The Ordination of Women as Priests - 25 Years On

This is one of a handful of photos that mean more to me than I can say.

It was taken at Coventry Cathedral on 11 May 1994. You will probably guess the occasion: the ordination of the first female priests in the Diocese of Coventry. And what a celebration it was! I've regularly attended glorious liturgy in no fewer than four cathedrals. But I knew on that day that this was a ceremony that would not just live on bathed in a kind of generalised afterglow. I knew that it would be unforgettable in its detail as well. Such as singing "Be still for the Spirit of the Lord is moving in this place" and, for once, truly recognising that she was.

When you are a cathedral precentor, as I was then, you train yourself to know the liturgy in all its particulars, to become familiar with the soul of it, inhabit it from the inside. Even when you have written the rite yourself, as you do on many a special occasion, you still have to learn the grain of it, intuit how it is going to "feel" in the particular liturgical space it's devised for, how the community that gathers together to celebrate is likely to respond to the words and actions, the silences and the music that you have so carefully devised for it.

We all knew that this ordination of women would be a once-for-all event, unrepeatable as a history-making act of worship. For many months I worked on the service with a small planning group of women who were due to be ordained, together with Bishop Simon Barrington-Ward and Director of Ordinands Canon, now Bishop, Mark Bryant. That preparation process was a remarkable experience in itself, both for the joy of looking forward to a great event in the life of the church and of the ordinands and their families, and for the deep sensitivity that was felt towards those who could not accept the validity of their ordination and for whom this ordination day would be one not of joy but of pain. 

I want to pay tribute to one of them in particular, Barbara Baisley who was then chaplain at Warwick University and the Dean of Women's Ministry in the Diocese. She and her husband George had both been students of mine at Salisbury (indeed, her brother Robin taught me English at school). I mention Barbara not only because of the skilled way she led those women through the delicate (and for some, highly controversial) process of becoming priests, but because she died a few years afterwards, long before her time. I also remember that a curate in the Diocese at that time by the name of Justin Welby joined the planning group in order to get a feel for how a major liturgical event is planned in a cathedral. I recall that he had his own gentle wisdom to contribute to the process.

All this was twenty-five years ago. It was in March 1994 that the first female priests were ordained in Bristol Cathedral. For those of us who had long wished and prayed for our church to take this step and had campaigned for it, the outcome of the vote in General Synod on 11 November 1992 was also a night to remember. That day, Armistice Day, is also the birthday of our youngest daughter who was nine that year. So we deferred the family fireworks that year by a few days, and as soon as Archbishop George Carey had announced the result of the vote, and we had taken it in (and shed a few tears of relief), we went out in the garden to light rockets and sparklers to celebrate what felt like a double birthday. 

As (now Archbishop) Justin Welby said this week, the contribution female priests have made to the life of the Church of England has been immeasurable. Women are now occupying every conceivable role in the church as priests: as chaplains and bishops, area deans and archdeacons, incumbents and cathedral deans. We had our ups and downs in the General Synod I was part of when it came to the question of female bishops. I won't say all that is forgotten - we mustn't airbrush out of history or our present experience the pain of those who dissent from these decisions, nor the fact that many of our sister churches have not taken these steps. My first cousin made the journey from Anglican to Roman Catholic priesthood because of the ordination of women as priests, and that made it a family as well as a church matter. Like #Brexit, you feel things in more pointed ways when they intrude upon your personal relationships. (But he and I have always remained good friends and colleagues in ministry, I'm glad to say.)

While I was taking part in that service 25 years ago, I thought back to my own memories of ordination in 1975 and 76. Ordination services have that effect on us who are deacons and priests, and it's a good thing that we're reminded of our ordination vows from time to time (even in retirement). But I had - I have - a very specific memory of the night before I was ordained deacon. Our Bishop (of Oxford - Kenneth Woollcombe) saw each of us for an hour that day. What he said to me would be imprinted on my memory for a lifetime.

The Bishop had led the campaign in General Synod that year in support of the resolution that "there are no theological objections to the ordination of women". He said to me: "Michael, you know what the Synod has resolved this year. From now on, everyone who is ordained as a deacon and thereby becomes an officer of the Church of England understands that this is the publicly stated position of our church. You must not say that the rules were changed during your public ministry. If you can't be content with that, now is the time to step back from receiving holy orders tomorrow." I imagine he said the same to all the ordinands. (But perhaps he thought I might have concerns about male "headship", trained as I was at a conservative evangelical theological college - whose last Principal, Emma Ineson, has just been ordained a bishop!). 

I've often thought back to that interview, and how influential it was, not in coming to a conclusion I'd already embraced, but in having the confidence to speak up for it publicly. It was my first experience of facing the reality of diversity in our church and learning to see it as a gift that enriches and ennobles us all. But I'm also trying to learn what Justin Welby has taught us to see as "good disagreement", how to listen carefully, practise generosity and charity alongside holding deeply to this and other matters of conviction (I'll not mention the B****t word a second time).

The Church of England still has a long way to go before it can claim to be a genuinely diverse institution. In particular, we are a long way from recognising and celebrating committed gay relationships as joyous, God-given and loving, let alone affirming and solemnising same-sex marriage - as we must, I believe, soon. Regular readers of this blog will know that I've tried to stand with my LGBT friends as they find a place of genuine, unreserved acceptance in our church. If I began to discern anywhere how we must all work tirelessly to become a more just, more equal, more caring church, it was at that marvellous ordination service in Coventry in 1994. 

Thank you to the women in the diaconate, priesthood and episcopate with whom it's been, and continues to be, such an inspiration to serve in the public ministry of the church of God. This silver anniversary brings fond memories of past ordained female friends and colleagues "who rejoice with us but on another shore and in a greater light", "those angel faces I have loved long since and lost awhile". And to those ordained women who read these words, congratulations to each one of you. This blog comes with gratitude, admiration, prayers and expectancy for all that is yet to be in the next quarter of a century.

AMDG

*** I want to add a postscript to this blog in the light of Twitter comments it’s received so far. 

One person reminded us that it is too easy to simply celebrate  without acknowledging the cost born mostly by women. An acknowledgment of the pain caused needs to go alongside a celebration of where we have got to. It is too easy to bypass the former. Another added: true, and it still goes on. Until the Institution recognises how the barriers it has imposed inhibit the full flourishing of women’s ordained ministry the cost will continue unjustly.

I responded: Yes. I can see that for all its good intentions, this [my blog] is a man’s perspective who perhaps wants too much for it all to be well. Or wants it prematurely, before real healing has had time to happen? Or doesn’t see the injustices that are still being perpetrated in our church? I wish I’d written more sensitively in the light of this. I’m aware how much this is also true for LGBT clergy in our church. We say we intend to listen and learn from people’s experience but in practice the Church goes on “othering” those who don’t fit its theological template. The recent disinvitation of bishops’ same-sex spouses to the Lambeth Conference was a case in point (the website has now removed that offending parenthesis). Nevertheless I still want the church to rejoice with and for its women who are deacons, priests and bishops, however long the road ahead that we must continue to travel.

Discerning Vocation in the Third Age: more from the retirement front line

Every now and then I try to take stock of this still new stage of life called retirement. In this blog I want to reflect on where Christian life and ordained life belong in it.

The first thing to say is that I am writing entirely personally. Every one of us has to negotiate this threshold into retirement in our own unique way. For clergy, it can be especially problematic because a vocation is so much more than the kind of job you can step in and out of. To have been a priest for more than forty years is to inhabit a way of life that forms you, shapes you, confers its own "character" on you, is intimately involved with your personal identity. As priests we "become what we are" just as we do in baptism and marriage. This is as true of our personal interior lives as well as our visible public roles. Which is as it should be.

I recall very clearly the experience of entering the priesthood as a young man. What we now call vocational discernment was accompanied by a vast amount of prayer, conversation, reflection, study and scrutiny. A great many other people were involved in helping me approach and then cross this threshold into ordained life. At that time I was in my mid-twenties and had been a student all my life up to then. Being ordained coincided, for me, with taking up my life's work, or if you like, taking responsibility and earning my own living. It felt like a rite of passage into adulthood.

At around the time I turned sixty, memories of that earlier vocational journey became much more vivid. I knew I had four or five years in which to prepare for retirement (not long in the sweep of a lifetime). There were inevitable practicalities to think about. Where would we live? What were our housing needs likely to be? What financial resources would we have? (I learned from older clergy who'd come to me for regular spiritual guidance that it's never too soon to ask these questions, and in today's less certain economic climate, the earlier the better.)

But I wasn't expecting these pre-retirement years to prove once again to be a time of vocational discernment. But that is precisely what they turned out to be. At the end of those four decades of ordained work, and now as an older if not wiser man, I found that the prospect of leaving stipendiary ministry felt remarkably similar to my memories of entering it. In other words, both seemed to have discernment at their heart. I found that for me, retiring was as much of a vocational issue as ordination had been. So it's important that the church "accompanies" its retiring clergy spiritually and emotionally because as every retired person knows, it's one of the biggest thresholds we ever have to cross in our adult lives. I think we are getting better at this, and that's heartening.

Discovering who we are in retirement and what we could become is a journey, of course. I am not even in media res. As yet, if I'm spared for a while, I am probably nearer the start than the finishing line. I have a lot to learn. But for what it's worth, here's my interim report on where I'm getting to.

For me (and again I stress that this is just one person speaking), I did not feel in my waters that retirement ministry could simply mean more of the same: taking services, preaching sermons, continuing in some form or other to participate in the church's public leadership. As I started to think and pray about it, I came to see how the coming years could offer all kinds of new and untried opportunities to contribute to both the church and the wider community. Some of these I have explored and begun to embrace. Some are as yet simply possibilities to be thought about. One or two have not led anywhere. But pushing at a few doors and testing volunteering opportunities has felt very much to be the stuff of discernment. I've wanted to discover if, and how, these different conversations might coalesce into a single answer to the question, "what could my life now become, what does God want it to become as I embrace the potential that comes from being released from day to day work responsibilities?"

At the core of this new vocation, and rather to my surprise, there emerged more and more insistently a desire to live and worship as a lay person once again. I mean that I wanted to play my part as a Christian not through preaching and presiding at the liturgy but as a worshipper, sitting with my wife in a church nave among the laos, the people of God. This isn't a nostalgic harking back to the first year of our marriage when this was what "churchgoing" meant. But it is to rediscover as a couple this communio in sacris, a "sharing in holy things". I'm one of those strange clergy who has always enjoyed churchgoing (even on holiday!). It's been good to find ourselves once again in that place of community where the holy-common people of God gather. I know that has always been true, whatever my role as a deacon and priest in the church. But to experience it in this new (i.e. old) way on the Sundays of our lives feels like one of the best gifts of retirement.

We are fortunate that in this village, our parish priest understands this and allows me to live out my vocation in this way. I've made it clear that if there is a need, and especially an emergency, I shall of course step up at once and help along with other retired clergy colleagues in the parish. I value the invitations to take part in special services and preach in and beyond the diocese when an invitation comes. I have the Bishop's permission to officiate. But if asked why I am comparatively rarely to be seen in a surplice or a chasuble, I try to give as honest an answer as I can along the lines I've explained. And I find that people not only understand what I'm struggling to articulate, but respect it.

What does this say about vocation at this stage of life? There's an important theological principle that I've needed to revisit. It is that the fundamental vocation of every Christian is conferred at baptism. For some of us, ordination flows out of that vocation to discipleship as a consequence. But I'm clear that the "normal" way of being a Christian and a member of God's church is the lay state. Deacons, priests and bishops do not renounce their lay-ness on ordination (nor the orders that have already been conferred on them). All the ordained continue to belong to the laos. I think it's not only good but important for us to express this from time to time. For me, retirement is - for the moment anyway - such a time.

I'm aware that this could be misunderstood. (I also recognise that other retired clergy will see it differently, and of course I respect that.) It may sound as though I have renounced my orders - as if it were possible to renounce an indelible "character" conferred by the church at ordination. Or that I am no longer interested in playing my part in helping the church to flourish. Or perhaps that I'm just not aware of the pressures local churches are familiar with through the relentless decline in the numbers of stipendiary clergy. None of these is true - but maybe it needs explaining.

(Excursus. I happen to think that our present patterns of church life, especially in the countryside, are not likely to prove sustainable beyond a few more decades, and the generosity of retired clergy should not protect the church and its dioceses, bishops and archdeacons from recognising that reality and engaging with it. I know they are already doing so. I am simply suggesting that the future of organised religion will look very different from the past, and one day there will not be enough clergy whether stipendiary or non-stipendiary, active or retired to maintain it in something like its present form. I say this with deep sadness because I believe with all my heart in parochial ministry and am uneasy that others, including some in senior leadership roles, seem to sit more lightly to it than I believe is good for the national church and the people it is here to serve.)

My response is to say that I am trying to re-express the lay aspect of my baptismal vocation - or, if you like, to live as a priest in the local church in a new kind of way. I am glad to be alongside so many good lay people in this parish who give such time and effort to supporting it. It makes me appreciate all the more how much all the cathedrals I served benefitted from our teams of volunteers. No cathedral, no parish, will go anywhere nowadays without its committed lay people. Now that I largely live as one, I see this more from the inside than I used to.

At the same time, I am glad to go across to the church on weekdays to pray the daily office with the vicar. I hope that by doing this I can offer him spiritual companionship. Reciting the psalms, hearing the scriptures read, offering intercession for parish, church and world all connect me in a deep way with the whole church and my own priesthood within it. All of this is what we call the opus dei, the work of God. Whatever form our ministry takes, whether as laity or clergy, it's our privilege to bear witness to the reality of God and do his work in the world.

How we undertake this, for people of faith, is the question that matters at every stage of life. In retirement, it's good to report that it still gets me up in the morning.

**These images are all taken in the Benefice of Haydon Bridge, Beltingham and Henshaw in Northumberland where we have made our home in retirement. Maybe there are appropriate metaphors in some of them?