Jonathan Gledhill
Popular Bishop of Lichfield who found central directives a trial
THE RIGHT REVEREND JONATHAN GLEDHILL, who has died aged 72, was Bishop of Lichfield from 2003 to 2015, having previously been suffragan bishop of Southampton for seven years.
Taking both population and area into account, the diocese of Lichfield is one of the largest in the Church of England. It includes Staffordshire, Stoke-ontrent, the Black Country of the West Midlands and northern Shropshire, with approximately 400 parishes and 600 churches.
Uniting such a diverse flock in a common sense of vision and purpose required something of an episcopal heavyweight and Gledhill did not find it easy to offer decisive direction to a strong-minded but disparate leadership team, which included three quasiautonomous area bishops and four archdeacons.
A story has it that when yet another central evangelism strategy was announced, requiring all parishes to produce a Mission Action Plan, the comment came back from north Shropshire: “There are three words that Salopian country folk do not understand – mission, action and plan.”
Nevertheless, Gledhill was much loved as a gentle, kind and humble pastor of his priests and people, who took time to listen, pray and think things over before eventually coming to a decision.
He was respected as dutiful, diligent and steadfast, yet forgiving and tolerant; and during his tenure Bishop’s House in the Cathedral Close at Lichfield became a place of warm and generous hospitality.
Gledhill also possessed a wry and dry sense of humour and was much amused when, at his enthronement ceremony as the 98th Bishop of Lichfield, the great west doors of the Cathedral opened to admit the new bishop – followed in solemn procession by the cathedral cat strutting imperiously up the nave as though to say: “This is my territory!”
Jonathan Michael Gledhill was born in Windsor on February 15 1949. After graduating from Keele University, coincidentally in the diocese of Lichfield, he trained for Holy Orders at Trinity College, Bristol, also gaining a Master’s degree from Bristol University.
He was ordained in 1975 to a curacy at All Saints’, Marple in Greater Manchester. Three years later he moved to Kent as priest-in-charge of St George’s, Folkestone.
From 1983 to 1996 he served as vicar of St Mary, Bredin, Canterbury, which experienced spectacular and sustained growth under his leadership. His reflections on his time there formed the basis of his book, Leading a Local Church in the Age of the Spirit, published in 2003.
Meanwhile, Gledhill combined his parochial duties with other roles including that of a tutor at the Canterbury School of Ministry, Rural Dean of Canterbury and Honorary Canon of Canterbury Cathedral.
In 1996 he was consecrated to the suffragan see of Southampton in the diocese of Winchester. He served as chairman of the National College of Evangelists from 1998 to 2010 and as the Church of England’s link bishop to the Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht from 1998 to 2014.
In 2007, his alma mater at Keele awarded him an honorary doctorate in recognition of his “outstanding contribution to the Church and to the people and the County of Staffordshire”. He entered the House of Lords in 2009.
Gledhill was a keen skier and an accomplished sailor. Visitors to his study were able to admire a sizeable model sailing yacht that he himself had assembled and rigged.
Shortly before his retirement in 2015 he announced that he had Parkinson’s disease.
He is survived by his wife, Dr Jane Gledhill, a university lecturer and lay reader whom he married in 1971, and with whom he had a daughter and a son.
Jonathan Gledhill, born February 15 1949, died November 1 2021