The Sydney Family Album – 5 – Bishop Frederic Barker

From Dr. Mark Thompson’s introduction to his The Sydney Family Album series, first published in 2011 –

“Evangelicals in Sydney have especially good reasons to remember our forebears and give thanks to God. The strong and clear evangelical witness of the Anglican Diocese of Sydney has not been an accident. Under God, it has been the result of the faithful labour of many men and women.

I propose periodically over this year to post brief entries reminding us about some of the key figures who have shaped Sydney Anglicanism. I will inevitably miss out many who should be mentioned, and my selection is bound to reflect my own limited knowledge, so please accept my apologies in advance if your favourites are omitted.”

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The Christian character of the colony of New South Wales was determined in the earliest days by its chaplains and by a number of influential Christian laymen. In time bishops would be sent by the English church to oversee the work in Sydney. Undoubtedly the greatest of the nineteenth century bishops of Sydney was Frederic Barker.

Barker was born into a clergy family in 1808, educated at Grantham School and then Jesus College Cambridge. While at Cambridge he came under the influence of Charles Simeon and by the time he left the university he was a keen evangelical. After ordination he served at Upton by Birkenhead and then a suburban parish in Liverpool, St Mary’s Edge Hill. One of the features of this time was a series of publications against Roman Catholicism. After Edge Hill he and his wife Jane moved to Baslow, and had only been there for three months when he received the offer to become Bishop of Sydney and Metropolitan of Australia.

Barker arrived in Sydney on 15 May 1855, more than two years after the death of his predecessor, Bishop William Grant Broughton, in London. He brought with him strong evangelical convictions, a view of his chief task as that of evangelism, and a fierce opposition to Tractarianism with which his predecessor had considerable sympathy. He also brought with him a number of clergy and ordinands who shared his basic convictions.

Barker’s long episcopate (until his death in 1882) saw massive change in the colony. Barker was certainly up to the challenge. He was a gifted administrator and was both visionary and practical. He formed the church society to raise money to supplement clergy stipends and to finance church expansion. He oversaw the establishment of Moore College (which was endowed by the will of Thomas Moore who had died in 1840). He also negotiated the struggles which finally resulted in an enabling Act of the New South Wales Parliament, which effectively provided a constitution for the church in Sydney. He initiated synodical government and financial reform. He enabled the creation of the diocese of Goulburn and made a number of shrewd ecclesiastical appointments (including William Cowper as Dean and Archdeacon).

Barker’s role in establishing Moore College as a theological college (Moore’s will had spoken only of a college ‘for the eduction of young men of the Protestant persuasion’) would be the critical part of his lasting legacy. His clear vision came from the urgent need to see men trained locally for the ministry in the colony. He sought out William Hodgson of Old Brathay to be the first principal but couldn’t wait for his arrival and so appointed William Macquarie Cowper as acting principal so that the College could open on 1 March 1856 (with 3 students!). His interest in the College never waned and his efforts on its behalf were tireless. Barker would in fact appoint the first three principals of Moore College: Hodgson, Robert Lethbridge King and Arthur Lukyn WIlliams. During Barker’s own lifetime, Marcus Loane suggests, ‘Moore College  had become the key to the spiritual strength and well-being of the Diocese of Sydney’.

Barker had inherited a diocese divided and compromised by the ermerging Tractarian movement. Through a long and faithful ministry he ‘was responsible for the rebirth of the Evangelical School in the Diocese of Sydney’ (M L Loane). This he did, not principally through the use of his skills as an administrator and a strategist but through his unswering commitment to acquiring faithful, biblically-minded, well-trained men to share the work of taking the gospel to the people of New South Wales. Here are his own words from his first Primary Visitation of Moore College in November 1858:

This is your high and glorious mission. It is your privilege to persuade men to be saved. You have an undoubted commission. You have faithful promises of direction and help. You have the testimony of your hearers’ consciences when your work is carried on with the highest degree of earnestness and vigour. Let me exhort you never to lose the testimony of your own consciences that your work is thus carried on. Live in and for your ministry, for this is indeed your happiness and your life.

Sources include K. J. Cable, ‘Barker Frederic (1808-1882), Australian Dictionary of Biography and M. L. Loane, Hewn from the Rock: Origins and Traditions of the Church in Sydney.

Image: Frederic Barker after an illustration in A Centenary History of Moore College by Marcus L. Loane, 1955.