| THE next Bishop of Coventry is to be Canon Dr Christopher Cocksworth, Principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge, it was announced on Monday. He is 49. His consecration and enthronement are expected in the autumn.
Before his present appointment at the Evangelical theological college in Cambridge, Dr Cocksworth was director of the Southern Theological Education and Training Scheme from 1997 to 2001, and was made an Hon. Canon of Guildford Cathedral in 1999.
He studied at Manchester University, and was trained for the ministry at St John’s College, Nottingham. He is married to Charlotte, a teacher, and they have five sons.
After the announcement, Dr Cocksworth paid tribute to his predecessors at Coventry the Rt Revd Simon Barrington-Ward, now the staff chaplain at Ridley College, and the Rt Revd Colin Bennetts, who retired in December. “They have done so much of the work that in some ways it will be easy,” he said. He wanted to follow their “deep commitment to the gospel and an openness to the Holy Spirit and a willingness to hold those two together”.
He looked forward to working with the city’s well-established ethnic-minority and Islamic communities, he said. “The second day after I became Principal at Ridley Hall was 9/11, and I realised the world had changed.” He saw it as part of his duty to help Christians respond to that new world.
“I have encouraged Christians to engage regularly with Islam, because I have found that it is not difficult to get a hearing, and that can be marked by a deep respect by both parties,” he said.
He spoke of the part Coventry had played as a 20th-century icon of the possibilities of the human spirit. “There are now new realities, so that the city is perhaps on the cusp, where new energies are needed that would spark a new wave of developments. I would like to play my part in that regeneration.”
He saw Coventry Cathedral, where the post-war cathedral is joined to the ruins of the old, as “an expression in bricks and mortar” of the work he had been doing on the Liturgical Commission with Common Worship, to integrate the past and the present. |
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