Speaking at an event in the House of Lords had not been on my bucket list—too unlikely to consider. But when friends from the Sophia Network invited me to do it, I added it, just to cross it off.
Sophia were launching the Minding the Gap research, the results of a survey that ran for a couple of months in summer 2017. Over 1200 women offered their experiences of being a woman in the church in the UK today.
As we queued for security (it was the House of Lords...) someone asked me why I had come. I said some things about being concerned about gender issues and ministry. She asked ‘Why?’
The scanner beeped and we were separated, but I had a flashback in my head. Six, seven years ago, our living room in St Andrews, a friend, Ruth, senior pastor of a significant Baptist church, talking about being a part of our church, our local fellowship, in her youth, sensing a call the ministry, being told that God does not call women. It was not so long ago; we have members who remember her.
I looked at my daughters, the eldest then 10 or 11, playing in the room. They didn’t notice what she said—grown up stuff—but they were growing into faith in that same church. In our congregation, things had changed; in too many others, not. I had always believed that the Bible teaches the God calls women and men indifferently; that day I pledged to get active about that belief.
The Minding the Gap research helps those of us who want to get active, by telling us things we might not have known. Let me highlight just three.
First, this matters. 1200+ responses is, surely, significant. There are women in our churches with stories they want to tell and with voices that need to be heard. We need to listen to those stories and to hear those voices, to find ways of making space so that they are no longer silenced. This research is the beginning of that, but there needs to be so much more.
Second, the stories are endlessly varied. There are women—praise God!—who have experienced support and affirmation and encouragement in their vocation to leadership. There are others who have not. Hateful and unloving words have been spoken and heard; hateful and unjust actions have been done and suffered.
More than that, these women’s stories point to the rich variety of the practice of ministry. If ordained but unpaid ministers are disproportionately female (they are...) then we should want to ask why; we should also want to ask whether it is possible to be appointed to a senior role from a non-stipendary ministry. Serving the church faithfully without payment should not, surely, be a barrier to becoming a bishop?
Third, these stories call us to look to our structures. Asked about the impediments to the full exercise of their ministry, most women named ‘institutional sexism’. If our institutions are broken, if our structures are sexist, solving our problems will require more than changing some men’s minds.
As Christians, I believe, we should hear language of institutions and structures in Biblical terms, as powers and principalities. Patriarchy is an evil spiritual reality, active and enveloping. Prayer and work will alike be required to overthrow it. We need to change things, to storm spiritual strongholds, to speak gospel truth deep into our cultural assumptions.
This sounds hard, but with prayer and faithful Biblical preaching and constant vigilance it can be done. Aged ten or eleven, my eldest daughter overheard Ruth tell of our church’s pulpit being closed to women. She turns seventeen next month. She has spoken twice from that once-closed pulpit already—by God’s good grace, principalities can be dethroned, and change can happen.

Steve Holmes is Principal of St Mary’s College and Head of School of Divinity at the University of St Andrews.