Dr Muriel Porter writes:
BISHOP Keith Rayner, a former Australian Primate and Archbishop, first of Adelaide and then of Melbourne, was one of the most significant Australian church leaders of the 20th century.
As Acting Primate from 1989 to 1991, and then Primate until his retirement in 1999, Dr Rayner steered the Australian Church through tumultuous debates about the ordination of women priests and then liturgical reform. It has been said that he provided the intellectual leadership needed to wrestle at depth with the fundamental theological and ecclesiological issues involved in what was potentially an explosive fault line in the Church.
The struggle over women priests came to a head early in his time as Primate. In 1992, several Australian dioceses planned to move unilaterally after several attempts to pass legislation in the General Synod failed. Dr Rayner called for a moratorium after a planned ordination in the diocese of Canberra & Goulburn for February was foiled by a court injunction brought by opponents. But in March, Perth’s Archbishop, Dr Peter Carnley, defying the moratorium and defeating an attempt to stop him through the civil courts, ordained ten women priests.
Dr Rayner realised that unless the General Synod could now resolve the situation, the unity of the national Church was in peril. Under his careful leadership, as he worked with the House of Bishops, where he was highly respected, and over two separate General Synod meetings, legislation for women priests was finally approved in November that year. The next month, as Archbishop of Melbourne, Dr Rayner ordained 33 women priests in three separate services. Other dioceses also moved rapidly; the Australian Anglican Church had 92 women priests by the end of 1992.
Dr Rayner had first become engaged in the women’s-ordination debate when he was a member of the first doctrine commission of the Australian Church, which had been created in 1969. The commission successfully brought a resolution supporting women clergy to the 1977 General Synod. (The 15-year delay in approving women priests was because of the General Synod’s rigid constitution, structured to protect minorities.) Early in the commission’s work, he became personally convinced of the rightness of ordaining women, although he could see that it would be “disruptive” for the Church. Nevertheless, “whatever the short-term cost, the integrity of the Church demanded that the issue be honestly faced,” he said. He argued dispassionately, but persuasively, in synodical debates during the late 1980s and early 1990s, on sound theological grounds in favour of women clergy. His aim was to reach a degree of consensus which would prevent the split in the Church “that the pessimists were increasingly predicting”.
In 1995, he chaired another difficult General Synod meeting, at which A Prayer Book for Australia, the successor to the 1978 An Australian Prayer Book, was debated over long, tortuous sessions. The new book was finally approved, but only as “liturgical resources authorised by the General Synod”, because of last-minute opposition from the diocese of Sydney. It is not authorised for use in that diocese.
Keith Rayner was born in Brisbane on 22 November 1929, the youngest of four children of Sid and Gladys Rayner. His father ran a butcher’s shop. Educated at the Church of England Grammar School (now the Anglican Church Grammar School), he graduated with a BA from the University of Queensland, gained his theological qualification at St Francis’s College, Brisbane, and later undertook a Ph.D. at Queensland University, on the history of Anglicanism in Queensland. Later, he received honorary doctorates, and, in 2001, the Centenary Medal for service to Australian society through the Anglican Church of Australia.
Parish ministry in Brisbane followed his 1953 ordination. He became Bishop of Wangaratta in 1969, and from there he was elected Archbishop of Adelaide in 1975. During his time there, he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for “service to religion”. His election as Archbishop of Melbourne in 1990 followed the early death of Archbishop David Penman the previous year.
At the time of his retirement in 1999, Dr Rayner nominated the changed status of the laity as the greatest change that he had witnessed in his 30 years in episcopal orders. When he first became a bishop, the clergy were the Church, he said, and this attitude was reflected in both styles of worship and church management at every level from the national to the parochial.
By 1999, the laity were playing a very different part, and the changed position of women was an important part of this difference, he said. It was not just that women were now ordained, but there was a new concern to consider the female point of view, with language a symbol of that change.
Shortly before his retirement, Dr Rayner also engaged cautiously in the Church’s discussions about same-sex issues. After the contentious 1998 Lambeth Conference, he asked whether God was calling the Church to review its received tradition, “to see whether further light is to be shed on it”.
In 1963, he had married Audrey Fletcher, an accountant for the diocese of Brisbane. They had three children. In their retirement in Adelaide, he regularly presided and preached and led Bible studies in his parish. This ministry he continued faithfully until not long before he celebrated the 70th anniversary of his ordination in December 2023.
Audrey died in 2011. He died in Adelaide on 12 January, aged 95, and is survived by their children and eight grandchildren.
