Letters to the Editor
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little confused here
"Vicar of Dibley" anyone? Aren't most Anglicans over this? In America our Presiding Bishop is a woman! So... in England, I guess, there are female priests but no female bishops yet? Is that the deal?
Locally the Episcopalians are split down the middle over ordaining gay men, but the only quibble I've heard over women came from my elderly, very High Church pastor who's been dead now ten years.
Heading to wikipedia now... sheesh... what a complicated mess. It's pretty sad when Memphis, Tennessee is more enlightened than the rest of the world.
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Dissent
Well, dissent is a healthy byproduct of a democratic society. Now, perhaps it's a sign of a democratization of the Church if instead of banging their fist on the table and saying that ye shalt do as I say, the Church of England is willing to compromise. You know, find a diplomatic solution.
After all, we the liberals are all about holding our collective nose and talking to people we don't like in order to resolve our conflicts peacefully, right? So, if we can envisage talking to the likes of Ahmadinejad and (gasp!) accepting his point of view as, you know, a point of view, we can find it within ourselves to agree with the Church of England in this. Perhaps (okay, most likely) they're motivated by a selfish desire to keep their congregation intact. But perhaps they're also aware that forcing progressive ideas down a conservative's throat is counterproductive at best and disastrous at worst. The English are stuck in Basra right now, and it looks like they're learning their lesson well.
I think they're doing the right thing: giving people choices. So, with time the congregation will shift more and more towards inclusiveness (especially as the crotchety old conservatives die off). The alternative would've been to force things and generates decades of resentment (and with it bigotry) that would simmer under the mask of compliance and not easily die off.
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Seperate but equal, huh?
They ain't giving female priests choices, now are they? It rather reminds me of Apartheid thinking. Give the women their own homelands, right?
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A Few Points from an "Insider"
Most of my fellow Anglicans (Episcopalians here in the US) would likely bristle at the idea that we are religious "followers" who are supposed to "follow our leaders." The relationship between clergy and laity is far more complex than that. The church's founding principles include the importance of reason (meaning conclusions drawn from individual conscience) as one of three equal influences in Christian life (the other two being scripture and tradition).
But it is precisely because the church is fundamentally non-doctrinal and committed to this type of theological diversity that we find ourselves in a perpetual balancing act between maintaining the unity of the Worldwide Anglican Communion on the one hand and living up to our commitment to diversity of conscience within our membership. It's like trying to keep a family eating at the dinner table together when Mom's a democrat, Dad's a republican, and all the kids are opinionated teenagers. These debates are part of the family, so to speak, and they are a good problem to have. Rather than splinter into a million different forms of the same church, we hammer out these compromises over and over again for the sake of being a community. That's an immensely humbling experience and a significant spiritual principle.
To give an example, my own church is generally liberal and affirming of gays and lesbians. We are headed by a priest who is himself a gay man. Down the road a bit is our sister congregation, which is comprised mostly of theological conservatives and whose priest is opposed to ordination of gays and lesbians. We worship in separate churches, have separate leaders, but we work together on many things and recognize one another as part of the same communion.
Of course, that's not to say that we haven't come down on the wrong side of tolerance vs. doing the right thing (the behavior of ECUSA during the civil war would be one instance where I think we erred way too far on the side of not judging the parishes that refused to denounce slavery). And our disagreements can get pretty nasty at times (hence the teenager metaphor), with this or that faction blithely declaring their doctrinal superiority to another and going off and sulking in their bedrooms when they don't feel they are getting their way. In this sense, I'm sorry to say, what I think the church is doing is saying "okay okay, go sulk in your bedroom for as long as you need."
Which is all to say that I very much doubt that this decision has anything whatsoever to do with wanting to "keep more members" in the strictly pragmatic sense of keeping butts in pews. It has more to do with the church's historical emphasis on compromise and community over judgment and fragmentation.
Also, I should point out for the sake of context that in the culturally Western branches of the Anglican Communion we've been ordaining women for about thirty years (give or take a few depending on what country you're in).
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Actually Some Episcopalians are Upset With Female Priests ...
Allie wrote:
-snip-
"Aren't most Anglicans over this? In America our Presiding Bishop is a woman! So... in England, I guess, there are female priests but no female bishops yet? Is that the deal?"
This is not a "done deal" in the Anglican Communion.
Here's a quote from the Washington Post's 2006 coverage of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori election:
"Thirty years after the Episcopal Church began ordaining women, three U.S. dioceses -- Fort Worth, San Joaquin and Quincy, Ill. -- refuse to allow female priests. Elsewhere in the Anglican Communion, change has come even more slowly: 13 of the communion's 38 churches have no female priests, and besides the United States, the only countries with female bishops are Canada and New Zealand."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/02/AR2006070200702_pf.html
I suspect that the attempted theft of the Diocese of San Joaquin by the now deposed former Bishop of San Joaquin and the Episcopal Church's lawsuit against him in response to this attempted theft may lead to a change in leadership for this diocese. The San Joaquin diocese may start having female priests in their churches now.