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Tag: family

  • Creating Family: A Perspective on the Debate on Looked-after Children and Those in Care

    by Helen King, member of General Synod 2021-2026; vice-chair, Together for the Church of England

    The July Synod agenda went through a few last-minute changes this time, including moving the debate on the Private Member’s Motion on looked-after children and those in care; a motion asking for a lead bishop, who can act as a focus for raising public awareness, and for work within dioceses to support this. I had put in to speak on this one so was very disappointed that the new time set was precisely when I had to see a hospital specialist yesterday morning. The motion was moved by Billy-Jo O’Leary, speaking from her experience as a Synod member who had spent time in care. The points I’d hoped to make were not made, so I have simply edited my draft speech here to add some references to what was said – the joy of being able to watch the debate on catch-up – and changed the tense to take into account of the that the motion was passed – unanimously.

    While I am not always a great fan of ‘let’s have a Lead Bishop for’ whatever concern we have, I think this was a very valuable motion. It highlights the obstacles currently faced by those leaving the care system, but I would urge that the role description for this bishop’s appointment should include promoting what for many is the best route out of the care system: adoption. We should not be put off by the shameful history of the church homes which carried out forced adoption. Adoption has changed beyond recognition and I suspect some of us have no idea what adoption means today.

    Unsurprisingly, based in cultures where adoption of adults was normal, the Bible uses the very strong imagery of all of us being adopted into God’s family; e.g. Galatians 4. If the Church is a family – and that language needs to be used with care, since for some people the family has been the site of the abuse which has damaged their lives – if the Church is a family, then it is a family formed by adoption. The trouble with these references is that they can sound too cosy. They can make adoption sound like it’s very simple. They don’t do justice to the issues raised by adopting a child or young person who may have been through all sorts of trauma, including that of being taken from their birth family.

    Adoption now

    In the debate, Sheila Bissell mentioned how long the process takes, but there is so much more that needs to be said. Like some of those who spoke, I have colleagues and friends who have adopted. So I know that there is a huge amount of vetting, training and support offered to potential adopters, and the support continues after the legal processes are complete. The language of finding one’s ‘forever family’, used by one speaker in the debate, misses the point that there is much more concern than in the past with maintaining relationships with the birth family, where this is possible (and attempts are made to find a kinship adopter before looking outside that family). We must also face the fact that adoption is not always the end of the story; some adoptions are not without pain, and some don’t work.

    But we should all note with concern the decline in the last 5 years in the number of children leaving care and moving into adoption; there are not enough people coming forward to adopt. In her opening speech, Billy-Jo noted that over 100,000 children in the UK are currently in care. We didn’t hear any figures for adoption. Billy-Jo mentioned race but, while the legacy of forced adoption shows us how the idealised model of the white middle-class nuclear family used to dominate, today adopters can’t only be from other racial backgrounds; they can also be single; over 50; and not owning their own homes.

    Sexuality: a significant omission…

    A significant omission from yesterday’s debate was affirmation of those who are LGBTQIA+ and in committed relationships and who have chosen to adopt. This seems to me pretty typical of our failure as a Church to recognise their contributions. Synod needs to know that sexuality is not a bar to adoption. A 2021 article in the journal Child Development concluded that “Given the large number of children in need of adoptive families, adoption agencies should give greater consideration to gay couples as prospective adoptive parents.” In 2025, the agency Adoption Matters had 40% of those approved to adopt identifying as LGBTQ+, pointing out that “What IS important is the commitment, resilience, stability and love that children who have suffered early childhood trauma ALL need.” Department of Education figures for 2025 state that 1 in 5 adoptions were by gay couples. Another agency, Adopt Thames Valley, currently aims to increase applications from the LGBTQ+ community “who are more likely to adopt children who typically wait the longest and are significantly more likely to adopt sibling groups”.

    And these figures exclude gay solo adopters like my colleague who adopted a toddler in 2024. She has written:

    “I think being a queer woman, especially of my generation, has given me quite a helpful perspective on adoption. I spent my formative years under the shadow of Section 28, and left to feel an outsider as a result, as ‘ideal’ family life was always presented as biological and nuclear. I think this experience is helping me put myself in the shoes of a child whose family life doesn’t fit that mould, because of their history and adoption. LGBTQ+ people – many marginalised people – tend to know all too well what it feels like to be seen as different, and to understand instinctively the importance of chosen family. There are positive messages from this we can pass on to our adopted children.”

    The log in our eye

    Finally, I was disturbed in the debate by what came across as self-congratulation on how good Christians are at offering to adopt; Julie Maxwell said that “We need Christians to step up”. We need people in general to step up! And let’s make sure we have seen the log in our own eye. We heard in the debate from Michaela Suckling about how the young person to whom she was the independent visitor was let down by a church youth club. In the Church we make all sorts of assumptions about ‘family’: but it doesn’t require two parents. And, when it comes to solo adoption, this can be difficult for Christians in some sorts of churches; I have spoken to another solo adopter who has felt repeatedly judged by Christian acquaintances who assume that she has given birth to a child without being married.

    Finally, I’d recommend that we don’t overlap the responsibilities by appointing a lead bishop who is also working on the forced adoption apologies: the new lead bishop needs to focus on looked-after children today. She or he needs to take the lead in educating our Church on what adoption, and also ‘family’, means now.

  • A Tale of Two Reports

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

    A little while ago I heard for the first time of the 1995 Board for Social Responsibility report Something to Celebrate: Valuing Relationships in Church and Society. The person to whom I was speaking recalled this as being published at about the time when they were ordained, and as a good thing in its reflection on marriage and relationships, and they wondered what had happened to it. Immediately piqued and slightly unsettled to realise that this report existed, I set about investigating. It was easy enough to obtain a second-hand copy, but also very interesting to discover how it was received by General Synod, and to recognise the remarkable parallel, but different outcome, to the 2023 Archbishops’ Commission report Love Matters. 30 years have seen a sea-change in attitude that is much wider than the over-publicised divisions about homosexuality, and I offer this account as a relief to those of us weary of acting as the proxy for all Church debate around relationships and marriage.

    You see, Something to Celebrate has an awful lot in common with Love Matters, although the more recent report curiously never mentions the former. Both explore the current nature of family life at length, drawing on a wide range of research to recognise the varied shape of families in England today. Both reports commend the quality of relationships rather than their specific form, and recognise that children can be raised well and successfully in different sorts of households. Both commend an open welcome by churches, and various aspects of state support for family life (speaking into rather different times for that). Critically for their reception, both reports deliberately shy away from particularly commending (heterosexual) marriage as the basis for family life. Both reports are long and thorough, and I commend reading them in full (Love Matters is here)

    In public reception, though, the reports fared very differently. The publication of Something to Celebrate in June 1995 was greeted by newspaper headlines with variants of ‘Church backs living in sin’ and, by the time it came to be debated at Synod in November, there was clearly a substantial head of opposition, signalled also by the last-minute resignation of Alan Storkey from the Working Party after they declined to accept his more conservative minority report for inclusion. The Bishop of Liverpool therefore introduced the debate with a good degree of caution. I am not sure if this was normal Synod practice for the time, but the debate was structured as a single block of speeches, at the end of which both a motion to Take Note of the report, and a Motion of clauses, with proposed amendments which had been introduced earlier in the debate, were all voted on.

    The tone was set decisively by George Carey as Archbishop, who thanked those who had worked on the report, but made it clear, to widely-reported applause, that he disagreed on the central point that there could be any equivalence between cohabitation and marriage. Other speakers – including, strikingly, Jeffrey John – criticised what they felt to be the weak theology of the report, but some defended it, including Jim Thompson as Bishop of Bath & Wells. The result was, very unusually, a strong division on the Take Note question, which went to a vote by Houses that registered the significant opposition (23-4; 164-60; 122-104) especially in the Laity.

    The four-part motion offered already included a first clause to ‘strongly affirm…that marriage provides the proper context for sexual relationships and the bringing up of children,’ along with commendation of the report and its specific recommendations. This was presumably because there was already recognition of the need to adopt a more conservative position, and motions to remove this clause failed. An amendment by Pete Broadbent to include reference to the 1958 Lambeth Conference resolutions on marriage and family life passed, meaning that the final motion, passed 428-15, was clearly something of a repudiation of the liberal position expressed in Something to Celebrate. With customary lack of haste, the House of Bishops subsequently published in 1999 Marriage: A Teaching Document which represented something of an official crystallisation of that decision.

    By contrast, Love Matters came out in an age when very little that the Church of England says attracts media attention. The chairs of the Commission, Professor Janet Walker and Bishop Paul Butler, plugged it by an article in the Church Times which drew a single hostile letter for the lack of focus on marriage, and a few disappointed conservative blogs flagged up the same point. But, perhaps deliberately, it did not garner much comment alongside the LLF hullabaloo, in spite of the obvious relevance of a report calling for the Church to value families in all their diversity. As Love Matters was not a Synod paper, it did not come for Take Note, but was presented by a motion for debate in February 2024, commending it across the Church, encouraging the Archbishop’s Council to make practical proposals, and Government also to act. Against these, a single amendment affirming the value of “marriage, especially when loving” was offered by Julie Maxwell.

    The debate on the amendment was not extensive, but it was clear that Dr Maxwell represented the viewpoint held by Archbishop Carey and the strong majority of Synod in 1995, that any report about family life needed to uphold the place of marriage. The Bishop of Durham was happy to accept her amendment, and she was supported by Christopher Townsend, but opposed by Jo Winn-Smith, who argued that it was unavoidably discriminatory. The amendment was pushed to a vote by Houses by the Bishop of Manchester, and fell in all three (8-8-1; 61-81-5; 74-84-8). The debate ran overnight, and in the morning a full commendation of the report by Archbishop Justin was followed by further conservative speeches from members including Matt Beer and Prudence Dailey, concerned by the lack of clarity on marriage. The final vote was therefore also taken to Houses, but passed strongly in all three (23-0-0: 97-30-19; 97-38-12).

    As noted above, it took the House of Bishops four years (fast work by their standards?) to produce Marriage: A Teaching Document in response to the Synod debate on Something to Celebrate. My suggestion is that the very different debate and outcome on Love Matters is an invitation to them to revisit their predecessors’ work of a generation ago, and to consider presenting a theology of human relationships which responds more imaginatively to the great diversity of family situations where love is found in England today, and which abandons the cult of an unreal idea of marriage that has dominated for too long.

  • There’s Another Church Abuse Crisis That’s in Every Congregation, and Very Much Closer to Home

    by Sally Hope, a writer with a specialism in faith, feminism and domestic abuse. Sally is the creator of the Always Hopeful Programme, and her latest book No Visible Scars is a recovery journal for Christian women who have experienced domestic abuse

    “I don’t believe in God anymore” I angrily declared, two weeks after I’d left my husband.

    It was a lie. I’ve known God as a real, tangible presence since I was a small child. I remember feeling comforted by God at night when I was five years old and scared of the dark, and when I was a lonely young teenager away from my family for the first time. I had stories of answered prayer, of God’s intervention in my life. I could no more stop believing in God than I could stop believing that the sky is blue. The problem was, I hadn’t been aware of God’s presence lately, and while I believed God existed, I felt abandoned and angry. I didn’t want to believe in God.

    What I really meant was, “I believe in God, but I have lost faith in God.”

    Hanging on the wall of my lounge was a collage of family photographs, made for me by my sister. Nestled among the pictures of my husband and my children were words from Psalm 37, “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.” It was ironic that these words were woven through my nearest and dearest, because the only desire of my heart was quite simple: a happy, peaceful family. I had “delighted myself in the Lord”, but I did not have the happy family I desired. I was bitter. Looking around church, I saw happy normal family after happy normal family. I didn’t feel like I was asking for the earth. Why then, had God given my friends at church the only thing I really desired, but not me? Why had I been given a husband who would spend our 13-year marriage abusing me and my children?

    God, I had decided, was a God who makes promises, but does not keep them.

    My experience is not unique. Christians experience domestic abuse at the same, if not higher levels than the rest of society.[1] One in four of us will be abused by an intimate partner at some point in our adult lives. How many women are in your church? Try to picture those women. For every 20 women quietly sitting in your pews, five of them will be experiencing domestic abuse, mostly secretly, silently, feeling stigma and shame. Hiding it, like I did for thirteen years. Many of them will eventually walk away from their faith altogether as a result.

    I didn’t lose my faith. I don’t know why but I know it was certainly not because of anything I did. Over the next three or four years I experienced the God who shows up, and won’t go away no matter how much you rail and spew your anger. The God who leaves behind the ninety-nine to pursue the one. The God who loves relentlessly, outrageously, who heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. In that time I questioned everything I had ever believed, my religion fell apart, but my God clung onto me as I rebuilt both my life, and my faith.

    Christian domestic abuse victims face unique challenges. In the majority of cases their faith and the abuse they experience are inextricably linked. Abusers will use spiritual abuse as a means of controlling their victims, making the victim feel as though a challenge to the abuser is a challenge to God. Abusers shoehorn themselves into God’s place in the lives of their victims, and often use biblical texts and Christian doctrines to justify their abuse. All victims of abuse find it difficult to leave an abuser but the added element of spiritual abuse, along with negative attitudes to divorce and the importance placed on two-parent families within Christian culture, can create another barrier for Christians. When we do leave, the way our faith has been weaponised against us invariably leads to a full-blown deconstruction of our beliefs, and if our abusers have managed to drive a wedge between us and God we can be resistant to God’s voice and tender care.

    As a Christian woman I found the strenuous journey of recovery lonely. I received excellent support from secular support agencies, found some levels of connection with other survivors in peer support groups, but always felt that none of them had the answers to the burning questions I was left with in relation to my faith: “Why did God allow it to happen to me?” “Is it okay for me to get divorced?” “Do I have to forgive my ex-husband? And if so, what if I can’t?” Worse, they saw my faith as part of the problem, not as part of the solution.

    Whilst secular support workers didn’t “get” my faith, my Christian peers didn’t “get” my experience of domestic abuse. I was told to repent of my own part in the abuse, urged to drop the charges against my husband, and made to feel less like an equal and valuable member of my church, and more like a project, a failure, and someone to be pitied, or worse: judged. I walked the path to recovery with Jesus by my side, but I longed to walk it with other Christian women who understood and connected with my pain.

    It’s now 12 years since I left my husband. My faith is stronger than it’s ever been, my relationship with God more loving and beautiful than I ever could have imagined. As I grew in strength I began to support other survivors of abuse; I volunteered at my local women’s refuge, and after a while I got a job there, running peer support groups for survivors both in the refuge and in the community. In the course of my professional life, I met other Christian survivors, listened to them ask the same questions I asked, saw them experience the damaging disconnect from God that I once felt, saw some of them leave their faith behind altogether and others struggle to rebuild, all the time deeply hurt and often broken all over again by the poor response from their churches.

    I do not know why God broke through my anger, hurt and broken-ness to help me rebuild my faith, when other victims don’t seem to experience that same divine healing. But I know that when I ask God, God’s reply is, “what are you doing now to bring my outrageous love to those women? Where are you in their journey of recovery?” I am grateful that God walked that journey with me but, more than anything, I wish other Christians had.

    So, I took the lessons I learned during my own recovery, along with my professional knowledge and experience of running support groups to create a peer support programme for Christian women. Never again should a Christian woman have to recover from domestic abuse on her own. My Always Hopeful Programme is now run online, via Zoom by Restored, a charity dedicated to supporting survivors of abuse and equipping churches to do the same. It’s also being run as a face-to-face peer support programme in a slowly growing number of churches in the U.K. Participants tell me it’s been a key part in their journey to wholeness. There is no substitute for face-to-face peer support and I would love it if every survivor was able to find an Always Hopeful Programme running in a church near them.

    I also realised, from my own experience working with survivors, that not everyone will find the courage to join a support group. There can be lots of reasons why women won’t join an Always Hopeful Programme, from fear or social anxiety to simple logistics of childcare or not being able to find a programme near to them. So, for those women who cannot attend an Always Hopeful Programme, I wrote No Visible Scars, which will be published on 17 July 2025. ‘No Visible Scars’ is an individual recovery guide for Christian women that seeks to help the reader work through those questions in order to “work out their own salvation” (Philippians 2:12) in the light of their experience of abuse.

    The Church has so much to offer to victims of abuse. It is often part of the problem but it could, and should, be part of the solution. We are called to care for the hurting, to defend the oppressed and to seek justice. Always Hopeful [2] and No Visible Scars are there to help the church accompany the women in every congregation who are victims of domestic abuse.

     

    Notes:

    [1] A 2018 study by Restored in partnership with the University of Leicester and Coventry University found that 25% of Churchgoers (across all denominations)  reported experiencing domestic abuse in their CURRENT relationship, and 42.2% reported experiencing at least one abusive behaviour in any intimate relationship (past of present) during their adult life. There have previously been studies by both the Evangelical Alliance and the Methodist Church that have found that rates of domestic abuse in churches is similar to that of the national average. Nationally 1 in 4 women will experience Domestic Abuse.

    [2] To run an Always Hopeful Programme at your church:
    online information here and     with free webinars at 12 noon, Monday 14 July [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/finding-hope-when-everything-seems-hopeless-tickets-1306878471689] or 7 pm Thursday 21 August [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/finding-hope-when-everything-seems-hopeless-tickets-1306883225909]