Geoffrey Craig endured a river torrent in Papua New Guinea, played the bagpipes on the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, and scaled a sea cliff in Skye.
Geoffrey William Craig was born in Glasgow on 16 December 1944. His mother, Agnes, was the younger daughter of Sir William and Lady Marshall of Uddingston, South Lanarkshire. Geoffrey, who was educated at Gordonstoun School, might have followed his father’s footsteps into the steel industry, especially as he gained his degree in metallurgy at Strathclyde University, and completed his Masters at Imperial College in London.
Instead, he felt God’s call to work with the Christian charity the Oxford Group and its campaigns for ‘moral and spiritual rearmament’ (MRA), now known as Initiatives of Change (IofC). It would be an adventure of faith, without any guaranteed income, that eminently suited his quiet and diligent spirit of service to individuals. This took him from Kenya and Ethiopia to Papua New Guinea, where he spent four years, to the Philippines and Hong Kong, for eighteen months, and to Japan for four and half years, staying long enough in each country to make life-long friendships.
Craig was Assistant Secretary and then Secretary of the Oxford Group from 2001 to 2005, facilitating meetings of the board of trustees. He was largely responsible for overseeing the move of the charity’s headquarters in London, in 2000. He was also the Convenor of IofC’s Panel of Elders from 2010 to 2014, giving pastoral oversight to teams around the world. It was typical of his calm and selfless spirit of service in taking on both roles.
