Phil's Boring Blog

Dear Bishops, Synod is broken: have you got the message yet? November 23, 2012

THANK YOU to everyone who has signed my petition, No Confidence in General Synod: Calling for an Urgent Review: 50 signatures in the first 24 hours and still gathering momentum, approaching 90 as I write. I’m aiming for 500+.

All the distress notwithstanding, the more I reflect on this situation, the more I think the way things have panned out is actually for the best. Daron Medway hits the nail on the head in this twitter exchange:

Not so much a tragedy, then, as an opportunity; but in the meantime, Synod is broken and thousands of people, men and women alike, feel severely bruised and battered by that discovery. We have a voting system that is not fit for purpose — but which can be fixed very simply without compromising on the two-thirds majority principle: 2/3 majority overall backed by a simple majority in all three houses. This retains the 2/3 majority protocol but ensures that a minority can’t hold the whole of Synod hostage yet still allows a majority objection in any single house to veto a motion.

All we need, Right Reverend gentlemen — yes, that’s you I’m speaking to, your Bishopnesses — is for you to make it happen. Call an emergency session or whatever it is you have to do, and fix it. Don’t faff about: just “get with the programme” as a certain other gentleman has expressed it, and mend the broken pipe before it floods us all with despair. In the meantime, I look forward to the day I can address a paragraph such as this to “Right Reverend ladies and gentlemen.”

If my little petition isn’t enough to persuade you that urgent action is needed, please see these other petitions:

• Petition to the Cabinet Office: No women Bishops, no automatic seats in the House of Lords – over 6,000 signatures
• Petition to ‘The Group of Six”: Women Bishops – Another Vote Now – over 3,000 signatures
• Petition to The General Synod of the Church of England: Unconditionally ordain Women as Bishops in the Church of England – approaching 600 signatures

Thank you.