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Insights into a joint ministry

Bishops’ spouses talk about their experience in a new collection of stories


Benita Rumalshah
Married to the Bishop of Peshawar (Pakistan), the Rt Revd Mano Rumalshah

My heritage is from a Christian family in West Bengal in India. My great-grandparents crossed the threshold of faith to Christianity, which, according to my grandfather, offered him a whole new vision of godhead.

My encounter with the wider world began when, in my late 20s, I was offered a teaching post in Australia under the Commonwealth Teachers’ Programme, which eventually landed me in England. It was here that I got married to a priest of Pakistani origin (loving your enemy).

We got settled into the groove of living in a vicarage in our adopted Church and country of England. There was not much thought about returning to our roots, partly because we became quite cosy and comfortable, and, as we were from India and Pakistan, we knew that it would be extremely difficult for us to find a home in either of these countries.

However, a day of reckoning dawned. We were invited to serve in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, bordering a lawless zone with Afghanistan. We knew that the area included the Khyber Pass and was the setting for The Far Pavilions and some romantic Hollywood movies.

We accepted the challenge, and landed in this region almost 20 years ago. At the time of our leaving, I was a college lecturer in Chelsea, London. Having been brought up in India, I felt as a woman that I was being thrown into an abyss. To add spice to the situation, even my husband was equally foreign to the area; he was totally ignorant of the culture and language of these tribal Pakhtoons.

The jurisdiction of the diocese spans the whole of the province, with a population of about 16 million and with a sprinkling of about 10,000 Christians spread in the far reaches of the area. Church in such a hostile and fundamentalist place became very demanding, as our people not only were marginalised but also extremely poor, and the majority were menial workers.

My own identity and perception changed alarmingly, as I found myself to be the “First Lady”, without any deep knowledge of the culture, and especially the language. The realisation that to be a woman among these people was to live behind closed doors disturbed me to my very core. I had to rediscover my inner strength, and create a place for myself with a new sense of responsibility and purpose.

In this part of the world, faith plays a crucial role in our day-to-day living. Being the minority, we cannot emphasise enough the importance of having regular worship together to share, to meet, to revive our belief. As families, we encounter each other, we share our joys and sorrows; we know that we are together in our struggle. Love of our Lord infuses us with warmth and power.

This is a place where life and death go hand in hand. One is thankful to be alive and doing God’s will here because the next moment one might be attacked or taken hostage or even be shot at.


Comfort Fearon
Married to the Archbishop of Kaduna (Nigeria), the Most Revd Josiah Idowu-Fearon

Being a clergy wife has a profound effect on one’s life, regardless of the position of the husband (vicar, archdeacon, or bishop). I come from Nigeria, where being a clergy wife means that some expectations are placed on you. You are meant to fit into this role, and it is not a matter of choice.

You are seen as the mother of all. You have to organise all women’s programmes and take the leadership position. Nobody prepares you for this position, and nobody takes into account your level of education.

My husband’s election as bishop was meant to be a very joyous day, which it indeed was, and a day of promotion, but moving from a fairly affluent diocese to a newly created diocese with just the Bishop and three priests in a predominantly Muslim environment felt more like a demotion.

As the Bishop’s wife, I was now the “mother” of the diocese. As we travelled around, the feeling inside me was that of intense mission work; the scenes I saw were so surprising. I could not believe this was the same Nigeria. Christians were in the minority, and they were persecuted.

My world had changed: three children who needed looking after, working full-time as a nurse, and the need to be involved fully in the Church — this all meant a struggle.

Seeing the state of health care in the villages and around the diocese, I felt called to use my skills to start a rural health programme, as well as working full-time in the hospital. The Bishop’s time was taken up primarily with trying to raise funds, and searching for and training priests to fill the vacancies, which meant I did not see much of him.

Some of the local congregations had not seen a member of the clergy for a year, neither had they received communion. As Bishop in a predominantly Muslim community, my husband needed to foster good relationships with Muslims, and this is still being promoted.


Richard Schori
Married to the Presiding Bishop of the US Episcopal Church, Dr Katharine Jefferts Schori

I want to start the discussion about how Katharine’s election as a bishop affected my life at the point when she became a priest. This had not been in my life plan, since, when I married Katharine, she was a shy graduate student in oceanography, and neither of us had any idea that she would go in this direction.

We married in 1979, and it was a good ten years later that she started seriously thinking of going to seminary. At the time, my first reaction was that I could not imagine myself going around with someone wearing a “collar”. However, as an adaptable human being, I soon became comfortable with this, partly because we continued to live in our home town where I had my own job, activities, and friends.

Some years later, I found myself being stretched again, when there was talk of her being a candidate for Bishop of Nevada. This wasn’t in my life plan either, but, guess what, she was elected. My life has seldom been boring, but this put a whole new direction to it.

However, moving to a large city from our comfortable community in Oregon was difficult. My friends and organisations in Oregon were hard to give up. . .

Now I was being pushed again when Katharine became a candidate for, and then elected as Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church. This was epitomised when she called me immediately after being elected, saying: “I got elected, and I’m so glad you are an adventurer.”

I’m slowly figuring out the implications of being the PBS (Presiding Bishop Spouse), and it is looking like the biggest jump discontinuity (a mathematical term) yet. I am an admitted extrovert, but I’ve always valued having the ability of going off anonymously by myself or with friends, and this is becoming much more difficult.

On the other hand, I’m travelling more now, and meeting a wider and more influential circle of people. To do this takes serious study of schedules to see what activities make sense for me.

Basically, I am awed by this huge, huge opportunity in life that very few people will have. It is something that I had no expectations of, nor aspirations for, but here I am feeling wondrously blessed and humbled. My prayer is that I can be a worthy servant to our Church, the Anglican Communion, and our world.


Helen van Koevering
Married to the Bishop of Niassa (Mozambique), the Rt Revd Mark van Koevering

My life, with that of my family, has been completely turned around by my husband’s election as Bishop of Niassa in 2003, and I have experienced much of the change as loss. Perhaps our situation is exacerbated by living within a different cultural paradigm (I was brought up in the new town of Welwyn Garden City), and much was unprecedented.

I left behind the joy of my work as an ordained woman, to wait for acceptance of this by Synod in late 2004. With the poverty of education here, we let our two sons go on to boarding schools in South Africa. My husband’s travels are extensive, and we are apart and/or out of communication for several months a year.

There have been many moments of feeling either invisible in an “other” culture — the Bishop is usually credited with or thanked for my work — or highly visible, with crude sexist and racist “street-talk”. Living in the shadow of my husband, the Bishop, is not easy.

For my own spiritual growth, I have found writing for two UK Christian publishers invaluable, though best of all is my involvement as priest of a local church. With this community of 200, I am challenged by our lay-led church, and the connections between traditional religion and Anglicanism, belonging and baptism, life and death, fear and love. “God is good” and “God is great” are oft-repeated phrases in our churches, and I have learned their truth here.

These are edited extracts from Marriage, Mitres and Being Myself by Jane Williams (SPCK, £7.99 (CT Bookshop £7.20); 978-0-281-06018-4.

To place an order for this book, email details to CT Bookshop



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