Dear Member of
RevisingReform,
You will have been
overjoyed by the General Synod’s vote last Monday on women bishops.
This was the logical and prayerful outcome of the decision in 1993 to
enable women to be ordained to the presbyterate in the Church of
England. That decision prompted the response of so many women to
God's call on their lives and since then we have actively sought to
urge the Church to reform herself under the authority of the Word of
God in the light of this.
Over the last 10
years we have worked hard both to resist the prohibition on women
bishops and to offer ways in which appropriate provision could be
made if the Church of England opened the Episcopate to women, for
those whose interpretation of the Scriptures, finds this problematic.
Thankfully provision is being worked out for our brothers and
sisters, who for hermeneutical reasons, or reasons of tradition, can
not accept the ministry of women in the Episcopate. The debate that
has ensued will better prepare congregations for engaging with the
issues so that they might go forward with confidence.
We can continue to
minister to each other and our wider communities with confidence
because God’s Word hasn’t changed. The church has engaged with
the Scriptures and decided that indeed God powerfully pours out his
Spirit on both men and women and gifts them for roles in the church.
We continue to rejoice therefore in the way God has ordered
relationships between men and women, overcoming the curse and calling
us to work for that mutual submission to one another that is a
reflection of the perichoretic dance of the Trinity. That the Trinity
is the perfect community gives us our ethic for living together.
Similarly, men and
women are equal in God’s eyes (Galatians 3:28) and this appears to
be Paul’s starting point in 1 Corinthians 11.3: “Now I want you
to realise that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the
woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.” As we see here, Paul
does not present a hierarchical sequence of relationships because he
doesn't arrange his sentences to denote this. Instead, God is the
source of Christ, Christ the source of mankind and man the source of
woman because she was made from his rib in the metaphorical narrative
of our creation. Men and women are equal in the Lord as Paul explains
because 'in the Lord...everything comes from God.' The Divine
mutuality of men and women really was God’s clear intention at the
very beginning of human creation. Adam is unconscious at the moment
of his wife's creation and unaware from whence she came, only struck
by how perfectly she completes him: 'bone of my bones and flesh of my
flesh.' As a result, the responsibility for teaching and leading
rests with both men and women after they have submitted themselves to
God and learned about the scriptures in an edifying environment (eg 1
Timothy 2:12). Women are encouraged to 'learn,' this would have been
very counter-cultural in Paul's day and there is a permanent
prohibition there that we can take from this pericope that no person
should usurp the authority of the person leading or preaching, we
must all pray to better recognise the godly leading of those God has
appointed to lead us in the faith and seek our own edification too.
From God’s first purposes in creation to his ultimate salvation,
mutual submission and humbly seeking God's will together as men and
women who complement each other and submit to one another (Ephesians
5), is a mandate.
It is going to be
our privilege to teach and model in the lives of our churches these
great truths. How we do that is something we will be always
discussing as we seek to be transformed into the likeness of Christ.
The House of Bishops’ Declaration says that it is committed to
human flourishing and our ecclesiology now better reflects our
biblically derived understanding that all three orders of ministry
are open to women. For our brothers and sisters unconvinced by the
Church of England's decision, there will be the appointment of a
conservative evangelical bishop who can provide episcopal ministry
that accords with their hermeneutical interpretation of the issue.
So what should we do
next?
We will continue to
focus on growing Gospel ministry through local Anglican churches,
particularly now that those who have prayed, written and worked hard
to have the church open its three orders to women, are freed to
concentrate better on the primary issues over which we are all
united. Part of our job, whatever our theological viewpoints, will be
to stand together to continue to make Christ known.
Secondly, we will in
the next few weeks seek to help PCCs think through this move from the
Church of England, to become better informed about the ways in which
the church reached such a decision, to engage with the Scriptures in
an edifying way and to come to a place of being able to confidently
assert how the Scriptures do indeed support women's leading in all
three orders of Anglican ministry.
So, now that the
vote has happened and the Church of England is set on the course of
introducing female bishops, let’s once again take courage from the
words of Scripture: ‘Be watchful, stand firm in your faith, be
courageous, be strong' . Let all that you do be done in love (1
Corinthians 16:13-14).' Let's love those for whom this decision has
caused problems and let's work together with a gospel that we have
always been able to proclaim with confidence. Let's watch for the
ways in which our proclamation has now been made more confident by
that proclamation being carried also by those women as well as men,
who have been called to make Christ known.
With love in His
service,
Rachel Marszalek
Written in response to this
2 comments:
Wonderful
Thank you Mouse - often wonder who you are, how you are, where you are and what you are doing these days...:-D
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