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Tag: Parliament

  • Learning from history: LLF and the ordination of women

    by April Alexander, Member of General Synod 2000-21; Church Commissioner 2008-18

    (Editor’s note: this article is based on letters originally published in the Guardian (7 February 2023) and Church Times (3 February 2023). They are reprinted here both to underline the point that there is a long history behind the LLF debate, and to draw out the parallels – and warnings – that can be drawn from the processes that eventually led to the ordination of women)

     

    Among the comments about the House of Bishops document debated at the February General Synod were many which implied that the anti-discrimination campaign for gay priests in the Church of England began about a decade ago.

    That is not the case. It began in 1987 when Tony Higton’s private motion was debated at General Synod declaring that homosexuality, adultery and fornication are “sinful in all circumstances”. The matter had not been discussed in General Synod before that, although there were around 400 Anglican clergymen in the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement at the time. It is probably true to say that many congregations were oblivious and, according to Jeffrey John, the future Archbishop of York did not trouble himself at all about it.

    Synod passed the motion not as originally worded but in another, only slightly less draconian, version stating that “fornication and adultery are sins against this ideal” – the ideal of sexual intercourse being something “which belongs properly within a permanent married relationship” – and “that homosexual genital acts also fall short of this ideal, and are likewise to be met by a call to repentance and the exercise of compassion”. Terry Louden, who spoke in the debate, has noted that “There was the air of a witch-hunt around at the time.”

    In the wake of these discussions the Rochester Group was set up, which published a Discussion Document suggesting that, while homosexual acts were acceptable for lay people, clergy should abstain. The discussion document, despite its status, was not discussed in Synod but this central new requirement for the clergy had not only become– apparently – part of the doctrine of the Church, but ordinands and clergy were required to sign up to it as Issues in Human Sexuality. A recent question in General Synod elicited the surprising information that there was no record anywhere of Synod or the House of Bishops having decided this or agreed to it.

    In 2003 Jeffrey John was offered the Bishopric of Reading and conservative evangelicals in the Oxford Diocese secured his withdrawal from the post through the then-Archbishop of Canterbury. This prompted the foundation of Inclusive Church which has struggled since to achieve affirmation, gratitude and love for the very many gay priests in the Church of England.

    Now, after the February 2023 debate, there is to be another ‘Pastoral’ group to consider whether it is yet possible to love and affirm our gay priests and whether the time is right to dispense with the intrusive questioning of ordinands which turns out never to have had the blessing of General Synod at all. So far, the issue has run for nearly forty years; it has caused misery to many and detriment to the Church. Many would consider there is very little to discuss but the Archbishop was far from unequivocal recently on the matter and meanwhile it stands as an extra hurdle for gay priests being considered for the Episcopate.

    Another of the many issues raised by the LLF debate is the relationship between the Church of England and Parliament; between the established church and the law of the land. MPs are currently demanding that the Church should allow the marriage of same sex couples in CofE churches. Sir Tony Baldry even outlined the way in which Parliament could impose the will of MPs and peers by “introducing a Private Member’s Bill with the effect of permitting Church of England priests to marry same-sex couples” (Church Times 7 February 2023).

    Here, it is worth remembering the history of the ordination of women in which Parliament also had a keen interest. In 1992, the General Synod passed a relatively simple measure to allow women to become priests, but not to impose them where a parish wanted to maintain the then-established position of appointing only male priests. That did not satisfy the Ecclesiastical Committee (a joint committee of MPs and peers) of the time and they demanded “protection” and “safeguarding” against women priests for those who “needed” it, by means of an Act of Synod. The church had no alternative but to oblige – and complicated arrangements were agreed whereby conservative evangelical and Anglo-Catholic parishes could opt out of the new regime and elect not to appoint women priests or to consider them for posts.

    Worse than this, because neither Conservative Evangelicals nor the Catholic wing could “trust” their Diocesans who supported and even ordained women as priests, the Act of Synod dictated that there should be not one but two categories of Provincial Episcopal Visitors (PEVs) (“flying bishops”) to provide Episcopal oversight for them: one category for the Conservative Evangelicals and another for the Catholics. A particular stipulation for the Catholic wing was that, in order to remain in communion with their Catholic flocks, such bishops could neither ordain women nor receive the Eucharist from them. More than that, neither they, nor their flock could receive the Eucharist from any bishop who had laid hands on a woman in ordination. One such Anglo-Catholic was recently consecrated bishop separately from his three colleagues (one of whom was female) for this reason. The two services took place at different times on the same day, 2 February 2023, both in Canterbury.

    These divisions within the C of E have not only survived but increased in intensity. That was the reason why legislating for women as bishops took so long and was so difficult – and the reason why we have so few women bishops today (25% of newly appointed diocesan bishops after seven years).

    Similar but not identical divisions are also evident today with regard to same-sex marriage; dissenters have become emboldened over the last thirty years and they insist not just that same-sex marriage cannot take place in church but that the relationship of same sex couples cannot be blessed there. This is despite the fact that same sex marriage in church can occur in our neighbouring Anglican Provinces of Scotland and Wales. These dissenters are largely on the evangelical wing and have huge support from some churches in the Anglican Communion worldwide, although by no means all.

    It is interesting to speculate whether, had parliamentarians left the church to its own devices in 1992, it would be in a very different position now. The examples of the Act of Synod, the provisions made around women bishops, and the continuing discrimination that have resulted are very relevant to consider at a time when some conservatives are calling for “structural differentiation”.

     

    Further reading

    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)

  • 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.

     

  • “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)