 After a number of years of parochial ministry in Withington, Manchester he returned to Hong Kong as principal of the Union Theological College there before taking up a post at Birmingham University's Extra Mural Department.Some years later he returned to Trinity to give the Speaker's lectures at Trinity College, Oxford in 1969–71 on St. Matthew's method of writing the gospel and, in the process, dispensing with Q, for which he was awarded a Doctorate by the University.In Birmingham he ran lecture courses for clergy but it was following an invitation to give lectures back in Hong Kong that he decided to resign his orders as a priest which he did in 1981, though he never became an aggressive atheist.