Expository Times, Jul 2004
This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of a remarkable woman in the story of the ordination of women in Scotland . Vera Mary Muir Findlay, much better known by her married name of Vera Kenmure, was born in Glasgow and was dux of Hillhead High School in the city's west end. She went to Glasgow University , just a stone's throw from the school she attended, where she studied classics, and while there she felt a call to the ministry of the Congregational Church.
She studied in the Congregational College and at Trinity College Glasgow, but before she completed her degree course at Glasgow she had been called, in November 1928, to be minister of Partick Congregational Church, just another stone's throw from the University of Glasgow. Three months later she graduated with a bachelor of divinity degree from Glasgow University , and two month after that, the Congregational Union of Scotland voted to agree that the word “minister” applied both to men and women.
Six years after she was ordained, by then married to Colin Kenmure, a dispute arose in Partick Congregational Church about whether it was appropriate for Vera to remain a minister after the birth of her son.
It seems strange that a communion which had accepted women as ministers should question whether women who had given birth should be ministers, but these were different times. Only forty years before Vera Kenmure's congregation questioned if a mother could be a minister, members of a Free Church congregation in the western isles had seceded because their minister's wife had given birth on a Sunday. They justified their action by insisting that the Almighty had said that “six days shalt thou labour” and a woman who went into labour on the Sabbath was clearly in breach of divine approval!
When members of Partick Congregational Church questioned whether Vera Kenmure could continue as their minister after giving birth, she resigned her charge. But more than two hundred members who wanted her to stay, helped to set up a new congregation,. Christ Church , and later followed her to Hillhead Congregational Church, again close to Glasgow University. In 1954 she moved to the south side of Glasgow, to Pollokshields Congregational Church, from which she retired in 1968. She died in 1974, when the Congregational Union of Scotland Yearbook recorded: “In the church family, which she loved and served – and beyond it – she will be remembered as the one who helped the Church of Scotland to realise that the gifts and service of a woman who had been called by god, whether she be unmarried or married, are an enrichment and not an embarrassment in the work of the ordinary ministry”.
Sixty years after Vera Kenmure was ordained, the Church of Scotland decreed that women could be ordained to the ministry of Word and Sacrament on the same terms as men. On the road to that historic decision, there were a number of arguments used against the ordination of women. My own father took the view that there were no theological, psychological, sociological or practical reasons to prevent women being ordained. But he added “a man is entitled to one irrational prejudice in his life”! He was wrong, both in assuming that irrational prejudice overcame rational argument, but also in resisting the opening of the ministry to women. I have to say, however, that he was in distinguished company. I once heard the (then) Bishop of London argue against women priests on the grounds that were he to see one at the altar he would want to embrace her, thus distracting him from the sacrament. At the time I thought this was one of the silliest arguments I had heard against the ordination of women, though as a devout Presbyterian I thought it provided one of the strongest arguments against bishops!
Perhaps it is significant that in this year which marks the centenary of Vera Kenmure's birth, the Church of Scotland, which was influenced by her example in its decision much later to approve the ordination of women, has, in May this year, elected an elder who happens to be a woman, Dr Alison Elliot, to be Moderator of its 2004 General Assembly.
The Church of Scotland's representative at the General Synod of the Church of England last February suggested that the title “moderator” was one he commended to the Church of England because it was “non-gender-specific”. He might have gone further and recommended the Church of Scotland's example this year as recognising that “the monstrous regiment (rule) of women” is not to be feared as much as John Knox thought it was.