Seated on the dais at the inaugural assembly of the Anglican Church in North America, alongside Archbishop-elect Robert Duncan, evangelical mega-pastor Rick Warren and Metropolitan Jonah of the Orthodox Church in America was a woman in a clergy collar.
The Rev. Mary Hays, canon to the ordinary — chief of staff — of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh (Anglican) had one of the most visible roles of an ordained woman in this assembly representing 100,000 people who broke with the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. She moderated a discussion among 900 people and led them in prayer for the Rev. Warren, a Southern Baptist who addressed the gathering.
Once a prominent leader within the conservative movement in the Episcopal Church, she is the sort of woman who might have been called to be a bishop. But her new church, which hopes to join the 80-million member global Anglican Communion, forbids female bishops pending some future consensus by the Anglican Communion to permit them. Each of the 28 dioceses in the Anglican Church in North America can choose whether or not to ordain women as priests and deacons. Most don’t do so.
The Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh (Anglican)? Is that really what its going to be known as? Is the reconstruction diocese going to be known as “The Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh (Episcopalian)?”
The ordination of women cannot remain an unresolved issue in this enterprise. It has a way of permeating every other part of the ecclesial enterprise until the whole body is swung one way or the other. Then the opposing party remains only on sufferance and will eventually wither.
As someone observed in the thread below on the first woman ordained in Accra, it is certainly in order to look at the state of WO in Anglicanism, but I fail to see any consensus against it, even in the Global South.
I think that most people in the Diocese of Cuba (a non-provincial Anglican jurisdiction) consider themselves to be part of the Global South, not the West. They have a woman suffragan bishop.
I also think that most people in Bangladesh, Brazil, Central America, Mexico, North India, the Philippines, Southern Africa, the Sudan and probably Japan consider themselves to be non-Western. All of those provinces expressly allow women bishops, although none have been selected as yet.
These nine provinces together with the six in the West that allow women bishops (Aotearoa/NZ/Polynesia, TEC, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and Scotland) amount to almost 40% of the 38 Anglican provinces. At least some of the twelve additional provinces that ordain women priests (Burundi, England, Hong Kong, Indian Ocean, Kenya, Korea, Rwanda, South India, Uganda, Wales, West Indies, West Africa) have no express ban on one being selected as a bishop. In all, 71% of the provinces have women priests, and (with the addition of Southern Cone, Congo, and Pakistan) 78% have women in the Sacred Order of Deacons.
In contrast, there are only seven provinces (Central Africa, Jerusalem and the Middle East, Melanesia, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, South East Asia, and Tanzania; 18%) that currently bar women from Holy Orders entirely.
The first province to ordain women (Hong Kong) is in the Global South. Two of the next five provinces to ordain female priests (Kenya and Uganda) are not only Global South, but among the overseas sponsors of the ACNA, so their theological conservatism can hardly be in question. If some supporters of the ACNA are waiting for a consensus in the Anglican Communion against women’s ordination, they may be waiting quite awhile.
Since Holy Scripture neither specifically commands nor forbids male or female priests/deacons/bishops, why should it be problematic to leave those decisions up to the diocese involved? In the O.T. the office of priest was hereditary, tied to being a decendent of Aaron; the N.T. church did not have “priests” until Constantine established Christianity as the state religion and put the pagan priests out of business. Along about the same time the Christians began to adopt both the title and the vestments formerly associated with pagan religions. So, whats to criticize or worry about? People who must have it one way or the other probably won’t join ACNA anyway.
Constantine didn’t establish Christianity as the state religion, he merely made it legal to be Christian. Pagan worship continued for some time. I rather doubt #4’s history of the Christian priesthood but await a qualified church historian’s post on that.
In fact, #4 is fantasy history rather than real history. Constantine made Christianity legal, and showered favors on the Church, but Christianity (or “Catholic Christianity” as the decree states explicitly) did not become the official religion of the Roman Empire until the Emperor Theodosius I’s degree of 381 to that effect. And as to priesthood, the term can be found in the ordination rities attributed to Hippolytus (ca. 215 AD) and in all later ones — although “priesthood” or “sacerdotal status” is attributed in these early rites to bishops rather than to presbyters, and it was only when bishops began to delegate the celebration of the Eucharist to presbyters so routinely, in the course of the Fourth Century, that it soon came to be seen as a “normal” function of their Order, that the term began to appear in presbyteral ordination rites as well.
#4
Better to keep silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.
And Bishop (now Archbishop, correct?) Bob Duncan supports WO. I believe it was he who stated, perhaps at Plano, that this was an issue which God would make clear “to our grandchildren.”
Does ACNA have any policy on divorced people in the ministry?
5,6,8, I stand corrected. Thanks. 7, back at you!
#9, Sidney, at this point the ACNA has made it clear that no divorced and remarried man will be made a bishop. I don’t think this is retroactive, and I don’t think they’ve gotten to the point of dealing with this among priests and deacons. I hope they will.
As a delegate to the ACNA Assembly I heard a very interesting comment from a young AMiA priest who had never been part of TEC. He noted that the few women priests he had seen at the Assembly were all over the age of 50. “There aren’t any young women priests are there?”
Thank you, Barbara #12, for that very interesting observation.