Post-mortem on women as bishops in Church of England

The Guardian does a post-mortem on the vote to allow women to become bishops:

Almost half of the lay people who voted against legislation to allow female bishops in the Church of England were women, according to figures released on Monday, as senior members of the church were urged to speed up reform or risk consigning it to years of ignominy and irrelevance.

Voting records released by Church House showed 33 of the 74 General Synod lay members who last week caused the long-awaited measure to fail were women and most of them are affiliated to the conservative evangelical group Reform or the traditional Anglo-Catholic movement Forward in Faith.

….

In spite of fears that some advocates of women bishops had contributed to its failure out of a belief that it made too many concessions to their opponents, the records showed the vote was comprehensively blocked by a powerful combination of conservative evangelicals and traditionalist Anglo-Catholics.

The records of Tuesday’s vote illustrated big differences in allegiances between dioceses. While some, such as Bradford, Hereford and Norwich, had a unified yes vote, with their bishop, clergy and laity all backing the measure, others, such as London, Guildford and Blackburn, had a strong novote among their lay people. In Chichester, one of the two dioceses to reject the measure earlier this year, six of the eight lay representatives voted against.

The details also gave succour to critics who say the house of laity has become profoundly unrepresentative. In Rochester two of the three lay members, and one of the clergy, who voted against the measure come from the same evangelical parish.

Thinking Anglicans has a spreadsheet of the voting here and a new roundup here. The roundup includes a statement from Women and the Church including this:

Bishop John Gladwin, the recently retired Bishop of Chelmsford, and Hon Vice President of WATCH said “The public humiliation and deep wound inflicted on the Church of England by the vote in Synod on November 20th has changed the whole landscape of this and many other issues. What a small minority has done is blow up the bridge to any compromise solution. The consecration of women into the episcopate has been moved from certainty to inevitability.”

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