Women and Holy Orders

Being the Report of a Commission appointed by
the Archbishops of Canterbury and York
Published by the Church Information Office, London. Dec. 1966

APPENDIX 3

Supplementary Essays

F. SUGGESTIONS FOR A LAY MINISTRY

by Alan Richardson

1 The resolution passed by the Church Assembly in November, 1962, requested the Archbishops to appoint a Committee which should examine ‘ the various reasons for the withholding of the ordained and representative priesthood from women ’, but the Commission which was set up in 1963 was given wider and less negative terms of reference, namely, ‘ the question of Women and Holy Orders’. It is therefore perhaps relevant to consider briefly the place of women in the total ministry of the Church. At a time when the Church’s work is handicapped by a shortage of man-power, the failure to make use of the gifts and services of women is indeed disheartening. Uncertainty about the intention of the Church authorities towards their status and function engenders a sense of frustration. The ambiguity which surrounds the Order of Deaconesses is not clarified by the recently promulgated Canon describing it as ‘ an order of ministry in the Church of England to which women are admitted by prayer and the laying on of hands by the Bishop ’, but yet ‘ not one of the Holy Orders of the Church of England ’. The ‘ recognition ’ of women church workers, too, remains an obscure matter of licences and certificates, and it is hardly surprising that, since the period immediately after the War when there were available many excellent Chaplains’ Assistants who had worked in the Armed Services, there has been a steady decline in the number of candidates coming forward for church work. It is time that the Church made up its mind whether it wants the services of women and, if so, what form their ministry should take.

2 One of the reasons why so little progress has been made since the publication of the report of the Archbishops’ Commission on The Ministry of Women in 1935 may have been the suspicion that the development of such a ministry would be regarded as a first step towards their ordination to the priesthood, in fact, ‘ the thin end of the wedge ’. The cure for any such uneasiness is to think in terms of a genuinely lay ministry comprising both men and women. The difficulty about thinking in this way results from generations of misuse of the term ‘ layman ’. When a person is ordained deacon or priest, or is consecrated bishop, he does not cease to be a layman. The laity (laos) is the whole people of God. In the apostolic Church every member of the laos had his own specific ministry, of which there were many forms, and for which he was endowed with the grace of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12). Today the New Testament conception of laity as ministry has been almost totally obscured, so that in ordinary speech ‘ layman’ means ‘ non-professional’, ‘ non-qualified ’. Thus, for instance, a clergyman at a gathering of medical men might speak of himself as a mere layman. In some languages the word ‘ lay ’ today means ‘ secular’ (cf. the French laique). Whatever concessions to accepted usage we may make in our everyday speech, we must learn to speak and think biblically when we are discussing the question of the Church’s ministry.

3 In New Testament times the distinction between professional and ‘ lay ’ had not arisen, and ministry was the function of the whole laos. Over the centuries, however, the ministry of the Church has been professionalised, and it is only in comparatively recent times that the idea of a ministry of the laity has been recovered. As far as the Church of England is concerned, the idea of such a ministry still remains to be implemented. In point of fact, the actual ministry of that Church is virtually monopolized by a professional priesthood (with the reservation of certain important specific functions to the episcopate). Even the order of the diaconate has been emptied of almost all significance by the custom of regarding the diaconate as merely a one-year period of probation before ordination to the priesthood. Because of the consequent shortage of deacons, the liturgical functions of deacons are usually performed by priests.

4 There seems to be little awareness of the unscriptural character of this equation of ministry with professional priesthood, although the pressures of social change are putting the parochial system, manned by a professional clergy, under strain. Even so, the mind of the Church seems incapable of trying to do more than catch up with the social changes of a generation ago; it is symptomatic of our malaise that the Church of England should be debating the question of the redeployment of the clergy at a time when its most urgent needs and opportunities are bound up with the question of the use and deployment of the laity. The absence of a real and fully recognised ministry which could be exercised by laymen and laywomen alike is a mark of the Church’s reluctance to make use of its available resources in an age of rapid social change. It is also a primary cause of the demand from certain quarters that women should be ordained to the priesthood: because the priesthood is generally held to be the only real ministry of the Church, it is therefore supposed that the only way in which women couldobtain any effective share in the ministry would be by means of their ordination as priests.

5 It would seem that the question of a ministry supplementary to that of the priesthood is what primarily needs attention in the light of the situation in England today. There are several forms which such a ministry might take. Perhaps the recovery of a real diaconate might be considered to be the most appropriate. In the ancient Church the diaconate was an office rather than an order, though it was normally held for life; it is usually mentioned in the third place after the bishops and presbyters. The duties of the deacons were largely concerned with administrative and welfare services within the Christian community, but their functions were not confined to such matters. They had liturgical functions at the Eucharist, such as those of chanting the Epistle and Gospel and receiving the offerings of the faithful. Many were teachers and preachers (to the unconverted) and were leaders of theological discussion. In fact, the questions addressed by the bishop to those about to be ordained deacon in the Ordinal are not far removed from the intention of the ancient office of the diaconate, even though the first question may seem somewhat remote from our own age of state-administered welfare. If the form of Ordering of Deacons ceased to be regarded as the inception of a one-year period of probation, it would serve quite well as a model for the ordaining of deacons to a new form of permanent ministry in the Church—new, that is to say, to us, but not unknown in the ancient Church. It was not until the fourth century that the diaconate became a step to the priesthood.

6 In our rapidly changing society it is becoming increasingly obvious that the pattern of a professional priesthood of beneficed clergymen is no longer adequate, no matter how they may be ‘ redeployed ’. The very word ‘ clergy ’ or ‘clerk ’ reminds us that the professional ministry developed in an age when the clergy were almost the only educated members of society; ‘ clerical work’ remains in our everyday speech as a survival from a vanished social order. (Of course, the ultimate origin of ‘ clergy ’ in the New Testament word kleros carried no such social implication; it signified the ‘ lot’ or ‘ share’ in the ministry which was committed to this or that member of the laos.) Today in an age of universal education the priest ministers to men and women who are often better educated than himself and who generally know much more than he does about the processes and techniques of the social and industrial order by which the common life is maintained. The laity are in daily contact with numbers of people whom the priest will never meet. Their opportunities for exercising an effective ministry in the world are wider than those of the clergy. Many churches all over the world are today giving much thought to the idea of lay evangelism, lay responsibility for pastoral care, and so on. Many lay folk are eager to receive sound theological instruction and to take pastoral responsibility for the spiritual welfare of many of those with whom they have contact, but who are out of touch with the ordained ministry of the Church. They would welcome also the due authorisation or commissioning by the bishop for their task, the grace which they feel that this would confer, and the consequent recognition by the whole Church that their ministry was a real one. In rural areas the exigencies of the priest’s situation are often such that he has to be in several places, celebrating the sacrament in each, while the people become increasingly indifferent to his comings and goings, receiving little regular instruction and unable to attend worship at regular and convenient times. A ministry supplementary to that of the priesthood is as necessary in the country as it is in the towns.

7 Such a supplementary ministry would doubtless develop several different forms. There are diversities of gifts, and all the members of the body do not have the same office. Not all of them would be authorised to preach (cf. the words of the Ordering of Deacons: ‘. . . and to preach the same, if thou be thereto licensed by the Bishop himself). But for all of them the requirement of the preface to the Ordinal would be maintained: that they should be sufficiently instructed in holy Scripture (though being ‘ learned in the Latin tongue’ might be dispensed with nowadays!). The ministers thus ordained to a permanent diaconate would in fact fulfil the duties which the Bishop in the Ordering of Deacons declares to appertain to the office of a deacon, though in a manner appropriate to the conditions of the twentieth century. Since all ministry in the Church of God is ministry of the Word and Sacraments, they would have their due place in the liturgy: ‘ to assist the priest in the Divine Service, and specially when he ministereth the holy Communion, and to help him in the distribution thereof, and to read holy Scriptures and Homilies in the Church; and to instruct the youth. . . .’ Such participation of a non-professional (‘ lay ’) ministry in the Divine Service, especially in the Eucharist, would give sacramental expression to the biblical doctrine of the priesthood of the laity. Liturgy involves the offering to God through Christ of the whole life and work of the community. A wholly ‘ clerical’ ministry, which by virtue of its office is withdrawn from such life and work, cannot adequately give sacramental expression to that offering apart from the laity. The growing awareness that the laity should have a place in the liturgical action and that their representatives should be ordained to a liturgical function and status is the response of the Church in our times to the needs and opportunities of today, as these are seen in the light of the contemporary study of primitive patterns of Christian ministry and worship. This awareness has created a theologically legitimate demand for the ordination of lay people to a non-professional ministry of the Word and Sacraments. It does not imply ordination to the priesthood in the narrower sense as defined in the Ordinal; indeed, it would not be met by such ordination, since it would leave untouched the vital question of the liturgical and ministerial function of the whole laity in whom, under Christ as Head of the Body, the priesthood of the Church corporately resides.

8 The relevance of such considerations to the task of this Commission will be obvious. There can be no theological reason why this kind of lay ministry should not be open to any suitable person, whether male or female. The question of the Pauline principle of the subordination of women does not arise, because all the ministers thus created, whether men or women, would be equally under the authority of the Bishop and of those whom the Bishop might appoint to direct their ministrations. There would be no superiority or inferiority amongst those who would be sharing a common ministry. The word ‘ deacon’ would be specially appropriate, because it is a common gender noun in Greek and could be used with biblical precedent for either sex (cf. Rom. 16.1). There would thus be no confusion with the existing Order of Deaconesses. (Contemporary usage, it might be remarked, does not speak of ‘ authoresses ’, ‘ poetesses ’ and the like, but of authors and poets of either sex.) The diaconate of men and women thus set up would be lay, not only in the sense that on ordination a deacon does not cease to be a member of the laity or laos, but also in the sense that he or she would be a non-professional: the deacons would continue in the professions or employments in which they were already working. If they did not so continue, the particular contribution of their ministry would be lost, since it lies essentially in their being able to insert the ordained ministry of the Church into those ‘ secular ’ areas of life which are largely closed to a professional ministry. The result of the creation of such a diaconate would, we might hope, bring the Church’s worship and witness into closer relationship with those areas of the common life of the world from which, it is said, they are excluded today. There should be no creation of an order of ministry which is yet not one of the Holy Orders of the Church; the new deacons would be in the full sense in Holy Orders. Their vocation would be different from that of the priesthood; it would be to live in the world as ‘ men for others ’ and in the Church as representatives of the life and work of the ‘ secular ’ world. The significance of a real ordination of women as well as men would be very great; it would give to both laymen and laywomen a genuine sense that the whole laity have a real and important part (kleros) in the ministry of the Church. No theological difficulties of any kind, such as might embarrass the Church of England in its relations with other Churches, would arise, and a worth-while ministry would have been established both for men and women on a basis of complete equality. At the same time such a diaconate would not create another kind of professional ministry and would redress the present situation, in which there is an undue monopolisation of ministry by ‘ the clerical profession ’.

9 There are undoubtedly women who sincerely desire to enter the priesthood and to work within the professional ministry; they would presumably be dissatisfied with the proposal suggested above. But there are others who are concerned to have a real share in the Church’s ministry but do not necessarily equate ministry with priesthood. Many of them already possess qualifications in theology; the universities, modern as well as ancient, are turning out every year graduates with honours in theology or who have read biblical studies as part of their degree course. Many others have read or are reading for the Lambeth Diploma or some other recognised qualification. Others would welcome the opportunity of theological study and of training in pastoral care. The same might also be said of many men, for there are many who possess degrees or other qualifications in theology who have not felt themselves called to enter the Church as a profession; others too, would welcome the opportunity of regular theological and pastoral guidance with such an end in view. There is a widespread and serious interest amongst the laity in theological teaching and discussion today, and many of the laity would gladly embark upon deeper studies, if they felt that they were equipping themselves for genuine ministerial service. It would be a pity if at this time attention were to be diverted from the practical possibilities of enlarging and enriching the ministry of the Church by undue concentration upon the controversial proposal to ordain women to the priesthood or upon the complicated tactics of the redeployment of the clergy. What is called for in our present situation is a new and bold strategy of advance, which will enable the Church to throw newly recruited forces into the field.

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