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.