ViaMedia

Category: Gender

  • Mutual Flourishing or Repeating Our Mistakes? A Response to Together in Love and Faith

    Mutual Flourishing or Repeating Our Mistakes? A Response to Together in Love and Faith

    by April Alexander, member of General Synod 2000-2021; Church Commissioner 2008-2018; member of Crown Nominations Commission 2013-2018

    I was delighted to read the proposals from the Bishop of Oxford summarised  in the Church Times (4 November) and to hear him speak about them further on Radio 4 (details of all media engagements here). I had begun to fear that the Church would remain too timid publicly to extend to those in same sex relationships the love and welcome extended to those in heterosexual relationships.

    Looking at the first four of +Steven’s proposals in Together in Love and Faith, the second is to give “freedom of conscience to clergy and ordinands to order their relationships appropriately”. This would at last allow us to move on from the 1991 Issues in Human Sexuality document which was only prepared as a “discussion document” but which subsequently – and astonishingly – acquired the status of “holy writ”, even though the Preface stated “We cannot expect all to agree with our conclusions”. Yet when, in July 2022, Revd Mae Christie asked the question at General Synod, “When and by what mechanism was Issues in Human Sexuality formally written into the Selection Criterion of the Church of England?”, she received the following reply from the Bishop of Chester in his capacity of Chair of the Ministry Council:

    We do not have a record of the date or the mechanism by which Issues in Human Sexuality was formally written into the former Selection Criteria. Unfortunately, since the information is not readily available it could not be obtained within the time-frame available for responding to Synod questions.

    I was a founder member of Inclusive Church in the wake of the Jeffrey John debacle in Oxford diocese before the days of civil partnerships and same sex marriages. The “freedom of conscience” which +Steven is now proposing was the hallmark of our endeavours and, over two decades later, we have made no progress to date. I had rather feared that such a provision had been lost entirely in the pressure to regularise same sex marriage.

    Looking at +Steven’s proposals 1-4 together, I am taking it that clergy should be among those who are able to turn to the Church to solemnise their own same sex marriages in Church. I am not quite sure that this is crystal clear.

    However, there may also be a legal difficulty with the proposal for solemnising singe sex marriages in Church, whether for clergy couples or lay, which only rarely enters into LLF discussions. The CofE website Your Church Wedding makes clear that “Although same-sex marriage legislation has changed, it remains the case that it is not legally possible for same-sex couples to marry in the Church of England”.

    The reason for this prohibition is that, in 2013, when the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act was enacted, the then-Archbishops (Williams and Sentamu) were so bitterly opposed to it that the Government went massively out of its way to appease them by including a “quadruple lock”. This was intended to “safeguard” the CofE against any attempt by any future Government to unscramble the legislation to allow such marriages in CofE Churches. Savi Hensman has discussed this on the Equal website.

    Bishop Steven’s proposals 5-7 are a different matter; they concern the provision of a platform for those clergy who oppose single sex marriage in approximately the same way as has been done for those who opposed the ordination and consecration of women. I am afraid my sympathies lie with the suffragans in the Oxford Diocese who are not in agreement with this, because that framework has at its heart a central dilemma. While the Five Guiding Principles state that “the Church of England is fully and unequivocally committed to all orders of ministry being open equally to all, without reference to gender”, at the same time they make “pastoral and sacramental provision for the minority within the Church of England who are unable to receive the ministry of women bishops or priests”. How is it possible to do both? More than that, this arrangement apparently allows the Church to “maintain the highest possible degree of communion and [also, and at the same time, contributes] to mutual flourishing” (House of Bishops Declaration 2014; GS Misc 1077). Whether Synod would be prepared to accept such a flawed notion a second time remains to be seen.

    Another aspect of this arrangement in relation to women as priests and bishops is that it did not emanate from the Church in the first place but very definitely was imposed upon the Church by Parliament in 1992; Judith Maltby’s 2011 chapter in Mark Chapman, Judith Maltby and William Whyte (eds) Established Church: Past, Present and Future explains this. Having been established in 1992 this arrangement was, in effect, replicated in 2014.

    By 2014, however, the attitude of Parliament was totally different. It was the Government, rather than the Church, which introduced the Lords Spiritual (Women) Bill in 2014. This was specifically to allow new women bishops to leapfrog over their male counterparts in order to speed up the process of appointing women to the House of Lords. Indeed, debates in both Houses reflected their view that discrimination against women was not to be tolerated any longer in the Mother of Parliaments. All indications are that nowadays Parliament is as opposed to discrimination on these grounds as it is to discrimination against women.

    On the Sunday programme on 20 November, Ben Bradshaw, MP assured listeners that Parliament could well take an interest in the matter of gay clergy and laity if the Established Church continues to remain out of step with the people of this land. Mr Bradshaw was a very effective Parliamentary operator on the matter of women bishops and I am sure he would be as effective this time.

    Further, these arrangements in respect of women have allowed pockets of discrimination and, in some cases, bullying and downright rudeness to persist, which grieve and may damage all women (lay and ordained) who experience and even hear about them. This is why a mediation service had to be set up. Those who are “unable to receive the ministry of women as priests or bishops” can still be elected to the Crown Nominations Commission, there to impede the nomination of women as Diocesans. If similar arrangements persist, the same discrimination would be likely to occur in respect of those candidates in civil partnerships and same sex marriages.

    I would beg the Bishop of Oxford to bow to what seems to be the majority view in his own Diocesan House of Bishops and not to propose another fault line which will involve many of the same people and parishes and is likely to have many of the same effects. He might also reflect upon the costs of supporting specific bishops for the relatively few parishes which are already provided with Episcopal Oversight in these straitened times.

    Finally, the Established Church should perhaps be asking itself whether it can yet again propose a framework which would rely on carve-outs from one of the most important and effective pieces of legislation in recent times, The Equality Act (2010). It might also bear in mind that discrimination of any kind is essentially against the tenets of our Christian beliefs as has been made abundantly clear in the recent work on race and disability, for example. The Church perhaps needs to examine the justification for continuing to go out of its way to facilitate discrimination on grounds of either gender or sexuality.

    The first four proposals from +Steven are permissive rather than directive; that should offer latitude enough.

     

  • Thirty Years On

    by Rev Martine Oborne, recently appointed Chair of WATCH (Women and the Church), a group that works for gender equality in the Church of England

    Thirty years ago, in 1992, I was appointed to the main board of an investment bank in the City called Rothschilds. I was 34 and the youngest woman to have been made a Director in the firm.

    At the same time, a battle was being fought in the Church of England to dismantle the legislation that blocked women from becoming priests. I was almost unaware of this at the time because I had largely given up going to church and would barely have called myself a Christian. Nonetheless, as I look back on 1992 today, I think how I might have been in the thick of that battle if I had stuck firm to the calling I had first received as a child – that God wanted me to be a vicar in his church.

    I didn’t come from a churchgoing family, but my parents sent me and my sister to Sunday School to get us out of the house so that they could have ‘a bit of time to themselves’ (whatever that meant!). And I became a very spiritual child, praying, reading my Bible, enjoying being in Church, watching my vicar Father Stephen and feeling that one day I might grow up and do the things he did. Lighting candles, reading from scripture, talking about God and chatting to old ladies.

    One day at school when I was about ten, my teacher started asking the class what we wanted to be when we grew up. One kid said an astronaut, another said Prime Minister, another said a film star and so on. But, when it got to me, I blurted out that I wanted to be a vicar. This was greeted with much laughter from my friends.  And then my teacher said, ‘Well, you can’t do that, Martine – they don’t have women vicars.’ And, at that, the whole class collapsed into fits of mirth while I just sat there feeling an idiot.

    I felt not only stupid but also confused.  It was the late 1960s and brave women were battling to breakdown discrimination in all areas of the public sphere.  And they were succeeding.  So why was it that I could not be a vicar, just because I had been born female?

    I began to wonder what my calling might be.  In my mid teens I had a time of worrying that I might be called to be a second Virgin Mary and I remember praying that God would send a dream to my mum, rather than to my boyfriend, to explain what was going on.

    But I guess, in all seriousness, this was the start of my giving up on my calling, setting aside the foolish things of my childhood and seeking other paths in life.  I got a place at Oxford, a job in the City and good things followed – a nice home, a family and a rewarding career where I was valued and treated as an equal alongside my mostly male colleagues.

    I started going back to church in my mid thirties to get the children into the local church primary school and I thought I could then drift away again after this mission had been accomplished.  But God took the opportunity to renew my faith and my calling and I discovered that, thanks to the persistence and sacrifice of brave women and men like those at MOW (The Movement for the Ordination of Women), women could become priests and vicars.

    That was, therefore, the beginning of a journey that finds me now happily serving as the vicar of a small parish in West London, doing all the things that Father Stephen had done many years ago.

    End of happy story, yes?  But also no.

    Because, although I am a vicar in the Church of England, I am not a vicar on the same terms as I would be if I were a man.  Although almost every Anglican in the land has wanted ministry in the Church to be equally open to men and women from the 1970s onwards, there have been certain small powerful groups within the Church that have resisted this vigorously and viciously.  This meant that legal provisions were made in the 1990s to allow parishes, if they wanted, to say no to women priests.  And then later, in 2014, when the barriers were removed that had prevented women priests from becoming bishops, new legislation enabled ‘flying bishops’ to be appointed so that parishes, if they wanted, could say no to women bishops.

    So I serve in a church where parishes can still advertise for a new vicar and ask for men only to apply, where bishops who are women are required to delegate their authority of oversight to male bishops for some of their parishes, where some of my colleagues espouse a theology that says God created men to lead and women to be led, and where some of my colleagues believe I am not actually a priest (that my ordination was invalid.)  And the official position of the Church is that we want these people, with the theologies that underpin their positions, to flourish.

    But hang on a second, I hear you say.  Isn’t this kind of discrimination illegal in the UK today under The Equality Act 2010?  And the answer is that yes it would be – except the Church of England has exemptions under that legislation which allow it to discriminate.

    OK, you might say.  But people like bishops who hold public office can’t be exempted under the Act.  And that’s true, which means that women bishops should operate on precisely the same terms as men bishops.  But in 2014 the Church got an amendment to the legislation saying that, for the purposes of the Act, bishops do not hold ‘public office.’  Which is somewhat extraordinary, since twenty six of them sit in the House of Lords.

    So what on earth is going on?  How can we be in 2022 and the national Church is still discriminating against women, who represent about two thirds of their congregations and half the population?

    The arguments boil down to largely two things: one, those who say we can’t have women priests because the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t allow them; two, those who say God created men, and only men, to be in charge and the Bible attests to this.

    I can’t get into the response to all this in this short post.  Suffice it to say that the arguments and theology have been hotly contested over the years and millions of words have been written.  But the Church’s legislative council, General Synod, came to the conclusion that there is no theological basis for women to be prohibited from being priests or bishops.  Which should have been an end to the matter, as the purpose of such councils is to resolve theological disputes and make decisions to bring unity and then allow the Church to move forward.  When the apostles Paul and Peter in the early Church debated whether Gentile Christians needed to be circumcised or not, they came to a conclusion and special provisions were not made for dissenters.  Nonetheless, two thousand years later, special provisions were made for those who continue to say no to women priests and bishops.  And, because of these provisions, the old discredited arguments and theologies not only continue, but are often seen on a par with the arguments and theology underpinning the validity of women’s ministry.

    My personal belief is that we are a separate Church from the Roman Catholic Church and can make our own decisions on women’s ministry, as we have on many other areas of doctrine such as allowing priests to be married.  And I believe that God created humankind in his image, in his image he created us, male and female – as we read in the first chapter of Genesis.  So that we do not reflect that image of God when men and women are not equal in the Church.

    The women and men behind the Movement for the Ordination of Women did great work back in the 1990s and earlier, and we have so much to thank them for.  But the work for equality for women in the Church is not done.  This is why I have accepted the role of Chair at WATCH (Women and the Church), which campaigned for women bishops and now seeks equality for all in our national Church.  I hope and pray that, in my lifetime, I will not only see the Church give up its exemptions from UK equalities legislation but also come to truly value women, both ordained and lay, and lament how it has treated us in the past.

    Please join WATCH here to help.

     

  • Toxic Theology, the Bible and LLF (Living in Love and Faith)*

    by Johanna Stiebert, Professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Leeds; co-director of The Shiloh Project, which explores topics of rape culture, religion and the Bible; co-investigator of the Abuse in Religious Contexts project

    My research focuses on topics of gender and gender-based violence, and on how these intersect with lived religion and the Bible. Much of the abuse variously called spiritual abuse, abusive theology, religious abuse, or abuse in religious contexts, has gender-based dimensions. Adrian Thatcher aptly speaks of “authoritarian masculinism” behind church abuse crises. Child sexual abuse by clergy has been shown to be of colossal dimensions, but while the 2020 publication of LLF contains a highlighted box, or infographic, on the Church of England (CofE) and IICSA (the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse), it recommends that theological reflection on IICSA should be carried out “separately” from LLF, “after the full published findings of IICSA have been carefully assessed” (p. 87). This does not really cut it, given how woefully inadequate CofE response to disclosures of abuse has been and continues to be.

    As for gender-based abuse, the likelihood is that the number of women abused by clergy is considerably higher still than that of children. Spiritual abuse is very frequently linked to gender-based abuse; and cases of religiously-based gender discrimination amount to spiritual abuse, whether or not that label is used.

    What LLF says about gender-based abuse is bound up with its approach to the Bible, identified as the ultimate source of the Church’s inspiration and authority, because “The life of the Church is soaked in the Bible”. Yet it notes that “every word of the Bible has a human history” shaped by “the contexts in which it was first produced and received”. The section “Power and pain” reviews abuse in scripture, identifying Samson and David as both heroes and abusers of their power, while “The sons of Eli abuse their position as priests and sleep with women serving in the tent of meeting (1 Samuel 2.22), in a chilling echo of abuse scandals in the church today”. Narratives of the rape of women and of the threatened rape of men are mentioned: “These stories matter deeply: they speak the truth about a violent world”. This, in turn, “invite[s] us to tell the truth … about the world in which we live and about our experiences within it, about the things we do and the things that are done to us”.

    This sounds like a positive intention – but does it go far enough? I don’t think so. When the Bible is brought into discussions on human sexuality or marriage, LLF ignores the problems of toxic theologies that come with reading some biblical texts at face value.

    Actually, the Bible has curiously little to say on marriage, and what is there is murky. There is no word for “marriage” in the Hebrew Bible; Hebrew does not distinguish between “woman” and “wife,” or “man” and “husband.” There are few clues in the Bible regarding marriage rites, and nothing on such matters as the age at which someone can or should be married. Despite this, a great deal has been said and asserted about “biblical marriage” – that it is monogamous, for life, aimed at procreation, between one man and one woman, and so forth.

    Numbers 5:11-31 is one of a few sustained biblical texts about a married couple and it is a prescriptive text of Torah, or Pentateuch. It sets out what to do when “a spirit of jealousy” (5:14) overcomes a man concerning his wife who may, or may not, have “gone astray” (5:12), which is expanded on as involving another man lying with her for “the lying of seed” (the expression for penetrative sexual intercourse and seminal emission) and this being kept secret, with no witnesses present (5:13). The husband is to take his wife to the priest, bringing offerings. The priest then performs an elaborate ritual to which, seemingly, the woman can only submit. All she says throughout the lengthy description is, “Amen. Amen” (5:22).

    The woman is said to be brought before God in the sanctuary, her hair dishevelled (5:18), and she is bound by an oath before drinking a potion; waters of bitterness with curses dissolved in them, which will either punish her with physical agonies, possibly a miscarriage, or infertility if she has been – in the terms of this passage – “defiled,” or it will declare her “clean” and able to conceive. Towards the close of the passage the woman is described as “under” her husband’s authority. The account closes with the statement that the husband in any case is clear of iniquity, whereas the wife must bear her iniquity. In other words, his “spirit of jealousy” along with the ritual – elaborate, exposing and highly likely to cause psychological distress – is excused, whether the woman has done anything or not. The woman, on the other hand, “must bear her iniquity” whether she has done anything to legitimate her husband’s jealousy or not.

    This is not a text widely cited in the literature expounding how the Bible can inform on matters of marriage – and yet it is one of the longer passages about a married couple. It seems to indicate a high degree of anxiety around women’s sexual continence. There is no more than passing reference to the adulterous man; no preoccupation with who he might be, or with finding him, and no insistence on either his guilt or punishment. All this, along with the absence of a ritual where roles are reversed, where a woman suspects her husband of infidelity, is very telling.

    The potential of this passage for encouraging and legitimating men’s jealousy and the policing of women, as well as its potential for what we nowadays call coercive control, is glaring. What is missing for me, however, is acknowledgement of and outcry at just how toxic this text is – especially in the midst of skyrocketing rates of domestic and intimate partner violence. And it does not help that the impetus for the man’s violence is a “spirit of jealousy” (ruach-qen’ah, with qen’ah sometimes translated “zeal”). “Spirit” and “zeal” or “jealousy” are widely associated with God. God’s ruach hovers over the deep in the creation story (Gen. 1:2) and God’s evil ruach afflicts Saul (1 Sam. 16:16). God’s zeal, meanwhile, motivates him to protect his people, especially in battle (e.g. Isa. 42:13). Not only is the husband guiltless whether his emotion has basis or not, but he is being associated with the deity, putting his authority and control beyond reproach.

    This text from Numbers is not mentioned in LLF, but it constitutes an unambiguous example of a toxic text. If it were to be utilised as a proof-text (which I am certainly not advocating!) then it could justify wives’ submission to their husbands and husbands’ jealousy, coercive control, and violent punishment of their wives. It could justify wives’ submission far more powerfully than Ephesians 5, mentioned in LLF and highlighted in The Peoples’ Bible with a subject box saying, “Professional social-work literature on women suffering domestic abuse showed that one of the anecdotally established indications that a woman was in imminent danger of suffering physical violence was that the man with whom she lived was quoting Paul’s command that women be subject to their husbands.”

    How must Numbers 5 sound to a survivor of domestic abuse and coercive control, given that the abused woman in this text is publicly exposed, and accused, while rendered passive, whereas the man is exonerated and protected by the religious authorities and God himself?

    Yet LLF does not empower such survivors by calling out and explicitly rejecting such toxic texts as harmful. We cannot shy away from the worst the Bible contains and must resist knee-jerk deference to the Bible. Casting out fear and speaking into the silence must be preceded by conscious effort to include and listen to those who do not feel safe and who find scripture and tradition condemns, hurts or silences them. Paying attention to power demands more sensitivity to the damage done by leaders and hierarchies but also more attention to who is named, or active, or vocal in biblical texts. To recall Phyllis Trible’s call for action from over four decades ago, we need insight, repentance and change, because if a dreadful story is alive then “all is not well.”

     

    *This post focuses on one aspect of a presentation to the annual conference of Modern Church.

     

    References/further reading

    Christy Cobb and Eric Vanden Eykel (eds.) (2020) Sex, Violence, and Early Christian Texts (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books).

    Helen Paynter (2020) Telling Terror in Judges 19: Rape and Reparation for the Levite’s Wife (London, New York: Routledge).

    Phyllis Trible (1984) Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress).

    Curtiss Paul DeYoung, Wilda C. Gafney, Leticia A. Guardiola-Sáenz, George “Tink” Tinker and Frank M. Yamada (eds) (2009) The Peoples’ Bible – NRSV (Minneapolis: Fortress).

     

     

     

  • An End to an Injustice: And the Start of a Campaign

    by Sorrel Shamel-Wood, Curate in the Diocese of Oxford

    This morning, Wednesday 6th July 2022, I presided at the altar for the first time. It was at the Church of St Mary and St Berin, Berinsfield – a 1962 daughter church of Dorchester Abbey – and, from my vantage point facing east*, it felt like heaven was breaking through. There were nineteen of us in attendance.

    In some ways, it felt very special and remarkable: after all, it was my first time in this privileged position, and of course women could not be ordained in the Church of England until I was seven years old, so it’s never something I’ve taken for granted. But in a different sense, it felt very normal: the midweek Wednesday eucharist is a staple part of the worshipping life of our team, and has been forever. Many priests have stood and celebrated behind that altar in the past sixty years and, down the road at Dorchester Abbey, they have done so for the past fourteen hundred. I pray they will continue to do so for many centuries after I have left.

    Readers of this blog will know that I almost didn’t get priested at all. In February, I wrote an article for Via Media detailing how my priesting was delayed because my husband had previously been married to someone else. Many ordinands are affected by the Canon C4 regulations (the rule that a faculty has to be granted in order for a person to be ordained who has remarried following a divorce, or whose spouse has remarried following a divorce). Our case was particularly nonsensical, though, because my husband is the one who was previously married to someone else, but he was already a priest when we married so could happily preside at the altar without any ramifications. The story was also reported by the Church Times. It gained attention from some significant people, and many people who read it were outraged and perplexed by the situation.

    Then, on February 16th this year, there was good news. I was in the early stages of labour when my bishop rang, but I didn’t mention this to him because I knew what the conversation was about and I didn’t want it to be delayed a moment longer. He was excited to tell me that the archbishops had agreed in principle to grant an exception to the three-year rule regarding Canon C4 faculties and, all being well and with the wind behind us, I should be able to be ordained at Petertide. I try not to over-interpret the coincidences that take place in the world around us, but it did feel to me that there was something meaningful in the fact that my baby and the good news about my priesting came at the same time.

    It’s difficult to express how thankful I am that I have now been ordained priest. But it has been a frustrating, bewildering and at times overwhelming experience. For a start, people who don’t even know my husband know that he was previously married to someone else, which is something deeply personal and difficult for him, despite the circumstances being relatively amicable and straightforward. We even had trolls who don’t believe in divorce attacking us on social media, being horrible about our wedding photos and my wedding dress.

    I’m not naturally a campaigner or change-maker in personality, and yet I found myself campaigning for changes to the faculty rules. (And if you are a member of General Synod who is reading this, do please support Revd Mark Bennet’s private members bill to revoke the Canon C4 regulation altogether). All this has caused me to realise that, if I’m capable of campaigning for a relatively small injustice that affects me personally, I can and must campaign on behalf of those who suffer infinitely worse injustices than we have experienced, and perhaps this is a new aspect of my calling that I hadn’t really anticipated.

    In a weird, microcosmic corner of social media we found ourselves in the spotlight for a moment and, if I’m entirely honest, I can see how that sort of thing could become quite addictive. It catered to the vainer, more superficial aspects of my personality which many priests have, and which women tend to be castigated for far more than their male colleagues, and which I’m not keen to encourage in myself because they distract from our real purpose of pointing people to Christ.

    So I am very happy to be at the end of this strange, frustrating journey. It has been painful at times, but also filled with encounters with good people and much grace. But of course, this is only the beginning of what I hope will be many decades of serving the Church, God’s world and God’s people. As I prepared for priesting, I was repeatedly struck by the words which the Lord once spoke to St Francis, “Francis, rebuild my church! It has fallen into ruin”. This morning, as we got the church ready for the service, the organist opened a window and the entire window frame fell out. We don’t really have the money to repair it. But spiritually, of course, as well as practically, the Church is facing huge challenges in our generation. There is a riding tide of secularisation to grapple with. A gospel that needs to be proclaimed afresh in a rapidly changing world. There are injustices to fight, within and without the church. There are broken people that yearn for God’s healing and lonely, hurting, lost people desperate to know God’s love. It is now that the real work begins.

     

     

    * The layout of the church was reversed at some point in its history during renovations, so the altar is next to the font where the entrance used to be.

     

     

  • Wanting to be One: The Rural Church Today

    by Claire Lording, Vicar of the Benefice in Pershore in the Diocese of Worcester and member of General Synod. Along with fellow parish priest Jo Stobart, she is standing as a ‘pair’ for election to the Crown Nominations Commission

     

    “I don’t like the countryside. It’s a soggy sort of place full of birds and animals wandering around uncooked.” Not my words, but those of Lady Bradley, a completely fictitious Victorian detective who graced our screens at the end of the last century. The truth is though that many people don’t like the countryside. Rural communities are too often misunderstood and defined by what can make them challenging places to live in. Yes, they can be beautiful places, but realistically they can also be isolating, hard to reach, lacking local amenities, ageing, home to stressed-out farmers, places of a variety of views including some very conservative opinions, and full of churches struggling to be Kingdom People with never quite enough volunteers or congregation. But they are also, most importantly, places where things can and do really happen.

    I’ve always ministered in rural communities and rural market towns and have never ceased to be thankful for the ‘can do’ attitude that these communities have had. The rural community has a deep sense of the value of relationships and of being immersed in the place that it is, so there is often a sense of simply getting on with life, inside and outside the Church. The seasons come and go and the community, as place and people, is still there, having weathered whatever storm or challenge has come its way. Not without cost or a sense of loss, but with a great degree of resilience. Perhaps in a rural environment where we see creation and the land around us grow, flourish and die, year after year, we have come to live with the reality of death and the possibility of resurrection and new life in a more natural way than others may experience.

    Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why in the rural places I’ve been there has never been an issue with the ordination of women to the priesthood, and then to the episcopate. Relationships really do matter in small communities, and it is these which count more than anything else because people are hopefully not anonymous folks down the road, but individuals with names and stories to share. Whether consciously, or unconsciously, people in rural communities are working at being one, knowing that this is how their community will continue and have the best chance of thriving.

    With all this experience, it shouldn’t have surprised me that, when the Living in Love and Faith course was launched, the parishes I work with would appreciate the opportunity to get involved. Not in huge numbers, but certainly enough to feel that we could contribute to the conversation. And what was most beautiful was the conversations we shared. People came with open minds and a sense of trust because the people round the Zoom screen or round the table were not complete strangers. Here were people from the same communities who were committed to listening to each other because that’s how we can best live together.

    There were differences of opinion and thinking as views were shared and we were always mindful of those not present, whose thoughts might have been more challenging in their conservatism. But those who were present remembered, at all times, that there was diversity on the screen or in the room. It was a privilege to see how some people moved from a place of having a deeply-held traditional understanding of marriage, to being insistent that everyone should be able to get married in Church, and what could we do about it? There was also real understanding of those who wanted to hold on to their traditionally held views about marriage; a sense that we will respect and honour each other, even when we don’t agree.

    There was a depth of compassion and a real desire to do more – to do everything we possibly could – for everybody in our churches and community, however they choose to identify themselves. This was the coming together of a group of people who wanted to be one, because they knew that God sees us as one and that we are so much better when we can be who we are meant to be in God’s sight, without fear or uncertainty.

    This was all wonderful and gave me great encouragement that the Church, in rural places and beyond, might be ready to take the next step to being more actively inclusive. Then we went a step further. After successfully using our new coloured lighting to light up Pershore Abbey tower in red, white and blue for the Platinum Jubilee, we had a community request to light our tower in the Pride flag colours. Not a problem, said the church! And then our social media volunteer put together a Pride display outside our community centre. Fantastic, said the church!

    Sharing in the LLF process, lighting a tower, or displaying a Pride flag are small and simple actions, but ones that shout out how forward-looking and inclusive the rural church and rural communities can be. They show that the Church can gently get on with the task of being open and welcoming to all. The rural Church may often be underestimated, but for the time being we will just get on being the best version of Church we know how to be.

  • “Sickened by our own Magnanimity?”:   Good Disagreement, Bad Ecclesiology

    by Prof Helen King, Professor Emerita in Classical Studies at The Open University and member of General Synod

    As Living in Love and Faith moves towards its conclusion, are we heading for a typically Anglican situation in which everyone has to compromise: and nobody gets what they want? How will that feel?

    In the Introduction to a collection of essays she edited in 1998, Act of Synod – Act of Folly?, the late Monica Furlong told of a priest – a woman – who was asked by a Diocesan Director of Ordinands not to lay hands on one of the candidates at an ordination which she was attending. “Couched in terms of Christian charity and sweet reasonableness, this request that she must not touch the candidate was difficult to refuse, yet left a nasty taste behind it. My friend agreed, but says ‘I was sickened by my own magnanimity’”.

    There is indeed something physically sickening about being the one who has to say “Yes of course, that’s fine” when it’s your own gender identity – or your own sexuality – which is being rejected. The ordination of women as priests, and then their consecration as bishops, divided the Church of England. As with current debates about same-sex marriage, the depth and seriousness of the disagreement was acknowledged. As with same-sex marriage, no simple Bible verse could be located to back up women priests or bishops. Instead, the House of Bishops argued that women bishops represent “a proper development in proclaiming afresh in this generation the grace and truth of Christ”.

    Nausea may be positive: a natural part of the beginning of a pregnancy. Maybe the time has come to admit to nausea, while asking whether further waves of it are inevitable as Living in Love and Faith moves into its next phase. Here, as in many other ways, it’s so instructive to look at how the Church of England dealt with disagreement when women were ordained. When Synod passed by the required two-thirds majority the 1992 motion opening the priesthood to women, some male priests took the ‘compensation’ package built into the legislation. That cost the church around £27.5 million: I really can’t see that sort of arrangement happening again. And laity who did not accept women priests? For them, provision was initially made by enabling parishes to pass Resolutions A (women presiding at Holy Communion or giving the absolution) and/or B (women as incumbents, priests-in-charge or team vicars; the ‘headship’ roles). Since 2016, Parochial Church Councils can pass a Resolution placing them under the authority of a bishop who will not ordain women.

    Some potential priests who stayed were worried about having a valid line of ordination; had anybody laying hands on them ever ‘laid hands’ on a woman? (This has a very specific meaning in an episcopal church…) This could be seen as ignoring Article 26 of the Thirty-Nine Articles; the understanding that the unworthiness of the minister does not hinder the efficacy of the sacrament. Or is being a woman the sort of ‘unworthiness’ which is beyond the pale?

    After Synod passed the 1992 motion, the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament brought direct pressure on the Church of England to provide even greater ‘protection’ to opponents as the price tag for its approval. In contrast to the lengthy process of consultation of diocesan and deanery synods which preceded the ordination of women, in less than a year the House of Bishops cooked up the 1993 Act of Synod, adding in something that was not part of the original legislative package, Provincial Episcopal Visitors (PEVs or ‘Flying bishops’). And it was not sent out for wider church consultation.

    The Church of England likes the principle of doing something new by presenting it as something old. So Beverley, a PEV for traditional catholic Anglicans, was imagined as continuing a suffragan see (originally created to help the Archbishop of York) which had lapsed in 1923. The other two, Ebbsfleet and Richborough, were newly created for the PEVs.  Creating sees is possible at any time by Order in Council. In 2015, a further PEV was appointed, this time for conservative evangelicals: the Bishop of Maidstone. His role is presented as an ‘honorary assistant bishop’ in – gasp – 14 dioceses (2019 figures); the other PEVs, too, work over a number of dioceses, thus breaking the link between a bishop and a geographical area which used to be key to our ecclesiology. So much for the bishop as a ‘focus of unity’.

    After the recent resignation of the Bishop of Ebbsfleet – now a priest in the Roman Catholic church – there is a consultation happening about replacing Ebbsfleet with a Bishop of Oswestry (a see created in 1888 but never filled) who would be a suffragan bishop in the Diocese of Lichfield, “rooted in an individual diocese and diocesan college of bishops” rather than floating free.

    For many people in the Church of England, of course, none of this is relevant. They belong to a local church and they have no idea what a PEV is. From my experience, I would add that they also have little idea that same-sex marriages can’t happen in churches, that clergy are not supposed to have same-sex marriages, and that different dioceses operate different policies with regard to the sexuality and relationships of candidates for both licensed lay and ordained ministry.

    Where women’s ordained ministry is concerned, the ecclesiology and the key documents of the Church of England have been treated with disdain, or constructively stretched, according to your point of view. The 2014 Five Guiding Principles from the House of Bishops attempt to hold it all in a dizzying tension: “the Church of England has reached a clear decision on the matter” yet at the same time those who on theological grounds “are unable to receive the ministry of women bishops or priests continue to be within the spectrum of teaching and tradition of the Anglican Communion”. That echoes the 2008 GS1710 Illustrative Draft Code of Practice, on those who refuse the ordained ministry of women as priests and bishops: “Their convictions are within the spectrum of Anglican teaching and tradition and are deserving of respect”.

    Spectrum is an interesting word. Many of us believe that gender and sexuality are also on their own spectrums. So is there a way that, on the current issues of marriage and ordination, we can repurpose those words from GS1710? In a 2018 study guide to the Five Guiding Principles, the Faith and Order Commission stated that “those opposed to the ordination of women should not characterize those in favour as caving in to the fashions of the age, and nor should those in favour stigmatise those opposed as supporters of discrimination and injustice”. Relevant to debates on sexuality, too?

    And from that same study guide:

    It does not require suspending my judgment that some theological views are wrong, or that some views that are wrong may be actively harmful. It does require that I do not take it upon myself to limit that perceived harm by seeking to restrict the participation of those who hold such views in the common life of our church… It may be tempting for the majority to think that, were the minority to leave or disappear, the ‘problem’ posed by their existence would be resolved and all the energy unfortunately required to manage it be liberated for more productive endeavours. It may be tempting for the minority to think that the more they can separate themselves from the majority and insulate themselves from its influence, the more secure their survival will be.

    Can this template from the ordination of women debates be applied to the current debate on human sexuality, or is the nausea – on both sides – just too much to bear?

     

    Further reading:

    Judith Maltby, ‘One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, but Two Integrities?’ in Monica Furlong (ed.), Act of Synod – Act of Folly (SCM Press, 1998)

    Judith Maltby, ‘Gender and Establishment: Parliament, “Erastianism” and the Ordination of Women 1993-2010’ in Mark Chapman, Judith Maltby and William Whyte (eds), The Established Church. Past, Present and Future (Continuum, 2011)

     

     

     

     

  • Time for the Church to Take Transparency Seriously

    Dr Sharon Jagger is a researcher and lecturer in Religion at York St. John University

    As a feminist researcher, I have spent several years exploring the experiences of women priests in the Church of England. It has been my privilege to talk in depth with 27 ordained women, at different stages of their careers and from different traditions in the Church. Through their experiences I have learned a great deal about women’s relationship not just with the priesthood but also with the institution of the Church.

    Perhaps you feel that this topic is over, and that – given the Church’s need to provide serious responses to institutional racism and calls for equality and inclusion for LGBTQ+ people – we should just move on. The Church of England settled on a structural compromise allowing two positions to be supported: we are ordaining increasing numbers of women, and at the same time structurally accommodating those who oppose women in the priesthood. This may seem like a contradiction, but after 30 years the worms are safely in their cans.

    But my research shows that women priests still face significant challenges and barriers in the Church because of their gender. The structural arrangements put in place in 1992 were flagged at the early stages of their implementation as unsatisfactory and discriminatory (see Monica Furlong’s edited book, Act of Synod, Act of Folly). The structure that limits women’s ordained ministry in the Church was agreed to be open ended and even permanent, but it by no means provides a resolution. The debate is merely in stasis.

    Most parishes support women’s ordained ministry, but some remain unable to accept women priests or bishops, and are led by male clergy who believe the priesthood is a male role. The Church has formal arrangements that allow such parishes, for theological reasons, to request oversight from gender traditional bishops and make a case for male-only priestly ministry (these arrangements were updated in 2014 when women were able to become bishops). After consultation, Parochial Church Councils (PCCs) may vote on a resolution like: ‘This PCC requests, on grounds of theological conviction, that arrangements be made for it in accordance with the House of Bishops’ Declaration on the Ministry of Bishops and Priests’. The number of parishes with such resolutions currently stands at 590 (figures are for 2021), a steady increase on previous years.

    These arrangements may be well-known to some but they are not well understood across the Church. My research also suggests there is a ‘quietness’ around the continuing division on women in the priesthood – a silence partly guided by the notions of ‘good disagreement’ and ‘mutual flourishing’. Whilst I argue there is a need for the Church to re-consider its arrangements because of the harm done to women in the priesthood, a more specific and urgent problem has developed.

    A recent Twitter thread has highlighted – not for the first time – the ongoing concern over lack of transparency in parishes that have voted for the above resolution. This conversation caught my interest because it chimes with stories ordained women shared with me in my research. The Twitter post argues that a significant number of churchgoers are unaware of their own church’s position regarding women’s priestly ministry, since it is not always made public on websites and through other communications. Newcomers may not be made aware of the views held by the leadership, and how that affects practices in their church. Indeed, they may not even realise that divisions in the Church regarding women’s ordination still remain.

    My research confirms there is often a lack of transparency. One ordained woman told me a painful story about her journey to priesthood that stalled late in the process when she learned that the vicar of the church where she worshipped was a member of Forward in Faith (an umbrella organisation that opposes women’s priesthood), and would not support her vocation. Despite this knowledge being crucial for her formation and the discernment and selection process, as she pursued her call to the ministry there was never any explicit explanation given by her vicar of his theological objections to women’s ordination. This silence meant she had to start the process again, after joining a different church which wholeheartedly supported the ordination of women. Such practices do not conform with the Church’s 2014 commitment, that ‘the Church of England is now fully committed to all orders of ministry being open equally to all, without reference to gender.’ (Guiding Principle 1)

    To complicate and expand this further, even ordained women do not always know where male colleagues stand. Another woman priest I interviewed describes one clergy colleague who does not accept the priesthood of women as ‘wonderful’ and ‘supportive’, but that ‘you would know nothing of the position he takes from anything he says or does.’

    This avoidance of openly discussing theological views and policies on women’s ministry may be a lingering legacy of the division women’s ordination caused in 1992, when the Synod finally voted in its favour by the tiniest of margins in the House of Laity. An Anglo-Catholic woman priest, another interviewee in my research, believes there remains unresolved division that still causes anxiety, resulting in withdrawal and reluctance to continue the debate on both sides. She says:

    People tend to be quite quiet about it because the experience of women’s ordination was quite traumatic, whichever side you were on . . . only talking about things obliquely . . . rather than open debate. Or you know only after the third gin and tonic . . . It’s both a curse and a blessing.

    The quietness is a blessing because it allows women clergy to get on with their ministry without being the perpetual focus of disagreement. But it is a curse because the current arrangements become crystallised without proper scrutiny, discrimination is hidden, and women may feel unsure of their status in parts of the Church. Not knowing whether a church or its leadership oppose women’s ordination is disempowering. It restricts agency and it disrupts an individual’s ability to choose an appropriate worship environment. I speak from experience: it is a shock to learn by chance that the church leader expected to have a hand in your human flourishing believes your gender determines what you can and cannot do and makes decisions accordingly. Lack of transparency is fundamentally unethical.

    The Twitter thread goes on to suggest some solutions: Parishes that vote for the above resolution should publish their position clearly and visibly on their websites, and the Church should publish its own easily accessible national list. Some of this information is available in various places on the internet. Forward in Faith, for example, provides a list of parishes it supports in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. But one must know where to look and be aware that even though there is little open debate, there are places in the Church where women’s ordination is not accepted.

    Theological beliefs that exclude women from leadership and ordained ministry profoundly affect women’s material, emotional, relational, psychological and spiritual experiences of church life. Transparency is the very least the Church should require where beliefs about gender, and policies and practices that flow from these beliefs, curtail women’s futures and their flourishing.

     

     

     

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  • Arguing with a Madman? Cranks, Trolls, Consistency, and ‘Come off it’

    by Sophie Grace Chappell, Professor of Philosophy at The Open University. Her two most recent books are Songs For Winter Rain, a poetry collection, and Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience.

    (in view of the House of Bishops apparently pushing on with yet another working party on trans people and gender identity, here is a further extract from Professor Chappell’s forthcoming book, Trans Figured; original posting here)

    This no-debate demand is often misunderstood as a refusal to engage in philosophical argument. That is a misunderstanding, and the reasons why it is a misunderstanding go rather deep. G.K.Chesterton says this (Orthodoxy p.32 (New York: Lane, 1909)):

    If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by things that go with good judgement. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by clarity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

    There is a scene in the fine 2016 film Denial that makes a rather similar point to Chesterton’s. Deborah Lipstadt and her lawyers are constructing their defence against a libel action brought by the Holocaust denier David Irving. To show, against Irving, that there was (alas) nothing fake about the Nazis’ mass murders in 1941-1945, Lipstadt wants to go into the witness box herself, and she wants Holocaust survivors to testify too.

    Her lawyers dissuade her. It is not that she and the survivors do not have a convincing story, and one that any decent interlocutor would be ashamed and embarrassed to deny, dispute, or question. The point is that Irving will not be convinced—nor ashamed, nor embarrassed—to carry on with an aggressive and sceptical cross-examination of old-age pensioners who have lived out the rest of their lives in the shadow of the hellish nightmare of Auschwitz. In Wittgenstein’s famous phrase, “See how much stage-setting” must already be in place before a “rational debate” can even begin. It is very difficult to discuss proofs of the reality of the Holocaust with people who will not accept the same standards of proof as any reasonable person accepts in any other debate, and who are not ashamed to browbeat, jeer, and heckle old and frail survivors of the worst genocide in human history.

    Just this lack of epistemic responsibility—and of shame—is all too evident in all too many people who come at transgender people and their allies waving the much-misused banner of “free and open debate”; as for example when those campaigners complain that they themselves are being “silenced” by harassment and mockery and intimidation, but are entirely happy to harass and mock and intimidate anyone who tries even to run a conference that they don’t like the look of; or when their immediate response to the harrowing statistics for transgender suicide and transgender assault is not to express sympathy and solidarity, but to cast doubt on the reliability of those statistics; or as when supposedly respectable journalists and academics are perfectly happy to promulgate bizarre myths about “transgenderism being bankrolled by Jewish billionaires”—myths that strikingly close the gap between transphobia and anti-semitism, and sometimes between both of those and conspiracy theories like Q-Anon as well.

    Such claims get us into the territory of what Rai Gaita calls “the crank”:

    “Cranks” is an interesting word… it is not just a term of abuse. It refers to someone who has so radically lost his capacity for judgement that his views are not even worth considering. Like those who are severely mentally ill, the most interesting thing about cranks—about what makes someone a crank—does not show itself when they declaim what they believe. It does so when they do not rule certain things out of consideration. They suffer from something far more serious than ignorance. Knowledge and understanding—and therefore, all serious radical critique—depend upon the exercise of sound judgement about what counts as evidence, about when authorities can be relied upon, when they are justifiably discredited, and so on… Reason is not what determines what it is to be “in touch with reality”. Rather, being in touch with reality is a condition for the sober exercise of those critical concepts which mark our sense of what it is to think well or badly, concepts whose proper application is what we call the exercise of “reason”.[1]

    Among other things, Gaita is writing here about how we should do philosophy—a question on which I have myself learned a great deal from him. I am almost echoing Gaita when I say that I think philosophy should not be a bureaucratic pigeonhole within a university’s administrative structure, kept “pure” of “non-philosophical” material by vigilant gatekeeping (and outgrouping). Rather philosophy should be a loose-bordered range of inquiries that are kept rigorous, maybe even a little bit austere, by the rather different but very much complementary requirements of two things: first of logic, and secondly of a grown-up, and open-minded, and kind, and humane, and humorous, and inquisitive, and un-fanatical, and tolerant, and mature—and sensible—sensibility.

    So there are two kinds of quality-controlling challenge in particular that philosophers should push each other hard with. One is “That is logically inconsistent”, the other is “Come off it”. In the academy today, partly because of the bureaucratic pressure to mark research territory, we hear plenty about inconsistency, but rather less about “Come off it”. In an age of perversely brilliant research programmes, for example about whether we’re living in a computer simulation—and also, in an age of conspiracy theories, many of which are, among other things, transphobic—“Come off it” is an important challenge too.

    “Come off it” matters both within and beyond philosophy. In both cases, another way to put it is, quite often, “Do not feed the trolls.” And that is, unfortunately, something we very often have good reason to say in the case of “debates” about transgender.

     

    [1] Gaita, A Common Humanity pp.160, 165-6. Gaita too quotes Chesterton. For my review of Gaita’s fine book, see Mind 2002, 411-413.

  • When is a Week not a Week?

    by the Rev Kat Campion-Spall, Associate Vicar at St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol and Dean of Women’s Ministry

     

    How long is a week? We all know that sometimes time seems to rush past and it is Saturday evening again with most of the jobs we had hoped to do still on a “to be done” list. Weeks during lockdown sometimes seemed to be endless, especially with active children desperate to get out and meet friends. But how many days are there in a week? The Church of England doesn’t seem to be able to come up with a consistent answer to that basic question.

    Seven? Apparently not. Try scanning the end pages of the Church Times, and looking at the part-time incumbencies advertised there. A post described as ‘two-thirds’ which turns out to mean Sunday + 3.5 days, with no mention of remuneration. Another advertised for 4 days including Sunday, for half a stipend plus a house. A ‘half-time’ post: Sunday + 3 other days. Other advertisements offering a 0.5 stipend don’t commit to a number of days, but the job description would be almost impossible even for a full-time incumbent. It’s not transparent, it’s not consistent, it’s often mathematically impossible, and it doesn’t seem to allow for any days off! The Church of England announces that more women than men are being selected for ordination training, but that is not the whole story: these “part-time” roles impact on women much more than on men.

    A House for Duty post which comes with nothing but that house, and which expects working on Sundays and two or three other days, may be useful for a priest entering retirement with a pension, but anyone under pensionable age will lose pension contributions in such a role. Women clergy are nearly twice as likely as men to be ordained as an SSM (Self Supporting Minister), roles which usually have no kind of remuneration. Two-thirds of women are over 40 when they begin training; nearly 40% who started last September were over 50. Whatever their experience, and whatever the reason for not offering, or being selected, for ordination when younger, this group will usually only be considered for SSM posts. Dioceses differ in the proportion of women who are in such posts; could this be to do with differing attitudes among senior staff towards enabling women to balance ministry with family commitments?

    But there is a growing need for properly paid part-time posts, particularly for the younger women who the Church of England says it wants to attract. Nationally, in the general workforce, in 2020 38% of women in employment were working part-time, many as a considered choice, compared with 13% of men. Yet in the Church of England, only around 15% of women and 6% of men are in part-time stipendiary roles. While examples of flexibility and good practice exist, it seems that the challenges of planning a fair and workable package, usually including housing, often mean that part-time is put in the “too complicated” box, so part-time roles are rare and, where they are offered, can lead to bad practice.

    In my role as Dean of Women’s Ministry, I have heard too many stories from my own diocese and further afield of women who went through discernment for ordination at a time in their lives when they didn’t want or couldn’t manage a full-time post, and so to enable them to have the part-time roles they need, have been pushed into self-supporting ministry which isn’t really what they want, and which does not always allow them to develop the ministry they have the potential to offer.

    There’s the half-time vicar who wasn’t told until she’d started that she had to pay the rent on half the vicarage. There’s the priest who took a half-time chaplaincy post and then looked into an additional half-time parish post to discover there literally were not enough days in the week for her to do both. There’s the vicar with a young family who moved from a full-time stipendiary role to a house for duty post as a way of working part-time, which means she misses out on potentially a decade’s worth of pension contributions despite being in work. And the vicar in her fifties whose peers in other professions were dropping down to 4-day weeks to enjoy a more balanced life, who simply didn’t see that option in the church and so left ministry.

    We know that there are going to be changes in how ministry, both stipendiary and SSM, will have to be organised in the coming years. We also know that a healthy church will need to attract and retain a diverse range of clergy. Until we have cracked a transparent, consistent and fair way of remunerating part-time roles, we won’t be attracting and retaining those clergy for whom full-time doesn’t work: many of them, women.

  • Women Bishops: The Legacy of Baroness Howe of Idlicote (8 February 1932-22 March 2022)

    by April Alexander, member of General Synod 2000-2021; Church Commissioner 2008-2018; member of Crown Nominations Commission 2013-2018

     

    Obituaries to Lady Howe saluted her well-known feminism, but few mentioned her Anglicanism.  For those of us who have worked for the ordination of women, however, Elspeth Howe is remembered with love and gratitude because, as a vice-president of WATCH (Women and the Church), she voiced in the House of Lords our joys and fears over the Bishops and Priests (Consecration and Ordination of Women) Measure (2014) and the Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015.

    It is timely to look again at those joys and fears to see whether they have been realised.

    After the failure in the House of Laity in General Synod of the original 2012 Measure to allow women to be consecrated as bishops, in 2014 there was a determination not to allow the new and revised Measure to stumble at any point. It was Elspeth Howe who nevertheless asked further questions which forced the Archbishop of Canterbury (in 2013, Rowan Williams had been succeeded by Justin Welby) to address the rather embarrassing truth that discrimination against women would survive despite the indications to the contrary; indeed, such discrimination is actually embedded in the 2014 legislation and Guidance.

    To this day, parishes who want to may request from their Diocesan bishop – whether female or male – the episcopal oversight of an alternative bishop who will ‘protect’ the parish from ever having an ‘unacceptable’ Diocesan. In her speech to the House of Lords on 14 October 2014, Lady Howe asked whether the reverse would be the case. She pointed out that there were already parishes with a woman priest serving under a bishop who did not recognise her orders, and asked whether such a parish would be able to request the oversight of an inclusive bishop. The truthful answer would have been a plain ‘No’, as we have seen during the years since, but it was a fudge.

    Lady Howe also asked for reassurance that, despite all-encompassing nature of Clause 2 of the Measure, it was only the protected characteristic of gender from the Equality Act 2010 which would be overridden and not those characteristics relating to sexuality, marital status and so on. The Archbishop of Canterbury replied:

    As a matter of policy, the House of Bishops has advised that those in parochial appointments should act as though the [Equality] Act applied [to all protected characteristics other than gender]. This change is not a cloak for discrimination on sexuality, marital status, marital history or, for that matter, age (Hansard October 2014).

    This is also the answer I had been given in General Synod in July 2014 by the Chief Legal Adviser to the General Synod.  However, by the time she died, Lady Howe would have been forgiven for wondering why the debate on sexuality rumbles on, eight years after such a clear assurance, given in the House of Lords, by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    Four months later, in February 2015, Baroness Howe spoke in the debate on the Lords Spiritual (Women) Bill which should have enabled new women bishops to ‘leapfrog’ over their male colleagues in being appointed to the Lords. In the event, of course, there have never been enough women to fill the places, and the provision lapses in 2025. She said:

    Given the great pleasure of seeing the first female bishop consecrated in the Church of England recently, it was sad to see that within a week the underlying divisions within the Church of England had begun to emerge once again…In October last year I asked the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury in this House whether archbishops would continue to consecrate all bishops in their respective Provinces. From his response and further debate in the other place I understood

    ‘that in the normal course of events, archbishops will consecrate all bishops but … there will be circumstances when an archbishop is ill or overseas’ (Commons 20/10/14; col 724).

    Then, he might delegate.

    Yet only one week after the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York (John Sentamu) had consecrated the first female bishop through the laying on of hands, he chose not to put his hands on the new Bishop of Burnley, although he was present at the time. He invited, as noble Lords will know, other bishops who were ‘acceptable’ to the new bishop to lay on hands in his place. There were only three such bishops. Thus, the contrast between the two services in that sense could not have been greater.

    This is still an important matter…. The archbishops [later] issued a statement that they would take each consecration on a case-by-case basis. Put simply, there are those in the Church of England who hold that once a bishop has laid hands on a female priest in ordination or on a female bishop in consecration he is no longer acceptable to consecrate members of the self-styled ‘traditional Catholic’ wing of the church. This is a notion of ‘taint’, however it is described by those who propose it.

    We should not forget that it has been a source of anguish among all women in the Church since alternative arrangements were introduced for ordination under the Act of Synod 1993.

    Readers should be aware that that the assurance quoted here by Lady Howe did not survive the passage of time. Citing not just the pandemic, but also ‘awareness of the sad reality that not all in the Church of England agree on issues of ordination’, the Archbishops issued another statement five years later on 20 July 2020. Rather than consecrating all bishops, they stated,

    We have agreed that the Metropolitan will normally ask another bishop to be the chief consecrator…From now on the Archbishops will ask three bishops to lay on hands with other bishops present and associating with the ordination but not in fact laying on their hands.

    From re-reading these debates, it is clear that assurances given even in the House of Lords, and even by the Archbishop of Canterbury, can turn out to be less than durable.

    What is also crystal clear is that Elspeth Howe had just the words to express the frustration and disappointment of the vast majority of women who had worked so hard for this legislation but who had no voice of their own in the legislature.

    May she rest in peace.