Since I last posted here, some months have passed, but that doesn’t mean nothing has happened. We had the November Synod with hours more of ‘debate’ (which really meant people restating their positions yet again). Then, in December, after the House of Bishops meeting, blessings within existing services for people in same-sex relationships were formally commended (24 in favour, 11 against, 3 abstentions), as agreed by Synod. 

It’s hard to gauge the response among those for whom this is a step in the right direction. There’s a list of 86 clergy and readers in Birmingham Diocese who support it, but I have no idea how many couples have taken the opportunity to receive blessings. Anecdotally it seems some are waiting in the hope that a more substantial free-standing service will be permitted, something Synod encouraged by passing the Bishop of Oxford’s amendment to the November motion. I also have no idea how many congregations have any idea that this commendation has even happened; there wasn’t any sort of announcement at my middle-of-the-road church, although a couple of members of the congregation came up to ask me about it after the service. Very few people read the Church Times or listen to the Sunday programme, so the prayers may well have passed under the radar. The first day they could be used was the Third Sunday of Advent, a time when churches are busy with carol services and Christingles and Christmas Tree festivals, and when those with no strong views pro- or anti-such blessings had other things to think about.

Meanwhile, of course, those for whom these blessings are already a step too far have been busy. The Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) released more podcasts and continued its campaign to persuade the bishops to back-track. And a wider alliance of those who oppose the blessings, conveniently calling itself the Alliance, came into view. It includes the more charismatic parts of the Church of England – most notably Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) – and the traditional Anglo-Catholics, but also CEEC, in a grouping that recalls the way disparate groups united in 1985 to oppose the ordination of women, under the flag of the Association for Apostolic Ministry.

In the final days of 2023, my fellow Synod member Nic Tall published a detailed analysis of the aims of these groups, and traced back to 2016 (at least) their plans to carve out for themselves a separate section of the Church of England that would be free of any idea that lesbian and gay people are just as entitled as anyone else to find relationships of love and commitment in which sexual expression of their love may play a part. His intention was to bring to a wider audience the various CEEC moves and, with nearly 25,000 hits to date, and a piece from Andrew Goddard attacking it, his article has perhaps had that effect.

The reaction from Andrew and others was predictable, those in the Alliance insisting that this isn’t schism, but is intended as a way to keep priests and congregations within the Church of England while the bishops continue to discuss ‘pastoral provision’. That’s now the preferred term to ‘structural differentiation’; not least because, as the Bishop of London pointed out in November’s meeting of General Synod, ‘differentiation’ was used to describe apartheid – ‘apart-hood’ – in South Africa. What CEEC/the Alliance are offering is a ‘stop gap measure to stop people walking away from the Church of England, but it’s not going to be sufficient in the long run’. 

So, what exactly is the plan for the long run? When I was briefly involved in the St Hugh’s Conversations, an initially private group bringing together some liberals and some traditionalists, any interim plan had not yet been mentioned. Andrew criticises Nic for not mentioning St Hugh’s, but I’m not sure how he could have done, as the meetings were private and, even when permission was given to share their existence, we were told not to repeat who had said what, so – in contrast to the forensic tone of Nic’s article – there are no weblinks that can be given as evidence. 

For now, though, the CEEC want to identify ‘informal overseers’ who will offer ‘informal alternative spiritual oversight’ to those who have lost confidence in their bishops. It’s not clear to me whether they are expecting other groups in the Alliance to join in and request overseers too. But how could an Anglo-Catholic sign up to the CEEC’s official ‘basis of faith’? How would female overseers relate to the ‘flying bishops’ who look after those conservative evangelicals or traditional Anglo-Catholics who don’t accept the ordination of women? The choice of job title is confusing, of course, as the adjective ‘episcopal’, ‘belonging to or characteristic of bishops’, comes from the ancient Greek word episkopos, ‘one who watches over’, so, er … overseer. But these overseers aren’t bishops. 

In this ‘interim’ world, overseers will exist alongside an alternative financial system in which an individual or a parish can send their money to the ‘Ephesian Fund’ rather than pay their parish share. The Ephesian Fund will only pay out to ‘similar parishes’ among ‘the churches that CEEC serves’ [https://ceec.info/ephesian-fund/more-information/], thus undermining the current Church of England system by which wealthier parishes subsidise poorer ones in the interest of having a C of E presence in every place in the land. I know that some dioceses already have ‘Good Stewards Trusts’ (e.g. Oxford) and a church requesting support has to sign up to these Trusts’ Statement of Faith – which is explicitly ‘based upon the basis of faith of the Church of England Evangelical Council’. So it’s not clear if the Ephesian Fund replaces such Trusts, as they are both CEEC products and both have the principle that evangelical parishes should only support other evangelical parishes. It’s not clear how they decide which ones are sufficiently ‘sound’ to receive the money. The list of items in the ‘basis of faith’ already suggests a far wider range than the use of the Prayers of Love and Faith; how about the ordination of women, second marriages after divorce, as well as the nature of the atonement, the structure of the Trinity, what Holy Communion really is? The list of theological ideas over which Anglicans disagree is a very long one.

There’s a role description available for potential overseers. My thanks to Bishop Pete Broadbent for clarifying to me on Twitter/X that they can be male or female (the word ‘person’ is used throughout), which surprised me when not all conservative evangelicals accept women’s full ministry. They need to ‘fulfil the Biblical expectations of an elder as set out in the Pastoral Epistles and the Ordinal’. I guess that means 1 Timothy 3, although that is only about men: an elder (the word here is episkopos again…) must manage his household well; his children obey him, and he has a good reputation outside the church. And he must be the husband of one wife. Historically, there has been some debate about what was originally meant here. Does it mean that elders must be married – no single men need apply? The reference to ‘children’ already suggests that. Are widowers OK? Is it about ruling out polygamists, or excluding those who are remarried? Is it about excluding those who are not faithful to their wives? 

And that brings us back to marriage. The CEEC ‘basis of faith’ includes ‘the unchangeable standard of Christian marriage between one man and one woman as the proper place for sexual intimacy and the basis of the family’. There is a long history, going back to the Hebrew Bible, of seeing the relationship between God and his people in terms of a marriage. Think of Hosea and his unfaithful wife Gomer, where the message is that we are faithless like Gomer, but God comes to save us when we are about to be sold into slavery. Marriage is a metaphor for God’s relationship with Israel and then, in the New Testament, for Jesus’s relationship with the Church, the ‘Bride of Christ’. What aspect of marriage? Obviously not the sexual aspect, so is it about consent, fidelity, exclusivity, or what? And the current debate over same-sex blessings attracts the ‘marriage’ imagery too. One, surprisingly naive, comment on Nic’s blog post was ‘It is not the faithful partner who can be justly accused of splitting up the marriage but the adulterous one.’

Suppose, then, we were to take the current ‘interim’ arrangements from CEEC, and their stated longer-term goals of structural differentiation – whether that is separate provinces, separate bishops, separate ordinations, separate selection for ordination training, separate theological colleges, separate confirmation services – and put those with their statements that this is about ‘keeping the church together’ … and then we see this in terms of a ‘marriage’ between all of those who call ourselves members of the Church of England? What do we get?

Let me tell you a true story. Many years ago I went out for a work-related meal on a wintery evening. By the time we came out of the restaurant, heavy snow had fallen, the trains had all been cancelled and I wasn’t able to get home. A colleague came to my rescue, offering to put me up for the night in his study. It seemed like a good solution.

To my surprise, his ‘family arrangements’ turned out to be far from conventional. He and his wife continued to be married, and to live in the same house. But they lived apart there. Their finances were separate, they had separate rooms (a bedroom and a study each) and they’d agreed it was fine for either of them to have a lover staying over. I wasn’t there long enough to find out how the shared spaces worked; but there was only one kitchen and one fridge. It was a large and rather lovely house. There was no talk of divorce; they seemed content with the situation, although one can never really tell. I subsequently found out that there is something called a legal separation that may mean staying in the same house, for family or financial reasons, but living separate lives there. Some people do this because they haven’t been married long enough to get a divorce: others just do it and stay like that.

So is this the sort of ‘marriage’ that is envisaged by the CEEC’s quest for ‘new structures’ or ‘differentiation’? Both parties agree to stay under the same roof of the Church of England ‘house’ – because it is a lovely house – but the house is somehow divided into ‘his’ and ‘hers’? 

Now, I know that life is complicated. For example, there are couples who are married but don’t live in the same house. They are committed, but without the shared space. When Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton shared their lives (although they weren’t married in law), they famously lived in adjacent houses. An even more extreme version of that is LAT-ing – Living Apart Together – which I first came across when working in the Netherlands. You live in separate places but have an intimate relationship. But being married, living in the same house, but living apart seems like something else again.

In today’s Sunday Times there was a seasonal feature on How to Get Divorced. I learned there that

Lawyers and relationship therapists are being asked to find “creative solutions” for couples who want to split up but can’t, says Laura Mortimer, a partner at the law firm BP Collins. These include marking up floorplans to divide the house between them, and colour-coded staircases and entrances to ensure warring spouses don’t cross paths. Some devise a rota for sole use of the kitchen and sitting room. 

Colour-coded staircases? Great idea, although it does mean that you need more than one – hardly a solution for most people.

I’ve been in enough rooms – meeting rooms, not kitchens and sitting rooms – where there has been an attempt to put people with different understandings of sexuality together that I really think I hear what the conservatives, the traditionalists, are saying: essentially, that there is no Biblical precedent for same-sex marriage so same-sex couples can’t enter marriages, that sexual expression is only acceptable in marriage, and, ergo, that any physical expression of love between two people of the same sex is sinful because such a couple can’t enter a marriage. I don’t agree with that conclusion. I have agreed – reluctantly, but because I want to keep us all together – that prayers to bless people in such relationships will not be the default setting in the Church of England, and that their use will always be subject to the conscience of the person presiding at the service. Nobody has to use these prayers. But apparently that ‘opt-in’ system is not enough to reassure those who fear their own salvation is compromised by remaining in the Church of England alongside those who do use the prayers. 

Is what is now being proposed, in order to keep traditionalists safe from the rest of us, something like my colleague was doing in living together under the same roof as his wife but keeping his life apart? It’s not an ecclesiological version of ‘Living Apart Together’ because there is no intimacy. It is more like a marked-up floorpan with colour-coded staircases. And I’m left wondering: in what sense can this be seen as one denomination?