BRITAIN: Britain's first black archbishop yesterday accepted his appointment to the Church of England's second most senior post with a call for the church to become "once again a spiritual home for all English men and women".
John Sentamu (56), who was yesterday named the next Archbishop of York, acknowledged that the Church had gone through a "trough" in its fortunes, and said it needed to regain its "vision and confidence" and be ready to take risks in order to reconnect with England.
Speaking at a press conference at Church House in Westminster to mark his elevation, Bishop Sentamu said he was "surprised" to have been chosen as the successor to David Hope, who resigned in February to take up a post as parish priest in Ilkley, West Yorkshire.
The Ugandan-born Bishop of Birmingham is a former barrister and judge who fled Idi Amin's Uganda and trained as a priest in Cambridge before rising to become Bishop of Stepney in 1996 and of Birmingham in 2002. He described the job awaiting him at York as an "exciting prospect". The sixth of 13 brothers and sisters, he has two grown-up children with his wife Margaret.
He hailed the example of the British missionaries who brought the Christian faith to his homeland, and urged the Church to make its voice heard "locally, nationally and internationally".
He called for reconciliation in the rows over gay priests and women bishops which have brought the church close to schism, urging African primates not to break with the Anglican communion in protest at the ordination of a homosexual bishop in the US.
The bishop, who was last week appointed by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to a panel to help resolve disputes over the church's attitude towards homosexuality, said: "What I hope is that when people violently disagree with one another in the same family, they will find a language for living together and ways of talking to one another."
But he made clear he stood by the Lambeth Resolution of 1998, which rejects homosexual practice as "incompatible with scripture" and rules out gay marriage.
Looking ahead to next month's general synod, at which fierce debate is expected over women bishops, he said: "I hope that, should we move towards ordaining women to the episcopate, those who oppose ... will still be made to feel that they belong to this particular church, and I am sure that arrangements can be made to make that possible."
He invoked the Elizabethan settlement of 1559 - which imposed a uniform type of worship across England in a bid to end confrontation between Protestants and Catholics - as a model for a church which had a responsibility for all the country's people, including those of other denominations or faiths and non-believers.
"I hope we can create a church and a culture which is more relaxed and open to taking risks and being creative, so that the Church of England is once again a spiritual home for all English men and women, as the Elizabethan settlement had hoped," he said.
He issued a warning to the affluent West that its material wealth could stand in the way of personal fulfilment. "For many in the West, Descartes' Cogito ergo sum - I think therefore I am - has been replaced by the motto Tesco ergo sum - I shop therefore I am. To judge your human happiness by how big your shopping trolley is, is to miss the point," Bishop Sentamu said.