Diocesan Bishop

Institutional context

A diocesan bishop in the Church of England is the senior bishop of a diocese, the territorial unit of the Church, and is a member of the House of Bishops. The most senior diocesan bishops sit in the House of Lords as Lords Spiritual. From the Reformation through 2015, every diocesan bishop in the Church of England was male.

Career path

Treweek worked for six years as a paediatric speech and language therapist in the National Health Service before training for ordination. She studied at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and was ordained deacon on 3 July 1994. She served in parish ministry in London and was Archdeacon of Hackney within the Diocese of London from 14 May 2011 until her appointment as Bishop of Gloucester in 2015.

Appointment

She was consecrated Bishop of Gloucester on 22 July 2015 at Canterbury Cathedral and installed on 19 September 2015. Her appointment as a diocesan bishop made her the first woman to occupy a diocesan see in the Church of England's history.

Tenure

Active. Tenure has included her becoming the first woman to enter the House of Lords as a Lord Spiritual under the temporary fast-track provisions for female bishops. She has been a notable voice in the General Synod on safeguarding and on prison reform.

Cluster context

Treweek's 2015 appointment is within the rate-acceleration window and follows Lane by approximately six months. The Church of England's relatively rapid sequence of female-bishop appointments after the 2014 enabling legislation is one of the dataset's clearer instances of mechanism-precedes-pattern: the structural change was the 2014 legislation, and the appointments followed in compressed sequence.

Sources

• Diocese of Gloucester — Bishop
• House of Lords — Lords Spiritual register