“Two meetings down, one to go” is pretty much all I am allowed to say about the meetings of the Living with Difference group which has been convened in the spaces between the College and House of Bishops making their decisions on what happens next with the Living in Love and Faith process. 

It’s never a lot of fun spending hours in a room where things are said which are one group’s truth but which cause pain to another group who have come to a different understanding of truth. This is no exception. But it’s nothing new. Having had the experience of being a latecomer to the St Hugh’s Conversations means I’ve already heard most of what people have to say, and indeed often it’s the same people. I still remember the feeling of nausea I experienced when I first realised that a group had been meeting informally for years to discuss how to split up the Church of England; that may sound melodramatic, but once you start to get into the technicalities of separate bishops or provinces or selection processes, so that those who can’t support any same-sex relationships are insulated as far as possible from those who do, then that’s what it feels like to me. 

Being at the St Hugh’s Conversations also means that I have learned to listen respectfully when I have wanted to challenge what is said. It’s too late for any challenges now. People have reached their positions; although that doesn’t stop them repeating these again. The question is simply how we can move on. I went in to these latest meetings hoping for what’s been called the ‘saviour moment’, when something new turns up on the agenda and is seized upon as the solution: I now accept that this isn’t going to happen, and nor should it, as such a new ‘something’ would not have been properly evaluated.

The group assembled for Living with Difference has been described by one contributor to Thinking Anglicans as made up of “Professional and quasi professional Anglican Christians”. Well, it’s fair to point out that there’s a lack of people from your average Anglican congregation. There have been questions asked about how we were chosen: I have no idea. As one of the group pointed out, in the press release we were all given a label, an affiliation, but most of us could have been given very different labels from other groups in which we serve, other roles that we hold. There is less representation than I was expecting from those who’ve previously been involved in the LLF process, but that hasn’t been important. What matters more is that we are all, in different ways, ‘informed’. 

Some of those in the room have set out their stalls very clearly over the last few years. In its formal response to the proposals in January this year, the Church of England Evangelical Council asked again for “a permanent structural rearrangement resulting in visible differentiation”, and repeated the call for “differentiation” after the February vote. Some in CEEC have engaged in LLF, others less so, but even CEEC had its version of the LLF course, with added advice to help its members navigate possible conversations in a diverse group. As an educator myself, it interests me that participants were warned by CEEC that the course would be different from other courses they had taken, not least because “It will introduce a range of different views for you to consider and discuss and evaluate for yourself rather than presenting one viewpoint” (CEEC Engaging with Living in Love & Faith: Guidance for course participants, p.1). If there’s only one possible viewpoint, it is clearly theirs. This looks like a reference – a negative one – to what, for me, was one of the highlights of the LLF book: its recognition of seven different possible positions on Biblical authority which Christians hold. But the CEEC course warned its readers that “it is important not to be intimidated by claims concerning ‘increasing numbers of Christians’ rejecting this or ‘ongoing scholarly discussions’ and ‘different conclusions’” (p.25). So once again, there’s only one acceptable position and, despite frequent calls for ‘more theology’ made by those who would like to delay any change, scholarship is disparaged.

As I can’t talk about what has been happening in the last two meetings, I’ve decided here to go back to that query about whether all in the room have a sense of “your average Anglican congregation” and, indeed, of what it is to be in the Church of England. I’ve been in quite a few Church of England congregations over the years; I’ve also had a period when I didn’t belong to any congregation, as the institution just felt such a damaging place to be. But your average Anglican congregation is, I believe, a mixture. Those who have interrogated their faith and those for whom faith is a gift. Those who attend because they are deeply involved in the life of the church, and those who are fed simply by being there. Those who experience church as a foretaste of the Kingdom, and those who are hanging on by their fingernails. They may attend that particular church because something – the youth work, the musical tradition, the theological views of the minister – gels with them, or they may attend because it’s the nearest church to them, or because they are committed to the Church of England’s parochial ecclesiology. 

And this variety is not just in one place – it’s also valid across time. The simplest way to show that is to take myself as an example. My earliest Sunday School experiences were in an evangelical church, St Paul’s Howell Hill, which I came to realise was known locally as having pretty well declared UDI from the diocese. I went through the Explorers and Pathfinders programmes, learned a lot of Bible verses, experienced some minor bullying (around not coming from a wealthy family) and won a lot of Bible translations as prizes for learning verses. That made me realise that translations differ, and that this matters. As a young teenager in the youth group, I had my first experience of the Holy Spirit, singing in tongues (and I can’t sing in the first place). 

I then moved to my parish church, because they were starting a youth group from scratch, and it meant I wouldn’t need to rely on lifts from parents to get there and back. As well as being on the committee running the youth group, I went to an adult Bible Study Group and was soon on the PCC, followed very swiftly by Deanery and then Diocesan Synod. I was also spending time in London at All Saints Margaret Street (where, a long time before, my grandfather had been a chorister), travelling there and back with a school friend who would eventually be ordained, would work at Walsingham, and would then leave the C of E over the ordination of women. It was at ASMS that I had my second powerful experience of the presence of God, at a point in the liturgy of the Triduum.

I continued to attend my very ordinary parish church, but joined the Church Union (that, in case you’ve not met it, is an Anglo-Catholic organisation). A few years later, I moved from being opposed to the ordination of women to being a supporter. And then there was my first stint, in my 20s, of about seven years on General Synod, during the years that saw the Higton motion, and the legislation for women as deacons and then as priests, where I was a member of Catholic Group because, despite being the outlier on women’s ministry, that’s where I felt most at home.

I worked for the best part of a decade in a college formed from one Anglican and two Roman Catholic teacher training institutes; because I wear a cross, when I went for coffee at the Roman Catholic staff room the catering staff called me ‘Sister’. It was there that I began a ministry of preaching.

For the last twenty years, I’ve been at my market town parish church, eventually becoming an authorised lay preacher as well as leading many nurture courses; but for many years I was also in a Baptist home group, and for some months in a prayer group at the church in the next parish. I am a Street Pastor, and most of those in our town are from a local independent church, an offshoot of the Baptists. Before we married, my husband and I did HTB’s The Marriage Course at that independent church, and then we ran it in our parish church.

None of this, I believe, is all that unusual. We don’t live in silos, and thank God that we don’t. The breadth of the C of E has enriched my life, and my faith. Maybe that’s why I want to preserve the maximum unity within the C of E, so that at different seasons of their lives people can draw on the spiritual riches which we offer to all, without walls and without prejudice. I strongly believe that we need each other, and that we can hold together those who choose to offer the Prayers of Love and Faith and those who do not, just as we hold together those with different understandings of what Communion is; indeed, our published orders of service offer options based on those understandings. Now, I believe, is the time for our bishops to continue what was begun at the February Synod; to be bold, generous, hopeful and kind, and to seek a more Christlike church while preserving unity as an important value.