Big Controversy Over Women In Ministry

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31340, 10 April 1967, Page 2

Big Controversy Over Women In Ministry

(N.Z.P. A.-Reuter —Copyright) LONDON, April 9. Anglican bishops and Methodist ministers last week appointed a joint commission to consider the ordination of women—one of the most difficult hurdles in the way of the proposed union of their churches.

Appointment of the commission of seven men and three women comes after months of pressure by irate churchwomen —and unyielding disapproval by establishment leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of the Church of England. The Archbishop (Dr. Michael Ramsey) says he is not in sympathy with the ordination of women.

With other male opponents —who succeeded in postponing discussion of the issue at a recent church assembly meeting—he stresses the theoretical rather than the practical problems of the ordination of women.

The Archbishop bases Ms opposition on his belief that if women were intended to be priests their role would have been revealed much earlier in the 2000 years of Christianity.

An inconclusive report published this year by leading Anglicans suggested that there was tremendous prejudice among congregations against female leadership. One of their most determined opponents, the Oxford theological professor, Canon V. A. Demant, firmly believes that the spiritual intimacy between a female minister and her congregation would bring erotic factors into play.

But Britain’s Methodist Church the Nonconformist group closest to the Anglicans—is more sympathetic to the claims of its dedicated women workers.

“We have 4000 female lay preachers who work among congregations, and often preach,” said a Methodist spokesman. “No one of any responsibility in our church is taking a hard attitude towards the problem.” The Methodist Church does not accept that there are any theological reasons against accepting women ministers but it is worried about the practical problems family women might face in its itinerant ministry. The only British women taking on full official ecclesiastical duties are the 34 ministers in the Congregational Church and the small number ordained by the Baptists. Their example has roused Anglican women to form their own pressure group to work towards equality in the church.

Among their supporters is the head of the Salvation Army, General Frederick

Goutts, who maintains that sex is irrelevant if candidates have the “personal godliness, sense of vocation, and intellectual capacity,” to be priests. Many Anglican priests, saddened by their dwindling, mainly female, congregations, agree with a Scots minister, the Rev. lan MacKenzie, who says: “Women represent sex and the priesthood represents life and death and most crises in between. Two such magnetic fields produce sparks—but better sparks in the church than dying embers.”