Unrepresentative Synod

I’d much prefer to be typing about our annual visit to the seal breeding colony on the Lincolnshire coast on Friday , but there it is. The bottom picture is a turnstone feeding on seal placenta.

The General Synod vote was a train crash waiting to happen, and it doesn’t give me any pleasure to say this was set out in my post of 14th July 2008.

Among the informed lay people who have been involved in discussing this issue there are some who take the position that the Church of England is not in a position to develop its tradition in this way at least without the consensus of the major Catholic and Orthodox churches; our continuity with the pre-Reformation church has never been fundamentally fractured. But they are in a small minority; the rest see careful weighing of our own place in a developing tradition as what happened at the Reformation and what continues to happen today.

Among them there are some who take the position that the Church of England is not in a position to diverge from a biblical interpretation which forbids women from taking leadership authority in the church; we are not free to make moves which a literal interpretation of any New Testament text would forbid. But they are also a small minority; the rest see careful weighing of the bible in our present context as what has happened at every stage of Christian history.

We know the size of these minority positions for two reasons. One is that only 7% of the parishes in the Church of England have taken advantage of the provision made at the time of the first ordinations of women as priests to ring fence themselves against their ministry. The other is that over the last year between them over three quarters of the members of the Houses of Laity in each Diocesan Synod have voted in favour of legislation to allow the consecration of women as Bishops.

So for 36% of the House of Laity of the General Synod to vote against this legislation was both entirely predictable and fundamentally misrepresentative of the mind of the church.

A hundred years ago England still refused women the vote and resisted their place in professions such as medicine. For the hundred years since, in the same way that those who found the Holy Spirit given to Gentiles as much as to Jews and brought their recommendation that such people could not be excluded from the church to the central authorities of the early church in Jerusalem, people have been bringing again and again to state and church irrefutable testimony that women’s voting, working, ministering and leading are as grace-filled as those of men. We can be respectful of those who take specific minority views on how we handle tradition and scripture, but there is no way of avoiding this truth self evident both to society and to the growing consensus in our church.

There are two ways forward from here. One is that, after behind the scenes negotiations, the six senior members of the General Synod will exercise their right to have the legislation re-presented, with safeguards for conscientious objectors more explicit, and passed next year. The other more tortuous and tedious path is that the next round of elections to the General Synod will be conducted with a sharp awareness that the militant tendencies of the church should never be over represented again.

This parish has produced as ordinands or has had serve in it as licensed clergy twelve priests who are women (Anne now Chaplain of our local Hospital, the late Bridget, the late Christine, George still working with us, Jan, Jenny, Judy still living in the parish and now a Canon of our Cathedral, Julie, Linda, Pauline, Sue and Terrie) and any implication that they are not real priests or that their fellow women priests are somehow incapable of being bishops would be laughable if it were not so sad.

Do not call unclean

My three ordained colleagues (Assistant Curate, Non-Stipendiary Minister and Team Vicar) happen all to be female, indeed I can count a dozen priests from this parish over the years who happen to be female (the three of them, five of their predecessors, and the most recent ordinands produced by the parish the fourth of whom is due to be ordained priest this summer).

There is such a quiet normality about this that I am always surprised when I trip over the conviction / prejudice (sometimes one, sometimes the other, and sometimes a strange combination of the two which it is difficult to unravel) that their ministry is unacceptable. One of the three tells me that she has never really encountered this, but I know that another feels instances of it keenly; I did have a rare phone call this week about arranging a Funeral for a non-church attender whose family ‘wanted a man to take the service’ and I have no idea what influenced this request because we got no further than establishing that I was already booked to take another Funeral at exactly the same time this new one had been arranged.

There are those whose conviction is that the Bible sets its face against such ministry, and who will presumably be shaping their whole way of life around faithfulness to every attitude equally evidenced in the Bible. There are those whose conviction is that the long standing tradition of the church sets its face against such ministry, and who will presumably be shaping their whole discipleship in equal resistence to all present cultural norms which the church has not previously inhabited. And there are those (like ourselves) whose Christian experience of the grace made known through their ministry means we cannot ‘call unclean what God calls clean’, and who presumably need to be equally alert seeking to discern the activity of God in other unexpected places.

And (most often totally woven into all this, which is why the conviction / prejudice strands are so hard to unravel from each other) there is the influence of the cultural context in which we operate. We have had a female ordinand from South Africa staying in the parish for ten days. Her choice of parish to visit has been partly determined by her awareness of cultural resistance to her future ministry in the rural area from which she comes. We suggested she visit our female Archdeacon who began a conversation with her about the way in which the English agreement to ordain women followed years in which the secular leadership of women was very visible in society (so it felt to many like the church ‘catching up’) but the South African agreement to do so has preceded anything like this (so it feels to many like the church acting in opposition to the norms around it).

I continued this conversation by wondering why the South African church had been such an ‘early adopter’ of this idea in the first place. My guess is that the history of apartheid has made what might otherwise have been a conservative church on this issue into a strong resister to any other form of apparent discrimination. If so, this might be similar to the liberal commitment of the American Anglican church where I observed before we may under estimate the degree to which being asked to hold back from acting on an emerging conviction that faithful homosexual activity is acceptable and moral is like being held back from acting on a conviction that slavery is wrong.

We found the pelican in her piety during Half Term on a wall in Amsterdam.

Two integrities cont

I tried the argument in my last post on our Archdeacon when I saw her on Wednesday and she offered me exactly the opposite point of view, so I may be wrong yet again.

There is no Ecclesiastical Committee yet in place for the new Parliament, but there is a new Second Church Estates Commissioner (the MP who steers General Synod Measures through Parliament). He is thus a new ex-officio member of General Synod and I’ve now had a look at what he said in the debate, which, if it persuaded a tiny handful of clergy who would not otherwise have done so to vote against the Archbishops’ amendment, may have made all the difference.

He said his personal opinions would not matter as he’d be neutral in attempting to steer through any Measure General Synod passed. He said his personal opinion happened to be that it should become legal for women to become Bishops.

He argued from scripture: God entrusted the first proclamation of the Resurrection to women (and yesterday, 22 July, happened to be the feast of Mary Magdalen, ‘Apostle to the Apostles’).

He argued from reason: leadership by women, once almost unthinkable in any context, has been found to be widely valued and fruitful (including the Vicars of the two major parishes in his constituency, and of the parish in which he worships, and the most significant civic leaders in the area).

He didn’t argue from tradition.

But, he said, Parliament is a different place to the 1990s, has recently strengthened equality legislation, and would be unlikely to take kindly to a Measure which appeared to qualify the status of women Bishops in any way. In the 1990s, the Ecclesiastical Committee wanted to make sure that provision for women priests included safeguards for objectors. Today, he opined, it would be certain to want provision for women Bishops not to be undermined by the extnet of such safeguards.

We will see who is right (but perhaps only if the Measure in its final form does achieves a majority of two thirds in each ‘House’ of a new General Synod about to be elected).

If the Second Church Estates Commissioner is right, then the question of whether or not provision for objectors should be by Code of Practice (as in the present version of the Measure, which they see as no fundamental safeguard at all) or by legal provision (the Archbishops’ suggestion which didn’t get into the present version of the Measure, which they desire) will be determined by a secular political understanding of equality quite independent of any weighing of Christian scripture, tradition or reason.

Whatever the rights and wrongs, this is exactly the process of decision making the Catholic movement in the Church of England has always feared.

Meanwhile, a grave at St Michael’s was vandalised in the week: the broken cross was found elsewhere in the churchyard, and the heart memorial down by the river.

I’ve honoured Bert by reviving his memory in looking him up in the burial register and his family in the 1911 census. His father was also a Bert who’d come from Harwich, worked as an oil boiler, and married a seventeen year old Grimsby girl (Jane Riley) in 1902.

In 1911, shortly before Bert’s birth, they lived at 10 Hargrave Street with his three older sisters (Doris, Gladys and Ivy). It was still the family address when he died in 1927 aged 15, and they seemed to have worked hard at what appear to be hand made memorials to him which had survived for over eighty years.

Two integrities

If I was unhappy with the proposals to enable women to be appointed as Bishops in the Church of England (which I am not), I’d take a particular interest in the formation of the Ecclesiastical Committee of the new Parliament, and I’d then be doing a lot of work with those who are appointed to it.

Any Measure passed by the General Synod has to be approved by Parliament before it can receive the Royal Assent. There is normally a brief debate in both Houses of Parliament to nod the Measure through; Parliament may not amend the Measure, but it retains the right not to approve it at all. Because of this, there is a preliminary stage at which a Committee of fourteen members drawn from both Houses of Parliament considers whether or not it is ‘expedient’ to put the Measure before Parliament at all.

Before the Measure to allow women to be ordained as priests was presented to Parliament, the Ecclesiastical Committee of the time made it clear that it would not regard it as expedient to present the Measure unless there were safeguards in place for those who could not accept it. The payments which were made to clergy who left the Church of England when women were ordained priest and the whole ‘flying Bishop’ provision for parishes which did not wish to deal with Bishops who ordained women followed from this. The language of ‘two integrities’ in the Church of England over this issue stems from this balance of Measure and related safeguards.

Now, the shape of the Measure which has just emerged from the General Synod does not make nor relate to any provision about payments to clergy who may leave and it dismantles the whole ‘flying Bishops’ provision. I’d have thought that the very least any well primed new Ecclesiastical Committee would want to know is how the General Synod justifies removing precisely the provisions without which the earlier Committee wouldn’t have let the previous Measure through; it might even feel that Parliament has been the subject of a confidence trick in this regard.

I’d have thought it quite possible that the message the Committee could then send would be legally binding safeguards for ‘the other integrity’ would have to be built into any new Measure before it would be regarded as expedient - which is exactly what the Archbishops proposed to the Synod, what a majority of the whole Synod supported, and what motions from many Diocesan Synod over the next few months may very well request.

The weeping ash at the entrance to St Michael’s churchyard has featured here before; this picture of it was taken yesterday.