ViaMedia

Category: General Synod

  • Cooking with Love and Faith

    by Nic Tall, member of General Synod and National Coordinator of Together for the Church of England

    The General Synod has met again. Once again, it has debated the current stage of Living in Love and Faith (LLF), once again the plans to move forward have been approved in all three Houses of the Synod, and once again this permission to proceed still has a significant minority of Synod in opposition to the proposals.

    One aspect of the debate was the selection of metaphors used in speeches – Fortnum and Mason port and Stilton hampers, Argos flat pack furniture, LLF being like a bus with some on board and others feeling run over. One metaphor which came up in several speeches, all opposed to the proposals, was that it wasn’t “oven ready”. That the phrase was used several times implies co-ordinated comms work from conservatives literally speaking from the same centrally pre-prepared text. “Not oven-ready” expresses a concern that there hasn’t been enough work done, that proposed pastoral guidance needs more time and more consultation before it is fit for purpose, and we should stick with Issues in Human Sexuality until its replacement.

    Since coming home from the debate, I have been thinking through the questions of process and this culinary metaphor, and I have been comparing the LLF process to baking bread. We have been following a recipe, collecting and mixing ingredients, kneading the dough, stepping back and leaving it to rise for a while, before returning to knock it back, squeezing the air out, more pushing, pulling and stretching before leaving it to rise again. A good baker knows that a time of proving before further kneading helps the structure and flavour of the bread, but repeat that process too often and you ruin it.

    Before I talk about how we have been cooking the bread of LLF, I want to think about how the House of Bishops prepared the meal that is Issues in Human Sexuality.  I recently spoke with someone who was in the room when Issues was written.  It was a document purely created by the House of Bishops, who we should remember at that point included no women and no openly LGBT+ people. There was no Programme Board, no working groups, no consultation with stakeholder groups or involvement with the wider church at all. The entire process came from the House of Bishops discussing among itself and then putting out its thoughts as a teaching document, not intended as the policy statement that Issues later became. The preface stated “We cannot expect all to agree with our conclusion and, indeed, in our discussions we encountered a wide variety of opinions… It is our hope that this Statement – which we do not pretend to be the last word on the subject – will do something ‘to help forward a general process, marked by greater trust and openness, of Christian reflection on the subject of human sexuality’”. Issues was cooked by a small group of episcopal chefs, and was not intended to be the final meal. More than thirty years since it was first served up it now become stale and few find it appetising.

    Given the lack of process leading to the half-baked Issues, what has been happening in the kitchen to cook up its replacement? LLF began with panels of experts gathering to compile material around theology, biblical studies, history and more which formed the LLF book, videos, podcasts and course. These were then made available to the whole church to study, discuss and pray about. From late 2020 through to mid 2022, all policy work was paused while the resources were used at the grassroots in parishes, benefices and deaneries. In the baking metaphor, this was a period of the LLF dough being left to rise. Then there was a consultation, the largest in the C of E’s history, capturing the feedback of over 6000 who took part in the course and following up with focus groups to drill down deeper into grassroots opinion. The results were a majority wanting liturgical affirmation of same-sex relationships, a quick decision so everyone knew where they stood and a strong desire for the church to remain together.

    Through the autumn of 2022, the House of Bishops developed their proposals, which were modest but deliverable and brought to General Synod in February 2023. Synod welcomed the proposals through a vote passed in all three Houses. There has since been further work considering refinement and implementation, including consultation with stakeholder groups, small working groups and facilitated conversations bringing together people with very different theological convictions, in-person talks with representatives from different constituencies, theological input from the Faith and Order Commission, legal support from the Church of England’s Legal Office and a further substantial debate in General Synod in November 2023 affirming the ongoing direction of travel. There have been a ‘Next Steps Group’ and a ‘Moving Forward’ video.

    In preparation for the July 2024 Synod, there were different working groups, more stakeholder consultations, a Programme Board, further meetings of the College and House of Bishops and more input from FAOC. And then at the most recent Synod a third major vote has yet again passed in all three Houses to affirm the ongoing direction of travel. We can safely say that the LLF dough has been thoroughly kneaded, shaped and proved. When we compare the many years and wide consultation of the LLF process to the short bishops-only cooking up of Issues, we can be sure that we are in a much better place that will be more widely owned by the whole church once this dish comes out of the oven.

    We also have to remember who the chefs are in preparing this meal. The commending of liturgy and the issuing of pastoral guidance is the responsibility of the House of Bishops.  When Issues was published, it did not require Synodical approval; it was a document from the Bishops. Its replacement will also not need the approval of Synod. The House of Bishops have been much more sensitive this time around in ensuring wide consultation and involving people outside their number. The new pastoral guidance will not be something created in a closed room by a small group of outwardly straight men and then passed down from on high. It has been a collaborative process, with the bishops supported by Synod, FAOC, stakeholders, the Legal Office and all our parishes and deaneries who invested time with engaging.

    But now it is down to the House of Bishops to complete the process by putting it in the oven to bake. That is their job, and it is not for the rest of us to interfere. Neither will it help if we insist on continually opening the oven door to check how it’s getting on. Too many cooks will only spoil the meal.

    So, once the well-prepared dough of LLF that we currently have has been properly baked, brought out and left to cool, I hope we will be able to gather together to enjoy the breaking, sharing and eating. And I hope that will be around one table, where all are called, including our LGBTQIA+ family members who are usually only offered crumbs under the table. I hope also that our more conservative family members will also be at the feast around the one table, and not feel that they have to sit in another room apart from the rest of us.

    I hope that shared meal comes very soon, as many in the church, especially LGBTQIA+ people, are hungry and are needing to be fed.

  • Trust and Training

    by Revd Dr Sean Doherty, Principal, Trinity College, Bristol


    This afternoon at General Synod, we debated     an important and very substantial report on Trust and Trustworthiness in the Church of England. Some impressive scholars were involved in researching and writing the report (including Professor Veronica Hope Hailey, an expert on trust in organisations, and the well-known theologian Professor David Ford), who generously gave what must have been a very considerable amount of their time on a pro bono basis. Prof. Hope Hailey conducted extensive qualitative research via interviews (which the paper sets out). The Church owes them a debt of gratitude.

    Unfortunately the amount of time we had available to discuss the report could not do it justice (this is no criticism of those who arrange the Synod’s timings, who had an enormous number of important items to schedule). It grapples with a dizzying array of topics, including a theological account of trust, the role of social media, the impact on trust of church-related abuse and the Church of England’s response, and an analysis of the current dynamics of trust and distrust within the Church of England! I hope that we can find further time and ways to consider the document further and in greater depth, and it sounds like further work on the topic is planned.

    In the spirit of fostering that conversation, in this post I want to comment on two aspects of the report. First, on page 25, it raises concerns (substantiated by comments made by two interviewees) about ‘identity and church tradition groups’ which ‘may not seem to have porous or flexible boundaries.’ One interview suggested that ordination training might be partly responsible for ‘baking in this tribal division … right from the beginning’ (paragraph 112). (A couple of speakers drew attention to the potentially clerical framing of some of the report. This would be an example, since of course training for ordination is not the beginning of anyone’s engagement with the Church of England!)

    The report then adopts this ‘tribal’ language itself. For example, on p. 40 it says, ‘Concerns are voiced, and these are not new, that the theological education and formation for the Church’s ministers, and particularly of the clergy, as one interviewee put it, “bakes in” tribal differences from the outset’ (paragraph 189).

    One TEI principal colleague noted that the term ‘tribal’ betrays a rather colonial mindset. No doubt some people are uncritically loyal to their tradition, but in our analysis I think it is important for us to say that, rather than perpetuating stereotypes of tribal cultures as something inherently negative.

     Second, in the next paragraph (190) there is a reference to ‘institutions and programmes that are designed to form candidates in a particular strand of Anglicanism.’ In the run-up to this Synod meeting, I took a straw poll of a cross-section of TEI principals to ask, ‘is your institution/programme designed to form candidates in a particular strand of Anglicanism?’

    All of those who responded said no. We see our task as preparing candidates to serve the whole of the Church. Indeed, this is one of the criteria against which our programmes are assessed when we apply for approval, and one of the things for which we are rightly scrutinised.

    Furthermore, nowadays the majority of candidates train in TEIs which gather students from across traditions, and even TEIs which have historically been associated with particular traditions are probably much broader these days than perhaps at times in the past. This is because many students choose their TEI for practical reasons such as location. Others deliberately opt to go to a TEI outside of their ‘home’ tradition precisely to get a broader experience through training.

     But even helping people to be rooted in a spirituality that feeds and sustains them need not come at the expense of breadth. Traditions can be inhabited defensively and naively, but they can also be inhabited generously and self-critically, as a healthy basis from which to be open to others and receive their gifts.

     Then, of course, the actual process of formation involves varied experiences of community worship, and encountering the full range of theological ideas in reading and seminars. Sometimes teaching is shared between staff from different TEIs such as in the Cambridge Theological Federation, or in the partnership between Bristol Baptist College and Trinity College, where I work. Perhaps most crucially, we all offer placements in a range of traditions. At Trinity, we sometimes have a little debate with particular students about why they need to go to a parish for their placement which will broaden their experience. Occasionally they are a little reluctant! But they almost always come back absolutely delighted by the experience, and grateful for the generosity of the parishes who welcome them and the clergy who supervise them and explain things.

    I hope this reassures readers that TEIs really want to ensure that candidates for ministry have ‘a deep understanding and empathy for other traditions’ (paragraph 190). No doubt there is more to learn about how we can do so, and more we can do to foster a culture in which people can be confident in their own tradition but open to others. We therefore look forward to engaging further with this work as it develops.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    And above all it must end within the NST.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

  • Power Games: Redemptive Violence or Redemptive Love?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

  • Essential Doctrines, Essential Hierarchies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    by Dr Penelope Doe, University of Exeter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

     

     

     

  • The Majority or the Minority? A Rhetorical Question

    by Rev. Yin-An Chen, Assistant Curate in the Diocese of Lichfield, Trustee of Open Table Network, and Council Member of Modern Church

    I have always believed that I need to stand in solidarity with other minorities and oppressed groups. I stand up firmly for the equality and rights of women, the disabled, transgender people, refugees, people from disadvantaged backgrounds and religious minorities. However, I do not belong to any of these marginalised groups—at least, in the British context. Sometimes some minority experiences are contextual and relative, depending on the situation.

    For example, as a Han-ethnic Taiwanese, I never feel I am a ‘racial minority’ in my homeland. I have been ‘learning’ to be a racial minority since I moved to the UK ten years ago. As a bisexual man, I am ‘generally’ a minority in both Taiwan and the UK. I am unlikely to find any place where bisexual men are the ‘majority’.

    Due to this ‘inconsistency’ of who is majority and/or minority, I am occasionally confused by what I am standing for and dubious about how “solidarity of the minorities” can be built on strong foundations and prosper—if one minority group can ‘suddenly’ see themselves as the majority, or if embracing the identity of one oppressed group over others has become more mainstreamed and more politically correct.

    Something truly heart-breaking happened in the spring of 2023 when the Church of England’s General Synod conducted a serious debate on Living in Love and Faith and the vexed question of the blessing of same-sex marriages. I was told by a campaigner for racial justice that the Church of England must consider the broader context of the whole Anglican Communion. That person continues to say that the unity of the Church must be prioritised over the alteration of the Doctrine of Holy Matrimony. (Beware! The ‘doctrine’ has a capital letter!)

    The LGBT community and its allies in the Church of England have heard enough of this stuff. It is nonsensical that the Church should hold back from gay marriage because of strong opposition from the Global Majority. And there is another parallel, which is the growth of conservative Christianity in the Global South vs the decline of liberal Christianity in the Global North. (The definition of ‘liberal’ was already ambiguous but here it simply means affirming women and LGBT people in the church to be ‘who they are’ in terms of their relationship and vocation.) The Synod should listen to what the majority of global Anglicans have taught the minority of English Anglicans about marriage.

    There is irony in the rhetorical language that is repeatedly used here when talking of majorities and minorities. The Synod debate and the ongoing conversation has confused me deeply about what I am campaigning for in terms of race and sexuality. Is it truly about the equality of the minority? What do we desire in our campaign? Why do people still assume that the majority voice remains more ‘convincing’ and ‘important’ than the minority voice?

    More fundamentally and radically, why should we always allow the majority vote/decision to override the fundamental value of Christian faith and the basic rights of the minority to equality? (I deliberately chose the term ‘override’ to emphasise the power of the majority!) This question is fundamental because how can any minority groups speak for themselves through the majority decision? The question is also radical because we may need to reconsider how ‘democracy’ is applied and fulfilled in the Christian community if the practice of loving our neighbours who are not part of the majority really is the core of Christian values. (Do Christians love our neighbours because the majority of people say so?) Can LGBT people ever win over the majority vote?

    I have no interest in arguing over the ecclesiology of the Anglican Communion or the definition of Holy Matrimony. But this part of the Synod debate was disturbing. As an ‘acquired’ racial minority in the UK, I was frightened to learn that many Caribbean Christians were ‘invited out’ when they were sitting in their parish church where they assumed that they would receive a warm welcome from their brothers and sisters in Christ.[1] What were the grounds for excluding these Caribbean Christians? It was because the majority of the white British congregation did not feel comfortable about their presence in their churches. There were certainly some clergy and Christians with a conscience who went against the majority and who wanted to create a hospitable environment for these new immigrants. However, there was also a backlash voice (with which we all are familiar) which attempted to hold back the welcoming move—in the name of the disapproval of the ‘majority’.

    Putting these two experiences together and looking at the rhetorical language of the majority-and-minority, it really shows the irony and reinforces my discomfort when I see the broken solidarity between racial and sexual minorities. In our campaigning for equality and justice, can we always rely on what the majority says and the appeal to the majority? How can the Church of England proactively avoid sacrificing sexual minorities on the altar of the majority view in the same way that it excluded the Windrush Generation? Here, now, in 2024, the Church of England continues to hang on and hang back until the day the majority vote for equality arrives—even though this will almost certainly never happen. Once again, we will be badly late—and may even wait forever.

    Note
    [1] As the Church of England’s General Synod has already admitted in Windrush Commitment & Legacy (GS 2156A, 2020): “There are Anglican Christians worshipping in parish churches today whose first experience of the Church of England was turning up at their local parish church and being told by clergy and laity alike varying versions of, ‘The Baptist Church is just down the road.’ Of those who persisted in seeking to worship within the Anglican tradition they had grown up with for generations, some were told they should sit at the back of church, some were even denied Holy Communion. We must acknowledge and lament the fact that this was due to the colour of their skin, their accent, their perceived nationality.”

  • The Long and Complicated History of Church Debates over Sexuality

    by Dr Laura Ramsay, Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Bournemouth University. Her book, Sexuality and the Church of England, 1918–1980, is scheduled for publication in summer 2024.

    Recent debates in General Synod about ‘Living in Love and Faith’ have resoundingly confirmed that the Church of England is racked by deep disagreements over issues of sexuality. It is struggling to find its way towards a resolution that might enable those with opposing perspectives to move forward together. But Anglicans know that these are not new arguments or divisions. The Church has been wrangling with disputes about its approach towards same-sex relationships for many decades. The first clear sign of this was in 1974, when the Synod’s Board for Social Responsibility (BSR) appointed a working party to study the matter, which was chaired by John Yates, the Bishop of Gloucester (1975–91). The working party’s report, Homosexual Relationships: A Contribution to Discussion (1979), also known as the Gloucester report, refused to accept that all people had an “unqualified moral right to sexual self-expression” but cautiously proposed “that there are circumstances in which individuals may justifiably choose to enter into a homosexual relationship with the hope of enjoying a companionship and physical expression of sexual love similar to that which is to be found in marriage”.

    Such claims were thought to be so controversial that the BSR initially delayed publication and only agreed to this on condition that a statement of its own critical observations about the report was included as an appendix. The BSR also forestalled its discussion in Synod by arguing that more time was needed to digest the report and ensure the debate was “Christian, charitable, instructive and informed”.

    Yet, by the time the Gloucester report came before Synod in February 1981, tensions were running high and factions had formed on opposing sides of the debate. Members introduced various amendments and motions in a desperate attempt to force Synod to make a judgment about ‘winners’ and ‘losers’—to either endorse or condemn the Gloucester report’s views on same-sex relationships. Faced with these pressures, Synod decided to sidestep all efforts to force its hand. By a considerable majority, it voted to simply ‘take note’ of the Gloucester report and leave the matter open for further discussion.

    For many on the outside who are looking in at these internal controversies, it appears the Church has largely been chasing its own tail on this issue, and from this perspective it seems reasonable for them to assume that its views on sexuality have always been static and have always lagged behind those of wider society. Indeed, some speakers in recent Synod debates have similarly claimed that Church teaching about sex has always been at odds with culture (and, therefore, they argue that now is also no time for change).

    For a long time, historians agreed with such claims, largely assuming that the Churches had a limited role in the making of modern ideas about sexuality. Influenced by traditional theories about secularisation, most histories of sexuality tended either to ignore the influence of religion (and instead focused on the impact of secular ideas emerging from the fields of science, medicine, and the law), or they portrayed religion as a chief antagonist that fought against the forces of social change. However, such historical assumptions have since been overturned by a new body of scholarship which shows that Christian commentators (and sometimes institutions) actually helped to lead and drive developments in British sexual culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

    My new book, Sexuality and the Church of England, 1918–1980, further enriches our understanding through its original, academic study of the Church’s role in historical processes of sexual permissiveness and religious decline. It provides an archivally rich account of the Church’s institutional grappling with matters of sex, relationships, marriage, birth control, and same-sex attraction across a long and previously underexplored chronology. I tell the story of how, despite intense internal disagreements, for much of the twentieth century the Church acted as a powerful social, cultural, and political force for shaping attitudes towards sex and morality, particularly in the years before the expansion of state welfare.

    Up until the late 1970s, British experts, policymakers, and campaigning groups generally wanted to know the opinions of the Established Church on sexual issues. They took its ideas seriously, and were willing to be guided by its views at least to some extent. In this period, the Church’s views on sex were led by its moral welfare organisations, which were designated as a centre for research, education, and expertise about sexual relationships, both on behalf of the Church and of the nation. These groups were frequently at the forefront of sexual and social changes in Britain—they made proactive moves to influence the attitudes of the Church, the state, and society by popularising new understandings of sex and desire and outlining up-to-date Christian approaches towards responsible, autonomous, sexual citizenship.

    Perhaps less surprisingly, Sexuality and the Church of England, 1918–1980 also uncovers a long and complicated history of Anglican disagreements and difficulties in decision-making about issues of sexuality, leading up to the beginnings of the Church’s contemporary impasse. In doing so, it points towards some of the underlying reasons why these divisions have proved so difficult for successive generations of Anglican thinkers to resolve. Historically speaking, disputes and tensions were built-in to the very nature of Anglican sexual politics. As Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1945–61, put it, “in the Church of England and throughout the Anglican Communion we jealously guard the freedom of people to have their own opinion and express it”.

    For this reason, questions of sexual morality were not regarded as definite issues on which the Church could speak with one voice or formulate an official policy. Instead, the Church sought to function as an agent of mediation and compromise in contentious debates about sexuality. Due to its deep-seated awareness of the intensity of disagreements existing both inside and outside of its membership, the Church consistently found ways to reconcile conflicting viewpoints and build towards a consensus broad enough to unite Anglicans across a range of churchmanship.

    Up until the furore over the Gloucester report, the Church’s historically established technique of mediation had worked well and allowed it to construct compromises and mid-positions on issues of sex and relationships. But, by the late-twentieth century, Anglican viewpoints had polarised and become entrenched. This presented new challenges for the Church, which it struggled to overcome. Previously, the Church’s national legislative assemblies had not been considered an essential forum for the discussion of sexual issues, but now these spaces were transformed into a key site of deliberation and confrontation. This development meant that, while the Church had previously experienced greater room to act flexibly and hold together a range of conflicting perspectives, it was now increasingly pushed towards committing itself to more definite pronouncements about sex and morality.

    By the late-twentieth century, the Church’s former ability to construct mid-positions and accommodate a range of perspectives (even at the cost of producing some quite ambiguous statements about sexuality) was increasingly constrained. Previously, there had been at least an implicit acceptance of the Church’s role as an agent of compromise and mediation, even if the intricacies of Church policymaking were not fully understood by the general public, campaigners, or even some Anglicans, who occasionally wrote to Church leaders requesting greater clarity on matters of Christian sex teaching. For much of the twentieth century, such complaints caused few problems and could usually be assuaged with a brief explanation about the complexity of Church viewpoints. As Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of York (1956–61, later, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1961–74) explained to one correspondent, it was not possible or desirable to “formalise” ecclesiastical support about sexual issues “on which the Church, as such, has not, and cannot have, an official line”.

    Yet, by the late 1970s, with the escalation of internal splits and the rise of a new cultural climate that increasingly demanded more precise and committed approaches towards issues of sexual identity and relationships, Church leaders struggled to present vague, diverse, or undecided Anglican approaches in the ways they had done previously. The situation was further exacerbated by the intense media publicity surrounding the Gloucester report, with internal and external critics applying increasing pressure to settle the conflict by picking just one side of the argument. But this was completely at odds with the Church’s established means of operating by holding opposing views in tension and seeking to avoid further polarisation of attitudes. `

    After the 1981 Synod debate, Church strategy faltered quite dramatically. For some internal critics, the Gloucester report had conceded too much ground to the so-called “propaganda” of gay activists. These commentators criticised the Gloucester report’s re-reading of Scripture and tradition and firmly argued that the Church should not change its sex teaching to suit contemporary mores. Meanwhile, the Church was also increasingly criticised by gay campaigning organisations who had once considered the Church a powerful ally. While these groups had previously looked to secure Church support for their campaigning initiatives, they now hit back by publicly attacking the Gloucester report’s views as “patronising,” “woefully misinformed,” and lacking in “faith, hope and charity”.

    Even though the Church remained committed to its historically established strategies of reconciliation, the intensification of internal splits and skirmishes between moral campaigners and gay rights organisations only served to attract negative publicity, and the Church lost control of its former ability to contribute to national debates about sexuality. In turn, the Church became a target of critics and lobbyists who could no longer comprehend its apparent inability to move forward decisively. With that, the Church’s former means of operating as an agent of compromise and consensus was largely forgotten and its long tradition of thinking flexibly about issues of sexuality (even when this inevitably involved a challenging and painful process of reconciling conflicting perspectives) became lost to history.

  • Some Are More Equal Than Others

    by the Venerable Christine Allsopp, archdeacon emeritus of Northampton, exercising a retirement ministry in the Diocese of Oxford

    As the actual date of the 30th Anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood approaches, I have been going through the jumbled collection of papers, scattered through several file boxes, that relate to the 1990s. In one box I found the texts of the presentations that I had given prior to the 1992 vote in General Synod; presentations given to several parishes, to deanery synod, and to a religious community.

    In them I describe how I became convinced of the rightness of women’s priestly ministry long before I felt a personal call: “The process began when I realised with a shock the similarities between George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ and the Church of England. The unjust position of women in the Church of England is like that of the animals who discover that while all are equal, some are more equal and others!”

    For me, the role of women in the church was a justice issue. So I quoted Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s words to his provincial synod: “The Bible is quite clear that the divine image is constitutive of humanity irrespective of gender. I cannot have struggled against an injustice that penalises people for something they can do nothing about, their race, and then accept with equanimity the gross injustice of penalising others for something they can do nothing about, their gender.”

    I argued that the Church of England had, unlike the Church in South Africa, lost the opportunity to lead the way against discrimination in our own society. Instead of being at the forefront of the fight against discrimination we were limping along behind, with the inevitable accusation that the church was merely following secular society. Nevertheless we could and should have a prophetic role as part of the universal church. Sadly, with some notable exceptions, church leaders often avoid confronting injustice; the prophetic role is inevitably uncomfortable.

    In the months following the vote in General Synod in 1992, I was focused on preparing for my priestly ordination and in moving to a new post. I was hardly aware of the implications of the Act of Synod hurriedly introduced by the House of Bishops to General Synod in 1993 to give more “protection” to those opposed. Yet over the years that followed, its language became subverted in a way not unlike changes in Animal Farm’s Seven Commandments. Wording that had a clear meaning was quietly altered to mean something quite different. “Extended Episcopal Oversight” as exercised by Provincial Episcopal Visitors (Flying Bishops) became “Alternative Episcopal Oversight”; “the integrity of differing beliefs and positions concerning the ordination of women” became “the two integrities”.

    In 2005 I was appointed as an archdeacon and later the same year I was elected to General Synod. I experienced a sense of déjà vu when the same arguments that had been used against the ordination of women as priests were repeated as arguments against their consecrations as bishops. Women were referred to as a problem to be dealt with rather than a gift to be valued. I did not remain on General Synod for the final vote. I am not certain that I could have voted for the Five Guiding Principles that  replaced the Act of Synod, although I can understand why those that did so were weary, and anxious finally to have women as bishops.

    Since then, the language of the Five Guiding Principles has often kept women quiet. All ordinands are required to affirm them before ordination, as if the Declaration of Assent and Oaths to the Bishop and the Sovereign were not enough. The Principles begin by asserting that the Church of England is “fully and unequivocally committed to all orders of ministry being open equally to all, without reference to gender”. All three orders of ministry may be open to us, but there are altars where we are forbidden to preside, posts for which women may not apply. Women continue to be underrepresented at Bishop’s Staff level and underrepresented among leaders of large churches. Nearly ten years after the first woman became a bishop, only seven out of forty-two diocesan bishops are female. While all are equal, some are more equal than others.

    Thirty years on from those first ordinations to the priesthood, what has changed? “Women seem to be getting angrier” observed a bishop to me recently. Anger, or at the very least, frustration, may be understandable reactions to the injustice of a church that still treats a male model of ministry as a norm. Bishops still appoint, and need, Advisors for Women’s Ministry to flag up areas of concern. There are more women in non-stipendiary ministry and fewer women in incumbency roles than men. It is not clear whether the non-stipendiary route is through choice, or whether more accommodation to ensure that roles are possible alongside family responsibilities would encourage more women into stipendiary ministry. How are all women clergy, whether single or married, expected to flourish alongside those who do not accept that we are priests?

    Not all women clergy feel angry or frustrated, and even those that do admit to these feelings can also speak of the great sense of fulfilment that their calling brings to them. Nevertheless, anger can be used productively if it results in challenges to a culture in the Church of England that for too long has avoided dealing with the injustices in the treatment of its women clergy. For we follow the One who challenged the norms of his society in his engagement with women; who was sufficiently angry to challenge the everyday practices in the Temple by overturning tables.

    I am looking forward to attending the Not Equal Yet Conference organised by WATCH (Women and the Church) on 20th April 2024.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Mini-MBA Talent Pipeline Group, Module Seven: Managing Synods

    by Anon.

    Memo

    Following the recent updated modules on marketing and strategy, and then on safeguarding, a number of you have written in to request that we bring forward the module on Managing Synods. Apparently there has been some alarm at recent meetings of General Synod, with reports coming in of hitherto composed people on the podium looking uncomfortable, and some even appearing to look downright shifty. Some of you have also – and we thank you for this – pointed out that the clergy and laity should not be given opportunity to ask difficult questions, raise awkward issues, or otherwise disrupt the smooth flow and seamless webs of meanings being spun from behind those sitting in the front row (bravely facing the firing line).

    At this stage, we judge the mood of General Synod to be no more than a level-3 “disconcerting”, which is well down from the level-6 “ugly train crash” of July 2023. There remains the possibility of a full-on revolt, or perhaps the slow handclap delivered to Prime Minister Blair at the Wembley Arena by the Women’s Institute, almost 25 years ago.

    Were that to happen to the Archbishops, please don’t worry: pre-emptive measures are already in place to restore the appearance of order. Specifically, in the event of a slow handclap at Synod or similar disruptive revolutionary acts of misconduct, you may like to know that both Archbishops would:

    1. leave the podium at that point, and join Synod members in their protest at the appalling conduct of those seated on the podium.
    2. lead Synod, from the floor, facing those responsible seated on the podium, in an act of quiet and silent reflective prayer-protest, and also pin ribbons and messages to any LOUDFence erected.
    3. make it clear that the Archbishops always stood with victims against the powers of oppression, so of course they are standing with those on the floor of Synod who believe that they now represent the dispossessed, and are being robbed of any proper democratic processes.
    4. Immediately issue a press release stating how much sadness and frustration the Archbishops share with the protesters. (NB: we do not quantify what is meant by “how much” in such gestures – enough to make a PR impact on the day and grab some headlines, naturally; but not enough to make any difference in the future, obviously).

    The drama thus concluded, Synod can return to business as usual, with the scripted motions, appropriate redactions, normal censorship and other attention to detail contained in the paper GS 101 (entitled “Ensuring Appropriate Scrutiny at General Synod” – but not a public document available for members to consult).

    It will be apparent to everyone in the Talent Pipeline that the Secretary-General of the General Synod, who is also the Secretary of the Archbishops’ Council, the CEO of Church House, Lambeth Palace and the remainder of the Church of England, cannot, de facto, have a conflict of interest in any matter under discussion. Like the reigning monarch, or perhaps a President for Life in some distant micro-state that once rashly flirted with democracy and other modern innovations such as an independent judiciary, the Secretary-General cannot do anything about the role and position he finds himself in.

    He did not create this system. He must just inhabit the role as humbly as possible. He rules by the Grace of God and the Consent of the People. Alone. But with the backing of Lambeth Palace lawyers and PR officers also around to help, and a Dark-Ops team who work off the grid, and can remove staff in the blink of an eye.

    However, Talent-Pipeline attendees enrolled on the Mini-MBA module are invited to take a step back from General Synod, and assess it as a whole. The take-homes should be obvious, but in case you cannot spot what is hiding in plain sight, we list a few of the lessons to take away. Watch and learn!

    1. The role of the Secretary General. The Secretary-General never speaks at Synod, yet controls everything that goes on. Like a monarch or some reclusive Japanese Emperor, he rules through force of law, silence and conducting all the real business in toto behind the curtains (Ed: ah, a veiled reference to the Wizard of Oz and Dorothy’s dog? Sec. Gen.: Take this as your first warning).
    2. Voting. Remember, democracy is never one-person-one-vote. You might learn that kind of idealism at Primary School, but General Synod is Real World Politics, my friend. On the floor of Synod, the following rules apply:

    a) The purpose of voting is always to get the right result. The right result is the result required before the voting was allowed to happen in the first place.

    b) Voting is tedious, annoying and time-consuming, as we already know what we want to do, so the only question is how to achieve the correct outcome if people still insist on voting.

    c) Some voting is done by clergy/laity/bishops’ houses, and the lawyers decide which, on advice from the Sec. Gen., sitting behind. The lawyers answer to the Sec. Gen. The Sec. Gen. answers to nobody, symbolised by his silence (Ed: You mean his refusal to speak or listen? Sec. Gen.: Second warning, seriously).

    d) If in doubt, call a Tea Break, then 10 minutes later ring the Division Bell very quietly (so as not to interrupt the fellowship over a cuppa).

    e) It is unclear if abstentions count as votes against, don’t count at all, or can be used as votes not counted in favour. The Sec. Gen. will advise the lawyers on what answer to give, depending on the issue up for debate. For example, if 100 people can vote on same-sex blessings, and fifty vote in favour, that is only 50%, so a fail. If 25 people abstain, and 25 vote against, you might think that 2/3 of the votes cast were in favour. But, duh! The ‘ayes’ only got half the votes. If, however, the same voting patterns were repeated for approving new mission communities to replace tiresome parishes, then the mind of Synod is clearly 2/3 in favour, with only 25% unable to make up their mind, and 25% against. Simple.

    f) Unclear? Good. This is why you need the lawyers on the podium, and experts like the Sec. Gen, to safely guide you through such labyrinths. Thank God democracy is in such safe hands (Sec. Gen.: You are now on your final warning. Don’t even think it).

    1. The agenda. Try to be imaginative about how you use Synod time. Remember, the more time you spend on launching initiatives and making presentations, the more it looks like you have a fresh and urgent energy about you, and are someone who is willing to try something new. It also means there is less time to dwell on difficult topics like money, income, statistics, morale, the mental health of clergy, etc – which just gets everyone down. You need to keep away from that sort of stuff, as people might hold you to account.

    Schedule business right at the end of the day, when everyone wants to go home or has already started drifting off. Or, schedule it just before lunch, as people need a loo-break by then. Or better still, put it right at the start of day, as it implies there is nothing to see here, and “there will be much more substantial things for Synod to be discussing later”.

    If you have passed this module, trust me, there won’t be.