The Order of Deaconess was created in 1861.  It was in 1975 that General Synod decided that there were no fundamental objections to ordaining women as priests.  It took another 20 years for that to be a tangible reality.  It is certain that it will not be until 2010 at the earliest that legislation will be changed to allow consecration of women as Bishops.

There is always going to be some pain when previously held allegiances are strained by change.  There is a balance that each of us must weigh up for ourselves.  The other side of this coin is to ask about the sensitivity that is needed towards those who have been excluded from the realisation of their calling because of the status quo.

My continuing concern for those who genuinely find difficulty with accepting the authority of Women as their Bishop does not extend to those who carry it to the nth degree and I find the language of taint unacceptable.  Some people, both lay and ordained, are finding it hard to settle into a Church which has changed.  But that is no argument for not changing.  That just means that we have to learn how to love them a little more.

In his sermon to the General Synod in 2000 at York Minster, the then Archbishop of York said that we might need to learn that “resistant as we are to God’s will” we are “yet saved by His mercy and His grace – so long suffering, so forgiving, so amazing, so profligate”.
There is a Hymn by Frederick William Faber that many of you know has been bugging me for a while now.

Son of an Anglican clergyman, Faber was ordained an Anglican minister.  He switched to Roman Catholicism and founded the Brotherhood of St. Philip Neri.  Later he moved to the Brompton Oratory.

“There’s a wideness to God’s mercy” is the start to his hymn which goes on

But we make his love too narrow by false limits of our own
And we magnify his strictness with a zeal he will not own,
There is plentiful redemption in the blood that has been shed,
There is joy for all the members in the sorrow of the head.

We need to understand well the false limits that we generate and put things into perspective in order to achieve maximum unity.

Faber died in 1863 - at about the time that the Order of Deaconess was established.

Tim Hind : Chair OSG