John Taylor (bishop of Winchester)


John Vernon Taylor was an English bishop and theologian who was the Bishop of Winchester from 1974 to 1985.

Education and family

Taylor was born in Cambridge – while his father was Vice Principal at Ridley Hall – and educated at St Lawrence College. He read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, then read theology and trained for the ministry at St Catherine's Society and Wycliffe Hall at Oxford, and the Institute of Education.
His father was later Bishop of Sodor and Man; his mother was Margaret Irene née Garrett. Taylor married Margaret Wright on 5 October 1940, and they had three children.

Priestly ministry

He was ordained in the Church of England: made a deacon by Arthur Winnington-Ingram, Bishop of London, at St Paul's Cathedral on 18 December 1938, and ordained priest by Guy Smith, Bishop of Willesden, at St Paul's on Michaelmas the following year. He spent five years engaged in Christian ministry in England,. He then felt drawn to overseas missionary work; unable to do so immediately because of wartime travel restrictions, he obtained a teaching qualification at London University.
In 1945, with the ending of World War II, he moved to Mukono, Uganda, as a missionary working in theological education. He returned to England in 1954 and worked for the International Missionary Council. In 1959 he became Africa Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, and in 1963 he succeeded Max Warren as its General Secretary, remaining in post until 1974.

Episcopal ministry

His nomination to the See of Winchester was announced 14 August 1974, he was elected and confirmed that winter, consecrated a bishop by Donald Coggan, Archbishop of Canterbury, at Westminster Abbey on 31 January, and installed at Winchester Cathedral on 8 February 1975. He then served as Bishop of Winchester until his retirement on 28 February 1985, succeeding Falkner Allison, an old-fashioned Evangelical much-loved by all parties within the diocese. He was the first priest to be consecrated directly to the See of Winchester since William Day in 1595, and was respected throughout the diocese and beyond mainly by liberals and modernists, but failed to gain the trust of Anglo-Catholics. A product of Wycliffe Hall, with connections with All Souls, Langham Place, he was nevertheless a liberal evangelical rather than a conservative one. When first consecrated, he initially caused some amusement by refusing to wear a mitre and ordering that it be carried in front of him on a cushion in processions. After that one occasion he reverted to custom and wore it.