The Revd Richard Farr writes:
THE Revd John Richardson, who died on 31 March, aged 63, was a friend and a colleague for nine years. He was often late, usually feeling the cold, and invariably attached to his latest gadget.

He was someone for whom life was not easy. As his churchwarden at Ugley said: "It's an old adage that it's the vulnerable who do the most good in a society, and John Richardson was its posterchild: a man who made Eeyore look like a celebrity DJ."

He had been given an extraordinary mind, and was a true polymath. He loved star-gazing, was eager to share a new curry sauce, and frustrated that a teenager was a better drummer. He was an early user of MapMyRun. He had a burden for writing, and, when the muse was on him, he found it hard to stop, let alone eat, or know whether it was day or night.

John grew up in a liberal Anglo-Catholic parish in Charlton. He studied at Keele University, and, nurtured by the Christian fellowship that he experienced there, made a life-long commitment to Christ in 1971.

He trained for ministry at St John's, Nottingham, and served two parishes in Birmingham. He joined the chaplaincy at North East London Polytechnic, and while there, in 1993, went to study at Moore Theological College in Sydney, Australia.

This varied background meant that he had a singular perspective on what was going on in the Church of England, and the approach that Evangelicals might take. He urged us to work within the system before going outside it, to take bishops seriously, and to make use of Resolution C. He was a visionary with a concern for the whole denomination, as can be seen in his book A Strategy that Changes the Denomination (Lulu).

He wanted the diocese to be more biblically literate. Out of a diocesan conference that he and others thought was dire came the idea for the Chelmsford Anglican Bible Conference. He wanted ordinands to have a better understanding of why the Church of England mattered; and so the Junior Anglican Evangelical Conference was born. Implementation and organisation were not his strong points, however, and he graciously allowed others to help him bring ideas to fruition.

John was an excellent speaker and lecturer, a favourite at the Cornhill training course. He could debate with the brightest, but was also able to instruct "the ploughboy", because he longed to see others "get it". He took you inside the passage or subject, enabled you to see it from previously unimagined angles, even if you had wondered where the discursive start was going.

As his churchwarden said: "My early memory of him was turning to my fellow-churchwarden, after his first sermon at Ugley, to receive the response, 'The best sermon I have ever heard.' This was no flash in the pan, and the power of his preaching was utterly remarkable."

In recent years, he was thrilled to discover the joy of reading the Bible one to one. He is survived by Alison, his widow, and his siblings Liz and Kate, Peter and Daniel.

The last words are those of Dr Peter Jensen, former Archbishop of Sydney: "John's passion was to serve Christ with all his heart, mind, soul, and strength. He was highly gifted and a faithful teacher of God's word. He combined this with a strategic sense far above the ordinary. It was a privilege to have him as a friend and to admire him as a fellow servant of the Lord Jesus Christ."