ViaMedia

Category: Structural Differentiation

  • Alternative Ordinations and the Fracturing of the Church

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

    I was brought up in rural north of Ireland, in the Church of Ireland. The Anglicanism that formed me was shaped much more by conservative evangelicalism than by Liberalism or Catholicism. My faith was nurtured not only by Anglicans but by Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and other Christians whose commitment to Christ was sincere and transformative. I have known the gifts of charismatic renewal, evangelical preaching and faithful discipleship across denominational boundaries.

    Yet my own spiritual home ultimately became the inclusive Catholic tradition of the Church of England. In making that journey, I have been deeply influenced not only by Anglican Catholicism but also by the wider Catholic tradition and by Orthodoxy. I have been drawn to their profound sense of stillness before the mystery of the God in Jesus Christ, their sacramental vision of creation, and their conviction that the material world, the human body and human relationships are places where God’s presence is revealed. At their best, these traditions hold before us a deeply positive vision of human dignity, grounded in the mystery of the Incarnation itself.

    That theological vision has shaped my ministry. It has taught me to seek Christ in other people, to work for reconciliation between divided Christians, and to recognise the dignity of those of other faiths and of none. In the diverse communities of Kilburn and West Hampstead, where people of many cultures, faiths and backgrounds live alongside one another, this is not simply a theological conviction but a practical necessity. Seeing the image of God in one another, and seeking the common good together, lies at the heart of how I understand Jesus in his portrayal in the Gospels and how I am called to follow.

    I found within the inclusive Catholic tradition of the Church of England a vision that was sacramental, rooted in tradition, intellectually serious, socially engaged and capacious enough to hold profound difference. That breadth has always seemed to me one of Anglicanism’s greatest gifts.

    Perhaps that is why a recent article by Andrew Atherstone, examining a further seven Church of England candidates ordained by bishops of the Reformed Evangelical Anglican Church of South Africa, troubles me deeply [1]. Whatever one’s views on Living in Love and Faith, this is now very clearly no longer simply a debate about sexuality. It is a debate about the nature of the Church itself. The Church of England has always contained disagreement. Catholics, evangelicals and liberals have often disagreed vigorously, sometimes painfully. Yet we remained committed to a common life. We worshipped together, discerned together and ordained together because we recognised that the Church belonged not to any one party or tradition, but to Christ. What Atherstone describes is not an isolated event. Alternative discernment processes, alternative training pathways and alternative ordinations are gradually creating parallel structures of authority. A Church that ceases to trust its own common life inevitably begins to fragment into competing constituencies, each accountable primarily to itself.

    As someone who has spent much of the last few years campaigning for greater independence and accountability in safeguarding, I understand why institutions can lose trust. Institutions sometimes fail. But the answer to institutional failure cannot simply be the creation of alternative institutions whenever we dislike the direction in which the wider body is moving. That path leads not to renewal but to separation.

    My ministry today is exercised in Kilburn, one of the most diverse communities in the country. Here questions of poverty, housing, mental health, migration, loneliness and community cohesion are not abstract policy concerns but daily realities. Our neighbours are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, people of other faiths and people of none. They come from every continent and speak dozens of languages. In such a place, Jesus’ commandment takes on a particular urgency: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and you shall love your neighbour as yourself” [2]. The neighbour is not the person who agrees with us. The neighbour is the person God has placed beside us. That is true within the Church as much as it is beyond it.

    When I look at the challenges facing our communities, I find it difficult to believe that the pursuit of theological purity is the primary calling of the Church. The Gospel repeatedly directs our attention towards reconciliation, justice, mercy and the building of communities in which people can flourish together. The New Testament consistently presents unity not as an optional extra but as a gift and calling. Writing to a divided Church in Corinth, St Paul insists that “the body does not consist of one member but of many” and that “the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you.” [3]. Diversity is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be embraced within the life of Christ. That biblical image poses a challenge to every party in the Church. If the eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you”, neither can evangelicals say it to Catholics, nor Catholics to liberals, nor liberals to evangelicals.

    There is a further irony here. The alternative ordinations described by Atherstone are themselves a response to Living in Love and Faith and, more specifically, to the Church’s willingness to commend prayers for same-sex couples who have entered civil marriages. Yet at precisely the moment when some conservatives are constructing alternative systems of discernment, training, ordination and oversight, the Convocations of Canterbury and York, the historic assemblies representing the clergy of the Church of England, are being asked to approve revised Professional Guidelines that remain heavily focused on the conduct of individual clergy, including questions of relationships, marriage and sexual behaviour.?

    Mine is not an argument about discipline. It is an argument about consistency. One side of the present debate is concerned with the regulation of personal conduct. The other concerns the creation of parallel ecclesial structures. One addresses the lives of individual clergy. The other concerns the visible ordering of the Church itself. The development of alternative structures is neither private nor unseen. It is deliberate, organised and public. It is announced in conferences, websites, public statements and ordination services. Whatever one’s views on Living in Love and Faith, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these developments raise profound questions about the Church’s common life and common order.

    The question becomes even more pressing in the light of the revised Professional Guidelines currently before Convocation. The Guidelines remind clergy that they serve under the authority of the bishop and commit themselves through the Oath of Canonical Obedience. They state that clergy should “respect and abide by the regulations or requests of the bishop of the diocese in which they serve” and insist that “unless and until a law is changed, the existing law must be kept.” The Guidelines are also intended to assist in determining whether conduct meets the standards required of a clerk in holy orders [4]. As a gay priest, it is difficult not to notice the contrast. Considerable energy is devoted to regulating the intimate lives and relationships of clergy, while far less attention appears to be given to the public construction of alternative structures of discernment, ordination and oversight.

    Historically, Anglicanism has sought to hold together right belief, right conduct and right order. Yet contemporary debates often seem to focus overwhelmingly on the first two while paying remarkably little attention to the third. As a result, many clergy will inevitably ask whether the Church’s concerns are being applied consistently. If we devote enormous energy to questions of personal conduct, should we not also devote equal attention to developments that reshape the structures through which we discern vocation, exercise ministry and express communion? The revised Guidelines remind clergy that they are called to promote peace and reconciliation in the Church and in the world and to strive for the visible unity of Christ’s Church [5]. That aspiration seems difficult to reconcile with the emergence of structures whose purpose is increasingly to create a church within a church.

    Of course there are moments when conscience demands resistance. There are times when the Church must reform. Yet Anglicanism at its best has always sought to hold together what others would separate. It has understood that living faithfully with disagreement is often harder, and more Christian, than walking away.

    The question before us, then, is larger than Living in Love and Faith. Can the Church of England remain a Church broad enough to contain genuine theological difference, or are we becoming a federation of tribes, each constructing its own structures whenever disagreement becomes uncomfortable? I still believe the Anglican instinct is the right one. We need one another because none of us alone possesses the whole truth. The tragedy of our present moment is not that we disagree. Anglicans have always disagreed. The tragedy is that we increasingly seem to doubt that disagreement can be held within a common life.

    In the seventeenth chapter of St John’s Gospel, on the night before his death, Jesus prays for his disciples “that they may all be one” [6] It is a prayer not for uniformity but for communion; not for agreement in every matter but for a unity rooted in the love of God. That prayer remains unfinished. It is a calling entrusted to every generation of Christians. Once we cease to believe that Christ can hold together people with whom we profoundly disagree, far more than a debate about sexuality is at stake. We risk losing confidence in the very prayer of Jesus himself. More profoundly still, we risk losing confidence in the God whose creative love is capable of holding together difference itself, the God who creates, sustains and reconciles all things.

    Notes

    1. Andrew Atherstone, “More Alternative Anglican Ordinations”, Law & Religion UK, 15 June 2026.
    2. Mark 12.30–31.
    3. 1 Corinthians 12.14, 21.
    4. Draft Professional Guidelines for the Clergy, Convocation of Canterbury FS(26)4, June 2026, especially sections 1–3 on clergy discipline, canonical obedience, episcopal authority and the obligation to observe existing law. Convocation is the historic representative assembly of the clergy of the provinces of Canterbury and York and is responsible for agreeing the Professional Guidelines for Clergy.
    5. Draft Professional Guidelines for the Clergy, paragraph 3.5: clergy are called to “promote peace and reconciliation in the church and in the world” and to strive for “the visible unity of Christ’s Church”.
    6. John 17.21.

  • Beyond Threats: Changing the Narrative after Living in Love and Faith

    by Charlie Bell, Fellow in Public Theology and Medicine at Girton College, Cambridge, Associate Vicar of St John the Divine, Kennington, in the Diocese of Southwark, and member of the LLF Vocations and Ministry Working Group

    When I was at my first Diocesan Synod, many years ago, just after the House of Bishops had issued their Valentine’s Day message that set in stone the current mess in relation to clergy being forbidden to marry their same-sex or gender partners, a cleric turned to me and said words that have stuck with me ever since: ‘you need to have a cooler head and a warmer heart’. These words have returned to me on a number of occasions during the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) fiasco, echoed by various ‘supportive’ or less supportive bishops or others involved in the process – often people who could return to their own husbands or wives at the end of the day, whilst asking people like me to ‘be patient’.

    They appeared in the back of my mind again last week when witnessing the total corporate failure of the House of Bishops to even pay lip service to their promise to ‘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’. It was hard – it is hard – to see this as anything other than a total betrayal. Like many others, I felt disappointment, I felt grief. I also felt anger, frustration and the deep impotence of watching my life being decided upon by others. I felt fury at the bully-boy tactics of the Alliance. I felt – frankly – disgusted with the apparent refusal to take all of this on, by those who have claimed to support us throughout. And I was tempted to despair.

    It is hard to know where to start with the inadequacy of what happened, and I’ve taken a bit of time before penning this article to hear a few different perspectives. A statement was put out in the name of the House of Bishops – rushed, presumably, in light of yet another anticipated leak in this depressing process – which failed even to mention LGBTQIA people (I wonder whether this was even seen, let alone signed off, by the House?). In this statement, there was a clear narrative – that LGBTQIA people were, once again, to be the acceptable sacrifice in the name of some vague notion of church ‘unity-through-silence-and-stasis’ (a ‘unity’ which was shown to be a mirage just a few hours later, as GAFCON launched their most recent preposterous salvo). Here was the triumph of pragmatism and politics over people – process over progress – and all in the face of clear decisions of the General Synod (decisions which have been totally ignored throughout the process).

    The bishops didn’t help themselves in the ensuing days, not least through the double-speak we have sadly become so used to hearing. We have seen this endlessly in Synod motions – where ‘consider’ or ‘potential’ have become weasel words to allow something to be passed and then thrown on to the ‘too difficult’ pile at will. In radio performances, the bishops provided disingenuous accounts, full of handwringing and ‘well actually’ commentary which once again failed to take the seriousness of the failure into account, and which might make LGBTQIA people feel just a little gaslighted. The reality of putting something through a two-thirds majority process – that it will fail, given the unrepresentative nature of the General Synod – has never quite been named, and similarly, there is no commitment to actually beginning Synodal processes on clergy marriage.

    Abysmal ‘pastoral letters’ were penned, including one surprisingly weak example which would fail the ‘pastoral exercise’ at any Bishop’s Advisory Panel for potential ordinands. And to date, there has been – once again – a general recourse to silence amongst the House, including amongst the ‘inclusive’ bishops. Silence – just like inaction – is not value-neutral. For our chief pastors, it appears the pastoral urge is worryingly absent. Or, perhaps, fear really has taken over the institution.

    What has become clear from several conversations that I have had – and sight of the legal advice and theological advice – is that the narrative that the legal advice changed is absolute nonsense. It is certainly true that the legal advice suggested that the bishops might be at risk of legal challenge, but we’ve known this all along, not least from February 2024’s GS 2346 (the optimistically-named Living in Love, Faith, and Reconciliation). Part of the role of being a leader is to shoulder that kind of risk. The theological advice on the PLF also made clear that there remain contested areas here, much as there are over clergy entering marriages to people of the same sex or gender. But nothing has substantively changed. ‘We need more theology’ was not, in the end, the deciding factor, and nor was the fabled ‘legal advice’.

    Whilst we’re on that point, might we be a little clearer with language? We have heard time after time that one of the questions to be addressed is whether clergy can enter such marriages, and the need for separate structures if that is to be allowed, but that is not the actual question here. There are already clergy in such marriages – I’m one of them. We walk amongst you. We celebrate the sacraments and preach the word of God freely. I can – and often do – cover parishes all over the diocese, and more widely. But what I can’t do is be appointed to a new post – and those waiting for ordination cannot be ordained. The whole situation is ridiculous – it’s OK for me to share cure of souls in my parish and preside in another but not share cure of souls there and preside in mine. It is hard to follow an argument that suggests that I can continue to be made use of, whilst to permit others would be to break canon law and would require some grand structural change.

    The demands for structural change, of course, have been one of the key issues underlying this whole LLF process – in fact, LLF has become less about LGTBQIA people and more about keeping the purveyors of threats within the Church of England. A narrative has developed, bought – it appears – hook, line, and sinker by far too many within the House of Bishops, that ‘if you do X, we need Y’. If you have standalone services (whatever that means), we need special bishops. If you have clergy marriage, we need our own province. And so on. Few have been willing to stand up to this and say, ‘no, you don’t’ – instead, the game has been played according to those rules, and so here we are. The bishops were unwilling to ‘do violence to the ecclesiology’ of the Church of England, so LGBTQIA people can, essentially, get stuffed. It’s understandable from a purely pragmatic point of view, but it is utterly theologically bankrupt.

    I have some sympathy for the refusal to give into this kind of bullying, and it has been fascinating to see the rather muted response of the small but synodically overrepresented and extremely wealthy threat-makers and money-withdrawers when they realised their grand plan to create a purity cult, a church-within-a-church, has failed. Yet beyond the apparent unwillingness to challenge the Alliance narrative, bishops have also spoken about feeling cornered – managed to within an inch of their lives – by being presented with faits accomplis at recent meetings, with no room left for manoeuvre. It’s this, or it’s that, they were told. So, whether or not it was their intention, looking in from the outside, it certainly looks like they have run scared of the Alliance, given into threats, and left us out in the cold. In doing so, all the hope of February 2023 has fallen away, motions and the associated clear will of General Synod have been discarded, and we have a few measly prayers which many of us were doing already. No bespoke services. No change to the absurd rules on clergy marriage. Nothing. Nada. Nil.

    As I said at the start, I am as angry and as dejected as the next person. But I am also not willing to accept defeat here. So, whilst it is easy to get caught up in the frustration and the fury, I want to think instead of where we go from here.

    It is clearly the case that the bishops decided it was not worth pressing ahead with standalone services, but why? Is this the result of threats of legal action? Bishops need to be clear in their own minds why they voted the way they did, and just as clear as to how they will stop this mess happening again. How are they going to enable all the things that they have promised through Synod motions – some little more than crumbs under the table? How are they going to focus once again on radical inclusion and not on threat management?

    One of the key things to which the House of Bishops – and particularly those bishops supportive of LGBTQIA inclusion – need to commit is doing this better and growing some courage. It is time for them to take back a level of agency and own the decisions and the decision-making processes they are engaging in. This means, too, refusing to accept narratives peddled on the back of threats. There is no inevitability to the Alliance’s wish-list, and this needs to be clearly and unmistakably stated by our bishops. The alternative – that the House accepts that no change will happen unless structural provision is made, and that the House will not provide this – is that LGBTQIA people are the acceptable sacrifice. We – LGBTQIA people – are asking you: which is it?

    Indeed, in a letter to supporters this week, the CEEC has made clear that they want to see even the current commended prayers removed from use, and ‘if that is not possible’ to ‘advocate for a structural rearrangement which secures orthodoxy [sic’] going forward’. Threats will continue until they are taken on.

    Secondly, there needs to be a sense of urgency in the work and witness of the House of Bishops. LGBTQIA people are sick and tired of being trampled over or told to wait. David Monteith expressed this very powerfully last week, and his experience chimes with many of us. A failure to see why this is not only important but urgent is hurting the witness of the episcopal leadership of the Church of England – indeed, a failure to hear even a public word from inclusive bishops in the aftermath of this week’s car crash is fairly damning in and of itself. Of course, it is likely that the 44 bishops who spoke out a while back are now on a ‘do not appoint’ list provided by the Alliance to anti-LGBTQIA Crown Nominations Commission members considering diocesan appointments, but since when have threats been the way we go about our business? How about naming them instead, and calling the bluff of those who make them?

    Thirdly, they – and we – need to commit to what can be done right now, and get on with doing it. The arguments over what does and doesn’t require B2 are somewhat complicated (and I will engage with them in a later post), but it is quite obviously the case that something can be offered now (of which the PLF are a mere part and not the whole), and we ought to be getting on with it – and our bishops ought not only to be giving us quiet, covert cover, but to be public in their support. Similarly, now we have a route to dealing with the nonsense over clergy marriage, let’s do it – rather than kick the can down the road further.

    Some people have expressed dissatisfaction that parishes are not being encouraged to withhold parish share. Nobody is stopping you: if you are an incumbent with the support of your PCC and you wish to do so, then maybe now is indeed the time to do so – and to say so. Make it clear to your bishops that the threats of the Alliance are not the only show in town. Challenge decision making that prioritises those who threaten over those who are LGBTQIA. Support your bishops when they need it, and oppose them when they sell us down the river. Get involved in the campaigns that are out there, and if you feel they don’t go far enough, go further.

    And, of course, we are moving into an important year, where General Synod will once again be elected. The reality is that we need money for this campaign, because the purveyors of threats have loads of it. But we also need people. We need deanery synods that truly represent the people of the Church of England. Deanery synods elect General Synod. I will admit that I really hate General Synod and the way that Synod’s clear will has been ignored. But if we are to make change, we have to win – and win big – in these next elections. It matters for every part of our corporate life, like it or hate it – the election of bishops, the possibility of bringing in Equal Marriage, the way our money is spent, you name it.

    The past two and a half years, since the first LLF motion was passed, have been characterised by a failure of courage, imagination, integrity, theology: and of leadership. We have retreated into being a church of anxiety and fear, shaped by threats and bullying tactics. We have become risk-averse, frustrated, and angry. There has been an immeasurable damage to trust in the institution and in the leadership. We have lost our way.

    But it does not need to be like this, and with God’s grace it won’t be. We – all of us – need to change the narrative, reorient the church’s perspective, and get back to the business of living in love, faith, and hope. We can turn this around. And there is no time like the present to let the Holy Spirit blow afresh, and to turn again to the Lord, and live.

    Weeping may endure for a night: but joy cometh in the morning.

  • Persona non grata: an Unwelcoming Encounter at All Souls, Langham Place

    by Anon.

    Today, at lunchtime, I embarked on a short walk to All Souls, Langham Place, with the hopeful intention of attending their 12:00 service—a Commissioning of Overseers for alternative spiritual oversight within the Church of England, followed by a light lunch.

    Unfortunately, what awaited me was not the spiritual solace I had expected but rather an unanticipated and disappointing encounter. As I stepped through the church’s historic doors, I was abruptly informed that my name was not on the list, making me ineligible to join the service. To make matters even more depressing, the staff turned cold and unwelcoming.

    This unexpected denial left me deeply disappointed. All Souls had effectively deemed me persona non grata.

    Today’s incident shows a definitive shutting of the doors to listening to one another by the Conservative Evangelical faction, which is sad, especially when it even extends to random Anglicans and passers-by. It highlights not only a rather sorry state of ecclesial affairs more broadly but, more importantly, a concerning aspect of CEEC’s modus operandi. I struggle to see it in any other way than as building a fortress within the Church of England. No analogy comes to mind other than that resembling a Trojan Horse.

    As a faithful Anglican, I was eager to gain first-hand experience of their service. Although I do not agree with the conservative evangelical position in relation to the LLF debate, we are members of the same church, and what better way to express my commitment to staying together, despite our differences, than by attending their service and being with my fellow Anglicans?

    The organisers’ decision to restrict access based on an invitation list seems antithetical to the inclusive and welcoming spirit that should characterise a place of worship, especially one within the Church of England. It is hard to see how this is not, in addition, illegal. If anything can be said about the Church of England’s policies based on today’s encounter, it is that they are far from universally applied, and CEEC seems to follow its own rules, not ones to which I am accustomed.

    This raises important questions about the nature of hospitality and openness within the ‘conservative’ circles. While logistical concerns and safety protocols may necessitate certain measures, it is crucial that they do not alienate or exclude those genuinely seeking engagement and spiritual connection, within the boundaries of respect and consideration for all attendees. But I struggle to see how I could offend anyone by simply being there and praying together? Unless, of course, my very being is deemed offensive.

    As I reflect on this experience, I hope that CEEC, along with their overseers (listed here, with some of them also having been on the panel to select them) whom I did not get a chance to congratulate, take a closer look at their approach to inclusivity, and that the Bishops of the Church of England will step up to protect and preserve the Church.

    May the doors of our church be wide enough to welcome all who need love and friendship.

    May its threshold be no stumbling block to young or old.

    May this church be, for all who enter, the doorway to Your eternal kingdom.

    Such is the Church of England, my spiritual home, and it is such an understanding of our unity and ecclesiology that I will fight to preserve.

    Your faithful sibling in Christ.

  • Finding a Way Through: February 2024

    by the Revd Dr Charlie Bell, Fellow at Girton College Cambridge, Assistant Curate, St John the Divine, Kennington and a consultant to the LLF Implementation Pastoral Guidance Working Group

    Well, there goes another General Synod.

    It has been rather a strange year. It feels like a long time since many of us yearning for change thought that we might finally be getting there – or if not ‘there’, exactly, then somewhere along the road from here to there. February 2023 saw the first glimmer of light for LGBTQIA people shine through and yet time after time, Synod after Synod, archepiscopal intervention after archepiscopal intervention, attempted rollback after attempted rollback, backdoor dealing after backdoor dealing, there seems to have been a concerted and rather ill-tempered determination to ensure that any semblance of progress is snatched away from us. It is fascinating that there is a ‘clear will of Synod’ until that clear will isn’t what some people appear to want – again, and again. The mantra of ‘just keep asking the question until you get the right answer’ is beginning to get just a tiny bit tiresome.

    So where do we find ourselves after yet another debate?

    Well, in the first instance, we find ourselves all pretty sick to the back teeth of the endless meddling of unnamed authorities in the process. It was enormously refreshing to hear the courageous voice of the Bishop of Newcastle make reference to this reality, and it is about time that whoever it is – and we all have our suspicions of the various parties involved – that keep sticking their noses in, trying to subvert the process, however well intentioned, just stop. It is becoming increasingly clear that the LLF Implementation leadership has had too many cooks, some in purple and some in suit and tie, and that the broth is at continual risk of being spoiled. Now is the time to step back – the trust in many in leadership is gone, and others, including the Bishop of Leicester, need to be allowed to get on with the job without endless interference and politicking.

    Secondly, there was a welcome change in the nature of the debate and – frankly – the behaviour of many of those involved in it. This might seem somewhat unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but as a gay person looking in, this was the first time that I didn’t feel physically sick, or seething, when hearing some of the speeches. There was the usual casual misrepresentation, and the occasional veering into discussion of ‘issues’ rather than people, but in general this debate did seem – at last – to be veering into decent human conversation. Only time will tell if this continues.

    And thirdly, it now seems very clear both where the bounds of the future direction are being drawn, and what that means for the church. Whilst there were howls of disquiet that the idea of ‘cannot agree to disagree’ and the need for ‘legally secure structural provision’ did not garner anything like majority support, nonetheless that is a fact – they did not, and they have not, consistently. What is needed now is a move away from the double-edged sword of ‘victimhood’ and threat that irresponsible organs such as the CEEC have used to date. If you choose to threaten to exclude yourself because you cannot live with disagreement, when there is clear disagreement, and you cling to demands for ‘my way or the highway’, then you are getting awfully close to being a bully. Nobody is forcing you out – you are choosing to exclude yourself because you cannot accept you might be wrong, or the reality – that we simply cannot agree on this. We see your false binary – and we challenge it.

    So it really is about time we named this tactic for what it is. ‘Give us X or we won’t stay in the church’ is not a negotiation – it is a bare, naked threat.  When it is done by people who appear dead set on ensuring those of us who want to find some kind of compromise are stopped from doing so, then that threat becomes very malign indeed. It is not the only way – and you, we, all of us, know it.

    Which brings us back to Synod. It was a very good thing that the Leicester paper was not voted through, because hidden amongst the concerning hints of rollback was the idea that it was only once ‘conservatives’ got their full structural change that standalone services or clergy marriage might be considered. Synod clearly and unambiguously voted that idea down, and it really is time to put it to bed. ‘Structural provision’ is simply not going to happen, and far too many of those who have been arguing for it have been doing so in bad faith, because the reality is that they wouldn’t accept anything remotely acceptable to the wider church and hence just want to delay, delay, and eventually throw their hands up in the air and say ‘this was all just too hard, let’s not bother’, binning the implementation of Synodical decisions at the same time. The sooner we name that, and move on to genuine, serious, engaged negotiations, the better.

    Many of us advocating for change are more than willing to come to the table and have already compromised a great deal, but there needs to be a starting point of good faith, genuine negotiation from those who oppose the Prayers of Love and Faith, and a recognition that it is now beyond time to implement the clear will of Synod, much as the Bishop of Leicester has indicated. Simply shouting ‘legally secure structural provision’ doesn’t, frankly, do the trick, and is getting tiresome. For many – me included – these are questions not just about these prayers, but about a fundamental threat to our ecclesiology. Casting our ecclesiology aside and creating a ‘pure’ church within a church in order to appease those who will never really be appeased is not a good strategy. Suggesting that we can remain in any serious way ‘one church’ whilst having ‘legally secure structural provision’ is a demonstrable nonsense.

    So – let’s sit down and work out how we can move forwards. If you are a reasonable conservative who opposes these prayers on theological grounds, we can and want to work with you to enable you to flourish in the same church as us. We want to ensure you have pastoral provision that allows you to feel valued and loved – pastoral provision which, incidentally, has been cruelly withheld from so many LGBTQIA people for years. You do not have to buy into the lie that structural provision, with bishops out of communion with one another, special ordinations, confirmations, theological colleges, pseudo-provinces, and the rest of it, is the only answer – it isn’t, and it’s not going to happen. It just isn’t. We want you to feel supported, and we want to build each other up in the faith – and we can make this happen if we’re willing to put our minds to it, and ignore the extremes.

    That’s the challenge, and that’s the direction of travel. There is a way through if we are willing to find it. Let’s learn to be the Church of England again, together.

  • Agree or Disagree: I’m Still in Communion with my Bishop

    Fr Thomas Sharp is Succentor at Southwark Cathedral, and Parish Priest at St Hugh’s Bermondsey. He is Coordinator of the Young Anglican Theology Project, a Third Order Franciscan, and a member of the Provincial Council of the Society of Catholic Priests.

    When I was at University, one of our lecturers tried to impress on us just how chaotic and disputatious was the early Church. He had us gather in a seminar room, and argue about anything we could think of, so long as it generated plenty of theological insults. It was great fun, if rather a culture shock from the polite University discourse in which we were trained.

    My favourite ‘Christian insult’ was ‘How dare you forsake your Baptism?’ Screamed at the top of one’s lungs. The charge is weighty, vital.  And it helps that ‘forsake’ and ‘baptism’ are immensely satisfying words to spit at a colleague in the classroom.

    The patristic tendency of Christians to levy the charge that opponents have forsaken their baptism has given way in recent years to the charge that they have forsaken communion. Breaking or impairing communion is the ecclesiological offence-du-jour on a range of issues. It remains the great obstacle of ecumenism.

    But the two charges amount to the same thing. Communion flows from our baptism. We are in communion with one another by virtue of the fact that we are baptised into one body. 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.

    I have not always agreed with my bishops. Very occasionally, I have thought it might be easier if I could perhaps put myself under a different bishop more closely aligned with my views.

    Feelings of alienation, frustration, and misunderstanding within the Church are not, however, a consequence of broken communion, or a cause of it. They are fundamentally a consequence of our common fallenness – and so point to the grace by which they and we must all be saved.

    The doctrine of salvation by faith and not works renders communion an objective reality: it gives us confidence. In the darkest days of the Reformation, when it seemed that the Church really thought communion was simply about assenting to the decrees of councils and authorities, their blasphemy was to render salvation subjective. They made it seem that salvation rested on nothing firmer than whatever the latest power bloc or prelate thought I should be burned over should I disagree. Under such rule, communion depends on whatever is going on in head of the one who sits in judgment. And hell’s maw yawns open – apparently, not for forsaking God, but for standing up to an earthly ruler, whose mind might change tomorrow. What sinking sand on which to build one’s faith.

    This is a caricature of pre-Reformation thought, of course, but salvation by grace is our safeguard against that caricature becoming real. It defends us against the temptation to put our faith not in God but in earthly councils and secular alliances. Salvation by works says that there’s something you can do to be in with the right crowd or in the right place to earn the mercy of God. But salvation by faith  proclaims healthily and firmly our sinfulness, our inability to save ourselves. It plants our trust firmly on the ground of God’s grace.

    No human being can be righteous enough to earn salvation: it is given through the grace of faith. No human can earn what God gives them – either through ‘right-thinking’ or ‘lifestyle’ -for God gives it freely, as unmerited gift. No human can be good and wholesome enough to merit the blood of Christ: it is medicine shed for the sick.

    My point is this: no Christian minister, no bishop or priest can be stainless enough to earn the pastoral ministry. It is given through the grace of faith. No bishop, no pastor, can teach infallibly (at least, I hold this as an Anglican): each is fallen and saved by grace. No communion with a bishop is so subjective as to depend on what they think about any number of things, or even what they teach or do. If they claim the blood of Christ and confess the Triune God, if they call upon God in their distress for the mercy revealed on the cross, then they are Christians and we are in communion. I do not choose them: Christ died for them.

    When the Bishop of London declared in her speech to General Synod that all members of the Church would be welcome at her table, one might be tempted to see it as a statement of flagrant liberalism, theologically lax if well-intentioned. But I took it as a clear and conservative planting of episcopal feet on a firm foundation: the communion of the baptised which is God’s graceful gift to the Body of Christ.

    My own diocesan Bishop urges us ‘to continue to speak well of each other,’ and again some might be tempted to dismiss this as a well-meaning aspiration. But to speak well of one another, even when we disagree, is to resolve defiantly and determinedly (and against the odds) not to impugn the blood of Christ by which we and they (whoever ‘they’ may be for us) have been saved. By baptism we have been incorporated into one body. If we insult or injure one another, it is that one body – the body of Christ – which we are injuring.

    I did not choose my fellow Christians, those who are called with me to the supper of the Lamb.

    I have not chosen my Bishops, and they have not chosen me. We have been gifted to one another by divine providence and God’s mercy.

    I did not choose the body of which they and I are a part, and I have not built it – for it is God who builds it and elects members to it and feeds it.

    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?’

  • The Difficulties of Differentiation

    by Revd Neil Patterson, Chair of the Gender & Sexuality Group on General Synod

    Followers of the increasingly torrid debate about sexuality in the Church of England will generally have noticed that the most prominent conservative group, the Church of England Evangelical Council, have been arguing for some time for something called ‘structural differentiation.’ In responding to this, I am informed by the private discussions over some years known as the St Hugh’s Conversations, and also the recent Living With Difference meetings convened within the LLF process. But to the credit of those representing the CEEC, they have maintained a very consistent line throughout, and I have not heard proposals different from those already in the public domain at CEEC – The Church of England Evangelical Council. However, I hope those who make them can read here a sense that I have genuinely sought to listen to their perspective, and will know that I am more open to making space for all views in a broad church than some. And I recognise that this is partly because, unlike others, I have not been subject to the sort of harmful pastoral ministry as others. However, even so I find that on reflection there is a serious problem with the proposal for differentiation, as I shall explain.

    In considering the possibility of some settlement that allows for the cohabitation of different views, it is inevitable that, as a historian of church legal structures and a member of General Synod since 2012, I should be drawn to consider the evolution of the 2014 settlement around women bishops formalised in the House of Bishops Declaration and the Five Guiding Principles, and it is here that I find the important contrast. From the discussions in 2012-14 and the regular perspective of New Directions which is kindly sent me each month, the central concept emerges of ‘sacramental assurance.’ Most Anglo-Catholics would hold, I think, to the theology that the sacraments (this works whether you think there are two or seven, incidentally) are by their nature about certainty – if the Church does what the Lord commanded, faithful to matter and words, the sacramental graces promised are assured. Even if, as for me, that approach raises other questions, I am quite happy to accept it as the legitimate belief of many, and also to see that, if you are uncertain about the ordination of women, that leads to the need for ‘sacraments we can receive with confidence’ as the slogan is.

    What became apparent in the discussions over women bishops was that, if those who doubted their orders were to continue in sacramental assurance, a higher degree of separation would be needed than before, because, as one bishop pithily put it in one of the small group discussions at Synod, “priests are sterile; bishops can breed!” It is more complicated than that; I have yet to be convinced by any argument for what is for shorthand called ‘taint’ – the refusal to receive the sacraments from a male bishop who ordains women. And the ambiguous phrase ‘mutual flourishing’ positively invites criticism from anyone who does not feel that they are personally getting what they want. But nonetheless most of the arrangements made since 2014 make sense to me, as a sad inevitability if we are to remain one church whilst allowing different convictions to exist in their own integrity. There is differentiation, but it is differentiation as a means to an end.

    Reflecting on the CEEC proposals, however, they seem different. The House of Bishops decision to commend the Prayers of Love & Faith, as an option for those places that wish to use them, does not impose any changes at all on the life of non-affirming parishes. It will not prevent conservative candidates entering training for ordination, or conservative clergy being appointed. And it is difficult to see how the provision of alternative structures, either designed by the Church of England or, it seems today, unilaterally by CEEC, is intended to meet a need for acceptable ministry. Rather what I find, both in some of the supporting texts and in the various meetings, is the expression of a much more troubling desire. That differentiation is needed to show that ‘orthodox’Anglicans (as they style themselves with little regard for the established use of that word to describe the churches in communion with Constantinople) are distinct from those of us who are moving with the House of Bishops to seek God’s blessing for same-sex relationships. In other words, it is differentiation for differentiation’s sake.

    The problem is that some distinctions, like the 2014 settlement or now-accepted varieties of worship or theology, lead to the minimal separation necessary for co-existence, the success of which is how far unity is maintained. But if the objective is to show that you have separated yourself from the unclean, the only success is the sight of clear blue water. And that is not differentiation, it is schism. And unlike the much-debated issues of sexual intimacy that appear nowhere in the Creeds, 39 Articles or law of the Church of England, schism does stand condemned by Canon A8 for the sin that it is.

  • One Church? Secrecy, Unity and Temptation

    by Helen King, Professor Emerita in Classical Studies at The Open University, authorised lay preacher, member of General Synod and vice-chair of its Gender & Sexuality Group

    It’s a year ago this month that I took over as guest editor of this blog. My post on taking up the role focused on how, to those outside the church, we look like a very strange social group. Looking back, has that changed? I think not. If anything, it has got worse.

    Last month, we had the long-awaited Synod debate on the Living in Love and Faith process (also known as ‘5 years of my life gone’). After hours of debate and yet more small group work, the bishops’ proposals were amended and passed with 57% in favour, and yet all that has really changed is that some conservative evangelicals have announced they are “compelled to resist”. I assume that, ahead of their meeting today, the bishops have been working out the membership of the various groups who will redraft the not-yet-allowed Prayers of Love and Faith and will write the pastoral guidance to replace the much-maligned Issues in Human Sexuality. As I write this, it remains unclear what – if anything? – will be presented to the July General Synod.

    In that blog post a year ago I remembered being part of the Diocesan Shared Conversations process which the C of E went through in 2015 and feeling that “I was desperate to find a way in which we could live together with respect being shown to those who read the Bible and tradition differently.” Little did I know then that – in my role as vice-chair of the Gender & Sexuality Group on General Synod – I would be invited to join the St Hugh’s Conversations. Tentative feelers came my way shortly after I took over this blog. I was initially horrified to find that this group existed and that it had been discussing how to split the C of E. Not “a way in which we could live together” so much a way we could live apart, with some of us welcoming same-sex marriage and others rejecting it. It made me feel physically sick. Once I had googled the group – and found nothing, confirming how well the secret had been kept – I realised that I probably should have guessed someone somewhere had already been working on the options. Because the group was secret, I couldn’t discuss it with anyone outside it, and that made it feel even worse.

    I wasn’t able to attend their meeting immediately before the July 2022 General Synod so my first experience of St Hugh’s (other than reading the file of various documents batted back and forth over the years) was in November 2022. At that meeting it was agreed that the high level of secrecy no longer needed to be maintained, not least because published comments by both Bishop Steven Croft and Vaughan Roberts had made it clear that such a group existed; we were therefore free to refer to the group, but not to name its members or attribute anything said there. I mentioned it in passing in a blog post soon after, and my fellow participant Simon Butler also mentioned it in his open letter to the Bishop of Southwark. Nobody was very interested, other than the English Churchman (A Protestant Family Newspaper) which became quite excited (“secret conversations come to light”) and that story was picked up by Anglican Mainstream. The English Churchman asked the Church of England Evangelical Council what was going on and shared their (deliberately vague?) response:

    For several years, CEEC has been talking with both those who share our views and those who disagree on the topic of human sexuality. CEEC has explored, in a number of articles, the idea that visible and robust differentiation might provide a solution to the fundamental theological incompatibility that exists around this issue within the CofE.

    Other than Simon and me, I am not aware of anyone else who has revealed they are part of St Hugh’s – is that because the conservative evangelicals in the room are embarrassed to have been part of a ‘secret’ group? Such a worry about secrecy would seem ironic when they are in churches which are not transparent about their own policies on women in ministry or on LGBTQIA+ people; something SCM’s Honest Church campaign is highlighting.

    In his open letter, Simon commented that “The uniting spirit of the St Hugh’s Conversations is a desire to bring to a conclusion the battle over sexuality that has beset the Church since 1987 … We believe – at least tentatively – that now must be the time to find a settlement which will suit us all. I have come to agree with this position.” I am less persuaded. What would ‘differentiation’, a ‘settlement’, look like? More ‘flying bishops’, deals between dioceses, another Province within the Church of England? A bishop for any combination of views on women and on LGBTQIA+ people? What sort of ecclesiology is that? I’ve now asked three times at St Hugh’s, “In any such settlement, in what would unity consist?” And I still haven’t had an answer.

    Let’s just look at what one congregation, Vaughan Roberts’ church, St Ebbe’s Oxford, has now done. Oxford has four bishops, none of whom support the CEEC. Vaughan Roberts states that

    St Ebbe’s clergy have already declared that we are in impaired communion with the bishops in our diocese, which means that we will not welcome them to preach, confirm, ordain or conduct our ministerial reviews, and we will not take communion with them.

    No unity there, then. Not even taking communion ‘with’ a bishop? That’s not “impaired” communion – it’s no communion at all. Not having your ministerial review with your diocesan bishops? Surely this is already saying that they are not in the same church? I wrote about my suspicions here when I noticed that some General Synod members weren’t even willing to attend the service at York Minster with the rest of us. Again I ask: in what does our unity consist, even now?

    In a recent post on this site, Charles Read noted that the desire to have a bishop who agrees with you on everything is something new. It’s been pointed out many times that conservative evangelicals have managed to stay in the C of E while disagreeing with the decisions on women priests, women bishops, marrying people who have previously been divorced, allowing priests to be in civil partnerships …  Where women bishops are concerned, a congregation which won’t accept their bishop can have a ‘flying bishop’ instead. Would such a congregation refuse to take communion with a bishop who is a woman, or a bishop who has ‘laid hands on’ a woman in consecrating her as a bishop or in ordaining her as a priest? Would they listen to a sermon preached by a person who accepts that women can be bishops?

    And now CEEC has raised the stakes yet again. Just when we thought the issue was gay sex, and so long as you didn’t do anything sexual then you could still be accepted in their churches, now it’s not OK to be in a committed relationship with someone of the same sex, even if you’re not doing anything you think counts as sexual. So what does that mean for clergy in civil partnerships: a relationship which the C of E had been allowing on the grounds that it wasn’t sexual? In one of the many supporting Q and A documents they offer, CEEC reject even CPs: being in “covenanted relationships such as civil partnerships so long as they don’t engage in sexual intimacy” is forbidden because such relationships are still “based on a temptation”.

    When you think of how little time in a marriage is spent feeling temptation or in “sexual intimacy”, it does seem to me that the conservative evangelical view of the marriage bond is dangerously skewed. The most conservative approach of all, I think, is the one they reject: simply to rejoice in marriage as a faithful and committed relationship for two people to live in, and to open it to any two people who are willing and able to make the marriage vows.

  • What is The Church of England Evangelical Council Up To? Some Autobiographical Reflections

    by Charles Read, a priest in the Diocese of Norwich and a  former member of General Synod who works in theological and ministerial education across East Anglia and continental Europe

    In its response to Living in Love and Faith (LLF), The Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) has said that evangelicals need separate structures in the Church of England. This has puzzled many people, including many evangelicals.

    CEEC was set up in the 1960s by John Stott. The evangelical wing of the Church of England had been in decline for some time. You might trace this back to the very negative and reactionary response of evangelicals to the later Oxford Movement in the 19th century but certainly by the 1920s the future in the Church of England was Anglo-Catholic with great congresses and Prayer Book revision which leaned in a clearly Catholic direction.

    The evangelical resurgence came after the Second World War and by the 1960s was growing, but evangelicals remained a minority voice in the Church of England. John Stott, rector of All Souls Langham Place in London, was acknowledged as the leader of this growing section of the church. One of the things which Stott was good at was organising and putting in place structures of support. He founded CEEC to bring different evangelical groups together for networking and support. It was not a campaigning group in those early days, and has only become so quite recently.

    I was born in the 1960s in a single-parent family in a fairly prosperous village in Staffordshire, although our family was not at all prosperous and we lived in some of the very small amount of rented accommodation in the village. The only religious options in the village were the Methodist Chapel and the Church of England church. This latter was evangelical in its tradition with strong evangelical patronage from the Martyrs’ Memorial Trust. However, like most evangelical Anglican churches at the time, it had a clear vision of being there for everybody in the community. So although my family were not churchgoers on a regular basis, apart from my uncle and his wife who were Salvationists, I was duly baptised in this local church.

    When the vicar introduced a Family Service once a month, my mother took me along. (It was evangelicals who invented family services in the 1960s.) She sent me to Sunday school on the other Sundays but by the time I got to secondary school I had lapsed out of this. I started going to the school Christian Union because it was somewhere warm to go during the long lunch break! It was run by the head of RE who happened to be a Reader in the village church where I lived. He persuaded me to go to the church youth group (Pathfinders) on a Sunday morning and it was through the ministry of this group that I became a Christian in 1973.

    Growing up in this kind of evangelical Anglican church, I recall that we did not expect a bishop to share our theological convictions. We were only three miles from Lichfield but did not see the Bishop of Lichfield very often. We welcomed him warmly when he came and we took people off to the cathedral for confirmation, including me. We assumed that bishops would be theologically liberal and liturgically Catholic and we had no problem with that – it was just how it was. When Maurice Wood became Bishop of Norwich in 1971 there was much rejoicing that an evangelical had become a diocesan Bishop. (People did not generally think back to Ryle in Liverpool some decades earlier or to the 19th century evangelical bishops.)

    From this sketch of my early experiences of church life as a child and teenager, I hope you might see the fact that evangelicals like us were happy to be who we were in a church where we were a minority, and where we did not expect to find bishops, archdeacons or diocesan staff who shared our theological views. We just got along with such people, and in the parish we got on with preaching a message of God’s love and salvation open to all, if they would simply turn to God and accept Jesus as their saviour. I was never aware of being rejected because I came from a single-parent family and my unmarried mother was never rejected by the local church either. This is a far cry from the judgmentalism of the first CEEC video which was produced in response to LLF where, in passing, at least one participant speaks about children growing up in single-parent families ending up in a life of delinquency and crime because of the absence of a father. I am afraid that I did not get the memo and so, rather than enter a life of crime and anti-social behaviour, I became a Christian and ended up in full-time Christian ministry as a priest. I can only apologise to CEEC that I missed my preordained vocation. I am too old now to embark on a spree of delinquency but I am doing my best to cause disruption at Diocesan Synod and I hope that will do.

    We did not, in those days, want or ask for separate structures in order to flourish. Gradually, we learned how to work within the structures of the Church of England and to bring some evangelical witness into things. Many of us learned to appreciate things in other parts of the Church of England which we evangelicals did not have. It’s true that evangelicalism was probably more united then than it is today, even within one denomination. When Anglican evangelicals met evangelicals from other denominations we found we might disagree over things like infant baptism but we put such disagreements to one side. (With the re-emergence of Charismatic Christianity in the 1960s, a fault line did appear amongst Anglican evangelicals.) Nowadays it is common to think that there might be several different tribes of Anglican evangelicals and often they are not speaking to each other very much.

    The CEEC was supposed to bring these different tribes together but in fact has become increasingly associated with the conservative evangelical tribe. It has long since ceased to represent the breath of evangelicalism within the Church of England. As such, its claim to speak for evangelicals in the Church of England is difficult to take seriously. Very few evangelical bishops are associated with it (and there are a lot more of them now than there were in 1971!).

    We managed with bishops who were theologically and liturgically different from us and we never thought it would be appropriate to insist on a Bishop who thought and worshipped in the way that we did. This was all part of being committed to being part of the Church of England. In more recent years, evangelical Anglicans have not needed separate structures over such issues as divorce and remarriage and very few have opted into the provision of a ‘flying Bishop’ – largely because most Anglican evangelicals support the ordination of women. The suggestion from CEEC that we have separate bishops and separate structures in the light of LLF is truly puzzling, not least to those of us who have grown up evangelical. Is this an attempt at setting up a pure church? Who knows – but it is a novel move within Church of England evangelicalism. I am glad to have come to faith and grown up in the welcoming, inclusive and truly Anglican evangelicalism of my youth. I do not recognise myself or this type of evangelicalism in the pronouncements of CEEC.