Touchstone: Killing with Relevance
November 11, 2007
S. M. Hutchens

This week David Mills forwarded an article from the British journal The Telegraph titled "Women Priests and their Continuing Battle." Obviously written by someone in favor of the institution, it celebrates the godly patience of ordained women in the face of the frequently rude, always backward, opposition of people who don't seem to realize that their advent is an essential part of the revitalization of a national church where attendance has fallen radically in the past several generations. Since women bring so many vital qualities to the role that were absent when only men could be priests, obviously ordaining them can only be a step in the right direction, a step toward greater wholeness, and therefore toward what people are seeking.

I remember hearing pretty much the same thing in the sixties from the Bishop of Woolwich, who also insisted the Church of England could only survive by adopting a far more open stance to the new ideas and practices it had a reputation for resisting. His Church took much of his advice, women's ordination eventually coming along as one of its responses to the continuing call of its leadership for relevance. Of course, there is no recognition, much less acknowledgment, from people like this that the radical decline of their churches corresponds chronologically to their success in a search for relevance that began several hundred years ago, that there might possibly be some connection between decline and relevance, especially when the best-attended churches in their realms are almost invariably those where people looking for irrelevance go, and the more relevant a church is, the fewer people are likely to attend. the rest-Excellent!