The Ven. William Jacob writes:
CANON Timothy Tyndall was a distinguished parish priest in the dioceses of Southwell and Durham, and a respected senior Church administrator, as Chief Secretary of the Advisory Council for the Church’s Ministry (ACCM), responsible to the House of Bishops and the General Synod.
Timothy was born into a clerical family. His father was a decorated army chaplain in the First World War, who subsequently served in Birmingham diocese, where, as an Anglo-Catholic, he came under the ban of the modernist Bishop Ernest Barnes. He subsequently became Provost of St Ninian’s Cathedral. Timothy’s uncle, who also served in Birmingham, was subsequently Bishop of Bradford.
Timothy was educated at Marlborough, and, as a conscientious objector during the Second World War, served with the Friends’ Ambulance Service in China in the Chinese Civil War. On returning to England, he went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, and then trained for ordination at Wells Theological College. He was ordained deacon in 1951 in Southwell diocese, and served a four-year curacy at Warsop, a mining village.
Bishop Russell Barry then appointed him Vicar of St Leonard’s, Newark, and, after five years, to St Martin’s Sherwood, where he served for 15 years. As a parish priest, he was an enabler and encourager. He worked collegially. He was open to change and intellectual questioning of faith. He extended St Martin’s for community use and was much involved in community affairs, chairing the Sherwood Community Association and the Nottingham Council for Social Service. He established a reputation as an excellent parish priest, pastorally and administratively.
In 1975, John Habgood, then Bishop of Durham, appointed him to succeed Kenneth Skelton, who had become Bishop of Lichfield, to complete the pastoral reorganisation of the Sunderland parishes. As Priest-in-Charge of St Michael’s, Bishopwearmouth, and Rural Dean of Sunderland, he had the challenging position of working with a large team of clergy and lay leaders to rationalise the somewhat haphazard 19th- and early 20th-century proliferation of parishes to provide for the industrial growth and subsequent decline of the area.
Having satisfactorily achieved this over ten years, he was invited to be Chief Secretary of ACCM, to advise and oversee recruitment, selection, training, and continuing education for ordained and accredited lay ministry. This, with accountability to both the House of Bishops and the General Synod, formed the major element in the Synod’s budget. It was one of the most challenging and exposed posts in the Church of England. Timothy was well placed to take this on. From a clerical background, with long experience of bishops, he was not over-awed by massed episcopal ranks and had no expectations of joining them. His extensive experience, in Nottingham and Sunderland, of working with senior local-government officers was also valuable.
Timothy’s capacity as an encourager and enabler and his political skills in working with both complex committee structures and unwieldy decision-making bodies were considerable. He was good at managing both those senior to him and his own staff. He was a good listener and a great encourager. His informality and appropriate self-confidence put people at ease and enabled him to build up a confident team and achieve significant change in the selection and training of ordination candidates, while keeping all interested parties on board. He was a good person to work with.
He retired in 1990, with permission to officiate in the diocese of London, where he assisted in parishes in Acton and Chiswick. He exercised an extensive and much valued ministry as a pastor, mentor, and counsellor for clergy and many laypeople. He continued active and interested in political and church affairs until his death.
His wife, Ruth, was a geriatrician. She died in 1998. He is survived by their four children and four grandchildren. The esteem and affection in which he were held was demonstrated by the very large number of people who gathered to celebrate his 99th birthday in April 2024. He died on 5 December.