by Madeleine Davies, Church Times
Group is also encouraging women clergy to log experiences of ‘harassment’
A CAMPAIGN to end the provisions that accompanied the women-bishops legislation of 2014, put in place to provide for those unable to accept women’s ministry (News, 28 July 2014), was launched by Women and the Church (WATCH) on Saturday.
The campaign group hopes to see a motion brought to the General Synod, asking members to consider “whether it is right for the 2014 House of Bishops’ Declaration on the Ministry of Bishops and Priests to continue in perpetuity and, if not, to set a date for it to come to an end”. The plans were discussed at the “Not Yet Equal Conference” at St John’s, Waterloo, in London. WATCH aims to roll out roadshows across dioceses in the coming months, in the hope of getting the motion carried by diocesan synods. An alternative approach would be a private member’s motion.
WATCH is also encouraging women clergy to log experiences of “harassment”, with a view to bringing a case under the Equality Act (2010).
Among those who addressed the conference was the Area Bishop of Croydon, Dr Rosemarie Mallett, a member of the steering committee that drafted the 2014 legislation (News, 26 July 2013). She was “fully behind the amazing work that WATCH undertakes to hold the Church to account with regard to its iniquitous treatment of women”, she said. But she had hesitated before accepting the invitation to speak, because she was one of the five members of the committee that had put together what were now known as the Five Guiding Principles, “which makes me feel very much like an instigator, or at least one of the architects, of the problems that we are all still facing”.
The Principles were part of the package that accompanied the Measure that enabled the ordination of women to the episcopate. Embodied in a House of Bishops Declaration, they include a commitment to enabling to “flourish” those who, on grounds of theological conviction, are unable to receive the ministry of women bishops or priests, and to pastoral and sacramental provision for this minority “without specifying a limit of time”.
Read also: WATCH are on the move, from Church Society Newsletter