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Tag: relationships

  • 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.

  • Collateral Damage: How Unjust Treatment of LGBTQIA+ People Harms the Church

    by Ruth Harley, curate in the Watling Valley Ecumenical Partnership

    All names and some details have been changed to protect the identity of those whose stories are told in this article.

    Let me tell you about Mary. She’s a woman in her 80s, widowed several years ago. She has come faithfully to church every Sunday for her entire life. She organises the flower rota, and volunteers at the parent and toddler group. She makes the tea, and notices when the tea towels need washing. She comes to the Lent course and makes thoughtful contributions, and apologises that she can no longer help stack the chairs afterwards. She has many children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and loves to talk about them. In short, Mary is a very ordinary Anglican. She is the sort of person without whom the church simply wouldn’t function, the sort of person who is part of the backbone of the C of E. She is also the sort of person who seems a million miles removed from LLF, General Synod, and conversations about sexuality and relationships. But she isn’t.

    When my partner and I got engaged, 7 years ago, Mary was among the first and most enthusiastic to congratulate me. “Oh, that’s wonderful!” she said, “Do you have a date for the wedding? And can I do the flowers? Please?” She had, naturally enough, assumed that we would get married in church. And so I had to gently break it to her that not only could we, as a lesbian couple, not get married in the church which Mary and I both loved and served, but also that for clergy marrying a same-sex partner at all was not an option. “But I do believe it will change,” I said. Mary looked me in the eye, and said, “But I won’t be here to see it.” It was the first time I cried about not being able to marry the woman I love.

    I think of Mary whenever people say of the conversation around the place of LGBTQIA+ people in the church: “But that’s not relevant here.” Usually they’re talking about a very ordinary parish church, typically middle-of-the-road with a predominantly older congregation: a congregation full of people like Mary. And I want to tell them – sometimes I do tell them – they’re wrong. It is relevant to Mary, and all the many faithful Anglicans like her, in ways which go far beyond flower arranging.

    Mary and I had many conversations after her initial shock at learning that the church she loved wouldn’t allow the people she loved to marry. Her dismay went far beyond the realisation that she would never do the flowers for our wedding. It was a profoundly destabilising realisation for her: the church to which she had given so much, which had been such a bedrock of her life, such a place of encounter with God, was not what she thought it was. She went on arranging the flowers, reading stories to the toddlers and washing the tea towels, praying each morning and evening and attending church each week, but something fundamental had shifted. The church which she had believed to be a place of abundant love and affirmation – a reflection of God’s unending love for all people – had revealed itself to be… not that.

    And it’s not just Mary, of course. There’s Brian, who invited his friend at work to something at church, and was shocked when his friend asked: “Will it be OK for me to come, as a gay man?” Brian had never considered that question before, but he suddenly realised he wasn’t sure of the answer. There’s Iris, who talks so proudly about her grandson George, but when she participated in her deanery’s LLF course (wondering what all the fuss was about) the couple next to her said quite casually “of course, being gay’s a sin” and she didn’t know how to tell them they were talking about her George. There’s Jean and Steve who struggled to support their daughter through the breakdown of her marriage, and weren’t sure what response they would get if they asked their vicar or their friends at church to pray for their daughter and daughter-in-law. So they kept quiet and struggled on alone. And there are so many more stories I could tell.

    There are people like Mary, Brian, Iris, Jean and Steve in every congregation. There is no part of the church which is untouched by how we treat LGBTQIA+ folks, either directly or indirectly. It is right, of course, that our conversations should centre the experiences of LGBTQIA+ people, who are most directly harmed by the church’s current policies and practices. But we shouldn’t forget the ‘ripple effect’ that harm has on others too. And nobody in church leadership should be claiming that it “isn’t relevant” in their context. It will be. It might just be that the Marys in your congregation don’t feel able to share their stories.

    That ‘ripple effect’ of harm to people who seem far beyond the scope of the questions raised by LLF should not come as a surprise. As Paul says: “if one member suffers, all suffer together with it” (1 Corinthians 12.26). The church’s unjust and unloving treatment of LGBTQIA+ people is not only a cause of pain for those of us most closely affected, it is painful and damaging to the whole body. For someone like Mary, that pain is not only vicarious – the pain she feels because she see that I am treated unjustly – it is also the pain of realising that the body of which she is a part is damaged in ways she had not previously seen. Unjust treatment of LGBTQIA+ people damages the whole church, the whole body of Christ. It distorts the image of God which we present to the world. It is not just an issue for us and our allies, but for the whole church.

    Paul goes on, of course, to say: “if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it”. There will come a time when our suffering turns to rejoicing. When and how is still unclear, but that is the direction in which the Spirit is surely moving the church, however painfully slowly. I do still believe what I told Mary: that change will come, that my beloved and I will marry. But Mary won’t be there to do the flowers.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Imagining Otherwise: Dreaming of the Future Church

    by Fr Jarel Robinson-Brown, Co-Chair of OneBody OneFaith and Visiting Scholar at Sarum College, Salisbury

    It is an immense gift, the most precious gift of my life, to be called to serve the people of God. I believe firmly that ministry to God’s people can teach us things otherwise unknowable. In my ten years of ministry, what I have valued most about serving the people of God is what it has shown me about people’s lives – how complicated each of our lives can be, how full of contradiction and paradox, how undeterminable our relationship to ourselves and others can be as we grow and fail, discover and wrestle with what it means to live, to be truly human. I suppose that what I am saying is that it is my pastoral relationships with God’s people that has most deeply transformed and deepened my theology. As I journey with God’s people, I have to let my guard down just enough, as priest, pastor and preacher – so that others too, may see the slow work of God not just in themselves and in our world, but also in me. It is in this dialectic relationship, where human experience touches human experience, that our theology deepens and our knowledge of God and reading of the scriptures are nurtured and enriched.

    Any theological conviction that begins fixed and remains fixed is one which has not come into contact with the world as it is, or us as we are. One can have a number of theological principles and moral convictions but, when someone who is made in the image and likeness of God sits in front of you and says ‘this is my life…here’s the mess I am, the mess I have made – here are my regrets, my failures, my shattered dreams’, a pastor can respond either with the mind and heart of Jesus, bringing their humanity to touch the humanity of another – or not. This is perhaps the biggest issue I have with much of the Church of England’s leadership currently – the lack of honesty about how our theological convictions are formed, and change. We seek to understand one another in the midst of a Church led largely by people we do not really know.

    For myself, I am so many contradictions. There are many labels I could wear: pro-life, Anglo-Catholic, Benedictine oblate, Black radical, patristic scholar, single priest, advocate for equal marriage, Wesleyan – not all of these are seen as compatible with one another, but they do name something about who I am and what I believe. There is something quite fatal about always wanting our lives to ‘make sense’, and part of the incoherence of the Church at the moment, is, I think, part of it becoming more honest, more real. This is the threat we LGBTQ+ Christians present to the Church – our lives do not ‘make sense’ to what people consider the only legitimate way of being a real Christian. It is because of the threat we pose that even heterosexual allies have to use words like ‘faithful’, ‘stable’, ‘committed’, ‘lifelong’ and ‘monogamous’ when expressing support for our relationships and marriage. They still seek to ‘absolve’ our love from its ‘sinfulness’ and ‘disorder’ – in other words, they still seek to make us straight in order to be holy. We must resist any attempt that seeks to describe LGBTQ+ relationships in this way, when heterosexual relationships are not made to carry a necessary list of qualifiers. Anything other than this is to suggest that LGBTQ+ relationships are somehow inherently unfaithful, unstable and everything else when, as anyone involved in pastoral ministry knows, heterosexual relationships can be, and are, just as messy. Let us quit the lies, friends.

    I also believe that our lack of honesty means we are only really having a debate on false grounds. Because we are saved by the life of someone fully human, I believe that our mission and witness are impeded by the ecclesial dishonesty in which we are all complicit around desire, the body and sex. As God, Christ’s mission was to be truly and fully human. To embody this true humanity, we need honesty about our lives, yet the politics our church leaders are engaged in makes this honesty impossible. How convenient for the Archbishop of York to emotionally affirm us, and how ideal for the Archbishop of Canterbury to rejoice in the possible blessing of our relationships but publicly exempt himself from ever offering such a blessing – it is simply too perfect a situation to have any real integrity. We need to know, as many have said before, what our Bishops really think – more importantly we need to know who they are!

    I have said little here about LLF, and absolutely nothing about General Synod. It is a great shame that the Archbishop of Canterbury seems to think that God will honour his loyalty to the Anglican Communion over LGBTQ+ people in England. My hope is that LLF will provide at least a route for clergy to live and love honestly – for those who have entered same sex marriages to be given back Permission to Officiate, and for blessings to happen in Church (though they have for some time illegally). In essence, neither LLF nor General Synod can be fruitful or lead the Church to where I believe God invites us, not as long as real honesty is demanded of LGBTQ+ people alone.

    So we must hope, and fight, petition, and pray – but most importantly, we must dream. One of the most powerful things about oppression is the way it limits our imaginations. Can we as LGBTQ+ people, despite the violence we have endured, still imagine a Church which is truly the Church? Can we imagine a Church which loves with the heart of Christ and stands between God’s people and the all the forces of death and violence? On a good day, I can imagine such a Church, but it is becoming more and more difficult. In her recent book Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, Lola Olufemi – a black feminist writer and academic – writes:

    ‘I belong to a legacy of those who saw what this world had to offer and refused it. Before they refused it, they fought it, and not just with words.’

    I look on our Church, and I refuse what it has to offer. This refusal seems like holy work. Instead I have a dream – one which I will pray for and labour for, one which I believe is the dream of the Almighty… it is a dream

    of a Church where all God’s people love with reckless abandon, and without fear.

    of a Church where the vocations of all are nurtured, celebrated and affirmed.

    of a Church where we see our tradition in all its truth, and diversity.

    of a Church which regains an understanding of sacrifice and self-emptying.

    of a Church certain of its mandate to speak prophetic truth to itself and the world.

    of a Church where one mega-Church in a hundred places does not have the monopoly on the Church’s resources.

    of a Church where Bishops step out of fear into courage.

    of a Church which trust deeply in the promises of God.

    of a Church set free of the ties which come from Empire and State privilege.

    of a Church confident in the power of sacraments and preaching.

    of a Church which has taken the sin of its past seriously.

    of a Church which knows the power of repentance in the heart of its institutional life.

    of a Church willing to lay down its life, that it may be born anew.

    of a Church which knows that at the last, it is answerable only to God – for how well and deep and passionately it has loved.

    Jesus did not wait for a two-thirds majority in every religious court of his day – he embodied the radical dream of God until it became manifest – and he calls us to do the same.

    I know that God has more to offer us than this, and that the heart of God rejoices in true love wherever it is found. I also believe that every power in the Church that seeks to define orthodoxy by the limits of their inclusive love will, in the end, fail. Between that time and this, there is the work of fighting and dreaming. God has more to offer us than this. For God’s sake, despite what we may be offered now – let us not set our sights too low.