The Church of England is relying on an increasing number of women priests to keep going as numbers of male clergy decline, even though women are still excluded from the highest office of the episcopate.
More women are being ordained into the Church than ever before, with women priests now accounting for nearly one in four full-time clergy and more than one in ten senior clergy.
The latest Church statistics released today reveal that a continuing rise in women priests has not been enough to offset a decline in overall clergy numbers….
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This is hardly surprising. Though in a different context, a rather similar process has gone on in the diocese in which I live. After holding at about the same level for a while, the “gender profile” of the diocesan clergy suddenly flipped a few years back, and now there are many fewer male clergy…especially straight male clergy. It seems that they are simply too expensive. The places with male clergy are (usually) larger parishes. At the same time, the stipends for diocesan clergy have dropped relative to the rest of TEC rather precipitously. Many places are in the 1/2 to 1/8 time bracket now…which results in a lot discouragement and “bonsai church” thinking. It is interesting to me that no one I have spoken to who was involved in the WO process back in the 70’s seemed to give the economics or missiological implications a second thought. The interchangeability myth seems to have had the run of the Church then. Now, we are seeing why that may not be case.
Hursley, would you like to unpack for us the thinking behind your final sentence? I ask in a wholly objective way – I want to think about why things would or could pan out the way you describe, what the causation is.
I can’t recall where I read it, but some years ago I came across a survey that indicated a dramatic decline in male religious vocations in churches that admitted women to the clergy. Over time almost all became profoundly liberal (heretical).
All professions have “tipping points.” That is well known. The tipping point is when there are enough women in the profession to begin to exert an influence on the pay scale (and sometimes the prestige) of the profession such that there begins to be an irreversible death spiral of men leaving the profession (that is, a process which is self-accelerating) so that the profession ends up being almost exclusively female.
An example current in the US — veterinary medicine. More and more women are entering the profession because they “love animals.” They are willing to take on huge student loans and then work for very low wages. Often they are married so they are not the primary support of their families. This drives down wages and makes men reluctant to enter the profession, which continues the spiral. For the first time in history, more women are graduating from vet school than men. It will only be a matter of time before it is primarily a female profession.
I haven’t read the article itself, because I refuse to pay, but in this morning’s Telegraph newspaper is another report which is obviously based on the same statistics but which points in an entirely different direction from the one we were assuming. It says that women are not entering the C of E ministry in ways anticipated, that in the previous year numbers of women ordained had dropped from 290 to 201, a drop of 24%, whereas the number of men had dropped slightly by 2% (which I would say is statistically insignificant). The paper surmised that the reason was the continued exclusion of women from the episcopate. As they say in the satirical weekly Private Eye: Shurely shome mishtake.
Gresham’s Law applied to the church.
Well, I’m for sure not paying 🙂 but a quick google produces [url=http://www.christianpost.com/news/ordained-women-priests-outpace-men-in-church-of-england-77553/]this article [/url] which states:
[blockquote] “It’s obvious that over time the priesthood will become increasingly a female profession….” David Martin, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, told The Sunday Times.[/blockquote]
Terry Tee:
I suppose the topic is too vast to be adequately discussed in a comment, but a couple of observations do come to mind:
1. Women often (not always, of course) seem to be willing to work for less remuneration in what are often described as the “caring professions.” Perhaps the morphing of TEC’s sense of the priesthood in the ’60s — ’80s from preacher/teacher/pastor/missioner into counselor/community organizer/secularesque life-coach has something to do with this transformation in our own context.
2. Men and women tend to minister and lead in different ways. This is liable to oversimplification, but I often find female leadership focusing on interrelationship of group members through the relationship with the co-ordinator (the cleric), while men often lead more by setting up structures for deploying mission, objectives, and institutional goals. As you can see by the language used, both have their strengths and weaknesses. The former, however, usually requires a smaller organization; the latter is more likely predicated on a larger congregational model. Interestingly, I have had some conversations with female clergy who trust me enough to confirm at least some cogency to this view.
3. When thinking back on the heady early 1980s, I do remember that WO promised something along the lines of a truly “Christ-like,” non-hierarchical clergy. It was thought that women were simply not “into” power games. The mythos around this should have been discredited, but was not. It led to a culture of contempt for reality as well as ignoring for the need in all Christians for ongoing grace in order to be truly effective instruments of Christ. We were told that “men like Jacob’s ladder; women prefer Sarah’s ‘circle,'” whatever that was (I remember at the time thinking this made zero sense…but it was swallowed whole. The fact that Sarah laughed at God seemed more the implied compliment.).
The point being made was that women are more inclusive, men less. It was obvious hogwash, but one couldn’t say anything about it without being branded “sexist,” which seemed to be more important than being honest — with predictable results over the long-term.
If WO is not simply a case of cultural incursion or realized eschatology, its proponents must demonstrate a level of honesty about the differences between men and women (in the aggregate, obviously) in psychology, leadership, societal expectation, etc. as well the biblical and theological considerations. Without this, it is likely that any group embracing WO in our society will witness the transformation of the clergy from sacramentalist/proclaimers of the Risen Christ into spiritual consultants and hospitality experts.
I realize this is anecdotal and reflective of my biases, but hereabouts it seems to be playing out in this fashion.
I thank Hursley for his thought-provoking post. There is some support for his # 2 from the work of the Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan, who in her book In a Different Voice argues that men start from a position of autonomy and work towards relationship, whereas women start from a sense of relatedness and work towards autonomy. She took a pasting for this from feminists who argue that there is no such thing as an eternal feminine, that gender differences and relationships are essentially social constructs. And yes, women were going to do ministry differently, we were told. Whether this would be in continuity with the memory of the Church through the ages was always a moot point.