Preachers, Prophets and Heretics: Anglican Women's Ministry

community.

Introduction

Elaine Lindsay

Archbishop of Perth: May God richly bless Elizabeth, Kay, Pamela, Jennifer, Teresa, Catherine, Judith, Joyce, Robin, Elizabeth and Robert. Are you ready to accept them as priests in the Church of God?

Congregation: We accept them gladly!

On 7 March 1992, in Perth, it came to pass: the long-anticipated admission of women to the Order of Priests in the Anglican Church of Australia. And with it came public recognition that women could be considered as persons fit for such office, able to receive the Holy Spirit and to forgive sins, and take authority to administer the sacraments and preach the word of God. By the end of 1992, 92 women were serving as priests.

The proponents of women’s ordination were overjoyed, the opponents less so.

Preachers, Prophets and Heretics, in bringing together key participants and astute observers of the struggle, explains why and how this change to the centuries-long tradition of male-only ordination came about. It elucidates the means by which it was achieved and the passions it roused, it describes the ways women’s ordination has enriched Anglican congregational life and worship, and warns against the threat of backlash. It honours the women who stepped forward to claim their equality before God, and those women and men who supported them, at some personal cost, as they challenged ecclesiastical teachings and hierarchies. In other times and places such pioneers may have been condemned as heretics; in Australia they were described as witches, but they functioned as prophets.

The debate on women’s ministry which so polarised Anglicans was initiated by bishops from the worldwide Anglican communion who, at the 1968 Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, urged every regional Church or province ‘to give careful study to the question of the ordination of women to the priesthood and to report its findings to the Anglican Consultative Council … which will make them generally available to the Anglican communion’.¹

That same gathering determined that women should be allowed to be ordained as deacons, noting that theological arguments against the ordination of women were inconclusive. In 1973, the Australian General Synod Doctrine Commission reported unanimously that there were no theological objections to the ordination of women as deacons, yet it was not until 1985 that General Synod passed a Canon allowing it. It may be a measure of the heat generated by arguments for and against women’s ordination that the first ordination service was delayed when a bomb scare forced the evacuation of Melbourne’s St Paul’s Cathedral. The Melbourne ordinations preceded those in Perth, Tasmania, Gippsland and North Queensland, all in 1986. Other dioceses followed, gradually, including Sydney in 1989.

As deacons, women could assist the priest, read the scriptures in church, perform baptisms, instruct young people and, if licensed by the bishop, preach. They were not given authority to exert leadership in the Church; rather, in the words of the service for the Making of Deacons (male and female), they were to be ‘modest, humble, and faithful in their ministry, ready to observe every spiritual discipline’. The diaconate was one way for women to express their commitment to ministry within the church, but it was insufficient to satisfy those who believed they had been called by God and the community to the priesthood.

How things change.

Twenty years after the Perth ordination, the 2012 Australian Anglican Directory reports that 22 of the 23 dioceses have women clergy (the Diocese of The Murray with neither deacons nor priests being the exception) and 20 dioceses have women priests (although the Diocese of Sydney does not recognise the two women ordained as priests elsewhere but resident within its boundaries). In the church as a whole, 36 per cent of active deacons and 20 per cent of active priests are women. Three women have been consecrated as bishops in the Dioceses of Perth, Melbourne and Canberra & Goulburn. Women are active participants in synods, commissions and processions, no longer sitting silently on the backbenches. In the 1970s there was a handful of women, all lay, in General Synod. By 2010, there were 67 women (24 clergy and 43 lay women) among the 228 members. These women included ‘right reverends’ (bishops), ‘venerables’ (archdeacons) and ‘drs’ (scholars) as well as parish clergy; even the Diocese of Sydney included four women deacons amongst its 30 clergy representatives. In 2012, the Anglican Church looks different, sounds different and, perhaps, thinks differently.

It is good to remember that the ordination of women in Christian churches is not a recent phenomenon. While the years 1986, 1992 and 2008 recur throughout this book, marking respectively the ordination of the first women deacons, priests and bishops in the Anglican Church of Australia, Jane Shaw, Anne O’Brien and Peter Sherlock remind us that the first women were ordained at least a century earlier. 1853 saw the first woman ordained in the Congregational Church in the United States; in 1862 the first deaconess was ‘set apart’ in the Church of England; in 1870 five women were ordained in Unitarian congregations in the United States; in 1873 Unitarian Martha Turner was appointed the first woman pastor of an Australian church; in 1880 the first Methodist woman minister was appointed in the United States; and in 1884 Marion Macfarlane was set apart as a deaconess – the first woman to be ordained in the Church of England in Australia. But women were most often appreciated for their unobtrusiveness – as preachers in the days before amplification, for example, they were expected to be sweet-voiced and lady-like. One hundred years later, members of the Movement for the Ordination of Women (MOW) were still being criticised by the church establishment for their banners, demonstrations and outspokenness.

The first report on ordaining women to the priesthood in the Church of England, as Peter Carnley notes, dates back to 1922. In 1935 a report of a commission appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York found there were no compelling reasons for or against the ordination of women.² The Bishop of Hong Kong ordained Florence Li Tim-Oi in 1944 as the first woman priest in the Anglican Communion, but this did not inspire other bishops; instead Tim-Oi was encouraged to cease her priestly duties in 1946 and her ordination was not formally recognised until 1971.

Then there was the 1968 Lambeth Conference, with its request to regional churches to discuss women’s ordination. The controversies that followed that request are covered here from various Australian standpoints – legal, historical, lay, ecclesial and feminist – by Keith Mason, David Hilliard, Janet Scarfe, Keith Rayner, Peter Carnley, Stuart Piggin and Muriel Porter.

It is at this point that the (to outside observers) byzantine processes of the Anglican Church of Australia, with its then-24 dioceses, constitutions and styles of churchmanship, become apparent. Conservative Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals united against women’s ordination, but for quite different reasons, the former citing tradition and fearing a breach with the Catholic Church, and the latter citing their interpretation of scripture which places man at the head of the family, and thus the church. A pluralist diocese such as Melbourne was far more supportive of women than a high church diocese such as Ballarat or a low church diocese such as Sydney. Battles were fought in diocesan synods, at General Synod, and in the law courts. And these battles were fought mainly by men, as is acutely evident in the Mason, Hilliard, Rayner and Carnley chapters. Despite their increasing presence in professional ministry, as described by Scarfe, women had little say as to whether they were capable of ordination, fit to hold any level of authority in the church, or even teach boys past the age of puberty.

Women found their voices in organisations such as MOW and Women-Church, Women and the Australian Church (WATAC) and Ordination of Catholic Women (OCW), all of which were ecumenical in their membership. And their voices were given expression through newsletters and journals, conferences, books and the media. While men fought over technicalities and the division of power, women explored the nature of ministry, engagement with the community, the language of worship, and the imaging of the divine. Hilliard observes that the Australian opponents to women’s ordination produced little original material, relying on arguments from the United Kingdom and, more recently, from the United States. Supporters of women’s ordination, in comparison, changed the theological and liturgical landscape, impacting not only on Anglicans but also, as Katharine Massam points out, on Catholics.

The drama of the struggle was not lost on the secular media: despite the efforts of opponents such as John Fleming and James Murray to argue their case through their radio programs and newspaper columns, the media were more sympathetic to the cause of women. The foundation president of MOW, Patricia Brennan, was a charismatic figure and the women’s story was far more compelling: the underdog against the behemoth, revolution against repression, hope against negativity, colour and movement against grey besuited tradition. Opponents may have thought the battle was on the synod floor, but it was also in the public square and that was where women were at their strongest.

That said, it was still incumbent upon men to decide in favour of women’s ordination and to act upon it. The turning point came when the opponents of women’s ordination resorted to the secular courts in January 1992 to prevent Owen Dowling from carrying through his intention of ordaining 11 women deacons as priests on 2 February 1992. For many, the sight of Anglicans taking their brother to court was too much to bear and, in November 1992, General Synod overturned the ‘Phillimore Rule’, inherited from late 19th century English church law, that said women were incapable of ordination. Peter Carnley did not wait for General Synod and ordained ten women in Perth in March 1992. The passage of legislation for women bishops was far less fraught, as Porter recounts, but, as Piggin laments, the battle still rages against the priesting of women in the Diocese of Sydney, at terrible cost to women and Anglicans of a moderate persuasion.

The ordination of women was accompanied by the introduction of gender inclusive language and imagery, an expansion of metaphors for God, the restoration of Biblical women to the lectionary readings, and the writing of new words for old hymns. MOW had been a great proving ground for women like Elizabeth Smith and Janet Nelson and it had instilled in women like Heather Thomson and Peta Sherlock an appreciation of the power of teaching, and a willingness to stir traditional parish certainties. Contrary to the propaganda put forth by some opponents of women’s ordination, the liturgies of post-1992 Anglicanism did not replace the ‘great pillars and arches of Christian faith’ with ‘subversive feminist doctrines which can hardly be viewed otherwise than as profoundly heretical’;³ rather, they attracted women reformers who, like then Uniting Church minister Dorothy Lee, wished to retain the core metaphors of Christianity, as expressed in the traditionally Trinitarian language of the Anglican liturgy. While the women who supported women’s ordination ranged from reformist to radical, most women seeking ordination, as Scarfe demonstrates, were quite conservative, not wanting to rock the boat, but to climb aboard.

Parishioners may have marvelled at the proficiency of their new women deacons and priests, but the first generation of ordained women were veterans already, with years of professional practice behind them, as deaconesses, pastoral workers, chaplains, student ministers, missionaries and clergy wives. Even so, they still needed to find a way of working that addressed the hostility of those who refused to recognise the validity of their appointment and the fears of their supporters who worried they might be absorbed into the power structures of the church, reproducing the clericalism against which the reformers had fought. In the end, as Peta Sherlock found, the women had to be true to themselves, to be fully human.

Advocates of women’s ordination hoped that the experience of women’s ministry would convert their opponents and in many cases it did, suggesting that fear of the unknown was at the heart of their opposition. But conversion has not been universal. Some Anglo-Catholics, citing their dismay at women’s ordination, have responded positively to Pope Benedict XVI’s invitation to join the Catholic Church while maintaining their liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions. This may prove a mixed blessing, both for liberal Catholics who support the idea of women priests and for egalitarian Anglicans who regret the loss of a counter-balance to North American neo-Calvinist teachings that are edging into Australia.

Women express their spirituality through many different traditions, although they often share similar problems, as Rachael Kohn reflects when she considers some of the powerful women she has interviewed as a religious broadcaster. The life-threatening experiences faced by some of her interviewees should cause Anglican women to be grateful for the relatively civilised way in which their struggle for ordination played out. The term ‘relatively’ is used advisedly, in the light of MOW member Pam Albany’s observation that

I have wept while priests, themselves the supporters of the ordination of women, told me that I am too angry, too loud, too uncompromising, too uncaring, too public with my views. Behind my back, they had called me witch, hag, emasculator, and other names I don’t want to remember ...⁴

The raw experiences of the women who were at the centre of the struggle for women’s ordination should not be overlooked in the flurry of dates, processes and arguments. Gill Varcoe was one of those women who would have been ordained by Owen Dowling in February 1992, had there not been recourse to the secular courts. Twenty years later, she was one of the (subsequently-ordained) women who returned to remember that day:

2 February 2012 saw a gathering in St Saviour’s Cathedral in Goulburn to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of something that did not happen. But a ‘non-event’ it wasn’t. What was hoped to be the first ordination of women as priests in an Australian diocese did not occur on that day following a NSW Supreme Court injunction preventing Bishop Owen Dowling ordaining eleven women. The ordination of the men proceeded as planned.

The evening before there had been long discussions about what should happen. Should the women go at all? Should they join the crowds standing outside? If they went, should they participate by distributing communion? We did decide to go. We also decided that it would be good to answer the first question in the series put to candidates for ordination: ‘do you believe you are called …?’ The calling of each candidate had been assessed in the usual way. The bishop and the church had confirmed that calling. It would be good to say so. As we worked through what to do, the bishop agreed that we could answer that question, and then, he suggested, the women should sit down.

But we had sat down for long enough. We remained standing. The Reverend Alison Cheek⁵ had been with us on the night of 1 February as we debated what we should do. She warned us of the cost of proceeding with what we planned. She wasn’t concerned about illegality – Bishop Owen and his advisers never intended to act illegally – but with the emotional and personal cost to each of us. Each of us and our families and friends has paid a price.

As we prepared for the commemoration we found that our memories and responses varied greatly. For some the day has become the ‘real’ anniversary of ordination: it is remembered as the day the long struggle ended. For others, it is remembered with grief and shock. We even differ in our assessment of how important the event was historically. Others are better placed to answer that question of whether it made any real difference in the end.

As I write, approximately one-third of the ordained people in the Diocese of Canberra & Goulburn are women and, in March 2012, the first female bishop in the province of New South Wales will be consecrated as an assistant bishop in that diocese. The bishop making that appointment was trained at Moore College in Sydney. So was she. She will have her own challenges to face, but she will be accepted warmly almost everywhere in the state. Women serving God and the community as priests are part of the new normal. As I am preparing to take up a new ministry, I reflect that there are children in my present congregation who have never had a male rector. And I have observed little girls vie with one another in their role-playing church games, arguing about who gets to be the priest. And I remember a past when little girls dreaming of leading the people of God were told their dream was absurd because they were girls.

The debate about the ordination of women to the priesthood in the church of God was not an academic debate. It was expressed and received personally, at the heart of being, at the heart of what it means to be female and human and called.⁶

The ordination debate was also about the nature of priesthood. In arguing that women seeking ordination were fired by feminism and greedy for power, opponents betrayed their belief that priesthood was about headship, not the performance of service. As Varcoe writes,

The truly radical aspect of Jesus’ teaching is about power. His revelation of God is as the one who comes among us to serve, to submit himself to the violence and anger of broken and sinful humanity, emptied of divine power. Women or men called to follow in those footsteps have no choice but to put aside reaching for human power.

One cannot help wondering, if priesthood were understood as an invitation to serve others, not to exercise authority over them, would the prospect of women priests have met such resistance? It is in the revisioning of priesthood, perhaps, that women, ordained and lay, will have the most radical effect on Anglican teaching. In so doing, they will provide a model for those in other Christian traditions who also aspire to equality in ministry but fear that just ‘adding women’ will not reform hierarchical structures.

In the meantime, the process of reform in the Anglican Church of Australia remains unfinished. Certainly, women are in senior leadership positions in the church and in theological colleges where the next generation of clergy are in training. The church has had to improve its employment practices, allowing for maternity and paternity leave and part-time ministry. New perspectives have been brought to painful issues such as sexual abuse. And the community at large regards the presence of ordained women as perfectly natural and wonders what the argument was about. But how deeply entrenched are these reforms? In the absence of a supportive priest, liturgical language can slip back easily into the predominantly masculine language of the past, with women once more expected to identify as sons of God. And, as Porter warns in her final chapter, there is evidence of a backlash, even in progressive dioceses such as Melbourne.

Preachers, Prophets and Heretics is a celebration of women in ministry, but it is also a reminder that change occurs at a snail’s pace and that it comes at great personal cost to those whose lives, callings and beliefs are dissected, queried and ridiculed. Patricia Brennan was one of those who was prepared to pay the price, for she understood that the position of women in the church had ramifications beyond the church. Those who attended her funeral in 2011 were reminded of her prophetic call to action:

There are millions of people in the world who are influenced by the notions that the church perpetuates. To think that the Church largely perpetuates the idea that God is male – and that women are brought into the world to assist the male – is horrific to me. So long as I have breath in my body and I believe God is, I will not stand by silently. And it’s about role models: you think the word priest and you think male; you think the word God and you think male. That’s a pretty sizeable reformation to bring about: if you could think priest, think male and female; think God, think male and female.

Notes

1   The Lambeth Conference, 1968, Resolution 35, viewed 23 February 2012, www.lambethconference.org/resolutions/1968/. For a summary of the ordination debate in the Church of England, see Church of England, viewed 24 February 2012, www.churchofengland.org/our-views/women-bishops.aspx.

2   Archbishops’ Commission (1935) The Ministry of Women: Report of the Archbishops’ Commission, Press and Publication Board of the Church Assembly.

3   Michael Gilchrist (1991) The Destabilisation of the Anglican Church: Women Priests and the Feminist Campaign to Replace Christianity, AD2000 Publications, Melbourne, p. 77.

4   Pam Albany (1990) ‘Violence to the spirit’, MOW South Australia Newsletter, June–July 1990.

5   Alison Cheek, originally from Adelaide, was a member of the ‘Philadelphia 11’, women deacons who were ordained priest by four retired Episcopal bishops in 1974, two years prior to a General Convention of the church clarifying the canon in favour of ordaining women priests.

6   Gill Varcoe (February 2012) ‘A reflection on dissection’, unpublished.

CONTEXT

1

The ordination of Anglican women

Challenging tradition

Jane Shaw

Early on in my time as Dean of Divinity at New College, Oxford, in the first decade of the 21st century, I was in the chapel of New College, Oxford on a quiet winter’s day, and saw the British Labour politician Tony Benn, alumnus of the college, walking around. I was wearing my clerical collar and he came up to me and said with huge delight: ‘My mother would have been so pleased that the Dean of Divinity at my old college is a woman. She was a huge campaigner for the ordination of women.’ On the strength of that, I got him to come back and preach, in memory of his mother.

Lady Stansgate (1897–1991), Benn’s mother, was part of a movement for the ordination of women in the early 20th century. She even managed to speak to the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, on the subject, after a dinner party at Lambeth Palace. When the Archbishop asked her why she supported the movement if she herself did not feel a call to be a priest (which she did not) she replied, ‘I have two little boys, and I want them to be brought up in a world in which the Church gives equal spiritual status to women. I believe that will make a great difference to their attitude to women, collectively and individually.’ She went on to report, in relating this episode in her autobiography, that ‘the Archbishop launched into a long account of his own views. He had always been a convinced feminist and had always supported the franchise for women. Beyond that, he had always believed the professions should be open to women; but, at last, homing in on the issue, he raised his voice and pronounced with an implacably dismissive emphasis: This is different. It cannot be. It goes against the Catholic tradition of two millennia. You must stop working for the ordination of women.’¹ Needless to say, she did not.

Rise of the deaconess movement

A number of forces combined to raise the issue of female priests in the early 20th century Church of England. The first was the impact of the revival, in the Church of England, of convents in 1854 and the female deaconess order in 1862. Women and men were equally deacons in the early church; by the third century, in some places such as Syria, the special order of ‘deaconess’ was created to minister to women. Gradually, the order of deaconesses died out, until it was revived in the 19th century. The success of the deaconess movement in the Lutheran Church at Kaiserswerth in 19th century Germany was one inspiration for the English. After the Convocation of Canterbury had debated the question of deaconesses in 1858, Archibald Tait, the Bishop of London, licensed Elizabeth Ferard (who had visited Kaiserswerth and subsequently, in 1861, dedicated herself to the service of the church) as the first deaconess in 1862. She founded the North London Deaconess Institution and what would become the (Deaconess) Community of St Andrew. The numbers grew fairly slowly. By 1881, there were 60 deaconesses; by 1920 there were 300, and in 1930, 216. They worked in caring for the sick and poor, ministering to those in hospitals, prisons and asylums, as well as in the education of children.²

The idea of the deaconess spread across the Anglican churches. Ferard’s institution in London trained deaconesses for other dioceses in England as well as different parts of the Anglican Communion: Australia, India, South Africa and New Zealand. Other churches in the Communion also revived the deaconess order. The Episcopal Church in the United States of America, for example, saw the reemergence of deaconesses at just about the same time as the Church of England. In 1855 two women styled themselves deaconesses when they began to work with the poor in Baltimore; by 1858 their numbers had swelled to seven, and the Bishop of Maryland had made their ministry legitimate by setting them apart. Bishops across the United States were soon eager to enlist the labour of deaconesses, who cost little and remained unmarried.³

All of this raised a sharp question: if deaconesses were part of an apostolic order that was being revived (as their defenders often said), what was their status? Were they in orders or not? Were they, essentially, female deacons? Their work in parishes was not that of a mere lay visitor, and yet it was clear they were subordinate to the clergy in their responsibilities. In an appendix to The Ministry of Women, the 1919 Report by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s committee, HUW Stanton rather vaguely described the deaconess as ‘a woman set apart by a Bishop, under that title, for service in the Church’.⁴

Confusion about the status of the deaconess existed around the Anglican Communion as witnessed by the bishops’ flip-flops at their once-a-decade pan-Anglican meeting, the Lambeth Conference. In 1920, the Lambeth Conference declared that deaconesses were in holy orders; in 1930, it declared they were not. Individual provinces continued to debate what deaconesses could do: the 1934 General Convention of the Episcopal Church, for example, decided that deacons could preach, but deaconesses could only give addresses. But the fact that women were working in parishes, and the confusion about the deaconess’s status, made people think.

Why not the priesthood?

As women were granted the vote, allowed to sit in Parliament, go to university and enter the professions, people began to ask why they could not also be ordained to the priesthood. The leading figure in the movement for the ordination of women in the Church of England was Maude Royden, an Oxford graduate and renowned preacher. For her, Christianity was the foundation of feminism. She therefore found it hard to see why the churches would deny equality to women.

Denied a pulpit in her own church, in 1917 Maude Royden had begun to preach at the City Temple, a Congregationalist church in London. Royden did not want to start a new church, but in 1920 she and the Anglican priest (and liturgist and hymn writer) Percy Dearmer began to hold ‘fellowship services’, first in Kensington Town Hall, and then in their more permanent home, The Guildhouse, a converted chapel near Victoria Station. The Guildhouse was a hive of activity, with weekday lectures, classes and groups, and Sunday evening services at which Royden preached. She was an immensely popular preacher. In 1928–29, she went on a year-long speaking and preaching tour of the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, China, Ceylon and India: halls and churches were packed to hear her. In the United States, she was invited to preach in Stanford University Chapel, an Episcopal church in Sacramento, and Christ Church Cathedral in St Louis; in Australia, she was the first woman to preach in Adelaide’s St Peter’s Cathedral; in New Zealand she spoke in Christchurch Cathedral, and in the Anglican church in Tokyo.⁵ The official line in the Church of England at this time, echoed in a 1920 Lambeth Conference report, was that women’s right to speak and lead prayers in consecrated buildings should usually be confined to congregations of women and children.

On Maude Royden’s return to England in 1929, she co-founded the interdenominational group, Ministry of Women in the Church, and in 1930 the Anglican Group for the Ordination of Women (AGOW) – of which Lady Stansgate was one of the very first members. These lobby groups kept up the pressure in the middle decades of the 20th century, but as Margaret Webster, one of the founders of the Movement for the Ordination of Women puts it, that period was one of ‘Taking refuge in reports’.⁶ These were years in which commissions were set up to examine and study women’s ministry: witnesses were spoken to and reports were published, but in retrospect this activity looks a lot like prevarication and delay. There were prominent supporters – such as WR Inge, and WR Matthews, successive Deans of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, and Charles Raven, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge – but they were often lone voices.

And then an unexpected event occurred in the middle of the war. In 1944, Bishop Ronald Hall of Hong Kong and South China ordained a woman as priest: Florence Li Tim-Oi. Working in an isolated city in China, where she was pastor to an Anglican church of about a hundred, and with the impossibility of any male priests reaching the church after the Japanese invasion, Bishop Hall thought it more regular to ordain a woman than to allow a layperson to exercise a sacramental ministry, including the celebration of communion. He had also heard reports from those whom Florence was serving that she was an extraordinary pastor, doing the work of a priest in all but name. The two met at Xing-Xing, a mid-point between their two places of residence: this involved for Florence a week of walking across mountains and partly through Japanese occupied territory, and for the Bishop five days of travel by foot and boat. They spent two days in prayer together and then Bishop Hall ordained her priest in the Anglican church there. Florence later wrote: ‘The wider issues of the ordination of women were far from my mind as I entered the little church. I was being obedient to God’s call.’⁷

The news of this ordination began to reach the wider Communion, first through a New Zealand missionary magazine, and then through a report in the Church Times in England. William Temple was then Archbishop of Canterbury and the question was whether he would do anything to discipline Bishop Hall. Temple seems to have been personally supportive of the ordination of women but, in his role as Archbishop, he believed he had to stand by what was legally permitted and not permitted. Just the previous year, 1943, a female Congregationalist minister had written to him, asking why she had not been allowed to participate in a united service in an Anglican church. He wrote, in reply: ‘The fact that a united service is held in an Anglican church does not make it anything other than an Anglican church, and nothing ought to happen in a church which is contrary to the rules or practically universal customs of the Church of England, unless by quite special permission given for what seemed to those responsible to be quite special reasons, and there are some among us who would say not even then’. Having spelled out what he thought permissible with regard to women’s participation in such a service (walking in a procession alongside other ministers or reading a lesson, yes; preaching or leading prayers, no), he continued, ‘I am not arguing in defence of this position; I am merely stating that it is the position in which I think that I should then find myself ’.⁸

By the time of Florence Li Tim-Oi’s ordination, Temple was ill and failing, and he died before he formally censured Bishop Hall for his action. But Temple wrote, by hand, to Hall saying ‘Whatever I may think of what you have done, it makes no difference to my affection for you’.⁹ The letter arrived after Temple’s death. Geoffrey Fisher, Temple’s successor as Archbishop of Canterbury, talked with Bishop Hall a year later in England and asked him to suspend Florence Li Tim-Oi, for the sake of the Anglican Communion and ecumenism, but Hall refused. So pressure was put on Florence Li Tim-Oi to resign, threatening that if she did not, then Bishop Hall’s position would be impossible. She agreed to resign from her position and to stop functioning as a priest, though she did not resign her orders as a priest. Hall’s diocesan synod made a strong statement saying that they ‘found the attitude of the Church in the West impossible to understand. The Reverend Li Tim-Oi’s ordination seemed to them natural and inevitable. She has shown in her life and work that God has given her the charisma of the parish priest.’ They stated that ‘the whole Church in South China has been spiritually wounded and grieved in heart’ by her being forced to resign. ‘We consider such discrimination against women in the Church of Jesus Christ, unreasonable, unchristian, and unscriptural.’¹⁰

Disappointed, the Diocese of South China nevertheless persisted. It asked the 1948 Lambeth Conference to consider a canon that would have allowed (for a trial period of twenty years) a deaconess, with the same qualifications as a male deacon, to be ordained priest. Not surprisingly, there was a negative response from the bishops assembled at Lambeth, and they referred to their decision of 1930, which had declared that deaconesses were not in holy orders. Geoffrey Fisher, as Archbishop of Canterbury, was actively discouraging. In the same year, Lady Stansgate was invited to be a consultant about women’s place in the church, at the first meeting of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Amsterdam. Fisher, knowing of Lady Stansgate’s activism for the ordination of women, felt compelled to write to the Secretary of the WCC to warn him that her views were not those of the Church of England. It was a turning point for Lady Stansgate. Fed up with the Church of England’s opposition she became a Congregationalist.¹¹ The year 1948 also saw the publication of CS Lewis’s anti-women piece, ‘Priestesses in the Church’. It was not a moment in which women with vocations to the priesthood or their supporters felt any great encouragement.

Changing times in the 1960s

It was in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the issue of the ordination of women became live once again, against the backdrop of the civil rights movement and the women’s movement. In 1964, the Episcopal Church dropped the requirement for deaconesses to be unmarried or widowed, and also changed their status from ‘set apart’ to ‘ordered’. The intentions behind this change were not especially radical. Only three women had become deaconesses since 1961, and it was hoped this might boost vocations and numbers. But the change highlighted that ambiguity which had dogged the status of deaconesses for a hundred years since their revival: were they now, at last, equivalent to male deacons?

It was Bishop Jim Pike, the radical Bishop of California, and great supporter of the civil rights movement, who pressed the question. He declared that he was going to recognise a deaconess in his diocese, Phyllis Edwards, as a deacon. His declaration provoked consternation and disagreement, and he was asked to defer his plans until the bishops had had a chance to gather and discuss the question. He agreed to do so. At the 1965 House of Bishops meeting, it was duly decided that deaconesses were ordered, but they differed from male deacons in that they were not allowed to distribute the bread and wine at the Eucharist. The gathered bishops also approved the liturgy for making deaconesses, which was very similar to that used for making deacons. Later that year, Bishop Pike used parts of that liturgy at a service in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, and gave Phyllis Edwards the traditional deacon’s stole and a copy of the gospels. He also listed her as a full member of the clergy in diocesan directories. All of this caused controversy, but Pike was used to that, having been accused of heresy for his views on the virgin birth and many other doctrines, and having been repeatedly criticised for the provocative way in which he backed liberal causes; a year later he resigned from his bishopric. As the scholar and librarian Pamela Darling comments, ‘The Edwards recognition service had been a critical example of the type of behaviour which so offended Pike’s brother bishops, and it clearly linked the issue of women’s ordination with questions of authority and collegiality, a connection that would reappear again and again.’¹²

But change often happens either because of pressure at the margins or because of the bold move of someone or some people at the centre, when those who are tired of being fobbed off by studies and reports decide to seize the moment, and Pike’s action had pressed the issue for the whole Anglican Church. In 1968, the Lambeth Conference recommended that those made deaconesses by the laying on of hands with appropriate prayers be declared to be within the diaconate. Decisions made at Lambeth Conferences are not, however, binding on the provinces and churches of the Communion, and never have been. They merely represent the ‘mind’ of the gathered Anglican bishops at that moment. It was now up to individual provinces of the Anglican Communion to decide whether or not they would follow Lambeth’s recommendation. The Churches of Canada, Hong Kong, Kenya and Korea quickly did so, and the Episcopal Church followed suit, voting at its 1970 General Convention to ordain women as deacons. Given that ordination to the diaconate was, in most cases, transitional, leading to ordination to the priesthood, the larger question of women’s entry into the priesthood