Cranmer (almost) gets his man

In the glory days of the Church of England, when Archbishop Fisher was on the throne, real vicars had leisure for two defining activities — playing with train sets and reading detective novels. In these dog days they have to spend much more time on the day job. I had a day off recently reading Revelation — the detective novel vicars can read without a conscience because the “Inspector Morse’s Boss” character is none other than Archbishop Cranmer himself. Those were the days, when Archbishops of Canterbury had leisure to superintend detectives who could appear in novels for the clergy to read.

C. J. Sansom has a fine eye for every nuance of the last days of Henry VIII. He spots the various complex subcurrents of post-dissolution England perfectly — heaving filthy streets, rising middle class, and upheaval all round. This, his fourth Tudor historical thriller, is set in 1543. Henry VIII is become an increasingly unstable old dog — irascible, toothless but prone to bite anyway. Various heads have been rolling. Mainline reformers are hanging on in there by their fingernails, whilst trying to shoo an understandably reluctant Catherine Parr into Hank’s marital house of horrors. Out on the streets “Bible Men” are workshopping various forms of “radical biblical” religion with more zeal than understanding, trying to turn the C of E onto a fundamentalist associational sect. Revelation is a Name of the Rose type romp through the stews and marshes of Tudor London in pursuit of a Biblicist nutter — Bizarre Cluedo with murder weapons like apocalyptic fish-oil and exploding Maggots. This book is Excellent Escapism from a world where religious nutters plan mayhem whilst radical Bible men try to turn the C of E into a Biblicist sect. Sleep Tight tonight. Under Cranmer’s supervision, Shardlake, a very Anglican slight underachiever, almost gets his man, and the evil is flushed away. It all comes of handling the poetry of the Apocalypse like a textbook. Reader beware...

Clergy Bullying 102

Valuable personal time yesterday exploring the issues around Bullying in the Church with Anne Lee, social psychologist from Oxford University, who has written and is working on it. There are interesting resources out there, and those of us at the coalface need to develop stronger definitions and models to support better working practice. The Church is meant to be a delivery system for freedom and wholeness. This issue strikes at the heart of what we are about.

1. When a group of human beings interact there is a scale of behaviour between pacific and agressive, and somewhere along that line lies a personal and social acceptability marker. Any context involving the use of power raises the stakes radically. Violence and the Sacred are always interesting bedfellows, especially in bourgeois, implicit cultures. Religious contexts easily become toxic and dangerous when people kid themselves they don’t have power. Back in the 90’s when I was helping lead workshops for training incumbents I met someone whose colleagues were utterly terrified of him. He thought because he was a vicar he didn’t have any power, so there wasn't a problem. When you talked to his colleagues, what spooked them was his inconsistency. He was terribly informal and chummy 99% of the time, with occasional completely unpredictable flashes of rage which humiliated and terrified his colleagues, for which he never took responsibility, but tried to smooth over by being chummy again. It was the classic pattern of the Young Offender who beats his girlfriend up on Friday night and buys her a dozen red roses and a box of chocs on Saturday morning. Responsibility needs to be taken for the exercise of power and authority. Just because many professional guardians of the sacred feel powerless, it doesn’t mean they are!
2. The meaning of our behaviours has to be discerned from who we are in context, but they also create the context in which we act next. The more extreme behaviour becomes, the more it can be seen as a problem and clinicalised. Everyone has repetetive patterns of response we call “Personality” that seem almost absolute, but, paradoxically, people have far greater capacity than the patterns indicate to reinvent themselves in different contexts. How do we measure behaviour in context? What are the routes to personal reinvention, and how do we take them? We all have it in us to assert ourselves inappropriately. Only with agreed norms does it become possible to say where lines have been crossed. That’s where basic rules of procedure and natural justice defend the less assertive against the more assertive, People always need to be listened to and perceived problems dealt with on an evidential basis. That only catches the tip of the iceberg, however, in the same way that whatever we do to try and raise conviction rates for rape and domestic violence, they remain shockingly low. More than blame and breast-beating, we need to promote actively cultures of dignity and mutual respect. How? Let’s begin with the Church of England’s new formal guidelines, to be published in June. The English gentleman amateur thing helps prevent senior staff and others seeking professional help about this, as about other workplace issues. Rigorous training to sharpen personal awareness and skills, like the Integrative Complexity course I have been doing this year, needs to become the norm.
   
3. This whole problem is part of a larger world of stress. For me the guv’nor on this subject remains, even after six years, Affirmation and Accountability. This was produced a few years ago by the Society of Mary and Martha, which helps decompress clergy and church workers. A&A is based on their experiences of the negative forces that bear down on working vicars. We studied it extensively in the diocese when it came out, and I believe it has yet to be bettered as a practical manual for establihsing wellbeing in the UK context. As well as following up the academic leads Anne gave me, that’s where I’m going next, to see how I think we’re getting on practically with the agenda I embraced theoretically as an area dean in 2002 — am I doing it as a bishop? how does it stack up against the new guidelines, coming out in June? Watch this space...
   

Remembering Humph (1921-2008)

Every now and then these islands produce a world class national treasure — William Shakespeare, Nelson, Queen Victoria, Monty Python and the late Queen Mum spring to mind. There in the background, however, through all those years has been Humphrey Lyttleton. The Bull's Head Barnes website says his band was established in 1684, but that’s just rumour and folklore. Any idiot who cares a pig's burp about jazz has at some time listened to the Monday night show he has presented since 1967, or been to the Bull’s Head; best jazz venue in London (along with the 606). Then there’s I’m Sorry I haven’t a Clue, for 40 years the antidote to panel games.

Born at Eton, Buckinghamshire in 1921 (and ecclesiastically still Buckinghamshire), Humph has timelessly exhibited immaculate musical and comic timing, gentle quiptic silliness, and wonderment at the ridiculousness of it all. Anyone with a soul must be in deep mourning — “as the squirrel of time nibbles on the nuts of eternity while the irritated bulldog of destiny tries to shake him off,” we all notice it’s the end of the show. RIP.

Here’s a slightly vulgar final word. It is said that Percy Shaw, the Bradford inventor, noticed a cat walking towards him up the road one night in 1934, thought about it, and went straight to his drawing board to invent the Cat’s Eye road safety device. Next night, said Humph, the cat was walking away from him, and Percy went straight back to his drawing board and invented the Rotary mechanical pencil sharpener... Only in these islands, and by such a genius, would such a crazy noton be thought, let alone expressed.

Big Thunder in Little Chalfont

Vibrant Charismatic Evangelical worship at St George's Little Chalfont. David Allsopp and colleagues are working well together as a team, and it was good to be in a congregation of all ages and backgrounds. I’ve had a particular soft spot for St George’s ever since the night in 2004 I was on my way to a licensing at Flaunden; only the order of service said Little Chalfont. There was nothing going on at St George’s except a boxing club in the hall. I walked in seeking directions (in flourescent purple) and the very nice man in charge took one look at me and said “What ho, Father. Going to a rave?”

Anyway, this morning I noticed a very engaging way to do intercessions. There was a silence into which people could gently speak the names of people for whom they were praying personally. Just at the end of the prayers came a tremendous clap of thunder — followed by us all singing a hymn about “hearing the mighty thunder.” Endorsement from upstairs, said somebody.

We did pray for Zimbabwe, at both services this morning. meanwhile, Members of the Mothers Union from Ss Peter & Paul Harare, were helping lead morning worship at St Mary’s Aylesbury. Fr Shane Wood, Rector said “Even the most restrained members of my congregation were drawn into the wonderful harmony and soon had them clapping and dancing in the aisles.” However bleak the news, we are praying for Zimbabwe, and these links, prayers and relationships give real hope.

The Local Church — hope of the world

Having called for prayer for Zimbabwe this weekend, some colleagues have been emailing, to tell me of deep roots they have, in prayer and working relationships, which bear on this situation. This, for example came from Fr Simon Douglas-Lane from Wraysbury and Horton (you often see Horton going into Heathrow)

We have had a project in Gwelutshena for 25 years and are in constant contact with them and have sent thousands of pounds: was at supper last night with a family friend who is married to Ivor Richard and he was involved with the 1976 Conference on Rhodesia/Zimbabwe in Geneva: Mugabe was then a devout Catholic and able to be involved with meaningful discussions on the future of the country: he has sadly turned into a tyrant and ruined his country: we are all praying here for an early deliverance from their long dark night and Zimbabwe, Bishop Wilson and Fr Jacob are prayed for at every service in both parishes.

It often strikes travellers that the poorest and most obscure communities around the world don't have much infrastructure. There isn’t often a surgery, or a bank, or even a post office. There is, however, a local Church. If you really want to change the world, you have to take that reality seriously.
Please do with your prayers for Zimbabwe this weekend.

Zimbabwe — for God’s sake

Both English archbishops are calling for prayers this Sunday for Zimbabwe. I’ve no experience of Zim apart from guys at college, and seeing asylum / immigration papers with a priest who came to live in Wycombe after substantial persecution of him and his young family for whistleblowing about his profoundly corrupt bishop.

A couple of years ago I met a family member at a confirmation, who had been minister of Agriculture in post independence Zimbabwe. He was reduced almost to tears as he described his feelings about seeing one of the most fertile places on earth reduced to a dustbowl. The present corrupt and egotistical dictatorship blames everything on the people who used to run the country thirty years ago, when it was bountfiul and prosperous. This isn’t about politics, it’s about people. Life expectancy in Zimbabwe since 1994 has reduced from 57 to 34 for women and from 54 to 37 for men. That corresponds to the life expectancy in England in the 12th Century.

This Sunday, please pray for this beautiful country and its leaders and its future, as it struggles with racism and corruption, ego-politics and famine.

If disaster comes upon us, sword, judgment, pestilence, famine, we will stand before the house of God, and before you, whose name is in this house, and cry to you in our distress, and you will hear and save...

Casting (200) Clouts

As global warming advances, the beginning of summer is now officially the day in April that the media start pointing out that the maybush is now blossoming in April. According to the rustic principle “Ne’er cast a clout till May is out” you could welcome the summer like this:

The real cost of War

If you want something to cry God for Harry, England and Saint George about, yesterday I caught and found myself drawn into one of the most perceptive and compassionate pieces of telly I’ve ever seen — a BBC documentary by Ken Hames, Ex-Forces and Homeless. The BBC has drawn to public atention how many people leave the services and go to pieces, ending up on the streets. The Oswald Stoll foundation, among others, try and put people affected in touch with each other and resources to rebuild their lives. It’s a problem Catherine’s noticed in her work in the West London Day Centre.

As a former major in the SAS with 27 years’ service, Ken Hames managed to tell the stories of three people from the inside, with moving tenderness and understanding. This wasn’t a simple sob story, thought there’s plenty sad about people who have been reduced from peaks of fighting fitness to life on the streets.

In the end, it came down to Post Traumatic Stress, and the degree to which people, being who they are, manage to confront their own demons. There’s a thin line line between painful recovery and falling off the edge. I was an army baby. Some of the programme stirred up some of the stuff in the sludge at the bottom of my life. Considering the human fallout of Bush/Blair loonery in Iraq, and bearing in mind Hillary’s rather disturbing electioneering offer yesterday to Obliterate Iran, this isn’t a problem that’s going to go away.

The programme’s well worth 40 minutes on the iplayer here.

Well, actually...

From a recent anti-Chinese demonstration in San Francisco, spotted by Andew Sullivan (h/t Doug Chaplin):

Blog confronts self-harm: doors open

Designer Jon Birch’s wonderful ASBO Jesus Blog, which I’ve encountered from, among others, Ian MacDonald and David Keen, opens the windows on self-harm — something we’d all rather ignore. A few years ago, having come across it bigtime in HMP Reading, I gradually tumbled to the fact that a much-respected adult friend in my parish was self-harming. There’s so much silence around this — Once people began to acknowledge what was going on, my friend found they had friends beyond embarrassment, and gradually began to recover the big picture from the grip of their need for temporary relief. There’s a sense in which this is just the tip of an iceberg — the struggle to love ourselves, commanded in the Bible. It’s a tiger we’re all struggling to ride, and the recognition of a common humanity, one way out, begins with the courageous open door offered on Jon’s blog.

Would the Birdman do his Bird in MK?

Woodhill prison, chairing a board to appoint a new second chaplain. Alan Hodgetts and multifaith colelagues are doing great work together. I was also struck by the good humoured commitment of staff to running a safe and non-abusive, occasionally high stress environment.

The staff are magnificent. What’s wrong with our prisons is the fantasy surrounding them. Woodhill is sometimes ludicrously described in the media as “Britain’s own Alcatraz.” Just in case your editor is too dim to know the difference, Alcatraz is on the Left, & Woodhill below.

Perhaps the next phase of our glorious prison building programme could involve digging a replica of San Francisco Bay around it. We could import pelicans, fogs, and greased up Clints swimming up and down dodging the sharks, etc. It would only cost 2 or 3 billion pounds. Oh and we could mount severed heads on the gate — only you'd need crowscares, or the magpies get ’em — if that happens your heads are soon rubbish, and crime soars again. Oh and we could moor rotten hulks in the bay, with broadcast groaning day and night. Then it really would be Britain’s Alcatraz. State of the art in 1934, the real Alcatraz was obsolete by the mid sixties.

Ludicrous fantasy pretty much colours what Fleet Street imagines should go on in prison. Historical experience is that once you have prisons, you fill ’em. The UK government actually plans to build more; and now recidivism is back around its historic 70% rate in the system, this can only increase the amount of crime on the streets long term.

The only silver lining I can offer is the discovery, thanks to Maggi Dawn, of a fantastic blog by Anne Droid (The Reverend), Scottish prison chaplain teasingly called Get out of Jail Free. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. It’s a kind of reality checkpoint amidst all the idiot fantasy about prison. Go read it, particularly her stuff on forgiveness...

How do people use Church (or not)?

As well as reading about Church coming and going, I've been reading about how people in different cultures use their computers. Forrester research has been investigating the “Groundswell” of new media. Its research analyses usage like this:
The categories are made up around what you do online. Spectators read blogs, Critics Comment on blogs, Creators originate blogs. Joiners use Facebook et al. You get the idea. An individual can be on several rungs at the same time. Proportions on each rung are vastly different in different cultures. In the US, 25% are creators — in Europe only 10%. 53% of Europeans are inactives, 41% of Americans, only 37% of South Koreans.

OK Team. This method has absolutely no tested validity at all in the field of religious participation, but let's sketch on the back of an envelope. If patterns of church involvement were similar, and for all I know they are, In the UK roughly 70% = 35m people say they are Christians. Most actives would be, er 10% = 3·5m weekly participants. Anglicans would be just under 1m bums on pews a week. Inactives would be 53% = 26·5m. They are.
Spooky, ja? Anyone care to develop this kind of approach?

Going Ape in Wendover Woods

Stewart & Nick’s birthday outing was snowed off, so this was the week we took a couple of friends to Go Ape in Wendover Woods — a fantastic day out. You spend up to four hours swinging in the trees with full safety equipment and training provided.

They also do team building corporate days. It’s a radically more intelligent way for bishops to recover lost youth, than playing at student politics.

Round Tabling

I preached last night for the inauguration of Camilla Walton’s ministry as Team Vicar of St Michael’s Beaconsfield. Dom Gregory Dix’s monumental work, The Shape of the Liturgy, continuously in print since 1944, and profoundly influential in the remodeling of Roman Catholic, Anglican and Free Church liturgies in the 60’s and 70’s, was actually written not in Oxford, nor even a monastery, but the vicarage of Saint Michael’s which he had been sent to serve by his community early in the World War II. It was a joy and honour to meet someone who had served mass for Dom Gregory.

Camilla had chosen the Hymn to Love from I Corinthians 13 for her induction, along with Jesus washing his disciples feet in John 13. It reminded me of this poem, that various people last night asked me to put on the blog. I first encountered it from my friend and close colleague Sheila Nunn when she used it as the basis for the design of our Diocesan Convention Eucharist in 2002. I saw Sheila a lot as she was dying of cancer in 2003, and we talked through this poem together, and its implications for the kind of church we have to be, and the kind of bishop I was supposed to be — that had just been announced. I think of it often...

In search of a round table

Concerning the why and how and what and who of ministry,
One image keeps surfacing: A table that is round.
It will take some sawing
To be roundtabled.
Some redefining
And redesigning,
Some redoing and rebirthing
Of narrow long Churching
Can painful be
For people and tables.
It would mean no daising
And throning,
For but one king is there
And he is a foot washer,
At table no less.
And what of narrow long ministers
When they confront
A round table people,
After years of working up the table
To finally sit at its head,
Only to discover
That the table has been turned round?
They must be loved into roundness,
For God has called a People
Not "them and us".
"them and us" are unable
to gather round; for at a round table
there are no sides
and ALL are invited
to wholeness and to food.
At one time
Our narrowing churches
Were built to resemble the Cross
But it does no good
For building to do so,
If lives do not.
Round tabling means
No preferred seating,
No first and last,
No better, and no corners
For the "least of these".
Roundtabling means
Being with,
A part of,
Together and one.
It means room for the Spirit
And gifts
And disturbing profound peace for all.
We can no longer prepare for the past.
To be Church,
And if He calls for other than a round table
We are bound to follow.
Leaving the sawdust
And chips, designs and redesigns
Behind, in search of and in presence of
The Kingdom
That is His and not ours.

Chuck Lathrop

Them and Us — The Truth

After a bit of a blockbuster about clergy bullying, with some very interesting comment, something profoundly relevant caught my eye yesterday at our senior staff Eucharist. We were in Christ Church Cathedral, using the millennium Altar commemorating George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, supporter of resistance against Hitler and courageous opponent of saturation bombing during World War II.

The Altar is from a single huge oak, blackened. Renewed humanity is hewn out of, and emerges from, a charred and defaced reality. It carries this quotation from Bell, framed in the context of calls for reprisals in 1945. Today, from parish breakdowns to Iraq, there’s a simplistic sense among otherwise intelligent people that we are OK and they are evil. Bell exposes the root of the matter. In reality, we are all complicit, and in need of redemption:

No Nation, no Church, no Individual is guiltless. Without Repentance, and without forgiveness, there can be no regeneration.

Bully pulpit — On baiting of the Clergy

Much interest in the media about clergy being bullied, stimulated by Rachael Maskell of the trade union Unite. Do vicars get bullied? Undoubtedly Yes.

I have been lucky — very blessed, on the whole — about the people I served during 24 years as an urban and suburban parish priest. They trusted me and supported me, way beyond my deserving or the call of duty; coped with my immaturity and uncertainty, my blundering attempts to understand what the job was about, my occasional depressions, fits and starts. These were the people who comforted me when my father died, and left meals on the doorstep when our children were born. But among them were, I reckon, three Prize Bullies. I felt it was somehow my fault that they were so overbearing. I felt trapped by my role in a place where I could do little or nothing about them.

I don’t buy “Pure Church” fantasy, and I believe that Rachael is drawing attention to a serious issue. Every area of human endeavour can become a toxic working environment, including this one, which has its own particular risk factors.

1. Pretty much all other professionals live far away from their work these days. Not vicars. Everybody knows where to find them.
2. Most Vicars are at heart altruistic, caring people, and this brings its own vulnerabilities. People have a tremendous longing to believe all is well in Church, sometimes in the face of what they know to be the truth. There are even people who behave in Church much worse than they would in daily work, where some of their antics would simply not be tolerated. Vicars, who often believe sincerely in going the second mile go to tremendous lengths to believe the best of people, some of whom may not have their best interests at heart. Vicars sometimes feel that if everybody is not happy it’s their fault.
3. For many vicars, their life is their work. Drawing boundaries between the two doesn’t always come easily to them, and in many instances wouldn't be appropriate. Anyway their job is also tied to their home. If they have to be off work, they can’t get away from it in the way that they could from a conventional workplace.
   
4. Being a Vicar means radical availability to all comers, and can involve unanticipated bouts of harrowing work — children’s funerals, personal disputes and tragedies. When our Occupational health physicians ask if someone can be given light duties in the post room, as it were, the honest answer is probably not, because there isn't really a vicar job that can be guaranteed not to involve unexpected painful encounter with people in need.
5. At one time Casualty departments and underground stations didn’t need to be festooned with notices warning the punters off punching the staff. In earlier and kinder times people were more deferential, and this relieved some strain on clergy to establish themselves as leaders. Large numbers of able and articulate people enrich the life of the church, but when things go wrong can make clergy feel desperately anxious and exposed, not always intentionally.

Sadly, like the question, the answer isn’t always as simple as might appear. Incumbent and Complainants sometimes say mirror image things about each other. The fact each says the other is bullying them doesn’t mean bullying isn't going on, but it’s an indication of the complexity of the problem. Both might be right — Clergy may be bullies as well as bullied. Indeed school experience indicates that people do to others what they feel is being done to them. We have to be very suspicious of simple “bloody fool” explanations and seek the truth all round carefully, steadily and openly.

How could things improve?

1. Anyone who believes a member of the clergy may either be being bullied or, indeed, be bullying, owes it to themselves and everyone else, including the perpetrator, to draw hard evidence to someone’s attention — bishop, archdeacon, area dean. Ditto gender or racial discrimination. Of course they will have at some stage to give evidence for what they are alleging in a form that can be communicated to the other person involved. I once was bombarded (bullied?) by over 100 emails from an angry person who wanted to complain about a vicar but refused to be accountable by providing evidence in writing I could lay before them at the preliminary stage. Clergy have a right to protection from malicious gossip. I did not give in on this point and would not. Measured natural justice all round is the only conceivable way to protect the human beings involved when feelings are running high.
   
2. This is a desperately unfashionable thing to say, but law and due process, sometimes an ass, no doubt, are there to protect everyone from abuse. Ditto working guidelines for clergy. We all, of course, want to live in a low deference informal society. The flip side of this desire is that anger will often out in intimidating and radically disrespectful ways. The advent of emails speeds the process up, discourages reflection, spreads pain and gossip round networks instantaneously, and enables people to say, for good or ill, things they would never dream of saying face to face.
   
3. Irresponsibility about hitting the send button sometimes spills over into letter-writing, and I receive letters that are Anonymous or from “a concerned parishioner.” The best way I can help these people is by giving them the opportunity to write a letter to which they could put their name. That means popping their letters straight into the shredder, where they could themselves have popped them the night before, if only they had had their wits about them. After many years of hearing confessions, the contents of their letters are in one ear and out the other, and I look forward to hearing from them in a less shameful way that shows higher character and accountability.
   
4. One simple fact is that clergy work in a much more open unsupervised environment than pretty much any other occupational group. On a good day, that gives us enormous historic independence, discretion and liberty about how we work, compared to others. On a bad day it can create an isolated, toxic working environment. In most contexts, most of the time, there is a strong community of loyalty and support for working clergy. We need to think through better ways of helping when that community is divided or non-existent. The involvement of a union is usually a good and positive thing if it brings any church based dispute within the ambit of good working practice in other areas of life. The Church of England is moving towards Common Tenure, for which legislation has gone through and should be implemented by 2010. Bishops and senior staff are receiving active HR training to help this happen well. CT will give licensed clergy access to tribunals and better HR support. With it, however, comes more responsibility about capability. Like everyone else, probably, I'd love to preserve the best of the historic freedom of the clergy, whilst attaching to it the best protection and support from more closely supervised working environments. This is going to be quite a difficult thing to achieve, though, especially in a workforce as “flat” as that of the Church of England.
5. Most people are better learners than they think. I am often deeply impressed by their grace and ability to reinvent themselves if they don’t feel trapped where they are, or in other contexts that suit them and their gifts better. The Bloody Fool theory is almost always wrong. We need to invest significantly in training and independent career counseling for clergy. In this diocese we have also developed the Developing Servant Leaders programme for all clergy to help them develop positive skills and attitudes that may help. We also have a network of work consultants, and are experimenting with developments in the role of area dean in places, to have more time to support colleagues. I also take professional HR advice in a variety of situations. All these things are moves in a good direction, but I would say we’ve a way to go yet...
   

John Dale: Gentle Anchorman

Sad, but immensely privileged, to be in Winslow on Friday to help with the funeral of John Dale (1945-2008), Licensed Lay Minster. It’s a thriving parish, and a great pleasure to minister with Belnda Searle-Barnes, Vicar, even on a very sad day for everyone. Hundreds and hundreds of people came — indeed the roads were thick with people twenty minutes before. The weather was amazing — Dark clouds and thick hail in Winslow, then beautiful spring sunshine for the burial in Addington Churchyard.

John was a remarkable man, combining the roles of reader, sacristan, and general factotum in all things pastoral and practical. I’m almost always a virtual newcomer in any Church I visit. Visitors easily sense the quality of welcome and connectedness, spiritually and personally, in a congregation. John was the anchorman for both of these at Winslow; the special person who somehow catalysed the best in everybody else, as well as keeping things running smoothly in the background.

Everything in St Laurence vestry was immaculately kept but not in a fussy way. He was immensely loyal and gentle, improvising and easing things into order, so that services could just begin as though everything had been waiting to go for hours. But that wasn’t the best of John’s ministry. At the end of the service he’d stand in a Jeeves-like way by me in the porch whispering occasional comments — “that's Mr Smith; his daughter’s baby’s been ill and he’d never ask, but he’d love a word of prayer,’’ “Have you met Mrs Jones; her ruby wedding’s coming up, and you could bless her new eternity ring,” and so on and so forth. You get the idea. It was like pastoral satnav for Vicars. To this very inexperienced Bishop, John’s ministry was striking and just wonderful. Every Church needs someone like that, and more churches than you’d think do have somebody a bit like that. John raised this gift to an art form, in his own gentle, unassuming way.

Professionally speaking, John never did anything but a very ordinary clerking job. His peculiarly Church of England, lay, holiness was not about doing extraordinary things but noticing people, and doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. There was pain and sadness in John’s life, but he never let it cloud his clear awareness of the beauty and spiritual possiblities in everybody. John was a gentle, implicit, son of peace. Much love and support was there on Friday for Jean and Luke, his son.
Let God’s peace rest on John as he rests, until with him, we rise in glory!