(With one amendment, made on 7 November)

As regular readers know – and as I’ve said in General Synod more than once – I believe in transparency. But I also respect confidences. This can be a difficult tightrope to walk when it comes to the Church of England. At the Living with Difference meetings in September, the usual St Michael’s House Protocols (it’s OK to share the learning but don’t attribute anything) were suddenly shifted to Don’t Say Anything About The Documents. At least that’s clear.

Last Friday, I was at Lambeth Palace for a meeting. No protocols were stated for this meeting, so for the purposes of this update I am assuming ‘St Michael’s House’, but with the extra feature that it’s impossible not to attribute what’s said when there is only one person in the room who could have said it; the Archbishop of Canterbury. Because the whole point of the meeting was to bring him into the same room as representatives of the various ‘inclusive’ groups: and yes, I know, this isn’t great terminology, but nor is ‘progressive’ (suggesting an opposite of ‘regressive’) or ‘liberal’ (many of us are highly orthodox in our theology) or ‘affirming’ (we don’t affirm just anything!). We’d been given no agenda in advance, only told that the meetings were “so that we [the LLF Staff Team] are able to share with you the intentions of the bishops and so you are able to share your thoughts and concerns with us.”

When Friday’s meeting was announced, at short notice, I heard from several stakeholders that they weren’t inclined to drag themselves into London yet again for what could well be a pointless meeting. We have bitter experience of being asked at these meetings to react to various scenarios, only for an entirely different scenario to be the one that is decided upon. Eventually they concluded that they may as well go; we’re nothing if not resilient. So, there we were. Again. Only, this time, all in the same room, rather than meeting the LLF team in sub-groups (Evangelical inclusives, Catholic inclusives, etc).

And there are many groups; therefore, it was a full room. The room allocated was on the eighth floor; there are two small lifts but with the number of people attending we were asked to consider taking the stairs. And I did. As we climbed up, someone joked that this was an attempt to get rid of us all…

What follows are my recollections (I took notes so anything in double quote marks is a direct quotation) and reactions. Some of my reactions differ from those of my friend Colin Coward, who was present for Changing Attitude (England) and who has blogged here. I am not going into detail on some parts of the meeting which he mentions, although I witnessed what he describes, because I don’t want to tell other people’s stories: that’s up to them. 

We were invited to go round giving our names and the name of the group we were representing. It was clear that the Archbishop hadn’t heard of some of these groups. Then the Archbishop gave an initial comment recognising the process as “costly and painful”; I wasn’t sure whether that was about being in this particular room or the whole LLF ‘journey’. He referred in particular to the feedback he had received after the 9 October meeting of the House of Bishops, and to the more recent meeting of the House at which only around three hours were spent on LLF although there had been “private conversations with different people” as well. Just wondering here who these would be? He stated that both Archbishops want the proposals to move forward “as quickly as possible”. He said he was well aware of the splits not just in the C of E and the Anglican communion but also in every other denomination on “living appropriately and rightly” with LGBTQIA+. 

The meeting’s facilitator then said that he would be holding the circle, and stated that the purpose of the meeting was for the Archbishop to hear our responses. 90 minutes would be devoted to that, with people invited to put up their hand when they wanted to vocalise what they were thinking. He added that there were to be “no threats”, which did make me wonder what the morning meeting with ‘conservatives’ – because he and the Archbishop mentioned this meeting – had been like. (Amendment: as of 7 November, thanks to one of those at the morning meeting, we know just what it was like… ouch) After that period of sharing, we would look at the questions in a different way: I’ve no idea what that meant because we never made it to that stage. Finally, the Archbishop would respond.

People’s contributions ranged from personal stories to anonymised stories of others in their congregations to wider reflections on the process so far and on GS2328 and the B2 route in particular. Three offered documents from their organisations, including the letter from Inclusive Evangelicals which has since been published. They were presented to the Archbishop, who didn’t look thrilled and put them on the floor by his chair; I think it would have given a better impression if he had held on to them, putting them under the A4 notebook in which he was writing some of the things we said. One person commented on the large proportion of those offering for ministry who are LGBTQIA+, especially their relative “over-representation” among Deans, but although this was offered with humour the Archbishop remained stony-faced. He never looked comfortable. When I spoke I mentioned anger and sadness, and reflected that one thing I was thinking was whether the many hours I have spent on the LLF process over the last six years have been a complete waste of time. The positive from those years, I said, was the privilege of meeting the other people in the room and I also stated that I am never again prepared to be in a room where people think it’s OK to tell my friends – my friends in loving committed relationships – that they are sinners.

And then we moved directly to the Archbishop’s response. We’d already gone over time (and it turned out that another meeting was happening in that room later in the evening). This meant there were apparently only two minutes left but after stating that, the facilitator then offered him five. The Archbishop came across as very grumpy – at one point it looked like he was packing up to go home – and said he couldn’t do it in the time but he’d try to reduce the number of points to two. Looking at my notes, I can’t work out what those two were supposed to be. 

Picking up some of the language from the thoughts shared by those present, he started with “You’re not a problem to be solved” and the related “I don’t see you as ‘Other’. You are fully part of the Church”. That sounds encouraging, but he used a very unfortunate image to affirm that the grace of God extends to everyone; he has since apologised for that. He then commented on the stories which had been shared regarding people in the room being threatened and harassed, or told they were going to Hell, but he used this as an opportunity to talk about the death threats he himself has received and showed us his personal alarm; rather than acknowledging and lamenting what had been shared, that seemed like diverting what was said into something about himself. Much of what followed also came across as self-defence, talking about what he does for LGBTQIA+ asylum seekers or his record of making staff appointments that are more diverse than those of many other bishops.

But this meeting wasn’t about self-defence. It was supposed to be about listening to the others in the room. I wish I had seen more evidence of that, and I wonder whether the morning meeting with ‘conservatives’ had been so difficult that he was still trying to process it.

The original invitation had suggested we’d hear “the intentions of the bishops” as well as sharing our reactions. We didn’t get any sense of “the bishops” at all, only of this Archbishop – I think the Archbishop of York was mentioned just the once. I’ve commented already on my shock when the B2 route – no stand-alone services of blessing until a vote in Synod in 2025 – suddenly surfaced, and at the meeting we were given some sense of why the B2 route had surfaced as sounding better than the original plan, and why the very tight timetable of moving to a B2 vote in 2025 was, in his opinion, the right thing to do. But it does sound like the Archbishop, or maybe ‘the bishops’, are keen to revisit the experimental use of the stand-alone blessing services, something not currently in the proposals. 

As for 2025, clearly it’s impossible to reach the two-thirds threshold required in Synod; the Archbishop knew the figures and stated them. But, he said, the onus was on us as leaders of the ‘inclusive’ groups to use whatever means we can to change people’s views. Well, thanks, but what have we been trying to do for a very long time now? And the ‘conservatives’ have been trying to change our views, and although some people in these groups do shift their position slowly over many years, bearing in mind the years of LLF, I can’t imagine what he has in mind. We’ve been through all the arguments. We just go round in circles. The ‘conservatives’ believe they’d be ‘blessing sin’ so why would they even support the crumb currently on the table: the very restricted use of the Prayers of Love and Faith in existing services. So why would they support the stand-alone services?

I came away from the meeting feeling very tired indeed. There were powerful emotions in the room, powerful and very sad stories, and I am not convinced these were properly acknowledged. I am also confused about where the LLF process is now; neither of the two ‘lead bishops’ for LLF were in the room and, while of course the staff will feed back to them, there’s nothing quite like hearing people’s stories for yourself. I note that the LLF Steering Group is scheduled to meet on 6 November, so I assume the staff team are busy writing up the meeting at this very moment. And then what?

I now have two more questions to add to the many that occupy me when I think about my experience through the LLF ‘journey’ (by the way, the LLF ‘roadmap’ still stops in July 2023, I assume because the staff don’t have the time to update the web page). My latest questions are: whose initiative lies behind this meeting? And – even more importantly – who is now running the show?