Chapter 33: Documenting Australian Women’s Church Ministries

I began this blog to record my Church ministry saga, and those of other Australian church women, and found myself embroiled in church controversies about the role and extent of church women's ministries in Australia.  These distracting spats take attention away from where it should be - on the laudable achievements of the many past and present women ministers of the Australian Church, such as Abbess Benedicta Phillips, Elizabeth Fry, Catherine Chisholm, and currently, Dominican Sister Trish Madigan and Anglican hymn writer Rev. Elizabeth Smith of Western Australia, now ministering in the outback city of Kalgoorlie. 

The stories of many great Australian Church women ministers, and the way they've shaped the worship, mission and work of Australian churches, are not well known or publicised. Australian Church men are encouraged and assisted by their male church sponsors to blow their ministry trumpets loudly, and they do so, but Church women often sink into oblivion because they have not bothered to record or document what they and their ministry sisters do. No matter how maddening or hilarious women's church ministry experiences are, they make wonderful journalistic press when well researched and well told. Consider, for instance, the ministry story of Daisy Bates, Kabbarli, the great but maligned Christian missionary to the Aborigines, recognised as a saint in her time by indigenous and settler Australians, and well documented, but consigned to grudging token recognition in church histories written by men. The history of church women's ministries should not consist of an obituary list of under-recorded names and dates. One way of informing the public about church women's ministry is to provide online links to their stories via social media like Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest. More and more church women are doing this: if every church woman posted one story about past or current female church ministry per week, it would focus greater media attention on the achievements and value of church women's ministry. Recently I published a Pinterest Board on women ministers, and another on women church musicians, and many people reposted my links - much information is already on the Internet, so why not make it better known? 

Lots of Australian girls and women work as unofficial ministry volunteers in Australian churches, but few are paid or even acknowledged. Even in denominations ordaining women, the percentage of Church women whose names and work are praised and accurately recorded in church bulletins, archives and histories us lamentably low. Yet Australian churches would close without their female workers. And time after time on the Internet I've received reports of church women being undervalued by male clergy, exploited, bossed around as if they were children, actively denigrated, and denied full liturgical roles, commissioning and recognition. 

Well, now we have a remedy. Don't wait for your clergy to document your church ministry - do it yourself, online. You'll be surprised at the breadth and quality of your ministry achievements. Take the recalcitrant Australian Church bull by the horns and guide it gently into the waters of eternal life - the fruitful and flourishing ministries of Australian Church women.

Chapter 32: Pink Smoke over Sydney II - Egalitarianism Hits the Fan

Foreseeing an outraged female reaction to his dogmatic complementarian stance, Archbishop Glenn Davies and his complementarian corps have staged a comical takeover coup, in the form of dogmatic "egalitarianism." Sydney Anglican "egalitarians" claim to be sympathetic to women's ministries, but they stop short at priestly ordination for women. Sydney Anglican "egalitarian" dogma proposes reducing church ministry to a lowest common denominator by discarding both Holy Communion and all forms of clerical ordination. Sydney Anglicans are now required to choose between the complementarian camp, or the egalitarian camp, neither of which favour ordaining women priests, who were supposedly outlawed by the overwhelmingly male Sydney Anglican General Synod.

In late April 2015 Archbishop Glenn Davies showed his true colours by withdrawing preaching licenses from several ordained Sydney women deacons. However these women are still preaching, because their diaconal ordination obliges them to ignore this complentarian / egalitarian dogma.

Chapter 31: Pink Smoke over Sydney

Anglican Women Priests defy Sydney Ministry ban!

Guess what. It's a complete myth that there are no Anglican women priests in the Sydney Anglican Diocese. Women priests are here, and they're staying. It's a complete myth that women don't preach in the Sydney Anglican Diocese. They do, and their insistent, reasonable voices are heard. And it's a complete myth that only church men exercise Christian leadership and management in Sydney Anglican churches. Sydney Anglican parishes could not function without their current women leaders and managers. Discrimination against women priests in Sydney Anglican churches has fallen flat on it's face since journalists revealed how prejudiced churchmen have exposed church women to domestic violence by endorsing rampant male misogyny. Anglican women priests from outside Sydney visit Sydney parishes regularly, and Holy Communion has been celebrated by an Anglican woman priest (a senior Australian Defence Force military chaplain) in Sydney, without the heavens falling in. Sydney Anglican dogmatism is in disarray. The Sydney misogynists who invaded our churches are definitely on the way out, but they're kicking and screaming all the way down the nave to the church door.

Scared out of their wits by being consigned to misogynist hell and damnation by the community at large, these Sydney Anglican churchmen have scrambled to rewrite their anti-women-priest dogmas. Rapidly backing away from their insistence on exclusively male church headship coupled with righteous male subordination of church women, they (and a gullible cohort of well rewarded, indoctrinated, subordained female deacons who have signed away their right to female priesthood) are now teaching a new, convoluted red herring heresy designed to distract and confuse parishioners. The largely irreligious Sydney public, many of whom have been driven out of the church by their bigotry, is just bemused by their stupidity.

Ironically, they couldn't find a word in the Oxford English Dictionary to describe it, so they invented a new buzzword - complementarianism. This convenient invention illogically asserts that trained and subordained women ministers, however capable, should do only what male ministers can't do, or don't want to do. Women get the ministry crumbs that fall under the table, the leftovers, and are supposed to lick them up gratefully. Like cleaning the church. It's so completely in tune with Vatican male misogyny that even Pope Francis is promoting it!

Chapter 30: ANZAC Day 2015 - recolonisation ofdecolonized Australia?

As we celebrate ANZAC Day 2015 we recall past sacrifices in past wars, pray for a positive outcome of current conflicts, and remember soldiers serving today. In the emotion of personal remembrance, questions about whether wars are just, or not, tend to fade into the background. Yet today we are ever more painfully conscious of the difficulties of our troops serving in harm's way, and the post-war suffering of returned soldiers.  ANZAC Day is important because it not only brings us face to face with striking examples of heroic mateship, but also with the cold-blooded, mortal violence that is enacted in extended wars. Christian churches and chaplains have played an important pastoral role in wartime, not only as comforters, but often as moral and ethical arbiters consulted by governments. Yet in decolonised Australia, the ties between Church and State have noticeably diminished, along with the moral influence of the Churches over wartime decisions. Some Australians think that the only way to restore moral credibility to Australia in wartime, is to reconnect the country to Church systems by recolonising it. Is this possible or desirable?

Australian Churches are asking themselves why their moral authority has diminished, and what can be done to restore it. Right, wrong, justice, judgement and doomsday have been grist to Church mills for centuries. Sad to say, some Churches have misused their moral authority in the past to inspire extreme fear of God in order to extort  "indulgence" fees from guilt-ridden parishioners eager to buy God's favour (the sin of simony). Clerical corruption and abuse has caused many Australians to reject and abandon unrepentant churches. An unhealthy, grasping obsession with the splinters of other people's sins, while ignoring the proverbial log in the Church's own eye, has also cost Australian Churches dearly. Yet all Australian Christians (church attenders or not) know that discerning right from wrong in good conscience under God is an essential moral skill. Australians generally, Christian or not, can judge what is right and wrong in human society. They know that discerning how to remedy wrongs with good judgement guided by God involves much more than greed for personal salvation.

In the past, Churches allied with various governments filled an active role as the moral gatekeepers of European, Miiddle Eastern, African, American, Asian and colonial societies, In our decolonised time this is rarely the case. Western law was grounded in basic Christian moral codes (e.g. the Ten Commandments), so the colonial churches endorsed most civil and criminal legal judgements and penalties, and could reverse unjust decisions. When clergy delivered sermons, people listened carefully, because (despite the claim that Church and State were separate, with God as the higher power), clergy were invested with certain powers as officials of "the Establishment", i.e. the combined Church and State. In England, Scotland and Australia in the 1940s and 50s, church clergy, vestry members and office bearers had many government record keeping responsibilities. Some of these tasks still survive, but the Parish Roll is no longer a comprehensive Census, and licensed lay officials now perform many tasks formerly reserved to Christian clergy. Australians who enjoy nostalgic memories of "the good old days" would like to rewind the clocks back to the British Empire, but time marches us inexorably on into a globalised multicultural future.

So who, and how, in our multicultural Australian society where Church alliance with the State is tenuous, and multilingualism is a serious barrier to quick communication, do Australians determine what is right, what is wrong, what penalties will be imposed for which crimes and misdeanours, and how our community reacts when our government wants us to wage war on other peoples? Leaving moral decisions and laws to secularised, irreligious politicians and lawyers has produced an unwieldly, painfully slow legal system that obstructs justice, is only available to the affluent, and is slow to react to crises. Yet it is now possible for alert, responsible Australian Christians to exert a powerful influence on moral and political decisions through the Internet. At this time Australian Christians have a responsibility to remain aware of current legislation and social justice issues, and take concerted, calm, well considered peaceful action when necessary. Speaking up peacefully and clearly in the Australian media to reform inadequate laws, maintain humane moral standards, eliminate bullying and enforce justice for neglected victims has never been more important.