The worldwide Anglican Communion has a new top prelate in a new top job. To streamline its scattered activities in a jet-shrinking world, the Archbishop of Canterbury last week announced that he had picked an American: the Right Rev. Stephen Fielding Bayne Jr., Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal diocese of Olympia, Wash.
Trim, twinkle-eyed Bishop Bayne, 50, is noted for his energy as well as his outspoken, often unorthodox ways; at last summer’s five-week-long Lambeth Conference, he was chief architect of a trenchant report on “The Family in Contemporary Society,” endorsing contraception as a liberating force in family planning.
“His enthusiasm and imagination made a great impression on us at Lambeth,” said a top British cleric this week. “Archbishop of Canterbury Fisher has been a bit conservative, perhaps, in his approach to TV and other 20th century methods of mass communication. Bayne is from the New World; he is young and wants to grapple in a modern manner with the problems facing the church today. He wants to see that we don’t go on plodding along the road we have always been plodding along. There’s been a lot of fluttering in the dovecots over Bayne’s appointment, but it’s mostly with pleasure at the thought of something new and different being about to be tried in the church.”
Bishop Bayne’s new and different post, created at the request of the Lambeth Conference, consists of two secretaryships: of the Advisory Council on Missionary Strategy and the Lambeth Consultative Body. In the first, he will coordinate the missionary activities of 15 constituent self-governing churches of the Anglican Communion (total membership: 40 million). In the second, he will supervise the lines of action initiated by Lambeth Conferences during the ten-year intervals between them. In addition, he plans to make his London office (he moves in after Jan. 1) a clearinghouse for theological studies. “The thing that draws me to this is the chance to try to weave a little unity,” said Stephen Bayne. “It’s not an English job; it’s an Anglican one.”
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