Ordination of women in the Church of Scotland

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Church of Scotland was one of the first national churches to accept the Ordination of women. In Presbyterianism, ordination is understood to be an ordinance rather than a sacrament; ministers and elders are ordained; until recently deacons were "commissioned" but now they too are ordained to their office in the Church of Scotland.

Women were commissioned as deacons from 1935, and allowed to preach from 1949. Serious debate on the ordination of women as ministers began when Mary Levison petitioned the General Assembly for ordination in 1963. She was eventually ordained in 1978 and later was the first woman to be appointed Queen's Chaplain.

In a Presbyterian Church, elders (the equivalent the members of a parish council in other denominations) are ordained for life. The minister ("minister of Word and Sacrament", to use the full title) is a "teaching elder", the other Kirk Session members are "ruling elders", and the difference is understood to lie in the authority of the appointment rather than the spiritual nature of the ordinance. Consequently the theological arguments for and against the ordination of women as elders were identical to those concerning women ministers, and the two debates ran in parallel and were settled more or less simultaneously. The General Assembly changed its legislation to allow the ordination of women as elders in 1966 and as ministers in 1968.

The first woman to be ordained as a minister in the Church of Scotland was the Rev Catherine McConnachie by the Presbytery of Aberdeen in 1969. She served as assistant minister at St George's Tillydrone, in Aberdeen. In 1972 the Rev Euphemia H. C. Irvine was the first to be ordained and inducted as a parish minister - at Milton of Campsie Parish Church, near Glasgow. She retired in 1988. Approximately 170 women are now ministers in the Church of Scotland.

The first female Moderator of the General Assembly was Dr Alison Elliot in 2004 - also the first elder to hold the post since the 16th century. On 31st October 2006 the Rev Sheilagh M. Kesting became the first woman minister to be nominated as Moderator-designate (for the 2007 General Assembly).

Women have also played an increasingly prominent rôle in the Church's administration. In 1996, the Rev Dr Marjory MacLean - then minister at Stromness, Orkney - was appointed as the first women to be Depute Clerk to the General Assembly and later served as acting Principal Clerk in 2002-2003. A number of other senior administrators in the Church are women.