Bishop Penelope Jamieson Will Stress Harmony in Her New Role
Episcopal News Service. August 7, 1990 [90203]
Julie A. Wortman
Penelope Jamieson allowed herself to be a candidate for bishop of Dunedin because she thought it was time for the church to realize that women were eligible to be elected bishops. She says she never wanted or expected to be elected, but on the fourth ballot of the electoral synod last November she became the first woman in the Anglican Communion to be elected diocesan bishop.
She calls it an Annunciation experience, "a situation not of choosing, but of being chosen -- and then finding the heart and the spirit to say 'yes.'"
Once described as "too untidy" in appearance to be a bishop, Jamieson is living out her new role with a certain awkward grace. Resigned to miter and crozier, she seems nevertheless unwilling to allow English ceremony and tradition to isolate her from others. She asks people to forget the titles and call her Penny.
As Anglicans in other parts of the communion worry about a woman bishop's ability to be a personal focus and instrument of unity and communion in the church, Anglicans in New Zealand are hoping that Jamieson will be a force not for unity, but harmony.
At her installation she told them, "It will be my most profound pleasure to be among you as one who both celebrates and shares [the Christian] life which is so dear to me -- and may we, all of us, grow together in that life as a community of Christians of diverse shapes and hues."
A week following the Dunedin election, New Zealand's Anglicans began using a new prayer book, one that proudly affirms an English heritage transplanted to a late 20th-century, Pacific island world. Twenty-five years in preparation, the new book has shaped an image of what the Church of the Province of New Zealand intends to be -- a church that increasingly affirms its Maori and Polynesian heritage, validates God's motherhood along with God's fatherhood, values lay as much as ordained ministry, and prefers partnership to individualism.
Dunedin's Anglicans were looking for a bishop who would help them live up to this image, and in Jamieson they found a woman remarkably suited for the task.
While working on a M.A. degree in Edinburgh, Jamieson was active in the Student Christian Movement. In 1965, following her marriage to lan Jamieson, a lecturer in medieval English at Wellington's Victoria University, Jamieson began busying herself not only with her growing family, but also with parish life.
She taught Sunday school and served on the vestry, but she was especially attracted to the edges of parish ministry, helping operate a drop-in coffee bar and working with Wellington's inner-city ministries. And the attraction continues. "I'm more interested in working in or on the ragged boundaries of the church than being at the center," she says when asked what her focus as bishop will be.
Committed to the country's efforts to honor its early commitments to the Maori people, she focused her doctoral work on a Council for Educational Research project involving Tokelauan children who were learning English. Ironically, the only New Zealand bishop who failed to attend her consecration and installation was Bishop Whakahuihui Vercoe, bishop to the church's Maoris.
While Vercoe does not formally object to Jamieson's episcopacy, he says the Maori people are not ready to address women's roles, either in the church -- where some Maori women already serve as priests -- or in society. His people, he insists, must have time and space to step back from 150 years of forced assimilation and determine how Maori and white roles can be equalized, a position Jamieson and others support. "I respect [Maoris'] right to make those decisions," Jamieson says. "The church must honor those whose voices are least heard."
Despite Vercoe's reticence, the Maoris in Dunedin are pleased with the diocese's new bishop. At her installation, a Maori priest in the diocese, the Rev. Tom Kahuki, carefully pointed out before reading the Old Testament lesson, "I do not stand here as representative of the Maori, but I'm here to honor our Mother-in-Christ."
It wasn't until 1978, the year after the province approved women's ordination, that Jamieson began studying theology. This she did while working as a lay parish assistant in one of Wellington's poorer neighborhoods. "My vision is of God suffering," she reflects.
In those years few women were ordained. Jamieson was among those who were qualified for ordination, but forced to wait until a bishop was willing to ordain them. It was an experience that makes her unsympathetic to concerns that the orders of men she ordains might not be accepted in Anglican provinces where women's ordination has not yet been accepted.
"The issue seems to be new because it's affecting men," she replies impatiently. "Women clergy already face that problem."
She was finally ordained a priest in Wellington in 1983, and in 1985 assumed the position of vicar in an ailing parish where she proved herself an able administrator. By delegating responsibility and focusing on the parish's spiritual life, she nurtured the struggling congregation into a thriving and active faith community. "It's easier to be close to people in a parish," she says a little wistfully when talking about what she will miss most about parish ministry.
It took virtually no time at all for Jamieson to settle comfortably into life in this picturesque university town, the diocese's only city of any size. Less familiar will be the needs and concerns of the aging, tightly knit, middle-class Anglicans who live in the sprawling rural countryside.
Jamieson's broad experience in the church will enable her to meet the challenges of her new role, according to the Rev. Claire Brown, who put forward Jamieson's name as a candidate for bishop. "Penny has 30 years of experience in Christian ministry -- she has, in fact, a much wider experience than many who have spent their whole adult life in the ordained ministry," Brown says. "Only those who have no real belief in the value of lay ministry could deny that."