For 22 years John Yates was a far-sighted member of the Episcopate, serving first at Whitby, then for 16 years at Gloucester and finally as Bishop at Lambeth. He was notably independent in his thinking and not a member of any party, political or ecclesiastical. His war service in the RAFVR had been as non-commissioned aircrew, and he had an enviable ability to relate to people irrespective of their age or background.

Yates and his wife, Jean, had a shared ministry. Their homes were remarkable for their hospitality. The front door at Gloucester had an array of mugs with sandwiches for the hungry. They both supported the Haven, a family day centre, and Jean researched bed and breakfast for mothers and children as well as feeding wanderers. The Yates’s tact and willingness to listen and discuss meant that he led an unusually united diocese.

John Yates was born in London in 1925. He was educated at Battersea High School, Blackpool Grammar School and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he tok a first in theology. After the RAF he returned to Cambridge and trained for the ministry at Lincoln Theological College under Kenneth Sansbury, John Fenton and Basil Moss.

He was ordained to serve at Southgate in North London. For five years he was then on the staff of Lincoln Theological College, a probing teacher greatly valued by graduates and non-graduates alike, as they grappled with demythologising the Bible and the Creeds for the first time. Many of the future priests were married with young children and found the traditional semi-monastic spirituality difficult. But Yates in his teaching, his energetic hockey-playing and in his own home showed a disciplined, happy and confident way through.

When he moved on to Scunthorpe his parish was a model of how to transform the conventional into a more adventurous modern style. He encouraged an industrial mission on the Sheffield pattern as well as ecumenism. At the same time he maintained a happy, lively parish with much personal care. To achieve all this he tended to arrive at meetings or services at the very last moment — or even sometimes later. In 1966 he was appointed principal of Lichfield Theological College but the downturn in vocations that year throughout Europe led to its eventual closure and he was appointed Bishop of Whitby by Archbishop Donald Coggan. Coggan found him “a steady man not easily knocked over”. He collaborated very closely with the archbishop, who had an international role and needed an ally in the large and scattered diocese of York.

Yates’s years as Bishop of Gloucester, 1975-91, showed him to be a leader who could persuade people to think for themselves and face the reality of a changing world. He would not allow members of staff meetings, diocesan synods or parochial church councils to get away with pious platitudes. His own faith was well tested and he was convinced that the divine was at work in the world as it is. It was significant that when the ordination of women came to be decided in the General Synod in 1992 the lay vote from Gloucester was the highest in favour for any English diocese. He was not a campaigner, but an intelligent persuader. This was noticed when he later presented church views to Douglas Hurd at the Home Office.

The lay people of the diocese found him accessible, willing to listen, ask questions, argue and reach agreements. In 1991 he set out his policy in a visitation charge, Treasure in Earthen Vessels, that was witty and well researched. He delighted the parishes by saying: “Whenever I come back to the diocese from some meeting in London the feeling I have is that I am coming from the less real to the more real Church.” He likened its middle-of-the-road Anglican attitudes to “the back wheel of a bicycle: it does not wobble about as much as the front wheel, but it gets there almost as quickly”.

He did not hesitate to criticise and his comments, firm though tolerant, were shrewd and compelling. He noticed especially the “massive if slow and silent slide . . . especially among the young, away from the Christian words and images through which most of us learnt our Christian faith”. He pleaded that the parochial church councils should not lose touch with the realities of national, local and personal life, or be taken over by money or administrative questions. He criticised churches that had no access for the disabled, gave warning against excessive rigidity in doctrine and commended the saying “we should believe more and more about less and less”. He aimed at an ecumenical and less authoritarian Church. He urged the Church “to travel light, unencumbered as far as possible by dogmatic or liturgical baggage acquired centuries ago”. He sought a more human Church that proclaimed a gospel of costly self-giving on behalf of the poor and powerless.

In 1974 Yates chaired a working party of scholars who wrote Homosexual Relationships, the first significant Anglican study of homosexuality after the Wolfenden Report (1957) and the consequent legislation in 1967. Traditional teaching, emphasising Old Testament attitudes and Pauline prohibitions, was thoroughly re-examined and legal perspectives, social implications and pastoral care were re-evaluated. Critics urged that the report should not even be distributed and its republication was prevented by conservatives.

Fortunately, the British Council of Churches sponsored another report, God’s Yes to Sexuality, and Quakers, Methodists and some Roman Catholic scholars supported the Gloucester report’s view that the tradition hostile to homosexuality needed to be reassessed.

It was unfortunate that the Gloucester report was not made available to members of the 1998 Lambeth Conference during which homosexual relationships were a main topic. Yates was premature to say that the churches had emerged from “a long period of darkness in which the whole subject was regarded as shameful and unmentionable”.

In the 1980s European Christians were concerned about Christians in Central America, after the 1980 assassination by a right-wing group of Archbishop Romero of El Salvador, a champion of liberation theology. In 1986 an ecumenical group was sent from London to support those persecuted in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. In the following year this was succeeded by a party led by Bishop Yates.

The liberation leaders welcomed him warmly. But his account of these experiences on his return was perhaps surprisingly low key, and it was the end of the Cold War, rather than Christian public opinion, that led to negotiated settlements in Central America. As chairman of the Board for Social Responsibility, 1987-91, Yates led a British delegation to the World Council of Churches conference at Basle on justice, peace and the integrity of creation. This was a high point of European ecumenical co-operation with Protestant, Orthodox and Roman Catholic participants.

In 1991, when he might have expected retirement, he was persuaded to serve for three years at Lambeth as the head of the new archbishop’s staff.

Yates’s wife Jean died in 1995. He married, in 1998, the Rev Beryl Wensley. She died in 2006 and he is survived by the son and two daughters of his first marriage.

The Right Rev John Yates, Bishop of Gloucester, 1975-91, was born on April 17, 1925. He died on February 26, 2008, aged 82