Good move for bishop

The Queen and the Prime Minister knew before Michael Perham did that he was to become Bishop of Gloucester.

Then Dean of Derby, the first he knew of his appointment was when a brown envelope from 10 Downing Street clattered through the letter box with the Christmas cards last year.

"I knew one or two people intended to put my name forward but we didn't take that with any seriousness because there could have been dozens of names," he recalls. Unknown to him, representatives for the Archbishop of Canterbury and the PM took surreptitious soundings about him and his suitability for the post.

Then a nominations commission whittled down the possibilities to two, the first of which by convention is rubber-stamped by the PM and sent to the Queen. "It's all terribly confidential," explains Bishop Michael, 56.

"There's no interview. They are going entirely on what people know about me and what people have written about me."

In preparation for our meeting, the Bishop's office has sent me a breakdown of how he has spent his first 100 days in office - two pages of tightly-packed bullet points. It is a feat of endurance - meeting the great and the good, visiting deaneries and county institutions, attending myriad events not-to-mention delivering 22 sermons.

At the same time he has presided over the move south of his family consisting of wife Alison, a palliative care specialist, and their four teenage daughters.

"I've worked quite hard haven't I," he acknowledges quietly when I remark on the exhaustive list.

"I think I've tried to make my first 100 days a long induction course. "I'm relatively tired but I have been carried along by the novelty of it and the encouragement from people," he says. "Apart from the Queen I'm the most prayed for person in the district."

Since taking up the post he has met thousands of people from across the professional and social landscape from parish priests to local authority chief executives, from newspaper editors to chief constables and charity workers.

"They are all expecting you to tune in quite quickly to what they are saying and to ask intelligent perceptive questions," says the bishop.

"You've got to have quite a lot of humility because you've got to be prepared to say I don't really understand what that is about. "You've got to be a good listener and a good learner."

An Oxford theology graduate, there was never any doubt he would devote his life to the church.

"I'm one of those strange beings, they don't make many of them these days, who always wanted to do it," he says.

"I always believed that it was what I was called to do. I was never tempted to do anything else.

"Some people might say I'm not capable of doing anything else." The man, who cannot appear to resist a self-deprecating aside, appears to have risen seamlessly through the church ranks.

Setting out in the mid-1970s as a curate in the Canterbury diocese, he went on to serve as chaplain to the Bishop of Winchester at the time, he was secretary of the Church of England doctrine committee, team rector in Poole, canon and precentor of Norwich Cathedral before becoming provost and then dean of Derby.

A member of the Archbishop's Council, he also chairs the General Synod's business committee.

"They keep giving me different jobs in the hope I will do something well," he jokes. At the dizzy heights of bishop, does he miss the grassroots contact of parish church life?

"I can't have the same pastoral relationship to people in the parish that I had when I was a vicar but I can hope to have it, after a while at least, with my clergy. If I'm a good bishop I need to know the clergy and be a pastor to them," he says.

"They are spending all their ministry doing what is the most important job of all - being the local priest."

Life in the church, from parish priest to archbishop, is one of tireless service and dedication to duty. And finding time for life outside the calling is difficult.

"I'm not very good at relaxing," says Bishop Michael. "It's a big job and I love it. I have to fight hard with myself to create space away from my work for my family. My principal job is not to neglect my wife and four children. They will probably say I'm not very good at it but I do try." Hobbies, he says, can wait until retirement.

He likes holidays in short bursts of a week at a time, especially to the family holiday cottage in Cumbria.

There he is able to "relax instantly" immersing himself in novels and historical biographies.

Salley Vickers' Mr Golightly's Holiday has been his read of the summer. But in the end it is family that keeps Michael Perham from being engulfed by the all-demanding role of bishop.

"They just about keep me in touch with bits of culture I might otherwise lose touch with," he says.

"And, more importantly, they refuse to take me seriously so if I'm in danger of becoming grand and self-important it wouldn't work at home."

"I think there are strong reasons for the ordination of women as priests and that there will be for ordaining them as bishops, which is what we've now got to face.

"I think women clergy have brought real and new skills and instincts into the ordained ministry of the church.

"I'm obviously behind them and I hope we will proceed within a few years to make it possible for women to be bishops. "But I do understand where the people who are opposed to that come from.

"It is mainly a thing about whether the Church of England has a right to decide such a thing on its own or step by step with other churches like the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches.

"In the end I don't go with that view but I understand that and therefore I want a church broad enough to encompass those that disagree with that.

"I think there's always room in the church, in the membership of the church, for anyone who calls themselves a Christian and wants to pursue truth.

"The more difficult issue is not about being a member of the church but about holding office and people will differ in what they think are the stumbling points.

"I thought Jeffrey John should have been a bishop and that actually there was a kind of unreasonable reaction to his appointment.

"You can only move at the speed at which people can find a common mind and sometimes you have got to hold back and say you haven't got a common mind on this and therefore even if this seems right we hold back because other people can't cope. "But it's not an issue I'm dealing with every day."

"I'm an optimist by nature and about the church. "It says in the New Testament Christ loves the church and I think that is true.

"Whatever a mess we make of it, it is a divine institution and God isn't going to abandon it but we may need to learn quite a few lessons and it may get worse before it gets better.

"Declining congregations may be because we got to change but it's important to say we haven't got all declining congregations. It's a mixed patch with reversing trends.

"There's a sense in which things that are unfashionable start meaning something again after the rise of the kind of Godless age we have lived through where people have rejected a lot of old values.

"People can see we are not actually a happier and more satisfied society than we were. "More people live with stress, depression and heartbreak, more people live alone rather than as a community.

"There have been some wonderful things that have happened to the human race in the last 50 years but on the whole it has been a fairly depressing process.

"Almost inevitably people are starting to turn back and see that there's more to life and saying where have we gone wrong. "I hope it will be a recovering of spirituality."

"I'm not keen to make great pronouncements yet. I'm suspicious of someone not 100 days in with all the answers.

"We need to be fairly bold about doing something new, in new ways, in different places and we must not expect the church to be immensely tidy.

"I quite like things to be neat and tidy but we have a church which in the Forest of Dean is quite different from the North Cotswolds and from a small village.

"We just need to be willing to let things spring up and grow in different ways not fit some grand design.

"I want to encourage people to be imaginative and bold and take some risks and not to want for some great central strategy to emerge from their bishop because it will not."

"I think there's a lot of affluence in Gloucestershire that strikes you quite a lot coming from Derby which probably makes it even harder for the people who do live a bit on the margins.

"When you see those maps of where there's deprivation they are so small you tend not to notice them but if you live in them they are as real as in some of the great northern cities.

"I think a bishop's job is partly to make sure people on the edge of society are not forgotten about and to keep on reminding the more affluent people that not everybody is as privileged as they are."