Comment (June 2010)
Back to menu
Bishop’s Letter
A story of two Bishops
I am delighted that Bishop Frank White is to serve as the next Assistant Bishop in the Diocese. Bishop Frank and his wife Alison, who is also ordained, are well known in the north east.
Alison was part of the Springboard Team and she was also a leading speaker at our last clergy conference in Edinburgh. She is a well known leader of retreats and conferences and is a much sought after spiritual director, companion and guide.
For Alison as well as Bishop Frank, their move to the Diocese represents a real home coming. Bishop Frank was brought up in the north east, went to school in Newcastle and after ordination, served all his ministry in the Diocese of Durham, becoming the first Archdeacon of Sunderland in 1997.
In 2002 he was consecrated as Bishop of Brixworth in the Diocese of Peterborough from where he will move to Newcastle later this year. He will share the Episcopal Ministry here and will bring his passion for mission and spirituality to encourage the parishes in our engagement with the Communities God has given us to serve. Throughout his life he has drawn inspiration from the lives of the northern saints.
In his leisure moments Bishop Frank enjoys bird watching, cycling and walking, and he has been a life long supporter of Newcastle United. I am greatly looking forward to working with Bishop Frank as an Episcopal colleague when he begins his ministry here at the end of November. His service of welcome will be held in the Cathedral at 11.00am on Saturday 27th November and I hope you will put that date in your diaries.
As we look forward with eager anticipation to Bishop Frank's arrival, Bishop Tom Wright will shortly leave his Diocese and his home at Auckland Castle for his new appointment as Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of St Andrews. Bishop Tom has decided to return to the Academic world and he will be greatly missed by the people of the Diocese of Durham as well as more widely by all of us in the north east.
Our two Dioceses have been working more closely together in recent years and we have been able to create a number of joint posts and pieces of work, including for example, in Finance, in Ministerial and Lay Training, and in Education and Schools. None of this would have happened without Bishop Tom's willing encouragement and support.
The Big Read in Lent 2010 was Bishop Tom's inspiration and enabled Christians from the churches in the North-east to read St Luke's gospel together. Next Lent a similar project, based on St Matthew's gospel is planned nationally with the introductory booklet again written by Bishop Tom.
It has become increasingly clear that Bishop Tom's considerable gifts and vocation as a writer, teacher and broadcaster are virtually impossible to combine with the many demands and duties of a Diocesan Bishop. This has led him to take what he describes as "the hardest decision of my life".
I have greatly appreciated and enjoyed cooperating with Bishop Tom over the last seven years. He has become a good colleague and friend to many of us in the Diocese.
We wish him and Maggie well as they prepare for the next phase of their lives. Happily, they will still retain strong connections with Northumberland. Bishop Tom's parents still live and worship in Morpeth and he and Maggie will continue to visit their 'bolt-hole' on the Northumberland coast.
Please pray for Bishop Tom and Maggie as they prepare to leave the Diocese of Durham and pray too, for Bishop Frank and Alison as they get ready to return home to serve with us in Newcastle.
Back to top
A call to work together
by Geoff Lowson
About 15 years ago I was on a course at a college in Edinburgh called St Colm’s. On arrival and after inspection of my accommodation, I rejoined my friends to tell them excitedly that in my room there was a painting carrying a brass plaque noting that Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah stayed here June 1910 - or words to that effect. My friends were amused and bemused by my excitement! But the clue is in the date.
In June 1910, 1200 delegates from all around the world gathered in the Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh for the World Missionary Conference . Most Protestant mission agencies from Europe and North America, of all denominations, where represented: 176 missionary societies and mission boards plus leading figures including the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The conference was a serious attempt at a systematic and business-like analysis of what Protestant missions had already achieved and of what remained to be done.
There were many outcomes but here are two interrelated ones.
The chairman of the conference was an American Methodist, John Mott. His publication called The Evangelisation of the World in This Generation set the theme of the conference and this carried with it a sense of urgency. This sense of urgency led in turn to a call for the missionaries to work together much more closely and across denominational barriers. It is generally acknowledged that this call marked the beginnings of the ecumenical movement as we know it today.
The second outcome? Well, this brings me back to the brass plaque. V S Azariah, (1874 – 1945) was the son of an Anglican priest, born in what is now Andhra Pradesh, South India. He became a YMCA evangelist at 19 and secretary of the organisation throughout South India only a few years later. He saw that, for the Church to grow and to bring ordinary Indians to Christ, it had to have indigenous leadership. He helped create the Indian Missionary Society in 1903, and was a co-founder of the National Missionary Society of India, an all Indian-led agency founded in 1905. He was ordained in 1909 and was a delegate to Edinburgh where he made perhaps the best-remembered speech of the entire Conference.
“We have a new generation of Christians who do not wish to be treated like children. True co-operation is possible only with a proper spiritual relationship, …in one word, ‘friendship’. I plead for ….a real willingness on the part of the foreign missionary to show that he is in the midst of the people to be to them not a lord and master but a brother and a friend. … Through all the ages to come the Indian Church will rise up in gratitude to attest the heroism and self-denying labours of the missionary body. You have given your goods to feed the poor. You have given your bodies to be burned. We ask for love. Give us friends.”
He was consecrated as the first bishop of the new Diocese of Dornakal in 1912 - the first Indian to be consecrated a bishop in the Anglican Communion – and went on to be a major figure in the indigenisation of the Church in India and in the area of ecumenism. He died just two years before the formation of the united Church of South India in 1947.
What of the painting and brass plaque? I rang St Colm’s and it is still there.
Back to top