The Church of England and British plumbing have a lot in common. They were both invented a long time ago, barely function at all and resolutely refuse to be updated. OK, I'll grant that mixer taps are not frowned upon any more, but that concession was hard won. Maybe sometime in the next century Brits will be able to have electrical outlets in their bathrooms, or, God forbid, light switches that are inside the room and not pull-cords. Well, let's not go crazy.
The one thing we can rely on though, is that the Church of England won't have moved an inch, even as the walls crumble around it and British society finds it less and less relevant. Now relevant is a bit of a charged word. To be a relevant church these days is to be hip, cool, with it, and the C of E resists that mightily. And there are some bad things about being too "relevant". But to be irrelevant is ultimately fatal because you have absolutely nothing to offer the world at large.
The ongoing furore in England over the possible, sometime, maybe in the future possibility of the consecration of a female bishop is painful to watch. The hand-wringing, the endless concessions to those in the church who resolutely refuse to move into the latter half of the second millennium AD (or should that be the more PC CE?) makes me want to stab myself with a fork. Well, maybe not, but it is annoying.
Having come from my own Diocesan convention, where we began the process of saying goodbye to Bishop Nedi Rivera as she retires over the next few months, put the issue into focus for me. Nedi was the 12th female bishop consecrated in the Episcopal Church, the 1001st overall. I like to think of her kicking off that second thousand in fine style. I have worked closely and personally with Nedi in our youth program over the last four years and she is a fantastic colleague. Like most of us in youth work, she does whatever is necessary, regardless of whether it is a suitable job for a bishop or not. I've seen her flip viewfoils for the band when we were singing, all the way through liturgical development to deep small group discussions up to the official bishoply business of confirmation. She's a very capable leader, and there is no question that she can do the job of bishop extremely well.
I guess I just don't understand the objection to female bishops in this day and age. The argument is never that they can't do the job, of course. It's that the Bible says they just can't be a bishop (even though it doesn't) or tradition says they can't, which becomes rather a circular argument. Of course, advocates of tradition rarely eschew the use of cars, planes, trains, indoor plumbing, central heating (*), television, radio and all those other innovations that have come along in the last couple of centuries. (* OK - I'll grant that the Romans had a form of central heating way back when, but it got lost somewhere along the way, and anyway, I don't see the traditionalists advocating rebuilding Hadrian's Wall - yet...)
The church is the last bastion of patriarchy. For the traditionalists it all started going to hell when women got the vote. Then they got jobs, then they got elected to public office, then the boardroom. the only safe place through much of that has been the church, led, of course, by the Roman Catholic church worldwide. So it's no shock maybe that Rome is attempting to lure some traditionalist Anglicans into the fold. They do have rather a lot of job openings - celibate males aren't flocking to holy orders in quite the numbers they used to. There is no finer summation of that situation than that of the inestimable AKMA.
To wrap up a rather long-winded and rambling post, let me compare two approaches to the role of clergy in funerals in the UK. First, via Maggi, the views of an insensitive clod who somehow stumbled into holy orders:
"...the best our secularist friends (and those they dupe) can hope for is a poem from nan combined with a saccharine message from a pop star before being popped in the oven with no hope of resurrection.”
One parishioner, Amy Griggs, 34, said she was appalled by Father Tomlinson’s opinion. “That means he stands at funerals pitying and effectively mocking people who have poems read or put on their loved one’s favourite song,” she said. “He is there to try to help people through, and if that means listening to Tina Turner or James Blunt then so be it. We’re not living in the past. If he doesn’t move on how can the Church be expected to survive?”
In contrast, here's a beautiful post from Kathryn at Good in Parts. If you got this far, you must read the whole thing. It ends thus:
This ministry is so very precious. Even amid the current tide of deaths, I need to pause to note the privilege of standing beside so many people as I try to remind them that God is with them too.
Having been through the loss of my lovely wife two years ago, I know which one of these I would want by my side in the midst of grief (and indeed I had my fantastic parish priest who takes her vocation as seriously and as beautifully as Kathryn does.)
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