On Women Bishops

So, the Church of England has voted in favour of the ordination of women to the episcopate, but not by a sufficient margin in all three houses for the vote to carry.  I have expressed that carefully and precisely because even the BBC has talked of the C of E having voted against the ordination of women bishops, which is not quite the case.  Indeed, not at all the case:  it's clear there is a majority, and quite a substantial one, for this to happen - but nonetheless it is true that the motion itself has failed, and we may presume that there will be no women bishops in the C of E within the next five years.

One reason why the House of Laity should be much more conservative on these matters than the Houses of Bishops and Clergy (both very solidly in favour) is that the laity of the Church do tend to be, on the whole, more conservative than the clergy - though for the most part less likely to be signed-up members of one party or another, or necessarily all that well-versed on the theological arguments for or against, in this or any other contentious issue.

But it is also a product of the way in which the House of Laity is elected.  Within a diocese, the clergy are, by and large, well known to each other, and also they are clued up on the issues and fairly highly motivated to vote in the election of General Synod members.  Lay people, even the fairly high profile lay people who might seek election to Synod, tend not to be so well known, and the electorate is by no means as clued up or as interested in voting.  It is easier for the hard liners on both sides to get their candidates through the process, not least because those most interested in participating in the vote are likely to be those with a firm position on one side or the other.

The impact of this depends on where you are looking at it from.  The House of Laity can act as an effective brake on the wilder and more excessively liberal impulses of the bishops and clergy, forcing them to take account of a perspective that is in fact more in tune with the views of the real man or woman in the real pew. That could be a good thing, perhaps.  Or the role of the laity could be that of the backwoodsmen who constantly stymie and cancel out the policies and proposals of those with a leadership vision, with the Gospel imperative at heart, and a real impulse to relevance and mission.  Which would be a bad thing, surely.

There will have been times when the House of Laity has been effective and useful as a brake;  there have been times when it has delayed and frustrated forward-thinking proposals that in some cases (like this, I think - but you may not) were already long overdue. My take on this is quite simple and straightforward, though I won't restate it here, except to say that surely, as the office and order of priest is dependent on that of bishop a Church that ordains women as priests ought to ordain them also as bishops, to be theologically coherent.

Female priests are a fact of Church life now.  I came close to voting against at the time, but I am glad to have been persuaded otherwise.  This, I am told by some, makes me no longer Catholic;  I have become schismatic, albeit as part of a Church that as a whole is schismatic.  I disagree, because I cannot separate catholicity as a concept from 'the mind of Christ', which is a fundamental of the Church.  To live, to decide and to order ourselves according to the mind of Christ is a vital task for his Church, and to do that may well challenge much that is or has been dear to us.