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Author: Helen King

  • Learning and Listening: Being Inclusive

    by Kat Campion-Spall, Rector of the Bristol Harbourside Churches, and a member of General Synod

    Arriving 3 years ago in a newly formed parish, a question from a parishioner awaited me: would we consider joining Inclusive Church?

    The two parishes had just merged. One church is community-focussed, with evangelical roots, although not wanting to use that label any more, with a vocation to hospitality and welcome. The other is a city centre church with a more creative, radical edge, historically the first point of contact for seafarers arriving from all over the world. I hadn’t expected the question of Inclusive Church but, as someone personally committed to working for inclusion, I welcomed it.

    It quickly became clear that this question came with history. A pastoral situation at one of the churches over a decade previously had caused pain and division, a number of people had left the church, attempts at reconciliation seem to have been ineffective, and the bishop’s instruction to stop talking about it and move on had left unhealed wounds beneath the surface. This wouldn’t be an easy conversation. 

    Although Inclusive Church has a wide remit, the point of tension was LGBTQI+ inclusion. The PCC and congregations cover a broad spectrum. Some who actively campaign for LGBTQI+ inclusion, many quietly affirming but cautious about division, some who hold to the church’s traditional teachings on marriage. Some were particularly concerned not to leave anyone feeling excluded because of their theological position.  

    Mention of Inclusive Church seemed like a flashpoint for many and even the history of the conversation caused disagreement – some remembered a discussion and vote on IC at one church, while others felt it had never been properly explored: historic PCC minutes suggest that a conversation about whether the PCC wanted to explore joining IC concluded that there wasn’t sufficient will to pursue it. It’s likely that that discussion had been a difficult one and many had little appetite to repeat it.

    So, over the course of 2023, we went back to basics. There wasn’t a shared narrative across the two churches, so we started with each church’s history of LGBTQI+ inclusion. We followed this by sharing our own personal stories of inclusion and exclusion, to try and understand each other’s perspectives.

    In January 2024 we had a pastoral decision to make. The Prayers of Love and Faith had been commended by the House of Bishops, and one of our congregation was planning to marry his long-term partner that spring and would love us to pray for them in church. I cautiously proposed that we offer these prayers to people with a connection with the parish. I was delighted that a PCC member suggested offering them to anyone who asked, as some couples wouldn’t have this option in their own parishes, and this received broad support. The resolution was passed unopposed, and I was privileged to lead prayers for Sam and Albert that April. This also demonstrated that the PCC was overwhelmingly wanting to affirm same-sex couples, so the difficult question was how we express that and whether IC membership was the right way to do this.

    Over the course of 2024 we adopted new values for our church community: inclusive, engaged, connected, inviting, which were warmly welcomed by the PCC and congregation. At the APCM, the question came again: would the PCC consider joining Inclusive Church? With all that we had done, we still hadn’t fully explored this. So the PCC discussed how we could have this conversation well. This in itself was a difficult conversation to have. Some members felt joining IC was essential to signal our inclusivity to those outside our churches, whereas others felt our church values and offering the PLF did this sufficiently; others feared that aligning with a particular organisation might alienate people with more traditional views. It became clear that a simple debate and vote would not move us forward. We had already spent many hours of PCC meetings on this and were making little meaningful progress towards agreement. It also became clear that we had to walk towards this. However difficult it would be to make a decision, not making a decision was taking its toll too.  

    So I planned a “month of inclusion”, for the PCC and wider congregation to learn about Inclusive Church and explore ideas of inclusion in general. We invited disabled, GMH, LGBTQI+, and neurodivergent guest preachers to help us listen to voices underrepresented in our church community and leadership. Our monthly discussion group heard from members of local churches that were part of IC. I encouraged PCC members to reach out to people who saw things differently and try to understand each other. And we set aside a whole PCC meeting to learn about Inclusive Church, with a vote at the following meeting.

    For the meeting, I invited an external facilitator. We reflected together on 1 Corinthians 12, on what it means to be a diverse body and to need one another. Each person was invited to share what they had learned so far in the process. We were joined on zoom by the IC National Co-ordinator, who answered our questions. I assured the PCC that while I was in favour of joining IC, I was committed to the parish whatever the outcome of the vote, and I wanted them all to be part of the churches.

    The meeting was difficult. Some people found it upsetting. Some felt that the process was too focussed on joining Inclusive Church and wanted to hear about alternatives. Some wanted to have a fuller exploration of Biblical and theological perspectives on sexuality. Some were concerned about aligning ourselves with an external organisation we had no control over. Some, sadly, felt approaches by other PCC members had been aggressive (although I remain convinced that was no-one’s intention). Some felt that not to join IC would be letting down the next generation. Some people felt uncertain about their future in our churches. 

    I wanted everyone to feel heard, but giving everyone even 5 minutes to talk would take up another whole PCC meeting. So between PCC meetings I offered 1:1 conversations to everyone on the PCC, not to persuade but to listen to their perspective. Each PCC member was invited to write a short statement setting out their position, and these were circulated before the meeting. With the Churchwardens, I gathered the arguments we’d heard into a ‘pros and cons’ list.

    We finally came to the vote. I set out the long journey of learning and listening we had been on. I set out what would happen if we voted no, and if we voted yes – both of which were underpinned by the same ongoing commitment to inclusion that the PCC had already expressed. We agreed to receive the vote in silence. We voted, and had a clear majority in favour. And we continued our meeting to discuss the things we really wanted to be talking about as a PCC – our mission, safeguarding our children, caring for our buildings.

    At one level, little has changed. Both churches remain committed to inclusion. Each is now forming a small group to develop different areas of inclusion: one probably focusing on disability, the other on LGBTQI+ welcome, which I hope would have happened anyway.

    But a few new people have found us through the IC directory. We now partner with Christians at Pride to host a monthly service, and have joined other local Inclusive Churches to share a stand at the university Freshers’ Fair. Most importantly, the Inclusive Church logo on our website and noticeboards now stands as a specific sign of welcome to those who might otherwise presume that they were not.

  • Cries of Suffering: A Response to ‘The Nature of Doctrine and the Living God’

    by Mike Higton, Professor of Theology and Ministry at Durham University

    The Faith and Order Commission’s recent document on ‘The Nature of Doctrine and the Living God’ (GS Misc 1429) is not, in my judgment, a particularly helpful contribution to the endless Living in Love and Faith process. I fear that, however good the intentions behind it, it will

    • perpetuate the strange detachment from the history of theological and ethical debate in the church that seems to characterise the current LLF process;
    • encourage the House of Bishops to misconstrue their role in that process and to misunderstand the key questions that face them;
    • encourage them once again to downplay the centrality that LGBTQ+ voices should have for them in this context; and so
    • prolong the harm that the whole process continues to do to LGBTQ+ people.

    It also happens to be a document in which my own name appears, several times. It was only when a friend emailed me about it last week that I discovered I had been presented as one of a chorus of theologians whose work supposedly confirmed the document’s account of doctrine, and of the role of the bishops in maintaining it – but that I had been made part of that chorus only by way of a selective and, to my eye, somewhat misleading reading of my work.

    Measured against the real harms being done to LGBTQ+ people by the stalled LLF process, this misappropriation of my work is of course an entirely trivial matter, and wouldn’t by itself warrant a lengthy public response. It does, however, present me with a particular angle from which to assess the limitations of the document, and an opportunity to caution others to take it with a pinch of salt.

    What is this document?

    Back in June 2024, the ‘LLF: Moving Forward as One Church’ document (GS 2358) posed some questions on behalf of the House of Bishops to ‘the Theological Adviser(s) to the House of Bishops and the Faith and Order Commission Episcopal Reference Group (FAOC ERG)’ (§43), asking

    how do we, as a church, develop or change our doctrine? Is it possible to hold multiple doctrines simultaneously, in order to respond in the most gracious and pastoral way possible, even when this is messy or incoherent? Is it possible for there to be a range of interpretations of one doctrine? (§41)

    GS Misc 1429 is a response to that request: it says that ‘It is the product of work by the Faith and Order Commission (FAOC) and the Episcopal Reference Group (ERG), with support from the theological advisers to the House of Bishops. It is shared with the House of Bishops in the name of FAOC’ (§3). (I should acknowledge, by the way, that I served on FAOC myself from 2010 to 2022, and was vice-chair from 2016.)

    The conclusion that the document draws about the nature of doctrine, presented as a summary of the work of numerous theologians (including me), is that ‘doctrine is true knowledge about God consonant with Holy Scripture that is communally authorised and communally regulative’ (from the Executive Summary).

    The document does not, however, simply present this argument in the abstract. Rather, it argues for it in order to say something about the role of bishops in decisions about doctrine in the church. It argues that the bishops

    are given the task outlined … by theologians from Hooker to Higton, and so many in between, to discern whether anything put forward as wholesome doctrine is either ‘grounded in the Holy Scriptures’ or … ‘agreeable to said Scriptures’. (§158)

    The proper exercise of this role will, to be sure, involve ‘a dialogical process between the House of Bishops and the General Synod’ (§162) and so be ‘a process of communal discernment that leads to an agreement about what the community authorises as sacred doctrine’ (§163, my emphasis). In other words, although ‘the House of Bishops play a special role in doctrinal formulation owing to their function as teachers of the faith … they hold that role in dialogue with the other houses of the General Synod’ (§164). Nevertheless, within this communal and dialogical process, the bishops have ‘a central role in discerning the faithfulness to Scripture of any doctrinal formulation’ (§160, my emphasis). And the document’s final sentence sets out more fully the nature of this role:

    Careful discernment about which parts and themes of Scripture are most pertinent to the issue being addressed and which reading of those texts best expresses the mind of Christ in the Church is required, so that the Church remains faithful to what it has received … while it proclaims the faith afresh in each generation. (§174)

    FAOC’s reply to the House of Bishops leads up, therefore, to this account of the bishops’ role. Faced with a development that may amount to a change of doctrine (or may not – the document provides little help in deciding what does or does not count as doctrine), the bishops are to test that development against Scripture – and the heart of that testing will involve both a determination of which ‘parts and themes’ of Scripture are most relevant, and a determination (carried out, it seems, by securing a majority in Synod) of which interpretations represent ‘the mind of Christ in the Church’.

    To explain why I think this is an unhelpfully limited account (and why I do not think my own work supports it) I need to explore in more detail the argument of the document, noting along the way some of the things that strike me as strange about it.

    Is your journey really necessary?

    The first odd thing to note about this paper is simply that its authors felt that, in response to the Bishops’ request, the thing they most needed to do was to argue at considerable length that doctrine should be ‘consonant with’, ‘grounded in’ or ‘agreeable to’ Scripture.

    That would make sense, of course, were this point hotly disputed, so that it was worth devoting extended labour to securing it before moving on – but that is not the case, as the document acknowledges. The authors insist that

    It is crucial to reiterate that the present disagreement about the content and use of the [Prayers of Love and Faith] is not over whether or not Holy Scripture plays the determinative role in doctrinal formulation expounded above, but how it does so. (§168, emphases added)

    And this is a point that has been made numerous times before in the debate. Right back in 2020, for instance, the initial Living in Love and Faith book discussed at some length the way in which the church’s disagreements were shaped by differing attitudes to Scripture, but within a shared commitment to Scripture’s authority.

    (The book can be found on the LLF website, for which a free account is needed; once logged in, the whole thing is available for download. I was part of the group that produced this book, and that I was, in particular, part of the group that initially worked on the material that became Part Four, including the chapter on the Bible.)

    At one point (pp. 295–297), Living in Love and Faith sets out seven different ways of thinking about Scripture that are identifiable in the church’s disagreements about sexuality and marriage (and it is worth noting that the differences between them go much deeper than their selection of different ‘parts or themes’ to prioritise). The book argues that two of them (one at each extreme of the spectrum it has painted) are ‘beyond the mainstream of the church’s conversation about the Bible’s authority and purpose’ (p. 298), but that the remaining five (which between them could cover many people on all sides in the debate) share a number of features, including:

    • a commitment to the diligent reading of the Bible as God’s instrument for training in holiness and love, and instructing us for salvation;
    • a determination to attend to the way the words of the Bible run;
    • a desire to have their consciences formed by the dynamics of those words;
    • a conviction that Christ stands at the centre of the Bible; and
    • a belief that the Bible’s deep purpose is to unite us with Christ
    • and to draw us into Christlike love for God and neighbour. (p. 298)

    Now, there is obviously material here for considerable ongoing controversy. People occupying any one of the ‘voices’ that the LLF book lays out might not regard those occupying some of the other voices as having a plausible or acceptable account of what consonance with Scripture involves. But the book argues that

    All of them are determined to be obedient to God’s purposes in giving us the Bible, as they understand those purposes. They can’t simply be divided up into those who are trying to be obedient to God’s voice and those who are not. (p. 299)

    All of them, in other words, are already committed to the idea that the church’s teaching should be ‘consonant with’, ‘grounded in’ or ‘agreeable to’ Scripture. Disagreement has arisen not because they dispute that, but because they understand that consonance, grounding, or agreement in different and incompatible ways. (And for more on this, see my 2020 paper on ‘Disagreement about the Bible’, available in the online ‘LLF library’, which explores further the nature of our disagreements about the ‘how’ of Biblical authority.)

    In the light of all this, however, there is something distinctly odd about the present FAOC document saying so little about how Scripture can or should play a determinative role in the formulation and doctrine, and so much about whether it should play such a role.

    And that brings me to my second point.

    Balance or imbalance?

    The second oddity about the document is the way in which its attempts at balance falter.

    There are clear indications (such as the sentence quoted earlier from §168, about all sides agreeing that ‘Holy Scripture plays the determinative role in doctrinal formulation’) that the document’s analysis is meant to provide even-handed background assistance to the bishops rather than taking sides on the issue at hand. In particular, the description of the nature of doctrine that the document offers is meant to work for all sides.

    There are, however, a few ways in which that attempt at balance slips.

    The first is a tiny point, which only becomes telling in view of the larger examples that follow. In the course of a discussion of Brooke Foss Westcott, the authors say

    Rowan Williams, reflecting on Westcott’s contribution, comments that Westcott, despite frequent labelling of him as ‘liberal’, is fully committed to the Scriptures as the source of faith and doctrine. (§76)

    Notice that little word ‘despite’. The impression a reader might get from that one word is that the authors either endorse or do not see the need to avoid the idea that being ‘liberal’ does not normally go with being ‘committed to the Scriptures as the source of faith and doctrine’. Yet they are quoting from Williams’ chapter on Westcott in Anglican Identities (London: DLT, 2014), in which Williams is both

    pleading for a recognition on all sides that the word ‘liberalism’ is complex and slippery, and that, despite the angry polemic of the right, there is no single ‘liberal agenda’ to be written off as apostasy

    and arguing positively that Westcott’s form of liberalism is entirely bound up with his ‘endlessly patient attention to the detail of Scripture’. It would be fairer to say that Westcott is the kind of liberal he is, in Williams’ account, because of his commitment to Scripture.

    There’s a second point later on, almost as small, but similarly telling in the light of the broader shape of the document. When, in §140, the authors summarise what all the theologians they have covered (including me) are supposed to have said about doctrine, they say, ‘Holy Scripture is the repository of God’s revelation of that truth, and thus the foundation of all doctrine.’ Here, it is that word ‘repository’ that snags. It has not appeared in any of the discussion before that point in the document, but it is used here to nail in place the account of Scripture that has (supposedly) emerged from the whole foregoing discussion. And it is a word that, at least to my ear, echoes ways of talking about Scripture that are much more common amongst conservatives than amongst liberals or progressives (to use those familiar but inadequate labels). I’ll say some more about this below.

    It is, however, a passage very close to the end of the document that gives me most concern on this question of balance. The authors of the FAOC document sketch the position of some (indeed, they say ‘many’) in the debate who believe that Scripture clearly rules out the proposed changes to the doctrine of marriage, and who believe that arguments to the contrary necessarily involve rejecting ‘the perspicuity of Scripture: the conviction that those things a Christian is required to know, believe, and observe are available to all in their reading of Scripture’ (§172).

    The authors give the whole of §§171 and 172 and a significant part of §173 over to expounding the view of these ‘many’. Those who disagree with them (who are, note, not described as ‘many’) are then granted only a sentence, and no part of that sentence sets out what forms their own commitment to the authority of Scripture might take, or what response they might offer to the claim that they reject Scripture’s ‘perspicuity’. The implicit suggestion is not that people in this latter group have their own firm commitment to the authority of Scripture but different understandings of the way in which that authority works; it is, rather, that they don’t have much at all to say on the matter. Once again, the impression is subtly given that the authors of the FAOC document know what to say about conservative commitment to the Bible, but are somewhat nonplussed when it comes to speaking authentically about other sides in the debate.

    It is in that context that we might think again about the apparently unnecessary effort that this document expends on establishing that doctrine should be consonant with Scripture. That effort reinforces the impression that, whatever might be said explicitly to indicate otherwise, the question of whether Scripture is determinative for doctrine really is the point at issue – and that the bishops’ task might be to hold fast against changes championed by people who aren’t really serious about the Bible. That impression may well be inadvertent – I rather suspect that it is – but it seems to me quite palpable.

    I want to reiterate, therefore, what the document itself says, even if it later manages to undermine itself: ‘the present disagreement … is not over whether or not Holy Scripture plays the determinative role in doctrinal formulation’. I say that as someone very firmly on the affirming or progressive side of this debate – someone who wants not just stand-alone services of blessing for same-sex couples, but equal marriage, and much else besides. And I am convinced that this is what the church is required to do by the gospel of Jesus Christ, as that gospel is revealed to us in Scripture. I believe that the refusal to take this path is disobedient to the gospel and disobedient to Scripture. And I believe that those on the conservative side who oppose these moves misread Scripture and misunderstand the nature of its authority.

    I might of course be wrong about any or all of that, but if you want to convince me that I am wrong, you would be foolish to spend any time at all trying to establish that our teaching as a church should be consonant with Scripture, because I already agree with you about that. Much better to save your breath for a conversation – likely to be much richer and much more complex – about how Scripture’s authority is to be understood. And that is a topic on which no story of a neat consensus stretching down the centuries, and no neat delineation of the task before the bishops, is going to work.

    (For a little more on all this, see a blog post I wrote a couple of years back on ‘Disagreement, conscience and harm’.)

    Consensus on the nature of doctrine?

    The bulk of the FAOC document (§§7–146) consists of summaries of the work of a variety of theologians: Aquinas, Hooker, Newman, Westcott and Ramsey, and a selection of more recent figures from Kevin Vanhoozer to me. We are brought in as witnesses who are all, together, presented as giving our support to a particular account of doctrine and its relation to Scripture:

    doctrine is true knowledge about God that is revealed by God. Holy Scripture is the repository of God’s revelation of that truth, and thus the foundation of all doctrine. (§140)

    I for one, however, do not recognise my own work on doctrine in this formulation.

    The authors of the document draw on my book The Life of Christian Doctrine (Bloomsbury, 2020). I explain in the introduction to that book that it was written while I was myself heavily involved in the Living in Love and Faith process (p. 9); I describe myself as ‘someone hoping and working for the Church to change its stance towards people in same-sex relationships, and for it to confirm the unreserved inclusion of trans people in all areas of its life.’ (p. 9), and explain that the book was written, in part, to explore some of the background issues about doctrine that the LLF debates about those matters had thrown up.

    I explain:

    These debates are, for instance, often framed as taking place between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘revisionists’, but I explore in this book an account of the doctrinal tradition in which that distinction doesn’t make sense – or at least an account in which it can’t be of primary importance. More generally, I ask what work doctrinal theology can contribute in a situation in which there is little agreement about what constitutes a good doctrinal argument – little agreement about the kinds of evidence that should be appealed to, about the weight that those appeals should have or about the forms of argument that might be telling. This book is in part an attempt to understand how to argue well in such a context, and what good – if any – such argument might be capable of doing. (p. 10)

    There are several divergences between the account I offer in the book and the ‘consensus’ that I am supposed to support. I can only offer brief indications of those divergences here, leaving out the case I build for my claims by engaging with Scripture, tradition, and reason, and the arguments I offer against alternative accounts – but I hope it will be enough to explain why I can’t endorse the FAOC document’s summary.

    I have already mentioned my discomfort at describing Scripture as the ‘repository’ of revelation. I make the case in my book that doctrine does not simply summarise or articulate the truths that can be found lying ready to hand in Scripture. I therefore do not think that the key hermeneutical differences involved in our present debates are simply disagreements about ‘which parts and themes of Scripture are most pertinent’. The ways in which Christians read – on all sides of the debate – are much more deeply entangled with and shaped by the patterns of their imagination and practice, and by their deep construals of the nature and plot of scripture, and so are much more deeply various, than such formulations suggest.

    I would also find it difficult, without some serious qualification, to describe doctrine as ‘knowledge about God’. I argue in the book the more apophatic claim that

    For Christians to grow in knowledge [of God] is for them to grow together in their imagination of the love of God for them – their grasp of its breadth and length and height and depth. It is for them to grow in knowledge of the God-imaging love to which they are called, discovering the wisdom that will enable them to live that love out in the midst of all the relationships – local, political and cosmic – in which they find themselves. Knowledge of God consists in this deepening knowledge of love, and any supposed knowledge of God that does not take this form is simply fatuous. (p. 104)

    Doctrinal statements and doctrinal theology can, I argue, play an important role in guiding and supporting this knowledge, but that doesn’t mean I can say that doctrine itself is ‘knowledge about God’.

    But perhaps my biggest difficulty with the summary I am supposed to support is its blunt assertion that doctrine is ‘true knowledge of God’ – and not just that but true knowledge ‘revealed by God’. Perhaps the most obvious difference between my work and the FAOC document is that I write with a much stronger sense of the fallibility and failures of the church, and I extend that to my estimate of the church’s doctrinal inheritance. I write that

    Doctrinal theology … is involved in the reproduction of the life of the church. Yet the life of the church is always broken, always distorted, always sinful. Whatever true knowledge of God is embodied in the life that any Christian community lives, it is always mixed with ignorance, with misunderstanding and with the deliberate refusal of knowledge. The life of the church is a series of always failing experiments in the knowledge of God. If doctrinal theology helps to reproduce the life of the church, it will be helping to reproduce all of this failure – all of the exclusions and imbalances of power, all of the forms of harm that mar the church’s response to God’s love. (p. 4)

    The authors of the FAOC document do briefly notice this aspect of my account (see the second paragraph that they quote in §136), but it quickly vanishes from sight. A large part of my book is, however, devoted to exploring how the Spirit works to convict the church of its sin (including those sins woven into its doctrinal theology), and to teach the church to know more of the truth. It is an account of the necessity of ongoing penitent change in the church’s doctrinal teaching.

    And this account of sin, conviction and repentance shapes what I say about the role that bishops might play in processes of doctrinal change – giving my account a tenor rather different (it seems to me) from that of the FAOC document.

    That document does, admittedly (in §138), quote substantial parts of a paragraph from The Life of Christian Doctrine that, in full, reads as follows:

    As with all other forms of doctrinal theology, however, this episcopal work of encouraging, amplifying and resourcing [a summary of the description I had just set out of the teaching role of bishops] cannot be undertaken alone – and that is especially true in relation to the work of challenging erroneous teaching. As with all other forms of doctrinal theology, the work of bishops needs to be embedded within processes of ongoing listening and re-construal, in which there is a real possibility of their being led to see differently by the challenge of others. Bishops are enabled to play their role as teachers by being members of communities of conversation and exploration that can encourage them, resource them and challenge them – and especially by being members of communities that can read scripture with them, and inspire them to read it differently. In particular, their ability to ‘uphold sound and wholesome doctrine’ will be directly proportional to their ability to hear the call of God in cries, encounters and improvisations – because those are the means that the Spirit characteristically uses to draw the church deeper in to the sources of its faith. (p. 238)

    And it is true that my point in this paragraph was in part, as the FAOC document suggests, to acknowledge that bishops are indeed granted a role in our polity as gatekeepers of doctrinal change – but it was also to point to the conditions under which that role can properly be exercised. And what I say here, if read in the context of my wider argument, does not simply amount to saying that they should be in dialogue with the wider church as represented by the other houses of General Synod, seeking some kind of majority or consensus, and it does not let me rest content with the descriptions that the FAOC document gives of the bishops’ proper recourse to Scripture.

    The line in the paragraph quoted above about ‘cries, encounters and improvisations’ refers back to, and summarises, a lengthier discussion earlier in the book. In this context I want to draw particular attention to what I say about ‘cries’:

    God’s call reaches this church through cries…. Most sharply, the call reaches the church through cries of suffering – cries from those injured, marginalized, erased, ignored or forced into passivity by the existing patterns of this church’s speech and action. These may be the cries of those who are already visibly part of the life of this church; they may be the cries of those on or beyond what are currently thought of as its edges – but wherever they come from, these cries break in on the church’s present life, posing questions and demanding re-evaluation. Can they do justice to the lives from which these cries emerge? (p. 223)

    Crucially, attending to such cries – and learning to walk with those whose cries they are – can and should transform how we read Scripture. I had earlier said that

    The reading practices to which the church is called, and which doctrinal theologians are to accompany, are practices of reading while walking. That is, they are practices of re-reading in the light of the new situations, the new encounters and the new relationships into which the Spirit leads scripture’s readers. Above all, they are practices of re-reading in the company of those who suffer and are oppressed, those who are marginalized and excluded, those who are harmed by the church’s present settlements. They are practices in which those in positions of hermeneutical power and privilege sit at the feet of those who read from the margins, to listen, to learn, to accompany and in time to converse. The Spirit can open the eyes and ears of readers more fully to scripture, and enable them to hear, see and dwell in the word of God more richly, by means of these situations, encounters, relationships and conversations. If doctrinal theology is to play a role here, it will be by keeping the church to this kind of reading and walking, by holding open space for the conversations that emerge, and by exploring the challenges and suggestions that are generated by those conversations. (p. 169, emphasis added)

    I am not trying to intervene here in some zero-sum game between attention to Scripture and attention to experience. I argue at length in the book that this does not make any sense at all as a way of describing our hermeneutical options. My argument is, rather, that the heart of Scripture is opened for us only as together we journey with Christ in the power of the Spirit, and in no other way – and that we should turn away from any account of Scripture’s meaning, of its ‘parts and themes’, or of the proper approaches to its reading, that can be offered in abstraction from that journeying.

    In other words: I don’t want it supposed that I give my support to a picture of the bishops’ role in guarding the doctrinal teaching of the church that has them testing what they hear from the wider church against a Bible that they already know how to read quite well enough, having learnt to read it outside the company of those whose lives, whose relationships, and whose futures they are discussing. I don’t think that any such picture can do justice to the nature of the journey on which we are called together into the knowledge of God; I don’t think it does justice to the nature of the Scriptures that we have been given by God to accompany us on that journey; and I don’t think it does justice to the nature of doctrine.

    Is it possible to hold multiple doctrines simultaneously?

    I say all this not because I expect to change anybody’s mind – though I hope, of course, that I might. I offer in its favour various arguments, exegeses of scripture, and readings of a range of ancient and modern theologians, but I know that all of those arguments, exegeses and readings are contested. I therefore don’t necessarily expect the authors of the FAOC document to agree with me, but I do want to establish that the supposed consensus marshalled in that document is not quite as neat as it is made out to be. And whilst I accept that I’ve only spoken about my own case, I’m fairly sure that closer attention to several of the other figures covered would indicate that they, too, don’t sing in perfect unison on these matters.

    In particular, the voices gathered in the document don’t all say the same things about the authority of Scripture, and neither do Anglicans more generally. I’m not sure how to distinguish between ‘dogma’, ‘doctrine’ and ‘teaching’ (a point on which the document declines to pronounce – §51), but I suppose you could say, without too much danger of misunderstanding, that there are indeed different doctrines of Scripture in circulation amongst us, and that this has long been the case. Some might resemble the views outlined at the end of the FAOC document, with their focus on the perspicuity of Scripture; others might resemble mine; others will be different again – but whatever their precise character, there is no doubt that the church is and has long been marked by deep and intractable difference in this area.

    But that brings me to the final oddity that I find in this document. The bishops asked whether it is possible for the church to hold multiple doctrines simultaneously – and yet that is a question that this document doesn’t even attempt to answer. The authors could have got somewhat further, however, had they dug back, not into general accounts of the nature of doctrine like mine or those of the other theologians they have mustered, but into earlier formal discussions of this very question by Church of England bodies, including discussions carried out by the commissions to which FAOC is a successor. I find it odd that this report is so detached from that earlier history of Anglican discussion.

    The authors could, for instance, have looked back to the 1938 report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Doctrine, Doctrine in the Church of England – a report commissioned precisely ‘because the tensions between different schools of thought in the Church of England were imperilling its unity and impairing its effectiveness’ (William Temple, ‘Chairman’s Introduction’, p. 4), and so long in the making that even the LLF process looks short by comparison. They could have looked at the succession of documents that the re-formed Doctrine Commission produced from the 1970s to the 1990s – including Christian Believing: The Nature of the Christian Faith and its Expression in Holy Scripture and Creeds (1976), Believing in the Church: The Corporate Nature of Faith (1981), We Believe in God (1987) and many more – all of which deal with questions of doctrine, and explore the nature and limits of difference in the church.

    Perhaps most pertinently, however, they could have looked back to the 1968 report on Subscription and Assent to the 39 Articles, produced by the then newly re-established Archbishops’ Commission on Christian Doctrine – and in that report they would have found the question about the permissibility of deep differences in Anglican approaches to Scripture already posed and discussed. The report describes those deep differences unflinchingly, but argues that this variety can indeed be held within the life of the church. And this wasn’t one of those reports that vanished from view the moment it was published; it initiated the revision of the Declaration of Assent made by all deacons, priests and bishops, which ensured that the promises they all made would leave room open for this variety to persist in the church. It is not the least strange aspect of the current debate that we seem to have lost touch so completely with even quite recent episodes in our history.

    It is not that I think there are easy answers to find in this history, or any insight that will suddenly cut through all the tangles that we face. Greater attentiveness might, however, help protect us from the temptation to deceptive neatness – a neatness that irons out difference, flattens out history, and somehow always manages to squeeze out the voices of those already marginalised within the life of our church as it is. I fear that FAOC, in its desire to provide assistance to the bishops, has slipped into purveying precisely that kind of neatness.

  • The House of Bishops on Clergy and Same-Sex Marriage – Further Personal Reflections

    by Peter Collier KC, retired Senior Circuit Judge and former Vicar-General of the Province of York

    Further to my recent reflections on the House of Bishops’ October statement on the future use of the Prayers of Love and Faith, I have now also reflected on their statement about the future of clergy and same sex marriage.

    Again, they say they have been influenced by the legal advice they have received and the papers provided by the Faith and Order Commission (FAOC).

    My reflections, as one who until not so long ago was engaged in the practice of the law, begin in a different place. I begin by looking at what marriage is generally seen to be in cultures across the world and then consider how, in England, the relationship between Church and State has played out over the centuries in changing attitudes to marriage in both Church and State.

    Family, Household, Marriage and Law

    I am no anthropologist, but as I understand it the basic units from which societies have been formed are tribe, and family. In most cultures there is a social group that broadly accords with what we would describe as the family. The core may be two people or, in cultures recognising polygamy or polyandry, more than two people. In some cultures, the wider household grouping plays a significant role.

    It is usually in the context of such groupings that children are born and brought up. The core couple relationship in such groups is commonly called a “marriage”.  How a “marriage” takes place, with what degrees of social customs, or required formalities, varies from society to society. Many of us will have had some exposure to different customs through attending Muslim or Sikh weddings in this country.

    As societies become more complex and sophisticated, the regulation of any particular society through a system of law will inevitably develop. The law may require preliminaries and formalities if a marriage is to be recognised as such, and to regulate both initiating and ending such a relationship.

    More complex societies will accord different consequences as a result of a marriage being recognised, treating the two (or more) people as a unit to be dealt with differently from those same people as individuals. This can have an impact on taxes required to be paid or on monetary or other benefits that the state may provide. In our society there is also a significant amount of law about the place of children and how they are to be dealt with if a marriage breaks down.

    As a young Christian, I was taught that marriage is a creation ordinance – it was God’s intention that people would find a helpmeet with whom they would share their life and they would together bring up children. And so this unit has always been the bedrock of a society. Of course, that has traditionally been interpreted as showing that marriage is between a man and a woman and only between a man and a woman. But additionally Genesis can be said to speak of permanence and in Matt 19 we have Jesus using the Genesis phraseology when asked about adultery. That led to the Matthean exception about which volumes have been written; and we will come to remarriage after divorce in due course. I would add that the church that taught me about creation ordinances also taught me that the world was made in 7 days; an article I wrote in the school 6th Form magazine (in 1965) advancing that cause led  my Headmaster to write on my report that term: “his Philistine attitude to science will be recorded on his UCCA form”.

    Since then, I have learned how to accommodate my interpretation of the Genesis account of creation to a growing understanding of what science shows us. Similarly, I have learned how to accommodate my understanding of what the Bible teaches about marriage, based not only on what science has shown us, but also and perhaps more significantly from getting to know some same sex couples and seeing the fruit of the Spirit in their lives. As my wife often reminds me, just as in our encounters with Christ, “conversion is in the meeting”.

    Whose Law?

    Throughout much of Europe, and in this country for nigh on a thousand years, the way marriages were initiated and thereafter controlled was governed exclusively by the Church. As the Christian church developed so did its Canon law through various synods and councils. In relation to marriage, perhaps the most significant of those was the 4th Lateran Council (1215). Its published Canons about marriage included Canon 50, prohibiting marriage in the 2nd and 3rd degrees of affinity, and Canon 51, forbidding clandestine marriages and priests witnessing such marriages, and providing that all marriages must be announced publicly by the priest in church so that legitimate impediments might be made known and the priest could investigate whether any impediment existed. That same duty and very similar phraseology remain in our own Canons today, over eight hundred years later – see Canon B33 (Of the duty of the minister to inquire as to impediments).

    The Church was able to impose its view of marriage – what it was and how it was to be solemnised and regulated – on the whole of English society. Consequently, for several hundred years the church and the state views about marriage were one and the same. Church courts had exclusive jurisdiction in enforcing the Church’s view of marriage. It was therefore the Canon law that was applied in all circumstances. It was only in church and in accordance with the rites and ceremonies of the church that anyone could enter into a marriage in England.

    The theology of marriage as understood by the reformers is set out in the introduction to the ‘Form of Solemnization of Matrimony’ in the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) – a man and woman come together in the sight of God and the face of the congregation to be joined in holy Matrimony; they declare (by their silence) that there is no impediment to their marriage; they then make various vows of lifelong commitment to one another; they are then blessed. In medieval times the making of vows had often happened in the churchyard or in the entrance to the church and the couple then came into the church for the blessing.

    However, there is nothing in the 39 Articles about marriage, apart from it being lawful for bishops, priests and deacons to marry (Art 32).  The wording of Art 32 is very interesting: “… therefore it is lawful for them … to marry at their own discretion, as they shall judge the same to serve better to godliness”. I think that many who are wanting to enter into a same-sex marriage would claim those words for themselves. The Canons of 1603/4 had no statement about what Holy Matrimony was, just details about its preliminaries, and the permitted place and time of marriage (Art 42); who can grant licences to marry, and other details about licences (Arts 101, 102 & 103); and finally various provisions about divorce (Arts 105,106 & 107).

    Recognition of marriages

    It is perhaps reasonably well known that how countries deal with other countries’ systems of marriage forms a very complex area of law; not all forms of foreign marriage are recognised in this country as valid. Currently, the government is considering how to enable humanist weddings, and those performed in accordance with other religious traditions such as Islam, to be equally recognised as those carried out in accordance with English law.

    But what is perhaps not quite so well-known is the origin of that non-recognition of forms of marriage other than those carried out in accordance with the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England. There were exceptions for Jews and Quakers, provided it could be proved that the marriage had been carried out according to the practices of either of those two distinct groups. However, the theological (and therefore the legal) position was that a couple were not married by a priest, but they married each other by the exchange of promises. The priest’s role was to register and to bless the marriage.

    So, there grew up the practice of “clandestine marriages”. These were marriages conducted secretly without following the legal formalities required. In England that meant they had not gone through any of the necessary Canonical preliminaries and had not been performed in accordance with the BCP service for the solemnisation of Matrimony. They were sometimes referred to as Fleet Marriages as many of them were conducted in the Fleet Prison or nearby. By 1740 it is estimated that half of London weddings took place there. Such marriages were often witnessed by a priest.

    The beginning of state intervention

    With the intention of bringing the practice of such unsatisfactory marriages to an end, the Clandestine Marriages Act 1753 (Lord Hardwicke’s Act) was passed. It put all English Canon Law about weddings on to a statutory basis. It made invalid all marriages that were not performed in accordance with its provisions, unless performed according to Jewish or Quaker rites. So, those apart, a marriage had to be carried out in church after the publication of banns, or the obtaining of a licence from the ecclesiastical authorities (i.e. in accordance with the Canons). This Act was significant because it was the first time that the state law makers made laws about marriage, even if the law they made was simply adopting the church law.

    With the growth of non-conformity, members of other religious denominations and groups also wished to be able to be married other than in and by the Church of England. In particular, Unitarians were very unhappy about the Trinitarian language of the marriage service. This was eventually resolved by the Marriage Act 1836. I have referred to this in my earlier paper and noted the Bishop of Exeter’s distress at this invention of “civil marriage”. I also referred there to the removal of any religious service from civil weddings in Register Offices in 1856, bringing about the difference between religious and secular marriages.

     Some other state-led changes in our attitude towards marriage

    The relationship of a husband and wife within a marriage was again shaped by the ecclesiastical law which was based on scripture, as then understood. Some of that understanding remains to some extent among those who hold to “complementarian headship principles”.

    The tradition developed that a woman was given by her father to her husband – passing from the control of one man to the control of another. For a long time, a married woman had no right to own her own property and on marriage her husband gained control of all her property. That did not change until parliament intervened and the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 gradually gave married women the right to own property, wages and investments separately from their husbands, and eventually to enter into contracts and lawsuits in their own names.

    Another ecclesiastical court action was for the restitution of conjugal rights. It was transferred to the court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes when that was created at the end of the 19th century.  By such an action, founded on Paul’s argument set out in 1 Cor 7, a spouse whose partner had left them and was living away from them could obtain an order that they be required to resume cohabitation. This was not abolished until the Matrimonial Proceedings and Property Act 1970 came into force.

    The 1991 case of R v R [1991] UKHL 12 is a landmark UK House of Lords ruling that made marital rape a crime by overturning the centuries-old legal exemption for husbands raping their wives. The court’s decision established that a husband can be convicted of rape, thus dismantling the legal principle that a wife’s consent to sexual intercourse became irrevocable upon marriage.

    More recent changes – (i) Civil Partnerships

    A more recent and significant change has been the introduction of Civil Partnerships in 2004. This did not change marriage but introduced a new state-recognised relationship alongside marriage. If two people (who initially had to be of the same sex, but since 2019 can be of the opposite sex) register such a partnership in front of a registrar and two witnesses, they are accorded almost all the same rights and responsibilities as if they were married. The few that do not carry over have no particular significance from a religious perspective, being chiefly around survivor benefits in occupational health schemes. Many people regarded this as introducing same-sex marriage in all but name.

    Civil partnerships proved very successful. By 2014 there had been 60,000 partnerships registered, three times as many as the government had anticipated when introducing them. For some they were preferable to marriage as they carried none of the stains of patriarchal marriage traditions. But for others they continued the stigma associated with gay relationships. Such Civil unions, as contrasted with marriage, are also available in many other European and former Commonwealth countries.

    All that can be said about what a civil partnership is that it is the registration of a legal relationship between two people that produces a number of rights and responsibilities for them. There is no reference anywhere to what the relationship of the partners involves or does not involve behaviourally, particularly in the realm of sexual intimacy. Because it is silent in this area, the Bishops found it difficult to say that couples, including a couple where one was a cleric, should not enter such a partnership as there was nothing about it that was inconsistent with an exemplary way of life as per the Canons.

    But it has been the practice that if someone who presented for ordination was in such a partnership they were asked (by some, but not all, bishops) to confirm that they accepted the church’s teaching in relation to matters sexual. It used to be the case that the document “Issues in Human Sexuality” was referred to in that context, but that has now been withdrawn and potential ordinands as an interim measure are to be asked to confirm that they will live consistently with the Guidelines for the Professional Conduct of the Clergy. That document at para 10.2 states “The House of Bishops’ Marriage: A Teaching Document (1999) clearly affirms, ‘Sexual intercourse, as an expression of faithful intimacy, properly belongs within marriage exclusively.’” Further pastoral guidance on this issue has been promised and is awaited.

    More recent changes – (ii) Same-sex marriage

    It was the pressure for real equality rather than a civil partnership (which could potentially be seen as a second-class relationship) that led to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013. This introduced same-sex marriage. Nearly 40 other countries make same-sex marriage available. Between March 2014 and the end of 2022, 55,613 same-sex marriages were registered in the UK. In 2022, 7,800 same-sex marriages were registered, 4,896 being female couples and 2,904 male couples.

    It might be asked why a same-sex couple, perhaps already in a civil partnership, would want to convert it, as they can, to a same-sex marriage (note that you cannot convert a heterosexual civil partnership into a heterosexual marriage). The answer is perhaps because it has more of a sense of commitment, perhaps associated with the traditional attitude to and words around marriage ceremonies. The socialisation of marriage, which we learn about from the cradle onwards, would seem to carry a lot of weight.

    In a civil partnership, you apply to register it and do so before the registrar, but no words are spoken, no promises are made or exchanged. If you have a same-sex marriage then the same words are used as in a heterosexual marriage, where each person says that there is no impediment / reason in law why they should not marry and that they (call upon those present to witness that they) take the other to be their lawful wedded husband / wife. So there is a level of contracted commitment (about which more later) that is not present in a civil partnership. But it is obvious that those words fall far short of the exchange of vows made in a church service.

    The government recognised that some religious organisations hold a different view of marriage. The fact sheet published by the government in April 2014 said: “Many religious organisations believe that marriage should only be between a man and a woman, and the Act explicitly recognises this. The civil understanding of marriage has always been broader than that of many religious organisations. Marriage has evolved over the years, for example to enable Catholics, atheists, Baptists and many others to marry outside the Anglican Church, and to recognise married women as equal to married men before the law.”

    There are however some interesting features of the legislation in relation to matters of sexual intimacy. Unlike in opposite-sex marriages, non-consummation is not a ground for voiding a same-sex marriage. Furthermore, you can only bring a divorce relying on adultery if the offending partner has had sex with a person of the opposite sex. I am uncertain what to make of these matters, but it does seem to me to raise the question as to whether there is any underlying assumption, in either a same-sex civil marriage or in a same-sex civil partnership, that there must be sexual intimacy. Clearly, although it is possible for a same-sex couple to adopt a child or for one of a female couple to bear a child, the underlying assumption about procreation (the first of the Augustinian “goods”, as spelled out in the BCP introduction to the service) is simply not there as it would be in an opposite-sex marriage.

    The modern contract of marriage – as seen by the state

    A well-known legal definition of marriage was provided by Lord Penzance in the case of Hyde v Hyde  [L.R.] 1 P. & D. 130, decided in 1866. He defines marriage as understood in Christendom and in English law as: “the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others”.

    The case itself is very instructive. Hyde was an Englishman who had converted to Mormonism. He met a young woman, also a Mormon, and in due course they went to Utah where they were married by Brigham Young in Salt Lake City. The male petitioner later renounced the Mormon faith but she did not. They separated and he returned to the UK. She then married again. Again her marriage was according to the Mormon form. The man then sued in England for divorce on the grounds of her adultery. The court refused his petition on the basis that it did not recognise his Mormon “marriage” as a marriage. The reason was that the marriage in Utah was potentially polygamous and English courts cannot recognise polygamous marriages. Lord Penzance, the judge, also said in that case, “Different incidents of minor importance attach to the contract of marriage in different countries in Christendom, but in all countries in Christendom the parties to that contract agree to cohabit with each other alone. It is inconsistent with marriage as understood in Christendom, that the husband should have more than one wife.”

    Lord Penzance’s definition of “the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others” has come under some criticism in recent years. Rebecca Probert in Child and Family Law Quarterly, Vol 19, No 2, 2007 said that a new definition was needed.

    The President of the Family Division had in fact provided such a definition in the case of Bellinger v Bellinger [2001] EWCA Civ 1140 [2002] Fam 150; [2002] 2 WLR 411.2005.

    In that case the issue was the validity of a marriage contracted between the appellant (born a man but who had undergone transgender surgery) and the respondent (a man). There were a number of arguments to be addressed, one of which was that “The relationship called marriage is and always has been recognised as the union of a man and woman.” (para 124).

    Thorpe P quoted the above passage from Hyde v Hyde and said at para 128:

    “But the world that engendered those classic definitions has long since gone. We live in a multi-racial, multi-faith society. The intervening 130 years have seen huge social and scientific changes. Adults live longer, infant mortality has been largely conquered, effective contraception is available to men and women as is sterilisation for men and women within marriage. Illegitimacy with its stigma has been legislated away: gone is any social condemnation of cohabitation in advance of or in place of marriage. Then marriage was terminated by death: for the vast majority of the population divorce was not an option. For those within whose reach it lay, it carried a considerable social stigma that did not evaporate until relatively recent times. Now more marriages are terminated by divorce than death. Divorce could be said without undue cynicism to be available on demand. These last changes are all reflected in the statistics establishing the relative decline in marriage and consequentially in the number of children born within marriage. Marriage has become a state into which and from which people choose to enter and exit. Thus I would now redefine marriage as a contract for which the parties elect but which is regulated by the state, both in its formation and in its termination by divorce, because it affects status upon which depend a variety of entitlements, benefits and obligations.”

    That judgment was given before the introduction of civil partnerships and same-sex marriage. It now needs to be updated to refer to and include those in its modern definition of what is meant by marriage in the law of England and Wales.

    The advice from FAOC seems to me to be provided almost as if we were still in a position where they believe that the Church is shaping the law of marriage for England and Wales, as it did in the 18th century. It does not grapple with any of the issues created by the evolutionary development of marriage law by the state which I have been describing, nor with how the church responds to the external realities with which it is confronted. It is very much speaking within its own bubble.

    As we have seen in relation to marriages in other denominations, before 1836 not everything that purported to be marriage was recognised by the church as such. And, whilst the church ran the show, the state went along with its views. Little by little the state asserted itself and the two views diverged. The 2013 Act recognised that the Church has a different view about marriage from that which is now the official state position.

    The current contract of marriage is very far removed from the contract underlying the BCP service with its threefold Augustinian goods of procreation, faithfulness and permanence.

    It also seems to be the case that entering into a contract of marriage adds hardly anything to the registration of a civil partnership, other than at an emotional level.

    In those circumstances, and having regard to the absence of any reference to, let alone requirement for, sexual intimacy in a same-sex marriage, and having said that entering a civil partnership is not of itself inconsistent with leading an exemplary life, it seems to me that there is no good reason why the Bishops should not say that entering into such a “marriage” is also not in and of itself an ecclesiastical offence.

    Legal advice to the House

    I turn now to the legal advice tendered to the bishops on this topic. The Advice tells us that the Chief Legal Adviser to the Archbishops’ Council and the General Synod was asked “to consider two specific possibilities for legislative change to accommodate clergy who enter into same-sex (civil) marriages.”  Those two possibilities were (i) changing Canon B 30 and (ii) the creation of a power to grant a canonical dispensation to individual clergy that would permit them to be civilly married to a person of the same sex.

    Changing Canon B 30 (Of Holy Matrimony)

    It is noted that General Synod has previously resolved that current doctrine should not be departed from and so this route is not considered in any detail. It is however said that it would require more than a change in the Canons, because the doctrine is set out in other places also. This means that it would require a Measure to carry out further changes. Although it would be Article 7 business, it would only require a simple majority vote (presumably in each House) to carry that change into law.

    Canonical Dispensation

    The other option considered is granting a canonical dispensation. The similarity is drawn with the Canon C 4.5 process whereby faculties are granted to allow the ordination of those who have remarried whilst their former spouse is still alive. The Chief Legal Adviser considers whether there could be a similar faculty to allow an ordinand or cleric to be civilly married to a person of the same sex.

    He draws a distinction between that option and Canon C 4.5 on the basis that, when that was permitted, it was on the basis that when B 30 speaks about marriage being “in its nature a union permanent and lifelong” those words encompassed a marriage that was “entered into with the intention that it be permanent and lifelong (my italics)”. Thus, the legal advice at the time said that matters could proceed along the proposed route without compromising the church’s doctrine of marriage. I have always found that to be a rather specious piece of “special pleading” and a convenient way round the difficulty created by the doctrine as traditionally espoused. When the Measure was before Parliament assurances were given that this approach would be exceptional and only granted in exceptional circumstances. But it is certainly no longer the case that these situations can be seen as “exceptional circumstances”. Between 1993 and 2023, 2449 such faculties were granted; and it is estimated that one in six ordinations now follows the grant of such a faculty. And it is also the case that a number of clergy still refuse to remarry those who are divorced as they regard the vow as absolute and not conditional on best intention.

    As is well known, the Roman Catholic church does not recognise divorce, viewing marriage as a lifelong and indissoluble covenant. A civil divorce does not end the marriage in the church’s eyes and a divorced Catholic who remarries without an annulment is not permitted to receive communion. Their way round this is for the church’s marriage tribunal to grant annulments, i.e. saying that the marriage never really existed as a real marriage in the first place.

    But the advice to the Bishops goes further and says that powers of canonical dispensation “do not permit the doing of things which are contrary to the Church’s doctrine; they permit doing things which are not normally permitted as being contrary to good order or that otherwise require regulation. To provide for a power of dispensation to permit the doing of something that was contrary to doctrine would be a novel departure in the canon law of the Church of England.”

    Some historical canonical dispensations

    That last statement seems to me to pass over what happened in the nineteenth century amid all the controversies over ritualistic practices. The church was as divided then over ritualistic issues as it is now over sexuality issues. Again the law was clear and many of the matters in dispute were doctrinal. There were prosecutions of those who breached the law, some priests going to prison for the sake of their consciences. In 1881, the bishops in the Upper House of the Convocation for Canterbury reached a decision together that they would no longer prosecute people for breaching various rules of liturgical practice. This followed a decision of the House of Lords in a case against the Bishop of Oxford seeking to compel him to issue proceedings when a complaint was laid about unlawful practices, when it was held that his approach could not be criticised. Such dispensations granted by the bishops permitted the continued breaking of the ecclesiastical law.

    And that was not the only occasion when the bishops, for the sake of the good of the church as a whole, decided to act outside the law. The efforts to overcome the ritualism controversies led to the production of revised Prayer Books in 1927 and 1928. These were twice rejected by Parliament. Notwithstanding that, Convocation resolved to press on with its use. Bishop Hensley Henson said that bishops “found themselves compelled to act outside the law because the aid of the law, which was indispensable to the healthy progress of the church, had been refused to them.”

    A possible way forward

    This would seem to be a more accurate reflection of the law of dispensation (or “economy” as it is known in the Eastern church). Of course it is always easier to allow an episcopal dispensation if there is authority for doing so. And so the introduction of some form of canonical authority would undoubtedly be of assistance to bishops generally in this regard. This would be achieved by amending the Canons, which requires a simple majority (although I would expect there to be a vote by Houses and so a majority in each House would be required).

    One approach might be to add to Canon C 26 (On the manner of life of clerks in Holy Orders) a further paragraph at C 26.3 which might read as follows:

    The fact that a deacon or priest has entered into a same-sex civil marriage by virtue of the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act 2013, shall not in and of itself be regarded as indicating a life other than one that is a wholesome example and pattern to the flock of Christ.

    A similar provision could also be added to Canon C 4 (Of the quality of such as are to be ordained deacons or priests):

    No person shall be refused ordination as a deacon or priest solely on the ground that they have entered into a same-sex civil partnership of same-sex marriage by virtue of the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act 2013.

    It may be that there will be other and better ways of phrasing such dispensatory provision in the Canons, but I offer this as a starting point for moving forwards.

    Those who would wish to argue against this, as I know some will, have really got to grasp two things. First, the absence of any assumptions about sexual intimacy in same-sex marriages. Second, given that the society in which we live has redefined what it means by marriage, how do we as a church relate to those who have entered into civil marriages, whether same-sex or opposite-sex, which are now both very different forms of social contract from that of Holy Matrimony as set out in the BCP? These are two quite different contracts, and it will not do to rely on the fact that the section 1(3) of the 2013 Act preserved the church’s different understanding of what a marriage is, without working out what the consequences of that different understanding mean in practical terms.

     

  • A Question of Conscience

    by Revd Ruth Harley (Vicar, Cowgate and Priest in Charge, Newbiggin Hall)

    Standing at the font, I smiled at the scene unfolding in front of me. A happily gurgling baby and his two proud parents, surrounded by his new godparents and family and friends, talking and laughing and taking photos. When they had arrived for the Christening, this little lad’s parents had been somewhat nervous, clearly unsure about being in church and whether they and their guests were really welcome. Of course I had done my best to put them at their ease, and it had gone so well (if I say so myself) that now, as they called me over for a photo with the church’s newest member, I found myself thinking “oh crumbs, I do hope they’re not going to ask me to marry them.”

    But hang on – isn’t that a bit of an odd thing for a priest to think? Aren’t we supposed to want people to have such a good experience of church that they want to come back to mark the most significant moments of their lives in the presence of God?

    This has all the makings of a future good news case study for the diocesan website, surely. A couple bring a child for baptism, unsure if church is really for them, and are so warmly welcomed that they decide to get married in church too. Maybe they start exploring questions about faith during the marriage prep course. Maybe they start coming on a Sunday, or bringing their little one to Messy Church. Maybe one or both of them goes on to be confirmed.  Maybe in 5 years they’re on all the rotas and the PCC. Maybe in 10 years this is the story one of them tells at a selection conference for ordination. Maybe… It’s a situation which has potential, anyway.

    So why was I, against all my better instincts, hoping that this couple would not ask me to marry them? Quite simply, because they are both women. And while nothing would give me greater joy than to declare them wife and wife in the sight of God, whose love shines through their relationship on even a brief acquaintance, as a priest in the Church of England I am not permitted to do so. Which means that, every time a same-sex couple asks me to marry them (which, as an ‘out’ lesbian priest, happens not infrequently) I have to act against my conscience.

    In saying ‘no’ – and of course I say it as sensitively and pastorally as possible, but really there is no good way to say ‘no’ to someone’s most cherished and life-giving relationship – I am also, I believe, acting against the best interests of that couple, and of the church, which could be so richly blessed by their presence.

    To act against my conscience, against my understanding of God’s calling both on my life and the life of the couple coming to ask for marriage, against the good of that couple and of the church, is painful. It is a form of moral injury. And done repeatedly, it takes a toll which is spiritual, emotional and physical.

    A great deal has been written and spoken during the LLF process about conscience. The House of Bishops is keen (and rightly so) that no clergy should be forced against their conscience to use the Prayers of Love and Faith, and has offered repeated assurances on this point. However, while much has been made of the consciences of those who believe the PLF go too far, little if any consideration seems to have been given to the consciences of those of us who think the PLF go nowhere near far enough. It is almost as if the House of Bishops doesn’t really believe we have a conscience that is worth considering.

    But we do have a conscience. And we act against it, frequently and painfully, in obedience to the discipline of the church which we have promised to uphold. The cost of acting against our conscience is high, and it is largely unacknowledged.

    Is it too much to ask that, just as the consciences of our colleagues with more conservative views on sexuality is respected, our conscience should be respected too? Apparently it is, if the most recent House of Bishops’ statement on LLF is anything to go by.

    There is no acknowledgement in this statement, and I don’t believe there has been in any of its predecessors, that all over the country hundreds of clergy are already required to act against our conscience, regarding the church’s response to same-sex relationships. Many of us continue to do so, doing our best to serve faithfully within a church which shows startlingly little consideration for our conscience, our integrity, or really our very humanity. Many others have found the cognitive, emotional and spiritual dissonance too great, and have left – either for another province, another denomination, or another path in life altogether. Their going is an enormous loss to the church yet, like the conscience of those of us who stay, has gone almost entirely unacknowledged.

    One of the greatest lies of the LLF process – and there have been many – is that we all approach it on equal terms, with equal power, equal stakes, and equal voices. That is not, and has never been, true.

    That inequality is nowhere more evident than in how our consciences are (dis)regarded.

    For those espousing a conservative position on same-sex relationships, their consciences are named as worth regarding, and assurances given that they will be protected. And when their conscience prompts them to say that they will leave if particular steps are taken, that is weighed as a significant factor in the decision-making of the church. Their consciences are treated as significant.

    For those espousing a progressive position on same-sex relationships, our conscience is not acknowledged: neither the fact that we are currently required to act against it, nor the fact that many of our siblings in Christ have been prompted by conscience to leave a church unwilling to affirm the lives and loves of LGBTQ+ people. Our consciences are treated as insignificant.

    There is a fundamental asymmetry here which has underpinned and undermined the entire LLF process. This has been explored before on this blog by Giles Goddard, in the first of a series of articles on the subject of conscience published here a couple of years ago but which remain as relevant as ever. Until that asymmetry of conscience is acknowledged and addressed, it is hard to see what progress can be made. When the conscience of some is elevated above the conscience of others, and implicitly with it the humanity, discipleship and vocation of some above that of others, that will never be a basis for good theology, nor for a just and faithful ordering of the life of the church.

  • A Response to “The Exercise of Discipline and Clergy Exemplarity in the Church of England: The Case of Same-Sex Civil Marriages: A Report of the Faith and Order Commission” (GS Misc 1431)

    Fr Thomas Sharp is a priest theologian based in the South East of England and is also Provincial Secretary of the Society of Catholic Priests

    This was the third report which briefed the House of Bishops before they made their decisions in October about Living in Love and Faith (LLF). It purports to explore theological issues relating to three possible ways by which clergy in a marriage to a person of the same sex might be licensed in the Church of England. It also purports to explore what it means that clergy are called to an exemplary life, and what implications there might be for licensing married people who currently would need a civil partnership in order to be licensed.

    The Report claims to do all this whilst ‘not endeavour[ing] to resolve those differences, either finding for one side or making clear a previously unknown path to consensus’ (§214). It does this by almost entirely sidelining the views and voices of LGBTQIA+ people, presenting a viewpoint significantly informed by North American Evangelicalism as if it were a balanced presentation of Anglican variety. Of the 24 modern theologians engaged with in this report (Gregory Nazianzen and George Herbert are the other two theologians included):

    • 100% are white
    • 96% are white men
    • 83% are straight or in opposite sex marriages
    • 46% are North American
    • 12% are ex-gay / same-sex-attracted identifying evangelicals
    • Only one person, at 4% of the whole, is an affirming gay Anglican with a partner.

    The one affirming gay Anglican contribution cited is from Jeffrey John, in a book which was published in 1993 when I was two years old.

    This report does not meaningfully engage with the theology produced by or read by LGBTQIA+ Anglicans, or people who hold an inclusive theology. Simply directing us to the LLF Resources does not constitute theological engagement (§100). This report is not balanced or representative. It should not have represented itself as being such.

    However, it is lengthy and technical, and gives a very good sense of being comprehensive, even whilst it utterly fails to present or even really take into account the voices of those most affected by its subject matter. This is a shamefully inadequate Report whose omissions (wilful or otherwise) have potential to mislead its readers.

    In order to make this meandering and confusing report more intelligible, my response to it comes under six headings:

    1. Make doctrine a moving target
    2. “Communal regulation”, discipline and toxic theologies of power
    3. Are the clergy a special case?
    4. Leading us to think we are talking about sex whenever marriage is mentioned
    5. Despite divorce, we really do still hold to the traditional doctrine of marriage
    6. Disempower the Bishops

    This is a report which overwhelms by the sheer variety of arguments it includes. Here, I cannot deal with them all, particularly the biblical section and its lack of meaningful engagement with LGBTQIA+ readings of important texts.

     

    1 – Make doctrine a moving target

    The FAOC Report on Doctrine defined doctrine as: ‘true knowledge about God that is communally authorised by warrant in the Holy Scriptures and is, therefore, communally regulative’ (GS Misc 1429, §146). However, in this report, that simple definition varies. Early on, ‘authorised by warrant in the Holy scriptures’ is watered down and communal regulation does not appear: ‘Doctrine… is true knowledge about the living God, grounded in or agreeable to the Holy Scriptures, that the Church of England determines by a process of communal authorisation’ (§8).

    Later, elements of both are mixed as doctrine is ‘true knowledge about the living God that is communally authorised and communally regulative’ (§84 & §212). But the scriptures seem to have vanished. On one level this might be a symptom of speedy or sloppy drafting. However, on another, it could be understood as an attempt to give an impression of a clear definition of what doctrine is and how it operates in these arguments, without being willing to be pinned down to any actually clear definition. This sort of slipperiness and unclarity of meaning runs throughout the report.

     

     2 – “Communal regulation”, discipline and toxic theologies of power

    A theological high point comes in §§12-17, when the heresy of Donatism is dealt with and it is concluded that individuals and the wider church can have confidence in the sacramental ministry of a minister, even if they err in doctrine. However, as the report proceeds to outline a theology of discipline, it is unnervingly one-way, authoritarian and entirely lacking in awareness of the operative theologies of power which have led to both the abuse crisis in the worldwide Church and the failure of the Church of England itself to respond meaningfully to abuse.

    The report links discipline with discipleship, and it is established with reference to The Homilies that ‘it is imperative to think of discipline in both its proactive, formative sense and also its reformative and punitive senses in order to understand it fully’ (§17). This is good, but the formative is not really considered. It is the reformative and punitive senses of discipline with which this report is interested, i.e. what sledge-hammers the bishops can hit us with, whether it be for our benefit or to teach us a lesson.

    A survey then follows of reformative discipline as described in the liturgies of ordination of deacons, priests and bishops in Common Worship and the BCP. It entirely lacks any meaningful awareness of the fact that the power to discipline can be incredibly dangerous, despite the liturgy enjoining the bishop to use their authority: ‘not to destruction, but to salvation; not to hurt, but to help’ (§24). The vocation of a bishop ‘to minister discipline, but with compassion’ leads to a reminder that even a compassionate bishop may also need to punish: ‘it may be that such a response is the compassionate one’ (§27). But there is no awareness in the report that hurt and destruction, i.e. abuse, may result from such episcopal behaviour.

    The rather odd concept of “communal regulation”, which I explored (and we were all no doubt confused by) in the liturgical context with reference to the report on Doctrine, reappears. Apparently, the vow made by bishops to ‘accept the discipline of this Church, exercising authority with justice, courtesy and love’ (§29) is when a bishop puts themselves under “communal regulation”. What is entirely overlooked is the significance of justice, courtesy and love in the exercise of that ministry by any individual bishop, or the College or House of Bishops as a whole.

    The same blinkered focus is apparent in the report’s reading of the latter part of the consecration prayer:

    Further on the Archbishop prays, ‘Give him humility, that he may use his authority to heal, not to hurt; to build up, not to destroy’, a reference to 2 Cor 10:8 and 13:10. The emphasis, like in the rephrased declaration, is on the corrective and reformative aspects of discipline.

    It takes deliberate one-track thinking to fail to spot the critique of punitive authoritarian power in this prayer. Punitive authority is the focus of this report. That seems to be what “communal regulation” actually means.

    This disturbing theology of power in the report comes out strongly when clergy families are considered. Canon C26’s injunction to the minister to order their life and their family’s lives in a manner ‘that provides a wholesome example and pattern to the community’ (§36) is presented uncritically. Though the duty to order our family members’ lives is ameliorated since the phrase ‘as much as in him lies’ is interpreted to remind us of ‘the limitations of any individual to determine the behaviour of other family members in all times and places’ (§37). But it is crystal clear that “communal regulation” should be exercised in the home as well, mostly I imagine over wives and children, but over clergy husbands and extended family as well. This is not a theology of power which a responsible theologian simply states uncritically.

    There is a hint that this dangerous and toxic theology of power might be applicable in wider discipleship (“heavy discipling” is one euphemism for spiritual abuse and grooming, after all). The report notes, again uncritically, the linguistic or etymological links between spiritual discipline, church discipline and discipleship: ‘The complementary relationship between spiritual discipline and church discipline would indicate the broad range between the proactive, formative and the condemnatory, punitive ideas that inhere in the single word discipline’ (§43). Tellingly, throughout this passage, the role of the ‘authority figure’ as the exerciser of discipline in its various forms is emphasised.

    Finally, the image of a doctor prescribing medicine from Gregory Nazianzen’s second Oration is used to support this broader deployment of discipline (§46). This is particularly unfortunate and ironic. Gregory wrote his second Oration shortly after his ordination, having fled his post because he did not think he was able to bear the weight of the pastoral duty imposed upon him. He writes in a manner which emphasises the importance and weightiness of pastoral care, almost to an absurd extent. This is an apologia for his belief that he should not be entrusted with such authority to discipline. It is not a suggestion that every bishop and priest should start prescribing punitive medicine.

    This isn’t a funny theological blooper. Rather, it reveals just how far the compilers of the report were not aware of the issues of power underlying the texts with which they engage. Bishops might well read Selina Stone’s A Heavy Yoke: Theology, Power and Abuse in the Church (London: SCM Press, 2025) before they decide that this is the sort of power in relation to God’s people which they want to define themselves as having. If they do, they need to deploy it in all areas of their episcopal ministry and equally on all people in the church, not just LGBTQIA+ people. Gregory, given the choice, ran away from it.

     

    3 – Are the Clergy a Special Case?

    In order to answer this question, the report presents a bewildering array of arguments, many of which are specious or based in unreality. I shall try here to present this torrent of uncompleted ideas in a way which is moderately digestible.

    First, the report argues that ‘The broadest possible jurisdiction one can conceive for church discipline includes baptised Christians on an electoral roll in the Church of England’ (§48). You might think we were about to get a sense of how “communal regulation” applies in the community of the baptised. But this is passed over, moving on to a discussion of Lay Ministers (§49). It seems simply to be accepted that discipline is not something which touches the baptised who are not licensed. This is unsatisfactory and inconsistent with the theology of discipline presented thus far.

    This gap in the argument means that the next argument, that clergy are held to a ‘higher moral bar’ than the laity (§50), seems to arise solely by virtue of ordination. No argument is offered to justify the statement that due to the ‘exceptional nature of holy orders’ the church ‘expects a public transparency about many aspects of life, including areas in which lay Christians are afforded the ease of privacy’ (§50). This is an unreasoned distinction from the privacy afforded to the laity which is presented as self-evident. And should then the bishop, as even more exceptional than the priest, be required for example to publish their bank statements on the diocesan website? There is no theological substance here.

    A strange argument is presented about the call for clergy ‘to witness by example against the norms of the culture in which they sojourn’ (§53). It is not stated directly, but we are used to this sort of homophobic gaslighting, which argues that we are not to be in ‘normative alignment with the shifting sands of cultural values’ (§52), those shifting values being a fictional secular society which is a nirvana of inclusion for LGBTQIA+ people. That secular inclusive society against which the church is called to witness is fiction and a foil. Society is deeply homophobic, even as it is deeply misogynistic and racist still. Homophobia in the Church is in lockstep with the homophobic abuse and discrimination we experience in the secular world every day. It’s not countercultural, it isn’t cool, and it isn’t a witness.

    The distinctive witness of clergy to procure the good conduct of children and their spouses is considered again in the context of this cultural witness. This is passed off masterfully with the sentence: ‘Modern assumptions about the alignment of private, domestic space with public order differ significantly from the assumptions in [the pastoral epistles]’ (§59). It is odd that the report should accept women’s lib and contemporary appreciation of children’s dignity and autonomy so easily after all the handwringing about being counter-cultural. If applied to LGBTQIA+ people, it is simply not clear why the same counter-cultural discipline would not be applicable to women, children and those in clergy households, and no arguments are made.

    The report advances an argument that the vocation to ordained ministry is a ‘whole-life dedication’ which makes it ‘difficult, if not impossible, to separate the moral from the exemplary imperative in a life conceived as a form of witness’ (§64). This is an extraordinary argument for an Anglican to advance, especially as it is essentially the root of the argument for clerical celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church. If ordination is ‘whole-life dedication’ to God, then heterosexual marriage and dedication to another person also should be inappropriate for the clergy.

    Then the report argues that we must take particular account of the perceptions of outsiders.

    The pastoral epistles… even specify that the exemplar ‘must be well thought of by outsiders’ (1 Timothy 3:7). It behoves us to consider the same in the 21st century just as it was commended in the 1st century. In practice, it is inescapable.

    This is blunt application. And it is hard to see why this argument for not ordaining or licensing those in same-sex marriages would not also hold for women, immigrants, disabled people and people who are racialised. Their ordination, as they will tell you, also prompts push-back and elicits ableist, racist and misogynistic abuse and even scandal. And yet again there is no considered argument in the report about why this problem of perception should only apply to LGBTQIA+ people.

    There then is yet another strange argument: that allowing clergy to marry their same-sex partner would ‘alter the context in which Christian exemplary witness is offered and point to the fragmentation within wider society of a consensus on the nature of marriage and sexual intimacy.’ This is simply delusional. There is no fragmentation in secular society on the issue of sexual intimacy. Rather, there is general agreement in secular society that the place of sexual intimacy is no longer anything to do with marriage. Indeed, for even the majority of conservatives in the Church (at the level of operative theology rather than theory) the question is really about what sexual intimacies you enjoy before marriage and which ones you save for your spouse. Again, cultural witness is set up as a straw man, in which resistance to LGBTQIA+ people is supposedly the keystone holding up the Church’s moral witness.

     

    4 – Leading us to think we are talking about sex whenever marriage is mentioned

    In §68 the report acknowledges that clergy households where a couple are in a civil partnership can be exemplary, but it is not clear why those in a same-sex marriage would not be. And in §70 the report acknowledges that things are hard for Christian couples in civil partnerships, but there is no sense that the writers of the report are aware of how the Church’s approach following the 2005 pastoral statement also impacts the broader Christian family gathered around the couple.

    At the heart of the problem here is that the report refuses to say plainly that a same-sex marriage has no more presumption of sexual activity than a civil partnership. The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 inserts s.12(1-2) of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973, which disapplies the requirement that same-sex couples consummate their union in order to have a valid marriage. In law, there is no expectation that a gay couple who are married will be having sex, any more than there is for a civil partnership.

    The failure to acknowledge this amidst all the handwringing is one of the largest and most uncomfortable omissions of this discussion of “clergy exemplarity”. The readers of the report are left with the false impression that marriages mean gay sex while civil partnerships mean gay celibacy. This is a false impression. If clergy can be exemplary as civil partners, living a sexually sacrificial life for the Church, there is no reason why they could not also do the same as a married couple. There is no difference in terms of sexual activity between civil partnership and same-sex marriage.

    Indeed, the report stresses that ‘none of what follows intends to draw into question the current provision’ for clergy in civil partnerships. ‘It is nonetheless notable that if a pastoral accommodation is agreed [to enable the same clergy to get married] this may mean that provision [of episcopal guidance] for same-sex civil marriages and same-sex civil partnerships are different from one another’ (§93). However, given that neither involve sex, it is not at all obvious why this should be the case. Yet again, a spectre of something completely new and different is created without specifying any real difference, theological or otherwise.

     

    5 – Despite divorce, we really do still hold to the traditional doctrine of marriage

    The report twists logic to the point of breaking in order to advance two arguments: (i) that the bending of the doctrine of marriage which took place in order to enable the marriage of divorcees with a spouse still living is not analogous to any bending of doctrine required to enable same-sex couples in a civil marriage to be licensed; and (ii) that in any case, despite permitting the marriage of divorcees, we do actually still hold to the traditional doctrine of marriage, that it is between a man and a woman for life. Fair warning: your head will hurt trying to follow this meandering thread.

    We are told that same-sex marriage is in no way the same kind of thing as the marriage of divorcees. ‘While there are clearly similarities between the two, an argument that they are identical does not seem sustainable. Therefore, the logic used to support adding Canon C 4.5 [enabling the licensing of clergy in a second marriage] cannot be a precedent’ (§96). But no reason is given for this judgment that the two are not identical. Indeed, both marriages are a statement of the traditional doctrine, except for one thing: either the gender of the parties, or the “one man and one woman for life” bit.

    Perhaps an analogy could be constructed instead. We are told that ‘Theological reflection should always begin with scripture’ (§99), a statement which will come as a surprise to anyone versed in theological reflection as practiced in Church of England theological colleges. After this we are told that:

    It is true that Holy Scripture does not include explicit precedent for a faithful, stable, permanent same-sex relationship. Similarly, one might observe that ‘Scripture’s teaching on homosexuality is sparse and ambiguous and it is highly questionable to what extent we can derive from it any application to the ethical issue of gay relationships as it faces us today. (§99)

    This is not an argument routinely advanced by LGBTQIA+ people today, who find precedent for our relationships and identities throughout scripture. But the report entirely ignores our love for and valuing of scripture, referencing a group of mostly American straight Evangelicals talking about LGBTQIA+ people (and also referencing Jeffrey John). Unlike divorce, which does exist in scripture, LGBTQIA+ people’s lives and relationships are portrayed in the report as absent from scripture, so without precedent, so without theological existence.

    The report then charts the progress, from the Lichfield Report (1978) to the early 2000s, of the idea that a marriage can end such that a person can marry someone else. This includes: (i) the rejection of sacramental understandings of marriage and (ii) doctrinal clarifications (or developments) that marriage’s being for life was not an essential part of a marriage’s nature, only an ideal (§§111-118).

    We supposedly have arrived at a relatively straightforward conclusion: there cannot be ‘a complete analogy’ (§118) with the marriage of divorcees. However, the argument continues, now in the context of divorce and in what sense clerics’ lives are meant to be exemplary.

    The report notes (referring to St Paul and St Augustine) that marriage was itself a pastoral accommodation in the first place to the ideal of celibacy. It suggests that, when considering making pastoral provision for same-sex couples in marriages, ‘one might contend that such an approach has parallels – though inexact ones’ (§120) with the Pauline and Augustinian accommodation of marriage. However, again, it is not clear why these parallels would not be exact. A thing is not the ideal for sexual ethics, but we make accommodation for it. Why the distinction?

    The section §§122-128 duplicates the arguments of §§52-60, sometimes verbatim, about culture and exemplarity. Again, this feels like an attempt to create an illusion of a coherent argument by repeating material rather than referencing it. On the other hand, it could simply be a drafting oversight.

    The argument seems to be that the pastoral epistles are contextual and culturally referential. They represent an attempt to work out what conduct should be required of the clergy in their own day, in order to be an example of godly life (§124). And so, scripture requires us to consider what holy life looks like today.

    Insofar as the Church of England aims to support and assist those who enter holy orders with the long work of forming and fashion their lives for a visible, grounded holiness, it can only deal in the on-the-ground realities of living as an ordained person in the contemporary culture in which they sojourn. This approach follows the scriptural lead: Paul’s example in the Holy Scriptures indicates it is impossible to think about the exemplary call without considering the context in which Christian witness occurs. (§126)

    A rare, positive conclusion is reached: that it might be possible to think about exemplarity in a way which refers to shifts in understandings of what being exemplary might mean, and in a way which is also biblical.

    Therefore, the argument that clergy in a same-sex marriage may be exemplary invokes cultural context – not in any way omitting theological rigour in preference for an appeal to contemporary culture, but as a move necessitated by Holy Scripture. (§127)

    However, the argument quickly moves off again in another direction, this time truly mind-boggling. The authors of the report wish to underline that the ‘call to celibacy’ may lead ‘same-sex attracted persons’ to opt for a ‘covenanted friendship[] or celibate civil partnership’. By analogy, we are reminded that ‘similar options have always been available to anyone who is divorced with a living spouse’ (§133).  Some choose to remain celibate after a divorce ‘since their remarriage would be a stumbling block to those holding to indissolubility for marriage’ (§133). An argument is being made that because some divorced people decide to remain celibate, that is an option open to LGBTQIA+ people too.

    The report then asks why many opt instead for further marriage. ‘There are surely a number of reasons – but it is hard to escape the conclusion that one reason will be because the church teaches sexual intimacy belongs within marriage and they wish to respect that’ (§134). This is frankly bizarre. On one level it is hard to believe that anyone has ever seriously made this argument. People who are divorced remarry because they want to remarry. The serial monogamist is not making a prophetic declaration that the place for sexual intimacy (with each of their sexual partners) is within marriage. This is utterly bizarre. However, this is advanced as an example of an argument in which an analogy might be possible for extending marriage to same-sex couples who are having sex, in order to affirm the church’s teaching that the place for sex is within marriage.

    However, this argument is so preposterous that it is hard to believe that it would ever be made by anyone who actually wanted to convince the reader that same sex marriage might be a good thing. The analogy with divorce makes it absurd. If the report was seriously offering a positive argument for marriage equality, it would simply argue that the place for sex should be within lifelong marriage. And that would be an argument that many LGBTQIA+ people do actually make.

    That positive argument is finally made, almost in passing, along with an equally easily missed reference to the possibility that same-sex couples who are married might not necessarily actually be having sex:

    While it is true that a same-sex marriage – which one cannot be certain is sexually active, but for those who want to affirm same-sex relationships offers a faithful, stable, and permanent context for sexual intimacy – does present challenges to the church’s teaching on sexual intimacy, which restricts it to heterosexual marriage, there is a case that a same-sex marriage offers a model that is exemplary in our society. (§138)

    But you could have been forgiven for missing those significant points as they flew past.

     

    6 – Disempower the Bishops

    In my response to GS Misc 1430 on marriage, I noted the high emotional tone of some of the language, which seemed aimed at making the episcopal readers less inclined to exercise their episcopal prerogative. We have seen how this report might well have the same effect, but by mystifying the reader in a barrage of confusingly arrayed arguments.

    However, the sections considering the possibility that the bishops might permit clergy, who currently need to be in civil partnerships in order to receive a license, to simply get married, and that they might just decide not discipline them, do sow fear. They do this by foretelling legal uncertainty and legal challenge in a manner that suggests the bishops would be taking a course of action which could be described as courageous.

    The ideal, surely, for all of us, is that we might come to one mind, with sufficient majorities to pass legislation which pleases everyone. However, if this is not possible, the report acknowledges that it is possible ‘for the diocesan bishops to exercise their discretion in responding to a situation that raises such questions about doctrine and practice being in tension’ (§82). This is a very odd way to frame episcopal discretion which arises from the tortured logic of ‘communally regulative understanding of doctrine’ (§84) which is rehearsed again. Far more sensible would have been a simple statement of the long-established episcopal discretion which exists for a bishop to administer their diocese as they see fit. A survey of the legal and historical as well as ecclesiological grounding for this would have been particularly interesting. But I suspect it would have shattered the illusion of a church held together by its ‘communally regulative understanding of doctrine’.

    The report notes that the House of Bishops could decide to relax discipline across the Church of England. ‘This would constitute a form of communal regulation – but only of one constituent house of the General Synod’ (§190). The argument is framed to evaluate every option for episcopal action through the lens of the ‘communally regulative understanding of doctrine’. Since that concept presumes that only maximum agreement can be acceptably communally regulative, this essentially paralyses the bishop from acting in their diocese.

    It is a masterful, if strangled, conceptual power grab. So the House of Bishops as a whole cannot act because they are only one house of Synod (§190). The bishop in their diocese cannot act because this ‘would also put the approach in tension with the idea that discipline operates on a communally [sic] regulative manner’ (§192).

    Indeed, with the concept of ‘communally regulative understanding of doctrine’, the bishop is rendered powerless, and the bishops as a House are disempowered utterly. They are responsible for discipline. But they cannot exercise their prerogative when it comes to discipline. Which begs the question, what is the point of a bishop? It is a line of reasoning which only works if you remain committed to the ‘communally regulative understanding of doctrine’ and wilfully ignore 2000 years of ecclesiological theology on the role of the bishop in their diocese.

    But, lest the bishops assert their prerogative, we are told that individual bishops inhabiting their role ‘carries the greatest risk for discipline to depart from doctrine, potentially resulting in legal challenges and increased confusion over such matters’ (§197). This argument is repeated in §213 as the last paragraph of the report, just to make sure the bishops were left with a dose of panic. Peter Collier KC has taken the teeth out of this legal threat pretty convincingly. Like many of the arguments advanced in this report, it is not real.

    The bishops should not be afraid to lead, to minister and to administer. Conservative bishops have done so, interpreting doctrine more tightly in some areas and more loosely in others as fits their own beliefs about what it means to be a shepherd of Christ’s flock in their diocese. Inclusive bishops should be similarly empowered. And the House of Bishops as a whole should not let its freedom to act be utterly dissolved into communal regulation. The bishops are not merely an upper rubber-stamping chamber for the secretariat and the Synod as a whole. For this reason, above all the others, this report must not become enshrined in Church of England thinking. What it risks is a functional Presbyterianism, a synodality which is not Anglican, and a House of Bishops who are ordained and consecrated to be shepherds of Christ’s flock, but who find themselves powerless to do anything meaningful in fulfilment of that calling.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • A Response to “The Doctrine of Marriage and the Prayers of Love and Faith: Texts and Contexts: a Report of the Faith and Order Commission” (GS Misc 1430)

    Fr Thomas Sharp is a priest theologian based in the South East of England and is also Provincial Secretary of the Society of Catholic Priests

    This was the second report which briefed the House of Bishops before they made their decisions in October about Living in Love and Faith (LLF). This is another extraordinary document, with which I imagine many of the members of the Faith and Order Commission will not have been entirely content. At least, I hope they would not be.

    Its purpose is to determine ‘whether and how the Church’s public use of these prayers coheres with, realises new boundaries for, or departs from its established teaching on marriage’ (§1). It does not do this, as we shall see. But it does present a case, or perhaps more accurately talk around the assumption, that the Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF) (let alone equal marriage) would constitute a departure from the traditional doctrine of marriage. It does this around four general themes:

    1. public perception and theological significance of the PLF;
    2. ecclesial condoning of “life choices”;
    3. disagreement and liturgical diversity;
    4. the Church’s traditional teaching on marriage.

    1) Public Perception and Theological Significance

    The primary concern is not theological. It is about what we are seen to do. In §5 a distinction is established, between private prayers and public prayers, which is ‘not merely practical but theologically significant’. What is meant by this is that private prayers are less likely to be misinterpreted as condoning or blessing something which we actually think is bad and do not think should be blessed or condoned. Whereas, ‘In the setting of public worship, it is impossible to escape the reality that the use of the PLF is liable to be received, however unintentionally, as ecclesial endorsement of the relationship being blessed’ (§14, cf.§24). The primary problem is public perception, that people should misunderstand us and think we are blessing and approve of queer people, when in fact we are not and do not. This is not in fact a theological consideration, but a practical one of public perception.

    The argument gets stranger. A distinction is drawn between regular services and occasional ones. ‘Regular services,’ we are told, ‘carry a high presumption of normativity and significance.’ Yet ‘Bespoke services,… by their out-of-the-ordinary nature will also suggest a high level of normativity’ (§15). So it is hard to see what distinction is being drawn here.

    The essential point of the first section of the Report is that, whatever liturgical provision is offered for same-sex couples, it will be interpreted as a marriage by people at those services and by the Anglican Communion and wider society (§§26,28). Although ‘Many would maintain that audience perception does not in itself determine doctrine’ (§32), ‘The weight of audience reception, then, may tip the balance from pastoral care into apparent [doctrinal] contradiction’ (§30). And we are reminded twice that ‘lex orandi, lex credendi’ (§§29,34). In other words, liturgy should mean what we say it does, but it doesn’t, and in fact it does mean what people attending the liturgy or talking about it on ‘social media responses or press headlines’ think it does (§32). This argument is repeated in §§66-68 in the context of a discussion of the importance of published liturgy.

    There is much concern also in §27 about the clergy and lay leaders who will be affected by the ‘symbolic resonance and precedent of a prominent public LLF service’. It is not made clear what that means. It is a strangely evasive paragraph. Presumably a gay bishop and their partner using the prayers. But, of course, that would never happen, would it.

    2) Ecclesial Condoning of “Life Choices”

    After concerns about whether we might be seen to be blessing same-sex relationships, next is the question of whether the Church is condoning same-sex couples and their ‘life choice/s’. This overtly homophobic phrase of long standing is used at both §11 and §14.  We are told that there is agreement ‘that God’s blessing may be prayed for over persons and intentions without necessarily affirming all aspects of a relationship or life choice’ (§11). It is apparently entirely possible to bless a same-sex couple without blessing in any way any part of their life together. If this seems strange, we are reassured that, ‘The Church has long provided public prayers in circumstances of moral or pastoral ambiguity’ (§19). Here, you might be forgiven for thinking that a door was maybe being opened to permitting a liturgy which also allowed for moral ambiguity (however much it feels unreal to suggest that this aspect of my life and identity might be any more morally ambiguous than a straight person’s). But that door is rapidly slammed shut.

    The Report gives short paragraphs to deal with the supposed arguments of unidentified and unreferenced ‘supporters of the PLF’ in a way which suggests that they/we may not have been in the room at the time. These supporters ‘point to analogous liturgical acts which mark without enacting and bless without endorsing every moral dimension of the context’, like civic services and memorials (§33). If we bless at civic services and memorials without being seen to condone every aspect of what we are blessing, can we do the same here? Computer says no. ‘In these contexts, there are some fairly set cultural expectations within which the Church can navigate at such commemorative events’ (§33). Apparently, we are meant to understand that that could not possibly also be true for using the PLF, although that is not worked out for us. Indeed, so prone to confusion with marriage must the PLF be that clear differentiation from marriage would require ‘clarity of liturgical differentiation’ and ‘the willingness of Church leaders to undertake sustained theological communication’ (§35). Now, I enjoy a public lecture as much as the next theologian, but even I think that would be overkill before a church service.

    Apparently, just telling people that it isn’t a legal wedding, as clergy I know have done who have used PLF so far, would still leave everyone confused. I am unconvinced. LGBTQIA+ people know that the Church is ambivalent towards us, and if we don’t know anything we assume that the Church is actively hostile. But these arguments are rehearsed again in §§81-83 and §86, just to make sure you heard them if you happened to be reading quickly before a meeting. The “theological question” is then summed up in terms which appear entirely out of the blue, unconnected as they are to the argument in the rest of the Report:

    Theologically, the question posed by the public use of the PLF is not primarily about whether God’s grace is available to all. It is about how the Church responds lovingly to the hope of those who come before God and desire to show forth their praise in thanksgiving for what God has given them. (§88)

    Is it? It hasn’t felt like that’s the theological question in this theological briefing. There’s nothing about the hope of those who come before God to give thanks to God. Perhaps they left that bit out. And if we are morally ambiguous and not-to-be-condoned then it is hard in any case to see what there is to give thanks for to God in Church. Our evil ways? What a strange thing to say.

    3) Disagreement and Liturgical Diversity

    The Report deals in some depth with how liturgical diversity has been handled in the Church of England in the past. The liturgical text is not a ‘narrow prescription’ but rather ‘a framework capable of bearing diverse theological interpretations’ (§42). This is presented as maybe a good thing, though in that section on how the public received liturgy it seemed to be a bad thing. There is a delightfully idealistic statement that Canons A5 and B5 ‘protect the liturgy from becoming an instrument of theological partisanship and ensure its function as a shared act of worship grounded in common faith’ (§43). Perhaps the authors are wilfully unaware of the many parishes and network churches in the Church of England which never or almost never use authorised liturgy, even if technically they perhaps do something which could be defended as a Service of the Word. The Catholicisation of the liturgy in Common Worship has not been accepted throughout the Church of England, and A5 and B5 have not ensured liturgical unity. Why would we expect them to now? Comments commending the ‘structured plurality’ of ‘theological sensibilities and liturgical styles’ in the deployment of different Eucharistic prayers (§45) and reminding us that prayers are not ‘neutral containers into which new meanings may simply be poured’ (§47) do not accord with the reality of the breadth of theological positions on the eucharist which are now accommodated by Common Worship’s diversity of prayers (if Common Worship or the Book of Common Prayer are used at all in a parish or network church).

    There is then a rather confusing but impressive argument about the Ritual Controversy and the tension between ‘prescription, rubric, and enactment’ (§§50-57). It seems to be strongly implied that, unlike other times when there have been debates and movements for change, we are somehow walking into this without proper discernment. But if the gruelling process of LLF which has lasted for the entirety of my training and ordained ministry was not discernment, I don’t know what discernment would look like.

    Suddenly the Report raises the tone, almost comically, warning us:

    Episcopal guidance becomes critical: without clear episcopal teaching and supervision, the national coherence of liturgical practice – and the doctrinal witness it sustains – may be compromised. (§60)

    It is precisely in the act of translating these prayers into public worship that the theological and doctrinal stakes become most acute. (§85)

    I think that we are intended to hear the warning that the national coherence of liturgical practice may be compromised with the same concern as a warning that the hull of our submarine might be compromised. However, this is not how it lands. It is hard to get upset about the stable door needing shutting when the horse is galloping gaily away over the horizon.

    And the Report is quite direct that this is in fact the reality:

    The Church’s embrace of liturgical diversity has hitherto been sustained by theological agreement on the central matters of faith. Where disagreement has existed – on baptism, the Eucharist, or the nature of ordination – it has generally been held within a framework of authorised texts and common structures. (§63)

    This is an extraordinary admission, given the picture presented that the PLF risked tearing up a unified doctrinal-liturgical fabric. In fact, on minor and unimportant issues, not at all central in any way, like baptism, the Eucharist or Holy Orders, we already disagree. And that is apparently fine. However, we are reminded, lest again a door towards living with disagreement be opened to us, that:

    If liturgical practice is allowed to diverge from doctrinal principle, then the Church’s claim to be a confessing body – one that worships according to what it believes may be placed in jeopardy. (§64)

    Jeopardy. Well, as much as I would like everyone to be of one mind, the Report has already said that disagreement and divergence has happened over central issues, and the Church is still one body with one head, however many times we have disagreed, done different things, or even gone our separate ways. This just reads strangely, along with the warning that suddenly liturgical difference is something about which we should now be terrified into inaction, now that LGBTQIA+ people are involved. This aspect of the report reads like an attempt to create panic where no panic is necessary. Or, if it was necessary, it was probably necessary over the past 40 years, when our present liturgical divergence was taking root.

    (4) The Church’s Traditional Teaching on Marriage

    Do you remember that the purpose of this Report was meant to be to work out whether the PLF departed from the Church of England’s doctrine of marriage? You could be forgiven for having forgotten, having worked through all of this. The so-called “traditional doctrine of marriage” is first stated at §38, though this is only to establish how much this conflicts with the PLF which ‘suggests at least a degree of ecclesial affirmation of the relationship’ (§37). That the authors believe that the PLF constitute a departure from the “traditional doctrine of marriage” is not explored, only the implications of this finding.

    The unchallenged assumption that the unchanging doctrine of marriage in the Church of England is and has always been that it be between one man and one woman for life runs throughout the Report. At §22 and in footnote 9, a reference is made to GS Misc 1407, which was the Episcopal Reference Group’s paper on marriage and its accompanying compendium of sources. The compendium is interesting in that it gives a useful overview of the ways in which the Church of England’s doctrine of marriage and human sexuality has changed a lot, even as the Church has professed not to change our teaching or doctrine, only our pastoral practice. This change is now normal.

    We do not actually believe (as a Church) that marriage is between one man and one woman, or if we do we certainly have not believed that unchangingly or traditionally. The Lambeth Conferences of 1888 and 1988 came to exactly opposing conclusions about polygamy. We also do not actually believe (as a Church) that marriage is for life, given that remarriage of divorcees is now routine in the Church of England, and not reserved to the ‘exceptional circumstances’ envisaged by Marriage in the Church After Divorce (2003). It now seems only in really exceptional circumstances that marriage of heterosexual couples after divorce is ever denied.

    I certainly have never heard of public penance being done by heterosexual divorcees to make clear that the Church does not condone their remarriage before their service of thanksgiving. But the Report uses divorce as an example of another ‘morally ambiguous’ situation which the church does not bless (§19). It is made clear in the liturgy, apparently, that what is offered to divorcees is not a blessing. But I have never known that service to be referred to in any terms other than as a ‘wedding blessing’.

    Conclusion

    This Report is frustrating, and disturbing. It presents the PLF as something of a worst-case scenario, with the potential to detonate the hitherto integral liturgical unity of the Church of England. However, it is not balanced. It is not theologically consistent. And its arguments are at times obfuscatory and self-referential. It does not evaluate whether the PLF are consistent with the Church of England’s doctrine of marriage(s). But it does make it appear as fait accompli that the PLF are inconsistent in a way that suggests that the House of Bishops has no freedom to exercise their episcopal prerogative to authorise them. As such, this was a confusing and at times needlessly offensive Report to read.

  • A Response to “The Nature of Doctrine and the Living God: a Report of the Faith and Order Commission” (GS Misc 1429)

    Fr Thomas Sharp is a priest theologian based in the South East of England and is also Provincial Secretary of the Society of Catholic Priests

    We can now see the legal advice and theological briefing which the House of Bishops was given before making their October decisions on Living in Love and Faith (LLF). One of these, the report of the Faith and Order Commission entitled The Nature of Doctrine and the Living God (GS Misc 1429), surveys Anglican understandings of the development of doctrine and the role theology has to play in the life of the Church. Putting it succinctly, the report makes it pretty clear that support for the Prayers of Love and Faith (not even for equal marriage) would probably constitute a “change” of doctrine which would also constitute an unacceptable change in our understanding of what scripture is, who God is, and who we are as created beings.

    Church reports are never as satisfying in theological terms as a good academic paper or book. They have different purposes and different standards for the arguments they make. And we also do not know which members of the Faith and Order Commission really contributed to it, and how, and to what extent its membership would agree with all the arguments made. I suspect that they don’t all feel excellent about this report. But we do not know any of this any more than we know whether any of the bishops have dissented from recent decisions and why. So we are left to evaluate the Report on its own terms, and to ask generous questions of those who may or may not have written the arguments it makes.

    It must be said from the outset that it is a strange document. It does have a few bloopers, as all reports do. The comment in §4 of the extended summary that ‘As the greatest of the medieval scholastics, Aquinas is representative of the thinking of the church catholic’ is certainly entertaining. It presents Aquinas’ thought as settled and established, ignoring the fact that the turmoil in the Roman Catholic church over the past 200 years has largely been caused by fundamental disagreement about what Thomas Aquinas meant, and whether the Aquinas we are talking about is his direct writings or the tens of generations of his interpreters who came after.

    As a scholar of catholic theology, a blooper like this does make my eyes roll involuntarily. But more problematically, it represents an attempt in this Report to present doctrine as something generally static, generally serene, a quiet lake in which even its dynamism is limited to the occasional wave breaking on the shoreline of its boundaries.

    But this is theological and historical make-believe. The theology of Paul was a seismic shock to the world. The emergence of the urban episcopate had monks and citizens rioting in the streets of the Mediterranean. The theology of Augustine was a genuine shock to the Church. Even the theology of Thomas Aquinas, with his startling new Aristotelian approach, was shocking and new, and was not and is not uncritically accepted in the church catholic.

    The doctrine of the church has never been worked out calmly and quietly. That isn’t how people work, especially not when we believe things dearly and love fervently the God about whom we are trying to speak and teach. Any portrayal of doctrine as settled and serene is fantasy. Well argued fantasy. But fantasy nevertheless.

    Section III of the report attempts to construct an Anglican sense of what doctrine is and where its limits are. It does this with a very eminent group of white theologians from the UK and North America, 22% of which are women. But it seems to pretend that the rest of the Anglican Communion and humanity has nothing to offer. They are or were all (John Henry Newman probably aside) either straight or in heterosexual marriages. Apparently nobody who would be directly affected by the Prayers of Love and Faith has ever thought about doctrine. Certainly never in the global south. There are people, even LGBTQIA+ people, South of the equator and East of Suffolk.

    In section III a degree of complexity is dealt with. But this is jettisoned in its summary synthesis §139-146 where a seductively unclear conclusion is presented:

    The nature of doctrine might be summarised as true knowledge about God that is communally authorised by warrant in the Holy Scriptures and is, therefore, communally regulative. (§146)

    What does “Communally Regulative” actually mean? Does it have a conservative meaning of establishing the bare minimum of precepts which a person must accept in order to be confident of their salvation, in the sense of Article VI of the Articles of Religion? Or does it have a broader, more liberal application, in the sense that ‘those things a Christian is required to know, believe, and observe are available to all in their reading of Scripture’ (§172) and that whatever lies outside this is not to be permitted. The Report acknowledges that the latter approach ‘is not expressed in the Church of England’s historical formularies per se’ (fn. 154).

    The former, more conservative approach, might fit better the doctrine of the scriptures found in the Book of Common Prayer and the historic formularies of the Church of England. English Anglicanism, at least in its formularies, is conservative about what it considers to be a “first order” issue. If anything ever mentioned in scripture becomes a “first order” issue, simply by virtue of the fact that it is mentioned in scripture, doctrine will simply cease to function as a useful means by which the Church teaches God’s people what their salvation is, and where their hope should be. Just because we feel very strongly about something at the moment, on either side, does not make it a first order issue.

    The knots a more liberal and expansive approach to what is a “first order” issue can get us into are clear in §171 of the conclusion. To pull at one thread of the great edifice of “first order” doctrine which has been built up seems to threaten to unravel the whole.

    For many, the doctrine of marriage as it has been articulated historically foregrounds a clearly defined set of biblical texts. Furthermore, those advancing that argument maintain those texts are decisive in their teaching that only relationship between one man and one woman may be offered a form of divine authorisation in a marriage service, blessing, or prayer. To argue otherwise – as those in support of the PLF do – appears to constitute a simultaneous challenge to the doctrine of marriage, the doctrines that marriage refers to (such as creation and redemption), and also the doctrine of Scripture. (§171)

    The illusion of a near eternally settled body of doctrine which peacefully and unchangeably has taught and guided God’s people is both a historical fantasy, and also dangerous, as our theology becomes so simply overconnected that everything is raised to being a “first order” issue. Such theology is not strong. It is brittle. It is magisterial. It is expansive, regulatory and tends towards the authoritarian. It moves us ever closer to the next divisive issue and the next schism. It makes “windows into men’s souls” beyond what is necessary to assure them of their salvation. In that sense, it is deeply un-anglican.

  • Where Does the House of Bishops Currently Stand on the Use of Prayers of Love and Faith? Some Reflections

    by Peter Collier KC, retired Senior Circuit Judge and former Vicar-General of the Province of York

     

    On 15 November 2023, General Synod passed a motion on Living in Love and Faith which acknowledged that we are in a period of uncertainty but, among other requests, asked “the House to consider whether some standalone services for same-sex couples could be made available for use, possibly on a trial basis, on the timescale envisaged by the motion passed by the Synod in February 2023”.

    Such a trial period would result in an expectation that if, at the end of it, there was a wish to continue the use of the Prayers, then that would be put through a Canon B2 process.

    After much longer than people had hoped for, the House of Bishops has now reached a provisional decision, which they anticipate confirming in December. That decision is that, following advice from the Church of England’s Legal Office and from the Faith and Order Commission (FAOC), such services – now described as ‘bespoke services’ – “would require maximum communal authorisation through the Canon B2 process of approval”.

    The recent legal advice (dated September 2025) which has now been published does not differ materially from what previous documents told us was the essence of the legal advice received on earlier dates. Annex F to GS 2328 had said that authorisation through Canon B2 would provide an automatic defence to any legal case brought against clergy for using the prayers. The advice at that time was that, provided the House, exercising its legally and theologically informed judgement, formed the view that the proposed prayers and other material met the requirements as to doctrine that are set out in Canon B5, then they could properly be commended. That was and presumably still is the case, as the use of the prayers in regularly scheduled services remains commended for use under Canon B5.

    The role of context

    What is of course new is the advice from FAOC. In short, it addresses the issue of the extent to which context and symbolic action communicate what the church believes. FAOC says that when used publicly, and especially when used in bespoke or occasional services, the Prayers may be seen to communicate an ecclesial endorsement of a couple’s relationship as a whole, including its sexual dimension. It says, some would say argues(!), that in public rituals meaning is read as much from what is seen as from what is said. Also, that actions, gestures, and vesture generate strong signals for a variety of audiences looking on. It says that, while explanatory prefaces may help, people will remember the enactment more than the caveat. In conclusion, FAOC suggest that symbolic actions, such as an exchange of rings, will communicate more than the church’s doctrine of marriage will allow.

    Notwithstanding that all of that also applies to such symbolic activity in regularly scheduled services – which are to be allowed to continue – the House has provisionally concluded that performance of the same symbolic activity in a standalone service should not take place until authorised by Synod through a B2 process.

    The Church of England and civil weddings

    Of course this is not the first time that the Church of England has addressed questions around marriage services. In 1836, the Marriage Act challenged the practice of all weddings being conducted only through the Church of England, and introduced what we now call ‘civil weddings’. Weddings conducted in registered buildings other than churches, in the presence of a registrar and two witnesses, were lawful. This was the first time that Parliament provided for people to marry other than through the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England.

    The Church was not happy and, in the debate on the bill in the House of Lords, the then-Bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts, said that it was “a disgrace to British legislation. [It] is pretended to be called for to prevent clandestine marriages, but I think it will greatly facilitate such proceedings. Not solemnized by the church of England, may be celebrated without entering into a consecrated building, may be contracted by anybody, and will be equally valid, whether it takes place in the house of God, or in the house of a registering clerk, one of the lowest functionaries of the state. The parties may take one another for better and for worse, without calling God to witness their plighted troth. No blessing sought; no solemn vows of mutual fidelity; no religious solemnity whatever …”. Clearly in his mind this fell far short of ‘Holy Matrimony’ as per the Book of Common Prayer.

    Various other developments culminated with the use of a religious service in a register office being prohibited by s.12 of the Marriage and Registration Act 1856. So, more by accident than design, we reached the place where there was a very clear distinction between religious and secular marriages.

    Divorce and marriage

    However, a much more fundamental issue arising from the different views about marriage held by state and church was that of remarriage after divorce. In 1857, control over divorce passed from the church courts – which had exercised complete control over marriage and divorce since the Middle Ages – to the newly-created Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes. Until then, divorce was rare and expensive, requiring in almost all cases an Act of Parliament to bring it about. The grant of divorces by the courts was slowly liberalised over the years, culminating in 1969 with the “irretrievable breakdown of a marriage” being the sole ground for divorce.

    Throughout this period, the Church of England remained adamant that marriage was for life and that any remarriage during the former partner’s lifetime amounted to adultery. In 1957, the church not only banned the use of the “solemnisation of holy matrimony” for the remarriage of divorcees but also barred the provision of any public service to mark a couple’s civil marriage when one of them was divorced.

    Some clergy, notwithstanding that official position, did hold private services of prayer and dedication for such couples either in their home or, sometimes, in a church. The Lichfield Report (1978) reviewed the position, along with the pros and cons of holding a service of prayer and dedication for those who had gone through such further marriages. However, it concluded that there was a risk of confusion between such a service and a marriage service. It argued that, whatever explanations were given, it was likely that some taking part would be unaware of the distinction, particularly if the traditional ceremonial elements such as a bride wearing white, the ringing of bells and the like “would convey a powerful misleading message which the words of the service would be unable to correct”. That argument will sound very familiar to anyone who has read the recent FAOC advice.

    However, within three years of the Lichfield Report being issued, in July 1981, Synod voted overwhelmingly for a motion that “there are circumstances in which a divorced person may be married in church during the lifetime of a former spouse”. But what were those circumstances? Such was the division on this issue across the country, that it was very difficult to find a way forward. At the root of the disagreement was the question as to whether this was a matter touching on the doctrine of marriage. That question remained unresolved when, in 1985, the then House of Bishops commended under Canon B4 a ‘Service of Prayer and Dedication After A Civil Marriage’.  This remains a commended service and is still in use today, particularly by some clergy who feel in all conscience that they are unable to agree to a remarriage in church according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England.

    The Church of England and the Civil Partnership Act

    The next occasion when changes in the civil law led to the Church having to address matters that touched on its understanding of marriage was when the Civil Partnership Act 2004 came into force. How should the Church respond when those who had entered into a Civil Partnership asked for prayers or for a blessing on their new status?

    On the 25 July 2005 the House of Bishops provided a Pastoral Statement on Civil Partnerships that said that clergy should not provide a service of blessing for those who have entered into a civil partnership but, if approached by people, they should “respond pastorally and sensitively in the light of the circumstances of each case”.

    Nigel Seed KC, then the Chancellor of the Diocese of London, prepared an advice in 2008 for the clergy of that diocese about what to do if asked to conduct services of blessing for those in civil partnerships. Having considered parallels with the ‘Service of Prayer and Dedication After A Civil Marriage’, and noting that “interestingly for a service that is not ‘a service of blessing’, it does include a blessing of the two individuals, but not of their union”, he concludes by saying:

    Thus the position is clear. Unless and until one of the relevant authorities listed in Canon B5.2 provides a form of service, beneficed clergy (or other clergy authorised by them) may use a form of service they consider suitable in respect of a civil partnership providing that service does not amount to a ‘service of blessing’ and is reverent and seemly and is not contrary to, nor indicative of any departure from, the doctrine of the Church of England in any essential matter.

    It would seem to be commonplace that such services are now in regular use across the country.

    Pastoral responses to same- sex marriage

    So where does all that leave us now that we are facing another challenge presented to us by Parliamentary intervention into marriage? Once more it fell to the Bishop of Exeter, in this case Michael Langrish, to express the Church’s concern when the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 was making its way through the House of Lords. He said that if the bill was passed:

    A basic understanding of marriage, in law, will have irrevocably changed, and with one reality now bearing two different labels; or we will have legislated into being two very different realities, but confusingly bearing the same name.

    One of the points about a civil partnership is that it is very much not a marriage. A same-sex marriage is also very much not a marriage in the eyes of the church. So, is there any good reason why a pastoral and sensitive response can be made to those who have entered a civil partnership, but not to those who have entered a same-sex marriage?

    The pattern would seem to be well established – we begin with the Service of Prayer and Dedication where the couple but not the union are blessed, we follow that with the pastoral and sensitive prayers for those who have entered a civil partnership which might equally bless them but not their union, and then we come to those who have entered a same-sex relationship where again we pray for and bless them but not their civil union. Although not spelled out in that way, it is my understanding that the many years of work that went into producing the resource section of the Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF) were intended to produce exactly that – a recognition and blessing of the positive goods seen in a relationship, without any acknowledgement of that relationship being anywhere close to what the church currently understands to be a marriage in the sight of God. Such a marriage, when entered into according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England, necessarily can only take place between a man and a woman.

    It was that understanding that was set out in GS 2289 when the House stated its intention of commending those resources for use by those who wished to use them, but reserving always the right of any cleric to decline to do so on grounds of doctrinal conscience, as was the case in 1985.

    On the basis of all the above, it is clearly in order for any cleric who wishes to do so, to use the commended PLF resources in any regularly scheduled service. Although the House has in its guidance so far said that they should not be used other than in regularly scheduled services, I find it difficult to understand why that should be the case. I take on board what FAOC has said about symbolism, but note that the same was said in the Lichfield report in 1978, and that all the symbolic matters that concern FAOC may be just as much present in a regularly scheduled service as in a standalone service. And it is to be noted that the Introduction to the Prayers at pages 3 and 4 is very clear about what is and what is not being offered through using these resources.

    It also seems to me that on the same basis that Chancellor Seed considered that, when no other provision had been made but some sort of service was required, then it is within the discretion of the minister to provide a service that is not contrary to or indicative of departure from the doctrine of the Church of England. It is very difficult to see how what is apparently not so indicative in a regular service should become so simply because the service is occasional.

    The threat of legal proceedings?

    Throughout the discussion of these matters, and obviously something that has weighed heavily with the House, is the possibility of legal proceedings being taken against a cleric who uses prayers that have not had full Canon B2 approval. But I question whether the House has really looked at the nature and detail of those potential proceedings and therefore at the reality of the threat they are thought to pose.

    Any complaint would clearly be about doctrine – the whole ground of any such disciplinary complaint would be that what had happened was contrary to the doctrine of the Church. As such it could not proceed under the Clergy Discipline Measure 2003, as section 7(2) of that Measure provides that “proceedings in relation to matters involving doctrine, ritual or ceremonial shall continue to be conducted in accordance with the 1963 Measure”. That is the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Measure 1963 (EJM). Its proceedings are complex to say the least. It was their complexity, cost and consequent rare use that led to the passing of the Clergy Discipline Measure 2003.

    First, under the EJM there are restrictions on those who can commence proceedings. Under section 19 proceedings can only be commenced (1) by a person authorised by the Diocesan Bishop to bring a complaint; (2) by six persons aged 18 or over whose names are on the electoral roll of the parish the incumbent or stipendiary curate who they seek to complain about; (3) in the case of the stipendiary curate by their incumbent. I would have thought it unlikely that a cleric whose parishioners were unsupportive is likely to offer such prayers. There is much in the guidance about discussing matters and getting the approval of the PCC for their use. Also, the complainants would have a lengthy and potentially expensive path ahead of them. As for the Bishop bringing a complaint, I think any Bishop would have to think long and hard before launching one, as may become clear as we consider the process.       

    Under section 39, once the complaint has been brought to the Bishop’s attention and they have considered it, they must give the accused and the complainant the opportunity of a private interview. Having held that interview or interviews the Bishop may decide to take no further steps in the matter in which case it comes to an end, or may decide to refer it for inquiry.

    If the bishop has referred the complaint for inquiry, the inquiry is carried out by a Committee of Convocation in accordance with section 42. The committee consists in the case of an accused priest or deacon of (i) one member of the Upper House of the Convocation of the relevant province appointed by the archbishop; (ii) two members of the Lower House of that Convocation appointed by the prolocutor of that House; and (iii) two chancellors of dioceses in that province, appointed by the Dean of the Arches and Auditor. That committee inquires into the complaint to decide whether there is a case to answer in respect of which the accused should be put on trial. Both sides may lay evidence before the committee in affidavits; the committee might also require any deponent to an affidavit to attend and answer questions on oath. The committee decides if there is a case to answer and, if so, they spell out what the offence is.

    But that is not an end of the matter because they go on to consider whether the offence is too trivial to warrant further proceedings; or that it was committed under extenuating circumstances; or that further proceedings would not be in the interests of the Church of England; and in any of those cases they would then dismiss the complaint. Also, they may decide there is no case to answer. Only if they decide there is a case to answer and that they are not dismissing it for any of the reasons set out above can they send it for trial before the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved.      

    This Court consists of five members: two Court of Appeal judges (currently Smales and Lindblom LJJ) and three Diocesan Bishops (currently Chelmsford, Chichester, and Gloucester) They are assisted by between three and five persons selected from of a panel of specialist theologians and liturgists. Proceedings follow the pattern of a criminal trial with the criminal rules of evidence. Any decision is decided by a majority.

    If at the conclusion of the proceedings the accused is found guilty of the offence charged, then they are liable to be censured in accordance with section 49. However, under section 49(3), unless the accused has been admonished on a previous occasion in respect of another offence of the same or substantially the same nature, then no censure more severe than a ‘monition’ can be imposed. A monition is “an order to do or refrain from doing a specified act”, which effectively would amount to an order not to do it again. There is therefore no risk of deprivation inhibition or suspension for a first offence.

    It is all that complexity coupled with the lack of teeth in any outcome for a first offence that causes me to think that it would be very unlikely that any bishop would (a) authorise proceedings in the first place, or (b) want to send to an inquiry any case that had been launched by anybody else. Equally, I think that any Committee of Convocation would be very tempted to use one of their three options to dismiss rather than send the case to a hearing. Given the limited penalty, for a first offence which this would inevitably be, what would be the benefit of going to a hearing? Even if any of the parties or the Bishop thought that this might resolve an important doctrinal issue, there would be no guarantee of the outcome, and so I would guess little appetite to take the risk.

    In all the circumstances, it does seem to me that the threat of litigation is vastly overstated in the papers that have been produced so far.

    So where do we go from here?

    The resource material in the PLF is available as commended material for use when praying with a same sex couple in regularly scheduled services and that position is likely to remain after the House reaches final decisions in December.

    Even if they were to withdraw that commendation, it would be open to any priest relying on Canon B 5.2 to use a form of service considered suitable by them to provide a service of thanksgiving and prayer for a couple who approached them asking for such. It seems to me that it would be very difficult to criticise what would surely be seen as a pastoral and sensitive approach. In the preliminary conversations with the couple, I cannot imagine that the priest would not explain that there were limits to what could be offered because the Church of England for the time being has a doctrine of marriage which does not permit it to do any more, given that they are a same sex couple. I cannot imagine that would be any surprise to the couple, who in agreeing to the service offered, would be acknowledging that they understood that that was the Church’s doctrine.

    I can also see no reason why in any announcements about the service, either in advance or at the time, something could not be said that effectively apologised that no more could be offered whilst the current doctrinal position about same sex marriage remains in place. This would overcome the anxiety of FAOC that simply saying what positively is on offer may lead people to conclude that the Church has a doctrinal position other than it has. I can of course understand that people may not want to say anything that detracts from positive statements in the service itself but it would, so far as I can see, provide a complete answer to that significant concern of FAOC.

    And we can look back to those same concerns being expressed about the remarriage issues in the 1980s and note that there has been no lessening of an understanding of what the Church’s doctrine of marriage says. People still believe that the couple are committing to a life together till death does them part, and not committing to have a go at it for as long as they can, which has always seemed to me to be what lawyers refer to as ‘special pleading’.

    But, assuming that the December position of the House follows on from what was said in October, what of those who are not able to accommodate the prayers into their regular pattern of services? It seems to me that the arguments I have just advanced in relation to relying on Canon B 5.2 apply equally in those circumstances.

    What if a diocesan bishop issues an ad clerum purporting to forbid clergy using those prayers in their diocese? The oath of canonical obedience is to “pay true and canonical obedience to the Lord Bishop … and his successors in all things lawful and honest”. On the face of it there is a strong argument for saying that the priest is properly applying canon law and cannot be forbidden from so doing. Canonical obedience is generally understood as obeying such instructions as are given within the law of the church, and the law expressed in Canon B5 allows a priest to use such forms of service as are considered suitable by them for the occasion.

    But it should be noted that Canon B 5.4 provides that “If any question is raised concerning the observance of the provisions of this Canon it may be referred to the Bishop in order that he may give such pastoral guidance, advice or directions as he may think fit,  but such reference shall be without prejudice to the matter in question being made the subject matter of proceedings under the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Measure 1963.” The question here is whether an individual diocesan Bishop, in all the circumstances outlined above, is really able to say that the use of such prayers is either contrary to or indicative of a departure from the doctrine of the Church of England in an essential matter. Ultimately of course if such a direction were given and not followed it could be the subject of a complaint under the 1963 Measure, which would proceed as set out above to an outcome which, at the moment, may seem very uncertain for the Bishop.

    Finally, it must follow from all that I have said above that the House needs to give further thought to the matters that I have set out before coming to any final decisions. Careful consideration needs to be given to the long history of the relationship between church and state in relation to the state’s development of marriage and how the church has responded at different times. It needs to be acknowledged that the church has always been concerned that any adaptation of its practices to accommodate what is happening in the outside world may be seen as a threat to its understanding and doctrine of marriage.

    However, accommodations have always been made, and the doctrine has survived. There may be a lot of pressure both inside and outside the church to change the doctrine, but there is no doubt what that doctrine is. They should also not forget that some provinces have already changed their doctrine of marriage, and many other provinces are currently struggling over these issues, even as we are. Historically, the House has led the way in providing sensitive and pastoral accommodation in such changing times.  My question to them is whether they have the courage to do so again?

  • Why Progressive Christians Must Reclaim the Case for Church – Or Face the Consequences

    by Simon Cross, a minister in the United Reformed Church, a writer, and the chair of the Progressive Christianity Network

    [reprinted with permission from http://simonjcross.substack.com/]

    Progressive Christianity has done much to reframe theology – challenging exclusion, reimagining scripture, and putting justice issues at the centre of our worship. But in the enthusiasm to move away from conservatism, we’ve often neglected to reconstruct a compelling case for why church still matters.

    The consequences are striking. Churches that champion progressive theology are shrinking, not because their message lacks depth, but because their communal purpose is unclear. This has various knock-on effects: visible Christianity becomes limited to its more conservative expressions, new leaders are not nurtured, people are cut adrift from supportive communities.

    For centuries now, we’ve critiqued doctrine, questioned hierarchy, and sought to dismantle harmful traditions. But we’ve not always articulated what church is for. Why gather? Why commit? Why return week after week to a community that is imperfect, slow-moving, and sometimes exhausting?

    The hard truth is that if we don’t make the case for church, others will. And often, they’ll make it in ways that reinforce conformity, control, or nostalgia. If we, as progressive Christians, believe in a gospel of liberation, then we must also believe in the power of, and need for communities which embody that liberation – not just in theory, but in practice.

    Church as a School of Compassion

    Church, through a progressive lens, is not just a place to hear sermons, sing hymns or mumble prayers. It’s a dynamic, open space where we learn, together, to be compassionate. Not in abstract terms, but in the messy, embodied reality of shared life. It’s a place where we learn to sit with grief that isn’t ours. We learn to celebrate joy that doesn’t benefit us. We learn what it means to forgive, and to listen.

    This vision of church is profoundly counter-cultural. While contemporary culture prizes individualism and efficiency, wealth and success, church offers a counter-formative rhythm. It slows us down. It asks us to notice. It invites us into relationships that aren’t transactional – or at least aren’t as transactional. Over time, it shapes us into people who can look beyond ourselves.

    Church as a Place of Ritual

    Progressive Christians often shy away from ritual, fearing it will become empty or oppressive. But in my own life, and my own experience of ministry, I have come to recognise that rituals are not the enemy. They are, in some ways, the scaffolding of meaning. (Don’t believe me? Read Ritual by Dimitris Xygalatas).

    In church, we enact rituals of restoration and renewal: communion being the most obvious one. Moments when we stop – recentre, renew. We also enact rituals of resistance – the most notable of which is baptism. In my tradition these two rituals are called ‘sacraments’ – for good reason.

    These rituals remind us who we are and who we’re becoming. They connect us to generations before us and to movements beyond us. They give shape to our longings and language to our hope.

    Church as a Community of Resistance

    Sometimes when I go into a church I find, in effect, a living history museum. A place where a group find comfort. But if church is only a place of comfort, it will not survive.

    At its best, church becomes a community of resistance. A place where we can come together, partly for comfort perhaps, but also to find a way to fight against injustice, against despair, against isolation. The earliest Christians gathered for this reason – they shared resources, they dismantled hierarchies, they cared for each other.

    Progressive churches have the theological tools to be communities of resistance. We speak of inclusion, of equity, of ecological care. But we must also embody these values in our structures, our budgets, our liturgies, and our relationships. Resistance is not just what we preach – it’s how we live together.

    Making the Case

    So how do we make the case for church?

    Perhaps we start by telling the truth, to ourselves and to one another: church is hard. It’s slow. It’s full of people who disappoint us. But it’s also one of the few places where we commit to one another not because we agree with each other (we don’t), but because we belong.

    Then maybe we tell stories – stories of meals shared, of burdens carried, of prayers whispered in hospital rooms. We name the ways that church has saved us by being present to us.

    We invite people not to consume church, but to co-create it. To bring their gifts, their questions, their wounds. To help shape a community that reflects the gospel we believe in.

    And we remind ourselves that church is not a building or a brand. It’s a practice. A discipline. A way of being in the world that says: we are not alone, and we are not powerless.

    Mostly, though, we simply need to understand the case for church in ourselves – we need to internalise it. We need to recognise that ‘this’ is why its worth being part of.

    A Progressive Future

    If progressive Christianity is to thrive, it must reclaim church. It must cultivate it, and tend to it. We must actively make the case for gathering together, and we must ensure our spaces are such that genuine discipleship can happen in them. We can’t really afford to just keep going through the motions.

    Church can be a place where justice is not just preached, but practised. Where compassion is not just felt, but formed. Where resistance is not just imagined, but enacted. We all know it – just as we know it can be the opposite. We need to make the case for church.

  • Beyond Threats: Changing the Narrative after Living in Love and Faith

    by Charlie Bell, Fellow in Public Theology and Medicine at Girton College, Cambridge, Associate Vicar of St John the Divine, Kennington, in the Diocese of Southwark, and member of the LLF Vocations and Ministry Working Group

    When I was at my first Diocesan Synod, many years ago, just after the House of Bishops had issued their Valentine’s Day message that set in stone the current mess in relation to clergy being forbidden to marry their same-sex or gender partners, a cleric turned to me and said words that have stuck with me ever since: ‘you need to have a cooler head and a warmer heart’. These words have returned to me on a number of occasions during the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) fiasco, echoed by various ‘supportive’ or less supportive bishops or others involved in the process – often people who could return to their own husbands or wives at the end of the day, whilst asking people like me to ‘be patient’.

    They appeared in the back of my mind again last week when witnessing the total corporate failure of the House of Bishops to even pay lip service to their promise to ‘lament and repent of the failure of the Church to be welcoming to LGBTQI+ people and the harm that LGBTQI+ people have experienced and continue to experience in the life of the Church’. It was hard – it is hard – to see this as anything other than a total betrayal. Like many others, I felt disappointment, I felt grief. I also felt anger, frustration and the deep impotence of watching my life being decided upon by others. I felt fury at the bully-boy tactics of the Alliance. I felt – frankly – disgusted with the apparent refusal to take all of this on, by those who have claimed to support us throughout. And I was tempted to despair.

    It is hard to know where to start with the inadequacy of what happened, and I’ve taken a bit of time before penning this article to hear a few different perspectives. A statement was put out in the name of the House of Bishops – rushed, presumably, in light of yet another anticipated leak in this depressing process – which failed even to mention LGBTQIA people (I wonder whether this was even seen, let alone signed off, by the House?). In this statement, there was a clear narrative – that LGBTQIA people were, once again, to be the acceptable sacrifice in the name of some vague notion of church ‘unity-through-silence-and-stasis’ (a ‘unity’ which was shown to be a mirage just a few hours later, as GAFCON launched their most recent preposterous salvo). Here was the triumph of pragmatism and politics over people – process over progress – and all in the face of clear decisions of the General Synod (decisions which have been totally ignored throughout the process).

    The bishops didn’t help themselves in the ensuing days, not least through the double-speak we have sadly become so used to hearing. We have seen this endlessly in Synod motions – where ‘consider’ or ‘potential’ have become weasel words to allow something to be passed and then thrown on to the ‘too difficult’ pile at will. In radio performances, the bishops provided disingenuous accounts, full of handwringing and ‘well actually’ commentary which once again failed to take the seriousness of the failure into account, and which might make LGBTQIA people feel just a little gaslighted. The reality of putting something through a two-thirds majority process – that it will fail, given the unrepresentative nature of the General Synod – has never quite been named, and similarly, there is no commitment to actually beginning Synodal processes on clergy marriage.

    Abysmal ‘pastoral letters’ were penned, including one surprisingly weak example which would fail the ‘pastoral exercise’ at any Bishop’s Advisory Panel for potential ordinands. And to date, there has been – once again – a general recourse to silence amongst the House, including amongst the ‘inclusive’ bishops. Silence – just like inaction – is not value-neutral. For our chief pastors, it appears the pastoral urge is worryingly absent. Or, perhaps, fear really has taken over the institution.

    What has become clear from several conversations that I have had – and sight of the legal advice and theological advice – is that the narrative that the legal advice changed is absolute nonsense. It is certainly true that the legal advice suggested that the bishops might be at risk of legal challenge, but we’ve known this all along, not least from February 2024’s GS 2346 (the optimistically-named Living in Love, Faith, and Reconciliation). Part of the role of being a leader is to shoulder that kind of risk. The theological advice on the PLF also made clear that there remain contested areas here, much as there are over clergy entering marriages to people of the same sex or gender. But nothing has substantively changed. ‘We need more theology’ was not, in the end, the deciding factor, and nor was the fabled ‘legal advice’.

    Whilst we’re on that point, might we be a little clearer with language? We have heard time after time that one of the questions to be addressed is whether clergy can enter such marriages, and the need for separate structures if that is to be allowed, but that is not the actual question here. There are already clergy in such marriages – I’m one of them. We walk amongst you. We celebrate the sacraments and preach the word of God freely. I can – and often do – cover parishes all over the diocese, and more widely. But what I can’t do is be appointed to a new post – and those waiting for ordination cannot be ordained. The whole situation is ridiculous – it’s OK for me to share cure of souls in my parish and preside in another but not share cure of souls there and preside in mine. It is hard to follow an argument that suggests that I can continue to be made use of, whilst to permit others would be to break canon law and would require some grand structural change.

    The demands for structural change, of course, have been one of the key issues underlying this whole LLF process – in fact, LLF has become less about LGTBQIA people and more about keeping the purveyors of threats within the Church of England. A narrative has developed, bought – it appears – hook, line, and sinker by far too many within the House of Bishops, that ‘if you do X, we need Y’. If you have standalone services (whatever that means), we need special bishops. If you have clergy marriage, we need our own province. And so on. Few have been willing to stand up to this and say, ‘no, you don’t’ – instead, the game has been played according to those rules, and so here we are. The bishops were unwilling to ‘do violence to the ecclesiology’ of the Church of England, so LGBTQIA people can, essentially, get stuffed. It’s understandable from a purely pragmatic point of view, but it is utterly theologically bankrupt.

    I have some sympathy for the refusal to give into this kind of bullying, and it has been fascinating to see the rather muted response of the small but synodically overrepresented and extremely wealthy threat-makers and money-withdrawers when they realised their grand plan to create a purity cult, a church-within-a-church, has failed. Yet beyond the apparent unwillingness to challenge the Alliance narrative, bishops have also spoken about feeling cornered – managed to within an inch of their lives – by being presented with faits accomplis at recent meetings, with no room left for manoeuvre. It’s this, or it’s that, they were told. So, whether or not it was their intention, looking in from the outside, it certainly looks like they have run scared of the Alliance, given into threats, and left us out in the cold. In doing so, all the hope of February 2023 has fallen away, motions and the associated clear will of General Synod have been discarded, and we have a few measly prayers which many of us were doing already. No bespoke services. No change to the absurd rules on clergy marriage. Nothing. Nada. Nil.

    As I said at the start, I am as angry and as dejected as the next person. But I am also not willing to accept defeat here. So, whilst it is easy to get caught up in the frustration and the fury, I want to think instead of where we go from here.

    It is clearly the case that the bishops decided it was not worth pressing ahead with standalone services, but why? Is this the result of threats of legal action? Bishops need to be clear in their own minds why they voted the way they did, and just as clear as to how they will stop this mess happening again. How are they going to enable all the things that they have promised through Synod motions – some little more than crumbs under the table? How are they going to focus once again on radical inclusion and not on threat management?

    One of the key things to which the House of Bishops – and particularly those bishops supportive of LGBTQIA inclusion – need to commit is doing this better and growing some courage. It is time for them to take back a level of agency and own the decisions and the decision-making processes they are engaging in. This means, too, refusing to accept narratives peddled on the back of threats. There is no inevitability to the Alliance’s wish-list, and this needs to be clearly and unmistakably stated by our bishops. The alternative – that the House accepts that no change will happen unless structural provision is made, and that the House will not provide this – is that LGBTQIA people are the acceptable sacrifice. We – LGBTQIA people – are asking you: which is it?

    Indeed, in a letter to supporters this week, the CEEC has made clear that they want to see even the current commended prayers removed from use, and ‘if that is not possible’ to ‘advocate for a structural rearrangement which secures orthodoxy [sic’] going forward’. Threats will continue until they are taken on.

    Secondly, there needs to be a sense of urgency in the work and witness of the House of Bishops. LGBTQIA people are sick and tired of being trampled over or told to wait. David Monteith expressed this very powerfully last week, and his experience chimes with many of us. A failure to see why this is not only important but urgent is hurting the witness of the episcopal leadership of the Church of England – indeed, a failure to hear even a public word from inclusive bishops in the aftermath of this week’s car crash is fairly damning in and of itself. Of course, it is likely that the 44 bishops who spoke out a while back are now on a ‘do not appoint’ list provided by the Alliance to anti-LGBTQIA Crown Nominations Commission members considering diocesan appointments, but since when have threats been the way we go about our business? How about naming them instead, and calling the bluff of those who make them?

    Thirdly, they – and we – need to commit to what can be done right now, and get on with doing it. The arguments over what does and doesn’t require B2 are somewhat complicated (and I will engage with them in a later post), but it is quite obviously the case that something can be offered now (of which the PLF are a mere part and not the whole), and we ought to be getting on with it – and our bishops ought not only to be giving us quiet, covert cover, but to be public in their support. Similarly, now we have a route to dealing with the nonsense over clergy marriage, let’s do it – rather than kick the can down the road further.

    Some people have expressed dissatisfaction that parishes are not being encouraged to withhold parish share. Nobody is stopping you: if you are an incumbent with the support of your PCC and you wish to do so, then maybe now is indeed the time to do so – and to say so. Make it clear to your bishops that the threats of the Alliance are not the only show in town. Challenge decision making that prioritises those who threaten over those who are LGBTQIA. Support your bishops when they need it, and oppose them when they sell us down the river. Get involved in the campaigns that are out there, and if you feel they don’t go far enough, go further.

    And, of course, we are moving into an important year, where General Synod will once again be elected. The reality is that we need money for this campaign, because the purveyors of threats have loads of it. But we also need people. We need deanery synods that truly represent the people of the Church of England. Deanery synods elect General Synod. I will admit that I really hate General Synod and the way that Synod’s clear will has been ignored. But if we are to make change, we have to win – and win big – in these next elections. It matters for every part of our corporate life, like it or hate it – the election of bishops, the possibility of bringing in Equal Marriage, the way our money is spent, you name it.

    The past two and a half years, since the first LLF motion was passed, have been characterised by a failure of courage, imagination, integrity, theology: and of leadership. We have retreated into being a church of anxiety and fear, shaped by threats and bullying tactics. We have become risk-averse, frustrated, and angry. There has been an immeasurable damage to trust in the institution and in the leadership. We have lost our way.

    But it does not need to be like this, and with God’s grace it won’t be. We – all of us – need to change the narrative, reorient the church’s perspective, and get back to the business of living in love, faith, and hope. We can turn this around. And there is no time like the present to let the Holy Spirit blow afresh, and to turn again to the Lord, and live.

    Weeping may endure for a night: but joy cometh in the morning.