Lambeth is gearing up for its conference in Canterbury. After last week’s Synod debate in York, the “issue” of women in the episcopate is fresh in people’s minds once again. One leading Bishop said last week that it was unwise to have debated women in the Episcopate immediately before Lambeth, as it created potential divisions at a time when unity is key. I cannot believe that people say dumb things like that. Unity? Once again it’s women who are supposed to say “it’s OK, it doesn’t matter really, let’s not upset the men with the boys’ club attitude.” The men with a bit of grit about them, I’m glad to say, were glad to have the debate and glad to endorse women joining in with Church. It’s high time the Church’s unity didn’t depend on women fading into the middle distance in a nice floral tea dress. It’s not that I don’t understand about the importance of unity. It’s just that when we disagree about how to do things it shouldn’t always be the women who have to back down.

The unwieldy Anglican insitution is at least stumbling a baby step at a time towards a Church that treats women as fully part of the human race. Meantime Churches that like to boast about their freedom from “the Institutional Church” often have their feet even more stuck in the concrete than we do. As the Synod was uncomfortably picking its way through the prospect of female Bishops, New Frontiers was endorsing the Old World attitude at its conference.

Such backward-looking attitudes are depressing, and I would give up on Church entirely were it not for the realisation that we don’t look back far enough – to Jesus of Nazareth. He included women in his groups of disciples, women among his friends, inspired a woman as one of the first evangelists, and appointed woman to be the first ever to proclaim the good news of the resurrection.

The Right Rev. Catherine Roskam was the fourth woman ever to be consecrated Bishop. She said to the Wall Street Journal: ”I have to say in my own diocese I am not a “woman bishop.” I don’t even feel like a “woman bishop” in our synod, …I am just a bishop who happens to be a woman. I’m in my thirteenth year of consecration — at the beginning, the newspapers were filled with the phrase “woman bishop.” How it changes over time is that people encounter the ministries of bishops who are women and it ceases to be an issue.”