On Muddying the Anglican Waters over Women's Ordination

Dame Sarah Mullally's forte is thermometers not theology

The good ship Anglican Communion, going down by the head — women’s ordination the last thing above water.

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I August 31, 2026

Just when you thought the Global South might come to the rescue of the Anglican Communion over the ordination of women, it all suddenly collapses.

Anglicans are brilliant at muddying the waters. The Hegelian-driven Archbishop Rowan Williams, the thoroughly conflicted Archbishop Justin Welby, and now a former nurse running the Anglican ship of state just as the Church of England slides into hospice care. Dame Sarah Mullally's forte being thermometers not theology.

Consider the anomaly. A GAFCON province, Kenya, already seats women in the episcopate — and has done since 2021, when Emily Onyango was made an assistant bishop in Bondo and Rose Okeno was consecrated diocesan of Butere — at the very moment the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) is still agonizing over women priests. The ACNA is firmly against ordaining a woman to the episcopacy, but even ordination to the priesthood is raising talk of internal schism. The Reformed Episcopal Church (REC) is firmly opposed to the ordination of women in any order, and there are rumblings that it might be the first to show ACNA the back door. The ACNA's Anglo-Catholic wing is also opposed to the ordination of women as are some evangelicals. The province's two-tier approach to women's ordination is showing its fragility in the face of Anglo-Catholic and confessional-evangelical resistance.

At least two provinces aligned with GAFCON or the GSFA — Kenya and South Sudan — have consecrated women as bishops, and a growing number ordain women to the priesthood. The Jerusalem Declaration treats the ordination of women as a secondary matter, noting that full agreement has not been reached among all signatories and that it is not held to affect one's salvation. Its proponents emphasize that while they maintain a unanimous view on primary matters, the diversity of opinion on women's ordination is acknowledged within their global fellowship.

Yet here is the contradiction that will not stay buried. If the matter is genuinely secondary — adiaphora, a thing indifferent — why did the GAFCON primates adopt a moratorium in 2018 on consecrating any further women bishops? A moratorium is the language of discipline, not of liberty. The fellowship wants to call the question secondary while policing it as though it were primary, and that unresolved tension is precisely why the Global South could not, in the end, ride to anyone's rescue.

The map bears this out. Kenya and South Sudan permit the ordination of women as both priests and bishops. Nigeria currently limits women to the diaconate. Uganda's canons would allow a woman to be elected and consecrated a bishop — but none ever has, and there are no plans to do so; women there serve as archdeacons, provosts and deans, never as bishops. Tanzania has no province-wide provision, though individual dioceses such as Tabora have lately voted to ordain women.

The Church of the Province of Myanmar authorizes women as deacons and priests but not bishops. Even the GAFCON-sponsored Diocese of the Southern Cross in Australia — led by Glenn Davies, the former Archbishop of Sydney who spent decades resisting the priesting of women — has now licensed a woman minister. The ACNA, for its part, leaves the question of women priests to individual dioceses rather than settling it at the provincial level.

For Anglo-Catholics and a good number of evangelicals, the ordination of women to any order of ministry is strictly verboten. They are supported theologically by the Roman Catholic Church and, in its own idiom, by the Southern Baptist Convention, which in June voted overwhelmingly to advance a constitutional amendment barring women from the pastorate — a measure introduced by the Rev. Dr. Albert Mohler that still requires a confirming vote in 2027 to take effect. A victory for Mohler, and a signal of where the confessional wind is blowing.

How this all plays out is still open to speculation. That it remains a live issue for Anglicans in North America more than fifteen years after the ACNA's founding cannot be swept under the rug of contemporary history. The "no ordination" position has a long historical pedigree that will not simply go away.

Nor can one ignore the argument that The Episcopal Church, having admitted women to the priesthood and episcopate, found itself on the slippery slope to ordaining homosexual and lesbian priests and bishops. Cause and correlation are not the same thing, and honest opponents will concede as much — but the sequence is there in the record, and it haunts every ACNA diocese now weighing the question.

Righteous rejecters of women's ordination can point to history, to tradition and, depending on how one reads it, to Scripture itself.

That the throne of Canterbury is now held by a woman speaks volumes. It is where the Church of England has been drifting for more than twenty-five years. With the denomination in freefall — little more than one percent of the English population to be found in its pews on any given Sunday, and barely four in a hundred under-35s attending any Christian service even monthly — she may well prove to be its last Archbishop of Canterbury.

Time will tell.

David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com.