LIKE me, John Thomson took to cycling as a curate despite our respective vicars’ deeming cycling beneath a cleric’s dignity. If Jesus rode on a donkey, a priest — and bishop — can ride a bike, a humility that Thomson catches well.

But, the book’s title notwithstanding, cycling is pretty low-key, with an introductory chapter linking biking with faith, character, and passion. Thereafter, cycling is used as a lunar slingshot to transport you to bigger planets, like formation, ministry, and suffering, where Thomson helpfully quotes John V. Taylor: “God has an end in view which is never abandoned, but no predetermined route to get there.”

He also breezes through chapters on the Spirit — noting Patrick Kavanagh’s description of the resurrection as “a laugh freed for ever and ever” — ecclesiology, leadership, multi-faceted truth, and challenging the Public Square, including seven sermons from his decade as Bishop of Selby.

Growing up in Uganda, Thomson enjoyed a cheerful and cheering Anglicanism with an international eye; then, training and teaching in South Africa, he was disturbed by the way in which white privilege was quasi-credal. All this gave a definite edge to his three decades of ministry in Yorkshire, when, like T. S. Eliot’s Magi, he was no longer at ease in the old dispensation.

As a vicar in Doncaster, Thomson was inspired by the theologian Stanley Hauerwas, whose fourfold stress on education through hearing, hallowing, hosting, and hospitality drove a successful parish ministry. It also drove his ministry as director of training, even though clergy proved resistant to the notion, à la Hauerwas, of today’s Church as an embodied apologetic for the gospel — not a phrase easily translated into dour Yorkshire.

Thomson proves himself a very serious and deep thinker: 119 substantial books are quoted in his “select” bibliography, and he has 230 footnotes for just over 140 pages of text. Suffragans are often hampered by having their plugs fitted with only five-amp fuses rather than the 13 amps of diocesans. Yet he writes with a flourish far beyond suffragan level: his succinct analysis concerning Living in Love and Faith is the best that I have read, unfettered by the crippling diplomacy thrust upon more senior bishops.

Selby, whose leafy lanes I have spent decades cycling through, has been fortunate to have had him in its midst. But his best tip takes us far beyond York’s Vale: when visiting Nice beach, never, ever, park your bike by the city sluice gates sporting the sign “Défense de stationner”.

The Rt Revd David Wilbourne is an hon. assistant bishop in York diocese.

On Your Bike: Reflections of a pedal pilgrim
John B. Thomson
DLT £12.99
(978-1-913657-90-1)
Church Times Bookshop £11.69