Christopher Maude Chavasse

Christopher Maude Chavasse

Christopher Maude Chavasse OBE MC ( November 9, 1884 - March 10, 1962 ) was a British athlete and Anglican bishop. He participated in the London Olympics in 1908 and later became Bishop of Rochester.

Before the First World War

Chavasse was the son of Francis James Chavasse , the Bishop of Liverpool and founder of St. Peter's College , Oxford. He had a twin brother named Noel Godfrey Chavasse, who was 20 minutes younger than him. The twins had two other brothers and three sisters.

Christoph and Noel Chavasse attended Trinity College in Oxford . At college, they trained on the rugby team and athletics . You took part in the British team at the Olympic Games in London in 1908 and reached the quarter-finals as a 400-M runner.

In the first World War

All four Chavasse brothers (Christopher, Noel, Aidan and Bernard) took part in the First World War: Christopher as an army chaplain, the others as paramedics. Aidan was wounded and then missing. The other three brothers each received the Military Cross . Noel became one of only three men to receive the Victoria Cross twice, the second posthumously . Christopher received the Order of the British Empire and other awards. Only he and Bernard survived the war.

After the First World War

After the First World War, Christopher Chavasse worked in various services for the Church of England . Eventually he became Bishop of Rochester in 1940 and remained so until his resignation in 1960. J. Arthur Rank produced a sermon by Chavasse in 1948 as a religious short.

In 1943 Chavasse was chairman of the Archbishop's Commission on Evangelism, which published the controversial report Towards the conversion of England . Because he hoped for a mass evangelization, he supported the "Crusade" of the American evangelist Billy Graham in the Harringay Arena in 1955 .

Chavasse married in 1919. One of his five children, a son named Noel (in honor of his uncle, i.e. Christopher's brother), served in the British Army in World War II and received the Military Cross.

Quote

“The Bible is the portrait of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Gospels represent the actual figure of the portrait: the Old Testament forms the background against which the divine figure stands and to which it refers; it is essential to the painting as a whole. The letters serve as garments and decorations for the figure; they explain and describe them. While we are now looking at the portrait in its entirety by reading the Bible, the miracle happens: the figure comes to life and emerges from the canvas of the written word, the eternal Christ from the Emmaus story also becomes our Bible teacher, around us everything to interpret personally what the scriptures foretold about him. ”(Quoted in: Nicky Gumbel : Questions of Life . Eastbourne, E. Sussex, 1993)

literature

• Theodore Andrea Cook: The Fourth Olympiad, Being the Official Report. , British Olympic Association, London 1908
• Herman de Wael: Athletics 1908. Herman's Full Olympians,, 2001
• EB Fryde; DE Greenway; S. Porter; I. Roy (Ed.): 1941. Handbook of British Chronology. (Third edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986, ISBN 0-521-56350-X .
• Ian Jones: Captain Noel Godfrey Chavasse, VC and Bar, MC, RAMC. (1884-1917) , 2003
• Stephen Stratford: VC & Bar Recipients. British Military & Criminal History in the period 1900 to 1999.
• Pawel Wudarski: Wyniki Igrzysk Olimpijskich , 1999 (Polish)

predecessor	Office	successor
Linton Smith	Bishop of Rochester 1940–1960	David Say