ABSTRACT
The Diocese of Sydney's relationships with the rest of the Australian Anglican Church have always been strained. When most of the other Australian dioceses were Anglo-Catholic in character, Sydney's severe low-church Evangelicalism kept them inevitably at odds, and bred something of a ghetto mentality. Sydney Diocese increasingly insists that the national church operate purely in accordance with its very limited 1961 constitution. At the very time that Sydney Diocese's Evangelicalism was changing into a more rigidly Calvinistic mode under the influence of Broughton Knox, the rest of the Anglican Church, in Australia as well as around the world, was grappling with the question of the ordination of women, an issue that would almost tear it apart. This chapter discusses Sydney's theological stance on the ordination of women and notes that a fundamental division over the issue was apparent from the outset of the debate in the Australian church.
