Steps

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

After man first set foot on the moon, mankind was left with the historic statement, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind". Everyone understood that the statement was not intended to exclude women but to encompass all humanity in the technological advancement of mankind which has seen men and women astronauts venture into space, part of a sequence of small steps that led to Kennedy's vision of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth".

Around the same time people in the Anglican church were taking what were represented as small steps, not towards a giant leap for mankind, Christ did that, but in what now can be seen clearly as a secular policy in furtherance of gender politics in the church, a process which is about to destroy the faith of many Christians in the name of feminism, one which already has done for many. In my previous Blog entry I referred to a Guardian article by Andrew Brown. One paragraph continues to rankle:

   "... there will be female bishops, as there are already female priests, and these will be treated exactly the same as male ones – except by the men who don't want to treat them equally and who believe that God has called them to undermine women's authority wherever it appears." [My emphasis.]

What was initially regarded as an honourable position in the Anglican Church, a church which assured traditionalists that they would continue to have a place, has been turned into one of having to suffer accusations of misogyny, prejudice, discrimination and, now, a "a belief that God has called them to undermine women's authority wherever it appears". How crass. God made man and woman in his own image, not hermaphrodites but both male and female, equal, neither superior nor inferior but with different roles in creation. Perhaps Mr Brown doesn't realise that both men and women, male and female, are equally opposed to the ordination of women priests and bishops, woman more vehemently in my experience but more prone to suffer in silence as they do not possess the strident streak exhibited by those who presume to speak for them as implied by the incorrectly named WATCH - Women and the Church. Women's authority does not depend on being a priest or a bishop. In Britain women are rightly employed at all levels in society, but 'authority' in the Anglican Church has become a banner used by people who have sold their souls to secularism in direct contradiction to Christ's example in choosing male Apostles, a tradition handed down in His Apostolic Church from a time when pagan priestesses were common.

The 'small' steps that turned deaconesses into deacons thus permitting their ordination as priests have now become that giant leap for the Church of England with the proposals before Synod to ordain women as successors to the Apostles in defiance of the wider Catholic and Orthodox Churches with whom we share our creed. To brand men and women  who oppose this innovation and whose only desire is to keep the Apostolic faith as 'undermining women's authority' is as absurd as it is offensive.