Ordination of Women: Some History and My Experience

One July 29, 1974, eleven women and three bishops processed into the packed, un-air-conditioned Church of the Advocate in north Philadelphia for an ordination service. For the first time in the Episcopal Church, the ordinands were the eleven women, all of whom had been to seminary, had been approved by their dioceses for ordination, and had already been ordained deacons, a necessary step for anyone to be ordained a priest.  Church of the Advocate had been a prominent center of urban ministry and civil rights witness for decades.

This Sunday, we will show the documentary The Philadelphia Eleven, during fellowship hour, which tells their story and the what came next.

At the end of the service, the eleven women were priests.  Their ordinations were non-canonical, meaning only mean were allowed to be ordained at the time. The Episcopal Church had voted twice, in 1970 and 1973, to not yet ordain women. Since the ordination non-canonical, the ordaining bishops were retired so they could not face tangible punishment.

The pushback was immense, but so was support for the action. In 1976, the Episcopal Church approved the ordination of women and recognized the ordination of The Philadelphia Eleven (and subsequent Washington Four) as priests in good standing the Episcopal Church. Their ordinations were valid, but illegal so the legislative action regularized their status without requiring the be ordained again.

In 1977, women began to regularly be ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church.

The Philadelphia Eleven were not the first women ordained in the Anglican Communion. The Anglican Church of Canada approved their ordination in 1973.  Yet, decades earlier, in China in 1944, Florence Li Tim-Oi became the first woman to be ordained in the Anglican Communion. Florence was a devoted lay leader with a powerful ministry in war-torn China. With hardly any priests left, her bishop recognized her gifts and ordained her because of expediency - he needed priests to tend the faithful under such threat. 

After the War, Florence’s ordination cause a crisis within the Communion. She voluntarily stepped back from priestly ministry until the Communion came of one mind. In 1968, the Anglican Communion recognized that there were no scriptural barriers to the ordination of women and that provinces (individual churches that make up the communion) were free to make their own decisions on the matter.  Florence again took up priestly ministry, and the movement to ordain women spread. Today, most of the provinces of the Anglican Communion around the world ordain women as priests and bishops. Even in places that might seem very conservative, such as several African provinces, women are ordained.

Fifty-One years after the ordination of The Philadelphia Eleven, the ordained ministry of women is still not fully recognized within the Episcopal Church. Only in the last decade or so has access to radiation for women become mandatory within every diocese. Clergy and congregations can still opt out for conscience reasons. Five congregation in the Diocese of New Jersey do not recognize the sacramental ministry of ordained women, including our bishop.

In 1983, I attended the ordination of the first woman in South Carolina. The Bishop was very supportive of the ordination of women and slowly raised up people in the process. One of my classmates in High School had an Episcopal priest for his father, and then his mother became ordained, too! 

When I moved to Rhode Island in the 1991, my congregation called a Rector who could not recognize the ordination of women. In 1994, Rhode Island elected the Rev. Geralyn Wolf as their bishop, which forced his hand. He ultimately went over to Rome, with his wife and four kids and was ordained a priest under their provision for dissenting Anglican clergy.

In many ways, Bishop Wolf was everything he wanted in a priest, except for her gender. He was gracious, welcomed her to the congregation (at the time, bishops could only visit with the permission of the rector), and respected her leadership and authority but refused to receive communion from her.

Bishop Wolf herself went to seminary in the early ‘70s with no guarantee that ordination would be possible. She refused to be a part of The Philadelphia Eleven or Washington Four because she believed strongly in the ordination oath to be obedient “to the doctrine and discipline of the Episcopal Church,” which, at the time, did not ordain women. She was among the first ordained in 1977, very aware that the Eleven likely made that timeline possible.

When Bishop Wolf ordained me in 1999, my name went on an internet list of “tainted priests;” that is, male priests ordained by women. The idea was that we were “tainted” and therefore not validly ordained.  The list was circulated among male-only advocates so they would not accidentally receive communion from a “lay person masquerading as a priest.”

I tried finding that list recently, and it is either so will hidden it cannot be found or no longer exists. Regardless, at this point, there are so many men ordained by women throughout the Anglican Communion that it would be impossible to keep up. That’s a good thing.

It is true some people to look at The Philadelphia Eleven and other early ordinations as self-centered (a woman saying “I want my place at the table”) or more interested in “justice” than “ministry.” Looking at the lives of the Eleven, the Four, and those who came after, this is extremely far from the truth. 

Yes, justice was a part of the story, but justice in the sense that women are fully human and are baptized. Women were recognized as apostles (though not among the Twelve) in Scripture and the early church. Is masculinity or humanity intrinsic to priesthood?  The best scholars and theologians recognized in the 1960s that it was humanity, not masculinity. Even the Vatican Pontifical Institute for Biblical Studies admitted as much at the time before back-tracking. 

One slogan popular in the 1970s was “If you can baptize them, you can ordain them.” The ordination of women has taught us so much in the last fifty years - eighty, if you go back to China. It has taught us about tenacity and humility. It has taught us about the power of baptism to empower us as the people of God, and the power of God to call some of us into a more-focused sacramental ministry regardless of our human traits or who we love.

In the life of the church, there is the idea of a provisional action. That is, something is done and tested over time, but is not accepted as fully legit until it stands the test of time. Some today still claim that the ordination of women is merely provisional. I cannot see that. It has become intrinsic to who we are as a church, and its fruits have been profound in the daily lives of the People of God and in the ability of the church to embrace more fully the ways of compassion and equality revealed to us by Christ.

I was at a clergy conference where  the Rt. Rev. Barbara C. Harris, first woman to ordained a bishop, was asked about possibly being provisional. She put it this way (paraphrasing from memory), “After decades of being threatened, spit on, called names, and marginalized, after serving faithfully as priest and pastor and then as bishop, after being at the bedsides of the sick, hearing confessions and absolving the penitent, blessing the dying, celebrating communion with those in prison, and confirming young people in their journey with Jesus, I do not feel provisional.”

Join us Sunday to learn more about this part of our history and the power of God to work in all people, and even within a reluctant and timid institution, to further the grace of heaven.