The Ven. William Jacob writes:

CANON Ronald Coppin made a significant contribution to minis­ter­ial training in the C of E. He was involved with the Advisory Council for the Church’s Ministry (ACCM), was founding Prin­cipal of the North-East Ordina­tion Course, and Dur­­ham diocesan director of min­­istry and subse­quently its director of post-ordination training.

Ronald was born in Cheshire and educated at Altrincham Grammar School, from where he went to Birmingham University, and then to train for ordination at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. He was ordained in Lon­­don diocese, to serve his title at All Saints’, Harrow Weald. He was then appointed domestic chaplain to Bishop Grier of Manchester, which proved valuable preparation for his subsequent work alongside bishops.

After five years, he moved on to join the staff of St Aidan’s College, Birkenhead, a liberal Evangelical theo­­logical college. He had an acute and critical mind, and there, in 1965, contributed a prescient article to Theo­­logy, pointing out that the ob­­servance of Remembrance Sunday was falling into decline and that the order of service drawn up in 1920, in changed times, unhelpfully dwelt on the heroism of the fallen, and neg­­lected any reference to reconciliation and peace. Perhaps coincidentally, that year, the then Bishop of London included a prayer for peace in the Cenotaph service. Subsequently, the Archbishops convened an ecu­­men­­ical gathering to review and revise the annual Remembrance Sunday order of service.

When St Aidan’s was closed in the first round of theological-college closures in the later 1960s, following a sharp decline in numbers of or­­dina­tion candidates earlier in the decade, Ronald was appointed to the staff of ACCM. He was a selec­­tion secretary for ordination can­­di­­d­ates, and Secretary of the Com­­mittee for Theological Educa­­tion, which over­saw policy for min­­isterial train­ing. There, he was in­­volved in two im­­portant initiatives in minis­ter­ial train­ing.

Ethics had declined to an in­­sig­nificant element in ordination train­­ing. Ronald became secret­­ary of a working party of the Church’s most distinguished moral theologians, to draw up a new and thorough syl­labus, pub­­lished as Teaching Christian Ethics in 1973.

He also initiated re­­cruiting two ordinands each year to spend a semester at the English College in Rome, so that they might experience something of the for­­ma­­tion of Ro­­man Catholic priests, and, over the years, a network of un­­der­­standing and friendship might de­­velop be­­tween Anglican and RC clergy, By now, about 100 Anglican clergy must have benefited from this ex­­peri­ence.

In 1974, John Habgood, the newly appointed Bishop of Durham, who, as Principal of Queen’s College, Bir­­mingham, had known Ronald’s work at ACCM, ap­­pointed him Canon Librarian of Durham Ca­­thedral and his director of ministry. In these posts, and in his ministry in the cathedral with nu­­mer­­ous stu­dents, Ronald had a significant influ­ence on the de­­velop­­ment of many vocations.

He also continued to be actively involved in the work of ACCM, where he was chair of the examiners for the then General Ministerial Ex­­amina­­tion; he later chaired the House of Bishops’ Inspectorate of Theological Colleges and Courses. He constructively brought his sharp mind, and sometimes his sharp tongue, to bear on the development of the Church’s structures for the formation of or­­dained ministry, as well as on the development of indi­viduals’ voca­­tions to ordained min­­istry.

In 1997, Ronald retired to Lon­don, where he assisted at St George’s, Bloomsbury, and was able to relieve the Rector of much of the burden of the major World Monuments Fund-funded restoration of Hawks­moor’s master­piece. He also helped out in other churches in central Lon­don. Sadly, he endured a long period of poor health before his death.

Canon Ronald Coppin died on 15 April, aged 93.