Archival treasures unveiled to celebrate women’s ministry in the Church of England

The title of the exhibition at Lambeth Palace Library ‘Women and the Church of England’, which runs until August 29, could be interpreted as implying an overview, but visitors can be advised to expect a vignette. Look in vain for a registered member of the Mothers’ Union, an accredited working lady, or even a female Reader.

Exhibition marks 80th anniversary of Florence Li Tim-Oi’s priesthood in Hong Kong (news, February 2); the 30th anniversary of the priesthood of 1,200 women in the C of E (News, March 15, 2019); and the tenth anniversary of legislation allowing women to be ordained as bishops in England (News, 20 July 2014).

It explores 200 years of women’s ministry in the Church of England, focusing mainly on a sequence of events from the revival of the order of deaconesses in the 19th century to the ordination of women deacons (many of whom were already deaconesses) and priests in the 20th century, and then bishops in the current century.

But it also sheds a side-light on the activities of lay women of substance such as philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts and social housing pioneer Octavia Hill, and the appointment, letter of many years, of Mrs Betty Ridley as Church Estates. Commissioner. The commissioners’ relations with Hill, who urged them to maintain their own housing to keep their standard high, are a feature of the display.

Ridley was the first woman to hold such an administrative post at 1 Milbank – and one of the first two women to receive a Lambeth degree: a development which, an exhibition shows, took time to emerge after the admission of women to degrees . at Oxford in 1920 and Cambridge in 1948.

Ridley, not yet a lady but a member of the House of Laity of the Church Assembly, is pictured with Mother Clare, Head of the Community of St Andrew’s Deaconesses, in 1958 when they received their MA from the Archbishop of Canterbury of the day, Dr Geoffrey Fisher. (Fisher’s university was Oxford.)

Lambeth Palace LibraryElizabeth Ferard (1885-23), pioneer deaconess of the Church of England, in the Lambeth Palace Library exhibition

The material that may be least familiar to visitors are the documents and photographs relating to Elizabeth Ferard, Isabella Gilmore and the history of the C of E Deaconesses and their “Devotional and Intellectual Preparation” for ministry.

The Hong Kong “Incident”, ca Church Times then duplicated, it is marked with a typed copy of the letter from Bishop Hall to Archbishop William Temple, in which he explained what he had done in ordaining priest Li Tim-Oi to meet the pastoral need in the emergency conditions created by the Japanese occupation.

Among the ephemera of the last 50 years are campaign leaflets from the Women’s Ordination Movement and its opposite, Women Against Women’s Ordination. Visitors may wonder whose pen annotations are on the displayed copy of the 1961 Clergy Pension Measure to adjust its wording in 1982 to include women deacons.

Also from the Queen’s late reign comes the impressive example of the Royal License and Seal Exhibition – as usual, innocent of punctuation.

Missing, although mentioned in the chronology, is Archbishop Randall Davidson’s 1919 commission report, Ministry of Women, but the exhibition touches on the largely forgotten debate about whether deaconesses were, in fact, in Holy Orders. The legend of a black-and-white photograph of the “ordination” of a deaconess in her veil, kneeling before a bishop in his pontificals, suggests a possible answer to that question which has exercised the Anglican mind for some time.

It is not the only question that will appear to visitors. During my visit, a discussion group seemed about to disappear into a 1662 pit about the “making” of deacons and the “ordination” of priests, but emerged before it left.

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