John Charles WRIGHT

WRIGHT, JOHN CHARLES (b. Bolton, Lancs England, 19 Aug 1861; d. Christchurch, New Zealand, 24 Feb 1933). Anglican abp of Sydney.

John Charles Wright was the son of the Rev Joseph Farrall Wright, vicar of Christ Church, Bolton, and his wife Harriet (née Swallow). He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Merton College, Oxford (BA 1884, MA 1887, DD 1909). He was ordained deacon 31 May 1885, and priest 20 June 1886 by the bp of Peterborough.

Wright served as curate to E A Knox in the Leicestershire parish of Kebworth Beauchamp 1885-8, having been tutored by that leading conservative evangelical at Merton. With legal and public confrontations with noisy Anglo-Catholics continuing, Knox was one of those evangelical churchmen who pressed for the enforcement of the law. Wright was to pursue that same legalistic path in his search for order and good government in Sydney. Wright served two further northern curacies before becoming vicar of St George's Leeds 1885-1904. Knox, as bp of Manchester, appointed him residentiary canon, chaplain and rector of St George's Hulme in 1904 and archdeacon in 1909.

Wright sought to combine these marks of preferment at the hands of the theologically conservative Knox with an engagement with modern scholarship. The fruits of this were his involvement in the 'Group Brotherhood' (later Anglican Evangelical Group Movement) and the publication of Thoughts on Modern Church Life (1909) which addressed contemporary social and theological issues.

Wright was elected abp of Sydney in 1909, in preference to the outspoken millennialist and theologian, Griffith Thomas. It was a victory for the pragmatic F B Boyce (q.v.) over Nathaniel Jones (q.v.). It encouraged Wright, in succeeding Saumarez Smith (q.v.), to exercise a comprehensive ministry. This more moderate evangelicalism which eschewed the prophetic urgency of Jones' followers was expressed in Wright's appointment of A E Talbot (q.v.) as dean of Sydney and D J (Ben) Davies (q.v.) as principal of MTC. Yet Wright insisted on his interpretation of the Prayer Book dress code and imposed his will on the high church parish of St James, King Street. No chasuble would be worn there or anywhere in the diocese: it showed Anglo-Catholics in Sydney they must conform to legal diocesan requirements, rather than flout them in the name of individual judgement. Clergy were henceforth obliged to undertake not to wear the chasuble before Wright would license them. Of course at the other end of the spectrum during Wright's time, Mervyn Archdall and David Knox (q.v.) were conservative evangelicals similarly convinced of the significance of private judgement and the modest powers of bishops. Wright himself denied that bishops had the power to decide on liturgical variations: that was a matter for 'competent authority' in England. In the meantime the existing law had to be maintained.

These difficulties notwithstanding Wright sought to exercise pastoral care in his diocese, and to encourage others similarly. He farewelled troop ships regularly during World War One, consistent with his support for conscription as a moral, not a political issue. But in the following decades Anglicanism in Sydney became, with few exceptions such as R B S Hammond (q.v.), A E Talbot and Ben Davies, even more conservative socially and politically. As Talbot and Davies in particular became more critical of that conservatism, and espoused social reform, it seemed to some that Wright was a weak reed as archbishop, and that the true evangelical cause was at risk from his mild-mannered pastoral style, and his legalistic emphasis that seemed to mask the urgency of the gospel message.

These criticisms were reinforced by Wright's frequent illnesses after contracting pneumonic influenza in 1919, during which he would retreat from Sydney's humidity. He did not, however, retreat from a fight: with an outraged personal conviction, he campaigned passionately against the Good Friday opening of the (Sydney) Royal Easter Show, though without success. This failure emphasised the difficulties of a Christianity which sought to cooperate with society, and which was based on a post-millennial interpretation of the times. It left Wright at odds with that very society which he was seeking to conform to godliness. It gave his conservative critics cause to re-emphasise their search for holiness in the increasingly popular Katoomba Conventions.

As primate of the Church of England in Australia (since 1910), Wright sought comprehension and cooperation, desirably in the acceptance of a constitution which would give autonomy from England. In 1926 and 1932, despite his hopes, the proposals failed, in part because of the conservative caution of Sydney delegates unwilling to accept the apparent prospect of being outvoted in a national synod by delegates from Anglican traditions they distrusted. Wright's failure to address that rising Sydney conservatism revealed the gap between his own genial evangelicalism and that of those energetic disciples of Nathaniel Jones who eschewed compromise and social reform in favour of evangelism, missionary service and the search for an even more holy life. It was to culminate in the highly organised way in which Wright's successor, Howard Mowll (q.v.) was chosen after Wright died while visiting his daughter in New Zealand.

ADB 12; S Judd and K Cable, Sydney Anglicans (Sydney, 1987)

STEPHEN JUDD AND BRIAN DICKEY