50 Years of women parish ministers

ASSEMBLY

Women Ministers Procession by Thomas Baldwin

IT was a sight that one person commented would have had John Knox ‘birling in his grave’.

Hundreds of women ministers and supporters, singing We are Marching in the Light of God, processed to the Assembly Hall to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the decision to permit the ordination of women to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament in the Church of Scotland.

Around 500 people altogether gathered in the quad of New College, under Knox’s statue. The Moderator, the Rt Rev Susan Brown, told them they were celebrating ‘when the community of women and men were given their place in the church, not because they deserve that place but because it’s the place to which Christ himself has called us’.

The procession was followed by a special session of the Assembly, where the Rev Dr Margaret Forrester, one of the leading campaigners for women’s ordination in the 1960s, recalled that in 1967 the church authorities had done their best to gag her and her colleagues. Half a century on, in probably the most moving moment of the entire week, she was given a standing ovation.

Margaret paid tribute to fellow campaigners the Rev Mary Levison and Elizabeth Hewat, and called for the work of women’s equality around the world to continue.

She said: “There is much stfill to be done. Where girls are not permitted to be educated, we must speak out. Where women are abused or marginalised, we must speak out. Where sister churches withhold ordination from women, we must encourage them to think again.”

She added: “My overwhelming memory is not of frustration but of joy. Joy, delight and thanksgiving that God was using us for the renewal of the church for these 50 years and more. Thanks and praise be to God.”

The Rev Jean Montgomerie, who was the ffirst female minister to convene a committee of the General Assembly, said: “If there were moments when my gender affected folks’ attitude to my ministry, these are now drowned in the sea of God’s grace. 50 years on, I am stfill passionate about women and men hearing the call to the ministry of Word and Sacrament.”

And the Rev Aquila Singh, the Church’s ffirst Asian female minister, said she wanted to pay tribute to Margaret Forrester, Effie Irvine (the ffirst woman minister to be called to a parish, who died earlier this year), ‘and all the women who have helped me forge my path in ministry’.

The Moderator concluded by recalling a time when, aged 26 and newly installed in her ffirst manse, she answered the door to a man who asked if her father was in; but more recently the comment of a female colleague that one of the children in her church hadn’t realised men could be ministers.

She ffinished: “Today we give thanks to the living God for the way he walks before us down paths we have not yet seen, to lead us in directions we have not yet thought of, in order to further His Kingdom in ways in which we have not imagined.”

This article appears in the July 2018 Issue of Life and Work

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