Читать книгу Know the Truth - George Carey - Страница 12

‘I have no difficulty in saying how I conceive the work of a parish priest. My object is first of all to gather a congregation; large, converted, instructed and missionary-hearted and then set it to work. Forge, temper and sharpen your sword – then wield it.

Peter Green of Salford

THE DECISION TO LEAVE ST JOHN’S and return to parish ministry was not taken lightly. There were those who felt that I should stay on at St John’s and consolidate my work, but the ‘Toronto experience’ had given me a thirst to work out what I felt God was teaching me. I considered a number of parishes which the Bishop of Southwell asked me to visit, but an invitation to St Nicholas’s, Durham, caused my heart to beat in excitement. St Nic’s, as generations of Durham undergraduates still call it affectionately, is a leading evangelical church in the north of England, with a distinguished teaching ministry. Interestingly, the previous incumbent was also a ‘George’ and his wife an ‘Eileen’. George Marchant had served for twenty-five years as vicar of St Nic’s before becoming Archdeacon of Auckland. A fine scholar and pastor, he had served the church devotedly and would be a hard act to follow.

Our first visit to St Nic’s confirmed my suspicions that there was much to do there, but that suited me down to the ground. I needed a real challenge, and a cosy bolt-hole was not for me. We met the churchwardens, Gerald Brooke and Dick Bongard, and hit it off with them at once. They were frank about the church’s problems, which were many. The local congregation was very small; there was hardly any youth or Sunday-school work to speak of; the buildings were in bad shape; the student congregation had shrunk ever since George Marchant had left, wooed away by the Charismatic, Catholic style of another city-centre parish, St Margaret’s; giving was appalling; and there was too much reliance on a small but dedicated lay team who had struggled manfully during the interregnum.

I was to learn some very important lessons during the exciting seven years I spent at St Nic’s. First, one has to have a clear theological vision. I made no secret of mine when the churchwardens and the Church Council asked me what I stood for. I replied that I was first of all a Christian who accepted other Christians of all mainstream traditions as full members of the Body of Christ. Although the Church is hopelessly divided, all baptised Christians are members of God’s one family. I remember quoting the statement attributed to Archbishop William Temple: ‘I believe in one holy, catholic and apostolic church – but regret that it doesn’t exist.’ I went on to say that I was a cradle Anglican, able to work and live with people from other traditions in one Church. Although an evangelical – and absolutely convinced of the role of the Bible as the ultimate authority in matters of faith and morals – I did not regard the evangelical tradition as the repository of the total truth about God. Furthermore, I continued, I believed that the emerging Charismatic Movement in the Church of England had much to teach us. It would be my intention, subject to Church Council agreement, to bring in some of these new elements in worship and their spiritual gifts to make the faith more appealing and exciting. I am glad to say that the Council were prepared to take a risk by giving their wholehearted backing to this vision of change.

Secondly, I found that one has to have clear objectives. For me the overall objective was to make St Nic’s an open, accessible church where everyone was welcome. I believed in growth, and aimed to increase the congregation and improve the giving. The church was positioned perfectly at the heart of the small city but was closed six days a week, when shoppers, workers, students and tourists crowded the streets, and only open on Sunday, when there was hardly anybody around. I wanted St Nic’s to be available to all, truly a serving and caring church.

In order to achieve this objective of growth, the character of worship had to change. Worship at St Nic’s was solidly morning and evening prayer according to the Book of Common Prayer, but there was no choir to lead or enliven it. With a heavy heart I came to realise that the services were, frankly, very boring. Furthermore, the coldness of the church building meant that there was little that might attract casual worshippers to come regularly. Although there was a regular 8 a.m. communion service every Sunday, celebrations of the Holy Communion at other times amounted to the final part of the 1662 Service, used after a morning or evening service for the handful of worshippers who remained. This was plainly unsatisfactory. The missionary situation the Church was now in demanded a fresh approach to worship – it had to be accessible, friendly, joyful, yet also reverential. I was confident that we could make it so, with the talents of the many able people in the congregation. Indeed, as I drew upon these talents in creating a music group, and in encouraging children to bring their instruments along when a church orchestra was formed, the congregation increased and with it a deepening sense of fellowship.

Not everyone liked the changes to the worship, of course. A small core of devoted members of the congregation felt that I was changing the character and identity of St Nic’s to such an extent that it was no longer their church. One evening in my second year a former churchwarden asked me to meet twenty-two mainly elderly members of the congregation. I was shocked and saddened to learn of their deep distress. The last thing I wanted was to cut them off from their spiritual home. As we talked I realised that the conversation was wholly one-sided. They were only concerned about their worship, what the church meant to them and how important the Book of Common Prayer was to them. There seemed to be no awareness of the missionary context of the Church, and the necessity of adapting to meet the needs of a new hour. The Church of England had been experiencing years of decline, which accelerated during the 1960s and 1970s as I began my own ministry. The situation was so serious that no regular churchgoer could afford to be sanguine. The need for change, I felt, should have been obvious to all.

I realised that there was no real meeting of minds; yet it was important to keep everyone within the family of the church. We therefore replaced the 8 a.m. communion service with a new traditional service at 9 a.m. All the services with their new styles of worship attracted greater numbers, including this one, although its growth was more modest.

This was a very important lesson to me, showing that it was possible – indeed, essential – to include the more traditional element in church life. That is not to say that the other services were extreme, by any means. I saw no reason to depart from the Church’s expectations that clergy should use the official prayers and should robe properly. It was and remains my conviction that liturgies, appropriately and imaginatively used, and the traditional dress of clergy are not barriers to understanding.

Another lesson I learned at St Nic’s was that if there is to be growth in church life, it cannot be accomplished by the clergy alone. It is imperative to utilise the gifts and abilities of lay people. The problem was that at the beginning I had to do everything. This was a shock to the system, having served my curacy at St Mary’s, Islington, where I was used to working in a team, and having attended two theological colleges where manpower was readily available. I realised that I had to bring about a change of culture in which the leadership of the church was corporate rather than singular. Of course there were lay leaders there from the beginning, but there were many others whose talents were not being tapped. Over the next few years I gradually broadened the leadership team.

This was not without its problems. One of the main challenges when lay people bring their gifts and skills to the task of leadership is the tension between the corporate and the specific responsibility for the ‘cure of souls’ entrusted to the clergy. The church, through the Bishop, had given me responsibility for building up the congregation, and the Bishop’s words at my induction rang through my mind again and again: ‘Receive this charge which is both yours and mine.’ I could not democratise this role too much without completely abdicating from it. On the other hand, neither could I run away from a desire to share my leadership, and to accept the challenge when somebody else came up with a brilliant idea or when I found myself in a minority.

In my third year this became a very real issue. I began to feel uncomfortable and even threatened by the fact that more and more people were sharing the exercise of leadership. At about this time I shared the platform at a meeting with a leading clinical psychologist, Dr Frank Lake. I told him privately that although the work was going well at St Nic’s, I had a problem: ‘As I widen the team I’m finding that I’m delegating areas of ministry where I’m strong, and being left with areas of ministry where I’m weak-’

Before I could finish, Frank beamed at me and said, ‘That’s wonderful, George! How few clergy have the grace and ability to surrender what they’re strong at and bear the burden of weakness!’ Without another word, he left for another seminar he was leading.

Frustrated, I initially did not consider this to be an adequate reply to my comment, but as I drove home I began to see that he had in fact given me a profound response. He was saying: ‘Leadership includes the ability to trust others and give them freedom to flourish. A true leader keeps watch on the whole, but is prepared to exercise humble ministries as well.’ That was an important lesson, and my sense of feeling threatened when leadership was shared diminished – indeed, my confidence in the exercise of my own leadership deepened.

Another thing I realised was that we had a very serious problem, in that there was hardly any children’s work going on. Even though St Nic’s was fortunate to have its own youth centre, it was rarely used. A young priest, Graeme Rutherford, who was doing a master’s degree at the university, was attempting to create an open youth club, but it was an uphill struggle and the results were meagre as far as church attendance was concerned.

It was the condition of the church accounts that gave the impetus to a change of attitude. As I pored over the accounts prior to my first Annual General Meeting of the Church Council, it dawned on me that they were a very good indicator of what we considered important. Our spending showed very bleakly that mission did not matter to us, and that areas like Sunday school and youth work were deemed unimportant. Indeed, the finances showed that the church was interested in maintaining itself only by spending money on buildings, repairs and heating.

I set the church a challenge. From now on, I said, our missionary giving must start at 10 per cent of gross income, and not what we can spare when all expenses are paid. Furthermore, I continued, we must have a realistic budget for children and youth work, for the reason that a church that does not invest in the young is doomed. Again the Parochial Church Council backed this overwhelmingly, but sadly the Treasurer himself was the first casualty of the strategy. He resigned because ‘the church would not be able to afford it’. The interesting thing is that when a congregation is set a healthy challenge, it will respond to it. This proved to be the case at St Nic’s. Giving soared as we created a missionary budget aimed not at simply maintaining ourselves, but at attracting new members.

Perhaps one of the most exciting developments was the creation of ‘Watersports’. The idea started when a new member of the congregation, David White, came to me one day and said hesitantly, ‘I know you’re appealing for people to help with youth work. At the age of sixty-two I’m hardly the sort that youth workers are made of, but I have a boat, and I’m prepared to take children sailing.’ From this small beginning developed a number of children’s and youth activities which continued for many years. Many dozens of families from inside and outside the church community, as well as a number of youngsters from areas of social deprivation, learned sailing and canoeing with the church in the Lake District. As a consequence many new children were fed into the Sunday schools, and often their parents began to attend the church.

I wanted the church to serve the wider community. For me, Christianity was too important to be left to churches and Christians. My theology was, and is, that God is at work in the world, and uses people of all faiths and none to further His purposes. Furthermore, caring practically for the body and the mind is as much a priority of the gospel as caring spiritually for the soul – indeed, the two cannot be separated. So I had no hesitation in raising the question: How may we serve our community better? As I saw it, healthy churches are relevant to the needs of those they serve.

It was difficult at first to see how St Nic’s was serving the wider community. I decided to do my own private survey, by going to people outside the church to see what they thought of it and what suggestions they might have. I approached the Mayor, the Chief Executive of the city council, market traders, shopkeepers, shoppers and others. The results were sobering as well as challenging. For the majority of them St Nic’s was ‘just there’, part of the landscape of Durham, and they had no expectations of it. But when I pressed the question: ‘What would you like to see the church providing?’ the answers were positive. Some wanted the church to be open, so they could go in and pray. Others suggested that they would like to see church people more involved in the life of the city, and St Nic’s more visible in providing help to the elderly, the young and the destitute.

This deepened my own resolve to get involved in the life of the city. I became a part-time Prison Chaplain at Low Newton Prison, which held over three hundred young men and about forty women. I spent up to twelve hours a week in the prison, and found it a healthy balance to the middle-class life of St Nic’s. I also became Chaplain to the Royal Air Force Club, where as an ex-RAF man I was made very welcome. This brought me into close contact with another side of Durham life, that of ordinary citizens very similar to the people I grew up with in Dagenham. Another area occupied a great deal of my time – I chaired the local committee of the Cyrenaian organisation, which dedicates itself to serving homeless people. From my days in Islington I felt I had a calling to help the members of this underclass, who usually drop out of mainstream community life. Today they constitute an even more serious problem than they did then. I and two other men of my age, one an agnostic, the other an atheist, made an unlikely trio as we set about helping such people get back on their feet by overseeing the management of a hostel where they could stay. Homeless men were frequent visitors to the vicarage as well, especially around dinnertime, when Eileen would make up a sandwich and a cup of tea for them.

Largely as a result of my desire to make St Nic’s more central to the life of the community, we set about a radical reordering of the building. From my first visit to the church I realised it had huge problems, but equal potential. It was ideally and excitingly positioned in a busy market square, yet it was in a very rundown state. The interior was gloomy and unattractive. The pews, many in very bad condition, made it difficult to adapt the space for anything other than worship. Heating was supplied by a temperamental coal boiler which, I was told, was the last solid-fuel boiler in the diocese, and which required stoking from Friday onwards before the Sunday services could be comfortably held. There were also serious leaks in the roof – six or so buckets were placed by the church cleaner, Mrs Simpson, at the offending places. If one adds to the list of problems the fact that the church interior was defiantly puritan in its ugliness and tastelessness, something radical had to be done.

The creation of an attractive interior that provided facilities which could be used seven days a week became the mirror image of the spiritual pilgrimage of the congregation at the same time. I learned the lesson that no reordering of any building should happen without the spiritual reordering of people. That we were able to raise £350,000 within two years at a time when inflation was raging at around 20 per cent was only slightly short of miraculous. I remain convinced to this day that many congregations do not properly see that buildings may either be part of their successful outreach into the community or, in the majority of cases, significant reasons for the decline of church life.

It is said in the Old Testament that Jacob’s love for Rachel was so special that his seven years of service ‘seemed but a day’. My time at St Nic’s was sometimes tough and always exhausting, but it stands out as perhaps the most significant period of our joint ministry. Eileen was blissfully happy bringing up our four children and sharing energetically in our work together. All of the children started school in Durham, and our eldest, Rachel, went away to college in London, while our sons Mark and Andrew completed A’ levels and ‘O’ levels respectively. Our youngest, Lizzie, was in primary school by the time we left. We lived in a beautiful seven-bedroomed vicarage overlooking the cathedral and castle, with grand, high-ceilinged rooms for entertaining, and a garden filled with adventure for the children and bushes packed with summer fruits. The whole family were to remember Durham with great fondness; it was an idyllic place to grow up.

Eileen’s ministry developed to such an extent in the church family that she provided much of the hospitality offered by St Nic’s, and opened the vicarage for bed-and-breakfast in order to raise money for the building project. Eileen’s mother, Margaret Daisy Hood, now in her eighties, came to live with us, having spent the last ten years of her widowhood with Eileen’s sister in Canada. It was clear that Mrs Hood was suffering from dementia, and this became very distressing for us all. Sometimes she would wander from the house, to be found in a confused state in some part of the city and be brought back by a kindly and sympathetic neighbour. This certainly added to the stress on Eileen. Alas, both her mother and my father died within a short while of each other towards the end of our time at St Nic’s. Both were wonderful Christian people whose influence on us was great. I particularly felt the death of Dad as his passing was so sudden – he had a severe heart attack and died instantly. His funeral in Dagenham Parish Church took the form of deep thanks-giving for the rich life of a truly humble man whose legacy was considerable.

In my second year at St Nic’s an unexpected phone call from Christopher Hill, on the staff at Lambeth Palace, affected my life greatly. Christopher’s responsibility was for ecumenical relationships. I remember that November morning very well.

‘Would you like to spend three weeks in Rome?’ was the strange question.

Looking out of my office window on a very bleak and cold Durham, I replied, ‘Yes please. But tell me more.’

I was told that the following February the Anglican Centre in Rome would be hosting a three-week course for representatives of all Provinces of the Anglican Communion, organised by the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity. John Moorman, the former Bishop of Ripon and now retired to Durham, was to lead the course. I had been chosen to represent the Church of England.

It was a life-changing experience. Ever since my Oak Hill days I had been becoming closer and closer to Christians of other denominations, especially in the Roman Catholic Church. In Durham warm relationships with Father John Tweedy, the local Roman Catholic priest, were quickly established and we worked closely together. I was also a regular visitor to Ushaw Seminary, a few miles outside the city. The visit to Rome made me aware that this great Christian city was part of my heritage of faith, and Roman Catholicism entered my understanding of theology. The place overwhelmed me, and in my spare time from the lectures and sessions of the course I would walk for miles – retracing the journey of many a martyr from the Colosseum to the catacombs. In the crypt of St Peter’s I would linger and pray at the very place where the bones of St Peter were laid.

Bishop John Moorman, a renowned authority on St Francis, was a splendid leader. Other teachers shaped our thinking – including a youthful Terry Waite, who was then working for the Roman Catholic Mission Department, and Professor Gerry O’Collins, New Testament theologian at the Gregoriana who later became a dear friend. Among fellow Anglicans was Misaeri Kauma, Assistant Bishop of Namirembe in Uganda, an inspiring and dynamic missionary Bishop. The three weeks in Rome gave us all an opportunity to study Catholicism, not only through the lectures and reading but also through rare opportunities to meet representatives of the many ‘dicasteries’, or departments, that comprise the Vatican.

But this three-week study course was not an unembroidered charm offensive by the Roman Catholic Church. It was a deliberate attempt to open the Church to others. I was especially struck by our private audience with Pope Paul VI. A deeply holy man, he was frank about the problems of his Church following the Second Vatican Council. As he saw it, the Council, which concluded its work in 1965, and with which he clearly identified, had left the Church divided. Implementation of its vision had fallen to him but was proving difficult to achieve, although much had been done. Now, in the twilight of his life and ministry, he was showing signs of great weariness, yet a serene spirit in Christ came through strongly to us.

On the course we were invited to put our toughest questions to our Catholic friends. As the only evangelical present, my theological questions concerned the infallibility of the Pope, the Marian dogmas, the authority of the Church, and prayers to the saints. While I was by no means fully satisfied by the responses given, I was better informed when I returned home. Two years later I made a private visit to consolidate my knowledge and to study in greater depth the significance of the Virgin Mary.

In my sixth year at St Nic’s I began to receive letters, phone calls and personal messages asking me to consider putting my hat in the ring for the Principalship of Trinity College, Bristol. I rejected all these overtures for a number of reasons. The first, and most important, was that my work at St Nic’s was not over. I could not leave when there was still a large amount of money to raise and the building work had not yet begun. A second reason which appeared to make it unlikely that I would be offered the post was that Trinity College’s theological tradition seemed far removed from mine. It stood for a reformed evangelical doctrinal commitment which seemed to me narrow, negative, anti-Rome, and puritanical. Perhaps this perception of Trinity was ill-founded, but it was shared by many other people in the Church at that time. Strong appeals to consider the post, however, made Eileen and me waver. What should we do?

I decided to get my Bishop’s advice. I did not know the Bishop of Durham, John Habgood, very well, though I had met him many times. He was an excellent speaker, preacher and scholar, but seemed rather remote to ordinary mortals. He had no capacity for small-talk, and most clergy in the diocese dismissed him as a pastor. This latter estimate, I knew first-hand, was mistaken. Two years before I had had a car crash and had ended up in hospital, following which I had required several weeks’ convalescence. On hearing this, John Habgood made available a sum of money to allow me to have a proper rest. I knew that, in spite of the impression he could give at times, he was a caring man, and would answer every question with great insight. I outlined my predicament to him, and without hesitation he gave his opinion that Trinity needed to be brought into the Church of England, and that I was ideally positioned to do it. He urged me to be positive about meeting the College Council, but said that I must make it clear to them that I had to finish the building project at St Nic’s before I could possibly take up the position.

In the light of that advice I accepted the invitation to visit the college and meet the Council. To my surprise, I found that it was set up as a formal interview. As I was not convinced I should even be considering the post, I had not prepared myself to argue my corner. Before the interview I met Trevor Lloyd, later Archdeacon of Barnstaple, the other person being interviewed that day, who shared with me his opinion that Trinity was at a crossroads – unpopular with Church of England ordinands, it was having to rely on American students from nonconformist traditions who were beginning to change the culture of the college. Trevor’s verdict was that Trinity was in a make-or-break situation, and that the appointment of the next Principal would be decisive for its survival. That was a sobering thought to take into the interview. However, the meeting with the Council went very well. I made it abundantly plain that I was not seeking a new post at the moment, and would have to have very good reasons to move from St Nic’s, where I was very happy. To my utter astonishment, at the end of the day I was summoned to meet the Council again, and was offered the post of Principal of Trinity College, Bristol.

I returned home on the train stunned. Eileen had not bothered to come with me, because neither of us had believed that this move could possibly be right for us. But as I told her about the day’s events we began to see that this could be the next step for us. It was a real and demanding challenge. The more we thought about it, the more we could see that my experience of theological education and parish life fitted me well for the post. We had to admit that once the building project at St Nic’s was complete my presence was not necessary for the next stage, which was to use the buildings for the wider community.

The lay leaders of the church were wonderful in their acceptance of our decision and their willingness to release us once the building work had been completed. The next nine months sped by quickly – we raised the remaining £50,000; indeed we exceeded that amount – and a week of celebrations were held, with the Bishop of Durham leading a service of blessing for the development. The farewells were sad and generous, and we travelled to Bristol with heaviness of heart but much gratitude to God for all we had learned at St Nic’s. We had been blessed beyond belief.

All my fears concerning Trinity College were confirmed when I began my new work as Principal in September 1982. Life at St Nic’s had been tough enough, especially in the first four years, but I seemed to have fallen from the frying pan into the fire. There were structural problems with the constituent colleges in the union. Tyndale Hall, associated with the famous names of Stafford Wright and Jim Packer, was renowned for its emphasis on uncompromising and clear evangelical teaching rooted in the inerrancy of scripture. Clifton Theological College, associated with Alec Motyer, had been established in protest to Tyndale and took a milder line on doctrinal matters, although it was still clearly evangelical. The Women’s College, which was itself an amalgam of St Michael’s House, Oxford, and Dalton House, had buildings across the Downs. Years earlier Oliver Tompkins, Bishop of Bristol, had issued an ultimatum to the three evangelical colleges to amalgamate, and they had done so with a lot of grumbling and not a little feuding.

When I arrived, the amalgamation was not complete. An independent body called the Clifton College Trust still held the deeds of the main building, and was reluctant to surrender them because of suspicions that the ethos of Tyndale would dominate. I found myself regarded with no small suspicion. Older Council members representing the Tyndale tradition were worried that my more open style would undermine a clear-cut evangelical tradition, whilst some of the Clifton College fraternity were fearful that I would be taken over by the dominant Tyndale group. It was clear that if this division were to be overcome – by love and persuasion – it would take some time to achieve.

In the short term the college was in a mess, partly due to its undeserved reputation in the Church of England, which I myself had shared. I realised from my first day that the college was served by an able and highly dedicated faculty who could hold their own with any theological department in the country. Nevertheless, the immediate future was troubling. The break-even financial figure was 105 students, but four weeks before the beginning of term only just over eighty had enrolled to join us. We were heading towards a huge deficit. Of those likely to join us, only forty-eight were ordinands, even though the Church’s allocation of ordinands to Trinity was eighty. The bursar told me that nothing could be done to tackle that year’s deficit.

I was dismayed, but I was also quite sure that a great deal could be done. To begin with, it was important to restore confidence in the college, starting with the staff. Once again the theological vision had to be shared and owned. I was delighted to find no objection to my desire to do something about the worship, which I felt must combine that Anglican balance of word and sacrament. I knew that with talented students the musical standard, and therefore the quality of worship, would steadily improve. When the students arrived our policy was to help them to realise that they had come to the best theological college in England. There was, I felt, a natural and healthy pride in speaking confidently of this. Another part of my job as Principal was to promote the college and make it visible in the structures of the Church. This was done in a variety of ways.

First, I accepted many speaking engagements, as a means to promote the college and to inform as many people as possible that Trinity gave a first-class theological education. Second, I revived a practice which Maurice Wood had developed at Oak Hill, of staff and students spending long weekends in parishes talking about the call of ordination. Third, I kept in close touch with some of the large parishes which were key providers of ordinands, especially at Oxford and Cambridge. My former Principal Michael Green was now at St Aldate’s, Oxford, and his church became a particular quarry for excellent and gifted ordinands.

The students themselves were a good bunch on the whole, but I was worried about the quality of some of the non-ordinands. It is understandable, if not excusable, for Principals to admit people simply to make up numbers. A few of the students at Trinity were plainly unable to cope with the college’s demanding intellectual disciplines, and were there hoping that the course would provide a back door into ordination.

If this troubled me, I had a greater shock when I received worrying reports about one particular student. The first complaints came from two of the women students, who reported that he was sexually harassing them. I called him in at once. He was from a breakaway Christian group, and was hoping to obtain a degree so that he might be ordained in his own Church. He listened to the complaints in an untroubled way, and it was clear that he had pestered the women but was completely free of shame. I gave him a lecture on the kind of behaviour I expected from students at Trinity. However, his view of sexuality appeared to amount to nothing more than an expectation of gratification. He assumed it was obvious that, as a single man, he had sexual needs that should be fulfilled. I asked him to square this with his theology and the discipline of the college. Sending him away again with a warning, I felt with sinking heart that I was encountering a wholly new phenomenon in my experience – a Christian who felt that there were no rights or wrongs in the area of sexual morality. My fears were realised as I and his tutor watched the man’s progress. Besides his inappropriate behaviour with female members of the college he was a practising homosexual. And then he mentioned without a trace of shame that he paid weekly visits to his ‘hooker’ in a nearby village. My mouth must have dropped. Perhaps I had misheard. ‘My hooker,’ he repeated. He did not last long in Trinity after that.

The episode prepared me for aspects of culture that I was to meet later in my ministry as Archbishop – namely the erosion of holiness by a cultural view that sexual intercourse is of little more significance than shaking hands. When this is combined with a view of the Bible as itself being culturally conditioned, with no authority in matters of sexuality, the drift into hedonistic narcissism becomes inevitable. The Church which blesses such immorality, or calls it holy, ends up as nothing more than a benign religious club.

Returning to theological education after seven years away in parish ministry brought to the surface some of my deepest questions and worries about the purpose and success of our colleges and courses in turning out effective ministers and priests with the leadership skills to work with others and to build up congregations. Was it our aim to produce theologians? Or to produce pastors and teachers? The curriculum of most colleges and courses did not make the purpose transparent. From my experience of three theological colleges it was clear that the majority of their staffs had little experience of parish life, and even less of leading congregations into growth. But it was also true that the brightest and most visible of students did not necessarily make the most dedicated and effective clergy.

These two facts worried me a great deal. If the task of the Church of England’s colleges and courses is to turn out godly men and women with fire in their bellies to teach, evangelise, pastor and build up congregations, then the logical conclusion is that that task is closer to vocational training than it is to making men and women academics. But compelling though this argument was, it was not without problems. My own experience told me that we could not ignore the intellect. While I wanted my students to leave college with a clear focus, dedication and enthusiasm for building up churches, I was also concerned to equip them to handle ideas, and that meant taking theology seriously. How could one square that circle?

I had also become aware of a very significant difference between Catholic and Anglican models of theological education. The Roman Catholic model focused on ministerial formation, whereas the Anglican model was more intent on information. It seemed as if we attempted to prepare people by loading them with knowledge, while Roman Catholic priests were formed in their spirituality and the application of theological knowledge to the life of the Church.

I found myself arguing more and more for two significant changes in theological teaching. First, that the present basic education of three years for those under thirty, and two years for those over, was woefully inadequate. Our starting point should be four years for those under thirty and three years for those older. Furthermore, my experience suggested to me that the best way to prepare would be by sandwich training, with substantial time spent learning from effective ministers and priests. Lastly, the whole purpose of theological education and training must be earthed in prayer and spiritual transformation. I was convinced that effective ministers – of all traditions – shared one striking characteristic: they had a burning love of God and a yearning to share Him with others. However, the responsibility for delivering such radical changes in ministerial formation was not mine – it belonged to the Church centrally.

My thoughts about the necessity of changes for the future of the Church’s ministry did not stem from any misgivings about my students. We were able to attract men and women of great ability, and student numbers grew to such an extent that by the time I left Trinity in 1987 it was the largest theological college in the Church of England. Furthermore, the divisions between the Clifton College Trust and Trinity had been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.

At the end of my fifth and final year at Trinity one of our most gifted students, Phil Potter, mentioned to me in passing that there was a lot of talk about my becoming Bishop of Bath and Wells. I was flabbergasted to learn this, but what I was even less prepared for was the way that the thought both disturbed me and prompted unhealthily ambitious thoughts. Up to that point, senior office in the Church had not entered my head. I was prepared to stay at Trinity until my work was over, and then return to parish ministry. But ambition now began to enter my psyche, and I both liked it and loathed it. Looking back on that time, I am still not sure how to interpret the ambition I felt. Of course, ambition is not always unhealthy. When one has gifts to offer any organisation, the desire to give leadership for the good of the whole is not bad. A part of me was suggesting that I had proved myself for a wider leadership role, and that there was nothing wrong in this unexpected desire to become a Bishop. However, to this day I feel that I was encountering something within me that was not good. I was desiring the role of Bishop more than the task of leadership it demanded. It was important to resolve this, which I attempted by an honest analysis of my desires and by taking them to God in prayer.

In my journal from this period I wrote: ‘It’s an awful cancer. I know at the level of my mind that this is all about baubles; that serving Christ is the most important thing. That being faithful, obedient and ready is all He requires. But deep within there is a demon which loves power and authority, and he will be disappointed if nothing comes.’ A realisation dawned that I needed to rededicate myself to the work of Trinity College. And in prayer I dedicated myself to God’s work rather than my own concerns. I found this liberating, as though a weight had been lifted from me.

Two days later, on 23 June 1987, an envelope dropped through our letterbox from Number 10 Downing Street. The letter, signed by the Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher, simply said that the Crown Appointments Commission had put my name forward, and that she hoped I would accept this offer. After careful thought and prayer I did, and was consecrated Bishop of Bath and Wells on 3 December 1987.