off. This was at a time when the Churches here knew little about Chinese Christians, and people had little idea what part China would come to play on the world stage.

Martin became a trustee of the Archbishops’ China Appeal, and chaired the Friends of the Church in China. He later donated his large theological library to Nanjing Seminary

In 1983, Martin left the BCC and moved to Ripon College, Cuddesdon, to tutor on Church and society. Three years later, he became President of the Selly Oak Colleges, Birmingham — not an easy time when the Churches and mission agencies that had come together to form the Federation were being reorganised and facing financial difficulties.

In Birmingham, Martin’s interest and commitment to interfaith work developed, something that was to bear fruit when he retired to east Oxford in 1997. His commitment to the environment and creation ethics increased, prompted, no doubt, by the pioneering work that his wife, Ruth, was doing on getting the Churches to take climate change seriously. In Oxford, he also chaired both the diocesan board of social responsibility and the Oxford Council for Voluntary Action.

He had height — in his prime, he was well over six foot — but he also had depth and breadth. His intellectual depth was most evident in his post as an interpreter at many ecumenical events: he combined his command of four languages with his theological knowledge. He was proud that, as a translator, he had participated in every WCC General Assembly from New Delhi in 1961 to Porto Alegre in 2006. Intellectually, he was not one for generalisations, believing that truth rested not in general statements but in principles that then had to be applied carefully and with attention to other factors and possible consequences.

What brought Martin alive was that the intellectual depth was combined with personal warmth, and with breadth: the breadth of vision, the ecumenical vision. He worked for church unity, but for something much more: in the end, the Church was, or should be, the agent and anticipation of the unity of all humankind, and indeed the unity of all creation. Inspired by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he wrote of mission as “a whole way of living” in his 1966 book, The Undivided Vision.

For Martin, the mission of the Church was not a matter of applying fixed or predetermined patterns of events and expectations. He wanted witness to his deep Christian faith, but acknowledged that it was “to do no more than point to what you believe to be significant and true, or to offer a criterion and an interpretation in which you find meaning and purpose. . . .The response to that witness is the affair of the other.”

In the book, World Christianity in the 20th Century, Martin and his co-author, Noel Davies, spoke of how the Christian faith should equip human beings to “live undespairingly” through whatever the future might hold: a hopeful attitude and practice very characteristic of him.

For Martin, ministry did not belong to the ordained, but to the whole Church. He championed the laity because they spent most of their time in the world. Towards the end of his career, he was no doubt disappointed with the fading energy for organic unity, unhappy with too many signs of churches’ turning in on themselves. But he would have rejoiced with those places where the ecumenical vision has taken shape in other ways, not least in the greater inclusion of women and men, of people from different cultures and ethnicities, and people from different faiths — in all of which he had played a pioneering part, as recognised in his award of a Lambeth doctorate in 1993.

Martin and Ruth were married for 61 years, and had three children and seven grandchildren.

Dr Martin Conway died on 14 January, aged 87.