To put it succinctly, I joyfully welcome and receive the gifts and leadership of women at every level in the church—lay leaders, Bible teachers, preachers, deacons, priests, and rectors. And although I am committed to and grateful for the dual-integrity unity we have in the Anglican Church in North America, I would be open to having female bishops.
I spent 30 years in complementarian church spaces. I wasn’t a hard core complementarian, but I suppose you might call me a “reluctant complementarian.” I had studied the issue a couple of times—once during seminary and then later in ministry, but was never convinced from scripture of the egalitarian viewpoint.
Though I was theologically complementarian at the time, the constraints on women in my former denomination—in my mind—went beyond Scripture. I sought to have women on our pastoral staff (and ones who weren’t solely working with women and children), we had women regularly teaching adult Bible classes, and we had women serving as deacons. Feeling the lack of women at the leadership table, we joined our diaconate with our session (i.e., the governing body of all male elders) into a combined leadership group we called the Pastoral Care Team. I would have gladly had women preach at Grace, but that was not possible in our former denomination.
So even though I was pushing the envelope in a certain way, at the end of the day I was still a complementarian.
When we came into C4SO, it was refreshing to be in a dual-integrity diocese. This gave me an opportunity to revisit my theological position in a context where there wasn’t a moving van attached to the process.
I began to read Icons of Christ by William Witt. That book changed my mind and made the Scriptures deeper and more vast to me. Witt allowed me to grasp that a hierarchy based on gender had no place in God’s original good creation. In addition, it became front and center in my mind that there is no gender hierarchy in the new heavens and the new earth, either.
Putting these two things together—God’s creational intent and eschatological vision— paved the way for me to see that denying our sisters the opportunity to preach, lead, and serve in any capacity of the body of Christ is a capitulation to Genesis 3 and the fall. In addition, such denial is also at cross purposes with our eschatological future. God’s good creational—and re-creational—intent is for men and women to joyfully serve alongside each other as full equals.
Our congregation spent all of 2023 prayerfully considering the issue and decided to joyfully receive and embrace women as deacons and priests in the ministry of our church. One of our pastors—Jamie Afshari—was recently ordained as the first female priest in our congregation. We also have women serving on our vestry and one of our co-wardens is a woman. Our church is immensely strengthened by the gifts, voices, and strength of our women.