The Bishop's Evening

The aroma of coffee was rich in the long, low-ceilinged temporary chapel of St. John's Church in Olympia, Wash. one night last week as Stephen F. (for Fielding) Bayne, Episcopal bishop of Olympia, surveyed the members of his flock who had turned out for the third of his Lenten "Bishop's Evenings." With one hand in the pocket of his magenta cassock, he asked, "How do you feel--singing or no singing tonight?" After a brisk singing of Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, he told them: "Good for you. Those old German hymns have a wonderful, solid, square feeling to them--not square in the contemporary sense--but in their feeling of wonderful power."

Bishop Bayne took off his glasses and polished them. "Don't be astonished at anything that goes on here," he warned. "This is very informal and relaxed. We Episcopalians can well learn how to relax more. My walking up and down the aisle isn't a gag--it gives me a feeling of being one of you. We will return to our liturgical habits on Sunday."

Building Bridges. The directness and informality were typical of Stephen Bayne--and two of the reasons for the growth of membership and enthusiasm in the diocese since he went there almost six years ago. In that time, the number of clergymen has risen from 27 to 53, the number of members from 19,627 to 24,522. Bishop Bayne works on a stern schedule that includes some 600 speeches a year over a 24,531-sq. mi. area reaching from the Cascades to the Pacific. In a section where physical growth and prosperity take attention away from things of the spirit, he has made theology almost as warm and immediate as politics and baseball.

At 44, Bayne has come a long way from his more formal beginnings. The son of an old New York family (his father is a warden of Trinity Church), he got himself suspended from Amherst College for low grades, and spent a year reporting for the Wall Street Journal. Wall Street in the late '20s was enough to send him back to Amherst and, after graduation, into General Theological Seminary. He was ordained an Episcopal minister in 1933.

During the Depression, when he had Trinity Church, a slum parish in St. Louis, he turned part of his church building into a dormitory for homeless men. Later, he was appointed Episcopal chaplain at Columbia University, which he left during World War II to become a Navy chaplain and see service in the Pacific. One of his naval assignments, at the Bremerton (Wash.) Navy Yard, led to his post in Olympia. He had put in some time helping out at Seattle's St. Mark's Cathedral, and Washingtonians did not forget him. One night in 1946, when he was back at Columbia, he got a long-distance telephone call offering him the bishopric of Olympia, and he quickly accepted.

The new bishop brought one basic premise to his diocese. "Religious convictions," he said, "belong in the market place. I'd like to see more clergymen down at the Boeing plant, off in the lumber camps, at sea, building bridges." As he analyzed the problem: "I know good and powerful men in the Northwest, Christian men, who see no use in the clergy at all. They can't see why we aren't out selling soup or plywood. They see us as marginal necessities."

It Will Go On. Bayne's chief aim has never been merely to build up the Episcopal Church. Says he: "In our prayer book you will find nothing about the Episcopal Church--only the little machinery needed to make it possible. We believe in one Holy Catholic Apostolic Church . . .

"The idea of one church has had its bad moments, times when there was a feeling the whole thing was going to collapse . . . Wise old heads like myself sit back and say it will go on."

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