Church blocks Chch woman’s ordination

Press, 24 October 1978, Page 1

Church blocks Chch woman’s ordination

PA Wellington The ordination of a Christchurch woman has been blocked by the Associated Churches of Christ. She would have been the church’s first New Zealand woman minister. Ms Barbara Stephens expected to be ordained during the week-end as part of the churches’ fifty-sixth annual conference in Lower Hutt, but the conference voted to defer a decision on ordination of women until next year. Ms Stephens, who is minister of the St Albans Church of Christ in Christchurch, said yesterday that the decision was devastating.

Mr Roderick Brown, of Lower Hutt, refused ordination at the conference. He said he would not take part in a discriminatory act; he would become ordained when it was non-discrim-inatory.

The ordination of Ms Stephens had been approved by the relevant department of the conference. It had come to the decision on the basis of the belief that the ministry of women had been accepted

in the church because in 1970 two women, one of them Ms Stephens, had been ordained deaconess. But what emerged at the conference later was “opposition to ordination of women on the part of a number of congregations,” said Ms Stephens yesterdav.

“The president asked the conference to decide whether the matter should even be discussed and the conference decided it should be.

“A motion was presented and passed which, in essence, was that the matter of the ordination of women should be discussed by churches during the next year and that the matter be brought before the conference next year for a decision.

“It was devastating for me at the time.” she said. “I had been working towards this for years. “Since then, T have received a lot of support and love from people and I don’t feel bitter at all. “In fact, it has made me think deeply on two points — it has reminded me where we are at as a Church, and has shifted me away from thinking

simply of my ordination and given me a greater concern for the whole role of women in the Church.” Ms Stephens shares her time between the St Albans church where she is minister and the department of Christian education.

She grew up in Nelson and did her theological training as a student of the Glen Leith Bible College of Knox College, Dunedin, between 1966 and 1969.

She was a parish deaconess in the Hutt Valley for five years, and in the last three years has been completing a degree in sociology at Victoria University in Wellington.