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Category: Transgender

  • Whose Toilet Is It? A Personal Theological Reflection on Bodies and Spaces

    by Alex Clare-Young. Alex is a thinker, facilitator and writer. They are a minister, member of the Joint Public Issues Team and patron of the Open Table Network

    I am going to write about toilets. I should probably explain a few things first: I am trans and I am disabled. Both of those facts mean that I cannot use gendered toilets any more. In fact, they mean that I have lost access to an awful lot of public spaces in general.

    Anyway, back to toilets. I grew up living as female, before I transitioned, which meant that I spent 18 years of my life using a mixture of female-designated and accessible toilets. I have been attacked multiple times in single-‘sex’ toilets. Every single time it has been by a cis woman – a woman who wasn’t trans.

    It may not come as a surprise to hear that I don’t think that public toilets have ever been safe spaces.

    The context: gender and public spaces

    I don’t like the term ‘culture wars’. It implies a dynamic of equal powers battling it out with mortal consequences. It also lends a sort of unearned gravitas to the political gameplay that instrumentalises trans people. Nevertheless, I will use the term here as it is the one most often used to refer to the situation we find ourselves in.

    Trans people have been the game-pieces of culture wars for some time. We have been banned from bathrooms in various USA states for over a decade. This has extended to the separation of gender-nonconforming children and young people from their families and a significant reduction in access to healthcare for trans people.

    In the UK, culture wars are different, with many people largely uninterested whilst those on the margins find themselves pushed increasingly farther out of the rapidly-shrinking middle ground. Recently, this has been particularly apparent in three areas: 1) horrific clashes over the housing of human beings who are seeking asylum in local hotels, 2) the provision of vital benefits to human beings who happen to be disabled and 3) the presence of human beings who happen to be trans in public spaces. So as a disabled trans person things are increasingly difficult.

    The EHRC Guidance

    The particularly challenging piece of this current phase of the UK’s Americanesque journey, for me, is caused by corporate and local responses to the EHRC interim guidance on gender and the Equality Act. The guidance effectively states that trans people may not use the gendered space that accords with their gender identity and should not use the gendered space that accords with their gender identity if this is likely to cause concern.

    That means that many trans people are left unable to use gendered public spaces – including public toilets – at all. The EHRC’s way of handling that has been to suggest that premises should ensure gender neutral toilets are available. This is not only unhelpful, it is a mishandling of the Act which requires the necessity of any exclusion based on protected characteristics to be rigorously proven – it has to be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. This means that it needs to be the least discriminatory way to meet that aim.

    The myth of the accessible toilet

    Now I’m going to take off my trans hat and put on my disabled one (I wish I could effect this switch, in both directions, in real life). Since becoming a full-time wheelchair user, I now have to use the accessible toilet at all times. The thing is, accessible toilets are already kind of a unicorn.

    So-called accessible toilets often have toilet roll you can’t reach, filthy floors that you wouldn’t want to wheel over (remember, many wheelchair users effectively have to touch very near the soles of our shoes with our hands for every move we make), and small-to-nonexistent turning circles crowded by overflowing bins.

    So, when I realised that several moto service stations had responded to the EHRC guidance by labelling their ‘accessible’ toilets as ‘inclusive’, I began to worry. It’s not that I don’t want trans folks to be able to use accessible loos. Of course I do. I want every trans person to feel safe, and to feel like they – we – have public spaces we can access. If those are intersectional spaces, what’s not to like.

    However, this label was not only targeting trans people. The big wheelchair on the door had been replaced with a big man symbol, a big woman symbol and a tiny little wheelchair in the bottom corner. The radar key lock had been removed. This was now just a big toilet. And there was only one.

    The more public spaces I go to, the more I realise that this has been the general response to the EHRC guidance – taking already limited space away from disabled folks and opening up accessible loos to anyone who can’t be bothered queuing. Yes, invisible disabilities exist – mine used to be one. Yes, trans people deserve toilets we can use – I am one. Yes, women are not safe in toilets – I learnt that the hard way.

    The thing is, taking away spaces is not the answer. No-one can win this so-called battle. All that we have gained is toilets that are less safe for women because anyone with a beard can access one by claiming to be a transman, accessible toilets that are predominantly used by able-bodied cis men, and a general increase in both transphobia and misogyny.

    The theology: Christ in public spaces

    So how do we reframe this woeful web of misinformation? How do we take the power out of a rapidly-escalating human rights battle? I believe that we need to unpick the underlying threads. To do this, I would like to consider three ways of looking at fair, safe and just uses of public space.

    Inclusivity

    Firstly, let’s consider what inclusivity means. An inclusive space is a space where everyone is welcome, just as they are. It is often held up as being the gold standard. And yet, inclusive spaces can be undermined by scarcity narratives. Remember when a woman poured expensive perfume on Jesus’s feet and was accused of denying the poor? No-one has been policing gendered toilets to date and trans people have been using them without causing harm. So why now? Are we, like the early disciples, playing whataboutery with Christ’s own body?

    Exclusivity

    So what about exclusivity? That seems to be the next logical move. Scarcity leads to protectionism. MY flag, MY taxes, MY spaces. You can’t have our spaces – get your own. It has seriously alarmed me to see so-called feminists arguing that the tiny minority of folks who are trans should simply create our own spaces. Last time I tried to build a public toilet without planning permission it didn’t go so well… I wonder what the un-named convert to Christianity in Acts 8 would have done if, when they asked, “Here is water, what is there to stop me being baptized?”, were given the response, “Not until you dig your own well”.

    Practicality

    I’m aware I may be using too much humour here. It’s a defence mechanism. This stuff is actually scary to me. Disabled people avoid leaving our houses due to lack of safe, sanitary, accessible public facilities, trans people are being attacked in public and often sadly losing their lives in private, and women are not any closer to real solutions to the actual causes of sexual violence in public spaces, not least the lack of any form of adequate justice.

    The only way to get through this is to stop looking for convenient scapegoats and to start helping each other. Can’t get to the soothing water? OK, I will carry you. Can’t reach Jesus? OK, this roof has to go. What’s to stop me being baptised? Nothing.

    We need to work together to create safe and accessible public spaces for trans people, disabled people and women, and that journey does not start when we attack each other. It starts by shifting the narrative. Are public toilets safe, accessible and inclusive? No. Why? Because systemic injustice and capitalist motivations have led to flimsy stalls and unsanitary spaces. Are trans people the problem? No. So how do we solve it? We build something better. Together.

    In practice: what now?

    10 hours before I wrote this, the EHRC submitted an updated code of practice to the Minister for Women and Equalities. They did not complete a full and proper public consultation and Parliament has not yet had a chance to debate the advice. The chair of the EHRC is encouraging people to preempt the process, stating that “We have been clear that service providers, associations and public functions should not wait for the code of practice to be published”. This irresponsible weaponising of legal process is what has caused the chaos I have described throughout this article.

    So firstly, please wait. If you own a space, please don’t change the rules before the rules actually exist. Secondly, please speak. Whatever happens, the draft code must be laid before Parliament for 40 days before it is in effect. Speak to your MP urgently and ask them to insist on a debate on this guidance, before it is too late. Finally, counter the misinformation. Trans people are not the problem. Women are not the problem. Disabled people are not the problem. The systems that use us as pawns are. Can we not just stop fighting and start building the solutions ourselves? Please?

  • Respecting Trans People, Part 2: Towards a Working Group

    by Susannah Clark, a member of the Fellowship of the Love of God who has worked as a Prison Governor in charge of a national centre for sex offenders, as a teacher of teenagers for 25 years and, after transitioning 16 years ago, as a registered nurse

    As I explained in Part 1 of my review of trans crisis in this country – and the lived experience of trans people – we have been ‘monstered’ by the media, whose campaigns have often framed us as predators and perverts in the minds of the public; they have formed part of a coalition including very conservative Christians, a sub-section of feminists who seek our exclusion, and politicians who have ‘weaponised’ rare and exceptional incidents to brand trans people as ‘threat’ out of fear of their voters shifting to Reform UK. The outcome for trans people has been their imminent exclusion from areas of life where they had previously been accepted by most people, who took a live and let live view on a tiny minority who, sadly, now find themselves confronted on the street by thugs and haters who believe they have been given a mandate for their abuse.

    Sadly, the outcome of Living in Love and Faith (LLF) has not kept pace with this onslaught on trans people’s lives.

    By its own admission, in the last four years the Church of England has side-lined work on trans issues. This could have been expected to form an integral part of LLF’s work on – in the words of the subtitle of the LLF book – ‘identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage’. Instead, huge energy and time are being invested in what has been nearing an existential crisis over same-sex blessings and sexuality. But trans people now find themselves faced with an existential crisis of their own. The need for a lead from the Church and a serious programme to deliver pastoral care to trans people – and importantly, their families as well – is now urgent. The ‘trans’ element of LLF should no longer be left in limbo.

    Let me offer a review of the Church of England’s actions in the past decade.

    If we start with the background, trans people had long been accepted and accommodated in their lived identities and gender, for example by the Church’s willingness to ordain trans priests/ministers. We still have transgender clergy today.

    Further to this, in a more tolerant and generous time – July 2017 – General Synod overwhelmingly (over 75%) passed a motion recognising the need for transgender people to be welcomed and affirmed in churches.

    This was followed in December 2018 by Pastoral Guidance: ‘the House of Bishops commends the rite of Affirmation of Baptismal Faith as the central feature of any service to recognize liturgically a person’s gender transition’… They further stated: ‘It is appropriate to identify the preference of a transgender person in respect of their name and gendered (or other) pronouns… the terms ‘trans man’ (referring to someone who has undergone female-to-male transition) and ‘trans woman’ (male-to-female) are sometimes preferred by the individual concerned.’ This has of course now been called into question by the recent Supreme Court ruling (though that only referenced one specific law).

    The Church’s ‘Living in Love and Faith’ initiative began in 2017 and included a study of gender. People were invited to submit views and attend interviews. I myself was invited to an interview on 13 February 2019 with Eeva John, at that time leading the process. She was sensitive but, of course, opening up about one’s life trauma and journey to wholeness came at a cost. But trans people participated in this process in good faith.

    Meanwhile, in July 2019, an updated version of ‘Valuing All God’s Children’ (Church of England’s Guidance for Schools) was published, which reflected the Church’s acceptance of trans identities up to that time. For example, it stated that adolescence… ‘is a time when the school culture needs to offer a compassionate acceptance that again allows young people to ‘try on identities for size’, and explore who they are and how best to be themselves, to grow into self-congruence, whilst acknowledging that they may struggle and be confused along the way. Young adults need to be offered the freedom that was afforded to the child in nursery of the metaphorical dressing up box of trying on identities without assumption or judgement.’ All students should be helped to ‘understand the issues for those who feel they are trans/transgender and may be in the process of transition, understanding the impact that bullying has on them. It is important to teach pupils to understand the appropriate use of gender labels and names for trans people and to explore why deliberately calling someone the gender other than that which they choose to identify as is a form of bullying.’

    However, a counter-culture of ideologies started to emerge (and be promoted by a trans-hostile media): religious ideology, trans-exclusionary feminist ideology, and the ‘anti-woke’ ideology of the political right.

    The work of LLF on the pastoral care of trans people was still being presented as an integral part of its purposes. For example, on 11 May 2021, the Next Steps Group tasked to continue the LLF work reported: ‘The group moved on to discuss the possibility of further work on questions of gender identity and transition. The group acknowledged that this is a complicated area and a first step will be to gather resources to enable the Church of England to be better informed. The group reiterated its commitment to do this together with people most affected by these questions and to do so with the utmost compassion and grace, creating as brave and safe a space for everyone as possible.’

    By the following month, that Group proposed a Working Group on trans issues in the Church: ‘The question of how to take forward the proposal of a working group on gender identity and transition was discussed. The work will need to be undertaken knowledgeably and compassionately as it will involve inviting people to come together among whom there are deep and painful divisions. The Group reconfirmed its commitment to supporting those most affected by questions raised by the work.’ In July, they stated that ‘The group discussed the correspondence members had received regarding the proposed gender identity and transition work and agreed a response.’

    And where is that Working Group? So great was the pressure on Church leaders over the threats of schism caused by the same-sex issue, that it was put on hold.

    In the absence of action at the top, I initiated a very helpful interaction with a conservative ordained minister, who was gracious and decent. His well-known evangelical church was grappling with trans issues too. In collaboration (I also led a teaching session at the church) we developed a 40-point list of guidelines on the pastoral care of trans people (a diluted version can be seen here and was sent to the Next Steps Group on 6 April 2022).

    There was no reply.

    So on 25 May 2022, I reached out again to the LLF team, asking whether the group had been formed, and how many trans people were part of it. I noted ‘I am anxious that the latest review/process does not get overtaken by any individuals who attempt to de-construct trans identity, or subvert our lives, while I respect a place for a range of views.’

    This was the reply: ‘The further work on gender identity and transition is currently on ‘pause’ as the Next Steps Group works out by and with whom and how this will be taken forward. So no group has been formed, as yet, and no further work has taken place. It will, of course, be vital for any work to involve the full range of diversities in relation to lived experience and convictions and, as you know, that in itself is a significant challenge in the current climate. It will also be vital to do this in a way that seeks to be authentically pastoral and welcoming of all. There is much work to do in gaining the trust of trans people who have experienced the deep and personal pain of being at the receiving end of so much unhelpfully and unthoughtfully articulated ‘debate’ both inside and outside the church.’

    So that was official: The Working Group on trans issues, proposed the previous year, was ‘paused’.

    That was disappointing, firstly because people had opened and given themselves in good faith to the LLF process, and secondly because the climate in society for trans people was by then worsening.

    Since the trans element of LLF had been put on hold, it was saddening to read that the statement on 3 March 2023 by the Next Steps Group tasked with following through on LLF issues opened with the words: ‘The remit of the Next Steps group now having reached its conclusion…’

    In July 2024 (three years after a Working Group on trans issues had been proposed) I wrote to Bishop Martyn Snow, who had taken over as lead bishop on the LLF process: ‘The reason I am writing is that I am confused and unclear about the state of play on future guidance/teaching/pastoral care for trans people individually in the Church, and for church communities themselves, trying to do the right thing if they have trans people – or, importantly, their families – who come to churches. It seems, predictably and somewhat understandably that the LLF workgroups will be preoccupied by the issues around gay sexuality, but I should love to know what the programme is with regard to trans people and the Church. Is there a working group specifically tasked with addressing trans issues? Does it work to a timeline? Who heads it up?’

    He replied the next day, and I am grateful for his honesty: ‘The short answer is that, since I took on this role, we have been totally absorbed with the PLF and questions of marriage. And as you know, LLF was intended to be about so much more than this…  it is certainly the case that there is no working group on pastoral support for trans people.’

    I appreciated Martyn’s forthrightness, but although he proposed to find out the state of play and get back to me ‘in the next few weeks’, nothing happened.

    It is now nearly summer 2025, and the Working Group on the pastoral guidelines to address the pastoral needs of trans people in church communities remains on hold.

    However, there are growing tensions building up against various previous policies of the Church: for example, on the affirming use of pronouns in church schools. The Department of Education released non-statutory guidance in 2023 which stated: ‘It is expected that there will be very few occasions in which a school or college will be able to agree to a change of pronouns. On these rare occasions, no teacher or pupil should be compelled to use these preferred pronouns.’ That implies a state expectation that ‘birth’ pronouns should normally be used, not ones the student identifies with. That conflicted with the Church’s own 2016 guidance on affirming pronouns a student identifies with.

    In April 2025 the Church of England provided new and updated guidance for church schools addressing bullying (Part B:2.2). It still says schools must challenge discriminatory and dehumanising language and not allow deliberate misnaming. Schools are to avoid causing harm. However, there is ambiguity here in that this new guidance alludes (Footnote 81) to the use of a pronoun with which a child does not identify being potentially harmful. That much maintains the 2016 assertion that this could be seen as a form of bullying, but there is growing political pressure to close down chosen pronouns in most cases.

    At this point, I wrote yet again about the non-appearance of that Working Group that had been proposed four years ago.

    I understand this week, after yet further enquiry, that the LLF team are now passing on the handling of trans issues to Richard Sudworth, the director of the Church’s Faith and Public Life Team. The leads on LLF now tell me (26 April 2025): ‘The challenges we face in capacity and focus on current LLF work remain… in that me and my team are having to place almost our full focus on seeking fuller use of the PLF (alongside appropriate pastoral reassurance). However, I recognise that this is not an adequate situation given the pastoral needs and care for trans people that you rightly remind us of.’

    I appreciate the frankness, and I’ve been offered a meeting which I believe may take place this month. But to be plain, it’s not about me. I would rather follow my secluded life of prayer. However, I feel very badly for young trans people and all those trans people in vulnerable situations. While trans people have been left ‘on ice’ in the outworking of LLF, events in the country have moved on – as we’ve seen with the terrible ‘vilification’ of trans people by media, politicians, and those with antagonistic ideologies. There is urgent need for leadership from the Church because many in the trans population feel in crisis, and face growing hate on the street. The very identity of trans people has been called into question. This will impact Anglican provisions like schools, and will undoubtedly lead to calls from some for changes in official guidelines. I don’t believe gender identity issues can be left in limbo any longer. I know that some trans people I respect prefer to ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ but then the other parties – including some who oppose transition altogether – will push and push. We need re-affirmed guidance and respect for who we are, and that has got to involve a working group at last, if only to home in on advice over pastoral care (which impacts not only trans people but their families, and churches uncertain about how to meet the present developments).

    What is needed is not passive toleration of trans people, but positive leadership and guidelines on welcome, inclusion, and acceptance (just as Synod overwhelmingly affirmed in 2017). How best can trans people be cared for, protected from subversion of their identities and self-worth, and offered space to flourish and open up? Following the way of the Cross, how can we become the whole of who we really are, in Christ?

     

     

     

  • Respecting Trans People, Part 1: A Pause for Kindness?

    by Susannah Clark, a member of the Fellowship of the Love of God who has worked as a Prison Governor in charge of a national centre for sex offenders, as a teacher of teenagers for 25 years and, after transitioning 16 years ago, as a registered nurse

    These are distressing times for people who are trans. They face increased hostility and danger on the streets, because of the way the media has amplified exceptional cases of ‘bad apples’ and associated trans people with predators, framing them as a danger to the public, when in reality the vast majority are decent people just trying to get on with everyday life. Trans women have been portrayed as a threat to cisgender women, when in fact both groups face unwanted male attention and the risk of male violence.

    Ten years ago, the culture wars were less febrile. Most people had started to take a live and let live approach to trans men and women, and many grew to affirm them. There was greater generosity of spirit and proportionality, combined with a realisation that transition for many could lead to better lives.

    However, in the intervening decade we have seen a convergence of very different and contrasting ideological groups, intent on isolating trans people as a class, for a variety of reasons: first there were deeply conservative and fundamentalist religious campaigners for whom transition itself was abhorrent; secondly there was a subsection of feminist activists who campaigned to exclude trans women from areas of life, and to subvert their innate and essential sense of identity; thirdly there were right-wing populists who tried to play on the worst human instincts to identify scapegoats in order to increase support for their politics; fourthly there were more established political parties who started to fear the traction the far right was gaining, and have come to see trans people as politically expendable; and finally – doing huge damage to trans people and treating us like pariahs – there has been media portrayal of trans people as threatening perverts. They have smeared all trans people in the public’s perception and amplified the hatred of the ignorant.

    Kindness and empathy have been so missing from recent discourse.

    Now we have the Supreme Court ruling that, in the context of one Act, the term woman should be understood to mean genital biology at birth. However, assuming that what it means to be female and a woman can be summarised by genitalia alone is a huge simplification. Reducing women to their bits also ignores the complexity of intersex people. The intention of the Supreme Court was to  leave it to elected policy-makers to develop and evolve how, in practical terms, the interests of groups might be protected in a humane and responsible manner. So it does seem to me that Baroness Falkner of the EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission), notwithstanding lip-service to the rights and needs of trans people, is running ahead of the game in pressurising public bodies to extend one finding of one law to general and hard-line implementations that exclude trans people, without taking responsibility first for the impact such enforcements may have on already endangered and vulnerable trans people’s lives, and allowing further time for debate and consultation on how to manage these issues with proportionality.

    The taboo of the toilets has been a focal point. Like anyone else, trans people go in, find a cubicle, pee, wash hands, and leave. That’s what people do, because, let’s face it, you really want to spend as little time as possible in a public loo. I have been transitioned for 16 years and I have never once faced any hostility.

    Of course, the argument is that some pervert could go into the public loos, and that might be someone trans; therefore, it is claimed, *no* trans women should be allowed in women’s public toilets. Think about that a moment: men’s public loos, with their open urinals, involve more exposure of genitals, and are there no cisgendered male perverts preying on boys or young men? Are the risks allegedly posed by trans women greater than the much greater number of male perverts molesting boys in men’s toilets? Of course not. Yet we don’t ban every male from those toilets. That would be disproportionate. The whole toilet thing has been weaponised, where it was working event-free for decades before.

    You could extend the exclusionary principle – excluding all members of a class of people because of rare and exceptional bad people – to schools (where I worked for 25 years). Some teachers molest young children. Yet male teachers are routinely allowed to oversee boys getting changed at school. Aren’t they a danger too? Well, the answer is the same as for trans women in loos: no. Or rather, there will always be risk of sex offenders but we don’t pin that risk on everyone else. We could ban all men from teaching but, of course, we don’t. It’s a matter of proportionality, and part of the proportionality needed is a mature, balanced sense of responsibility for minorities and not just the majority: worked out and developed by government, and certainly not rushed headlong into, which is what the Chair of the EHRC seems to want to do.

    And then there is the matter of NHS hospitals… already being pressurised by Baroness Falkner to exclude trans women from women’s wards immediately. After transition I re-trained as a registered nurse and absolutely loved my work. This included medication, preparation for theatre, cleaning up shit and vomit, and yes… intimate care such as washing genitalia and catheterisation. Out of care. Out of kindness and compassion. Many patients (male and female) were appreciative. Not a single woman objected. I would have shown respect if they did, but in 10 years no-one ever did. When you’re sick, you just want to get well.

    Yet now, if I myself fell ill, I would be characterised as a potential ‘threat’ and excluded from a female ward. I was safe before as a nurse (nurses of all genders work in wards for men and wards for women). But in my own vulnerability I would be cast out.

    Up until now there has been ‘live and let live’. We have deployed kindness and generosity of spirit to accommodate all the varieties of people who make up a hospital ward. That principle should apply to society as a whole.

    People talk about ‘the gender ideology’. I’m not an ideology, I’m a person.

    I have described elsewhere my own recovery after gender surgery, in a convent where the loving sisters were there for me, as women caring for a vulnerable woman. The healing continued (to my great joy) and I returned to work – I worked in critical care, and acute care, and in later years with the elderly. And psychologically I flourished, able at last to openly be who I was. At work and at play. It is wonderful when solidarity is extended to trans women by other women, and in my experience many do. They are not all exclusionary ideologues. There is live and let live. And kindness.

    If you have a trans sister or a trans daughter, you might well recognise that they are obviously female. Many friends, neighbours, colleagues who know trans women would too. They know, through personal interaction and goodwill, that these friends have female brains, female manner, female presence. Or, at least, they’re certainly not guys!

    Yet politicians allege we’re not real. We are fake.

    But the opposite is true. We’re fake before transition.

    The cost of ‘performance’ outside your true self can be devastating. But when I transitioned… such a psychological ease came flooding into my life. My life became congruent, and no longer tormented by dysphoria. And after surgery: a sense of wholeness, well-being, and flourishing. Decades of self-harm just disappeared, sad memories of my past. Today my life is so happy, and I’m loved deeply by my precious wife, my children and my friends. But I feel so sad for young trans men and women, and those trans people who are socially vulnerable, or abused by neighbours, or abandoned by society. And that’s why I’m writing this article – out of solidarity – for them.

    For many trans-excluding activists, I fear that the campaign for this particular Supreme Court decision is not their only goal, merely a bridgehead leading to what they hope will be further enforced exclusion. They frame us as the enemies of women.

    It’s as if a trans woman like myself doesn’t care about the protection of all women. I have cared about women all my life. Most trans people do – they care hugely. Many of us have mothers and daughters and wives and sisters who we love and care about. Indeed we have a vested interest ourselves in protection, because trans women know discrimination themselves.

    In the end we can either accommodate each other’s differences with kindness, or we can go down the road of populism, hatred, othering, and the policing of tribal boundaries. It doesn’t have to be that way. Instead of meanness of spirit I think we need: generosity, kindness, responsibility, balance. We should help one another to be the whole and best of who we really are.

    Politicians need to stop courting populism, and find the courage to reject simplicities and recognise the need for proportionality in what follows this one-off ruling. Baroness Falkner may want to go rushing in, but there needs to be much further reflection, nuance, and consultation.

    There is a strong case for pausing on actions to be enforced, until an independent review has recommended how to navigate the need to protect women generally, but also the need to protect trans women before their lives are imperilled, and sort that out, because frankly, that is an urgent responsibility of good government. And yes, of course, the present government may be running scared of losing some votes by sticking its head above the parapets on these issues. Hiding behind the Supreme Court ruling and allowing the EHRC to carry the can, at the immediate expense of trans people, would be a cowardly abandonment of a most vulnerable group in our society.

    But there is a different way: the way of the convent sisters who nursed me and accepted me as a woman, the way of most women I nursed who welcomed my care, and so many women I meet in day-to-day life: not activists with ideological agenda, but human beings willing to treat other human beings with generosity, decency and kindness.

    The sad thing is that I feel like the present campaign to define trans women has been big about sex and genitalia, but the reality is that women are more than their bits. As trans women our biological brains and gestalt identity may also be irrevocably female (in a whole spectrum of different versions). That ‘being a woman’ is at heart something you are, how you know yourself, the heart of your being, and loveliness, and potential. To reduce the definition of a woman only to sex and genitalia is to ignore so much more of what makes a woman who she is. In a way it’s quite insulting. It’s not all about sex. I’m a human being who happens to understand myself as woman at the heart of my being. I’m a threat to no-one, and a gift to those who love me, and we don’t deserve to be excluded, far less to be vilified.

    All of us should care about each other, as we dare to open up, more and more, to the whole of who we are.

     

    *   *   *   *   *

     

    Susannah Clark has written other articles, and advice on the pastoral care of trans people, that can be found here:

    http://transition.org.uk

    https://trans.org.uk

    https://viamedia.news/2024/06/19/the-whole-of-who-we-are/

  • Essential Doctrines, Essential Hierarchies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Whole of Who We Are

    by Susannah Clark; she belongs to the Fellowship of the Love of God (Oxford)

    It was Augustine who wrote ‘You were within me, but I was outside’.

    How many people find themselves living, at least in part, outside themselves: performing to colleagues to fit in and meet their approval; or conforming with others around us – at work or at church – to feel part of the group and accepted? Even sadder, when we lose contact with ourselves. You may know the feeling, when you work and work, until you finally stop and ask, ‘Yes, but where am I in all this? In the life I lead?’ and you feel out of touch with yourself.

    We so easily do this to ourselves, and drift away from who we really are, uniquely made and cherished by God. We can feel fragmented, with countless loose ends, but haunted by a kind of inauthenticity. ‘How are you, Susannah?’ ‘Oh I’m fine,’ when you’re not. In our ‘outside’ lives when we’re fronting up ourselves to others like that, it is all too easy to become alienated from the God who dwells within us, always longing and calling us to get back in touch, to open and grow… to resume the journey and vocation to become the whole of who we are.

    In the Carmelite practice of contemplation, that re-connecting with the God who knows and loves us is called ‘recollection’… collecting yourself together again, and recalling the core reality of who we are in relationship with God… God who knows us tenderly, calls us into our being and becoming, loves us to the point of no turning back… and beckons us to know ourselves in opening up and devotion of our souls.

    That opening up can be – oh – so raw, and we may well fear it: because so many of us have closed doors in our souls that we’d rather not open… old hurts, old shames, and the anxiety of what it might cost if we do: what we might unleash! And yet, there is a gentleness and healing in the love of God, and opening up to the flow of God’s love is the beginning of becoming. It’s opening up, often in trembling steps, to the whole of who we are. Most of us know on paper that love is the great commandment, the first imperative, if we are to give ourselves to God and be authentic. But truly opening up means more than just being loved.

    The flow of God’s love in our being and lives is like a stream of compassion: as Jesus described it, streams of living water that would flow from within us. It is not simply a static pool that we can wallow in for our own enjoyment alone. Yes, God does water our soul like a garden, and wants us to receive and to flourish. But the fulfilment of our being is more than self alone. The Love of God is a flowing stream, the Spirit of God, longing to reach through us to others… because that’s what love does: it flows and enlivens us in the act of opening up our hearts to others round about us. When we give ourselves like that, as channels of mercy, we start to know the best of who we are. We recollect and encounter the authenticity we can have in God.

    For decades I self-harmed, and ‘who’ people saw did not match who I was, how I felt, inside. I policed and defended and locked down that person for fear of discovery. I tried to project and act out a congruent manhood to meet their expectations and presuppositions, and yet… how I was inside my ‘gestalt’, what I felt, how I longed to become, was painfully incongruent with my physical body. So I tried to shut all the doors, put my integral person in a box, tape down the lid, and hide it away. But repression can be like a dam that increases and increases in pressure, until it erupts in negative ways: in my case in terrible self-harm. That was the cost of ‘performance’ outside my true self. Not waving but drowning.

    Then sometimes the dam finally breaks – I’m not just talking about trans experience, it happens to many people. In my own case I think it broke because I ached for God so much. I ached to be true. And once the dam was broken I could not put it all back. I transitioned. It was not a casual ‘life style choice’. I lost friends who ghosted me. I was told by my employers that I must leave. I lost my home. For a while I even lost my children. People at my church told me I was wrecking my life. And yet, God did not abandon me. On the contrary, I felt held and comforted and spiritually alive. I commenced hormones, and within weeks the self-harm of decades just ceased. I underwent surgery. An amazing Anglican community of sisters (in fact the community that was later featured in ‘Call the Midwife’) took me in, loved me, and nursed me for ten weeks after surgery. ‘Yours is just like ours’ they gently assured me as they tended the wounds. Christian inclusion.

    My contemplative life deepened and came alive, and I was guided and helped by another Anglican community: the Sisters of the Love of God in Oxford. They were wonderful, and encouraged me along my contemplative path. I learnt the practice of trust in the God who is there, even through the cloud of unknowing. I dared to open doors long closed, I confronted myself, I opened my being to God. My life became congruent and no longer racked by dysphoria. Instead… deep psychological ease and a more practical, productive day-to-day, week-to-week journey. It has now been fifteen years. I re-trained as a nurse, and it was the best thing I could have done: in looking outwards to others I found myself healed from within. My life – and the journey to become the whole of who I am – expanded, opened up, found release in little practical acts on the hospital wards. Contemplative life is not just internal: it permeates and colonises our practical lives as well.

    Friends at church had warned, ‘It will end badly’ and some Christians still say ‘Transition is wrong. It’s against the will of God.’ They call my vagina a ‘mutilation’ and my womanhood a fake. Politicians and sadly some Christians go further, politicising my quiet life and who I am, and framing people like me as ‘threats’ and ‘predators’. It is hurtful and in some cases hateful. They talk about an ‘ideology’ but in truth they have an ideology themselves. Their language endangers trans lives on the street, massaging the ‘culture wars rhetoric’ and providing a kind of mandate for hatred in the eyes and sick minds of those who spit, or threaten, or shout abuse: ‘you’re a pervert and a bloke in a frock’. It is sad and a bit shameful, weaponising who we are for political gain. In truth, for most trans people our lives are as mundane as anyone else’s: getting up, going to work, shopping, washing, ironing, making supper. It’s the same ‘lifestyle’ as yours I am sure: it’s called being a human being.

    My children – all three are committed Christians – have returned to love me tenderly. I am so proud of them and their devoted lives. I’m not jubilant about the impact on them and others, but we are loving and close now, which I find really humbling. One of my last jobs before retirement in 2022 was as a school nurse caring for 1200 teenagers in a large secondary. There I witnessed – but did not proselytise – four trans teenagers who were trying to explore the whole of who they were. The school had a great ethos: to afford them time, space, and respect. The same respect given to young gay or lesbian teens there. They, and all the students, would come to me for care, for cuts, inhalers, migraines, allergic reactions, or sometimes just to talk. And within the first week, I was just ‘the nurse’. Teens are great like that.

    It’s not just individuals though, is it? It’s not only about me, me, me. I’m incredibly insignificant in the great scheme of things. Thank goodness. The whole point about transition is just to get on with your life, only with greater psychological ease, more congruity, more in touch with who you are and can become. It’s the same for the Church as a whole: the call of God to open up to the whole of who we are and can become. Not excluding people, or insisting everyone conforms to a single dominant dogma, but learning that when a church welcomes the neuro-diverse, the foreigner, the gay, the bi-, the disabled, the trans, the precious individual beset with mental health issues… every one of them has been uniquely created by God and brings gift to God’s community… which would be impoverished without them.

    Yes, as a Church, we should pray that in opening up to the flow of God’s love we open more and more to the whole of who we are.

     

     

  • Church of Scotland Welcomes Trans Members and Ministers

    by the Rev Canon Professor Paul Middleton, Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Chester; a Minister of the Church of Scotland, he is also a member of its Theological Forum, and Canon Ecumenical at Chester Cathedral

    The annual meeting of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland took place at the end of May in Edinburgh. Though not established in the same way as the Church of England, the Church of Scotland is recognised in law as the National Church. The Monarch, who it is said ‘becomes Presbyterian when they cross the border’ is represented at the General Assembly through the Lord High Commissioner (this year, the Duke of Edinburgh), and in the Gracious Letter, reaffirms the Accession Oath ‘to uphold Presbyterian Church Government in Scotland.’

    This year’s Assembly, which was somewhat overshadowed by the announcement of the General Election, for the first time considered the question whether or not there was any bar on Trans people and those with diverse gender identities holding office in the Church. As was noted in the recent Cass report, discourse around Trans people in society has become toxic. While Hilary Cass was writing about the situation in England, this is arguably more so the case in Scotland with the recent controversy around the Westminster Government blocking the Scottish Parliament’s Gender Identity Bill, which was passed overwhelmingly with support from members of all parties.

    The Church’s Theological Forum was given the remit of reporting to this year’s Assembly. While the Church of Scotland spent the best part of a decade debating same-sex marriage and lesbian and gay ministers in the church, there have been relatively few statements on the place of Trans people. In 2016 it produced the booklet Diverse Gender Identities which promotes awareness and inclusive pastoral care, and the 2022 Assembly supported the Scottish Government’s proposed criminalisation of conversion practices, rejecting a proposal to specifically exclude Trans experience from that ban. Therefore, although the Church has not said very much in the past, the Theological Forum were building on a generally positive and welcoming position.

    In compiling their report, the Theological Forum, which includes a spectrum of theological opinion, spoke with a number of Christians who are transgender and others who hold diverse gender identities, including someone who had de-transitioned. The Forum concluded that since the Church of Scotland takes no consideration of sex or gender for church membership or holding the offices of Elder or Minister, there is no bar on Trans people being Ministers.

    The report the Theological Forum presented to General Assembly is relatively brief. A decision was made to make no comment on the current debates in Scottish (and now British) political discourse, although it calls attention to the fact that rhetoric in these political debates directly impacts real people. The report is divided into three sections: Engagement with Scripture; Engagement with Lived Experience; and Theological Questions. Each section is brief, and is a truncated presentation of far wider discussions. The first section acknowledges that some Christians find a clear sex binary in the creation accounts, while others would see these accounts, along with hard-wired gender roles in the text, as descriptive (how the world looked to the ancients) rather than prescriptive. Moreover, in the same way as few would argue the Creation accounts override advances in natural sciences, there is no reason to suppose they should take priority over advances in human and biological sciences, such as psychology and physiology. There is some reflection on the biblical account of eunuchs, although the report is ambivalent about the helpfulness of mapping these characters on to contemporary Trans experiences.

    The second section, which recounts the Forum’s meetings with people of diverse gender identities, makes the important point that there is no single ‘Trans experience’. On the basis of the stories described, the Forum concludes that ‘the duty of love requires the Church to follow a course that will avoid causing distress, and that will promote wellbeing and demonstrate compassion’. The final section raises some theological questions around whether transitioning or not may best express people’s calling to be the person they were created to be, observing that ‘many Christians see diversity of gender identity as a gift from God and a blessing.’

    The Theological Forum would acknowledge the report is far from exhaustive. There was a clear decision to focus mainly on the principal question it was asked to investigate; whether or not Trans people could be ministers. Much of the debate on the floor of Assembly noted that there is far more that could be said, such as the importance of changing name in biblical tradition, gender diversity in creation exemplified through the animals, and the figure of the eunuch. The Forum’s report urged that all sides exercised charity and grace, and the discussion was largely carried out in that spirit. The report concluded with an important and unambiguous statement of welcome: ‘Transgender people are part of the Church of Scotland and they are welcome.’ General Assembly unanimously accepted the report.

  • Don’t Preach. Just Don’t.

    by Chrissie Chevasutt, ‘Outreach and Development Worker with Transgender, Intersex and Non-binary People’, for St Columba’s Oxford. They have lived and worked in the city for 33 years, across a wide spectrum of churches, and in varied roles, thus having a unique perspective on church history and practices over that period

    I’ve been the Outreach and Development Worker with Transgender, Intersex and non-binary people at St Columba’s United Reformed Church in Oxford since 2022, and I wrote about my role here. When I started in this work, I described it as “a prophetic act, a ministry of social justice and an expression of God’s outrageous love for the marginalised and oppressed.” I have been making connections, publicising what I do, and hearing people’s stories. And I have been becoming aware, even more, of how much work there is that needs to be done, in Oxford and beyond. The Oxford Safe Churches project just underlines that.

    I attended St Aldate’s Church in Oxford for many years. It’s a parish church with a large student membership and describes itself on the front page of its web presence as somewhere you can “feel right at home”. Really?

    That doesn’t seem to apply if you are LGBTQIA+. One of the sermons given at the church which was preserved online makes that very clear: ‘The Truth Will Set You Free’, link to the audio here. Full transcript here. I’ve mentioned it before but here I want to say rather more about it. It was given by Simon Ponsonby; I don’t know exactly in what year, except that it is definitely pre-Covid. The sermon summarises nearly 20 years of campaigning against LGBTQIA+ people, their dignity, equality, rights and spiritual freedom, by him and by the previous Rector, Charlie Cleverly, for which there is much evidence, all readily available online. Letters, articles in the press and media, both local and national, all confirm the deep prejudice towards us of this church’s leadership.

    I’ve described on my blog how I am both angered and wounded deeply, by Simon Ponsonby’s abuse of power in this sermon, and I have for the last few years been ministering to many of those he has damaged, wounded and broken by his attitudes, beliefs and homophobic campaigning and preaching, which both produced and resulted from this sermon.

    It’s hard to know where to start with the academic, intellectual, scholarly, theological, and pastoral reasoning in the sermon. A key factor to me seems to be the tone; Ponsonby presents himself as the oracle or avatar of the divine message; ‘absolute truth’. There is no sense of humility or self-reflection on his part, either upon his own very limited understanding or his own deeply sinful nature; he has not pursued all the way that conservative evangelical notion of the human heart (even his own), being wicked and deceitful and bent towards pride.

    One last glaring dissonance which jars heavily upon many listeners who are either LGBTQIA+ or allies, to the extent it leaves one almost stunned in unbelief, is the chasm between Simon’s tone of voice and delivery, and the words he uses to describe us. I was dumbfounded on first hearing this sermon, and have had to go back and study it, several times over, to understand how such a gulf could exist in a person’s lack of self-awareness, and to try to find an explanation for it.

    Simon’s tone is calm, measured, and oozes compassion. This draws the listener and audience in because it soothes them, making them believe this is God’s heart of compassion, being reflected by the preacher and teacher. Part of this tone is his continual refrain in both introduction and conclusion, of ‘We love you.’ Easy to say, but the content of the sermon gives the opposite message.

    I know the preacher well, perhaps better than many. In every other sermon I have heard him preach I know this to be a genuine and authentic reflection of his heart but I am so shocked and sickened by this sermon and its content that I have had to question whether in this case the compassion is real, or feigned.

    While his voice oozes compassion, his words drip hatred, judgement, condemnation, exclusion, and rejection towards us as LGBTQIA+ people. Simon demonizes us and pathologizes us, pouring shame upon us; all in the name, and supposedly for the glory, of God.

    The sermon is divided into three parts, of roughly equal length, and they, to a large degree, depend upon each other for their integrity, or rather lack thereof. Each informs and builds the argument of the other. In each part – history, theology, and psychology – he indulges both flawed science, history, and experience to substantiate his argument, whilst his reasoning in each is deeply flawed, if not deliberately and intentionally skewed to favour his presupposed starting point. He offers snapshots of history, wrenched out of their true context, to prove the ‘gay lobby’ was a bullying, manipulative and destructive force against Christian morality and belief.

    He points the finger at the ‘liberalism and relativism’ of modern theology, informed by both science and human experience, labelling it ‘a pick and mix’ of whatever truths you choose to believe, but fails to see that he is indulging exactly this ‘pick and mix’ approach to truth in his own versions of history, theology, and psychology. He quotes from a particular selection of work from these disciplines, without giving his hearers any sense of how limited a selection this is. He claims that he “sets some facts straight” but there is no indication that these are not objective facts. It is a shameless hypocrisy of the worst possible kind, because he is using his failure to apply academic, intellectual, scholarly rigour and discipline to the arguments he presents as ‘absolute truth’, and he is doing so, in order to exalt his own authority as a theologian, preacher and teacher and stigmatise, demonise, pathologize a vulnerable and already oppressed group.

    His approach to other academic disciplines reminds me of what’s known in psychological analysis as the Dunning-Kruger effect. This is when someone who assumes themselves to be an expert or authority in one field, science, or discipline, believes they are therefore an authority in other sciences or disciplines.

    I have heard Simon preach many, many times, and he always rejects the liberal theology and theologians of the last thirty years, often men and women of far greater intellectual, academic, and scholarly rigour, research, and theological depth than his own. They are seen as irrelevant because he is preaching ‘absolute truth’ and they are preaching lies.

    But that repeated insistence that ‘We love you’, simply does not wash, it is meaningless, after we have been so cursed by his authority, power and words.

    Why does he do this? He, like so many of his tribal mates, genuinely believes that by converting gay and LGBTQIA+ people to being straight, he is saving us from hell.

    We clearly see here homophobia being embedded, maintained, and perpetuated in a parish church. It is homophobia which is using erroneous history and psychology to destroy young and vulnerable LGBTQIA+ lives. I have watched young LGBTQIA+ people, caught in cycles of shame, despair, self-hatred and self-harm, even suicidal ideation, after being subject to this type of ministry. I was one of them once. This sermon is spiritual abuse.

    Did Ponsonby ever stop to think that within his congregation, listeners to his sermon, there might by young church members who are LGBTQIA+?!

    If Jesus is our model of ministry, it is plain, simple, and so easy to see in the gospels, that his whole ministry was built around breaking shame from people’s lives, to restoring the oppressed and marginalised back into community, that they might flourish. The contrast I am seeing and hearing between Ponsonby’s ministry here, and that of Jesus, is so far apart, that I can only label this sermon as a manifest evil.

    It is God’s loving kindness that leads us to repentance. No threat of hell, or fear of hell can draw us into the loving heart and mind of God. No theology of judgement, condemnation, exclusion, and separation, as Simon so espouses in his sermon, can reveal God’s perfect love.

    It is grace, love and truth that leads us to repentance. I offer Simon that grace, love and truth and I urge him to make a full and public repentance and attempt some kind of apology and restitution to his victims. If he has moved on from his beliefs here, then he needs to publicly clarify what his new beliefs are. Yet his recent teaching in the St Aldate’s podcast series ‘Unscripted’ suggests he has not moved far at all.

    What scares me the most? It’s that the church applauds the preacher for this sermon…

     

     

     

     

     

  • A Plentiful Harvest: Growth in Inclusive Churches

    by Revd Dr Augustine Tanner-Ihm, Team Curate at St James & Emmanuel, Didsbury, Manchester and winner of the 2020 Theology Slam

    Just over 19 years ago, my life took a profound turn when I pledged myself to the teachings and person of Jesus Christ. This powerful, transformative experience occurred during a Pentecostal service in a small village located approximately 90 minutes outside of St. Louis. At the time, I was a 14-year-old adolescent grappling with depression and the harsh realities of homelessness, as my family and I were living in a shelter near Chicago. As narrated in the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), I was lost, and then found, embraced by a divine love that forever altered the path of my life.

    In subsequent years, I discerned a profound call to ministry, resonating deeply with the Great Commission as found in Matthew 28:19-20: “Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” This call from our Lord Jesus Christ provided me with a sense of purpose and value, igniting a fervour in me to spread the gospel in a way that was contextual and geared towards spiritual transformation.

    Today, nearly two decades later, my mission and focus remain steadfast. I value church growth not out of ambition for worldly success, but from a deep-seated desire for more individuals to come into a saving faith in Jesus Christ. As Paul writes in Romans 1:16, the gospel is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes. This conviction transcends denominational lines and theological differences within the Christian community. Despite these disparities, my spirit rejoices when individuals come to know Christ, and my zeal for evangelism remains unabated.

    Upon answering the call to priesthood, I was initially apprehensive that my primary role would shift to being a chaplain to a congregation, rather than an evangelist. Further, my theology, which affirms the inclusion of marginalized groups, seemed to conflict with the prevalent notions of church growth I observed in the United Kingdom, where I have resided for the past decade.

    Often, churches that baptized and discipled many individuals either remained silent on inclusion matters or made very clear statements affirming traditional views on human sexuality. However, my experience serving under Revd Dr. Nick Bundock, Rector of St. James and Emmanuel Church, Didsbury, deviated from this pattern. Under his leadership, our church has adopted an inclusive theology while simultaneously producing ordained and lay leaders, establishing a Church of England Primary School, an Anglican School trust, and playing an active role in the community.

    Last August, we held a confirmation service where over 95 people from our parish were confirmed. It was a deeply moving experience. A few weeks later, we baptized an entire family who had converted to Christianity from Islam. Earlier in the year, a man who found our church through our online presence started attending our church. All of these individuals came to our church because of our bold and inclusive message of the gospel.

    Initially, I feared that advocating for inclusion might lead to the closure of our church. However, what we have experienced has been a profound affirmation of God’s love for all people. We have seen faith manifest itself in a myriad of ways within our community. We have seen belonging leading to believing, and believers becoming disciples. We serve a God who, as expressed in Acts 10:34-35, shows no favouritism but accepts all who fear Him and do what is right.

    We do not believe in inclusion because it is trendy, but because we are convinced it is a faithful interpretation of Scripture and the work of the Holy Spirit. We are praying and sowing the seeds of the gospel as described in Matthew 13, the Parable of the Sower. As we look to the future, we pray for a revival of faith among more inclusive evangelical churches. We believe we are witnessing a new harvest, one that affirms the beautiful diversity of God’s creation.

    Our congregation, under the guidance of Revd Dr. Nick Bundock, has cultivated a vibrant community that seeks not just to declare God’s message but to live it in practical ways. We have participated in various missions in Salford, Uganda, India, and beyond, demonstrating the global scope of our gospel mission. We emulate the apostles in the Book of Acts, particularly in Acts 1:8, where Jesus proclaims: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

    In a notable instance of domestic outreach, a man who was seeking understanding of autism in relation to Christianity stumbled upon our church’s inclusive website. He happened to live in the parish, and has since become an active participant in our spiritual community. This striking experience exemplifies the far-reaching power of the internet as a tool for ministry in the digital age, drawing parallels with the apostle Paul’s innovative communication techniques in his time.

    Another powerful instance occurred during a marriage course, designed by my fellow curate Revd Lex Russell and her partner Johanna Russell. This course allowed couples to explore the intersection of the gospel and relationships, facilitating spiritual growth in a unique context. In one case, the bride of a couple I was preparing for marriage expressed her desire to be baptised and begin a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. This serves as an exemplary instance of how relational ministry can lead individuals closer to God, echoing the teachings found in Ephesians 5:22-33, where the relationship between partners ikened to that between Christ and the church.

    Reflecting on these and numerous other experiences, I am struck by how our explicit message of gospel inclusion has fostered such rich and diverse spiritual growth within our community in Manchester. Every person, every story, is a testament to God’s love and grace extending to all people, mirroring the teachings of Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

    In conclusion, we do not view inclusion as a fleeting trend, but rather as a central tenet of our faith derived from a thoughtful understanding of Scripture and underlined by the Spirit’s conviction. This belief in the inclusivity of all God’s people guides us as we pray, sow seeds of faith, and wait in hope for a plentiful harvest.

  • Trans Theology Conference – The Pastoral Care of Transgender, Intersex and Non-Binary People

    A Reflection by the Revd Jane Speck, Chaplain to the Conference; Jane is the Chaplain at York St John University, where she works with staff and students and leads a multifaith team.  She is also a member of the Iona Community.

    This September, York St John University was privileged to host the second ever Trans Theology Conference. Inaugurated in Oxford in 2022 by Revd Helen Garton and Chrissie Chevasutt, the conference seeks to give voice to trans people of faith, to create community and to share research and best practice.

    As the Chaplain to the conference, I was invited to offer the Conference Reflection at its end. Myself a cisgender trans-affirming feminist woman, it was a huge honour to be invited to address the conference in this way. The following is an edit of the reflection I offered, in the hope that it will sum up the main issues of the conference and even inspire some of you to sign up for next year!

    Attendees at the conference travelled a long way together in those couple of days, plumbing the richness of trans lives and experience, sharing wisdom, offering poetry, performance and song to express experiences more fully. It was emotional for many, as we looked both at how very far the Trans community has come, and yet how far there is still to go.

    Chrissie Chevasutt began the conference with the image of the Very Hungry Caterpillar. It’s such a favourite with me, as a metaphor for all kinds of life journey, that I keep a couple of copies on the Chaplaincy bookshelves for people to read.

    However, I realised during Chrissie’s talk that Eric Carle made a huge omission when he wrote his book, and it’s one that Chrissie addressed. It’s the page depicting the caterpillar’s cocoon. Carle drew the cocoon, then we flip the page and – ta daaaa! Butterfly! Which is exactly how easy transition is, right?!

    Well, of course not. That time in the cocoon can last a very long time. On the second day of the conference, Professor Susannah Cornwall showed us data on NHS waiting times for Gender Clinics. The average wait for a trans person to rise to the top of the waiting list and start to receive treatment is 69 months. The struggle to be taken seriously; the pressure to submit to a medicalisation that may or may not feel helpful, and meanwhile the striving to live an authentic life within a patriarchal society and what, for many, is also a patriarchal church denomination, all take their toll.

    Not for nothing did Dr Nicolete Burbach draw profound parallels, in her session, ‘What Does the Cross Mean for Trans People?’, between the experience of transitioning and the cross of Christ. Many trans people will have felt crucified by their experiences, as the data around trans people’s mental health tragically shows.

    However, there was a broader theme that I saw peeking out around the edges all the way through the conference. And that is the theme of hope. Dr Burbach spoke of the hope encapsulated in the cross as we look back with the benefit of hindsight and see the light of the resurrection. This is not a blind or Pollyanna-ish hope. This is a hope which bears the scars of crucifixion, which transforms its suffering into the understanding, compassion and love of redemption.

    It’s hope that keeps trans, intersex and non-binary people on their paths, and hope that keeps them battling to save themselves and one another. It’s hope that leads people like Jack Woodruff, speaking of his experience ‘Navigating the Church’ to believe that for trans people to find a place in a church that affirms them is a distinct possibility – and, in some places, actually a reality. It’s hope that keeps so many of us within churches that are experiencing the pushback we explored at this conference against the equality and inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people, as trans people gain confidence. Chrissie helpfully named the forces that seek to keep minority groups ‘in their place’ as the Old Empire, rising out of our colonial past and refusing quite to die.

    We heard that hope sung by Naomi Orrell in her astonishingly beautiful, prize-winning ‘Antiphon for the Blessed Trans Body’ in the Spoken/Written Word competition. We saw it enacted in Jo Clifford’s ground breaking ‘Queen Jesus the Play’, and experienced its rhythm and power in the poetry of Jay Hulme. This hope is real, and weaves its way through all our lives.

    Hope, however, is not an easy thing. A Buddhist friend tells me that one of the things Buddhists seek to let go of is hope, as it is tied in to desire and is therefore a form of suffering. Hope is a risk. Hope courts rejection and hurt, which many trans, intersex and non-binary people will know too much about.

    But hope also gives strength for the struggle. The gloop inside the caterpillar’s cocoon struggles to rebuild itself, then fights to be free. Without the fight, there would be no strength. Without the struggle, the butterfly will never fly free.

    This does not, and cannot be allowed to, justify the pain inflicted on trans, intersex and non-binary folk by others. Perhaps it can give meaning to the hard paths they walk, as they head towards the light, but it can never be used as an excuse. This is why the non-judgmental, positive pastoral care on which the conference was focussed is so vital in enabling people to re-member themselves in the re-telling of their trauma, and in being given the space to grieve, to process and to move forwards again. Alex Clare-Young addressed this in their talk on ‘Queer(y)ing Narratives’, noting that pastoral care can never be a ‘one size fits all’ model, but must be nuanced for each individual, the stage they are at and the needs they bring. Perhaps Eric Carle should have inserted an extra page in his storybook, showing the struggle of the butterfly to get out of the cocoon and fly…

    In the Christian faith we are particularly and uniquely placed, I do believe, to embrace people of all gender expressions. We believe in a God who transcends the gender constructs we ascribe to. We teach a God, as The Venerable Dr Hayley Matthews noted in her opening remarks, who spoke that word Vav or ‘and’, not ‘or’, in creating humanity – male and female; who chose a model of infinite variety for creation. A God who reminds us that we never, ever get to say, ‘you’re made in the image of God, and you’re made in the image of God, but I’m not so sure about you…’ And we believe in a God who gave us Jesus, to experience human suffering, give himself to the process, and show us that suffering and even death are not the end of the story. As it says in the Psalms, by his wounds we are healed. And so we wear our own scars, however we have come by them, as symbols of our hope and badges of our belonging to the One who touches our wounds and says, you are still here. You belong.

    This conference was a gift, both to us at York St John and, I hope, to the attendees. It is, I hope and pray, one that many more people will open their arms and hearts to receive next year.

  • Two-Edged Scripture: Taking the Bible Seriously

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

     

    Hebrews 4.12: Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

     

    Here are 5 bits from the Bible:

    In childbirth the woman will have pain (Genesis 3.16)

    Male and female created he them (Genesis 1.27)

    God hates shrimp (Leviticus 11.9-12)

    Homosexuality is an abomination (Leviticus 18.22)

    The she-bears (2 Kings 2)

    Evangelicals sometimes call the Bible “God’s instruction manual for life” or similar. This struck me as odd even when I was an evangelical myself (from about 1980 to about 1990), because on the face of it the Bible is nothing like an instruction manual. Rather, it’s a library of all kinds of different books: love poetry, hymns of praise, history books, origin myths and foundation tales, allegorical poems, philosophical reflections, proverbs, political tracts, forewarnings of judgement and apocalypse, shaggy-dog stories, and then the Gospels and the Epistles and Acts are each of them something different again. And in this library of books we see all sorts of things going on: shady dealings with goats in Genesis 29, religious genocide in Joshua 1 and 1 Samuel 15, rape and incest and murder in lots of places, hunger-strikes and dirty protests in Ezekiel, political debate in the books of Samuel, shipwrecks and trials and what we now call evangelism in Acts, straight theology in Hebrews and Romans, very strange eschatology in Revelation… and lots and lots of other things too.

    But here’s the thing: there is no obvious non-supernatural sense in which any of the writers of the books of the Bible thought that they were addressing us. When Paul wrote his letter to the Romans his intended audience was, well, the Romans—the Christian church in Rome in maybe 60 AD. When James wrote his Epistle he was addressing church communities of that time, communities that he’d lived in or visited, or had some pastoral responsibility for. The authors of Kings and Samuel and Chronicles thought they were writing the history of Israel, for the people of Israel in their own time. The author of Genesis, from where we get the lines about childbirth and about “male and female created he them”, were writing a foundation myth the point of which is to explain that things are the way they are because God made them that way. The authors of Leviticus, who give us the passages about shrimp and about homosexuality, were laying down a code of behaviour for a nomadic tribe which later (after the eye-wateringly violent conquest of the land of Israel by war, mass murder, religious persecution, and ethnic cleansing) settled down as a pastoral people.

    So even the bits of the Bible which are most like instruction manuals were not, in any non-supernatural sense, written as instruction manuals for us. (I don’t by the way have any problem at all with the notion of the supernatural. Not at all, unless it counts as a problem that I don’t think any “naturalist” yet has ever given a remotely plausible account of what “the natural” is.) Exodus tells us that the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Law were given by God, via Moses, to the people of Israel in the wilderness in maybe 1000 BC. Matthew tells us that the Sermon on the Mount was teaching given by Jesus in maybe 27 AD to his twelve disciples and other followers at the time. In Romans and Corinthians and Ephesians we can see the moral and religious and spiritual teaching that Paul gave to those churches then, in maybe 55 or 60 AD. But none of it is, directly and immediately, directed at us.

    So how do we know when the Bible is stating a divine command that applies to us here and now?

    If some of the observations about the foundation of our world are to be taken as not just parts of the narrative, but also instructions for us, like the bits in Genesis about women having to suffer in childbirth and about humans being made both male and female, then how do we know which of these observations give us rules, and which don’t?

    And how do they give us rules? Is the fact that women suffer in childbirth something to preserve, as in nineteenth-century resistance to using new forms of pain relief? Or to remove, or mitigate? Is “male and female created he them” something that tells us that there are no transgender people? Or that there shouldn’t be? Or that everyone has a bit of male and a bit of female in them? Rebracket it and see how it looks then!

    It is not for nothing that our Hebrews text calls Scripture two-edged.

    Or take Leviticus: if some rules apply now (e.g. be merciful to the widow and the stranger), but other rules don’t (e.g. the ideas that menstruating women are unclean or that God hates shrimp), then how do we know which rules apply and which don’t?

    If some of the examples of behaviour that the Bible gives us are examples to imitate (e.g. David repenting of his murder and adultery when Nathan challenges him), and other are not (e.g. Solomon taking a thousand wives), then how do we know which examples we are commanded to follow and which we are not?

    And this is where we come to the last of my five bits, the she-bears. Because some evangelicals apparently think that Elisha’s action in using supernatural powers to massacre dozens of young people for mocking him sets an example that we should at any rate admire—maybe even imitate, if we can. And I couldn’t disagree more strongly about that if I tried.

    It’s not all right for spiritual leaders who, like Elisha, have been entrusted with prophetic powers by God, to use those powers to massacre 42 (or however many; it’s a suspiciously numerological number) troublesome youngsters. It’s REALLY not all right. To suggest that it is, is to endorse millennia of pointless and tragic religious murderousness, from the allegedly divinely-sanctioned religious genocide of Joshua 1, to the actions of the IDF against the Palestinians.

    If we want to talk about “taking scripture literally”, well—there is nothing in 2 Kings 2 that forces a preacher to read it as an endorsement of Elisha’s violence against the troublesome youth of Bethel. It could be read as “God gave Elisha this power as successor to Elijah—and the first thing he did with that God-given spiritual power, tragically, was abuse it—just as the Apostles did when they were confronted by Ananias and Sapphira.”

    I don’t want religion/ faith (especially not my own religion/ faith, Christianity) to be what it so often has been, a way of normalising and institutionalising and even ritualising individual or church or state violence. (We do the ethnic cleansing, then we get together and sing some happy-clappy worship songs, and then we feel okay about those nasty scenes we witnessed this morning in the killing fields.)

    That is the norm for homo sapiens: that we use religion to sanitise and legitimate what is ABSOLUTELY NOT okay, what actually cries out to heaven for vengeance. But for my part, I don’t want the Christian church to be like that. I want Christians to do what Jesus did, and renounce the whole awful cycle of human violence and human self-hypnotism that it’s okay to be like this. In which cycle, religion plays a prominent and deeply ugly part. Because it isn’t okay, it really really isn’t, and we have to stand against it, even if that means we end up on the Cross.

    To be clear, I don’t think this “How can we tell when Scripture is giving us a command?” question is unanswerable.

    My answer is this: I think that the church today has to trust itself to be what it is, the continuation of the very same story that the Bible tells, the story of a people whom God is calling to be like his son Jesus. Since we by God’s grace are part of that same story, we have the same right to disagree with the Biblical authors as we have to disagree with each other in the church today. If someone in the Bible sets an example or issues a command that our best and most careful moral reflection tells us is just wrong, then we are free to disagree with it. After all, “We have the Holy Spirit too”. God is at work in us today just as he was at work in the people who wrote the scriptures. What they say is always for us to reflect on, and we can often learn from it too: the Bible can and does change our moral viewpoint, and improve it. But sometimes—Joshua 1’s apparent presentation of religious genocide as God’s will—it is not just that we are right to disagree; it would be abominable not to disagree.

    Now it’s not just me saying this. I actually think that this is what everybody does, even evangelicals. Martin Luther does this. Calvin does this. But I think conservative evangelicals typically have a false self-understanding. They claim to be “simply obeying just what it says in the Scriptures”. My point is that they do no such thing. Nobody could, because there is no such thing as “just what it says in the Scriptures”. Nor is it a matter, as I’ve heard some say, of “letting the Scriptures interpret themselves”; they don’t, we have to apply our understanding and our powers of interpretation to them.

    So forget about “taking the Bible literally”. Think instead about taking the Bible seriously, and reading it reverently and attentively and intelligently. The first step in that is to look closely at what kind of text we’re actually dealing with in reading any book of the Bible. In almost every case, what we are dealing with is not an instruction manual. And even when it is, the instruction manual was not originally written for us.

    That doesn’t mean we can’t get instruction from the Bible. Of course we can. But we get it not by literalism, but by serious and careful thought and reflection.

    Above all, perhaps, it means this: we have to try and read the scriptures with Jesus, to read them as he reads them. So with the she-bears, we could point out the contrast between Elisha (and the Apostles in their treatment of Ananias and Sapphira) on the one side, and Jesus on the other: how in the whole of his prophetic career the sole casualties were one fig tree, some money changers’ tables, maybe a herd of pigs, and Jesus himself. Jesus was an extremely radical and an extremely unorthodox reader of the scriptures: witness his constant clashes with the Pharisees, “today this scripture is fulfilled in your sight”, “the stone that the builders rejected…”, and many other points where he presents a completely subversive reading of a well-known text.

    And in fact there is a place in the Bible where Jesus gives us an example which he seems to have intended to be set alongside Elisha’s example, and to demonstrate how it is possible to respond to mockery or criticism of what you take to be your prophetic role completely differently from how Elisha responds. The passage I’m thinking of here is Luke 9.51-56:

    And it came to pass, when the time was come that he should be received up, he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem, and sent messengers before his face: and they went, and entered into a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him. And they did not receive him, because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elijah did? But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them. And they went to another village.

    Martin Luther famously said that “We go to Scripture as the wise men went to the manger: to find Jesus in it.” I think that’s right. I think it’s also right that we can go to Scripture in Jesus’ company: and try to learn to read it, and to act on it—or against it—as Jesus did.

     

    (based on a sermon preached at All Souls’ Church Invergowrie)