Word: stockwood
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...diocese is said to be on the boil," says the Rt. Rev. Mervyn Stockwood, Bishop of Southwark. "If that is so, I accept it as a compliment. Boiling water is better than tepid. It can cleanse and generate power." Measured against British coolness to the Anglican faith (of 27 million baptized members, only 3,000,000 are registered on parish rolls), the Diocese of Southwark is indeed bubbling. And Bishop Stockwood, 50, a charming and worldly man in whom humility coexists with vanity, gives it another stir almost daily. In the process, he has become perhaps the most storied bishop...
...Bishop. Stockwood came to Southwark in 1959 from a post as vicar of Great St. Mary's, Cambridge University's church, where he often sported bow ties instead of dog collar and packed in undergraduate congregations for guest addresses by such speakers as the Labor Party's Aneurin Bevan and anti-apartheid Bishop Trevor Huddleston. He took his informality right along with him to Southwark. He sometimes takes a morning dip with early-rising parishioners at an open-air pool before starting a full Sunday's work. Once, by appointment, he called, wearing layman...
Theological Fossil. On the theory that getting people talking about the church is a big advantage over the customary apathy, Stockwood has encouraged dissent and nonconformity among his 600 clergymen. In a sermon on the existing moral code at Southwark Cathedral last March, his canon librarian, the Rev. Douglas Rhymes, preached that Christ never suggested that "marriage is the only possible occasion of any expression of physical relationship," and charged on to say that "much of the prejudice against homosexuality is on the ground that it is unnatural-but for whom? Certainly not for the homosexual...
Then one of Stockwood's aides, the Rt. Rev. John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, stirred up a row with his book Honest to God, arguing that Christianity needs a new idea of God. And another Southwark clergyman, the Rev. John Pearce-Higgins, recently took arms against some of the 39 Articles-the declaration of Anglican faith. He called the 400-year-old Articles "in the nature of a theological fossil" and announced that he assented to them under protest...
Kitchen-Sink Communion. But Bishop Stockwood has more serious goals than mere shock. Three years ago, he started a night-school seminary to produce worker-priests, and in September will ordain the first class of men engaged in ordinary trades who will thereafter also double as clergy. This challenges the strong tradition that Anglican clergymen should be gentle Establishmentarians from the best schools. And if communicants will not come to church, Communion, Stockwood decided, could go to them; his priests now bring "kitchen-sink Communion" to homes; one such priest, when he needs Communion bread, just nips around...