Rev Howard Taylor

Rev Howard Taylor, who has died aged 68, was a popular missionary with a lifelong love of the people and language of Malawi. He is still fondly remembered by Malawian ministers who say of him: "He was an African minister like us", a very unusual accolade for a foreign missionary in the country. In later years, he was chaplain to Heriot-Watt University, where he transformed the chaplaincy centre into a focal point for international students from India, Africa, China and Europe.

He was born on the same day as the D-Day landings, and brought up in Stockport, Staines and High Halstow. He was educated at Gravesend Technical School, near Rochester and after an abortive attempt at working down a pit, went to Nottingham University and graduated BSc with honours in production engineering in 1965.

That same year he went to Malawi with VSO, where he taught maths and physics at Soche Hill, Limbe near Blantyre, and at the new university.

It was there that he met his future wife, Eleanor Clark, who was a missionary teacher at the time. They married in 1969 while he was studying divinity at New College, Edinburgh. After graduation and a period at St Colm's College, they returned to Malawi in 1971. He was the first Church of Scotland missionary to be ordained by Blantyre Synod after the Scottish mission handed over to the African church.

Later he was the last expatriate to be a parish minister in Blantyre Synod (the inheritor of the original Church of Scotland mission that followed David Livingstone's death). He requested that his first congregation be one where no-one spoke English, so as to make himself learn Chichewa. He succeeded and was rated one of the best expatriate speakers in the country.

He worked in Zomba, where he was minister of the town church and some rural congregations and chaplain to three secondary schools. In 1976 he taught theology at Kapeni Theological College, and when it closed he became minister of Limbe, a large urban area.

In 1981 the family, now including three boys, Douglas, Keith and Ian, came back to Scotland where Howard was inducted to the charge of Innellan linked with Inverchaolain and Toward. It was during this period that he began lecturing at what was then the Bible Training Institute in Glasgow, a relationship which was to continue for the rest of his working life.

After five years in Argyll, he was inducted in 1986 to the parish of St David's Knightswood in Glasgow. His preaching attracted many overseas students; he and his wife gave hospitality to young people for whom he had a great concern and he was active in school chaplaincy.

In 1998 he completed an MTh at Aberdeen University, with a dissertation on science and religion. The same year he became chaplain at Heriot-Watt University. He taught two degree modules there: moral and social philosophy, with Dr Thomas S Torrance, and the philosophy of science and religion.

He continued to teach similar courses at what was to become the International Christian College in Glasgow. Although he was not an orator, students rated his lectures highly because he was straightforward, logical and committed to his subject and those he was teaching.

He was a member of the Church of Scotland panel on doctrine, and convener of a committee on apologetics hosted by the then board of national mission. He was a well-known conference speaker, especially on subjects like the Christian understanding of Israel. He retired in 2008, knowing he had begun to suffer from the disease later identified as multiple system atrophy. By that time he had published several more books and booklets to add to those published earlier in his career.

Rev Taylor and Eleanor moved to Anstruther and during his final years he was cared for by his wife with enormous devotion, including his final months in the St Andrews Community Hospital.

It was there that I found him one day with a Malawian staff member at his bedside, reading the Bible to him in Chichewa. Although he was increasingly unable to do anything for himself, his faculties and his faith remained firm to the end.

He is survived by his wife Eleanor, three children and eleven grand-children.