Ban conservative bishops until we have gender equality, Church told

Sep 19, 2017 by

by Harry Farley, Christian Today:

A senior Anglican academic is calling on the Church of England not to appoint any ‘traditionalists’ – those opposed to women priests – until a third of all bishops are women.

Warning the Church is damaging ‘its public witness and Christian credibility’ by promoting those who oppose female ordination, Prof Martyn Percy, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, says the CofE ‘needs to embrace equality unequivocally’.

Calling on the Archbishop of Canterbury to aim for 50 per cent female bishops in the next 20 years, he says the Church is ‘the public’s spiritual body and so needs to correspond to the very best standards in public life’.

In an essay published in Christian Today, Percy says conservatives who disagree with female bishops should, like pro-Apartheid groups in Nelson Mandela’s South Africa, be protected but not given power.

‘It could never be ‘illiberal’ to oppose the appointment of a pro-Apartheid politician as the new chief government minister for education. It would simply be rational to object to such an appointment,’ he writes. ‘There is no half-way house.’

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