Where are all the women priests?
When the women's ordination debate was in full swing (in the late 1980s and early 1990s) a panoply of arguments was put forward as to why we should all get on board, do the right thing and ordain women as priests/presbyters. We were told that our witness to an unbelieving world would never be effective until we removed the stumbling block of excluding women from leadership. And we were told that the ‘evangelical’ case for women's ordination had been made, and that many evangelicals were willing to get with the programme, presumably to the shame of those recalcitrants (like this author) who remained utterly unconvinced.
As the ever-perceptive John Richardson points out in a recent issue of ‘New Directions’, neither of these contentions have proved true. More than a decade after the ‘women's ordination wars’, the vast majority of women priests in the Anglican church in the UK are liberal, and none of them are running large churches:
Excluding cathedrals, there are about 160 Anglican churches with ‘Usual Sunday Attendances’ in excess of 350. The majority are growing, many of them are evangelical, and all the senior ministers of these churches are male. When pastoral push comes to shove, it seems that congregations instinctively congregate around male leadership.
If, as we have been told, most evangelicals have no problem with the ordination of women, we should expect this picture to change, so that the proportion of women running larger churches corresponds to the proportion of clergy who are women. However, whilst women are found in every ‘senior’ position from dean to archdeacon, and will soon be bishops, they have yet to be found running big churches, evangelical or otherwise.
Judging by the tiny numbers of evangelical women being ordained, it seems that evangelicals as a whole are actually not convinced at all about women's ordination. Those who are convinced congregate almost entirely in the liberal wing, and the churches that they run are hardly being overrun by grateful atheists willing at last to embrace the gospel now that a woman is in charge.
The liberal churches, in which the vast majority of women priests serve, continue to decline, while the evangelical arm of the denomination, in which there are very few women priests, continues to be the only sector showing any growth.