Please Presbyterian, Don't Revisit Female Ordination

In a previous article, I parodied the pro-discrimination views about female ordination that are sadly percolating through the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. Not even I, though, for all the gallons of sarcasm I poured into that article, could have satirized this trend as well as the Church itself did in this year’s General Assembly.

What a stinker this issue has become, a matter considered settled – resolved, in fact, five decades ago – till the Church decided it needed a new rod for its own back in the form of another squabble. “If you like a good row, join a church,” as a man said; what a state of affairs. Our Christian communities have so much better things to do than bicker, a theme to which I return at a later stage.

Presumably, there was a time when the General Assembly’s function was to strengthen the bonds between congregations across this island through constructive discussion, bookended by prayer and worship. That’s the situation that all Presbyterians of goodwill aspire to have again.

Today, the General Assembly has become an annual ground-zero for whichever mushroom cloud of animosity the church has detonated under itself. I wouldn’t be surprised if long-suffering clergy have started marking it in their planners with a skull and crossbones or a biohazard symbol.

This year, South Belfast Presbytery brought a motion before the house to mark the Church’s 50th year of equal ordination for women: ‘the Presbytery requests that the General Assembly make plans to use the opportunity to encourage women in leadership roles within our denomination on the same basis as men, ’ the text read, ‘and to explore what can be done to facilitate more women exploring a call to ordination in the future.’

The debate on the motion — conducted amid audible chuntering from some of its opponents, though the majority behaved civilly — wound up without resolution when the house voted to curtail discussion and move to the next item of business. Read the motion again, in light of how things played out, and I’ll wait while you bang your head against a wall in despair.

To the wider public, nonsense like this – wrangling over who can or cannot serve in the pulpit – makes PCI look aimlessly lost in the contemplation of its naval. So many delegates rose to declaim against South Belfast Presbytery’s motion that after a succession of naysayers, the Moderator invited speakers in favor to jump ahead in the microphone queue to balance things out. You know that you have lost whenever that happens.

This is likely why Dr. Trevor Morrow, an egalitarian former Moderator, was the one to propose a curtailment of debate, or ‘passing from the question,’  probably for fear the house would vote down the motion. Morrow must – along with representatives from South Belfast, who subsequently rowed in behind him – have gauged the mood in the room from the tenor of debate up to then.

It was a wise calculation; defeat for the motion would have been disastrous because it would have shown that a majority within the General Assembly no longer believe in equal ordination. This would, in turn, have given complementarians a pretext for their own vote on the disbarment of women from the vocation. The motion would, in this dreadful scenario, have backfired spectacularly. Morrow’s intervention was tough medicine, but one that averted a nightmare alternative.

Let’s rewind, though, to the debate which preceded Morrow’s gambit. In the course of an inglorious forty minutes, the prize for most… er… unconventional argument surely goes to the lady who said: ‘If we keep producing blue books [of annual reports, in which the motion was printed] of this size, slow readers like me will need to take a week’s holiday in June to get it read before the Assembly.’

The motion was barely two pages long, Ma’am. It ran to less than 400 words; I checked. If excessive material ended up in the blue book, what exactly would you like to have omitted apart from this one highly specific motion? Who says you have to read it, anyway? Did Jigsaw have you chained to his bathroom floor, holding you prisoner till you’d parsed every footnote?

I’m being unfair, though; she was referring to the 2023 blue book as a whole. Were the South Belfast motion taken out – all 1¼ pages of it, in a 416-page document – I have no doubt she wouldn't need any time off work at all. Everybody knows that you can read a 414¾-page document with ease, perhaps even in one sitting, but not a 416-page one. The latter will certainly detain you for a full seven days.

And so, the year is 2023. Northern Ireland’s largest Protestant denomination cannot even bring itself to tell female clergy, “Well done, ladies; you’re doing a sterling job!” Honestly, Pleistocene glaciers made faster progress towards the 40th parallel than Irish Presbyterians are making towards equality for women. The glacier of equality has even begun to slide uphill again, defying gravity like Idina Menzel.

What’s really tragic is how these immature fights over gender detract attention from the good work in PCI. The Beyond These Steps initiative, for instance, opened up a dialogue between the Church and working-class communities as well as young adults. The 2022 World Development Appeal raised over £440,000 (!) for causes like the Tahaddi project, a Lebanese non-governmental organization that alleviates poverty. These are, I can sincerely say, great achievements. Two Presbyterian women also got accepted to train for the ministry this year!

I’d like to finish on this positive note. Enjoyable as it is to fling caustic jibes at ideological opponents, I do not relish at all the rancor that is weltering like an ulcer within Irish Presbyterianism. This was, after all, the tradition within which I was raised. I sometimes wonder whether the Church I was baptized into still exists, but I know that all is not yet lost; I have cited examples of real contribution to society from this very same Church. More of that, please.

Too many good people – inspirational Christians, along with rapscallions like me – have simply walked away from it all. There are only so many spiritual punishment-beatings a person can endure before deciding they have  had enough; it’s time for PCI to swallow this dose of reality. Focus on the things, like outreach and charity, which make a difference to the world’s neediest and – who knows? – you might woo back some former members.