Here’s some news located over at Anglican Ink!

http://anglicanink.com/article/church-england-will-not-break-south-carolina

This post has been updated above with results of the Women Bishops vote which failed in the House of Laity

BBC Report

Report from the Church of England Media office:

The General Synod of the Church of England has voted to reject the draft legislation to allow women to become bishops.

Under the requirements of the Synod the legislation required a two-thirds majority in each of the three voting houses for final draft approval. Whilst more than two thirds voted for the legislation in both the House of Bishops (44-03) and the House of Clergy (148-45), the vote in favour of the legislation in the House of Laity was less than two-thirds (132-74). The vote in the House of Laity fell short of approval by six votes.

In total 324 members of the General Synod voted to approve the legislation and 122 voted to reject it.

The consequence of the “no” vote of terminating any further consideration of the draft legislation means that it will not be possible to introduce draft legislation in the same terms until a new General Synod comes into being in 2015, unless the ‘Group of Six’ (the Archbishops, the Prolocutors and the Chair and Vice Chair of the House of Laity) give permission and report to the Synod why they have done
.........
The House of Bishops of the Church of England will meet at 08.30am on Wednesday morning in emergency session to consider the consequences of the vote

Wow, I’m surprised! Was this expected? Does it have anything to do with the new resident at Lambeth Palace, even though he said he supports female bishops?

Perhaps the English laity are noting the bad(for the most part) TEC example, and voting accordingly. 

When you look at the breakdown of bishop-clergy-lay vote when it comes to traditionalism, it reminds me of the giggle-inducing thing that Archbishop Yong Ping Chung said at Hope/Future in 2005(paraphrased):  “I’m so glad my Faith was formed BEFORE I went to theological school”... 

Teatime2, probably many people feel as you do, but that is at least partly a result of the very one-sided reporting of the issue by media and by those in Church of England who favour women bishops.  In fact there was good reason to expect that this might be the result. 

For example, this draft measure in various forms has been voted on by General Synod in the past, as part of the process of consideration and approval, and it never at any time achieved 2/3 votes in the House of Laity.  No-one ever explained why they were so certain it was going to achieve 2/3 this time around.

Also, much is made of the fact that 42 out of 44 dioceses passed the measure as a preliminary step.  What is not mentioned is that the largest and most successful diocese (London) was one of those opposed.  What is also not mentioned is that 10 of the approving dioceses passed “following motions”.  In other words, they didn’t approve it in its actual form, but only with greater protections for those opposed to women bishops.

Then there was the “straw in the wind” of the bishops deciding unilaterally a few months ago to change the draft measure to add more protection for the traditionalists. Since the bishops are overwhelmingly in favour of women-bishops and don’t particularly care for traditionalists, the most likely reason for this was that they had counted the numbers in Synod and realised that the measure might not pass.

It was a near thing, but perhaps not as much as some would like to spin it.  There were 9 abstentions - it would not have helped if any of these abstainers had changed their vote to a “yes”, but of course changing to a “no” would have made it much harder.  In order to pass, the measure needed (a) 6 of the 74 “no” voters to change their vote to a “yes”, and (b) none of the abstainers to change to a “no”.

Re your first question, no, probably Justin Welby had nothing to do with this.  The vast majority of bishops in CofE are in favour of women bishops, and +Welby is just one of that crowd.  But this points to a major problem in CofE - the many large and growing evangelical churches have no representation among the bishops, yet they cannot be ignored because they are largely keeping the CofE alive.

My sense is that, while most of the bishops favor women in the episcopate, they know they’re walking in dangerous territory where the laity do not favor women bishops, and it is the laity whose numbers comprise most of the Church.  If I were one of those bishops, I would rather not cause offense among the flock for fear of losing them.

Could you imagine if legislation had to pass by a 2/3 in 3 different houses in our General Convention?  Of course, they could do like happened in ECUSA, when it failed to pass by simple majority the attempted ordination of women in 1973, and the disobedient just did it anyway in 1974.  By 1976 there were so many running around as priests that they decided to make it permissive, which of course is now mandatory.

I am still stunned, not by the result of the vote, but that supporters of women bishops for so long repeated the mantra “42 out of 44 dioceses passed the motion so we are going to win with an overwhelming majority”.  I can’t remember a single liberal commentator who pointed out the obvious:

Diocesan synods work on a simple majority.  General Synod needs a 2/3 majority for this measure.  Even if results could be easily translated from one to the other (they can’t, but that’s another story), it should be obvious to everyone who has completed grade school that the measure could pass each of the 44 diocesan synods and yet easily fail at General Synod.

If you then consider that in two of the dioceses (including the largest) the measure didn’t even get 50% support, and that in 10 others the diocesan synod passed a “following motion” (i.e. a desired amendment), its difficult to understand why anyone thought this was a done deal.