by Mouneer Anis, Barbara Gauthier, and Gerald McDermott, The North American Anglican
Global Anglicans have been congratulating themselves ever since their 2023 Ash Wednesday Statement declaring they would no longer recognize the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury because of the Church of England’s decision to bless same-sex couples. Their recent Abujah Affirmation gives its leaders a high-five for obeying the Bible’s “plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.”
It is ironic, then, that global Anglicans who claim to prize the Bible and historic tradition are circumventing both biblical and traditional approaches to ministry and polity (church government).
These are not secondary issues. On the long front in the war between secularism and orthodoxy, they are sites of the fiercest battles. For secularism’s god is, arguably, Equality. There is to be no distinction between man and woman in ministry, and laity should join clergy in determining church practice and doctrine.
Yet the historic Church has paid careful attention to both Scripture and tradition on these matters. Jesus was a revolutionary in the way he treated women and had plenty of godly and gifted women to choose from, but he restricted the apostolate to men. Paul reserved pastoral and sacramental ministry to men as well: “I do not permit a woman to have authority over a man . . . A bishop must be the husband of one wife . . . . Let deacons be the husbands of one wife” (1 Tim 2:12; 3:1-2; 3:12).
Paul made clear that this sexual distinction followed from creation rather than the Fall when in justifying sexual differences in ministry he pointed to God’s order in creation: “Adam was created first, then Eve . . . . For man was not made from woman, but woman from man” (1 Tim 2:12-13; 1 Cor 11:8).