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The following extracts are from Donald S. Annentrout, “Christopher Bryan: A Biographical Note.”  In Biblical Imagination:  Essays in Honor of Christopher Bryan.  Edited by Ellen Bradshaw Aitken.  STR 50.1.  Sewanee, Tennessee  The University of the South, 2006.  207-15. They remain the copyright of the author and The University of the South.

Michael John Christopher Bryan was born in London, England, the only son of William Joseph Bryan, a British soldier, and Amy May Bryan.  He spent his childhood and early adolescence in London, a period that included the whole of World Ware II.  He still retains vivid memories of the outbreak of war in September 1939, the London Blitz (1940-1941), and subsequent events such as the dropping of the first atomic bomb.

He received most of his primary education from Saint Michael’s (Church of England) Primary School on Star Street, near the Edgeware Road.  After taking the “eleven plus” examination, he was awarded a place at Saint Marylebone Grammar School, which he attended from 1946 to 1954.  He was awarded a Woodward Scholarship by Wadham College, Oxford, in 1954, and went on to graduate from there successively in the Honour Schools of English Language and Literature (1957) and Theology (1959).

Bryan’s formal religious life began in 1949 when he decided to attend confirmation classes at Saint Mark’s Church in the Marylebone Road.  He was confirmed and subsequently joined with enthusiasm in all the activities of a thriving Angle-Catholic parish.  Bryan is clear about his indebtedness to this Angle-Catholic beginning.  Father John Crisp, who was vicar of St. Mark’s for most of this time, remains to this day his model of what a pastor should be.  Bryan says, “He was, quite simply, the finest parish priest I ever knew.”  As for Anglo-Catholicism, Bryan explains, “Christ came to me within the Anglo-Catholic tradition.  There Christ call me, and there Christ has blessed me.  Of course I have come to appreciate some of the insights of the Reformation – I am, after all, an Anglo-Catholic, not a Roman-Catholic.  Thus, for example, the reformed theologian Karl Barth has been very important for me.  Indeed, he has probably influenced me more than any other single theologian, although I have never been ‘a Barthian,’ – not least because I have always thought that he was quite wrong about baptism, and did not really understand the sacraments!  But all that granted, it remains that Anglo-Catholic liturgy, Anglo-Catholic concern for social justice and the poor, coming daily to God’s table for the Eucharist, the availability of confession, joyful acceptance of the prayers and fellowship of blessed Mary and all the saints – these things, by God’s grace, are the basic furniture of my ecclesial home, and, in this life at least, I cannot imagine why I should ever either abandon or replace them.”

Bryan’s studies continued at Ripon Hall Theological College in Oxford, where he was trained for the priesthood.  He was ordained to the deaconate of the Church of England by Mervyn Stockwood, bishop of Southwark, in Southwark Cathedral on Trinity Sunday 1960, and to the priesthood on Trinity Sunday 1961, at which liturgy he was honored by being the appointed gospeller.

In 1972 he married Wendy Elizabeth Smith, only daughter of Jack Egbert Smith and Joan Dickinson Smith.  They have lived subsequently in Virginia, in London, in Exeter, and in Sewanee.

http://christopherbryanonline.com/

Rev. Dr. Bryan will be speaking as part of the Tennessee Antiquarian Book Fair on Sunday, July 18, 2010 at 2:00 pm, at the Cowan Center for the Arts Theater.

$5.00 general admission ticket will allow access to both the book fair and all speakers at Cowan Center for the Arts.