10-2-3 The Church Of England And Women

Rev. Jacqueline Henry’s First Speech

First of all, I would like to thank you for inviting me, and then I would like to explain that what I have to say tonight is not an official Church of England statement, but this is my own thoughts on women serving in the church. I am not talking about priesthood, that is another issue altogether, but I am talking about women serving in the church. And I am not doing a Bible study because I think you’ve had that, meanwhile as a Christian I have to use the Bible because it is basic to me, and so I can’t help quoting it. But I am also going to quote women who, because of their Christian faith, have served others sometimes in the church and sometimes outside of it, serving the church, the body of Christ, men and women. I want to talk about women using the gifts that God has given them.

There’s a story of a church in America who had their first woman minister. It had been the custom of the churchwardens to take the new minister out for a day’s fishing and to fill them in on the church. And so they invited her and she said yes, and so off they went. When they got to the middle of the lake they started to put their gear together and the woman said, “O dear, I’ve left my rod on the beach.” So she said, “You go ahead and I’ll just go back and get it,” And she stepped over the boat and started to walk across the water to go and get her rod. And the churchwardens said one to the other, “Now isn’t that just like a woman to forget something.”

I am not quite expecting that of women ministers! But do they have a place in ministering in the church? What is the place that God has for them? Duncan has already quoted Genesis. In Genesis chapter 1 we are told that God created man, mankind, male and female, and then we get a fuller story in Genesis 2. In the Authorised Version it says that God created Eve as a helpmeet for Adam. I looked up the dictionary, and the Oxford dictionary says that a ‘helpmeet’ is a ‘helpmate,’ and that is a misunderstanding of Genesis 2 v 18, that’s the Oxford English Dictionary. The helpmate is a helpful companion. What was Eve supposed to be helping with? Was she supposed to be looking after Adam, or was she supposed to be helping Adam in the job that God had given him, which was to look after the garden and tend it? I think that Adam was given Eve to help him in the work that God had given him in the world, to look after creation.

I would like to look at the Church in England because it was that translation that’s really formed the way we look at women. In England in the Celtic church, women did have some authority and they did have leadership roles. St Hilda is the one who is always quoted. She had been the abbess of a double monastery; that is a monastery that had men and women in different wings of the building. After being at Hartlepool she then moved to Whitby and founded a new monastery for men and for women. There she was over a number of outstanding men, including Brother Caedman who wrote religious poetry; one of the first people to write hymns to help people remember the Bible and their faith. Bede wrote about her. Bishop Alden and other devout men who knew her and admired her innate wisdom and love of God’s service often used to visit her.

But she wasn’t the only one. Abbess Ebba was another woman who was abbess of a double monastery; and St Bridget in Ireland was over four different double monasteries, and there are various stories told about her; some of them rather apocryphal, I think, including the one that she was made a bishop by a very old bishop who was rather blind and started on the wrong service when he was making her an abbess.

I blame the Normans for the change in the position of women, both in the church and in society at large in England. The Nonnans brought all those stories about knights in armour riding forth to defend these defenceless women from the dragons and other dreadful things. The Normans had this picture of women at home doing their embroidery, like the Bayeux tapestry. Not that it was ever really like that at all.

When the men went off to war, the women were left at home to manage the estates and bring up the children. But the church changed. Monks and nuns were separated and women no longer had authority except under men. And the theology was changing too. The verses about women keeping silent in church were remembered but other’ verses about women were forgotten. If you remember your church history, you will remember that so much was forgotten that by the end of the 15th century even the Gospel was forgotten, and it needed people like Martin Luther and other brave reformers to bring back to the church the truth that they had lost.

And so the reformation brought about again a change in the thinking, not just in the church but again about everything. Sir Thomas More, “The Man for All Seasons,” was on Saturday. He educated his daughter Margaret as well as he would have educated sons, and if you remember the film on Saturday, he offers to teach his wife to read, but she didn’t want to, she had been brought up in the old way. Sir Thomas More was the new way of thinking; that women should be able to read, and read the Bible for themselves.

Henry VIII educated his daughters. Elizabeth was fluent in French, German, Italian, Latin and Greek. And she was also theologically with it. When someone asked her about transubstantiation she knew that if she gave the wrong answer under Queen Mary, she’d have her head oil And she said about the sacrament of communion: “Twas God the word that spoke it, he took the bread and break it; and what the word did make it, that I believe and take it,”

Of course it was only the rich girls that were educated, but then it was only the rich boys. With the reformation there was a change of attitude, but that didn’t last very long. In “Adam Bede,” the Methodist Preacher in the story, Dinah Morris, has by the end of the book been forbidden to preach along with the other women. But when the Methodist movement was new, the women (along with the men) were part of taking the news of the Gospel of Jesus, which again was beginning to get lost in all the ramifications of the Church of England. Elizabeth Fry, a Quaker, served God by visiting people in prison.