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Tag: House of Bishops

  • Trust is a Hard Thing to Come by Right Now…

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

    Of all the things that the revelations and revolutions of recent years have impacted upon, trust must surely be front and centre. Whether it is in the societal recognition that trust needs to be earned rather than merely assumed, or the endless, devastating examples of where trust has been so badly abused and misused, no part of society can claim exemption from the new reality in which we live. Those in positions of responsibility are no longer simply blessed with the trust of others, however uncomfortable that might feel, and protestations fall on the deaf ears of a society that knows it has had its fingers burnt.

    The trouble with trust is that once it’s broken, it’s so much harder to rebuild. The Church – not only but certainly including the Church of England – is a place where that trust has, in so many places, been broken, and is also a place where so many in authority seem to be smarting from that very fact, blinking in the sunlight and disoriented by the new world which it reveals. We hear it as a constant theme in debates about safeguarding – extraordinarily in some places about, even, the need for it, and across the board in a failure of recognition by those who hold authority and responsibility that those to whom they are making promises find those promises hard to believe. ‘We are acting in your best interests’ quite simply no longer cuts it, and nor do the rather unedifying tantrums of authority figures that appear all too frequently when great assertions and promises are not believed or taken at face value. Not only has the trust gone, but the people who need to listen to why this is the case, rather than complain that it is the case, don’t seem – in the main – to be willing to do so.

    In the Church of England, our church culture does not help things. The church, by nature, is hierarchical – and in many ways, that isn’t a problem in and of itself. Yet in recent years whilst we’ve seen increasing examples of the toe-curlingly embarrassing ‘call me Dave’ attitude creeping in to episcopal communications and engagements (the church, once again, being around fifteen years behind the Conservative Party), the reality is that this is little more than window dressing. For all the guff, we retain a hierarchy in the church that is fundamentally unnecessary – a hierarchy that shows very little introspection about what is rightly hierarchical, and what is not. The endless lack of transparency and accountability in many parts of our leadership is not of necessity part of the life of the church – it is a failure of our common life. Of course, it is easier to wear jeans and a tee-shirt and talk about your favourite football team, but the reality is that, for all this window dressing, the unhelpful power imbalances that sit at the heart of the way episcopacy is lived out in the twenty-first century Church of England remain. And it doesn’t need to be so.

    To address those imbalances would take more than a few hundred words, and I would argue should be front and centre of the discussions of the College and House of Bishops as they move forward. The issues are not insurmountable, yet whilst there remains a centralising, fortress mentality, nothing will change. The reality, of course, is that if it were to change, then everybody would benefit – bishops included. It remains a stain on our church fabric that nobody seems willing to lift the lid for fear of what they might uncover.

    The College of Bishops meeting this week, and on their agenda must be – although, of course, we mere humble workers in the vineyard are not told – the proposed outcome of the Living in Love and Faith project. There are, of course, too many groups from which to choose that have faced a total breakdown in trust with church authorities, but one of them must surely be LGBTQI people. It has become increasingly clear to me, as someone who has been involved in recent discussions on the Pastoral Guidance, that we are not suffering from a trust deficit – we are suffering from a total lack of trust in church authorities from LGBTQI people. And, frankly, for good reason.

    For years, LGBTQI Christians have been led up the garden path, misled, openly lied to, faced broken promise after broken promise, and lobbed on the bonfire of unity, treated as means and not ends in the dirty world of church politics. In conversations with bishops, I have heard disbelief and hurt expressed when I suggest to them that their words are worth very little to so many LGBTQI people who have – frankly – seen it all before, and are yet to be convinced any change is coming. There seems to be a collective outrage when LGBTQI people express hurt and caution, which is far too frequently cast by those in power as cynicism and prickliness (with more than a dash of unconscious homophobia dwelling in those kind of characterisations).

    Now it’s certainly true that many of those currently in purple are different individuals to those who have previously let us down so badly, but there is a real need for some corporate responsibility to be taken and some introspection undertaken as to why this mistrust remains. The faces may be different, but many of the structures remain the same, and throughout this process LGBTQI people have been treated – unconsciously or consciously – as political footballs, our lives and loves used as bargaining chips in the endless debates around unity (which are really about money, buildings, pensions, and power). A failure to see – or recognise – this doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Burying one’s head in the sand, or saying ‘just trust me’, doesn’t work. In short, where’s the evidence we should do so?

    Many promises have been made to LGBTQI people – publicly (‘radical new Christian inclusion’) and privately – about what will be decided (about – not with – us) in the coming weeks. These promises have been made in what purports to be a genuine, well-intentioned, honest way, alongside an apology for the way we have been treated in the past. All of that means very little unless something is actually delivered, and actual change occurs. We are all pretty much done with hearing nice things said.

    The ball is now in the court of the College and the House of Bishops. LGBTQI people, despite our reservations and our painful memories, have been cajoled into placing our trust in this process. Some LGBTQI people cannot bring themselves to trust that anything will change – and who can blame them? Others, me included, do believe that, at last, change is on the horizon, and the bishops will finally have the courage of their convictions – for that is what it is – to do what they know to be right, and to open the windows of the stuffy misery that is institutional homophobia and transphobia. This is their chance to prove that we’re not just naïve.

    Yet let’s make no bones about this – if these meetings end up with no change being made, no freedom for LGBTQI Christians to follow their consciences, no light being let in, no acknowledgement of the queer holiness that seeps out of LGBTQI Christians and enlivens the body of Christ, then we will enter into a time of crisis out of which it will be nigh on impossible to ever regain the trust of LGBTQI people – within and without the church. This really is ‘it’, and the stakes could not be higher.

    Now is the time for our leaders to deliver. Let us pray for our bishops to have the courage to begin the rebuilding of trust – and in so doing, to start rebuilding the church for whom they are called to care.

  • Playing the Victim

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

    There is often a very British reticence to ‘victimhood’. Whether it’s the stereotype of the stiff upper lip, or the willingness to ‘keep calm and carry on’, we are not known as a nation of victims. ‘Stop whingeing and get on with it’, as my school teachers used to say – and in the main, we do. ‘Playing the victim’ gets us less sympathy, and is far more likely to make us enemies.

    It has been interesting, then, to see the pernicious and yet all-pervasive narrative of victimhood seeping its way through some parts of the Church of England in recent months. In the wake of the bishops of the church putting forward a proposal that removes the impediment to us blessing a same-sex couple in the same way that we might bless a car or a plant pot, many of those for whom this would apparently be the ‘one step too far’ moral outrage have turned up the volume on their campaign to tell bishops about just how hurt they are by the whole thing.

    It remains surprising, of course, that there are people who cannot bear the idea of compromise and who appear to believe that agreeing to disagree on whether we can bless other people’s relationships will destroy the very foundations of their Christian faith. It’s important to distinguish, I think, between those who hold to this view quite genuinely, however bizarre many of us might find it, and those who are weaponizing it in a last gasp as they see their iron grip on power falter.  The former group are those whose worries and fears need to be listened to – and insofar as they are genuine, addressed. The latter – through their campaign – are doing their best, inadvertently, to ensure that this will not be the case.

    Not a day seems to go by without yet another asinine and misleading ‘question’ or statement being released on the Church of England Evangelical Council’s Twitter feed. To save the delicate stomachs of some readers who would prefer not to trawl the whole thing, here are some highlights. We have been told (several times) that the bishops are ‘denying’ the faith ‘due to cultural pressure’; we have had some very bizarre selective scriptural quotes from Revelation; we have had the usual claptrap about the fact that something legal advice specifically states is not a change of doctrine is, in fact, a change of doctrine; we’ve heard nonsense about how the changes coming are ‘theologically compromised and pastorally confusing’; and that old chestnut, the ‘lifestyle’ choice, is back with a vengeance. None of this is new – much of it is dishonest.

    Yet whilst these repeated tropes are tiresome and often – quite frankly – silly, the worst to come out of the campaign is the barefaced attempt to present those who are attempting to roll back Synod’s decision as ‘victims’. Let’s be absolutely clear about this suggestion – it is utterly ridiculous, and not only ridiculous, but insulting. For years there has been a conservative stranglehold on the policies of the Church of England, with bishops apparently too scared to say what they really think until they leave office, and a tacit acceptance that unity is quite reasonably built on the backs of queer people. At last, that wicked, immoral consensus is crumbling. It is staggering how shameless those who have fought against any liberation for queer people are now being.

    We are told that the introduction of voluntary, opt-in prayers of blessing are an existential threat to those who choose not to offer them. We are told that it is unacceptable that those who say LGBTQI people should be celibate will now have to admit to it. We are told that any compromise position, any opportunity to offer anything whatsoever to queer people, is an act of victimisation towards conservative evangelicals. We are told that it is imperative that queer clergy must not be sexually intimate and must be punished if they are, and that this is the red line. Blithe nonsense about cancel culture abounds; misrepresentation of facts, and of the reality of power structures, is front and centre. It is scandalous. As a recent Tweet from the CEEC campaign apparently unironically stated, ‘we are for respecting people, even when we disagree on theological conclusions’ – perhaps it’s time to put that into action, folks.

    The thing is, the Church of England and its hierarchy should be willing and able to challenge this ratcheting up of confected terror, rather than imbibe it and be scared by it. The Church of England has produced something rather valuable in the Pastoral Principles, yet there seems to be precious little recognition of how these relate to this recent campaign. There is little point having these principles written down if they are not going to be put into practice – and it is about time some leadership was shown and people held to account. Yet as ever it is queer people who are told to calm down and have warmer hearts.

    The apology to LGBTQI people from the House of Bishops is not worth the paper it’s written on if nobody is willing to stand up for us. Since the Synod vote, little to no comment has been made on how those of us who are LGBT face discrimination on a constant basis from wider society, let alone from the church. LGBT people face genuine and real oppression and are openly victimised, targeted and discriminated against. Trans people are murdered across the world, year by year. Gay young people in parts of sub-Saharan Africa are taken out of their homes and killed. I do not understand why there is such an oppressive and overwhelming silence on this issue. If we’re looking for real victims in all of this, a good place to start – for example – would be the queer folk of Uganda. Yet a month’s wait for anything – at all – to come out of Lambeth (and there is still nothing out of the Anglican Communion Office or GAFCON) in response to the Archbishop of Uganda’s blasphemous support for criminalisation of LGBTQI people is hardly the ‘speaking into silence’ that the Pastoral Principles demand. It’s simply not good enough, and if this is the trajectory, then the feigned apology is nothing more than an insult.

    Those who are promoting the CEEC campaign and its messages need to take a long, hard look at themselves. A false narrative of victimhood – a genuine ‘playing the victim’ – is not only a tactic that flies directly in the face of the Pastoral Principles, but one that flies directly in the face of our belonging to Jesus Christ. And the leaders of our church need to step up and speak into what is going on here, instead of running scared. Doing so behind closed doors is not enough – we are being publicly attacked day after day, and there is nothing whatsoever being said to support us.

    Queer people have put up with ‘just getting on with it’ for too long – and we’re being taken advantage of. Just because we don’t constantly play the victim doesn’t mean we’re not hurting. Many – most – of us are. We’re living in a church that tolerates and doesn’t love us, and now we’re living in a church that is willing to tacitly accept that – once again – we’re the problem. We still do not matter – we are still an issue.

    It’s time – in fact, it’s well beyond time – for our leaders to practise what they preach. We’ve been hung out to dry quite long enough.

  • Being Syrophoenician: Eating the Crumbs?

    by the Very Revd Dr Mandy Ford, Dean of Bristol

    There is a terrible irony for gay clergy preaching this Sunday; for those of us observing the Third Sunday of Epiphany, the lectionary invites us to reflect on the presence of Jesus at a wedding in Cana. It is a story of God’s generosity, and a foretaste of the banquet when earth and heaven are united at the end of time – a feast to which both Jews and Gentiles will be welcome. I can see the gospel in the gospel, the good news in the good news, but I’m struggling to see this gospel at work in the Church of England just at the moment.

    Having read the House of Bishop’s proposed Prayers of Love and Faith, and the legal advice that shaped them, I feel like the Syrophoenician woman, whose entreaty for help Jesus turned away with the words “it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs”. It is rare occasion when we are taken aback by the violence of the language used by Jesus.

    Yet, despite being horribly insulted, the woman stood her ground and reproached him with self-deprecating humour, “even the dogs may eat the children’s crumbs”.

    So here we are, a crowd of Syrophoenicians, standing at the door of the wedding feast, asking for a share and being thrown the crumbs.

    And for the avoidance of doubt, these really are crumbs. While, should these prayers pass through General Synod and gain acceptance, I will be using them as creatively as I can to bless couples and celebrate their permanent, faithful and committed relationships, I will do so in the knowledge that these prayers are a very poor substitute for the sacramental, covenantal, liturgical resources offered by the Church of England for those who can enter what is now distinguished as “holy matrimony”.

    There will be many people who throw the crumbs back in the face of those who offer them and walk away. I’m not going to judge them.

    But I am going to reluctantly stand at the door and refuse to leave.

    The courage of the Syrophoenician woman and her challenge to Jesus was enough to make him repent and change his mind. She was no longer a “bitch”, a gentile “other”, to whom the doors of the Kingdom were closed, she was a beloved child of God, fully human and deserving of the flourishing that God longs to give all his children.

    There is a very real danger that some of us will read the legal advice shared with General Synod, and feel less than human. It is difficult not to do this when you are apparently being denied access to one of God’s gifts in creation, a gift given to enable us to flourish in our full humanity.

    But as a baptised child of God, I refuse to have my humanity denied by the institution I serve. I continue to believe that Jesus was as present on the day of my civil partnership as he is at every wedding to which he is invited. And I find myself, unexpectedly, strengthened in the conviction that the full sacramental riches of marriage should be generously shared with all who seek it from a Church which still wants to convince itself that it serves the whole of England.

    The story of the Syrophoenician woman is an enacted parable of the love of God which is expansive enough to include the once despised Gentiles. In responding to her request, Jesus is signposting the future of a community of great diversity who will all be invited to share in the heavenly wedding feast.

    Institutionally, we have not reached the place where we can say this unequivocally. Pragmatically, some terrible sophistry has been used in order to gather up enough crumbs to throw to the dogs. Pastorally, it will be challenging to encourage gay couples to come to church for blessing when we long to offer so much more. Politically the space in which, as a gay person I am standing, feels more toxic than at almost any time I can remember.

    So, I’m praying for the faith, the resilience and the humour of the Syrophoenician woman because Syrophoenician lives matter.

  • Wrestling for a Blessing in a Time of “Theological Nonsense”

    by Ruth Harley, curate of Watling Valley Ecumenical Partnership in the Diocese of Oxford, and co-author of ‘Being Interrupted: re-imagining the church’s mission from the outside, in’. 

    “The Blessing of a Civil Marriage of a couple… is a theological nonsense, but sometimes a pastoral necessity, while the Church’s marriage discipline is in such confusion. Theologically, we should have to say that, if a… marriage is possible and valid, the Church should be willing to celebrate it for its members. If it is not possible or valid, the Church has no business blessing it.”(1)

    This could almost have been a commentary on the proposals made in GS2289 Living in Love and Faith: a response from the Bishops of the Church of England, released on Friday ahead of General Synod. But it is not. It is the late, great Michael Perham, writing in 1984 in about the blessing of the civil marriage of couples in which one person (or both) is divorced with a former spouse still living.

    He is right, I think, to say that blessing a marriage which we will not celebrate puts the church in a position of “theological nonsense”. That was true when he wrote it almost 40 years ago about the remarriage of divorcees, and it is true now about the marriage of same-sex couples. As Perham goes on to observe, “the principal function of the priest in a marriage is to bless”. It makes little liturgical or theological sense to permit the blessing of a marriage but not the solemnisation of the marriage itself, the principal function of which is, after all, blessing.

    And yet, here we are – in the territory of “theological nonsense”. The proposals for blessing same-sex relationships are a step forward, but still a far cry from the fullness of what we hoped for, and will continue to work for: full marriage equality irrespective of the genders of the couple.

    But blessing is in itself a powerful and weighty thing. I remember the first time I raised my hand to bless someone as a priest – to pronounce God’s blessing with the authority of the church – being  taken by surprise by the physicality of that weightiness.

    Blessing is more than ‘saying a prayer’. To pray a blessing is to do something more than “to reflect the blessing of God in all creation”,  as the bishops’ response to LLF puts it (2). A blessing, as spoken liturgically in the context of divine worship by a priest, has a particularity about it. To bless is to ask and declare God’s blessing on these people and, in the case of the blessing of a marriage, this relationship. To bless is to recognise and respond to God’s presence and purpose in this specific moment and person(s) and place.

    We bless people not because they are good, but because they are God’s – and so is the blessing we proclaim. We bless in the midst of the world’s brokenness, and blessing and breaking are closely entwined in the liturgical imagination, as day by day we offer the blessed and broken body of Christ in the eucharist, and live as the blessed and broken body of Christ in the world. To bless is not to say ‘this is perfect’, but rather ‘God is in this’. To bless a loving relationship – whether that is a civil partnership or a marriage (or indeed a covenanted friendship) – is to reflect the truth that “whoever lives in love lives in God and God lives in them” (1 John 4.16).

    Blessing is a significant step in the right direction in terms of the church’s response to same-sex couples. But it is a step which leads us to not into the satisfaction and relief of resolving the situation, but rather into the turmoil and discomfort of “theological nonsense”. So just what kind of progress is this?

    Significant change – change which is paradigm-shifting – often requires the old paradigm to be destabilised before a new paradigm can be established. It is out of the destabilising “theological nonsense” in which we now find ourselves that a way forward will emerge. That is how it was with the remarriage of divorcees. As Michael Perham observed, to say that a marriage can be blessed but not solemnised by the church is an untenable position. And so a way forward was found for divorcees to marry in church.

    There are some parallels here with women’s ordination too. To say that a woman can be ordained priest but not ordained bishop is also “theological nonsense”. But it was only out of a time of living with that untenable position that the move to ordain women to all orders of ministry eventually emerged.

    We long for a conclusion, a resolution, for the theological and pastoral good sense of full equality for all, irrespective of sexuality or gender identity. This week it may feel like we are still so far from that goal. The proposals before Synod are like a discordant note, still awaiting the final, resolving, chord. But we should not underestimate the power of blessing. It is a significant thing, both in its own right, and as a means of showing up the “theological nonsense” of denying equal marriage to same-sex couples for what it is.

    Dwelling in this in-between time, this now-and-not-yet in which the “theological nonsense” of the status quo is revealed but not yet resolved, will be hard and painful for many of us. We are blessed, and yet still wrestling for a blessing. The church will emerge from this wrestling, this time of “theological nonsense”, both broken and blessed, as the body of Christ always is. For now, we limp on together.

     

    (1) Michael Perham, Liturgy Pastoral and Parochial (SPCK, 1984), p. 104.

    (2) GS2289 Living in Love and Faith: a response from the Bishops of the Church of England, p. 6.

  • Marry Me a Little?

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

    A confession: I find the ‘Church as the bride of Christ’ image deeply unhelpful. Yes, it’s in the Bible and yes, it’s part of the tradition, but… really? I’ve been a bride, and had a very happy day, but this imagery doesn’t help me think about God at all. The idea that Jesus, who as far as we know (Da Vinci Code aside) never married while living among us, is somehow marrying, or going to marry, the Church? What is that about? It doesn’t help that I am very much aware of the long history of arranged marriages, of payment of dowries or bride-price, of a woman being used as a pawn in a game of thrones or as a means of cementing an alliance between families lower down the social order. Brides, historically, haven’t been in a freely-chosen relationship. And the bride of Christ imagery can be highly circular, somehow moving back from the cosmic marriage of Christ and the Church to the individual marriages of human beings, where the gendering of the image can then be used to support the idea that that marriages can only be between people of opposite sexes. I also know that the bride of Christ image can be embraced enthusiastically by men; there’s a long history of men seeing themselves as the ‘brides’, and I wrote about that here.

    For me, a far more helpful image of marriage as a deep form of commitment between two people comes from what may sound an improbable source: Stephen Sondheim’s musical Company (1970). For many decades now, theatre has been my main hobby. My tastes are eclectic: Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, new plays… and musicals. Sondheim’s lyrics are perfection, his rhymes clever and his insights into the human condition profound: he wrote that “Nobody goes through life unscathed, and I think if you write about those things, you’re going to touch people.”

    Company is about marriage. I saw the recent gender-swapped production, which made the lead character into a woman (Bobbie) rather than a man (Bobby) and changed one couple into a gay couple (opening number here). The changes worked very well, not least in raising the question of whether being a single woman is still more difficult than being a single man; the ticking of the biological clock featured several times. Last week I watched the 2006 revival, available in full on YouTube here.

    The basic plot? It’s Bobby’s 35th birthday. He’s at the age when all his friends are married or planning to marry, but he isn’t. Why not? He comes to realise that his friends spend time with him to project the failings of their own relationships on to him. He’s the catalyst in their relationships, and they ‘perform’ their marriages when he is with them. Even in that opening number it’s clear that his friends don’t really know him for himself, as they all use different names for him. His relationships with his girlfriends are no deeper.

    Sondheim has explained that it was difficult for him, as a gay man, to write about marriage; in his book Finishing the Hat (2010) he wrote about “The unknown Kingdom of Marriage”. He did in fact marry Jeff Romley, but not until 2017, when Sondheim was in his late 80s. For Company, he found out what marriage was like by asking the songwriter Mary Rodgers. His relationship with her was unusual. In her memoirs, she described how Sondheim’s psychotherapist thought he should have a ‘normal’ relationship, and so Sondheim invited her to move into his New York house as a sort of experimental marriage, but one in which the ‘M’ word was never used. She wrote that they shared a bed and “just lay there… the whole thing was wildly uncomfortable… and yet it kept happening”. The relationship had “All the guilt of sinning with none of the pleasure”. Before this time with Sondheim, Rodgers wrote of relationships that “I was 29. I could hear the party-game music winding down, and all I wanted was a good-enough chair.” And, by the time Sondheim wrote Company, about Bobby reaching 35, Rodgers – with experience of two heterosexual marriages – was a good guide to that unknown kingdom.

    In ‘Marry me a little’, which closes the first half of Company, Bobby announces that “I’m ready! I’m ready now!” But the lyrics make it very clear that he isn’t. For example,

    Marry me a little,

    Do it with a will.

    Make a few demands

    I’m able to fulfill.

    Want me more than others,

    Not exclusively.

    That’s the way it ought to be…

    We’ll look not too deep,

    We’ll go not too far.

    We won’t have to give up a thing,

    We’ll stay who we are.

    In the song ‘Getting married today’, delivered at breakneck speed, Bobby’s friend Amy goes into a blind panic on the morning of her wedding:

    Remember Paul? You know, the man I’m going to marry

    But I’m not, because I wouldn’t ruin anyone

    As wonderful as he is.

    A wedding. What’s a wedding? It’s a prehistoric ritual

    Where everybody promises fidelity forever,

    Which is maybe the most horrifying word I ever heard of,

    Which is followed by a honeymoon, where suddenly he’ll realize

    He’s saddled with a nut, and want to kill me, which he should.

    It’s clear here that the problem is Amy’s self-image: she thinks she can never deserve Paul. Each of these songs is a valuable reflection on marriage, commitment and the sense of worth; on the need to be happy with oneself before committing to another person.

    While the first half closes with ‘Marry me a little’, the final number of the musical sees Bobby commit much further in the song ‘Being alive’. Here, “what starts as a complaint becomes a prayer” as Bobby ‘gets’ what marriage is really about.

    Somebody hold me too close

    Somebody hurt me too deep

    Somebody sit in my chair

    And ruin my sleep

    And make me aware

    Of being alive

    Being alive

    Somebody crowd me with love

    Somebody force me to care

    Somebody make me come through

    I’ll always be there

    As frightened as you

    To help us survive

    Being alive

    His friends comment throughout the song, telling him for instance that “You’ve got so many reasons for not being with someone, but you haven’t one good reason for being alone” and encouraging him:“Come on, you’re on to something, you’re on to something”.

    The profundity of union with another person; the transformation we experience when we prioritise someone else over ourselves. Knowing ourselves as we are known. Why does the Church of England still act as if this can’t be something experienced by people who are of the same sex?

    The equal basis of marriage, with neither partner somehow ‘in charge’ by virtue of their sex, has so many advantages over a model in which a bride is traded for her purity and always at her husband’s command. As PCR2 has just reminded us, some theologies of marriage make it difficult to report abuse within the relationship, leading to “a culture of minimising the seriousness of domestic abuse”, because “the attitude towards domestic abuse [is] linked to the belief around the sanctity of marriage”. Of course, abuse can happen in same-sex marriages too, and there may be other reasons for not wanting to report it, but it’s worth stopping to reflect on whether an equal model of marriage is healthier here.

    The equal model also says something less obvious to our current debates. If we start to think about the relationship between those of us in the Church of England who believe marriage can only be between people of different sexes, and those of us who believe that it can exist for people who are the same sex, and as we wait for the bishops to decide what to bring to the February 2023 General Synod, are we thinking that We won’t have to give up a thing/ We’ll stay who we are?

    Or can we say to each other I’ll always be there/As frightened as you? Perfect love casts out fear: are we capable of dwelling in that love? Can we find a way to be fully alive … together?

  • “Sickened by our own Magnanimity?”:   Good Disagreement, Bad Ecclesiology

    by Prof Helen King, Professor Emerita in Classical Studies at The Open University and member of General Synod

    As Living in Love and Faith moves towards its conclusion, are we heading for a typically Anglican situation in which everyone has to compromise: and nobody gets what they want? How will that feel?

    In the Introduction to a collection of essays she edited in 1998, Act of Synod – Act of Folly?, the late Monica Furlong told of a priest – a woman – who was asked by a Diocesan Director of Ordinands not to lay hands on one of the candidates at an ordination which she was attending. “Couched in terms of Christian charity and sweet reasonableness, this request that she must not touch the candidate was difficult to refuse, yet left a nasty taste behind it. My friend agreed, but says ‘I was sickened by my own magnanimity’”.

    There is indeed something physically sickening about being the one who has to say “Yes of course, that’s fine” when it’s your own gender identity – or your own sexuality – which is being rejected. The ordination of women as priests, and then their consecration as bishops, divided the Church of England. As with current debates about same-sex marriage, the depth and seriousness of the disagreement was acknowledged. As with same-sex marriage, no simple Bible verse could be located to back up women priests or bishops. Instead, the House of Bishops argued that women bishops represent “a proper development in proclaiming afresh in this generation the grace and truth of Christ”.

    Nausea may be positive: a natural part of the beginning of a pregnancy. Maybe the time has come to admit to nausea, while asking whether further waves of it are inevitable as Living in Love and Faith moves into its next phase. Here, as in many other ways, it’s so instructive to look at how the Church of England dealt with disagreement when women were ordained. When Synod passed by the required two-thirds majority the 1992 motion opening the priesthood to women, some male priests took the ‘compensation’ package built into the legislation. That cost the church around £27.5 million: I really can’t see that sort of arrangement happening again. And laity who did not accept women priests? For them, provision was initially made by enabling parishes to pass Resolutions A (women presiding at Holy Communion or giving the absolution) and/or B (women as incumbents, priests-in-charge or team vicars; the ‘headship’ roles). Since 2016, Parochial Church Councils can pass a Resolution placing them under the authority of a bishop who will not ordain women.

    Some potential priests who stayed were worried about having a valid line of ordination; had anybody laying hands on them ever ‘laid hands’ on a woman? (This has a very specific meaning in an episcopal church…) This could be seen as ignoring Article 26 of the Thirty-Nine Articles; the understanding that the unworthiness of the minister does not hinder the efficacy of the sacrament. Or is being a woman the sort of ‘unworthiness’ which is beyond the pale?

    After Synod passed the 1992 motion, the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament brought direct pressure on the Church of England to provide even greater ‘protection’ to opponents as the price tag for its approval. In contrast to the lengthy process of consultation of diocesan and deanery synods which preceded the ordination of women, in less than a year the House of Bishops cooked up the 1993 Act of Synod, adding in something that was not part of the original legislative package, Provincial Episcopal Visitors (PEVs or ‘Flying bishops’). And it was not sent out for wider church consultation.

    The Church of England likes the principle of doing something new by presenting it as something old. So Beverley, a PEV for traditional catholic Anglicans, was imagined as continuing a suffragan see (originally created to help the Archbishop of York) which had lapsed in 1923. The other two, Ebbsfleet and Richborough, were newly created for the PEVs.  Creating sees is possible at any time by Order in Council. In 2015, a further PEV was appointed, this time for conservative evangelicals: the Bishop of Maidstone. His role is presented as an ‘honorary assistant bishop’ in – gasp – 14 dioceses (2019 figures); the other PEVs, too, work over a number of dioceses, thus breaking the link between a bishop and a geographical area which used to be key to our ecclesiology. So much for the bishop as a ‘focus of unity’.

    After the recent resignation of the Bishop of Ebbsfleet – now a priest in the Roman Catholic church – there is a consultation happening about replacing Ebbsfleet with a Bishop of Oswestry (a see created in 1888 but never filled) who would be a suffragan bishop in the Diocese of Lichfield, “rooted in an individual diocese and diocesan college of bishops” rather than floating free.

    For many people in the Church of England, of course, none of this is relevant. They belong to a local church and they have no idea what a PEV is. From my experience, I would add that they also have little idea that same-sex marriages can’t happen in churches, that clergy are not supposed to have same-sex marriages, and that different dioceses operate different policies with regard to the sexuality and relationships of candidates for both licensed lay and ordained ministry.

    Where women’s ordained ministry is concerned, the ecclesiology and the key documents of the Church of England have been treated with disdain, or constructively stretched, according to your point of view. The 2014 Five Guiding Principles from the House of Bishops attempt to hold it all in a dizzying tension: “the Church of England has reached a clear decision on the matter” yet at the same time those who on theological grounds “are unable to receive the ministry of women bishops or priests continue to be within the spectrum of teaching and tradition of the Anglican Communion”. That echoes the 2008 GS1710 Illustrative Draft Code of Practice, on those who refuse the ordained ministry of women as priests and bishops: “Their convictions are within the spectrum of Anglican teaching and tradition and are deserving of respect”.

    Spectrum is an interesting word. Many of us believe that gender and sexuality are also on their own spectrums. So is there a way that, on the current issues of marriage and ordination, we can repurpose those words from GS1710? In a 2018 study guide to the Five Guiding Principles, the Faith and Order Commission stated that “those opposed to the ordination of women should not characterize those in favour as caving in to the fashions of the age, and nor should those in favour stigmatise those opposed as supporters of discrimination and injustice”. Relevant to debates on sexuality, too?

    And from that same study guide:

    It does not require suspending my judgment that some theological views are wrong, or that some views that are wrong may be actively harmful. It does require that I do not take it upon myself to limit that perceived harm by seeking to restrict the participation of those who hold such views in the common life of our church… It may be tempting for the majority to think that, were the minority to leave or disappear, the ‘problem’ posed by their existence would be resolved and all the energy unfortunately required to manage it be liberated for more productive endeavours. It may be tempting for the minority to think that the more they can separate themselves from the majority and insulate themselves from its influence, the more secure their survival will be.

    Can this template from the ordination of women debates be applied to the current debate on human sexuality, or is the nausea – on both sides – just too much to bear?

     

    Further reading:

    Judith Maltby, ‘One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, but Two Integrities?’ in Monica Furlong (ed.), Act of Synod – Act of Folly (SCM Press, 1998)

    Judith Maltby, ‘Gender and Establishment: Parliament, “Erastianism” and the Ordination of Women 1993-2010’ in Mark Chapman, Judith Maltby and William Whyte (eds), The Established Church. Past, Present and Future (Continuum, 2011)

     

     

     

     

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Only this time it is worse.

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

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

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