Episcopal church to make the Almighty less male

Centuries after Archbishop Thomas Cranmer set out how English Christians ought to address their God, leaders of America’s Episcopal Church are considering revisions to the Book of Common Prayer so that it does not sound as if the Almighty is a man.

The church, an independent off-shoot of the Church of England, uses a prayer book that derives from Cranmer’s 1549 edition and was last revised in 1979.

Now, in an era when sex scandals have ignited a passionate new movement for gender equality in American society, church leaders meeting in Texas are considering whether the appeal to the ‘‘Lord God of our Fathers’’ tends to enforce a vision of a masculine God.

‘‘The whole #MeToo movement, I think, has really raised in sharp relief how much

we do need to examine our assumptions about language and particularly the way we imagine God,’’ Bishop Jeffrey Lee, of the Diocese of Chicago, told The Washington Post.

‘‘If a language for God is exclusively male and a certain kind of image of what power means, it’s certainly an incomplete picture of God. We can’t define God.’’

At the church’s triennial convention in Austin, Texas, this week, Bishop Lee said that he would propose a three-year study of the text. He and others argue that alternative texts promulgated by the church since 1979, which can be used with the permission of a bishop, already allow priests to use gender neutral language.

Calls for a new Book of Common Prayer have sounded for some time. ‘‘It’s always struck me as one of the great ironies of the 1979 version, emerging as it did during the push for greater gender equality, how obviously maleorientated the end result was,’’ wrote Eric Bonnetti last year, in a piece for Episcopal Cafe, a magazine which covers the church.

‘‘The whole #MeToo movement, I think, has really raised in sharp relief how much we do need to examine our assumptions about language and particularly the way we imagine God.’’ Bishop Jeffrey Lee, Diocese of Chicago