by Fr Jarel Robinson-Brown, Co-Chair of OneBody OneFaith and Visiting Scholar at Sarum College, Salisbury
It is an immense gift, the most precious gift of my life, to be called to serve the people of God. I believe firmly that ministry to God’s people can teach us things otherwise unknowable. In my ten years of ministry, what I have valued most about serving the people of God is what it has shown me about people’s lives – how complicated each of our lives can be, how full of contradiction and paradox, how undeterminable our relationship to ourselves and others can be as we grow and fail, discover and wrestle with what it means to live, to be truly human. I suppose that what I am saying is that it is my pastoral relationships with God’s people that has most deeply transformed and deepened my theology. As I journey with God’s people, I have to let my guard down just enough, as priest, pastor and preacher – so that others too, may see the slow work of God not just in themselves and in our world, but also in me. It is in this dialectic relationship, where human experience touches human experience, that our theology deepens and our knowledge of God and reading of the scriptures are nurtured and enriched.
Any theological conviction that begins fixed and remains fixed is one which has not come into contact with the world as it is, or us as we are. One can have a number of theological principles and moral convictions but, when someone who is made in the image and likeness of God sits in front of you and says ‘this is my life…here’s the mess I am, the mess I have made – here are my regrets, my failures, my shattered dreams’, a pastor can respond either with the mind and heart of Jesus, bringing their humanity to touch the humanity of another – or not. This is perhaps the biggest issue I have with much of the Church of England’s leadership currently – the lack of honesty about how our theological convictions are formed, and change. We seek to understand one another in the midst of a Church led largely by people we do not really know.
For myself, I am so many contradictions. There are many labels I could wear: pro-life, Anglo-Catholic, Benedictine oblate, Black radical, patristic scholar, single priest, advocate for equal marriage, Wesleyan – not all of these are seen as compatible with one another, but they do name something about who I am and what I believe. There is something quite fatal about always wanting our lives to ‘make sense’, and part of the incoherence of the Church at the moment, is, I think, part of it becoming more honest, more real. This is the threat we LGBTQ+ Christians present to the Church – our lives do not ‘make sense’ to what people consider the only legitimate way of being a real Christian. It is because of the threat we pose that even heterosexual allies have to use words like ‘faithful’, ‘stable’, ‘committed’, ‘lifelong’ and ‘monogamous’ when expressing support for our relationships and marriage. They still seek to ‘absolve’ our love from its ‘sinfulness’ and ‘disorder’ – in other words, they still seek to make us straight in order to be holy. We must resist any attempt that seeks to describe LGBTQ+ relationships in this way, when heterosexual relationships are not made to carry a necessary list of qualifiers. Anything other than this is to suggest that LGBTQ+ relationships are somehow inherently unfaithful, unstable and everything else when, as anyone involved in pastoral ministry knows, heterosexual relationships can be, and are, just as messy. Let us quit the lies, friends.
I also believe that our lack of honesty means we are only really having a debate on false grounds. Because we are saved by the life of someone fully human, I believe that our mission and witness are impeded by the ecclesial dishonesty in which we are all complicit around desire, the body and sex. As God, Christ’s mission was to be truly and fully human. To embody this true humanity, we need honesty about our lives, yet the politics our church leaders are engaged in makes this honesty impossible. How convenient for the Archbishop of York to emotionally affirm us, and how ideal for the Archbishop of Canterbury to rejoice in the possible blessing of our relationships but publicly exempt himself from ever offering such a blessing – it is simply too perfect a situation to have any real integrity. We need to know, as many have said before, what our Bishops really think – more importantly we need to know who they are!
I have said little here about LLF, and absolutely nothing about General Synod. It is a great shame that the Archbishop of Canterbury seems to think that God will honour his loyalty to the Anglican Communion over LGBTQ+ people in England. My hope is that LLF will provide at least a route for clergy to live and love honestly – for those who have entered same sex marriages to be given back Permission to Officiate, and for blessings to happen in Church (though they have for some time illegally). In essence, neither LLF nor General Synod can be fruitful or lead the Church to where I believe God invites us, not as long as real honesty is demanded of LGBTQ+ people alone.
So we must hope, and fight, petition, and pray – but most importantly, we must dream. One of the most powerful things about oppression is the way it limits our imaginations. Can we as LGBTQ+ people, despite the violence we have endured, still imagine a Church which is truly the Church? Can we imagine a Church which loves with the heart of Christ and stands between God’s people and the all the forces of death and violence? On a good day, I can imagine such a Church, but it is becoming more and more difficult. In her recent book Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, Lola Olufemi – a black feminist writer and academic – writes:
‘I belong to a legacy of those who saw what this world had to offer and refused it. Before they refused it, they fought it, and not just with words.’
I look on our Church, and I refuse what it has to offer. This refusal seems like holy work. Instead I have a dream – one which I will pray for and labour for, one which I believe is the dream of the Almighty… it is a dream
of a Church where all God’s people love with reckless abandon, and without fear.
of a Church where the vocations of all are nurtured, celebrated and affirmed.
of a Church where we see our tradition in all its truth, and diversity.
of a Church which regains an understanding of sacrifice and self-emptying.
of a Church certain of its mandate to speak prophetic truth to itself and the world.
of a Church where one mega-Church in a hundred places does not have the monopoly on the Church’s resources.
of a Church where Bishops step out of fear into courage.
of a Church which trust deeply in the promises of God.
of a Church set free of the ties which come from Empire and State privilege.
of a Church confident in the power of sacraments and preaching.
of a Church which has taken the sin of its past seriously.
of a Church which knows the power of repentance in the heart of its institutional life.
of a Church willing to lay down its life, that it may be born anew.
of a Church which knows that at the last, it is answerable only to God – for how well and deep and passionately it has loved.
Jesus did not wait for a two-thirds majority in every religious court of his day – he embodied the radical dream of God until it became manifest – and he calls us to do the same.
I know that God has more to offer us than this, and that the heart of God rejoices in true love wherever it is found. I also believe that every power in the Church that seeks to define orthodoxy by the limits of their inclusive love will, in the end, fail. Between that time and this, there is the work of fighting and dreaming. God has more to offer us than this. For God’s sake, despite what we may be offered now – let us not set our sights too low.
Any thoughts?