Bishop Edwin: Just Let Us Go!

Bishop Edwin Barnes addresses the Archbishop of Canterbury who yet seeks to stave off the inevitable.

Well, Rowan, we must tell you there is a way to set us free. It is to go ahead as quickly as you can to consecrate women as bishops, making no sort of provision for us at all. Any provision you make CANNOT give us what we need and have consistently asked for, so GET ON WITH IT: and set us free. Don't concern yourselves with what happens to us. The Good Lord will provide – and if Parliament's concern to ensure justice when women were first ordained is renewed this time round (by requiring there to be financial provision for us) so be it.

Only so is there any hope of your "contributing to (our) holiness". We do not want to be endlessly arguing about this issue. We have the offer of an honoured place – a real one – from the Holy Father, so just let us go. It will be sad to bid farewell to the church of our life's ministry; but that church is now just ancient history. We look to a better future. And we hope you too will enjoy your purified church with its broad open vistas without glass ceilings for women or LGBT bishops.

You said it yourself in your address to Synod; there might have to be "an unwelcome degree of distance" between us – just remember sometime though, that it was not we who chose to go, but you who made it impossible for us to stay.