Call for Comment: Women and Ordination
Episcopal News Service. July 16, 2004 [071604-1]
Nearly 30 years ago, on July 29, 1974, 11 women were ordained to the Episcopal priesthood in rites termed "irregular" in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On September 7, 1975, four more were ordained in Washington, D.C. And on September 16, 1976, General Convention approved the ordination of women.
Hailed by some, resisted by others, the ordinations brought far-reaching change to the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion.
Plans are being made across the church to commemorate the anniversary. For instance, the Episcopal Church's Office of Women's Ministries website offers "Thirty Ways to Celebrate Thirty Years of Women's Ordained Ministry," to be used between July 29, 2004 and September 16, 2006.
Women are now priests in all but 12 of the Communion's 38 provinces. Eleven provinces have no canonical bar to a woman bishop, though none are ordained yet. Three provinces-the USA, Canada, and Aotearoa/New Zealand-have had women bishops since Barbara Harris' consecration as suffragan of Massachusetts in 1989.
Although women¹s ordination is widely accepted, in some ways the controversy over women clergy continues to simmer-and occasionally boil over-even as newer issues such as the place of lesbians and gay men in the church and the rise of a strongly evangelical Anglicanism in the Global South hold the spotlight.
What the 1997 Eames Commission report on women's ordination termed a "process of reception" continues to meet resistance, even as the notion of "reception" is lifted as a model in submissions to the current Lambeth Commission on Communion as it contemplates how Anglicans can disagree and remain together.
ENS seeks your comments and observations on how women's ordination has been and continues to be received where you are-and what the implications of that may be for the future of other changes in the Anglican Communion.
The ENS staff will appreciate any and all responses, ideally prior to July 20.