Archbishop Keith Rayner AO died in Adelaide, where he had been living in retirement, on 12 January 2025.
Keith was born in New Farm, Brisbane on 22 November 1929, the youngest of four children of Sid and Gladys Rayner. Sid was a butcher whose shop still bears the family name. Keith won a scholarship for his secondary schooling at the Church of England (now Anglican) Grammar School, known as ‘Churchie’ in Brisbane, and attended the University of Queensland from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts. Though his mentors encouraged him in the sciences, his heart was in the Arts, and his Ph.D was done in history.
From an early age he was an altar server and later became very involved in youth ministry; he was a keen debater and often represented Australia at national and international youth gatherings. His sense of vocation to the ordained ministry of the Church is said to have begun to flicker into life when he was only 13 years of age.
When Keith shared his belief that he was being called to full-time ordained ministry, one of his brothers who was in New Guinea at the time apparently wrote to say that he did not think this was a good idea, and raised the possibility that Keith might think of an alternative profession – perhaps a dentist? For Keith, however, it was a matter of an insistent vocation from God, and so he entered St Francis’ Theological College in Brisbane to prepare for ordination to the priesthood.
In 1963 Keith married his wife Audrey who pre-deceased him in 2011. Together they had three children – Philippa, Jill, and Christopher.
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Keith’s was a life of sustained Christian service. After ordination he served in a number of parishes in the Diocese of Brisbane before being elected to the See of Wangaratta in 1969. He became Archbishop of Adelaide in 1975 and then moved to be Archbishop of Melbourne in 1990, and was Primate of Australia from 1991, though he had acted in that capacity for the previous two years.
It is said that he was once confronted by a child when he was fully vested and holding his pastoral staff. ‘I know who you are’, the child declared, ‘Bo-Peep!’
During his time, as Primate he worked to hold the Anglican Church of Australia together through a period of enormously challenging developments and changes, marked by lively, and indeed intense debate on such vexed issues as the re-marriage of divorced people, the ordination of women, and the challenges of ministry in the new world of sexual diversity. In 1995 he also presided over the adoption of A Prayer Book For Australia, which replaced An Australian Prayer Book (1978), and which is now in normative use across Australia. Keith possessed both the intellectual capacity and the somewhat cautious and conservative temperament needed to steer the national Church though these minefields so as eventually to achieve the high levels of consensus required to secure positive outcomes while holding the Church together.
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My own friendship with Keith Rayner dates from 1972 in Bathurst when I was Chaplain to the Mitchell College of Advanced Education, which has since become Charles Sturt University. As then Bishop of Wangaratta, Keith agreed to come to preach at the Commencement Service to mark the beginning of the academical year. He was a kindred spirit in matters of theology and churchmanship, and we became good friends. Keith was amongst other things also a very committed ecumenist.
At the Lambeth Conference of 1988 the huge body of bishops who had expressed a special preference in working on ecumenism, was divided into two groups for purposes of manageability; Keith chaired one and I chaired the other. So we kept in close touch so as to secure a positive single outcome to present for endorsement of the plenary session of the Conference. One of the most important results of this work was the development of a detailed blueprint to guide ecumenical negotiations between Anglicans and Lutherans around the world, which included the suggestion that there should be “interim eucharistic sharing” while national churches worked to restore full-communion, including the reciprocal sharing of ministries. Before the next Lambeth Conference met ten years later, a Concordat securing this outcome had been entered into in the United States (where the Evangelical Lutheran Church was already structured with the three-fold ordering of bishops, priests and deacons). In Australia we had the more difficult task of engaging with Lutherans who had yet to embrace episcopal orders. Happily that step has now been taken.
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A Requiem Eucharist in thanksgiving for his life and ministry was celebrated at St Peter’s Cathedral, Adelaide on Monday, 3 February. Eulogies were delivered by Keith’s Rayner’s son, Professor Christopher Rayner and The Reverend Dr Bruce Kaye AM, who had been General Secretary of the Anglican Church of Australia during Keith’s time as Primate. The sermon was delivered by the current Primate of Australia, The Most Reverend Geoffrey Smith. The young pallbearers were drawn from Keith’s eight grandchildren.
This funeral was appropriately attended by a very large congregation, which included the Governor of South Australia, and visiting bishops from dioceses across Australia. May he rest in peace.
