WHEN asked to return to Liverpool to serve temporarily as diocesan Bishop, the Rt Revd Ruth Worsley “principally said no”, but promised that she would give it some thought.
“I desired to do it on my terms,” she told the Church Times in an interview after her appointment as Interim Bishop of Liverpool had been announced.
After sleeping on the query, she proposed that, as a substitute of “Acting Bishop”, the job must be more clearly defined as “Interim Bishop”, with a stated duration of at the very least two years.
“I’m not going to be on loan. I’m going to be there as a totally committed, paid-up player, joining in with all that the diocese is searching for to do,” she said.
Bishop Worsley is well-positioned to debate the merits of interim episcopal ministry, having previously served as each Acting Bishop of Bath & Wells and Acting Bishop of Coventry.
“I sense a vocation on this,” she said: “a selected ministry for a length of time that’s for a selected intervention that should be appropriately resourced, supported, and given authority; and that’s what I’m proposing to do.”
Asked what qualities she had that made her well-suited to this sort of ministry, Bishop Worsley recalled the “simpler, humbler, bolder stuff that the Church of England keeps talking about. . . I prefer to keep it easy. I’m not likely there for the status, but I would like to be daring in breaking out from the standard ways of doing things.
“I also think I’m a non-anxious presence: I appear to give you the option to maintain calm where others are flapping. I’m good in a crisis.”
In Liverpool, within the wake of Dr Perumbalath’s resignation, how could reconciliation be effected in a situation by which many were still reeling, and unsure what, or whom, to imagine? “I’m brought back to the Cross of Nails and Coventry approach to reconciliation,” Bishop Worsley said, gesturing to her pectoral cross, which is fashioned from silver-plated nails.
The approach, she said, was “not about about trying to choose over what happened, and what went fallacious, and who do you think, but, actually, what does it mean to heal the injuries of the past? We do need to essentially listen well to at least one one other and listen to the damage and hurt that folks have.
“This isn’t about attempting to persuade people to all think alike, or to see it from the identical viewpoint, but to value the indisputable fact that we’re, in our diversity, a part of that whole Church of God, and seek to live that out.”
One of the outstanding questions within the diocese of Liverpool is the long run part to be played by the Suffragan Bishop of Warrington, the Rt Revd Bev Mason. Bishop Mason has been away from the diocese for a 12 months and a half. In January, she revealed that she had also made allegations of misconduct against Dr Perumbalath (News, 31 January).
She was “much missed”, Bishop Worsley said, but emphasised that it was as much as Bishop Mason whether, and when, she desired to return to the diocese. “I might hope, each for her sake and ours, that that [decision] shall be sooner somewhat than later,” Bishop Worsley said.
Unlike her previous diocesan posts in Bath & Wells, and Coventry, there is no such thing as a fallback when the interim post in Liverpool ends. Previously, she has returned to her ministry as Bishop of Taunton; this time, when a everlasting bishop is appointed, the see of Wigan will lapse, and Bishop Worsley will potentially be out of a job.
“My husband [who teaches at Trinity, Bristol] and I are taking an enormous risk,” she said. “[But] I’m not on this for the safety of life within the here and now — I’m in it for the long run.”
The interim position could, potentially, result in a everlasting one, if the CNC nominated her as the following bishop, and Bishop Worsley has not closed off this possibility. “If it was appropriate, and I felt pulled, they usually felt I must be a candidate to be considered, then I would really like to be considered,” she said.
She was not regarded as a candidate in Coventry, despite spending time as Acting Bishop: a call that she attributes to church politics.
At a gathering of the House of Bishops in September, Bishop Worsley spoke in favour of changes to the episcopal appointments process, suggesting that the present set-up of the Crown Nominations Commission was proving to be unfair to women.
She spoke then concerning the experience of girls in Afghanistan, whose hard-won freedoms had been reversed by the Taliban’s return to power. “It has caused people to recognise that ladies’s voices should give you the option to be heard beyond the partitions of their very own home. We don’t even allow for those voices to be heard throughout the partitions of our Church,” she said.
At last month’s meeting of the General Synod, proposals recommend by the Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Sarah Mullally, including the removal of the key ballot within the CNC, were rejected after a heated debate (News, 21 February).
Bishop Worsley described this as a “missed opportunity”. “I believe it was unfair to suggest that this was about bishops’ wanting to claim their power,” she said, and expressed disappointment that, from her perspective, the proposals had turn out to be “something of a battleground to fight other causes”, particularly Living in Love and Faith (LLF).
Bishop Worsley supported LLF, she said, since it was about “full inclusion”. “Everybody matters: one and all has an element to play throughout the Church of God,” she said; but she expressed concern that this was not working when it got here to women’s ministry: despite searching for to “offer flourishing for all”, it had come “on the expense of girls”, she said.
