ViaMedia

Category: Marriage

  • Smoke and Mirrors and the Alliance

    by Nic Tall, National Co-ordinator of Together for the Church of England

    The House of Bishops has just met to discuss, among other things, the latest steps in the drawn out Living in Love and Faith process. Current discussion points include whether clergy should be allowed to marry their same sex partner while receiving a licence to minister, how the Prayers of Love and Faith for blessing couples in a same sex relationship can be implemented, and what provision needs to be made for those of differing views in this complex and contested area. A letter to the Bishops written by a group called the Alliance, who oppose the full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people and their relationships into the life of the Church, has also become public.

    The Alliance letter makes the interesting claim that it “continues to grow numerically with 2360 clergy whose churches currently represent 42% of the Church of England’s average Sunday attendance and 53% of all under eighteen-year-olds within the Church of England.” Some online commentary has been taken aback by these numbers and the suggestion that the Alliance are supported by so many rank-and-file pew-filling Anglicans. But the numbers are not quite what they seem. I therefore thought it would be useful to dig into the numbers, show the unresolved questions around them, and place them into the wider context so you can make your own mind up about the current state of the Church of England and any likely dissent from the use of the Prayers of Love and Faith – prayers which, of course, nobody is obliged to use.

    First, who are the Alliance? Their website describes them as “an informal partnership of leaders from networks within the Church of England”. Most of these networks are of a conservative or charismatic evangelical flavour. In previous letters written by the Alliance there have been around 25 to 30 signatories, with the qualifying statement that “all signatories are leaders of networks/organisations but are signing in their personal capacities, recognising they cannot claim to speak for everyone that they lead.”

    The Alliance are also a limited company, the most recent letter having been signed by its directors. Of those seven directors, two are on the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) including the CEEC National Director, one is a Regional Director with New Wine, three have links to the HTB (Holy Trinity Brompton) church planting network and one Chairs the Traditional Catholic Group on General Synod. That balance of directors shows that it is substantially being driven by the HTB network, and one point that is far from clear is how far CEEC statements are also Alliance statements.

    It is a big stretch to get from seven directors and around 30 signatories to 2360 clergy, so where does that figure come from? The Alliance website has a section inviting clergy and laity to “join with the Alliance”. The form to fill out includes the proviso that “we will not assume you speak on behalf of your whole church.” The first page is for personal details, including the church they attend, the diocese it is in and if they are clergy, lay ministers or other laity. The second page has just two questions, only for clergy and licenced lay ministers: “Your church’s average adult Sunday attendance” and “Your church’s average under-18s attendance”. The final page asks them if they agree to the Theological Vision published by seven conservative bishops and if they support the ongoing work of the Alliance.

    I assume that this sign-up form is the source of the 2360 clergy, along with the stats for their congregation and under-18s. In June 2024 the Alliance stated they had “over 2000” clergy, which has now become “2360 clergy” in October 2024; does this limited growth imply that the Alliance numbers are plateauing? And what does “clergy” mean here? It should not be assumed that they are all incumbents leading churches. The number could also include curates, non-stipendiary ministers, chaplains, clergy in other work and retired clergy, who may or may not hold a Permission to Officiate. Given that there are approximately 20,000 active clergy in the Church of England across all roles, that means over 17,000 have not indicated their support for the Alliance. And how many separate churches are covered by the 2360 clergy, given that there can be more than one priest licenced to a church? For example, the National Register of Clergy lists 37 clergy licenced to the parish of Holy Trinity Brompton. So it is difficult to know just what the 2360 clergy represent in terms of their roles or the churches they minister in.

    What we can be sure of is that these clergy do not represent everyone in their churches. The statement at the top of the sign-up form affirmed that. So it’s strange that the latest Alliance letter closely links these clergy of unspecified role with “42% of the Church of England’s average Sunday attendance and 53% of all under eighteen-year-olds within the Church of England”. But it’s clear that not all in a church under conservative leadership share their leaders’ views. The false assumption that they do was challenged in an article in the Church Times in January 2024 about members of HTB network churches; one priest stated how the leadership were ignoring different perspectives, with “many keeping quiet out of fear for repercussions”.

    The statement regarding 53% of under-18s is also strange, given that most toddlers I speak to hold no firm views on church politics or the theology of interpersonal relationships. Yet it is repeated on social media without any challenge. As for the teenagers within that 53%, are they all fully behind the stance of the Alliance? Having met teenagers from Gen Z, I highly doubt it. The notion that young people are staying away from the Church of England because it isn’t homophobic enough doesn’t bear much scrutiny. One reason many conservative churches aren’t open about the vicar’s views on LGBTQIA+ relationships (and sometimes also on women’s ministry) is that they know the younger generation just wouldn’t wear it.

    As for the claim to have 42% of average Sunday attendance, how is that calculated? Do the Alliance add up those figures from the people signing up on their website, compare it with the national statistics for ministry, and calculate a percentage from the two? This is unlikely to be comparing like with like. Some filling out the Alliance form will have given an optimistic estimate, rather than the more detailed count required for the national figures. If two clergy from the same church sign up and give different figures (the Vicar says 150 per Sunday, the curate says 120) which figure is used? The more optimistic one, of course. There is no guarantee that there hasn’t been double counting, adding in the figures given for Sunday attendance for every priest signing up, even if some are from the same church. It is clearly not a reliable percentage, given that the number of people allegedly attending the churches connected to the 2360 clergy are unlikely to have been calculated on the same basis as the national figure for average Sunday attendance.

    The next question is just what have the 2360 clergy signed up to? Page 3 of the sign-up form includes both the conservative theological statement and also support for “the ongoing work of the Alliance”. The theological statement is straightforward enough, but it does not contain a programme of action or assert any of the measures the Alliance say they feel are necessary. And what is that “ongoing work of the Alliance”? There is currently no single document on the Alliance website that lays out their position. There are the letters written, mostly to the House of Bishops, which offer hints reiterating what has been requested in other places (e.g. separate bishops, separate training for ordinands, the formation of a separate province for conservative clergy). Much of this develops over the course of the letters, so it is not clear whether clergy signing in support in the early days would offer support to the measures being requested many months later. So those unhappy with the commendation of the Prayers of Love and Faith, but who have no intention of leaving the Church over them, may not realise that signing is being taken to support demands for formal structural and legal change as a condition of remaining.

    While the Alliance may not have a single paper in the public domain outlining their demands, there is one published by the CEEC from 2024 titled “What do we need”. This lays out their demands clearly and in one document, and some of these are echoed in later Alliance letters. It demands a legally secure structure with separate bishops, separate finance, separate vocations and ordinations, separate training, separate deaneries and dioceses, separate safeguarding, and more. They present this as a plan to maintain “unity” in the Church of England but it reads instead as partition into two separate churches under one roof. The main points of contact between these two entities would be the conservative province retaining access to funding and continuing to be represented on General Synod. It is as if I said to my wife “we can only stay married if I live in another country, never speak to you, but still have access to the bank account”. There is no requirement for the 2360 clergy indicating support to the Alliance to have read, let alone accept, this schismatic programme outlined by the CEEC.

    What we do know, however, is that the scale of ambition of the Alliance is not being met. As I reported at the end of last year, there were grand plans to recruit 3000 churches representing more than half of the Church of England’s worshipping members. Evangelical clergy were receiving direct approaches encouraging them to take part, including signing up for the Ephesian Fund and Overseers schemes launched by the CEEC. These schemes are intended to divide the church, using finance and walking away from diocesan bishops as leverage.

    However, a CEEC newsletter in September 2024 revealed that they had not even reached 500 clergy or churches subscribing to these schemes. John Dunnett, CEEC National Director, wrote:

    “We will be encouraging more churches and clergy to take action to show their concern about the current direction of travel. We would love to see 500 churches paying their parish share through the Ephesian Fund and 500 clergy receiving the alternative spiritual oversight being facilitated by CEEC.”

    It should be noted that signing up for the Overseer scheme, rejecting the pastoral provision of your own diocesan bishop in favour of someone appointed by the CEEC, does not require a priest to receive the approval of their PCC. It is also open to those who already receive alternative episcopal oversight from the Bishop of Ebbsfleet due to rejecting the ordained or episcopal ministry of women. In such instances the CEEC would recommend oversight be provided by the Bishop of Ebbsfleet, who currently has oversight of around 140 parishes. This seems very odd; in order to inflate their numbers to reach 500 parishes opting for extra episcopal oversight, is the CEEC asking those who already receive it from the Bishop of Ebbsfleet to reject the Bishop of Ebbsfleet so they can be assigned to the Bishop of Ebbsfleet and therefore count as a dissenting parish under the Overseers scheme? Yet more smoke and mirrors from the CEEC.

    This autumn, the Ephesian Fund is being further promoted by the CEEC so their “call for negotiation can get louder and more impactful”. Rather than being a last ditch means to facilitate those who feel they can no longer pay their parish share, some 18 months after Synod made a clear vote for LLF in February 2024 the CEEC are having to stir up discontent and persuade parishes that this is something they need to consider. Originally the rationale for the Fund was so that parishes can keep giving financially to the Church of England (although with the money channelled to the “right” sort of churches), but now it is being presented as a way of applying political pressure on the bishops. Concerns about this weaponizing of church finances for political ends have been raised by Together for the Church of England, who have released this briefing paper for PCC members being asked to consider the Ephesian Fund. Such careful consideration is needed; while I was writing this article, I heard of one large charismatic church whose income dropped by £50k after the incumbent announced he was taking the conservative line. PCC members being encouraged down this route should be warned.

    In conclusion, the claims made by the latest Alliance letter need to be questioned and put into wider context. My reading of these claims is that a plateauing number of clergy of undisclosed role from an uncertain number of churches, who do not speak for all their congregations, have signed up to support a conservative theological statement and an unarticulated practical response to the LLF programme. Remember that such clergy are not, and never will be, required to use the Prayers of Love and Faith and will be able to operate in full conscience in the Church of England as they always have done. For most, such assurances are sufficient. Meanwhile the CEEC and the Allianceå are trying to overinflate the impression of widespread dissatisfaction at all levels within the Church, because their aim is to reach a structural split which signals schism in everything but access to resources. That so many have not joined up shows that the Alliance may be a broad coalition, but only a fraction of that coalition are moving to take action in forming the so-called “de facto province”.

    What is so sad here is that the rest of the Church of England, the majority, has already made significant allowances to accommodate differences of conscience over same sex relationships. It really is time we accepted this and moved on. The Church has other issues to deal with. The General Synod has voted by a majority in all three Houses on three separate occasions to implement greater inclusion for LGBTQIA+ people, including welcoming the use of the Prayers of Love and Faith. Fighting a continual last-ditch attempt to restrict the freedom of LGBTQIA+ people to love who they love and to serve in the Church as they are called is not helping anyone.

     

  • The “Failure of the Church”: Why Waiting is Not Neutral

    by Revd Dr Charlie Bell, Fellow at Girton College Cambridge; Assistant Curate, St John the Divine, Kennington 

    ‘Lament and repent of the failure of the Church to be welcoming to LGBTQI+ people and the harm that LGBTQI+ people have experienced and continue to experience in the life of the Church’.

    So began the motion passed by the General Synod in 2023, in relation to the LLF project. Just look at the state of it now. According to Bishop Martyn Snow, in his recent video, ‘We’re still in the process of working with LGBTQI+ people to look at what that apology really means in practice’. So far, not much.

    I am bored writing about LLF. I am sure you are bored hearing about it. And yet here we are, almost two years on from that motion, and we have moved … effectively nowhere. Yes, some prayers have been commended – which was ‘looked forward to’ in that first motion – and that was a real step forward (although, of course, it really just formalised what was already happening in many parishes). But it happened nearly a year ago now, and although the prayers have been approved as a ‘standalone service’ we are being asked to wait to use them until a ‘registration process’ has been set up. Meanwhile, there have been a love-in residential, endless variations on working groups (with precious little new output), and various half-promises made. Folk wanting some progress for LGBTQIA+ people have given of their time and energy again and again. But in terms of actual change brought about for LGBTQIA+ people, let’s be frank – since that motion, there has been effectively nothing. Zero. Nada.

    This is enough of a disgrace in itself that the endlessly dithering House of Bishops should hang their heads in shame. Yet let’s be absolutely up front and frank here – that is not the half of it. Let’s not pretend: we know that there have been votes amongst the bishops to enable clergy to enter same-sex marriages, and those of us in the process know that Archbishop Justin’s comments on sex being for marriage do indeed reflect the general position of the House and College. Against that background, though, the required withdrawal of the nasty little Issues in Human Sexuality (a withdrawal required, let us remember, all the way back in February 2023), still has not happened – which is completely unacceptable. Similarly, all those in the LLF process know that clergy same-sex marriage is a question of when and not if – such has been said to us by staff, by bishops. The idea it won’t happen is ludicrous – and if that does become the plan, then there is no benefit to dragging it out any longer. Yet still, no decision is made – and we are treated like fools, again, and again, and again.

    Indeed, forty-four bishops called for this decision to be implemented ‘without delay’ in November 2023. Funny definition of ‘without delay’, right, a year on – and with the endless can-kicking, wasted time, and – frankly – wasted vocations.

    Because this isn’t an abstract issue. We have potential ordinands, whose call has been blocked by the absolute impediment that they have fallen in love with someone and have formalised it in law. Similarly, bishops are refusing to license clergy in same-sex marriages, all in the middle of a vocations crisis and the scandal of endlessly overworked clergy. Cases from the Diocese in Europe, where some countries don’t provide the option of civil partnerships, show quite how small-minded, absurd, and nasty this policy is in practice. In some places, bishops are quite inexplicably – and viciously – refusing to license lay people in civil marriages to people of the same sex or gender too. Even Issues in Human Sexuality didn’t go that far.

    So we clergy can pray prayers of blessing for others in such relationships but not enter into them ourselves? Similarly, clergy from other provinces of the Anglican Communion in same-sex marriages cannot minister in the Church of England, but clergy from these provinces who have celebrated such a marriage can? What a load of ecclesiological – and queerphobic – nonsense that is. The whole thing is a rotting ulcer at the heart of our church’s polity – and still, nothing is done. Where is the courage? Where, frankly, is our pastoral heart? How long, O Lord? Why is it that we are so expendable – so worthless – so detested? We asked for bread, were promised a stone – and even that is still withheld.

    The truth is, though, that there has been work done, ‘progress’ on LLF – it’s just that this work has nothing whatsoever to do with LGBTQIA people. LLF is no longer about them – about us. It is about those, a small but rich and powerful minority, who wish to exclude them from parts of church life based on their sexual orientation. It has become yet another tool of the powerful over the vulnerable. Just like Jesus always wanted.

    This is not new. Those who ‘couldn’t accept’ the ordination of women as priests and deacons got a nice pay-off as they swam the Tiber. In today’s arguments over other people using prayers and other people getting married, once again the sole focus has been on those who oppose the majority position. Look back over the reams of papers, debates, and ‘solutions’ suggested for our current predicament – how many of them actually mention, let alone prioritise, LGBTQIA people? Hint: not many.

    Those of us in favour of LGBTQIA inclusion seem to be bending over backwards to ensure those who think we aren’t even Christians should be given absolutely everything they claim they need so that they are not stained by our queerness. Adverts from inclusive churches speak of the need for ‘support’ for those who feel ‘disappointment, discomfort, or distress’ about the use of the Prayers of Love and Faith. While it’s surely good that PCCs are discussing where they stand on their use, and complete honesty about this will help people decide whether a church is for them or not, it’s all very one-sided. Meanwhile, there is precisely nothing about the actual LGBTQIA people about whom this project was supposed to be.

    The entire project has become disproportionate without ever moving anywhere near the ‘radical new inclusion’ promised at the outset. All we are doing now is yielding to threat upon threat from the ‘Alliance’, which has a much louder bark than its bite, and in the process chucking more and more LGTBQIA people onto the pile that says: ‘not important enough’. We appear willing to be agents of injustice to protect the powerful who now claim they are being oppressed. It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

    Christians and their churches are known by how they treat their weakest members. Jesus said something about that somewhere. The Church of England is standing at a precipice where it must decide whether it really wants to be known for creating a system that looks after the privileged, or whether it actually wants to embed and live the apology to LGBTQIA people that it so far only claims to believe in.

    This time of treating LGBTQIA people like collateral chaff cannot continue. If the bishops do not have the courage to permit us to enter into same-sex marriages and continue to live out our vocations – vocations that have been acknowledged and affirmed by the church – then it is time for them to admit that. This includes every serving Church of England bishop – every single one of whom, at present, agrees to implement the 2014 voluntary agreement. Similarly, if they want to continue the nonsense of ‘yes at Evensong, no at a standalone’ when it comes to the Prayers of Love and Faith, so be it. If that is the church they are proud to lead into the future, then they should own it.

    That is, of course, the church they currently lead. Waiting is not neutral – it is ongoing structural violence. Deciding not to decide is a decision – a decision to support ongoing injustice, and to say, through their actions, that we are not worth the hassle of making oneself unpopular with one’s sibling bishops. Neither handwringing nor can-kicking, nor hoping it will all go away, nor endless agonising about how difficult it all is, is a Christian virtue.

    And until a single bishop is willing to name this injustice, and then actually act justly, then they can – frankly – keep their apologies.

  • Can the Church of England be Mature about Love?

    by Revd Canon Neil Patterson, Vice-Dean of Bristol Cathedral and Chair of Together for the Church of England

    As readers are probably aware, a set of liturgical resources known as the Prayers of Love & Faith (PLF) were commended by the House of Bishops for use in the Church of England in December last year and are available here. Whatever the shortcomings of the texts felt by some, these are important as the first official encouragement to pray with same-sex couples for the flourishing of our relationships. Inasmuch as the Church of England’s doctrine is defined by liturgical texts rather than dogmatic statements, they constitute the decisive point on the Living in Love & Faith journey where the Church has acknowledged that same-sex couples exist and are a good thing, even if we are still corporately a bit unsure what sort of thing that is.

    So it was a delight to recently attend a service where the Prayers were used for two friends of ours at a regular service at a cathedral. It was not quite ‘regular’ to the extent that the congregation was swelled by a substantial number of family and friends, close relatives read the lessons, and the music was provided by a superb choir assembled from friends for the occasion. But liturgically, it conformed entirely to the rubrics for the Prayers – it was a joyful service of Evensong, with the couple sitting in ordinary seats with everyone else, and the short prayers for and by them taking place alongside the intercessions towards the end.

    I do still hope for a Church of England in which same-sex marriage in church happens and, in the short term, for  ‘standalone’ services, i.e. for the use of the PLF to be accepted for a free-standing service devised for a particular couple (though it is already unclear how adding hymns, Scripture readings and other prayers – all of them already permitted in other services – to the commended PLF would render them unauthorised). This is especially important if we are to welcome those for whom a regular liturgy like Evensong would be inaccessible, as well as for the practicalities of time and date. But I reflected that the service I attended felt like a more mature Christian celebration of what was happening than many church weddings I took in my parish ministry.

    What I mean is that my friends were not at the beginning of their relationship – they remembered that, as a very new couple, they had attended my own civil partnership in 2017 – and have shared a house for some time. Their own legal partnership was in fact a little while ago, but this was the occasion when they felt ready to celebrate publicly, with family and friends, and to seek God’s blessing for the years ahead, as devout and serious Christians.  And for that the modest prayers, within a service which was chiefly an act of praise to God, seemed thoroughly appropriate.

    But is this not usually the situation for those marrying in church? I can only recall a single wedding I have taken where the couple were not already cohabiting, and that was because the groom was in the RAF and so (as I understood) not provided with married accommodation. And after marriage there is limited change in legal identity – as far as I can tell there is no pressure from  conservative Anglicans to revert to the situation before the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, when all property was held in common (but controlled by the husband) or before the case of R v. R in 1991 when a wife’s body was held to belong to her husband (following 1 Corinthians 7) and so he was immune from any charge of rape. Yet we still purport to undertake some sort of existential change in a church wedding, taking two ‘single’ people and making them into something else, but I am not sure that we know what.

    Living in Love & Faith has focussed the attention of the Church with painful rigour on those of us in same-sex relationships, scrutinised as never before and now held by some to be responsible for many ills including, apparently, the decline in vocations to ordained ministry.  But I wonder if in fact we may be pointing the way to a more mature, less fairytale, understanding of all committed relationships. There have been official CofE documents on marriage occasioned by accepting the reality of divorce in 1999, or resisting same-sex marriage in 2013, and both are skewed by their contexts.  The LLF book treats it more widely, but evades the messy reality of forming relationships that leads to marriage. Until we can talk about this more honestly, we will have little credibility on the subject at all.

     

  • The Luxury of Marriage

    by Helen King, lay member of General Synod for Oxford Diocese and Editor of Via Media 

    That Southwark Diocese invitation to couples with ‘healthy’ marriages to come away to a luxurious hotel for a weekend to strengthen their marriage further… It’s been doing the rounds on social media and attracting a range of comments, from outrage at ‘healthy’ to surprise at the gap between ‘luxurious’ and the values of the gospel, to suggestions that the ad makes it sound like a swingers’ weekend, to questions about the weird typo where the hotel is described as ‘near’ without saying ‘where’. Since I wrote this blog post this morning, Anna and the Comms team from the Diocese have generously responded to the various complaints (including the typo) saying on X/Twitter “We recognise that some of the language used was clumsy and unhelpful.” All credit there.

    Full disclosure: I write this as someone who took the Marriage Course in 2004 and who has subsequently co-led it. I think it’s a very good course (OK, there are some cringeworthy moments, but they’re the exceptions) and my husband and I both found it very useful in different ways. When he saw the Southwark invitation and its typo, he did wonder whether the omission of the venue was to stop those of us who’ve done the Marriage Course showing up in the hotel bar and staging a really high quality argument in the style of Session 2 ‘Resolving Conflict’.

    Now, I’m not in one, but I entirely understand that clergy marriages are particularly challenged. I don’t know if that’s worse, or better, or just different in the situation where both partners are clergy, but maybe the modified four sections of the Marriage Course are adjusted according to that further potential dynamic. It is interesting, though, that the Southwark version is led by two couples where the man is the clergyperson. I wonder whether the national version also allows couples where both are clergy, or where the woman is the clergyperson, to be leaders?

    When we ran the marriage course, it was explicit in the course materials that this was for ‘couples’; whether or not they were married was not an issue. That is still stated here: “The Marriage Course is for couples who are married or have been living together for more than two years”. However, other websites put it differently. HTB’s site has “designed to help married couples invest in their relationship and build a strong marriage” (online course and in person). Has this been tightened up since we took the course?

    Time for an even fuller disclosure: we weren’t married when we took the Marriage Course. The Pre-Marriage Course wasn’t available locally so we asked the local independent church (offshoot of a Baptist church) if it would be OK to join and they couldn’t see why not. After all, my husband has been married before, just not to me… and it was my idea to do it, since marrying for the first time in one’s late 40s is quite a step to take. And Session 6 is on ‘Good Sex’. Well, there we are. If you aren’t doing the practicals, you can at least get up to speed on the theory elements.

    And the issue of sex brings me to the most disturbing point. When we ran the Marriage Course here, there weren’t any lesbian or gay couples in our church who wanted to take part. Had there been, we would have welcomed them. But the helpers, who served and cleared up the meal, by chance included lesbian and gay people, and they could watch the videos on the big screen. They didn’t raise any objections, and they said they found it all very helpful,

    But, as usual in the current state of the Church of England with its claims for a “radical new Christian inclusion” which don’t play out on the ground, there’s a significant group of people who are excluded from the Southwark Diocese weekend: clergy in same-sex civil partnerships or marriages. Clergy same-sex marriage is of course currently deemed Not OK, and those clergy who have entered such marriages are told they won’t be licensed to minister once they leave their current job. This has already deprived the church of people in good and faithful (and ‘healthy’?) relationships, who are good priests. But those in CPs are, of course, at least officially, supposed to be fine, because there’s no sex in CPs – at least, not according to the Church of England. So maybe it wouldn’t be a smart move to offer people in CPs the Marriage Course ‘Good Sex’ session. But that’s only one of the seven sessions, and the Southwark Diocese weekend is just doing four out of seven.

    So, would a clergyperson in a (perfectly valid) same-sex civil partnership be allowed to attend the Southwark ‘luxurious’ weekend where their ‘healthy’ relationship could be strengthened further?

    Apparently not. This suggests that the word ‘healthy’ is doing two different jobs: it’s making the point that, if your marriage is in difficulty, you should be looking for help from someone who specialises in this situation rather than rocking up to the luxurious hotel, but it also seems to be carrying the suggestion that only straight relationships can be ‘healthy’.

    When the exclusion of same-sex couples was stated on  X/Twitter, my fellow Synod member Benjamin John commented “But clergy can’t enter same sex marriages”? I asked him whether he would support those who enter same sex CPs having “events like this to help strengthen the relationships of such clergy?”

    He replied, “No”.

    Well, there you have it. Lesbian and gay and same-sex attracted clergy, the Church of England fully and explicitly recognises your civil partnerships, entered into according to the law of the land but also in faith and hope and commitment, but you can’t attend a weekend to help keep your relationship strong – and at least one member of Synod wouldn’t support anything that was of benefit to your relationship.

     

     

     

  • Power Games: Redemptive Violence or Redemptive Love?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

  • Essential Doctrines, Essential Hierarchies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Time to be Civil about Marriage

    by the Revd Dr Charlie Bell, Fellow at Girton College Cambridge; Assistant Curate, St John the Divine, Kennington 

    Well, here we go again then.

    In the next few months – in an eerie echo of the same months exactly a year ago – the Church of England will once again be asking small groups to sit down and discuss queer people’s lives and loves. Despite the fact that the draft Prayers of Love and Faith have been sitting ready to go for almost a year, and despite the fact that an almost final draft of the Pastoral Guidance permitting clergy equal marriage has similarly been sitting ready to go for almost a year, the feet-dragging nature of the church’s response to love has once again been on full display. If in doubt, set up a subgroup, and so here we are, with yet more subgroups, asking exactly the same questions, and promising a solution by July.

    It would be a foolhardy House of Bishops that suggested a further delay in July – many LGBTQIA clergy and their allies are close to civil disobedience, along with an increasing recognition by a number of bishops that the current situation is not only untenable but deeply unjust. Yet it is clear that the sticking point on much of the negotiations is not the Prayers of Love and Faith, and their ‘legal route’, however much noise is being made about this by rather tiresome bloggers, but clergy discipline. The real nub of this is whether faithful, committed, partnered clergy can enter what they personally believe to be, but what the church corporately does not yet receive as, marriage, and whether the church is empowered to continue to ask prurient and weird questions about their bedroom antics.

    It does sometimes appear to be the case that those doing and promoting the work on LLF have forgotten that there are actually (despite everything) LGBTQIA people in the church. When the Programme Board was first announced, there was not a single (out) LGBTQIA person on it, and similarly you needed a microscope to find the LGBTQIA people in the small groups (something which has been, to some degree, mitigated thanks to some of us spotting it!). For all the warm words and the ‘apology’, the mode of operation of the Church of England has resolutely not changed on all this; it’s frankly not good enough, and it’s rather grating when compared to the way other minoritized groups are increasingly treated. There seems to be a wilful determination to keep LGBTQIA people out of the frame, and hence to condemn the process to an endless procession of unforced errors. LGBTQIA people remain, apparently, acceptably ignored.

    There are plenty of us LGBTQIA folk who are really willing this process, and its leadership, to succeed, despite everything – yet we are treated as though our involvement would somehow infect it with queerness. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing, but in seriousness there needs to be a step change in the way the Church of England engages with us if it is to gain even a modicum of trust. People like me would be perfectly happy to look over press releases and point out the obvious issues, and indeed people far more qualified and senior than me, who are themselves ‘openly’ LGBTQIA (a term reserved, it seems, almost solely for the church in the modern world), should be invited to be part and parcel of the decision-making processes rather than merely advising it from the side-lines. There remains far too much being done about us, and not with us, and until that changes, the Church of England is displaying that it has learnt precisely nothing about its institutional queerphobia.

    Which brings us back to clergy marriage. From all the whingeing and whining, you’d think that the people this most matters to are those who oppose ‘sexual intimacy’ (as yet undefined) amongst queer people, but perhaps we might just reset the dial and remember that the key stakeholders here are queer people themselves. We have heard the usual delaying clarion call of ‘we need to do more theology’ on this time and time again, and we have heard all the handwringing about the conscience of bishops, yet we have – it appears – infrequently actually listened to and thought about the impact of the current pernicious, institutional and structural violence of the current position of the church for actual, real live, queer people.

    The level of pastoral ineptitude and lack of practicality found in the House of Bishops’ ‘Pastoral Guidance’ [sic] issued on Valentine’s Day 2014 is rivalled only by the disgraceful way that this has been implemented over the past decade. Absolutely no recognition has been given to the fact that the distinction between Civil Partnerships and Civil Marriage is not present in every jurisdiction, leading to clergy in Europe, for example, facing a choice between basic next of kin rights and their licences. Clergy from Anglican provinces overseas or our other communion partners, where equal marriage is not only permitted but required for clergy in same-sex relationships, have been prevented from offering their ministry in the Church of England in an extraordinary display of arrogant inflexibility on behalf of ‘mother church’. It is interesting, of course, that it’s only the queer married clergy who are blocked, and not the straight clergy, including bishops, who have been doing the marriage services – you really don’t have to look far for institutional queerphobia.

    Yet, finally, it seems that this pernicious nonsense is about to end, and not before time. There is now a clear way forward that brings the Church of England back to a position more true to itself – generous hospitality. We appreciate that we are not all going to agree on whether same-sex unions are marriage or not, perhaps for some time, yet we are part of a church and a communion in which a variety of perspectives are held entirely within the mainstream.

    In many ways, this is just a case of recognising facts. As yet – and it is only a matter of time – the Church of England corporately does not recognise the essence, dare I say sacramentality, of the marital in same-sex marriages. That’s actually where the distinction lies – not between the civil and the church (the marriage-matrimony idea), but in the anatomy of the participants. There are also, however, a number of queer clergy who want to enter into such a vowed state that is recognised as such by the State, and indeed by many churches that presently come to a different conclusion about this than appears to be the case in the Church of England. Some of them will want to do that in a civil ceremony, and others before God (indeed, in ceremonies in which God can actually be mentioned) in a church where such marriages can be celebrated.

    Neither of those options changes anything about the Church of England’s own position on what it holds to be marital. Clergy are not entering into marriage lightly – they’re doing so because they believe it to be part of their growth in holiness. The church has accepted – and indeed encouraged – clergy entering into Civil Partnerships, and the result of making a similar decision on marriage is absolutely no different from the church’s perspective, given the Church of England institutionally continues to refuse recognise such marriages as full fat marriage. The only difference it will actually make is to queer clergy – and it’s about time that happened, and the cruelty ended.

    Incidentally, this is not about press-ganging into marriage. For traditionalist Society clergy who are worried they might be forced to marry their same-sex partners, this is plain and simple scaremongering nonsense, often delivered to you by hierarchs in order to scare you into playing ball. Nobody is being forced into same-sex marriages, queer or otherwise, but the option is simply being put on the table. If in conscience clergy don’t want to take it, then that’s up to them – that’s the benefit of generous hospitality. Nothing has been said about civil partnerships being taken off the table, and the whole point of this exercise is surely to be expansive, and not close things down.

    And yet there are a number of ‘conservative’ bishops who continue to rail against this hospitality, and whose consciences ‘must be respected’ (again, interesting how it’s only ever one way, isn’t it). They won’t license or ordain clergy in same sex marriages, whatever the church decides, they say – and again, fascinating to see that they are unlikely to apply any restrictions to clergy from elsewhere who officiate at such marriages, but only on the queers in them. Their ongoing threat of a postcode lottery is holding the whole thing up, and they’re once again holding us to ransom. And it is all an argument built on sand, because as they like to remind us, the Church of England hasn’t changed its doctrine of marriage – and as is entirely obvious, the Church doesn’t recognise the marital in marriage between people of the same sex. It’s a house of cards, and needs calling out.

    It is high time for the Church of England to return to a sense of balance and proportion, to focus on the pastoral and not the disciplinary, and to actively find ways to enable and release its clergy into the world so badly in need of the Gospel message. We have failed – disastrously – at doing this for queer clergy in the last ten years, and at last we have the opportunity to change that. We don’t agree – maybe we never will – on marriage. But we can, surely, agree on the primacy of the Gospel. It really is as simple as that.

  • Slouching Towards Synod*

    by Helen King, member of General Synod, editor

    Usually things start to settle down in the week before General Synod meets. The agenda is out, Questions are submitted and the written answers awaited, and people read through the various papers and start to think about whether they have something they’d like to contribute to the debates.

    But, in this particularly troubled Synod, where safeguarding, Living in Love and Faith, and governance are all coming together and overlapping in a disturbing way, nothing feels settled at all. That wasn’t helped this morning by an unexpected letter ‘To all General Synod Members’, from the one remaining LLF Lead Bishop. There is still no sign of anyone having been identified to take over Bishop Helen-Ann Hartley’s role as the ‘inclusive’ Lead Bishop; or perhaps nobody so identified has been willing to take this on.

    In the letter, Bishop Martyn Snow assures us that the list of ‘commitments’ being brought by him to Synod are not really the commitments. They are ‘intended as an illustration of the sort of commitments that might form the basis of an agreement’.

    Yes, the underlining/bold face combination is in the letter.

    We are further asked not to ‘pick apart’ the wording of the commitments, or to discuss whether we agree with the details. It’s not clear what we are allowed to do.

    Is that it? Or are any more documents likely to land between now and Friday?

    In these circumstances, rather than offer any new reflections, Via Media News is instead offering you a reminder of some of the pieces published already here, and which speak into aspects if our current situation. No.10 of the commitments in GS2346 – commitments which are not really commitments – concerns communion: the search for the ‘highest possible degree’ of communion and the idea of ‘degrees of unity’. Is this about impaired communion? Ah, but we are not supposed to ‘pick apart’ the wording.

    So, let’s think about sacraments, and impaired sacraments. On Via Media, back in 2019, we featured a piece on our common baptism, from Bishop David Gillett, picking up cases where a minister had refused to baptise the child of a same-sex couple: ‘Does the Bible really say … that baptism should be withheld from some people?’ David looked at the sorts of “Oh my goodness how do we do this??” practical questions, like how to fill in the register when there are two mothers, or two fathers, and reminding us of Canon B22: No minister shall refuse or, save for the purpose of preparing or instructing the parents or guardians or godparents, delay to baptise any infant within his cure that is brought to the church to be baptized.

    He wrote “Meanwhile we are in the ironic situation where baptism, the foundation sacrament within the Church, is open to all whereas lawfully married same sex couples are barred from both a church marriage and the possibility of ordination.”

    Last year, Fr Thomas Sharp wrote about breaking, or remaining in, communion, when communion “flows from our baptism”. “To declare then that communion is broken is, simply, to make a fundamental statement too about baptism, that the sacrament, too, has in some way been broken.” He concluded, “I am tempted, when I disagree with them and any number of my fellow members of the Church, to declare us ‘out of communion’, to insult and write them off. But then the Spirit’s voice accuses me: ‘How dare you forsake your baptism?’”

    This raises questions around the stated objectives of the Church of England Evangelical Council, as stated in their document ‘Securing evangelical witness’. In the non-geographic dioceses envisaged here, people will be “able to express the view that others in the C of E are preaching a different gospel and are false teachers”; not that we disagree, but that one group of us are false teachers and the others aren’t. One baptism? Apparently not. Sharing communion? It doesn’t sound like it.

    Evidence for that comes from another 2019 piece published here, on ‘impaired communion’, where Dr David Ison challenged the January 2019 Letter from Concerned Anglicans in the Oxford Diocese, which took issue with the Oxford Bishops because they were insisting that all could be baptised and could receive communion: the Concerned wrote ‘in supporting the formulation first produced by the Bishops of Lichfield, [your Ad Clerum] Letter makes specific reference to nobody being excluded or discouraged from receiving the sacraments of baptism or the Lord’s Supper” and argued that what they called ‘such indiscriminate participation’ was actually unbiblical because, the Concerned Anglicans observed, ‘the Apostle Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 11: 27-29 clearly discourages participation in the Lord’s Supper for those who have not examined themselves.’

    So, for some within the wider, and diverse, evangelical constituency, some cannot be baptised, while some cannot accept the invitation to the Lord’s Table if the person presiding there has stated that they will bless people in committed same-sex relationships. This of course already happens – although, I think, less than it did – if the person presiding is female. David responded to all this was that “It’s ironic, and worse, that Paul’s confronting of corporate division and contempt is used by one part of Christ’s body as a stick with which to beat and exclude another part of Christ’s body – when Paul is telling his hearers to take a good look at themselves, not others.” Examining oneself seems rather different from labelling others as automatically excluded.

    And that brings us back to the big question: when Christians in the same Church refuse to take communion from, or with, other Christians in that Church: are they still in the same Church, or is that schism?

     

    *The title of this blog post is of course a reference to Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming. Make of that what you will.

  • Response to the ‘Letter from Seven Bishops’: A Theology of Inclusion

    by Fr Alex Frost, Vicar of St Matthews, Burnley and member of General Synod

    After reading the recent document around the Doctrine of Marriage and today’s sequel by seven Church of England Bishops, I wanted to ask myself: Am I, and others like me, wrong in all this? Have I been hoodwinked by a bunch of liberal-minded weirdoes who have all simultaneously jumped on a bandwagon of inclusion? Have I just been swept along in a sea of rainbow-coloured waters with an ever-increasing empathy towards vegetarians and vegans and people who have partners of the same sex? Has this heterosexual, former new romantic, a man married in a registry office, sexually active with a son before marriage, just bought into the narrative of same sex attraction and inclusion for all? Have I been led astray by a plethora of heretical charlatans acting in the inclusive name of Jesus Christ; have I been secretly deceived by leaders of the wrong pack rather than the shepherds of the sheep?

    Well, I decided to investigate a little further and started at the Church of England website A place to belong, which opens with an encouraging and opening proclamation: We all want our churches to be places of welcome for all, and indeed we believe that church communities are only whole when they include everyone.

    Knowing that not to be true, after some unpleasant placements as a pre-ordination candidate, I decided to look elsewhere as is my academic freedom to do – and just as was the Bishop of Newcastle’s decision to step back from her role as a LLF Lead Bishop. Of course, all the assumptions and points raised by the seven Bishops come from a place of integrity. I don’t for a minute doubt that they believe that what they write is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I understand that they think the biblical texts are true, the word of God, and that if they are the word of God they are to be unquestioned and to be implemented at all times and in all circumstances. I get it, I get it, I get it!

    But of course, one of the problems our church has is that we don’t all come to faith at the same time, with the same experiences, with the same blind assurance of literal belief in the Bible that the authors of the recent publication share. Many people turn to faith in times of sadness, uncertainty, disappointment, or hardship. I’m not sure how many new followers of Christ become Christians out of untold joy and happiness in their lives. That’s certainly not been my experience in my nearly 9 years as a man in Holy Orders. I also think people in our society are encouraged to challenge, debate, consider different views of opinion. They just will not accept that, to become part of this or that denomination, this faith or that religion you must sign up to a ‘you must believe this, or you can’t come in’ model, unless of course they have been indoctrinated to literal interpretation of what truth is from a very young age. Which raises a question… Is liberal Christian simply a heretical entry into church from the secular world? Or is it a legitimate gift from God, wanting to use the full talents and gifts of academic thinking beyond the traditional and conservative evangelical narrative?

    Where might myself and more conservative thinking theologians share some common ground, then? Maybe in agreeing that many problems in the world are because of people turning away from Christ, or not even knowing Jesus, which is very much the case in many of our secular schools. Maybe we share some common ground in that we both want our relationships to be loving, kind, trustworthy, honest, faithful, and lifelong. Maybe our common ground is that we both love Jesus and his church, and we will do all we can to preserve it and stay together. Maybe our common ground is that we all find it deeply upsetting that now we seem angry and apathetic, like many estranged brothers and sisters and families. Maybe the best theological advice we can give, not only to our Bishops but to one another, is to be kinder, more tolerant and to work towards a ‘settlement’ that recognises difference in the house of God, in the name of God.

    Maybe we have to ‘reset’ to a place of unequivocal agreement, that we love one another and that he loves us. Surely the common ground is that we all know what Jesus’ primary commandment was: to love one another, despite evidence I have witnessed to the contrary. But despite those failings our language should and will reflect that commandment, always, because when it doesn’t it steps out of the minimum entry requirement to follow Jesus. For millions of Christians, the words of the Bible are literal, and for millions of Christians they are not, and so we have a square that will never fit the circle. That should not mean condemnation for fellow Christians but, as in the secular world, I do believe a path forward will only be found in a way of compassion and compromise. Glimpsing eternity through a virgin bride or groom, is quite a scary and un-inclusive thought; quite poetic and romantic, but sadly not realistic. Many people can’t live up to the expectation which some theologians set before them. Gay people, certainly gay Christians, can’t conform to the doctrinal narrative laid down before them and nor should they have to. And nor should they be threatened with the assurance of eternal damnation. Many people have turned away from, or ignored, a journey of faith because it appears cruel, mean-hearted, misogynistic, intimidating. Or, even worse, they have first-hand experiences of those things.

    I don’t ever want Christians who believe something with integrity and assurance to be made to do something or accept something they don’t want to do. But I also don’t want these people to stop others doing something which they want to do, which they want to do with the utmost, honesty integrity and in good faith. If people think my desire to embrace and celebrate same sex relationships and a fully inclusive agenda comes from a place of heresy, or even from the devil, I can’t convince you otherwise and I’m sorry. But I write in Jesus’ name, as a devout Christian, but from a place of difference. A place that witnesses addiction, death, violence, and torment daily, yet a community still loved by Jesus although he is sadly unknown to many of them. Through our outreach we have become a bit of a haven, to the broken, the lonely and the lost. They have been devoured by the wolves and, somehow, they have landed at our door. Their restoration comes through acknowledgment of their experience and struggles, and there is a building of trust. The boundaries many of them hold are in a place far removed from the ideology of biblical narrative that is set in stone as the one they must adhere to. Their starting point for Christian healing and wellbeing comes from a place of acceptance and they can come as they are. Illiterate, ravaged by life, criminals, destitute, and lost.

    It is my view that Christianity will thrive once more in our country when we turn our faces towards the marginalised, by restoring them by a practical theology rather than a doctrinal theology. In restoring others in this way, it is my prayer we may restore ourselves in the process.

     

     

     

     

  • Marriage, but not LLF

    by Revd Canon Mark Bennet, Team Rector in the Thatcham Team and member of General Synod

    We are hearing much about marriage as the Living in Love and Faith process continues. But there is another aspect of marriage – this time, opposite-sex marriage – where I believe the Church of England should do much better.

    In a previous article on Via Media, published in 2022, Revd Sorrel Shamel-Wood told the story of her ordination as priest being deferred because she had recently got married. The ‘problem’ was that, even though her new husband was a priest, he had been divorced and his former wife was still alive. Sorrel had been ordained deacon already, with no impediment, and had she deferred her marriage she could have been ordained priest and been married later with no consequence. But, by marrying before ordination, she found herself caught up in the arcane and poorly known provisions of Canon C4. The directions given by the Archbishops under the Canon had not been significantly changed for many years, and specified that it would normally be necessary to wait at least three years after a relevant marriage before a candidate could be ordained.  By the time of Sorrel’s case it was generally understood that this three year period was a fixed requirement. In fact the Archbishops always retained a discretion, which they were eventually able to use, though Sorrel’s ordination was still delayed.

    But why should Canon C4 be there in the first place? Sorrel’s story is not the only example of this Canon failing the Church of England and making it look rather ridiculous. But, because the provisions touch on deeply personal matters, these stories are not well known. Many candidates have been advised to defer marriage until after ordination to avoid the complications of the Canon. An organisation which claims to value marriage encouraging ordination candidates to delay their marriages? Does that make any sense?

    And here is another fact that should be more widely known: over 30 years, one in six ordinations has – like Sorrel’s – required the intervention of the Archbishops under the Canon – one in six – and that is quite apart from those who have actually taken the advice offered to them to defer their marriage. That is some 2,500 faculties issued in 30 years – an average of over 80 each year. Yet when Amending Canon 9 was passed by General Synod in 1991 such exceptions were expected to be rare.

    Most members of the Church of England, even of the General Synod will likely be totally unaware of the practical ramifications. Here as in so much of church practice, processes have varied in different Dioceses – some candidates have been required to attend a panel interview on the subject of their marital history. Clergy who have remarried after divorcing abusive spouses have been told that the former spouse will have to be contacted, even if this might be a safeguarding issue for the candidate or their children. Many candidates find the process intrusive.

    My conclusion is simple: Canon C4 needs to be amended, and I have a private member’s motion listed for debate in General Synod in February which seeks to achieve that. Rather than deciding so many cases are ‘exceptional’, we need to get to the root cause of the problem: the Canon itself.

    The debates leading up to the passing of Amending Canon 9 were tense and highly charged – including allegations that the doctrine of marriage was being changed, and legal action to try to get the amendments declared ultra vires. What was at stake? Those affected were both those like Sorrel – marrying a person who had a former spouse still living – and those who were themselves divorced with their spouse still living, and who had remarried.

    In contrast to former marriages, however, other relationships are not subject to the same scrutiny. This means, for example, that a brief and unwise youthful marriage when the candidate was not yet even a Christian is regarded with more seriousness than a long-term relationship into which children may have been born and which has now come to an end. In former times such a relationship would likely have been solemnized as a marriage, but times have changed. Focusing on remarriage can distort the pastoral understanding of a candidate’s history.

    I would like to encourage General Synod members to find out about how the Canon has operated locally, and to support my motion – and if you are not a member of General Synod, please encourage your reps to understand the issues and to offer their support. I have heard many personal stories which, because they are personal, I am not at liberty to share, and I’ll also have limited time to speak and need to deal with technical matters too. It would be good if other Synod members could come prepared to tell stories they know and have permission to share (there are clearly lots of them).

    These technical provisions buried in the detail of the Canons are not the subject of wide knowledge or popular debate, but when they affect so many lives and vocations it is incumbent on us to get them right. it is the human cost which is the real failing of Canon C4.

    This is my motion, currently scheduled for debate on the afternoon of Tuesday 27th February:

    Revd Mark Bennet (Oxford) to move:

    ‘That this Synod request that the Archbishops’ Council introduce the necessary legislation to remove the canonical impediment to ordination in respect of a person who has remarried and, the other party to that marriage being alive, has a former spouse still living; or who is married to a person who has been previously married and whose former spouse is still living.’