The compromise on offer, as with female priests, is to allow opponents to carry on with their parish life as if there were no female bishops – they can demand to be served only by men, and more particularly, only by men who will not themselves ordain women.

This autumn sees a decisive democratic vote – it is of course the decision of the church’s General Synod to approve the final legislation on female bishops. What makes it poignant is two things – first that the process has been so very slow that I suspect I used the very same jokey intro four years ago at the time of the last presidential election. Second, there are still smart people who think the vote may be lost.

There are not enough dedicated opponents of female bishops to muster a blocking third in any of the three “houses” of synod – although it is close in the House of Laity. But their ranks may be swelled by the dedicated supporters, who feel that the present legislation is an unacceptable compromise that enshrines discrimination.

The legislation that the synod will be asked to vote on is an attempt to do justice to two utterly irreconcilable groups – those who believe women must be bishops, and those who believe they can’t be. The compromise on offer, as with female priests, is to allow opponents to carry on with their parish life as if there were no female bishops – they can demand to be served only by men, and more particularly, only by men who will not themselves ordain women. This is a small minority of the bishops, so the opponents also want guarantees that there will always be a supply of new bishops and priests who reject the ordination of women.

Something like that is more or less what they were promised in the convulsive panic that overtook the Church of England in 1992 when it realised that the synod had actually made a decision. No one had planned for that. There was talk of thousands of priests leaving. In the event, several hundred did leave for Rome andmost of them stayed. The real resistance came from conservative evangelicals, committed to the position that the Bible forbids women to teach men doctrine.

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