Anglican Compass

There is not unanimous agreement about women’s ordination in the worldwide Anglican Communion. Godly and thoughtful Christians hold opposing convictions about Holy Orders and who is called to ordained ministry. You often see the results of this debate at the Provincial level—a national expression of the Church may or may not ordain women, in accordance with their conviction. But for the Anglican Church in North America this disagreement is internal to the Province, varying from diocese to diocese and bishop to bishop....

Almost every vocational deacon I know, when asked why he or she has not become a priest, will respond, “I have never felt called to the priesthood.” Some will add emphatically, “not for a minute!” I am not one of those deacons. I don’t share this story often, rarely in its fullness, and never in public non-anonymous writing. Be gentle with my soul, O Church. The words which follow are all too raw....

NOTE: As is our policy with all Anglican Compass content, we ask that you please submit a request before republishing content. Following the lead of bishops Jim Hobby, Todd Hunter, Stewart Ruch III, and Steve Wood, who recently wrote in response to the death of George Floyd, which gained support from a number of other bishops, we offer this open letter to our fellow ACNA clergy and to the churches under our care....

I’m pondering the “don’t stir the pot” reaction that reliably happens every time we publish something on women’s ordination—most especially anything in favor of women’s ordination—over at Anglican Compass, where I’m the Managing Editor. (Note: This post is not a subtweet of anyone in particular. It’s just me thinking out loud about a phenomenon that keeps occurring.) Almost every time we post something about women’s ordination, a controversial issue has been whether or not doing so needlessly “stirs the pot,” as in “causes trouble, unrest, dissent....

Editor’s Note: The piece below represents the opinion of the author. Anglican Compass does not take a site-wide position for or against women’s ordination. We do, however, require both clarity and charity. We ask that your responses to it do so as well. Over the past several months, readers of Anglican Compass have engaged with many opinions on the topic of women’s ordination. One wonders, given the state of dual integrities within the ACNA and the ever-churning blog debates between our public intellectuals, what is the point of another take on this issue?...

As of this morning, it looks like everything for Anglican Compass has been successfully moved over from our HostGator shared hosting to Bluehost VPS hosting. I’m hoping that this new arrangement works well for us! Although, to be honest, it’s still an open question in my mind whether or not managed WordPress hosting with WPEngine would be a better fit. I just can’t quite tell whether or not it would be worth the extra cost, given our current traffic and budget....

Editor’s Note: Thank you to the Rev. Dr. Emily McGowin for writing this rejoinder to Fr. Blake Johnson’s and Fr. Lee Nelson’s responses to her original blog post about the in persona Christi argument against women’s ordination. While we invite this conversation (about McGowin’s original blog post) to continue in our comments section and elsewhere—and we plan to publish more about women’s ordination in the future—we will not be adding surrejoinder blog posts....

Editor’s Note: The piece below represents the opinion of the author. Anglican Pastor does not take a site-wide position for or against women’s ordination. We do, however, require both clarity and charity. We ask that your responses to it do so as well. After reading this piece, please see Lee Nelson’s response and Emily McGowin’s rejoinder. The connection between christology and soteriology A cornerstone of orthodox Christian theology is summed up in the phrase “what is not assumed is not healed”....

Maybe you, like me, are coming to Anglicanism from a different tradition. If that’s the case, then one thing you should know is that Anglican debates about women’s ordination can often be quite different from debates about the same topic in other church contexts. This is due to Anglicans having different views on, among other things: ecclesiology (the doctrine of the church), the sacraments, and ordination. For example, in my broadly evangelical/non-denominational/Baptist upbringing, debates about women in ministry centered on whether or not women were allowed to preach and teach....