Revving up

The C of E’s pioneer women priests are waiting anxiously for their first female bishop

Diocese by diocese, the Church of England is voting in favour of women becoming bishops. Last week Truro, Norwich, Blackburn, Rochester, St Albans, Wakefield and Winchester gave their ‘yes’ vote to the draft legislation, bringing the total to 29 dioceses out of 44 in favour, well over the 50 per cent mark needed to allow it to go back to the General Synod for final approval next year. So far only two dioceses have voted against: Chichester and London. And even London (a notoriously prickly diocese on this issue) very nearly voted in favour. House of Bishops: two in favour (Kensington and Stepney), one against (Edmonton) and one abstention (the Bishop of London himself). House of Clergy: 39 in favour, 41 against. House of Laity: 45 in favour, 37 against. So (requiring a majority in all three Houses) the outcome came down to two clergy votes. In Chichester the vote was similarly close — except that both its bishops voted against.

For women priests, following all this is as gripping as watching the swingometer on election night. Dotted and isolated across the Diocese of London, the pioneer female reverends, though dismayed by their own diocese’s result, have been quietly delighted to discover that all over England, from Truro to Carlisle, the vast majority of clergy and laity are coming out in favour of what seems to them the obvious and proper next step. The current situation seems to them a theological nonsense.

‘I wish we’d done it all at once like the Province of Sudan,’ the Revd Lucy Winkett, Rector of St James’s Piccadilly, told me. ‘There, it was all decided in one night.