Most of the Diocese of Sydney is in full engagement with the Archbishop’s challenge to mission. We are in mission focus and this is leading us to reconsider all our usual activities and the presumptions on which they are based. Time has been spent reviewing the present so we can effectively move into the future.
But we should remember one well-known saying. It runs something like this: ‘you can’t really be certain where you are going until you know where you have come from’.
This makes Bishop John Reid’s recently published biography of Sir Marcus Loane, former Archbishop of Sydney and Primate, a very timely book. Bishop Reid and Acorn Press have done us a real service. For it is in the last decades of the 20th century, from the 1960s onwards that we find important clues to what makes up the Diocese of Sydney today.
Archbishop Jensen wrote that Sir Marcus Loane’s “episcopate was formative for the organisational, structural life of the Diocese, for its commitment to evangelism and its gospel witness to this nation.”
The foreword was written by Roderick West. I agree with his opinion that the book gathers strength as it goes and becomes totally engrossing from the moment it records Marcus Loane’s consecration as assistant Bishop.
Those who participated in much or all of the events in the Loane episcopate will have their own opinions about what should or should not be included, and what interpretation should be offered. That’s the challenge that biographers such as John Reid face when writing about someone to whom they and others were close, and about events in which they participated.
So it is a mite disappointing to find some details one hoped for not there. For example why did Archbishop Hugh Gough’s episcopate came to a sudden end? That example is perhaps tendentious but in that chapter the words are very careful indeed. Later biographers will explore such matters. In 2004, who cares about why an archbishop resigned in the 1960s.
But what we do care about is to be found in Bishop Reid’s book. The genius and emphases of Marcus Loane’s episcopate, gospel exposition in preaching, commitment to evangelism, the 1959 Billy Graham crusade, and commitment to sound scriptural training of men and women preparing for ministry in the diocese.
It is only a slim volume, and enjoyable reading. Read it through to find out many of the clues about what has formed the Diocese of Sydney.

Margaret Rodgers