by George Conger, Anglican Ink
In a five-part series published through his Substack newsletter *The Anglican* over the past few weeks, the founding rector of Christ Church Plano and veteran of more than four decades of ordained Anglican ministry has attempted what most of his colleagues have long avoided: a sustained, candid, publicly accessible examination of women’s ordination as it sits at the beating heart of the Anglican Church in North America’s present crisis. The series deserves careful reading. It also deserves honest assessment.
Roseberry frames his project with admirable modesty. “My purpose is not to relitigate a sensitive issue or to generate more heat,” he writes in the introduction. “I want to help us think like Anglicans: to read Scripture carefully, listen respectfully to the wisdom of the Church, and engage one another with both conviction and charity.” Whether the series achieves that goal is a question we shall return to. But it is worth noting, at the outset, that the mere fact of attempting it publicly — naming his own change of position, inviting disagreement, and holding the conversation in the open — marks Roseberry out from the great majority of Anglican leaders who have preferred to manage this issue through polite institutional silence and avoidance.
Part One sets the historical stage. When the ACNA was constituted in 2009, Roseberry recalls, the founders were in the mode of lifeboat operators. Dioceses, bishops, and congregations fleeing The Episcopal Church arrived from sharply different ecclesiological traditions — Anglo-Catholic, evangelical, charismatic — and not every dispute could be adjudicated before the vessel was launched. The question of women’s ordination was, in Archbishop Bob Duncan’s famous phrase, resolved by adopting “dual integrities”: an agreement that faithful Anglicans held differing convictions, and that those convictions would be mutually respected.
Fifteen years on, Roseberry observes, the arrangement is fraying.
Read Women’s Ordination: A Five Part Series from The Anglican