As it happens, Christopher is my Area Bishop, so as Lay Chair I have had closer dealings with him than most laypeople in Southwark have.
I am still collecting my thoughts about the appointment, which, I must admit, left me kind of gobsmacked. Not because Christopher is unfit to be Bishop of Southwark, because he is eminently fit. It is out of the ordinary for a suffragan bishop to be appointed Bishop of the Diocese in which he was suffragan, at least in the Church of England. Other clergy in the diocese have remarked that they thought he might get Truro (before that was filled). So appointing him to Southwark was an unexpected pleasure.
I must say, at the conference where Bishop Tom introduced Christopher (then Archdeacon of Northolt in the Diocese of London) as Bishop of Woolwich that nice Stephen Brown, from the Grauniad, asked a pointed question about Christopher’s sexuality (as he is unmarried). The answer was politely non-committal, but the gist of it was that Christopher was living within the Church’s norms for unmarried people.
At the time I put out feelers to the network of openly-gay priests I knew to see what they thought about the whole business, and the verdict I got back is that he is not gay, as far as they were aware, and certainly not gay-unfriendly. The gay clergy here in Southwark who have had dealings with him in re the civil partnership thang (Tom left it up to his suffragans to enquire whether priests who wished to commit civil partnerships were aware of the Church’s teaching on the subject of gay sex) who have discussed it openly or with me say that he was very sympathetic and not at all judgmental.
A couple of things occur to me at the moment. First, Christopher is a priest’s bishop. He is a pastor to the priests in his area, which is a good thing. One mustn’t neglect the laity, though, as we are the largest order in the Church, and there is always the danger that a priest’s bishop will not spend enough time with the lay people in his care.
Second, the appointment of an insider to the See of Southwark will radically change the dynamic in the diocese. I suspect you will see a mass exodus from the Diocese’s top ranks as people who have served with Christopher either as equals or as fellow members of the Bishop’s Staff Meeting will start looking around for “pastures new”. This will probably take a year or two, but I predict that by 2014 Christopher will have a staff largely of his own appointment. This is especially true of the suffragan bishops: Bishop Richard (Cheetham, Kingston) has done well in the interregnum and I would expect that he is floating up toward the top of the list for a vacant diocese somewhere. Bishop Nick (Baines, Croydon) is an extremely good communicator and I expect that he will also get a diocese within the next few years and subsequently be a top candidate for Canterbury when the incumbent slinks off into academe again. One Archdeacon has been talking of retirement for a while, and several others are probably on the Episcopal “A” list and will get mitres in due course. Hopefully Archdeacon Christine Hardman, who is one of the best clergy among them, will still be working when female bishops are approved here as she would make an excellent Bishop. Barring that, a Deanery (Colin Slee is 65, I believe…) would be a great place for her to exercise her priestly ministry. Americans: if you are looking for an excellent Suffragan bishop nominee from England please take a look at Archdeacon Christine.
In fact, Christopher’s elevation has also made him “papabile” for Canterbury. He is the right age (54 last August), so if Rowan retires at 65 Christopher will be 59 and will have the administration of a complex diocese on his CV. I’m reaching now, as only one Bishop of Southwark has been promoted to an Archbishopric (Cyril Garbett, to York). But one never knows.
Third, Christopher is not a man who is going to rattle cages anywhere. Tom came into the Diocese 11 years ago like a whirlwind. I am given to understand that George Carey sent him here, like a Rottweiler, to “root out the gays” and that Tom was initially quite a bully in meetings with lesbian and gay clergy. However, his opinion subsequently changed, through contact with the excellent gay and lesbian clergy we have in this Diocese, most of whom were ordained after Mervyn Stockwood retired and thus are not Mervyn’s “creations”. He became, most famously in his Thought for the Day in which he extolled the work that his lesbian and gay clergy were doing here, one of the great boosters of equality of opportunity for lesbian and gay clergy in the C of E.
Christopher, however, is not a Rottweiler. He is very well acquainted with the ministry of the lesbian and gay clergy and lay people of the Diocese and will not go after them in any way, shape, or form. On the other hand, I do not expect him to be celebrating or preaching for LGCM or Changing Attitude, the way the Primate of Canada did for Integrity/Toronto a few days ago.
I do not expect Christopher to turn up on the “Thought for the Day” rota, although stranger things have happened. Once he is elevated to the Lords, I expect he will be duty Bishop quite often (he lives fairly close to Westminster, after all) and I expect he will be a point man on the Church in the Inner City, which he knows so well.
Fourth, and last, the danger of appointing an insider as Diocesan Bishop is that structures, attitudes, and opinions that need examination and a new, fresh outlook will not be subjected to rigourous examination. There are a couple of things that Tom did in his last few years that need thinking about. The “renewal” of the Board for Church in Society into three different committees happened 3 or 4 years ago, and has not yet really taken root. There were indeed problems with the old structure (people were appointed or elected to the BCS and never bothered to attend, for example) but the new structure is very much sub-rosa and not yet the forceful body it was pre-Tom. The rolling-up of the OLM scheme into the NSM structure (Ordained Local Ministers have been combined with the non-Stipendiary ministers) was controversial even for Tom, and there was a goodly amount of ruckus in that normally pretty supine species, Synodus Diocesanus over it. I expect that there will be some tweaking of both structures.
I wonder if more cross-Thames cooperation might be in the cards. Tom, of course, had been Archdeacon of Northolt and Suffragan Bishop of Willesden in London, but had moved away to Leicester before coming south again. Christopher had spent a lot of time in London, both in Stepney and in Northolt, before being appointed to Woolwich 5 years ago. There has often been some talk about various ways in which London and Southwark could cooperate (sometimes combined with Guildford, St Albans, and Chelmsford) but I don’t believe any of it came to anything substantial.
Well, we shall see what happens. At last, the waiting is over.