Consider the lilies: on changing one’s mind

Posted on February 15, 2026 by fluff35

Yes, I know that is a dahlia not a lily. But please bear with me! I’m back from another 5-day Synod. As ever, much as I enjoy seeing familiar faces and learning new things, it’s great to be back. So far I’ve been there in person for every day of every meeting, and each day I go to as much of the discussion as I can, mostly in the debating chamber itself, but sometimes – because it’s hot and stuffy in there, and I don’t feel comfortable in such large groups – watching from the Quiet Room, where the sound and vision feature, but without distraction. And often fringe meetings too, and since I was speaking at one and hosting another that meant two lunchtimes accounted for.

First, a personal comment but one which also relates to people being unaware of what being on Synod entails. I was irritated by comments on another member’s Facebook feed, expressing a lot of crossness at empty seats in the chamber. Those commenting seemed unaware that some people were watching and voting on zoom, or watching from the Quiet Room, but also failed to recognise that those attending in person are human: and there are commonly no scheduled tea/pee breaks from 9-12.45 or from 2-7. The exception was the break in the middle of the long debate on Living in Love and Faith on the Thursday, when tea stations were set up on a long table in the tea room so that we could all drink a paper cup of it before going back in. I do my best, but I need to keep hydrated. And doing my best included being there for the Eucharist first thing on the Wednesday with Archbishop Sarah as celebrant; the empty seats there probably due to some people not respecting her authority, and others regarding her and other bishops as ‘false teachers’. Not much has changed here.

The business this time around covered many areas that affect us all: some progress towards independent safeguarding; the care system; mental health (with more support recommended for clergy on how best to support those with mental health needs); poverty (40 years on from the Faith in the City report); fees for burials (Synod rejecting attempts to raise these very significantly); funding the communities with the lowest incomes; an update on plans to encourage working class people into ministry. 

And, of course, Living in Love and Faith (LLF). On that, as I said when speaking to my amendment, ‘The problem that it is too much of an end for some, and not enough of an end for others’. I was hoping to amend the motion so that the new working group will not have the usual 50:50 pro:anti split, which I believe is a recipe for stagnation, as well as injecting some urgency into their meetings and some ownership by Synod of what they are going to do. Like all other amendments in this five-hour debate, it was rejected because we voted by Houses and the House of Bishops largely followed the Archbishop of York’s call to oppose them all, although my amendment had by far the most support from bishops (12 in favour). Then we voted on the motion as unamended; the most significant part of it being to set up this working group, but a smaller one than in previous attempts. That motion was passed by nearly a 66% majority overall. So although the LLF ‘brand’ has ended, discussions go on. As I said in my speech, ‘a little less conversation and a little more action’ is needed. 

In the rest of this blog post, I’m going to reflect on just one item, and it’s not one which was at the top of my list of debates when I arrived at Synod.

This item was the Worcester Diocesan Synod motion on sustainable church flowers. It was mentioned in the first substantial debate of the session which was, as usual, on the agenda itself, taking off from the report of the Business Committee. Church flowers? Ahead of Synod there had been many ‘No, really??’ comments around Business Committee’s decision to schedule this debate. How could church flowers merit an hour of discussion? As anticipated, a speech was made in the debate on the agenda criticising that decision: I joined in the applause for that speech. Why talk about flowers when Gaza is not on the agenda until July? What does that say about our priorities?

And yet, by the end of the week, I was a convert.

The motion in question was based on the Sustainable Church Flowers movement, and originated in St Bartholomew’s, Harpley, a parish in Worcestershire. The movement has many dimensions. It’s about the environment; avoiding damaging pesticides and unnecessary plastic, and the release of microplastics into the seas. It’s about the planet; the use of water in drought-affected countries to grow flowers for export. It’s about working conditions; who grows these flowers and how are they treated? But it’s also about beauty and life and fragility. Floral foam is the enemy: chicken wire is one of many environmentally-friendly ways of keeping flowers in place. 

In the debate, so many good reasons were offered for this motion being on our agenda. Yes, it could have been a memo to parishes asking them to think about using seasonal flowers and sustainable methods of display. But by coming up from one parish, through deanery and diocesan synod to General Synod, the sustainable church flowers motion demonstrated precisely the way that we can amplify the voices of our parishes; their concerns and their experiences. It celebrated the work of the largely invisible people who, week by week, decorate our church buildings; many of them women, many of them in the older age groups. By asking how we arranged flowers before floral foam, it also recovers lost knowledge and honours older people who can share this knowledge afresh. And, as was pointed out in the debate, we can be angered by silence on Gaza as well as angered by the damage we are doing to the environment. They are not mutually exclusive. There was a procedural motion to move to next business during the debate, but it was defeated. I wasn’t the only convert in the room!

More than once in the debate people quoted Jesus’ words, ‘Consider the lilies of the field’. I was interested to see that the Sustainable Church Flowers site has an excellent analysis of the origin of lilies as an Easter flower, showing how forced flowers out of season have huge costs for the environment. There’s something there about tradition, and how it needs to be challenged in the light of new information.

I even stood to speak. I wasn’t called; it probably didn’t help that I had not put in a request to do so ahead of the debate. I wanted to share a further flower-related point from the mantra ‘reduce-reuse-recycle’. When I married my husband, in another church in our benefice there had been a funeral of a member of the armed forces a couple of days before. His family asked if the flowers from that funeral could be reused in any way, so our vicar called me. I said yes, of course. My friends – mostly from the Baptist church, one of them a professional florist using our wedding to train some other people new to this work – rapidly rethought and wove those funeral flowers into their arrangements. Flowers can move from signs of mortality to signs of celebration. It’s just one aspect of flower power. I was delighted to run into a group of parishioners from St Bartholomew’s Harpley after the debate, and to share my new enthusiasm with them.

I’ve been reflecting on why I was converted to the importance of this motion. It’s partly about initial gut reactions versus learning more. Don’t get me wrong, I love flowers, to the point where I post pictures on them on Bluesky using the hashtag ‘bloomscrolling’. My dahlia photos are particularly widely shared! I’m also a galantophile so this is one of my favourite seasons. But I hadn’t thought through the implications of this debate. Once I knew more, I moved towards enthusiasm. In that sense, it’s like my instant conversion to supporting the ordination of women to the priesthood, many years ago, when I was a deanery synod secretary taking notes as Mary Tanner addressed us and pointed out that the priest at the altar represents Jesus’s humanity, not his maleness.

And I’m just back from church, talking to one of our churchwardens about the flowers in our church, because she’d seen this debate was coming up and had told our wonderful flower arrangers about it; so, from the parish to Synod, and from Synod straight back to the parish. Normal church life has been informed and enhanced.

For me, this debate was Synod at its best. 

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February 2026: Questions raised by Synod Questions

Posted on February 7, 2026 by fluff35

The Questions Synod members are allowed to send in are answered by appropriate staff members and then circulated with those answers shortly before Synod meets. We meet on Monday, for a week, so the answers came out yesterday; another 106 pages of reading.

Of the 258 (!) Questions this time around, the ones attracting attention are those on Project Spire – which are first in the list so there will be opportunities for supplementaries on them – and those around the costs, in money and time, of the Living in Love and Faith process. I was one of two members asking about the financial cost of this. The answer (Qs 94/95) is that, from 2017-2025, LLF cost £1.6 million. That of course excludes those of us who offered our time to the work. As for Synodical time, 42¼ hours have been spent on LLF in Synod since Feb 2019 (Q. 96; see also Q. 238: 34 hours of those fell in this quinquennium). And more hours to come next week.

There are two contenders for my personal award for the best Question/answer.

Unlawful use of those parts ordained for generation

The first is one of those ‘what is sex?’ Questions. Synod is notoriously coy, fond of euphemisms and of collective clutching of pearls. Here’s Q. 228, following up on last July’s Synod binning of Issues in Human Sexuality and replacing it with the Guidelines for the Professional Conduct for the Clergy. Revd Dr Patrick Richmond (Norwich) asks:

Given that the Guidelines for the Professional Conduct of the Clergy now serve as a primary document for discernment and discipline, what consideration has been given to the definition of ‘sexual intercourse’ used therein? Specifically, if the term is understood in the narrow sense of biological coitus, as recently argued by the Revd Canon Neil Patterson [https://viamedia.news/2026/01/24/what-is-anglican-sexanyway/ ] what assessment has been made regarding how the Guidelines reflect the Church’s wider authoritative teaching—such as that in the Book of Homilies warning against ‘all unlawful use of those parts ordained for generation’—and what steps are being taken to ensure that candidates and clergy understand the wider scope of the conduct to which they are committing? 

Unlawful use of your parts, eh? And the answer, from the Bishop of Chester as the Chair of the Ministry Development Board:

The replacement of references to Issues in Human Sexuality (“Issues”) with the Guidelines for the Professional Conduct for the Clergy (“the Guidelines”) in the discernment process does not create new obligations for candidates and clergy and nor does it make the Guidelines a primary document for discernment and discipline. 

The primary documents for discernment are the Qualities for Discernment used before a candidate comes to a discernment panel and the Qualities for Formation, using during training for ordinands. Reference is made to the Guidelines within these processes. 

The primary documents for discipline are set out in the statutory grounds within the Clergy Discipline Measure and the proposed Clergy Conduct Measure. 

As was emphasised by Synod in July 2025 when they called upon the House to replace Issues with the Guidelines, and emphasised again by the House when they decided to make the requested change, no aspect of the Church of England’s theological or ethical understanding of matters relating to sexuality has been changed by the decision to refer to the Guidelines in the process of vocational discernment and training for ordained ministry. Moreover, the Guidelines for the Professional Conduct of the Clergy do not in themselves establish or extend the law, though they do point to the law. They seek to provide a framework for behaviour that reflects the highest standard to which all clergy should aspire.

Wisely, avoiding any reference to those ‘parts’. However, Neil, whose Via Media article is cited, knows his Book of Homilies – a sixteenth-century document – and observes that the quotation comes from the Homily Against Whoredom and Adultery, which also commends the ‘godly acts’ of societies where adultery was punished by mutilation or death. It is rather unlikely that we will make it to Q. 228 in the time available, but he suggests that a good supplementary would be ‘Can the bishop confirm that the Church of England no longer supports such punishments?’

Doing the theology (even more of it)

But my absolute favourite Question this time around has to be Q.144 with the legible raised eyebrows in the answer; goodness, someone is reading these documents and wondering about why they cite certain scholars! Readers will recall that the last few years of Synodical business have heard many calls for ‘more theology’ and that’s why the Faith and Order Commission (FAOC) has produced a lot of pages of it which are supposed to underpin what is happening (or not happening) now on LLF. One is GS Misc 1431. Here’s the Question:

The Revd Canon Simon Talbott (Ely) to ask the Chair of the House of Bishops: 

Of the Theologians cited in GS Misc 1431 100% are white, 96% are men, 83% are in opposite sex marriages, 46% are North American, 12% are ex-gay/same-sex attracted identifying evangelicals, and only one (4% of the whole) is an affirming gay Anglican with a partner. Will the House of Bishops please commit to ensuring a broader theological base in the advice it receives, including taking seriously the scholarship of women and LGBTQIA+ Anglicans? 

The Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe to reply on behalf of the Chair of the House of Bishops:

The question indicates a careful reading of GS Misc 1431. The House is grateful for this engagement with FAOC’s work on GS Misc 1431 and the detailed analysis of sources that the questioner provides. 

FAOC recognises it has a responsibility to ensure representation across a range of backgrounds and perspectives in the scholarship with which it engages, certainly including gender and sexuality. Indeed, FAOC has discussed this responsibility at various times during this quinquennium, sometimes in connection with its work on LLF. 

GS Misc 1431 derives from a particular context. FAOC was asked to address a specific set of process-focussed questions closely connected to the Canons and disciplinary processes of the Church of England. Existing scholarship in this area is very limited, and it was difficult to achieve the desirable level of direct representation. At some points the argument is carried by theologians arguing for greater inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people. 

GS Misc 1431 refers the reader on several occasions to the Living in love and Faith book (2020), which contains a wider range of backgrounds amongst the scholars cited. This wider background has informed FAOC’s theological reflection on all its LLF-related work, although FAOC accepts this is not explicitly reflected in the work that GS Misc 1431 cites.

Advice given to the House of Bishops incorporates more than the sources quoted, always including the wider theological reflections of FAOC’s members, where considerable attention has been paid to issues of diversity. Moreover, the House trusts its advisers to support the whole Church in their work. 

FAOC welcomes analysis of the diversity and representativeness of its work. The Commission will continue to seek broad, balanced engagement with a diverse range of theological voices. 

We know from another Question (Q. 119) that the House of Bishops only had a week to read GS Misc 1431, along with the legal advice and another FAOC paper, so it seems unlikely that they could come up with such a ‘careful reading’ as this. After all, they’d just had 100 pages of theology and law sent out to them. You can see why the bishop – who is the chair of FAOC – comes across as rather impressed, although of course we don’t know if he wrote this answer himself.

This reference to FAOC is timely, because it is clear that the House of Bishops are waiting for yet another FAOC paper, on episcopacy and specifically on Delegated Episcopal Ministry; yes, DEM which the House has already rejected. (see Q. 140). We find out from Q. 254 that the House of Bishops Standing Committee decided such a paper was needed in February 2025 but FAOC haven’t had time to go beyond scoping it yet. Why did they want it?

We don’t get the Minutes of this Standing Committee but we can see where this is coming from by looking at the Minutes of the January 2025 House of Bishops. These feature the Bishop of Leicester (at that point, lead bishop for LLF) saying that the ‘theological undergirding’ for DEM ‘would be ready for May’ (5.2) but also have the Bishop in Europe – remember, he’s the chair of FAOC – saying that FAOC had ‘agreed’ (who asked them? Not clear) to do ‘further work on episcopacy, including ecumenical reflections’ (4.3) and specifically asserting, apparently contrary to what the lead bishop for LLF said at the same meeting, that the House ‘would not have the ecclesiological thinking on DEM by May’ (my italics, Minutes 5.10; and see also 5.7.8). There’s also a reference to the House agreeing ‘To commission more theological work on the appointment of diocesan bishops with some sacramental impairment’ (4.4.1). More? In addition to the other episcopacy work? Answering a Question on the episcopacy work, Q. 254, the Bishop in Europe says that it won’t be ready until ‘well into 2027’, probably not until Autumn. Casting some doubt even on that date, the Bishop added that FAOC changes its membership on 1 April 2027 and it’s the new membership who will decide if the document is ready to publish.

So when we are told in another paper for this Synod that a new Working Group will be set up and that it will ‘report back to General Synod within the first two years of the new General Synod quinquennium’ (from its Terms of Reference); how does that work with the FAOC tasks? The last batch of FAOC papers did not come out when we’d been told to expect them, even after Synod had voted extra resource to make that happen. 

Is this yet another timetable which will inevitably slip? And, if so, can we trust this new Working Group to be able to do any work?

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Concluding without ending: what happens next with Living in Love and Faith?

Posted on January 25, 2026 by fluff35

February 2026’s meeting of General Synod is nearly upon us; the papers came out last week and I am starting to make my way through them. 

There’s a very full agenda but, for the moment restricting my thoughts to Living in Love and Faith (LLF), what do we have this time around? It’s been obvious for months that LLF is somehow coming to a close now, although what’s interesting is how we envisage a ‘close’. GS 2426 summarises the attempts of the bishops to ‘explore’ (their word) how to implement the motions Synod passed in, and since, February 2023, and it traces what happened between then and the January 2026 House of Bishops Letter to the Church of England. Unless otherwise referenced, all quotations in this blog post are from GS 2426. The bishops’ ‘exploration’ involves going through the various clauses of all these motions while saying nothing we’ve not heard before. The ‘lament and repent’ clause of the February 2023 motion is repeated with more focus on the pain – ‘it has been indescribably painful’. Apparently, while many are feeling bruised and unsafe, we have ‘learned lessons’. I really wish that terminology, thoroughly debased by its repetition in the context of safeguarding failures, could be abandoned.

This latest document comprises 48 pages.

Anything I’ve not seen before?

Not really; it’s all about how there is not going to be any ‘Delegated Episcopal Ministry’, nor any Code of Practice (originally planned, but as nothing has changed, no need for it) nor an Independent Review Panel (because nothing has happened). I suppose one tiny new nugget is that, in response to the clause in the February 2023 motion about ‘monitoring’ the use of the Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF), we now have a statement that there is some ‘exploring’ going on to see how this can be done through data we already have. But prayers of blessing with same-sex couples are still only allowed in existing services. However, I can save the C of E some time here – A Church Near You already includes a tag for churches to add if they are willing to use the PLF so why not use that? Maybe it’s just too easy.

The much-delayed Faith and Order Commission (FAOC) documents which came out in November are mentioned yet again (they are in the GS Misc section here and I wrote about them here), but not the various critiques of them that have appeared on Via Media (e.g. here) and other blogs. Instead, we are promised ‘an orientation webinar’ on them ‘prior to the February 2026 group of sessions’. I suppose this is the zoom on 26 January – tomorrow! – which was flagged up in an email sent to Synod members on 21 January. I’m signed up for that. Anyone thinking of standing for Synod later this year, make a note not just that there are extra meetings that turn up ahead of the actual five days in London, but also of the short notice that you are given. And probably better not to be working: the briefing for Safeguarding Structures is scheduled for 3 pm on 2 February.

Is this the end?

The summary of the Bishops’ statement is that it contains a plan to ‘conclude the work under the LLF Motions’ but this doesn’t mean all conversations are ended. So a conclusion to one thing (and LLF was a very large thing) but somehow not an end. There’s a hint that we need a pause, a ‘period of rest’ which could ‘leave more space for the Holy Spirit to move’. I am afraid that comes across as a convenient excuse for doing nothing. And there’s more because, despite the word ‘conclude’ the proposal is not, in fact, to do nothing. The intro to GS 2426 points the reader to Part 3 which offers a ‘more permanent structural framework’ for the continued conversations, which are to happen as part of ‘regular ongoing work’. I’ll get to that shortly.

The continued work is going to include ‘areas that have received less focus to date’, and in my negative moments I read that to mean that a load more people are going to be discovering just how ‘indescribably painful’ it is to have your life dissected, your identity challenged and your most important relationships defined as sinful.

Part 2: the House of Bishops Letter to the Church of England

While the second part of GS 2426 just repeats the January 2026 statement of the House of Bishops, we can read these alongside the Minutes of their October meeting when the decisions were made; these came out very late in the day but they are interesting. 

Part 2 states:

  • The point that the LLF process is ending in a way that is ‘imperfect, untidy and which leaves some important questions unresolved’ (§34)
  • That ‘lessons need to be learned’ point, this time referring to the 2023-2026 period (§35) – well, one lesson is that what Synod passes doesn’t necessarily happen
  • That there will be yet more FAOC work (§29) – and we’ve already seen how long it takes to get reports from them (I am sure for good reasons, but it does look like a delaying tactic) – this time on Delegated Episcopal Ministry, which the rest of the document suggests is already dead so why do we need another report?

But the main take-home message from Part 2 is the proposal for another – another! – working group. This one would be to talk about how Canon B2 could be used to make standalone services of the PLF possible. That makes no sense at all. We already have the long list of legal steps that would be necessary if Canon B2 were to be used. The group would also talk about the legislation and the theology needed for clergy to be in same-sex civil marriages. You’ll remember that same-sex civil partnerships are fine for them but marriages aren’t, because apparently there’s no sex in civil partnerships; something addressed in a recent blog post from Neil Patterson. The C of E really does feel like an alternative universe, and not in a fun way.

As for those ‘areas that have received less focus to date’, the spotlight will be falling on ‘singleness; transgender identity; technology and sexuality; and the wider sexualisation of society’. I am not sure what this says about how we respond to changes in ‘society’ (like it is One Thing?); perhaps, by the time this group says anything, ‘society’ will have moved back towards purity culture again.

Part 3: the new group

This is where the interesting stuff begins. The LLF process is concluding. But it isn’t. Part 3 tells us that the temporary programme of LLF (a temporary programme that has been dragging on since 2017) ‘now needs an established, ongoing place within the life and work of the Church’ with ‘longer term resourcing’. Enter… a new group! The Relationships, Sexuality and Gender Working Group! Not a very snazzy title but we get the picture. It will be driving and marshalling the work. It will issue advice (not relationships advice, I trust) but the Bishops will make the decisions. It will have workstreams! It will manage teams! And it will report back to Synod by 2028. Annex 2 gives the details. As usual it’s designed to be bishop-heavy (up to 5 bishops): the 10-12 members will be picked ‘by  Archbishops in consultation with the LLF Programme Board’. It will meet four times a year which doesn’t seem like a recipe for making progress.

This group, if Synod agrees (and maybe even if it doesn’t?) will explore how standalone services for same-sex couples can happen under B2 and how clergy could enter same-sex marriages. Interestingly, the document doesn’t say (this is on p.20) same-sex civil marriages. So are we talking about church marriage? That seems unlikely. But it will also consider ‘proportionate pastoral reassurance measures to accompany’ these marriages. Maybe we are talking about church marriages after all?

Part 4: what comes to Synod next month

Part 4 simply consists of the 4-clause motion for Synod to vote on, closing LLF and setting up the RSGWG.

Annex 3: asking the dioceses

In the introduction to the document the feedback from consultations at diocesan synods was described as ‘helpful’ but GS 2426 also has a very short report on these consultations which shows that no conclusions were possible because they weren’t all working with the same questions, and anyway the results from only 24 dioceses were available for analysis. The material analysed isn’t just from the consultations but also from emails – from those who couldn’t be there in person? That’s a surprise. I note that in my diocese we were told no participation was possible if you weren’t at the meeting. 

Pastoral Guidance

And finally… we have an updated version of the Pastoral Guidance document, which is about how to decide whether to use the PLF in a church, cathedral or chaplaincy. This still includes some pretty dodgy questions like 1.2.2 ‘Do the PLF presuppose sexual activity? Could or should a minister ask questions of the couple with regards to sexual activity?’ While the answer is No, and No, even seeing the question is distasteful. There are also some questions which I wonder if anyone is ever going to ask in reality, like whether you can enter a covenanted friendship if you are married to someone other than this friend.

Back to Synod

The LLF material in this Synod comes in two instalments: a presentation on 10 February and a debate on 12 February. The latter comes after a debate on a diocesan synod motion on using sustainable flowers in churches: because ‘Church flowers are an expression of our worship and an important part of our welcome to people in our churches’ (GS 2433B). There is a certain irony in having a debate on flowers immediately before a debate which includes reference to that Pastoral Guidance and the importance of not following ‘wedding traditions’ (§1.3.6) in a service using the PLF.

What is currently far from certain is how Synod will respond to this concluding-which-isn’t-ending, this move from a very long and very expensive ‘process’ to an ‘established, ongoing place’ with dedicated resources. Will Synod vote for it, or against it? Will the motion to set up the new group be so heavily amended that it falls under its own weight? And why should we believe – whether we want change, or we don’t – that anything different is going to happen? Is this just finding an even longer patch of long grass, into which we can deposit not just lesbian and gay people, but trans people too?

Watch this space.

Posted in Church of England and gender, equal marriage, General Synod, Living in Love and Faith, marriage | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

What colour should it be? ‘Furthering’ Living in Love and Faith

Posted on January 7, 2026 by fluff35

As we start to look towards February’s General Synod, with an hour scheduled in the draft agenda for a Living in Love and Faith (LLF) “presentation”, and another 4 hours for a “debate” (not clear yet on what). it’s time, I think, for (yet another) update on the process.

It’s been obvious for a while that LLF is in some way drawing to a close; a pretty strong clue was that, when Nick Shepherd left in September as the main staff lead, he was replaced by Revd Helen Fraser on secondment just until March 2026. That suggests LLF ends at the February General Synod, with a bit of mopping up left to do.

But what do ‘close’ and ‘end’ mean? That’s a good question. Let’s backtrack briefly…

The House of Bishops met in October. We still await the Minutes and I shall update this if those add anything to what we already know. A 15 October press release announced simply that “a series of key decisions” had been made “with near unanimity”, following the release of long-promised documents from the Legal Office and the Faith and Order Commission (FAOC). My own brief summary of those documents is here and they have since been challenged by a range of other people; for example, as “not particularly helpful”, “confusing and at times needlessly offensive” or as “shamefully inadequate”. It will be interesting to find out just how much time the bishops – who have quite enough to do without having around 150 pages of law and theology dumped on them – were given to digest those documents; at least one Question on this will be asked in February’s Synod.

The main decision in October was on the synodical and legislative processes that would be necessary (a) for standalone services of blessing for committed same-sex couples to happen, and (b) before ordinands could enter training, or existing clergy could be allowed to be relicensed, if they entered a same-sex civil marriage. None of this is exactly new. I’ve noted here that much of it had already been laid out in other synodical papers which have already come to Synod, such as GS2346 which was debated in February 2024. There’s already an established route for new services, Canon B2 (explained here), although not everyone agrees that a standalone blessing would need to take that route. Allowing clergy to enter same-sex civil marriages would need to be an “amending canon and measure”. Nothing new there either. But no sense of wanting to start the processes.

Meanwhile, blessings of committed same-sex couples continue in existing, scheduled church services, using thePrayers of Love and Faith commended by the House of Bishops under Canon B5. So what’s the problem with using these in standalone services? Apparently that they may look like weddings, with casual attenders thinking they’d been to a church marriage because … frilly white dresses, flowers, rings, whatever. In the Minutes of the May 2025 House of Bishops meeting (6.6), Revd Dr Casey Strine told the House that the term now being used for these was “symbolic actions. The latter term is preferred to the earlier terminology of liturgical aesthetics”. One example among many of how there seems to be a lot of work on language without any action. It reminds me of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where after 573 committee meetings fire still has not been discovered, and where the “single simplest machine in the entire Universe” – the wheel – has not yet been discovered, but the “marketing girl” deflects criticism with “Alright, Mr. Wiseguy, if you’re so clever, you tell us what colour it should be.”

Of course, casual attenders at all sorts of church services may not grasp the theological niceties. I’m not sure regular attenders grasp them all. But is that really such a problem?

The other decision in October was that Delegated Episcopal Ministry (DEM) – arrangements for diocesan bishops who thought one way on LLF to delegate their role to other bishops who thought the opposite way, for bishop-y things like confirmations and ordinations – was officially not going to happen. And without that, there would be no need for some sort of code of practice to set out how it would be happening. Because it wouldn’t be happening! The “near unanimity” here was no surprise, as for conservatives who want their own “third province” – I wrote about that here – DEM didn’t go far enough, while for everyone else it went too far in eroding the role of the diocesan bishop. I can see that; it’s dangerously near to “pick your own bishop” and if you could do that according to their view on lesbian and gay people then why not on everything else?

And so we come to December. According to the published agenda, the December House of Bishops meeting had nearly two hours allocated to LLF in a meeting scheduled for just over three hours in total. The 16 December press release from that meeting states that it did not, as we had expected and as the press release from October had anticipated, make those “Final decisions”. Instead, the House announced that it was going “to spend more time finalising its proposals on the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) process”; the decisions made in October “were not contested” but work was needed “to finalise” the text of a letter from the House. This, presumably, is a reference to the Bishops’ Letter, which was long ago announced as one of the documents that would be issued but which has so far not come to Synod in any form. The language is interesting: ‘finalise’, to go with ‘close’ and ‘end’.

So what’s driving the LLF process into the mud?

Some possible answers would be:

  • Reading the various FAOC documents has made the bishops nervous (the problem with this is that they don’t seem to have had time to read them before the October meeting)
  • DEM was A Step Too Far for everyone (pity that they couldn’t have decided that before all the work was done developing a plan for local groups of dioceses that would make it possible to find conservative bishops when asked for)
  • The Alliance has done brilliantly in scaring the bishops with their talk of an Action Day on which PCCs or – if they don’t want to pass a motion to this effect – just the vicar would announce to their diocesan bishop one or more of these statements: we want to have the oversight of a different bishop/we are not paying into the common fund but will only allow our money to be used to support parishes with whom we agree on theology/we want ordinands to be trained in a special “orthodox” [1] programme rather than in the C of E theological colleges and courses.
  • Bishops like the sound of a closure to LLF as a ‘process’ but with the onus being placed on the rest of the church to decide what to do. To quote the summary of the words of Bishop Martyn Snow at the May 2025 House of Bishops, “Failure to reach agreement would not be the end of the conversation. Synod members would table Private Member’s Motions; dioceses would pass Diocesan Synod Motions. These would pass or fail by narrow margins with consequences.”

As we wait for more from the bishops – not just the minutes from October, which would have been approved in December so I had expected to be released before now, but also from their next meeting in the middle of this month – we can at least see where the driving force of The Alliance, the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC), stands.

The CEEC issued a press release and newsletters after the October House of Bishops. The key message from this group, who believe that any sexual expression between two people of the same sex is a sin, is that the bishops need to go even further, so The Alliance must “continue to contend” (they do like their alliteration). And it’s not enough for them to prevent use of the Prayers of Love and Faith in existing services: they have to be taken out of use completely, because they are “unbiblical”. CEEC “long[s] for the bishops to remove the prayers they commended in 2023” and “If that is not possible – let’s advocate for a structural rearrangement which secures orthodoxy going forward.” So that’s the third province again.

And that Action Day, originally planned for 1 December? According to The Alliance, it’s not off the table; there’s been what they call a “pivot” away from putting the plans into action, but it will be happening “if and when the red lines of standalone services and clergy same-sex marriage are furthered.”

Note that: “furthered”. What counts as “furthering”? That’s the big question. If any new group is set up to continue work on relationships and marriage, will that count? If the remit of such a group is to produce another document, or to offer possible ways forward without actually committing to such movement, is that “furthering”? Like The Alliance leaders, the trustees of Together for the Church of England met with the Archbishop of York and others at Lambeth Palace on 5 November. Like them, we were told that some sort of group would probably be proposed. But much here depends on the wording. Would it be a “dialogue” group or something with more direction? The Alliance have written about their aversion to it being a “steering” group because that, to them, means “furthering”. Back to the thesaurus, everyone. 

Because playing with words is so much easier than thinking about the people whose lives are most affected by the continued inertia of the Church of England.

[1] Here I am having trouble, as usual, in finding labels for the different views. Inclusive/conservative used to work; then the conservatives seemed to prefer to call themselves orthodox and the rest of us progressive; and recently their word for us seems to be ‘revisionists’.

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The Third Province: Welcome to Mercia

Posted on December 29, 2025 by fluff35

Mercia? I wonder how many of those who read this blog realise that the ‘third province’ which some conservative evangelicals are promoting already has a name, even though it doesn’t exist? These conservatives say they are willing to remain in the Church of England but only under certain conditions, the main one being that our Church would comprise the three provinces of York, Canterbury and … Mercia. In contrast to the current Masonic Province of Mercia, which has its own badge illustrated here, this Mercia would not be a geographical province in the way that the current provinces of the Church of England also are, but it would have the same structures as the C of E. In this post I want to look into the history of the idea of a third province, and to explain the very different sense in which that is currently being mooted.

As I write this, I am waiting for the minutes of the October 2025 House of Bishops meeting to be released. Recently, they have come out once the following meeting – in this case, the December 2025 meeting – has agreed them as a correct record. October was when the bishops resisted the proposals for Delegated Episcopal Ministry (DEM), an informal system by which those who disagreed with their diocesan bishop’s position on same-sex marriage could have ordinations and confirmations carried out by a different bishop nominated by their diocesan. The DEM proposals were an attempt to respond to conservative concerns, but managed to panic not only those who found this model of the role of the bishop within the church entirely alien to Anglicanism, but also those who call themselves ‘orthodox’ (see this video from Revd Charlie Skrine, who is someone in the latter group). DEM was supposed to be accompanied by a Code of Practice, intended to protect those who disagreed with their bishop on same-sex marriage (from either direction). When DEM was thrown out, the Code of Practice also bit the dust; after all, why would it be needed, as the bishops were not recommending any further movement on either allowing clergy to be in same-sex civil marriages or extending use of the Prayers of Love and Faith to standalone services? 

DEM was not enough for conservatives because it was not sufficiently formal, not sufficiently enshrined in law. And they are quite clear that what they want instead is that ‘third province’. Details of what this would mean, in terms not only of episcopal oversight but selection for ordination training and the provision of such training, were laid out in the 2020 CEEC document Visibly Different, put together from earlier CEEC documents by Stephen Hofmeyr and Martin Davie. 

For example, the decision to join Mercia would be made by parishes. The boundaries of those parishes would be unchanged but they could plant churches in other parishes (Visibly Different, 7.5.10). Mercia’s doctrine would be that of the C of E “at the point of its formation minus any elements that were supportive of same-sex relationships and gender transition” (7.5.13). What about the ordination of women, previously the issue that was going to split the Church, and for which – as we will see shortly – a third province was also proposed? In Mercia, women would remain eligible to serve in both lay and ordained roles, although parishes could opt out of that and have “a male bishop who shared their convictions” (7.15.16) (as they already can, of course). Those on the third province’s Convocation and in its elected House of Laity would also be on General Synod but could not vote on anything that concerned the other two provinces (7.5.22). In July 2024, Martin Davie imagined further how Mercia would work, here.

The most conservative members of the C of E already have their Provincial Episcopal Visitors (‘flying bishops’), both Anglo-Catholic and conservative evangelical, but this only covers those who cannot accept the ordination of women. That isn’t the issue any longer; the focus of panic has shifted to those in same-sex relationships but, as that quote on doctrine from Visibly Different shows, this has been extended to include gender identity. Different alliances have been made over recent history between groups within the C of E who may disagree on much, but who are prepared to come together briefly on those areas where they agree. At the moment, it’s The Alliance, although I often find it hard to tell the difference between The Alliance and one of its constituent groups, the Church of England Evangelical Council(CEEC). 

The Alliance includes not only CEEC, HTB and New Wine but also the traditional Catholics. Writing in 2000 about the forms of evangelicalism around at the time, Monica Furlong quoted W.R. Matthews who in 1969 described “the unholy alliance between the extreme Protestants and the extreme Anglo-Catholics” around the moves to update the Prayer Book – and that was nearly a century ago, in 1927. Extreme Protestants “feared the Mass” while extreme Anglo-Catholics “feared they might be prevented from saying the Latin Mass in their churches”. Furlong’s own comment is that “Such alliances, based not on shared principle but on expediency, seem rather ignoble”. [1] 

Of the partners in The Alliance, it seems to me that it’s CEEC currently leading the calls for a third province. But this term has meant different things over the last century.

How many dioceses per province?

In its twentieth-century manifestations, the possibility of a third province had been raised in the 1920s. The place of the county of Nottingham was under discussion in the Convocation of Canterbury: should it be moved from Canterbury to York? It was pointed out that if the province of Mercia ever came into being, “a further transplantation would be necessary” (Church Times 11 May 1923). Why Mercia? Because there had briefly been a province of Mercia at the end of the eighth century (788-802) although that was rather different from anything being proposed then (or now) because it had a clear geography – basically, the Midlands – and it was focused on Lichfield.

In the 1960s, calls for a third province again began as a purely pragmatic idea, based on Gregory the Great (an example of finding something in church history to support what you want to do now). Briefly, this is how it happened. The 1969 Synodical Government Measure set up our present General Synod in which the House of Laity votes on all matters that come before Synod. As part of the discussions leading up to that, in October 1962 the Convocation of York discussed the different ways in which the laity could be involved in church government. The bishops had supported the Majority report to create a General Synod, but the York Convocation voted for the Minority report which kept the Convocations (Convocation just means a separate meeting of the House of Clergy of either York or Canterbury province). This was about whether Convocations should continue to have the final say on doctrine. The Bishop of Manchester (Rt Revd William Greer) noted that: “When Convocation had acquired its exclusive rights in matters of doctrine, the laity could no longer read or write. This was no longer true.” At this meeting of the Convocation of York, a third province was proposed, to be the archbishopric of Lichfield, formed from half of the dioceses of Canterbury province, in keeping with Gregory the Great “who had limited a province to twelve dioceses”. 

So the original ‘third province’ idea was about how many dioceses should be in any one province. This was also the sense of debates in early 1965 when the creation of more dioceses was mooted; if that happened “would it be possible to avoid the creation of a third province in the Church of England?” The report in the Church Times of 22 January 1965 included this reaction against such a development: “the thought of three separate Convocations, each going its own way, is frightful to contemplate”. Yet when the proposal for synodical government eventually went to the dioceses, Carlisle – for example – voted 273 to 77 in favour of a third province. It didn’t happen. Administrative reasons were also why, in the 1980s, the Bishop of London (Dr Graham Leonard) suggested that London could be a third province, replacing the area scheme there.

Getting ethical: the Third Province Movement

It was only in the 1990s that calls for a third province began to be linked not with administrative effectiveness but with ethics. ‘The Third Province Movement’ was set up in 1992 under the aegis of the Church Society: another of the groups currently in The Alliance. A simple majority on the PCC was considered sufficient for joining the third province. Adverts began to appear in the church press, with those interested asked to send a stamped addressed envelope (remember those?) to an address in Mayfield, East Sussex. This was the home of Margaret Brown, a General Synod member who was the Chairman of the Movement, although rather than giving her name the ads focused on the eminent male patrons. Brown, whose first speech in the Synod was about being called to uphold the Bible – and having been in the debating chamber at the time I can bear witness to the fact that she held one up as she said that – was also a co-founder of Women Against the Ordination of Women. She died in August 2018, but there is a useful profile of her in the Church Times for 28 September 1990.

Looking at these ads in the Church Times, in 1993 the only issue mentioned by those wanting a third province was the ordination of women, although unspecified “liberal changes” were mentioned in passing. The women priests legislation had passed in 1992, so the Movement was one way of reacting against that, but not everyone had the same sort of structure in mind. In Sept 1994, Forward in Faith (also now part of The Alliance) was also asking for a third province for those opposed to women priests but their chairman Revd John Broadhurst said “This is nothing to do with the Third Province Movement. Our ultimate aim has always been for a parallel Church”. It’s not clear how far this was about two different models of what a ‘third province’ could be, and how far it was about ownership of the Movement. It is interesting that, in 2014, when women bishops were being proposed, the Movement was again in opposition to the traditional Catholic position.

By 1994, Third Province Movement ads had moved towards offering a third province as better than other options which were now being named as: the ‘Rome’ option, the ‘Orthodox’ option, a ‘Continuing Church’ or stay at home on Sundays (e.g. Church Times 25 Nov 1994).

In 1998 the Church Society issued an editorial saying a third province was the only solution, and in this editorial it unpacked that “liberal changes” remark further; it was becoming clear, the editor – Gerald Bray – stated, that the ordination of women was linked to “the push for the ordination of practising homosexuals, and also to the desire for ‘inclusive-language’ liturgy”. Bray raised questions about whether bishops in the third province would “be on a par with the others, or would they be suffragans only? Above all, what would happen to the quota system?” As so often, it all goes back to money. Possibly the most bizarre suggestion in the 1998 editorial was that, while “Liberals would not be welcome in the new province”, there was no way in which they could be kept out, and “one can be sure that liberal elements would flock to it, as parasites always seek the fattest body to suck blood from”.

Over the following decade, the range of concerns continued to expand well beyond that initial objection to women’s ordination. In 2001, the Third Province Movement was also wanting to stop divorced people “becoming churchwardens or general synod members”. Two years later, the Movement was inviting people to send in their s.a.e. if they were concerned about respect for Scripture, the ordination of women to the priesthood and women in episcopacy, the laxity of morals in the C of E or the C of E’s alleged failure to proclaim the uniqueness of Jesus Christ (Church Times 28 Nov 2003). The aim of the Movement was to have their own Province, Archbishop and Bishops “exercising both pastoral oversight and full jurisdiction over all parishes, whatever their churchmanship that do not accept the Ordination of women to the Priesthood and liberal innovations, if all else fails”. They would have their own governing body and Canon Law and “an equitable share of the buildings and financial resources of the Church of England”. Money, again…

Unilateral action

The Movement’s 2003 ad also stated that they rejected “unilateral action” but such rejection ended in 2009, when Brown was still holding out for “dioceses for traditionalists” but wrote, “It’s come to the point where we shall have to say, with great reluctance and after very careful thought, that if something more is not done on [sic] our favour, we shall seriously consider cutting quota payments and consecrating our own bishops” (Church Times 16 Oct 2009). The initial proposal of the Movement was that a simple majority on the PCC was all that would be needed for a parish to join; this was not an occasion when the importance of a two-thirds vote was suggested.

And this is pretty much where we are today, with The Alliance. The CEEC promotes the Ephesian fund, a way for conservative parishes to make sure that their quota money does not go to parishes of which they do not approve. “Consecrating our own bishops”? Well, the conservative churches have now commissioned some ‘overseers’ and leaders. And I’ve already written about the Alliance’s Action Day, when members were supposed to send letters to their bishops saying they no longer recognise their authority, and to withhold their funds from their dioceses. It was postponed from 1 December after the bishops unexpectedly decided against any movement at that October meeting – but rather than being taken off the table this was described as a “pivot”, meaning it could move from ‘off’ to ‘on’ at short notice.

Although a surprising amount of time has been spent fleshing it out, the promotion of a third province as the solution to a range of perceived problems is nothing new. Nor are temporary alliances between parts of the C of E which, on key issues of theology and practice, are normally far apart. Those are simply historical facts. As for vampire liberals sucking out the blood from the parishes of the third province… All hypothetical, like Mercia itself. Why look to the hypothetical when the reality is already bloody enough?

[1] Furlong, The C of E: the state it’s in, p.337, citing Matthews, Memories and Meanings, p.149. 

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‘We need the theology’: what has now been released, and does it answer the real questions?

Posted on November 8, 2025 by fluff35

Unusually, with the next General Synod not until February, last Wednesday Synod members received the four key documents on Living in Love and Faith (LLF) which the House of Bishops had been sent before their 15 October meeting – the meeting now widely read as having ended the LLF process by not proposing any more steps towards LGBTQIA+ inclusion. That ending does not come as much of a surprise, because when the current Programme Director, Helen Fraser, was announced, her secondment to LLF was only until March 2026; and that would fit with LLF bowing out at the February Synod. The writing was already on the wall. Because I was involved in one of two meetings with key bishops – one with Together trustees, the other with the Alliance – we saw these four documents a week ahead of the rest of the church. I’ve now had time to read them again and, to help those who are bracing themselves to do the same, I offer this document-by-document reading.

What are the issues?

The issues under discussion remain the standalone Prayers of Love and Faith services (the preferred terminology is ‘bespoke services’, but I resist this because there’s no suggestion of a make-it-up-as-you-go-along service, simply the existing PLF resources in a separate service) and clergy in same sex civil marriages. Note, nobody here is talking about same sex marriages in church.

What are the documents and who wrote them?

There are four documents: 12 pages of September 2025 Legal Advice (although the link address gives November 2025, so it isn’t clear whether it is exactly as issued to the bishops) and three documents from Faith and Order Commission (FAOC), a group of theologians – many of them bishops – which works with a Theological Adviser, currently Revd Dr Casey Strine, and his deputy, Dr Guido de Graaff. These are long documents: 47 + 34 + 54 pages. What is, of course, missing from them is any sense of the real people for whom this is not an exercise in definitions and history and logic, but part of the pain or the joy they experience in their daily lives.

The Legal Advice was written by Revd Alex McGregor, Head of the CofE’s Legal Office. I do wonder what the status of this is, compared with the other legal advice that we have seen. “Advice from the Legal Office” was referenced for example in GS2346, which Synod saw in February 2024. I would be interested to learn whether any of the new Legal Advice is really new; the annexes to GS2346 seem to have it all already. 

None of the other documents has an author, because they come from FAOC, but from switches of style – at times giving the reader quite a jolt, as in The Exercise of Discipline, paragraphs 125 and 128 – it’s clear that they weave together contributions from different people. So, on to the documents, first of them that Legal Advice.

Legal Advice

What does this say on the two key topics? First, on Prayers of Love and Faith, the Legal Advice strongly supports the lengthy process of Canon B 2 as the “most secure way of bringing bespoke services into use”. “Most secure” means “least likely to be challenged in law”. B 2 involves various stages going through General Synod and stating that the services don’t depart from the “doctrine of the Church of England in any essential matter”. These stages, which would involve securing two-thirds majorities in the Houses of Bishops, Clergy and Laity, were already clear before this document came out (I wrote about that here) and would take until at least February 2028 to put into practice.

An alternative would be Canon B 5, which is what has been used to commend the existing PLF for use in a regular service. Canon B 5 only needs the House of Bishops to ‘commend’ material. When the existing commendation of PLF in regular services happened at the end of 2023, the House voted 24:11, with 3 abstentions, to commend them. The Legal Advice document states that something commended in this way does not have “any canonical or other legal authority” and is simply the opinion of the bishops, and the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Measure 1963 could be used to start proceedings against any cleric using the material. The Legal Advice is that it is “unlikely that an accused who uses a commended form of service will be found to have acted unlawfully” but using such a service if not all bishops agree is more iffy.

The clear message is: B 2 is safer if you don’t want to have proceedings brought against you.

Second, on clergy in same sex civil marriages, here too a possible route through CofE structures is given, but this time only simple majorities would be needed in Synod. I would draw attention to the point in paragraph 29, on whether a different route would be to change Canon B 30 (Of Holy Matrimony). Mr McGregor comments “I have not yet seen FAOC’s thinking on this”. Here is one of the big problems with the LLF process; each document depends on another document and the endless delays as more has been sent off to FAOC for discussion have not helped. Back in July 2024 Synod voted to send more money over to fund FAOC’s work. Did it make any difference?

Possible parallels with what happened with divorce and remarriage are rejected. Somehow the “one man with one woman” part of Canon B 30 trumps its other phrase, “a union permanent and lifelong”. So marrying divorced people while the former spouse is still alive is OK but that doesn’t help with same sex civilly married people.

As for clergy who are already in same sex civil marriages, the Legal Advice states that “in principle” different bishops could take a different approach to this. But it has to be on a case-by-case basis, rather than announcing that in their diocese no such clergy shall face discipline.

So, as we are back on to whether same sex marriage is ‘marriage’ in the sense the Church understands it, and whether a couple in such a marriage would be in breach of church doctrine, we need to move on to the theological papers.

Full disclosure, for non-theologians like me, these were very heavy going. But if read along with the general vibe of the Legal Advice, namely that concern about what happens “unlawfully”, I think there’s a clear message being pushed.

The Nature of Doctrine and the Living God  

So… my take-home from this is the phrase “communally authorised and communally regulative”, as in “doctrine is true knowledge about God consonant with Holy Scripture that is communally authorised and communally regulative”. The word “communally” features 28 times. “Communally regulative” also comes up in the final document to be discussed here.

The Nature of Doctrine tries to explain how “for many people” marriage doctrine is a first order issue (for many people, though, it isn’t). It tries to have its cake and eat it by accepting that much depends on “how texts are selected and interpreted” but also that it is possible to decide “which parts and themes of Scripture are most pertinent and which reading of those texts best expresses the mind of Christ in the Church”. On the rest of the document, I’d just say two things: first, it’s very odd to start with Aquinas, Hooker, and Newman, and then to focus on a group of more recent theologians and second, that there is a lot about Scripture but nothing on Jesus, the Word of God to whom Scripture points.

“Communally authorised” obviously feeds into the story that standalone PLF require Canon B 2 processes. All the way through the last few years, there has been uncertainty as to what needs to go to Synod and what the House of Bishops can do on its own. The message of all these documents, when taken together, is that the bishops are not feeling that they can make decisions, other than the decision to pass it back to Synod. But is Synod representative of the Church of England as a whole? Is it sufficient as the “community” doing authorisation?

The decision to commend the PLF at all is described as a “contested decision” and links to one of the other FOAC papers on the “judgment of the House at that time”. That paper is: 

The Doctrine of Marriage and the Prayers of Love and Faith: Texts and Contexts.

As someone trained in social anthropology, I found this interesting, although on one of the working groups I was on I had already seen a lot of it (this does make me wonder why this final version took so long to appear). It argues that meaning – the nature of what we believe – comes out not just in words (like the PLF) but in symbolic action. Back on that working group we read a lot about whether a standalone PLF service could include couples wearing white, or having flowers and confetti, or exchanging rings. Basically it’s all about how to stop a standalone PLF looking like a wedding.

There are some fleeting appearances (mostly in the footnotes) of the service for Prayer and Dedication after a Civil Marriage, commended under Canon B 5, which many people think is the nearest thing to a standalone PLF. In that service, the notes say no rings can be given or received. So why not just say the same for a standalone PLF? Is it enough, asks the paper, to say of a standalone PLF ‘this isn’t a wedding’, or will people assume it is? It gets a bit silly at times. Oh dear, what if wearing white was banned, surely that would have to include traditional wedding garb for e.g. African or Indian weddings? This is a possibility raised by this document. So we are really supposed to imagine same sex couples, banned from wearing white, considering going the full sari instead?

As this paper moves along, it comes to the conclusion that it isn’t really about symbolic actions. It’s about whether PLF are a departure from doctrine “in any essential matter”. And also about the claim that commendation from the House of Bishops – as used for the PLF in existing services – carries “the highest risk of challenge once enacted”.

In the final pages of this document, the writer(s) finally admit that it is also about sex. If we bless a same sex couple, are we saying that “same-sex sexual expression” is not “morally problematic”?

And finally, the longest one of all, the snappily entitled The Exercise of Discipline and Clergy Exemplarity in the Church of England: The Case of Same-Sex Civil Marriages.

It self-describes as “technical and lengthy”. Yes. It refers across to the Nature of Doctrine paper and the importance of “communal authorisation” and how that then becomes “regulative”. It’s nice to see two papers which appear to have been written in tandem. This one is all about the possible routes for ordaining and relicensing people in same sex civil marriages. The basic point is that we can’t, because marriage is only one man and one woman, but there is more sense here than in the other papers that we have no consensus on reading the Bible, what we think clergy exemplarity is, or … what to do next.

The sections on clergy households and the tension experienced by spouses, children and lodgers of also having to follow the need to be “exemplary” is truly terrifying; thinking of some of the adults I know who were brought up in such households, I am surprised that any of them have remained sane.

In contrast to the Legal Advice, which didn’t see the relevance, this document also has a very lengthy section, paragraphs 94-144, on whether remarriage after divorce (for clergy or for anyone else) is relevant. One argument proposed is that such a marriage “departs from the historic understand [sic] of the doctrine of the church, but not in a way that consists of a departure from doctrine in an essential manner”. Much of the section rehearses the usual points about how to read the Bible. More than any other part of these documents, there are clearly different views in here and they can’t be reconciled. There’s “a case for”, “a case against” and “a further objection to” pastoral accommodation for same-sex civil marriage.

So there you have it. On my reading, risk, particularly the risk of legal challenge, is a theme of all the documents. Relaxation of discipline by some bishops is seen as carrying “the greatest risk for discipline to depart from doctrine”.

I do wonder whether all these scary risk comments were enough to make even some of the inclusive bishops think that they couldn’t go through with any of this. So what is left? While the 15 October statement included the assurance that “Prayers of Love and Faith, for use in regularly scheduled services, remain commended by the House of Bishops for use under Canon B5”,  I read enough hints in here that such use of PLF in existing services is also risky, to suggest to me that the next stage will be to propose removing them too. 

There is also an elephant in the room: Delegated Episcopal Ministry. This was the proposal for various aspects of bishops’ roles to be delegated to a different bishop, if the actual bishop were to be considered too progressive – or perhaps even too conservative – for someone being confirmed/ordained to accept confirmation/ordination by them, and there were various versions of this being suggested in different dioceses. It went too far for many, and not far enough for others. It would have entailed a Code of Practice to give “pastoral reassurance” to those who felt unable in conscience to live with whatever was decided. The October House of Bishops considered three possible versions of this, but threw them all out. No change = no need for a code of practice. So – as Andrew Goddard has suggested at the end of a blog post issued while I was finishing this piece – when push came to shove, was the nature of episcopacy felt more important even than the theology of doctrine or marriage, or the legal threats? 

 

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Living in Love and Faith, October 2025: What’s changed?

Posted on October 28, 2025 by fluff35

Like many others, I have been reflecting on the 15 October House of Bishops announcement, which appears to say that Living in Love and Faith (LLF) has ground to a halt, with no change to the welcome given to lesbian and gay people other than a set of prayers – Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF) – commended at the end of 2023 for use with a same-sex couple who would like to come before God to offer him their relationship, but only to be used in an existing service.

Here I would like to do two things. First, to think about two related questions: why this has happened, and why it has come as a shock to many people. Second, to think about other routes that could have been – or still could be – taken.

Why did this happen? 

In innumerable debates, and in Questions posed formally to the House of Bishops or those leading LLF, Synod members have heard from conservatives the words ‘Show us the legal advice’. The narrative was that we hadn’t seen it all, and Synod does love a conspiracy theory. Apparently there’s now another set of this, which isn’t yet public. But it is being held responsible for the 15 October announcement. Somehow, the legal advice around how we could move forwards is supposed to have changed. Or perhaps simply the way it was interpreted has changed. Another factor is the bishops’ resistance to one of the conservatives’ requests: for their own bishops to carry out confirmations and ordinations, their own process for selecting candidates for ordination, and like-minded bishops to support them. What they have asked for, in order that they can stay in a church where not everyone agrees with them that all same-sex relationships are sinful, is “structural separation”: one form of which was something that came to be called Delegated Episcopal Ministry. And that was too much for the bishops to contemplate.

Much of this isn’t new to those of us who’ve been part of this LLF ‘process’ (yes, those are deliberate scare quotes) for years. Think back to when GS 2346 (Living in Love, Faith, and Reconciliation) was debated at the February 2024 Synod. After some debate, and some amendments being made to the motion (and others rejected), the scheduled vote on the report itself did not take place, because instead we voted by a very large majority to move to next business. Frankly the document was a mess, offering too much “structural separation” within the Church of England for progressives to be able to support it, but too little for conservatives to accept it. Little has shifted since then.

Annex A to GS 2346 already laid out the various options for what were then called ‘standalone’ services, which are currently one of the sticking points – the use of PLF but in a separate service rather than in an existing scheduled service. Would it look too much like a church wedding? How could that be prevented? Well, just for starters, the service is different…! Somewhere along the line, the terminology shifted, as it so often does in LLF discussions. ‘Standalone’ became ‘bespoke’; I’ve heard it said that this is just a posh word for standalone, but I feel there is more going on here. ‘Bespoke’ implies more of a ‘make it up as you go along’ service, whereas surely these services would be using exactly the same materials from the PLF suite, maybe just more of them because there would be more time available. So here I am just going to use the original terminology of ‘standalone’; that is, separate.

Annex A already went through all the options for how this could happen, in terms of synodical processes, listing them with their likely risk. That’s interesting when so much of what is now happening seems to be about risk management.

One option in Annex A was that Canon B 5, which was used in 2023 to commend the PLF in existing services, could be expanded to include standalone services too. The quickest and the simplest route, it would mean designating some parishes as those which would use the PLF in separate services, for a fixed period of time, on an experimental basis. Feedback would be collected, and then the services would stop while a further, more complicated, process under Canon B 2 was considered by the House of Bishops and the Liturgical Commission, with a view to these standalone services being used anywhere. 

GS 2346 spelled out how, if that process under B 2 went ahead, it would mean the full legal mechanism of a steering committee, first consideration, setting up a revision committee, maybe another report on doctrine and a General Synod debate on that, then a revision committee stage producing a report back to Synod, maybe a repeat of that stage if members were not happy, then a further revision in Synod, then back to the House of Bishops, then perhaps votes in the separate Houses, then back to Synod for Final Approval needing two-thirds majorities in each House. And there could be a referral out to diocesan synods somewhere along the line. Gasp. But that’s how B 2 works. GS 2346 estimated a minimum two years for all the stages. Yes, it sounds protracted, but that’s how the C of E operates and it’s what happened with, for example, the ordination of women.

But GS 2346 offered some other ideas. Under Canon B 4.3, individual bishops could simply authorise the separate services – no experimental period, no need to get Synod to vote. That would mean that things would be different in different dioceses – rather like they are already on many matters, not least on sexuality; for example on whether licensed lay ministers are subject to the same restrictions on entering same-sex civil marriages. Under Canon B 4.2, the archbishops could do the authorising. One decision, all sorted. However, both were designated as having “High likelihood of legal challenge.” Back to risk again. Would the bishops, or archbishops, be taken to court? 1 Corinthians 6, anyone? “Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to decide between one believer and another, but a believer goes to court against a believer”?

To think further about the risks of these challenges, various pieces of theological and legal advice were commissioned. Returning to GS 2346 we read “I [that’s the voice of Bishop Martyn Snow, who at that point was lead bishop for LLF] have included in the annexes to this paper information on some of the key legal issues, as advised by the Church’s Legal Office. Other lawyers might offer different advice on some points, which could only ultimately be determined by the courts. But we include here the best professional advice we have.”

So we already had legal advice and, as Bishop Martyn noted, the problem is that it differs depending on who is asked to give it. And even then, you need to interpret it.

According to the House of Bishops’ 15 October press release, “the House reviewed detailed theological and legal advice on outstanding questions following the landmark 2023 Synod vote which led to the introduction of the Prayers of Love and Faith (or PLF)” and decided on the processes that would be needed both for separate services and for clergy in same-sex civil marriages to be licensed. As we had already been given detailed information in GS 2346 on the B 2 system, I am not sure why that had to be discussed again, nor am I sure why it seems to have come as such a surprise to some people. I suppose it’s just that very few people, except some Synod members, read all the documents that have come out along the way. It would be good to know that our bishops, at least, understand how Synod makes legislation!

But the October press release – which has to suffice until the minutes of that meeting are approved in mid-December – doesn’t hint at any discussion of the Canon B 4 options. So…

Let’s have some history

And here, not for the first time, I suggest going back to another long, angry process in recent history; marriage in church after divorce, finally made possible (officially) in 2002. It began with a series of reports, responding to changes in secular law regarding marriage and divorce, in 1966, 1971, 1978, 1983 and 1985; the Root Report (1971) noted “that divorced partners could enter into new unions that bore the hallmarks of a satisfactory marriage”; extraordinary wording that, while depressingly grudging, seems to me to be something that needs to be acknowledged around same-sex committed relationships.

At the moment, as we know, marriage of same-sex couples in church is not even on that table from which crumbs so rarely fall. When marriage of divorced people in church did eventually happen, as with PLF, individual clergy consciences were respected: no member of the clergy would be forced to conduct such a marriage against their conscience. There are those in Synod even today who do not believe marriage is possible if one or more partners has been divorced with the former partner still living. We manage to cope with that division, still. 

What is more closely comparable with PLF, though, is the service of blessing for a straight couple where a partner has been divorced. Such services have an interesting history. I’ve recently acquired a copy of GS 1361 Marriage in Church After Divorce, a report from a working party commissioned by the House of Bishops, and published in 2000, 17 years after Synod resolved that “there are circumstances in which a divorced person may be married in church during the lifetime of a former partner”. While that resolution was making its way towards something that put this position into practice, and in the full knowledge that “many … find our present positions contradictory in principle”, one step on the way was the approval of a service of prayer and dedication after a civil marriage. This happened in June 1985 – forty years ago.

What’s the difference between such a service for a straight couple, and using the PLF in a standalone service? I can see why some would not like to make the connection; it would make the PLF seem more likely to be a staging post on the way to equal marriage. But note that the prayer and dedication service was approved by the House of Bishops with “its use being permissible under either Canon B 4 or B 5”, not needing to go through General Synod because it was not an alternative to anything in the Book of Common Prayer.

GS 1361 Marriage in Church After Divorce outlines the history of how the services of blessing after a civil marriage evolved (all the following quotations, and those in the previous two paragraphs, are taken from this document). It’s an instructive read. Some clergy offered what came to be called “prayers at the chancel step”, which focused on penitence; “some bishops decreed that no stoles be worn”, to emphasise this theme, and the couple were not to be blessed. I note that the penitential theme would not have played out well if the person who was divorced had been subject to domestic abuse. There were also contextual considerations about not letting this look like a wedding, including “Hymns were often considered inappropriate since this would be to turn private prayers into a public service.” That’s the first time I’ve heard this suggested; how does a hymn make a service “public”? And these services were somehow not “public” but were standalone – although there were limits on the number who could attend.

There was no authorised liturgy for such a service “although a number of diocesan bishops began to issue guidelines and even circulated what they considered to be appropriate forms of service”. Fascinating. I wonder if any of these survive? But clearly there was variation between dioceses – the ‘postcode lottery’ which is held up as a bogeyman to scare people off using PLF in standalone services today – and in the 1970s some of these forms of service became more celebratory than penitential. The 1985 service of prayer and dedication, as eventually approved by the House of Bishops, is still alive and well and advertised as available. Is it right to assume that it was discussed when the Prayers of Love and Faith were drawn up? The service of prayer and dedication goes further than the prayers at the chancel step, as it even allows hymns!

So the history of how the Church of England moved towards allowing divorced people to marry again in church shows us a period of disruption, with clergy taking a lead and bishops responding to this, followed by a vote of principle in support, and then a House of Bishops initiative in approving a service to be used. I wonder: is this the way forward?

Posted in equal marriage, General Synod, Living in Love and Faith, marriage | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

This week in Living in Love and Faith: On the Alliance Campaign Manual

Posted on October 16, 2025 by fluff35

It’s been quite a week for Living in Love and Faith news. Yesterday, an update from the House of Bishops putting everything on hold. It was clear when the staff team for LLF was modified a few months back, with the new lead being seconded only until Spring 2026, that LLF was coming to an end, but it was still surprising to see that even those ‘standalone’ services using the Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF) remain off the table. Note that these are now called ‘bespoke’. That’s a word which suggests a make-it-up-as-you-go-along service, which surely has never been the intention – a standalone service simply means the contents of PLF but not as part of an existing church service. Words have power, and to me it feels like this one has shifted to make it sound more alarming. Yet in other parts of the Church of England, they really are making services up as they go along, with what are being called New Worshipping Communities creating their own liturgy – and not for marriage (which only became church business in the Middle Ages) but for the Eucharist.

Today, another document appeared from the Alliance, setting out their plans for an Action Day on 1 December. More on that below. And then tomorrow lunchtime, yet another residential meeting of the LLF Working Groups is scheduled to begin. I would hazard a guess that the House of Bishops’ update makes the residential even more pointless, but it doesn’t seem to have been cancelled.

Here I want to focus on that Alliance document. It has always been clear in meetings I’ve attended that there are those in the room who have no interest in finding some sort of middle ground. Yet they remain in the room. That doesn’t seem a helpful way to proceed. I took part in the autumn 2023 set of three meetings between progressives and conservatives (called “Living with Difference”), where the progressives were willing to make the concession that the PLF should be an ‘opt-in’ – where parishes would have to decide to opt in to use them – rather than their use being the default position: but the conservatives simply restated the same demands at each meeting instead of suggesting any compromises. And so it has continued. Conservatives – or, at least, those who speak for them at these meetings – will be content with nothing less than their own bishops, their own selection conferences for ministry, their own ordinations and even their own theological colleges. And, quite possibly, their own archbishop too, in other words a third province in addition to the geographical ones of York and Canterbury. 

As a precursor to all that, the Alliance – the group combining the unlikely bedfellows of the Revitalisation Trust, Church of England Evangelical Council, Holy Trinity Brompton churches, New Wine, Living Out and traditional Catholics – wants a temporary “De Facto Parallel Province” (a DFPP, a particularly unsnappy acronym). That would, if necessary – which means, if there were ever to be any further move towards Prayers of Love and Faith in standalone services, or towards accepting clergy in same-sex marriages – become a split in which those leaving would have their own appointment and training systems plus full access to Church of England money. However, from the document issued yesterday, neither of those moves are going to happen. So do the conservatives still need their DFPP?

The disregard of geography that would follow in this DFPP has been encouraged by the situation with women priests, where it is permitted for parishes to receive their episcopal oversight from one of the Provincial Episcopal Visitors, a.k.a. a Flying Bishop, whose role crosses several dioceses. Only recently it was agreed by the Independent Reviewer, whose role is to arbitrate if a question arises around how we deal with these parishes, that more people are needed to minister to those who refuse the ministry of women. Well, that was always likely, once geography was abandoned. Travel takes time.

And now, courtesy of a leaked document from the Alliance, we can see what else they’ve been working towards in recent months.

This document is the Alliance Campaign Manual, bearing a date in late September. It outlines a plan starting with “Network Influencers” – chilling phrase? – identifying suitable incumbents. Then those incumbents get PCC members onside in order to work towards PCCs passing one or more of a range of motions, which include “That this PCC resolves to uphold Biblical orthodoxy by not permitting the Prayers of Love and Faith, commended by the House of Bishops in December 2023, to be used within St xxx Church and its associated congregations.” Passing such motions builds up towards ‘Action Day’, 1 December 2025 (although at one point it is stated as “prob. November”, and at another “in late Autumn”, perhaps relics of a previous version of the plan). On Action Day, parishes are expected to write to their bishops (I assume as it says ‘Diocesan Bishop’ even those who have opted for a Flying Bishop will write to that Diocesan who is not allowed to show up in their churches) to pass on their PCC’s views and decisions.

The Manual says the early stages of this were scheduled to happen between June and November, so let’s use the past tense here. In order to “onboard” (yes, that’s the language used in the Campaign Manual) PCC members, church leaders have been forming little groups of ministers and churchwardens who agree with the Alliance, with those in this group then having 1-to-1s with those PCC members. If members “hold strong views” (I think I know what that means) then the incumbent, rather than a warden or associate priest, has prioritised meeting with such people. Those with “progressive views” will be “heard and listened to”. I should hope so! Why is it necessary even to say that? An example of the sort of pressure which can be applied to any progressive members of the PCC is that incumbents are asked to remind them that they are trustees, and therefore should “represent the congregation and focus on the theology and mission of the church rather than personal experience and conviction”. In other words, if their views are not what you want to hear, you can try the “it’s not about your views” approach. So … what if the congregation supports the PLF? Are conservatives supposed to bow to that support, or to continue to try to get the motions through the PCC? And I find the dynamics of summonsing a PCC member to the office to sound them out very disturbing. Aren’t there safeguarding issues here? Power imbalances, potential threats?

Once the “onboarding” has happened, PCCs have been asked if they want to move to another bishop; whether they want to stop sending money to the diocese (Parish share) and send it somewhere else where it would only be used to help parishes who are also in the Alliance; and whether they want to encourage potential ordinands to take part in an “orthodox vocations programme”. If the PCC didn’t want to play ball then the church leader has been told that they can write to the bishop anyway.

The situation with ordinands is particularly disturbing. I’m an elected member of the Ministry Development Board, and we’ve put much time into finding ways to adjust how selection, training and formation are provided, to take account of the current needs of those coming forward and offering for ordained and lay ministry. That means we’ve been working with dioceses and theological education institutions to try out ways to work with older candidates with much experience, with those whose circumstances mean they need to train part-time, and so on. There is a Ministry Experience Scheme which gives 18-29 year olds the chance to try out different areas of ministry. Personally, I am strongly opposed to having theological training reserved for those of one tradition only, or for those who all share the same view on women’s ordination, or indeed on same-sex relationships. Clergy and lay ministers should be able to work with those with whom they do not always agree.

But, to the existing models for discernment and training, the Alliance Campaign Manual adds in another programme: Ready To Serve. It is being piloted by Southwell & Nottingham diocese, and the Alliance is recommending all its potential ordinands take this path “if supportive discernment is not available locally”. This seems odd, when diocesan directors of ordinands focus on the person in front of them, not on their own personal beliefs. But there’s more to Ready To Serve; the website clarifies that it is “open to those beyond the diocese”. So is this an Alliance programme and does it prefigure an Alliance training path and eventual ordination by the Bishop of Southwell & Nottingham for anyone who isn’t in agreement with their bishop?

As ever, people who are LGBTQi+ (the preferred letters of Alliance) don’t feature much. They weren’t even mentioned in the Church of England statement that came out on 15 October. The Alliance Campaign Manual insists that homophobia is wrong and that everyone is welcome in their churches (I assume, so long as they are not partnered) and it uses the phrase “radical welcome”. To explain what that means, they point to the Living Out resources. Not that radical, then. Living Out, of course, tells gay people – sorry, same-sex attracted people, the preferred terminology – that they must either remain celibate or marry someone of the opposite sex.

What are the connections between the House of Bishops statement and the Alliance Campaign Manual?It is all in the public domain: so you can make up your own mind. 

Posted in General Synod, Living in Love and Faith | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

White smoke day: the new Archbishop of Canterbury

Posted on October 3, 2025 by fluff35

Because I am on General Synod, friends and family assume that I have some sort of hot line to the process by which the new Archbishop of Canterbury is chosen. Well, in a word, no. I have been as much in the dark as anyone else, as easily swayed by Channel 4 News‘s Cathy Newman telling us she’d heard it was to be Rachel Treweek, Bishop of Gloucester, or The Times telling us that Pete Wilcox, Bishop of Sheffield, was a “late contender”. That wording from The Times was particularly odd, when there aren’t any late entrants to the field; everyone will have had references taken up and interviews and medicals and safeguarding checks, and you can’t just say “Oh let’s look at someone we’ve not considered yet”. Having any (supposed) leaks at all is worrying when we all know that those on Crown Nominations Commissions to find new bishops and archbishops have to promise to keep all proceedings confidential, and that includes the names of those on the shortlist. We won’t have voting figures, or any other information on how the name finally emerged. I am delighted that it is Sarah, Bishop of London, having worked with her when she was a lead bishop on the Living in Love and Faith process, and knowing how she has managed to function with grace and dignity in a diocese where some church members will not accept her episcopal authority. If anyone can cope with being a woman in a church where women’s ministry is fully accepted in theory but not in practice, it’s surely her.

I’ve heard too many times now the statement that the Roman Catholics can find a new Pope within weeks but we take nearly a year to find a new Archbishop of Canterbury. Well, in the Church of England we involve lay people in making the decision. We involve women, both lay and ordained. This time around, we have also involved members of the wider Anglican Communion. Maybe bearing in mind how long it has taken for us to get to this point, some Church of England members were quite surprised when rumours began that the announcement would happen around now; apparently that counts as pretty soon after the interviews. Looking at the known events of the week, today is conveniently between major party conferences, and marked only by the release of Taylor Swift’s latest album. And this, according to the BBC News site, is “a triumphant pop victory lap”. I wonder what the archepiscopal equivalent for that would be?

But life, and news, are rarely that predictable. The appalling anti-semitic attack in Manchester on Yom Kippur reminds us that religion can be a life or death matter. That applies to Jews, to Muslims, and to Christians. This has ended up being a week in which celebration is difficult, and when the cost of faith can’t be ignored.

When I woke up this morning, I noticed that today is also the date on which the Church of England commemorates Bishop George Bell as “ecumenist and peacemaker”. The Lectionary app gives potted biographies of those in the church calendar, and includes this:

Through Bonhoeffer Bell was in touch with the underground anti-Nazi opposition in Germany and unsuccessfully attempted to get a commitment from the wartime government to distinguish between Germans in general and Nazis in particular. During the Second World War, Bell spoke in the House of Lords strongly condemning some of the actions of the Allies such as indiscriminate bombing of German cities. Though there is no actual evidence one way or the other it is widely accepted that this preparedness to speak the truth as he saw it may have prevented him from succeeding William Temple as Archbishop of Canterbury after Temple’s sudden death in 1944.

This felt very timely not just for the situation in the Middle East right now, but for the speculation that an obvious contender for the Canterbury role was passed over in 1945 because he spoke the truth “as he saw it”. That would seem like a good thing for an Archbishop to do?

Having the announcement on the day that Bishop George Bell is remembered is also timely in terms of safeguarding; one point that I’ve heard made again and again in the process for finding our new Archbishop is that they must be someone accepted by survivors of Church abuse. Bell was himself posthumously accused of abuse, and when Justin Welby, as Archbishop, responded to the independent review into the case he wrote

No human being is entirely good or bad. Bishop Bell was in many ways a hero. He is also accused of great wickedness. Good acts do not diminish evil ones, nor do evil ones make it right to forget the good. Whatever is thought about the accusations, the whole person and whole life should be kept in mind.

Archbishop-designate Sarah has been Bishop of London since 2018. London diocese is unique – with what’s called the ‘Area System’ making the role of the diocesan bishop very different to that in other dioceses – and it has maybe more than its fair share of safeguarding problems. Tragically, Father Alan Griffin took his own life in 2020 after finding he was under some sort of investigation carried out following a “brain dump” of information held by a retiring Head of Operations in the diocese; the church was criticised by the Coroner and there was an independent review into what happened, which stated that “There is clear evidence that the way Father Alan was treated was, in part, influenced by the Church and individuals’ conscious and unconscious bias around his sexual orientation”. In his summary, the reviewer stated “In particular, the Diocese has a strong leader in Bishop Sarah and I can see she is driving that positive change”.

The readings set for today include the following verses from Deuteronomy which seem like a good reminder for the Church of England and our new Archbishop:

Then Moses summoned Joshua and said to him in the sight of all Israel: ‘Be strong and bold, for you are the one who will go with this people into the land that the Lord has sworn to their ancestors to give them; and you will put them in possession of it. It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not fail you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed.’

Posted in Shared Conversations | 1 Comment

Is there a quorum in the House of Bishops?

Posted on September 4, 2025 by fluff35

Just when you’d have thought that the dust had settled from Dr Ros Clarke’s Private Member’s Motion calling for an independent governance and culture review of the House of Bishops, finally the minutes appear from the May 2025 meeting of the House; so, now, we have a glimpse of how they were thinking about their response to the PMM ahead of the Synod meeting in July at which it was debated. The stated purpose of the PMM was to restore trust in the House, but it allowed people of different views to blame the bishops for not doing what they would like them to do. One online commentator, Michael Hayden, noted before Synod met, ‘It’s surely unthinkable that they would vote against the motion, which in itself would say an awful lot.’

When it came to it, though, there wasn’t a vote, so bishops didn’t need to make any decision on how to vote. Instead, Synod voted to move to Next Business, a procedural motion which can avoid showing the extent of any division. However, we can see from the published results of the Next Business motion that this would have gone the other way if those who decided to abstain had instead voted ‘Against’, thus continuing with the debate and moving towards a vote on the motion itself. But even more interestingly, while we can see that four bishops voted in favour of Next Business, with two against and 13 abstentions, we also discover that there were only 19 bishops voting. There is of course a fourth voting option – simply, not to vote – but my bishop-spotting ability, while improved considerably in the last four years of Synod membership, didn’t allow me to detect any taking this option. Neither the dress-down style of York Synods nor our inability to see who is taking part by Zoom helps here.

Compared to some of the voting figures for July, 19 was mildly impressive. In several counted votes, the number of bishops was in the low teens, although for the motion on redistribution of funds 32 of them were there and voting.

When I was on Synod back in the last century, there were frequent calls of ‘Is there a quorum in the House of Bishops?’ I recall that happening during the Wimbledon Men’s Singles Final, shown in one of the hall of residence lounges in the days before iPads and smartphones. I was there; I can bear witness to preponderance of bishops in front of the TV. I don’t know what the system was then, but today there’s a rota to ensure there is always a quorum in the House. But, for the voting on the Clarke PMM, that’s not the point. What I want to know is: where are the bishops? I know we all need to go to the loo and find refreshments, and that not everyone is in the debating chamber at any point, but really? A motion about the House of Bishops, but only 19 of them vote?

There are in theory 53 bishops on General Synod. Not all are diocesans; some are elected from the suffragan and area bishops, and they can vote. But some sees are vacant, with an acting bishop, and those acting bishops can attend Synod but currently have no voting rights. There are moves afoot to change this; the House of Bishops minutes for May 2024 include, as part of their own work on increasing the transparency of the House, the intention “To remove the current legal prohibition on acting diocesans from voting in the House.” In my view, the Clarke PMM was not necessary, because the bishops have already got the point that the House is not sufficiently open to scrutiny, and the 22 pages of minutes from May show that there’s listening happening already.

And how has that work on allowing acting diocesan bishops to vote been going? Apparently it is… going. By March 2025, the House of Bishops minutes give us “9.2.1 Noted the importance of progressing the work on ensuring that Acting Bishops could vote in the House and General Synod. The Bishop of Dudley was progressing this with lawyers.” 

I don’t know how or why the Bishop of Dudley was given this job but, bearing in mind the repeated request of conservatives in the Living in Love and Faith debates to see “the legal advice”, I’d like to know a bit more about this. But the minutes from May 2025 don’t mention the lawyers; they pass the responsibility on to the Houses of Clergy and Laity. Maybe that’s what the lawyers said? This is what we now have:

“5.4 The BISHOP OF DUDLEY briefed the House on work being done to allow acting diocesan bishops to vote in both the House and the General Synod. Acting Bishops were approved and lawfully entitled to exercise episcopal functions in their diocese, but are not lawfully members of the General Synod or House of Bishops and therefore they as individuals and their diocese are left without a vote during often lengthy vacancies. Changing this required an amending Canon; this could be done swiftly with the support of Synod – but could become a partisan debate. He was therefore engaging with the Houses of Clergy and Laity to explain the issues and take matters forward.” 

An amending Canon; was that the legal advice? I think I could probably have given that advice myself. So, until acting diocesan bishops can vote, we are not going to get anywhere near 53 bishops voting. 

Meanwhile, back in the House of Bishops, the May 2025 minutes show that they addressed the Clarke PMM within the context of a paper they had received called ‘Making the House work better’. As is the usual format of House of Bishops’ minutes these days, what we can read are isolated comments from unnamed bishops. For example someone noted “That the House should take the PMM seriously”; someone (else?) “There was a case for a review, providing it was multi-disciplinary”; also “That the House needed to focus on building accountability and transparency”. The Bishop of London, who had presented the paper, noted “The work would proceed as set out in the paper.”

But here’s the problem. The paper was written for the bishops so we have no idea what constitutes “the work”. The agenda for the July House of Bishops meeting includes a ten-minute item, “Review of culture and governance of the House of Bishops: update”, so maybe more will become clear when the minutes for that meeting are eventually approved and published.

There are all sorts of other comments about the House in the May 2025 minutes: the Bishop of London’s observation that the House doesn’t always find the right balance “between working formally as a legislative body as a House of Synod and working more informally as an episcopal leadership providing prayerful discernment”; a comment on LLF, attributed to the Bishop of Leicester, that “the House was increasingly facing the choice of whether to lead or be led” and another comment, this one attributed, that the function of the House “had changed as a result of the Living in Love and Faith process and the pandemic”. 

What I think has changed is something else. The House of Bishops had, for whatever reason, reached a stage in which they felt that expressing collegiality could only be done by voting the same way. In the 2017 Take Note debate which kicked off the LLF process, all the bishops voted in favour of ‘taking note’ of their widely criticised Report, GS2055 Marriage and Same Sex Relationships after the Shared Conversations, which offered a vague “radical new Christian inclusion” to lesbian and gay Christians; all but one, and he had simply pressed the wrong button. 

Since then, the chains have loosened again. Now we are all aware that the House of Bishops contains a range of views, just like the wider church it serves. And somehow, that is hard for some people to hear. Personally, I don’t have a problem with it; they are individuals, people, and I am glad that they feel able to say what they think in their meetings as a House. The negative side of it, however, is when church members say that they want – or even that they can’t flourish without – a bishop who thinks as they do. People are complex. Bishops are complex. There’s never going to be a bishop who, in their views on sexuality, poverty, the Trinity, establishment, marriage, racial justice and the theology of atonement is ‘just like you’!

Posted in General Synod, Living in Love and Faith | Tagged | 2 Comments