Our Father

So an organisation called 'Watch' - Women and the Church - wants 'inclusive terminology' i.e. female pronouns and indeed nouns, to signal God's genderlessness and to make women feel more in the loop when in church. The organisation's hashtag rallying cry is that though 'we' now have women bishops, we're only 'just getting started'. This is such a daft an instance of wanting to saw off the branch you're sitting on that it's almost funny. 'Watch' may just be getting started but there will be nowhere to go: there will be no church left to transform when it is gutted of its gendered structure. The gender of the pronouns in the Bible - and from there, in church tradition - is not optional, let alone meaningless. On the contrary, maleness expresses fundamental truths about how the world is made, about who we are as human beings, and most of all about the nature of the triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Fatherhood of God is the bedrock of the universe. No amount of campaigning can alter that fact. All that gender reforms can accomplish is to sever the intuitive and poetic connection between Our Father and His creation by making the church a place of desolation. This is not progress.