Two key votes on the consecration of female bishops set for tomorrow at the General Synod of the Church of England meeting in York may determine whether more than 1,300 clergymen will defect from England’s established Church.
Some 1,333 members of the clergy in the Church of England earlier this week sent a letter of protest to Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, promising to leave the church if the Synod votes in favor of ordaining women as bishops. Two issues will be considered: the ordination of women bishops and, if that measure is approved, what to do with so-called “traditionalists” within the Church who oppose female bishops. The Church is considering legal safeguards or a simple voluntary clause to protect traditional evangelicals who hold to a traditional view of gender roles in the church. Liberals in the Church oppose adding conditions to the legislation as an olive branch to evangelicals, the London Times reports. A number of female priests recently wrote a letter of protest to Anglican bishops denouncing the conditions.
The Church of England is the established state Christian church in England and serves as the mother church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The Church of England traces its formal corporate history from the 597 Augustinian mission, stresses its continuity and identity with the primitive universal Western church, and notes the consolidation of its particular independent and national character in the post-Reformation events of Tudor England.
The Church in recent years has boiled with controversy over the ordination of women in various offices, including priest, and over homosexuality. Some observers, according to the London Times, are calling the promise of secession from the 1,300 evangelicals “an unprecedented crisis since the Reformation” in the Church.
The Church of England is not the only denomination that is embattled over the issue of qualifications for ordination. On June 27, the Presbyterian Church USA approved the ordination of homosexuals. On June 30, conservative Episcopalians in Richmond, Va., won a legal victory Friday when a judge upheld a Virginia law that allows the churches to secede from the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia over the role of homosexuals in church. Last weekend, a conservative evangelical Anglican group declared that it will create a new body, a “church within a church,” called the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, in response to the Anglican embrace of homosexuality. The Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans will have its own bishops, clergy and theological colleges.
What will ultimately happen in the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion? Those in the Church who are calling these events “the greatest crisis since the Reformation” seem to be suffering from historic amnesia. The Church has been down this road before. During the so-called Puritan revolution of the 16th century, members of the Church of England sought to purify doctrine, worship and moral integrity while remaining in the Church. Ultimately, the reform 
movement foundered on the shoals of an ecclesiology that refuses to separate church from state. Without leaving the denomination, evangelicals within the Church of England lack any formal apparatus for meaningful reform. Evangelicals in the Church of England will either have to continue to fight a losing battle or flee the denomination as a lost cause.