Injustice to Jeffrey John made me want to resign, reveals Bishop

The Bishop of Oxford has revealed how he wanted to resign in the wake of the controversy following his proposed appointment of Jeffrey John as area bishop for Reading.

In an exclusive article for the DOOR , the Rt Revd Richard Harries says he was only persuaded to stay on by colleagues and because he did not want to leave the position at Reading vacant for 18 months or more while a new bishop of Oxford was appointed.

In a trenchant piece, he sets out his reasons for appointing Canon John – and his reaction to the hostility it generated.
He attacks his critics for confusing the situation in Reading with ‘what was going on across the Atlantic’ – the appointment of practising homosexual Gene Robinson as Bishop in New Hampshire.

He insists that Jeffrey John had explicitly promised to adhere to the Church’s teaching on homosexuality. Without this promise, says Bishop Richard, he ‘would not have dreamt of putting forward Jeffrey’s name’.

He says he was encouraged by the way Jeffrey John had won over conservative evangelicals in his Southwark diocese.

He said that while he expected some opposition, he believed that Jeffrey would have won the trust and respect of evangelicals in the Oxford diocese within ‘a couple of years or so’.

What took him by surprise was the scale of opposition across the Anglican Communion. And he is fiercely critical of the nine bishops in the UK who went public with their concerns in a letter to the press.

Calling it a ‘grave breach of collegiality’ he said they would have been far wiser to have petitioned the Archbishop for a delay to the appointment, rather than launch a full scale attack via the media.

He is full of praise for Jeffrey’s pastoral and leadership skills and insists that his decision to nominate him Bishop of Reading remains the right one.

‘Despite the division his appointment caused, this was and remains a profound issue of principle for me,’ he says. He calls for more debate on the issue of gays and lesbians in the Church. A new Guide to the Debate is to be published by the House of Bishops working party on sexuality, chaired by Richard Harries, on 3 November.

The process to appoint a new bishop for Reading is already underway and a name will be announced ‘without delay’.

But the main criteria ‘must be to find someone with the kind of gifts I had identified in Jeffrey, someone with a real heart for mission,’ insists Bishop Richard.

Rebecca Paveley

Why Jeffrey was the right man for Reading by Bishop Richard