Peter Storey
Professor Storey is former president of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa, past president of the South African Council of Churches, and was Methodist Bishop of the Johannesburg/Soweto area for 13 years.
A native South African with a 30-year track record in urban ministry, he served as director of a 24-hour crisis intervention service in Sydney, Australia, senior minister of the Inner-City Methodist Mission in District Six, Cape Town, and of the Central Methodist Mission in Johannesburg. In the 1960s, Professor Storey founded a network of crisis intervention centers in South Africa and served as chaplain to Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners on Robben Island.
In the 1980s he became a national leader in the church struggle against apartheid and co-led an ecumenical delegation to the United Nations, the U.S. Congress and Europe, urging intensified pressure on the apartheid regime in 1984. Committed to non-violence and reconciliation, Professor Storey was a founder of the Methodist Order of Peacemakers and Gunfree South Africa, the nation’s anti-gun lobby. He co-chaired the regional Peace Accord structures intervening in political violence before South Africa’s first democratic elections and was appointed by President Nelson Mandela to help select the nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
He has authored many publications, including With God in the Crucible: Preaching Costly Discipleship (Abingdon, 2002), And are We Yet Alive? Revisioning our Wesleyan Heritage in a New Southern Africa (Methodist Publishing House, Cape Town, 2004) and Listening at Golgotha (Upper Room, 2004). He was a weekly columnist for South Africa’s Sunday Independent, a national newspaper. He presented the Franklin S. Hickman Lectures at Convocation & Pastors’ School at Duke Divinity School in 1987.
The Peter Storey Papers document Storey’s leadership and active involvement in the Methodist Church of Southern Africa, the South African Council of Churches, the Central Methodist Mission in Johannesburg, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Gun Free South Africa, and other religious and anti-apartheid groups.
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