Sevenoaks Reporter

News Report by Aileen Over

Sevenoaks has got its Saint Nickers in a twist! Curate god Marcus Odin and his Rector Angus MacCoatup have now achieved what many evangelical clergy want: women bowing down and swooning at their feet, in utter silence and with heads covered too!

Rector Angus, who wears a daring kilt despite his dismissal of elaborate Anglican frockery, has told women in a church leaflet to "submit to their husbands in everything".

It isn't just women bishops he doesn't want, but any woman who has the facility to rabbit rabbit rabbit. The church now has sticking plasters at the entrance, so that these can be placed across those lipstick adorned lips, which the curate called, "A filthy, filthy habit in this modern day and age."

The notice by the tins of plasters says:

God has ordered women's relationships to submit to their husbands and to shut up in church. Please apply these elastoplast and breath through your noses.

A leaflet distributed throughout the church says marriage needs the order that God has determined, and so women must submit. "As Christ is the head of the church, so the husband is the boss," it says. The leafleat continues:

It would seem that women should remain silent.... if their questions could legitimately be answered by their husbands at home.

In the church, the Rector or Curate never speaks to the women. They address their husbands even when wanting to ask the woman something, usually some sort of pleasantry. When they get home, the husband then asks the wife. The wife answers. The husband finally uses the telephone (for only he may use it in a Christian household) and tells the Rector the answer. A leading layperson in the church described how it works.

Rector: Isn't it a pleasant morning, Mrs Grosseteste?
Mrs Grosseteste: Mmm...
Mr Grosseteste: Mavis! Thank you for your question, Rector.

Later that day.

Mr Grosseteste: Mavis, was it a pleasant morning?
Mrs Grosseteste: Yes dear.
[Mr Grosseteste Rings the Rector]
Rector: Knobhead Rectory.
Mr Grosseteste: Hello Rector. My wife Mavis has told me that it was a pleasant morning.
Rector: Thank you very much for that and being such an observant Christian.
Mr Grosseteste: By the way, a very good sermon this morning, Rector. Goodbye [puts the phone down]. Mavis. Get your clothes off - I want sex.
Mrs Grosseteste: Yes dear, it will keep our marriage together - which orifice do you want me to present to you first?

The sermon referred to was from the curate, the god Odin (the women swoon around his mastery of authority). He said:

It's the way women behave these days, showing acres of flesh and hair in the streets, and even in this church. Why are you not wearing hats? One in four children have divorced parents, and three in four girls are not being trained in covering their heads or their bodies. Look at how they dance in night clubs these days, or parade themselves on beaches when it is hot. Wives, submit to your husbands. Do those dances and displays in their company only, and only one husband with one wife, preferably their own.

It is understood that many women who are Bible believers are now flocking to the church. Once called it a real place to submit to the male leadership in church as well as home. Indeed, some women are now being driven to that church by their evangelical husbands.

In later responses to this newspaper, the Rector and Curate have pointed out that neither of them said these things originally, but they are in the Bible. As a woman reporter on this newspaper I put my questions and received my answers through a male colleague by him using a telephone.

In an aside the Rector asked how many articles I had written, because he had thirty nine guiding him, and they told him how to regard the Bible, and he wasn't going to let women and modern culture tell him and his curate what to do.

He blamed the press from moving from its Christian moorings, and said that as a husband and rector he had bent over backwards.

He added that his message was that men are to also to bend over backwards in understanding their wives and women are to simply bend over backwards.