Many of us on Synod and beyond are spending the weekend ploughing through the 108 pages of GS2328, the update on where the bishops now are, which contains versions of the three documents promised after February’s motion passed. GS2328 is an odd read, not least because there was some radical change between the College of Bishops in September, which was going with allowing stand-alone services of blessing for same-sex relationships immediately (under Canon B5a), and the House of Bishops on 9 October, where some sort of ‘saviour moment’ led to an entirely new direction, B2 authorization, meaning that no such services can yet happen, only the use of the special Prayers in services which are already happening, so presumably the usual Sunday Communion and Evensong services. That there has been this late-in-the-day change is acknowledged in GS2328 Annex E, “there has not yet been time to incorporate fully the implications of the House’s decision to move to B2 authorization for the standalone service”.

I do wonder about this. It came out of nowhere. It wasn’t mentioned at the three days of September I spent in the Living With Difference groups and, as I’ve commented elsewhere, we were specifically told not to trust the ‘saviour moment’ where someone comes up with something that’s new and therefore hasn’t been properly thought through. It wasn’t mentioned at the stakeholder meetings at the start of October; it just turned up on 9 October. 

I’ve been to two of these stakeholder meetings, as a representative of General Synod Gender & Sexuality Group. In GS2328, we are told in Annex G that “One of the successful features of the Living in Love and Faith Process so far has been the broad and deep engagement with stakeholders across the Church and beyond, both to listen to what their concerns and hopes are, and to manage those concerns actively. That engagement will become even more important as we move into the implementation period.” The format is that one or two members of an organisation come along, with maybe two or three organisations are combine, to sit with members of the LLF team and be briefed and then discuss what is going on.

But I’m not fully convinced that attending as a stakeholder is really worth it; specifically, it’s a funny sort of “broad and deep engagement” when the Great Plan is not even mentioned at a meeting. 

When invites were issued to this latest round of stakeholder meetings, those with ‘inclusive groups’ were originally scheduled for 10 October. But the House of Bishops’ meeting to decide precisely what was coming to Synod had been fixed for 9 October, making it look like the meetings were to try out what the House eventually decided. From the Church of England grapevine, however, it then turned out that the ‘conservative groups’ were all meeting the LLF team before that House of Bishops meeting. So, what they said could feed in to the decision, but what we said would only be a reaction? I wrote to the LLF team to ask what was going on. We were told that the purpose of the meetings was to “enable the core team to meet with groups ahead of the General Synod meeting in November, to listen well to the different concerns and hopes of each group, and to help shape the presentation of the LLF material at Synod, particularly tonally and pastorally. We are keen to hear your views in order to help us prepare well for General Synod, rather than to input directly into the meeting of the House of Bishops.” While appreciating the speed of the LLF team’s response, this didn’t entirely add up in terms of meeting dates, so we accepted their revised invitation to attend before rather than after the House of Bishops met. In the end, some of us couldn’t change our calendars, meaning that some inclusive groups met before 9 October, others after. Perhaps there was nothing sinister at all going on, but we have learned to be so suspicious of behind-the-scenes sneakiness that we see it even when it perhaps isn’t there. Or, perhaps, it is…

But going back to that statement about what the meetings were supposed to be for, I am now wondering how anything that happened in the stakeholder meetings helped “prepare well” for Synod. As for the “tonal and pastoral” presentation of LLF material at Synod, I suppose the proof of the pudding will be what happens on 13 and 14 November. The “tonal and pastoral” level of GS2328 is hardly impressive. You thought Issues in Human Sexuality was tone-deaf? Just try the various documents provided here.

Yet GS2328 lists among the many more areas of work needed “Stakeholder engagement and liaison”. That there is still much work to be done has been a continuing refrain in the last year or so of the ‘LLF journey’, even though the LLF ‘roadmap’ stops dead at July 2023. Even though by February 2023 the total cost of the LLF process – staffing, expenses, publications – was already £994,071, I suspect it’s all just under-resourced; so there’s nobody to update the website? According to Annex G, further work means not only implementing what is already stated, more work on the new Pastoral Guidance’s section on clergy and lay ministers (shorthand for ‘Can people in ministry be in same-sex civil marriages without losing their permission to work?’) and maybe or maybe not developing “formal structural pastoral provision”; there’s also yet more work on “singleness, celibacy/chastity, friendship, human identity” (what, more on friendship, beyond the bizarre Covenanted Friendship thing, which to my knowledge nobody was even asking for?). You may well wonder why the House of Bishops didn’t devote its time to these topics over the past six years, and the only answer that I can come up with is – because they hoped it would all go away. But there’s only so long you can keep your head in the sand.

One of the most optimistic pages in GS2328 is the timeline for what happens between now and November 2025, when the stand-alone services of blessing for same sex couples are supposed to return to Synod for a vote under Canon B2; which requires a two-thirds majority in all three houses, something clearly unreachable under the current Synod. So, is this all set up to fail? In which case, why are we wasting time on it? Do we have to stick with the B2 route, or could we, even at this late stage, reinstate the original plan: to have a trial period of using the services and then a return to Synod to vote on them? And there’s another thing. The final approval of the Prayers – the session of Synod at which they will, presumably, just be voted down – is November 2025. Bearing in mind how the timeline has slipped already, with people expecting July 2023 to be when things were sorted out, and then revising that to November 2023, and now to an even later date, does this mean another round of General Synod elections dominated by this unresolved issue which is so damaging to so many? For how long are faithful LGBTQIA+ members of the church supposed to wait for the very small step of blessings; blessings which no church will be compelled to offer?