It's midday in Westminster Abbey and a robed priest is presiding at communion – holding the chalice aloft, bowing before it.It's a small congregation, just five or six tourists, but high-church ritual is still meticulously observed.
In this 1,000-year-old building, tradition is the stock-in-trade.
In the cloisters behind the Chapter House lives Rev Jane Hedges, Canon Steward at the Abbey, and one of the most senior women in the Church of England.
The 54-year-old, who cares for the Abbey's tens of thousands of visitors, was among the very first intake of women priests to be ordained in 1994. "People asked then: 'When do you think the first women bishops will be?'" says Hedges.
"And I remember replying: 'I don't think there will be women bishops before I retire.'"
Yet Hedges is now being touted as the first woman to get the job. She is one of a growing number of women – archdeacons, deans and canons – with both the qualifications and the experience to take up the position. And this month, after several years of wrangling, the General Synod, which meets in York from 9-13 July, will try to pass the final piece of legislation allowing them to do so.
For those outside the church, and many within it, it may seem curious that after 16 years of women in the priesthood promotion to bishop is still denied them. "I think many of the bishops themselves find it uncomfortable that when they meet, it's an all-male environment," says Hedges. "It's not at all representative of how the Church of England is."
But for conservatives and traditionalists, the prospect of a woman wearing a mitre has become a rallying cause, a line in the sand. A bishop's role is to oversee the parishes in his diocese, and to ordain other clergy; those who believe that church authority can rest only with men will refuse to recognise a female bishop.
In a letter written in 2008 to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, 1,300 clergy, including 11 bishops, threatened to leave the Church of England over the issue. Last October the Pope gave them their escape route, offering the possibility of joining the Roman Catholic church while maintaining their "Anglican identity". If this month's Synod fails to keep them in the fold, the church faces schism.
St Saviour, Walthamstow is a world away from the grandeur of Westminster – the 19th-century listed building is situated in a poor parish, on a road lined with greasy spoons and posters for international calling cards – but it is firmly rooted in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. The church offers Mass seven times a week, and its vicar, Father David Waller, is a leading figure of Forward in Faith, the group set up in the wake of female ordination to protect "the apostolic succession" of male priests.
Forward in Faith has 7,500 members, roughly 1,000 of whom are clergy, and is the second largest membership organisation in the Church of England after the Mothers' Union. Its argument against ordaining women is, put simply, this: Jesus chose 12 male apostles and gave them authority to minister; those apostles then passed on that authority to a new generation of (male) church leaders, and so on. Women were not included in the process and so should not be now. "It seems arrogant," says Waller affably, "but it's the exact opposite: we simply do not have the right or the authority to change these things."
Since 1994, parishes such as St Saviour which object to women priests have been overseen by "flying bishops" (otherwise known as Provincial Episcopal Visitors). These specially appointed senior clergy fulfil the role of pastoral and spiritual care in place of the parish's actual bishop – who will, of course, have been ordaining women. With the issue of women bishops, however, "the key objections are the same, but the knock-on effects are much greater". To Waller, not only would a female bishop's authority be void, but also that of any priests she ordained. "This is a decisive moment," he says. "There can be no going back."
The devil, if he is ANYWHERE, is in the detail. The decision to allow women to become bishops was agreed, in principle, in 2005, when Synod voted by a two-thirds majority to remove the last legal obstacles against them: next weekend's meeting will debate what provisions should be made for those who still cannot, in conscience, accept them. A committee led by the Bishop of Manchester has drawn up a "code of practice" by which women bishops would delegate objecting parishes to the care of the flying bishops. Forward in Faith, however, wants their authority in those parishes removed by ecclesiastical law. Women and the Church (Watch), the group that campaigns for women in the episcopate, says this would give women authority with one hand and take it away with the other. "It's creating two different types of bishop based on gender," says Rev Lucy Winkett, Canon Precentor of St Paul's Cathedral, "which in any other area of public life would be called discrimination. We would be enshrining in our very fabric a sense that women are not as much of a bishop as men are."
The debate is complicated further by the unlikely allies Forward in Faith have. The conservative evangelical wing, while disagreeing with much of the Anglo-Catholics' dogma and tradition, is also opposed to women bishops. And that's a particular problem for the Church of England because many of its conservative evangelical churches are influential, flourishing and rich.
St Ebbe's is one such in Oxford; its congregation includes hundreds of women, many of them young, many of them in high-powered careers. Most, nevertheless, would accept the church's teaching that they cannot preach, teach or lead the congregation, because they must not have authority over men.
"The Biblical argument is that before the Fall, before anything went wrong, there was an order in creation," explains Annabel Heywood, the church's women's worker, who is allowed to teach women and children, but may only "act as a helper" to men. "Adam was formed first, not Eve."
The specific theological objection to women in church authority is drawn from passages in St Paul's letters to the early church, around 30 years after Jesus's death, particularly one from Ephesians that says "the husband is the head of the wife", and another in 1 Timothy that reads: "I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man."
Heywood herself was a high-flying accountant ("That was a very male environment") before she worked for the church, and insists that the evangelical position does not value women any less highly than men. Is it hard to tell women who might one day lead FTSE 100 companies or political parties that they can't lead a church? "Yes," she says, "because our culture is that you're valued by what you do, therefore to say you can't do something is saying you're second-rate. But this is a positive model we're following."
Others point out that there are several female church leaders and teachers named in the New Testament, all endorsed by Paul himself. "You have to measure what Paul says against what Paul does," says Dr Elaine Storkey, the UK's leading feminist theologian. "Where he comes down heavily on restricting women it's either because the church isn't ready for it – it isn't mature enough – or there are women who shouldn't be holding forth because they've got learning to do."
Last month Reform, a group representing the conservative evangelical churches, sent an open letter to the House of Bishops signed by 100 clergy.
It included a not-very-subtle reminder of their financial clout – the churches represented have contributed more than £38m to the Church of England's central funds over the past 10 years – and the veiled threat that, should their needs not be met, the churches may be forced to train their own clergy "outside the CofE's formal structures", which would likely include parachuting in bishops from other parts of the Anglican communion (typically from Africa) to ordain them. Without leaving the Church of England, the evangelicals could essentially withdraw into their own self-perpetuating enclave, a church within a church.
Having battlelines drawn on two different flanks has made it particularly hard for those in the middle to find a solution that suits everyone – "Even if you bend the knee to one of those groups it's very difficult to find a single code that gives space to both," says Storkey.
The arguments themselves seem to have reached a stalemate, and Synod is set to be as tense and potentially unpleasant as when the subject was last debated in February ("a low-grade shouting match and exchange of prejudices", according to the Bishop of Durham).
The only thing that everyone agrees on is that the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, whose job it is to try to keep the warring factions together, has it particularly tough. While Williams is "very eager to see women ordained" – and has said that he personally sees no theological objections to a woman one day taking on his own role as Archbishop – he has made it clear that his priority is to try to keep the Anglican Communion together. "He has done it as well as anyone could have," says Waller. "But it's like herding cats. It's an impossible job."
REV Rose Hudson-Wilkin sits in her vicarage in Hackney, jabbing at her kitchen table with her finger. "No, no, no!" she says, punctuating each word with a little stab.
"The church should not" – another stab – "be held to ransom."
The Jamaican-born vicar of All Saints Haggerston has no sympathy for clergy who complain they are being pushed out of the Church of England. "Rubbish! You're pushing your own self out!" she says, bristling with energy.
"Here we are – women have laboured for years and years in the church, and I'm not aware of them saying: 'Well, because they're not ordaining us, we're going to take up our marbles and go.' So I have gross impatience with that."
Like Hedges and Winkett, Hudson-Wilkin is another tipped for a future career in the House of Bishops. She was also in the first crop of women priests ordained in 1994 – she says her joy at the occasion "was matched by sadness for the women who I knew had given their lives to the church but not been able to receive the ordination".
She is now, in her forties, one of the Queen's chaplains. I ask whether she's concerned at the prospect of the evangelical churches withdrawing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in funding.
"Let them!" she snorts. "I don't think we ought to be worried about people taking their money and setting up alternative structures. There's a lot of power games going on. And when I read the gospel, the gospel is not about that."
Winkett, too, believes the church should no longer be seeking compromise and inclusion at all costs.
"The number of people who really can't accept this is extremely small," she says. "That doesn't mean they should be dismissed, but they should be put in context. This is not one person arguing for, one person arguing against."
Forward in Faith and Reform between them have a combined individual membership of 24,000; the Church of England has a regular worshipping community of 1.7 million (who attend at least once a month), the majority of whom – 65% – is female.
Half of the ordinands training to be priests are now women; many of those say that it is important to them to know that the calling of bishop is open to them. One young curate, who was halfway through her training when Synod voted in favour of women bishops in 2005, told me her predominant feeling was one of relief: "It meant I know I can do the job that is best suited to who I am." For others such as Kat Campion-Spall – a 33-year-old ordinand who will be priested this September and who has argued for the Code of Practice at Synod – the issue is one of the church's credibility.
"All my non-Christian friends' perceptions of the church were about controversies over gay priests and women priests," she says. "It's really sad that because of the way that equality legislation is, the church can have exceptions on gender that no one else could have. "
In 2008 research by Jane Hedges indicated that 54% of women priests would be open to the possibility of being a bishop. She argues that women "would have an especially strong contribution to make" in the role, because "although one mustn't generalise too much", women minister in a particularly collaborative way. "They are often very capable of holding things together, which is in an important part of being a bishop."
Ironically, then, women could be prize assets in the Church of England's ongoing struggle for unity.
Timing, however, is everything.
The Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright – a highly respected figure on all sides of the church – has long supported women in the episcopate, but he believes that there is a strong theological imperative not to push through legislation that will cause more division.
"There are clear guidelines in the Bible about contentious issues," says Wright. "We ought to expect to have demands made on our patience and on our charity but not on our consciences, and we have been forgetting this in our eagerness to push this or the other agenda.
"We have been trying to square a circle," he continues, "and we don't seem to have found a way of doing that. This is possibly a sign that we are not yet ready to run ahead. But the process of Synod is like an escalator – once you're on it, you can't get off."
Waller agrees that the four-day meeting will be trying to do too much in too short a time, and warns of dire consequences should the solution please some but not others. He points to the fractious, fragmented nature of the Anglican church in the US: "Everyone suing each other, breakaway groups…"
For those who want to see women bishops soon, however, there is both an urgency to right injustice and a need for the church to move on from a bitter and time-consuming row. Many of the female priests I speak to say that they are disturbed by the amount of energy the debate consumes.
"It's an important issue," says Hedges, "but it needs to be settled. The church has taken an enormous amount of care to find the right way forward, and if what is presented to Synod gets the right majority to go through, I think that has given the mind of the church."
"If we are constantly at war," says Hudson-Wilkin, "we are taking our eyes off the main business, which is proclaiming good news."
She bristles once more.
"It wasn't the right time when we ordained women as deacons, it wasn't the right time when we ordained women as priests, and it will not be the right time when we consecrate women as bishops. It will never be the right time for those who are intrinsically opposed to women in leadership within the church."
SIC: TGUK