Towering intellectual leader was highly respected across church

THE RIGHT REVEREND DR KEITH RAYNER AO November 22, 1929-January 12, 2025

Keith Rayner, a former Anglican archbishop of Melbourne and one of the most significant Australian church leaders of the 20th century, has died in Adelaide at the age of 95.

As primate (leading bishop) of the Anglican Church of Australia from 1991 until his retirement in 1999, Dr Rayner steered the Anglican Church through perhaps its most turbulent decade. He provided the towering intellectual leadership needed to wrestle at depth with the fundamental theological and ecclesiological issues involved in what was potentially an explosive fault line in the church.

First, as the fractious decades-long debate about women’s ordination came to a head, he chaired the church’s general synod – the Anglican Church’s “national parliament” – through two difficult meetings in 1992 that finally approved the ordination of women as priests. Barely a month later, in December that year, he presided over the first Melbourne ordinations of women priests. There were so many women waiting for ordination in Melbourne that three services were required that month.

Second, just three years later, in 1995, he chaired another difficult general synod meeting as the Anglican Church struggled to agree to a second modern prayer book. A Prayer Book for Australia, the successor to the 1978 An Australian Prayer Book, passed the synod but despite numerous concessions made during the meeting, it failed at the last moment to achieve the approval of the conservative diocese of Sydney. Nevertheless, it is used extensively around the rest of the Australian church.

On both occasions, many believed it was Dr Rayner’s firm but careful leadership committed to building consensus that ensured that the national church was able to survive intact and with a degree of equanimity. Despite the significant differences in the national church between conservatives and progressives, he was always highly respected across the church.

A considerable theologian, he had first become engaged in the women’s ordination debate when he was a member of the first doctrine commission of the Australian church. The commission, which began meeting in 1969, brought a resolution in favour of women clergy to the national church in 1977. Dr Rayner has said that while early in the commission’s work he became personally convinced of the rightness of ordaining women, he could see that it would be “disruptive” for the church. Nevertheless, “whatever the short-term cost, the integrity of the Church demanded that the issue be honestly faced”. He argued dispassionately but persuasively in favour of women clergy in the highly charged synod debates that marked the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was eventually delighted to see women ordained, returning to Melbourne in 2012 to join the 20th anniversary celebrations of the first ordinations of women priests here.

Leigh Mackay OAM, a Melbourne lawyer and laywoman who was appointed registrar of the diocese of Melbourne by Dr Rayner in 1995 – the first woman to hold that role – has described him as “unpretentious, shy, wise, dedicated and hardworking”. Although by nature conservative, she said: “He engaged with contentious issues – divorce, women’s ordination – and was prepared to change his mind. Many times, I saw his pastoral concerns for his clergy.” She added that, in chairing synod meetings, she saw him as “courteous, clear, across the detail of the agenda and legislation”, as well as of the “arcane synod procedures”.

Archbishop Keith Rayner with the 12 women ordained at St Pauls Cathedral in December 1992.Credit: Fairfax Media

At the time of his retirement in 1999, Dr Rayner nominated the changed status of the laity as the greatest change he has witnessed in his 30 years in episcopal orders. Thirty years ago, people used to talk about “going into the church” when they meant they were going to be ordained, he said then. That attitude – that the clergy were the church – was reflected in styles of worship, and church management at every level from the national to the parochial.

Now, he continued, the laity played a very different role in the church, and the changed position of women was an important part of this difference, he said. “It is not just that women are now ordained, but we have a new consciousness about the need to consider the female point of view. Language is the symbol of that change,” he said. “Even if we still usually use the male pronoun for God, most people now readily recognise that God is not male,” he added. “That was not the case earlier.”

The church, like Western society, was presently undergoing enormous change in what he termed the “technological revolution”. “It is not just about changing technology, but changes to the way we human beings think and act”, he said. “What will emerge will be a different kind of church,” he continued. The gospel would be the same essentially, “but its structural expression will be very different. We are already in this process. At the moment, we are struggling for the points of relevance with our society, but eventually the church will adjust itself to the needs of society.”

Shortly before his retirement, Dr Rayner also engaged cautiously in the church’s discussions about same-sex issues. In 1998, at an early stage of the debate that is now convulsing the Anglican Church worldwide, he asked whether God was calling the church to review its received tradition, “to see whether further light is to be shed on it”.

Keith Rayner’s last service as archbishop of Melbourne.Credit: Joe Armao

Keith Rayner was born in Brisbane on November 22, 1929, the youngest of four children of Sid and Gladys Rayner. His father ran Rayner’s butcher shop in New Farm, and the shop still bears the Rayner name. Educated at the Anglican Church Grammar School, Brisbane, (formerly the Church of England Grammar School and commonly referred to as “Churchie”) where he excelled at debating, he graduated BA from the University of Queensland, gained his theological qualification at St Francis’ College, Brisbane, and later undertook a PhD at Queensland University on the history of Anglicanism in Queensland. Later, he received honorary doctorates and, in 2001, the Centenary Medal for service to Australian society through the Anglican Church of Australia.

Ordained in Brisbane in 1953, parish ministry followed in Brisbane. He moved to Victoria on his election as bishop of Wangaratta in 1969 and from there he was elected archbishop of Adelaide in 1975. During his time there he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for service to religion. His election as archbishop of Melbourne in 1990 followed the early death of David Penman the previous year. He was confirmed as primate in 1991, having served as acting primate for the previous two years.

Dr Rayner was well known across the world-wide Anglican Church not only as the Australian Church’s leader but in other areas as well. He was the inaugural chair of the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission created in 1980, and after his retirement, served on a committee reviewing the See of Canterbury in 2000-2001.

In 1963, he had married Audrey Fletcher, an accountant with the diocese of Brisbane. They had previously met at a Sunday school teachers’ summer camp at Toowoomba. They had three children. In their retirement to the Adelaide suburb of St George’s, they supported their local parish, St Saviour’s, Glen Osmond. There, he regularly presided and preached and led Bible studies. This ministry he continued faithfully until not long before he celebrated the 70th anniversary of his ordination in December 2023. A major project of his retirement was writing his memoirs of his time in Anglican leadership. He had taken them up to 2016, a project his family hopes to complete.

Dr Rayner, whose wife died in 2011, lived independently until last year. He is survived by his three children – Philippa, a retired nurse and social worker; Jill, a physiotherapist; and Chris, a professor of gastroenterology. He had eight grandchildren.

His funeral will be held at St Peter’s Cathedral, Adelaide, on February 3.

Dr Muriel Porter was a lay leader in the Australian Anglican Church during Dr Rayner’s time as archbishop of Melbourne and Primate.