Bruce Henderson Kenrick, clergyman and housing campaigner, was born 18 January 1920 in Aintree, Liverpool, the son of an accountant. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School in Crosby. During the Second World War he served with the Army Medical Corps in West Africa - in the Gold Coast, now Ghana - and then with the Eighth Army and the Parachute Brigade in Italy. After the war he began studies in Medicine at Edinburgh University but during his studies he became involved with the Christian Union which led to his switching courses to Theology. He was awarded the degree of B.D. on 9 July 1954. Also in 1954, Kenrick married Isabel Witte, a Bostonian.

After his ordination as a Presbyterian minister in 1961 - the Church of Scotland - he continued his studies at Princeton Theological Seminary and joined the ecumenical ministry of the East Harlem Protestant Parish (EHPP) which was involved in promoting a Christian response to rising racial tensions. Between 1956 and 1959, Kenrick served as a missionary in Bengal - in Calcutta - where he and his wife supported local movements for land reform. However, when he contracted typhoid in India they returned to the UK. The family then moved to Iona in the west of Scotland where he had become a member of the Iona Community - an ecumenical community created by the Rev. George MacLeod in 1938.

Between 1962 and 1980 the Kenricks were in Notting Hill, London, where he worked with an ecumenical group ministry modelled on the EHPP. In 1963, while in Notting Hill, he established the Notting Hill Housing Trust after becoming appalled at the housing conditions in the area.

Kenrick's work in Notting Hill inspired him to found the housing charity Shelter which was launched in 1966 as a national campaigning body for housing. The charity was given a huge boost by the public outcry after the BBC screening of the Ken Loach film Cathy come home. Kenrick was then able to persuade the Labour government of Harold Wilson to introduce legislation to provide funding for housing associations to enable them to buy and renovate run-down properties, and also for a rent rebate scheme for poorer tenants.

In 1980, Kenrick was appointed as a minister in the United Reformed Church in Bayswater. Later still, he moved to another ministry in Hackney before retiring to Iona where he often served as a locum minister. Prior to that, in 1983, he became divorced from his wife.

Kenrick's publication record includes The new humanity (1956), Come out the wilderness (1962) which was his account of his experience with the EHPP, and which carried a foreword written by the Rev. Trevor Huddleston, and A man from the interior (1980) which was written after a visit to Cuba and in which he argued that Communism and Christianity could co-exist.

The Rev. Bruce Henderson Kenrick died 15 January 2007 in Oban, aged 86.