MANY thousands of people who never met Bishop Jim Thompson will have been shocked by his sudden death last week while lecturing on a cruise. For as a broadcaster and writer he was known well beyond the confines of the Anglican Church. For many years he was an outstanding and witty contributor to Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4, helping listeners to enter into careful assessment of moral issues in the light of contemporary events. His words were rooted in his own faith yet able to reach a much wider constituency than the Christian Churches.

Such broad appeal was also the key to his career within the Church of England, where Jim Thompson made his reputation as the champion of some of the poorest communities in the London area. He was one of the most articulate church voices raised in protest at the social consequences of the Thatcher governments in the 1980s — a protest that delayed his appointment as diocesan bishop. Once he did become Bishop of Bath and Wells in the 1990s, however, he became an equally trenchant voice in debate about how the Church itself was to respond to a social and cultural environment changing so rapidly around it.

James Lawton Thompson (known almost universally as “Jim” in his adult life) was born the son of an engineer in Birmingham, and moved with his family to Gloucester where he attended Dean Close School. Rather than taking up a university place he opted initially to train as an accountant — an unusual qualification for a future churchman. He also did two years’ National Service in the Third Royal Tank Regiment.

He then moved on to study theology at Cambridge, followed by training for the priesthood at Cuddesdon, near Oxford. Ordained deacon in 1964, his first curacy was at East Ham in London, an early taste of the kind of social deprivation which he was to experience so closely in subsequent decades. While working there he met and became close friends with David Sheppard, the former England cricketer and future Bishop of Liverpool, who would be a later ally in criticism of the Thatcher Government.

In 1966 he returned to Cuddesdon as chaplain, invited by Robert Runcie, then the principal of the college, later the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was to be another firm friend. Here he developed his considerable teaching and pastoral skills within the context of Anglican worship and spirituality which remained central to his life.

In 1971 Thompson was appointed rector of a vast new housing estate in Thamesmead in southeast London. There he helped pioneer strong ecumenical partnerships which included the local Roman Catholic church, one of the first signs in Britain of the thaw brought about by the Second Vatican Council.

Despite high hopes the obstacles and misunderstandings were frequent, and Thompson had to fight many battles, something he learned to do with theological conviction and passion. Seven years later he was asked to succeed Trevor Huddleston as Suffragan Bishop of Stepney, a part of the Diocese of London with a distinctive identity of its own. In an expansion of his ecumenical horizons, he became deeply involved in the life of many communities, ethnic and religious, that made up this part of the capital.

He gave unstinting support to clergy and their families, while at the same time passing through a time of some personal crisis, which he described in a moving book Half Way, published in 1986 and subtitled Reflections in mid life. The book arose from talks he gave on Thought for the Day with one chapter, Struggling with Faith, indicating some of the convictions which would undergird the rest of his ministry. “Faith is not a solution to life, it is a way of living it,” he wrote. “My time as a priest and a bishop in East London has made me realise that justice and a healthy society are not just a matter of changing individuals, we also have to tackle the great structures which control so much of our life.”

Those structures and their effects became a more urgent preoccupation after 1979 and the advent of a Conservative government. Thompson became an outspoken critic of some of the more ruthless consequences of the Thatcher era. He began, for example, to ask pointed questions about the human effects of developments in the Docklands area of London, which were seen by many as shutting out existing communities in the rush to build expensive new office space and luxury housing. Early in the 1980s Thompson became a member of an unofficial group known as the “urban bishops” which met several times a year for mutual encouragement and to consider issues pressing on inner-city areas. From these meetings came the proposal to set up a working party which led to the report Faith in the City, one of the most influential challenges to the Thatcher Government’s claims of social improvement.

Although he was always at pains to root what he said in his understanding of the Gospel, Thompson’s ability to state an argument forcefully and stick to his guns earned him condemnation in some quarters as a “political bishop”. This approach left him out of favour with 10 Downing Street and meant that he failed to win prime ministerial approval for appointment as diocesan bishop until 1991, when John Major rather than Margaret Thatcher was in charge. Thompson’s appointment to the bishopric of Bath and Wells seemed inappropriate in view of his commitment to the inner city. However, he and his wife Sally, with whom he had a close and supportive relationship, welcomed the change. He described himself as “a countryman at heart”, was a lover of horseriding, and became a spirited defender of hunting in recent years. In the diocese he won praise as an excellent pastor who “led from the front”.

In the wider Church of England world he was at the centre of crucial debates in his role as chair of the social policy committee of the Board of Social Responsibility. The committee’s report Something to Celebrate, about the future of the family, attracted attention and criticism in some quarters when it advocated lessening church hostility towards cohabitation, traditionally described as “living in sin”. In his work as chair of the Children’s Society he also tackled highly sensitive issues such as adoption by gay couples. He defended his position in these and other debates with characteristic vigour, but at some personal cost. He always tried to state his case clearly, even forcefully, but in a way which affirmed others, and he found it hard when they responded with animosity or suspicion.

A colleague in such debates, Alison Webster, said of Jim Thompson that “he always tried hard to stay faithful to the Anglican tradition and to people’s lived experience”. It was a challenging task at a time when that “lived experience” was going through everything from the social and political tensions of the 1980s to the broader changes which brought much traditional Anglican teaching into question. But he relished the challenge more than most. His was a gloriously rich personality, full of humour and sympathy, but with a sharp mind that made him such an effective broadcaster, writer, pastor and prophet.

He is survived by his wife Sally, a historian, and by a son and daughter.

The Right Rev Jim Thompson, Bishop of Bath and Wells, 1991-2001, was born on August 11, 1936. He died on September 19, 2003, aged 67.