Bishop of Likoma

 

The Bishop of Nyasaland who baptised me (Frank Thorne) served a diocese which covered the whole country.   Actually, when he became Bishop in the 1930s, it had also served some of what is now Tanzania on the eastern shore of the inland sea which was Lake Nyasa. 

It was when that land (where he had been a missionary priest) was taken away when boundaries were reorganised that he made the unpopular decision to move his headquarters from Likoma Island, which had been central to the old diocese, to the mainland.  Some of his predecessors had been known as Bishop of Likoma rather than Bishop of Nyasaland.

With independence, Bishop Thorne’s successor quickly became Bishop of Malawi, a diocese which has since developed into four separate dioceses. 

First it was divided into Lake Malawi and Southern Malawi.  Since then Lake Malawi has been divided into Northern Malawi and Lake Malawi, and Southern Malawi into the Upper Shire (the river is pronounced to rhyme with an eagle’s eyrie) and Southern Malawi.  The huge Cathedral on Likoma is now in the diocese of Northern Malawi.

Last week a formal announcement was made of further new dioceses.  Northern Malawi will divide into Northern Malawi and Likoma.  Lake Malawi will divide in three, into the Central Highlands, Central Malawi and Lake Malawi.  As a result, with the continuing dioceses of the Upper Shire and Southern Malawi, there will be seven dioceses.

This is a response to church population growth, but is also preparation for the potential formation of a new Anglican Communion Province of Malawi (with its own Archbishop) in a couple of years’ time.

Not the most important part of this, but the part which intrigues me the most, is the reappearance of the title Bishop of Likoma.  Likoma will have by far the smallest area and overall population of the seven dioceses. 

When Anglican mission and contact was most effectively done by a steamer around the shore of the Lake, the island was indeed central.  Its Cathedral will now cease to have to try to serve what has come to feel like distant mainland, and those in the six mainland dioceses will find their smaller local cathedrals more accessible.

All of which I will hold in mind when I’m next in the Russell Chantry in Lincoln Cathedral and see the stone under which Bishop John Hine’s cremated remains are buried.  He was consecrated Bishop of Likoma in 1896 (and was then in turn Bishop of Zanzibar, Northern Rhodesia and Grantham).  He died in 1934, two years before Frank Thorne became Bishop of Nyasaland.

The picture comes from the grave slab of an Abbot of Bardney (now on display in Bardney Parish Church), and shows his soul being taken up to heaven.