Women’s ministry

Sir, I cannot help contrasting Stephen Kurt’s utopia of a “Church in all its Fullness” with the full participation of women in the episcopate and everywhere (CEN 10 February, p. 14), and the grim practical reality of the woman-led “The Episcopal Church” in the USA headed by Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori excoriating her conservative evangelical and traditionalist opponents with outrageous remarks, calling them “terrorists”, “wolves” and “false shepherds” (same CEN, p. 7).

Of course there will always be “real” “false shepherds” within the Church, and some have risen to its highest level, and bad examples should never be used to discredit the good, but Stephen Kurt is deluding himself if he fails to take into account the extreme liberal feminist theology espoused by many women ministers and ask whether it is these or his evangelical women that he will be unleashing to “turn the church completely upside down.”

For those who believe Paul’s Patriarchal proof texts can be overthrown the fact remains that the Church has survived almost two millennia without women bishops and so they are not either essential to the Church’s being or well being. So appointing them now must raise the purely practical point - given the state of our Church, would it be expedient? On the whole would we be empowering orthodox women or Creed-denying feminist women with their mother goddesses?

Take another aspect of the bigger picture: the clear New Testament witness to eminently gifted women can speak either way.

Their very existence and recognition did not lead to an early tradition of women priests and bishops. This implies that their gifts may be otherwise used. Further, this suggests that those who knew the Apostles and their successors, understood the Patriarchal texts to exclude women from office.

What of the vocation to the Christian ministry? Of necessity, including women as ministers is transforming how we understand the ministerial vocation. Treating it as a limited commitment job will manage the Church into further decline whilst reviving it as an all hours all days vocation of sacrificial service would actually turn the Church upside down.

The all hours, all days male priest can be father to his flock and his family, the one reinforcing the other. Can the devoted Christian wife and mother be at the same time an example of this and also be available at all times as a Priest? When this came up in earlier debates, this practicality alone settled the question against women priests for many. Alan Bartley, Greenford, Middlesex