Bentley-Taylor, David 1915-2005

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born January 25, 1915, in Liverpool, England; died February 10, 2005. Missionary and author. Bentley-Taylor was an influential missionary who helped found the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES). While attending Trinity College, Oxford, he was converted to evangelical Christianity. Completing his studies in 1936, he traveled to China as a missionary, teaching in the northeast and in the remote province of Gansu. Returning to England in 1944, he helped found the IFES in 1947. He then set out in 1952 to the island of Java in Indonesia, where he converted much of the population—many of them Muslim—to Christianity. Back in England by 1962, he remained there for four years before acting as traveling secretary for the IFES; he spent 1967 through 1974 in Africa and West Asia. In 1974, Bentley-Taylor became involved with another organization, the Middle East Christian Outreach, for which he served as general secretary until 1980. In addition to his missionary work, he also completed several books, including The Prisoner Leaps: A Diary of Missionary Life in Java (1961; revised edition, 1965), My Love Must Wait: The Story of Henry Martyn (1976; second edition, 1978), Josephus: A Unique Witness (1999), Wordsworth in the Wye Valley (2001), and My Dear Erasmus (2002).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Daily Telegraph (London, England), February 21, 2005.

Times (London, England), March 3, 2005, p. 68.