Intra-Church Property Disputes and the Failure of Neutral Principles: A Call for a Return to the Deference Standard

The issue of intra-church property disputes is one that is simultaneously quite old in American history and perhaps of greater relevance now than ever before. Given ever-increasing dissension within Christian church bodies over issues including homosexuality, women's ordination and racial justice, there are currently numerous church property disputes outstanding in the courts, and there are likely to be many more in the near future. From 1871 until 1979, the Supreme Court of the United States consistently took a deferential approach in property cases that involved church bodies with their own authorities and tribunals. When a dispute arose over church doctrine, polity or discipline and a hierarchical church reached its own decisions regarding proper ownership of the church's property, the Supreme Court determined that civil courts should defer to that church's internal decision-making process. The court first created this doctrine as a matter of ‘federal common law’ but in 1952 anchored it in the First Amendment's Free Exercise and Establishment clauses, applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. During the mid-twentieth century, the Supreme Court consistently extended the deference standard against any state-level attempts to restrict or circumvent it. However, in the 1979 case of Jones v Wolf the court changed its standard significantly and adopted a ‘neutral principles’ approach, which weighs a church's internal documents and deliberations against property deeds, state property and trust statutes, and other sources, in an attempt to allow secular courts to rule on such cases while avoiding potential First Amendment concerns.

Theology and Practice of Claiming Call

Chapter 7 concludes this book by discussing the efficacy of rhetorical strategies in women’s call narratives and includes an evaluation of the different forms featured throughout this work. By claiming their call, and a contested call at that, the women discussed in previous chapters found new ways to exercise their voice and agency to attain ecclesial endorsement. Through a summary of this project’s analysis of women’s rhetoric, the chapter recovers historical narratives of call for contemporary homiletics. By reclaiming rhetorical strategies and tactics, the author offers practical applications for people struggling today, to help them construct their own narrative and provide scripts to claim their call to preach. Further, through different hermeneutical lenses, the author demonstrates how call can be re-interpreted and traditional biblical texts can be re-imagined in preaching sermons. Finally, the chapter brings a renewed focus on the continued debate over women’s ordination and, in effect, calls the question to end the discussion and allow women their rightful place in the pulpit.

Florence Spearing Randolph

Chapter 6 surveys the life and pastoral ministry of Florence Spearing Randolph. As a black female preacher, Randolph faced issues of gender and racial inequality throughout her life in southern and northern states as she sought to advocate for reform of the extreme class divisions of the Gilded Age. As a proponent of the Social Gospel movement and an ordained and installed minister, she joined scripture with cultural reform for impactful messages. Through an analysis of her sermons, including Antipathy to Women Preachers and Looking Backward and Forward, this chapter investigates her perspective on gender roles, women’s ordination, and race relations. This chapter considers her call narrative and her use of pulpit rhetoric in communicating her position as a minister within the black church, summoning women to answer their call to preach as ordained ministers and claim the power of the pulpit.

Global Anglican Discourse and Women’s Ordination in Kenya: The Controversy in Kirinyaga, 1979–1992, and its Legacy

In the 1980s, the question of women’s ordination in the Anglican Church of Kenya (ACK) caused a controversy in Kirinyaga diocese, in which Archbishop David Gitari (1937–2013) played a critical role as an advocate for women. This controversy is just one example of how African Christian women have faced multiple material and theological obstacles to ordination, both in the Anglican Church and in other churches. Through an analysis of institutional texts we show how the issue of women’s ordination has been addressed in formal Anglican decision-making processes. We also outline the patriarchal attitudes that characterized the wider discourse of women’s ordination in Kenya and in the Anglican Communion, and discuss how this discourse informed Gitari’s intervention. Opposition to women’s ordination is only one facet of sexism in the ACK, as was implicitly recognized by Gitari in his wider project of ‘holistic development’.

The ordination of Catholic women as deacons: The state of the question

The report of a commission set up by Pope Francis to study the question of women as deacons in the Catholic Church was issued in May 2019. Whilst it is well known that the Catholic Church refuses to ordain women, the form of the diaconate being discussed is that of the ‘permanent diaconate’ for men, which was established after the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). This article first discusses how this issue has arisen, clarifies the types of deacons and reviews the reasons why the Catholic Church refuses to ordain women. It then looks at Scripture and the history of the Church to assess the historical role of women deacons. The issue of women’s ordination emerged after Vatican II (1962–1965). Women’s ministries have grown immensely since then and this is a factor in the question about the ordination of women deacons. There are important theological issues involved in the study around women deacons. Lastly, the article raises questions about the future of this issue under Pope Francis and his successors.Contribution: The issue of the ordination of women deacons in the Roman Catholic Church is a current and contentious issue. This article reviews the historical evidence for women deacons and the views of theologians and Church leaders in order to assess whether there are grounds for hope.

Postfeminist, engaged and resistant: Evangelical male clergy attitudes towards gender and women’s ordination in the Church of England

Despite the introduction of female bishops, women do not hold offices on equal terms with men in the Church of England, where conservative evangelical male clergy often reject the validity of women’s ordination. This article explores the gender values of such clergy, investigating how they are expressed and the factors that shape them. Data is drawn from semi-structured interviews and is interpreted with thematic narrative analysis. The themes were analyzed with theories on postfeminism, engaged orthodoxy and group schism. It is argued that participants’ gender values are best understood as postfeminist and that the wider evangelical tradition, as well as a perceived change in Anglican identity with the onset of women’s ordination, shape their postfeminism. Moreover, whilst evangelical gender values possess the potential to foster greater gender equality within the Church of England, gender differentiation limits this possibility, a limitation that could be addressed by increasing participants’ engagement beyond the Church.

When Women Reject Women’s Ordination: Reframing and Semanticizing in the Speeches of Two Female Seventh-day Adventists

This study analyzes two public speeches of two North-American Seventh-day Adventist women who oppose women’s ordination, in order to understand how they reconcile inequity perpetuated by their religious position that denigrates women. The two women in this study address the apparent disadvantage by reframing the issue and reordering their reality. Whereas one speaker creates other formidable sub-issues that make exclusion of women from church leadership imperative, the other speaker resorts to the elusive notion of female privilege. I demonstrate how their discourse surrounding ministry and headship illuminates the fact that gender relations and religious convictions are ordered through permeable boundaries of arbitrary lexico-semantics.

Human Dignity and Rights in the Context of Gender and the Sacramental Priesthood

This paper considers the question of women’s ordination to the sacramental priesthood in the context of human dignity and rights. Differentiating between two forms of ontological or intrinsic dignity – the universal dignity of the human being made in the imago Dei, and the particular dignity of those baptised into the imago Trinitatis – it argues that the refusal of ordination to women is a violation of baptismal dignity that constitutes a refusal of women’s rights. It analyses the arguments against women’s ordination and shows them to be based on a misreading of Thomas Aquinas, on the innovative concept of sexual complementarity which has replaced the earlier hierarchical model of sexual difference, and on appeals to mystery that might be better described as mystification. It concludes that the refusal to allow women to respond to the call to ordination is based on a modern form of essentialised sexual difference that is alien to the Catholic tradition and that violates Christological orthodoxy, insofar as it suggests that women are not able to image Christ.