When Lynn and Roger Perkins married in 1983, they not only embarked on a marriage, they embarked on a spiritual journey together.
That journey took an unusual twist in the road in 2004, a twist which eventually lead the couple to a new vocation and a new life in Gallup.
Recently ordained as Episcopal priests in November 2007, the Perkins are the new, part-time co-vicars of the Church of the Holy Spirit. Although the Episcopal Church has been ordaining women as priests for about three decades, the Perkins said it is unusual for both a wife and a husband to serve together as co-vicars. Their arrival in Gallup is a boon to their small congregation, which has been shepherded for the last decade by a series of interim pastors. The church will officially celebrate the couple’s arrival with a ceremony later this month.
It’s not completely unknown. For the last decade or so that I was there, my old Episcopal parish was led by married co-rectors.
Victory Outreach International (a shard off the Assemblies of God block) sends out only married pastors to plant churches. Although only a male can be a senior pastor, the pastor’s wives are key elements in the overall pastoral care and leadership of their churches.
[size=1][color=red][url=http://resurrectioncommunitypersonal.blogspot.com/]The Rabbit[/url][/color][color=gray].[/color][/size]
My husband and I have shared parishes for the last 12 years. It’s marvelous.
“the pastor’s wives are key elements in the overall pastoral care and leadership of their churches.” They always have been, haven’t they? My mother, never even deaconed, functioned like that in all my father’s CofE parishes, from 1937 to 1975. All those places got two for the price of one.
shades of fertility religion
Both Lynn and Roger made an outstanding contribution as deacons at Trinity Cathedral while completing their seminary careers at TESM. The Episcopalians and Anglicans of Gallup will be blessed by their presence. As I understand it, they are not taking a salary from the congregation, choosing rather to live on their savings and pensions. Not a bad way to spend retirement.
“Shades of fertility religion”
Shades of spraying without thinking?
Don’t forget Matt and Anne Kennedy.
eek the thought sends shudders down my spine. Working with my wife!! as a team of two- how introspective. Nah thanks
I will stick to the holy priesthood over ‘ministry’ and adore my wife as a caring loving Christian with her own powerful job and worthwhile hobbies. Part of her gift to the parish is not just her volunteerism but the space AWAY from it she affords me.
Aren’t you confusing the catholic objection to women playing a sacramental role (which I share) with introspection, rugbyplayingpriest? There are plenty of married lay couples who play leadership roles in parish life together, without becoming introspective.
More to the point, like it or not, many of your allies in the wider Church (the Anglican portion, that is) are increasingly going to conform to profiles more like this (it may even start to happen in places like Uganda and Kenya). The question will then arise as to whether we will continue to agree to disagree or insist on clarity.
I gather from an earlier post that Archbishop Venables has been assuring the Diocese of Fort Worth about the prized “autonomy” of dioceses within the Province of the Southern Cone. While I’m sure they are pleased to hear that there will be no attempt to tamper with their catholic order, I imagine that the irony of this statement, in the context of the last five years, has struck some other readers of T19 besides myself.
Ireneaus, I wasn’t “spraying” without thinking. I have long believed this about husband and wife teams, despite their theology. I did not say that it was fertility religion, but that it bordered on it. To mix the marital relationship with the priestly is exactly what I am talking about.
I know the low church protestant crowd doesn’t like to talk about the iconic nature of the priesthood, but it’s there whether they like it or not. You have a father in God in the male priest. Now do you have a mother in God in the woman? Both are functioning in the same sacred office. So, effectively you now have a father and mother in God over the parish, a father and mother who are truly husband and wife.
Now tell me how that doesn’t grease the hinges on the door to a very common heretical religion.
RE: “I know the low church protestant crowd doesn’t like to talk about the iconic nature of the priesthood, but it’s there whether they like it or not.”
We don’t mind talking about it, any more than we mind talking about UFOs.
We don’t spend a whole lot of time on it . . . because of course we don’t believe that “it’s there”. But I could have a great discussion about UFO’s pretty much any time I have the time.
Sarah, if you think a key theological principle held by catholics and orthodox alike is comparable to UFO’s then you’re in great company, if Schori and her crowd can be called great.
Chris, I don’t know about your mother, but mine, when I was a boy, was a powerful authority figure. But then, I didn’t have a male teacher until I was in fifth grade, and even then it was just the luck of the draw.
I’ll worry about the fertility angle when these priests move their marital bed into the choir and have at it as part of the Sunday service. Well, or when they start using liturgies approved by the OWM. I tire of the sentiment that everything that happens in the Episcopal Church today is a sign of its divinely directed demise.
Well, and I have to say that a gray-headed couple doesn’t exactly bring to mind images of fertility. Matt and Anne Kennedy, well, that’s a different story…. 🙂
My in-laws co-pastored churches their entire careers in the Church of the Nazarene. It woked out quite nicely.
And that would be “worked,” not “woked.”
RE: “Sarah, if you think a key theological principle held by catholics and orthodox alike is comparable to UFO’s then you’re in great company, if Schori and her crowd can be called great.”
Heh — as a woman, I’m in “great company” by virtue of being female, I suppose, CH. ; > )
Doesn’t trouble me a bit.
But recall — as an evangelical I am scripturally opposed to WO. I just don’t believe that clergy re-present Christ. I could name several other doctrines of those two magnificent churches that I deem to be awfully similar to UFO’s — and somehow I suspect that they could do the same for a low-church evangelical regarding doctrines I believe. I’m not offended by that and I suspect they are not offended by mine.
So I’m just fine with not being in the company of the Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic. If I believed as they do then . . . [drum roll] . . . I’d convert.
So I’m just fine with not being in the company of the Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic. If I believed as they do then . . . [drum roll] . . . I’d convert.
Am I to suppose by this that you see no problem in the diunity of Christianity? If a majority of Christians now believe something, and the vast majority of Christians over time believe it, should that not count for something? Is there any sound argument why they might be wrong on this issue? Preferably an argument drawing from Scripture.
I would argue from Scripture that Ephesians 5:23 and 1 Cor. 11:7 give evidence that a man is more an icon for God than is a woman.
It seems to me the supreme futility (is that phrase an oxymoron?) of Protestantism to presume to remake Christianity through its own understanding and to scoff at the witness of antiquity and of the great Catholic/Orthodox majority. If you are going to resist the common witness of these churches you ought to come up with a pretty sound argument.
disunity, not diunity (which might be a theological heresy) 😉
[i] Please do not slide off topic on this thread. [/i]
RE: “If you are going to resist the common witness of these churches you ought to come up with a pretty sound argument.”
Indeed yes — but I won’t be going into that on this thread.
The Elves already are sharpening their gleaming fangs, and I, an Innocent, Gentle, Dolphin-Like, Minority Victim, am constantly seen as Prime Prey, for what reason I cannot imagine.
[i] So little time; so much to say. [/i] 🙂
hey, elves, where is anyone off-topic on this thread? The theological implications of the post are hardly off-topic.
If you don’t want discussions about issues maybe you shouldn’t post anything.
A noble tradition stretching back to Pricilla and Aquila in Corinth (Acts 18).
we had a married team working at Grace Mission in Tallahassee, to great effect, in a very low income area of town. They were truly a blessing to those there. And now Jim and Sherry Hobby are working at a Church in Thomasville.
Jim, the “stretch” is to cite Pricilla and Aquila as any kind of precedent for this. There is no “tradition” about this novelty whatsoever. There is a great deal of theological and spiritual minefields in this that many seem to blissfully want to ignore. But hey, we’re Protestants, so we do what feels good to us and screw the theology or witness of antiquity.
Here’s a practical concern for those who find sacredotal theology irrelevant:
In any parish setting in which there are multiple clergy, there is one Rector and the others are subordinate to him. If any parishoner has a problem with an assistant priest he can take it to the Rector. The lines of authority and headship are clear. Yet when there is a married couple acting as co-rectors, even if the husband is clearly seen as the head of the arrangement, any problem a parishoner has with the co-rector wife is much marder to take to the husband Rector because this would entail an intrusion into the marital relationship. Don’t try to sell me the line that any husband is going to be as objective in hearing complaints about his wife or that his wife would take kindly to him tolerating such criticism.
In any healthy marriage, the husband cleaves to his wife and she to him and their bond is stronger than any other human relationship. How does that work when they then are to be joint pastors to the same flock? Would not all the parishoners come to see themselves as the children in this arrangment? Otherwise they would be outsiders to the church “family”.
That is one strange situation to be promoted by a bunch of Prostestants who supposedly believe in the Priesthood of all believers.
If “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24), how does it follow that “a man is more an icon of God than is a woman”? If a married couple in ministry is dangerously close to a fertility cult, how does insisting that only men represent Christ not come dangerously close to a priapic cult? In other words, how is it that a woman’s spirit cannot represent Christ because she is not physically as Jesus was, even though Jesus Himself presented the spiritual, not the physical, aspect of worship as the ideal? (John 4:23-24)?
I don’t think there is a stretch — Priscilla and Aquila were husband and wife, and both were cited as the leaders of the church that met in their house.
Sorry, Jim, I don’t see either Priscilla or Aquila cited as “leaders” of the church that met in their house. Such a designation would come as a real surprise to all the church fathers. But whatever. What do they know?
Suwatchalapin, it is not the man’s spirit that represents Christ but his flesh, as Christ is more than spirit, He is also Man, still Incarnate. You see, the truth of Christian worship, as the truth of Christian doctrine, is that the true spiritual reality of God comes to us in the form of flesh. Our most intimate communion with God comes to us not through prayer, but through eucharist. Thus it is that Christ, while absent in the flesh, is made present in a real sense in the eucharist and in an iconic sense in the man standing at the altar in His stead.
If your interpretation of John 4:24 were true we would be gnostics.
No, Chris, we would all be filled with the Spirit and all equally able to embody Christ. There is nothing in my statement of the classic gnostic “secret knowledge” or a hatred of flesh as evil. Quite the opposite. As vessels of Christ’s Spirit, we are each “icons” in the flesh.
Embody, yes, in the sense that Christ dwells in all of us equally, but that does not make us equally an image of Him. Argue with St. Paul. The flesh still matters, and human flesh comes in two forms: male and female. Jesus is still man, thus still male.
Actually, Chris, there is considerable scholarship that shows just that: that they were co-leaders in their home church setting (I Cor 16:19, feast day, July 8 Western calendar, July 13,14 Orthodox calendar); they took time — together — to take Apollos into their home to instruct him in the full teaching about Jesus; Paul calls them — both — fellow ministers (Romans) who risked their lives on his behalf.
Whatever your view, it is clear from the few times that these two are mentioned that they were a team, married ministers of the Gospel, who opened their lives and their home to spreading the faith and strengthening the faith and knowledge of the Christians under their care.
I think that a number of serious theological points need to be made. In no particular order:–
(1) The NT teaching about man and woman is relational and this-worldly, not ontological and eternal in its reference.
(2) The NT shows no interest in a sacerdotal ministry confined to only some in the Church, or in any doctrine of the Eucharist according to which an individual represents Christ. This is fully reflected in the Anglican Ordinal, which, like our Reformed Holy Communion service, was carefully composed so as to express some doctrines and exclude others.
(3) Nobody’s ordination or lay status is a NT subject as such. Neither is the sex of the minister, though the same cannot be said of the minister’s sex-life. Rom 16 shows the pattern quite clearly. Neither sexual equality nor lay/ordained status are of any interest there: collaboration is. Paul thanks a lady who was a ‘mother’ to him, but this does not represent an interest in her sex, beyond the fact that he could scarcely have called her his ‘father’.
(4) Sex outside marriage is not a NT subject, except in the sense that we are warned to avoid it like the plague.
(5) Marriage, the only sphere for relations either broadly or narrowly sexual, is the Great Metaphor for God’s love and our response, in both Testaments.
(6) When the Greek man/husband and woman/wife terms are used in close juxtaposition, the presumption should be that marriage is at least part of the discussion.
(7) Marriage, and its significance, was never far from St. Paul’s mind.
(8) We need to understand that if the reference in I Cor. 11 is to all men and all women as opposed to men and women who are married to each other, then the teaching is that all men without exception are in authority over all women, married or single. That cannot be right, if only because of the plain sense of other passages about authority in marriage.
(9) The NT displays no particular interest in Christ’s sex as such. His divinity and humanity are where the emphasis lies.
(10) Christ surrendered His privileges as Divine Son in the Incarnation. Certainly it would have been inconsistent for Him to have claimed any authority on grounds of physical sex, nor is there any sign that He did so. No, I am not denying the significance of typology, just trying to se what is there in the text.
(11) Male ‘headship’, if it is a New Testament doctrine at all, is modelled on Christ’s, earned by obedience and sacrificial love, not inherent in physical sex.
(12) A husband is not his wife’s father, nor is she the eldest child in relation to him; rather both are to be obeyed as a parental unit by minor children, and both father and mother are to be honoured. A note in this connection: we may see operative in much of the modern world the disastrous effects where sons do not obey and honour both father and mother equally.
(13) As a married Christian woman I have to please only one man qua man.
I believe that all this can be fully substantiated by seeking to read ALL the New Testament, and by seeking to READ all of it. My own studies, drawing on as many scholarly works as I was able to encompass, are to be found at http://www.nwnet.org/~prisca/NTWOTEXTS.htm and http://www.nwnet.org/~prisca/NTWOTEXTS.doc.
1. True, but it is a world God created and in which the church exists and ministers. Therfore, the rules of that world still apply to the church.
2. False, and can only be concluded by a Protestant prejedice against sacerdotal ministry which is clearly evident in later Christian writings. The idea that if the NT doesn’t clearly express an idea that it doesn’t care about it or is against it is a Puritan way of reading Scripture and not an Anglican one, let alone a small “c” catholic one.
3. Doubly false. This only can be concluded by rejecting Paul’s proscriptions against women in positions of authority inthe church.
4. If by sex you mean sexual acts, true, but so what?
5. Very true.
6. Yes, but primarily because man and woman exist for the sake of marriage and marriage for the sake of man and woman. Single men and women are understood to belong to that paradigm even if they don’t participate in it, for we draw our existence from the first couple, Adam and Eve, and from the last couple, Christ and the church.
7. True again.
8. That conclusion does not follow. Where in scripture is it plainly shown that within the church any man was under the spiritual authority of a woman?
9. Again, this is a presumption that has to be read into Scripture. If the Bible doesn’t mention something because it wasn’t questioned that is no evidence of unimportance. If Christ is human it must be a real humanity. What kind of humanity doesn’t come sexed? Since God knew that he would be incarnate as a mna from the beginning of time, even before He created man, could His sex really have no significance for the meaning of our creation as man and woman?
10. This kind of kenotic theology is very dubious. Christ may have emptied Himself of glory. But authority? It seems to me that the demons recognized His authority all too well, and He excercised it in their regard, as well as over the storm and sickness.
11. It’s so much fun to deny the obvious. 1 Cor 11 speaks very clearly about male headship, and this has b een understood by all churches, barring some heretical sects, down to the modern age when everything in Scripture seems open to doubt. And we are supposed to trust the wisdom of such an age as this?
12. Where was anyone saying that a wife is a daughter to her husband? That is not the type of authority that the husband is called to excercise , Eph. 5:25, 1 Peter 3. There are different types of authority, after all.
As for the dissastrous effect in the modern world, it seems fairly clear that the problem is moostly a lack of fatherly authority being excercised, either because the father is absent or because when he is present he has abandoned his authority. Feminism can take a little bit of credit in that, though women cannot truly take authority from men unless the men cravenly give it up, despising it like Essau despised his birthright.
13. True, but that does not make you free to act like a man outside that relationship. A Unisex society is not only heretical. It is deeply self-destructive.
And Jim, the kind of “scholarship” you alude to does not show anything, it merely asserts it. It is on the same level as Boswell’s “schlarship” showing acceptance of homosexual relationships in medeaval society.
Acceptance of woman in religious authority did not exist in 1st cen. semitic culture, as any reading of Rabbinic teachings will demonstrate. It does not exist in contemporary semitic mideast culture. It didn’t exist in the Patristic church, nor in the medeaval church, nor in the Reformation church. If such a thing ever existed in the NT church it would have had to be a work of God, that He thought better of later. How logical is that?
Christopher, it was my hope in posting my careful discussion of relevant NT texts that readers would seek to argue in the light of it. You have made, and repeated, some large assertions about matters which vitally affect the lives and vocations of Christian people; I have been trained to look at ancient texts soberly and with care, and to assert nothing which I cannot document. If I had regularly failed to perform to a high standard, British O- and A-Levels, let alone both Parts of the Classical Tripos, then two Parts of the Theological Tripos plus an Oxford doctorate in Septuagint Studies, could not have been part of my record.
I continue to hope for a high standard of discussion of such large questions. Let someone write as thick and thorough a book in this whole field as Gagnon’s on Homosexuality and the Bible.
My reference to cultures where mother and father are not honoured equally was primarily to Islam. This is a culture where religion, far from rebuking and correcting sinful tendencies, serves to reinforce them. Oppressed and mutilated girls, boys that are out of hand and unformed by civilised ideals of manhood, are the manifest evil fruit.
I am called to imitate a Man, and to imitate other lesser good examples at all points where they are exemplary. I am also, male or female, called to eschew the typical aberrations of my sex. The NT itself instructs me to avoid exaggerated femininity in my dress and demeanour. When it comes to courage and devotion, all of us are commanded ἀνδÏίζεσθε, regardless of sex. Nevertheless my spouse of nearly 46 years does not think of me as representing any kind of oddness or perversion.
Are there really no respects in which the Church has never fallen short of NT ideals? Was the Protestant Reformation all a mistake? Has Rome learned nothing from it? Was the Lord asleep at that time? Not according to the BCP and the Articles. Not according to the great wide world reached through Reformed preaching with the Gospel.
Priscilla, you are right that I “have made, and repeated, some large assertions about matters which vitally affect the lives and vocations of Christian people”, but these assertions aren’t new with me. They are rather old. And I have yet to see them rebutted with any substantive argument that can take critical examination. You may claim to assert nothing without documentation, yet I state that what you call documentation does not amount to historical verification of your assertion. That you are not alone in your assertions does not strengthen them in my book if there is no historical pedigree to them. It should also be noted that to refute the ancient common understanding of these matters with the new modern ideas and “scholarship” also vitally affect the lives and vocations of Christian people, it just does it in a way that is more pleasing to its proponents.
I confess I was not thinking of Islamic culture in your comment. You are right that there women have absolutely no authority, as even the authority in the home in the raising of children has been robbed of them. But again, the problem is with abusive male excercise of leadership. The men do not love their wives as partners but as possessions. Islam represents one extreme in the abuse of male headship. Modern Western society represents the other extreme. I am simply affirming the moderate path in between of biblical male headship. 🙂
About the church falling short of NT ideals and the need for the Reformation: As a Protestant I cannot disagree. Yet I protest back that there must be sounder historical argument to demonstrate that the church has indeed fallen short and that these so-called NT ideals are in fact genuine than simply the assertion that the church can fall short and so why not in this instance. I would note that the early Reformers did not simply point to the Bible but also to the writings of the early fathers. It is the sects, like the Mormons and JWs that completely ignore all church history as undependable and stick to their own interprtetation of the Bible, supplemented as they see fit. The idea that the church could, after the apostolic period immediately and universally fall away from such a monumentous shift, as female religious authority would be in a Jewish based church, is a huge assumption to swallow, and one that would make any use of church history to know what is normative Christian practice and doctrine virtually irrelevant.
To dismiss the sound and sure witness of history, as opposed to the witness of “historians” who often reconstruct it through their own understanding, is like throwing away the rudder to a ship.
One further note:
You ask, in defense of the Reformation, “was the Lord asleep at that time?”, appealing to the Providence of History. Well, I do believe that the Reformnation was necessary and so was providential. But, it is entirely within the realm of reason to believe that the Reformation was a mistake, a wrong solution to a real problem. I believe that this is the position of the largest Christian church today. The Lord has allowed many heresies in the past and present. The apostacy of TEC is a good case in point. The Roman Catholics can always argue, “What is more logical, that God would be asleep letting a portion of Christendom fall into heresy and schism in the Reformation, or that He was asleep in letting the entire western church fall into such a state that schism was necessary to save it?”.
It seems to me that God has been asleep for a very long time to be only now, in the last century, “restoring” the sexual egalitarianism that you claim is there in Scripture.
I rejoice in the obvious obedience and dedication of this fruitful presbyteral couple, working as a team in accordance with the New Testament pattern.
If more people asked before they married whether they would serve the Lord better together than apart, not only would there be more Christian fruitfulness in general, but many marriages would be happier and more inspiring all round.