Aldeburgh Church: Women Missing

Aldeburgh in Suffolk has a pleasant parish church which Simon Knott, the great Suffolk Church writer, prefers to some of the other, what he calls more pretentious, ones. Apart from noticing with interest that its staff of clergy were entirely female (Reverends Sarah, Nichola, Sheila and Johanna) I saw a fifteenth-century floor brass in which all the women had been picked off. The menfolk, even the little children, were there, whereas the wife and daughters were nowhere to be seen. Although now either melted down or part of some dubious private collection, the memorial is all the poorer for want of the family’s females.

Readers may know that I have endured some grief for my stance on women pastors and preachers (views borne by faithfulness to scripture rather than personal preference). Yet a church, even more so than this old tomb, is the poorer if both women and men are not a part of it. We are living in days in which the very concept of womanhood is attacked by woke intellectuals, and supposed marriages can now be performed in which women are entirely absent. God made the two sexes to complement each other, to enjoy the other's society. While one gained by having additional, physical strength, the other gained in procreative privilege. God made men and women to be together, just as He made humankind to be with Him.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Galatians 3:28