The Church of England first appointed female preachers in the course of the First World War. This is the story …
Women within the Church of England
The Church of England had effectively accepted the principle of ladies in leadership as early because the Tudor times, otherwise it couldn’t have had Queen Elizabeth I, and later other Queens, as Supreme Governor of the Church of England.
The Great War
In 1866 the Church of England licensed men as lay readers, who were licensed to evangelise, but it surely was not then open to women. During the Great War, many ladies took up roles more traditionally taken by men. From the Church of England, huge numbers of men had gone to war, and lots of clergymen had also gone to function military chaplains.
Back home, women took on more roles of their local church. Traditionally men taught boys in Sunday School and girls taught the women, but now women were teaching the boys and the women. In some places women began to read the Bible lesson, help with communion, and other tasks where a parish had no men left to do them.
The pragmatics of wartime meant that the Church of England decided to permit bishops to appoint women to assist in ministry. These women weren’t ordained, but licensed as a latest category of limited ministry under the discretion of every bishop. The first such women were appointed in London in 1916, when women were allowed to evangelise and lead services, although initially only to women and girls, during a National Week of Mission.
Bishop Gore of Oxford
The Bishop of Oxford, Charles Gore, was essentially the most enthusiastic of the bishops for the concept of appointing women to latest roles. In June 1917, he arrange a committee to look into appointing women to assist in ministry. This was tasked to organize a scheme to produce the diocese with a band of ladies lay ministers. The Anglican Diocese of Oxford covers the largely rural English counties of Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire. They looked into what training was needed, and recruit and appoint them. A woman called Mrs Illingsworth was appointed to liaise with clergy who wanted female staff to assist them within the ministry.
The licensing service followed the official wording for appointing lay readers, who as much as then was all the time male. The women were effectively lay readers, but were originally called the Diocesan Band of Bishop’s Messengers. The Rev J.B. Seaton was appointed as chaplain and director of studies. Their secretaries were Mrs Brabant and Mrs Illingworth of Oxford. The first batch from the Diocese of Oxford were 21 women who were mainly wives and sisters of clergy, but not all.
Other Bishop’s Messengers
Other Anglican bishops soon followed Bishop Gore’s model. The Bishop of Southwell followed in appointing Bishop’s Messengers, and the Bishop of Exeter began the same scheme called the Women Evangelists. Eventually Women’s Messengers were appointed by 21 bishops in England, which was about half of all of the dioceses. Those appointed by the bishop might be invited by a priest to evangelise and lead missions. Often these were held outside on village greens and commons.
Diocesan Order of Women’s Messengers
Although the scheme was arrange as an expedient to satisfy the shortage of clergy in the course of the war, it was so successful that it continued after the war. In 1919, the Diocesan Order of Women’s Messengers was formally created as a national organisation and an Inter-Diocesan Conference of Women Messengers was held every two years. In 1926, there have been about 400 Women’s Messengers in England. In 1928, it was held in Oxford when there have been 120 messengers.
Women’s Messengers in Canada
In 1928, the Canadian Anglican Diocese of Rupert’s Land in Manitoba also adopted the model. Women, starting with Miss Marguerita Douglas Fowler, were appointed as Bishop’s Messengers to evangelise, spread the gospel, and establish schools and missions where there have been not enough men to do it. She was later awarded an OBE for her work. The Bishop’s Messengers of St. Faith’s was later named The Order of St. Faith’s and operated until 1979. The story is told in “The Story of St Faith’s” by Marguerita Fowler.
Harbingers of Ordination
The last latest ones to be appointed are believed to have been a gaggle of six, appointed by the Bishop of Worcester in 1945. Later no more women were appointed, and the numbers slowly dropped as women left the order or died. It was not until 1969 that ladies were once more appointed as lay readers within the Church of England, when Rosamund Essex was appointed.
Miss Bangay
The longest serving of the Anglican Women’s Messengers was Miss Bessie Bangay of Chesham. She was amongst the primary group licensed by the Bishop of Oxford in 1917. Aged 28, she was appointed to assist the vicar of the parish of Christ Church, Waterside in Chesham. She was tasked to run a village church called St George’s within the small village of Tyler’s Hill, near Chesham, where she ran the Sunday School.
She was quite pioneering for the time. In the Nineteen Twenties, she began a women’s cricket team after which within the Nineteen Thirties, she began a latest branch church meeting in an area pub within the nearby hamlet called Lye Green, which had no church. She also helped with evangelistic missions in Anglican parishes around Buckinghamshire upto 1945. Remarkably, she was the last of the Women’s Messengers in England.
She continued to work into her 90s and died in 1987, aged 97. With seventy years of ministry, she holds the record for longest-serving woman in an official ministry position within the Anglican world. The story is told within the book “The Church by the Woods”, published by Hawkes Design of Chesham.
The story of the Anglican Women’s Messengers is little known, but they’ve been called the harbingers of the ordination of ladies within the Anglican world.
