to the auxiliary or non-stipendiary ministry. Had she lived a decade longer and been rather younger, she could, as a deacon of Wilmslow Congregational church, have been ordained to the eldership when her church became part of the United Reformed Church. In both cases, though with varying emphases, the word ‘ordination’ was carefully, almost precisely, used. Such developments, sharpened while Ruth was in Wuchang by English Congregationalism’s formal recognition of the ordination of women to the ministry of word and sacrament, were the natural accompaniments of con-stant concern over the nature and expression of ministry, that duty and privilege of all believers. So what of the minister, whom John Angell James, the famous Birmingham Congregationalist, had once called ‘the highest type of Christian’?

doi:10.4324/9780203166505-101

Chapter

to the auxiliary or non-stipendiary ministry. Had she lived a decade longer and been rather younger, she could, as a deacon of Wilmslow Congregational church, have been ordained to the eldership when her church became part of the United Reformed Church. In both cases, though with varying emphases, the word ‘ordination’ was carefully, almost precisely, used. Such developments, sharpened while Ruth was in Wuchang by English Congregationalism’s formal recognition of the ordination of women to the ministry of word and sacrament, were the natural accompaniments of con-stant concern over the nature and expression of ministry, that duty and privilege of all believers. So what of the minister, whom John Angell James, the famous Birmingham Congregationalist, had once called ‘the highest type of Christian’?

Chapter

to the auxiliary or non-stipendiary ministry. Had she lived a decade longer and been rather younger, she could, as a deacon of Wilmslow Congregational church, have been ordained to the eldership when her church became part of the United Reformed Church. In both cases, though with varying emphases, the word ‘ordination’ was carefully, almost precisely, used. Such developments, sharpened while Ruth was in Wuchang by English Congregationalism’s formal recognition of the ordination of women to the ministry of word and sacrament, were the natural accompaniments of con-stant concern over the nature and expression of ministry, that duty and privilege of all believers. So what of the minister, whom John Angell James, the famous Birmingham Congregationalist, had once called ‘the highest type of Christian’?

ABSTRACT

Church. I wish our ministers were more priests than they mostly seem to be, and let the Anglican priesthood alone, or in much imitate them.

Hardly mollified, the Baptist pursued the correspondence. What of the New Testament’s teaching of the priesthood of all believers? At which Forsyth expressed his gladness ‘to have had a hearer so attentive’, and referred him to the Free Church principal Lindsay’s book on the church and the ministry. Recalling the exchange, the Baptist concluded:

Evidently Dr Forsyth was a man of great attainments, high culture, and a leaning to High Churchism, and it is a matter of devout thankfulness that in the closing years of his life he was a firm believer in the Atonement.32