40 years a deacon

The Bishop

John Richard Humpidge Moorman, (born Leeds, Yorkshire, England, 4 June 1905; died Durham, England, 13 January 1989) was an English divine, ecumenist, and writer, Bishop of Ripon from 1959 to 1975.

Born in Leeds, the son of Frederic William Moorman (1872-1919) and his wife Frances Beatrice Humpidge (1872-1919), Moorman was educated at Gresham's School, Holt and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He gained the B.D. degree in 1940 with his work The Sources for the Life of Saint Francis of Assisi.

In 1929 he was ordained and became curate of Holbeck, Leeds, later of Leighton Buzzard. In 1935 he was appointed Rector of Fallowfield inManchester. One year later in 1930, Moorman married Mary Caroline Macaulay (1905–1995).

During the Second World War, Moorman resigned his living and worked as a farmhand in Wharfedale, and during this period completed his thesis Church Life in England in the Thirteenth Century for a doctorate of divinity (Cambridge University, 1945).

In 1945 he went to Lanercost Priory, and in 1946 re-opened Chichester Theological College. While there, he also served as chancellor ofChichester Cathedral. In 1956 he resigned to concentrate on his Franciscan writings.

In 1959 he was appointed Bishop of Ripon. He was a frequent visitor to the Vatican and led a delegation of Anglican observers to the Second Vatican Council. In 1967 he became the chairman of the Anglican commission which led to the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission. He remained a member until 1981. He died aged 84 in Durham.

The Cathedral

Ripon Cathedral is the seat of the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds and the mother churchof the Diocese of Ripon and Leeds, situated in the small North Yorkshire city of Ripon,England.

A church on the site is thought to date from 672, when it is believed to have been the second stone building erected in the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria. The crypt dates from this period.

People have been coming to worship and pray at Ripon for more than 1,350 years. The Cathedral building itself is part of this continuing act of worship, begun in the 7th century when Saint Wilfrid built one of England’s first stone churches on this site, and still renewed every day. Within the nave and choir, you can see the evidence of 800 years in which master craftsmen have expressed their faith in wood and stone.

The Wesleys

After completing their studi

es both John and Charles accepted the invitation of a certain Captain Oglethorpe to sail out to the colony of Georgia in America for John to be a chaplain to the colonists and Charles as a private secretary with some additional religious duties. Both brothers had followed their father as priests in the Church of England. John particularly saw this trip as an opportunity to try to convert the Red Indians. But things turned out bad for both brothers - after a stormy sea journey they soon found that the settlers were either deported felons or people of a disreputable character who resented the stern religious practices of the Wesley brothers and tried hard to compromise John's character. As for the native Indians they were too dangerous to be approached by any white man unless he had either a bottle of gin or a gun in his hand.

In 1737 the Wesley's returned to England both disillusioned and depressed - it had all been a disaster and a failure, except that on that storm-tossed outward journey John Wesley had been deeply impressed by a party of German Moravian missionaries on board who, during the height of the storm, showed no fear having a complete and serene trust in Jesus Christ to see them safely through the storm. This included women and small children. Wesley, who found himself terrified of perishing, realised that these people had a deep personal religious experience that was foreign to the severe, but conventional, Christianity of the Wesley brothers.

So impressed was John that on his return to London he took letters of introduction to a Moravian group which met in the city. And indeed it was at one of their meetings in a place in Aldersgate Street that John Wesley had a religious experience that turned round his whole life.

To quote Wesley's own words from his journal for the 24^th May, 1738, At the meeting there was someone reading from Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About quarter before nine whilst the speaker was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, that I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, in Christ alone for salvation and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and had saved me from the law of sin and death.

Strangely, brother Charles had had a similar experience a few days before, on his sick bed in his lodgings, and both John and Charles soon met to celebrate their new-found faith, singing together some verses which Charles had composed which began:

Where shall my wondering soul begin ?
How shall I all to heaven aspire ?
A slave redeemed from death and sin,
A brand plucked from eternal fire

It was this dual experience, by the Wesley's, of God's redeeming grace that sparked off a movement of religious revival in eighteenth century England that eventually led to the birth of the Methodist Church.