19 December 2014 A.D. Meet Libby Lane—Interview with 1st Woman Bishop in CoE
Hardman, Isabel. “Meet Libby Lane – the first interview with
the first woman bishop.” The Spectator. 17
Dec 2014. http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2014/12/meet-libby-lane-the-first-interview-with-the-first-woman-bishop/. Accessed 19 Dec 2014.
Libby Lane, the first
female bishop in the Church of England (Photo: Nigel Roddis/Getty)
Why is
Libby Lane the first woman bishop appointed by the Church of England? She was
one of the first to be ordained as a vicar 20 years ago when the Church
approved women priests, and today she was unveiled as the Bishop of Stockport.
But she was not one of the favourites, and so Bishop Libby was as much of a
surprise as her appointment, which the Church kept under wraps until late last
night.
When we
meet in the Crewe YMCA, she has just been touring the building surrounded by a
small cloud of cameras and journalists and is preparing to say goodbye to her
congregation at a party this evening. They only found out this morning that she
would be leaving them to become a bishop. When we talk about the church at St
Peter’s Hale, Lane seems a little emotional as she is clearly sad to be leaving
them behind, but for the rest of the interview, she is as polished as any
politician I’ve ever interviewed.
The first
ever woman bishop, appointed after years of campaigning and fighting in the
Church of England, is so keen not to cause any more fights that she tries to
avoid saying anything particularly striking during the interview. She refuses
to put herself on one side or another when I ask whether she sees herself as a
liberal, a conservative, an evangelical, or something else. Speaking in that
special Anglican way – a slightly slower-than-usual pace of words that linger a
little longer over vowels, especially ‘God’, which becomes ‘Go-od’, and
thoughtful-sounding pauses – she says:
‘I would
describe myself as a Christian and as a passionate Anglican and that’s how I
would describe myself. I have been formed and shaped by a whole breadth of the
Church of England’s tradition and experience and been really enriched by that
and I want to hold onto that breadth and the richness that I have got in Christ
and all the traditions of the Church.’
I’m not
sure what that means, other than that she’s very keen to get on with everyone
in the diocese, so I try to find out whether she has a liberal or an
evangelical approach to the Bible. Does she believe in a literal interpretation
of Scripture or applying context to tricky issues?
‘I read
the Bible every day, I shape my preaching around Scripture, I love the Bible
and it is what shapes my life. I hear God’s voice in it speaking to me and
shaping my life and through it I think God’s intentions for the world, the
Bible really matters to me. But so do the Church’s liturgy and sacraments, so
does the Church’s teaching through history, rich history of prayer and
spirituality, I am hard to label and I’m happy with that.’
If Lane
applies a label to her beliefs in private, she clearly doesn’t think it’s wise
to tell the world about it at the start of her ministry as a bishop. The
website of the church she is now leaving, St Peter’s Hale, explains the
Christian faith in a rather gentle way, saying that Christ’s ‘life, death and
resurrection holds the key to knowing and loving God and to making sense of
life, before and after death’. Perhaps her sermons are clearer.
Bishops
have always clashed with governments, and recently the Church of England has
had a number of high-profile debates with ministers about certain social
policies, particularly welfare reform. Lane is a suffragan bishop and will not
sit in the House of Lords, with the first Anglican woman to sit in the Upper Chamber
coming next year. But she sees it as her duty to ‘challenge’ politicians on
policies that she sees hurting those she serves. ‘Where my voice can articulate
the voice of the church in its whole breadth, then I will, she says. ‘I think
speaking of the experience of the people that we are and the people that we
serve is incumbent on all ministers, and that includes challenge as well as
encouragement.’
She has,
along with other women who have felt called to full-time Christian ministry
from a young age (her first inkling that she wanted to work in the Church came
when she was 15 and she told her own vicar when she was 20 that she was
thinking of following in his footsteps), been campaigning for many years for
this day to come, and must have got into a few scraps with those who oppose it
on theological grounds. She tries to be polite about these people, while saying
‘there have been people inevitably, colleagues, and people within the
communities that I have served for whom this has been disturbing, unsettling
and distressing’.
She claims
that her own conviction that she was called to work in the Church is enough to
help her deal with CofE colleagues and parishioners who wish she didn’t have
the job she now does. But come on, she must have had a few fights with people
over the past 20 years since the Church started ordaining women?
‘I’m very
happy to engage with robust… engagements… but, um, I would hate to get to a
place where I thought I was always right or that I knew everything. So the fact
that people disagree with me is actually a positive thing and it continues to
help me to learn to grow.’
The
furthest Lane comes to saying that the opponents of women Bishops need to do
anything now that she’s in post is that ‘there are people who do carry hurt and
scars and those must be honoured and recognised’. She’s keen to work with any
churches under her authority as Bishop of Stockport who disagree with women in
authority in the Church, and will ‘ensure that they have the support and the
oversight that they are entitled to, so that they can flourish and I will
continue to serve them as their bishop, praying and resourcing them as much as
I am able’. That word ‘flourish’, by the way, is an official part of the
Church’s attempt to accommodate those who disagree with its new official
position on bishops and gender. But as I explained in the Spectator recently,
some conservative evangelicals feel they will eventually be forced to leave the
Church, rather than flourish.
But Lane likes
the fact that the modern Church of England is a very broad one indeed. She says
‘I think that part of its strength is that we strive to hold people together in
Christ and that we don’t all agree with each other. I think we are stronger
because dissenting voices are heard’. She, though, clearly doesn’t want to add
to the noisy debate in the Church at the moment, and is quite happy instead to
blend back into the noisy YMCA to talk to more of the people who work there.
Which makes her the perfect first woman bishop in many ways: the only thing
that appears to be controversial about her is her appointment, which was the
subject of so much fighting in that broad church.
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