The Rt Revd Dr Richard Treloar
Richard was installed as Bishop of Gippsland in 2018, and lives in Sale, Victoria, with Dr Leanne Habeeb and their two children, Rachel and Nicholas.
He was ordained Deacon (1990) and Priest (1992) in Ballarat, where he served two curacies, and as Rector of the rural, multi-centred Parish of Skipton.
Postgraduate studies took Richard back to Melbourne in 1998. Whilst undertaking these, he joined the chaplaincy team of Trinity College at the University of Melbourne, and the faculty of its Theological School, where he had previously trained for ministry. Richard was Chaplain of the College from 2003 to 2007 before returning to a parochial role as Vicar of Christ Church South Yarra (2007 – 2018).
For those eleven years Richard was also President of Christ Church Grammar School, serving on the school board there and on the Melbourne Grammar Council as the Archbishop’s alternate. Since then, terms on the boards of Gippsland Grammar and of Trinity College have extended his involvement with educational governance in Anglican settings.
Richard’s doctoral studies in Hebrew biblical narrative saw a PhD awarded by Monash University in 2003, which was later published by Australian Theological Forum Press in its dissertation series. He has authored more than a dozen articles and book chapters in refereed journals and edited volumes on a range of subjects, including hermeneutics and human sexuality.
Having been shaped theologically in the ecumenical context of the Melbourne College of Divinity (now the University of Divinity), ecumenism is close to Richard’s heart – a commitment to Christian unity that has been strengthened by his membership of the World Council of Churches Faith and Order Standing Commission (2001 – 2012) and of the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity Faith and Order (IASCUFO) since 2023.
The opportunity to contribute to the development and reception of the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals, published by IASCUFO in Advent 2024, has been a focus of Richard’s extra-diocesan work in recent years, and has renewed his sense of unity as both gift and call, to be received and expressed across the breadth of the Anglican tradition, in service of our share in God’s mission to the world in Christ. Other wider church involvement includes membership of General Synod’s Liturgy Commission from 2012 to 2025, and Richard currently serves on both the Appellate Tribunal and Standing Committee of General Synod.
In 2024, with +Genieve Blackwell, Richard represented the Anglican Province of Victoria at a live hearing of the Yoorrook Justice Commission, and joined with episcopal colleagues and other Anglicans in the Walk for Truth that coincided with the tabling of the Commission’s Final Report to state parliament in 2025.
Serving in regional Victoria with the clergy and lay people of Gippsland has brought Richard ‘full circle’ in terms of pastoral ministry, and he and his family are enjoying the diversity of the area and its communities.
He has a penitential allegiance to the Carlton Football Club, of which he has been a member since 1995, and hopes to live long enough to see another premiership.