ViaMedia

Year: 2024

  • Beyond Jay: Here’s What the Response Group and Synod Need to Do for a Safer Church

    by Gilo, hymn writer, co-editor with Janet Fife of the book Letters to a Broken Church, and co-creator of the House of Survivors website

    Three diocesan bishops seek my take, with varying degrees of regularity, on developments in the Church of England’s safeguarding and response to survivors. I’m careful to point out that any views I express are mine, mine alone, and do not represent those of any organisation or group. I neither seek nor receive any funds in the process. So the thinking expressed here is not the only viewpoint, nor necessarily the right one (if such exists). It is simply mine, in a field which is likely to be contentious in the forthcoming Synod.

    The three bishops have each asked what I think of the Jay report. In my view the Jay is undeliverable and, even if it were, would it necessarily result in something better than the current mess? Professor Alexis Jay has done the reverse of what she did in IICSA. The IICSA recommendations were limp and didn’t go far enough. Now she’s gone too far, and by proposing Org A she’s given CofE a possible excuse to slow down the crucial Org B. She is a political naïf, and in my view the recommendations in the Jay report arose perhaps as a form of psychological penance for not being ambitious enough in IICSA. I think this report will set the Church back, not move it forward. If you follow its course logically, then other institutions may seek Org A structures in the name of ‘independence’ and we’d end up with a multitude of safeguarding bodies creating further confusion. I think no amount of Org A, and no amount of expenditure on Org A (which would put current CofE safeguarding expenditure into deep shade) can stand in place of properly designed mandatory reporting in the statutory framework. This is the key. The best course of action the Church could be taking is banging loudly on Home Office doors to argue a case for an end to the ‘potemkin village’ Whitehall is wanting to create and instead to introduce effective mandatory reporting. Whitehall wants mandatory reporting in name only, in a watered-down version of the IICSA recommendation which was already itself a watery version.

    The Church has undoubtedly arrived at a car crash moment. Where does responsibility for this lie? Failed leadership. Synod must remind itself that failure at the heart of the axis of power, represented by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in conjunction with the Secretary-General, has brought the Church to such a desperate situation. Had they resolved their differences with the ISB in a transparent and safe way there would have been no need for the Jay report.

    Let’s turn to the much-needed Org B, which is where I believe focus must be directed. Org B, as an essential body for scrutiny and oversight and the all-important handling of complaints is urgently needed, and is long overdue. The Church must give such a body effective powers if it is to avoid creating another toothless tiger (NSP anyone?). At present I believe the power to place a diocese into special measures lies within the gift of the Archbishop. This happened memorably to Chichester Diocese under Rowan Williams. This is the kind of bite Org B requires. Not the set of rubber dentures which Archbishops’ Council and their NCIs will be looking to manufacture.

    And no veto by an Archbishop. It may well be that one of the places needing such Special Measures might be the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, alongside London Diocese which would seem a prime candidate for emergency action. London is not alone in being crashy, but it’s up there amongst the worst. We only need one diocese placed publicly into Special Measures and any other dioceses currently lagging behind in handling of cases or responses to survivors will tighten up their bootlaces in a weekend. The routine blanking and obfuscation that still persists in some quarters will quickly end.

    And above all it must end within the NST.

    Whatever shape the Archbishops’ Council eventually decides to give to a new shiny ‘independent’ model, the NST must be removed from the grip of the Secretariat. Its days as an arm of the legals and comms of Church House must end. If it is to have a positive future, it must be repurposed, retrained and given a new vision of itself, with independent management which involves survivors, with all our experience and narrative wisdom. The NST leadership must face their own cognitive dissonance squarely and courageously, and recognise that its deployment by Church House in various aspects of reputation management has been disgraceful and dishonest.

    Whatever happens, ‘Delay’ is likely to be the watchword. Delay by design, but also through incompetence and systemic dysfunctionality. One thing is for definite: the CofE must never again allow one individual to hold as much unaccountable power as is currently compressed into the office of the Secretary-General. He has presided over a rotten borough in the NCIs and puppet-stringed the NST to such an extent that it has become almost impossible for survivors to have much trust in the thing. But the problem is not William Nye alone; it’s the inherited system of which he is a part, albeit a big part. We must factor in too, the lack of leadership by the Archbishops, the Lead Safeguarding Bishop and the NST.

    The House of Bishops is an enfeebled house with a poor grasp of these things. What we’ve seen across the past decade is fewer than a handful of bishops speaking out. Alan ‘Elbows’ Wilson knew that any time the media approached bishops on matters ‘survivor related’’, the traffic would immediately be centrally controlled through Church House comms. He ignored this, and spoke directly to journalists without approval from the centralized machinery of the Secretariat. He was past playing safe games with the structure and was happy to be out on the edge speaking truth to its power. He doubtless took many a kicking but it never seemed to upset him. Julie Conalty has been a courageous voice too, often a lone voice highlighting particular aspects of corruption. But I suspect she’s marginalized by a structure which expects all bishops to stay blandly ‘on message’. She needs a few diocesans to step up and publicly support her when she dares to challenge the status quo.

    Bishops must stop being cowed, stop colluding with toxic culture. They must learn to get over their fear of receiving ‘heavy shepherding’ from one or other of the Archbishops when they speak out of turn. If an Archbishop arrives on your door to bully you into submission to the rules of purple enclosure – then stand up to him. If you stick your head above the parapet, you will be marginalised. Learn to embrace this. The likelihood is that this or that particular bit of funding for your diocese will be squeezed. It’s been indicated to me that this is quietly how the culture of collegiate control operates. So the purple enclosure stays on message and lets any missives be handed out by a Lead Bishop who to all intents and purposes seems mostly missing in action as far as survivors are concerned. When a bishop dares to go off-piste and makes an authentic comment, they experience the polite scowl of the institution. But if enough speak out, especially from the top of the Lead trio, then the toxic culture might begin to change.

    Successive lead bishops have discovered they have nothing but rubber levers to work with! The real levers, those of power and any real change, are held by Archbishops’ Council which in turn is heavily controlled by a shadowy Secretariat. The wheels turn slowly because everything is hardwired to move slowly. Just as the structure is hardwired to protect hierarchy and itself. One of the bishops who listens to me recently asked me what I consider to be the three main obstacles to progress. In my view, these are:

    (1) centralised and dysfunctional power which rules an unchecked empire with disastrous consequences. Look at the handling of the ISB members and the way they were closed down at an hour’s notice.

    (2) siloed mindset of the bishops who occupy a ‘me and my diocese’ headspace. There is little public collegiate expression of responsibility and far too much collegiate fear.

    (3) the transparency gap. Too much of the structure is wedded to reputation management and used to hiding stuff. The institution has failed to grasp that transparency is the best route to salvaging reputation.

    I want to end on a positive note, because the picture is not all gloom. Some dioceses have made huge strides. I’ve been supporting one survivor in recent weeks. We sent an initial letter of disclosure to the relevant diocese, and I advised that we should hopefully expect a response within 48 hrs. The reply came within 15 mins! And was hugely positive. Not only did the diocese agree to therapy costs immediately but they are also meeting us in the home geography of the survivor’s town rather than expecting us to make the journey cross-country. The bishop also sent a positive response as soon as he could. I believe dioceses must continue to retain responsibility for the deliverance of good safeguarding and positive response to survivors. And dioceses that are operating out of a handbook that should have been jettisoned a decade ago should be placed into the equivalent of an ambulance that Org B will need to have on standby for just such an eventuality.

     

     

  • Power Games: Redemptive Violence or Redemptive Love?

    by Simon Friend, a property developer and lay member of General Synod and part of HTB/New Wine churches for the last 40 years; he is one of the conveners of The Evangelical Forum on General Synod

    The latest response from the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) to the latest set of proposals put forward to General Synod for the July 2024 sessions in York repeats a familiar tone from them that has echoed round the Synod chamber and the endless days of meetings many of us have been involved with, really ever since Shared Conversations in 2015. The message is No… No…. No…. No. The proposals and letters from various Bishops published just recently in Premier Christianity and by The Society of St Wilfred and St Hilda make the same, and now rather tiring suggestion, that we “need more time”. But I certainly get the feeling that no matter how much time we spend on this – the answer will still be No….. No…. No.

    Let me take just one point from CEEC’s June 21st statement: “…we do not believe this is an ‘agree to disagree’ issue – because the bible is clear that you cannot bless a sexually active relationship outside of male/female marriage.”

    So let’s be clear. This is about who is having sex with whom and who has the right to judge what is biblical in these matters. Many of us have been highlighting that this is the core issue we need to debate. Is sex outside of marriage of one man with one woman a ‘first order’ or as some would call it, a ‘salvation’ issue? I addressed this in my speech during the LLF debate in February this year. Here is what I said:

    “It’s clear that this drive for structural provision has at the root of it the doctrinal question: ‘Is sex outside of marriage of one man and one woman a 1st order salvation issue?’

    I am wondering what it is about this one particular aspect of the purity code, which has now become some sort of boundary marker of true faith; whereas justice, poverty, war, or the environment don’t seem to generate anything like the heat they should for us as Christians.

    Personally, I blame the doctrine of Original Sin. The Augustinian view of Original Sin that bound Adam and Eve’s action into a narrative of sexual shame intimately involved with The Fall. As John Gibson wrote back in 1981: “It’s high time that the doctrine of original sin in the sense of a sexually transmitted guilt going back to a primal guilty pair was abandoned” (John C. L. Gibson, Genesis, Volume 1, 1981, p.178).

    Original Sin wasn’t about sex. Nor should who’s having sex with whom in 2024 be cast as a ‘first order’ issue; something to tear the church apart over by making ‘structural provision’.

    The original sin was eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

    Funny isn’t it, that the one thing God asked us not to do – we can’t help but do, even all these millennia later. To know good and evil – well, that’s power, isn’t it? Something that elevates us to the status of gods, giving us mastery over mere mortals. And we are called to pay attention to power. Especially the use of the power of what we think is right or wrong.

    I wonder why God said – don’t eat this fruit. You will surely die.

    As Brueggemann writes: “No one dies in this text. This is not a reflection on death but a troubled, anxiety-ridden life. That is a greater problem than death.” (Walter Brueggemann, Genesis: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, 1982, p.252).

    We’ve been suffering this sort of living death ever since; devising mechanisms like scapegoating where we conveniently project the corruptness within our own hearts onto whoever we suppose to be more sinful over there; and banish them to the ‘structurally differentiated’ desert (or, as others would put it, the ‘pastorally provisioned desert!). And that makes us feel so much better. Doesn’t it?

    Sex isn’t the Original Sin. The use of the power of knowledge of good and evil to judge, split, condemn, and cast out the other – that’s Original Sin.”

    When I said this at Synod, it was around this point that I crashed into my 3 minute warning. I’d been intending to go on to say:

    “As Christians we believe that Jesus made himself the final scapegoat so that this cycle of shaming would end. So why can’t we let go? Why do we cling on to Redemptive Violence like a survival instinct – convinced it’s our prerogative and role to be the arbiters of right and wrong?

    When Jesus came, he resisted constantly this basic human need to judge and shame the other. He showed us the way of Redemptive Love intentionally drawing in those on the margins of society – the outsiders.

    It’s time we addressed this “sex and who is having sex” as a ‘first order’ salvation issue.

    I urge you to resist this amendment for structural provision.”

    And where are we now, in July? What has changed? If we just keep hearing the language of No…. No…. No… after all these years in which many people have put in huge amounts of effort to produce endless resources and workshops and endless group discussions … then really I think we need to ask the hard question: “How are we going to end this cycle of shaming and scapegoating if people keep using language which assumes a position of knowledge of what is right and wrong to judge, split and condemn – even cast others into some structurally differentiated part of the church?”

    So, I challenge the CEEC to ponder on this original sin and ask some self-reflective questions about how they, and indeed all of us, use a ‘knowledge of right and wrong’ when God clearly sets out from the beginning that that is precisely what we should not do. I challenge CEEC and The Alliance to reflect on how using their position of power in the Church of England, which they clearly have, is morally acceptable when it comes to the latest threat expressed in The Alliance letter of 26th June: “We will have no choice but rapidly to establish what would in effect be a new de facto ‘parallel Province’ within the Church of England and to seek pastoral oversight from bishops who remain faithful to orthodox teaching on marriage and sexuality.”

    When we play these power games based on a perceived knowledge of good and evil – then I think we abuse the power we hold. And theologically I would say it is a form of Redemptive Violence. Reasoning, that somehow believes that splitting the church makes the church a better bride of Christ. We have centuries of church splits to show that doesn’t lead anywhere positive. Some parishes in my diocese have already used their power over Common Fund to divert payments to The Ephesian Fund set up by CEEC, though I note that the moral imperative driving them does not stretch to giving back their houses, stipends or pension to the diocese from which they feel they simply have to ‘separate’ themselves.  No doubt The Alliance wants to take the Church Commissioners’ pot of funds into their new Province also. They have already benefited from vast swathes of it through SDF Funding.  At least now their behind-the-scenes planning is out in the open.  The Alliance letter states: “We will encourage all church leaders who are in sympathy with The Alliance to join the parallel Province.”

    Jesus clearly picks up the theme of Genesis 2 and how use of the power of knowledge of good and evil can lead to wrongly judging others, leading us away from considering the planks in our own eyes. He constantly berates the religious elites for judging and excluding and scapegoating the vulnerable and marginalised. Surely, it’s obvious, isn’t it? And I can hear the conservatives saying right now…. “But he told the woman caught in adultery to leave her life of sin…”. For me, even leaving aside the fact that the story was about unfaithfulness and this debate is about affirming faithful same sex partnerships, that is to completely miss the point of the story, which is that Jesus, the sinless one, should have fulfilled the law and stoned the woman himself… but instead he radically and transformatively, for himself and for the woman, said…”I do not condemn you.” That’s the point of the story, isn’t it? He is not going to condemn and judge her against a purity code and neither is he going to send her off hopeless. He gives her hope and says to her, like he says to all of us, “go and live a better life”.  Perhaps that was what Jesus was silently saying to the men who slunk away after his challenge to them.  They too needed to go and “live a better life”.

    I am sorry to say I am really, really tired of CEEC’s pronouncements. Like many others I have given up days and days to sit in group discussions with them and nothing changes.  But I still don’t want them to leave.  I still count them as my brothers and sisters in Christ.

    I want to say Yes….. Yes….. Yes…. to Jesus’ grace, love, intentional non-judgement, inclusion and acceptance. Redemptive Love, not a sort of redemptive violence.  Those of us on the affirming side of this debate have to keep believing that Redemptive Love will win and come to fruition in the end.

     

     

  • A Heart Transformed by Undeserved Grace

    by Michael Hampson, a published author devoting his early-retirement from parish ministry to producing practical resources for busy clergy and lay-led congregations, beginning with the weekly lectionary resource ssra.uk

    Last week, at Pride, my heart was transformed by undeserved grace. And on this occasion, it wasn’t from God, or fellow Christians, or the church. But it relieved the shame of decades and transformed my heart.

    Until last year, I hadn’t been to Pride since the 1990s. Back then, there were probably fewer than half a dozen in the entire country. I would be at London’s. It was mostly a protest march of angry men, with almost as many police as marchers. The march would be funnelled into a fenced-off field or park, where the stalls would all be campaign groups, and AIDS charities desperately trying to save men’s lives.

    Then last year, after a gap of a quarter century, I followed a small group down the hill after church to join the Lancaster Pride Parade, and I laughed with delight, as the contrast was almost unbelievable. There were all ages present, from babes in arms and pushchairs, to toddlers and children of all ages, to students and young adults, parents, and adults right across the age-range, and generally more women than men. Everything was joy: rainbow party and celebration. And the tallest presence in the parade was a fifteen-foot tall Big Jesus in a rainbow sash, surrounded by Christians at Pride with handmade placards announcing the names of Inclusive Churches and My God Loves Everyone in rainbow colours.

    The only police were managing traffic, to let the parade go past.

    The parade concluded in the historic town square, under Queen Victoria, where there were funfair rides, and food stalls, and musicians and poets and speeches – including a Christian minister – and three thousand people mingled through the afternoon. The small band of Christians at Pride seemed to have a gazebo and a few leaflets with Big Jesus parked outside.

    Another year takes us to last week. I had made contact with Lancaster Christians at Pride, which turns out to be a completely ad hoc group that has a couple of planning meetings and a bit of a scramble by email in the few weeks before Pride, to coordinate the superb work of some heroic individuals to produce what has become – over several years – an increasingly significant presence.

    As the parade concluded, and an afternoon’s duty on the stall lay ahead, I braced myself for an afternoon of well-deserved anti-Christian hostility from the LGBTQ+ crowd. I wasn’t expecting blatant abuse, but I was certainly expecting hostile stares, cold shoulders and dismissive looks – the hints of a well-earned low-level background contempt, after all that we know the churches have hurled at this community over the last forty years and more.

    What followed, across the next several hours, was a genuinely transformative experience of undeserved grace; not (on this occasion) from God, or fellow Christians, or the church, but from the LGBTQ+ community, gathered for Lancaster Pride. They approached Big Jesus and the Prayer Tree and our Christians at Pride gazebo with nothing but utterly undeserved warmth and grace. It was utterly disarming.

    They came for selfies with Big Jesus. They came to hang prayers for the world, and for loved ones. They came to hang heartfelt longings, which are the same as prayers; and wise hard-learned life-lessons, summarised in a few words, which are surely proverbs; and perhaps most movingly, in memoriams to loved ones, which held who-knows-what life-stories, in a moment of profound reflection, at this little holy shrine, on this big pounding party-day.

    I was braced for the shame of being Christian in the LGBTQ+ community – for the church absolutely deserves the hatred of that community for all that it has done, and continues to do. And all that I experienced yesterday from that community was undeserved grace. That undeserved grace relieved the shame of decades, and transformed my heart. That little holy shrine became a grace exchange. They brought in grace, and soon I had grace to share. I listened as people told their stories. I coaxed the cautious with gifts, which had seemed so pointless earlier in the day: “Everything is free! Free cake! Free prayers! The rainbow crosses were made here in Lancaster by the needleworkers at the Priory!” Suddenly everything made sense – in the light of grace received, grace upon grace. We had built a holy shrine in the city square, and the people brought in their gifts of holy grace to share.

    Some people only go to church once a year. This was our little holy shrine in the middle of Pride – their once-a-year church – and the prayers and the occasional conversations were profound. We’ll build it again next year. The rest of the church may still be squabbling, an unholy wreck, somewhere off-stage. But God is love and grace, active and fully alive amongst the ordinary people.

  • Essential Doctrines, Essential Hierarchies

    by David W. Congdon, senior editor at the University Press of Kansas. His most recent book, Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture, is available now from Cambridge University Press.

    For outsiders like me trying to make sense of the Church of England’s recent Synod debates over Living in Love and Faith (LLF), the official church resources on identity, sexuality, relationships, and marriage, and the corresponding Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF) that are seeking to make the church a more inclusive space without changing canon law, the last half-year has been rather bewildering. With another General Synod coming up on 5–9 July, the bishops are once again preparing for another round of debates over the church’s relationship to LGBTQ+ persons.

    The conversations are of interest to me as an American, not only because of my affiliation with the Episcopal Church, but because I wrote about the Church of England’s views on trans identity in my recent book, Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2024). I devoted one section of my book to the way Anglican theologians—especially Oliver O’Donovan and N. T. Wright—connected trans identity to gnosticism, showing how their rhetoric has influenced, however unintentionally, American evangelicals and far-right conservative activists. I argue that conservative Anglicans and American conservatives form a “discourse coalition,” meaning they participate in a shared discourse that associates transgender persons (and LGBTQ+ persons more generally) with heresy.

    O’Donovan’s views were given official sanction in the 2003 Church of England document, Some Issues in Human Sexuality, and one significant aspect of the LLF materials is the effort to replace the theological certainty of the old guidelines with a new approach “marked by provisionality and humility, recognising that we are in a time of corporate not-knowing, where mystery remains as to our humanity and how we are to live our lives in a world that we do not always understand, and where God often acts in surprising ways” (GS2328, LLF Annex H, 4). This in itself is something worth celebrating—but many internal tensions remain.

    While the attempted association of trans identity with gnosticism was problematic for a number of reasons—including a misunderstanding of both gnosticism and gender dysphoria, among other things—I was most interested in the way it assumed an ahistorical and timeless understanding of doctrine and ecclesial identity. Gnosticism, if such a term has any meaning, referred to various ancient sects that understood God to be so transcendent that a demiurge was necessary to bridge the infinite Most High with the finite cosmos. Once unmoored from its original historical setting, with its corresponding metaphysics, a term like “gnosticism” quickly becomes a rhetorical weapon that one can use against almost anyone and anything that one wishes to brand as “anti-Christian.” And that is precisely what has happened in North America, and especially the United States.

    The conservative political theorist Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) claimed that gnosticism is “the essence of modernity,” while the Canadian Presbyterian pastor Philip J. Lee asserted in his Against the Protestant Gnostics (1987) that gnosticism is essential to American Protestantism. In 1992 the conservative Presbyterian scholar Peter R. Jones published The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back: An Old Heresy for the New Age, where he blamed gnosticism for environmentalism, feminism, and homosexuality. More recently, American evangelical theologian Peter Leithart warned of “invasive Gnosticism” in the government prohibitions against transgender discrimination. The Catholic natural law theorist and Princeton University professor Robert P. George declared in 2016 that all modern social liberalism stems from gnosticism. The atheist and right-wing activist James Lindsay attributes all “woke” identity politics, especially LGBTQ+ identity, to gnosticism. This past week, conservative evangelical radio host Erick Erickson published his new book, You Shall Be as Gods: Pagans, Progressives, and the Rise of the Woke Gnostic Left.

    While Church of England leaders no doubt want nothing to do with this bigoted, antiliberal rhetoric, my concern here is, in part, to highlight the danger of letting our theological concepts run free of any historical context. Moreover, it is not enough to keep our “heresies” grounded in history; we also need to keep our “orthodoxies” historically rooted as well. And this is where the current LLF runs into trouble.

    The supplementary annexes for GS2328 include explanations of the thought process behind the new guidelines, including the theological rationale. A consistent theme throughout is demonstrating how the new PLF remains consistent with Canon B5’s requirement that “all variations in forms of service and all forms of service used under this Canon shall be reverent and seemly and shall be neither contrary to, nor indicative of any departure from, the doctrine of the Church of England in any essential matter” (emphasis mine). If the definition of “essential matter” seems impossibly vague, the bishops and clergy readily acknowledge as much. Annex A points out that the words “in any essential matter” were included in the Church of England (Worship and Doctrine) Measure 1974 (No. 3, Section 4), and that there was a proposal to omit these words on the grounds that they “seemed otiose and it would be difficult to decide what matters were essential.” Indeed! In response, the Revision Committee for the Measure retained the phrase on the grounds that “if they were omitted it became equally difficult to determine what issues were or were not contrary to or indicative of any departure from the doctrine of the Church of England” (Annex A, #19). This makes little sense, however, since the mere word “essential” hardly gives any guidance on what doctrines count as essential. It only empowers those in the church to fight about it. A further explanation stated that these words “enable the Synod to make small changes in matters which are regarded as doctrinal, provided that the essential doctrines of the Church of England are safeguarded” (Annex A, #20)—a circular claim if there ever was one.

    Annex A seeks to reassure the conservative wing by stating in a matter-of-fact manner: “We consider that the essential doctrines of the Church of England are safeguarded” (Annex A, #25). What counts as an “essential doctrine”? The question naturally follows from the wording of the Worship and Doctrine Measure, and yet we look in vain for any guidance. The LLF documents all assume that the “doctrine of marriage” is one of these essential doctrines, but the grounds for this assumption remain opaque. The Theological Rationale in Annex H acknowledges that some in the General Synod view marriage as “a secondary matter, because it does not touch essential beliefs as reflected in the creeds,” but then responds to this by saying, “we disagree.” If asked about which doctrines are essential, the average Anglican would almost certainly point to the Nicene Creed, where of course we will find nothing pertaining to marriage and sexuality. Even the Thirty-Nine Articles mention marriage only in the context of stating that priests are permitted to marry (Art. 32). So on what basis do the other bishops and clergy make marriage as essential to the church as the doctrine of incarnation?

    Even if we allow for marriage to be an essential doctrine, the alterations and adjustments to this doctrine make it difficult to sustain the conviction that the essence has not changed. Annex H provides a rather remarkable history of the ways the “doctrine of marriage” has been modified, in what it says are admittedly “significant” ways. These include accommodating divorce and remarriage, removing the claim that marriage is a “remedy for sin,” embracing the use of contraception, and allowing for couples to live together in sexual union before committing to marriage. Perhaps most important is “the move away from the primacy of procreation and increasingly making room for the expression of sexuality as a good” (Annex H, 7). Procreation is one of the three “goods” of marriage as defined by Augustine of Hippo in his famous treatise on the matter. If this does not count as an essential change in the doctrine of marriage, it is hard to know what does. Another significant change is the ethical requirement of “consent, both to the marriage and within marriage,” which broke with the patriarchal paradigm of marriage as a property transaction toward a recognition of both spouses as equal agents. As a result, “marital rape is now recognised and condemned, in law and in the church, which again marks a significant change in how sexuality, marriage, and gender relationships are conceived of” (Annex H, 8). Significant, but apparently not essential.

    The authors of Annex H correctly observe that “teaching on marriage does not just reflect theology and Scripture, but the interaction of theology and liturgy with wider cultural mores, whether consciously, or not” (Annex H, 8). This recognition that culture and history play an indispensable role in constructing and interpreting the teachings of the church sits in uneasy tension with the notion of “essential doctrine.” Even the most essential doctrines, like incarnation and trinity, are not immune to cultural and historical changes. The metaphysical assumptions of even the most conservative Anglicans today are radically different from those held by the bishops who gathered at Nicaea in the fourth century. Our creeds and doctrines give the illusion of being in unchanged continuity with the past because we say the same words (though even this is not technically true, since we are working in translation), when the reality is that the historical context, including our assumptions about divinity and our mental picture of the cosmos, gives these words a substantially different meaning.

    To their credit, the authors of Annex H acknowledge the problem I am raising here: “Some have asked, quite appropriately, whether routine accommodation/provision then becomes a de facto change in doctrine. The challenge has some weight: doctrine is not simply produced by official pronouncements but in an iterative process of dialogue between conceptual formulation and embodiment in practice.” Their response to this question is to claim that “pastoral accommodation” has always been part of the church, and—here is the crucial point—they do not want to give up “on the idea of a proper or fuller configuration of relationships altogether” (Annex H, 17).

    Put another way, the Church of England leadership still wants to say there is a normative way to be human—a “proper” or “full” form of life that is superior to other forms that deviate from this norm. Without saying so, the bishops still hold on to a moral hierarchy, much like Augustine and others throughout church history. The only difference is they have switched out who is at the top of the hierarchy. For Augustine and most everyone in the ancient church, unmarried celibate Christian men were at the pinnacle of the moral ladder. Today’s Church of England places straight monogamous married Christians at the top. The ladder is a lot longer now and accommodates many more people in the higher rungs than it used to, but there is still a ladder.

    We are now in a position to understand what is essential about essential doctrines. The essence is not any particular doctrine or interpretation of doctrine. As we have seen, these can change in quite drastic ways without apparently violating the “essence.” Instead, the essence is the normative hierarchy itself that places some Christians closer to the divine rule than others. If there is a universal truth to be found here, it is this: whenever churches talk about “essential doctrines” or “essential matters,” they are constructing the rhetorical framework for reinforcing social hierarchies.

    “At the beginning of the twentieth century,” according to the Living in Love and Faith book, “the Church of England still had a clear, global hierarchical structure that stretched across much of the world” (Chapter 7, 147). Much has changed since then. But if the emphasis on “essential doctrine” is any indication, a certain nostalgia for “a clear, global hierarchical structure” remains.

    Living in Love and Faith represents genuine progress in the Church of England. But if the goal is to create the conditions for a more just and equitable commonwealth, then it is not enough to change the church’s essential doctrines. The church needs to rethink its adherence to the essence itself.

  • Lovingly Hated

    By Anon., on behalf of the Oxford Safe Churches team

     

    The summer after my first year at university I listened to hours of sermons telling me I was going to hell.

    I was already painfully familiar with these words and hearing them from an Oxford church was by no means surprising. As is often the case, these accusations of ‘sexual immorality’ and ‘going against God’s will’ came from a church with a greeting sign at its doors: ‘All are welcome’.

    Lovingly hated. That’s how I like to refer to it. The way some of these “Christians” so completely oppose my queer identity and relationships. Yet, in the same breath, they will tell me I am loved and considered worthy by the same God they believe would send me to hell. Unless of course I renounce every aspect of this ‘deviant identity’ and mould my innermost being to fit into their idea of acceptable behaviour.

    Conversation therapy happens all the time in churches. It’s not always a dramatic exorcism, sometimes it’s disguised as ‘meeting for coffee’. And then the people you look up to and respect will reveal what they’ve believed from the very beginning: that there is no space for queer identity in their view of Christianity. That you need to renounce this  ‘same-sex attraction’ or, if you can’t, be forced to pursue a life of celibacy.

    The worst part about being judged and shamed by churches, is that it can happen when you least expect it. From the same people who drew you in with their free dinners and flashy events; in the same places you once felt safe and seen. You can be torn apart at a moment’s notice. This only happens because churches intentionally hide what they believe about LGBTQ+ identity and relationships in order to draw people in.

    “Okay, we get it, some churches don’t accept you… but why are you so focused on them? Can’t you just move on to other places?” I wish I could just move on, but no.  Firstly, their words and actions cut deep. Secondly, moving on leaves no trace of what these places actually believe and practice behind closed doors. Each year, freshers are sucked into churches that ‘welcome’ them and leave them vulnerable to spiritual abuse. Out of concern, because I would never want anyone to go through what I’ve seen happen to others, I felt an obligation to make everything public.

    Hence, I put in hours of work over my summer ‘break’ listening to those sermons over and over again. Each damnation was transcribed and carefully put together in a report to prove that certain Oxford churches are not in fact ‘loving and welcome to all’. But that this love has conditions. Even though it’s excruciatingly obvious to anyone who even remotely looks, or loves, like I do, I had to prove this was happening. I had to show freshers which churches could be seen as safe, and which have hidden beliefs to be wary of.

    Oxford Safe Churches. Pages and pages of testimonies, research, affiliations, references, sermons, and anything else that gives any indication of what an Oxford church believes about LGBTQ+ identity and relationships. There was a lot to put in that report. And it was awful.

    And what was the response from our Bishop of Oxford? The same Bishop so celebrated for his support of same-sex marriage in the Church of England in his 2022 booklet, Together in Love and Faith. Silence. Even the slightest acknowledgement of what we wrote would have been enough to know we have someone on our side. Yet, in the light of everything we reported, all the horrible testimonies, there was no response.

    In fact, in that booklet, the last we heard from Bishop Steven, he insists we don’t ‘assign blame to individual clergy or churches’ and should avoid the ‘emotive language of abuse’. But how can we possibly move past the shame and trauma that LGBTQ+ people have felt in the church without acknowledging it for what it is? The Oxford Safe Churches Project has now written to him. Clergy and churches who are responsible for spiritual abuse have the responsibility to repent of that. To take accountability and be transparent about what they believe. If not, it seems the Church of England cares more about protecting its image than protecting vulnerable people.

  • Between Meaning and Despair: A Generous Faith

    by Canon Giles Goddard, Vicar of St John’s, Waterloo

    Extracts from Generous Faith: to be published on 28 June 2024

    Advent is the dawn of the Christian year. A season of light, starting four weeks before Christmas, not long after the clocks have gone back and the nights have drawn in. That first Advent, a dark November in 2009, I was trying to get used to the space. To find the light in the murky gloom. We held services and sang Advent carols: ‘Christ, be our light, shine in our hearts, shine in the darkness’. There was an Advent wreath that had four candles, three purple, one pink, and one in the centre, white. It was placed on a little table by the High Altar, and we lit one candle every week to symbolise the weeks before the arrival of the Christ Child.

    When I go down to the river I watch the waters running to the sea and the cormorants perched on pleasure cruisers, their wings stretched out to dry, looking like crucifixes. I wonder what Wordsworth would think if he was transplanted today to Westminster Bridge. Waterloo and the South Bank, a mile from the Square Mile, inundated by the tidal surge of consumption. The rush of rush hour, crowds crossing Waterloo Bridge in the twilight, I had not thought greed had undone so many, the alienation, the loneliness.

    Between the early 1980s and the turn of the century the churchyard was part of Cardboard City, a temporary home for people without homes: tents were head to head across the grass, fires at night flickered on the gold mosaic on the side of the church:

    ALL MAY HAVE IF THEY DARE TRY A GLORIOUS LIFE OR GRAVE

    Developers now buy and sell land at millions of pounds per acre and wrestle with residents and councillors to produce yet another tower to overtop the forest already crowding around us. Bus drivers press the secret combination to use the special bus drivers’ toilets. Street drinkers piss behind the tombs.

    At an early meeting of the Church Council, packed into a meeting room of the hostel next door as we had no rooms in the church, I asked them about their hopes and dreams.

    ‘What’s your vision for the future? What do you think this church should be?’

    There was a silence.

    ‘We’re a friendly church,’ said Holly eventually. ‘You know that, darling, don’t you.’

    ‘Indeed you are,’ I said. ‘But what else are you? What kind of message do you want us to offer? What do you want people to find when they come to us?’

    A silence.

    ‘Not sure,’ said Elaine. ‘We’re doing OK, aren’t we?’

    ‘Is that all we can hope for?’ I asked. ‘Is that why we’re here?’

    When the Bishop granted me my licence as Priest in Charge of the parish, I thought I knew what my task was: to produce results. To renew the church and to reduce the suffering of people in need. But I had a deep fear that it would all turn out to be a waste of time and energy. There were many times when I went into church and felt that for all the work and effort and imagination and dreaming, nothing really changed. The congregation remained fragile and diminutive and their painful insecurity seemed close to the surface and unassuageable.

    It felt as though I was locked in a battle between meaning and despair, between love and hate. A cosmic battle between God and the Devil and a personal battle with the demons whose especial task was to undermine me. It seemed to be a battle against shape-shifting enemies. The inertia and destructiveness of tradition. The insidious and overwhelming power of class, race and privilege. The muddied hopelessness that I saw so often in the faces of people I spoke to – drinkers ground down in the churchyard with their brittle laughter, people who appeared in church who had been struggling for most of their lives with abuse or addiction. The stolidness of the buildings I had inherited, which defiantly resisted the work of the spirit. I remembered the words of the prophet Isaiah:

    A voice says, ‘Cry out!’

    And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’

    All people are grass,

    their constancy is like the flower of the field.

    The grass withers, the flower fades,

    when the breath of the Lord blows upon it;

    surely the people are grass. (Isa. 40.6)

    St John’s is built on the tidal plane at the heart of London, only protected from flooding by the Thames Barrier. Sea level rises will put this part of the city at risk; salt water could quickly inundate these streets that have been reclaimed from tidal mud. The threat of global disruption is increasing and the fragility of the city is becoming more and more apparent. What seems lasting is fleeting. We are here for a moment and then we are gone.

    I am part of an institution that has a history going back nearly five hundred years, since Henry VIII promulgated the Act of Succession in 1534. A history of dark and light, times of oppression and times of transformation, an arm of the state at times and at others a critical friend. Notorious, now, as an institution that fails to welcome marginal groups and is still a long way from being fully inclusive and affirming.

    I became the priest of a church that has been here for nearly two hundred years, and, climate change permitting, could be here for another two hundred. Sometimes I wondered what I could do to help it last so long – and at other times I wondered whether it even deserved to survive.

    I soon began to understand that people washed up at St John’s with a suitcase-full of reasons. Some came to use the loos that nestled in the vestry by the High Altar. Some came because they were passing and wanted to nip in to say a prayer – often they were young and from a Catholic country where popping into church is more commonplace. Some came to see the building and to check out the architecture or the gaunt picture of the crucified Christ above the altar. Many came because they were musicians, playing in orchestras or singing in choirs.

    Some came to find what they could, seeking a way to heal their pain, to deal with the damage of their early lives – or damage from their treatment by the churches they had grown up in – or because they had fallen out with God but could not silence the whisper of the Divine in their hearts.

    People came to pray and sing and eat morsels of unleavened bread, they came with an ache acknowledged or unacknowledged, they came with hunger, sometimes hunger unknown, they came to seek, they came in fear, they came in hope.

    They asked me questions about faith and God. I was often unsure how to answer. Was I flawed or fraud? Or both? The quietly benevolent façade I presented felt like a stage set, all columns and pediments and reliability and niceness. It was hard to know where the public merged into the private. I listened to the questions and a big part of me wanted to cry: ‘Please don’t trust me, it’s not worth the risk, I am acting a part that the institution demands of me.’

    I was already aware of one problem with being the vicar: often when I tried to be of help, the boundaries I tried to set were pushed and pushed until I had to call a halt, so my original intentions were undermined and I felt worse than useless.

    The Church of England felt like an unsafe world where I was accepted only conditionally, on sufferance. The self I had constructed over many years from earliest childhood felt tenuous, a uniform, a product I had developed so I could do the work I thought I had to do. There were times when it felt as though the whole thing was about to collapse, when even my presence at St John’s was under threat.

    I had an atavistic fear of being found out. Impostor syndrome? Perhaps. The fear that the curtain would be drawn back and everyone would see the little old man working the machinery. The self I presented to the church and the world was as the good gay, the honest broker, the safe pair of hands. I tried to hide the toxic bifurcation between public and secret which stirred and bubbled beneath the surface. I was not always successful.

     

  • The Whole of Who We Are

    by Susannah Clark; she belongs to the Fellowship of the Love of God (Oxford)

    It was Augustine who wrote ‘You were within me, but I was outside’.

    How many people find themselves living, at least in part, outside themselves: performing to colleagues to fit in and meet their approval; or conforming with others around us – at work or at church – to feel part of the group and accepted? Even sadder, when we lose contact with ourselves. You may know the feeling, when you work and work, until you finally stop and ask, ‘Yes, but where am I in all this? In the life I lead?’ and you feel out of touch with yourself.

    We so easily do this to ourselves, and drift away from who we really are, uniquely made and cherished by God. We can feel fragmented, with countless loose ends, but haunted by a kind of inauthenticity. ‘How are you, Susannah?’ ‘Oh I’m fine,’ when you’re not. In our ‘outside’ lives when we’re fronting up ourselves to others like that, it is all too easy to become alienated from the God who dwells within us, always longing and calling us to get back in touch, to open and grow… to resume the journey and vocation to become the whole of who we are.

    In the Carmelite practice of contemplation, that re-connecting with the God who knows and loves us is called ‘recollection’… collecting yourself together again, and recalling the core reality of who we are in relationship with God… God who knows us tenderly, calls us into our being and becoming, loves us to the point of no turning back… and beckons us to know ourselves in opening up and devotion of our souls.

    That opening up can be – oh – so raw, and we may well fear it: because so many of us have closed doors in our souls that we’d rather not open… old hurts, old shames, and the anxiety of what it might cost if we do: what we might unleash! And yet, there is a gentleness and healing in the love of God, and opening up to the flow of God’s love is the beginning of becoming. It’s opening up, often in trembling steps, to the whole of who we are. Most of us know on paper that love is the great commandment, the first imperative, if we are to give ourselves to God and be authentic. But truly opening up means more than just being loved.

    The flow of God’s love in our being and lives is like a stream of compassion: as Jesus described it, streams of living water that would flow from within us. It is not simply a static pool that we can wallow in for our own enjoyment alone. Yes, God does water our soul like a garden, and wants us to receive and to flourish. But the fulfilment of our being is more than self alone. The Love of God is a flowing stream, the Spirit of God, longing to reach through us to others… because that’s what love does: it flows and enlivens us in the act of opening up our hearts to others round about us. When we give ourselves like that, as channels of mercy, we start to know the best of who we are. We recollect and encounter the authenticity we can have in God.

    For decades I self-harmed, and ‘who’ people saw did not match who I was, how I felt, inside. I policed and defended and locked down that person for fear of discovery. I tried to project and act out a congruent manhood to meet their expectations and presuppositions, and yet… how I was inside my ‘gestalt’, what I felt, how I longed to become, was painfully incongruent with my physical body. So I tried to shut all the doors, put my integral person in a box, tape down the lid, and hide it away. But repression can be like a dam that increases and increases in pressure, until it erupts in negative ways: in my case in terrible self-harm. That was the cost of ‘performance’ outside my true self. Not waving but drowning.

    Then sometimes the dam finally breaks – I’m not just talking about trans experience, it happens to many people. In my own case I think it broke because I ached for God so much. I ached to be true. And once the dam was broken I could not put it all back. I transitioned. It was not a casual ‘life style choice’. I lost friends who ghosted me. I was told by my employers that I must leave. I lost my home. For a while I even lost my children. People at my church told me I was wrecking my life. And yet, God did not abandon me. On the contrary, I felt held and comforted and spiritually alive. I commenced hormones, and within weeks the self-harm of decades just ceased. I underwent surgery. An amazing Anglican community of sisters (in fact the community that was later featured in ‘Call the Midwife’) took me in, loved me, and nursed me for ten weeks after surgery. ‘Yours is just like ours’ they gently assured me as they tended the wounds. Christian inclusion.

    My contemplative life deepened and came alive, and I was guided and helped by another Anglican community: the Sisters of the Love of God in Oxford. They were wonderful, and encouraged me along my contemplative path. I learnt the practice of trust in the God who is there, even through the cloud of unknowing. I dared to open doors long closed, I confronted myself, I opened my being to God. My life became congruent and no longer racked by dysphoria. Instead… deep psychological ease and a more practical, productive day-to-day, week-to-week journey. It has now been fifteen years. I re-trained as a nurse, and it was the best thing I could have done: in looking outwards to others I found myself healed from within. My life – and the journey to become the whole of who I am – expanded, opened up, found release in little practical acts on the hospital wards. Contemplative life is not just internal: it permeates and colonises our practical lives as well.

    Friends at church had warned, ‘It will end badly’ and some Christians still say ‘Transition is wrong. It’s against the will of God.’ They call my vagina a ‘mutilation’ and my womanhood a fake. Politicians and sadly some Christians go further, politicising my quiet life and who I am, and framing people like me as ‘threats’ and ‘predators’. It is hurtful and in some cases hateful. They talk about an ‘ideology’ but in truth they have an ideology themselves. Their language endangers trans lives on the street, massaging the ‘culture wars rhetoric’ and providing a kind of mandate for hatred in the eyes and sick minds of those who spit, or threaten, or shout abuse: ‘you’re a pervert and a bloke in a frock’. It is sad and a bit shameful, weaponising who we are for political gain. In truth, for most trans people our lives are as mundane as anyone else’s: getting up, going to work, shopping, washing, ironing, making supper. It’s the same ‘lifestyle’ as yours I am sure: it’s called being a human being.

    My children – all three are committed Christians – have returned to love me tenderly. I am so proud of them and their devoted lives. I’m not jubilant about the impact on them and others, but we are loving and close now, which I find really humbling. One of my last jobs before retirement in 2022 was as a school nurse caring for 1200 teenagers in a large secondary. There I witnessed – but did not proselytise – four trans teenagers who were trying to explore the whole of who they were. The school had a great ethos: to afford them time, space, and respect. The same respect given to young gay or lesbian teens there. They, and all the students, would come to me for care, for cuts, inhalers, migraines, allergic reactions, or sometimes just to talk. And within the first week, I was just ‘the nurse’. Teens are great like that.

    It’s not just individuals though, is it? It’s not only about me, me, me. I’m incredibly insignificant in the great scheme of things. Thank goodness. The whole point about transition is just to get on with your life, only with greater psychological ease, more congruity, more in touch with who you are and can become. It’s the same for the Church as a whole: the call of God to open up to the whole of who we are and can become. Not excluding people, or insisting everyone conforms to a single dominant dogma, but learning that when a church welcomes the neuro-diverse, the foreigner, the gay, the bi-, the disabled, the trans, the precious individual beset with mental health issues… every one of them has been uniquely created by God and brings gift to God’s community… which would be impoverished without them.

    Yes, as a Church, we should pray that in opening up to the flow of God’s love we open more and more to the whole of who we are.

     

     

  • Church of Scotland Welcomes Trans Members and Ministers

    by the Rev Canon Professor Paul Middleton, Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Chester; a Minister of the Church of Scotland, he is also a member of its Theological Forum, and Canon Ecumenical at Chester Cathedral

    The annual meeting of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland took place at the end of May in Edinburgh. Though not established in the same way as the Church of England, the Church of Scotland is recognised in law as the National Church. The Monarch, who it is said ‘becomes Presbyterian when they cross the border’ is represented at the General Assembly through the Lord High Commissioner (this year, the Duke of Edinburgh), and in the Gracious Letter, reaffirms the Accession Oath ‘to uphold Presbyterian Church Government in Scotland.’

    This year’s Assembly, which was somewhat overshadowed by the announcement of the General Election, for the first time considered the question whether or not there was any bar on Trans people and those with diverse gender identities holding office in the Church. As was noted in the recent Cass report, discourse around Trans people in society has become toxic. While Hilary Cass was writing about the situation in England, this is arguably more so the case in Scotland with the recent controversy around the Westminster Government blocking the Scottish Parliament’s Gender Identity Bill, which was passed overwhelmingly with support from members of all parties.

    The Church’s Theological Forum was given the remit of reporting to this year’s Assembly. While the Church of Scotland spent the best part of a decade debating same-sex marriage and lesbian and gay ministers in the church, there have been relatively few statements on the place of Trans people. In 2016 it produced the booklet Diverse Gender Identities which promotes awareness and inclusive pastoral care, and the 2022 Assembly supported the Scottish Government’s proposed criminalisation of conversion practices, rejecting a proposal to specifically exclude Trans experience from that ban. Therefore, although the Church has not said very much in the past, the Theological Forum were building on a generally positive and welcoming position.

    In compiling their report, the Theological Forum, which includes a spectrum of theological opinion, spoke with a number of Christians who are transgender and others who hold diverse gender identities, including someone who had de-transitioned. The Forum concluded that since the Church of Scotland takes no consideration of sex or gender for church membership or holding the offices of Elder or Minister, there is no bar on Trans people being Ministers.

    The report the Theological Forum presented to General Assembly is relatively brief. A decision was made to make no comment on the current debates in Scottish (and now British) political discourse, although it calls attention to the fact that rhetoric in these political debates directly impacts real people. The report is divided into three sections: Engagement with Scripture; Engagement with Lived Experience; and Theological Questions. Each section is brief, and is a truncated presentation of far wider discussions. The first section acknowledges that some Christians find a clear sex binary in the creation accounts, while others would see these accounts, along with hard-wired gender roles in the text, as descriptive (how the world looked to the ancients) rather than prescriptive. Moreover, in the same way as few would argue the Creation accounts override advances in natural sciences, there is no reason to suppose they should take priority over advances in human and biological sciences, such as psychology and physiology. There is some reflection on the biblical account of eunuchs, although the report is ambivalent about the helpfulness of mapping these characters on to contemporary Trans experiences.

    The second section, which recounts the Forum’s meetings with people of diverse gender identities, makes the important point that there is no single ‘Trans experience’. On the basis of the stories described, the Forum concludes that ‘the duty of love requires the Church to follow a course that will avoid causing distress, and that will promote wellbeing and demonstrate compassion’. The final section raises some theological questions around whether transitioning or not may best express people’s calling to be the person they were created to be, observing that ‘many Christians see diversity of gender identity as a gift from God and a blessing.’

    The Theological Forum would acknowledge the report is far from exhaustive. There was a clear decision to focus mainly on the principal question it was asked to investigate; whether or not Trans people could be ministers. Much of the debate on the floor of Assembly noted that there is far more that could be said, such as the importance of changing name in biblical tradition, gender diversity in creation exemplified through the animals, and the figure of the eunuch. The Forum’s report urged that all sides exercised charity and grace, and the discussion was largely carried out in that spirit. The report concluded with an important and unambiguous statement of welcome: ‘Transgender people are part of the Church of Scotland and they are welcome.’ General Assembly unanimously accepted the report.

  • PRIDE: More than Sparkling Spandex

    by the Very Revd David Monteith, Dean of Canterbury

    In 2009 Barack Obama sealed June as ‘Pride Month’.  These events are now as common across the UK as apple fayres or carnivals of Olde. PRIDE is mainstream. The elements of protest and political rally have gone in favour of community celebration – perhaps still with a little more edginess and ostrich feathers than your average festival.

    The badge is still the rainbow PRIDE flag with its origins in the stories of San Francisco gay liberation. The flag provokes strong reactions. Some people of faith remind us that pride is a deadly sin as if LGBTQIA+ people have more monopoly on that than others.

    I grew up in N. Ireland in a flag culture. Flags united and divided communities. They added colour to life and made visible in the public arena the aspirations which people held privately. Working in cathedrals has taught me a lot about flags used in services as banners of identity. The ultimate intensity of these symbols is the Military Standard (not technically flags) which carry the weight of full regimental identity. Some call them sacramental. PRIDE and the PRIDE flag carry intense meanings which allow many to rally around and others to oppose.

    A colleague here displays a Progress Pride flag on their office window out onto our Precincts. We get periodic complaints about this suggesting it is discriminatory, inappropriate and that we are supporting the ‘gay agenda’. Often complaints are intemperate. We’ve had individuals storming into the office requiring us to remove the flag with diatribes of anti-LGBTQIA+ venom.

    Much has changed since I attended my first PRIDE in the 1980s.  LGBTQIA+ equality is no longer a minority concern. Laws, institutions and families are more inclusive. However, I also see that not far under the surface remain fears and hates which bubble up.

    My partner and I walked along a beach with the dog, holding hands, whilst a group sniggered, offered low-level abuse and the derogatory names. I sit on a train in civvies going up and down to London and I hear prejudicial hate-filled talk about LGBTQIA+ people. We’ve sat in curry houses with groups of tertiary level students being horrible. I’ve had reports of people who will not come to worship if I am preaching. I sit in meetings where LGBTQIA+ people are tolerated.  How often have I visited a parish having to explain I do not have a wife but a civil partner and then – stony silence.

    These experiences, whether verbal abuse or that chilly atmosphere or that silence, still provoke anxiety in me as to what hurt might happen next. Hate crime remains under-reported by LGBTQIA+ people yet it is still rising despite all the protections in a more inclusive society.

    We still need PRIDE even just as a community festival. It makes us visible. Despite footballers or celebrities, visibility is still an issue. PRIDE insists that it is possible to be an inclusive community where the needs and rights of everyone do not diminish the needs and rights of others. A PRIDE rainbow flag flown on town halls, hospitals and fire stations, schools and even some places of worship says ‘we are here’, ‘you are welcome’ and ‘there is still work to do’.

    Social media and politics remind us that lurking not far under the surface are views and emotions for harm rather than for good. No amount of training or education seems to really deal with this sea of dystopian sludgy sin. We now know from brain analysis that our ancient (sometimes described as monkey) brains have signals that travel much faster than other brain signals. These trigger flight, fight and fear responses long before more reasoned responses. This brain is much less malleable than the rest of the brain which is much more able to learn from experience.  This old brain is the hardest place for grace and redemption to reach. Many prejudices emanate from such visceral instincts. This does not justify such prejudices but it means that addressing them is a life’s work.

    As LGBTQIA+ people we too make this painful journey – we are still learning what ‘generous Christian inclusion’ fully means in us rather than listening to the prejudice that can rise in our own hearts and minds as well as with others. This is a spiritual and psychological locus which makes for shame that impacts negatively our self-esteem. Of course, for Christians our safe identity is in Jesus Christ as children of God. There is security from that belonging when ‘sticks and stones’ have sought to do us harm. However, if in church or family or community our sense of genuine inclusion is not reinforced but instead questioned, rejected or filtered through visceral prejudice, then our ability to live out the good news of our identity in Christ is hampered. PRIDE is a counter-balance to the undermining pressures we still too often experience.

    It’s great that many PRIDE celebrations include ‘Christians at PRIDE’ groups made up of LGBTQIA+ people and allies. However, can we imagine most local churches present at PRIDE, generously inviting people to the gospel and life amidst the rainbow people of God, protecting those still harmed by hateful words and actions?

    We’d need a church which is genuinely safe enough with the ability to nurture everyone and address the fears that rise from our prejudicial depths. Even as the glitter and the glamour of PRIDE cheers us to a smile, these celebrations remind the church that there is a very long road still to travel.

     

     

  • Queering the Church: The Theological and Ecclesial Potential of Failure

    by Dr Penelope Doe, University of Exeter

    July General Synod approaches and the interminable conversations on LLF and PLF continue. It’s over 10 years since The Pilling Report was published, launching Diocesan Shared Conversations amongst other conversations at Synod and elsewhere. I read Pilling when it was first published, was a little surprised by how superficial I found it, and was intrigued by the tension on display between provisionality and certainty. Its hermeneutics, like those of the CoE as an institution embodying authority power, privilege, and the unalloyed goods of progress, became the subject of my PhD and now my recently published book, Queering the Church: the Theological and Ecclesial Potential of Failure.

    This is, I think, the first time that the hermeneutics of an institution have been interrogated using queer theory and disruptive readings of the Church’s neoliberal models of growth and success, alhough Charlie Bell makes a similar challenge to ecclesial models of hegemonic normativity presented as gospel truth in his recent book, Queering Redemption (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2024). Queering the Church uses Pilling as a paradigm of the ways in which churches construct authority, success and progressiveness, and embody power and privilege. Far from eschewing the liberal secular societies of the Global North, the Church has readily embraced their neoliberal identities and practices.

    What do I mean by queer/queering as a methodology? Queer is better figured, perhaps, as a verb rather than as a noun; a doing rather than a being. Since queer theory is disruptive, transgressive, and troubling, it can have no definitive logic, discourse, or end. David Halperin apprehends queer’s slipperiness in his statement that the concept owns no stable reality:

    Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. ‘Queer’, then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative – a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of her or his sexual practices; it could include some married couples with children… (Saint Foucault, OUP, 1997)

    I often find queer theory richer and more disruptive than queer theology. My two main conversation partners in the book are Jack Halberstam, whose Queer Art of Failure provided a methodology for queering the church, and  Karen Bray whose work on a Theology for the Unredeemed (Grave Attending, Fordham University Press, 2019) suggested Holy Saturday as a site of queer temporality in which the church could learn to experience the abnegation and alterity of that liminal day, as queer people have often been coerced into the acceptance of liminality in a heteronormative church. As for that motif of failure as a ‘queer art’, it derives from Halberstam’s book which posits failure as a kind of ‘victory’ for those who fall outside the cisheteronormative models enforced by neoliberal patterns of success and progress.

    First, what can Halberstam’s work offer us? By adopting the potential of failure as a means of que(e)rying the hegemonic assumptions of church reports and report writers, the Church of England might be able to embrace those whom Halberstam calls ‘the incoherent, the lonely, the defeated and the melancholic’. The Pilling Report and its ‘afterlife’ showcase mostly those voices whose authority derives from the hegemonic norms of neoliberal ideas of progress and success. Such norms are represented as Christian, often as traditional or orthodox Christianity. These prevailing ways of knowing disregard the possibilities suggested by the failure of progress, success, knowing, agreeing, and predominating.

    The institutional life of church reports and debates, which is predicated on the belief in the unassailability of church polity, could, perhaps, seek for ways of knowing outside this dominant framework. Rather than ‘success’ and ‘progress’, failure’s art embraces the queer hope of unbecoming, undoing, unknowing; the ways of negativity, passivity and immaturity. Halberstam focuses on what Foucault calls ‘subjugated knowledge’ – cultural understandings that have been regarded as childish and foolish notions of possibility. It is, perhaps, ironic that a religion that enjoins its followers to be childlike has such a problem with the radical and anarchic potentialities of childishness. Failure and negativity can be redemptive.

    The academic or quasi-academic language of church reports and debates acts as a gatekeeper for this discourse, making access difficult for those who do not ‘speak’ the scholarly or ecclesial vernacular. Halberstam’s appeal to the silliness and childishness of some subcultures and popular culture reminds us that meaning is made outside ‘proper’ knowledge in failure, forgetfulness, wandering and improvisation. But if we dwell in the ‘queer temporality’ of Holy Saturday, the prospect of resolution is tenuous and uncertain. Failure and the almost fugue state of Holy Saturday are the suggestive ‘solutions’ I offer to the peculiarly intractable ‘issues’ that sexuality, or rather homosexuality, poses for the church.

    As for Bray, her political theology borrows from the Holy Saturday theologies of remaining explored in Shelly Rambo’s Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), using the mystical theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr exploring the meaning of the wordless and abandoned ‘middle’ between the cross and the resurrection. Speyr’s mystical revelations began in the Holy Week of 1941 and continued until her death in 1967. Christ’s descent into Hell was presented not as a triumphant rescue of lost souls, but as an experience of experiencing utter abandonment by the Father.

    Balthasar and Speyr both saw Holy Saturday as timeless, a space where redemption is begun in a tiny drop of love, originating in Christ’s wound that will blossom and fruit: ‘This residue of love is not powerful but weary and impotent. Its movement suggests that death does not fully govern it’.

    Holy Saturday is (also) a Wordless space since the Word made Flesh is, according to Balthasar and Speyr’s mystical theology, now dead. Forsaken by His Father, the Son enters into a condition of suffering and separation, of passivity and failure: ‘the Father and the Son are from the furthest reaches of each other in Hell’. In this vision of Holy Saturday, not only does the Son take on our suffering on the Cross, but also He descends into Hell where He endures alongside the dead and damned; there is nowhere now that God has not entered and no condition, however perilous, that God has not inhabited.

    This concept of Holy Saturday as a Wordless space – a site of absence and failure – could be a model for the Church of England’s engagement with the troubled waters of sexuality and gender. Non-normative sexualities and genders are not in themselves ‘troubles’ to be solved, but the number of reports and debates on homosexuality are evidence that they ‘trouble’ the Church. The Church of England’s response to what it views as aberrant ways of being human can itself be ‘troubled’ (or queered) in the queer temporality of Holy Saturday rupturing the cisheteronormative utopias that the Church creates and that deny – or attempt to elide – their queer beginnings.

    Holy Saturday, this ‘middle’ day, is a Wordless site in which the Church of England can remain without anticipating the certainties and realisations of Easter day. Even in its paschal liturgies, the Church seems too eager to rush from the agony and failure of the crucifixion to the joy of the resurrection without pausing to experience both the abandonment and the exiguous hope of Holy Saturday. Following the death of a naked and tortured Messiah and bereft, therefore, of hope, the Church must encounter and admit failure, so that even if rescue comes, the experience of failure will always form a part of salvation. But the Church of England baulks at the prospect, or even at the possibility of failure.

    If those who produce church reports could only enter the queer temporality of this ‘middle’ day, they could face the rupture of all their certainties, encountering a provisionality that does not expect the traditional answers. They might see negativity, not as a negation of the orthodox, but as an empty space that follows the rupture of the normative. Abiding in the desolation of Holy Saturday requires, in Bray’s terms, a ‘grave attending’ to different ‘becomings’; to how ‘transformation’ and ‘living obedience’ might work out for the unredeemed. In Grave Attending (p.31) Bray writes:

    Current discourses on queer temporality seek to examine the ways in which heteronormativity and white supremacy fortify the neoliberal political economy. Many queer theorists uncover the resonance between the demand to be a productive member of society and the manipulated desire to be a reproductive member of the heteronormative family. Such demands nurture in us an optimistic belief that the straighter and whiter we become, the happier we will be. This cruelly optimistic promise (to borrow from Berlant) impedes alternate desires of community, family and self.

    I want to use the uncertainty, provisionality and, indeed, failure of Holy Saturday as a site for queering the hermeneutic and teleological assumptions of church discourses produced by a stable, influential, neoliberal institution – the Church of England – that reflects the values of resilience, productivity and growth promoted by the market. For Bray (p.27), grave attending is

    a style of life that does not wait for resurrection as much as it tries to remain with a difference on the day after damage and death. It does not and cannot rush toward redemption out of the gravity of such damage, because it is attendant to the damage of those who, in the wake of our resurrective impulses, we have let drown.

    It is not those crucified by neoliberalist ethics – which Bray describes as ‘heteropatriarchal, ableist and white supremacist’ – who need to inhabit the queer temporality of Holy Saturday, even though it is a site in which queer folk are often required to suffer simply because their bodies are figured by some churches and by some Christians as unredeemed. It is the Church, as an institution, which needs to be gravely attentive and to experience its queer temporality, rather than those who may already have suffered ecclesial trauma. Being able freely to inhabit a site of suffering and failure requires a level of privilege not always afforded to those whose lives are marked as unproductive or liminal. As I write in the conclusion:

    I want to end with the hope that, by troubling the waters of ecclesial discourse on (homo)sexuality, I have indicated a site – a place of desertion – where the Church of England might reflect on the art of unknowing, undoing, unbecoming; on the ‘queer art of failure’.