Stephen Verney was a courageous and much respected Anglican bishop. His friends included seekers after religious truth in many traditions — including the agnostic, eastern and post-modern.

His deep devotion to the symbolism of the Fourth Gospel, the experience of active war years in the Middle East — for which he was appointed MBE — with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, the Intelligence Corps and working underground with the Greek Resistance in Crete gave him rare empathy.

As a canon of the new cathedral at Coventry, and later Suffragan Bishop of Repton, he was the enabler of many groups and retreats and author of several books, original and forward-looking reinterpretations of Christian faith.

Stephen Edmund Verney was born in 1919, the second son of Sir Harry Verney, a Liberal MP. Verney’s home was traditional. His grandfather had been Viceroy of India, and he remembered as a boy the servants filing in carrying the benches on which they sat down for family prayers. It was only when he was, in his own words, lonely and frightened right at the bottom of the social pile as a private in Egypt, that he discovered how members of all classes and all races could be true friends.

As an undercover agent in Cretan villages he was hunted by German military police and depended absolutely on the trust and loyalty of a band of fighters. Surviving such risks in Greek villages of extraordinary vitality (at one village wedding the bridegroom’s gun, fired exuberantly through the ceiling, wounded a sleeping guest) reinforced Verney’s impish dynamism, which broke through the barriers of ecclesiastical boredom and social apathy.

Bishop Verney’s expositions of the New Testament were attractively explicit. He would contrast the Church of England’s former extreme caution on spirituality and sexual morality with what he saw in Christ’s conversation, as described by St John, with the woman at the well.

In place of British attitudes such as: “If you are very religious then you are eccentric”, and “Cold baths and plenty of exercise will deal with extramarital sex”, Verney pleaded for new thinking. His own marriage to Priscilla Schwerdt in 1947 was exceptionally happy, and her death in 1974 was deeply felt. In 1981 he was married to Sandra Ann Bailey and again there was a true meeting of spirits. She had, however, been married before, and her husband was living: this became in those days a matter for discussion at a bishops’ meeting and fuelled debate among laity too.

Verney listed “conversation and aloneness”, with music, gardening and travel among his recreations. This short, broad-shouldered man with deep-set smiling eyes, always determined to find time to think for himself, had a powerful gift of supporting others in exploring their own depths.

Ordained in 1950 he became curate, priest-in-charge and then first vicar of St Francis, Clifton, a new estate in Nottingham. His eight years there were a struggle to give birth to a depressed community. Bishop Cuthbert Bardsley then appointed him canon-missioner and canon of Coventry Cathedral, which was being rebuilt from the ashes.

Verney was one of an outstanding trio of canons, with Edward Patey and Simon Phipps. Coventry became a place of pilgrimage, the equivalent of Taizé in France or Iona in Scotland. These years (1958-70) were exceedingly creative for the Church he served, with new attitudes to theological inquiry, to industrial mission, fresh liturgies, sponsorship of the arts and imaginative symbolism in theology.

Verney’s accounts Fire in Coventry (1964) and People and Cities (1969) give inspiring pictures of the reconstruction and reconciliation which guided life at the cathedral as the walls slowly rose on their foundations.

In the diocese Verney was a centre of personal affection and trust among the clergy and church members. Again and again by the gift of his time, energy and humour, he defused the envy which such resources concentrated on a single cathedral could arouse.