[The] Revd John Pritchard is far from your average man of the church. Whilst guiding his flock back here in Oxford, he’s caused national controversy with his calls for church reform, in the process becoming the ultimate bogey-man for CofE traditionalists. Yet to some he is a leading progressive voice in a church plagued with doubt about its place in the world, an institution which in the eyes of many is fast descending into irrelevance. So who is this robed reformer?Despite hailing from Salford in Manchester, under the shadow of the Manchester Utd spotlights, Bishop John was educated right here in Oxford. Rather then reading Theology at some obscure Private Hall, the younger Pritchard was in fact a somewhat run-of-the-mill lawyer at St Peter’s. Of course this was before he received his ”˜calling’. “While I was putting all my ideas in the melting pot” the Bishop recounted “I encountered a Christian faith that was intellectually credible and emotionally satisfying”. From then on it was a matter of taking the relevant qualifications, at Oxford, Cambridge and Durham, eventually being ordained in 1972. Having successfully ascended the Anglican equivalent of the greasy pole, in 2007 he found himself returning to where it all began.
Bishop John sent shockwaves throughout the Anglican community when, in April 2011, he called for church schools to “serve the wider community”, arguing that they should reserve only one in ten places for church-going Christians….