Later this year, the Australian Anglican Church will havetwelve women bishops, following the consecrations of Sarah Plowman in Brisbane,Vanessa Bennett in Canberra & Goulburn and Sophie Relf-Christopher inAdelaide. They join two women bishops in Perth, one the archbishop no less; onein Adelaide; three in lucky Melbourne; two in NSW (outside Sydney of course)and one already in Canberra & Goulburn. There would have been thirteen, ifnot for Bishop Barbara Darling’s untimely death in 2015.
Nationally, women priests are nowabout a quarter of the country’s active priests, in all but three of the 23dioceses. More than 30 years since the first women were priested in thiscountry, this is something to be celebrated, given the long, divisive debatethat preceded their acceptance. At times in that debate, it looked as if wewould never have women priests, let alone bishops, because of concertedopposition from one quarter in particular. It is time to remind ourselves ofhow we got here.
The question of women’sordination first burst onto the Australian scene in a concerted way in the1970s. The 1968 Lambeth Conference of bishops, though lukewarm about the ideaof ordaining women, had asked Anglican churches to consider the possibility,despite there already being one Anglican woman priest, Li Tim Oi, ordained forthe Diocese of Hong Kong in 1944. In 1971, Hong Kong once again took the lead, ordainingtwo more women priests. Within a few years, there were women priests in Canada,the United States and New Zealand. So it was hardly surprising that thequestion was also on the agenda in Australia.
The crucial step in the Australian journey was the General Synod DoctrineCommission’s report to the 1977 General Synod. Though cautious, it neverthelessdecided that there were no theological objections to prevent women’sordination, and recommended that the church take appropriate steps “whenpracticable” to enable the ordination of women as deacons, priests and bishops.The General Synod, by a comfortable majority, resolved to do so.
But a “comfortable majority” achieved little becauseof the national church’s constitution. In most cases, our legislation needstwo-thirds votes in favour in each of the houses of bishops, clergy and laity.And once that milestone is achieved, it needs to gain the same support in asubsequent General Synod. Just think if our parliaments had to work like that!
So although “comfortable majorities” continuedto support women clergy in vote after vote in General Synod meetings for fifteenyears – we called ourselves the “oppressed majority” – they were never enough.
The writing was on the wall for the ongoingdefeats in that Doctrine Commission report. Although eleven of the twelvemembers of the Commission supported its conclusion, the twelfth was a highlyinfluential clergyman from the Diocese of Sydney, Canon Broughton Knox,Principal of Moore Theological College. In his dissenting argument, he insistedthat God’s word made clear that “in creating humanity God gave a headship toman which he did not give to woman”. He concluded it was “premature to concludethat there are no theological reasons debarring women from the ministry ofleadership in the congregation.”
Another member of that Doctrine Commission,Keith Rayner, later Archbishop first of Adelaide and then of Melbourne, hascommented that it was the Sydney argument that dominated the agenda in thefollowing years. That was certainly thecase. Again and again, Sydney leaders argued against women’s ordinationprincipally on their claims about male headship. Again and again, legislativeattempts failed. Those debates spilled over from General Synod to diocesansynods to parishes and into the secular media. They were heated, and oftenaggressive and deeply distressing.
But there was also some remarkable propheticaction. The Movement for the Ordinationof Women, formed in Australia in 1983, energised women and men to refuse to letthe matter drop. And some brave, determined bishops, from David Penman ofMelbourne to Bruce Wilson of Bathurst and Owen Dowling of Canberra, all struggledto find legal ways for their highly-committed dioceses to break the impasse,sadly to no avail. It took shrewd Peter Carnley of Perth to find a way throughthe quagmire. He ordained Australia’s first women priests in March 1992. So bythe time the General Synod met a few months later, and again in November, therewas a different dynamic at work. We scraped through the required votes on bothoccasions and by December that year, ninety women priests had been ordainedacross the country.
That was not the end of the story. It took areference to the Appellate Tribunal, the church’s highest court, before womenpriests could become bishops. The first two, Kay Goldsworthy in Perth and thelate Barbara Darling in Melbourne, were consecrated in 2008.
Give thanks for the many fine men and women who responded faithfully to God calling our church to this new truth.
Dr Muriel Porter OAM
