Word: stockwood
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...Church Times, England's leading Anglican publication, praised Coggan as a man of "true evangelistic zeal and fervor" who was taking on a job that was "no bed of roses." Wrote Mervyn Stockwood, the liberal and nonconformist Bishop of Southwark, in the London Times: "I placed Donald Coggan at the top of the list. [He] is well aware of the problems that confront a generation that has been reared in a scientific era ... [He] is increasingly aware of the need for the church to concern itself with practical affairs." Others praised Coggan's efficiency and administrative abilities...
Even by the unfettered standards of Britain's Anglican hierarchy, the Bishop of Southwark is known as a bold and outspoken churchman. In addition to sponsoring a host of adventurous urban missions, the Rt. Rev. Mervyn Stockwood has over the years defended homosexuals, denounced Anglican policy on divorce as cowardly, told ribald stories in public and revealed the drinking habits of his fellow clerics in a book called The Compleat Imbiber...
Seances and Psi. Stockwood is not the only Anglican clergyman to dabble in telepathy, seances and other "psi" phenomena. He happens to be vice president of a group called the Churches Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Studies, whose patrons include 20 bishops of the Anglican Communion. One of the fellowship's basic concerns is with what it considers a "highly agnostic" trend: the diminution of belief in the traditional Christian doctrine of life after death. Not only does such skepticism deny comfort to the kin of the dead, says the fellowship, but it raises profound questions about "what...
...consider spiritualism an outright violation of the Biblical injunctions against the occult. If a Christian seeks from spiritualism what he cannot find in his own faith, warns an article in the Anglican quarterly, Modern Churchman, he is not "far from the sin of Lucifer-the sin of pride." Nonetheless, Stockwood claims that his pieces in the Times produced hundreds of letters from believers who are convinced that they too have had ghostly visitors...
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...