Forward in Faith welcomes the Rochester Report on the theological issues raised by women in the episcopate.

The Church of England and the Anglican Communion have taken an incremental path to the ordination of women, asking successively whether they can be deacons, then priests, then bishops. The consecration of women as bishops raises, head on, questions about the role of the sacred ministry as both the agent and expression of the Church’s communion and fellowship, which the often muddled and imprecise language about ‘impairment of communion’ has hitherto obscured.

Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali and the members of the Commission have helped the Church to tackle those issues in an honest and intelligent way. We commend the Report, alongside our own book Consecrated Women? (Canterbury Press, £12.99) for careful and prayerful study.

A bishop is called to express and embody the unity of the Church on three planes: to be the focus of unity in a diocese, to be an expression of unity in the collegiality of bishops world-wide, and to be a sign of the Church’s continuity from the time of the Apostles. Can a woman bishop, whose ministry will be rejected by many in her diocese, who will be unacceptable to many of the world-wide college of bishops and who will have been chosen, not to continue the succession from the apostles but to correct the prejudice and misogyny of previous ages, be such an agent of unity? We believe not; but the Church of England must now decide.

A major consideration in that decision will necessarily be the terms on which the ordination of women to the priesthood was agreed. Both the proposer of the Measure in November 1992, and the House of Bishops subsequently, gave solemn undertakings that the consciences of those who could not accept the innovation would be respected and upheld. Those assurances must necessarily apply a fortiori to the ordination of women as bishops.

Of the options for the Church of England outlined in the Rochester Report, only two, in our view have a degree of theological and intellectual rigour and coherence:

• the proposal for one clause legislation (making no concessions to opponents)
• and the proposal for the establishment of a free and independent province (providing a structural solution for those opposed)

The five other proposals, in different degrees and ways, undermine the hopes and aspirations of women by deforming and devaluing the episcopate into which they would enter. We believe, moreover, that previous undertakings make a one-clause Measure immoral and unacceptable.

After debating the Rochester Report the Church of England may well (like the Anglican Church of Australia) draw back from such a fundamental and irreversible decision, with all its ecclesiological and ecumenical consequences. But if it chooses to go ahead, we have laid out in Consecrated Women? a Draft Measure which would provide adequately and simply for the consciences of opponents. We give notice that nothing less than such a structural provision will suffice.

Geoffrey Kirk

Secretary