Like many others, I have been reflecting on the 15 October House of Bishops announcement, which appears to say that Living in Love and Faith (LLF) has ground to a halt, with no change to the welcome given to lesbian and gay people other than a set of prayers – Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF) – commended at the end of 2023 for use with a same-sex couple who would like to come before God to offer him their relationship, but only to be used in an existing service.

Here I would like to do two things. First, to think about two related questions: why this has happened, and why it has come as a shock to many people. Second, to think about other routes that could have been – or still could be – taken.

Why did this happen? 

In innumerable debates, and in Questions posed formally to the House of Bishops or those leading LLF, Synod members have heard from conservatives the words ‘Show us the legal advice’. The narrative was that we hadn’t seen it all, and Synod does love a conspiracy theory. Apparently there’s now another set of this, which isn’t yet public. But it is being held responsible for the 15 October announcement. Somehow, the legal advice around how we could move forwards is supposed to have changed. Or perhaps simply the way it was interpreted has changed. Another factor is the bishops’ resistance to one of the conservatives’ requests: for their own bishops to carry out confirmations and ordinations, their own process for selecting candidates for ordination, and like-minded bishops to support them. What they have asked for, in order that they can stay in a church where not everyone agrees with them that all same-sex relationships are sinful, is “structural separation”: one form of which was something that came to be called Delegated Episcopal Ministry. And that was too much for the bishops to contemplate.

Much of this isn’t new to those of us who’ve been part of this LLF ‘process’ (yes, those are deliberate scare quotes) for years. Think back to when GS 2346 (Living in Love, Faith, and Reconciliation) was debated at the February 2024 Synod. After some debate, and some amendments being made to the motion (and others rejected), the scheduled vote on the report itself did not take place, because instead we voted by a very large majority to move to next business. Frankly the document was a mess, offering too much “structural separation” within the Church of England for progressives to be able to support it, but too little for conservatives to accept it. Little has shifted since then.

Annex A to GS 2346 already laid out the various options for what were then called ‘standalone’ services, which are currently one of the sticking points – the use of PLF but in a separate service rather than in an existing scheduled service. Would it look too much like a church wedding? How could that be prevented? Well, just for starters, the service is different…! Somewhere along the line, the terminology shifted, as it so often does in LLF discussions. ‘Standalone’ became ‘bespoke’; I’ve heard it said that this is just a posh word for standalone, but I feel there is more going on here. ‘Bespoke’ implies more of a ‘make it up as you go along’ service, whereas surely these services would be using exactly the same materials from the PLF suite, maybe just more of them because there would be more time available. So here I am just going to use the original terminology of ‘standalone’; that is, separate.

Annex A already went through all the options for how this could happen, in terms of synodical processes, listing them with their likely risk. That’s interesting when so much of what is now happening seems to be about risk management.

One option in Annex A was that Canon B 5, which was used in 2023 to commend the PLF in existing services, could be expanded to include standalone services too. The quickest and the simplest route, it would mean designating some parishes as those which would use the PLF in separate services, for a fixed period of time, on an experimental basis. Feedback would be collected, and then the services would stop while a further, more complicated, process under Canon B 2 was considered by the House of Bishops and the Liturgical Commission, with a view to these standalone services being used anywhere. 

GS 2346 spelled out how, if that process under B 2 went ahead, it would mean the full legal mechanism of a steering committee, first consideration, setting up a revision committee, maybe another report on doctrine and a General Synod debate on that, then a revision committee stage producing a report back to Synod, maybe a repeat of that stage if members were not happy, then a further revision in Synod, then back to the House of Bishops, then perhaps votes in the separate Houses, then back to Synod for Final Approval needing two-thirds majorities in each House. And there could be a referral out to diocesan synods somewhere along the line. Gasp. But that’s how B 2 works. GS 2346 estimated a minimum two years for all the stages. Yes, it sounds protracted, but that’s how the C of E operates and it’s what happened with, for example, the ordination of women.

But GS 2346 offered some other ideas. Under Canon B 4.3, individual bishops could simply authorise the separate services – no experimental period, no need to get Synod to vote. That would mean that things would be different in different dioceses – rather like they are already on many matters, not least on sexuality; for example on whether licensed lay ministers are subject to the same restrictions on entering same-sex civil marriages. Under Canon B 4.2, the archbishops could do the authorising. One decision, all sorted. However, both were designated as having “High likelihood of legal challenge.” Back to risk again. Would the bishops, or archbishops, be taken to court? 1 Corinthians 6, anyone? “Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to decide between one believer and another, but a believer goes to court against a believer”?

To think further about the risks of these challenges, various pieces of theological and legal advice were commissioned. Returning to GS 2346 we read “I [that’s the voice of Bishop Martyn Snow, who at that point was lead bishop for LLF] have included in the annexes to this paper information on some of the key legal issues, as advised by the Church’s Legal Office. Other lawyers might offer different advice on some points, which could only ultimately be determined by the courts. But we include here the best professional advice we have.”

So we already had legal advice and, as Bishop Martyn noted, the problem is that it differs depending on who is asked to give it. And even then, you need to interpret it.

According to the House of Bishops’ 15 October press release, “the House reviewed detailed theological and legal advice on outstanding questions following the landmark 2023 Synod vote which led to the introduction of the Prayers of Love and Faith (or PLF)” and decided on the processes that would be needed both for separate services and for clergy in same-sex civil marriages to be licensed. As we had already been given detailed information in GS 2346 on the B 2 system, I am not sure why that had to be discussed again, nor am I sure why it seems to have come as such a surprise to some people. I suppose it’s just that very few people, except some Synod members, read all the documents that have come out along the way. It would be good to know that our bishops, at least, understand how Synod makes legislation!

But the October press release – which has to suffice until the minutes of that meeting are approved in mid-December – doesn’t hint at any discussion of the Canon B 4 options. So…

Let’s have some history

And here, not for the first time, I suggest going back to another long, angry process in recent history; marriage in church after divorce, finally made possible (officially) in 2002. It began with a series of reports, responding to changes in secular law regarding marriage and divorce, in 1966, 1971, 1978, 1983 and 1985; the Root Report (1971) noted “that divorced partners could enter into new unions that bore the hallmarks of a satisfactory marriage”; extraordinary wording that, while depressingly grudging, seems to me to be something that needs to be acknowledged around same-sex committed relationships.

At the moment, as we know, marriage of same-sex couples in church is not even on that table from which crumbs so rarely fall. When marriage of divorced people in church did eventually happen, as with PLF, individual clergy consciences were respected: no member of the clergy would be forced to conduct such a marriage against their conscience. There are those in Synod even today who do not believe marriage is possible if one or more partners has been divorced with the former partner still living. We manage to cope with that division, still. 

What is more closely comparable with PLF, though, is the service of blessing for a straight couple where a partner has been divorced. Such services have an interesting history. I’ve recently acquired a copy of GS 1361 Marriage in Church After Divorce, a report from a working party commissioned by the House of Bishops, and published in 2000, 17 years after Synod resolved that “there are circumstances in which a divorced person may be married in church during the lifetime of a former partner”. While that resolution was making its way towards something that put this position into practice, and in the full knowledge that “many … find our present positions contradictory in principle”, one step on the way was the approval of a service of prayer and dedication after a civil marriage. This happened in June 1985 – forty years ago.

What’s the difference between such a service for a straight couple, and using the PLF in a standalone service? I can see why some would not like to make the connection; it would make the PLF seem more likely to be a staging post on the way to equal marriage. But note that the prayer and dedication service was approved by the House of Bishops with “its use being permissible under either Canon B 4 or B 5”, not needing to go through General Synod because it was not an alternative to anything in the Book of Common Prayer.

GS 1361 Marriage in Church After Divorce outlines the history of how the services of blessing after a civil marriage evolved (all the following quotations, and those in the previous two paragraphs, are taken from this document). It’s an instructive read. Some clergy offered what came to be called “prayers at the chancel step”, which focused on penitence; “some bishops decreed that no stoles be worn”, to emphasise this theme, and the couple were not to be blessed. I note that the penitential theme would not have played out well if the person who was divorced had been subject to domestic abuse. There were also contextual considerations about not letting this look like a wedding, including “Hymns were often considered inappropriate since this would be to turn private prayers into a public service.” That’s the first time I’ve heard this suggested; how does a hymn make a service “public”? And these services were somehow not “public” but were standalone – although there were limits on the number who could attend.

There was no authorised liturgy for such a service “although a number of diocesan bishops began to issue guidelines and even circulated what they considered to be appropriate forms of service”. Fascinating. I wonder if any of these survive? But clearly there was variation between dioceses – the ‘postcode lottery’ which is held up as a bogeyman to scare people off using PLF in standalone services today – and in the 1970s some of these forms of service became more celebratory than penitential. The 1985 service of prayer and dedication, as eventually approved by the House of Bishops, is still alive and well and advertised as available. Is it right to assume that it was discussed when the Prayers of Love and Faith were drawn up? The service of prayer and dedication goes further than the prayers at the chancel step, as it even allows hymns!

So the history of how the Church of England moved towards allowing divorced people to marry again in church shows us a period of disruption, with clergy taking a lead and bishops responding to this, followed by a vote of principle in support, and then a House of Bishops initiative in approving a service to be used. I wonder: is this the way forward?