by Ruth Harley, curate in the Watling Valley Ecumenical Partnership
All names and some details have been changed to protect the identity of those whose stories are told in this article.
Let me tell you about Mary. She’s a woman in her 80s, widowed several years ago. She has come faithfully to church every Sunday for her entire life. She organises the flower rota, and volunteers at the parent and toddler group. She makes the tea, and notices when the tea towels need washing. She comes to the Lent course and makes thoughtful contributions, and apologises that she can no longer help stack the chairs afterwards. She has many children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and loves to talk about them. In short, Mary is a very ordinary Anglican. She is the sort of person without whom the church simply wouldn’t function, the sort of person who is part of the backbone of the C of E. She is also the sort of person who seems a million miles removed from LLF, General Synod, and conversations about sexuality and relationships. But she isn’t.
When my partner and I got engaged, 7 years ago, Mary was among the first and most enthusiastic to congratulate me. “Oh, that’s wonderful!” she said, “Do you have a date for the wedding? And can I do the flowers? Please?” She had, naturally enough, assumed that we would get married in church. And so I had to gently break it to her that not only could we, as a lesbian couple, not get married in the church which Mary and I both loved and served, but also that for clergy marrying a same-sex partner at all was not an option. “But I do believe it will change,” I said. Mary looked me in the eye, and said, “But I won’t be here to see it.” It was the first time I cried about not being able to marry the woman I love.
I think of Mary whenever people say of the conversation around the place of LGBTQIA+ people in the church: “But that’s not relevant here.” Usually they’re talking about a very ordinary parish church, typically middle-of-the-road with a predominantly older congregation: a congregation full of people like Mary. And I want to tell them – sometimes I do tell them – they’re wrong. It is relevant to Mary, and all the many faithful Anglicans like her, in ways which go far beyond flower arranging.
Mary and I had many conversations after her initial shock at learning that the church she loved wouldn’t allow the people she loved to marry. Her dismay went far beyond the realisation that she would never do the flowers for our wedding. It was a profoundly destabilising realisation for her: the church to which she had given so much, which had been such a bedrock of her life, such a place of encounter with God, was not what she thought it was. She went on arranging the flowers, reading stories to the toddlers and washing the tea towels, praying each morning and evening and attending church each week, but something fundamental had shifted. The church which she had believed to be a place of abundant love and affirmation – a reflection of God’s unending love for all people – had revealed itself to be… not that.
And it’s not just Mary, of course. There’s Brian, who invited his friend at work to something at church, and was shocked when his friend asked: “Will it be OK for me to come, as a gay man?” Brian had never considered that question before, but he suddenly realised he wasn’t sure of the answer. There’s Iris, who talks so proudly about her grandson George, but when she participated in her deanery’s LLF course (wondering what all the fuss was about) the couple next to her said quite casually “of course, being gay’s a sin” and she didn’t know how to tell them they were talking about her George. There’s Jean and Steve who struggled to support their daughter through the breakdown of her marriage, and weren’t sure what response they would get if they asked their vicar or their friends at church to pray for their daughter and daughter-in-law. So they kept quiet and struggled on alone. And there are so many more stories I could tell.
There are people like Mary, Brian, Iris, Jean and Steve in every congregation. There is no part of the church which is untouched by how we treat LGBTQIA+ folks, either directly or indirectly. It is right, of course, that our conversations should centre the experiences of LGBTQIA+ people, who are most directly harmed by the church’s current policies and practices. But we shouldn’t forget the ‘ripple effect’ that harm has on others too. And nobody in church leadership should be claiming that it “isn’t relevant” in their context. It will be. It might just be that the Marys in your congregation don’t feel able to share their stories.
That ‘ripple effect’ of harm to people who seem far beyond the scope of the questions raised by LLF should not come as a surprise. As Paul says: “if one member suffers, all suffer together with it” (1 Corinthians 12.26). The church’s unjust and unloving treatment of LGBTQIA+ people is not only a cause of pain for those of us most closely affected, it is painful and damaging to the whole body. For someone like Mary, that pain is not only vicarious – the pain she feels because she see that I am treated unjustly – it is also the pain of realising that the body of which she is a part is damaged in ways she had not previously seen. Unjust treatment of LGBTQIA+ people damages the whole church, the whole body of Christ. It distorts the image of God which we present to the world. It is not just an issue for us and our allies, but for the whole church.
Paul goes on, of course, to say: “if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it”. There will come a time when our suffering turns to rejoicing. When and how is still unclear, but that is the direction in which the Spirit is surely moving the church, however painfully slowly. I do still believe what I told Mary: that change will come, that my beloved and I will marry. But Mary won’t be there to do the flowers.
Any thoughts?