'Nelson Jones omits mention of the non-conformist chuirches'

"Oh, drat!" says Rowan. "Why didn't I think of that? And now I've gone and resigned. Fiddlesticks."

If you were thinking of sneaking past the theology of it, Roy, you won't be believed. There are none on the face of the planet more expert at biblical theology than Anglican evangelicals, and the free churches have no secret solutions to the problem. They never did. It's _because_ Anglican evangelicals have the highest scholarly and personal reputations to uphold that Rowan is stuck where he is. The Vatican, before Europe was liberated from its grip, had enough trouble suppressing women, though its motive was not biblical, but political. But Protestantism, that ostensibly sourced its beliefs to the Bible, not politics, could find no justification to promote women alongside men. When it has done so it has been with rather sly dishonesty and hypocrisy.

Nelson has more nous than to mention those awful mavericks, anyway. For one thing, nobody much notices free churches today. Many of them caved in to secular pressure decades ago. You can hear a United Reformed, Methodist or perhaps even Baptist female preaching the same godawful twaddle that males preach, at a venue near you. But that doesn't count when those imposing people in weird hats are all men. The public is highly impressionable, you see, and is in 'hushed awe' of those hats. At least, that's the idea. Though whether Nelson wants women to wear them in order to devalue the awe and the hush, to eventually let it be swept away, is unclear. So the maverick church, with low social kudos, religious status or even downright invisibility is one thing. An established church, part of the Establishment, with active participation in the political and social process, is another. The jolly old Sally Army, best known to beer drinkers, is just not to be compared with it, really. Don't blame me, none of it is my idea.

In any case, what you might have noticed, having dutifully read the whole short thread, is that the 'non-conformists' (what a revealing word) don't have diocesan bishops. A 'non-conformist' can by definition go to the church in the next street if he doesn't want to hear a woman preacher. The Anglican can't do that. This is why the concept of 'flying bishops' was introduced, to permit those who insist on male bishops to stay in the CoE with good conscience. But of course the feminists see that the authority of women bishops would be fatally damaged by that. It would be worse than the status quo.

Though, by and large, most members of free churches did not have to move churches before the 20th century. Until recently, most of them were just as biblical on the role of women as Anglican evangelicals. The strong and well-publicised impetus for change in this respect has been very recent, and exactly simultaneous with the rise of feminism generally, in the media and the workplace; and this has all been inspired by mercenary capitalists and crooked 'scholarship'; not all by discovery of some long-hidden secret in theology.

It was the Bible that plainly told the church member that this was not possible, and he or she accepted it. Women could be prophets, yes, but prophets and prophetesses do not speak on their own accounts; rather, they reveal the non-scriptural utterances of deity, simply; without interpretation, as a teacher does of the Scripture. (Not that a real prophet would either want to stay long in a denomination, or be tolerated in one.) Deborah was a judge, true, but as a rebuke to Israel, whose men were at that time too pathetic and faithless. If Junia(s) was a woman, rather than a man, and there is no compelling reason to believe that Junia was female, then, with Andronicus, she may have been well-known _by_ the apostles, as Aquila and Priscilla were, not _as_ apostles. This is quite likely, since Paul was writing to a church he had never visited, and the reported feelings of prominent members of other churches would have been of particular value and comfort. If she was accounted apostle, it may have been because she was married to an apostle, and was apostle in an informal sense in that she assisted an apostle. It is unlikely that Paul would have greeted one man and one woman in the same 'breath' unless they were married. Though, that both had been in prison with Paul suggests that both were men, anyway. The very flimsiness of this argument demonstrates the desperation of the whole position. Only an explicit statement that women can lead men would suffice, and then of course it would flatly contradict explicit Scripture. It's contemptible, to be quite honest. Mountain out of a mole-hill. Case dismissed, with costs.

Women would make excellent priests and bishops. Why do you think men had to make up rules to stop them being those things?

You ony have to stop people from being something if they want to be something. You ony have to introduce negative propaganda about them when they are better at it than you are.