In the short term the college was in a mess, partly due to its undeserved reputation in the Church of England, which I myself had shared. I realised from my first day that the college was served by an able and highly dedicated faculty who could hold their own with any theological department in the country. Nevertheless, the immediate future was troubling. The break-even financial figure was 105 students, but four weeks before the beginning of term only just over eighty had enrolled to join us. We were heading towards a huge deficit. Of those likely to join us, only forty-eight were ordinands, even though the Church’s allocation of ordinands to Trinity was eighty. The bursar told me that nothing could be done to tackle that year’s deficit.
I was dismayed, but I was also quite sure that a great deal could be done. To begin with, it was important to restore confidence in the college, starting with the staff. Once again the theological vision had to be shared and owned. I was delighted to find no objection to my desire to do something about the worship, which I felt must combine that Anglican balance of word and sacrament. I knew that with talented students the musical standard, and therefore the quality of worship, would steadily improve. When the students arrived our policy was to help them to realise that they had come to the best theological college in England. There was, I felt, a natural and healthy pride in speaking confidently of this. Another part of my job as Principal was to promote the college and make it visible in the structures of the Church. This was done in a variety of ways.
First, I accepted many speaking engagements, as a means to promote the college and to inform as many people as possible that Trinity gave a first-class theological education. Second, I revived a practice which Maurice Wood had developed at Oak Hill, of staff and students spending long weekends in parishes talking about the call of ordination. Third, I kept in close touch with some of the large parishes which were key providers of ordinands, especially at Oxford and Cambridge. My former Principal Michael Green was now at St Aldate’s, Oxford, and his church became a particular quarry for excellent and gifted ordinands.
The students themselves were a good bunch on the whole, but I was worried about the quality of some of the non-ordinands. It is understandable, if not excusable, for Principals to admit people simply to make up numbers. A few of the students at Trinity were plainly unable to cope with the college’s demanding intellectual disciplines, and were there hoping that the course would provide a back door into ordination.
If this troubled me, I had a greater shock when I received worrying reports about one particular student. The first complaints came from two of the women students, who reported that he was sexually harassing them. I called him in at once. He was from a breakaway Christian group, and was hoping to obtain a degree so that he might be ordained in his own Church. He listened to the complaints in an untroubled way, and it was clear that he had pestered the women but was completely free of shame. I gave him a lecture on the kind of behaviour I expected from students at Trinity. However, his view of sexuality appeared to amount to nothing more than an expectation of gratification. He assumed it was obvious that, as a single man, he had sexual needs that should be fulfilled. I asked him to square this with his theology and the discipline of the college. Sending him away again with a warning, I felt with sinking heart that I was encountering a wholly new phenomenon in my experience – a Christian who felt that there were no rights or wrongs in the area of sexual morality. My fears were realised as I and his tutor watched the man’s progress. Besides his inappropriate behaviour with female members of the college he was a practising homosexual. And then he mentioned without a trace of shame that he paid weekly visits to his ‘hooker’ in a nearby village. My mouth must have dropped. Perhaps I had misheard. ‘My hooker,’ he repeated. He did not last long in Trinity after that.
The episode prepared me for aspects of culture that I was to meet later in my ministry as Archbishop – namely the erosion of holiness by a cultural view that sexual intercourse is of little more significance than shaking hands. When this is combined with a view of the Bible as itself being culturally conditioned, with no authority in matters of sexuality, the drift into hedonistic narcissism becomes inevitable. The Church which blesses such immorality, or calls it holy, ends up as nothing more than a benign religious club.
Returning to theological education after seven years away in parish ministry brought to the surface some of my deepest questions and worries about the purpose and success of our colleges and courses in turning out effective ministers and priests with the leadership skills to work with others and to build up congregations. Was it our aim to produce theologians? Or to produce pastors and teachers? The curriculum of most colleges and courses did not make the purpose transparent. From my experience of three theological colleges it was clear that the majority of their staffs had little experience of parish life, and even less of leading congregations into growth. But it was also true that the brightest and most visible of students did not necessarily make the most dedicated and effective clergy.
These two facts worried me a great deal. If the task of the Church of England’s colleges and courses is to turn out godly men and women with fire in their bellies to teach, evangelise, pastor and build up congregations, then the logical conclusion is that that task is closer to vocational training than it is to making men and women academics. But compelling though this argument was, it was not without problems. My own experience told me that we could not ignore the intellect. While I wanted my students to leave college with a clear focus, dedication and enthusiasm for building up churches, I was also concerned to equip them to handle ideas, and that meant taking theology seriously. How could one square that circle?
I had also become aware of a very significant difference between Catholic and Anglican models of theological education. The Roman Catholic model focused on ministerial formation, whereas the Anglican model was more intent on information. It seemed as if we attempted to prepare people by loading them with knowledge, while Roman Catholic priests were formed in their spirituality and the application of theological knowledge to the life of the Church.
I found myself arguing more and more for two significant changes in theological teaching. First, that the present basic education of three years for those under thirty, and two years for those over, was woefully inadequate. Our starting point should be four years for those under thirty and three years for those older. Furthermore, my experience suggested to me that the best way to prepare would be by sandwich training, with substantial time spent learning from effective ministers and priests. Lastly, the whole purpose of theological education and training must be earthed in prayer and spiritual transformation. I was convinced that effective ministers – of all traditions – shared one striking characteristic: they had a burning love of God and a yearning to share Him with others. However, the responsibility for delivering such radical changes in ministerial formation was not mine – it belonged to the Church centrally.
My thoughts about the necessity of changes for the future of the Church’s ministry did not stem from any misgivings about my students. We were able to attract men and women of great ability, and student numbers grew to such an extent that by the time I left Trinity in 1987 it was the largest theological college in the Church of England. Furthermore, the divisions between the Clifton College Trust and Trinity had been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.
At the end of my fifth and final year at Trinity one of our most gifted students, Phil Potter, mentioned to me in passing that there was a lot of talk about my becoming Bishop of Bath and Wells. I was flabbergasted to learn this, but what I was even less prepared for was the way that the thought both disturbed me and prompted unhealthily ambitious thoughts. Up to that point, senior office in the Church had not entered my head. I was prepared to stay at Trinity until my work was over, and then return to parish ministry. But ambition now began to enter my psyche, and I both liked it and loathed it. Looking back on that time, I am still not sure how to interpret the ambition I felt. Of course, ambition is not always unhealthy. When one has gifts to offer any organisation, the desire to give leadership for the good of the whole is not bad. A part of me was suggesting that I had proved myself for a wider leadership role, and that there was nothing wrong in this unexpected desire to become a Bishop. However, to this day I feel that I was encountering something within me that was not good. I was desiring the role of Bishop more than the task of leadership it demanded. It was important to resolve this, which I attempted by an honest analysis of