ViaMedia

Category: Human Sexuality

  • Living in Love and Faith: The Ozanne Foundation Responds

    Organisations as well as individuals have been invited to share their response to the LLF course, materials and process by 30 April 2022.

    Here is the response of the Ozanne Foundation.

    We write to share our thoughts and reflections on the LLF process and our hopes for the “next steps”.

    1. Overview of LLF

    Whilst we recognise that the LLF was originally conceived as a “necessary step” towards a more inclusive and just Church of England, we question whether the time and money that has been invested in it has been worth the significant harm that it has caused.  This is not least because of the time that it has taken – indeed it is now over five years since the archbishops promised a “radical new Christian inclusion”, a promise that had originally brought hope to so many and yet has now faded to become yet another example of “words not action” for the LGBT+ community.

    It is therefore of no surprise that during the intervening years – where open debate has been stymied within the General Synod and discussions around LLF have been heavily managed – that positions on both sides have hardened.  Sadly, as always, those this has impacted the most are the LGBT+ community, particularly those growing up in certain conservative settings.  Same-sex relationships are still not recognised, our LGBT+ priests are still asked to sign “Issues”, our LGBT+ youth are still taught that they must deny themselves any physical intimacy for life, even if it is lawfully recognised – severely impacting their mental health.  There continues to be no admission of the harm that conservative theology can inflict on those in their “care” and, perhaps most worryingly, there has been little desire by bishops to challenge or chastise those who inflict such harm, allowing them to continue their practices with impunity.  This can be evidenced by the various public letters that many conservatives have signed stating their desire to continue to practice “conversion therapy” and the increasingly hostile rhetoric towards trans people.  Conservative networks and many conservative churches and individuals continue to threaten schism and to withdraw funding, holding their dioceses to ransom.  Meanwhile LGBT+ people, their friends and families have continued to leave quietly – dismayed and disheartened by the lack of any real or meaningful progress.  What is more, we see no evidence that the national conservative networks have engaged with LLF.  Instead, they have publicly promoted the use of their own materials, including the “A Beautiful Story” video, to shore up their positions and underline their homophobic/transphobic doctrine.

    What is most worrying are the stories that we have heard from those LGBT+ church goers who were brave enough to take part in the LLF discussions.  Few found them safe spaces, and most wished afterwards that they had not taken part – even senior LGBT+ clergy.  The Church of England’s “good disagreement” strategy serves only, it seems, its heterosexual cisgendered members, with little thought for those who are most affected by these discussions.  Despite repeated calls to avoid giving equal weight to views on either “side” of the “debate”, given the significant power imbalance that exist and the clear evidence of harm that one side inflicts on the other, the Church of England has continued to push a strategy of “balance”.  In so doing it has lost the trust and respect of a large section of the general public, who look with incredulity at the way the LGBT+ community continue to be treated by a religious organisation whose central message is meant to be that of love and justice.  We are seen, rightly, as hypocrites!

    1. What Next?

    We recognise that we sadly cannot undo the damage that has been done, but we can – we hope – ensure that the next step is one that will lead to concrete decisions, actions and equality.  We cannot continue to objectify and problematise LGBT+ lives, for this has gone on long enough.

    It is clear to most that the only possible way forward is to allow some form of accommodation for those who wish to recognise LGBT+ faithful loving relationships.  This step is now well overdue.  We are well beyond creating a “middle ground” of sanctioning “just” blessings and must now move without delay to a Church that offers marriage to all living in England.  We already have a proven model for accommodating this while respecting individual consciences with the way we have managed marriage after divorce.

    At the same time, however, we are deeply concerned about the continued abuse of LGBT+ people, particularly young LGBT+ people within conservative churches, and the homophobic teaching that they are made to endure, which leads to self-hatred, shame and internalised homophobia – let alone rejection and alienation from their families and friends.  Research shows that this has a significant and lifelong impact on their mental wellbeing and can lead many to consider or indeed to attempt to take their lives.  This spiritual abuse must stop.  For too long the Church of England has turned a blind eye to this abuse and have let the brave testimonies of those who have spoken out go unheeded and unheard.  This lack of resolve to tackle the damage done by conservative theology is deeply inconsistent with the Church’s developing understanding and practice of the importance of safeguarding for vulnerable people and continues to make the Church of England vulnerable to the charge of complicity in abuse.  We therefore urge the Church of England to move swiftly to adopt the Global Interfaith Commission on LGBT+ Lives’ “Safeguarding Principles to Protect LGBT+ Lives” agreed in March 2022 at a conference sponsored by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

    We hope that you will find these reflections useful and await with interest the publication of a set of proposals from the House of Bishops regarding the way forward, for action is now long overdue.

    Yours sincerely

    Very Revd Joe Hawes, Chair, Ozanne Foundation

    Jayne Ozanne, Director, Ozanne Foundation

    April 27th 2022

  • Trans Figured: Experience Trumps Theory

    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.

     

    (an extract from her forthcoming book, Trans Figured)

    I hope to get a wider audience with this book than a philosophy professor might normally expect for most of her writings. But who knows: you yourself, dear reader, might have read some of my more conventional writings in philosophical ethics. (My much more conventional writings in philosophical ethics.) And if you have, you may know this about me as a philosopher: that I think experience trumps theory almost everywhere. Let me say a little bit about why.

    One of my favourite philosophers is Bernard Williams.[1] At the outset of his writing career, Williams took for his own “a phrase of D.H. Lawrence’s in his splendid commentary on the complacent moral utterances of Benjamin Franklin: ‘Find your deepest impulse, and follow that’” (1972: 93). Thirty years later he added, when looking back over his career, “If there’s one theme in all my work it’s about authenticity and self-expression… It’s the idea that some things are in some real sense really you, or express what you and others aren’t…. The whole thing has been about spelling out the notion of inner necessity.”

    Yes, that; very much that, about me and transgender. “I just want to,” but in capitals. An inner necessity, a need to be authentically and above all openly who I actually am, and to be known as who I am by those around me, and accepted and, yes, loved, even so. That is exactly what it’s all been about.

    However, that doesn’t mean that I have a theory of transgender to offer. I tend to steer away from philosophical theories of anything, at least in those parts of philosophy that aren’t best understood as handmaids of science. But even in science, I think the real truth of things often resists systematisation. (And what is being transgender but resisting systematisation?)

    I am never quite sure what a theory of anything outside strict science is supposed to do. Ever since Plato’s Meno philosophers have been saying, and rightly so of course, that the point of philosophy is to change right belief into knowledge: into a state where you don’t just think true things, but also understand, deeply, why they are true. Fine. But is it obvious that constructing a philosophical theory always helps with this? Can we really not have a deep understanding, and an explanatory understanding, that (for example) murder is at least typically and maybe always wrong, or that love is usually a good thing, or that flowers are generally beautiful, or that paedophilia is profoundly wrong, until we have a philosophical theory’s kind of explanation of why this is so? Why is some set of words, arranged in propositions with inferential relations between them, the sole kind of explanation that we need to understand the goodness of love or the badness of murder? For most ethical cases, that seems to me an oddly inappropriate picture of understanding and explanation. In ethical matters understanding can be verbal and articulate, but quite often it isn’t at all; oftener still, the propositional bit isn’t the only bit—and not the most important bit, either. And likewise for explanation: explanations don’t have to be verbal, and often are better if they’re not. (Think of explaining how to do something—by doing it.)

    Science limns the structure of reality, as Quine says in Word and Object. Sure it does, at least if it’s any good. But so does poetry, if it’s any good. There isn’t just one correct way to grasp the deep structure of things. There are lots, because there are lots of things that we might call “the deep structure of things”. Propositional structures are great for the understanding, but experience matters too, and experience is no less cognitive for being, sometimes, non-discursive and not expressible in propositions. All these general considerations about theorising apply in the particular case of transgender: here too it should be experience first, theory later—if at all. In Nietzsche’s famous words, “the will to system betrays a lack of integrity”.

    In any case, and also with particular reference to transgender: trans people don’t owe cis people, or anyone else, an explanation of why they’re who they are. No more than gay people do, for instance, or black people or Jewish people, or any other historically stigmatised minority. Our right to exist as transgender people is not conditional on our being able to prove it, by demonstrating the truth of something called “gender ideology” (our gender ideology, that is, not the rest of society’s). The onus of proof is not on us transgender people at all. It is on those who want to exclude us. By what right do they discriminate against us? By what right do they demonise us, marginalise us, gaslight us, ridicule us, patronise us, in ways that no one would accept for a minute of any other minority?

    We shouldn’t be refused admission to society until we’ve won some abstract rhetorical cage-fight, or arrived at a philosophical theory of transgender that is “satisfactory” (to whom?). Our right to be ourselves, without apology and without explanation, is simply not up for discussion, any more than anyone else’s. We don’t get kindly admitted to equal status once we have satisfied our critics. Like everyone else, we have equal status from the start.

     

    [1] For more from me on Bernard Williams, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/williams-bernard/.

  • The Invisible Privilege of Being Voiceless in the Church: Creating a Platform for Bisexual Christians

    by Hattie McInerney, a second-year Theology and Religion PhD researcher at the University of Birmingham

    In 2019, when writing my Master’s thesis, I decided to interview 10 university students who identified as Christian and LGBQ+. Personal and thought-provoking, these interviews gave me a real insight into how queer Christians navigated their faith lives, both in their home churches, and on their university campuses.

    During my research I discovered Carol Shepherd’s work Bisexuality and the Western Christian Church: the first time I’d read an academic, theological piece that focused purely on bisexuality. It led me to reflect on my own personal experiences, as a Christian with faltering faith, and someone who had been questioning their sexuality for a long time. I was keen to know more. Diving further into the bisexual Christian field, I was surprised to see only a small handful of names turning up. Why wasn’t there more research in this area? Why were bisexual Christian voices smothered so deeply under the experiences of lesbian and gay Christians? Why did some texts, proud to reference bisexuality on their covers, then fail to mention it even once within their work?

    These questions, alongside the fantastic interviews I’d hosted with some bisexual participants, spurred me on when identifying a topic for my PhD. I decided to explore every nook and cranny of Church of England attitudes, policy and paperwork: what exactly did the Church have to say about bisexuals?

    It was then that I was introduced to Issues in Human Sexuality.

    Don’t get me wrong, I was aware of Issues beforehand, but I certainly couldn’t say I’d read it cover to cover. Looking further into the text led me to discover Section 5.8, a neat paragraph of 119 words arguing bisexuality’s ambiguity, labelling bisexuals as ‘inevitably unfaithful’, capable of redemption only through heterosexual marriage or by seeking some form of professional help. At the November 2021 General Synod, it was vehemently stated that this passage does not encourage conversion therapy, but the call for bisexuals to ‘seek their truth’ and to gain ‘inner healing’ through counselling says otherwise.

    The Church’s most recent sexuality publication, Living in Love and Faith, was released in November 2020. The 400+ page document takes an awful lot of tree to say very little at all, and if anything demonstrates the lack of clarity surrounding what today’s Church actually thinks of human sexuality. Has the Church really progressed? 31 years since the release of Issues, ordinands are still expected to assent to a document that calls those in the bisexual community confused, frisky individuals needing help.

    As I continued to examine policy, I began to think back to my MA interviews, alongside my own personal experiences. I only returned to church in September 2021, and one month prior to this, I became happily engaged to my male partner. When considering my positionality in this project, I began to face a roadblock. Many methodologies in qualitative research argue a strong ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ position for their researchers, but where did I fit in? Male-only relationships throughout my life, a slightly broken relationship with the Church after leaving the ordination process during my MA; how could I call myself a Christian, when sometimes I felt God and I were constantly on different paths to one another? How could I call myself bisexual, when despite the gender of my attractions not mattering to me, I only ever seemed to end up in ‘straight’ relationships? I consistently found myself floating in the grey space between inside and outside, unsure of exactly where I’d fall.

    For my PhD, I have so far spoken to ten participants; six identifying as bisexual and Christian, and four who worked on Living in Love and Faith. These interviews reveal the disparities between those who are involved in policy and documentation processes within the Church, and those who experience what it’s like to live as bisexual Christians; and let me tell you, their experiences are far from those promiscuous and ambiguous lives depicted in Issues. Whilst not wanting to give away all my research, one key point from a bisexual Christian has really stood out: that bisexuals experience a truly invisible privilege in the Church.

  • Is the Conversion Therapy Ban a Muddle? A Response to Angela Tilby

    by Vicky Brett,  a member of the House of Laity at General Synod and a Lay Pioneer with the Church of England serving the LGBTQIA+ community in Peterborough

     

    In the Church Times (8 April 2022), Angela Tilby reacted to the recent U-turns by the government on conversion therapy with regard to trans people. Here, Vicky Brett, the mother of a transgender child, responds to some of Angela Tilby’s statements.

    “The conversion therapy sometimes urged on gay people by conservative Christians is a very different matter from the kind of listening and exploratory counselling that should surely be the norm for pre-pubescents wanting to change gender”

    Angela Tilby’s article stokes people’s fears with misinformation. Here, she tries to criticise conversion therapy for gay and lesbian people while defending it for young trans people. But those attending a gender clinic already receive counselling from trained, experienced clinical psychologists, psychotherapists and psychiatrists!

    Having experienced both this and ‘conversion’ therapy, I can say the two could not be further apart. A trained therapist does not tell you what to think or what to do or who you are – they allow you the freedom to explore and question and understand yourself and your situation. They do not force or coerce you to transition or to not transition. In contrast, the ‘Christian’ conversion practices we experienced held not one jot of freedom or exploration – we were told repeatedly that we were evil and going to hell, that being transgender or supporting someone was wrong, that my child was a sexual pervert, that we were bad parents, subjected to yelling and prayer to remove demons. Pressure was applied by removing our ability to work or serve in the church, and eventually we were asked to leave. During this time my child took an overdose, but by God’s grace they were resuscitated in A & E. The church’s response to the overdose was complete silence: no apology, no concern, not even an offer to pray – as far as they were concerned, we got what we deserved. Conversion ‘therapy’ is not therapy, it is abuse.

    “among American adolescents, trans services are being accessed far more often by teenage girls than boys, because of … ‘peer’ or ‘social’ contagion”

    Leaving aside that the American and UK situations may not be the same, blaming peer pressure may not explain everything. Girls may find puberty more difficult, not least because of society’s negative attitudes to menstruation. But in a gender clinic, this will all be addressed. Alternatively, remarks like Tilby’s may be just plain old sexism, the idea that girls need protecting because they are weak and vulnerable and don’t know their own minds and can’t think for themselves. We could look at this the other way round. Under the age of 24 only one-third of transitions are male to female and two thirds female to male. Over 24, it’s four out of five male to female and only one in five female to male (ignoring non-binary). Why are trans women only transitioning so much later in life? Is it the extra dose of hatred and hassle they seem to be subjected to by society?

    “things were very different in my childhood; I was a tomboy … But nobody thought this particularly odd”

    But being a tomboy has nothing to do with being transgender! Playing with a particular toy, having particular interests is gender expression – who you are on the outside, how you fit with gender stereotypes. Being transgender is about who you are on the inside. A girl might refuse to wear skirts – but still know she is a girl.

    A transgender child would say ‘I am a boy’ not ‘I want to play with boys’ things’. They might still want to play with dolls’ houses and wear pink (gender stereotypes), as some boys also do. But they would insistently, persistently and consistently reject the notion that they are a girl and get annoyed, upset or distressed when people ‘get it wrong’ or when their body does not match their internal view of what it should look like.

    Tilby implies that it was easier to be free to experiment in her day; maybe this was true for girls like Enid Blyton’s ‘George’, but it was certainly not for boys! A boy would never go to school or a pub wearing a dress when I was young: he would be beaten up! Nowadays some boys feel safer to dress in a non-conforming way and wear make-up – in safe spaces.

    Children can recognise their gender by ages two to three. Transgender adults often report their first public acknowledgment of who they are was before the age of seven. Gender Clinic waiting lists are measured in terms of years, not weeks. Puberty blockers are only given to some children, and only after extensive counselling, to allow the child additional time to think and process before the potentially traumatic experience of puberty kicks in. Cross-sex hormones are given only to a select few over-16s, and no surgery is done pre-adulthood. If a child first voiced their trans identity at seven, this means they would have to be insistent, persistent and consistent for nine years before even hormones would be prescribed.

    “Keira Bell … recently detransitioned and sued the Tavistock on the grounds that she was too young, at 16, to give consent to the hormones that would lead to a double mastectomy”

    12 mothers sadly died while giving birth at Shrewsbury and Telford hospital trust; medical mistakes do happen, but we need to work to fix them rather than insist that the 5,000 women who need their services each year should just stop having babies.

    The Keira Bell case was tragic; a young, troubled girl who mistakenly believed that transitioning would solve all her underlying problems. The case led to a temporary pause on work at the clinic. To me, this was completely wrong. Gender clinics need a lot more funding and staff to enable them to handle the case load, and pausing services just increased waiting times. There is already a four-year waiting list and 11% of trans people go abroad for treatment or buy their hormones over the internet because they cannot access treatment here. We shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath water!

    Trans people deserve healthcare too, and healthcare decided between them and their doctors, not by uninformed politicians and Christians.

  • In Search of the ‘Optimal’

    by Grace Davie, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Exeter and co-editor (with Lucian Leustean) of The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Europe (2021)

    I was delighted to respond positively to the invitation to write a piece for Via Media – a chance to put my own thoughts in order. Too often invited to ‘take sides’, I want to explore ‘optimal’ as opposed to right or wrong answers to complex questions. Of course, there are principles that we need to respect, but even these should be debated with courtesy, and much, in my view, depends on asking the right question in the first place.

    Take, for example, the question of ‘establishment’. I have listened to arguments both for and against as if this was a black and white issue; but it cannot be so, given the weight of history. Like it or not, we have inherited a model from the past, meaning that we will feel its impact whatever we do. This does not mean that the present situation is immutable.

    What then is the best way forward in a society that is both increasingly secular and increasingly diverse? Is there any place for establishment in this mix?

    The Church of England is a ‘weak’ established church (no doubt about that) with a distinctive past – one of partial rather than total monopoly in a country that has housed significant religious minorities for centuries not decades. There are important positives in this combination: such a church has opportunities denied to more dominant equivalents. It is better placed to welcome rather than exclude, and to encourage rather than to condemn; deployed wisely, it can foster the maintenance of a tolerant and pluralist society. Specifically, it has the potential to promote and to sustain a constructive conversation about faith (of all kinds) at the centre of our society, an ever more necessary task. The goal in this respect is to extend privilege rather than remove it; to level up, rather than down.

    The parish raises both similar and different issues. Here again, is an inherited model but one that is ‘too big for itself’. How can the parish system (effectively a public utility) be sustained without the equivalent of a church tax?

    No one has spoken more eloquently of this model than Matthew Parris (The Times, 19 November 2021). His position is clear: ‘I don’t believe in God. But I love the Church, pay my subs to All Saints in Elton, sing hymns and delight in the Testaments Old and New’. The perceived ‘dangers’ are variously personified: the archbishops; diocesan plans; charismatic churches in general; church planting in particular; the new vicar and so on. The tone in the lengthy comments below the article is unforgiving, but none of them articulates the crucial point: this is a spectrum, not a zero-sum game. Many of us – whatever our churchmanship – can empathise with elements of Matthew Parris’ article, never more so than at the turning points in life. But all of us know that doing nothing will lead, as night follows day, to empty and decaying churches – hardly a good look.

    Rehearsing the same arguments over again won’t help. What might move the situation on is a clear analysis of what exactly we want to keep from our historical legacy and what can go? Quite a bit if only we could agree on priorities.

    Circumstances, moreover, alter cases – sometimes in unexpected ways. At one and the same time, COVID-19 has not only revealed the significance of church buildings for countless individuals (by no means all of them churchgoers) but vastly stimulated the online alternatives. Reactions to lockdown varied: some rejoiced in new-found freedoms; others mourned the loss of the familiar, physical as well as liturgical. Most hovered somewhere in between.

    Two points need careful underlining. The first addresses quality. Even a glance at what is on offer reveals that both in-person worship and its online equivalents are enormously varied, and that both can be good and less good. They are, moreover, complementary. Joining a Europe-wide service for Ukraine in early March, including the Anglican chaplaincies in both Moscow and Kyiv, was a deeply moving experience and necessarily online. Of course, this didn’t replace the fervent and continuing prayers of parishes up and down the land, but it most certainly enhanced that effort.

    Secondly, and finally, the new normal. ‘They (the congregation) are not coming back’ is a constant refrain. But a similar reticence is felt all over society; it is foolish to think that what is happening in the world of work, healthcare, leisure, and shopping will not be happening in the churches. None of us are where we were in 2019, nor will we be in the foreseeable future. We must aim for what is optimal. A carefully-planned and locally-based mix of in-person and online worship must be encouraged both within the parish and beyond it. Easier said than done, I know: but we have to start somewhere.

  • No Sex, Please? Remembering the Higton Debate

    by Terry Louden, Hon. Canon of Portsmouth and of Cape Coast, Ghana; member of General Synod, 1985-90; Permission to Officiate, Diocese of Portsmouth, where he has served in parochial ministry since ordination in 1975

    The Church of England has a long history of pronouncing on sex. Back at the November 1987 group of sessions of General Synod, the Revd. Tony Higton, then a parish priest in Essex, moved a Private Members’ Motion about sexual morality. The motion’s prime purpose was to condemn homosexuality in general; as Higton’s own speech made clear, the particular individuals he wished to target were gay clergy and ordinands and their ‘immoral practices’. The motion, amended substantially by the Rt. Revd. Michael Baughen, Bishop of Chester, was passed overwhelmingly. I was a member of Synod at the time and spoke to an amendment in my name. More on that later. First, some context.

    In 1987, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, and had just won her third General Election. Her moral compass rarely veered from the conservative. HIV/AIDS was still prevalent, as was the accusation of a ‘gay disease’. Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which made illegal the promotion in schools of a gay lifestyle, was under discussion, and became law in 1988. The association of homosexuality with paedophilia was still being made, especially by the tabloid press, as was the charge that homosexuals were naturally promiscuous. So at Higton’s instigation, and in full view of the media, the Church of England was playing out a national debate. As Higton said in the debate: ‘The eyes of the world are on us today’.

    Through its senior bishops, the Church had generally supported the efforts to decriminalise sex between consenting men, which was secured in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. This prompted a growing debate within the Church about sexual morality and particularly the welcome (or the lack of it) the Church should offer to gay people. The 1979 report, Homosexual Relationships (the ‘Gloucester Report’), was prepared for General Synod but was seen as too liberal and was widely ignored.

    In 1986, the House of Bishops commissioned another report (the ‘Osborne Report’) which, for the first time, considered the views of gay people. It was very unfortunate that the work of the Osborne committee was trumped by the Higton debate. While Osborne reported to the House of Bishops in 1989, that report was suppressed until 2012. However, the Osborne group’s working methods can be seen in the current LLF process.

    The Baughen amendment, like Higton’s original wording, asserted that the biblical standard for sexual intercourse is in the context of a permanent married (i.e. heterosexual) relationship; that fornication, adultery and homosexual genital acts fall short of this ideal; and that holiness of life, especially in the sphere of sexual morality, is required of Christian leaders. But it was more temperate in its wording, omitting Higton’s call for clergy falling short of the ideal not to be appointed or to be removed from office.

    There was the air of a witch-hunt around at the time.

    Thirteen members of Synod made substantial contributions, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie; the Bishop of London, Graham Leonard; the Bishop of Chichester, Eric Kemp; Bishop Baughen; Dr. Peter Forster, Baughen’s successor at Chester; the Revd. Malcolm Johnson and the actor, Frank Williams. New insights were scarce in the debate. The Bishops of London and Chichester did take an important stand against the persecution of gay clergy, and in his speech, the Archbishop of Canterbury, often accused of indecision, said ‘I want to insist that to be homosexual by nature is to be a full human being, that homosexuals have human rights like the rest of us’.

    I put down and was invited to speak to an amendment in my name. This proposed that Christians should follow the teachings of the Early Fathers, Tertullian, Clement, Cyprian, Jerome and John Chrysostom, who advocated celibacy and virginity as the Christian ideal, because ‘an orderly sex life is inferior to no sex life at all’.

    What was this about? When I was ordained in 1975, after three years at a theological college with a significant number of gay men, I remember my training incumbent, the late Bill Sargent, of blessed memory, saying to me ‘The Church of England is far too interested in what goes on in people’s bedrooms’. What he was criticizing was the prurience of certain parts of the C of E as well as its concern with personal morality at the expense of social and corporate sinfulness. So that was one of the reasons for my obscure amendment – to remind Synod members that there were issues more important than sexual morality.

    Another reason was that by drawing attention to the teaching of the Fathers as part of Tradition based on Scripture, and showing their proposals to be unworkable in practice, I was trying to demonstrate that Scripture and Tradition by themselves cannot provide detailed answers to all modern ethical issues. If we cannot be bound by Tradition, should we be bound by the Scriptures?

    There was little reaction to what I said. I delivered my speech seriously and dead pan. But Synod members in the late 1980s were not known for their sense of humour! What I said was misunderstood and ignored, though not entirely. The late Bernard Levin, a secular Jew with much sympathy for the Church of England, mentioned me in his Times column the following day. And the Sunday Times sent a journalist all the way to the Isle of Wight to interview me and my wife about my supposed advocacy of celibacy.

    Sadly, by the time the journalist had returned to London with his copy and his photos the world had moved on, and the profile was never printed.

     

  • Good News From Via Media: on Transgender Day of Visibility

    by Chrissie Chevasutt, author of Heaven Come Down – The Story of a Transgender Disciple, who has been advocating on behalf of transgender youth and vulnerable people within the conservative evangelical church for the last seven years

    Then… The Holy Spirit commanded Philip down the road to Samaria; Acts Chapter 8.

    I imagine this road trip left Philip with something of a headache? As he trudged back to Jerusalem, he must have been pondering many things, and not just what the future looked like for the black Ethiopian eunuch he had just baptised into fellowship and the body of Christ; because, in doing so, he had violated The Law that forbade anyone emasculated by crushing or cutting from entering the assembly of God’s people.

    The largely Jewish church in Jerusalem was struggling to understand just how they might reconcile their newfound faith in Jesus and the outrageous nature of his grace with the thorny issue of The Law. This meant arguments between those who clung to The Law, and those who dispensed with The Law as a means of setting boundaries for the new church; disputes on who was out and who was in, about food sacrificed to idols, unclean foods and circumcision. And now, Philip would have to explain how a eunuch was welcome in their midst.

    It seemed that some had not yet fully worked out what faith in Jesus delivered them from.

    Philip probably dreaded having to wade into yet another long conflict with the religious legalists within the church. ‘You’ve whaaat?!?! You’ve baptised a eunuch into the fellowship of God’s people?!?! – they are not even allowed to enter the temple!’

    On the long road home, Philip was no doubt preparing his theology, to justify his actions.

    The church has often struggled with issues of race and diversity, gender and sexuality, legalism and judgement. Tradition and The Law is a mother of a burden to lay down in order to embrace grace, grace for everyone. The Holy Spirit’s desire, and Philip’s desire, was to demonstrate that faith and grace triumph over Law, every time.

    The Ethiopian’s baptism had been God’s will, and the proof of heaven’s overflowing grace.

    And now… Reverend Helen Garton, the Minister at St Columba’s United Reformed Church, Oxford, had been watching, hearing, and praying with transgender members of the congregation, and trans and non-binary ordained URC Ministers whom she knew as friends, in the pain and struggles they were facing in their daily lives and ministries. Out of this a vision was born for an ‘Outreach and Development Worker with Transgender, Intersex and non-binary people: a full-time, three-year salaried post at St Columba’s, funded by sacrificial giving from St Columba’s members and further funds from the Wessex Synod and URC centrally.

    I have now been appointed to this post. My work will be developed by listening to those who are already working very effectively in serving the transgender, intersex and non-binary community. This first year is all about research, networking, relationship-building, making connections with those who have already been working for many years in serving the community. Bringing people together, strengthening and encouraging, building cooperation and cooperatives is necessary in a grass roots up, rather than ‘top down’ culture.

    What is already clear is that this new role has two distinct, but balanced, aims: first, the local, urgent and immediate pastoral needs of transgender, intersex and non-binary people in Oxford and surrounding areas, and second, to advocate and work for lasting change and improvement at a national level in every arena that we can influence, including education, health care, law, politics, arts, the media and of course the wider church. One of the first fruits will be an annual national Theology Conference for Transgender, Intersex and non-binary people in Oxford this summer.

    Much of my work will be in ‘digging the foundations’ for a role that will work for the long-term future and betterment of transgender, intersex and non-binary people’s human rights, equality, provision and care. Part of my work will be raising support and funding, because we want this role to be long-haul and sustainable. The work is urgent and extremely demanding; already this year we have had two trans teen suicides local to me.

    And beyond… Our detractors and oppressors argue strongly against bringing the Ethiopian eunuch into their discussion about whether God accepts transgender and non-binary people. ‘Eunuch’ had a range of meanings in ancient times, and even within ancient Jewish culture its usage was broad, just as today the label ‘transgender’ is a vast umbrella term. The eunuch in the Bible represents an oppressed and marginalised people group which transgressed and blurred the strict Jewish vision of binary sex and gender. God’s heart to the eunuchs is beautifully expressed in Isaiah 56, a prophesy of radical inclusion towards a people condemned by The Law.

    The intersection of eunuch, intersex, transgender and non-binary identities is too deep, wide, vast, overlapping and obvious to ignore or dismiss.

    The role with which I have been entrusted, like the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, is a prophetic act, a ministry of social justice and an expression of God’s outrageous love for the marginalised and oppressed. As such I pray that it marks a sea-change, a turning of the tide, in the wider church’s acceptance of us as transgender, intersex and non-binary people.

  • What You Do Matters More Than You Can Know….

    by Canon Richard Lamey, Area Dean of Sonning and on Diocese of Oxford’s Bishop’s Council

    I am the incumbent of a market-town parish in Berkshire. A young man who joined the congregation about four years ago stepped forward to be confirmed this year. When we met to think about preparation, and talked about why he was wanting to be confirmed now, he shared with me that his discovering of God was part of his journey as a trans man.

    He told me that he had not grown up going to Church but something had drawn him into a Church building as he discovered who he was. He thought about it a lot, and became convinced that if God was and God was real, then everything was connected and God loved him as he was. He started coming to services at St Paul’s and felt welcomed, included and loved- and that sense of community and inclusion made him open his Bible and learn more about Jesus, and then go on to wanting to be confirmed.

    I was grateful and humbled that he trusted me with these conversations, but I was also struck by the realisation that everything we had said over the last four years in church around human sexuality and personal identity had been heard by him in a very personal, specific and profound way. Could this church be trusted? Was it a safe place? He had found God- or God had found him- but did he need the Church as well?

    He particularly thanked me for putting Pride flags at the back of church for people to take home around Pride weekend over the last two years. At the time, I remember being disappointed that more hadn’t been taken and wondering why we had bothered. Now I know that it made him feel welcome and cared for, even though we didn’t know we were serving a member of our own congregation.

    It was a reminder that churches are called, in Lent and every season, to live lives of the same integrity and truth as we do as individual disciples. Collectively living out what we believe and what we are called to do, whether people are watching or not.

    I am not sure that we have said enough about God’s radical inclusion, welcome and love in church – I am not sure if we ever could – but I am pleased that we said something about the height, depth and length of God’s love in Jesus Christ for all creation and for every single person. I am pleased that I went on the local Pride march and was proud myself to be photographed for the local paper. I am pleased that we have a statement of universal welcome in our church porch and in our noticesheet, every week. I am pleased that people in same-sex relationships hold and have held elected office in the parish and sit on the PCC.

    Speaking with my parishioner, I was glad we had done something, glad we had done enough to make him feel that this was a family he wanted to be part of, glad that he felt safe enough to share his journey of faith with me. We had welcomed him enough to let him keep finding God, the God who made him, and loves him, and delights in him, and in us all. Furthermore, through our welcome and deepening friendship, we have found more of God’s love together. We have come to see Jesus’ face more clearly.

    For all the times I have offered a blessing to the congregation, it felt that I was the one being richly blessed in this conversation. I learned that one of God’s precious and unique children had been starving and we had fed them without even knowing they were hungry.

    This precious conversation is a reminder of how easy it is to get this wrong, but also how easy it is to get it right, by striving to be the Church we are called to be and by not always shying away from difficult conversations, by simply being the community we are called to be, the community the Holy Spirit is bringing to life. And what is true of our individual church might, perhaps, wonderfully, become true of the whole Church of England if we remember that we are always talking about ourselves and not about others, about us and not them, about the people of God who Jesus loves fully and without reservation and not a problem to be solved or cured.

  • Gen Z, Authenticity and Religion

    by Professor Jane Shaw, Principal of Harris Manchester College and Professor of the History of Religion at Oxford University, and co-author of Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age (2021)

    Last year, I was a member of a preliminary vacancy-in-see group in a large diocese and, as we talked about the diocese’s future, I was struck that no members of its future were present. The group of about forty included no people younger than forty. The Church is greying, and this brought the fact home forcefully to me.

    Over the past few years, three colleagues (a sociologist, linguist and anthropologist) and I (an historian) conducted an interdisciplinary study of Generation Z – those born in 1995 or after, who have never know the world without the Internet. We became convinced that older generations need to understand Gen Z and figure out how to work with Gen Zers to make the future better. We did surveys of that age group’s values across the general population in the USA and UK; conducted in-depth interviews with students at three very different campuses; and constructed a large database of Gen Z language scraped from social media. We published the results last year in a book titled, Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age.

    Here are my reflections on what we learnt and what the churches need to grasp if they stand a chance of engaging Gen Z.

    Religion. It’s not so much that Gen Z-ers are against it, but it just doesn’t come up on their radar screens. They are largely indifferent. For the most part, religion hasn’t been transmitted to them so, if they are going to investigate it, that will have to happen from scratch. This means that those in the churches will need to figure out how to engage with Gen Z – from scratch.

    Churches so often appear (and frequently act) as if they have all the answers for those outside institutional religion and little to learn from them. We need to begin by asking Gen Zers what is important to them. As the Anglican priest Vincent Strudwick says, “It’s no good taking people from where they aren’t to where they don’t want to go.”

    Living in the Digital Age is what Gen Z has always (and only) known. Online and offline life are seamlessly connected and totally integrated for them, though they understand the value of offline encounters. Participating in gathered community online is something they are used to; online groups are essential areas of belonging and identity formation though affiliations are not necessarily permanent or even long term. Gen Zers belong to groups as and how they make sense in relation to their identity and friend networks. It’s the equivalent of church hopping, and church hopping is exactly what we saw many – from all generations – doing online during the pandemic once they were given the opportunity to find what they liked for a particular time and season. Churches, struggling post-pandemic with how to win back congregations, might ask Gen Z for some advice on how you successfully combine and negotiate the online and offline, and work with people’s multiple affiliations. Gen Zers are brilliant at it.

    Identity is central for Gen Z. It is finely grained and carefully articulated, the result of a judicious sorting and selection of attributes. Gen Z’s identities also guide their affiliations and loyalties; the Internet has allowed them to find people ‘like them’ in ways that were simply not possible before. If identity is important but religion is rarely one of the attributes of identity, then the churches will have to figure out how to engage with other aspects of Gen Z identities as a starting point. Given that sexual orientations (yes, many) and genders (yes, many) are key to Gen Z identity, the churches are already on the back foot. Engagement with race and ethnic identity are also absolutely vital. For Gen Z-ers this is all a matter of justice and, if they are going to engage with Church, they will want to see Gospel justice values reflected in Christian behaviour.

    This brings us to authenticity. Gen Z-ers can sniff out inauthenticity from a mile off. Faced with sorting through a vast amount of information online from an early age, they have learnt the importance of finding what is authentic, what speaks to their experience and what is relevant or ‘relateable’ – a very Gen Z word.

    Gen Zers care passionately about the environment and issues of equity and justice. They are sceptical of institutions, seeing them as broken or incapable of solving deep problems. They have, of course, inherited much from the liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s, although they don’t always recognise that, and they are sceptical about the capacity of older generations to address and tackle what seem like intractable problems.

    Gen Zers who are part of the Church point out that their concerns flow out of their faith. In a book published this month, titled Young, Woke and Christian, edited by Victoria Turner, fifteen younger Christians argue that issues like the climate crisis, sexual identity, disability justice, food poverty, and racial justice are Gospel issues.

    These are some of the big issues of our day, and it is vital that people of all generations, including Christians of all generations, bring together our different skills and insights to address them, and find shared generational hopes and values. To do so, we will need to keep listening to each other.

  • Boring Ourselves to Death?

    by Liam Cartwright, professional organist and ordinand

    A recent survey in The Times (March 14th 2022) suggested that going to church was the most boring activity a person can do, second only to being asleep. Sobering stuff for those of us whose vocation and life’s work is tied up in the church.

    I have spent most of my professional career in church music. I am at a crossroads switching to full time ministry, approaching ordination this summer. I have a vested interest in going to church. The most boring thing one can do? Absolutely not. And yet often, absolutely yes.

    I have had the privilege of experiencing some hugely inspiring worship. In my student days the combination of dramatic liturgy, organ improvisation and the awe inspiring architecture of Notre-Dame de Paris felt like a meeting of heaven and earth. Back here in the UK, Choral Evensong in our wonderful cathedrals has often been a transcendent experience. The finest choral music in the world has enabled me to glimpse something of the divine.

    Sometimes my sense of collective worship conducting various parish choirs, or making music with fellow musicians in a worship band with fellow musicians, has been even more profound. My sense of being led by the Holy Spirit in a common purpose has taken me to a level which one could only experience worshipping God.

    That said, I’ve also been bored and, at times, deeply frustrated at what passes for worship. Sometimes, preaching has been dull, or liturgy has been badly led. Other times, music has been poorly executed. Occasionally, I’ve sensed a complete lack of joy or engagement from those leading or worshipping.

    Worst of all, though, is a kind of nervous blandness often encountered in the CofE. Ideas are dismissed because they are too Catholic, too Evangelical, too traditional, too modern, too different, not what we normally do. People might not like it, or it might not work. We cut singing merely to save time, or insist everything is said in case someone doesn’t know the music or understand all the words. Far too often we reluctantly opt for nothing as the least bad option.

    Fear and a risk-averse culture pervades. Our intentions are noble, but the reality is dull.

    I’ve heard clergy friends lament despairingly, “I’m leading worship that I would never want to go to myself”. My question is, “why do you do it like that then? If you don’t believe in what you’re doing, it’s unlikely anyone else will either.”

    I’m a big believer in not pigeon-holing churches, worship or people. It’s rarely helpful.

    We have so much that is good to learn from each other. I’ve seen real joy in worship at charismatic evangelical churches – people just thrilled to be there together, praising God as a church family. I’ve heard great preaching in these churches. The welcome, often with coffee and even breakfast thrown in, has been brilliant.

    I’ve seen people flocking to Cathedral Evensongs to find peace and beauty – an oasis in a frenetic and busy world.

    In theological colleges I’ve encountered creative worship that was fresh, imaginative, and spoke right into the heart of big issues in the real world. I’ve rejoiced in truly inclusive worship at Two:23 https://www.two23.net gatherings. I’ve shared, first hand, the joy of all of God’s children knowing they are accepted for who they are. It takes worship to another level.

    I’ve seen small children at an All-Age Parish Eucharist transfixed by a polyphonic motet sung in Latin by the choir.

    At On Fire mission conferences I’ve seen rooms full of people, many of whom would never have thought it was their thing, quietly overcome by the real presence of God in the sacrament during Exposition and Benediction.

    Worship needs vibrancy and diversity. We have to stop just going through the motions. We must truly believe God will turn up and do stuff with his people. We can draw on many different traditions, enjoying the broad spectrum of available resources .

    Doing this could be as simple as using our space and buildings more imaginatively, using incense or other sensory aids, or drawing more of the congregation into serving in the liturgy. If there are things people do not understand, explain, or even allow them to work it out for themselves. This doesn’t need cathedral choirs or lots of money and staff – just a real belief in what we’re doing, delivered with warmth and joy, thought and imagination.

    We face a turning point as we emerge from the Covid 19 pandemic. It’s time to shape up or ship out. If our worship is to be vibrant and engaging, preserving all that’s good whilst embracing the new, we need to lose our defensiveness and draw on the rich breadth of the church.

    We can’t do this without embracing equality. There are some tough questions to be asked. How long can we sustain cathedral choirs where boys have far more opportunities than girls, or only those children willing and privileged enough to board are able to take part? How long will church choirs survive if they refuse to sing any worship songs, and prioritise  their preferred style of music over the real purpose of worship? What does it mean to have great worship bands performing brilliantly, in an environment where theology is toxic and excludes many from God’s table?

    All worship is for God. Without boldness there is blandness. We want to stop the boredom and enable people to experience God vividly through word, spirit and sacrament. This means ensuring our worship is vibrant, broad, rich and inclusive, always serving the mission of the church, creating a space where worshippers can encounter the divine.