The newspaper headlines proclaimed on the lampposts and airwave that caught my attention was “Sex workers do not go to Church” and “Woman bishops: Church of England votes no”. The latter set the blogosphere ablaze with articles highlighting the absurdity of being penis-endowed as one (the most important?) of the criteria for being a bishop.
The first headline did not have merely the same exposure as the latter, but read in conjunction with the latter, telling none the less. But before I continue my way of thinking on the interaction between the two headlines, please allow me a short side comment on my immediate context, the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa. It would be easy to side step this debate on woman being part of the clergy because women have been ordained as ministers of the church for some time already. Such a manoeuvre would unfortunately not be the most honest appraisal of how licensed and ordained women experience the equality of the clerical playing field in the church.
It might not be surprising that sex workers, many of them being woman, don’t attend worship in the same place where woman are excluded from facilitating the worship. It might just be that in rethinking what church we desperately need to realize that we are all created in the image of G-d, that to be fully church we both need female and male voices, and that a more feminine approach might be the transformative power we desperately need in our current day and age. Maybe the time has come that we take the Holy Scriptures more seriously if it refers to the church as the Bride of Christ, intrinsically female. If we do that, how is it possible to exclude woman from clergy and make sex workers feel unwelcome?
Originally posted on langenhoven.wordpres.com
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