Religion: Bishop of God’s Country

All through the 25,000 green and watery square miles between the Cascade Mountains and the Pacific Ocean that constitute the Episcopal diocese of Olympia, Wash., people knew last week that the bishop was back. And in Seattle, Bishop Stephen Fielding Bayne Jr., 50, just returned from a trip to Russia and five weeks at London’s Lambeth Conference, climbed into a U-Drive-It Chevrolet, set out on a fast 2,000-mile trip to tell his Episcopal flock what he had seen and heard. Somewhere, between the spaghetti-and-meatball church suppers, busy Bishop Bayne knew he would have to fit in a few other chores, including the preparation and delivery of three sermons each Sunday, a meeting of the State Child Welfare Advisory Committee, the christening of a minister’s baby, the welcome for the Presiding Episcopal Bishop of Japan, the 50th anniversary celebration of the Episcopal Church in Seattle’s Japanese community, and the annual meeting of Diocesan Women.

Then he would be off again—to next month’s Episcopal General Convention in Miami Beach, where he is one of the leading candidates to succeed retiring Henry Knox Sherrill as U.S. Presiding Bishop, top office in the Episcopal Church.

Bishop Bayne himself played down his chances: “For a week I was the golden boy at Lambeth,† and people get ideas. But then they go home and ponder and think better of it. I hope we younger men can promote the selection of an older and wiser man, if only because 18 years in the Presiding Bishop post, removed from parish work, would dry up any man—it would try the Angel Gabriel.”

Naval Hitch. Manhattan-bred, Amherst-educated Bishop Bayne is not happy at the possibility of leaving what he calls “God’s Country”—the diocese that was one of the smallest in his church when he came to it eleven years ago, has since grown from 18,000 to almost 40,000. He came to Washington from a slum parish in St. Louis, a town-and-gown parish in Northampton, Mass. (Smith College) and a hitch as chaplain in the Navy.

In the Olympia diocese, blue-eyed Bishop Bayne promptly began working to make Episcopalianism less of what he deplores as a “fancy-pants” denomination, sending more and more ministers out to the logging and fishing villages and the river-dam projects. “If I had lived in the 18th century,” he once said, “I would probably have been a Methodist.”

Joy in Battle. Bishop Bayne wades into the big picture—race relations, social reform, international affairs—with the kind of joy in battle that has given him a reputation as one of the most outspoken churchmen in the U.S. Sample blasts:

¶ On the Dave Beck labor union scandals (for which he coined the term “beck-adilloes”): “Irresponsible power—power wielded by labor tycoons as well as by management tycoons, wielded by cynical men who are above any moral law except the income tax . . . Christian leadership will have only itself to blame for not bearing its witness in the marketplace, where Christ’s witness belongs,” if the situation results in the addition of “one more province to the empire of the state.”

¶ On the Anglican Church’s position in the Princess Margaret-Peter Townsend brouhaha: “The inevitable mush-headed vicar has put in his appearance . . . There could be a slightly Gilbert and Sullivanish flavor to the whole affair—royal background, star-crossed lovers, Episcopal blunderbuss, aging clerical sap, now for the mustard and cress—if it weren’t all so desperately troubling . . . The lives of two people . . . her duty and his … a chaotic moral theology . . . Romantic individualism was masquerading as the Gospel—is there anyone not moved to the, deepest and most penitent intercession for all concerned?”

¶ On the signs of the times: “The only trouble with our intellectual habit of likening our times to the . . . decadent Roman Empire and the challenge of the barbarians is that in the earlier case there was a vital, revolutionary new leaven at work . . . Whether Christianity can once again perform that function remains to be seen. To do so would require a pretty radical rebirth of Christian thought, of which I wish I could see more signs. Perhaps we may find such a rebirth in the remembrance of the Birth, that timeless fact about God which did once turn the world upside down. But we shall have to separate the birth from the Cadillacs and the crystal decanters and the ladies’ electric shavers.”

† Where he headed the committee considering The Family in Contemporary Society, which firmly endorsed birth control (TIME, Sept. 8). Bayne was the only American at this council of Anglican Communion bishops to head a major committee.