ViaMedia

Category: Human Sexuality

  • “Sickened by our own Magnanimity?”:   Good Disagreement, Bad Ecclesiology

    by Prof Helen King, Professor Emerita in Classical Studies at The Open University and member of General Synod

    As Living in Love and Faith moves towards its conclusion, are we heading for a typically Anglican situation in which everyone has to compromise: and nobody gets what they want? How will that feel?

    In the Introduction to a collection of essays she edited in 1998, Act of Synod – Act of Folly?, the late Monica Furlong told of a priest – a woman – who was asked by a Diocesan Director of Ordinands not to lay hands on one of the candidates at an ordination which she was attending. “Couched in terms of Christian charity and sweet reasonableness, this request that she must not touch the candidate was difficult to refuse, yet left a nasty taste behind it. My friend agreed, but says ‘I was sickened by my own magnanimity’”.

    There is indeed something physically sickening about being the one who has to say “Yes of course, that’s fine” when it’s your own gender identity – or your own sexuality – which is being rejected. The ordination of women as priests, and then their consecration as bishops, divided the Church of England. As with current debates about same-sex marriage, the depth and seriousness of the disagreement was acknowledged. As with same-sex marriage, no simple Bible verse could be located to back up women priests or bishops. Instead, the House of Bishops argued that women bishops represent “a proper development in proclaiming afresh in this generation the grace and truth of Christ”.

    Nausea may be positive: a natural part of the beginning of a pregnancy. Maybe the time has come to admit to nausea, while asking whether further waves of it are inevitable as Living in Love and Faith moves into its next phase. Here, as in many other ways, it’s so instructive to look at how the Church of England dealt with disagreement when women were ordained. When Synod passed by the required two-thirds majority the 1992 motion opening the priesthood to women, some male priests took the ‘compensation’ package built into the legislation. That cost the church around £27.5 million: I really can’t see that sort of arrangement happening again. And laity who did not accept women priests? For them, provision was initially made by enabling parishes to pass Resolutions A (women presiding at Holy Communion or giving the absolution) and/or B (women as incumbents, priests-in-charge or team vicars; the ‘headship’ roles). Since 2016, Parochial Church Councils can pass a Resolution placing them under the authority of a bishop who will not ordain women.

    Some potential priests who stayed were worried about having a valid line of ordination; had anybody laying hands on them ever ‘laid hands’ on a woman? (This has a very specific meaning in an episcopal church…) This could be seen as ignoring Article 26 of the Thirty-Nine Articles; the understanding that the unworthiness of the minister does not hinder the efficacy of the sacrament. Or is being a woman the sort of ‘unworthiness’ which is beyond the pale?

    After Synod passed the 1992 motion, the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament brought direct pressure on the Church of England to provide even greater ‘protection’ to opponents as the price tag for its approval. In contrast to the lengthy process of consultation of diocesan and deanery synods which preceded the ordination of women, in less than a year the House of Bishops cooked up the 1993 Act of Synod, adding in something that was not part of the original legislative package, Provincial Episcopal Visitors (PEVs or ‘Flying bishops’). And it was not sent out for wider church consultation.

    The Church of England likes the principle of doing something new by presenting it as something old. So Beverley, a PEV for traditional catholic Anglicans, was imagined as continuing a suffragan see (originally created to help the Archbishop of York) which had lapsed in 1923. The other two, Ebbsfleet and Richborough, were newly created for the PEVs.  Creating sees is possible at any time by Order in Council. In 2015, a further PEV was appointed, this time for conservative evangelicals: the Bishop of Maidstone. His role is presented as an ‘honorary assistant bishop’ in – gasp – 14 dioceses (2019 figures); the other PEVs, too, work over a number of dioceses, thus breaking the link between a bishop and a geographical area which used to be key to our ecclesiology. So much for the bishop as a ‘focus of unity’.

    After the recent resignation of the Bishop of Ebbsfleet – now a priest in the Roman Catholic church – there is a consultation happening about replacing Ebbsfleet with a Bishop of Oswestry (a see created in 1888 but never filled) who would be a suffragan bishop in the Diocese of Lichfield, “rooted in an individual diocese and diocesan college of bishops” rather than floating free.

    For many people in the Church of England, of course, none of this is relevant. They belong to a local church and they have no idea what a PEV is. From my experience, I would add that they also have little idea that same-sex marriages can’t happen in churches, that clergy are not supposed to have same-sex marriages, and that different dioceses operate different policies with regard to the sexuality and relationships of candidates for both licensed lay and ordained ministry.

    Where women’s ordained ministry is concerned, the ecclesiology and the key documents of the Church of England have been treated with disdain, or constructively stretched, according to your point of view. The 2014 Five Guiding Principles from the House of Bishops attempt to hold it all in a dizzying tension: “the Church of England has reached a clear decision on the matter” yet at the same time those who on theological grounds “are unable to receive the ministry of women bishops or priests continue to be within the spectrum of teaching and tradition of the Anglican Communion”. That echoes the 2008 GS1710 Illustrative Draft Code of Practice, on those who refuse the ordained ministry of women as priests and bishops: “Their convictions are within the spectrum of Anglican teaching and tradition and are deserving of respect”.

    Spectrum is an interesting word. Many of us believe that gender and sexuality are also on their own spectrums. So is there a way that, on the current issues of marriage and ordination, we can repurpose those words from GS1710? In a 2018 study guide to the Five Guiding Principles, the Faith and Order Commission stated that “those opposed to the ordination of women should not characterize those in favour as caving in to the fashions of the age, and nor should those in favour stigmatise those opposed as supporters of discrimination and injustice”. Relevant to debates on sexuality, too?

    And from that same study guide:

    It does not require suspending my judgment that some theological views are wrong, or that some views that are wrong may be actively harmful. It does require that I do not take it upon myself to limit that perceived harm by seeking to restrict the participation of those who hold such views in the common life of our church… It may be tempting for the majority to think that, were the minority to leave or disappear, the ‘problem’ posed by their existence would be resolved and all the energy unfortunately required to manage it be liberated for more productive endeavours. It may be tempting for the minority to think that the more they can separate themselves from the majority and insulate themselves from its influence, the more secure their survival will be.

    Can this template from the ordination of women debates be applied to the current debate on human sexuality, or is the nausea – on both sides – just too much to bear?

     

    Further reading:

    Judith Maltby, ‘One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, but Two Integrities?’ in Monica Furlong (ed.), Act of Synod – Act of Folly (SCM Press, 1998)

    Judith Maltby, ‘Gender and Establishment: Parliament, “Erastianism” and the Ordination of Women 1993-2010’ in Mark Chapman, Judith Maltby and William Whyte (eds), The Established Church. Past, Present and Future (Continuum, 2011)

     

     

     

     

  • Living in Love and Faith? Insights from the Church of Scotland

    by Professor Paul Middleton, Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Chester, and a Church of Scotland Minister

    Last month, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland passed legislation to permit its Ministers and Deacons to conduct and solemnise same-sex marriages. The legislation is permissive, and the rights of those Ministers who choose not to conduct same-sex weddings are protected in Church as well as Civil Law. While the Quakers, Scottish Episcopal Church, United Reformed Church and Methodists have already authorised same-sex marriage, and the Church in Wales last year agreed to bless such marriages, the Church of Scotland is now the largest denomination in the UK to do so. How might this move by the National (distinct from ‘Established’) Church in Scotland affect current discussions in the Church of England as it nears the end of the Living in Love and Faith process?

    In common with virtually every church around the world, the Church of Scotland has wrestled with questions of sexuality, and same-sex relationships in particular. Unsurprisingly, the Kirk originally took a strongly negative view, even initially opposing the setting up of the Wolfenden Committee. However, by the late 1980s, opinion became more divided, and some Ministers began offering services of blessings for same-sex couples. It is widely believed that conducting a blessing was the reason the Rev Margaret Forrester, one of the first women to be ordained, was never elected Moderator of the General Assembly.

    Assembly reports through the 1990s and 2000s held conservative and liberal positions on sexuality in tension as the Church declined to either reaffirm a traditionalist position or endorse more revisionist positions. This was typified in 2006 when the Church refused to ban Ministers from conducting same-sex blessings, but also refused to guarantee those who participated in such blessings could not be subject to disciplinary procedures.

    This uneasy truce was shattered in 2009 when a group of traditionalists challenged the decision of Aberdeen Presbytery to sustain the call of the Rev Scott Rennie, who was in a same-sex relationship, to Queen’s Cross Church. While Rennie was by no means the only Church of Scotland Parish Minister in a same-sex relationship, the action against the Presbytery brought the issue into the open, and began one of the most turbulent periods in the Church’s recent history. General Assembly sided with Aberdeen Presbytery, but agreed to set up a special commission to report on the legal and theological issues raised, while imposing a moratorium on ministers, boards, and courts of the church from making any further comment for two years.

    In 2011, the Special Commission offered the Church two trajectories; one affirming a ‘traditionalist’ approach to sexuality and marriage, which would end any future ordination of Ministers in same-sex relationships, the other a ‘revisionist’ path towards explicitly affirming the place of gay Ministers in the Church. Instead of advocating either path, the Commission allowed arguments for the two contrary positions to sit side by side in the report. While debates over sexuality often make claims about what is ‘biblical’ or ‘unbiblical’, in the report both sides of the argument were dominated by the interpretation of Scripture.

    The Church of Scotland holds that Scripture has a non-negotiable place as ‘the supreme rule of faith and life’, but it also fully embraces the insights of Biblical Criticism. Even ‘conservative’ reports from the 1980s and 1990s explicitly recognised that those equally committed to Scripture can reach different conclusions on this and other important issues. The main interpretative division between the two parts of the 2011 report was essentially over the difference biblical criticism makes to contemporary application. In 2011 the revisionist trajectory narrowly prevailed (56%/44%), but in all subsequent divisions confirming this trajectory from 2013 onwards, the vote has been consistently nearer to a 2:1 majority.

    In 2015, Assembly finally passed legislation to allow congregations to call Ministers in same-sex Civil Partnerships and Marriage. It recognised that a significant minority in the Church did not support this move. Their consciences are protected in what has become known as ‘constrained difference’, in which a variety of views and practices are held, respected, and protected within the Church of Scotland.

    What about the Church of England? Decades of inconclusive, aborted reports have not only entrenched already polarised positions, but have resulted in an increasingly intolerable tension between the theoretical ‘official’ position of the Church and the reality on the ground. Issues in Human Sexuality, the ‘official’ Bishops’ teaching statement, dates from 1991 and is an outworking of a conservative 1987 General Synod resolution. It states ‘clergy [as distinct from the laity!] cannot claim the liberty to enter into sexually active homophile [sic!!] relationships.’ However, the fact is that many are. Probably the most bizarre expression of this tension is that while Priests have been permitted to enter into Civil Partnerships since 2013, the Church of England (uniquely) persuaded itself that this was little more than an expression of ‘close friendship’. Unlike the Church of Scotland and the Church in Wales, the Church of England has never really acknowledged the presence of gay Priests, either to explicitly affirm their place in the Church or to enact disciplinary procedures against them. Moreover, in February’s General Synod, the Bishop of London effectively side-lined Issues by suggesting it was never designed to have an official place in the ordination process. A Private Members’ Motion from Rev Mae Christie has recently been tabled, asking ‘That this Synod request that the House of Bishops remove any requirements relating to Issues in Human Sexuality from the Vocations (Shared Discernment) Process.’

    The Church of England already lives with a tense and unacknowledged ‘constrained difference’. Living and Love and Faith appears to be preparing the ground for at least beginning the journey to officially recognising that there is theological and biblical integrity in a range of positions. For what it is worth, it seems to me that agreeing to live with constrained difference on sexuality is far simpler than the Church’s current compromise on women Bishops, since it is effectively recognising what is already the case.

  • Bishops Speaking Out: So Very Right and So Very Wrong

    by the Revd Canon Rosie Harper, Chaplain to the Bishop of Buckingham, former Member of General Synod and Trustee of the Ozanne Foundation


    This is my thoughtful quote of the week: ‘The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget – that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out but who it lets in.’ So said the wonderful Rachel Held Evans. Her prophetic voice did exactly that. It drew people in. Oh my, do we miss her!

    It’s easy to jump to a pious interpretation of this radical inclusivity of the gospel, but the truth is more incarnational than sacramental. Jesus includes real embodied people, not their notional ‘souls’ (whatever you imagine a disembodied soul might actually be!). Because there are prostitutes and beggars, refugees and tax collectors in Jesus’ life we can’t avoid the message our faith is giving us. That message, because it is embodied, can’t help but be political.

    When the policy of exporting refugees to Rwanda was first mooted, I thought it was a joke. It seemed so off the scale of normal morality that it couldn’t be true. More than failing to welcome the stranger amongst us, a code which most world religions hold dear, the proposal was to export them. It looks like a government-sponsored form of human trafficking. People who are in the most desperate need being sent against their will to a country they don’t want to go to. A country which for many will prove dangerous.

    As a country we badly need more people willing and able to work. The NHS, care services, farms, haulage, airports are all struggling to deliver. We need people, but not, it seems, refugee types of people. The layers of prejudice are astounding.

    All this stirred the hearts and consciences of our Archbishops and Bishops. They wrote a stiff letter which appeared in The Times on June 14th. I’m tempted to say: ‘What took you so long?’ Even Prince Charles pronounced before them. But yes, it was a good and helpful intervention, and yes, for some, this dose of gospel truth was offensive.

    As I write, we have seen a plane loaded with a mere handful of men stopped on the tarmac by the European Court of Human Rights. They are now saying it might be a year before another flight is attempted. The government is managing not only to be cruel and immoral but also ludicrous!

    I am left with a question: a question about this united action of the bishops. They understood that you don’t exclude people, you welcome them, and they knew that this was at the heart of the gospel. They were prepared to tolerate the consequent offence that some felt because they deeply believed that what they were saying was right.

    Why then can they do the right thing at a national level, but not within their own institution? If you are a gay priest and you get married you are excluded from any further preferment. If you are gay and married and feel the call of God to ordination you are excluded before you even get on to the first step. Many are put into the intolerable position of being asked to choose between the call of God on their lives and the person they love most deeply. Somehow the Church of England thought it was OK to embark on yet another cycle of study and discussion about the theological rationale for excluding people simply for being the people God made them to be.

    I know some folk defend Living in Love and Faith, but frankly it stinks. It stinks because it only exists because we have accepted the premise that discussing other people’s sexuality in order to determine whether they can be fully included is a legitimate thing to do. It is not. It is abusive and simply repeats the abuse that the church has perpetrated over the decades.

    Only this time it is worse.

    Worse because we’d reached a point where it looked as if change might happen, but maybe it never will. Worse because privately many and possibly the majority of bishops know what is the right, faithful, gospel-led thing to do, but remain silent. Worse because the way we exclude people is the primary cause for the collapse of numbers. Not the language we use or the music we play, but the way the Church spits out the people we love.

    I could have written the same article about excluding black people, or disabled people, or people with mental illness, or alas survivors of abuse. There is a long list because in so many areas we still get our sense of identity by who we keep out of the club. We know it’s not right, but somehow we can’t help it!

    Dear Bishops, why keep the good ‘you’ hidden? Why follow the crowd? You could have a rush of blood to the head and decide to tell one another what you really believe, and acknowledge that we have a huge gospel imperative to stop excluding anyone. That’s not only at a national level, but within the very heart of our church. In this past week you have rather magnificently conquered your fear of causing offence, for the sake of the gospel. You are still standing. It was OK. You can do it again. Take a long hard look at who is being excluded from our church and resolve to stop doing it…..for the sake of the gospel.

  • Arguing with a Madman? Cranks, Trolls, Consistency, and ‘Come off it’

    by Sophie Grace Chappell, Professor of Philosophy at The Open University. Her two most recent books are Songs For Winter Rain, a poetry collection, and Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience.

    (in view of the House of Bishops apparently pushing on with yet another working party on trans people and gender identity, here is a further extract from Professor Chappell’s forthcoming book, Trans Figured; original posting here)

    This no-debate demand is often misunderstood as a refusal to engage in philosophical argument. That is a misunderstanding, and the reasons why it is a misunderstanding go rather deep. G.K.Chesterton says this (Orthodoxy p.32 (New York: Lane, 1909)):

    If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by things that go with good judgement. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by clarity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

    There is a scene in the fine 2016 film Denial that makes a rather similar point to Chesterton’s. Deborah Lipstadt and her lawyers are constructing their defence against a libel action brought by the Holocaust denier David Irving. To show, against Irving, that there was (alas) nothing fake about the Nazis’ mass murders in 1941-1945, Lipstadt wants to go into the witness box herself, and she wants Holocaust survivors to testify too.

    Her lawyers dissuade her. It is not that she and the survivors do not have a convincing story, and one that any decent interlocutor would be ashamed and embarrassed to deny, dispute, or question. The point is that Irving will not be convinced—nor ashamed, nor embarrassed—to carry on with an aggressive and sceptical cross-examination of old-age pensioners who have lived out the rest of their lives in the shadow of the hellish nightmare of Auschwitz. In Wittgenstein’s famous phrase, “See how much stage-setting” must already be in place before a “rational debate” can even begin. It is very difficult to discuss proofs of the reality of the Holocaust with people who will not accept the same standards of proof as any reasonable person accepts in any other debate, and who are not ashamed to browbeat, jeer, and heckle old and frail survivors of the worst genocide in human history.

    Just this lack of epistemic responsibility—and of shame—is all too evident in all too many people who come at transgender people and their allies waving the much-misused banner of “free and open debate”; as for example when those campaigners complain that they themselves are being “silenced” by harassment and mockery and intimidation, but are entirely happy to harass and mock and intimidate anyone who tries even to run a conference that they don’t like the look of; or when their immediate response to the harrowing statistics for transgender suicide and transgender assault is not to express sympathy and solidarity, but to cast doubt on the reliability of those statistics; or as when supposedly respectable journalists and academics are perfectly happy to promulgate bizarre myths about “transgenderism being bankrolled by Jewish billionaires”—myths that strikingly close the gap between transphobia and anti-semitism, and sometimes between both of those and conspiracy theories like Q-Anon as well.

    Such claims get us into the territory of what Rai Gaita calls “the crank”:

    “Cranks” is an interesting word… it is not just a term of abuse. It refers to someone who has so radically lost his capacity for judgement that his views are not even worth considering. Like those who are severely mentally ill, the most interesting thing about cranks—about what makes someone a crank—does not show itself when they declaim what they believe. It does so when they do not rule certain things out of consideration. They suffer from something far more serious than ignorance. Knowledge and understanding—and therefore, all serious radical critique—depend upon the exercise of sound judgement about what counts as evidence, about when authorities can be relied upon, when they are justifiably discredited, and so on… Reason is not what determines what it is to be “in touch with reality”. Rather, being in touch with reality is a condition for the sober exercise of those critical concepts which mark our sense of what it is to think well or badly, concepts whose proper application is what we call the exercise of “reason”.[1]

    Among other things, Gaita is writing here about how we should do philosophy—a question on which I have myself learned a great deal from him. I am almost echoing Gaita when I say that I think philosophy should not be a bureaucratic pigeonhole within a university’s administrative structure, kept “pure” of “non-philosophical” material by vigilant gatekeeping (and outgrouping). Rather philosophy should be a loose-bordered range of inquiries that are kept rigorous, maybe even a little bit austere, by the rather different but very much complementary requirements of two things: first of logic, and secondly of a grown-up, and open-minded, and kind, and humane, and humorous, and inquisitive, and un-fanatical, and tolerant, and mature—and sensible—sensibility.

    So there are two kinds of quality-controlling challenge in particular that philosophers should push each other hard with. One is “That is logically inconsistent”, the other is “Come off it”. In the academy today, partly because of the bureaucratic pressure to mark research territory, we hear plenty about inconsistency, but rather less about “Come off it”. In an age of perversely brilliant research programmes, for example about whether we’re living in a computer simulation—and also, in an age of conspiracy theories, many of which are, among other things, transphobic—“Come off it” is an important challenge too.

    “Come off it” matters both within and beyond philosophy. In both cases, another way to put it is, quite often, “Do not feed the trolls.” And that is, unfortunately, something we very often have good reason to say in the case of “debates” about transgender.

     

    [1] Gaita, A Common Humanity pp.160, 165-6. Gaita too quotes Chesterton. For my review of Gaita’s fine book, see Mind 2002, 411-413.

  • Pageants, Progress & People – The End of an Era?

    by Jayne Ozanne, Founder of ViaMedia, Chair of the Ban Conversion Therapy Coalition and Member of General Synod

    On Sunday I shall be incredibly “proud” (in the best LGBT+ tradition of the word) to take part in the Queen’s Jubilee Pageant as part of a small group of “contemporary” LGBT+ figures who have been asked to carry a giant rainbow flag in the parade.  We will feature in the 1970s section of the pageant, a decade chosen in order to honour those who took part in the first ever Pride March 50 years ago – some of whom will also be taking part on Sunday.

    Not all LGBT+ people who were approached wanted to participate in this event – most notably my friend Peter Tatchell, who has made his views very clear in a recent article for The Guardian.

    Whilst I respect Peter’s views, I must admit I am saddened that he is not taking part because this People’s Pageant (as it is being called by the organisers) marks one particular thing that has underscored the seven decades of Her Majesty The Queen’s reign.  It is the one thing that we cannot take for granted, but which the British Public have I believe embraced.  It can be summarised in one simple word: Progress.

    We are not where we were 50 years ago, thank God.

    As we walk down Whitehall, through Admiralty Arch and up the long red road that leads to the Palace, we will be met by tens of thousands of people who will, I anticipate, be cheering us and waving us on our way.  That would have been utterly inconceivable 50 years ago – indeed even arguably 25 years ago, when we were still in the dark days of Section 28.  But today the majority of the British public are keen to celebrate diversity and embrace difference.  Indeed, many are far more attuned to the pain that discrimination has caused for most now know a friend, a family member, a neighbour or a workmate whose life has been scarred by prejudice.  To borrow a phrase from the late President Nelson Mandela, it has been ‘a long walk to freedom’ and I for one believe we should stand tall, mark it and celebrate it.  For all freedoms are hard won and none are totally secure, as we are seeing with the advancement of far-right politics that is sweeping through the Western world.

    Which leads to a question that I have been asking myself over the past few days – what, I wonder, would the crowd’s reaction be if those of us holding this enormous rainbow flag were followed directly behind by the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury?

    Interestingly, I seem to have got my answer as I heard the crowd outside St Paul’s Cathedral react to the arrival of the Prime Minister at the Service of Thanksgiving.  In case you are unaware, many booed.  It was quite an audible and a seemingly unprompted reaction. Crowds, as we know, can react in three ways – they can cheer, they can remain silent, or they can boo.  The latter is rare and is usually only invoked when people want to show their profound disapproval of a situation they believe is deeply wrong.

    I do not need to rehearse why the public might currently want to boo the Prime Minister given the ongoing Party-gate saga.  However, were he perhaps to be positioned behind us in the pageant, I am convinced that the crowd’s reaction would be doubly vociferous – given his recent attempt to backtrack, without explanation (or indeed apology) on his one primary commitment to the LGBT+ community, that of promising to ban “conversion therapy”.  Whilst it may have found its way back into the Queen’s Speech last month, this was only partly and grudgingly so – as we sadly have now had confirmed, those who most need the ban are to be excluded from it.  It makes no sense at all and is one of the main reasons behind the fact that the UK have plummeted in its ranking on international LGBT+ rights.

    So, what if we were to be followed by the Archbishop of Canterbury?

    Well, quite apart from the fact that many would, I think, be unaware who this man in a colourful cape and a pointy hat might be, those who do recognise him would I think fall silent for – let’s be honest – the Church of England remains very publicly opposed to LGBT+ people.  Yes of course there are wonderful examples of parish churches trying to make us welcome – but many of the British public now know someone who has been rejected from having their wedding in church, and others are aware of the rejection their friends have faced when coming out to Christian relatives and friends.  Silence might, in fact, be too optimistic – I fear that it would only take a few to start being vocal (as they were with the Prime Minister) and the rest would probably follow suit.

    So why am I labouring this point?

    Because whilst it is clear that Britain has made significant progress over the past 70 years, in truth these institutions and administrations that are there to serve the people have yet to catch up.  Unless they do so soon, they will I believe seriously risk undermining the trust people have in them and as a result risk their very future.

    Am I the only one, I wonder, who senses that we are coming to the end of an era?  For all that Buckingham Palace might want us to start to embrace “succession planning” I can’t help thinking that significant changes lie ahead in the not too distant future – particularly for the established Church.  No institution has an indubitable right to exist, and the Church of England is no exception.  Despite all the church planting and mission focused plans we might have, I just can’t see institutional religion being something the British Public are going to be keen to embrace in the years ahead – certainly not if it remains a place of discrimination, prejudice and pain for those who so many of the public care about.

    Is that progress?

    Time alone will tell.

     

  • Hanging in Love and Faith

    Revd Canon Dr Judith Maltby is Chaplain, Fellow and Dean of Welfare of Corpus Christi College, Reader in Church History in the University of Oxford, and a member of the General Synod of the Church of England.

    At the beginning of May, Mark Chapman wrote a piece for this blog about how theological understandings of natural law have shaped the church’s view of sexuality far more than readings of biblical texts and provided valuable historical context as to why that is significant to our present debates. Like Mark, I served on the History Work Stream of Living in Love and Faith and agree with his assessment that, in the end, the discipline of history has largely been marginalized from the LLF final material. There is much that is good about LLF, but there remains an underlying assumption concerning the continuity of Christian belief about human sexuality until, well, this thing called Modernity happened and disrupted the common doctrinal framework. As Helen King, another colleague from that History Work Stream commented on the Shared Conversations process which preceded LLF, “it was clear that history only began in the 1960s”.

    The History Work Stream was a diverse group in terms of our views, but we all agreed historical contexts matter and set ourselves an initial task of writing short papers exploring case studies of when “the church changed its mind” about something “big”. As a historian of the English Long Reformation, I chose clerical marriage. What might surprise some readers is that, after the Reformation, church and state continued to maintain that celibacy was the “ideal” state for the clergy. Clerical marriage was not a positive good, but pragmatic because some clergy just couldn’t keep their cassocks on; it was better to let them marry in order to regulate their sexual urges. To many Tudors, clergy marriage, as it said now of same sex partnerships, fell short of the “ideal”.  (You can find my fuller argument on the LLF Hub.)

    Let’s take another case – surely one of greater moral consequence than marriage: is it moral for the state, after a judicial process, to take a life? We don’t know how this question would break down among current members of the General Synod, but anyone upholding “traditional Christian teaching” would, by that reasoning, favour its re-introduction in the UK. Christian thinkers as diverse as St Paul, Aquinas and Calvin can be enlisted in its defence. Article 37 of the 39 Articles of the Church of England (1563), to which all ordained ministers of the Established Church assent, states that “the Laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences”. Anglicans were not alone. In 1566 the Council of Trent of the Roman Catholic Church reaffirmed the morality of the death penalty: “the just use of this power [capital punishment], far from involving the crime of murder, is an act of paramount obedience to Commandment which prohibits murder”.  In the hothouse of sixteenth-century Europe, on this issue at least, there was consensus between the mega-churches, although even then there were voices of dissent amongst radical Protestants, which only united Roman Catholics and mainstream Protestants in persecuting them. Looking back, it is a pretty uncomfortable example of ecumenical convergence.

    In the twentieth century, a substantial sea change for Anglicans and other Christians occurred. In 1958, the General Convention of the American Episcopal Church passed a resolution urging its abolition – a moral question that is still dreadfully live for Episcopalians over sixty years later. Three decades later the Anglican Communion’s Lambeth Conference also voted for abolition; given the number of countries in the world which still retain capital punishment, a Lambeth Conference might want to revisit the question. In 1995, John Paul II hedged his bets and rather than declaring an absolute ban argued that execution should only be used “in cases of absolute necessity”, maintaining (optimistically) that because of the progress in penal systems, “such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent”. However, in 2018, Pope Francis pronounced an absolute prohibition on capital punishment as a violation of the dignity of the human person in Catholic teaching, putting him at odds with countries such as the US, China, and Nigeria as well as with laity and clergy of his own church.

    In Britain, as with the abolition of the trade in human beings, non-conformist Christians led the charge against hanging. But even the bishops of the Established Church could be converted and play a part via their seats in the House of Lords. In 1948, only one bishop, George Bell of Chichester, clearly supported abolition in the Lords; in 1956 eight bishops voted for suspension and one against.  In the 1960s, nineteen bishops voted for abolition and only one against. How do we account for this episcopal “change of mind” on such a “big” moral question? In his essay “God and the Gallows” (2004), the distinguished historian Hugh McLeod suggested that the twentieth century saw a move away from a theology of salvation based on understanding the cross as punishment for sin to an incarnational emphasis on God becoming human in Christ. It strengthened the view that all human life was sacred, and by the 1960s this soteriology was reflected on the episcopal bench. In other words, punishment was no longer key to the narrative of human salvation. McLeod also argues that British Christians who considered all parts of the Bible ‘equally authoritative’ and took a literalist approach displayed the strongest support for the death penalty prior to its abolition in 1965.

    2025 will be only the sixtieth anniversary of the abolition of capital punishment in Britain – less than a lifetime ago.  It was a momentous moral achievement in which the leaders of the Church of England, by and large, followed from behind rather than led from the front.  Sound familiar?

  • ‘Resource Churches’: When Planting Becomes Colonialism

    by the Revd Robert Thompson, Vicar St Mary’s, Kilburn & St James’, West Hampstead; host of Open Table, London; member of General Synod

    Robert Thompson

    For those of us who come from the island of Ireland, the language of plants and planting, on the face of it a lovely horticultural metaphor, has a morally problematic dark side. The plantation of Ulster, and of other parts of Ireland, was a colonial endeavour. It involved the resettlement of my own English and Scottish ancestors and was characterised by, at the least, the appropriation of the land of the Irish, and at worst a violent hostility towards them that too often resulted in death. The present, continuing, sectarian divisions of the north of Ireland are a direct result of this form of planting.

    As the Vicar of a parish which has a UKME/GMH majority congregation, I have also become acutely aware of how this same rhetoric of planting was operative in the colonisation of Caribbean islands. Here, much more problematically, most of the indigenous peoples were either murdered or died of imported European diseases. The combination of both these resulted in what can only be described as genocide. Here too the land was parcelled out to the incoming settlers as large ‘plantations’ but, worse than in Ireland, the human labour for these estates came from Africa in chains on slave ships. People made in God’s image were reduced by the people of Christian nations, including the church and missionary agencies, to capital and commodity, to be owned, bought, sold and killed at whim. The history of colonialism also has on-going consequences in the global distribution of wealth and racism.

    In the contemporary Church, we have come to use the horticultural imagery of planting, and to practise it, without much critical reflection either on the language itself or on its practice. As the panacea for our falling numbers we are now are wedded to a ‘mixed ecology’ of church, of which planting forms a major part, as the basis of our future mission. So-called ‘Resource Churches’ are a major strand of this mixed ecology. But many of us have come to the lived realisation that here, too, the seemingly benign language that oozes notions of practical support is not the reality on the ground.

    It was to unmask this contradiction that I recently tweeted:

    “Resource Churches” what a misnomer! “And so Jesus told them a parable: Vicar alone on housing estate parish writes to neighbouring Resource Church, with 13 full time staff, 4 being clergy, 5 times over a year to ask for help with accounts & position of treasurer. No reply….Bishop calls housing estate vicar this week to say Resource Church Vicar would like to ‘church plant’ into housing estate parish & church building. Housing estate Vicar says to bishop “You can tell Resource Church Vicar to go f**k themselves.” Let them with ears to hear, hear!”

    I then further retweeted the original post by saying:

    And how many Resource Churches have a woman, UKME/GMH or LGBTQIA+ person or someone living with a disability or a chronic health condition as Vicar? Of initial 19 in @dioceseoflondon only 1 has a UKME Vicar, 1 now (but not originally) has a woman & as for the other E&D markers…

    My purpose in these posts was to problematise the naïve notion that a ‘mixed ecology’ church is not already a ‘mixed ecclesiology church’ in which we have created a form of neo-liberal, competitive capitalism as the precarious foundation (built on sand) of our ‘common’ life together. I wanted to indicate that, just as in our colonial history, the lived effects of so-called church planting and resource churches are based on a binary opposition of some forms of church to others. Just as in the plantations of Ireland and the Caribbean, this ‘othering’ has deathly consequences for those who are forcibly, without any real consultation and with the blunt instrument of a Bishop’s Mission Order, resettled or displaced.

    The responses from a myriad of clergy and laity to my social media posts ‘parabalising’ the effects of ecclesial planting and resourcing show that these are experienced by many of us in our day to day ministry as a form of colonialism. This colonialism is leading to the breakdown of what has been established ecclesiology of the Church of England as well as trust between us.

    Don’t get me wrong! I am not anti-evangelism, or anti-church planting, so long as they use models of partnership ‘with’ and are contextually intelligent. I am not anti-New Worshipping Communities or anti-Fresh Expressions, or anything else that helps in the living out of the gospel of Jesus Christ and Christ’s proclamation and embodiment of the justice and peace of God’s Reign. But what I, and many, are increasingly deeply concerned about is the ways in which this now happens in parallel and deeply sectarian tracks, in competition not only with parishes, but with other emerging expressions of church. This has created situations in which some clergy and people are completely under-resourced, whilst others have a cup that overflows. As one person on a thread said, these are not ‘Resource Churches’ but ‘Resourced Churches’ pumped and primed with money from the Strategic Development Fund whilst parishes are expected to give, give, give to the diocese with little in return.

    I make this critique not so much as the ‘liberal Catholic’ that many might label me, but as a person formed in conservative and charismatic evangelicalism. I hold, within myself and in my own faith development, the tension of the unity of the church. Biblically, therefore, for me, what is most blatantly contrary to the teaching of Christ and that of Paul are the ways in which church planting and resourcing are pretty well always practised within sectarian silos, leading to economic injustices within the church, and overwork, mental health challenges and burn-out for many.

    The effect of the Save the Parish movement and the election of many of who support it to General Synod has rather focussed this debate. The disillusionment and anger of the many clergy who contacted me indicates that what happened in Winchester could potentially happen in very many dioceses very soon.  To save us from such a breakdown on a national scale, it is time for the present colonialist model of planting and resourcing to stop. It should be replaced by biblical economic fairness. As another contributor to a thread said:

    a modest distribution of SDF funds amongst a single deanery rather than a single ‘resource’ church could revolutionise each church’s potential for mission, and let’s not lose sight of the most important thing: ensure they are solvent. A comparatively minor cash injection would enable struggling churches to renovate, complete minor re-ordering, sort out any problems with the ‘show’ and make money. Which is what we all serve, after all.

    When the rich get rich and the poor get poorer, we are called to practice Jubilee.

     

  • Leading, Following, or Forgetting? The Church and the World

    by Felicity Cooke, a member of General Synod and a trustee of WATCH. She writes here in a personal capacity.

    The Church approaches issues of equality, diversity and inclusion within the cultural and social context of secular society, where law and regulation prescribe a framework for human behaviour, however faulty that behaviour may be. For the Church, there is the additional dimension of theology and scriptural teaching, and principles which may seem clear in a societal context become more complex once differing theological beliefs come into play. There was a time when churches argued that slavery was justified on the basis of scriptural interpretation. In time this was seen to be mistaken and Christians came to believe that slavery was wrong. Slavery still exists but the Church no longer teaches that it is justified; instead, it takes part in the fight to end it. This also applies to racial injustice and race discrimination, in part legacies of slavery: the Church has challenged itself to right these wrongs, on theological grounds.

    So far, so consistent: movements in secular society have been mirrored in the Church, and sometimes even – as Mark Chapman showed – led by the Church. But in the 21st century we are seeing scripture called upon to maintain what secular society has come to recognise as discrimination and injustice, in relation both to the position and treatment of women, and the status and treatment of LGBTQ+ people in the Church. In both cases, the accommodation given to those who do not accept the ordained ministry of women is defended on theological grounds, as is different treatment of LGBT+ people, with some groups within the Church making a virtue of rejecting secular progress towards inclusion, instead presenting themselves proudly as ‘counter-cultural’.

    Currently, both racial justice and sex and sexuality injustice are being supported from the Bible. Of course there are no easy answers to this paradox, and meanwhile the different views easily become entrenched, and immoveable. The outcomes for both women and LGBTQ+ people are painful and detrimental.

    The Church has different ways of attempting to mitigate these differences. The 2014 Declaration on the Ministry of Bishops and Priests (GS 1076) introduced the ‘Five Guiding Principles’. These were devised prayerfully by a group holding a range of views on the ordained ministry of women and were intended both to confirm that the ‘Church of England is fully and unequivocally committed to all orders of ministry being open equally to all, without reference to gender, and holds that those whom it has duly ordained and appointed to office are the true and lawful holders of the office which they occupy and thus deserve due respect and canonical obedience’ (Guiding Principle 1): and,  at the same time, to affirm those who could not accept the ordained ministry of women. Guiding Principle 5 went on to make ‘pastoral and sacramental provision’ for this minority. The aim? To maintain ‘the highest possible degree of communion’ and to contribute to ‘mutual flourishing’ in the Church.

    In similar vein, the LLF exercise was accompanied by the formation of the ‘Pastoral Principles’, which set out ‘how the Church of England can live well together within the parameters of its current position on marriage and the different deeply held convictions that individuals and churches hold on these matters.’ Church members are encouraged to take a course on how to put the principles into practice, and do better at understanding other points of view, and belief.

    We have Guiding Principles, and Pastoral Principles, and in case these do not work as we hope they will (and they do not), then we are constantly enjoined at General Synod to find better ways to ‘disagree well’. Most recently, General Synod was introduced to the ‘Difference’ course, ‘a course that explores what it means to follow Jesus in a complex and divided world, seeing transformation through everyday encounters.’ The intention is for participants to find ways, as we hear God’s call, to cross divides, navigate disagreement, practise forgiveness and risk hope.

    But I have a question. Do these principles, guidance and courses help those who suffer real pain (and worse) as a consequence of the beliefs and behaviour of those who disagree about their lives and how they live them, about their calling and their vocation? If we look at those original Five Guiding Principles then the answer to that must be, for the most part, no. Women in both lay and ordained ministry continue to experience exclusions, discrimination and sexist behaviour. The LLF process, for which the Pastoral Principles were written, is yet to be completed, but there is evidence that for some positions have calcified, while others refuse even to engage with the resources.

    Are we to be left simply with the idea that we can ‘disagree well’ when people continue to suffer the consequences of disagreement? Is this the best we can do? If we embrace beliefs and behaviour in the Church which are rightly condemned in the secular world, what does that mean for anyone whose face (or body) does not fit with the white, male, cis-het, non-disabled norm? If the Church is prepared to accommodate what in the secular world is clear discrimination, and if being ‘counter-cultural’ actually creates a huge gulf between those who come to church, and those who do not, and between those who in the church who are fully inclusive and those who actively exclude others, then we have only ourselves to blame for falling numbers and incredulity expressed at what it apparently means to be a Christian.

    Using biblical teaching both to justify the fight against racism and the right to discriminate between women and men, LGBT+ and straight makes no sense either to the ordinary person in the pew or to the ordinary person in the street. The Church is out of step, and all the principles and exhortations to disagree well will not bring us to be the fully inclusive, loving, compassionate church which Christ longs for us to be.

     

  • It’s Not Just About the Bible

    by Mark Chapman, Professor of the History of Modern Theology at the University of Oxford and Vice-Principal of Ripon College, Cuddesdon. Mark is currently writing a book on the history of the Church of England and homosexuality.

    When the LLF process was announced, four ‘working groups’ were set up, looking at the Bible, theology, history and the social and biological sciences. Looking at the LLF book now, though, it’s striking just how little history it contains. We worked hard during the long drawn-out process to produce some solid resources, but these were scarcely used. At the first or second meeting our convening bishop – not himself a historian and now retired – asked us if we would like to disclose our views about same-sex marriage. We politely refused. Most historians, perhaps rather naively, still like to believe in something like objective truth. We all got on very well and left others to have their fights.

    And it was the biblical group that seemed to be most inclined towards belligerence. Of course, good Anglicans will want to see the Bible as containing all things necessary to salvation through faith in Jesus Christ but that says nothing about how to use the Bible in ethical debate. As a historian, I was rather keen to point out to people who were wound up about the few passages of scripture apparently outlawing male sexual activity that, aside from a few general principles about love, the Bible was hardly ever used by Anglicans in discussions about sexual morality until the 1970s.

    Before then, sexual ethics was all about natural law. The arguments were very simple: the natural order of the universe was for there to be men and women. Their sexual organs fitted together and every other form of sexual activity was therefore disordered. Furthermore, the point of sex was to procreate, which required the institution of marriage, which for most of history was a set of financial transactions between families rather than anything particularly Christian.

    The problem with natural law, however, is that it changes as the understanding of nature changes. As soon as there is a recognition that some people are naturally attracted to people of the same sex, what the early sexologists called ‘inversion’, then the whole natural law defence comes tumbling down. And by the 1940s a substantial number of people accepted this – even in the church. As a young ordinand wrote in a letter to the journal Theology in 1952:

    Is homosexual concubinage to be treated purely and simply as an unio illicita like fornication and those who practise it to be judged as ‘living in sin’ and to be deprived of the sacraments of the Church? If so, what are we to say to those who profess to be congenitally homosexual?

    This letter led directly to the commissioning of work from the Church’s Moral Welfare Council on the ‘problem of homosexuality’. The report clearly identifies homosexuality as a natural condition, meaning that it was wrong to punish people for ‘doing what comes naturally’. Homosexuality could not be cured like some sort of physical disease.

    This work led to the Church of England being the principal agent behind the momentum that led to the Wolfenden Report and the subsequent decriminalization. Writing in 1970, one commentator observed:

    there would be truth – especially political truth – in the claim that the established Church is the putative father of ‘the permissive society’.

    Similarly, Peter Wildeblood, the Daily Mail journalist jailed in 1954 for committing acts of indecency could write:

    I had always thought of the Church as the last stronghold of prejudice and had never found an occasion for praising it for its courage in controversial matters; yet here, from Church House, came an attack on the law which was as broad-minded, clear-headed and brilliantly argued as one could wish.

    That said, in the 1950s the Church expressed no desire to adapt its own teachings: ‘Homosexual acts are sins against God, whether or not they are crimes against the State’. The argument was again based on the ‘unnatural use of non-complementary organs within a relationship which is not that of a man and woman’. Christian ‘inverts’ should consequently seek to ‘accept their condition, and by seeking to sublimate their sexual lives in socially useful ways achieve personal fulfilment’. That, of course, is no surprise for the early 1950s, but celibacy and sublimation for all now seem both ludicrous and potentially dangerous.

    And that’s presumably why, from the 1970s, people started replacing a discredited natural law theory with the even flimsier method of resorting to proof texting Scriptural passages ripped out of context. It is clear that the Church was way ahead of much of the wider society in the 1950s and 60s. But it then stalled and forgot what Kenneth Ingram, one of its more forward-thinking authors wrote in 1940, as he envisaged Sex Morality Tomorrow. His words even seem remarkably biblical:

    the love-motive is the only legitimate basis on which a positive sexual morality is likely to be built. Wherever there is love, wherever the desire is genuinely mutual, there can be no immorality in sex. … Love is the test of sexual morality. Sex divorced from love, whether it occurs in a union which is officially designated as lawful marriage or not, belongs to an altogether lower level.

     

  • To Love and to Cherish… According to our Beliefs and Lifestyles

    by Stephanie Pywell, Professor of Law and Social Justice at The Open University Law School

    The last 20 years have seen a very significant increase in the number of couples who opt to have celebrant-led wedding-style ceremonies that have no legal effect. This post outlines some of the findings from my empirical research into weddings and related ceremonies, including evidence that traditional forms of wedding ceremony no longer meet couples’ needs.

    The main statute governing weddings in England and Wales is the Marriage Act 1949, which states that marriages must be solemnised in one of five ways: in Anglican churches or registered places of worship for all other religions, according to Jewish or Quaker usages, or on civil premises (register offices or, since 1995, ‘approved premises’). This gives rise to a religious/secular dichotomy: officiants at weddings on religious premises are likely to follow a specified liturgy or form, while Superintendent Registrars conducting ceremonies on civil premises may not include any material that is ‘religious in nature’. Leaving aside the fact that my 2017 survey of registration officers found that there is no consensus as to what ‘religious in nature’ means, there is no obviously appropriate form of wedding ceremony for couples whose religious or other beliefs do not coincide.

    And, of course, there are some couples who cannot, for a range of reasons, marry in a religious ceremony that reflects their faith. Legislation expressly prohibits the Church of England and the Church in Wales from conducting same-sex weddings, and other religious groups must opt into, rather than out of, solemnising marriages for such couples. Similarly, some religious groups’ officiants might decline to marry people who are divorced or transgender. For many couples, therefore, a religious wedding ceremony is unavailable.

    These gaps in provision are, increasingly, being filled by ‘wedding celebrants’, who conduct what the Court of Appeal has termed ‘non-qualifying ceremonies’. Of the 287 respondents to my 2020 survey of independent wedding celebrants, which was supported by the Wedding Celebrancy Commission, two had started to practise in 2003, with single-figure numbers starting each year until 2011, and over half – 154 – having started in 2017–2019. The number of ceremonies conducted by respondents had risen from around 1,100 in 2015 to around 2,800 in 2019, and my best estimate is that the total number of ceremonies conducted by celebrants in England and Wales was around 9,500 in 2019.

    Between 80 and 95% of couples who chose ceremonies led by respondents were either already married to one another at the time of the ceremony, or intended to marry after it. After conducting a pilot study, I offered respondents a choice of 18 reasons why couples had opted for celebrant-led ceremonies. The most popular option, thought to have applied to about 1,400 couples, was a desire for a ‘person-centred ceremony that reflected their beliefs, personalities and lifestyles’.

    It is notable that all the elements of ‘beliefs, personalities and lifestyles’ are plural because, in today’s multi-cultural society, there are many couples where the partners have different beliefs. Anecdotally, a registrar told me in 2018 that many couples who have civil wedding ceremonies would ‘like to include the Lord’s Prayer – just in case’, and lamented the fact that the law prohibits this.

    Independent celebrants, on the other hand, can offer any blend of religious, spiritual, cultural or themed elements that the couple request. One independent celebrant described a ceremony involving a Catholic prayer, rituals including presenting flowers to a statue of the Virgin Mary, a lasso, a Mexican exchange of coins, and drinking alcohol during the ceremony – the drink was ‘Mexican and also formed part of their love story, as they were drinking this when they met’. A Jewish–French ceremony had incorporated ‘sharing a cup of wine, seven blessings, smashing of the glass and the signing of a certificate by the many “temoins” (French groomsmen)’. Another respondent had conducted ‘two fusion weddings combining atheism (bride) and Jewish traditions (groom) incl circling, Hebrew prayer and jumping on the glass’. One respondent had conducted a Hindu-inspired wedding – for which ‘a Mandap had been built and the ceremony content contained all the elements of a traditional Hindu wedding, interspersed with explanations for those attending not of the Hindu faith’ – in a marquee, following their wedding in the local Anglican church. An event conducted jointly by a celebrant and a Hindu priest had taken place at a hotel: ‘This ceremony had lots of rituals in line with Hindu faith and traditions. I then did a version of the British vows, ring blessing and ring exchange.’

    In 2020, the Law Commission issued a Consultation Paper including provisional proposals to regulate wedding officiants. This framework could potentially enable the Government to allow independent wedding celebrants to apply to be authorised to officiate at legally binding weddings. The Commission is due to publish its recommendations this summer.

    The consequences, if any, remain to be seen, but it is clear that the current law governing weddings does not reflect the needs of many members of the society it is designed to serve.