Christmas is a time for listening

As Christmas approaches we prepare to celebrate the birth of the Christ-child, the Prince of Peace. Sadly in our world there are too many wars, conflicts and disagreements. People refusing to listen to others, shouting but not hearing, are the cause of many a conflict. Jesus teaches us to listen.
The strengths of the Church of England include its tolerance of difference. A wide range of beliefs is tolerated, as is a wide range of liturgical practise of how church services happen, and a very tolerant approach to whether the official service books and their texts are used at all. The Revision Committee of General Synod are thinking about how we can have women bishops. There is no doubt, we will have women bishops at some point. 2020 is the latest guess of when that point will be reached. Our society can not understand how women can be discriminated against in a church which preches that in christ there is neither male nor female. Our society looks to the church to catch it up. This is one reason why I am pleased that the revision committee has decided not to take away some of the authority of women bishops by statute, but instead to have a code of practice or guidelines under which women bishops delegate some of their proper functions to others to undertake. One of these functions would be ministering to those who don't beleive in women's ordination. A bishop is either a bishop or isn't a bishop, there is no half-way point. No one wants people to leave the Church of England, and this is not a campaign to disenfranchise Anglo-Catholics, but the Church's governing bodies see no theological objection to raising women to the episcopate. Women will be bishops, and they will be properly ordained whether we like it or not, just as women are properly ordained priests, even if some would rather they hadn't been.
One of the latest developments from Rome has been a structural way of welcoming former Anglicans into the Roman Catholic Church while allowing them to retain some of their Anglicanism. Clergy who transfer will need to be ordained and their priestly status or episcopal status regarded as null and void. It is a difficult thing to do when faithful priests have administered the sacraments to their congregations for decades. Can they regard all they have done as invalid? At least in the Church of England we have the concept that sacraments can be 'valid but irregular'. The sacraments remain sacraments and their validity is retained, but to imagine that you have never administered holy communion, absolved sins, blessed people, baptised them or married them, is something I can't do. I think that the revision committee of synod are trying to balance the needs of different groups as best they can. Some people will never believe that a woman can be ordained, others will never believe that episcopal authority can be taken away from diocesan bishops. What remains, or I hope will remain, is provision for those who can't in conscience agree to the majority or democratic view to remain in the Church of England because they are needed. Proper provision is likely to be the provision by women diocesan bishops of a bishop to whom they have delegated their rightful authority. Perhaps a quicker way of dealing with this issue would be to remove the church's exemption from the sex discrimination act. An act of synod could alternatively use simple language like: 'where legislation refers to the training, consecration and duties of bishops for 'he' and 'him' read 'he/she' and 'him/her'.
We all know that if you put three people in a room you will get four opinions of how a problem can be solved, and the issue of women bishops is no different. How can we accept people who are different from us? I hope that the Church of England can use this issue as a good example of how difference can be tolerated, and people respected who have different views. The church should be an example of how disagreements can be managed, and it is no different locally nationally or internationally. People don't have to agree to get on, and treat each other with dignity and respect, to listen and really hear what the other person is saying.
May God bless you are you prepare to celebrate the birth of our Saviour Jesus Christ.
Your friend and vicar,
Adrian