Women, leadership and the church

Jane has been blogging about this so I thought I should get onto it too. She has 'blogged my memory' so to speak. Yesterday I meet women who are in leadership in the church. One told me about the bible studies she had facilitated using some of the RB methods that are on the Wision4life website. Another I had last seen in her kitchen in South Africa 15 years ago, at the end of our exchange period in 1994. She's now in ministry in Kent. I came home and read a bit in the Guardian about women clergy in the Church of England by Riazat Butt [http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/12/women-in-the-church]. There were some interesting bits:

Of the 512 male clergy who left in 1994 when women were ordained as priests, 72 came back. What's that story?

Of the 8,423 stipendiary clergy a smaller proportion are women (1,543) than are the nonstipendiary clergy (2,588 of whom 1,247 are women). What's the story? We had a similar disproportion in the two different streams in the URC at the time we wrote Daughters of Dissent (that's it on the right: about women and leadership in the URC).


Then there were a few thumbnail sketches about the ways in which women clergy currently exercsie leadership in the Church of England, including the story of one who now chairs several important committees. The URC also does committees and we have tried to balance committee members by gender. however, what we have not dealt with is work load by gender or any other criterion.


I also wondered about the story behind the story. For women clergy to lead committees is one story but why do we need ordained clergy to lead committees? All denominations do this: clog up the church beurocracy with ordained clergy. Why? Particularly when most mainstream churches also struggle with the availability of ordinaed leadership at local pastoral level. Why do we need priests or ministers, women or men, to chair committees? Of course you are hearing from a total meetings-phobic person here. I can understand that knowledge and skills in theology and ecclessiology etc may be required of a committee chair, depending on the remit of the committee. But to struggle for all those years for ordination of women to the priesthood and then celebrate by chairing a committee, however prestigious, well I just don't get it. Please someone, tell me the story of that.


Daughters of Dissent by Elaine Kaye, Janet Lees and Kirstry Thorpe is still available from the URC bookshop via the website http://www.urc.org.uk/