It’s rare in my experience of the Church of England to find myself quoted by those higher up the food chain. When I was called to speak at the July Synod, I observed that ‘Notice Paper V – which sets out the financial implications of each item of business – mentioned £175,000 for residential conversations around LLF’. It turned out that I was right to assume this meant the LLF team was planning to convene yet more groups, but meeting for longer than the usual isolated days. I also asked that, when these new groups were put together, they wouldn’t consist just of ‘the usual suspects’ – speaking, of course, as a ‘usual suspect’.

That wording seems to have struck a chord. It’s included in the 8 March letter from +Martyn Snow which went to all members of General Synod and was published on the Living in Love and Faith website (incidentally, don’t try getting your information from the LLF Timeline as it ends in July 2023, I assume not from ill-founded optimism but because there’s still not enough staffing to have it updated).

Now, I’m not naïve. I’ve been around for long enough to know that it’s unlikely anything I say can influence anyone here. Instead, it’s more probable that the LLF team had already realised that this Synod has been functioning for long enough, and has endured enough hours of work on LLF, that there are plenty of members who have something to contribute at national level, and who have not yet had the chance to do so. Some of those will have valuable experience of leading LLF groups at local levels; others will have been involved in similar sorts of discussion in a work context. As we move forward on the slow process of implementing Synod’s decisions, we all need their input.

The 8 March letter invited members to put their names forward to join three groups, each to be chaired by a bishop. These groups are:

Pastoral Guidance Working Group 

Pastoral Reassurance Working Group 

Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF) Working Group 

I suppose they could all be controversial in their different ways. But it’s the second of these which looks trickiest. Its task is ‘to draft an outline proposal for the minimum structural provision that is both necessary and proportionate’. What does that mean? I’ve never cared for ‘structural’ as it makes me think of the conservative calls for a separate ‘province’, a non-geographic one alongside the geographic ones of York and Canterbury.

The words ‘minimum’ and ‘proportionate’ have been used before. At the July Synod, it was a conservative, the Bishop of Guildford, who championed ‘proportionate’. In proportion to what, though? To what is actually supposed to happen next: the replacement of ‘Issues in Human Sexuality’ (over 30 years out of date), so that clergy and lay leaders in same-sex marriages can remain in post in every diocese, plus the availability at some churches of standalone services to bless a couple in a committed same-sex relationship? To me these seem tiny (compared to having such couples married in church) but to others they seem enormous (‘blessing sin’, I understand, being their preferred terminology). Or, in proportion to the results of the various votes on motions and amendments taken in Synod, or in proportion to how many in the C of E want this to happen (who knows? by which survey should we decide)?

As for ‘necessary’; is that ‘necessary for everyone to stay in the C of E’ or ‘necessary so that the maximum number – but it can never be everyone – feels that they can stay in the C of E’? Thinking about this in the aftermath of the resignation of the Rector of Liverpool over the ‘institutional homophobia’ of the CofE, which is very public evidence that those leaving are certainly not just those who reject any change to the current situation, makes it clear that that even with the status quo not everyone feels able to stay.

When LLF started off, back in 2017, the process was led by Dr Eeva John. She is now Vice-Chancellor of the Episcopal University of South Sudan, having formerly been chair of the trustees of its funding body. Since she left, the pattern became that two bishops were in charge of the process. Who is now going to make the decisions about what the new groups discuss, and decide? The 8 March letter clarified this, sort of. There is (or is to be?) a Programme Board to which the groups report. It will include the one remaining Lead Bishop for LLF, +Martyn Snow, but someone else will chair it. The timetable? Here I can expand a little on the letter because I know people who have been invited to join the groups (no, I haven’t – this ‘usual suspect’ is off the case!); three meetings by zoom before a residential meeting in mid-May. Then the bishops meet again. And in theory something is put to July Synod.

I appreciate that it takes time to put the new groups together. People will have been on holiday and not responded; if someone says ‘no’ then it will have been necessary to find someone who says ‘yes’ while still keeping a balance (I hope!) between lay and clergy, women and men, northern province and southern province, gay and straight, while ensuring racial diversity. But it’s been a long wait. And as we continue to wait, not just for the information on group membership but even for the publication of the information on who is heading the Programme Board, it’s hard to know how this latest iteration of LLF groups can produce something by July. There will be the issue of members getting to know each other and building up trust in each other and in the process. 

Once again, there’s the question of ‘red lines’. Many of us who are on the inclusive/liberal end of this feel that we’ve already gone as far as we can go on this; we would prefer the CofE to accept same-sex blessings (at the very least) as the default situation, with an ‘opt-out’ choice for those priests who don’t feel they can offer such a blessing – rather like the current situation for priests who, in conscience, are not comfortable marrying a heterosexual couple where one or both partners is divorced with a former partner still living. But we have accepted ‘opt-in’, and probably a more complex process of this in which both the incumbent and the PCC have to agree to do this. 

Other than the extreme proposals from CEEC, with separate everything (except for Synod membership and access to funding), I still don’t know what we can do to ensure that those who disagree with stand-alone blessings and same-sex married clergy and lay leaders still feel they can stay in the CofE. For those who think this is ‘blessing sin’, it’s hard to see how anything can sufficiently insulate their priests and people from the rest of us in such a way that our presence would not alarm them. And it doesn’t help that we are in a situation of growing unease with the existing situation with women priests and bishops, in which those who would not accept being ordained by a bishop who has previously ‘laid hands on’ a woman (in the church this has a rather different meaning to normal conversation) are able to have a different bishop at their ordination. As Christine Allsopp has just reminded us, when women became bishops there were subtle changes to the wording around them so that ‘extended’ oversight became ‘alternative’. Who is going to watch out for those sorts of subtle but damaging shifts of language?

There is one other set of meetings which has been announced: further ‘stakeholder group’ meetings, for the first time by Zoom, in mid-April. Similar meetings will happen again in May. These are where representatives of the networks and groups of both the conservative and inclusive kind meet the LLF lead bishops and staff team but they appear to be more one-way than previously, the purpose announced being ‘so that we can update you on the process and progress moving towards July’.

‘Process and progress’. I hope that the membership of all the groups – process – can be announced at last. Progress? I hope so. Is the end really in sight?