In a five-part series published through his Substack newsletter *The Anglican* over the past few weeks, the founding rector of Christ Church Plano and veteran of more than four decades of ordained Anglican ministry has attempted what most of his colleagues have long avoided: a sustained, candid, publicly accessible examination of women’s ordination as it sits at the beating heart of the Anglican Church in North America’s present crisis. The series deserves careful reading. It also deserves honest assessment.

Roseberry frames his project with admirable modesty. “My purpose is not to relitigate a sensitive issue or to generate more heat,” he writes in the introduction. “I want to help us think like Anglicans: to read Scripture carefully, listen respectfully to the wisdom of the Church, and engage one another with both conviction and charity.”  Whether the series achieves that goal is a question we shall return to. But it is worth noting, at the outset, that the mere fact of attempting it publicly — naming his own change of position, inviting disagreement, and holding the conversation in the open — marks Roseberry out from the great majority of Anglican leaders who have preferred to manage this issue through polite institutional silence and avoidance.

Part One sets the historical stage. When the ACNA was constituted in 2009, Roseberry recalls, the founders were in the mode of lifeboat operators. Dioceses, bishops, and congregations fleeing The Episcopal Church arrived from sharply different ecclesiological traditions — Anglo-Catholic, evangelical, charismatic — and not every dispute could be adjudicated before the vessel was launched. The question of women’s ordination was, in Archbishop Bob Duncan’s famous phrase, resolved by adopting “dual integrities”: an agreement that faithful Anglicans held differing convictions, and that those convictions would be mutually respected.

Fifteen years on, Roseberry observes, the arrangement is fraying. Some dioceses — C4SO is cited explicitly — not only ordain women to the priesthood but expect all clergy within their jurisdiction to support the practice. Others ordain no women at all. Between these poles runs a wide spectrum: bishops who will not ordain women but will receive them; bishops who ordain women to the diaconate but not the presbyterate; and at least one diocese that arrived at a full deadlock when electing a bishop over precisely where the line should be drawn.  This is not, Roseberry argues, a sustainable arrangement indefinitely. The series is his attempt to say why.

Part Two turns to Scripture, and here Roseberry is at his most careful and, ultimately, his most even-handed. He acknowledges forthrightly that “entire libraries have been written on this subject” and disclaims any ambition to settle the debate. His purpose, he writes, is to “explain why thoughtful, Bible-loving Christians have reached different conclusions.”

The central passages are the familiar ones — 1 Timothy 2, 1 Corinthians 14, Galatians 3 — and Roseberry presents them with reasonable fairness, acknowledging the weight of the egalitarian case alongside the complementarian. His reading of Galatians 3:27-29 is important: he does not dispute that “there is neither male nor female” in Christ, but insists this is not the question at issue. The question is not one of status or worth but of ordered office.

This is a standard and defensible move in the literature, though Roseberry does not press it as far as he might. He does not engage as seriously as he might with the exegetical tradition that reads the Pauline restriction passages as culturally conditioned, nor does he reckon with the hermeneutical challenge posed by N.T. Wright — whom he quotes in his introduction — who suggests that “later traditions” may have silenced portions of the New Testament witness to women’s ministry.  The series would have been strengthened by a fuller encounter with the strongest arguments on the other side.

Part Three, on the nature of the priesthood, is arguably the strongest section of the series and engages the deepest theological question beneath the surface of the debate. Roseberry draws on Dean Bryan Hollon’s striking formulation: “The priest is called from within a disharmonious and disordered world to hear and perceive and articulate that ordered reality which precedes us and which has been revealed in Jesus Christ… The voice of the priest is tuned to a music none of us composed.”  This moves the argument decisively away from questions of competence or fairness — no one is disputing that women have gifts for ministry — and onto the ground of sacramental ontology.

The priest, on this account, does not merely perform certain functions. The priest *represents* — acts *in persona Christi* at the altar and in the pronouncement of absolution and blessing. The question then becomes whether that representational function is sex-differentiated in a theologically significant way. Roseberry answers yes, though his exposition here is more evocative than rigorous. He invokes the priest as “icon of the bridegroom,” a formulation with deep roots in Catholic and Orthodox theology, but he does not fully develop the argument or acknowledge the range of criticism it has received.

Part Four, subtitled “Why I Remain Unconvinced,” is the most personally revealing section of the series and the most candid. Roseberry discloses that he has not always held his current position. He has, over the course of forty years, moved — and not in the direction most of his evangelical contemporaries moved. He arrived, after sustained reflection, at the conclusion that the priesthood should be reserved to qualified men.

He addresses directly the critique offered by an unnamed evangelical bishop, a friend from his Episcopal years, who argued that the “icon of the bridegroom” argument breaks down because all Christians are members of the Bride — and if that is so, why cannot a woman represent Christ as readily as a man? Roseberry acknowledges the force of the objection and concedes that he may not have been sufficiently clear in Part Three. His response is essentially to reassert the distinction between baptismal equality and ordered representational function, leaning again on Hollon’s formulation.  It is a response that will satisfy those already inclined toward his position; it is less likely to move those who are not.

The bishop’s objection, it should be said, is a serious one, and Roseberry’s reply is the weakest moment in the series. He gestures at an answer without fully delivering one. The logic of “in persona Christi” representation is not self-evidently gendered in the way the argument requires, and the patristic and medieval sources that ground it were operating within cosmological assumptions about gender that most contemporary theologians — including many complementarians — do not wish simply to endorse. That gap in the argument is noticeable.

Part Five — provided by the author with the title “How Shall We Live Together” — pivots from the theological to the ecclesiological. Having stated his own conclusions, Roseberry turns to the question that will actually determine the ACNA’s future: can a province sustain dual integrities indefinitely, or must it eventually choose? The subtitle of the final installment is arresting — “Why Women’s Ordination Has Become a Question About the Future of the ACNA” — and it signals that the series was never simply an academic exercise.

Here Roseberry is less a theologian than a churchman, and the shift in register is appropriate. The ACNA, he argues, is reaching the point at which the founding settlement requires renegotiation. Whether that renegotiation can be accomplished charitably, with the institutional coherence of the province intact, is the real question before the College of Bishops — especially now, in the shadow of the Archbishop Wood affair and the turbulence that has accompanied it. Roseberry does not pretend to know the answer. He is, in this final piece, more honest about uncertainty than he has been throughout the series.

What, in the end, are we to make of this series? 

On the one hand, Roseberry writes with clarity, pastoral warmth, and genuine intellectual honesty. He names his own position without coyness and invites disagreement without becoming defensive. The series is accessible to a non-specialist Anglican readership — a virtue not to be underestimated — and it raises the right questions in roughly the right order. He is careful to separate the question of women’s gifts and vocation from the narrower question of ordered priesthood, and he models the kind of charitable engagement that the ACNA desperately needs if it is to navigate this question without further fracture.

On the other hand, the series is less a work of theological argument than a work of theological clarification. Roseberry summarizes positions fairly but does not always engage them deeply. The strongest egalitarian arguments — the exegetical case from Galatians 3 pressed to its logical conclusion, the historical-critical reading of the Pauline restriction passages, the feminist sacramental theology of figures like Sarah Coakley — receive acknowledgment rather than genuine refutation. The “in persona Christi” argument, which is doing the heaviest lifting in Parts Three and Four, is deployed without sufficient grounding in its patristic sources or honest engagement with its internal difficulties.

There are also questions the series leaves open or does not adequately address. What precisely does “dual integrity” mean in practice when a diocese that ordains women and a diocese that does not are asked to share communion at a joint synod? What happens to the women already ordained in ACNA dioceses if the province moves toward a male-only presbyterate? Roseberry raises the institutional question in Part Five but does not work through its human consequences. What is the relationship between the ACNA’s internal debate and the broader question of communion with GAFCON partners and the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches, many of whom take the male-only position as settled? These are not peripheral questions. They are, arguably, the questions on which the future of the province actually turns.

The most important unanswered question in the series is one that Roseberry raises obliquely and then retreats from: can a province of the Church Catholic sustain indefinitely a policy of conscientious theological pluralism on a matter touching the sacramental constitution of the Church itself?

Dual integrity” was a political solution to an ecclesiastical emergency. It was, as Roseberry rightly notes, the price of formation. But ecclesial formations must eventually mature into settled convictions, or they dissolve into managed ambiguity. Roseberry tells us that the arrangement is under pressure. He does not tell us — because he does not know, and is honest enough to say so — where the pressure leads.

That, in the end, is both the strength and the limitation of this series. Roseberry has opened a conversation with intelligence and courage. He has not, and perhaps could not, close it. But in a church that has preferred for fifteen years to keep this particular door firmly shut, the willingness to open it at all is not a small thing.

The series is worth your time. Read it with a pencil in hand. Disagree where the argument requires it. But do not dismiss it. See it as the model of how the church passes through the tensions of the present moment.