October 22, 1920 — Lambeth Conference and the Ministrations of Women, Southend, UK

MR. CHAIRMAN, MY LORD BISHOP, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,

I should like to begin by saying with all the frankness that has been desired, that I do, like all other women of my way thinking, regard the Report of the Lambeth Conference on the Ministry of Women as a very real step forward, and realise that it has been given to the world in a spirit of good faith and genuine desire to see what is right and to do what is right, which ought to make those of us who are not satisfied that “enough is recommended, feel grateful to the Bishops who composed that Committee.

If the Church of England herself is as broad-minded and progressive as her representatives at Lambeth were, we shall see a very live Church indeed during the next generation.

Having said that, I should like very briefly to comment on the points which I consider are the most important in this report.

First, there is the very frank recognition of the fact that neither with regard to the prophetic nor the priestly office is the exclusion of women to be based upon the words or the action of Our Lord. This is crucial. We modern women feel very strongly that St. Paul is to be followed most closely when he tells us to test everything by the standard of Jesus Christ. Those of you who attach greater importance to other passages in St. Paul’s epistles will remember that this is at least a fundamental one! And consequently, we do not feel that we can accept an answer to so great a question as this, unless it agrees with the authority of our Lord Himself. Let me then quote the Report: —

With Bishop Westcott and Dr. Hort, we venture to think that the Great Commission was given to those who were representatives of the whole Church; and among those representatives we have every reason to believe that women had a place. Again, we are led to conclude that the evangelistic charge was delivered to a company which included women.

The last sentence of this paragraph of the Report reads: “Demonstration, in this as in so many other important matters is beyond our reach. But at least the strong probability is that women were among the recipients of the Great Commission and of the evangelistic charge as afterwards they were of the gift of Pentecost.”

From this, it follows that the exclusion of women from the ministry, however much it may be justified on grounds of custom or expediency, at least cannot be justified by the words of our Lord Himself.

So far, indeed, as the ministry of the Word is concerned, the Church has already recognised the power and vocation of women. Women are prophesying all over the world and the country which has produced a Mrs. Booth and a Mrs. Josephine Butler can hardly be said really to have lost the tradition that women prophesy as well as men.

The Church has, to a large extent, conceded this claim. With the question of priesthood, it is different and here again we find important statements in the Report. I do not know whether their Lordships realise it or not, but it does seem to me when they affirm that the setting apart of women as deaconesses constitutes oraination,” and that the ordination of a deaconess confers upon her Holy Orders, they make untenable —  the contention of some of our opponents, that a woman is incapable of the grace of ordination. The Bishops propose the admission of women only to minor orders; yet they speak definitely of “Holy Orders.” Again I submit that when that is granted it is not possible to hold the extreme position any longer.

The question ceases to be one of principle, and becomes a matter of expediency and of order. There again we have reason to be grateful to the Bishops: they have not asserted anywhere in the Report that women should be excluded from the priesthood, on principle. They have not based their exclusion on the belief that women are, for some reason, fundamentally incapable of Holy Orders. The Bishops rather base their refusal (which is not affirmed, but rather implied or understood) upon the long established custom of the Church. They tell us they do not see, at present, at any rate, any reason for interfering with that long established and Catholic custom.

I want therefore to ask this question: —

What is the vocation to the prophetic or priestly office? What gifts or qualities constitute that vocation? The vocation of the prophet surely consists in having a message from God. It may be a great and fundamental message for all time, as with our Lord. It may be a message to a single generation. But whether great or small, it is the possession of that message that makes the prophet. The Church can hardly prevent such a one from exercising his vocation. The prophet is a very difficult person to silence. But the Church has decided that the message shall not be delivered within the walls of a church, if that message be given by a woman. Why it should be this one building, namely the House of God, where she may not deliver her message given by the Holy Spirit of God, I have never been able to understand. But then, I do not belong to the sex which specializes in logic. I find no answer to my difficulty in the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians, for though we know that St. Paul said a woman should not preach in church, he could not have meant in a consecrated building,” for there were no such buildings when he spoke. He must have meant by ” the Church “the congregation of the faithful, and when the Bishop of Chelmsford asked Miss Picton-Turbervill to address the Church Congress he was really “scrapping” St. Paul more than most people have quite realised. The Church Congress is surely a congregation of the faithful! Here we have a Bishop as President, Bishops and Canons presiding at the different meetings, priests as well as laity in the audience. After that, to say that women must not speak in the Church because St. Paul said they must not, is a little late.

The Church has in fact abandoned the idea that women cannot exercise a prophetic office. She did so when she agreed to send women all over the world to preach the Gospel and for people now to split hairs about the special building, or the special place in the building, from which a woman may be allowed to speak, is really farcical.

When I was prohibited by the Bishop of London from taking the Three Hours’ Service in St. Botolph’s, we meekly went from the church to the school-room. The Bishop afterwards thanked me for this, and said that “of course the schoolroom was all right.” I contend that if my congregation in church would have been “the assembly of the faithful,” they still were the assembly of the faithful in the schoolroom! And I assure you I gave them the same address, because I was not prepared to alter it at the last moment. The difference was in the building in which I stood, and yet the saying of St. Paul on which all this is based could not have referred to the building.

We rejoice then that the Lambeth Report sets aside this unreal distinction as to place and frankly recommends that women should be allowed to preach in church. It is always an advance for people to have the courage of their convictions, and the Bishops have to make it clear to the world that the Church does not attach importance to such minor points as the character of the building, or the place in the building, in which a prophet’s message may be delivered. It is indeed difficult to understand how anyone can read the Gospels and think Our Lord would have attached importance to such a detail.

Surely it is what people say that matters, and not the place from which they say it?

Now let us turn to the other great office — that of the priest. The vocation of the prophet is to have a message from God. What is the vocation of the priest? I do not find it set out in any authoritative book. But it seems to me, judging by Our Lord Himself, who was the great High Priest, and judging by people who have everywhere in all ages been recognised as having the priestly vocation, that that vocation consists in a great passion for souls, a love for every individual human being, such that, in the sight of the priest, every human being, whether good or bad, young or old, learned or ignorant, black or white, is simply a child of God, whom it is not possible to see perish without having that anguish that a mother has for her dying child, for whom the priest is prepared to travail in spirit, as a mother travails in body, that he may bring that immortal soul to life. That passion for souls seems to me the great mark of the real priest. But if this is so-if this is the vocation to the priesthood, can anyone in this Hall tell me what it has to do with sex? The ministerial priesthood is a spiritual vocation, and our Lord has told us that sex is not eternal-it is not of the spirit-therefore in spiritual things there cannot be any sex exclusiveness or sex barriers. This passion for souls is the vocation of the priesthood, and it has nowhere about it the mark of sex. If you will look back over history, I think you will find that the greatest figures of the Church were both priests and prophets. Our Lord was both Prophet and Priest, and after Him came perhaps the greatest of all the saints, St. Francis of Assisi, a man who was both priest and prophet. He had both a message for the world and a love of the individual soul. Others have only one vocation. I suppose that St. Augustine, Luther, Wesley and others of like character were men who had rather the great message to deliver — whose appeal was rather to the great mass of humanity, than the individual office of the priest; while St. Francis Xavier and St. Francis de Sales were the ideal priests and men like Pusey and Keble who were not on that grand heroic scale that belongs to the prophet, but rather had the fineness and sensitiveness which are the mark of the priest. It is only the greatest of all who have both vocations on a great scale; but many have one or the other, and perhaps all of us, in a measure, have a little of one and the other. Most of us have care for some individual souls. In women like St. Catherine of Siena or St. Theresa of Spain, you get the great prophetic message to the world, and withal that love of the individual soul which makes these great ones serve humanity, not in one way only but in both. And it is astonishing that in such a matter as this, anyone should raise the question of sex at all.

But it is argued that, though these gifts may be found in women, they cannot be publicly exercised because of the expediency which keeps women to some extent, out of public life, and here I want to touch upon a thing which it is very difficult to speak about, but which I believe to be at the back of a great deal of the opposition. Forgive me if I speak very plainly upon this question. I have again and again seen it written, and heard it said, that a woman cannot be at the altar, cannot come within the sanctuary rails, cannot minister as a preacher, without great danger to the people to whom she ministers, and that danger I suppose, to put it frankly is this: we are all in these days of psychology, aware that the religious and sex emotions are very closely allied, so much so that the age of conversion very often coincides with the age of development into manhood and womanhood. We are even warned that a person may fall into the mistake of thinking he is religious, when it is the other side of his nature that is moved. Spiritual revivals of a certain type are sometimes accompanied by an increase of immorality in the district-not when rightly and wisely conducted, but when the appeal made is too emotional or sensational in character. Is there not a danger then, it is argued, that when women in the pulpit appeal to the people, they may arouse the emotions and move their hearers in an undesirable way ? Is it not detestable to think that people might mistake the appeal of sex for the appeal of religion?

Ladies and Gentlemen, when I hear people say that, and know how true it is, how tragically true, that the religious and sex emotions are very very closely intertwined, I ask myself why do not men realise that there may be a hardship to women, in having men only in the pulpit?

Has it not ever occurred to you that women have religious and sex emotions? Certainly it has! The woman who mistakes a flirtation for religion, the woman who does not know when she is sentimental and when she is religious is the bye-word of the religious world. You all know the kind of woman to whom I refer. And let me remind you that a man, nine times out of ten, knows if he is in danger. I ask you to believe that in many cases a woman does not know. She is brought up in ignorance of what sex means. She genuinely does believe her emotion is religion. She has not even the safeguard of knowledge that a man has. I believe that men and women who cannot distinguish between religion and sex, are over-developed. They are abnormal. But such over-developed people are not found among one sex only, and I ask you to have a little consideration for the women who are suffering and who have suffered under this difficulty for centuries.

I know that there are women who would rather perish than make their confession to a man, simply because they are conscious of their own danger. It is a refinement of cruelty to a woman who has that temperament to forbid her to go to one of her own sex. Her wish to do so ought to be respected. I wish the Lambeth Report had spoken a little more frankly on this point.

Had it stated simply that men and women, as part of the laity were entirely equal, a beginning would have been made. For this would affirm the right of women to be allowed to serve at the altar, as a layman may do. And if this is granted, it rules out the idea that it is a danger to have a woman in the Sanctuary during Divine Service. Let us admit that there are men, as there are women, who feel this danger — who are sexually over-developed. But who expects the great mass of normal people — those who are temperamentally sane —  to regulate their lives according to the wishes of those who are abnormal?

A pamphlet written by a very distinguished physician, whose name will be known by all who know anything of scientific research, Sir Almroth Wright, made this claim for the abnormal man. He claimed that because there are men who cannot work with women, therefore women should be excluded from public life. The claim has not been admitted. We will not consent to have the world regulated by people of abnormal temperament.

In the East there are men who cannot look upon a woman without danger; for their sakes, women are secluded and veiled. In the West we have acted differently, and more justly. While we respect and pity the abnormal, whether in man or woman, we deny their right to demand the sacrifice of a whole sex, or to expect the world to conform to their standards.

To say that the sight of a woman in the pulpit, or a woman in the sanctuary, is a “danger,” is simply an insult to the normal man and woman of decent standards. To ask us to regulate our custom by other standards is unworthy.

While therefore the Bishops have gone a long way, I regret that they did not make this point clear. If they had said that men and women as part of the laity were equal, it would have been the beginning of the end of that destestable kind of opposition, which bases itself on the needs or wishes of abnormal people — on a view which is not that of the normal man and woman.

Finally, let me remind you that if women desire to give a greater service to the Church than has been possible for them in the past, it is not because they think to get anything for themselves. I say, without hesitation, looking round on the women that I know, that it is rather that they are profoundly moved by a desire to serve, by a conviction that the only solution of our problems is a spiritual solution — the only answer to our difficulties is Jesus Christ.

Some of us have done political work, social work, work in industrial life, public work of different kinds. It is because we are increasingly convinced that at the bottom of all these problems there lies a real spiritual difficulty, that we have been forced, step by step, into the demand to be allowed to do more purely spiritual work, and I suggest that, though any one of us may be mistaken as to our own vocation for such work, this is a point which should be decided on its merits, and not by a refusal of all women.

The Church ought not to refuse the commission where the vocation exists. We speak too much as though the Church gave the vocation. It does not. The vocation, where it exists, is given by God. The Church cannot give you a message to deliver to the world. The Church cannot create in your heart the passion for souls. These are the gifts of the Holy Spirit of God. It is for the Church to recognise them and give the commission. Where they are found, the commission ought not to be withheld, for it is not a question of whether people “want” this, that or the other kind of priest; it is a question whether God has given the vocation. And, to my mind, part of that Report should have been the assertion that where God has given the vocation, there the Church should give the commission, whether to rich or poor, white or coloured, man or woman.

To the question whether I could say anything upon the point raised by Canon Goudge in a discussion, when he suggested that the ordination of women would have a bad effect on family life.

There are two answers. One is that the same difficulty has always been raised with regard to women doing anything outside their own homes. We have come to the conclusion in regard to other matters than this, that it is best to leave it to the individual to decide between the claims made on her. My own feeling is, that probably the number of women who would desire to be ordained either to the diaconate or priesthood, would be considerably smaller than the number of men. If a woman marries, and while she has young children, she will generally feel her first duty is to them. The ordained woman would therefore probably be either unmarried, or would have children who are grown up. I should like to point out that children do grow up! And I submit that a married woman who has had children and brought them up, is very likely to be a woman who could give very fine spiritual service to the world. I would further suggest that there are, especially in this country, a very large number of women who will not marry — who cannot marry and it has been the glory of the Christian Church (I think this is true of no other religion in the world) to teach that even an unmarried woman has a human value. As Canon Scott Holland said, the “old maid ” is a purely Christian institution! In other countries there are no old maids, simply because if there are too many girls, they are exposed or thrown into the river soon after birth.

I am always trying to teach the young girls who form a very large part of my congregation, and who form a very large part of those individual people who come to me for advice, that their lives need not be either wasted or futile, because a cruel war has made it very probable that they will not marry. I do not know what answer, ladies and gentlemen, you give to such young women to whom life has become a tragedy (because when a woman is born with a vocation for marriage and motherhood, it is a tragedy if she loses it) — I do not know what answer you would give them, but I will tell you what I say. I tell them — “You can serve the world wherever there are people lost or suffering or weak, or sick, or in any kind of human need. That instinct of motherhood you can use for the service of humanity. It is not easy, but it is possible, and it is the path chosen by some of the greatest women God ever made.” I can say that to them, and I believe it is true, and from my own personal experience, I know that such a life can be as rich and full of opportunities for service as the life of the woman who lives and serves in her own home.

If a woman is not to have children, is there no vocation for her in the world? I claim there is, and one of those vocations is surely the service of the Church of God.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, In answer to a question, let me point out that I did not say that, because the Lambeth Report affirms the presence of women on a certain occasion when the Great Commission was given, that therefore they should at once be admitted to ordination. What I said was that we could no longer argue that Christ excluded them. Most of us feel that if Christ definitely excluded women from ordination, or if anything that He ever said or did, justifies us in believing that He would have excluded them, that ends the matter. Naturally therefore I regard it as a great gain that the Lambeth Report deliberately rules out that possibility: that in the opinion of the Bishops, when Our Lord gave the Great Commission, there were women as well as men present. You cannot, therefore, quote Our Lord as having ruled against us. And we believe that Our Lord, on the contrary, acted and spoke in such a way as would suggest that He did not make any spiritual difference between men and women.

I have not developed this argument to-day because to-day it has been my special duty to deal with the Lambeth Conference Report. Otherwise, I invariably go on to point out the different ways in which our Lord touched upon these problems, and the attitude He Himself had towards men and women respectively, from which I deduce the fact that He Himself would not have erected this barrier. When He gave the Commission He did not say These special men out of this assembly shall be ordained.” He said “To the assembly this power is given.” It therefore rested with the Church to what special individuals the exercise of the power should be given. Christ gave it to the whole Church and the Church was to decide. And the Church did decide, and she gave it at first only to men. One of the speakers has pointed out that this was an age filled with the Holy Ghost. I do not think that the Church was more directed by the Holy Spirit at one moment than at another. I believe the Holy Spirit has guided the Church throughout all the ages. I believe the Church is guided now, and is therefore able to develop her institutions. Our claim is that the time has come to go forward and to give the ministerial priesthood to women.

Some say “No — you run the risk of schism.”

I would remind you that the Lambeth Conference did not only consider the question of the position of women. It also considered the question of re-union — the possibility of re-union between ourselves and other bodies — and that no one raised objection on the ground that in some of these bodies, women are already being ordained.

I am told it is not possible “lightly to set aside” the great tradition of the Church. Such a phrase as “lightly to set aside is not a fair argument. No one dreams of “lightly setting aside a great tradition.

I should not dream of asking you now and at this moment to say at once that women should be ordained. I do not consider that enough thought has been given to the subject or that the Bishops are in a position to say at once that women should be ordained. No one more than I would regret a light” decision on such a matter of importance. Yet such decisions may have ultimately to be made, even in matters of great importance.

After long consideration the Church of England did decide to set aside the custom of the celibacy of the priesthood, and did not consider it was doing anything that was wrong, or beyond its powers. Our forefathers realised that Churches cannot be united by clinging to the errors that they happen to have in common! Such a union” would be like a rope of sand. Each question must be considered on its merits; whether it is right or wrong. The nearer you get to the Truth — which is Christ — the nearer you will get to one another. But if you stick to a thing which is not right, in the hope that that can form a bond of union, you are trying to unite the Churches with ropes of sand. I therefore contend that our sole concern in considering this question, must be whether it is after the mind of Christ or not. If after the mind of Christ, it must, in the long run, be a bond of union, for the Churches are all endeavouring to get nearer to Christ.

I do not know any fallacy that seems to me more serious when you are approaching the question of re-union, than the fallacy that you can arrive at a real understanding by refusing to consider whether any problem that suggests itself to you is ​after the mind of Christ or not, because you fear a danger to re-union. Christ alone can make us One. Let us seek unity by conforming ourselves to Him.

I cannot forget the words of God about tradition —”Ye do make the Word of God of none effect by your tradition.” We are just as able to deal with matters of this kind in our time and circumstance, as anybody who lived a good many centuries ago.

Now one thing we must all try to avoid in a matter of this kind, is making it a party question.

We must each consider the matter on its own merits, and not be swayed by any party feeling. If we do that, then we are entrusting ourselves to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. If we do not, we are putting self prejudice in the place of guidance, and we cannot expect the right result.

We must take our stand on the Gospel as preached by Our Lord. God is Love — His whole teaching was love, and he that loveth is born of God. Now self is the antagonist of love. Where self is, love cannot be, and therefore in all we do we must put self far away and seek only the good of others the good of the community. We must preach this matter — the women must preach this matter, not because they want to serve as priests or deaconesses or anything else, the only question that must be considered is whether the use of the ministrations of women in our time, in our country, in our social conditions is for the glory of God, the advancement of His Kingdom— the Kingdom of love and joy.

Source: “The Lambeth Conference and the Ministrations of Women,” by A. Maude Royden (London: League of the Church Militant (Anglican), J.C. Frances, Athenæum Press), pp. 1-12.

Also: Full Report of the Lambeth Committee on the “Ministrations of Women,” with Resolutions, Extracts from Encyclical Letters, and Bibliography (London: League of the Church Militant (Anglican)), pp. 2-12.