This year sees a particular anniversary for women in ministry. It is 25 years since the first women in the Church of England were ordained as priests. However, there are many ways in which women exercise leadership and service in the church. Women are now bishops, priests and deacons, and there are a very large number of women in lay ministries, both formal - as Licensed Lay Ministers and Church Army Officers, for example - and informal, providing leadership in churches as churchwardens and treasurers, youth workers and musical directors, home group leaders, community outreach workers to name but a few. We are sometimes reminded that "women hold up half the sky", but in reality women often hold up far more than half the church!
We want to celebrate the ministry of women in all its forms this year in Rochester, so we are hoping to post a number of articles here about the very varied ministry of women in the Diocese. The first is from one of those first women priests, but we hope to have others from women in other roles. If you have a story to tell, let us know via contact form on the right, and we can discuss further.
Here is the first article, by one of the first of the women ordained as a priest back in 1994, but whose ministry started well before then. It's from Revd Dr. Anne Townsend, a Ministry Team member at St Peter and St Paul's Church, Bromley.
CELEBRATE WHAT’S NORMAL?
My words, ‘These days, I need to remember that I’m a bit of a “Has-Been”!’ are guaranteed to elicit the fierce response from my husband , ‘That’s not true!’
When in comes to thinking of celebrating the 25th
anniversary of the ordination of women to the priesthood, I feel I’m sitting in
the ‘Has-been, Forget-it Bin’. After all, what is there to celebrate? Women are
now firmly established and respected in most church circles. Aged 81, I’m
delighted to have lived long enough to see women bishops becoming the norm. You
don’t celebrate ‘normal’ – or do you?
It wasn’t always like this. My mother trained as a doctor in
the days when only the Royal Free Hospital accepted female medical students.
Having achieved this, one of her goals in life was to see women ordained as
priests before she died. The topic was our family’s blue touch-paper. Mention
the words ‘ordination of women’ and off they’d go. There’d be an explosion of
father versus mother, engaged in erudite, logical theological arguments – she
‘for’ and him ‘against.’ Emotions then coloured the discussion – him with an
ancient gut-level feeling that it was ‘wrong’, and she (sister of four boys)
with her passionate conviction that male and female might be different in
physical structure but, of course, they were equal in all senses that really
mattered.
My mother, who lived till she was 102 years old, quietly
campaigned for women to be priested during many years of representing the
Lichfield diocese on the General Synod. She longed to help change church
cultural norms. When she wrote for publication, it was under her maiden name,
to preserve her marriage.
I worked as a missionary doctor in Thailand for 16 years, unquestioningly
performing priestly roles when necessary. At that time, just one Church of
England priest served the entire country. We lived in the back-of-beyond, and I
didn’t think twice at presiding at Communion and preaching in the Thai language
when needed. I baptised new believers in isolated pools and rivers, offered
absolution to the dying and blessing to the living. God needed people to do
this and we missionaries (believing in the ‘priesthood of all believers’) filled the gap, sharing Jesus’ love
as best we could.
Sixteen years later, on return to England, I realised that this
ministry must be curtailed. As a former missionary doctor, my sex was overlooked occasionally and I was invited to
preach in a few churches but that was all. I could no longer exercise my
God-given vocation because I was female - and my Church, the Church of England,
forbade it. I saw no reason to enlist in another denomination which welcomed
women’s ministry.
In those years, I discovered that God used my voice, not in
the pulpit, but through books and magazines. I wrote over 20 books for the
popular religious market, covering subjects I could have preached about had it
been permitted. God took my written words, and literally thousands of people
have thanked me for the personal life-changing effects of some of those books.
My gift seems to have been that I articulated what many evangelical Christians
were thinking and worrying about, but hadn’t had the courage to admit or discuss
with anyone else. The most costly was the book ‘Faith without Pretending’ in
which I was honest about a ‘breakdown’, a suicide attempt, and subsequent faith
shifts to a different, deeper experience of God.
The Church of England hadn’t muzzled me. Having a
‘breakdown’ in my late 40’s, and wrestling with God during a year ‘off-sick’, to
my total amazement I found myself being gently nudged to knock at the door
labelled ‘ordination’. I was even more amazed when it opened. My mother was
excited, ‘Of course – you’re riest already!’ My father (by then a vicar) barely
acknowledged it, and couldn’t bring himself to attend my ordination services.
Training completed (on the Southwark Ordination Course) the
crunch came when, a year after being deaconed, my male peers were to be
ordained as priests but we women were excluded. The men were up in arms, sought
an interview the bishop, offered to refuse to be priested if that would bring about
change – to no avail. In the event, we women swallowed our tears, read the Bible
passages, prayed the intercessions and administered the bread and wine at their
ordinations. It reminded me of my fifth birthday party. I’d gone down with
Measles, was stuck upstairs in bed listening to all the other children enjoying
themselves downstairs at my party!
I was there, two years later, outside Church House,
Westminster, at the General Synod when the vote swung in favour of the
ordination of women to the priesthood. We laughed, sang, danced and wept
together on the pavement when the news was relayed out to us. I rode home atop
a double-decker bus, heart singing with joy and wondering, ‘What would these passengers
think if they knew a woman was sitting here who soon will be ordained as be a
priest?’ The unthinkable was at last thinkable!.
‘Soon’ took a few years, while legislation was completed.
But then, in a wave of one cathedral after another throughout England, hundreds
of women were ordained as priests. My Cathedral, Southwark, had three
ordination services on one Saturday – there were far too many of us for just
one service.
Years later, my vicar shared that very late on the night
before my ordination, his ‘phone had rung. A voice threatened that should he
permit a woman to be ordained as a priest, then our church would be burned
down. I knew none of this, and floated on air that day – my mother and husband
overjoyed at what was happening to me. The ‘anti-women’s ordination’ placards,
banners and protesters outside the Cathedral were balanced by the bouquets of
white roses from a Roman Catholic women’s group stating they were praying for
us. One protester managed to evade the Cathedral’s screening process, mounted a
pew, interrupted the service and loudly declared his objections. He was firmly
and politely ejected.
Several members of my own church were wary about the
priesthood no longer being solely a masculine province. A good friend, Vi, came
to the Cathedral service, ‘I’m still not convinced!’ she commented afterwards.
The following day I presided at Communion. It was the first time that a female
voice had sung the priestly responses and prayers. Her heart melted. Tears in
her eyes, she offered, ‘You’ll need stoles to match all our different altar
coverings – I’ll make them for you.’
Memories of my dead father’s voice over-shadowed that first
Communion service. It was as if he was sitting on my shoulder reiterating, ‘Danger!
Women are forbidden! Don’t do this!’ I inwardly defied him, ‘Get lost away
Dad!’
Breaking the Communion wafer for the first time, was a
tender moment of remembering delivering pre-term babies, with their fragile
brittle limbs. There were no priestly role models for us to follow - for women
had never presided at Communion, in England. I followed my vicar’s lead until James,
the West Indian church warden, bluntly suggested, ‘Just do it your own way Anne
– that’ll work best!’ So I began to preside and preach using a less masculine
model, and finding my own way of being priest
and female.
My church wanted to celebrate the first Communion service at
which I presided. They knew how to do this for new male priests. A female? That
was different! They marked the difference beautifully. The children picked flowers
from their gardens. At a given moment, they lined-up at the back of the church
and when the music began to play they skipped and ran forwards each presenting
me with a posy. Then they danced round and round the outer aisles, finishing by
singing me a song of blessing. I held back my tears..
I then became the property of the ‘regulars’ in my Wednesday
bus queue, ‘She’s a lady-vicar and wears one of those dog-collars!’ Phoebe (who
only came to church for the midnight Christmas mass) would proudly announce to
anyone who’d listen.
It was 25 years ago that all this happened - on May 21st,
1994.
I rejoice that it’s now the norm for women to be priests,
and it’s becoming more normal for women to be bishops. On my 25th
anniversary, on May 21st, I will celebrate those men and women who
worked so hard to bring this about, who risked being hated, becoming figure of
fun and humiliation, being ostracised, and told their theology and Christianity
was grossly deficient. I’ll particularly remember my mother and her quiet, firm,
hopeful and persistent work towards bringing about change - change that means
that it is now unremarkably normal to have female priests in England.