utilizing the untapped resources of the female 50% of the membership in ways
that are fair, satisfying and productive?
Heulwen M. Ridgway (Miss)
Canberra, Australia
The Time Has Come
To The Editors:
I can appreciate and respect the leadership of the General Church for having a
great deal of difficulty changing its established position of excluding ordained
female clergy. Over most of my 82 years I have accepted and had no reason to
question the Church’s ordination policy.
However, in recent years the question has grown steadily in my mind. I
have come to see through the eyes of the wife and five daughters whom the
Lord sent me, and through the eyes of other women, the effect on women
of an exclusively male-oriented clergy – sometimes seen as the last vestige of
a formerly male-dominated world. Many women can only relate to another
woman in the deepest and most intimate questions of their lives, and the
Church must endeavor to meet their needs better.
While endeavoring to do our thinking from the Word we cannot ignore
the world because that is where ultimate realities exist. The Lord’s Word, and
His Truth, are timeless and yet our understanding of them and their application
to life are subject to change as time passes.
In Victorian times of the late 1800s when the “fathers of the Church” were
“putting it together,” so to speak, female clergy anywhere were so rare as to not
even be “on the radar.” Those “fathers” could not have helped looking at the
doctrines, and their world, through their own lenses, formed by thousands of
years of male leadership history.
Might they not have been persuaded to limit the priesthood to males
simply by seeking any doctrinal points that seemed to support their world
view of women at that time? More than a hundred years later we must question
if the “fathers” got it right then for all time. Additionally, those times were at
least a generation or more before any women even had gained the right to vote
in civic or church affairs.
In General Church affairs women were only given the vote and
membership in Church corporations with the incorporation of the General
Church in Canada, which founding meeting in Toronto I attended in 1971.
The admission of women to membership in the General Church International
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