Priscilla Turner

I grew up in England in a clerical home. I am a product of St. Paul’s Girls’ School in London, arguably the best girls’ school in the English-speaking world. I won in 1956 scholarships into both Somerville College, Oxford and Girton College, Cambridge (the latter being the oldest college for women). By the time I was married in 1962 (I am now a grandmother) I had read four parts of the Cambridge Tripos, Classics Part I, Classics Part II, Theology Part II, and Theology Part III (which is now an MPhil course) in Old Testament Studies with Hebrew. From 1960 to 1962 I was Crosse Student for the Study of the Holy Scriptures in Hebrew and Greek. From 1964 to 1966 I was Hall-Houghton Student for Septuagint Studies at Oxford. In 1970 I submitted a DPhil dissertation now described by Canon Professor J.A. Emerton, without qualification the world’s best Classical Hebraist and my former supervisor, as “ahead of its time”, and by the eventual examiners as “all very original”. I am a published Septuagint scholar and give papers at international conferences.

My spouse, who holds five Oxbridge degrees, is a distinguished Byzantinist and a world-famous Russianist. He has always given me unstinting academic and spiritual support. He taught in Canadian universities for over thirty years. For most of that time he taught in and presided over the Department which gave Michael Peers his first degree. He has served as Rector’s Warden, Assistant People’s Warden, and People’s Warden at Holy Trinity. Together we joined St. John’s, Shaughnessy in 1971, and saw renewal there. In our current parish we have seen the same. In the 1980s I held office in every possible capacity in the Council of Christian Churches of Greater Vancouver. As President, it fell to me to invite the United Church member Presbyteries to consider their position in the Council, in the light of that body’s constitutional commitment to “biblical and traditional Christian ethics”. I too have served in our parishes, to which we have given many thousands of dollars, in numerous capacities. I have sat on Parish Council most years, led worship, preached and taught, done counselling, literature distribution and editing. Twice I have shared in the work of our Holy Trinity Canonical Committee, the first time when we recommended Roger Simpson, and more recently when we asked for Colin Goode.

I have gone to Synod for Holy Trinity very frequently. I spoke and voted on the then Motion 9 in 1998. It was I who asked publicly, in the midst of that climactic debate, the framers of the motion (which was most significantly emended at Synod itself so as to drop the allusion to “full inclusion”, alias admission to ordination and church salaries) to explain precisely what they meant by “blessing” and “union”. I said that I could not vote in an informed way on something so unclear: did the Church have available, in tubs, vats etc., some gloppy substance called “God’s blessing”, which it could pour out at will on things and people? What precisely constituted same-sex “union”, in respect of both men and women? We were all promised an answer before the vote, but we proceeded to the vote with none having been forthcoming. I have still heard none from any Diocesan quarter.

After that Synod I was asked by the Rector and Parish Council to pen a letter of protest on behalf of the Parish. This I append.[2] It is important to note that we received no reasoned response, nor were any of our pointers apparently taken up in the subsequent Diocesan so-called study process. My spouse and I engaged as fully as possible in that process. At this date, and in view of the kind of claims now being made in international fora about its thoroughness, we need to say that it greatly lacked integrity, both intellectual and spiritual. The impression was left on untutored lay people that Scripture was so ambiguous that the only Christian course was to do the ‘loving’ i.e. tolerant thing; tradition, from the Fathers on, was not investigated, but seemed to have come to mean “what I and my friends think nowadays”; and we were not permitted to apply Scripture, tradition or reason to the thinking of the Lesbian and Gay Voices. Again I append the Holy Trinity Questions [3] which were both invited and carefully prepared, but effectively screened out of the actual discussion as it was handled.

I injected into the Process the technical paper of which I enclose a copy with introduction.[4] Nobody ever asked me to speak to this, or to explain more obscure points to any confused by it. I do not believe that it ever went further than the inner group of facilitators. Nobody appears to have noted the integrated approach to Scripture or, most central of all, the argument about what must have been the Lord’s teaching and example. At no stage did we at Holy Trinity hear any cogent theological argument in favour of innovation in sex-ethics.

‘Our diocesan bishop has stated that he will not be party to balkanising the Diocese, or weakening the Episcopate. It seems to the two of us perfectly clear that he has done both very thoroughly, single-handed and without any help from any particular cleric or Parish.

We now have a situation in which what is right in one Parish is wrong in another, clergy and laity may be disciplined for some reasons here but not there, some of us proclaim that the Holy Spirit is “the Lord, the giver of life”, while others wish to privilege one particular form of vice, some seek to defend young people from corruption, while others want Christian parents to bring their growing boy or girl to their friendly neighbourhood Anglican priest to be ‘turned’. Further afield, people will be getting ordained in this Diocese and floating about the world whose ordination and ministry will not be portable to the rest of the Anglican Communion, unless you count one other Diocese in this country, and a couple in the USA.

As for the Episcopate, it has been weakened to the point where it has become a laughing-stock. It has lost authority because it appears to be subject to none. Christian man shall not live by Scripture, tradition and reason alone, but by every word which proceedeth out of Synod Office. Clergy have been threatened on the grounds that they wish to remain faithful to their ordination vows.

Our public witness as Anglicans has been divided and undermined in this Diocese. The message we now deliver is that there is an open invitation to every sexual predator, to Rome’s offscourings, to adulterous priests and laity, saying, “Come be an Anglican Christian, here anything goes”.

In effect we of Holy Trinity shall be asking the House of Bishops to rescue us. Whether this is achieved by retractation or by resignation I leave to the [heavenly] Management. We shall be saying that here in New West the hungry sheep look up and are not fed, and they [the Bishops] need to supply us with a mature pastor. We need leadership capable of rising above the level of habitually playing the enfant terrible. We shall be asking them whether as Anglicans we have one church in this country, or merely a collection of autonomous Dioceses, one church worldwide, or a patchwork of national movements. Whatever the legalities of the situation, the House of Bishops certainly have the moral authority to act for us; and it is hard to see how the need for such action could be more urgent than it is.

To speak personally, after a quarter of a century of struggle, public and private, against the great evil of the official baptising of homosexual practice in the church of Jesus Christ, and the consequent ruinous division and scandal to outsiders, it matters desperately to me to be able to remain in the church of my birth and baptism: I have been battle-weary for years, and speaking like this today may well be my last throw. Nearly 42 years ago my spouse-to-be was confirmed, having been a Methodist. I am frankly tired of apologising to him for the spiritual abuse which I seem nowadays to have involved him in. I need to live and die somewhere where I see and hear that there is spiritual reality, and am taught that it is possible to be fruitful, loving and joyful while living with many unfulfilled desires.’

There are two assumptions behind this motion. One is that, as things stand at present, we have to choose between accepting the “conscience clause” offered by Bishop Ingham or, on the other hand, joining the Anglican Communion in New Westminster. And one reason for the present Motion 3 is that the Bishops may open up a third possible course of action.

The other assumption is that the House of Bishops will take action. There are two main reasons why they must do so. In the first place, our diocese is deliberately contravening the Guidelines issued by the Canadian bishops with regard to this matter in 1979 and essentially confirmed in 1997. Michael Ingham, when he was a candidate for the bishopric, promised that, while he would work to change these Guidelines, he would not contravene them. He has now announced his intention of breaking that promise. Can our bishops simply let that pass?

In the second place, both the outgoing and the incoming Archbishops of Canterbury have recognised that the action of our diocese has damaged the “sacramental unity” of the worldwide communion. In fact, one does not have to be an archbishop to see that schism is being promoted by what, during our summer travels, I was not pleased to hear called “the diocese of Sodom.” It seems to me that this promotion of schism was not sufficiently appreciated by those who voted for it at Diocesan Synod. Our bishop is doing this on the basis of his legal authority in this diocese, thumbing his nose at the national and worldwide communion. Our national House of Bishops have to recall him to his moral responsibilities as a bishop of the church catholic.

Persistently the baptising of what is essentially the vice of a powerful group of men has been represented as a justice issue, the ordination of members of my own sex, however exemplary, being used, most offensively, as a stalking-horse. I have not held since my feminist early twenties that there was a ‘right’ to ordination for anyone; and certainly Jesus did not hang on His Cross so that any one of us should think it our right to live as we please. For further and very extensive writing on this whole topic, including my long and many-segmented Dialogue with the late Hugh Dempster of this Diocese, some may wish to open up my Website and download material from there.

In this Diocese and Parish we are so sorely in need of a senior pastor that I must add this personal appeal to that of the Parish itself. It seems to me that real bishops have a duty of care, not only to the lower clergy, but to the laity, and not only to both these groups, but to one another. It will be wholly inadequate for you to say to us or to the world, “Everybody’s out of step except our Johnny!”. Will you care for Michael, so that he may care better for us?

I am by now very tired in every way: I need all the help I can get in fulfilling my confirmation vow “manfully to fight under His [Christ’s] banner, against sin, the world and the devil, and to continue Christ’s soldier and servant until my life’s end”. Shortly before your next meeting I expect to undergo a radical operation for renal cancer. I hope to wake up from this, and to a better Anglican world than I have lived in for too many years. I want no detailed answer to this long letter; a brief formal acknowledgement will suffice. The real answer will I trust come in the form of decisive action.

It is well over two-and-a-half years since I wrote to the House of Bishops with extensive sup-porting materials, both personal and academic, about the situation of my parish in the Diocese of New Westminster. If any of that mailing reached you, I received merely a formal acknowledge-ment from the then-Primate. It may, however, still be read on my Website, under http://nwnet.org/~prisca/PDMTtoHoB.htm

In the light of more recent developments in the Communion, I think it right to send you more personally some material which is being read and taken seriously all over the world. It is not long, and will not take you long to read; but if you wish to comment on it, to me privately or in a more public way, I urge you to refrain from doing so until you have followed up at least some of my supporting references. They will enable those of you who are not familiar with it to come to terms with weightier modern scholarship in several spheres.

What is my authority for writing to you again? My academic training has been in the Greek and Roman Classics, their language, history and sociology, ancient philosophy and ethics, the literary and textual criticism of ancient books, the Old Testament, the Apocrypha and other inter-testamental literature (in the original langu-ages), the New Testament, Church History, Christian doctrine, and biblical text and language. I am a Septuagint scholar, and am quoted all over the world as a lexicographer. I am a contributor to the modern Hexapla project. I think it possible that some of you at least have somewhat different gifts; and all of us are commanded to exerc-ise what we have been given for the common good.

What do I hope for in writing to you again? My distinguished spouse and I continue to counsel patience with you our official leaders. We still encourage others to expect you to rise to the demands of these difficult, in-deed unprecedented, ecclesiastical times. The St. Michael’s Re-port represents some mature theological reflect-ion originating in our church. Chaucer said of his exemplary priest, “And gladly woulde he learne, and gladly teche”. You are stated to have recov-ered a degree of collegiality among yourselves. It is our earnest hope and prayer, and that of very many faithful educated laypeople, that this may be rooted in your central responsibility as stud-ents and teachers of the Faith, and your shared commitment to fulfilling that responsibility.