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Tag: Complementarianism

  • WWBD? What Would Barbie Do?

    barbie1.JPG

    By Anon.

    Above, The Rev. Dena Cleaver-Bartholomew, rector at Christ Church in Manlius, with a Barbie that was a gift from Rev. Julie Blake Fisher in Kent, Ohio. Photograph by David Lassman.

    As you are probably well aware, Barbie is the summer’s blockbuster movie. The premise of the film rests on haemorrhaging stark reality into a tightly engineered fantasy-land. The film immediately summons the paradoxes highlighted in the acclaimed 1998 satirical movie The Truman Show.

    Barbie (the movie) focusses on the most popular of all the Barbies in Barbieland, and begins with her experiencing a serious existential crisis. So, Odyssey-like, she travels to the human world in order to understand herself better and discover her truer purpose. Ken – a kind of boyfriend, albeit struggling with his low self-esteem issues and a sense that he is somewhat surplus to requirement – tags along. In Barbieland, men are, well, non-essential. But Ken and Barbie enter into this human world. Ken, all the while, remains acutely conscious that his own existence depends far too much on Barbie acknowledging him, or even treating him as an equal. She does not need to.

    The film pivots, as one might expect, on feminine nature – and the nature of feminism. Knowing something about the original creation of the Barbie doll is important here. In 1956, an American business developer, Ruth Handler, had observed her daughter (Barbara) playing with paper dolls, and noticed that she often enjoyed ascribing adult roles to the dolls. At that time, the vast majority of dolls were baby-like or toy representations of infants. Furthermore, the clothing with which the dolls were marketed, packaged and sold was often affixed to the doll.

    Handler, with her husband Eliot, who was a co-founder of the Mattel toy company, pitched the idea of an adult-bodied female doll with changes of clothes that gave her different roles. Mattel were initially cool on the idea, and it wasn’t until 1959 that Barbie launched. Yes, there were fashion clothes for Barbie and the inevitable nurse uniform. But there was an astronaut Barbie doll (1965) long before there was any actual woman in NASA’s astronaut corps (1978), let alone a woman in space.

    We forget that the Barbie dolls allowed young girls to imagine future roles that could barely have been contemplated by their mothers, yet had a normative existence in Barbieworld. Furthermore, Barbie’s multiple career possibilities were not subject to any male gaze or masculine censure claiming “such roles are unsuitable for women”. Barbie could be a flight attendant. But she could fly a jumbo jet too, long before airlines hired women as pilots. In Barbieworld, and in the Barbieland film, Barbie rules; and Barbie makes the rules.

    As one might hope, the movie acknowledges Barbie’s unrealistic physical proportions—and the very real body issues that these could create in young girls—while also celebrating her role as a feminist icon. Ken, in contrast, begins with a kind of ‘himbo frailty’ (as opposed to the threat of any ‘bimbo identity’ that some might attempt to foist on to Barbie).

    Yet as the film progresses, Ken goes from being Barbie’s uncertain and needy boyfriend to becoming some kind of advocate for macho-posturing and laddish culture, as he starts to think and act as a real man should behave. Without saying more about the film and issuing spoiler alerts, both Barbie and Ken discover a number of harsh truths and realities along their road to enlightenment. This is a funny, ironic and classy odyssey, and well worthy of the praise it has garnered.

    Well, since there has been a Barbie astronaut long before there was a female astronaut, I had wondered about a sequel to Barbie called Barbiechurch. There have been Barbie priest outfits for some time, and a few homemade Barbie bishops. To the best of my knowledge there has been no Barbie Cardinal, Archbishop or Pope. Yet. But in a more serious vein, I began to contemplate what the Barbie-doll-as-human, and Ken tagging along for the ride, might make of the Church of England at the moment?

    I think our heroine would be surprised and shocked by concepts such as ‘mutual flourishing’ and ‘complementarianism’. Not least because in Barbieland and Barbieworld, Ken is Barbie’s helpmeet and accessory. He is only there to complement her. No doubt he is there to compliment her as well. It is Ken who supports Barbie – and it is she who is the achiever and breadwinner. I think Barbie would be even more surprised to meet real women (human) who have signed up to inequality as being good, helpful and fair – which is still the simplest way to characterise ‘mutual flourishing’ and ‘complementarianism’. Furthermore, some women seem to think Manchurch (an odd kind of Fresh Expression full of ‘liberated’ Kens) is a great place for women to hang out and flourish. A kind of Frat House spiritual community? Women keen on ‘mutual flourishing’ love it, apparently, and find it all very convivial. (Though statistics on women sticking around in or moving to such dioceses suggests otherwise).

    I’m also wondering how this would play out with any potential new outfits available for the Barbie doll range? I can see a promising line of clothes that might draw on the BBC TV series Call the Midwife. But I suspect that the Admiral, Chief Engineer, Jet Pilot, President, Judge and Priest garb will be in short supply.

    The Church of England is currently beset with all manner of knotted and barbed issues it seems unable to address, let alone resolve. Despite Living in Love and Faith (LLF), the conversations and resolutions on human sexuality seem less than honest, and at times bizarrely surreal. Special dispensations for those who hold ‘honoured views’ or have ‘alternative-but-traditional positions on the role of women’ are sanctified.

    The Church of England would not, today, attempt this on the grounds of skin colour, ethnicity, class, disability or any circumstances where the person deemed to be a sign of social deviance was not ‘at fault’ (e.g., they were born illegitimate, or conceived through a mixed-race liaison, or a wife deserted and destroyed by the infidelity of their husband). The Church of England would not attempt to hold two opposite but mutually incompatible views on slaves and slavery. But the Church of England does do this with sexuality and gender.

    Of course, you are not allowed to draw this historical comparison to the attention of the leadership. It is deemed to be impolite and unpolitic to remind church leaders and bishops that the Church of England used to discriminate against all of these groups, even refusing them communion, holy matrimony, ordination and the like. To do some history homework would, apparently, be “unhelpful”. Nobody wants to be reminded that, back in the day, we discriminated against all manner of persons on the grounds of their colour, class and condition.

    WWBD? What would Barbie do now in a real-world situation where we had two mutually incompatible integrities on slavery, disability, ethnicity or class? It wouldn’t wash in Barbieland or Barbieworld. Just take a brief look at the range of Barbie dolls over the years. “Colored Francie“, a version of Barbie’s cousin, was marketed in 1967,  although Black and Latina Barbies were not available until the 1980s. The medium was the message.

    Church of England double-think is an elephant occupying the chancel, sitting in the sanctuary or propped up in the pulpit. But you are not allowed to say what you see. The ground rules in Churchyworld dictate that discriminatory views have the same equal value as progressive views. And that views and values of the wider public (which are, incidentally, overwhelmingly pro-equality) have no part to play in the doll-world where Ken rules.

    There is no play-world where Barbie supports or submits to Ken. All credit to Mattel and Ruth Handler here. We have never been offered a ‘Submissive Barbie’, ‘Helpmeet-Vicar’s-Wife’ or even so much as a Deaconess Doll. The striking element of Barbieworld is that girls are being given imaginative empowering possibilities: to become what they aspire to be. Furthermore, I am always struck by how many of the Barbie costumes exemplify professionalism and servant leadership (unlike Action Man; or poor Ken).

    There are many stalwart Synod advocates striving for an awakening of the church. For recovering our social and political conscience, albeit with its long history of struggling with a weak pulse, and failing to live out its calling as a full-blooded incarnational entity. But as I observed General Synod discussing safeguarding in July – I think especially of the wigged-up-gowned lawyers, dress-down episcopal garb (bishop Ken beach holiday attire seemed to be in vogue) – I did ask myself how real the Church of England currently is?

    The Archbishops’ Council and their presentations on safeguarding might just as well have come from mannequins or dolls. Theirs was juvenile staged play; a plastic and inauthentic tea party with no genuine humanity detectable at all. Indeed, you’d find more genuine humanity and reality in Barbieworld or Barbieland.

    So, what would Barbie do with the Church of England today? I think she’d conclude that of the two – Churchyworld and Barbieworld – the latter is the more real and far more human than the former. WWBD? Stay at home in Barbieland, where Ken knows his place, struggles with his insecurity and identity, women are free to be themselves and can aspire to anything, and nobody has to pretend.

    Pretence is the key, and that is what makes Barbie such a great, and even subtle-deep movie, recalling the Toy Story trilogy. It is ironic that in the world of play, pretending is meant to be there for imagination and pleasure and, much like theatre, not a substitute for reality. The purpose of child’s play, or staged play, is to hold up a mirror to reality, and help us to perceive our world and imagine it in some better state.

    Yet in the Church of England, pretending – and silly pretence-denials – have now become so normal and fundamental to its everyday functioning, we have forgotten what reality actually is. WWBD?

     

  • Equality, ‘headship’ and authority: drawing the line in schools and churches

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

    It should go without saying that all schools in this country want to teach children that all people are equal and should have equal opportunity. And it is important that schools should do this, as young people may be picking up other messages in society, in their home lives and from religious leaders.

    A couple of weeks ago I was at a Church of England school giving a talk to a group of sixth formers, who were studying Religious Education for A level, about gender equality and how equality is at the heart of the Christian faith. The class was a mixed group of boys and girls, Christians, Muslims, and others of other faiths or none.

    After the talk, I opened the floor for questions and was a bit shocked when one boy put up his hand and said, ‘It’s God’s will that men should be in authority over women.’ A couple of boys sitting next to him smirked and a number of the young people shifted in their seats uncomfortably. I challenged what he was saying, arguing that scripture can be and has been interpreted this way, but it also can and should be interpreted differently. Christian or Muslim, I strongly believe that it is God’s will for us to all see each other as equal – that there is no one lesser or greater than ourselves.

    The boy pushed back, quoting scripture, and explained why he believed women need to be controlled by men. I saw the teacher give him a look, but I calmly responded to his questions, giving alternative interpretations to the scriptures he referred to. He and I could have continued back and forth all day, but I tried to involve others who might have different opinions.

    At the end of the class, when the young people had gone, I had a chat with the teacher. She said that it is a problem that some young people are being taught by faith communities that it is men’s role to lead and women’s role to submit to that leadership. She said that in RE, a few years ago, she would have given some input about the interpretation of different texts regarding gender in scripture and then allow the students to discuss in small groups. She says she can no longer do this, as it causes so much upset and abuse. Another RE teacher I later spoke to about the experience confirmed that, more and more, boys are goading girls at school that they are the superior sex.

    As Chair of WATCH, a campaign group for equality for women in the Church of England, and as a vicar in West London, I spend a lot of time arguing that equality is at the heart of the Gospel and that we shouldn’t be discriminating against people on grounds of sex or other protected characteristics. WATCH calls for an end to the institutional discrimination, whereby it is still permissible for parishes to advertise just for a male vicar or to refuse the authority of a female bishop. Personally, it troubles and upsets me that our church is divided and some priests won’t receive communion from others because they are female and some of my colleagues don’t believe women should be vicars or bishops, or even preach (other than to women and children.)

    Nonetheless, I had not realised that the theologies that underlie these positions, especially headship (or ‘complementarian’) theology, are having such an impact on young people – at least, as evidenced by my visit to that Church of England school.

    Recently there has been some discussion about whether schools, particularly Church of England schools, should be teaching children about the ‘white supremacy pyramid’ and systemic racism. Some dioceses already recommend using the ‘pyramid’; for example, Derby. Whether this is a good idea or not, we all accept that schools should be teaching that it is not right for anyone to consider themselves greater or lesser than anyone else on the grounds of skin colour. But what about gender? How should schools respond to young people who are being taught in mosques or churches that men need to have power over women? Not only is this situation unpleasant and offensive for girls to contend with in schools, it is also dangerous. There is much evidence that in cultures that teach and accept male privilege over women there are higher levels of violence against women and girls, than in cultures which promote equality between the sexes.

    The day before my school visit, I was in York at General Synod and had a number of conversations with Conservative Evangelical Christians while I was there. I was campaigning, along with the Student Christian Movement, for an ‘Honest Church’ where, if we are going to continue with institutional discrimination against women, then we should at least be transparent about this, and churches that limit women’s roles should be clear about their position. Talking to one man, he admitted that his church says nothing about its headship theology on its website, but he said that they do teach headship theology in the church at least once a month, so anyone going to the church for any length of time should soon realise this. When I heard this, I thought that this was probably a good thing so that at least people knew the situation and could choose whether this church was for them or not. But now, having gone into the school, I am not so sure.

    Religious leaders have a lot of power and influence, especially over younger people, and headship teaching is possibly being accepted without any critical analysis or any acknowledgement of alternative approaches. As a result, some men may be hearing that they need to control women; indeed, that it is their role to show authority over women. I’d like to see the Church of England give a clear edict to our schools that it is not God’s will that one sex should have authority over the other. But, given that we allow this teaching in our churches and that we state in recent legislation that we want such churches to flourish, then that currently seems impossible.

    And the goading, or worse, seems set to continue.

     

     

  • Thirty Years of Women Priests in the Church of England and Still Two Thirds of Paid Posts Are Held by Men

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

    Suppose you are a senior leader of a major institution in the UK, two thirds of whose customers are female, and you are asked to set a gender diversity target for all the paid posts in your institution. You would probably come up with a figure of 50% for women or even more.

    Now suppose that you work for a major institution in the UK whose customers are two thirds female and which publicly states that it is committed to all roles in the institution being open equally to all people irrespective of gender. Then you would probably be upset when that institution sets a gender diversity target for paid posts at 70% for men and 30% for women.

    Welcome to the Blackburn diocese in the Church of England, which has set these gender diversity targets – apparently matching the national figures which, after thirty years of women priests, show men holding over two thirds of stipendiary posts.

    I don’t know what the current statistics are for Blackburn diocese, because the Church of England has stopped producing gender diversity statistics since 2020. But in 2020 the Blackburn diocese was said to have 24% of its paid posts held by women. So it’s hardly a very ambitious target for this to increase to 30%. And, when we look at the small print more closely, we see that the target is not a percentage of all the posts available in the diocese but only of the ones that are open to women.

    Confused? You may well be, but the situation in the Church of England is that, while it claims that all its roles are open to all people irrespective of gender, it still allows churches to pass resolutions saying they do not want a female vicar and they do not want to be under the oversight of a female bishop.

    Blackburn Diocese’s recent Statement of Needs, which was issued when it was looking to appoint a new bishop, said it has 235 parishes and 30 of these have passed resolutions saying they will not have a female vicar. For 18 of these, this is because they do not think the Church of England has the authority to ordain women as priests. For the other 12 it’s because they believe God created men to be leaders and women to support them in that leadership in the Church, a theology which is referred to as Complementarianism but is also described, more accurately, as Male Headship.

    So Blackburn’s target is 30% of a smaller number of posts than the 24% of a slightly larger number of posts in the official statistics three years ago. Which is hardly ambitious or encouraging.

    But it’s not surprising. If senior clergy in Blackburn had any serious intention of increasing the number of female clergy in their diocese, then they would not have supported the recent selection of a diocesan bishop who does not ordain women as priests.

    It will be said that the Bishop of Blackburn is highly supportive of women and has encouraged the appointment of many women to posts in Blackburn, but many female clergy will not apply for posts in a diocese where the Bishop overseeing them does not believe the Church had the authority to ordain them. And, furthermore, that bishop would therefore not receive bread and wine consecrated by them – even though he is happy for parishioners and others to receive their sacraments.

    If the decision makers for this appointment had had any doubt about this issue, they might have researched the situation in the only other diocese in the Church of England that is headed by a bishop who does not ordain women: Chichester. Chichester has had the same diocesan bishop since 2012, two years before women were allowed to be made bishops, and he does not ordain women as priests. And I believe this is a major factor in why Chichester is at the bottom of the league table in terms of the percentage of women holding stipendiary posts. Again, we don’t have up-to-date official statistics but in 2020 16% of stipendiary posts in Chichester were held by women, 84% by men.

    Talking with a senior leader in Chichester recently, I asked whether things were getting any better there for women. The leader told me that the statistics are probably slightly worse now, despite the fact that they were all working very hard to attract women and could not understand why more women didn’t apply for posts in Chichester. I suggested that the problem might be that many female clergy, myself included, would not take on a job in a diocese when the most senior bishop had any question over my ordination or my ability to consecrate the sacraments. And only when a fully affirming Bishop is in charge is this likely to change.

    Goal 5 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Targets is to end all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere – recognising, among other things, that understandings of male privilege are drivers of abuse against women and girls.  The UN asks us to imagine what our world might look like if we achieved this by 2030. And I would say that, if this were the case, then the world would look a lot more like the Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed two thousand years ago – in which there is no last, no first, no lesser, no greater – but all human beings are treated equally.

    The Church of England, as the country’s established Church, has the opportunity and responsibility to take a moral lead in ensuring the human rights of all people are protected. Women’s rights are human rights, and our Church cannot advocate for human rights while it has institutionalised discrimination against women and other groups – which legitimises sexism and sometimes abuse.

    I was at a large meeting of female clergy recently and was shocked to hear story after story of putdowns and underminings, everyday sexism, that women were experiencing in the Church. They said they could not raise these issues with senior clergy for fear of being seen as difficult or moaning – so it was only in the safe environment of an all-female group that they were comfortable to share their experiences. Which, to my mind, is a very unsafe culture that the Church has now created.

    Many women do as we are told and show so-called ‘gracious restraint,’ but this is wearing female clergy down and affecting their well-being. One woman, on the point of resigning her post, said to me, ‘Taken alone, each incident can be brushed off as not very important. But it’s like death by a thousand cuts and one day you realise that you are done.’

    Let’s set some new targets in the Church of England for bringing about true gender equity and balance. First, to get rid of the institutionalised discrimination. And, secondly, to seek that 50% of stipendiary posts are held by women and 50% by men. I truly believe it is just that simple.

     

     

  • Equal Marriage – 1928 Style

    Revd Canon Dr Judith Maltby is Chaplain, Fellow and Dean of Welfare of Corpus Christi College, Reader in Church History in the University of Oxford, and a member of the General Synod of the Church of England.

    One of the things that struck me forcibly during the February 2023 debate on Living in Love and Faith at General Synod was the repeated reference to the ‘doctrine of marriage’, as though this was a constant and fixed set of ideas throughout time. In the debate, only Revd Dr Miranda Threlfall-Holmes challenged this assumption.[1]  Another striking theme, for the more punitively minded, was how bishops might be disciplined for their apparent departure from orthodoxy.

    All this was a response to the modest proposals brought to Synod by the House of Bishops, proposals emerging out of the six-year long Living in Love and Faith process. The bishops maintain that their proposals do not alter the ‘doctrine of marriage’. Marriage remains, in the words of canon B30, ‘a union permanent and lifelong, for better for worse, till death them do part, of one man with one woman’. (Elephant in the Room Warning: except when it isn’t ‘permanent and lifelong’ – but we are steadfastly refusing to talk about that.) Opponents, however, challenge this claim from the bishops.

    I found myself feeling a bit sorry for the bishops as a group: from my ten years on the Crown Nominations Commission, I know the great emphasis we as a Church place on ‘Leadership’. Yet when bishops exercise even a smidgen, all hell breaks loose. Do we want our chief pastors to develop their thinking based on theological reflection and pastoral encounter and then exercise some ‘Leadership’ about it, or not?

    As with most things, we’ve been here before.

    Edward Lee Hicks (1843-1919) was Bishop of Lincoln from 1910 to his death in 1919. He is not a well-known figure in Anglican history. Hicks had the misfortune to follow Bishop Edward King – a figure of such devotion in certain traditions of the Church of England that he has a day in the calendar (8 March). In addition to his legendary pastoral devotion to his diocese, especially to the rural poor, King may have been the first Church of England bishop openly to wear a mitre since the Reformation  – yes, a mitre! – a pretty commonplace practice now even amongst some of the most evangelical on the episcopal bench,  such as the Bishop of Lancaster and the former Bishop of Blackburn. In the late nineteenth century, however, wearing a mitre was a Massive Thing, and at the instigation of the Church Association (an ancestor of the Church Society), King was prosecuted for all manner of now-unexceptional Anglican liturgical practices, such as lighting candles in daylight and making the sign of the cross at the blessing. The statue honouring King in Lincoln Cathedral celebrates his transgressive liturgical behaviour rather gleefully.

    Hicks was also transgressive in his thinking but about something – and here I speak as a good High Church woman – considerably more important than tat. He was a member of the Commission in the early twentieth century revising the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which in the end became the 1928 ‘deposited’ Prayer Book. Parliament, as readers of this blog no doubt know, refused to approve the book, causing a Church/State crisis that was still talked about in wounded tones when I arrived in England as a graduate student in 1979. Nonetheless, from the late 1920s onwards, the revised book was probably used more in the public worship of the Established Church than the 1662, in an impressive collective act of episcopally-sanctioned grassroots passive resistance throughout the Church of England.

    Hicks was committed to equality for women and in 1912 became president of the Church League for Women’s Suffrage, a group working to put laywomen on the same footing as laymen in Church councils. Over many years on the Commission to revise the Book of Common Prayer he worked to have the word ‘obey’ removed from the marriage service and replaced with equal vows for the couple – as Common Worship does. He argued further for the use of 1 Corinthians 13 at weddings in place of Ephesians 5 to avoid any suggestion that the wife is not her husband’s equal. An unscientific sample (that is, my own 30+ years of officiating at marriages – oops – Holy Matrimony[2]), 1 Corinthians 13 is very popular – I’ve never had a request for Ephesians 5. In the end, Hicks got his reform – his change in the ‘doctrine of marriage’ – with the option to have equal vows included in the 1928 Prayer Book provision. Needless to say, no woman would be forced not to vow to obey.  I hope that the irony of that last sentence is not lost on anyone.

    Change, as we are seeing with LLF, is incremental in the life of the Church. The 1928 Prayer Book made no provision for the exchange of two rings – another liturgical expression of the equality of the couple and included the ‘giving away’ of the bride – both changes in Common Worship. I have spent some time trying to track down when two rings become the norm in England but have failed – there is a Master’s thesis topic waiting for someone! Despite neither the English or American 1928 Prayer Books making provision for it, the doyen of mid-twentieth century Anglican liturgists, Massey Shepherd, suggested that exchanging two rings was becoming ‘frequent’ in the American Episcopal Church in the 1950s.[3]

    Nothing exists in a vacuum, and it is important to place the ‘obey’ debate of the 1910-20s in its historic context alongside not only women’s wider political and educational rights, but their inclusion in new Church governance structures, such as Parochial Church Councils and the forerunner of the General Synod, the Church Assembly. Laywomen were excluded from these new bodies. The opponents to equal vows did not use the language of complementarianism but that of good old-fashioned inequality and subordinationism. In the first decades of the twentieth-century, vocal opposition to equal vows came largely from the Anglo-Catholic quarter, based on a clear assumption of the inequality of the sexes. Athelstan Riley told the Church’s National Assembly in 1930 that:

    … in 1923 when the cry of equality between the sexes was at its height, a short measure was pressed putting husband and wife on an equal footing – a cruel and wicked act. There was and could be no equality in matters of sexual morality between men and women. It had pleased God to create a profound inequality; in temptation, in the results of sin to the individual [pregnancy out of wedlock?] … and eventually to society at large.[4]

    It is good to be reminded what a new kid on the block complementarianism is in the gender debates.

    Overshadowed by King, Hicks deserves to be better known. Most importantly for our current discussions of LGBT+ inclusion, the beginning of his theological change on the ‘doctrine of marriage’ had been brought about, in the best Anglican way, by pastoral encounter:  a young couple, whose marriage he was to solemnize, requested the omission of ‘obey’ and that the bride not be ‘given away’ by her father. Hicks’ diary records his puzzlement at the request, but it clearly started him thinking. The year, dear reader, was 1914.[5]

    In the early 20th century, an Anglican bishop was promoting the view that marriage – or Holy Matrimony as we now apparently must call it – was a union of equals and he managed to move the needle in terms of the Church’s expression of doctrine in its public liturgy. How many members of the General Synod realize what a departure from the 1662 Prayer Book’s ‘doctrine of marriage’, equal vows, not being ‘given away’, and the exchange of two rings, expresses? Heaven forbid, that pastoral encounter should be divorced (I choose that word deliberately) from the shaping of doctrine and pastoral practice.

    References:
    [1] General Synod 9 Feb 2023 (at c 3.22).
    [2] The House of Bishops’ paper on LLF, GS2289, argues that the civil understanding of marriage has departed from the Church’s for the first time by Parliament’s introduction of equal marriage in 2013. This is a remarkable statement, given the bishops’ statement that ‘Holy Matrimony is between one man and one woman for life’ and the fact that British people have been able to divorce and re-marry multiple times for decades (see p. 10).
    [3] Massey Hamilton Shepherd, The Oxford American Prayer Book Commentary (OUP, 1955), pp. 301-303.
    [4] Cited in Timothy Willem Jones, ‘Love, Honour and Obey?  Romance, Subordination and Marital Subjectivity in Interwar Britain’ in A. Harris and T. Jones, eds, Love and Romance in Britain, 1915-1970 (Palgrave, 2014), p. 130; an exceptionally good article on the ‘obey’ question in the Church of England. Jones notes that several interwar clergymen reported not using asymmetrical vows before the introduction of the alternative service (p. 128). See also his splendid book, Sexual Politics in the Church of England 1857-1957 (Oxford, 2013).
    [5] See The Diaries of Edward Lee Hicks, Bishop of Lincoln 1910-1919 (Lincoln Record Society, 82, 1993), p. 89 and Graham Neville, Radical Churchman:  Edward Lee Hicks and the New Liberalism (Oxford, 1998), p. 169.

  • The Sexism Women Continue to Face in the Church of England

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

    At Christmas parties this year, the chances are that someone will start talking to you about the dire national census results for the Church of England, which show that less than 50% of people in the UK now identify as Christians. If, like me, you are ‘in the Church’ in some capacity – perhaps a minister or a Churchwarden – they’ll want your take on it. Why don’t people go to Church anymore? How can people sit down to turkey and all the trimmings without first spending an hour in a chilly ancient building singing ‘O Come all ye faithful’?

    These are good questions. And there are many possible answers. On the positive side, perhaps our Christian values have become so embedded in our culture that we no longer need to be stirred up from the pulpit. Or, on the negative side, perhaps we are put off by a Church that can’t seem to make up its mind about gay marriage. Quite often, however, there’ll be one person at the party who starts going on about the female vicar of their local village church and how everything has gone downhill since she arrived.

    So I want to give a big shout out for that female vicar, and all the other female vicars and leaders in our Church. Do you have any idea how hard they work, how often they feel unvalued and what they have to put up with?

    Usually, the said female vicar has made some kind of change which is, of course, what all new vicars do. Maybe she has asked the Choir to occasionally sing a hymn that was written less than a hundred years ago. Maybe she has introduced an all-age service on the first Sunday of the month – for the two or three children who hardly ever come. She might even have succeeded in growing a congregation of families who now annoy ‘the regulars’ because they don’t sit still and make too much noise. The reason she is doing these things, of course, is a desperate attempt to build a wider congregation than the handful of septuagenarians and octogenarians she has inherited. A male vicar who did this would also be annoying to the indigenous congregation, but a female vicar gets it in the neck because she is a woman. Somehow, it’s simply because she is a woman that she is doing these things. Which is, of course, pure sexism – or unconscious bias, at the very least.

    But sexism is still sadly par for the course in the Church of England. In 2014, with great fanfare, women were finally allowed to be bishops as well as priests. But, in almost complete silence, provisions were then made so that parishes who didn’t accept female vicars and bishops could avoid their ministry. And this situation remains.

    So our vicar, who simply happens to be a woman, just has to put up with this. If she was ordained since 2014 she will have had to sign on the dotted line to say that she accepts that the Church both recognises her as a priest, but also recognises that some, including her colleagues and maybe even her bishop, don’t recognise she is a priest – and that is how the Church intends things to be indefinitely. This means that there may be a church in the next village where she could not cover a Sunday service because that church’s bishop isn’t confident she can consecrate the sacraments validly. And there may be a church in the nearby town, where she could not lead a service because that parish believes that women should not preach to mixed congregations.

    Our woman vicar will be working six days a week, sometimes looking after about six or seven churches and often not being paid a penny. More women are ordained later in life than men and they tend to get directed towards leading small churches or groups of small churches – often without a salary. Men tend to get ordained earlier and end up in paid posts leading bigger churches in more urban environments. One clergy colleague once explained to me why this made sense by saying, ‘Men are generally more dynamic than women and should therefore lead the bigger churches.’ Again, pure sexism.

    Earlier this month, Rev Rob Munro was appointed Bishop of Ebbsfleet to provide episcopal ministry to churches who do not accept female vicars and female bishops, although this purpose was cloaked in church jargon so that any ordinary person might have struggled to understand. The Church said that Munro ‘will have a special national ministry to parishes of a complementarian evangelical theology across England… [who] are unable to receive the priestly or episcopal ministry of women,’ which is fairly clear. But Munro, in his interview with The Church Times, simply talked about his ministry being for ‘resolution churches.’ Neither explained what complementarian theology is – the understanding that God created men to lead and women to submit in the Church and in marriage. Even the word ‘complementarian,’ which is now being used to replace what was previously referred to as ‘male headship,’ is misleading because it suggests equal balance and fairness, rather than one sex having authority and control over the other.

    Of course, neither I nor most of my colleagues in the Church of England agree with this theology but we feel under great pressure not to debate the matter, certainly not publicly. As Chair of Women and the Church (WATCH), a national campaign group for gender equality in the Church, I want to help us lift the lid on the ongoing sexism and discrimination that women, both ordained and lay, experience in the Church and help to change the culture. One of the things that we are asking for is that every church should have a statement in clear English about any limits it puts on women’s ministry in a logical and visible place on its website. This way, ordinary churchgoers can easily be aware of this matter. Munro says he doesn’t believe this should be required – he says it’s up to churches to say whatever they think is important on their websites. But, despite claiming that their theology on women’s ministry is so important they need a special bishop to look after them, churches who limit women’s ministry are mostly saying nothing on their websites or saying something in incomprehensible language on a page deeply buried within it.

    This isn’t about naming and shaming, it’s about being honest on a matter that ordinary Anglicans care about deeply. We have all worked hard to bring discrimination to an end in the secular world but, thanks to exemptions that the Church has under The Equality Act 2010, it can go on discriminating legally. Many people want to be members of churches who say no to this and feel angry when they find out, sometimes after years of support including financial donations, that their church limits women’s ministry. Furthermore, it’s not just a theological matter – these beliefs result in practices that impact women’s opportunities in the Church and their well-being.

    The Student Christian Movement recently launched a campaign called #honestchurch seeking churches to be clear on their websites regarding their theology about LGBTQ+ people. Their CEO, Naomi Nixon, was featured last week on Via Media. And we join with SCM in seeking equal clarity about women.

    So, when you go to Church this Christmas, and I hope you will, please spare a thought for your hardworking vicar. And, if that vicar is female, please tell her she’s doing a great job, a job she has every right to do. If you are ‘in the Church,’ please make sure you know where your Church stands on all this and who your bishop is and what their position is. Not to be a nuisance, but for the long-term good of our Church.

    After all I can’t believe that, if we brought an end to discrimination in the Church of England, this would not have something of an impact on those dire statistics.