THE question of women bishops will inevitably come back, the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, said, after the prospect of women bishops in the Church in Wales received an indefinite setback on Wednesday of last week.

The House of Clergy in the Governing Body lacked a two-thirds majority in their favour. The House of Bishops was unanimously in favour of the Bill to enable women to be ordained as bishops, and the Laity voted for it 52-19, but in the House of Clergy the voting was 27 for and 18 against, which was just 60 per cent in favour.

The Bill had been published in July 2007, and a select committee had been established to consider amendments from the dioceses, of which 12 had been included in their report to the Governing Body meeting in Lampeter last week. At the start of the debate, however, all but the select committee’s own two amendments had been withdrawn.

As the Bill was defeated in only one House, it could come back at any time, Dr Morgan said, “but there is no point in bringing it back to the Governing Body in two or three years just for it to be defeated again; so we need to take stock.”

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The Church in Wales … voted not to consecrate women bishops. The motion, proposed by Archbishop Dr Barry Morgan, fell by three votes. In the laity it was 52-19, in the clergy 27-18. It fell after the amendments that would have offered alternative oversight for the clergy opponents also failed. Canon Mary Stallard, chaplain to the bishop of St Asaph and pictured on the far right of this picture, said: ‘The moment will come back. We are very disappointed. It is not totally unexpected. But we are looking forward to bringing it back. This issue will not be ignored.’

Read it all and Archbishop Barry Morgan’s piece in the Guardian is here also.

In his sermon at Llandaff Cathedral on Easter Sunday, Dr Barry Morgan says, “There isn’t one story of Jesus in the New Testament but four, since each evangelist uses the events of Jesus’ life to make his own particular point. Nor do we have just one story of the appearance of Jesus after his resurrection, but many different stories. The Gospel writers emphasise different aspects of the significance of Jesus, so that the question to ask, is not did the events in these stories happen exactly in this way but what truths are they trying to convey?” Another important perspective we need in order to grasp the meaning of the stories is the historical one, he says.

“The New Testament has layers and layers of meaning ”“ it tries to convey truth through stories that are subtle, deep and many layered. Very often to understand them, you need to know something about the Jewish background against which they were written and also about the Old Testament.”

Dr Morgan takes St John’s story of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Jesus outside the tomb in the garden on the first day of the week after his resurrection to illustrate his point. It’s a story, he says, which can be read as a straight historical account ”“ Mary meets the risen Jesus. But its true significance is that God through Jesus reverses the fall of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis.

“Here in St John, Jesus is the new Adam. Here is a new creation. Here through the person of Jesus, men and women can be recreated, transformed, redeemed. In the person of the risen Jesus, God becomes close and familiar once more as he calls Mary by name. Whereas through the fall, humanity had become estranged from God, now in Jesus, God has drawn close. This story is also about the reversal of death. Jesus has burst through death to God’s new life. Mary mistakes him for the gardener and of course he is the gardener, but not in the sense Mary means it, but because He is the Creator of the garden ”“ referred to in Genesis.”Finally, he concludes, the stories need to be seen from the perspective of faith as well as reason.

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To have a coherent and rational debate about the tenets of the Christianity is perfectly natural. To have a virulent, almost irrational attack upon it claiming that what is being said is self evidently true is dangerous, not just because it refuses to allow any contrary viewpoint but also because it affects the public perception of religion. It leads, for example, to local authorities calling Christmas ”˜Winterval’, to hospitals removing all Christian symbols from hospital chapels, or to schools refusing to put on nativity plays, or allowing children to send Christmas cards with a Christian message, or airlines refusing staff the freedom to wear a cross round their necks.

All of this is what I would call the new ”˜fundamentalism’ of our age and any kind of fundamentalism, be it Biblical, atheistic or Islamic, is dangerous, because it allows no room for disagreement, for doubt, for debate, for discussion. It leads to the language of expulsion and exclusivity, of extremism and polarisation, and the claim that because God is on our side, He is not on yours.

Contrast all that with the message of the angel to the shepherds in the nativity story in St Luke’s Gospel, “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all people”. It is a message of joy and good news for everyone
”“ no one is excluded, everyone is embraced, from the shepherds, who would have been seen as nobodies by respectable Jewish society, to the magi – Gentiles, who would have been strangers in the land.

The Gospel writers make the point that Jesus is the focus of all God’s promises and purposes from the beginning of creation. God is not exclusive, he is on the side of the whole of humanity with all its variety.

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An interesting read.

Alwyn Rice Jones’s time as Archbishop of Wales involved big changes in the Church. Having once failed to get the ordination of women as priests through the governing body, he brought it back in 1996 when it was approved and, unlike in England, no clergy left the Church in Wales. He also steered through the legislation for the remarriage of divorcees in church.

A theological liberal, Jones was a committed ecumenist. While a priest at Porthmadog he developed close relations with the Roman Catholic Church and was secretary of the Gwynedd Ecumenical Forum. From 1985 to 1987 he was the chairman of the Commission of Covenanting Churches in Wales. He steered a Bill through the governing body for the creation of local ecumenical projects and became chairman of the religious advisory committee for the Welsh-language TV channel.

He was committed to social justice and was not afraid of political issues. He condemned the bombing of Kos-ovo and was a strong supporter of devolution and the creation of the National Assembly of Wales. A year after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, he wrote to his clergy saying that he thought too much was being made of her status. He left it to the discretion of his clergy as to whether prayers should be said on the anniversary of her death.

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