Brian Wren was a Congregational Church minister in Essex, England, working for Christian Aid and serving as Programme Secretary of the Churches’ Committee for World Development, when he made a CFT study tour to South Africa in 1973. He was an Oxford scholar and a poet, and was moved to express his response to his exposure to apartheid in a poem, ‘Pilgrimage of Confession’ (quoted in part above and was later published as a hymn), which opened his report on his visit. He reflected on the distance and proximity between his home country and South Africa from the moment he got on the plane at Heathrow:

Brian met with members of the SACC and CI, with Beyers and Ilse Naudé, and with members of SASO – and grappled with the concept of Black Consciousness and recorded in his report: ‘To be white is not to know what it is to be black, in South Africa. I can never know what it is like to carry a pass, live in Soweto, be raided at three o’clock in the morning, tortured in prison, banned and silenced.’