ViaMedia

Category: Politics

  • Equality, Parliament, and the Established Church:  Some Recent Close Encounters

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

    (the first in a series of four: based on a presentation to the June 26th Symposium on Same-Sex Marriage in the Church of England organised by Sir Ben Bradshaw and Jayne Ozanne)

    In February 2023, the General Synod of the Church of England debated and passed by a sizeable majority a paper from the House of Bishops which is intended to move the needle in a positive direction towards equality for LGBT+ people.  Such reform impacts on laypeople and clergy active within the Church but also on the wider public the Established Church seeks to serve, chiefly through the parochial system and sector chaplaincies. This wider public turn to the Church for food banks, youth work and elder care and at key ‘life events’, or ‘occasional offices’ of baptism, marriage and funerals. Marriage, of course, is at the heart of the issue. The House of Bishops’ proposals to Synod in February were the result of a lengthy six-year process known as Living in Love and Faith. I know it was a lengthy and careful process – I was a member of one of LLF’s working groups.

    In February, before Synod, a group of about a dozen cross-party Parliamentarians met with Archbishop Justin. It was, according to the Guardian and Telegraph, a heated meeting, at which Parliamentarians ‘threatened’ disestablishment if the Church did not change its position to allow equal marriage. The Telegraph reported that ‘the Archbishop of Canterbury has vowed that he will not be told what to do by MPs over blessings for same-sex couples’. Later that month, while at the global Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Ghana, the BBC reported that the Archbishop spoke of being ‘“threatened with parliamentary action” in an attempt “to force same-sex marriage” into the Church of England’.

    There is a lot of alleged ‘threatening’ going on by MPs as well as the implied criticism that Parliamentarians were somehow out of line to take a genuine interest in how the Established Church serves the nation. I would like to put the Archbishop’s remarks into historical context in terms of the relationship between Parliament and the Established Church of England. I am principally a historian of the 17th century, but you will be relieved that I only want to go back about 30 years to another significant equality issue in which Parliament and Church interacted: the ordination of women to the priesthood in the early 1990s and the consecration of women as bishops in the 2010s.

    In 2011, I co-edited a collection of essays with two other Oxford colleagues, called The Established Church:  Past, Present and Future.  The book came out of a day conference on the same topic. I am a cradle Anglican but moved to England from the United States in 1979 to begin doctoral studies and have lived here ever since. In my 20s and even into my 30s, I thought Church Establishment to be frankly bizarre – who wouldn’t coming from abroad? But over the years, I have become a ‘critical convert’ to it. The day conference came about because whenever I heard a bishop on the radio defending establishment, I wanted to dis-establish it. Surely, there were more robust and creative ways to understand the public good of Establishment than the tired truisms that get trotted out. That is what we set out to do, though not all the contributors were of one mind on the subject.

    My own chapter looked at gender and Establishment. The research was prompted by an exchange in Synod in 2010, rather like the one I started with, between the new Second Church Estates Commissioner, Tony Baldry, MP and the then bishop of Durham, Tom Wright. Baldry, characteristically, gave Synod some nuanced and honest advice that the Commons would look dimly on a measure to consecrate women as bishops that was discriminatory – that is, that treated bishops who were women differently than bishops who were men. Tom Wright, in his last speech before resigning his see, attacked Baldry in the chamber, claiming that he had said (which Baldry had not) something like ‘the political winds were blowing this way, and so the church had better get in line’. With rhetorical flourish, Wright said: ‘The day the Church ceases to be able to say we must obey God rather than human authority will be the day it ceases to be the Church.’ His remarks were greeted by thunderous applause in the Synod chamber as it is a statement, on face value, pretty much impossible for any Christian to disagree with.

    As I said, this exchange was the motivation for my own chapter in the book. I had a sense, although I had never explored it in detail, that the creation of Provincial Episcopal Visitors (or ‘Flying Bishops’ as they have come to be known) was the result of pressure from the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament, as it was not part of the Synodical Measure that passed Synod in November 1992.

    Some of you, like me, will remember that momentous vote in 1992 in General Synod, approving the ordination of women to the priesthood.  The 1992 Measure certainly did not treat women priests equally with their male counterparts. It:

    • Exempted women clergy from any protection provided by the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act
    • Created Resolutions A and B ‘to protect’ parishes from women clergy
    • Explicitly excluded women from the episcopate
    • Guaranteed that no bishop would be ‘forced’ to ordain women
    • Provided financial provision to ‘compensate’ male clergy who felt they needed to leave the Church because of the ordination of women to the priesthood

    You might think that that was quite enough compromise and ‘protection’ for opponents.

    And you might also be thinking, there is no mention whatsoever here of Flying Bishops – an invention entirely without historical precedent to address an issue on which Anglicans were not of one mind. There is a very, very long list of things about which Anglicans are not of one mind, but never before has an episcopal sub-structure been created to meet the needs of a particular theological constituency.(1)  And what a dangerous precedent it set for dealing with disagreement as we now see attempts to apply the model to other theological disputes.

    Where did this theological and ecclesiological innovation come from? Well, Parliamentarians, I hate to tell you, it came from you. Hours spent on Hansard, which in 2010 had the slowest search engine I’d ever come across:  there it all was in the proceedings of the Ecclesiastical Committee, a committee of both Houses, whose job it is to decide whether a Synodical Measure is ‘expedient’ to go to the Commons and Lords for approval.

    A cross-party group of MPs, chiefly Frank Field, Simon Hughes, Patrick Cormack, and John Selwyn Gummer pushed for even greater concessions to those opposed to the ordination of women than were already in the Measure. In fact, the vast majority of time spent by the Ecclesiastical Committee in 1993 was on how to provide even more ‘safeguards’ for those opposed to women in the priesthood. Such involvement by Parliamentarians was entirely appropriate, as Frank Field maintained, as it was part of their:

    … function as parliamentarians … to protect the interests of constituents who may be adversely affected by a [Church] Measure …. we are quite rightly … much concerned with, and will no doubt spend much time on, how the position of minorities is protected.(2)

    Going back to this material recently to prepare this piece, I was struck by the extensive use by Parliamentarians in the early 1990s of ‘safeguarding’ language – that male clergy might somehow be ‘victims’ of some sort of ‘abuse’ merely by the existence of women clergy. It is very chilling language now in the light of the recent series of catastrophic and real safeguarding failures in the Church that are piling up. But in the early 1990s, while Bishop Peter Ball was committing terrible abuse, somehow it was women priests who were seen as the people from whom other Church members needed ‘safeguarding’.

    The bishops, I’m afraid, caved in to this Parliamentary pressure and these ‘threats’ and produced the Act of Synod of 1993, putting it in place for the Ecclesiastical Committee to deem it expedient for the Measure to go to Parliament for a vote in October and November 1993. The Measure passed handsomely – 10:1 in the Commons and 7:1 in the Lords – and several hours of parliamentary time was set aside for debate. Thanks to the Ecclesiastical Committee, even more ‘safeguarding’ was provided and the equality of women clergy even more eroded. Both Field and Hughes spoke in the debate in the House, proudly outlining how the Ecclesiastical Committee had been key in the creation of Flying Bishops.

    I have time to touch only briefly on women in the episcopate, but we can see significant culture change from the early 1990s to the early 2000s. MPs used Early Day Motions from the early 2000s onwards to raise the question, with increasing impatience, of when the country can expect the Established Church to have women bishops. In their remarks, MPs often praised the public good provided by the Church’s parochial system and the women priests who were serving the wider community through it.

    Reflecting on this history challenges any notion that Parliamentarians taking an interest in the affairs of the Established Church is in anyway improper or unusual in the modern era. In the early 1990s, Parliamentarians ensured there was even more discriminatory provision against women priests and gave us Flying Bishops. By the early 2000s, MPs were repeatedly raising questions about the exclusion of women from the episcopate of the Established Church. You will remember the outcry in the Commons when the Measure narrowly failed to achieve a two-thirds majority in the House of Laity in 2012.   As the Church of England obsesses with its narrative of decline and lack of relevance, it is ironic that when the members of the public legislature of the country actually take an interest in the Church because they believe it to matter, such interest is perceived as ‘interference’ and ‘threatening’. In a way, I agree with Frank Field when he said it was their function as Parliamentarians:  ‘… to protect the interests of constituents who may be adversely affected by a [Church] Measure’.(3)

    In 1993, the ‘interests of constituents’ were understood to mean providing yet more discriminatory measures against women. In the past 20 years or so, the attention of MPs to ‘the interests of [their] constituents’ is about promoting equality in the way the Established Church orders its life and serves the wider community. The modern relationship of Parliament and the Church of England is more complicated than accusations of ‘threatening’ behaviour support.

    Notes
    (1) See Judith Maltby, ‘One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, but Two Integrities?’ in Monica Furlong, ed, Act of Synod or Act of Folly?: Episcopal Ministry Act of Synod 1993 (SCM Press, 1998).
    (2) Reports of the Ecclesiastical Committee, p. 64 (19 April 1993).
    (3) Reports of the Ecclesiastical Committee, p. 64 (19 April 1993).
    Further reading
    Judith Maltby, ‘Gender and Establishment:  Parliament, “Erastianism” and the Ordination of Women 1993-2010’ in Mark Chapman, Judith Maltby & William Whyte, eds, The Established Church:  Past, Present and Future (T&T Clark, 2011).

  • Conscientious Objection

    Questions of Conscience (5)

    by Rachel Muers, Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers)

    The annual International Conscientious Objectors’ Day commemorates and supports those who refuse compulsory military service. Objection to military service is the modern paradigm for ‘conscientious objection’. Indeed, conscientious objection may be equated with pacifism, so that the argument about whether conscientious objection is justified shades into the debate about whether war can be justified.

    Historically, however, the question of conscientious objection is not about a specific ethical issue, but rather about the deeper question of the relationship between an individual’s convictions and the state’s requirements. The starting point for conscientious objection is saying no to a specific demand, but it points to a wider conviction – that a person cannot hand over her responsibility for moral or religious judgement to an external authority. Objection to military service is a paradigm for conscientious objection, not just because pacifism is a well-established ‘minority report’ in Christian ethics – but also because military service requires one to place oneself fully at the disposal of the state. It is not a coincidence that objection to swearing oaths, particularly oaths of allegiance, is another major context in which conscientious objection arises. An oath of allegiance, after all, is also a ‘giving over’ of oneself to authority – and though the main objection to it from the earliest conscientious objectors mainly arose from Christ’s command not to swear, there was also a deep and frequently-expressed concern that oaths of allegiance were linked to political and religious violence.

    In English law, conscientious objection arises initially in the confrontation between nonconformists – including, but not only, members of what became the ‘historic peace churches’, such as Quakers – and a state anxious to secure the loyalty of its subjects. From the seventeenth century onwards, we see a long and often tortuous process of negotiation around the provisions the state was able or willing to make to legalise conscientious objection. This was a negotiation not just about what constitutes an acceptable range of opinions, but more fundamentally about what it takes to be recognised as a full member of the national community.

    For example, the specific words ‘conscientious objection’ first appear in English law in the title of an 1838 Act, designed to allow Quakers and Moravians to take up elected local offices without swearing the prescribed oaths. The preamble to the Act refers to the ‘conscientious scruples’ of members of these groups – a puzzling eccentricity, obstinately maintained by minority communities. The problem is that these scruples, when they come up against the law, have effects ‘to the manifest detriment of themselves and their fellow subjects’ – and the Quakers and Moravians will accept that detriment rather than swear an oath. Fortunately, in this case to accommodate them will cause ‘no mischief or inconvenience’, so an alternative process is found, and the wheels of local government continue to turn.

    Notice here that from both sides, the nonconformists and the state, conscientious objection was framed in terms of community membership and religious identity. It was Quakers and Moravians, and elsewhere Separatists and other named groups, who, collectively, maintained and were identified with the conscientious objection. What looked like eccentric ‘scruples’ when they cropped up in isolation – refusing to swear an oath in order to take up the post you were elected to – were recognised as belonging to part of a coherent religious framework and a way of life.

    This points to a wider meaning of conscientious objection, at least as it was framed by early objecting communities. Conscientious objection was not just about refusing a constraint or being in charge of one’s own destiny; it was about being free for and in the service of Christ. The objector’s refusal – I will not obey the state – was grounded in an affirmation – I will follow the call of Christ.

    Does this make the conscientious objector more or less difficult to deal with than the common-or-garden objector, the person who simply finds the provisions of the law inconvenient? On the one hand, we might think that it makes the conscientious objector impervious to reason. If she thinks she is obeying a higher law, a calling from God that is at odds with what most other people (including most other Christians) perceive, she will never be persuaded that she is wrong. Our only options will be either to accommodate her scruples, if accommodation doesn’t cause too much ‘mischief or inconvenience’, or to exclude her, if it does.

    The Quaker social scientist Constance Braithwaite, however, offers another perspective on the religious conscientious objector and her faith. For Braithwaite, conscientious objection is both ‘a reminder to all governments and parliaments that they are not infallible’ and an affirmation that a person ‘must act according to [their] own conscience, even though it is fallible [my emphasis]’. Put in a religious context, conscientious objection is thus a way of saying that both the state authorities and the individual objector are open to divine judgement. The objector claims freedom to seek and follow the leadings of God – which might require her to change, or admit that she was wrong – and in doing so, she reminds the powers that be that they might have to change, or admit that they were wrong. Another way to read conscientious objection, then, is that it holds open a space for future change beyond what we can currently imagine as part of the conversation – just as those engaged in the tortuous negotiations of earlier centuries could not imagine a future in which nobody was forced to swear an oath.

     

     

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Only this time it is worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    So why am I labouring this point?

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

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

    Is that progress?

    Time alone will tell.

     

  • Women Bishops: The Legacy of Baroness Howe of Idlicote (8 February 1932-22 March 2022)

    by April Alexander, member of General Synod 2000-2021; Church Commissioner 2008-2018; member of Crown Nominations Commission 2013-2018

     

    Obituaries to Lady Howe saluted her well-known feminism, but few mentioned her Anglicanism.  For those of us who have worked for the ordination of women, however, Elspeth Howe is remembered with love and gratitude because, as a vice-president of WATCH (Women and the Church), she voiced in the House of Lords our joys and fears over the Bishops and Priests (Consecration and Ordination of Women) Measure (2014) and the Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015.

    It is timely to look again at those joys and fears to see whether they have been realised.

    After the failure in the House of Laity in General Synod of the original 2012 Measure to allow women to be consecrated as bishops, in 2014 there was a determination not to allow the new and revised Measure to stumble at any point. It was Elspeth Howe who nevertheless asked further questions which forced the Archbishop of Canterbury (in 2013, Rowan Williams had been succeeded by Justin Welby) to address the rather embarrassing truth that discrimination against women would survive despite the indications to the contrary; indeed, such discrimination is actually embedded in the 2014 legislation and Guidance.

    To this day, parishes who want to may request from their Diocesan bishop – whether female or male – the episcopal oversight of an alternative bishop who will ‘protect’ the parish from ever having an ‘unacceptable’ Diocesan. In her speech to the House of Lords on 14 October 2014, Lady Howe asked whether the reverse would be the case. She pointed out that there were already parishes with a woman priest serving under a bishop who did not recognise her orders, and asked whether such a parish would be able to request the oversight of an inclusive bishop. The truthful answer would have been a plain ‘No’, as we have seen during the years since, but it was a fudge.

    Lady Howe also asked for reassurance that, despite all-encompassing nature of Clause 2 of the Measure, it was only the protected characteristic of gender from the Equality Act 2010 which would be overridden and not those characteristics relating to sexuality, marital status and so on. The Archbishop of Canterbury replied:

    As a matter of policy, the House of Bishops has advised that those in parochial appointments should act as though the [Equality] Act applied [to all protected characteristics other than gender]. This change is not a cloak for discrimination on sexuality, marital status, marital history or, for that matter, age (Hansard October 2014).

    This is also the answer I had been given in General Synod in July 2014 by the Chief Legal Adviser to the General Synod.  However, by the time she died, Lady Howe would have been forgiven for wondering why the debate on sexuality rumbles on, eight years after such a clear assurance, given in the House of Lords, by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    Four months later, in February 2015, Baroness Howe spoke in the debate on the Lords Spiritual (Women) Bill which should have enabled new women bishops to ‘leapfrog’ over their male colleagues in being appointed to the Lords. In the event, of course, there have never been enough women to fill the places, and the provision lapses in 2025. She said:

    Given the great pleasure of seeing the first female bishop consecrated in the Church of England recently, it was sad to see that within a week the underlying divisions within the Church of England had begun to emerge once again…In October last year I asked the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury in this House whether archbishops would continue to consecrate all bishops in their respective Provinces. From his response and further debate in the other place I understood

    ‘that in the normal course of events, archbishops will consecrate all bishops but … there will be circumstances when an archbishop is ill or overseas’ (Commons 20/10/14; col 724).

    Then, he might delegate.

    Yet only one week after the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York (John Sentamu) had consecrated the first female bishop through the laying on of hands, he chose not to put his hands on the new Bishop of Burnley, although he was present at the time. He invited, as noble Lords will know, other bishops who were ‘acceptable’ to the new bishop to lay on hands in his place. There were only three such bishops. Thus, the contrast between the two services in that sense could not have been greater.

    This is still an important matter…. The archbishops [later] issued a statement that they would take each consecration on a case-by-case basis. Put simply, there are those in the Church of England who hold that once a bishop has laid hands on a female priest in ordination or on a female bishop in consecration he is no longer acceptable to consecrate members of the self-styled ‘traditional Catholic’ wing of the church. This is a notion of ‘taint’, however it is described by those who propose it.

    We should not forget that it has been a source of anguish among all women in the Church since alternative arrangements were introduced for ordination under the Act of Synod 1993.

    Readers should be aware that that the assurance quoted here by Lady Howe did not survive the passage of time. Citing not just the pandemic, but also ‘awareness of the sad reality that not all in the Church of England agree on issues of ordination’, the Archbishops issued another statement five years later on 20 July 2020. Rather than consecrating all bishops, they stated,

    We have agreed that the Metropolitan will normally ask another bishop to be the chief consecrator…From now on the Archbishops will ask three bishops to lay on hands with other bishops present and associating with the ordination but not in fact laying on their hands.

    From re-reading these debates, it is clear that assurances given even in the House of Lords, and even by the Archbishop of Canterbury, can turn out to be less than durable.

    What is also crystal clear is that Elspeth Howe had just the words to express the frustration and disappointment of the vast majority of women who had worked so hard for this legislation but who had no voice of their own in the legislature.

    May she rest in peace.

  • All Change: What Next for Living in Love and Faith?

    by Scot Peterson, Lecturer, Corpus Christi College, Oxford; Scot’s research focuses on issues of constitutional history, including particularly the relationship between religion and the state

    Now that Eastertide has commenced, Living in Love and Faith approaches the end of its initial stage, and a decision about church policy has become inevitable. The outcome will be a policy with widespread impact. The Church of England’s leaders have sheltered behind an invalid understanding of marriage as an unchanging institution and have resisted change through a sequence of conversations and study groups. But change is coming.

    The Debate over Same-Sex Marriage

    In 2013 my co-author Iain McLean and I published a book intended to inform a broader debate about same-sex marriage. In it, we argued that marriage is a legal institution that structures human relationships, allowing, for example, the partners to inherit without a will. It is also a religious institution (considered a sacrament by some), which has historically involved more or less consent by women. Its religious aspect has sometimes treated spouses equally but has also at times treated women as subordinate to men, even to the extent that they became property. Despite arguments to the contrary, over its centuries of development marriage has never been a fixed relationship or a static institution, and it continues to change.

    The broader discussion about same-sex civil marriage, which we wanted to address, began with a ‘listening exercise’ by the coalition government in 2010. Then, in March 2012, the Home Secretary (Theresa May) and the Minister for Equality (Lynne Featherstone) launched a twelve-week consultation about how (not whether) to afford same-sex couples access to civil marriage. The government issued its response to the consultation in December of that year, and parliament enacted legislation on 17 July 2013. The first same-sex marriages took place in March 2014.

    Church and State

    In the 2012 consultation the government responded to the Church of England’s argument that by permitting same-sex civil marriage the government would weaken the religious establishment.?A change in who could be married for civil purposes would, the church claimed, complicate the meaning of marriage (which it claimed had been fixed for centuries). The Church of England was also somewhat misleading in arguing it had supported civil partnerships, when in fact most bishops had opposed them even when they were celebrated by members of other religious denominations. In response to the church’s objections to same-sex marriage, the government imposed a quadruple lock: (1) ensuring that no minister or religious organization would be required to perform or recognize same-sex marriages; (2) requiring religious organizations to affirmatively seek authorization to solemnize such marriages; (3) barring discrimination claims against religions or individuals who refused to perform such marriages; and (4) making a change in the Church of England’s canons, which must be initiated by the church, a prerequisite for any change in church practice. The quadruple lock remains in place: only the church can change it, and it puts the church firmly outside the centre of the legal marriage regime, as one participant in a broader process, rather than as the one defining it.

    The current consultative process in the Church of England on these matters, Living in Love and Faith, follows a series of Shared Conversations launched at the time of the first same-sex weddings in 2014. After the Shared Conversations, which lasted for two years, Synod rejected  a report recommending that the church not re-visit its position on same-sex marriage (the House of Clergy voting against, 100-93). In response, the bishops appointed another study group, which developed a curriculum of podcasts, training materials, videos and even a book, to encourage conversation on the issues of marriage, faith and sexuality in an even-handed way. The curriculum was released in November 2020 (during the pandemic). Groups have been meeting, including virtually, to discuss those materials, and feedback from participants is due to close at the end of April. Further reflection will take place, with the House of Bishops (once again) offering options on how to proceed at General Synod in February 2023, nine years after the first Shared Conversations launched.

    Choosing Policy

    A decision has become inevitable, and the outcome will be public policy. It will not necessarily affect all of the public, but the Church of England, as the established church in England, retains special status in matters such as baptisms, funerals, and marriages. Political science distinguishes between ways of making these kinds of ‘political’ decisions.

    One way is not to decide at all: to leave a matter to the market or to individual preferences. We call this spontaneous ordering. Not deciding is not an option in the current process; however, because the quadruple lock remains in place, even this is a decision. A second way of making decisions is through consensus. The UK cabinet makes decisions in this way, with a full discussion, after which all members come to agreement. This happens after a prime ministerial ‘summing up,’ in which he or she articulates the sense of the meeting. (Arm-twisting may be involved.) So far arm-twisting has not worked in this matter. Finally, there is voting, which always fails to seamlessly aggregate preferences and which necessarily leads to one side feeling it is the loser, perhaps quite acutely.

    Living in Love and Faith seems aimed at achieving some form of consensus. This is highly unlikely given the response rates that are currently available, and the intensity of preferences on both sides, which can lead to unrepresentative results (in both directions!). Moreover, the pandemic has made it possible for the losing side to claim it was unfairly disadvantaged. However, spontaneous ordering remains an option. While it is a temptation for the central church to decide important questions like these, local congregations may be better placed to understand the nuances of their members’ preferences. Indeed, the Living in Love and Faith conversations may have greatly improved that understanding, irrespective of the responses. Thus, the best option may be for the church to allow variation among congregations, with many not performing same-sex wedding celebrations but with others doing so, when their members, clergy and PCC agree. In this way the church may preserve unity by allowing for diversity of belief within the structure of the national church.

  • 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.

  • Truth – The First Casualty in War

    by Jayne Ozanne, Director of the Ozanne Foundation, Chair of the #BanConversionTherapy Coalition and Founder of ViaMedia

    “Truth is the first casualty of war” is a phrase that has been attributed to a number of leaders over the years, but whether it be Senator Hiram Johnson in 1918 or Dr Samuel Johnson in 1758 it remains as true today as it has ever done.

    From the war on Covid to the war in Ukraine, there have been significant attempts to undermine the truth about the reality of the horrors of what is happening.  And it is always the most vulnerable and the most at risk who bear the brunt of these falsehoods.

    Sadly, we are witnessing exactly the same “war on truth” in relation to the lived reality of our trans friends, neighbours and colleagues, and again it is the most vulnerable and the most at risk who are bearing the brunt of the falsehoods that are being spun by the gender critical lobby. What is utterly unforgiveable in this case is that it is those in power, who have the means and the opportunity to do something about it, who are actively choosing not to do so.

    I know I am not alone in being appalled by Downing Street’s confirmation yesterday afternoon that they would not be including trans people in a ban on “conversion therapy”.  Their rational? Well their statement claims that this is “a legally complex area” which needs “further careful thought”, which is a pathetic excuse given that they have been working on this for nearly four years now!  That is why I and over 100 LGBT+ organisations have chosen to distance ourselves from the government’s ironically named “Safe To Be Me” international conference planned for the summer.  The fact that the Prime Minister is prepared to leave those who are the most likely to undergo and be offered “conversion therapy” open to abuse has only served to confirm in the minds of many that this administration is institutionally transphobic.

    One has to ask who is advising the Prime Minister?  It would appear that he has surrounded himself by people who are either too scared to tell him the truth or, perhaps more worryingly, those with a specific agenda, who are determined to peddle their own faux concerns about trans people and in so doing are wanting to wage a culture war against them.  What is clear is that he is not listening to the advice of the UN Independent Experts, his medical profession, research experts or indeed the brave testimonies of survivors, who all are calling for protections against a form of abuse that leads many to consider taking their lives.

    Let us be clear, “conversion therapy” has nothing to do with good medical practice, despite what the gender critical lobby would have us believe.  What we urgently need is to ban any practice that has a “predetermined purpose”, where a person is told that they cannot be who they know themselves to be and are encouraged to change or suppress who they are in order to fit in with a perceived “norm” of a certain group, cultural community or religious belief.

    Affirming spaces, whether they be in a healthcare setting, the home or a religious setting, is the essence of good practice and must be encouraged.  Despite what the gender critical lobby would have us believe, these are spaces where one can explore who one is without prejudice or fear.  That is why senior leaders, including Lord Rowan Williams, sent a letter to the Prime Minister yesterday condemning “conversion therapy”, particularly trans “conversion therapy”, and emphasising that “every church should be a safe space which affirms people in being who they are, without fear of judgement.”

    These are dark days, where there is a spirit abroad that seeks to want to ignore the evidence of harm caused and instead cling to certain falsehoods and ideology.  We see this repeatedly when trying to engage with those religious leaders who are hell bent on opposing a ban.  Time and time again they have been confronted with stories of people whose lives have been torn apart by their actions, with research that shows that these individuals are not alone, with medical professionals explaining the damage they do.  Their response?  Well, it should perhaps concern us all that their tactics seem worryingly familiar – they say we are exaggerating, that we are making things up, that we are bringing these terrible mental health traumas on ourselves.

    Indeed “truth is the first casualty in war”, and we are I would offer in a spiritual war.  The good news though is that we know the outcome already for, to quote one very brave president recently, “we shall win for truth is on our side”.

  • Earth Accuses Earth: Responding to Cancel Culture

    by Jayne Manfredi, an ordinand at the Queen’s Foundation in Birmingham and a contributor to BBC R4 Thought for the Day

    I think that God is calling me to be a peacemaker, which is really annoying because what I’ve wanted to do for most of my life is fight people. My younger self was not so much conflict averse, as conflict enthusiastic. I revelled in rage because I felt that life had dealt me some crummy hands and by God someone was going to pay for it. Now, as I take a breather and enjoy a sit down, a nice cup of tea and a biscuit in the middle years of my life, I see that God has worked a kind of miracle in me. I do hate it when God does that.

    It’s been coming on for a while. In my first year of ministerial training, I posted a silly photo of myself on Twitter, wearing a cassock and a stupid grin, with a caption from 1 Timothy 2:12:“I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.” The juxtaposition was an obvious joke to the people who had followed me for some time. Unfortunately, the tweet went viral and that was when my problems began.

    ‘THIS PERSON IS A DISGRACE,’ quote tweeted one Catholic priest. Other outraged people proceeded to bombard my mentions with further accusations, questioning everything from my personal morals to my suitability to be ordained, my poor theology and exegesis, my respect for God, the bible, the church, my husband and myself. Out of the avalanche of notifications, the odd poisonous phrase leapt out like shrapnel: ‘Woke Whore.’ ‘Stupid bitch.’ ‘Devil sucker.’ One man threatened to report me to my Archdeacon. I shouldn’t be allowed to continue training. The church leadership needed to discipline me.

    If their intention was to make me question my behaviour, then it backfired. Being piled-on in this manner rarely creates the environment necessary for the discomfort of self-reflection. I felt attacked so I behaved defensively, stubbornly entrenched in my own righteousness, complete with a newly acquired victim mentality that stridently declared, ‘Poor me. Why are the internet men being so mean?’ This allowed no room for personal accountability or growth or for taking a step back and looking at the situation dispassionately and with sagacity.

    Cancel culture is a contested phrase, which I’m defining here as the collective shaming of people who have committed a perceived offence, often for the reward of social credit. What started out as a valuable way for marginalised people to hold institutions and powerful individuals to account has mutated into a pernicious form of internet justice, online sabotage and mass shunning. It’s a blight that is not restricted to any one political leaning or community, and at its absolute worst, it manifests as large-scale, unrelenting bullying which can have devastating consequences. It is an abysmal way to treat people and as Christians, we should be taking no part in it.

    To add insult to injury, we are told that cancel culture is not a thing. It doesn’t exist. As someone who has been at the centre of several attempts to ‘cancel’ not only my online output, but my ministerial vocation, I can tell you that it absolutely does. The fact that the attempt was unsuccessful does not in any way negate the impact these incidences have had upon my mental health. The people who participated in the bullying or complained about me to my Bishop would probably frame it as merely holding me to account, or – that ubiquitous and obnoxious phrase – calling me out, when in reality, the goal was entirely punitive.

    I’ve been finding parallels with the story from John 8:1-20 concerning the adulterous woman and her accusers and contemplating it as a teaching about the politics of judgment, rather than the injustice of someone wrongly accused. Indeed, Jesus does not exonerate this woman; he doesn’t tell her that she’s blameless or even that she’s forgiven. This is a story about how we deal with sin when we are all sinners. When you understand that, you realise that this story isn’t about the woman at all; it was always about the people throwing stones.

    I fear we’ve become a church that is addicted to public condemnation. We delight in citing Jesus’ example of turning tables over in righteous fury as a justification for our own rage. We criticise anyone who doesn’t express the same level of outrage as us and dismiss their appeals to nuance and mercy by denouncing them as too privileged to care, or too centrist, or too complacent. Rage, when well-directed has its place, but regularly feeding off anger in an orgy of outrage is not what Jesus told us to do.

    I am wary of the cleansing seduction of giving in to my anger because my own outrage is an ocean that I dare not swim in; to just dip my toe from time to time feels spiritually draining. These are well traversed waters from my past and they are dangerous and unfathomably deep. To wallow in even the shallows is to risk drowning. I ration my outrage and take sips when I need to. I will never again use it to drown out the humanity of anyone else.

    Jesus talked far more about mercy than he ever did about rage, so if we’re going to turn tables over, we need to sometimes be willing to use them to shield those who are hated and despised, as well as the ones for whom there is no cost in loving. My faith is in a God who died but was resurrected and to follow Him is to believe that no one is beyond redemption. It’s to accept the inconvenient truth that even the most awful sinners are worth more in His sight than their worst moments. This is a God who shields sinners from stones, offers them a fresh start and empowers them to sin no more; not because they are threatened, shunned or shamed into it, but because they know they are loved.

    It’s offensive to me that God extends grace to people whom I find repugnant. It goes against every unwritten rule I’ve absorbed about fair play, and yet. If I want to receive that gift of grace myself, can I do no less than to extend it to everyone else? There’s something liberating about admitting that I am a sinner too, and we are all but creatures of the mud. Some scholars have pondered that when Jesus bends down in front of the crowd holding stones, what he writes in the sand is earth accuses earth. God is the ultimate judge. Not me. Not you. When the heady rush of condemnation takes hold, we cast ourselves as judge. Earth accuses earth. We miss the redemptive power of loving the hated, because we are far too busy looking for stones to throw.

     

  • Drawing the Line?

    by the Rt Revd Paul Bayes, Bishop of Liverpool and Chair of the Ozanne Foundation

    Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord.[1]

    It’s not that long ago that the word “inclusive” used to irritate me. I saw it as a party slogan, rather like the use of “orthodox” or “godly” in other parts of our Church. It annoyed me, even as it nagged at me.

    This is because I hoped to rise above such divisive words. In particular, in my early days as a bishop I tried to inhabit a vacuum of opinion. I believed that this vacuum is the proper place for a bishop, the only place that a “symbol of unity” in the Church could possibly sit. Such a vacuum is certainly a good place to live if you want a quiet life: in space, no one can hear you scream.

    Well, over the years things changed for me. As with so many others in the long history of the Church, events and wounded people approached me and I came to know them, and they changed me. Now, as I approach my retirement, the place and voice of a disciple involves (to quote Dan Berrigan SJ as I so often do), “knowing where you stand, and standing there”.

    So I have done my best to say what I think about a whole range of things, including one or two which are contended in today’s church. I’ve tried to speak for, to make room for, the lives of people for whom there was no room in the past. Overall I’ve tried to set my compass by what the Roman Catholic Church has called the preferential option for the poor; what my predecessor David Sheppard called the bias to the poor.

    As I’ve done so there has been no shortage of people to tell me that by making this journey at all, I have fallen short of my discipleship in general and of my episcopal vocation in particular. I’m told that I have gone wrong in one or both of two ways: by being a heretic and/or by being a maverick.

    Those who think I’m a heretic usually write to me. They tend to be unrestrained in the use of their language. Many of them believe that my eternal destiny is at stake and that they need to help me with my salvation by setting me straight. From the tone of their letters they clearly believe that the job will best be done by shaming me into heaven, reminding me forcibly of my mistakes, inaccuracies, ignorances, underlining how offended they are by my words. I try always to reply to these letters and emails with thanks, but I have to say that none of them has yet succeeded in its aim. Shaming and anger are poor persuaders.

    Those who think I’m a maverick are usually more restrained in their style. They tend not to write but to speak privately, or to express themselves non-verbally, in the raising of an eyebrow of the rolling of an eye. They communicate more in sorrow than in anger. What a pity, brother, that from time to time you have so noisily flouted the agreed norms of polite Christian behaviour. How unfortunate that you seem to be questioning or resisting or pre-empting the necessarily slow deliberations of the Church. What a shame that you keep banging on about one or two issues, rather than spreading your indignations more carefully, seamlessly and evenly about the place. How sad that you’re so… well, untactful.

    For me, as for a number of my colleagues retired and serving in all orders of the Church, being seen as a maverick is unpleasant and unwelcome. Unwelcome, since our belief is that we live in the mainstream of discipleship and not on its margins. Making the option for the poor, being there for those on the edge of things, is the mainspring of our witness. But we ourselves do not wilfully seek to be on the edge of things. Still less do we want to be treated as a mildly tolerated presence on the edge, like pepper in a stew, piquant but mercifully optional.

    Anyway, as the year’s end approaches, and with around fifty days to go before my farewell service in Liverpool, I have been reflecting on this question: how have I, who used to be so annoyed by the word “inclusive”, come to be seen as an annoying maverick/heretic now?

    Perhaps it’s because I have entered in to a greater faithfulness to what I was taught about God and about his only-begotten Son. That at any rate is my hope and prayer.

    Here is a short passage from the Lutheran liturgical theologian, Gordon Lathrop. I read it years ago, and I quote it often:

    Draw a line that includes us and excludes many others, and Jesus Christ is always on the other side of the line. At least that is so if we are speaking of the biblical, historic Christ who eats with sinners and outsiders, who is made a curse and sin itself for us, who justifies the ungodly, and who is himself the hole in any system.[2]

    In the week of my forty-second Christmas as an ordained minister, I look again as a disciple to the paradox of the Incarnation. I look to the Infant of Days, to the scrap of humanity who couldn’t find a room yet who is fully God, who grew up to dine with sinners, to scandalise the religious, to die an unclean death outside the city. I look to him and I agree with Gordon Lathrop. Jesus is himself the hole in any human system of righteousness, and Divine righteousness is a gift given to those on both sides of any line. And I will live in this mystery with all the integrity I can muster.

    Another long-remembered thing. As a sixth-form student I read a book by Daniel Berrigan SJ, the US Catholic priest and peace protestor whose words I quoted above. The book was called “America is Hard to Find”. That book drew me into the peace movement, as a member of which I was honoured to have been arrested and held three or four times for standing or sitting in the wrong place, with Quakers and Catholics and Methodists and a few other Anglicans, acting as a heretic or a maverick over against the laws of England, when instruments of mass destruction were found on the streets, at Cruisewatch near Greenham Common, or at RAF Lakenheath, or in places where decisions were taken about the use of such weapons, such as 10 Downing Street (where in those days you could indeed stand or sit on the street outside). This has been a wellspring of my witness, and I remain glad that I stood there, although doing that too brought criticism to me.

    Perhaps all these criticisms are justified, perhaps one day I’ll grow up enough to understand them and to repudiate my life’s journey. Or perhaps not.

    In any case mine is far from being the unblemished journey of a saint or a prophet. It’s been full of twists and turns, mistakes and apologies, depressions and re-commitments. It has led me from a seat on the road outside 10 Downing Street to (briefly) a seat in the House of Lords, and many would say that sums up a road of contradiction and paradox and compromise and complicity.

    But as a result of that journey, I am more and more convinced that if we draw a line that includes us and excludes many others, then Jesus Christ is always on the other side of the line, among the people outside. I want to be there with Him. I have become unashamedly inclusive, for Christ’s sake.

    And on that road I hope to keep walking, through Christmas and through retirement and on into my own future, as part of the future of this broken and excluding world which needs Jesus so much.

    As I prepare to enter another chapter of my life and ministry, I commend the life of looking beyond lines to you all. I hope that you’ll walk on that road yourself, unafraid. God is with you. Have a blessed Christmas, and a happy and spirit-filled New Year!

    © Paul Bayes 2021

    [1] 1 Peter 3:14

    [2] Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology, pp. 64-5.