With a day of grueling deliberations ahead on the potentially church-dividing issue of women bishops, General Synod finished its morning worship singing with gusto words from an unlikely source, the Puritan Richard Baxter (1615-91), whose hymn “Ye Holy Angels Bright” ends thus:

My soul, bear thou thy part,
triumph in God above:
and with a well-tuned heart
sing thou the songs of love!
Let all thy days
till life shall end,
whate’er he send,
be filled with praise!

Before sessions began there was an air of unease. There was talk about “meetings behind closed doors.” There was a specially convened closed meeting of the House of Bishops. Press reports speculated that, while the tone of the Catholic Group in General Synod’s statement was forebearing, it would use procedural tactics in hope of stalling progress.

There was an audible buzz as the Archbishop of Canterbury rose to speak. Within moments he had distilled a lot of anxiety.

“I want to encourage the synod to go on and finish the business of this legislation,” Archbishop Rowan Williams said. “It would be all too easy to drop it in the too hard basket. That doesn’t help us.”

He added the church now needed the measure to go to the dioceses to give it thought and prayer to enable the process to go to completion.

He pledged the bishops will draft a code of practice which “will be available for the next synod.” Commenting on the vote not to back the archbishops in their attempt to find a way through the vexed question of how to make provision for people who oppose women as bishops, he said he was “well aware” that putting an amendment forward without a draft code of practice “was asking a lot.”

People, he said, should not see the legislation as “the end of the road” but the start of a process where discernment and mutual service could take place.

“We remain committed by a majority to see women bishops and to see a church that’s healthy and flourishing,” he said. He hoped this could be extended to the minority who could not accept women bishops, though “we haven’t cracked that yet.”

The intervention by Archbishop Williams prompted the chair of the debate, professor Michael Clark to add, “This morning let’s aspire to be synod at its best.”

The urgings had an immediate effect. A member from Guildford diocese, Robert Cotton, had earlier indicated he would speak against the second clause in the measure setting out the revision committee’s version of safeguards for people opposed. It was “unfair,” he said, to categorize any part of debate on Saturday as between “winners and losers.”

He thought all the theological traditions in the Church had the resources within themselves to work out how to continue their adherents’ ministry.

Another early speaker, the Rev. April Alexander of Southwark, said the Church had always known it needed to make provision for people who couldn’t accept women bishops. She pointed out that for women, what was proposed was more than a compromise — “it was a sacrifice” — and she wished it were possible to “pass simpler” legislation.

“I will support clause 2, but I wish we didn’t need it,” she said.

The mood was taken up by Irish-born Archdeacon Norman Russell of Oxford, who claimed he was probably the only member of synod who had been stoned by Roman Catholics many years ago, after he mistakenly strayed into their area.

“One of the attractive things about English life is its culture of understatement,” Russell said. “There is a culture of restraint that doesn’t push things to the limit.”

The origins of that culture, he said, may be found in the Church of England, the English Bible and The Book of Common Prayer. “Here in Synod we need to rediscover that.”

In a typically English moment the Rev. Debbie Flack (Diocese of Europe) said she would “speak against but vote for.” She reminded synod how Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori of the Episcopal Church was “asked to be gracious” by an official at Lambeth Palace.

“Mitregate,” she said, was a good example of how things were for women. “We are very used to being asked to be gracious just in case it causes offense to those who don’t believe we can be in holy orders.”

With overwhelming support for clause 2, much of the rest of the process was plain sailing. In all just four amendments succeeded, all of them with agreement from the steering committee in charge of process.

The next stage is a round of consultations with dioceses, and final approval could see women bishops in England in 2014. It’s unlikely the church will follow the Church of Ireland, which agreed to have women bishops 16 years ago but has not elected a woman.

None of this masks the pain of those who have found themselves in the minority. “We are in despair,” commented a senior member of the Catholic Group.

Only once did debate get sparky when Robert Key, a member of Parliament, told the Bishop of Durham, the Rt. Rev. N.T. Wright, that he was talking “rubbish.”

Wright had delivered the sound bite of the day. A London taxi driver said to him recently, “If God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, it’s all rock-n-roll, innit?”

In the New Testament there was collaborative oversight — for example, Paul, Silas, Timothy and Sosthenes were equal coauthors in a form of shared episcopacy.

Wright said there was still a need for full debate on some of the theological sticking points, particularly headship and sacramental security.

It was Wright’s final comment, however, that triggered Key’s retort: “The day the Church ceases to say we ought to obey God rather than human authority, we cease to be the Church,” he declared.

The issue was whether the legislation (clause 7) would satisfy the British Parliament in respect of the Equality Act, passed at the end of the last Parliament. The church had fought hard to win exemptions from mainstream legislation over its employment procedures. Key, from the Diocese of Salisbury, warned that clause 7 could be struck down in the courts.

There has been growing conflict between church and Parliament. The recent general elections signaled more may be in the offing. The Rev. Stephen Trott of Peterborough suggested something like The Church of Scotland Act (1925) may soon be needed. This act gave the Scottish church the right to regulate its doctrine and practice without losing the status of being “established.”

More than 5,000 women have been ordained priest since the synod vote in 1994. The rate of increase of women in training is growing.

While synod was in session the Archbishop of York was making news in his own right. His presidential address at the start of synod signaled his concern about cuts in public spending because of government cuts and their effect on the poorest, especially in the north of England.

Today he launched an online charity, Acts 435, that will provide poor people with basic necessities such as cookers, refrigerators and washing machines.

Archbishop Sentamu wrote in the Yorkshire Post that the picture for the poorest of the poor was “very bleak” and the church should always reach out to people who are hurting. “The Bible tells us we are one body. When we stub our toe, the whole body bends over to see what’s wrong.”

John Martin, in York