"From the first time I met Rowena in the Hôpital de la Tour (that was my first week in Geneva), I saw a friendly person and a remarkable fighter," wrote Setri Nyomi in a tribute sent from the WARC executive committee meeting in Tondano.

"Those of us who came to know her in her last few years in this life have come to appreciate her talents, her friendship, and her loving care. These were gifts she freely shared."

This is what her husband said at Rowena's funeral in the Ecumenical Centre of August 2.

I'm not going to talk about what Rowena means to me or to our three children, because that's personal. And I'm not going to talk about God, because Rowena is British, and for the Brits, as some of you will know, God also is rather personal.

What I want to talk about is Rowena as a quilter: an artist in fabric, a creator, a maker of things. Some of you may suspect that I'm cheating, that indirectly I am talking about God after all.

quilt We moved to Geneva in 1993. Not long after, Jane Dempsey Douglass, then president of the World Alliance, feminist and theologian, came to dinner with her husband, Gordon. "What do you do?" she asked Rowena. "I quilt," Rowena replied. Innocently, Jane asked a second question: "And what else do you do?" Rowena never quite forgave Jane for that innocent supplementary. She did many other things besides quilt, and was always much more than a quilter; but quilting was at the heart of an identity that she forged for herself over two decades and in spite of many obstacles.

Rowena as a quilter could be intimidating. She combined a ferocious technique, densely layered and always developing, with a deeply personal vision. She was always pushing herself to try something new. But she was also a passionate teacher, finding intense pleasure in helping those who were new to quilt-making, so that they were encouraged rather than intimidated.

Rowena was born creative. Her mother taught pottery and embroidery at the Women's Institute in Lancaster; her father loved gardening; his father made stained glass. She discovered quilting almost by accident; but once she had found it - or once it had found her - she could not let it go.

goose quilt Imagining quilts was as natural to Rowena as breathing. "Snow Geese" - the quilt that covers her coffin today - was her last major project, but she had eight or ten more big quilts, in various stages of development, in her head and it grieved her more than words can say that that is where they would now remain. Making quilts was as natural to Rowena as breathing, and she continued to sew throughout her fight with cancer until, about a month ago, her hands shook so much that it was hard to thread a needle. And then, just under a week ago, she stopped breathing.

Rowena was a perfectionist, who was often dissatisfied with her own work. But she knew its value. She allowed no false modesty to cloud its merits. She was less certain of her own worth. It was difficult for her to accept how greatly she was admired and how deeply she was loved. In recent months and years, and especially in these last weeks, many of you found the words to tell her.

What George Eliot says of Dorothea Brooke at the end of Middlemarch we may also say of Rowena: "Her full nature... spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive." She will live on in the lives and work of those she touched, and touches still.

ocean quilt And she will live on in her own work. Three weeks ago, I told each of our children that Rowena would shortly die. One of them - breaking with the habits of a ministerial lifetime, I shall leave him safely anonymous - lifted his eyes to the quilts that cover our walls and said, "Look on the bright side: we'll always have proof that she existed."

Claude Monet said something similar which goes to the heart of the mystery of creation. When he was eighty, a photographer came from Paris to take his picture. "Why on earth do you want to do that?" said Monet. "Come back in the spring when my gardens are in flower and take pictures of them. They look much more like me than I do."