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
I’ve been the Outreach and Development Worker with Transgender, Intersex and non-binary people at St Columba’s United Reformed Church in Oxford since 2022, and I wrote about my role here. When I started in this work, I described it as “a prophetic act, a ministry of social justice and an expression of God’s outrageous love for the marginalised and oppressed.” I have been making connections, publicising what I do, and hearing people’s stories. And I have been becoming aware, even more, of how much work there is that needs to be done, in Oxford and beyond. The Oxford Safe Churches project just underlines that.
I attended St Aldate’s Church in Oxford for many years. It’s a parish church with a large student membership and describes itself on the front page of its web presence as somewhere you can “feel right at home”. Really?
That doesn’t seem to apply if you are LGBTQIA+. One of the sermons given at the church which was preserved online makes that very clear: ‘The Truth Will Set You Free’, link to the audio here. Full transcript here. I’ve mentioned it before but here I want to say rather more about it. It was given by Simon Ponsonby; I don’t know exactly in what year, except that it is definitely pre-Covid. The sermon summarises nearly 20 years of campaigning against LGBTQIA+ people, their dignity, equality, rights and spiritual freedom, by him and by the previous Rector, Charlie Cleverly, for which there is much evidence, all readily available online. Letters, articles in the press and media, both local and national, all confirm the deep prejudice towards us of this church’s leadership.
I’ve described on my blog how I am both angered and wounded deeply, by Simon Ponsonby’s abuse of power in this sermon, and I have for the last few years been ministering to many of those he has damaged, wounded and broken by his attitudes, beliefs and homophobic campaigning and preaching, which both produced and resulted from this sermon.
It’s hard to know where to start with the academic, intellectual, scholarly, theological, and pastoral reasoning in the sermon. A key factor to me seems to be the tone; Ponsonby presents himself as the oracle or avatar of the divine message; ‘absolute truth’. There is no sense of humility or self-reflection on his part, either upon his own very limited understanding or his own deeply sinful nature; he has not pursued all the way that conservative evangelical notion of the human heart (even his own), being wicked and deceitful and bent towards pride.
One last glaring dissonance which jars heavily upon many listeners who are either LGBTQIA+ or allies, to the extent it leaves one almost stunned in unbelief, is the chasm between Simon’s tone of voice and delivery, and the words he uses to describe us. I was dumbfounded on first hearing this sermon, and have had to go back and study it, several times over, to understand how such a gulf could exist in a person’s lack of self-awareness, and to try to find an explanation for it.
Simon’s tone is calm, measured, and oozes compassion. This draws the listener and audience in because it soothes them, making them believe this is God’s heart of compassion, being reflected by the preacher and teacher. Part of this tone is his continual refrain in both introduction and conclusion, of ‘We love you.’ Easy to say, but the content of the sermon gives the opposite message.
I know the preacher well, perhaps better than many. In every other sermon I have heard him preach I know this to be a genuine and authentic reflection of his heart but I am so shocked and sickened by this sermon and its content that I have had to question whether in this case the compassion is real, or feigned.
While his voice oozes compassion, his words drip hatred, judgement, condemnation, exclusion, and rejection towards us as LGBTQIA+ people. Simon demonizes us and pathologizes us, pouring shame upon us; all in the name, and supposedly for the glory, of God.
The sermon is divided into three parts, of roughly equal length, and they, to a large degree, depend upon each other for their integrity, or rather lack thereof. Each informs and builds the argument of the other. In each part – history, theology, and psychology – he indulges both flawed science, history, and experience to substantiate his argument, whilst his reasoning in each is deeply flawed, if not deliberately and intentionally skewed to favour his presupposed starting point. He offers snapshots of history, wrenched out of their true context, to prove the ‘gay lobby’ was a bullying, manipulative and destructive force against Christian morality and belief.
He points the finger at the ‘liberalism and relativism’ of modern theology, informed by both science and human experience, labelling it ‘a pick and mix’ of whatever truths you choose to believe, but fails to see that he is indulging exactly this ‘pick and mix’ approach to truth in his own versions of history, theology, and psychology. He quotes from a particular selection of work from these disciplines, without giving his hearers any sense of how limited a selection this is. He claims that he “sets some facts straight” but there is no indication that these are not objective facts. It is a shameless hypocrisy of the worst possible kind, because he is using his failure to apply academic, intellectual, scholarly rigour and discipline to the arguments he presents as ‘absolute truth’, and he is doing so, in order to exalt his own authority as a theologian, preacher and teacher and stigmatise, demonise, pathologize a vulnerable and already oppressed group.
His approach to other academic disciplines reminds me of what’s known in psychological analysis as the Dunning-Kruger effect. This is when someone who assumes themselves to be an expert or authority in one field, science, or discipline, believes they are therefore an authority in other sciences or disciplines.
I have heard Simon preach many, many times, and he always rejects the liberal theology and theologians of the last thirty years, often men and women of far greater intellectual, academic, and scholarly rigour, research, and theological depth than his own. They are seen as irrelevant because he is preaching ‘absolute truth’ and they are preaching lies.
But that repeated insistence that ‘We love you’, simply does not wash, it is meaningless, after we have been so cursed by his authority, power and words.
Why does he do this? He, like so many of his tribal mates, genuinely believes that by converting gay and LGBTQIA+ people to being straight, he is saving us from hell.
We clearly see here homophobia being embedded, maintained, and perpetuated in a parish church. It is homophobia which is using erroneous history and psychology to destroy young and vulnerable LGBTQIA+ lives. I have watched young LGBTQIA+ people, caught in cycles of shame, despair, self-hatred and self-harm, even suicidal ideation, after being subject to this type of ministry. I was one of them once. This sermon is spiritual abuse.
Did Ponsonby ever stop to think that within his congregation, listeners to his sermon, there might by young church members who are LGBTQIA+?!
If Jesus is our model of ministry, it is plain, simple, and so easy to see in the gospels, that his whole ministry was built around breaking shame from people’s lives, to restoring the oppressed and marginalised back into community, that they might flourish. The contrast I am seeing and hearing between Ponsonby’s ministry here, and that of Jesus, is so far apart, that I can only label this sermon as a manifest evil.
It is God’s loving kindness that leads us to repentance. No threat of hell, or fear of hell can draw us into the loving heart and mind of God. No theology of judgement, condemnation, exclusion, and separation, as Simon so espouses in his sermon, can reveal God’s perfect love.
It is grace, love and truth that leads us to repentance. I offer Simon that grace, love and truth and I urge him to make a full and public repentance and attempt some kind of apology and restitution to his victims. If he has moved on from his beliefs here, then he needs to publicly clarify what his new beliefs are. Yet his recent teaching in the St Aldate’s podcast series ‘Unscripted’ suggests he has not moved far at all.
What scares me the most? It’s that the church applauds the preacher for this sermon…