Friday, September 06, 2013

New Zealand continues to show the way

Great news today as New Zealand elects the third woman Diocesan bishop.

The Rev Dr Helen-Ann Hartley has been elected the next Anglican Bishop of Waikato.
Helen-Ann, who is 40, succeeds Archbishop David Moxon, who is now the Anglican Communion’s ambassador to Rome.
Bishop-elect Helen-Ann is at present Dean of Tikanga Pakeha students at St John's College in Auckland.
She was born in Edinburgh and grew up in north-east England. She is the fourth generation of her family to be ordained, and was priested in 2005 in the Diocese of Oxford.

So apparently she is the first woman ordained in the Church of England to become a bishop.

In New Zealand she follows Penny Jamieson, who was the Bishop of Dunedin from 1990 till 2004, and Victoria Matthews, who was elected the Bishop of Edmonton, in Canada, in 1997, and who was chosen as the Bishop of Christchurch in 2008.

Of course England is yet to vote to allow women to be bishops and while Australia now has 4 assistant bishops they are still not allowed to be in charge of a diocese.

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