Feminism is corrupting the heart of the Church Posted 10th March 2017 By Belinda Brown The Right Reverend Philip North, selected to be a diocesan Bishop is to ‘withdraw’ from his appointment. Why? Reverend North does not believe in women priests, and this has caused more than a rumble in parts of the Anglican Church. Residents from his new diocese spearheaded by Reverend Professor Martyn Percy and his wife Reverend Canon Dr Emma, have been working to get Rev North to either change his views or stand aside. They have succeeded in their mission. This is the second post he has been pressured by activists in the Church to withdraw from. In a statement he said "The highly individualised nature of the attacks upon me have been extremely hard to bear. If, as Christians, we cannot relate to each other within the bounds of love, how can we possibly presume to transform a nation in the name of Christ?" While Rev North is guided by Theology, God is suprisingly pragmatic and his laws serve the human condition well. I also don’t think women can be, or should be ordained. The motivations for doing so are influenced by secular ideology and the creation of women priests threatens the integrity of the Church. The desire to have female priests and bishops is driven by a secular idea of equality based on power and status. This ignores that a servant is equal to his master and we are all equally precious in the eyes of the Lord. The insistence on a secular equality of power and status between male and female is particularly pernicious. It is a denial of the difference and complementarity of the sexes and these were created by God. Above all, it suggests a stubborn and wilful denial, even a rejection of the greatest gift God has given to women; the gift of new life. It is turning our face from God. For if we truly valued that ability, we would never feel threatened or undermined by male power. We would know that we are totally and utterly the equal of men. We don’t properly value our reproductive potential because we have lost sight of the value of life itself. This is a consequence of feminism which supports abortion, and divorce, encourages us not to look after our children and is inimical to life itself. We can see it reflected in an extremely influential feminist text: “Women’s body seems to doom her to mere reproduction of life; the male by contrast… must … assert his creativity externally … In so doing, he creates relatively lasting, eternal, transcendent objects, while the woman creates only perishables – human beings”. By devaluating our reproductive capacity, feminism blinds women to their equality. And it is feminism that is corrupting the heart of the Church. For when we properly value human life and therefore our capacity to reproduce it, we see our roles as complementary. Women give birth to the physical body. Men as fathers are providers, as priests provide spiritual substance. Through baptism a person is reborn. Click here for the rest of the article: http://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/belinda-brown-feminism-corrupting-heart-of-church/
To me, one of the sad things about this matter (The Right Reverend Philip North) is that it seems to indicate a failure in the compact that allows the Church to be a place where people with different views on this matter can still recognise the worth and value of each other and celebrate the vast array of things that bind us together. Back in 1998 the Lambeth Conference – a gathering of Anglican Bishops from around the world – noted that in relation to the unity of dioceses the Conference “in particular calls upon the provinces of the Communion to affirm that those who dissent from, as well as those who assent to, the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate are both loyal Anglicans”. I think this is a very sad matter. I believe we need to be bigger than this.