News

Turning point for CTBI as Scot becomes general secretary

April 2, 2006

Revd Bob Fyffe of the Scottish Episcopal Church has taken over as general secretary of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland at the CTBI church representatives’ meeting in Coventry.

Mr Fyfe, a former chaplain to the Glastonbury Festival, will lead the new reinvigorated CTBI which places importance on relations and shifts emphasis away from structures. "I will be looking for areas of ecumenical energy and resourcing those people who want to work towards continued reconciliation between people of different Christian traditions and different faiths," he said.

The Coventry meeting marked the turning point for CTBI as it changes its role to become an agency of Churches Together organisations in Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England. CTBI is now a charitable company limited by guarantee.

Representatives joined the congregation in Coventry Cathedral for morning worship on Sunday and visited the Chapel of Unity, where there are daily prayers for peace and reconciliation and the nearby ruins of the cathedral, where there is an altar cross created from two charred beams found in the ruins when the cathedral was bombed during the Second World War.

The meeting saw the departure of general secretary Dr David Goodbourn, who has completed his second year term as general secretary and is now president of the Partnership for Theological Education, in Manchester.

He said: "It’s been a tremendous privilege to serve Churches together over the last seven years, and to get to understand better the life and perspectives of the different Churches. These have been years when people have been struggling to discern the goals and future shape of the ecumenical movement, but the underlying relationship between the Churches of very different traditions is amazingly good.

" The commitment is there. Perhaps the future requires listening harder to one another, to see where that commitment might lead. That’s why it makes sense that the new general secretary of CTBI will be putting much of his time into a 'study' portfolio, enabling such listening at depth."