(One UPDATE 8 September)

As my friends know, I’m a fan of Hamilton, which has that great song about ‘being in the room where it happens’. While my previous post here, on the various dates leading up to the November Synod announcements/presentation/debate (no idea yet which of these it will be) on Living in Love and Faith, was in still in draft, I received an email from the admin team of LLF inviting me to be one of those in the ‘facilitated conversations’ happening across three days in September. These have since been renamed ‘Living with Difference’, although one person I know has decided to call them ‘Living Indifference’ instead (this is the same person who calls LLF ‘Living in Lies and Falsehood’…). Yes, in the church and beyond there is still considerable scepticism about the process with which we’ve been engaged since 2017. And we have to be aware of that.

The invitation was confidential, so I didn’t change the blog to incorporate it. It came as a surprise, as I had heard on the grapevine that people had already been invited, something confirmed by the 1 September Church Times story which mentions a briefing note circulated to members in July. I was asked in mid-August, so I clearly wasn’t on the ‘A’ list, but that’s OK; after my long journey with LLF, it is good to be in this particular ‘room where it happens’.

The full list of names will shortly be made public (UPDATE – since I wrote this, it is now here): but as we are under the St Michael’s House Protocols (also physically signed-up-to as part of the Shared Conversations) and we are ‘private’ but not ‘secret’ – hardly secret when there was a press release in early August about the meetings – there seems to be no objection to me now saying that I am involved. We meet for the first time on 7 September.

I am still not clear about how the different groups meeting in September relate to each other, although I am guessing that the meeting of the episcopal Steering Group for LLF on 30 August explains why our first meeting is on 7 September. As the original press release said, our meetings feed into the College and House of Bishops.

So back to Hamilton. The song has all sorts of relevance to what is happening at this stage of LLF. It even includes the line “Hate the sin, love the sinner”. And “When you got skin in the game, you stay in the game”; the Living with Difference group includes a better balance than the LLF presentation at July Synod did, between different sorts of ‘conservative’ and different sorts of ‘inclusive’ Christians.

What happens in ‘the room where it happens’ is that a deal is struck. Is that finally going to happen? “And how you gonna get your debt plan through? – I guess I’m gonna have to finally listen to you.” Is that what the Living with Difference group is about – listening? That’s certainly a focus of the St Michael’s House Protocols. Seems like we’ve done a lot of that already, in preparing the LLF resources, in doing the course, in the small group work in Synod. And there will be group work in the three meetings to which we are committed, with highly-experienced facilitators in the room with us; does that mean we will be taken through exercises like those used in the Shared Conversations and beyond to help us think through what lies beneath our differences, and to understand trust? The exercise where one person describes an image and the other tries to draw it? The fruit and chocolate one? Is it still worth making the point that apparent differences may conceal shared beliefs? In Hamilton, the deal depends on each side emerging feeling that they “got more than [they] gave”. For me, the plan for some very subdued prayers with couples who have contracted a civil relationship is already giving up a lot; yet I recognise that for some ‘conservatives’ even that is a step too far. Can we all emerge from the room feeling we got more than we gave?

As the song says,

No one really knows how the game is played
The art of the trade
How the sausage gets made
We just assume that it happens

No one really knows how the parties get to “Yes”
The pieces that are sacrificed in every game of chess
We just assume that it happens
But no else is in the room where it happens

My God, In God We Trust
But we never really know what got discussed
Click boom! Then it happened
But no one else was in the room where it happened.

Thought, or perhaps prayer, for Thursday: Click boom!