is this church safe for me?
My facebook feed has been full of reactions to the new Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne. While I worshipped in an Anglican church for a number of years, it is a long time since I have been involved in that space. So, I am watching as a somewhat disinterested observer. In the week before that, I was seeing commentary about a 5 minute segment on the ABC which talked about women leaders in the church in Australia. There is not much nuance you can get into in 5 minutes, especially when people from the Uniting, Catholic, Lutheran and Anglican churches all had something to say, but there was no small amount of complaining that they didn’t get every single detail in the world correct. The conversation around these two events demonstrated something for me.
Firstly, women in leadership is still a hot issue in the church. In denominations that ordain women, as well as denominations that don’t. It’s also a continuing issue in denominations that don’t ordain their clergy.1 Of course, ordination is only one data point in a whole range of practices and behaviours that demonstrate whether women are valued as people within a church. And once the women ‘issue’ is dealt with, the next common ‘issue’ in the conversations is often the acceptance of queer people.
Many commentators don’t seem to realise that there is an overlap between the groups ‘women’ and ‘queer’ people, so the acceptance of women often really means the acceptance of cis, straight, hetero-passing women (who perform their femininity within the range of acceptable parameters).
I saw a comment bemoaning the fact that Baptist women were not included in the ABC story. Baptists don’t practice ordination,2 and even though the segment had leadership in the title it really focussed on the issue of ordination, so that might be the reason they were not included. But I couldn’t help reflect on the recent NSW Baptist decision to disaffiliate two churches becuase they welcomed queer people. The church rejecting people for being accepting of queer people just isn’t news, it is business as usual. The twenty-five year debate in the LCA over ordaining women that has just ended, however, is somewhat newsworthy. This IS a new thing, even though the LCA is tiny.
This kind of leads me to the second point. One intersting point made about the Anglican Archbishop election3 was that the vote was not covered in mainstream media even though it was apparently unanimous and very quick.4
My reply would be that in large part the media don’t care about churches. They don’t care about our squabbles. They don’t care about doctrinal minutaie. They don’t care about getting every little nuance and wording right because even if they did, the readers or watchers don’t understand the difference and for the most part don’t care either. Years of churches acting with arrogance and impunity has diminished the public appetite for Christian stories.
What they do care about is how the church continues to harm people. Women, queer people, disabled and differently abled people, children, vulnerable people, Indigenous people, non-white and non-western people. All the ‘least of these’ that apparently Jesus cared about. I saw lots of questions about whether people would be safe under this man’s leadership. And each time I saw those concerns dismissed - sometimes with the assurance that he 100% supports women5 - it waved a giant red flag for me. If any one person is not acceptable to the church in their full embodied humanity, then none of us are safe because there will always be a reason to reject us. And the media and the general Australian public know this all too well.
NCLS has some statistics around this: https://www.ncls.org.au/articles/women-in-church-life-and-leadership/
EDIT: Apparently Baptists DO practise ordiantion, but they don’t require it. Thanks for those who let me know I got it wrong.
It is kind of interesting to me how many articles I read that just refer to ‘the Archbishop’ without clarifying which archbishop they are talking about, so I think it is always important to be clear about which denominations Archbishop we are talking about.
So, apparently the Melbourne archdiocese is fully in support of women at all levels of ministry, but not one person thought that for the first time in history the Archbishop should be a woman, even though there was a token woman as a candidate.
Becuase it’s very clear he doesn’t accept queer people’s rights to have full and fufilling lives.
Amen!
And linking back to your previous article, Michelle, are the other 'outliers': the truth-tellers, the people who have experienced trauma and/or discrimination at the hands of the church, those with disabilities of any kind, the psychologically damaged, survivors of violence snd crime, refugees, the socio-economically less well-off etc etc. Some individual congregations are supportive - which is wonderful to see. But then I remember, I'm the church too ... I wish there was a space I felt safe instead of defensive ... maybe then I'd find the courage and strength to do more ... so tired of it all.