I’ve been putting off writing this post because the way things are in the world today, it is bound to be misunderstood. I’m writing to clarify some things I said, and didn’t say, in the two preceding posts, both of which alluded to the debate in the Church of England about the ordination of female bishops. As most people reading this blog will know, I am a member of the Orthodox Church, and the Orthodox Church does not ordain women as bishops, priests or deacons. That has led some people to assume that I must be against “women’s ministry”, and some have said as much to me. One colleague in the University of South Africa’s department of church history once complained to my department, the department of missiology, about their employing me at all, because she said it was “sending the wrong signals”. Perhaps that’s why I hit the glass ceiling there. I read a number of blogs of women in ministry in different denominations, and some of them I know read this one, and though none of them has actually said anything about it, it is possible that some of them might be a bit annoyed with me for “not accepting their ministry”, or there might be some, like my former colleague at Unisa, who will tell them that they ought to be annoyed with me for that. And so I take a tentative step into the minefield, attempting to clarify, and yet aware that I will probably just succeed in muddying the waters, theological, ecclesiological and ecumenical. In alluding to the Church of England’s debate about the ordination of women in my earlier posts I was careful not to mention that issue directly, because I don’t have a dog in that fight. It really does not matter to me one way or another what the Church of England decides. The first of these two posts, on St Euphemia and Paul the Octopus, was based on a sermon preached to an Orthodox congregation, and alluded to the Anglican debate mainly in order to show the different attitudes towards Tradition found in the Orthodox Church, and among Western Protestant denominations. I also noted that while the Orthodox Church does not have female bishops, priests or deacons, it does have female apostles, like St Olga of Kiev. So the Orthodox Church is not against “women’s ministry”, because these two women had pretty powerful and influential ministries. In second post, on the decline of Anglo-Catholicism, though I did not explicitly mention it, the Anglican debate about the ordination of women lies behind it, though what is at stake is really a question of ecclesiology. Among South African Anglicans, Anglo-Catholic ecclesiology was dominant until about 1960, and thereafter it began to decline, and it has reached the point where there is no longer any room for it in the Anglican Communion. Anglo-Catholic ecclesiology is not the same as Orthodox ecclesiology (though many Anglo-Catholics seemed to think it was), but it pointed me towards Orthodox ecclesiology, and for that I am grateful to it. Another sign of the decline of Anglo-Catholic ecclesiology, which I did not mention in the previous two posts, though I have written of it elsewhere, is the mutual recognition of ministries of South African denominations involved with the Church Unity Commission (CUC) — Anglicans, Congregationalists, Methodists and Presbyterians. So the distinctions between different ministires (like bishops, priests and deacons) became blurred, and all became part of “The Ministry” — a kind of pan-Protestant religious functionary. Among Pentecostals there was a similar process, though with as slightly different nomenclature. The minister of a local congregation was called “The Pastor”, but sociologically there was very little difference. Some denominational differences remained, however. Anglicans retained vestiges of episcopacy. Congregationalists retained vestiges of congregationalism. Methodists retained vestiges of connexionalism. But whether the full-time functionary in charge of a congregation was called “minister”, “pastor” or “priest” made little difference. The theological interpretation was tailored to the sociological reality. And in that kind of reality it matters little whether the main religious functionary is male or female, except to a few Evangelicals who believe that male “leadership” and “headship” is scriptural. I sometimes think it is a pity that in this process the Methodist ministry has lost some of its distinctive features. Historically the Methodist ministry consisted of itinerant pastor/teachers, who travelled in a “circuit” caring for and enouraging local preachers and class leaders, and following up the work of more widely itinerating evangelists, like John Wesley. Until they separated from the Anglicans, the ministry of the sacraments was left to the local parish priests, and wasn’t really the concern of the Methodist ministry. After the separation from the Anglicans, Methodist ministers had to perform a sacramental ministry as well, and over the years their ministry has gradually become assimilated to that of Anglican priests, so that now the main difference is connexionalism as opposed to episcopacy. If John Wesley had been Orthodox, he might have been known as “Equal-to-the-Apostles” too, for his apostolic preaching ministry, like his contemporary, the John Wesley of the Balkans, St Cosmas the Aetolian. But when I read the blogs of women who are ministers in Western Protestant denominations, I accept their ministry as much and as little as I accept that of their male colleagues. One of my favourite fiction authors is Phil Rickman, and the protagonist in many of his books is Merrily Watkins, a female Anglican priest, in the west of England. Rickman originally wrote tales of supernatural horror along the lines of Stephen King, and when Merrily Watkins first appeared in his books, it was with her appointment as a replacement for the diocesan exorcist, who was retiring. In accordance with the modern sociological interpretation of “The Ministry”, the post was renamed “deliverance consultant” when she took over. I have to admit that, having been out of touch with Anglican life and thought for the last 25 years, and the Church of England for the last 40, I now get much of my knowledge from Anglican blogs, interpreted through the lens of Merrily Watkins, so I may have a weirdly distorted picture of what is going on. If Anglicans, or Methodists, or any other Christian body, want to rearrange or reinterpret their ministry in any way they like, that is really none of my business. I find it interesting, of course, because I’m interested in the history of Christianity and its growth, and as a missiologist I’m interested in the way that ministry affects mission and vice versa. But their decisions about whether their ministers should be male or female or both does not concern me, and I have no stake in what they decide about it. The Orthodox understanding of ministries is somewhat different, and I’ve tried to explain it here in terms accessible to Western Protestants. One observation I will make, however, on Protestant ecclesiology and ministry, in comparison with Orthodoxy. In South Africa there are many denominations that fall into the general category of “Zionist”. They comprise one of the largest groups of South African Christians, and one Zionist denomination, the Zion Christian Church (ZCC), is the largest single Christian denomination in South Africa. Martin West, who made a study of Zionist and related denominations in Soweto, published his findings in 1975 in a book Bishops and prophets in a black city. The title summarises his findings. He found two kinds of ministries in the churches, which he summarised as “bishops” and “prophets”. Zionism appeared in South Africa about 100 years ago, when Zionist missionaries from the USA (Zion City, Illinois) converted a former Dutch Reformed congregation in Wakkerstroom, in what is now Mpumalanga. After four years the missionaries returned to the USA, leaving their South African flock to sort themselves out. They sorted themselves into white-led groups, like the Apostolic Faith Mission (Pentecostal) which organised themselves along lines similar to the Dutch Reformed Churches (right down to the architecture), and the black-led groups, called Zionists, who were left to themselves and cookbooked their ministry patterns from the Bible, observing other denominations, and their own experience. And what they came up with was “bishops” and “prophets”. And the bishops were often male, while the prophets were often female. The woman founder of the St John Apostolic Faith Mission, Christianah Nku, was its prophet in chief, yet she appointed her husband as a bishop. The Zionists, left to themselves, seemed to have rediscovered something that the Orthodox knew from 2000 years of church history. But with Western Protestant bodies differences tend to be more apparent. The Orthodox Church does not have female priests, but it does have female pastors. Some might think that the Pentecostal pastor is the functional equivalent of an Orthodox priest, but it is not so. A priest is not necessarily a pastor, and a pastor is not necessarily a priest. An Orthodox priest may be a pastor if he is in charge of a parish, but not all priests are in charge of a parish. And the Igumena (abbess) of a monastery is a pastor, but not a priest. People in Western Protestant denominations often have a “one-man-band” conception of ministry. Anyone who studies theology as an academic discipline is assumed to be seeking ordination. When I tell people that my daughter is studying theology at the University of Athens they someimes say “I didn’t know that the Orthodox Church had women priests.” But the fact is that most lecturers in the theology faculties in Greece are not ordained. And in the not too distant past many parish priests did not have an academic education. When I taught at the theological seminary in Albania ten years ago, about half the students were male and half female. And there are many ministries in the church besides the ordained ministries of bishops, priests and deacons. I wrote in another blog post about a deliberately misleading article in a British newspaper about disciplinary action to be taken against Catholic clergy who participated with episcopi vagantes in mock ordinations of “Catholic” female clergy. The article quoted one person as saying “This declaration is doubly disempowering for women as it also closes the door on dialogue around women’s access to power and decision making, when they are still under-represented in all areas of political, religious and civic life. We would urge the Catholic church to acknowledge that women’s rights are not incompatible with religious faith.” It seems strange to me that such a secular source should be quoted, someone who clearly doesn’t “get it”. No one has a “right” to be ordained. Anyone who sees it as being about “access to power” has got it all wrong, and doesn’t understand what the word “ministry” means. And most of the women who have ministries of various kinds in their churches whose blogs I read certainly don’t have that kind of mentality either. As I read their blogs, I don’t see any signs of a desire for “access to power”, but rather signs of a desire for an opportunity to serve. We may differ in theology, in ecclesiology, and in our understandings of ministry; we may not be communion with each other, but we can still communicate with each other and read each other’s blogs. Two whose blogs I read fairly regularly are Sally Coleman and Jenny Hillebrand, and there are several others as well. Do I think they should not be doing what they are doing, because they are women? No. That is for their own denominations to decide, not for me. Do I think that they are Orthodox priests? No, and neither are any of their male colleagues. Having said that, I hope they will still be willing to talk to me!

I read a rather sad blog post this morning, about the end of a parish blog. It was a parish diary of St Peter’s at London docks, and the priest who wrote it bids farewell to his readers. St Peter’s London Docks: I have decided to end the Peterite Blog. It has run for just under four years, some 198,000 of you have visited (over 600 yesterday), which is a goodish score for what never purported to be other than a parish diary online. I can see little future for a blog of this sort and thus it is a kindness to you all to end it. Hat-tip to A conservative blog for peace. It’s the end of a parish blog, and the end of a parish, and really the end of a way of life too. Reading the blog about the parish took me back fifty years, because that was what the Anglican Church was like in Johannesburg fifty years ago. St Peter’s, London Docks, must be one of the last surviving pockets of a kind of Christianity that was quite widespread and influential in the 1920s, but went into a serious decline after 1960. Fr Martin SSF Fr R D E Jones SSC Fr. J Caster SSC processing the relics of SS Peter & Paul Such sights used to be common in Anglican Churches in Johannesburg, and often involved priests from the Community of the Resurrection, the religious order to which Father Trevor Huddleston belonged. I never met Father Huddleston, but I read his book Naught for your comfort, which I recently reread. I also knew several of his colleagues in the Community of the Resurrection. The Community of the Resurrection also trained many of the black Anglican clergy at St Peter’s College in Rosettenville, next to their priory, and just across the road from St Benedict’s Retreat house, run by the sisters of the Order of the Holy Paraclete (OHP). All gone now. St Peter’s College was forced by the Group Areas Act to relocate to Alice in the Eastern Cape in 1963, where it joined other denominations in the Federal Seminary, which was in turn kicked out of Alice ten years later. The clergy who trained at St Peter’s, Rosettenville have probably all retired by now. One whom I met when he was a student there was Desmond Tutu who introduced himself as the man with the name like a motorbike (isithuthuthu in Zulu). He was one of the last. St Benedict’s was a place where many parishes in Johannesburg went for retreats, and also met for Shoe Parties, monthly gatherings where speakers would speak on various aspects of the Christian faith. The High Church ritual, with vestments, incense and birettas, went together with the kind of social activist Christianity represented by Naught for your comfort — a Christianity based on the theology of the Incarnation, and a high view of the church that regarded attempts by the government to separate by race people whom God had united in baptism as tantamount to blasphemy. That kind of Anglo-Catholicism had been nurtured in parishes like St Peters in Docklands, which in the 1920s and the 1930s were run-down slums, and Anglo-Catholic priests, many of whom had grown up in the relative comfort of upper-middle-class homes went to those parishes and worked among the poor. Many of that school found their way into the Community of the Resurrection, and exercised the preferential option for the poor. Not all the CR fathers and brothers were as overtly “political” as Father Trevor Huddleston, but they were usually less vocal about it, that was all. Another in the same mould was Arthur Shearly Cripps, who lived an ascetic life in Zimbabwe, then called Rhodesia. The Anglo-Catholic movement developed in England in the second half of the nineteenth century. It combined the High Church theology of the Tractarians with ritualism, which was unacceptable to many “Low Church” Anglicans at the time, so that the early Anglo-Catholics were often persecuted. The Ritualists followed many contemporary Roman Catholic practices, and indeed elaborated them. They believed that they taught The Catholic Faith, and had a strong sense of historical continuity of the church. In England, where the Church of England was the Established Church, many saw it as a religious arm of the State. But the High Churchmen had a higher view of the church than this. They saw it as founded by God, not man, and built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, rather than kings and prime ministers, and this was guaranteed by the apostolic succession of its bishops. When the Bishop of Cape Town tried the Bishop of Natal for heresy, Anglo-Catholics in England saw him as contending for “the faith once delivered to the saints” and many of them came to South Africa to work. And, like their colleagues in England, they tended to work among the urban poor, who in South Africa were mostly black and coloured. So parishes in the black townships, especially in the Witwatersrand, were often marked by the kind of processions seen at St Peter’s in Dockland. I went from an atheist/agnostic upbringing to a Methodist school with Protestant teachers who converted me to an evangelical “born-again” kind of Christianity, teaching the importance of personal commitment to Christ. When I left school, however, I was plunged into the Anglo-Catholicism of the Anglican Diocese of Johannesburg. In my parish, St Augustine’s, Orange Grove, we had High Mass with all the trimmings twice a year, at Christmas and Easter, and on ordinary Sundays there was Low Mass at 7:00 am and Sung Mass at 8:00. But when we visited parishes in Alexandra or Orlando or Meadowlands, or St Cyprian’s in downtown Johannesburg, there were 20-30 red-cassocked altar boys, and clouds of incense produced by thurifers who were amazingly dextrous and manipulated the censer like a drum majorette tossing a baton. It was in such parishes that political activists like Oliver and Adelaide Tambo grew up. In England the Anglo-Catholics lived side by side with the Low Church Evangelicals, and the Broad Church modernists, who are now called “liberals”. As it was said in those days, the three main parties among Anglicans were the Low and lazy, the Broad and Hazy, and the High and crazy. In Johannesburg, however, the Low Church were in a separate denomination, the Church of England in South Africa (CESA), which, perhaps to distance themselves even further from the Anglo-Catholics, became staunch supporters of the National Party’s policy of apartheid, and, among English-speaking white South Africans at least, constituted the “religious right” of those days. Several of their leaders attended and spoke at the far-right Volkskongress Teen Kommunisme (People’s Congress against Communism) in 1964, which denounced liberalism along with communism and racial mixing. But after about 1960, Anglo-Catholicism began to decline, and by the end of the 20th century it survived in only a few isolated pockets, like St Peter’s in Docklands. In 1966 I went to England to study at St Chad’s College in Durham, which was reputedly a High Church college, and there I encountered an entirely different brand of High Churchmanship, and one that in my mind was associated with the 17th century. There were several High Church Tories in the college, and, in marked contrast to the heroic priests of the London slums who took the preferential option for the poor, these took the preferential option for the rich and aristocratic. This new and effete version of Anglo-Catholicism I had never enountered before. Some of the new students at the college went to tea with the principal — I was from South Africa, and another from New Zealand, and the third was one of these High Church Tories. Whenever anything was mentioned that was inefficient or nutty about the church, he applauded it loudly. He appeared to think that New Zealand was still a crown colony, and the idea that New Zealanders no longer thought of England as “home” horrified him. He acclaimed the startling (to me) and radical revelation that the Bishop of Durham lived at Bishop Auckland, andthe Bishop of Jarrow lived in Durham. He was, of course, an arch-Tory, probably was wedded to the cult of King Charles the Martyr. It became apparent that some of this school were Anglo-Catholics mainly because they liked dressing up. Perhaps that kind of degutted Anglo-Catholicism will hang on a bit longer. When I got back to South Africa I became involved with the charismatic renewal movement, so if anyone asked me about my “churchmanship” (as Anglicans sometimes liked to do), I would say “Evangelical Anglo-Catholic Charismatic”, or “Revolutionary Orthodox”, depending on my mood at the time. Hands up and knees down, singing in tongues with incense. But after 1980 the charismatic renewal movement also went into decline. I’ve written about, and am writing about that elsewhere, and will say no more about it here. In the last post on the St Peter in Docklands blog there is a rather sad picture: And so to an end, the final picture, Peterite children at Walsingham being taught, its what we did. It’s sad because the children were being taught about a church that will no longer exist when they grow up. There is no longer any room for that kind of Christianity in the Church of England, and it began to die in Johannesburg fifty years ago. They will have been taught that some things were important that no one around them values, and their Christian faith will belong forever to a lost childhood. Twenty-five years ago now I left the Anglican Church, and that picture gripped my imagination as illustrating the main reason for leaving. In 1979 I attended the South African Christian Leadership Assembly (Sacla) in Pretoria, and various Protestant missionary societies had exhibitions in a hall, some of which I remembered from my Evangelical schooldays, and that reawakened my interested in mission and evangelism. In the early 1980s I joined with some others who wanted to form an Anglican Mission Association, and took university courses in missiology. But I also became increasingly uncomfortable about it. If one evangelises, and people come to Christ, then they also come to the Body of Christ, the Church. But it became more and more clear to me that the Anglican Church was not that Church. I would be teaching people things that fewer and fewer Anglicans believed. I would be bringing them into a church that was dissolving around me. I had, in my early Anglo-Catholic days, been taught about the ministries of bishops, priests and deacons, and the importance of apostolic succession. I was at one time responsible for training for ministries in the Anglican Diocese of Zululand, and tried to train people along those lines. But by the 1980s most Anglicans seemed to have an entirely different model of the ordained ministry. The majority saw them more or less in secular terms, like a chain of supermarkets, where the branch managers are called vicars, the regional managers are super-vicars called bishops, and the CEOs are called archbishops. The only difference between bishops and regional managers of a secular business was that bishops wore funny hats. And so I left the Anglican Church and became Orthodox, which in a way gathered all three aspects of my earlier spiritual journey — the evangelical, the Anglo-Catholic and the charismatic — and linked them into something bigger and richer. That is not to say that the Orthodox Church is perfect, and I’m not trying to proselytise among disgruntled Anglicans by saying this. But I can teach people and say “this is the Orthodox Faith”, and they won’t discover that most of the people the meet in the Orthodox Church don’t believe it, and believe something else altogether. Yes, there are plenty who don’t practise it (including me). We may try and fail and fail again to make the world fit the vision, mainly because we ourselves can’t make our own lives fit the vision. But at least we aren’t changing the vision every day.