(Why) is God calling older women and younger men?

My nostalgic moment about Ember Lists yesterday got me thinking about the figures on the CofE website, which seem to confirm something which experience suggests, namely that when it comes to full-time stipendiary clergy in the Church of England, the women basically tend to be older than the men.

Now I would be the first to admit that statistics are tricky things and my analysis may be off. Nevertheless, several interesting things can be observed.

First, the actual number of male assistant curates peaks at 35-39 (206). This is also the point at which they are the greatest total percentage in their gender-group (3.5% of all male clergy, compared with 2.5% for those five years older and 2.9% for those five years younger). However, the balance of incumbent-status clergy and assistant-curates in this age group is about the same (52% and 48% respectively are incumbent-status or assistant curates).

By comparison, women assistant curates in this age group total 57 and represent 3.3% of all female clergy, which is not dissimilar to the men. However, the balance of incumbents to curates in the age group is strikingly different, being 43% and 57%, respectively. Moreover, whilst the percentage of those five years younger is lower (and is higher than that for the men) at 3.2%, the percentage of curates for those five years older is 4.4%, and for those aged 45-49 is 7.2% of the female total.

In fact, the number of female assistant curates peaks at 50-54 (116), at which point they represent 7.6% of all the female clergy. Moreover, the percentage of women incumbents in this age group is still only 67% of the total, whilst a third (33%) are assistant curates. By contrast, 92% of the men in this age group are incumbents and only 8% assistant curates. The same ratio amongst women is only reached at 60-64, although by this time the actual numbers are very small (200 incumbents compared with 14 assistant curates) and the statistics may be correspondingly less reliable.

Rather harder to show in a blog post, but just as telling, is the ‘quinquennial’ rate of percentage change in the clergy who are assistant curates in each age category.

Age                 % of Men        % of Women

                        in curacies      in curacies

25-29              92                    100

30-34              70                    67

35-39              48                    57

40-44              22                    46

45-49              12                    40

50-54              8                      33

54-59              4                      16

Similarly, we may compare the increasing percentage of incumbent-status clergy:

Age                 % of Men        % of Women

                        as incumbents as incumbents

25-29              8                      0

30-34              30                    33

35-39              52                    43

40-44              78                    54

45-49              88                    60

50-54              92                    67

54-59              96                    84

Just to reiterate, these are figures for stipendiary, parochial, clergy. They do not include non-parochial posts, part-time or self-supporting clergy, or ‘dignitaries’. Nevertheless, they seem to indicate two clear trends. One is that male and female clergy differ in their age profiles related to incumbent-status or assistant curate posts. The second is that a higher proportion of male clergy are in incumbent status posts at an earlier age than is the case for women. Conversely, a higher proportion of women clergy are in assistant curate posts at a later age than is the case for men.

To put this in plainer English, but slightly more tendentiously, it looks as if men get ordained younger than women, and therefore tend to become incumbents at an earlier age than do women.

Now my question is this — and it may not be the one people are expecting — but if it is true that (a) male clergy are typically younger than female clergy and (b) getting ordained is dependent on God’s call, why would God be calling older women and younger men?

And for what it is worth, here is my answer: God is far less involved in this process than we like to think. Actually, the age differences can be accounted for by issues of sociology at least as much as theology. My guess — and it is a guess — is that far more women feel the ‘call’ after their children have grown up and left home than do men, and that accounts for the key age difference and all the other phenomena we observe.

But this then raises a question in my mind, which has actually been there for some time, as to whether we have really got it right when it comes to ‘calling’.

The selection process, and indeed the Book of Common Prayer, lays a great deal of stress on the ‘inwardness’ of calling: “Do you think in your heart that you be truly called, according to the will of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the order of this Church of England, to the Order and Ministry of Priesthood?”
But what is a ‘true calling’? In my own day it was understood to be a special sense from God that this was what he wanted me to do. In Scripture, however, I find very little emphasis on inward feelings and an awful lot on outward, observable, competence and the decision of the Church to recognize that (eg Titus 1:6-9). Jesus’s ‘calling’ of the disciples, in particular, seemed to owe nothing to them feeling they should become apostles, and everything on his appointment of them (John 6:70).

Arguably, then, the Church should be fingering people and telling them they jolly well ought to be considering the ordained ministry, not waiting while they wait to see if they have ‘a call’. And that being the case, I would have thought we want to get people in their prime, when they are young enough, and free enough of other ties, to be able to give time to training, and then themselves to ministry wherever they might be needed. (That, at least, was something we were getting right forty years ago.)

But that being the case, ought we not to be seeing far more young, and doubtless single, women going into training — just as we currently see quite a high percentage of young, single men?

On the other hand, if we’ve got this ‘calling’ business right, I come back to my earlier question — what is it about God’s plans and purposes such that, if men and women are ‘equal’ in their endowment for ordained ministry, he seems to call them at such very different times in their lives?

John Richardson
25 June 2011

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Some notes on Anglican ordination, gender and ministry

The background — Nottingham and the NT

We begin with history — in 1977 Resolution J6 of the Nottingham Statement, produced at the second National Evangelical Anglican Congress, stated,

We repent of our failure to give women their rightful place as partners in mission with men. Leadership in the Church should be plural and mixed, ultimate responsibility normally singular and male.

‘Plural and mixed’ is certainly the pattern of ministry we find in the New Testament churches — to give one example, Romans 16 names several women ministers.

In the 1970s, however, shared ministry was a fairly novel concept in the Church of England. ‘House groups’ were a revolutionary idea as was the phrase ‘every member ministry’. In 1977, these proposals were radical regarding plurality of leadership, but fundamentally traditional regarding gender and leadership.

Since then, we have ‘moved on’ regarding the issue of gender, and both Anglicanism and evangelicalism have become deeply divided – as exemplified by Lis Goddard and Clare Hendry in their joint book The Gender Agenda (Nottingham: IVP, 2010).

This illustrates how two people can both believe they are being faithful to Scripture and come to practically incompatible conclusions. It is also a reminder of the theological principle formulated by Dire Straits: “two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong” (or both of them). Furthermore it shows that there is still a debate to be had, even so many years on from 1993.

Personally, I think there are weaknesses in the arguments advanced both by Goddard and Hendry. Nevertheless, I am still unpersuaded overall that the outcome advocated by Goddard, which would introduce women as Anglican incumbents and now bishops, actually takes us in a direction more compatible with Scripture than what was expressed in the Nottingham Statement.

An historic struggle

Historically, the Church of England, like all the mainstream churches, has struggled to resolve its structures of ministry with its doctrine of the ministry.

Our structures are post-apostolic. The preface to the Ordinal in the BCP is very careful:

It is evident unto all men diligently reading holy Scripture and ancient Authors, that from the Apostles’ time there have been these Orders of Ministers in Christ’s Church; Bishops, Priests, and Deacons.

NB, it says “these Orders”, not “three Orders”. There are ‘these orders’, but it is evident to anyone diligently reading holy Scripture that they are by no means the same as we have today.

The NT has deacons, but they are not ‘probationary priests’. Rather, they are an office in themselves, and almost certainly it was an office open to both men and women (cf Rom 16:1).

The NT has presbyters, but they are not to be confused with the ‘priests’ of the OT — which of course is easily done when you use the same word for both — and there is more than one per congregation.

And the local bishops of the NT are one and the same thing as the local presbyters.

Roger Beckwith in his Elders in Every City shows that the formal pattern of ministry was probably based on the synagogue model, meaning that the presbyter-bishops would have been responsible for running and governing the community and in some cases, though not all, for teaching.

But even this leadership would have been mixed, and it is clear that the ministry at least was ‘plural’ to use the NEAC phrase.

Our problem is that we are trying to fit NT principles to a context that in many respects is not like the NT.

Ministry: ‘charismatic’ or ‘pragmatic’

And there is another difference between then and now. Then, the principle for selection was ‘pragmatic meritocracy’, exemplified by Romans 12:3-8:

For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. ⁴ Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, ⁵ so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. ⁶ We have different gifts, according to the grace given us. If a man’s gift is prophesying, let him use it in proportion to his faith. ⁷ If it is serving, let him serve; if it is teaching, let him teach; ⁸ if it is encouraging, let him encourage; if it is contributing to the needs of others, let him give generously; if it is leadership, let him govern diligently; if it is showing mercy, let him do it cheerfully.

What you should do in the church was assessed ‘on merit’. The person gifted in serving should serve, the gifted teacher should teach, etc.

Hence Titus (1:5-9), when he is left in Crete to appoint ‘elders in every city’, is given a list of outward, observable qualities to look for in those he should appoint.

That, however, gave way to what I would call a ‘charismatic aristocracy’ model which prevails to this day. The ministry is something to which you are called by God, and for which you are empowered from without — usually attributed to the gifting of the Holy Spirit through the laying on of hands.

In our context, however, this may not reflect the practicalities to which Scripture refers.

Where this matters in the gender debate is that people are given an authority by ordination which may well not correspond to the realities of relationships established on other grounds recognized by Scripture.

Liberty and restraint

In some important ways, the NT presents an egalitarian and easy-going model of male-female relationships.

We have seen that women were heavily involved in the ministry. We also see a liberty in the way that men and women are called to relate to one another. In 1 Tim 5:1, Paul writes,

Do not rebuke an older man harshly, but exhort him as if he were your father. Treat younger men as brothers, ² older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity. (1 Ti 5:1-2)

In the family, gender differences call for modesty, but not for separation. There is no uneasiness about the genders mixing, nor is there a suspicion of women generally.

This even carries over into the area of ministry. In Acts 18 we read about Priscilla and Aquila in their encounter with Apollos. Apollos, we are told,

... began to speak boldly in the synagogue. When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they invited him to their home and explained to him the way of God more adequately. (18:24-26)

Notice that apparently both Priscilla and Aquila are involved in teaching Apollos.

Yet elsewhere in the NT there are some evident restraints on the rôle of women. 1 Tim 2:12:

I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. (1 Ti 2:12)

Also 1 Cor 14:34-35,

... women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. ³⁵ If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. (1 Co 14:34-35)

How can we have both? Context is king.

A bi-polar community

In the NT, the Church is a bi-polar community, in the same way that society generally was bi-polar. There was the community of the whole, gathered, body and there was the community of the household.

And the household was fundamental not just socially but theologically.

Parenthood is conceived of as being derived from the character of God himself — within the godhead there is a ‘Father-Son’ relationship, but this also extends to ourselves. We call God ‘Abba’, and we are his children by adoption.

The fifth commandment, “Honour your father and your mother”, therefore has an abiding relevance. In Ephesians 6:1-3 Paul writes,

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ² “Honour your father and mother” — which is the first commandment with a promise — ³ “that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.” (Eph 6:1-3)

The family was a community within which the faith was lived and taught. So Paul continues in Eph 6:4,

Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. (Eph 6:4)

This would be the pattern of Jewish families but was also found more generally. The church — or for other purposes, the school — could be a place for instruction. But this was balanced by the home where the children learned the essentials of life and faith from their parents.

Husbands, wives and bishops

The life of the household, however, is focused on the special relationship between husbands and wives. Thus, going back to Eph 5:21-2, we read that we are to be,

... submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. ²² Wives, [submitting] to your husbands as to the Lord. ²³ For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Saviour.

And this, really, is the crux of the modern debate.

The egalitarian lobby places the emphasis on v 21: “submitting to one another”. In practice, it argues, the submission of husband to wife is no different from the submission of the wife to the husband.

Howard Marshall takes this line in Discovering Biblical Equality (Leicester: InterVarsity Press, 2005). For Marshall, marriage is due to go the same way as slavery. We don’t have slaves submitting to masters, and we won’t have wives submitting to husbands.

Of course, it could be argued that whilst we have abolished slavery, we have not abolished marriage or families. Moreover, given that we still have employers and employees, it could be said that what we have today is the reformation of a relationship, not its abolition.

Nevertheless, the trouble is, especially in the present Anglican context, whilst there is pressure to move away from the biblical model of marriage, there is no corresponding pressure to reform the unbiblical model of ministry.

On the contrary, one of the crucial arguments against the various proposals for alternative provision for those opposed to women bishops is that if a woman bishop’s authority is in any sense diminished then she is ‘not a real bishop’. Submission to her authority in the hierarchy is seen as of the essence, even while submission in the home is being denied.

Of course it could be said if we allow hierarchy in the marriage, why not in the Church? And in fact the NT does encourage us to submit to church leaders (13:17).

But it is difficult to see how we can argue against the Ephesians model of marriage because it is inherently hierarchical (as Marshall does) and at the same time argue for an inherently hierarchical understanding of episcopacy.

Either we have both (if that is what the NT teaches), or we have neither.

Steering a path

The present debate is not straightforward. However, we are in danger of making a difficult situation worse and making things even more imbalanced than they are already.

The home is already weakened as a place of spiritual nurture and is in danger of being made worse.

The question to ask ourselves is this: if we followed the NT pattern of the household and the family, what sort of leadership would emerge in the congregation? And in particular, how would the rôles of men and women in the congregation reflect the pattern of family life?

Theologically, the concerns of the NT arguably focus on preserving the right relationships in the household.

David Broughton-Knox in one of his essays writes,

It would be anomalous if when Christian families come together in the larger grounds of the Christian congregation, heads of homes were subject to the rule of those who, at home, would be under their headship.

I think that is a very good governing principle, though it poses immense challenges to us regarding the home and household.

However, Knox adds a couple of interesting riders:

But apart from this easily understood restriction [in the congregation] which arises from the position in which God the creator has placed men and women with regard to one another in the family setting, the ministry of women is as wide as is that of men, and is largely identical with that of men, because apart from the different endowments and functions which the distinction of sex involves, the abilities of men and women are similar and their opportunities are similar.

And then he goes on:

In the modern organization of the ministry the ordained minister does many things besides that of exercising the dominion of Christ in the full congregation through teaching his word. In fact, some ministers hardly exercise this ministry at all. All these modern ministries are as open to women as to men and there is no point in making artificial distinctions between the same God-given ministry by different places to stand when speaking or different clothes to wear.

And he concludes:

The New Testament does not consider the anomaly when Christian men are incompetent, ill-prepared or unwilling to discharge the teaching ministry. In this anomalous situation it may well be that what is normal must give place to what is beneficial. (D Knox, Church and Ministry, Selected Works [Kingsford NSW: Matthias Media, 2003] 244-5)

The challenge for us is twofold — first, not to do anything in the congregation which would contradict the teaching of the NT about husbands and wives and households and families.

Secondly, to begin to do in our households and families what the NT clearly expects by way of the exercise of responsibility.

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Women's ordination and the other elephant

In all the recent debates in the Church of England about women’s ordination (in which I include those going back to the eighties and nineties), there have been not one, but two elephants in the living room.

The first elephant, gradually acknowledged and initially given space, has been the indecisive attitude of the church. Women’s ordination was sold to the Synod and to the wider Church on the basis of an accommodation. Women would be ordained, but the ordination of women would involve a further process of reception. What lay behind this was a hope on the part of some that there would always be a place for opponents, and on the part of others that opposition would die out as time went on.

Now that (thanks, in part, to some judicious gerrymandering of the bench of bishops) numbers favour the ‘pro’ side, we are seeing signs of the ‘end game’ on this initial compromise.

However, as we look at the options resulting from shooting the first elephant, we must now confront the second, which is that the Church of England embraces two entirely different concepts of the ordained ministry.

At the risk of oversimplification, one of these basically assumes that the pattern of having bishops (who run, or help run, dioceses), priests (who minister more locally, celebrate the sacraments, preach and pastor), and deacons (who are probationary priests), represents the way the church long has been and forever should be. The other takes the view that these same orders are, in the form in which they are found in the Anglican Church, essentially man-made, and therefore dispensable. They may sometimes serve the Church well — they are of its bene esse (its ‘well being’) — but they are not, in their present form, of the esse (the ‘very being’).

Most laypeople, I suspect, take the former view. It is how they have always seen and experienced the Church of England, and they have never bothered to look into why this is the case. So, of course, do the Anglo-Catholics clergy, though they consciously look back to the tradition of the Fathers for a justification. But to them we must add also the Liberal Catholics, who generally take a very ‘high’ view of the ministry, even whilst they might take a very sceptical view of traditional theology.

Then we have what may be popularly known as the ‘Evangelical’ view, though it can be found long before the movement of that name, in the writings of the Fathers of the English Reformation. This group places far more emphasis on the fact (generally acknowledged by Catholics both traditional and liberal), that the New Testament displays nothing exactly like the orders we know in Anglicanism. Specifically, the ‘priest’ of the New Testament church is actually a ‘presbyter-bishop’, whilst the deacon is something entirely distinct, in no way comparable to our one-year ‘priest in waiting’. As to the bishop as the ‘area leader’ of a group of non-episcopal priests, this figure is nowhere to be found.

Like most Catholics, the early members of this group were generally happy to acknowledge that the emergence of the threefold pattern known to us from later years took place in the providence of God. Unlike the Catholics, however, they were equally happy to see it disappear, should it be found to have outlived its usefulness.

Thus, Richard Hooker wrote, in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, that no “true and heavenly law can be shewed, by the evidence whereof it may of a truth appear that the Lord himself hath appointed presbyters for ever to be under the regiment of bishops” (VII v 8). Therefore, as far as he was concerned, their authority is “a sword which the Church hath power to take from them” (ibid).

In other words, the Church could manage without bishops — especially if, as he warned, “bishops forget themselves, as if none on earth had authority to touch their states” (ibid).

The same view is found in the writings of Thomas Cranmer, who asserted that, if necessary, the Church could start up from scratch, with the first bishops and priests being ordained by laypeople. And in a series of Questions and Answers Concerning the Sacraments, etc, he asserted that in earliest times the churches were not ruled by the Apostles, but simply listened to their advice:

... not for the supremity, impery [sic], or dominion that the apostles had over them to command, as their princes or masters; but as good people, ready to obey the advice of good counsellors.

Just as importantly, the Homilies (which form part of the historic Anglican ‘formularies’) also recognize an earlier time in the Church’s history when different arrangements prevailed. Thus,

Our Saviour Christ ... [forbade] his Apostles, and by them the whole clergy, all princely dominion over people and nations: and he and his holy Apostles likewise, namely, Peter and Paul, did forbid unto all ecclesiastical Ministers dominion over the church of Christ. (Sermon Against Wilful Rebellion, emphasis added)

In all this, of course, the Reformers were following the Continental Protestants, as was Cranmer in his revision of the service of Holy Communion and in the formulation of the Thirty-nine Articles.

Yet the Church of England never entirely shed its Catholic elements, and under the impulse of the nineteenth century Oxford Movement, reintroduced practices which had not merely been abandoned since the Reformation but declared illegal. Thus, by the time we reach the middle of the twentieth century, we have a Church which is a caricature model of schizophrenia — one side taking the Catholic and the other the Protestant view of the ministry, but both outwardly belonging to the same organization.

Moreover, as I have indicated, the demarcation is not clear-cut, for there are theological ‘liberals’ with decidedly ‘fundamentalist’ views of the threefold ministry (to say nothing of the absolute authority of bishops and the unchangeable nature of the church’s orders). And there are ‘evangelicals’ today whose views of priesthood or episcopal ministry (particularly their own!) are of a decidedly ‘catholic’ bent.

This would be bad enough, but it becomes even more complex when we add in the ordination of women, for then we encounter two quite different objections, for the Catholic objection centres on the nature of priesthood and its relationship with the sacraments, whilst the Protestant objection centres on the nature of ministry and its exercise in the congregation.

Between the two, the Catholic objection is actually easier to present. For the traditionalist Catholic, what matters is the embodiment of the truth in the person of the priest, and the validity of that priest’s sacramental ministry. For Catholics who oppose the ordination of women, the problem is not that a woman should not be a priest but that a priest stands as the eikon of Christ — the embodied representation of the Son of God.

What this means regarding gender is, perhaps, best summed up in the words of Newman’s hymn Praise to the Holiest in the Height:

O generous love! that he who smote
in Man for man the foe,
the double agony in Man
for man should undergo.

Behind this is the thoroughly biblical idea that Jesus is the man par excellence, in whom ‘man’ — the human race — finds redemption. It is an inclusive idea which, significantly, cannot be expressed in modern ‘inclusive’ language, because it runs entirely counter to the modern understanding of humanity. But in this view, the iconic status of Christ requires a man for its present embodiment. And without this, the validity of the priesthood, and therefore the validity of the sacraments, is negated.

Now, at the risk of losing the few internet friends I have left, I must say that this is an argument with which I disagree. But I can feel its force, and I can recognize why, for those who do hold to this view, the issue is so urgent.

For the Protestant, however, things are a bit more messy, and this is because he does not take the same view, either of priesthood or sacrament. Indeed, some Protestants, like Martin Luther, held that women could, indeed, celebrate the sacraments, just as they could proclaim God’s word. The Protestant objection to women in leadership (an objection which was advanced by Luther also), has to do with authority, not sacramental ministry or ontological ‘priesthood’.

The problem, as they experience it, is that in the Church of England, ordination generally not just recognizes ministry but confers authority. This must particularly be so in the case of the episcopate, where the bishop is not merely in authority over a particular congregation (to which the individual may or may not choose to belong), but over entire groups of clergy, who will be given no choice in the matter.

Now again, one may not agree with the argument, but it needs to be understood and recognized. And yet it also needs to be recognized that it is a quite different argument from that advanced by Catholics, and therefore it may admit of quite different solutions.

One unintended consequence of the current debate about women bishops, therefore, may well be to highlight these different views on ordination. For a century, the Church of England has managed to get by without confronting the issue. And whilst the status quo of a universally recognized ministry prevailed, it was able to muck along. Now that the options to compromise are being reduced, the willingness to overlook those differences may also be coming under pressure. And that may have its own unintended consequences.

Revd John P Richardson
21 February 2010

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What the ...?

I was just reading Tim Goodbody's apologia pro vita sua, "Why I am still an Anglican" on the Fulcrum website when I was pulled up short by this bit:

I am a Canon A5 evangelical, which means I took my ordination vows very seriously; when I was ordained I had to prostrate myself before a bishop; I felt very uncomfortable about this, but when my friend (also an evangelical) standing next to me on the platform said “I will do whatever it takes to follow my vocation”, I saw her point and assented to the ritual. I was glad I did because at that point (during the singing of the Veni Creator) the Holy Spirit came upon me (indeed us) in an immensely powerful way.

I'm not sure which bit of this has my gob most smacked as it were: prostration before a bishop? had to? also an evangelical? whatever it takes to follow my vocation? the Holy Spirit came on us (implicitly because)?

The only bit I felt comfortable about was the bit that said, "I felt very uncomfortable about this."

I do not post at Fulcrum -and it might fairly be asked why I read (probably for the same reason that some people read this blog) -but I offer it to other readers for their consideration.

I am stunned - and I didn't think I could be by anything that still went on in the Church of England.

John Richardson
10 June 2009

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