65 mins
From homelessness to Primus
PROFILE
A FEW days before our interview, the Most Rev Mark Strange and his family joined the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the editor of Life and Work, and over 8000 others at the mass sleepout in Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh.
The aim was to raise money and awareness, working towards an end to homelessness in Scotland. But for Mark, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, and his wife Jane, the event had a more personal meaning. In the early part of their marriage, they went through a two-year spell where they had no regular work and no home.
“I have to say I approached the evening with apprehension,” he says. “As a couple, even when we didn’t have a home of our own we didn’t sleep rough, although we slept in a number of railway stations etc. “But I’d forgotten just how long a cold night is, when you haven’t got anything to stimulate you.
“There were actually five of us from the family that did it, and it was actually the following night that I think for all of us became quite a painful reflection – at how horrible it had been, and yet, we only had to do it for one night.
“And yet others who I have passed every day this week between the General Synod office and my hotel have to do it every night. And that can’t be right. And we have to find ways of changing it.”
A challenging aim, but Bishop Mark says he likes a challenge, which is probably for the best.
He was elected Primus of Scotland’s branch of the Anglican Communion in June 2017, in the midst of what are unquestionably interesting times for his church. At the same General Synod the decision was taken that the church would allow its priests to solemnise same-sex marriages – a decision for which Mark then had to account to the meeting of Anglican Primates in Canterbury in October.
“I was apprehensive about it,” he admits of the meeting which ended with his church being barred from chairing meetings and taking part in conversations on the doctrine of the Anglican Communion for three years. “But by the end I could see huge opportunities for us as a church to be working amongst the rest of the Communion and therefore the rest of the world.”
On the decision itself, he says: “There was never going to be a time to make that type of change when everyone was going to be comfortable with it, (but) so much time and energy has been spent on these things when our real commission is to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and set the downtrodden free. We have to begin finding ways of reaching the stage where the focus of our General Synod is to follow the Commission of Christ, without spending all the time looking in on ourselves. That will be a joy.”
But it’s not just matters of human sexuality distracting him from that calling.
There is also the continuing fall-out from the 2016 Columba Declaration, by the Churches of Scotland and England, which surprised and upset some within the Episcopal Church – ‘like finding out your sister is going out with your best friend’, as he described it to that year’s General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. “I think the timing of the announcement (on Christmas Eve 2015) was a bit of a shock, and it challenged the relationship we thought we had with the Church of England as much as the Church of Scotland. So there was, I think, an understandable response of shock, anxiety, how did this happen, etc, which I tried to articulate to the General Assembly in 2016.
“But I was always brought up with the idea that there should be close relationships with what I was taught to call ‘the other part of the Church of Scotland’ and with the Church of England, and it might be unfortunate in the way the circumstances occurred, but if we are truly trying to be the Church of Christ then we have to work through that – and simply being cross and angry doesn’t help.
“For me what has come from this is the reopening of serious conversations with the Church of Scotland through [the new joint working group] Our Common Calling, which I attended until I became primus and thoroughly enjoyed – I’m the kind of odd person that likes discussing declaratories and canons.
“I think there’s a potential which has come from that – I don’t think it was the intention, but in our determination to rebuild the bridges and heal the dfficulties that we’ve actually having more conversation than we’ve had since the end of the SCIFU [Scottish Church Initiative for Union] conversations [in 2003].
The Most Rev Mark Strange, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church
We have to begin ffinding ways of reaching the stage where the focus of our General Synod is to follow the Commission of Christ, without spending all the time looking in on ourselves. That will be a joy.
“So I wish things had been done dif erently on all sides, but I think the potential for good healthy and powerful conversations has come from that and we need to keep working on that.
“I don’t have anxiety about churches having conversations. I think the church has to have the courage to talk to all its branches, because the world, society, looks at a divided church and says ‘why should we listen to that?’.
“When I think back to the Church of my childhood it was a very separate institution, but I think as time has gone on the realisation has grown that there is The Church and it is expressed in a variety of ways – which I think is healthy – but is in fact all the Church of God.
“And the more opportunities for Moderators and Primuses to do things together, the better.”
On top of all that, his church is facing the same issues as most of the other mainstream denominations: falling numbers in some places, particularly among the young, though there has been an encouraging growth in the numbers coming forward to train for ministry.
So never boring, then? “No. The only thing that is sometimes boring at the moment is being in Edinburgh without Jane.”
Mark, whose regular stamping ground is his Diocese of Moray, Ross and Caithness – ‘one of the most beautiful places on God’s earth’ – spends a week every month in Edinburgh. “Historically, it’s 80-odd years since a Primus has come from the north,” he says, “And what the church has got used to is a Primus who can come to Edinburgh for the day to attend a meeting, so everyone’s having to readjust.
“There were some questions in my mind and other people’s minds as to whether there would be enough to fill my time for a whole week in Edinburgh. I have to say that, so far, the days are very long and a lot of people come to see me, so in no way have I ever felt I’m wasting my time and energy.”
The role of Primus, as Mark tells it, is a historical anomaly combining aspects of the Presbyterian moderator and the Anglican archbishop, while not really being either.
“We had archbishops until that little moment of local dfficulty in 1689, when the Church of Scotland decided that bishops were no longer required. And of course (the Episcopal Church’s) problem then was that bishops were appointed by the monarchs, who we considered to be the Stuarts [who had lost the throne when James II and VII was deposed in 1688], and the Stuarts failed to appoint an archbishop, I suspect because they had other things to do, like attempting to reclaim the throne.
The Most Rev Mark Strange, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church
“So what happened was that the bishops who were left said ‘we need someone to chair us and represent us to the world’. So that became the Primus.
“My task is to chair the College [of Bishops], but I don’t have any authority over the other bishops at all. They run their own dioceses and I don’t have any say in that.
“The Anglican Communion, at some point in its history, decided that the Primus should have the same status as an archbishop within the Communion. So I represent the Scottish Episcopal Church as a Primate of the Anglican Communion.
And my other tasks are to represent the church within ecumenical relations, within society, and to be prepared to attend and be part of the processes which would have fallen to an archbishop if we’d had one – as long as I always remember that I’m not one.”
So a chairman and a public face of the church: not that dissimilar from Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, then? “Yes. Only my role could last for 15 years. But much of what Derek [Browning] is doing are the same sorts of tasks that I have.”
Mark’s route into ministry was, he says, not typical for a bishop. He grew up in Aberdeen, where he was educated at a comprehensive state school, Hazlehead Academy, and studied divinity at the university – funding his studies for a few years by running a pub. His first formal ministry was as verger of Inverness Cathedral in the summer of 1978 – “I always point out to people I’m probably the only bishop who has been employed to polish his own throne.”
He met Jane at university and they married ‘I suppose quite young’. “Jane has, I think it’s safe to say, been the rock on which I’ve been able to build my ministry. She has done the jobs to keep the money coming in, while I’ve swanned of to do more study. It wasn’t until our children were grown that she was eventually able to go back to university to fuli ll her own vocation, which is teaching.”
Mark and Jane have three children, now all grown up, who he says were all given great freedom in how and whether they followed their faith, and he takes great joy from the fact that they all still do.
One of his interests from early in his ministry has been working with young people, which is as much a challenge to the Episcopal Church in 2018 as it is to the other mainstream denominations, but Mark says he remains optimistic.
“I ran the provincial youth camps for the Episcopal Church for many years, and a signficant number of young people have passed through that process and many of them are now lay representatives of their churches, many of them are still involved in youth work in church work and actually speak very passionately about their faith and therefore are doing as Jesus commanded us, to take the message to the world. So those who are involved are really involved. Probably far more involved than many of the young people that I grew up with.
“If the church simply sees not having the number of young people as the issue then there really is a problem. But if the church sees the voice of its committed young people and hears what they have to say, and shares with them in their hopes and aspirations for the church and for faith, then I think we’re in a place we haven’t been for many years.
“I have great hopes and absolute joy in listening to the passion of the young people who have come through the church in the last 10 years. I think we’re about to come to a very exciting time.”
Mark trained for ministry at Lincoln Theological College, and worked in various parishes in England before returning to Scotland in 1998 to serve as Rector of Holy Trinity, Elgin, with St Margaret’s, Lossiemouth to which were added St Michael’s, Duf town and St Margaret’s, Aberlour, which enabled him to explore collaborative ministry among those congregations.
He says it came as ‘a surprise’ to be elected as Bishop in 2007, but that he quickly realised it was an opportunity to do the work he’d been doing on a wider scale.
“What I’d been doing in Elgin had actually been a small expression of episcopacy anyway because the task was to lead a team of people. So when I was elected to the job in the diocese it was expanding that role and the fact that large parts of the northern highlands really had the potential for the expansion of mission. So the gifts I believe I had shown in Elgin could be replicated within the diocese.”
He was still ‘getting used to the idea that people elected me as a bishop’ 10 years later, when the call came that his colleagues were planning on electing him Primus. “I went through to the kitchen in my house, and my daughter was sitting there and she thought that someone had died, because I was just completely speechless.”
I have great hopes and absolute joy in listening to the passion of the young people who have come through the church in the last 10 years. I think we’re about to come to a very exciting time.
He says initial concerns that being made Primus would result in him being buried in bureaucracy have proved unfounded.
“I was anxious about whether it would just lead me into a huge job of administration, and take me away from being involved with people. I think I have rapidly realised that you can’t take me away from that – it’s just what I do.
“And as Primus I have greater opportunity to blether to more people about my love of God, and that’s wonderful.
“And lovely moments. What I think has surprised me in most cases is how much generosity and love is being shown and people being very forgiving of my stumbles and very generous. So from sleeping in the park on Saturday night to sitting in the crypt at Canterbury Cathedral there hasn’t been much time for saying ‘what’s next’. It’s very full-on, which is how I enjoy life.”
This article appears in the April 2018 Issue of Life and Work
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