Women have been denied opportunities for development and participation in all spheres of life, including the religious. This has had negative impacts on men and women.
Slowly, painfully, we have been learning to set our sexual stereotypes and prejudices beside the challenges of the Gospel. We are called to a life of justice, compassion, intelligence and patience that takes us beyond our own comfort and interests. While women have always played significant roles in Anglicanism (we are, after all, a Church to which definitive shape was given by a woman — Elizabeth I!), it is only in the last few generations that we have discovered how life-giving it is for them to be involved in leadership and ministry in every order and level of the Church. We can no longer make invidious distinctions between “women in the Church” and “the Church.”
[quote]Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not fully participate in all spheres of the body,” it should as a matter of social justice forthwith be surgically removed from the ankle and attached to the wrist.[/quote]
Free after 1 Cor 12. I’m still undecided about WO, to be perfectly honest, but this sort of cod theology makes me sick. As is the underlying, deeply culturally conditioned set of assumptions about human worth and flourishing.