South Bank Religion

"My 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 in England.

Southwark slices the British social system from top to bottom. It starts on the tough Thames River docks in the heart of London, runs south through the vast, scruffy slums of Bermondsey, and courses along the commuter train tracks to green suburban Surrey, where Tudor estates and Bentleys abound. An estimated 550,000 confirmed Anglicans live in the diocese. Where the wealthy Establishment stockbrokers reside, the churches--and collection plates--are full, but in the populous working-class parishes, the pews have never been full.

Bow-Tie 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's clothes, on one of his vicars. The vicar's wife greeted him at the door, saying, "I'm afraid you can't see him now--he's expecting the bishop." A bit later he joined a quiet gathering attended by other bishops wearing black gaiters and aprons. Stockwood was resplendent in purple cassock and cape. "Ah, Mervyn," said one friend, "incognito, I see." Shortly after young Prince Charles, 14, was caught drinking cherry brandy in a hotel bar in Scotland last month, Bishop Stockwood was introduced to a parishioner's son at a sherry party on the lawn of a rather staid Surrey rectory. Jovially, he asked the boy: "Have you had your cherry brandy today?"

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 to the local baker for dinner rolls.

A year ago, Stockwood opened a diocesan training center where laymen meet for intensive study and lectures on the relevance of faith to modern life, from the morality of expense-account living to the morality of strike tactics. Stockwood is encouraging putting off baptism until a child has some grasp of its meaning, and also favors "full-rite visitations," in which baptism, confirmation and First Communion are all administered to the same recipient on the same day.

Some Anglicans, deploring "South Bank religion," argue that the Southwark clerics are making Christianity so timely that it ceases to be timeless. But Bishop Stockwood believes that time is running out. As he declared after his consecration as bishop: "I have nothing but contempt for a church that sets out to be eclectic, that just wants to draw to itself the holy holy Anglo-Catholics. I have every use for a church that sets out to draw all those living within its boundaries."

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