Born in Derbyshire in 1955, I was schooled in Yorkshire, in Hull, York and Scarborough and all the stops between. I then studied Natural Sciences and Theology at Jesus College, Cambridge, where I was an Exhibitioner and Scholar, and trained for ordination at Westcott House, Cambridge. Prior to ordination, I worked for Barclays Bank in central Hull for six years and taught Greek and New Testament Studies as a Cambridge University Supervisor. In 1981, I returned to Yorkshire as a priest, ministering first in urban Middlesbrough, and then in a shadow-urban parish north of Pontefract, where, amongst other things, I ran an Ancient Greek class for twenty enthusiastic parishioners. In 1991 I became the Archbishop of York’s chaplain, (a cross between Sir Humphrey and Bernard of Yes Prime Minister fame) working with John Habgood for four years and then, after Archbishop Habgood retired, working with his successor, David Hope. I was also Director of Ordinands, where I selected women and men for the ordained ministry and took them through training to their first post.

In September 1997 I became the Vicar of Helmsley, a moorland market town in North Yorkshire, which has now become a central church serving eight other satellite churches. Archbishop John Sentamu appointed me a canon of York Minister in 2008. I have worked in over 30 schools, where I have enjoyed taking the most bizarre assemblies, and have been chair of Governors of both Helmsley Primary School and Ryedale Comprehensive School, one of the nation’s leading rural schools. From 2013-2017, I was co-chair of the National Society and lead bishop for Education in Wales.

In 2009 I was made a bishop and worked with the Archbishop of Wales in Cardiff, serving the Llandaff diocese which runs from Cardiff to the outskirts of Swansea and from the Vale of Glamorgan to the Heads of the Valleys. This is the area where Dr Who is filmed, and indeed it is a place of time-travel, because for every mile you travel north of the M4 in South Wales, you seem to go back ten years! In 2017 I returned to Yorkshire, living in Scarborough and serving as an assistant bishop in the York Diocese.

My heart’s desire is to communicate the humour, depth, sorrows, joys and sheer quirkiness of life inside and outside the Anglican Church, through several media. This has included A Vicar’s Diary and A Summer’s Diary, two ‘James Herriot with a dog-collar’ novels, set in the 1960s and published by HarperCollins in 1998 and 2001. In 1995 SPCK published Archbishop’s Diary a hilarious diary of my travels with Archbishop Habgood and also published in 2001 a quasi-philosophical work, You were made for me, exploring the development of personality through use of five personal pronouns, originally a series of Lent lectures at York Minister. My most notorious book was A Virgin’s Diary, (published by SPCK in 1999) which was really the Gospel according to a Palestinian teenager-with-attitude called Mary; since Christians believe that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ, why should the teenage mindset be excluded? Twelve years of writing a regular diary column in The Church Times has enabled me to chart a latter day Kilvert’s Diary, catching the highs and lows of ministry, which was later published by DLT in 2012 as The Helmsley Chronicles. Pan MacMillan published Shepherd of Another Flock, a memoir of his first year in Helmsley, in 2017. In 2020 I published Just John, the authorised biography of John Habgood, 95th Archbishop of York (SPCK) and Jesus Christ Superstar, a Lent Course (York Courses) – I previously wrote and starred in  two Advent Courses with York Courses – Expecting Christ (2013) and Jesus, the Voice that makes us turn (2014)

A son of a priest, I am married to Rachel, a teacher, and we have three adult daughters. My interests include cycling ( I cycle daily along the former railway line between Scarborough and Whitby, trying to beat to old train timetable!) hill walking, New Testament research and writing, particularly trying to strike a balance between the humorous and the poignant. I am a frequent after-dinner/lunch/coffee speaker, radio and TV broadcaster, guest preacher and retreat and conference leader.

We live near Britain’s second Jurassic Coast, whose tricky-to-access beaches contain dinosaur footprints, reminding us of the big beasts who formerly stalked the earth.

Someone suggested I should take the name Jurassic Anglican because my own Jurassic focus is to celebrate the big beasts who formerly stalked the Anglican world, many of whom I’ve walked beside in my 45-year ministry as a priest and bishop. With my father a priest before me, I have almost a century of sharp memories. Often forgotten, often dismissed as ‘yesterday’s men’, these ecclesiastic dinosaurs not only inform and thrill our present, but their wisdom can spare us the manifold wrong turnings which can only lead to disaster.  

With my characteristic blend of humour and pathos, likened to an ecclesiastical Alan Bennett, I scour history’s shores, charting the footprints of these giants, compared to which we are mere grasshoppers. Nostalgia may seem so retro and backward-looking; but who knows, my beach-combing may occasionally glimpse the biggest beast of them all, Jesus Christ.