JOHN KENT .sx 7 Women , ministry , and 'apostolicity' .sx I write in the Methodist tradition , as a member of a Church which decided to ordain women to the priesthood a generation ago , has done so , and does not seem to have suffered the divisive , destructive effects that are frequently assumed to have happened elsewhere - in Scandinavia , for example .sx In this absence of conflict Methodism is no more remarkable than the British Free Churches in general , which have taken this particular change as an unbuckling step towards the greater equality of the sexes , and as a recognition of what women have already contributed to the life of their Churches .sx I mean , quite seriously , that no great emotional investment was involved , either for or against a proposal which in Anglican terms is sometimes presented as though it would mean the end of religion in our time .sx In the Methodist case - the one I understand the best - the phrase 'apostolic ministry' has never been the catchword of a group , nor has 'ministry' , in the broader sense , ever been identified exclusively with the masculine .sx John Wesley judged 'apostolicity' in terms of faithfulness to doctrinal ( he would have said Anglican , doctrinal ) standards :sx he took it for granted that the teaching of the Church of England , evangelically ( and not Calvinistically ) understood , was 'apostolic' .sx He also measured 'faithfulness' partly in terms of effectiveness , asking if God honoured what was preached or otherwise taught by conversions or other signs of spiritual fruitfulness .sx These attitudes constituted a pragmatic test which made it hard for him to reject altogether the collaboration of women .sx I do not mean that John or his brother , Charles Wesley , both of whom were regularly ordained Anglican ministers , considered the formal ordination of women a possibility :sx Charles steadily resisted as totally improper John Wesley's willingness himself to ordain the Wesleyan itinerants , all of whom were male .sx But both men accepted the role of women as pastoral advisers and spiritual leaders ; John found it difficult to say that women should never preach , as long as they did not actually call it preaching .sx Indeed , eighteenth-century Wesleyanism at the local level - and it was the local level which mattered - was as much the creation of women as of men .sx Women could , it is true , play an important role in eighteenth-century Anglican Evangelicalism , but the existence of women class-leaders , who had a pastoral role but were not ordained , gave a more formal value to their position in Wesleyanism .sx Even in 1968 , when the official , ill-fated scheme for Anglican-Methodist unity was produced , the Methodist leaders had to be careful to say that their future acceptance of the " strictest invariability of episcopal ordination " would not commit the Methodist Church to the view that the historic episcopate was essential to the apostolic character of the Church , and that this character was something which nonepiscopal Churches necessarily lacked .sx There had to be a saving clause for pragmatism , because a pragmatic attitude to questions of church order was the fundamental presupposition of the eighteenth-century Wesleyan movement .sx Not all modern Methodists rejoice in the pragmatic origins of Wesleyanism , but they cannot ignore them altogether .sx Indeed , it was a pragmatic fact that in the 1970s many Methodists were offering to accept episcopal ordination for the sake of unity , not unity for the sake of episcopal ordination , or for some kind of fresh guarantee that Methodist ministers were , after all , in an 'apostolic succession' .sx It is equally clear , I think , that having once tested the ordination of women in practice and found it acceptable , the Methodists will not worry very much about Catholic opposition .sx There may be cultural elements involved , but whereas an older generation of Methodists had found the presence of women local preachers , who conducted non-sacramental services in local chapels , something of a problem , there was no similar reaction against women presiding at the Eucharist .sx It is an additional example of the pragmatic tradition that women had in fact already been conducting eucharistic services for many years as Methodist 'deaconesses' , that is , without formal ordination but with the specific authority of the Methodist Conference .sx Methodists , therefore , find Anglo-Catholic objections to the admission of women to the priesthood hard to follow .sx 'Apostolicity' , after all , was a mark of authenticity put forward in the early Church as a way of distinguishing local churches which had been founded in some kind of continuity with the apostles from other churches which showed heretical trends .sx In the sixteenth century large-scale division inevitably gave the idea fresh prominence , and while Roman Catholics put their stress on the possession of an episcopal succession from the apostles , the Reformers asserted that they were reviving a theological continuity with the apostles and the primitive Church which had largely disappeared in recent centuries .sx The difference between the two could also be thought of to some extent in terms of 'tradition' , on the one side , and 'Scripture' on the other , both of which depended on apostolic authority .sx An 'apostolic' ministry , therefore , was one which claimed to be faithful to the essential witness of the apostles , and there was an obvious need for some such idea , and for some such institution , if Christianity was to remain visibly what its founders had intended .sx However , by the time that the Reformers had established themselves it had become clear that the idea that Christianity must maintain an essentially unchanged , apostolic identity was ambiguous :sx it could be used to object to any kind of change , on the ground of loss of identity , or it could be used to defend innovation , on the ground that what was proposed expressed the true spirit of the apostles .sx This situation caused great anxiety in the sixteenth century , and again in early nineteenth-century Anglicanism , when John Henry Newman and his friends agonized over the where - abouts of the true , 'apostolic' Church .sx Yet again in the late twentieth century Anglo-Catholics and Anglican Evangelicals are both anxious about a loss of the Church's identity , though they don't necessarily define it in the same way .sx One has to recognize , in any case , that the apostolic identity , even when defined as episcopal succession , is primarily to be found in the whole life of the Church , and that the particular form in which we have received the church's ministry is a sign , not the substance , of the apostolic witness as such .sx It is truer to say that there have always been ministers of some kind in the apostolic succession than it is to say that these ministers have always been male .sx This conclusion may sound perverse , but one has only to consider the history of the ecclesia .sx A few examples must suffice here .sx In the medieval period , for instance , Catherine of Siena dominated the western Church in her lifetime ; in the seventeenth century the Inquisition worked hard to destroy the religious credibility of the iron Teresa of Avila , but those who study her today waste little time on the Inquisition's views .sx In the early nineteenth century , Elizabeth Fry , who had no doubt that she stood in the succession of the apostles , firmly rejected the 'modern' penitentiary prison system which was supported by many masculine ordained chaplains , and was certainly nearer to the mind of Jesus in doing so .sx And if one looks for traces of that great succession in more recent years , I think that one would pass over the male and usually ordained theologians , and rest on another gallant , tragic Carmelite , Th e r e-grave se of Lisieux , and the unofficial patron saint of the 'almost christians' , Simone Weil .sx The official Churches may have wanted an authoritarian , male-dominated structure , but the existential Church , the only Church that can really be in the 'succession' , has never been as gender-simple as that .sx There was always an unsatisfactory attempt at balancing , which meant that in practice women could organize Orders and run convents , could become deaconesses , could dictate whole spiritual traditions through their alleged mystical experiences :sx it is not so very surprising that in the end Wesleyan women became class-leaders and local preachers , and finally ordained ministers .sx The case would be complicated , but one could argue that this was an example of theological development within the tradition which has reached the point where the official Church has to accept what has happened .sx Even in the fairly limited case of the traditional male priesthood the relationship between the sexes has differed so much that one can hardly speak of an authoritative tradition running back to the apostles .sx This becomes obvious when one looks at the ways in which the male priesthood , for which so much is claimed , has actually been developed .sx In the Roman Church , theory requires a celibate priesthood , but in the Orthodox tradition priests were left free to marry , as they were in the Church of England from the sixteenth century .sx The concept of the married priest has also shifted in recent times :sx at first the priest's wife was almost an anonymous figure ; then she was transformed into a kind a married deaconess , who had to exhibit total loyalty to the ideal of the family while giving herself to the service of her church or parish - perhaps the extreme example of this was the relationship between Salvation Army married couples .sx In the past generation a sudden revolution has meant that the priest's wife increasingly refuses what is seen as a male-determined role and pursues , quite properly , her own identity in work not connected with her husband's responsibilities .sx It is rather late on in the day now to argue that one of these traditions is right and the other wrong :sx one has to look at the whole Church and recognize that there has been a great uncertainty about the nature of the priesthood and about the proper relationship of the sexes in that priesthood , an uncertainty which Protestantism , which had the historical advantage of disunity , was able to explore much further , though in the present-day Roman Catholic Church similar anxieties are reflected in the gulf , on the subject of priests being allowed to marry , between Hans K u ng , for example , and the present Pope .sx K u ng is an interesting example of how uncertain the situation really has become .sx In his Wozu Priester ?sx ( 1971 ) , translated as Why Priests ?sx , he said that one could not say dogmatically that ordination to the priesthood was instituted by Christ :sx " there is not the least proof of this institution " ; and he went on to say that today ordination could no longer , as in the medieval period , " pass as a sacral investiture , by virtue of which the receiver is .sx .. invested with a legal and sacral potestas that would enable and authorize him alone to consecrate the eucharist " .sx K u ng also said that the ecclesial ministry should not be exclusively male :sx " in this respect the New Testament should be viewed as a time-conditioned work ( remember the veiled women in Corinth ) " , and it should be interpreted on the basis of Paul's 'abolition' of discrimination between men and women .sx There are obvious criticisms of K u ng's argument .sx If the New Testament is a time-conditioned document - and I entirely agree that it is - one can do no more with a quotation from Paul on this matter than point out that even in such a conditioned source surprising things could be said about the relationship of the sexes , but what Paul said can have no absolute authority , and it is obvious that he was not thinking about the ordination of women as such .sx Either the Church has a meaningful history or it does not , but that it has a history cannot be denied .sx And just as the New Testament is time-conditioned so is tradition , and so is our modern response to the problem of the ordination of women .sx What we also have , however , is a , by now , highly developed set of practical examples of what it means to authorize women to behave as full ministers of the Church ; we are not simply innovating in the dark , we are not simply responding to some fashionable current of 'liberal' opinion , we are watching a situation develop and trying to learn from what is happening .sx What was significant about K u ng's discussion was that in the Roman Catholic Church one already had an important theologian whose vision of priesthood as a ministry of leadership and service , open to both men and women , came very close to what had evolved on the broad plain of Protestantism .sx