Stephen Fielding Bayne, Jr. (1908-1974) was called by Harvard University, at the awarding of an honorary degree, "an American Apostle whose faith and power are called to build communion among diverse elements of a great church."

A graduate of Amherst College and the General Theological Seminary, a parish priest in Missouri and Massachusetts, chaplain of Columbia University and Navy chaplain during World War II, Bishop of Olympia (1947-1959), he emerged as a global leader in 1959 when appointed the first executive officer of the Anglican Communion, a post he held until 1964. He was to go on to be a strong center of rationality and spirituality as a national leader, serving the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church during a time of turmoil and then spending his last years as a teacher and dean of General Seminary.

The high point of Bishop Bayne's service to the church came when, as executive officer of the Anglican Communion, he led the Anglican Congress at Toronto, Canada, in 1963, in what he called "a rebirth of the Anglican Communion." Where it had been an association of older, sending churches and newer, receiving and dependent churches, it was to be henceforth a true communion of equals. This found expression in a program adopted at Toronto and called Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ. He argued that the program grew out of discussions before and during the congress, but it is clear that it reflected Bishop Bayne's views and principally his understanding of the church.

Bishop Bayne's vision of the church was that of a body created out of love by God who seeks "an answering love for love's sake." The response of love is offering, mutual care, community, communion ... reconciliation, communion with God and with one another in God. In The Optional God (1953), he wrote: "The Church is the creation, offering and being offered. The Church is the breaking crest of the Universe returning to Him from whom it comes. The Church is existence itself, fulfilled and being fulfilled in the endless and inexhaustible liturgy of time." Its mission is to be, in the words of John Knox, the New Testament scholar that Bishop Bayne so much appreciated, "the constantly growing sphere of a constantly deepening reconciliation."

He was deeply disturbed that the Episcopal Church of the 1960s and '70s seemed to be anything but a reconciling community on mission for Christ. That mission was expressed in the Mutual Responsibility document as "response to the living God who in his love creates, reveals, judges, redeems, fulfills. It is he who moves through our history to teach and to save, who calls us to receive his love, to learn, to obey and follow."

Confronted by a church mired in bitter controversy, Bishop Bayne argued the necessity of lifting the differences and conflicts to the theological level, where differences of opinion and differences of emphasis and technique can find a new unity in common obedience which over-rides differences among individuals.

For him the ultimate concern was for spirituality and the lack of or distortion of the same. In a sermon preached at St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, he said: "In the center of our religion is the Eucharist, and the center of our life is the Eucharist, the offering in thanksgiving, the offering of our createdness as the best response that free people can make to the living God who brought them into existence. This is the triumph, this is the glory of the Kingdom. Look for it in the lives and hearts of your fellow men, for here is where you see most clearly the thumbprints of God, the saving work of Christ." o

The Rev. John Booty is the historiographer of the Episcopal Church.