Community leaders have paid tribute to Canon Howard Dillon after retiring last month as Executive Director of Anglicare. It is a position he has held since 1996.

Canon Dillon was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in January for his trailblazing service to the community through Anglicare in establishing new chaplaincies, nursing homes, counselling services and assistance for migrants and refugees.

Archbishop Peter Jensen said Canon Dillon was “much admired for his compassion and wisdom”. “Howard Dillon is a distinguished servant of Christ,” he said.

The Rev Martin Robinson, Chairman of the Anglicare Council, said Canon Dillon built on the work of his predecessors to make Anglicare a part of the national body ‘with a common sense of mission’. Under his leadership, the Anglican Home Mission Society, which will celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2006, became known as Anglicare in 1997.

Former Archbishop of Sydney, the Rt Rev Harry Goodhew recalls Canon Dillon as a “faithful evangelical … deeply involved in welfare work.”

“John Stott wrote about how evangelicals had backed away from social concerns. Howard has tried to keep those two things together,” Archbishop Goodhew told Southern Cross. “He was anxious to fashion the mission statement…that the primary task was to lead people to Christ.”

Canon Dillon was born in Campsie in 1939 and completed his training at Moore Theological College in 1963. He has served in the Diocese of Sydney as the Curate at St Stephen’s, Willoughby from 1963 to 1966, and the Rector of St Simon and St Jude, Bowral in the mid 1970s. He was Archdeacon of Melbourne from 1991 to 1996 and as the Executive Director, Mission of St James and St John (now Anglicare Victoria), from 1987 to 1993. Canon Dillon also served from 1966 to 1973 as an army chaplain in Australia and Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

Of Anglicare’s achievements in the last decade, Canon Dillon is particularly pleased with the establishment of counselling service for children who had been traumatised or abused. “Before, you had to wait three or four months to get a traumatised child to see a psychologist.”

He called on the government to keep supporting Australian families. “I would encourage them to keep funding the marriage and family relationship work, because in many cases that is the fence at the top of the cliff rather than the ambulance at the bottom,” Canon Dillon said.

Wollongong solicitor Peter Kell will become Anglicare’s new Executive Director in October.