Fr Michael Harper RIP

(I have known, and respected Michael, since first meeting him at his Harley Street flat over London MGC when he was a curate at All Souls. I was still a Methodist minister attending the meetings of the World Methodist Council at Westminster. One of my lay men up in Knaresborough had challenged me to make contact and find out from him more about the developing charismatic movement in the English context).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Very Revd Michael Harper, an archpriest in the Antiochian Ortho dox Church, who died on 6 January, aged 78, was a former Anglican who had been a leading figure in the Charismatic revival. From 1984 to 1995, he had been a Canon of Chichester Cathedral.

Latterly, he referred to the Church of England as his “foster mother”, after he was reordained in 1995 under the Patriarchate of Antioch. Women’s ordination had been the “last straw” for him and his wife, Jeanne, in their growing concerns about the direction that Anglicanism was taking; and, from 1993 to 1995, he had been president of the Pil grimage to Orthodoxy group of Anglican priests seeking to go over with groups of lay people.

A deanery was set up in the UK, and he was appointed its first Dean. In 2002, he was elected a director of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge, and he served as a representative of the Patriarch at consultations with Anglicans and at the present Archbishop of Canter bury’s enthronement. He was made an archpriest in 2005.

Michael Claude Harper was born in the London parish of All Souls’, Langham Place, where, almost three decades later, he was to serve six years as a curate. His mother was a beautician with a large cosmetics company, and his father was a busi nessman whose hobby was racing horses.

After studying at St Faith’s School, Cambridge, and Gresham’s School, Holt, Michael Harper read law and theology at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. During his first year, he came under the influence of the Christian Union, and had a vivid conversion experi ence at a eucharist in King’s College Chapel.

In 1952, he offered himself for ordination, and after two years at Ridley Hall took up a three-year curacy at St Barnabas’s, Clapham Common, in London, where he mar ried Jeanne, a student at the Royal Academy of Music whom he had met at a university mission in Norwich in 1951.

An examining chaplain, Donald Coggan, set him a deacon’s essay on “The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit”; but it was not until he was serving as a chaplain to the Oxford Street stores under the Revd John Stott that he had the Charismatic experience that was to change the character of his ministry.

This arose “out of the blue” one weekend from a reading of the Epistle to the Ephesians. All week­end, he felt waves of wisdom and knowledge pouring in upon him — an experience that he described in one of his 18 books, None Can Guess. After this, prayers seemed to be answered in a new way; worship be came vital and real; and he experi enced talking in tongues, an intenser awareness of Christ, and a new ability to help people.

He stayed on at All Souls’ for a while, but it was not a Charismatic parish, and this changed spiritual outlook absorbed more and more of his energies. After nine years in as sistant curacies, he left to found the Fountain Trust.

He was its first director from 1964 to 1975, founding in 1966 and edit ing Renewal magazine, and organis ing an international Charis matic conference at Guildford in 1971. This was a five-day event at the university and cathedral, with 450 resident participants and 250 day visitors, at which Dominican and Orthodox priests mingled with Anglican religious, and many young people and others from 20 countries and 14 denominations.

It was to be the first of many con ferences that he organised or ad dressed; and it was on a small scale in comparison with those of 40,000 to 50,000 to which he was later to speak in South Bend, Indiana, and Rimini in Italy. His ecumenical contacts were wide, encompassing both the Roman Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches, and he was widely and highly respected.

He initiated a meeting of Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Anglicans in Rome in 1984; and was a member of the executive of the Singapore Consultation, which in 1989 became the International Charismatic Con sultation on World Evangelization (ICCOWE). He was its chairman until 2000.