Thank you for that DavidR.  Let's hope this appeal is successful.  Good for Bishops Nicholas and Graham.

Salisbury Diocesan Synod made space for an emergency motion at their meeting a few days ago.

"This Synod calls upon the House of Bishops to withdraw its amendment to Clause 5 of the Draft Bishops and Priests (Consecration and Ordination of Women) Measure". It was passed overwhelmingly.  Earlier, in his Presidential Address, Bishop Nicholas Holtam said "the Bishops have destabilised the compromise agreed by 42 of the 44 Dioceses".

Both he and Bishop Graham Kings voted for and welcomed the motion.

Bowman, thank you for drawing attention to empirical studies on men women and 'growth'. You rightly point out they are dated. But there are other limitations. One is the issue of where in what ministerial capacity women are being deployed compared to men. There has been more variation in this than for men - and for a variety of reasons. More women are likely to be part time or non stipendiary for example. These are also measures taken from still relatively early days in the availability of women alongside men in church job interviews. There is evidence ( I need to track the source)  that in the early decades of women being appointable to local church leadership they were more likley to be appointed to smaller churches and/or in more socially mixed areas. Larger and more resourced churches were not  yet appointing them. Has that proportion changed?

My concern is that these stats may be applied with the same subtlety as school league tables and have the capacity to sustain the same kind of prejudices and even more to measure and judge ministry by unrealistic expectations.

Bowman

My reply to your 17 June 2012 - 07:37pm post:

As I have tried to say before, whether a person is a Christian or not is an objective fact known to God. Those who are Christians as an objective fact are those who, having been predestined to life before the foundation of the world have been regenerated by an act of God and justified in the blood and resurrection of Christ by a verdict of God, and, (an addition to what I have said before arising from thinking about our exchanges on East/West atonement) have been adopted as sons and united with Christ in his death, resurrection, ascension, and heavenly reign (I am not prejudging further discussion about theosis etc.).

Such Christians are called to a life-long obedience to God in Christ in the power of the Spirit as God conforms them to the image of his Son, as they grow in grace and know God more and more; to a life-long mortification of indwelling sin; to a lifelong repentance for sins committed; to a life-long chastening; to a life-long meditation on the things written by God for our learning by the inspired Prophets and Apostles. God’s predestinating love guarantees that this process (maybe through many ups and downs etc.) will be successfully completed.

In that process we may fall into sin intellectually (so to speak) as well as morally and come to wrong conclusions about what the Bible says and means. If we end up believing that something is not a sin which in fact is a sin in God’s sight, or that something is a sin which is not a sin in God’s sight, I don’t see how that belief can avoid being a sin in God’s sight. If we are persuaded/convicted of our sin, we have to repent of that and change our beliefs and behaviour. This is often traumatic. I realise that if any women who have been ordained come to the view that it was against God’s will, that trauma would be extreme in many ways. So it behoves us all to conduct these debates in fear and trembling.

Phil Almond

JonathonDavid,

I dont see any scriptural support that the disciples felt it inappropriate to approach Jesus at the well (John 4:27) nor where they might have learned from Him not to interrupt whilst He was speaking with women.

The claim "The interactions where they learned to be wary of interrupting Jesus have not been included in Scripture." is very interesting. Alternatively it would not be mentioned in scripture that this is fantasy.

You said "Jesus said that 'true worshippers, worship Him in Spirit and truth, that such people are the people The Father seeks. (John 4:23) "

Hi Angela,

If the disciples felt it inappropriate to approach Jesus at the well (John 4;27) it would have been because they had learned from Him not to interrupt whilst He was speaking with women.   It cannot be anything to do with the prior teachings of the Old Testament because women were not held in high enough regard to prevent men interrupting.  

The interactions where they learned to be wary of interrupting Jesus have not been included in Scripture.   Maybe they were considered insignificant discourse, but they must have happened.  

Jesus was not an advocate of oppressing women. He advocated releasing them into a place where they could sit alongside the men to hear Him speak. He did not want them in the background if they could ‘choose’ to be with the men. Remember, He said that Mary had chosen the better part (Luke 10;42) 

Therefore, there should be a compulsion within women to ‘choose’ the better part. Curtailing to anything less than hearing their call is tantamount to disagreeing with Jesus. 

Whether or not it has been a sin to perpetuate the cultural values that Jesus Himself stood against is up to the church to decide, but there is no question that 'cultural' values have been perpetuated in a continuous spiral of self justification. 

Jesus said that 'true worshippers, worship Him in Spirit and truth, that such people are the people The Father seeks.   (John 4:23)    

Some of the arguments being made on this issue lend themselves to empirical scrutiny, and given the stakes, I'm sure we all want to avail ourselves of the evidence available. On membership decline, Nersen has challenged the value of women's ordination for church growth, and in fact both sides have made predictions about the inevitable numerical decline of the other.

Given that the 42 mainland dioceses in England have apparently adopted different stances on the ordination of women, how has that affected their rates of core membership decline? In 2006, the Empirical Theology Unit in Bangor published an analysis of just that question using data from 1994 to 2000, and reached the two conclusions below. I leave the interpretation of these results to those better acquainted with the several dioceses. The researchers themselves concluded that, "dioceses which have apparently encouraged the ordination of women have overall experienced neither greater nor lesser decline in terms of membership statistics than dioceses which have apparently discouraged the ordination of women."

Using published data, the researchers identified the dioceses with the highest and lowest average proportions of ordained women (1994-2000)--

Most (top quartile)-- Southwark (17 per cent), Southwell (16 per cent), St Albans (16 per cent), Lincoln (16 per cent), Ripon and Leeds (15 per cent), Hereford (15 per cent), Oxford (15 per cent), Liverpool (14 per cent), Birmingham (14 per cent), Ely (14 per cent), and Bristol (14 per cent).

Least (bottom quartile)-- Chichester (2 per cent), Truro (4 per cent), Blackburn (5 per cent), Exeter (5 per cent), Winchester (6 per cent), Chester (7 per cent), Portsmouth (8 per cent), Norwich (8 per cent), Canterbury (8 per cent), Carlisle (8 per cent), and Bradford (8 per cent).

Speaking of these two groups, they write--

...Individual dioceses have embraced the appointment of women clergy to stipendiary positions to noticeably different degrees... Clearly the balance between the two integrities in the Church of England remains to some extent a lottery of geographical location.

They then used independent t-tests to compare these two groups on seven measures of church membership decline, each of which has its quirks. Since the p-values vary from .989 (Confirmations) to .204 (Easter communicants) none of them are close to the conventional alpha = .05, and hence none of the differences has a better than one in twenty chance of having simply happened by chance alone. Thus the researchers conclude that the data (n = 42) do not support the conclusion that there is a statistically significant difference in the membership decline associated with a diocese's chosen "integrity." In their own words--

...Different policies among the dioceses regarding the deployment of women priests are irrelevant to the major issue of decline in membership statistics. No statistically significant differences were found between those dioceses which promote the ordination of women and those dioceses which do not promote the ordination of women in terms of core membership (electoral roll and usual Sunday attendance), in terms of wider outreach at major festivals (Easter communicants and Christmas communicants), and in terms of new members (baptisms and confirmations). Whatever it is that is leading the decline in the membership statistics routinely collected by the Church of England, the ordination of women to the priesthood does not seem to be a major factor. At the same time, whatever it is that is standing in the way of even greater decline in the membership statistics routinely collected by the Church of England, the ordination of women to the priesthood does not appear to be a major factor either. Here is a Church that supports two integrities, but experiences one pattern of decline.

Though originally published by Sage, this analysis was not written in the standard scientific report format, and so it omits the usual discussion of the limitations of the research design and the next steps for further research. The most obvious limitation is that the data are 12 years old. My guess is that most villagers would be interested in a two-way ANOVA (analysis of variance) that used recent parish-level data for a much larger n and coded parishes as evangelical, catholic, liberal, or other. Interested villagers can find this study, either here or else in their libraries--

Carol Roberts, Mandy Robbins, Leslie J. Francis, Peter Hills (2006) "The Ordination of Women and the Church of England Today: Two Integrities, but One Pattern of Decline in Membership Statistics" Journal of Anglican Studies, 4 (2) 201-18. DOI: 10.1177/1740355306070680

Please forgive my incomprehension, but in this, as in some other discussions, I am not able to follow the inference from "A is mistaken about God's will" to "A is a 'sinner' who must repent." Has it been shown that a person cannot be both mistaken in an opinion and right with God? What, given the case of a "sinner" who methodically follows a rule of "obey scripture" to a mistaken opinion, would constitute repentance for her or him? How might an evangelical evaluate this proposed repentance?

@Jonathon David

What is this "The Word" - with two capital letters. I presume you mean the Bible or the New Testament or some other portion of Scripture. But The Word? No - that all rather elevates it too much - The Word was in the beginning and became flesh - that is who The Word is, not any book, however important.

Nersen

You wrote "The attitude of Watch seems to be using nice words to say 'Good riddance'?"

Quite the contrary, in fact. I am part of WATCH, and I desperately want us to remain one church rather than two churches pretending to be one. That is why I am so strongly against legal separation - which will give us the same dynamic whice created the Ordinariate - and strongly in favour of pastoral provision, which has a much better prospect of keeping those of us who differ in a working relationship.

The question I have is whether you want to be in a working relationship with me for the Gospel, and whether (and why) this depends on whether women become bishops or not.

Jonathon David

I read your first paragraph, and i agree with you about learned behaviour, and as there is no written record of Jesus teaching the disciples to speak in front of women, do you think that that learned behaviour, came from a much earlier period. I would suggest it was more likely to have come from the deutro times, when the laws were made and the Ten Commandments given. What i think happened was that in the real human anxiety of the religious leaders of the time, they were fearful of "falling short of the glory of God" The response was to as with the muslims and with the Jews in the temple to split with the men on one side and women on the other or even outside, or possibly not in attendance at all. This of course is still going on there are the beduin villages in Egypt where the rules about only seeing the spouce once for half an hour before marriage and then covering themselves in the viel after that.

All of the issues surrounding women in ministry sort of come from that..But of course as we know Muslims are more Moderate as are all of the "religious communities"

Learned behaviour of a negative and oppressive kind is always much more difficult to modify as it is accompanied by so much fear on all sides. Jesus worked alongside women often, and God even in old teastament times used women to promote the kingdom, to the point wherethe mother who carried Jesus arrived at nazareth at the stable on a donkey , and the paralell was jesus being hailed on a donkey, in one we have the Birth of a baby boy who would become recognised as the "sent one" in the other we have the "sent one" giving spiritual birth to the world as the two worlds merge for a short while in the ascention.

The example of humility and Power of Love and the ability to endure Loss in this World to gain in Spirit. The learned behaviour from Jesus would have been to bare suffering with dignity and to carry on loving and worshipping. Yet again we all learn we are slow at learning the Saving Grace, the grace that says "i am not afraid" to allow the change that is required to enhance the gospel for all. It is scary, for the men who believe it is wrong it is scary.But Jesus came to show us all a new way.

Angela