FAQs

We answer your questions about WATCH’s call for a generous end to the 2014 House of Bishops’ Declaration…

  • This is something that women have been asked on many occasions in the past as we have struggled to be treated equally with men. There is always something else that is deemed more important.

    Women make up half of the population and two thirds of our congregations. Making us feel second-class and restricting our God-given ministries has a high price both on women ourselves and on the mission of the Church. Ordained women tend to put up with the situation, because they have no other choice, but lay people – when they become aware of the inequality for women in the Church – are dismayed by it and find it unacceptable. The way that the Church discriminates against women and other groups is a reason often cited by people when asked why they have stopped going to Church or are not interested in attending Church.

Do the arrangements actually cause anyone any harm?

Being on the receiving end of discrimination is harmful, whether or not we accept it. It diminishes and degrades us, often in a slow and steady process. At a NADAWM (National Deans of Women’s Ministry) conference recently, someone described the wounding that women experience discrimination in the Church a bit like how a bed sore develops – with one tiny abrasion adding to another until it is a really painful sore.  Dr Gabriella Thomas in her research, For the Good of the Church, comes to a similar conclusion – referring to mutual flourishing, as experienced by Anglican women, as ‘an open wound’ in the Church.

When we look at mental health statistics, we see that all groups that experience discrimination, whether by sex, sexuality, race, class or disability, typically have poorer mental health than white able-bodied heterosexual middleclass men.

  • Ordained women face the most obvious and direct discrimination. Doctoral Researcher at the University of Birmingham, Sarah Schofield, has conducted recent research (comprising interviews with a range of ordained women in the Church of England), that evidences the discrimination that ordained women experience and its impact.  One of her interviewees says, ‘To be in an institution which has said that it is alright for people to hold office who have the view that women are not able to be priests is for me to be in an institution which appears completely half-hearted in its support for my ministry and for the ministry of other women.’ Bishop Rose Hudson-Wilkin has spoken of the daily humiliation that the arrangements bring. Being expected to attend events where you are not allowed to preach or preside over communion and yet are expected to smile and say this is acceptable.

    Rev Jeremy Clines, Chaplain at Sheffield University, speaks about the moral injury that is caused to ordained women when they are expected to be silent about the injustice that they experience and yet represent a Church that is called to proclaim a gospel of justice for all people.

    Ordained women are forced to keep their concerns and experiences of discrimination to themselves. To speak out means that they are labelled as difficult and will preclude them getting promotions in the Church. I myself, for example, have been told that I am blacklisted from getting any form of promotion because I have spoken out publicly about discrimination against women in the Church. I know Deans of Women’s ministry who have been advised to resign their membership of WATCH if they want to continue in their positions. All this means that not only are women experiencing costly discrimination and diminishment, but also they are coerced into silence about this.

    The discrimination that ordained women experience means that there are certain parishes where they cannot apply for posts. And, in the case of bishops, there are parishes for whom female bishops need to make arrangements for extended oversight by an acceptable male bishop.

    But, perhaps more importantly, this institutional discrimination legitimises all kinds of sexism. And although we have a good percentage of priests and bishops who are now female, the top jobs are still largely given to men. Statistics show that, as a female priest, you are more likely to be serving in rural ministry looking after seven or more parishes with no support, while male priests occupy almost all of the senior posts at large city churches with big staff teams. Furthermore, about 25% of bishops are now female, but only eight out of 42 Diocesan Bishops are female. This is because the system of appointment through the CNC is skewed against female candidates who effectively need to get 10 out of 10 possible votes rather than 10 out of 14.  As a result, only three in the last thirteen appointments of Diocesans have been women.

  • Most lay women and men are unaware of the ongoing discrimination against women in the Church. There is a deliberate policy of covering up and disguising the current arrangements. Despite WATCH, the SCM and others calling for transparency, almost nothing has been done to make it easy for lay people to see whether their church puts any limits on women’s ministries. And this is deliberate because churches who limit women’s ministries know that to explain this clearly would be problematic from a missional perspective. So, either nothing is said or wording is cloaked in jargon so that people cannot understand it. When people do find out that their church has a policy of limiting women’s ministries (usually when a vacancy arises), they are frequently upset about this.  They may feel betrayed and almost defrauded, especially if they have been members of the church for a long time and have given sacrificially with their own ministries and their money.

    A lay woman may also be in a church which limits women’s ministry and find that, if she has a vocation to ordained ministry, then this is either unrecognised or discouraged. All priests are supposed to pass on potential female candidates for ordination to other priests to help them in the discernment process, if they cannot themselves. Nonetheless, this does not always happen, and sometimes a woman does not recognise her calling herself when she sees no women leading, preaching or presiding in the church she attends.

    As an ADO myself in recent years, I have observed how some vicars will give men in their congregations, who are discerning a calling, opportunities like preaching or leading a small group to help them explore their calling.  But deny the same opportunities to women who have also told them they are discerning a calling. All this makes it harder for a woman to get a true sense of whether she is being called to ministry or not.

    Women have been treated as second-class in the Church for many, many years and have been constrained to lowly positions. Their gifts have often not been recognised. Continuing with arrangements that still put women in a special category where they may or may not be accepted and their gifts may or may not be fully received by the Church, is to continue to diminish women who are equally made in the image of God as men are. Dr Sharon Jagger, senior lecturer in religion at York St John University, has done some recent research with lay women in the Church of England which she has published in a report called Rock the Boat and gives evidence of the impact of discrimination on lay women in the Church today.

  • Our children and young people are being taught, in some churches, theology that is frankly bad and potentially harmful. There is a clear and proven correlation between understandings of male privilege and violence against women and girls. (See almost anything written by Kevin Giles on this subject.) 

    I was in a Church of England school last year and taking a class of sixth formers and one young man put up his hand and said that his church taught that women need to be under the authority of men.  This was a difficult thing to hear with half the class being 16-year-old girls. I was personally, of course, in a position to rebut the interpretations of scripture that he had been taught, but they were not. One girl rather meekly said, but isn’t it Eve’s fault as she ate the apple first?

    We have to take seriously the theology that our children are being taught. Just because we call something theology does not make it good. Some theology is bad. With hindsight, we can easily look at the theologies that underpinned apartheid in South Africa or the Ku Klux Klan in the US and say this was bad theology – but we need to recognise it in our own midst. And I (and many practical theologians like Leah Robinson, for example) would say that a clear red flag when it comes to discerning if theology is good or bad is whether it actually harms people.

    There is a lot of domestic violence in our culture and most of it is directed at women and girls and is often justified by an understanding that women need to do what men tell them. I would have liked to have said to the young people in that classroom that, in the Church of England, we treat women and men equally and we believe that this is what Christ calls to do. Full stop. Sadly, I was unable to do this.  I could not even say that the Church is working towards greater gender justice because it isn’t. We have (thankfully) a Church of England Head of Racial Justice but no Head of Gender Justice.

    A lay woman may also be in a church which limits women’s ministry and find that, if she has a vocation to ordained ministry, then this is either unrecognised or discouraged. All priests are supposed to pass on potential female candidates for ordination to other priests to help them in the discernment process, if they cannot themselves. Nonetheless, this does not always happen, and sometimes a woman does not recognise her calling herself when she sees no women leading, preaching or presiding in the church she attends.

    As an ADO myself in recent years, I have observed how some vicars will give men in their congregations, who are discerning a calling, opportunities like preaching or leading a small group to help them explore their calling.  But deny the same opportunities to women who have also told them they are discerning a calling. All this makes it harder for a woman to get a true sense of whether she is being called to ministry or not.

    Women have been treated as second-class in the Church for many, many years and have been constrained to lowly positions. Their gifts have often not been recognised. Continuing with arrangements that still put women in a special category where they may or may not be accepted and their gifts may or may not be fully received by the Church, is to continue to diminish women who are equally made in the image of God as men are. Dr Sharon Jagger, senior lecturer in religion at York St John University, has done some recent research with lay women in the Church of England which she has published in a report called Rock the Boat and gives evidence of the impact of discrimination on lay women in the Church today.

  • The injustice and violence that women and girls experience around our world is caused, perpetuated and justified, in many instances, by an understanding that women should do what men tell them to do and, if they don’t, they should be punished.  The practices of these oppressive cultures are often underpinned and justified by theology – whether Christian, Muslim or of other faiths. Correcting this bad theology is really important. And it is hard for us to do this with any authenticity if we ourselves, as a Church, still discriminate against women.I was in a Church of England school last year and taking a class of sixth formers and one young man put up his hand and said that his church taught that women need to be under the authority of men.  This was a difficult thing to hear with half the class being 16-year-old girls. I was personally, of course, in a position to rebut the interpretations of scripture that he had been taught, but they were not. One girl rather meekly said, but isn’t it Eve’s fault as she ate the apple first?

    We have to take seriously the theology that our children are being taught. Just because we call something theology does not make it good. Some theology is bad. With hindsight, we can easily look at the theologies that underpinned apartheid in South Africa or the Ku Klux Klan in the US and say this was bad theology – but we need to recognise it in our own midst. And I (and many practical theologians like Leah Robinson, for example) would say that a clear red flag when it comes to discerning if theology is good or bad is whether it actually harms people.

    There is a lot of domestic violence in our culture and most of it is directed at women and girls and is often justified by an understanding that women need to do what men tell them. I would have liked to have said to the young people in that classroom that, in the Church of England, we treat women and men equally and we believe that this is what Christ calls to do. Full stop. Sadly, I was unable to do this.  I could not even say that the Church is working towards greater gender justice because it isn’t. We have (thankfully) a Church of England Head of Racial Justice but no Head of Gender Justice.

    A lay woman may also be in a church which limits women’s ministry and find that, if she has a vocation to ordained ministry, then this is either unrecognised or discouraged. All priests are supposed to pass on potential female candidates for ordination to other priests to help them in the discernment process, if they cannot themselves. Nonetheless, this does not always happen, and sometimes a woman does not recognise her calling herself when she sees no women leading, preaching or presiding in the church she attends.

    As an ADO myself in recent years, I have observed how some vicars will give men in their congregations, who are discerning a calling, opportunities like preaching or leading a small group to help them explore their calling.  But deny the same opportunities to women who have also told them they are discerning a calling. All this makes it harder for a woman to get a true sense of whether she is being called to ministry or not.

    Women have been treated as second-class in the Church for many, many years and have been constrained to lowly positions. Their gifts have often not been recognised. Continuing with arrangements that still put women in a special category where they may or may not be accepted and their gifts may or may not be fully received by the Church, is to continue to diminish women who are equally made in the image of God as men are. Dr Sharon Jagger, senior lecturer in religion at York St John University, has done some recent research with lay women in the Church of England which she has published in a report called Rock the Boat and gives evidence of the impact of discrimination on lay women in the Church today.

  • Before addressing this question, it is important to point out the work of social scientists, like Dr Alex D J Fry of Bournemouth University, who show that so-called theological conscience, of those in the Church of England who seek to limit women’s ministries, is mostly from social factors – that is, it is indistinguishable from what we understand as prejudice. Furthermore, Fry has done some interesting work on how the arguments that those who seek to limit women’s ministries use map onto what sociologists call System Justification Theory. That is to say that people who enjoy privilege often seek arguments that will preserve that privilege. And that is what appears to be happening in the Church.

    Bringing the 2014 arrangements to an end would mean that we put an end to discrimination institutionally. It would not mean that anyone needs to be evicted from the Church. No one would be forced to receive communion from a female priest if they did not want to. People who did not want to receive preaching or teaching from women could seek out churches with exclusively male leadership. So, there would be the ability to continue as individuals to believe that women’s ministries should be restricted – but the Church would not see this as theology that it condoned as an institution.

    The Church of England is a broad church which is a good thing, but even the broadest churches have to have some walls. We do not, for example, allow those who believe God created one race to be superior to another to teach that ‘theology’ in our Church, and quite rightly.

    Every other Anglican province which has allowed women to be priests and bishops has managed to create a culture in which theological difference of opinion on the ordination of women is accepted as a reality, but is not enshrined in law. The Church of England is the only Anglican province that has female priests and bishops and has legislation that says it is acceptable to not accept them and those who don’t accept them should flourish.  As you can imagine, these provinces had a good number of male priests who did not welcome female priests but those male priests have neither flounced off in any substantial numbers nor do they feel unwelcome in their churches.

    Furthermore, as we continue to worry that there may be a small number of people who say they cannot stay in the Church of England if we bring the 2014 arrangements to an end, we seem to take no account of the many people who cannot join the Church of England or have left it because of its discrimination against women.

  • Admitting to discrimination and using exemptions that the Church of England has under the Equality Act 2010 to administer this discrimination is publicly embarrassing, so the Church goes out of its way to cover all this up.  Senior clergy are completely against raising awareness about the arrangements, whatever they may say. Bishops have made it a requirement for church websites to make a statement about safeguarding on their homepage and they could do the same about churches’ positions on women’s ministry. But we have been told that discrimination by sex is a ‘secondary issue’ and not something that churches should be required to be transparent about.

    If you speak to people who have recently been ordained, they will tell you that they received hardly any information about the Declaration and the background to women’s ministry in the Church when they did their theological training. They will tell you that they were required to sign to say that they accepted the 5 guiding principles and the Declaration and ADOs very often would tell them not to worry about it, if they had any concerns, but just to sign because they have to – otherwise they would not be allowed to train for ministry. Countless women and men have told me that they had concerns about the arrangements, but were told they had no choice if they wanted to continue with their calling.

    The current exhibition at the Lambeth Palace Library on Women in the Church of England is an example of how the Church is seeking to sanitise the story of how women came to be priests and bishops and the conditionality of their acceptance into the Church.

    Only by doing what WATCH is doing and trying to speak out about the situation can create some awareness. But it is difficult and costly to do this.

    I would say that a young ordained woman, who supports WATCH, is jeopardising her future in the Church because she will be branded as unsuitable for a lot of positions, simply because she has the courage to say that she wants women and men to be treated equally.

    Last year the Church of England appointed a Diocesan Bishop, who does not believe that the Church of England has the authority to ordain women as priests, with oversight over female clergy. It ignored the recommendation of Independent Reveiwer, Sir Phillip Mawer, in the Sheffield report he published in 2017 which said that work should be done by the Church, before making such an appointment, to consider the consequences of appointing a Diocesan who has reservations about women’s ordination insofar as this impacts female clergy.  But this work has not been done or even started, despite the current Independent Reviewer, Canon Maggie Swinson, calling for it again this year.

    On the other hand, someone like myself, a woman who is a feminist simply wanting women and men to be treated equally, is automatically blacklisted. I myself have been told that I could never be considered an appropriate candidate as a bishop because I am open in saying I want equality for women.

  • With hindsight, many women believe that it would have been better to have waited until the Church of England was willing to ordain women as priests and bishops on equal terms with men rather than going down the route that we have taken. And which leaves us in this state of acceptance which is really only a semi-acceptance or a conditional acceptance i.e. that we are accepted but we have to show gracious restraint where our services are not wanted and keep quiet about the ongoing discrimination.

    We used to have a Church where a bishop was a bishop. You almost certainly would not agree with your bishop on every theological matter but nonetheless he was your Bishop and you just had to get on with that. In the past, we have had bishops who have said that they don’t even believe in the resurrection but no one had the right to have extended oversight from another bishop who did believe in the resurrection.

    Scandalously, it is only over the matter of the ordination of women, that churches have the right to seek oversight from a bishop who concurs with them theologically on this matter. (And incidentally the cost of four PEV bishops is £497,000pa plus housing costs.)  I personally think it will be a disaster if we have some similar arrangement for people who want to insist that their bishop agrees with them theologically on LLF matters.

    The Declaration is not fit for perpetuity and yet we are stuck with it and in a position where it is going to be difficult to dismantle it. In the meantime, yes, women get on with their ministries but at a huge cost – to themselves and to the whole Church, which is not living out the true Gospel by treating women and men equally. And is unlikely to flourish while it is effectively being complicit with theology that harms and diminishes.

  • Although the Declaration does not provide for a review, it recognises that it might be amended in the future. And of course it is the prerogative of Synod and the House of Bishop to bring it to an end if they choose. The Declaration was entered into in good faith and reading it you can see that it is all about protecting a minority who is expected to see their position in the Church diminish over time. This has led to some kind of insurgency - with tribal churches now existing within the Church insisting on having equal rights to flourish, including the right to be Diocesan bishops, their own theological college (a new one has just been opened in Lancashire for Traditionalist Anglo-Catholic ordinands with funding from the CofE), separate Chrism masses, separate ordination services and restrictions on who can lay hands on people during the consecration of bishops.

    There are many aspects of the Declaration that are being abused and there is no policing of it by the Church. For example:

    • Some Traditionalist Anglo Catholic parishes are being told (by Forward in Faith) that they can pass resolutions to avoid having a female vicar not only because of theological conscience (the only legally valid reason) but also ‘for unity’ and because, if they have a female vicar, then this will spoil the way the liturgy and worship is conducted. As an Area Dean myself, when I have heard this, I have pushed back but nothing seems to be being done to remedy this sort of thing happening.

    • Some Conservative Evangelical churches, that have not passed resolutions asking for extended oversight because of theological convictions on male headship, practise what they sometimes refer to as ‘soft complementarianism.’ This means that, although they have not passed a resolution, they don’t really think women make very good leaders and have a quiet policy of keeping to male leadership.

    • Although PCCs are required under the Declaration to reflect the theological convictions of the parish regarding women’s ministry, we have seen PCCs pass Resolutions with minimal consultation and where the majority view – in favour of women’s full ministry – has been overridden.

    • We have asked bishops to encourage parishes that have Resolutions to review these regularly, but this is generally not happening.

    • We have brought to the attention of bishops ‘Guidance’ about passing Resolutions that has been published by third parties, and commended for use by churches, which is misapplying the Declaration – but the Church has not commented on or corrected this ‘Guidance.’

    • We have come across churches who do not have Resolutions, and do not want to limit women’s ministry in any way, being pressured by some patrons and bishops to accept clergy who limit women’s roles.

  • Obviously it will not be easy to bring the Declaration to an end and I understand that it will require majorities in all three houses of two thirds. Nonetheless, simply bringing the situation back to Synod will greatly increase awareness of the issues and I believe that lay people up and down the country very much would like to get rid of discrimination by sex in the Church, and also most clergy would too. It was interesting to see in The Times survey last year that 67% of the 1,500 clergy who were interviewed said that it was time for the arrangements to come to an end. Of course, we do have more of a problem with the bishops who are, on the whole, becoming increasingly conservative.

    Nonetheless, behind the scenes there may be more support for unravelling the legislation than might be perceived. One of the first things that Bishop Sarah said to me, when I first visited her as the new Chair of WATCH, about 18 months ago, was that we need to find a way to get a motion before Synod again that allows a conversation about the Declaration and five guiding principles. I couldn’t really understand what she meant or how on earth one could achieve that, at the time. But I think something is astir and there Is increasing recognition that the Declaration needs to come to an end and, possibly, it is better to address this sooner rather than later.

For an explanation of terms, please head to our Glossary page