Women Bishops and the Church of Sweden

Thank you for the invitation for me to come to York today.

I have been asked to say something about how the Church of Sweden has received the first women bishops and about what the working situation as a bishop and a woman has been like.

I could in fact make it very easy for myself by saying that, as the first woman bishop of the Church of Sweden, I took up my appointment on 1st July 1997, and it has only been a positive experience. This statement of mine is closely connected with the fact that the Church of Sweden has dealt with the issue of women priests and bishops in a different way compared to the Anglican Church. We have not separated access to the priesthood and the episcopate respectively. When the Church of Sweden Church Assembly took the decision in 1958 that, as from 1959, the priesthood should be open to women, that decision also implied that it was only a matter of time before the church would also have women bishops. When that day eventually arrived, there was no need to take any further decisions. In practice, this means that, when I was appointed, 37 years had passed since the first ordinations of women to the priesthood had taken place, and thus we had already, for almost four decades, sought to deal with all the difficulties that arise from the fact that not everyone is able to accept that women serve in the priesthood, regardless of what position a woman might occupy in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. 

In order to say something about how I myself and my colleague, Caroline Krook, who is the bishop in the Diocese of Stockholm and who was consecrated as a bishop in 1968, have functioned as bishops, I must first recapitulate what has happened in our church between 1958 and today with regard to women in the priesthood and not particularly in the episcopate.

At 1958 a large majority of the Church Assembly decided that women, as from 1st January 1959, could be ordained as priests in the Church of Sweden. In order to make it easier for those who believed that the church had taken a wrong decision an introduction was added to the law about women's competence for the priesthood. This introduction became known as the conscience clause. That clause underlined that no bishop would have to ordain a woman against his own will, that no priest would be forced to service that would offend his conscience and that those who were against female priests would nevertheless themselves be able to be ordained as priests in the church. However, the opponents made the conscience clause into a law and used it as a weapon in the fight against women priests and their ministry. My view is that, instead of being a help towards solving a difficult situation, the conscience clause became the way for a minority to exert its power and to avoid engaging in a continued dialogue. The minority stood for faithfulness to the Bible and the confession. The rest of us were disobedient to the word of God.

On the 10th of April 1960, three women were ordained as priests in the Church of Sweden. Immediately the opponents who had formed the association Kyrklig Samling sent out the 17 points. They contained advice on how priests and lay people should relate to women priests since their ordination was against the word of God and the confession. Priests should refuse to serve together with a woman priest or to participate in a service led by a woman priest and in her work. Organists should refuse to play and lay people should not attend services led by a woman. One could in short use the word boycott.

  In 1979 a new Church Assembly had been convened with the question of the conscience clause as a main item. There was a proposal from a working group appointed by the Archbishop that the conscience clause should be replaced by regulations for collaboration within the Church of Sweden. A major point in that proposal was that a male priest would not be allowed to hinder the ministry of a woman priest but he did not have to participate himself, the so-called "right to make way.”

As the first woman priest elected to the Church Assembly, I participated a great deal myself in this debate. We were a minority who fought for a proposal which would abolish the conscience clause and impose the duty to follow the law in force, that is without reservation to accept collaboration with a woman priest. The proposal also contained a period of time set aside so that it would come into force for everyone who would be ordained as from 1983 onwards. The intention was not to stop ordination to the priesthood for those who were already engaged in their theological studies. This proposal was voted down. That meant in reality that the church accepted a divided priesthood, one half of which was accepted by everyone and the other half was by certain groups considered as invalid and objectionable. Since the ministerial actions carried out by women priests could also be called into question and priests could not meet at the Eucharistic table, this meant in reality a fragmented church. The whole thing turned out to be a non-sustainable solution and in 1981 there was a report about a review of the conscience clause.

At the 1982 Church Assembly, the conscience clause was abolished. The general law about equality from 1945 should thus at last also apply to the employees of the Church of Sweden and the church itself should handle its tensions and there was talk of coexistence and collaboration.

Since 1983 the Church of Sweden has its own governing body and a Church Assembly that meets every year. At every meeting, questions about women priests have appeared on the agenda and the fatigue in these conflicts have become ever more obvious. When the decision was taken in 1958 it was obviously believed that there would not be very many women priests, so it would probably be possible to handle the problems. But that is impossible. Today more than 40 percent of the priests of the Church of Sweden are women. In 1994 the Church Assembly and the College of Bishops ruled that what applies to the priesthood in our church is expressed as follows:

"According to the confession and teaching of the Church of Sweden, it is a mark of the church that there is one ministry. The shape of the ministry can however vary and in that sense it is an issue of practical ordering. But behind the decision that women also may be ordained as priests in the Church of Sweden was a decision with regard to the confession and the teaching of the church, namely that it is accordant with the Evangelical-Lutheran confession to introduce such a church order. From a theological and pastoral point of view, it is basic that women and men are ordained and serve as ministers.

Different views about the shape of the ministry find room within the Church of Sweden. At the same time, it is clear that our church has only one applicable order. The ordination promise implies a promise to follow this order.

The issue of orders becomes an issue of confession if the validity of the ordination is called into question and if the administration of the sacraments is made dependent on the person of the priest. With regard to the issue of validity, the Church of Sweden does not accept two views as accordant with its confession. It is therefore from a doctrinal perspective correct that only those who accept the validity of the ordination of both men and women and their administration of the sacraments may be ordained to the priesthood. That means that a candidate for ordination to the priesthood must be prepared to collaborate fully with other priests in services and in other contexts.

For the sake of the unity of the church it is important that all ordained ministers should be able to collaborate together in the service and in that way manifest their common confession. The individual minister is not free to choose for him- or herself the consequences of his or her view with regard to the exercise of a mission in the church. The common order of the church is superior to the minister.”

The 1994 Church Assembly meant that the highest decision-making body of the Church of Sweden at last took the decision, which means that the church will no longer try to live with a divided ministry and a divided Eucharistic table. The years that have passed since have shown that the conflicts about the priesthood have paralysed the church and not least worried and confused the very large majority of the members of the Church of Sweden who are in favour of women in the ordained ministry. It also turned out that in the dioceses in our church where bishops ever since the 1960s had been positive to the opening of the priesthood to women and who had ordained women have e created dioceses with few problems of collaboration. Two of our dioceses did however have bishops who did not accept the reform and who therefore did not ordain women for their dioceses. Those dioceses attracted many of the priests who are opponents. Today those dioceses have had other bishops for a long time as well as many women priests, but the many opponents among priests who do exist partly concentrated in these two dioceses still constitute a problem for the bishop as well as for priests and lay people, since in these two dioceses, the majority of people are in favour of this reform. Freedom of opinion must apply in the church, but priests must accept the order of the church and must be able to function together at the altar. Nowadays it is also the case that no priest who is unable to collaborate with another priest, regardless of gender, can hold a management position within the church. That means that those priests who oppose the ordination of women to the priesthood can no longer become vicars of parishes or bishops. It has also been important during these developments that the church has never seriously considered breaking the leadership by the bishop of the diocese and its priests and deacons. We have therefore never had two structures, as for example the Anglican Church, with its flying bishops.

As you might imagine from this short presentation, which nevertheless contains the most important steps in the way that our Church have dealt with the issue of women in the ordained ministry from 1959 onwards, it was not a major step that the church had to take in order for the first appointment of a woman as bishop to take place. When I had won the first trial election to the Episcopal chair of Lund, it was easy to understand that it would not be long before the Church of Sweden would have its first women bishop. Then our Archbishop KG Hammar and the college of bishops acted in a commendable manner to prepare the way for the new bishop. The archbishop sent his chaplain to several countries where there were already women bishops in order to investigate how the management of those churches and their bishops' conferences had handled the arrival of women as bishops. Besides our sister churches in Denmark and Norway, the chaplain also visited Lutheran churches in Germany and the Episcopal Church of the USA.  A kind book of 'testimonies' was established, so that our bishops could take on board what had happened, for better or for worse, in other churches. It should not have to be, as happened in one church, that when the woman bishop arrived to attend her first meeting of the bishops' conference, the chairman greeted her with the words, "Oh well, now that you are here, we will have to say 'Welcome' to you.” 

When I first became a member of the bishops' conference, I had the advantage of having been a member of the Church Assembly and of the Church of Sweden Central Governing Body, so I knew all the bishops personally and had already worked with several of them. But it was nevertheless such a touching care on the part of the bishops' conference that they had decided that the archbishop's secretary, who was a woman, should from then on also be present as secretary to the bishops' conference, so that the woman bishop should not be the only woman in this otherwise male-dominated gathering. This may seem like a simple gesture, but it represented something much more, namely a concern that a female colleague should feel that she was precisely a colleague, and a fully welcomed colleague. 

How then was the first woman bishop received? If I consider the Church of Sweden at large, and not only the Diocese of Lund, it was easy to see what enormous joy that spread in the church throughout the country. I believed I received several hundreds of letters, of which only two were negative. The congratulations expressed the joy that the church now had a woman as part of its management. At last people were able to experience that the church itself affirmed its view of the priesthood as open to men and women at all levels without any exceptions.

What, then, has happened during my ten years as the Bishop of Lund with regard to those priests and lay people who cannot accept either women priests or women bishops? Let me say first of all that I have been the bishop of the diocese that has the largest number of priests, some 500, of which about 40 % now are women. My colleague in Stockholm has the second largest number of priests, some 450, of which about half are women today. When I spoke to Bishop Caroline the other day she told me that of these 450 priests, she has a problem with 5.

When I arrived in the Diocese of Lund, one of the first things I did was to meet those who clearly expressed that they were opponents. We sat down, 12 people, to a long and good conversation, where we talked both theology and about what practical attitudes we would adopt in relation to the fact that the Diocese of Lund now had a woman bishop. They declared to me that they could not accept me as their bishop, but only as the manager of the diocese, since they had no problem with that aspect of the bishop's function which is concerned with diocesan management and administration. My message to them was very clear. I said that I expected them to be loyal to the order of the church while I clearly underlined at the same time that I would not seek to force them so serve together with me at services of worship, which was the difficult point for them. This has meant that, when I have visited my 430 parishes and met with all employees and elected representatives, I have not tolerated that a priest would not be present for the conversations and negotiations that took place on these occasions, On the other hand, I have never forced them to participate in the mass, which I have celebrated and in which the priests have been expected to participate. This way of handling the problem has meant that we have not had any conflicts and I have even noted that several of those who previously were opponents now receive communion when I celebrate, and some have also without major gestures began to serve at the altar together with women colleagues. This is a hint that there is an ongoing reflection and it is possible to change one's views. I can even say that I have not met any unkindness from those priests who believe it is wrong to have a woman bishop. On the contrary, I have been received with respect.

Is everything well then with the Church of Sweden? No, of course not. We do have opponents. They are not many, but they are quite good at voicing their view. What has happened is however that the opponents' side has, so to speak, broken. We have those who believe that it is wrong for women to be part of the ordained ministry, but who nevertheless seek to be loyal and who want to remain within the church. Then there is also a group of opponents, the so-called Missions Synod, who asked Bishop Obare from the Lutheran Church in Kenya to come to Sweden and to consecrate one of our retired priests as bishop. This priest was defrocked after that consecration, and this has become a break-off group from our church. The Missions Synod has since consecrated another two bishops, who have therefore also had to leave the priesthood of our church. But who knows? Maybe it will turn out that it will become easier to enter into conversations with a group outside the church than within it. Time will tell.

The fact is that no new problems arose for the church with the advent of a woman bishop. But those who do not like women priests do not of course like women bishops either, although they loyally consider us as diocesan mangers. The problem is rather outside our church but it affects, for example, our relationship with the Anglican Church here in England. Since there are not yet any women bishops here, the priests that I, Bishop Caroline and my successor in Lund Bishop Antje have ordained are not permitted to serve in England in spite of the Porvoo agreement. This is something that I myself find totally unacceptable. In this way the English church "punishes” some priests from our church, both men and women, and divides our priests into an A-team and a B-team. This is an ecumenical problem, which in my view must soon be solved, and it cannot wait until the Anglican Church has its own first women bishops. This issue is on the agenda of our archbishops, but the process must be speeded up. This is a problem, for which we have to pray for a quick solution.

With women priests and bishops, something new arrived in the church after almost 2000 years. It is obvious that such a fundamental change could not take place without causing anxiety and difficulties. The roles of the male priest and bishop have always been so self-explanatory. We make different theological judgments, about which we must continuously engage in conversations.

But it is also very important that we, in our thinking about women priests and bishops, also include our very ordinary feelings. It is interesting to see that when we last had a real popular storm in Sweden; it was not about nuclear energy or the EU. No, it took place in the 1950s, when a woman newscaster appeared on the TV for the first time. Sweden stood up like a man. A woman cannot present the news. Can you trust them? Is their voice all right? This shows how we are governed, not only by our intellect, but also by our emotions. Many people who were previously against the opening of the priesthood to women have since changed their minds and they have highlighted this saying "This felt wrong".  It is important to give one another time to reflect on that aspect of our humanity and the attitudes of which our emotional life is an expression. I am convinced, that, for many people, who have experienced difficulties with the thoughts of women as priests and bishops, it has primarily not been a matter of theology, but of something unimaginable. They have just not been able to conceive the image.

This is the area to which we have so far given our very least reflections, but maybe this is what we ought to start giving priority to now. Theology is one starting point, the emotions are another, and they must belong together when we take our stands. 

Let me finish by noting that, in a way it may look like a break with tradition to have a woman bishop. A woman in that role is something new. But at the same time I would like to say that it has not meant a break with tradition. When I was made a bishop, I went straight into the role and function of the bishop as something to take for granted. It was not about forming something specifically female, but it was a woman who entered into a tradition, functions and continuity. To see a woman bishop wearing a cope, mitre and with her staff in her hand was nothing strange and different. Rather, for the doubtful, who hold the office of bishop in the church in high esteem, it was helpful to see that the continuity was still there and the function is not linked to gender. 

This my statement I base on the fact that when the Diocese of Lund had to elect my successor, an overwhelming majority of the priests and lay people elected a woman once more. It was no longer anything strange, but quite natural to do so.

Christina Odenberg