On the very week to the Church of England issues a major report on evangelism (forward by the ABC and ABY), the ABC and ABY announced their cunning scheme to appease traditionalists within the church by putting women bishops in a second tier. Maggi Dawn is no longer willing to defend the two men:
The more pressing problem for evangelism, it seems to me, is the ongoing debacle about women in the Church, this week of all weeks. Yesterday we learned that the Archbishops seem OK with proposing a compromise on women bishops that downgrades the status of all the women in the Church. It beats me how you can put that together with an upbeat view of evangelism. They might feel fine about evangelising people into a Church that continues to give women second class status. I do not. You don’t have to go back that many decades to find a church that disallowed people from becoming priests or bishops because of the colour of their skin, or because they had a disability. Those barriers have been broken down in the name of justice, and rightly so; no-one would dare uphold such an idea now, and even if they thought it privately they wouldn’t dare to say it out loud. It seems outrageous to me that we continue to believe that it’s OK to delay indefinitely the active acceptance of women at all levels in the Church. Its patently obvious that the world at large thinks so too, and this unacceptable injustice towards women is far more of a blight on evangelism than shyness.
Read it all. H/T, again, Thinking Anglicans.
The Lead has been following The Rev. Dr. Dawn‘s views on #mitregate as well.
Prior to finding Dawn’s cogent comment here’s what we were going to say about the Evangelism report:
C of E issues 45 page white paper on evangelism with no table of contents. Media coverage at The Guardian and The Telegraph.