This is ‘non-political.’
That is how a covering letter, from an Anglican stable, described a document released over the Easter weekend with the title ‘Affirming Evangelical Unity over the Theology of Men and Women.’
When something announces itself as nonpolitical I tend to smell a rat. In the affirmation the supposed secondary issue of the Complementarian vs Egalitarian debate over the roles of women in the church is framed as a threat to the ‘über-value’ of evangelical unity. Why the document? I think the timing says a lot. With Archbishop Welby having pushed through the first woman bishop in the Church of England some kind of reshuffling of positions within Anglicanism was inevitable. It is this which makes me feel that despite its protestation, the document is actually highly political. Two or three years ago it might have been different.
The re-emergence of heavy shepherds
What would you think if you received a letter from your church leaders that read like this? ‘Are church members …