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Tag: ordination of women

  • 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.

  • 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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