Women Bishops and Reception: An Occasion for Rethinking
Editor’s Note: The Rev. Dr. Stephen Noll, now a board member of Anglican Compass, also served from 2015 to 2020 as the Convener of the GAFCON Task Force on Women in the Episcopate. In 2017, this Task Force issued a recommendation for a moratorium on the consecration of women bishops. In this article, we share Dr. Noll’s 2019 essay “Women Bishops and Reception,” together with a foreword from Dr. Noll.
The GAFCON Primates authorized the Task Force on Women in the Episcopate in 2015. The decision to focus on the episcopate was made for pragmatic and ecclesiological reasons: at that time, there were no women bishops in the GAFCON churches, and bishops in our polity are “heads” bearing authority within their dioceses and ecumenically. The Task Force included representatives—men and women, episcopal, presbyteral, diaconal, and lay, for and against women’s ordination—from eleven GAFCON provinces, representing a majority of the members of the Anglican Communion.
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Task Force Recommendation
We met three times in person and submitted recommendations to the GAFCON Primates in 2017, the chief of which stated:
The Primates approved these recommendations. In 2019, the Task Force presented a 327-page Interim Report, with fourteen essays and a summary available here. My essay was titled “Women Bishops and Reception” [N.B.: “reception” is a term referring to how the Church “receives” the teaching of Scripture and passes it on (tradition)]. Once again, the Primates endorsed the Report and encouraged the Task Force to continue its work.
Women Bishops as a Secondary Issue?
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 delayed further consultation. Before it could resume, the news broke in early 2021 of the election and consecration of a female bishop in the Anglican Church of Kenya. This event in one of the founding GAFCON provinces presented the Primates with a crisis similar to that faced by the Episcopal Church in the 1970s. When they met again (in-person and online) in September 2021, the Primates unilaterally changed their position, stating in their Communique:
The Primates, it seems, are basing their decision on clause 2 of the 2008 Jerusalem Declaration, which states:
We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God written and to contain all things necessary for salvation.
Jerusalme Delcaration, Clause 2
So, they reason, if no explicit prohibition of women bishops exists in Scripture, the sex of a bishop is a secondary matter permitted according to clause 12, which reads:
We celebrate the God-given diversity among us which enriches our global fellowship, and we acknowledge freedom in secondary matters.
Jerusalem Declaration, Clause 12
As I understand them, the Primates are employing a minimalist reading of “salvation” and “mission” and a maximalist reading of secondary matters (adiaphora).
But many elements of the biblical economy of salvation—the whole Gospel—go beyond the question: “What must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30). Proclamation (kerygma) is, to be sure, a crucial part of the mission of the church, but so is doctrine (catechesis) – “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt 28:19-20; Acts 1:2).
Similarly, while the Jerusalem Declaration affirms the sufficiency of Scripture, clause 2 goes on to say:
The Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.
Jerusalem Declaration, Clause 2
I have recently argued that this clause represents a “via media for orthodox Anglicans” based on classic Anglican formularies and texts such as Canon A5 of the Church of England (“Of the doctrine of the Church”), the Articles of Religion (VI and XIX), Cranmer’s Scripture Collect, and Richard Hooker’s maxim:
what Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth.
Richard Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, V.8.2
The question which the GAFCON Primates dodged, as I see it, is whether ordination of a woman bishop is, in the words of Canon A5, contrary to the teaching of the church as “grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and in such teachings of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church as are agreeable to the said Scriptures.”
The Nomination of a Woman Archbishop
Of the many responses to the recent nomination of Dame Sarah Mullally to become Archbishop of Canterbury, most have either acclaimed it as a “historic first” on the road to equity or deplored it on grounds that her progressive views on abortion and same-sex marriage are contrary to the Bible and hence divisive among Anglicans at home and abroad.
Few have focused on the question of whether her female sex alone should disqualify her for the office. However, Archbishop Laurent Mbanda, chairman of the GAFCON Primates, did note in his statement that:
The Most Rev. Laurent Mbanda, “Canterbury Appointment Abandons Anglicans.” GAFCON, October 3, 2025.
As the former Convener of the GAFCON Task Force on Women in the Episcopate, I would like to argue that GAFCON’s objection to Dame Sarah represents not just nose-counting but also prior theological reflection on whether a woman’s ordination to the episcopate is consistent with Scripture and the received tradition of the Church and how the Church communally “rethinks” such a tradition.
I am not here to cast stones but rather to ask whether the advent of a woman Archbishop of Canterbury, an office for many years considered a “focus of unity” in Anglicanism, should cause a rethinking among global Anglicans of our doctrine and discipline of Holy Orders. Rethinking may, in turn, require repenting of errors not only in the revisionist West but in our own movement.
To further this consideration, I am posting below an essay I wrote for the Task Force on Women in the Episcopate. For a published version of the essay, see my The Gospel of God and the Church of God: Global Anglican Essays (Anglican House Publishers, 2020).
Image: Photo by JLGutierrez, courtesy of Canva. Digital editing by Peter Johnston.
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