Antonia looks forward to discovery and new challenges

As she steps into the role of Women’s Ministry Adviser for the diocese the Revd Antonia Cretney is in no doubt that issues currently being addressed in the Church of England promise to make her job both interesting and challenging.

One  glance at Antonia Cretney’s current ministry in the Oxford diocese and women will rest assured that they could hardly have a more thorough package of experience and advice on hand from the time they first consider ministry and onwards.

In addition to her new role she is a diocesan vocations adviser (helping people who feel a call to ministry to decide on the best way forward), a volunteer diocesan director of ordinands and a spiritual director (guiding and helping people along their spiritual journey).

She has also been a minister (both stipendiary and now NSM) since 1994, in Bristol and latterly in the Wantage Deanery.

Her new responsibilities, she agrees, fit nicely in tandem with her existing roles:

‘It’s very rewarding and a great privilege to help people explore and find their spiritual direction and to encourage them along that journey.’

Her own spiritual calling led her to study for a degree in Theology as a mature student at Bristol University when her children were aged five and eight, with the idea that it would help her define the kind of ministry she should pursue.  Ironically, she says, it left her with a degree and doubts.

‘It was a difficult time for me. I wasn’t where I had expected to be in terms of my faith and for a while I pursued other avenues. I did research for a year and tried teaching which I think neither my pupils nor I enjoyed!

‘Gradually I found that part of me still had a relationship with “the beyond” and I couldn’t deny that. Out of that calling I felt that God had shown himself to me through a route of prayer and I had to make a choice to cast my lot in with the Church or deny the calling.’

Antonia became a curate in Bristol, moving to the benefice of Beedon, Peasemore, West Ilsley and Farnborough in 1997 with her husband’s job.

She laughs as she remembers a rural parish was the last place she expected to be: ‘My curacy was in an urban parish and my vicar there said the last place he could see me was in a rural situation. But actually I enjoyed it enormously.’ Antonia maintains a rural connection through her present links with the Ridgeway and Wantage Downs benefices.

Part of the enjoyment has definitely been the positive attitude of the diocese and her parishes to women priests, she says: ‘I became a priest  quite shortly after women were accepted to ordained ministry and I have been lucky that I’ve had a very positive experience. I’ve found people in the country to be very pragmatic. They have responded to me on the basis of my ministry, not my gender.

As Women’s Ministry Adviser Antonia, together with a team of area advisers, will be an important channel of communication between women ministers in the diocese and the Bishops and senior advisers.

‘I see it as my responsibility to make sure there is a full and open dialogue. It will also be a voyage of discovery for me, which I’m looking forward to, as I attend Bishop’s Council for the first time and find out more about how the diocese works,’ she says.

Already there have been challenges, she acknowledges: ‘I have never been an activist but I think we are in the middle of very interesting times for ordained women and taking on this position has made me explore and in some cases re-evaluate my views on specific subjects such as women bishops.

‘I do think that if we are to achieve a wholeness of ministry for men and women in the Church, which I think is essential, there can be no half measures or compromise solutions which I would have perhaps thought acceptable before. I feel now that these would only enshrine division.’

On a personal level she says there are still challenges she would like to address: ‘I would love to see change in “God language” and the hugely masculine bias in the way we think about God in our worship.

‘For a time I wrote a column in the Mothers’ Union magazine and the only time I got letters back was when I playfully referred to God as She. One woman said she was really saddened that I would insult God by calling him She. What does that say about what it is to be a woman or about our picture of God?’

Antonia takes as women’s ministry adviser from the Revd Canon Theresa Scott.