Bishops by Michael Keilemans

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This book is made up of a number of distinct parts, and it is unfortunate that the last part is the weakest as that tends to mean that the impression you take away and remember is that weakness.

Chapters 1 to 5 give an historical overview, of Bishops in the early church and then, from Christianity arrival in Britain, with a focus on their development with in the UK.

Chapter 6 looks at the socio-economic make up of English Bishops between 1905 and 2005, and points to the fact that although there have been some shifting trends in levels of public school education and choice of University in reality the background of the bench of Bishops remains firmly establishment – and the elite end of the establishment at that.

Chapter 7 takes the same socio-economic look at Welsh Bishops, and the most interesting thing is probably that the disestablishment of the Church in Wales in 1920 has not fundamentally changed the leadership of the Church.

Chapter 8 looks as Scotland, and here there is a real contrast – while Anglicans in England and Wales are the Church of the establishment, even after “disestablishment” in Wales, fellow Episcopalians in Scotland are a minority and marginal Church, and so their Bishops are rather different characters.

Chapter 9 gives some supplemental remarks on contemporary thinking on the episcoal role.

Chapters 10 and 11 provide the results of questionnaire survey that Keulemans undertook of recently retired Bishops. Within this that Bishops rated “problematic clergy” as their biggest frustration and “pastoral care of clergy” as their biggest satisfaction is interesting, especially when coupled with a majority of Clergy saying they would turn to Bishop for help but only a minority being able to say they felt they had actually been helped by Bishop. This points to the dysfunctional relationships within the structures of the Church.

And finally Chapter 12 entitled “Where do we go from here?” which lacked any meaningful grounding in the preceding evidence base presented and unfortunately is little more than an opinionated rant.