God may be female, say Church of England clerics
Support is growing within the Church of England to rewrite its official liturgies to refer to God as a female following the selection of the first women bishops.
A growing number of priests already insert such words as “she” and “mother” informally into traditional service texts to try to make the language of worship more inclusive, it has been claimed.
But calls for a full overhaul of liturgy have already been discussed informally at a senior level.
This comes after the Transformations Steering Group, a body that meets in Lambeth Palace to examine the impact of women in ministry on the Church of England, issued a public call to the bishops to encourage more “expansive language and imagery about God.”
Hilary Cotton, chairwoman of Women and the Church, the U. K. group that led the campaign for female bishops, said a shift away from the traditional patriarchal language of the Book of Common Prayer is at an advanced stage in some quarters.
“The reality is, in many churches up and down the country, something more than the almost default male language about God is already used,” she said.
“The response you often get at one end is, ‘ Why does it matter, because God is beyond all this?’ At the other end the reaction is: ‘ You mustn’t, because Jesus calls God father.’ ”
Her comments came after a discussion at the Westminster Faith Debates on whether consecration of women as bishops will change the Church of England.
The Church of England’s worship already includes some references to God as female, many of them centuries old.
“There is a thin thread of this throughout history,” Cotton said, “but having women bishops makes it particularly obvious that to continue to refer to God purely as male is just unhelpful to many people now.”