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Tag: Safeguarding

  • The Body We Are Becoming: Ecclesiology, Safeguarding and the Common Life of General Synod

    by the Revd Robert Thompson, Vicar St Mary’s, Kilburn & St James’, West Hampstead; host of Open Table, London; member of General Synod

    Walking together requires more than making space for disagreement.

    Earlier this week I had the privilege of drafting, on behalf of more than eighty members of the Houses of Clergy and Laity of the General Synod, a letter to the Presidents asking them to exercise their powers under the Church of England’s Fringe Meetings and Displays Policy to withdraw approval for the proposed fringe meeting People Change: Sexual Identity Transformation and its associated exhibition stand before Synod meets in York. This fringe and stand involve speakers from groups who claim to change people’s sexual attraction.

    This letter, shared here, simply asks constitutional, safeguarding and governance questions about the presence of the meeting and the exhibition stand. It is my understanding that only the Archbishops as Presidents can intervene in a situation in which many members believe that the common life of General Synod itself is at stake.

    As I found myself drafting that letter, however, I became increasingly convinced that the questions it raises go beyond what is constitutional or political. While our debates about sexuality take place, what is General Synod becoming?

    Ecclesiology: what is our body?

    The real issues are ecclesiological. While that word can sound like an abstract branch of theology, every decision the Church makes about authority, safeguarding, worship, disagreement and belonging reveals something about what it believes the Church itself to be. Ecclesiology is the shape our common life takes. So the question before us goes beyond whether one particular fringe meeting should proceed. It’s about the kind of Body we are becoming, and how our understanding of the Church shapes the way authority is exercised, disagreement is held and every baptised Christian is enabled to participate fully in the common life of Christ.

    I write not only as the lead signatory to the letter but also as a priest of the Church of England who is also gay and in a partnership. In September, we celebrate our 18th year together. I do not simply accept my sexual orientation, nor have I merely made peace with it after years of struggle: I receive it with gratitude as one of God’s gifts. It has shaped my vocation, enlarged my compassion and deepened my understanding of the Gospel. It has taught me something about exclusion, dignity, grace and the Christ who is so often encountered among those whose place within the community has been questioned. I believe that my priesthood has been enriched, not despite being gay, but partly because of the particular experiences through which God has formed me. That has been further intensified by being in a long-term loving relationship.

    Dignity and participation

    Over recent days I have also heard from a significant number of sibling queer clergy and lay members of General Synod. Not all of them agreed about the best response to this situation; not wanting to write a letter, or wanting stronger language or a different strategy. Yet beneath those differences one theme emerged with striking consistency. Several people told me that the approval of both this fringe meeting and, particularly, the accompanying exhibition stand had left them questioning whether they could arrive in York with the same sense of safety, dignity and belonging as every other member of General Synod. They spoke not in the language of ideology but of participation: whether they could enter the shared spaces of Synod without anxiety, contribute freely to debate and trust that their very presence would not itself become the subject of debate. Those are not peripheral concerns. They go to the heart of whether Synod is experienced as an expression of the Church’s common life. Quite simply, can they move through the shared life of General Synod, its worship, corridors, exhibition spaces, cafés and informal conversation, without reasonably experiencing themselves as the object of theological intervention?

    I understand these concerns because, for me, this is not an abstract discussion. On two previous occasions at York I left General Synod early and completed my work online after being approached by individuals who asked whether I wanted to “become a Christian”. I have no reason to doubt that those conversations were offered sincerely or prayerfully. Nevertheless, they fundamentally altered the way in which I experienced Synod. Instead of simply participating in the Church’s discernment, I found myself unexpectedly defending the legitimacy of my own faith, vocation and ministry within the very community whose life I had come to share. Those encounters were fleeting, but they have remained with me because they revealed how easily the culture of the Church can fail to reflect the theology the Church professes.

    It was through that lens that I first read in the list of fringe meetings the title People Change: Sexual Identity Transformation. My first reaction was not anger but sadness. I come to General Synod expecting robust disagreement. I expect to hear arguments that I believe to be profoundly mistaken. I expect to debate legislation, doctrine, mission, finance, worship and ethics with people whose theological conclusions differ radically from my own. All voices belong in Synod. That is part of the discipline of belonging to a Church that has chosen not to divide.

    But I am a person, not an abstract theological point. What troubles me is the impression that the person God has called to priesthood and elected to General Synod is, by virtue of who I am, someone who ought fundamentally to become somebody else. That moves the discussion from debating ideas to experiencing sibling members themselves as the object of transformation.

    One way of testing whether this is truly an ecclesiological principle, rather than a special plea about sexuality, is to ask the same question of any other group already gathered within the Body of Christ at General Synod. Replace the phrase “sexual identity transformation” with the identity of another group of Synod members – women priests, disabled Christians, or Christians from particular ethnic communities – and ask whether the Church would regard such a fringe meeting or exhibition stand as raising questions about its common life.

    As members of General Synod we are bishops, clergy and lay people who worship together, receive the Eucharist together and seek together to discern the mind of Christ. The quality of that common life is one of the principal concerns of ecclesiology.

    Matters of Policy

    The Fringe Meetings and Displays Policy requires organisers to abide by the General Synod Members’ Code of Conduct, the House of Bishops’ safeguarding policies and the University of York’s own policies on freedom of speech and equal opportunities. It reserves to the Business Committee and the Presidents the right to refuse space where they judge that a fringe meeting would be contrary to the ethos of the Church of England, damage its reputation or be inconsistent with House of Bishops’ safeguarding guidance.

    By including displays, it covers all those informal spaces in which members meet, converse, encounter one another and seek together to discern the mind of Christ. Ordering those spaces, too, is part of the Church’s ecclesiology.

    If we look at General Synod’s own previous decisions, in July 2017 Synod overwhelmingly endorsed the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy, affirming that gay conversion therapy “has no place in the modern world”, is “unethical”, “potentially harmful” and “not supported by evidence”. It also called upon the Church to be sensitive to contemporary expressions of gender identity and called upon the Government to ban conversion therapy. Whatever theological disagreements remained – and remain – they did not prevent Synod reaching institutional conclusions about practices which it believed to be harmful. Those commitments now form part of the context within which later administrative decisions should properly be made.

    Nor is the 2017 motion the only relevant context. Through the Living in Love and Faith process the Church has repeatedly acknowledged the hurt experienced by LGBTQIA+ people and has commended prayers which include a corporate lament and repentance for the ways in which they have been treated in the life of the Church. Those prayers represent an institutional recognition that our common life has, at times, failed to reflect the dignity of those who are already members of the Body of Christ. That acknowledgement should surely inform the way we order our common life today.

    One of the gifts of Christian ecclesiology is that it teaches us to begin not with categories but with calling. Before we are anything else, we are those who have been baptised into Christ and called into his Body. We remain women, men, trans, gay and straight, disabled and non-disabled, people of every race and culture. None of those realities disappears. Yet the Church’s first question is never simply, “Who are you?” It is, “To whom do you belong?”

    Some readers may nevertheless object that Christianity is, after all, a religion of transformation. Of course it is. Every one of us is called to repentance, to holiness, to become more fully conformed to Christ, the One into whose death and resurrection we have been baptised. It is not a movement away from the person whom God has called into discipleship, but the fulfilment of that calling in Christ. The call to holiness is not a call to erase the self but to allow the self to be transfigured by grace.

    This conviction lies at the heart of Paul’s ecclesiology in the First Letter to the Corinthians. In chapter 12 Paul reminds the Church that it is not simply an association of people who happen to share certain beliefs. In the Body of Christ, and every baptised member is indispensable to its life. Those members of the Body who appear weaker are indispensable, and those parts that seem less honourable are to be treated with greater honour. Paul’s point is not merely that diversity should be tolerated. It is that our primary identity rests not in ourselves but in our incorporation into Christ. Ecclesiology begins not with agreement but with baptism.

    That, I suggest, is the theological framework within which the present controversy should be understood. The issue is not simply how General Synod manages disagreement. The issue is whether the structures, decisions and culture of Synod reflect the reality that we already belong to one another because we belong to Christ. Because our meetings are set in the context of prayer and worship, the culture of Synod matters every bit as much as its procedures, because it is part of the Church’s public witness to the Gospel.

    Safeguarding

    And what about safeguarding? The Fringe Meetings and Displays Policy allows intervention if “the subject matter of the fringe meeting or display, or the presence or other involvement of any person at the fringe meeting or display, would be inconsistent with the guidance issued by the House of Bishops on matters relating to the safeguarding of children and vulnerable adults”. This is because safeguarding belongs to the Church’s common life; it, too, is an ecclesiological practice. It is one of the ways in which the Body of Christ learns to honour the dignity, vocation and belonging of every one of its members. More than that, safeguarding is not simply about protecting vulnerable people. It is about protecting the integrity of the Body of Christ.

    Impaired communion

    There is another irony which has increasingly struck me as I have reflected on these events. Some of those associated with the theological movements represented by this fringe have, for reasons of conscience, already decided that they cannot always share fully in the sacramental life of General Synod. They absent themselves from Eucharists at which they cannot receive Holy Communion or recognise the ministry of those presiding. I respect the seriousness with which those convictions are held, even though I profoundly disagree with them. Yet they also expose the deeper ecclesiological question before us. If we have become accustomed to forms of impaired communion within our sacramental life, we should be especially careful not to deepen those fractures within the wider common life of Synod.

    Paul returns to these themes in 1 Corinthians 11, where his concern is not simply the manner in which the Eucharist is celebrated but the failure of the Christian community to discern the Body. Too often those words have been heard solely in relation to the sacramental bread and wine. Yet Paul’s rebuke is directed equally towards a community whose divisions prevented it from recognising the Body of Christ present in one another. Eucharistic theology and ecclesiology cannot be separated. The tragedy of General Synod is that we are becoming accustomed to living with forms of impaired communion and sometimes mistake that impairment for normality.

    Does our culture as a General Synod help us to discern the Body of Christ more faithfully in one another, or does it make that task more difficult?

    My hope is not that General Synod becomes a place without disagreement. Such a Church would almost certainly have ceased to listen to the Holy Spirit. My hope is that it becomes a place where disagreement is so held within relationships of trust, generosity, humility and mutual dignity that nobody needs to wonder whether there is a place for them at Christ’s table.

    Every Synod should leave us more deeply conformed to the Body of Christ that we proclaim ourselves already to be. If a decision instead leaves existing members questioning whether they truly belong within that Body, or whether they are regarded primarily as people who ought fundamentally to become somebody else, then the Church’s own policy on fringes and display stands asks precisely the right questions. Is this consistent with the ethos of the Church of England? Is it consistent with the House of Bishops’ safeguarding guidance? Does it build up or diminish the common life of the Body?

    In this instance, they should now be answered. The issue before General Synod is not simply what it chooses to debate. It is what, by those debates and by the way they are conducted, General Synod is becoming, as the Body of Christ.

  • Mini-MBA Course for the Talent Pipeline in the Church of England: Revised Strategy Module

    by Anon.

    Now that the dust has settled on the Post Office scandal (Ed, is this right?), many of you in the Talent Pipeline have been asking for course guidance on the lessons learned. As you know, the mini-MBA has been developed by those seeking to develop pools of talent to run the Church of England, and we have drawn from the commercial and public sector to bring you this new module:

    Lessons Learned: Strategy in the Church of England

    Strap-lines 

    How do you know if the strategy for your diocese or cathedral is working? How can you know that your new strap-line is garnering enough traction, and that clergy and congregations are on the same page?

    We know that strap-lines are just catchy slogans meant to give us an effervescent lift. Like a small caffeine hit, every time you hear or read the strap-line, it should make you more alert, give you a bit of a buzz, and help you to stay awake longer. But, like caffeine, don’t overdo it, as it can cause migraines. Limit yourself to no more than three mentions a day, and avoid strap-line use after 6pm, unless you want to lose sleep.

    Most strap-lines don’t make any sense. They don’t have to. That’s the point. They’re meant to be pick-me-ups, not rational statements. Some are oxymorons. “Growing Younger” (Newcastle) is great, because it is impossible and meaningless. “Wider, Younger, Deeper” (Southwell & Nottingham) is rather risky, and may open you up to mischievous Freudian readings. Your clergy will love that, but it is distracting, so you should try and avoid that sort of thing. Usually, a strap-line with something like “transforming” and “growth” will work, because it can’t be measured, so you avoid becoming a hostage to fortune in future.

    Understanding Church Strategy 

    Strategy is like developing ideas and planning, but much, much better. While planning can be tedious and difficult, strategy is constantly rewarding because someone else does the work. This is one of the ways we can talk about collegiate leadership and collective responsibility in the Church. Remember, true leadership is “we”, not “me, me, me”. Everybody gets to own and participate in the strategy once you have set it out for them. Clergy and laity who reject it can be asked to move on.

    For example, if you face a financial crisis or can no longer recruit clergy to your diocese, it would be easy to get bogged down in the details as to why. A more strategic approach is to streamline the issue, and avoid describing it as a problem at all. Start with a catchy slogan or a brief Mission Statement, such as: ”Attract, Train, Retain, Develop”. Remember, “Crisis” means “opportunity” in Chinese. But don’t use the C-word too much, as it may cause people to revisit your strategy. You don’t want that.

    If you still feel there’s something missing, consider adding the word “Inspire”. Note that this word could go anywhere in your assemblage of terms. Like a versatile midfielder in a football team, “inspire” looks great and performs well in any position: ”Attract, Train, Inspire, Retain, Develop.”

    You could represent all of this in a diagram using the words in a circle, linked by arrows. More advanced strategic thinkers can produce different versions of this diagram, headed ‘phase one’, ‘phase two’, etc. But please be careful, as you don’t want to imply there is a timetable. Nominate a hypothetical deadline year (2030?) by which time it will be delivered. By 2025 it will all be forgotten, and you can devise another strategy.

    Think hard about appointing an officer to deliver all this. You may want to consider a Facilitation-Facilitator, a Facilitator-Initiator, or an Enablement-Enabler. These can be attached to any posts concerned with mission, growth and vision, and for helping parishes to downsize and consolidate resources (i.e., “sharing in mission”).

    Does My Diocese or Cathedral Need a Strategy?

    Strategy is how we set the direction of travel. You cannot go forward without a direction of travel. Going forward is the strategist’s key objective. It doesn’t especially matter where you go, as long as you move forwards, not backwards. Even going forwards blindly over a cliff beats going backwards.

    Avoid discussing the actual rate of travel as this could lead to awkward questions about dates and deadlines. Talk instead about pace or, better still, momentum. How do you quantify momentum? You don’t. Remember, this is your strategy, and it is not concerned with measurement.

    For example, you can announce your intention to create five hundred new Intentional Discipleship Communities over the next five years. Nobody actually knows what this means, and it could cover anything from a new church on a housing estate to four people meeting for coffee at Costa each Wednesday to discuss last week’s sermon. These all count in the figures.

    What are the Best Strategic Words for Me to Use?

    There are certain words that every aspiring strategist needs to know. These are some of the most important.

    • Delivery – in daily life, a delivery is something that arrives, like a parcel from Amazon meant for your neighbour. Or a letter from the Post Office, eventually. Or, some deliverables from a Lessons Learned Safeguarding Review (i.e., timing and content unspecified). But in strategy, delivery is an end in itself. You need to be focused on or committed to that delivery. Don’t allow yourself to be distracted by specifics, such as “what is in the box, or in this report, or did I get what I asked for?”. Deliverables arrive. The joy of them is that nobody really knows what’s about to arrive, or when. God is a God of surprises. People must be expectant, otherwise nothing will happen. Like waiting for Santa.
    • Integration – this is the ultimate goal of strategy. Integration solves all known problems, particularly strategic ones. All great integrated strategies start with joined-up thinking. Make sure you emphasise that your thinking is joined-up, as it implies all previous thinking was OK, but not part of a strategic plan. If you have no thoughts of your own that are worth sharing, then claim to be linking-up other people’s ideas. This ticks the box for Enabling and Facilitating – also good words to use. Consider appointing a Facilitator-Enabler for this, and create a new group to review progress and to monitor deliverables. Then create a group to review the review group. That is how momentum is maintained.
    • Safeguarding Strategy – if thinking about a Safeguarding Strategy, then

    [NB: this entire section has been redacted in full by the Archbishops’ Council and Secretary General – please scroll down to Transformation.]

     

    • Transformation –for when mere change just won’t cut it. Nobody ever mastered strategy by worrying about incremental change or orderly progress. You can’t achieve transformation without vision. The great visionaries of the past all dared to dream. There are many recent Vision Statements to draw upon from in the Church of England, and they’re beacons for us all. (Ed. Do you mean these reports and strategy documents are all on the bonfire?)
    • Ambition – a tricky word for those in the Church of England’s Talent Pipeline and studying on the mini-MBA course (you may prefer ‘vocation’?). Either way, start by setting this out in the broadest terms imaginable. Don’t set limits or impose constraints. These can be added in much, much later, in the Operational Phase. Your job is to make the asks, not provide the answers. If you have appointed a Facilitator-Enabler, as suggested, then you are no longer providing answers or results in any case. Your role is to ask the questions and review progress.
    • Digital and Social Media – a vital ingredient of all strategy. There is virtually nothing that social media and digital solutions cannot enable. You can reach limitless numbers of people without spending too much time and money, except of course on more IT and Comms staff in Diocesan HQ. Your strategy will not be complete without a short paragraph acknowledging the transformative power of digital and social media. Again, use broad strokes. Your role is to embrace this world, not explain how it might be effective.
    • Leadership – no strategy can succeed without it. Setting out the strategy is the ultimate expression of leadership. In the unlikely event that your strategy fails, point to the absence of leadership in laity and clergy. Remember that rather like strap-lines, it will repay you handsomely to use a self-contradicting phrase that encapsulates your leadership style. A favourite is ‘Servant-Leader’, as it is easy to pose for photos doing servant-like things (e.g., put your back into planting a commemorative tree, or hold tea towel for a few minutes the next time you are at a parish lunch). But obviously, you are still The Leader, and you have no accountability to your colleagues. They have no employment rights. And the laity and the clergy won’t be allowed to scrutinise or appraise you. The good thing about strategy in the Church of England is that it is not a democracy, and they can’t get rid of your governance and leadership if they don’t agree with it. In some respects, setting strategy, goals and vision in the Church is more like being the sole ruler of a one party state. Enjoy.

    How Can I Operationalise My Strategy?

    Hand the PowerPoint assignment to someone subordinate and ask them to make it happen. Don’t try to tell them how. That’s their job. You’re strategic. Invite someone who works for you to follow up much later with “detailed operational guidance”. Ask them to link it to your strategy, wherever possible.

    If the programme fails, it’s because people didn’t understand the strategy, lacked the management skill to operationalise it, chose not to buy into it, clung to vested interests or failed to read the guidance over the bank holiday. Often, it’s a combination of the above. Or the laity and clergy are to blame, as they failed to keep pace, or preferred to continue without your vision. Either way, it’s not your problem.

    How Will I Know if My Strategy is Working?

    The success of every strategy is judged by history. The wise strategist will put as much distance as possible between themselves and history to give their strategy a fighting chance.

    Never promise that your strategy will bear fruit while you’re in a position to be accountable. Make sure the planning horizons of your strategy (if any) are slightly longer than the life expectancy of your current role. Set your heart on a bigger, better diocese or cathedral in the future, and work backwards from that point. If you are only a Suffragan or Area Bishop, it is usually a good idea to volunteer to lead and implement the strategy. When it is not working, it is easier for the Diocesan Bishop to move you on, meaning they can start again from scratch with a new vision, and blame the fact that you were called to a new role on the implementation failure.

    Can You Ever Have Too Much Strategy?

    If you need to ask this, you should not be in the Talent Pipeline. Non-strategists concentrate on the failures of the past and try and avoid repeating mistakes. These people are egg-head analysts, and are not persuaded by vision.

    Strategy depends on endless repetition. Consider what state the Church of England would be in were it not for your endless reforms and transforming vision. The true strategist constantly builds on their own success, as defined by themselves. Remember, your role is to go forwards, not backwards, and not to get distracted by the direction of travel. The point of going forward is to keep moving. The destination is open-ended.

    Assessment:

    The course is assessed by your response in the boxes below. Please note, we do not accept essays, attachments, citations or any secondary analysis drawn from academic literature or case studies you may deem relevant.

    Write your proposed Strap-line [3 words, max].

     

     

    Set out your strategic goals, and the resources to achieve these ends [20 words, max.].

     

     

    Describe your distinctive leadership contribution and style as related to your vocation and formation as part of the whole Baptised People of God [10 words, max.].

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Keeping Students Safe: the Oxford LGBT Students Safe Churches Project

    by Chrissie Chevasutt, ‘Outreach and Development Worker with Transgender, Intersex and Non-binary People’, for St Columba’s Oxford. They have lived and worked in the city for 33 years, across a wide spectrum of churches, and in varied roles, thus having a unique perspective on church history and practices over that period.

    As part of my work in the city of Oxford, working with the transgender, Intersex, and non-binary community, I work alongside and with many LGBTQIA+ students. The stories I hear from them are constant, consistent, and repeated many times over. They experience spiritual abuse and religious trauma in some of the city’s churches. They are traumatised, and often suffer many secondary conditions; deep emotional, mental, social, relational, and spiritual wounding, some of which can work itself out in psychosomatic physical illness, chronic anxiety, and struggles with mental health.

    These same churches – who would describe themselves as ‘conservative’ – then add to the students’ pain by teaching that all their struggles are because they are gay, bi, trans, or queer. These churches and leaders refuse to accept that the judgement, condemnation, exclusion, and separation, sometimes even damnation, that flows from their lips, hearts and pulpits might be the cause. The consequence of their theology, preaching and teaching is to inflict guilt and shame upon many vulnerable young lives. From this, withdrawal and isolation are a common experience for students who are driven away from church and God.

    Self-loathing, self-hatred, despair, and shame can cause self-destructive behaviours and compulsions, almost impossible to control or contain, from eating disorders and self-harm, to suicidal ideation, suicide attempts and sadly, suicides.

    All this poison flows from the systematic homophobic theology that emerged from post-WWII USA. It’s a theology undergirded by the threat of hell.

    This theology is grounded in the claim that those who enjoy same-sex relationships are indulging sexual immorality, drawing on a Christian fundamentalist and biblical literalism that leads from 1 Corinthians 6 v9, through Ephesians 4 v17-19, 5 v3-5, to the eternal damnation of Revelation 21 v7-8.

    I was recently approached by a student who felt forced to leave a church where this theology was being preached. Even after 18 months in the church, they had no idea this was the theology of that church. They are in a same-sex relationship, their partner already badly wounded by a conservative evangelical church. They were told this church they’d started to attend was ‘youth friendly, progressive and liberal, welcoming everybody’.

    Confirming this, another three students have told me separately how they had shared within their student fellowship group meetings that they are gay, and in same-sex relationships. None of this appeared to trouble the group, or the student pastors, some of whom are paid church staff. On the contrary, they felt loved and affirmed by everyone present.

    (Most of the older members of the Christian LGBTQIA+ community in Oxford, however, know this church to have a long history of campaigning against LGBTQIA+ people’s dignity, equality, rights and freedom.)

    This pastoral policy of conservative evangelical churches marketing themselves as ‘Everybody Welcome’, in order to draw in as many students as possible, may make them ‘successful churches’ but only by hiding their homophobic theology and pastoral policy, a practice which is deceitful, disingenuous and dangerous, and potentially fatal to vulnerable young lives. We know that the incidence of self-harm, suicidal ideation and suicide attempts are far higher amongst LGBTQIA+ youth, and this increases again amongst LGBTQIA+ youth from Christian fundamentalist homes, families, churches, and faith backgrounds.

    It appears certain city churches now hold a policy of strict silence over their staff, of not saying anything about gender or sexuality that might go public. They realise that, if they are known to hold homophobic theology and pastoral policies, they will lose many of the students who flock through their doors.

    In September 2022, Bishop Steven published his proposal, outlining his theology for equal marriage: Together in Love and Faith. I read it and was impressed and blessed, until I got to page 46. The LGBTQIA+ Christian community has absolutely no doubts about the courage and compassion of Bishop Steven, in becoming the first bishop to put forward a proposal for same-sex marriage. We feel both indebted to him and want to protect him from the storm he faces from those clergy in his diocese who disagree.

    Many of us, however, have grave doubts about his commitment to protecting us, especially in the matter of our Safeguarding within his churches. There are doubts over his own history and proximity to colossal Safeguarding failures that have had tragic out-workings.

    On page 46, Bishop Steven repeatedly expresses extreme reluctance to place responsibility for the spiritual abuse of LGBTQIA+ people upon individual clergy or churches. This is a red flag waving right here, threatening effective Safeguarding of LGBTQIA+ people in his own Diocese.

    After being approached by the student who had felt forced to leave the ‘welcoming’ church that had been their spiritual home for the previous year and a half, on account of the attack upon their same-sex relationship, I began to research further. I discovered an audio recording of a 45-minute Sunday sermon on homosexuality.

    It is without a doubt the worst homophobic teaching I have heard in 43 years of church life. It is an appalling distortion and manipulation of history, theology, and psychology, used by a priest, to deliberately stigmatise, pathologize and demonise LGBTQIA+ people.

    This sermon was applauded by the church.

    This is exactly why the students’ Oxford Safe Churches Project had to happen. We have a Bishop who supposedly stands for us, but won’t stand with us and protect us; so, who will?

    Students who are driven away from church have nowhere to go. They know they will not get a fair hearing from the church’s Safeguarding Officers, many of whom will hold similar beliefs to the church’s leadership, and they have zero confidence in many of the denominational or Oxford Diocesan Safeguarding structures and current practices. The evil of Pilavachi in Soul Survivor, and the Church of England’s total failure in safeguarding young people there, has destroyed what little faith they may have had in any safeguarding process with which they might have otherwise engaged. They know they will most likely suffer further abuse and retraumatising in any internal safeguarding process they enter.

    In March 2022, I met with one of the university transgender reps, who represents both their college and the LGBT Student Society. They happened to be profoundly Christian, in faith and character. One of the subjects we wrestled with was the knowledge we both shared, of students getting badly damaged, and spiritually abused, in some of the city’s conservative churches. We both felt we could not call out the damaging churches, and that whoever dared to do so might be subjected to character assassination for attempting such a daunting task.

    When we met again at the beginning of this year, our hearts and minds had totally changed. Both of us had seen, in just that one year, too many students being wounded by homophobic, transphobic theology and pastoral practises. The suffering and pain in those lives, and even in our own, led us to conclude we could longer tolerate this happening on ‘our watch’.

    Together we wrote up a proposal for the Oxford University Student LGBT Society (of which, as a mature student in the city, I’m a member), to begin a project to signpost safe churches and flag up churches we knew where students were being broken.

    This was unanimously passed at the end of Easter term, and plans developed for the project.

    A team of students has laboured right through Summer term and the summer holidays, sending out questionnaires to 30 of the main city churches, collecting testimonies, researching churches’ history in archives online. From this they are collating all their information into a simple traffic-light-coded review, to assess which churches might be safe, and which are potentially damaging for queer students.

    Their passion, desire, and objective is to stop freshers getting sucked into churches who promise welcome, but inflict spiritual abuse. Most of them have been through this themselves, or seen friends whose student life in Oxford has suffered irreparable damage. They know this is a war over students’ lives and souls. They have paid a heavy price doing this research, which for most of them is triggering, traumatising and affects their mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health. They are watched over by professionals in the university, clergy from various denominations and non-ordained pastoral workers like myself.

    The project has gone live in time for Freshers Fayre. Its bottom line is to save young lives; literally. They know their time in Oxford is short, but they are determined to leave a lasting legacy, that might see more churches becoming fully affirming at best, and at the least, force conservative churches to become honest, transparent and open about their core theology, pastoral policies and practises for their LGBTQIA+ potential members.

    They believe the Oxford Safe Churches Project has the power to achieve both those aims.