I recently replied to Chris Findley’s article with the post The Inconvenient Truth About the Nature of the Priesthood. One of the respondents to this pointed out a statement from the ACNA bishops as follows:
As a College of Bishops, we confess that our Province has failed to affirm adequately the ministry of all Christians as the basic agents of the work of the Gospel. We have not effectively discipled and equipped all Christians, male and especially female, lay and ordained, to fulfill their callings and ministries in the work of God’s kingdom. We repent of this and commit to work earnestly toward a far greater release of the whole Church to her God-given mission.
As someone who worked in lay ministries at a denominational level for more than a decade, I have pointed out that the issue of WO and that of empowering, equipping and sending the laity forth to due the work of the Gospel as God intended them to are tied together. Many people who advocate for WO shy away from making this connection because they implicitly fear that advancing lay ministries of all kinds will dilute the urgency of WO. But that doesn’t change the reality: a church that throttles the laity will, sooner rather than later, have to deal with all of those who conclude that they can never fulfil God’s plan for them as a lay person.
The concept of the priesthood that Findley set forth and which excludes women from that vocation also does the same thing for the laity. The inert laity of Roman Catholicism was supposed to be activated with Vatican II, but that too is an unfulfilled promise. The ACNA and other Anglican bodies have learned little from this experience. But, in all fairness, personal experience tells me that it doesn’t take such a theory to effectively sideline lay involvement in the way envisioned by the New Testament. It is the great failure of contemporary Christianity, and sooner or later we will all have to deal with its consequences.
Positive Infinity 
Thanks for this! I agree with you – it is not right (and we do not have the luxury of it!) to marginalize anyone – including the laity & women. If the Spirit indeed gifts every member of the Body, every member is needed.
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One interesting twist to this whole thing is that the department I was Ministries Coordinator for–which was abolished in 2010 during a major budgetary cut–also oversaw men’s ministries in the Church of God. One persistent source of opposition came from a portion of our pastors–most of whom are male–who basically feared the presence of strong laymen in their church. This is not to say that we lacked pastors who were enthusiastic supporters of our men’s ministry–we had many and are grateful to this day for their support–but there was that core of them who opposed us to the very end. Some of that is tied to the hierarchical dynamic in our church (we have a centralised, episcopal form of government) but, hey, that’s in the ACNA and TEC and RCC too…
Since we are a Pentecostal church, you may be interested in why a church in recent years veered away from women in ministry, my thoughts on that and other related topics are here.
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