On Saturday 24 May 2025, the Anglican Church Diocese of Melbourne reached an historic inflection point, voting to elect Bishop Ric Thorpe as the next Archbishop of Melbourne.
It was a stunningly quick result. My wife Steph and I are both ordained,1 so grandparents had flown down from Sydney, my sister was primed for multiple babysitting contingencies, and we had prepared our three kids for potentially weeks of synod meetings and adjournments interrupting our family life. The previous election took seventeen ballots and stretched on for months.
We were bracing for a similarly long, and perhaps even fractious process. In the end, however, we elected on the first ballot cycle, after a generally constructive and respectful discussion, chaired by Bishop Genieve Blackwell with grace, warmth, and good humour. This is a testament to the hard work of the Board of Nominators, and the excellent documentation and videos they provided us to keep us well informed.
The speed was surprising. That the candidate we elected is an evangelical, however, comes as a surprise to nobody – all four candidates who were up for consideration are respected evangelical leaders. I serve as President of The New Cranmer Society, a reform movement within the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne seeking to promote orthodox Biblical teaching and mission-minded practice. For the first time, we were delighted to be able to endorse all four names offered by the Board of Nominators as in line with that vision. While we encouraged our members to focus on getting Bishop Ric over the line, we also advised them to vote yes for any of the other candidates who made it to the final round.
The risk, however, was that we would elect nobody this synod. In our non-preferential, multi-round ballot system, candidates must receive two-thirds of the vote in both the house of laity and the house of clergy to be elected as Archbishop. For a diocese as diverse as Melbourne, this is a high bar for any candidate to clear and is designed to facilitate a compromise between the various groups in our diocese (at the risk of oversimplification, the main groups are low-church evangelical parishes, theologically conservative Anglo-Catholic parishes, and more theologically liberal parishes).
Evangelicals have slowly been gaining influence in synod over several decades but are nowhere near the two-thirds required to elect. In the end, Bishop Ric was elected by a combination of evangelical delegates plus a group of more traditional, liturgically-minded delegates, including key Anglo-Catholic parishes and clergy. The latter were persuaded that Bishop Ric could lead as Archbishop for the whole diocese, and bring our diverse parishes together behind a shared mission.
Why Bishop Ric?
To understand both why this broad cross-section of Melbourne Anglicans got behind Bishop Ric, and the job he has before him, you need to understand that we are in the midst of a crisis.
First, there is the impending financial crisis. The diocesan budget has had increasingly large deficits for years. In 2022, I brought a motion to Synod insisting that we balance the budget – it was an urgent and unprecedented response to a $1.5M deficit. In 2024 Synod reluctantly approved a $4.2M deficit. Such deficits are usually ultimately resolved by selling church property, and I fear that future generations will wonder what we have to show for their inheritance we spent. This has been brewing for years, with no plan in sight to turn things around. And we have reached the end of the runway: we run out of cash in 2028.
Bishop Ric has a proven track record of leading transformative change at a diocesan scale as a Bishop. This will prove helpful in enabling him to quickly shape a lean, fit-for-purpose team at head office to serve our parishes effectively – and to do so before the money runs out.
Second, there is the existential challenge of Anglican church decline. Dozens of our churches will need to close soon unless something miraculous happens. Bishop Ric Thorpe has the evangelistic zeal and optimism about the future needed to mobilise a weary church towards a better future. I remember meeting him over lunch at a pub last year in North Melbourne and his first comment was “wouldn’t this be a great place to run Alpha?”
We originally heard about Bishop Ric as the “church planting bishop” and many assumed that this meant planting Holy Trinity Brompton style2 contemporary churches in a similar mould. It turns out a significant part of Bishop Ric’s work for the last decade has been about church growth – something all our parishes need. The day before Synod I spoke with a London priest in the Anglo-Catholic tradition who raved about the work Bishop Ric has done helping his parish grow. My non-evangelical friends who voted for Ric tell me they did so because they recognise that their parishes have even more to benefit from a creative approach to church growth than large church-planting networks like City on a Hill.
Into the challenges and opportunities of mission in Melbourne, Bishop Ric brings a creative strategic imagination backed by long experience in revitalisation across many churches in diverse contexts. Ric knows the challenges we face in Melbourne, having coached and consulted here regularly for years. And through the Gregory Centre for Church Multiplication, he has also worked with diverse churches in diverse contexts and cultures across the world. This global experience will be invaluable as he leads and encourages our people to reach our own neighbourhoods and networks with the gospel in new and effective ways.
Third, we have a crisis of leadership recruitment and retention. In 2008 we ordained twenty-nine deacons; this year the number of deacons ordained was eight. We need Bishop Ric to mobilise and support the next generation of leaders in every role – lay and ordained – across the diocese. Those who know Bishop Ric testify to his warmth, integrity, godliness, and prayerfulness. He is not flashy, but he is sincere, inspiring, and compelling. Some of us on the New Cranmer committee remember meeting him and thinking “he could even convince me to become an Anglican minister!” For clergy and lay people worn out by compliance burdens this is no small thing.
Many have commented how strange it is that we are importing a Bishop from London to be our next Archbishop (“who is London sending to the colony this time?”). Indeed. A crucial part of an Archbishop’s role is making good appointments, and no doubt a priority for Bishop Ric will be to leave us with a full bench of proven assistant bishops when he retires in 2035.
The challenges ahead
The Synod were very aware throughout this process that we must not pin all our hopes on any Archbishop. Ric is going to need a huge amount of prayer, a great team, and practical help from all sorts of people. But in meeting the challenges of finances, church growth and recruitment, we need a confident, compelling, and courageous diocesan bishop to guide us through the necessary change, complementing the good work happening in our parishes, colleges, and in parachurch ministries. I believe that God has answered our prayers and provided us with the leader we need.
Too many bishops around the world seem to have resigned themselves to managing decline towards graceful extinction. In Ric, we have someone who believes that God, in his mercy, might have a different story for us – churches growing, lives transformed by the preaching of the gospel, and youth groups and children’s ministries bursting at the seams. That fills me with hope, optimism, and thankfulness.
Rev Dr Andrew Judd is Deputy Principal: Community and Lecturer in Old Testament at Ridley College in Melbourne.
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