Women in the company of mission priests?

1985.

I was enjoying a sabbatical, six months in America as a Proctor Fellow at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

At the first meeting of the programme, the programme director warned us that 'there are some angry women out there'.

Out there being the Campus of the Episcopal Divinity School in Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I guess he was right.

But the women I met were neither angry nor anti-men, in fact they were ordained or training for ordination.

Of course this was all new to me.

Eventually it so happened that I found  myself in the College Chapel for a Eucharist when in swept the all woman Altar Party, Carter Heywood, Sue Hiatt and a woman sub-deacon.

I was faced with a dilemma, it was a clash certainly but it was also a Clash dilemma, 'Should I stay or should I go?'

Well, not really that much of a dilemma, I stayed, the earth kept turning, the Episcopal Church, at least in America continued to flourish and I realised that I had participated in an important justice moment for myself and the Church in which I was an ordained minister, indeed a fellow Priest with those who celebrated that Eucharist, breaking both bread and word and spilling wine.

I know none of the participants in the forthcoming Ordinations to the Episcopacy at York next week.

But I guess that they have been selected for their experience, their pastoral gifts and their presumed fitness for the office into which they will be ordained i.e. Servants of the servants of God aka Bishops.

But I gather that all is not well in the Province of York?

Once the Bishop of Chester has had hands laid upon her, then those hands will it appears be no longer welcome on the head of the Bishop of Burnley?

And the Archbishop has it appeared consented to withdrawing from both Ordaining and Celebrating the Ordination Eucharist?

It is fast becoming an odd sort of Church, the Church of England.

It is a Church full of nooks and crannies, or crooks and nannies, a church where liturgy has been replaced by turgidity and  the smaller and the less relevant it becomes, the more its finances edge to the verge of collapse, where the giving of the parishes, in what in the Newcastle Diocese I christened the 'Fertile Crescent', essentially pay for the stipends of the clergy in the inner city areas, and the senior clergy simply engage in busyness for busyness sake, like so many speed daters looking for romance.

But whatever motivates the new Bishop of Burnley in his insistence on some form of purity of the apostolic succession in which he hopes to remain unsullied by women, I am reminded of an ordination I attended where one of the newly ordained deacons refused to bow to the verger on the grounds that he was male.

And I am also reminded that the whole sorry state of racial, class and gender discrimination within the church which affects variously just about everyone stands as the most fundamental of obstacles with regard to the bringing into being of that community of persons we are called to be under God, which is a community of justice in which we are all equal.

Perhaps the Archbishop of York should give some thought to inviting the two new Bishops to join him in kneeling before the mercy seat and reminding himself and them that the Mercy Seat is the only place where God's forgiveness meets human sinfulness, where they would kneel and as it says in The Letter to the Hebrews, where, above them, would be 'the cherubim of glory'.

Greening the Church?

No this is not about climate change and the environment.

This is about the church being taken over by a cabal of management guru's who combine their Alpha Course conversion with Management speak.

Will the proposals in the Green report be any fairer or more open to ensuring that talent rather than mediocrity rises to the top?

The Church has historically had a system of preferment predicated almost entirely on patronage.

A few years ago I found myself sitting in a pub with a retired Bishop waiting for a couple of other people to join us for a meeting to do with a project we were both involved in.

In the way of things conversation wandered aimlessly until some part of what we were discussing struck a chord with said retired Bishop.

Hard to know now what that was but he reflected that whilst he had always resisted he had inevitably ended up colluding with a system with which he profoundly disagreed but which he had no power to challenge or change.

The process he described was he felt unbelievably corrupt.

Apparently, he told me, every two years as Bishop he had to send a report to Lambeth Palace, in that report he commented on the various clergy in his Diocese. On each report he had to state whether the subject of the report could and should be considered for a senior position in the Church, and in each case it was necessary to state what level of seniority might be appropriate: Residentiary Canon, Dean, Archdeacon, Suffragan Bishop, Bishop.

What then happened when an appointment was to be made was that he would be sent the list abstracted from the 'Golden Filing Cabinet" at Lambeth Palace. Of course when he looked at the list half the names would be familiar because he had put them on the list. In this way the self appointing Oligarchy and its right to be at the top of the heap of ambition was secured.

There has been a trend in recent times to advertise such senior posts but all that does is ensure that the long list is peopled by the aspirational, the ambitious, the hopeful and inevitably those who feel that they have been overlooked by the system.

Almost certainly there is a correlation between the names on the short list and the names in the Golden Filing Cabinet.

I always enjoyed the story told by an Archdeacon I knew who hadn't had the lobotomy (Humour By-Pass) that seems to go with appointees to such posts in Diocese.

In other words he was someone with whom I was able to share a joke.

He got the nod that he was going to be offered a senior appointment whilst using the Toilet in Church House during a meeting of General Synod (I should make clear that this was for the sole purpose of performing his ablutions!).

He was washing his hands, when from behind him a pompous prelatical voice boomed.

So you know the North-East, looking in the Mirror he responded yes, he had served in a North Eastern Diocese.

Good, came the response we need an Archdeacon, you'll be hearing from us.

Well the Green Report wants to cut this Gordian Knot of ambition by identifying a Cadre of potential leaders and training them in the skills of management.

Being a conspiracy theorist at heart I am sure that behind Green, Lord, Banker and Non-Stipendiary priest of no particular parish there lurks the same cabal that managed to fast-track our current Archbishop so spectacularly.

Who knows?

It is ultimately all suspicion and heads are not being raised above the parapet, various commentators have offered various hermeneutic readings of the scheme, in this blog however I want to go back to our founding document to get a flavour of how this leadership scheme might work or not work.

Will, for example, there be any Peter's or Andrew's? James', John's, Thaddeus', Matthew's, Philip's, Thomas's, Nathaniel's, Judas's, Simon's?

Fishermen, Tax Collector's, Zealot's or Oil Executives?

My suspicion is that when Lord Green assumes the role of Lord Sugar of the Church those showing  disciple like characteristics will be 'fired' not 'hired'.