The Recent Historical Background

Women in Ministry:
A Study

Published by Church Information Office
Church House, Westminster, SW1. 1968, pp. 9-13

Full-time service given by women in the Church of England is now largely undertaken by three groups:

(a) The Religious Orders;

(b) The Order of Deaconesses;

(c) A body of licensed lay workers which includes Church Army sisters.

Each of these groups has its distinctive history and background, and it is not possible to understand the present situation without taking into account this history over the last hundred years.

Outside our terms of reference, but not to be forgotten, is the growing use of women missionaries in this period. The Church Missionary Society first sent a woman missionary to Sierra Leone in 1820 and the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel records that in 1857 Miss Sarah Coombes, having been passed by the Archbishop’s Board of Examiners, went to Labuan. The very fact that women were being given increasing scope for service overseas, inevitably raised questions about their use at home.

The Religious Orders

Their revival in the Church of England dates from 1845, when Pusey founded a sisterhood for work in the parish of Christ Church, Albany Street. In 1848, the vicar of Wantage founded the Community of St Mary the Virgin, also for parish work, and within a few years twenty communities were in existence in different parts of England.

A new kind of religious community was founded in 1861 by Elizabeth Ferard, with the support of Dr Tait, then Bishop of London, the Community of St Andrew, whose members are both deaconesses and members of a religious community, and who work in collaboration with the diocesan and parochial system.

The revival of the religious life at first aroused much hostility and suspicion since it was generally identified with Roman Catholicism, but the devoted work of religious communities among the poor and underprivileged gradually led to their acceptance, and the 1897 Lambeth Conference formally recognised the revival of such communities in the Anglican Communion.

During the later years of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, the existing communities grew considerably in size and expanded overseas, while new communities were also founded. There are now about forty women’s communities and they provide the largest number of women engaged in full-time ministry in the Church of England. (See Chapter IX, footnote 1, p. 56).

Recently, new experiments in community living have been made (e.g. Lee Abbey, Scargill and St Julian’s) but they are not religious communities in the traditional sense, nor are they necessarily confined to women.

The Order of Deaconesses

The Order of Deaconesses was revived in the Anglican Communion by the action of Dr Tait, in ordaining Elizabeth Ferard deaconess in 1862. The revival received the recognition of the Lambeth Conference in 1897 and the Order was formally restored by the Convocation of Canterbury in 1923 and by the Convocation of York two years later. The Order is governed by the Resolutions of Convocations in 1939-41 and by Canons D.l-3, which have now received the royal assent. (1)

The position of the Order has not, however, been properly clarified. For this there are a number of reasons.

Confusion over status The preparatory commission on the ministry of women for the Lambeth Conference 1920 was of the opinion that the ordination of a deaconess confers on her Holy Orders, but this is not stated in the Conference Resolutions. The special committee of the 1930 Lambeth Conference did not regard the deaconess and deacon as equivalent in Order and affirmed that the Deaconess Order was sui generis. Some deaconesses ordained between 1920 and 1930 undoubtedly thought that they had been admitted to the third order of ministry, and in these circumstances the Lambeth Conference resolution of 1930 appeared to them a backward step.

Within the Church of England, the Archbishops’ Commission on the Ministry of Women (1935) referred to the Order of Deaconesses as ‘a Holy Order’, but the 1939-41 Convocation Resolutions on Deaconesses made no mention of ‘Holy Order’ at all. (2)

Confusion over function Various Lambeth Conferences have suggested that the deaconess should be allowed to administer Baptism, officiate at the Churching of Women, read Morning and Evening Prayer and preach. The Convocation Resolutions (1939/41) permit her to read Morning and Evening Prayer and the Litany in case of need, and to preach, except at Holy Communion.

Confusion over celibacy The fact that the Deaconess Order was revived at the same time as the religious communities were being re-established and that Elizabeth Ferard was both the founder of the Community of St Andrew and the first Anglican deaconess led to the assumption that the deaconess should remain unmarried. Many deaconesses in fact took the view that celibacy was involved but it was never required by the Church of England. Indeed Lambeth 1920 and 1930 clearly stated that no vow or implied promise of celibacy should be required for admission to the Order, and there is no reference to celibacy in the Convocation Resolutions. In spite of this, some church people still wrongly assume that celibacy is at least implied in a deaconess ordination.

The Licensed Lay Worker

(1) Full-time lay work has developed out of the voluntary service which women have always given to the church. As long ago as 1857, the first ‘Bible Woman’ was sent by Mrs Ranyard to work in Seven Dials ‘to supply the very poorest of the population with copies of the Bible and also to improve their temporal condition’. In 1887, Canon Body started the Society of Christ and Blessed Mary the Virgin in Durham for deaconesses and lay workers.

From such simple beginnings, the range and variety of work undertaken by the lay worker has greatly increased until at the present time in qualification and function there is little to distinguish her from the deaconess.

With the exception of the Church Army (see sub-section (3) below) this service is not now given within societies such as Greyladies, Ranyard and the Society of Christ and the Blessed Virgin, but under the aegis of the Boards or Councils of Women’s Work which many dioceses have set up.

(2) Meanwhile, for over a century, women had been drawn into another aspect of church work, that of moral welfare. From the mid-nineteenth century this included two different, but complementary, branches of development: the movement for reform and social justice in human relationships, associated with the names of Josephine Butler and Ellice Hopkins, and the provision of shelter and service for the victims of injustice and social conditions. In both cases, the motivation was explicitly Christian, and the leaders of the reform movement were Anglicans whose thinking was well ahead of their time, and whose activities aroused considerable resistance from respectable church people. Many of the homes opened in the 1850s were penitentiaries run by the new religious communities: others were run by local committees of evangelical churchmen from Anglican and Free Church traditions. Both the Salvation Army and the Church Army were soon in the field. From these emerged experiments in mother and baby homes and the beginning of foster homes and child care. By the turn of the century ‘outdoor’ work had begun. All of this work was organised extra-parochially, and the workers were responsible to the committee (local, deanery or national) or the religious community which sponsored them, though Diocesan Associations and Organising Secretaries made their appearance around 1900. It was, however, assumed from the very start that these were church workers, and discussion tended to centre rather on the growing realisation that they were also social workers.

(3) Parallel to this must be seen the growth of the Church Army, whose sisters serve not only as parish and welfare workers but also in other spheres. In 1887, their first training centre for women was opened, but the first Church Army sisters who were commissioned were known as ‘Church Army nurses’. In 1921, the Bishop of London (Dr Winnington-Ingram) admitted 55 sisters to the office of ‘Mission Sister’, subsequently changed to ‘Sister Evangelist’.

To recognise and encourage all this variety of service, various councils were set up. A Provincial Council for the Order of Deaconesses was formed in the Province of Canterbury in 1925 and in York in 1927; these councils merged to form the Council for the Order of Deaconesses in 1934. As an outcome of the Pan-Anglican Congress of 1908, the Central Committee for Women’s Church Work was set up. In 1930, this committee was united with two parallel bodies: the Inter-Diocesan Council for Training and the Advisory Council for Women’s Service in the Church, to become the Central Council for Women’s Church Work. (The new council became a Council of the Church Assembly in 1941.) The work of the Council for the Order of Deaconesses and the Central Council for Women’s Church Work was taken over in 1960 by the present Council for Women’s Ministry in the Church. This council, and its predecessors, have been concerned, not only with proper standards of training and employment in the field of women’s ministry, but also in continual efforts to obtain for women as full a scope as possible within the Church’s work.

Parallel to these councils were other bodies, both at central and diocesan level, concerned with moral welfare. The Archbishops’ Advisory Board for spiritual and moral work was constituted in 1918, and in 1934 this became the Church of England Board for Moral Welfare. From 1923, these boards were concerned jointly with the Inter-Diocesan Council for Training and its successors, in the examination and accrediting of moral welfare workers.

Recently, the Council for Women’s Ministry in the Church has become more closely linked with the Advisory Council for the Church’s Ministry, while the Committee for Diocesan Moral and Social Welfare Councils is a constituent part of the Board of Social Responsibility.

Unlike some other Churches, the Church of England has never had a Department of Women’s Work co-ordinating all the ministry of women. Clearly this is partly due to the independent and parallel growth of various patterns of women’s ministry in the last hundred years. We must now consider how this historical background continues to affect the present situation.

(1) Detailed information will be found in the Appendix.

(2) The only Anglican Province whose canons describe the deaconess as in Holy Orders is the Holy Catholic Church of China.

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