Pastors' Spouses and Women Ministers

Judy's response to my pastoral stats post, together with this short and incisive post by Dana Delap, makes me reflect on my own situation.

Already the Beaker people have started suggesting to me that it would be better for us to have a married Archdruid - maybe as soon as Young Keith and Charlii have jumped over the birch-twig. After all, they say, the benefit of having a married Archdruid is that their spouse is available to do all those things that Archdruidical other halves are useful for. Already the suggestion is that, when Charlii puts on the official gold-trimmed silken pointy hat, Young Keith will be available for mowing lawns, tending the Moot House garden, and playing football with the more boisterous of the Little Pebbles.

Let's jump to my other theme. There's a little sting in Dana's comment that she is being blamed for the financial and numerical decline of the Church in the north-east. After all, the Church was financially fine and growing strongly, up to the point where the first women were ordained - and the Catholic Church in Britain and Ireland is, I believe, going from strength to strength. Whereas the reality, it seems to me, is that without the vast influx of women priests - often unpaid - over the last few years, the Church of England's creaking and archaic method of doing business could have collapsed already. There may be many - including many life-long Anglicans - who would think that was a good thing. But if the C of E finally rethinks the nature of its mission, to get to grips with the 21st Century, it will do so from at least a position of gentle decline, rather than radical disintegration.

In terms of the stats, they're pretty clear. There are now far more women priests than the number of male priests who left the Church of England over them. And in terms of theology, well the Church managed to cope with Gentile priests (when Jesus was a Jew); it coped with red-headed priests (when Jesus was almost certainly a brunet) - I'm sure if Gentiles and red-heads can represent Jesus despite their genetic dissimilarities, then so can women, if that's what you think the priest is doing.

Final thought. Margaret Thatcher died last month, and the people that hated her got "Ding-dong, the Witch is Dead" way up the download charts. When right-on, left-wing thinking people can stigmatise the only woman who ever became Prime Minister as a witch, that's not down to theology. But it feels a whole lot like the way some people regard women ministers. Not the ones that take a theological view and leave - the ones that stay behind and snipe.