There are growing signs that a procedural motion will be tabled to delay the women-bishops legislation when it goes to the General Synod for final approval next month.
Under Section 94 of the Standing Orders, a motion can be moved from the floor of the Synod to send the draft Measure back to the House of Bishops for further consideraÂtion. Supporters of women bishops have expressed their reluctance to vote for the Measure since the Bishops added two amendments
Fascinating watching the manouvering going on. On the one hand the pro women bishops crowd want the vote to happen and know that to get it through it will be necessary to persuade those reactionary old turkeys to vote for Christmas.
On the other hand they want it all and they want it now, just as the fratricidal Affirming Catholics, ‘open evangelicals’ and WATCH all ganged up on the Anglo-Catholics and some Conservative Evangelicals at Synod a few years ago and voted down any provision which would have enabled opponents to stay. Their short-term and selfish actions led directly and almost immediately to the Pope and now Gafcon parking tanks on Lambeth Palace’s lawn and to Williams being led out in triumph to be paraded as a war trophy in front of the world’s press as the Ordinariate was established. What a disgrace that was, but self-inflicted. Now AMiE is here and it was amusing to watch the fluster of the relevant bishops dashing all over the place to welcome FCA’s meetings to ‘their diocese’, rather like a dog marking a tree.
Now the conspirators are wondering if they can jiggle this and jiggle that to engineer some sort of way of getting what they want without the legislation going back to the drawing board.
But we are in a new Synod, and there is less of a heart for the disgraceful actions of a few years ago, we have an Archbishop in disgrace who most of the Communion just ignore, and that has reflected on us in the Church of England. But on planet CofE, the parochialism continues.
Fascinating, but in some respects irrelevant. The Ordinariate and AMiE are here, and from the Scots Presbyterians we are already seeing the first denominational splits taking place. While the parochials in the CofE are fighting among themselves, bigger issues are at stake, which is what the House of Bishops have realised and tried to deal with in the amendment.
So there is a bit of this and a bit of that, and meanwhile elsewhere somewhere in the middle there is some seeing and some sawing, which I suppose is what happens at a fulcrum.
Women bishops is not the biggest issue facing the Church of England, and it is indicative of its dysfunction and increasing unfitness for purpose that mission, evangelism, and biblical proclamation are sidelined for gender issues, environmental activism and transaction taxes. We have learned nothing from the St Paul’s debacle about the failure to have any relevance to the country or to have any message to offer; in short to equip ourselves to be ready to serve, to give an example of behaving like Christians to one another, and be fit for purpose as a church.