Women answering the call

When the Rev. Canon Dr. Alyson Barnett-Cowan was a Divinity student at Trinity College, Toronto, she was one of only two women in her class. The other woman left at Christmas.

Now, more than 50 years later, she’s gratified to see how many women are leading parishes, dioceses and provinces—and the Anglican Communion itself.

“It all happened a lot faster than I think we would have realized 50 years ago. I remember there were jokes going around at the time—at the next Lambeth Conference there’ll be women bishops, and the one after that they’ll bring their husbands, and the one after that there’ll be an Archbishop of Canterbury. That was a joke, but it’s true,” she says.

The Anglican Church of Canada celebrates a major milestone in November: the 50^th anniversary of the ordination of women as priests. The first women priests were ordained in 1976, following the approval by General Synod of a resolution authorizing the ordination of women in 1975.

The women who entered ordained ministry over the next five decades experienced that change in very different ways, both personal and profound.

Being called

In the early 1970s, ordination to the priesthood wasn’t yet something women could seriously contemplate.

Canon Barnett-Cowan’s path to the priesthood wasn’t straightforward. She had attended Trinity College as an undergraduate and felt called to study theology, even if priestly ministry wasn’t available to her.

It was the Rev. Canon Howard Buchner, Dean of Divinity at the time, who insisted she pursue a Master of Divinity, a degree focused on practical ministry, rather than an academic Master of Theology.

“It really blew me away that he would suggest that at that point,” she says.

She faced a lot of misogyny from her male classmates. “They said, ‘What are you doing here? You should be a nun. You should marry a priest.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to marry you.’ And it was kind of a negative rebellion in me that said, ‘Wait a minute, why not? Why not offer myself as a deacon?”

The question of her right to be ordained was a frequent subject of discussion and debate even as she continued to study and discern her vocation.

“About 700 people, many of whom I knew, had signed a petition against the ordination of women. So that hurt. I looked at the names on the list and thought, these are my friends. These are the people I studied with,” she says.

She was ordained a deacon for the Diocese of Nova Scotia in 1975, just before General Synod voted to allow the ordination of women to the priesthood. She met and married her husband, the Rev. Bruce Barnett-Cowan, who was also ordained a deacon while at Trinity, and they moved to northern Quebec to serve in a parish together.

When the Bishop of Quebec told Bruce that he would soon be ordaining him as a priest, Bruce insisted that he wouldn’t be ordained without Alyson. They were ordained together at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Quebec City in 1978.

“It was clear by that point that the work I was doing in the congregation was priestly ministry,” says Canon Barnett-Cowan. “I was grateful that there was already a woman ordained in the Diocese of Quebec. Mercifully, there were no objections at my ordination.”

Growing up in Jamaica, the Ven. Cheryl Palmer loved the church, which was the centre of community life. By age 14 she knew she wanted to work in the Church, but she didn’t know what that might look like.

“I never knew that I could be a part of this until both a deaconess and a nun came to our church, and I thought, wow, there are places for women in the Church,” she says. “I was always interested, but it really sparked the possibility of being involved in the life of the Church.”

When her family moved to Hamilton in the mid-1970s, she immediately found an Anglican church, hoping to discover the same kind of joyful community she had known in Jamaica.

“It was extremely disappointing,” she says. “I remember just weeping my first Good Friday there, and it wasn’t because of the crucifixion at all. It was because there was hardly anybody there.”

When she went to Queen’s University, she found a church that more closely resembled the vibrant community she missed, and when she returned to Hamilton, she decided to try Christ’s Church Cathedral.

“I took three buses every Sunday morning to get to the cathedral. Joe Fricker was the dean, and Peter Elliot was there as the curate. And I found the church that I had left in Jamaica,” she says.

It was at the cathedral that her call to the priesthood began to take shape and be affirmed.

“There was no lightning strike for me. This was just always a part of my life—I cannot think of a time when the Church wasn’t critical in my life,” she says. “But I definitely knew that that was my call, and it was affirmed at the cathedral.”

She studied divinity at Trinity College and was ordained deacon in 1985 and priest in 1986 in the Diocese of Niagara. She celebrated her first Eucharist the next day at St. John, Ancaster, surrounded by members of her parish community.

“Presiding over the Eucharist was this huge honor for me, to know that this crowd out there will feel watered and fed by this act that I am doing,” she says. “That had the weight of responsibility, but also, and to me more importantly, the joy of communion, in the biggest sense of that word.”

While women’s ordination was becoming more commonplace in the Anglican Church of Canada, ordained ministry wasn’t something that women who grew up in other denominations could consider seriously.

In her early 20s, the Rev. Canon Stephanie Douglas was studying biblical translation and searching for a way to live out the call she felt to serve God full-time. When she joined the Anglican Church and decided to pursue graduate studies at Wycliffe College, that call started to take shape as a priestly vocation.

“My sense of vocation really came from other people seeing a vocation in me,” she says.

Dr. Alan Hayes, her thesis advisor, suggested that she speak to Bishop Victoria Matthews, a suffragan bishop of Toronto and the first woman elected bishop in the Anglican Church of Canada.

“We talked about vocation and calling and women in ministry specifically, and with her encouragement, I began the conversation with the diocese,” says Canon Douglas. “It was through listening to those voices, and my own longing to do the work of a priest, that I discovered a willingness to take on the actual mantle of priesthood, despite some of my questions from my childhood.”

She was ordained a deacon in 1998 and a priest in 1999, serving as an assistant curate at St. Paul, Bloor Street. When she remembers her first experiences behind the altar as a priest, she recalls feeling “gratitude with some trepidation.”

“What I remember is, first of all, being overwhelmed by all the hardware,” she says. “And a sense of my smallness. Not just because of the physical space and because of the size of everything spread out in front of me, but metaphorically speaking. And of gratitude to be called and set apart for the Church for this ministry.”

Years later, the Rev. Shelly Pollard had a similar experience. She first felt a call to ministry during high school, but she, too, grew up in a church that didn’t allow for ordained ministry by women.

“I just kind of pushed that away and thought, I’ll go to seminary and learn about that stuff when I’m older,” she says.

As her faith journey brought her to the Anglican Church, a few different clergy told her she should think about ordained ministry. At first, she rebuffed them.

“I thought, no, I’m focusing on my career,” she says. “It was hearing that call affirmed in other people, both male and female priests, once I found my way into the Anglican Church that made me think, OK, maybe I should actually think about this.”

Pollard was ordained a deacon in 2018 and a priest in 2019, and she remembers her first time standing behind the altar as a priest very clearly.

“I couldn’t stop smiling,” she says. “I remember putting on the chasuble and just being thrilled. I’m sure I probably made a couple of mistakes here and there because it’s your first time celebrating. But the whole entire time, I had the biggest smile on my face. It was just wonderful.”

Serving as priest

After ordination, beginning ministry as a female priest wasn’t without its challenges, especially in the early years. Beyond outright hostility, there were practical considerations.

“I remember on the fifth anniversary of the ordination of women, we had a gathering in Winnipeg, and one of the sessions was Dress and Address,” recalls Canon Barnett-Cowan. “People tried to share with each other how they named themselves, what they wore. Do you wear a collar like a man? How do you get a shirt that fits? All that kind of stuff.”

In the early 2000s, Canon Douglas still faced opposition to her vocation. She served in several parishes as an associate priest during the first years of her ministry.

“There were always people who left the church because I was coming. There were people who wouldn’t receive communion from me, who would come and talk to me about why they disagreed with the ordination of women,” she says.

She also faced more subtle resistance and even confusion. “There were some people who had a hard time calling me ‘Reverend.’ My male colleagues were talking about the authority and deference they were given. They were called ‘Father This’ and ‘Father That,’ and I was just Stephanie.”

She soon realized that she would have to earn her congregations’ trust in a way that wasn’t required of her male colleagues.

“I wasn’t given the same trust by virtue of the collar that my male colleagues were, or that I think I am now. But I decided that that wasn’t such a bad thing, because once you’ve done the work of earning people’s trust, it’s harder to lose it,” she says.

Across the years, the four agree that being a woman has shaped their ministry in particular ways.

Canon Barnett-Cowan says her role as a mother helped form her ministry as a priest. “Being a mother to people, I think, teaches empathy, teaches driving you crazy in situations, being adaptable to different people,” she says.

Archdeacon Palmer says that being a woman has shaped her ministry entirely. “I’m responding to people as a woman. And whether I recognize it or not, whoever I’m ministering to and with experience me as a woman, and specifically as a Black woman,” she says.

Canon Douglas has noticed that she’s been able to offer pastoral care to people who may find her less threatening because she’s a woman. “With women suffering from domestic violence, I get a lot of calls, and I’ve had people walk up off the street, coming to our church for prayer,” she says.

For her part, Pollard says her experience as a racialized woman has given her a perspective on the lives of some of her parishioners.

“I can speak to that in a way that maybe not everyone can, just recognizing what that lived experience of being a racialized woman is. It has helped me to give language to what some of our parishioners might face,” she says.

Archdeacon Palmer also identifies that her presence as a leader in the Church lets other women consider opportunities they otherwise might never have dreamed of.

“Our churches have always been packed with women, but they never saw themselves in the leadership,” she says. “I think that one of the things that women did was allow other women to see themselves in the leadership—and as a Black woman, even more so that other young Black women could see themselves in the leadership.”

Looking ahead

Archdeacon Palmer doesn’t look back at her own ministry for wisdom, instead focusing on what’s happening in the Church now.

“In my 40 years as a priest, it’s been so different from the start to now that anything I would have to tell some young person coming in would only be about the now. The rest is nostalgia,” she says. “The Anglican tendency to appeal to a time long past may not be what will keep us going. Think long and hard about being conventional.”

Canon Douglas recalls the advice from a postulancy supervisor not to sacrifice her family and relationships for the sake of the Church.

“It reminded me of the importance of all the vocations that are ours,” she says. “The ministry of priest is important, but God cares about all the roles that we form, as wives, husbands, daughters, sons, aunts, uncles, mothers and fathers.”

She would also remind her younger self that there is more generosity from people in the pews than she might expect.

“Despite a few experiences in parishes where my being a woman was an obvious obstacle to some people, I have found colleagues and parishioners to be very generous in allowing me to be a priest named Stephanie,” she says.

As a more recently ordained priest, Pollard says she’s grateful for the women who came before her.

“I know that I came into ordination after a lot of work has been done, in terms of both gender and race. It’s not something that I take for granted,” she says. “It’d be wrong of me to say that there is equality when there isn’t. But I recognize that I stand on the shoulders of those who’ve come before me, and that is something that I try to honour.”

Canon Barnett-Cowan is grateful that women being ordained priests in Canada today are much less likely to experience overt misogyny.

“Just be yourself, don’t try to fit a mold. That, of course, is a great freeing thing, because women coming into training now have a vast array of role models that they can follow. They don’t have to make it up at the beginning,” she says. “The doors are wide open for women in ministry now to do whatever they feel called to do. Just be brave.”

The diocese will mark the anniversary with a Eucharist on Oct. 15 and a service of Choral Evensong on Oct. 18 at St. James Cathedral. Bishop Riscylla Shaw will preach, and women priests are invited to vest (choir dress: cassock, surplice, tippet and hood). After the service, everyone is invited to a wine and cheese reception.