ViaMedia

Tag: women

  • Why Only 1 Diocesan Bishop in the Last 10 Appointments in the Church of England has been a Woman

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

    **updated 28 September 2023**

    Congratulations to Bishop Debbie Sellin, whose appointment as the next Bishop of Peterborough was announced today, and prayers for a fruitful ministry. The Church of England will now have 7 female Diocesan Bishops out of a total of 42 Diocesan Bishops and will have made 8 appointments of women as Diocesan Bishops out of the 29 appointments made since women became eligible as bishops in 2015.

    Congratulations to the Peterborough Vacancy in See Committee which stated, during the discernment process, that it was seeking to appoint someone who ‘wholeheartedly ordains men and women.’ Vacancy in See Committees all need to make clear statements like this, otherwise it may well be assumed in the appointments process that a candidate who does not ordain women or accept women as church leaders is acceptable.

    Congratulations also to Bishop Debbie for being selected, despite the disadvantages that female candidates face when appointments of Diocesan Bishops are made. This un-level playing field is evidenced by the fact that the Church of England has appointed three times more men than women as Diocesan Bishops and, most recently, over five times.

    Let me explain what’s going on. First, when a Diocesan Bishop is to be appointed, a Crown Nominations Committee (CNC) is assembled. This CNC has 14 members comprising: the two Archbishops; 6 members elected from the Diocese concerned; and 6 members from a group of CNC members that have been elected by General Synod to serve in this capacity for a term of five years. Synod elects 6 “pairs” of CNC members for this purpose and, for each appointment, the pair can decide which of them will sit on the particular CNC.

    So far, so good. But three of these “pairs” comprise Traditionalist Anglo-Catholics who do not believe the Church of England has the right to ordain women and/or Conservative Evangelicals who question whether women should be church leaders. This implies that at least 3 out of 14 members of any CNC do not believe that women should be bishops, or even priests. And that is before we take into account the 6 locally elected members of the CNC where there is often representation of those who do not fully accept women’s ministry too.

    When it comes to voting, a candidate needs 10 out of the 14 possible votes of CNC members to be appointed. We don’t know how individual members of the CNCs vote, because they are allowed to do this in secret and are therefore not accountable. Under the process, members can claim verbally to be supportive of certain candidates but then not vote for them in the ballot. Furthermore, if a member abstains that is equivalent to a No – because the candidate still needs 10 votes in their favour. A few years ago, in the Oxford diocese, the CNC had two female candidates and neither were approved because of abstentions. The process had to be repeated, and then a man was appointed.

    9 of the last 11 appointments have been men, including the appointment of one Diocesan bishop who is on the Council of The Society, a network of Anglo-Catholic clergy within the Church of England who do not believe the Church of England has the right to ordain women. For a Church that claims, in its famous Five Guiding Principles, that ‘it is fully and unequivocally committed to all orders of ministry being open equally to all without reference to gender,’ these arrangements seem extraordinary. I can’t help wondering whether the skewed and secretive system, by which Diocesan Bishops – of whom many sit in our House of Lords – are appointed, is actually even legal. While the Church of England has certain exemptions under the Equality Act 2010 to discriminate on grounds of sex, it does not have carte blanche.

    This is a sorry state of affairs, especially given the many episcopal appointments that are due to be made in the next few years. According to a recent survey conducted by The Times, about two thirds of participating clergy want to see the provisions allowing parishes to reject women’s ministry come to an end and over 80% said they would be happy to support a female Archbishop of Canterbury. But, to become Archbishop of Canterbury, candidates are generally expected to be experienced Diocesan bishops first – and, at the moment, only 7 out of 42 are women.

    All this implies that not only is there a long way to go in ridding the Church of discrimination on the grounds of sex but also there is something badly wrong with our governance and, in particular, how minority voices have gained such a lot of power in General Synod. Overwhelmingly, Anglican clergy and laypeople want equality for all people in our Church – but the skewed composition of the bodies that elect our bishops means that many senior clergy do not reflect these views. Furthermore, about 8-9% of bishops are Traditionalist Anglo-Catholics or Conservative Evangelicals, when only 4% of parishes have passed resolutions to restrict women’s ministry. No wonder many frontline clergy and lay people see senior clergy as becoming more and more out of touch.

  • Getting Hot under the Collar about Sex

    by Mother Fiona Jack, curate at St.Barnabas, Ealing and member of General Synod

    A motion to urge the government to take action to limit children’s access to pornography was passed with an overwhelming majority at the July sessions of General Synod. There was also a recommendation for programmes to increase awareness of its pernicious influence on the young. There’s currently an Online Safety Bill at Committee stage in Parliament; if passed, it will go some way to bringing in legislation to address the problem. No-one, I imagine, would take issue with this; we heard evidence from professionals, parents and confessors attesting to the damage done when children access age-inappropriate material.

    I have a particular interest in this as, in my other life, I run a qualitative research business. Recently, we conducted a study for a major platform provider on the same topic. We discovered that not only do children access 18+ sites, but they are often more tech-savvy than their parents and can circumvent parental controls because they know their parent’s login and password details. The issue is much broader, however, than pornography. Equally harmful for children is violent content or horror. I remember my own daughter (despite warnings from me) watching a horror film with a 15 rating when she was about 12. She discovered, to her regret, why such films are not recommended for younger children. As well as horror and violence, online gambling and other online purchases can present problems: not only can children manipulate their parents’ email accounts, but they sometimes have their bank and credit card details and can run up large bills through online purchases of – for example – computer games, which also sometimes have violent or other adult content.

    Given this potential broader remit, I was somewhat disturbed that the debate in Synod focussed on pornography, to the exclusion of these other risks to children’s mental health and well-being. Coupled with other debates in Synod and the subsequent furore around same-sex relationships and marriage at the Lambeth Conference, this led me to reflect on why, as a Church, we seem to have sex on the brain. The overriding narrative from the Church seems to be that sexual sin is more serious than any other. What about the many other besetting sins of our age? Why don’t we hear much about pride, greed, envy or anger?

    I would argue – and I don’t think this is particularly contentious – that the underlying message of the Gospels is love. We hear plenty about agape love, certainly, the kind of selfless love a parent has for their child or the love God has for us. In the Church, we’re all comfortable with this kind of love. Love is OK as long as it’s pure and spiritual, right?

    There’s also the eros kind of love though, as so breathtakingly portrayed in the Song of Songs. What is it about the eros kind of love that makes some people in the Church get so hot under the collar? Being embodied is part of our identity – we are not built or intended to be pure spirit either on this or the other side of the grave – have you noticed how nobody talks about the resurrection of the body these days? We interact in the world for good or ill with our bodies. In a lecture entitled “Towards a Christian Sexual ethic for the 21st century”, the Revd Dr Carla Grosch-Miller pointed out quite rightly that the only function of the female clitoris is pleasure. If we believe we are fearfully and wonderfully made by our Creator, then we can only assume that enjoyment of sex was part of God’s plan for women in the first place. And for how many centuries have women who have enjoyed sex been thought of as whores – not to mention the cultures which still practise FGM for this very reason?

    There can be no more beautiful expression of love than the joy of sexual union between two people who love each other in the context of a committed relationship – and that’s equally true for heterosexual and homosexual couples. If we theologise sex into something shameful and sinful, then we deny a fundamental part of what it is to be human, and life becomes beige not red-blooded. In the words of the Song of Songs: ‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it’. If we are fortunate enough to find this kind of love in our lives, we might find in it a window into the love of God which is both passionate and fervent, full of desire and longing, eros as well as agape. Sadly, we are taught not to want certain things or certain people: we don’t choose who we love – how much easier would life be if that were the case?

    Going back to our starting point, our children must be protected from all kinds of harm online, not just pornography. Over-emphasis on sexual sin can make us look like people for whom it is always Lent and never Easter (Pope Francis) or like Narnia without Aslan where it’s always winter and never Christmas. Here’s a radical thought: instead of disapproving attitudes and a tone of moral outrage towards the secular world and our fellow Christians, what if the Church were to send a message of understanding and encouragement, a message that speaks of joy and hope even in the midst of suffering? Perhaps then we’d be following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ.

     

  • 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.