Australians Ponder the Appointment of Women Bishops
Episcopal News Service. November 18, 1999 [99-176E]
(ENI) According to supporters of women's ordination, the Anglican Church in Australia could be five years away from voting to allow the appointment of its first woman bishop.
Australia would become the fourth country in the world to have Anglican women bishops. There are 11 women bishops in the world-wide Anglican Communion -- one in Aotearoa/New Zealand and 10 in the United States and Canada. Australia has 70 ordained women, about 50 priests and 20 deacons.
Dr. Muriel Porter, a lay member of the church's standing committee and chair of the national working group examining this issue, said the church hopes to introduce women bishops without any of the controversy of 10 years ago.
"It was terrible, just hideous," she said of the arguments about women priests, which led some in the church take court action to block the ordinations. Porter said that when the church began discussing the issue of women priests, it did not consider that they might oneday want to be bishops. She believes all three ministries in the Anglican church -- deacon, priest and bishop -- should be open to women.
The working group recently released a report canvassing a number of ways to allow women bishops. The group hopes that Anglicans will discuss these options, and that a motion will be put to the next general synod in July 2001. A two-thirds majority vote from clergy and laity would make the motion a provisional canon, or law. A further vote, this time requiring a three-quarters majority, at the General Synod in 2004, would make the motion a full canon of the church.
"By then," Porter said, "there will have been women priests in Australia for 12 years. Some of them, however, although they were ordained as priests in 1992, were ordained deacons in 1986. Normally there is only a one-year gap between being a deacon and being a priest, but that wasn't possible for these women. Some spent six years as deacons, and some were in charge of parishes. So in fact we've got some women who are well and truly experienced."
Porter stressed the need for consensus, saying the big concern for many people was whether women bishops would divide the church. "Our group is very hopeful that we just might find a way through this that is quite unique to the Anglican Communion. We are hoping we might be able to show that by really sitting down together and talking about it...we might be able to find a middle road of allowing women bishops but still providing some means of caring for those who are opposed."