THE next Bishop of Exeter, Dr Mike Harrison, is used to an itinerant life, and is looking forward to returning to the region where he courted his wife and discerned his vocation.
Dr Harrison, who’s currently Suffragan Bishop of Dunwich within the diocese of St Edmundsbury & Ipswich, spoke to the Church Times shortly after the announcement on Tuesday of his translation to Exeter (News, 4 June).
It isn’t the primary such move that Dr Harrison has made along with his wife, Rachel, an occupational therapist, having served variously within the dioceses of Southwark, Leicester, and Bradford (before its amalgamation into the diocese of Leeds), and having trained for ordination Oxfordshire.
“I’ve had an itinerant form of life. My father was a tutorial, and we moved around with him,” he said. It was a life-style that he had in common along with his wife-to-be, whose father, the Rt Revd David Bentley, served as Bishop of Gloucester from 1993 to 2003 (Obituary, 3 April 2020).
The episcopal connections go further. Dr Harrison met Rachel when her sister married his friend Martin Gorick, who’s now Bishop of Dudley. When Dr Harrison became Bishop of Dunwich, it gave Bishop Bentley the weird distinction of getting two sons-in-law who were bishops.
Dr Harrison discovered his vocation to ordained ministry during a period of his life through which he was spending an amazing deal of time in Devon, visiting his then-girlfriend, who was studying near to Exeter.
He was working in London, doing management consultancy part-time “to place bread on the table”, while also working at St Paul’s, Deptford, in south London. “I used to be doing youth work, pastoral work, visiting prisoners, and community engagement,” he said, and was helped within the discernment process by the instance of parish priests he encountered.
As lead bishop on pioneer ministry, Dr Harrison says that he is worried with the challenge of “presenting the never-changing gospel to an ever-changing people in an ever-changing culture”. Parish ministry, though, has “all the time been central” for him, and he says that he’s committed to “sustain so far as possible stipendiary numbers” in his latest diocese.
A supporter of the introduction of same-sex marriage within the Church of England, Dr Harrison says that he wants the diocese to be “a spot where those across the spectrum on this could thrive, that we honour each other, that we speak well of each other, and that beyond differences on this, we’re united by way of mission and evangelism”.
Dr Harrison is predicted to be installed within the autumn.
