Brother Walter Draper was an unusual person in many ways. He was not arrogant. He was not opinionated. He was not judgmental. He was meek like Moses. Throughout his long life in following his Master, he totally impoverished himself for others. And he was, in a true scriptural sense, almost unbelievably humble.
The biggest problem some had with Walter was that, above all else, he was a friend of sinners. But so was Jesus his Master, which is why he refused to bow to pressure and treat poor Jamaicans, any poor Jamaicans, with disdain and contempt, and as second-class subjects of the great King. After one confrontation over this issue, he published one of his poems which became quite famous: Out of Every Kindred.
For all 116 years of its existence, the Kingston Brothers in Christ, otherwise the Christadelphian Church, has been in a violent part of Kingston said to be inhabited by many sinners. For 46 of those years, Walter lived downtown,
and used each of seven successive meeting halls, including the present beautiful Assembly Hall dedicated in 1991, as a refuge for tormented souls and a light in the darkness. Through his ministry, many people have been helped and strengthened, and slowly drawn from a life of sin to know God’s grace.
When he was asked, as he was many times, why he allowed sinners to enter a Christadelphian meeting hall in their shabby clothing, Walter would quietly refer them to Scripture: Have you never read what James says? Faith without works of charity is dead. Or more pointedly: Have you never read the word of Jesus Christ? I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. When a proposal was made to sell the meeting hall, Walter wept so long he became ill. He believed that the Lord intends his church to be a hospital for sinners not a private club for saints. No doubt about it: his favorite Scripture was Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan.
The same deep love and Christ-likeness empowered him in his dealings with brothers and sisters stigmatized by others as wayward. He never condoned sin, but like his Lord, he was very merciful with sinners. Like Jeremiah, Walter often wept over the weakness – and especially the self-righteousness and hard-heartedness — of others. A spiritual giant himself, he would say, If my Savior would not condemn one taken in the very act, who am I, chief of sinners, to dare weed out the tares? How could I face my Lord?
Walter had a very low estimate of unregenerate human nature, and at no time did he ever suffer fools gladly. But his rich appreciation of the mercy and love of God gave him a forbearance and tolerance towards human weakness that infuriated the self-righteous.
On matters of principle, Walter Draper was as unmovable as the rock of ages. However much he was insulted, he never retaliated. He never defended himself. He would just sit quietly listening to the complaints of the zealots, and then go along doing what he believed to be right. He never tried to win an argument. He would say: You can win an argument but lose your soul.
Though unmovable on biblical principles, Walter was extremely flexible, and an extraordinarily reasonable man when it came to detail. Wisely, and characteristically, he would not push his views on anybody, even though he was not afraid to speak his mind.
Walter was a Jamaican Moses. He adored and consciously emulated the meek Lawgiver. When he was castigated for encouraging a brother to witness whom others had not authorized, his answer was typically simple but scriptural: Have you never read what Moses said about Eldad and Medad? I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets! And he went on encouraging his young protégé to do his best, and was delighted when he went on a missionary visit to Brazil. Throughout his long life, Walter’s consuming passion, his constant companion, was his Bible. In the various tiny rooms he occupied most of his life, there was no space for any other possessions. The Bible he used was the Revised Standard Version (RSV). His opinion of later modern translations was low.
Walter was a splendid and moving writer. In fact, he was writing incessantly. He knew his Bible so well that he never used a concordance or any other book. The law of God was imprinted in his mind and engraved on his heart. Five hundred of his articles and around a hundred of his poems were published. Many more he wrote for his own pleasure. He was recognized by the University of the West Indies as a significant Caribbean poet.
Walter was a very unusual Christadelphian in one other interesting respect.
He was among the very best expositors, speakers and writers in the Brotherhood, particularly in his heyday of the 1980s. Yet as a deliberate policy, from 1958 until 2002, he never spoke at, nor even attended, any ecclesia but his own in Kingston. He was convinced that rule of the church by committees and synods and councils was its ruination. He felt sincerely that the organization of our brotherhood is too closely modeled upon the secular business corporation, with legalistic rules and worldly objectives, and does not reflect the love of Christ. To him, as with the Lord Jesus, love is a commandment, surpassing all else. If a meeting or discussion got heated or rancorous, he would cut in and say: Let’s stop right there. The love has gone, so there’s no point in continuing. With that spirit, our business meetings were always blessed occasions, full of the Spirit.
He was a wonderful spiritual shepherd on the model of Ezekiel 34, a chapter he loved. He felt a divine calling to shepherd the flock of God in Jamaica’s turbulent capital city, and he never wavered in his pastoral duties. Gunmen tried to kill him. Once he was shot at close range outside a hospital gate, so his life was miraculously saved. Because we all knew the base was secure, other members of the Kingston ecclesia could safely carry the ministry of the Word far and wide. One thing is certain: everything Walter Draper did had its example in some incident in the gospels. Miracles apart, he lived the gospels every day.
Walter was what people call a confirmed bachelor, and was wedded only as a chaste virgin to Christ. In business life he was a journalist, an accountant, and a pest control operator. Rats and other vermin he would not suffer to live. The noxious chemicals eventually gave him lung cancer. But he was not, as this world views it, a good businessman. He was much too generous. He learned that virtue from Jesus Christ.
Indeed, for Walter, generosity of heart and wallet was simply non-negotiable as a Christian. Have you never read what Moses said: Be open-handed, not tight-fisted, with your brother? He said that our money must be given as a freewill offering to God, not as a share in a company where the dividend has to be disclosed to our satisfaction and profit.
To Walter, love was absolutely paramount. If our lives are short on love, we are nothing. At the top of the long list of his loves was his wonderful God, Jesus, and Moses. Then down the list were his Kingston brothers and sisters — especially sisters, whom he felt were not given the freedoms and responsibilities to which they are entitled by the Bible and in the early church. Then came his love for the Jamaican poor. Then for the city of his hopes, Jerusalem the golden. Not the present carnal battle ground of Jew and Arab: it was Jerusalem from above, the city of the Great King, that he longed for with all his heart. Then down the list, he loved the land of his adoption and nationality, land of wood and water, of joy and human dignity. For him, the Blue Mountains surrounding Kingston made it the most beautiful city on earth. He would say: They are like the mountains round about Jerusalem. They tell me that the loving arms of the Lord are always around us here in Kingston. Finally, at the very bottom of his list of loves was the man Walter Draper. Why at the bottom of the list? Well, he used to say, he died seventy years ago.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One