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Stephen Trott (born 28 May 1957) is an Anglican priest in the Church of England, a representative in the House of Clergy of its General Synodand an elected Church Commissioner. He is Deputy Chair of the Closed Churches Committee. In 2010 he was appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury as Synodical Secretary of the Convocation of Canterbury.

He was born in Penrith, in the historic county of Cumberlandwhere his father was a clerk at the Ocean Insurance Company in Carlisle. During his childhood the family lived in Thursby, [|Dalton-in-Furness], and [|Sutton Coldfield]where he passed the 11+ exam in 1968 and attended Bishop Vesey's Grammar School. The school's historic connections with John Vesey, Bishop of Exeter at the time of the Reformation, made a profound impression and be became a Christian during his time in the sixth form.

At first he read Law at the former Birmingham Polytechnic in Perry Barr, Birmingham, but quickly decided that he did not wish to become a solicitor, and transferred instead to the University of Hull to read English. In his first year he was Confirmed at St Mary's Cottingham by Stuart Blanch, Archbishop of York, and during this time discovered a vocation to the sacred ministry.

He was trained for ordination at Westcott House, Cambridge, where he also read Theology as a member of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and was awarded the University Prize for Liturgy in 1983.

He returned to the Diocese of York in 1984 and was ordained in York Minster as assistant curate of All Saints' Hessle, where he served his first curacy, and subsequently served a second curacy at St Alban, Hull. During this period he was a postgraduate student in Theology at the University of Hull, and later at Leeds University where he worked on the modern history of Church and State in England under the supervision of Professor Adrian Hastings. From 1999-2001 he studied Canon Law at Cardiff University School of Law.

In 1988 he was appointed by [|Bishop William Westwood] as the first Rector of the [|benefice] of Pitsford with Boughton in the Diocese of Peterborough, and Secretary for Continuing Ministerial Education in the diocese. He has been actively involved with the newly founded Northamptonshire Grammar School in Pitsford (now Pitsford School) since 1989, serving as visiting chaplain and as a school governor.

He played a leading role in establishing the first modern trade union for members of the clergy and ministers of religion in 1994, approaching the TUC for help, where he was recommended to join the voluntary sector section of the MSF (Manufacturing, Science and Finance) trade union which established a special section in August 1994 to provide for ordained and lay ministers, most of whom were serving in the Anglican churches in the UK.

The MSF clergy section campaigned on a number of current issues, principally concerned with the security of tenure and conditions of service of the clergy, and helped to ensure the retention of the freehold system for incumbents in 1995. It then lobbied both Church House and the DTI where it won a sympathetic hearing from the Minister of State, Alan Johnson, and legislative provision in s.23 of the reforming Employment Relations Act of 1999 to ensure that clergy without a freehold appointment could no longer effectively be dismissed without any right of appeal. This principle was subsequently adopted by the General Synod of the Church of England in its Ecclesiastical Offices (Terms of Service) Draft Measure of 2008.

The MSF Clergy Section also played a prominent role in campaigning for a modernised system of ecclesiastical discipline for the clergy, to replace the criminal-style jurisdiction of the Consistory Courts, modelled on the old Assize Courts, which had last been modified in the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Measure of 1963. The General Synod of the Church of England began work on a new Clergy Discipline Measure in 1995, following the trial and acquittal of the Dean of Lincoln, and the new legislation came into force in 2003. Trott was a member of the revision committee for the new Measure and successfully argued for a number of key changes to the legislation, including the abolition of the historic penalty of deposition from holy orders, which could not practically be undone when a verdict of the court was later found to be unsound.

In 2002 MSF merged with another union, the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union, to form [|Amicus] and at this point Trott left the Executive Committee of the clergy section, of which he had been the first chair and later canon law adviser, since in his judgement the new union was radically different in ethos to MSF.

In 1999 Trott was invited to write an occasional weekly bible study, Sunday Readings, for the Evangelical Church of England Newspaper, based on the scriptural texts appointed by the Revised Common Lectionary, which was adopted by the Church of England for its new liturgy, Common Worship in 2000. Soon afterwards this became a permanent arrangement which remains current.

In 2005, following a meeting of the Primates of the Anglican Communion at [|Dromantine] in Northern Ireland, a Panel of Reference for the Anglican Communion was set up by the Archbishop of Canterbury, to which Trott was appointed. The Panel considered a numbered of requests for assistance from 2005 to 2008.