THE next Bishop of Exeter, Dr Mike Harrison, is used to an itinerant life, and is looking forward to returning to the region where he courted his wife and discerned his vocation.

Dr Harrison, who is currently Suffragan Bishop of Dunwich in the diocese of St Edmundsbury & Ipswich, spoke to the Church Times shortly after the announcement on Tuesday of his translation to Exeter (News, 4 June).

It is not the first such move that Dr Harrison has made with his wife, Rachel, an occupational therapist, having served variously in the dioceses of Southwark, Leicester, and Bradford (before its amalgamation into the diocese of Leeds), and having trained for ordination Oxfordshire.

“I’ve had an itinerant kind of life. My father was an academic, and we moved around with him,” he said. It was a lifestyle that he had in common with his wife-to-be, whose father, the Rt Revd David Bentley, served as Bishop of Gloucester from 1993 to 2003 (Obituary, 3 April 2020).

The episcopal connections go further. Dr Harrison met Rachel when her sister married his friend Martin Gorick, who is now Bishop of Dudley. When Dr Harrison became Bishop of Dunwich, it gave Bishop Bentley the unusual distinction of having two sons-in-law who were bishops.

Dr Harrison discovered his vocation to ordained ministry during a period of his life in which he was spending a great deal of time in Devon, visiting his then-girlfriend, who was studying near to Exeter.

He was working in London, doing management consultancy part-time “to put bread on the table”, while also working at St Paul’s, Deptford, in south London. “I was doing youth work, pastoral work, visiting prisoners, and community engagement,” he said, and was helped in the discernment process by the example of parish priests he encountered.

As lead bishop on pioneer ministry, Dr Harrison says that he is concerned with the challenge of “presenting the never-changing gospel to an ever-changing people in an ever-changing culture”. Parish ministry, though, has “always been central” for him, and he says that he is committed to “sustain as far as possible stipendiary numbers” in his new diocese.

A supporter of the introduction of same-sex marriage in the Church of England, Dr Harrison says that he wants the diocese to be “a place where those across the spectrum on this can thrive, that we honour one another, that we speak well of one another, and that beyond differences on this, we’re united in terms of mission and evangelism”.

Dr Harrison is expected to be installed in the autumn.