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Tag: language

  • No First Reading – Four Circumcisions Instead

    by Michael Hampson, a published author devoting his early retirement from parish ministry to producing practical resources for busy clergy and lay-led congregations, beginning with the weekly lectionary resource Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud, ssra.uk

    Yesterday morning at church, we had four circumcisions. Plus a weird growth on a ligament. This all happened where the first reading should have been.

    It didn’t matter who was there. Young families. First time visitors. People who had been coming for a month or two. Gen Z students who expect trigger warnings. Suddenly, without warning, there it was: four circumcisions and a weird growth on a ligament. There was all manner of weird physiological stuff following on from the four circumcisions, actually. In an ordinary church, on an ordinary Sunday morning.

    They weren’t actual circumcisions, obviously. Just a polite elderly reader at the lectern who might as well have gone to the lectern and said ‘penis’, ‘foreskin’, and ‘ritual genital mutilation’. Four times. With no context and without warning. Why do we put up with this?

    I have spent so long in the SSRA lectionary and translation (Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud, ssra.uk) that I have forgotten how simply dreadful, and unfit for purpose, are the Common Worship (CW) lectionary, and the regular translations (in this case NRSV), compared to the enormous (and almost universally untapped) potential that the three-year Sunday lectionary actually holds.

    A small percentage of churchgoers may be so used to the word ‘circumcised’ that they only heard ‘Hebrew as opposed to Gentile’ when they heard it yesterday; or perhaps 75% of them are so bored by the standard of the public reading of scripture in their church that they can be relied upon not to be listening at all. But it’s no excuse. This will not do. We should not be using this word in public worship any more than we should be using the words penis, foreskin, or ritual genital mutilation in regular Sunday worship. There is no excuse. SSRA is not the first scripture translation to euphemise this word; and the precedent of avoiding passages that address the first-century Christian circumcision controversy directly in contemporary lectionaries has already been set (you will not find any version of the Sunday three-year cycle that includes Saint Paul’s frustrated wish that circumcision enthusiasts recircumcise themselves and accidentally castrate themselves in the process [Galatians 5.12]). The question of whether the ritual surgical removal of the foreskin from the penis is necessary for Christian salvation is not one that was worrying people in the pews of the average Church of England church yesterday morning; neither does the unnecessary surgical removal of the foreskin from the penis serve effectively, for most contemporary listeners, as a touchingly beautiful metaphor for salvation in Christ. It is time to select a different passage of scripture for the lectionary – there are only so many slots available – or find a different way of translating this one. As for preaching about the first-century controversy around keeping the Mosaic law: the controversy was also expressed around the food laws, also well-documented in the lectionary, and these are surely a more appropriate example for use on a Sunday morning. In 2025, you need to prepare well when approaching the circumcision texts even for a small bible study session; you don’t know what personal issues people bring, what surgical history or personal trauma surrounds the specific issue, that you just don’t know about – and why is the penis suddenly a legitimate subject for discussion anyway, and can we move on quickly now please, before I call the safeguarding officer. Seriously.

    If you want to remind yourself just how dreadful yesterday’s reading was, it’s here. I still can’t easily parse verse 15, ending in ‘it’, or verse 17 (what substance?). I know I could if I tried, but this was supposed to be a text read aloud from the lectern to a mixed congregation, not a written comprehension exercise for a year 11 class.

    Circumcision made a brief appearance three weeks ago, when the original catholic version of the three-year lectionary (Lectionary for Mass, LFM) hinted at Saint Paul’s frustration, by saying that circumcision is irrelevant (Gal 6.14-18). Revised Common Lectionary (RCL), and the CW lectionary based on RCL, demanded the whole explicit chapter. SSRA opted to start Colossians a week early instead.

    This juggling of epistles is not unusual. RCL/CW epistle and Old Testament readings are quite typically two or three times the length of the equivalent LFM readings. As a consequence, the RCL/CW epistle is often a week or two out of sync with the LFM epistle. And as another consequence – an unintended consequence – almost all RCL/CW churches choose to have only two readings instead of three. The RCL editors had hoped that, by making the readings longer, they would ensure that people heard more scripture; the actual consequence is that people in RCL/CW churches have a much poorer diet of scripture than they would have had otherwise. SSRA corrects that error, with a classically Anglican approach, taking the best of the catholic original and the best of the RCL (protestant) adaptations – far too many details to list here – but click through the last two or three weeks (start at https://ssra.uk/?20250727) and you find readings from Colossians, that instead of sounding culturally alien and incomprehensible (or even offensive or triggering), are as attractive and accessible to readers and hearers alike as any that you will find anywhere in scripture. It’s just a case of paying attention to the context.

    “Where other translations are offered primarily as study texts, or to be read alone at home, the SSRA translation is offered specifically for reading aloud… [The hearer should be] drawn in by the reading – without needing a printed text – even on first hearing. …aims to deliver the full meaning of each passage in language which is clear, timeless, dignified, and, where appropriate, even poetic.”

    And the original listed aims: “encourages more confident participation in the public reading of scripture by more readers; encourages a greater appreciation of the public reading of scripture by more hearers; offers all three readings, to establish familiarity with more than 400 key passages of scripture across a three-year cycle, for an investment of just five minutes of the Sunday gathering each week; compatible with thousands of lectionary-based resources in print and online for sermons, prayers, children’s work and more; a complete Sunday lectionary solution for busy clergy and lay-led congregations; ideal for ordinary local churches on ordinary Sunday mornings; takes all the hard work out of finding, choosing, printing and distributing the Sunday morning scripture readings.”

    There has been a nagging condemnation of SSRA’s inclusive language policy on the Church Times letters page for the last few weeks, specifically the way SSRA avoids calling the Holy Spirit ‘he’. A writer this week asserts that while the Holy Spirit is indeed not male, unless we continue to refer to the Holy Spirit as ‘he’, we all risk committing the heresy of representing the Holy Spirit as a mere impersonal force, so apparently the pronoun ‘he’ for the Holy Spirit must remain in consistent use regardless. I stand corrected! But there will always be a reason not to change. There will always be a reason to do nothing, a reason to turn down the invitation to the banquet, a reason to pass by on the other side, a reason to say that doing nothing is somehow safer, wiser, more sensible, less trouble. But sometimes, the time has come to do something; the time has come to make things better. The church is in a mess in so many ways. I just thought: let’s at least get the bible readings sorted out. I had the right mix, at the right time, of pastoral experience, technical skills, opportunity, motivation, and academic background (psychology, philosophy, linguistics, theology), and here’s the result. Click, share, use.

    The three-year print editions of SSRA were released this spring. The Home Paperback edition is already in its third printing. All three editions are now available on Amazon, but it is cheaper to buy direct at ssra.uk/shop. You can see SSRA in use at Llandaff Cathedral here: https://www.youtube.com/live/gPHxNLZqG0k?t=1615s

     

     

  • Common Worship and our Gender-neutral God

    by Michael Hampson, a published author devoting his early-retirement from parish ministry to producing practical resources for busy clergy and lay-led congregations, beginning with the weekly lectionary resource Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud, ssra.uk

    Thirty years ago, in making the move from ASB to Common Worship, the Church of England took the decision to vastly reduce the use of he/him pronouns for God.

    This was an incredibly bold and progressive decision for a church traditionally defined by its liturgy.

    That this decision really matters is seen not least in the open wounds that continue to grieve the contemporary church: institutionalised sexism, the abuse crisis, LLF. The role and the nature of gender is a common thread through these three – especially, inevitably, the role and nature of masculinity, and toxic masculinity. If we constantly reinforce the image of God as exclusively male, we just throw more fuel on these three fires.

    Let us give thanks to the Lord our God

                It is right to give (him) thanks and praise

    It happened at the millennium. After twenty-seven years, we would have to start omitting the word ‘him’. It makes the rhythm of the line completely different. To practice, we chanted, before the service, ‘Right! Thanks! Praise!’

    Other provinces and denominations had made the change more clumsily. The lazy default is to replace every male pronoun for God with the word God; hence, in many provinces: ‘It is right to give God thanks and praise’. It is factually accurate – you could sign it in a legal document – but it lacks all poetry: that double-g is ugly and awkward, and placing the word God on a down-beat is somehow just wrong. So others chose to say, ‘It is right to give our thanks and praise’. It is a more poetic line – but it makes it all about us.

    The Common Worship solution is altogether better. It considers the line in its context. A look at the previous line reveals that the two suggestions for replacing the word ‘him’ (namely ‘God’ and ‘our’) are both redundant, as they are already specified in the previous line: it is ‘us’ giving thanks, ‘to the Lord our God’. The response in Common Worship – which simply omits the word ‘him’ – is sufficient, and far more poetic. ‘Right! Thanks! Praise!’

    And of course no he/him: no endless reinforcement of the false image of a masculine God.

    But somehow we didn’t manage to follow through on this incredibly bold and progressive decision, made thirty years ago. The bombardment of masculine pronouns continues unabated, not only in the traditional texts still in use (and in some other legacy texts brought forward), but in our preaching, in our conversations, in our parish magazine articles, on our diocesan websites – and of course, in our bible translations.

    I have actually made a point of avoiding he/him pronouns for God throughout my ministry – for more than thirty years. It takes a little time to develop the habit, and still the occasional pause to re?phrase a sentence before speaking – but pausing before making an assertion about God usually does no harm. And as a general principle, it seems appropriate not to make so many assertions about God in quick succession that pronouns become necessary. It seems appropriate not to reduce God to a pronoun at all, rather than arguing about which pronoun to use.

    Late in the pandemic, I was seven years into ministry in a four-parish benefice, and it came about that the time was right to invite four different lay people each to take their first turn at providing a homily at the Parish Communion. Each brought their own unique gifts and experience to their contribution, and each was a delight. But this was interesting: one of the four had decades of faith history, and spoke of God as he/him; the other three had walked much of their faith journey in the previous few years, and they did not use pronouns for God at all; I had the impression that they would no more have referred to God as he/him than referred to God as ‘it’.

    This is surely the future we need: a future without the false deification of masculinity, toxic or otherwise; indeed a future without the deification of either gender over the other; a future with God as naturally without gender, just as God is without height, weight, or race.

    God’s pronouns are not he/him. And a tidy and universally uncontroversial solution is not to reduce God to a pronoun at all. We can all adopt this approach, in our preaching, in our conversations, in our parish magazine articles, on our websites; and in our liturgy, thanks to Common Worship, if we’re just slightly selective about what we use; and now, for the first time, in our bible readings as well.

    Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud uses he/him pronouns for Father, for Son, and for Jesus. But God, Lord, the Holy Spirit, the eternal Word, and the eternal Christ, take no pronouns. And as with ‘Right! Thanks! Praise!’, the solution is always poetic. The first priority of the SSRA translation was that it should work well for reading aloud, in ordinary churches on ordinary Sundays. But inclusive language was just part of the translator’s DNA. So as the project reaches the milestone of publication as a perpetual print edition, it has yet another reason to be called remarkable, timely and necessary: it is the only lectionary translation in which God does not take he/him pronouns. It is done so subtly that you would not even notice unless it was pointed out. And yet the potential is a generation who would no more refer to God as he/him than refer to God as ‘it’; a generation who would simply choose not to reduce God to a pronoun at all, because that’s not how you speak about God.

    So yes, the SSRA Complete Three-Year Lectionary is in print: the Luxury Hardback Edition, the Standard Lectern Edition, the Home Paperback Edition, all supported by the live website. In another surprise, I find that it also appears to be the only version of the Three-Year Sunday Lectionary in print in the UK at all, apart from the much-criticised new catholic edition in ESV. This does not speak well of our prioritisation and valuing of scripture, as a church.

    One of the true joys of the last three years has been spending so much time in scripture. And one of many things I have learned is that we gain nothing from endlessly interrupting the flow of the lectionary with our special themed Sundays, with readings chosen ‘to fit the theme’. Those Sundays mirror the approach taken by our opponents: they risk presenting a false God that we have cobbled together in our own image. In stark contrast, if we just read steadily, ploddingly even, through the Gospels and Epistles for the year, as set for the Thirty-Four Sundays in Ordinary Time (given a muddle of different names in Common Worship), we hear a gospel of love and grace, and liberation from the law, condemning those who would condemn us, doggedly, week after week after week, making a mockery of those conservatives who claim to be ‘bible-believing Christians’ (and indeed of those liberals who think the solution is to respond to them by saying ‘the bible doesn’t matter any more’). What we need is a bible translation that re-engages us with the scriptures, that has us on the edge of our seats with anticipation as the readings are about to begin, that makes the reading of the scriptures a highlight of the Sunday gathering.

    Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud aims for all of this and more. Take a click around, in time for the start of a new three-year cycle this Advent – or even in time for this Sunday – here.

    Previous Via Media News blogs on SSRA are here and here

     

  • Jesus Did Not Call a Woman a Dog

    by Michael Hampson, a published author devoting his early-retirement from parish ministry to producing practical resources for busy clergy and lay-led congregations, beginning with the weekly lectionary resource ssra.uk

    There is a fundamental problem with the art and science of translation.

    Every word in the original text contains nuances that we cannot capture in a single word in our own language. And every word available in our own language introduces nuances that are not there in the original.

    In the end, the only accurate rendering of the original text – is the original text.

    The specific example that prompts this piece is the word kynarioi in the Gospel reading four weeks ago, on 20 August – because, let’s be absolutely clear, Jesus did not call a woman ‘a dog’.

    But the problem is more general. It’s not just the wince that most of us suffered that day, or the misogynistic Twitter-storm that I endured that weekend for daring to produce a lectionary resource that managed to translate that day’s text perfectly well, without using the d-word.

    The question for a translation is not whether it is accurate or inaccurate, because compared to the original, it is always inaccurate. The question is whether it fulfils its specific intended purpose as a translation.

    We are very fortunate – in English – to have access to so many translations. And equally fortunate to have ready access to the original texts.

    And for each translation in turn: the question is whether the translation fulfils its specific intended purpose as a translation. Is it for academic study, or for clergy-led parish study, or for individual study by lay people at home? Is it for line-by-line analysis, or for reading in long chapters like a novel? Is it for the first-time reader, or for someone already familiar with the text? Is it for someone reading alone, or for reading aloud in public? Is it for reading aloud in short verses, or in long chapters? Is the reader a professional actor, in front of a huge audience, or a member of an ordinary local congregation, on an ordinary Sunday morning?

    You have to be kind to all our modern translations, for having a go at fulfilling at least one of these hugely diverse purposes.

    As its name indicates, the resource I’ve produced, Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud, is designed to be read aloud, by members of ordinary local congregations, in ordinary local churches, on ordinary Sunday mornings. It is laid out on the page to be easy on the eye. It aims to be easy on the tongue, and easy on the ear. The three readings for the day are set out, ready to go, on one page. It offers clear, poetic, timeless, dignified translations with uncontroversial inclusive language. Less than a year after launch, dozens of churches have the print edition on the lectern, hundreds more access the live online edition every week, and the number of users continues to rise steadily month by month.

    As to the fundamental question faced by all translations, of how to render each word or phrase of biblical Hebrew or Greek into English, SSRA determines that, on balance, it would rather risk missing an occasional nuance from the original, than risk introducing into the English text a significant nuance that isn’t there in the original.

    And that is why there is no place in the English rendering of Matthew 15.21-28 for the d-word: because the d-word has a misogynistic nuance in English that is not there in the original Greek.

    Imagine this scene enacted between Jesus and a male challenger, instead of a female challenger. The d-word immediately loses nine-tenths of its harshness. And that proves the point. It still sounds harsh, and perhaps it is; some even speculate that the challenger’s riposte, in this encounter, is significant in the incarnate Jesus’s realisation that the work of the Messiah is for all humankind, not only the people of Israel. Others speculate that there is no harshness, just playfulness; that this is a riddle, a game, from the start. But what we know for certain is that the exchange takes place two thousand years ago, dozens of cultures away, probably in Aramaic, and we have it only in Greek. Kynarioi may mean something vaguely like ‘puppies’ (it is a plural diminutive); it absolutely does not have the atomic-blast nuance of the d-word. Jesus absolutely does not call a woman a dog, and any translation that still uses that word is – well, frankly, for virtually all purposes, and certainly for reading aloud in church, just wrong. It introduces a commonplace, widely-understood nuance – a meaning – that is simply not there in the original Greek. That is a serious error in translation, with terrible consequences. We should not tolerate it. We should not tolerate it when it comes around again on 16 August 2026.

    For the purposes of SSRA, I reluctantly decided that the word kynarioi is untranslatable – but the sentence in which the word appears is not. The sentence is perfectly translatable. In verse 26, the small mammal (kynarion) wants feeding. In verse 27, it crawls under the table to eat crumbs. Both sentences can be translated perfectly adequately without having to compare the woman to a dog, or indeed to any specific mammal at all. Having to eat waste, and having to crawl under the table to collect it, is humiliation enough. The rest is nuance and commentary, and indeed speculation; and that is for the pulpit, and not necessarily for every time the text is read. As it says in the blurb, “a preacher may wish to refer to a more literal study translation (or indeed the original Hebrew or Greek) when making a word-by-word or line-by-line analysis of the text.”

    Jesus said, ‘It is not right to take food away from the children.’

    She said, ‘Yes, Lord, but surely there will be crumbs that fall from the table.’

    It is enough.

    There is only one other passage in the entire three-year cycle that is as problematic as this one. And it is only eight weeks away. On 12 November, the Gospel uses the v-word, and it is unacceptable for all the same reasons as the d-word. By using the v-word, the standard translations of Matthew 25.1-13 take ten women with dignity and agency, and reduce them to objectified ridicule.

    For SSRA, I have kept the context of a wedding, because it’s upbeat, and it’s the context that Jesus chose, even though we have absolutely no idea, from any source, why ten young women would be waiting up all night, specifically for the groom, before, during, or after, any part of a wedding celebration. But I have translated this opening image of being up all night before the wedding feast as a single concept, rather than letter-by-letter or word-by-word (though the single word ‘people’ might reasonably describe who they are in 2026, given the principles set out above).

    Jesus then gives these ten people agency. They are determining their own futures, when they decide how much charge to put in their lamps; or, in the meaning of the parable, how much effort to put in to being prepared for whatever may lie ahead, including for the coming of the Kingdom.

    But instead of recognising their dignity and their agency, we have objectified them, sniggering at them with the v-word, and making it worse with the f-word.

    The final puzzle was the gender of the group, and I know there are valid arguments both ways, but on balance – with the gender wars ready to hijack every conversation – I decided not to risk a late hijack on this one, having just rescued it from that very war zone. So I chose gender-neutral language, so the focus can be on the oil in those lamps.

    My first challenge to every preacher on the day is to get through the sermon without making any reference at all to any part of the traditional title of this parable – because if you do, you just reinforce, yet again, centuries of misogyny, and that is all that anyone will remember. And don’t preach about the art and science of translation either, or about misogyny (there are other days for that); preach about oil in lamps, and the coming kingdom; it is Remembrance Sunday, after all. You might even, you might just, find space to say, that in the original Greek text, those preparing for the wedding feast through the night are actually all women; and by analogy, those preparing for the coming of the kingdom, in this parable, are women; Jesus is taking the opportunity, in telling this parable, to highlight the fact that women have agency, just like men, in the work of the kingdom.

    Misogyny continues to objectify women by dividing them into the two passive categories of d-word and v-word.

    It is no coincidence that the traditional translations of these two gospel readings do precisely that as well. The traditional translations take women who, in the original Greek texts, have dignity and agency, and objectify them, for humiliation and ridicule, into each of these two passive categories in turn.

    Translations that continue to use these two English words, with their heavy misogynistic nuances not present in the original Greek, are unfit for purpose – especially where that purpose includes public reading in church.

    I guess over the last month I’ve been genuinely surprised to find – after thirty years of just getting on with ordinary parish ministry – that the debates of thirty years ago are still so fiercely contested, in Synod and online. Perhaps The Times clergy survey, three weeks ago, was evidence that in the vast majority of ordinary parishes – thank goodness – they’re not.

     

  • Let’s Disagree to Agree: Rwanda and Homosexuality

    by David Bagnall, Associate Rector of St John’s Episcopal Church, Edinburgh. Formerly chaplain of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, his PhD thesis examined the role played by language and discourse in generating new concepts of homosexuality in the Anglican Church of Rwanda

    One of the perishingly few points of general agreement within the sexuality controversies currently wracking the Anglican Communion is that everyone disagrees. Disagreement, as we all know, is at the heart of the issue – indeed, that’s the whole point. Put crudely, liberals, generally in the Global North, think that homosexuality is a God-given identity to be cherished and nurtured along with everything else that is sacred and holy; conservatives on the other hand, generally in the Global South, think that homosexuality is sinful and is a way of life chosen by fallen humans in defiance of God’s law and purpose. So far so simple: we disagree. Or so we might think…

    My research focuses on sexuality debates within the Anglican Church of Rwanda (ACR), and in particular on the role the Rwandan church has played within global sexuality controversies. Research in this area is continually fascinating, of course, but among the most startling of my findings has been the fact that, contrary to popular opinion (my own included), disputes regarding sexuality across the communion aren’t so much characterised by disagreement but rather by misunderstanding, or even miscommunication. My research focuses on debates between the ACR and the Church of England, and therefore involves interviewing many priests from both provinces about their experiences in discussions and dialogues, and time and again – to my surprise – interviewees report not so much disagreeing with their interprovincial colleagues but actually failing to understand them. Many priests I interviewed described such conversations as being deeply frustrating, with one CofE priest telling me that almost every conversation had been ‘a non-starter’, and a Rwandan Bishop noting that ‘there is no listening’ within the debates. Moreover, when asked about the nature of this frustration, members of both churches described it consistently in terms of a failure, not to agree, but even to understand one another. One CofE priest, for instance, told me of a conversation with a Rwandan friend regarding homosexuality in which his friend ‘couldn’t understand’ what it was that he was trying to describe, and that there was ‘a massive…difference’ in what they were each attempting to communicate. One CofE Bishop, too, told me that he felt that there was ‘a very big gap’ in understanding during conversations he’d had with Rwandans, and former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams noted that such conversations seemed to him to be ‘a dialogue of the deaf’. One Rwandan priest, finally, commented that for this reason sexuality is ‘difficult to talk about’, and Bishop Nathan Amooti of Kigali, reflecting on such difficulties, concluded sombrely that ‘there’s no proper dialogue’.

    The reasons for these misunderstandings are multiple and complex, and are too lengthy to detail in a single blog post, but at their centre is the fact that there are wildly diverse meanings conveyed within the English word ‘homosexuality’ when used by different actors across the Anglican Communion. For British Anglicans – regardless of their opinions on the subject – my research reveals that the meanings and resonances conveyed in the word reflect its deep and entangled history of usage within the British Isles. It has roots in psychopathology, but contains insights from theology, politics, socio-cultural discourses, and even legal practice. It has resonances of everything from the Wolfenden Report to Virginia Woolf; from Stonewall to David Beckham’s sarong. In other words, the word ‘homosexuality’ has a particular and culturally contingent history within the UK, all of which is contained within and expressed by it when used by British people.

    By contrast, the word ‘homosexuality’ has a startlingly short history within Rwanda. In Anglican circles it first appears within interprovincial documents in the late 1970s, but is barely mentioned until it suddenly explodes into life during the mid-2000s, during which time the ACR established deep bilateral partnership with disaffected conservative American Anglicans. It was by means of this partnership that an astonishing wave of anti-homosexual literature entered the Rwandan Church and. once there. came to redefine and renegotiate native and organic understandings of what we would call homosexual behaviour. For, just as homosexuality has a rich and complex history of development within the UK, so does what we would call homosexuality have a correspondingly deep history of development within Rwanda, though of a different kind. Prior to the mid-2000s, the word used by most Rwandans to describe homosexual contact was mutinganyi which, as my research revealed, conveyed a very different meaning to the British word ‘homosexual’. The word ‘mutinganyi’ is rich in depth and meaning, but at its heart is the idea of the use of intimate same-sex sexual friendship and activity as a means to self-knowledge and mutual development. Crucially, too, the word has no sense of the pejorative about it and isn’t tied to any ideas of identity exclusive to heterosexual norms. To be a mutinganyi, then, was to be a person who had intimate relationships – both sexual and otherwise – with people of the same sex, but in a fashion that wasn’t at all prohibitive of heterosexual relationships. It’s difficult for us to conceive of how this could be the case, of course, but that’s because I’m describing the phenomenon in English and using words which, as we have seen, convey different meanings. The point at stake, then, is that sexuality itself has an utterly different history of development within Rwanda no less rich than our own, and which our own words are simply incapable of describing, at least in discrete terms.

    The problem is, however, that the word mutinganyi is hardly ever used in Rwandan Anglican circles in the present day, and has come to be replaced almost entirely by ‘homosexual’. The reasons for this are chiefly down to the extraordinarily pugnacious and virulent anti-homosexual discourse introduced into Rwanda by American conservatives in the mid-2000s, which itself has evolved and developed within Rwanda to become the ubiquitous language within which sexuality debates are currently couched. It is for this reason that homosexuality is perceived without exception within Rwanda to be both a novel and foreign phenomenon. Paying close attention to language-use and development reveals that, in a strict sense, it is. The meanings and resonances conveyed by the word ‘homosexual’ – forged in conservative circles within American Anglicanism – are indeed both novel and foreign to the organic understandings of sexuality detailed above, and the near-ubiquitous use of the word ‘homosexual’ within Rwanda has therefore come to obscure or even redefine such native understandings.

    The reason why all this matters, then, is that people like me – who care deeply about the dignity and welfare of gay people, and who long for the day when people of all sexualities can participate fully as equally members of the Body of Christ – need to watch our language. For in using words like ‘homosexual’ in interprovincial dialogues, progressives are constantly in danger of unwittingly colluding with conservatives by falling into conservative narratives of a so-called ‘Western agenda’. If we want to see a church that celebrates the rich diversity of sexualities and sexual orientations that God has created, then we must resist the temptation to see our own sexual categories as ubiquitous, and focus instead on celebrating and fostering organic and culturally contingent sexual epistemologies throughout the Anglican Communion. Doing this, of course, will require patience and a constant awareness of the particularity of our own discourse and the discursive traditions of others. It will require serious thought, too, and the wisdom to discern when the limits of our language precludes real mutual understanding. True agreement may be far off, of course, but at least we might start with true disagreement.