As we start to look towards February’s General Synod, with an hour scheduled in the draft agenda for a Living in Love and Faith (LLF) “presentation”, and another 4 hours for a “debate” (not clear yet on what). it’s time, I think, for (yet another) update on the process.

It’s been obvious for a while that LLF is in some way drawing to a close; a pretty strong clue was that, when Nick Shepherd left in September as the main staff lead, he was replaced by Revd Helen Fraser on secondment just until March 2026. That suggests LLF ends at the February General Synod, with a bit of mopping up left to do.

But what do ‘close’ and ‘end’ mean? That’s a good question. Let’s backtrack briefly…

The House of Bishops met in October. We still await the Minutes and I shall update this if those add anything to what we already know. A 15 October press release announced simply that “a series of key decisions” had been made “with near unanimity”, following the release of long-promised documents from the Legal Office and the Faith and Order Commission (FAOC). My own brief summary of those documents is here and they have since been challenged by a range of other people; for example, as “not particularly helpful”, “confusing and at times needlessly offensive” or as “shamefully inadequate”. It will be interesting to find out just how much time the bishops – who have quite enough to do without having around 150 pages of law and theology dumped on them – were given to digest those documents; at least one Question on this will be asked in February’s Synod.

The main decision in October was on the synodical and legislative processes that would be necessary (a) for standalone services of blessing for committed same-sex couples to happen, and (b) before ordinands could enter training, or existing clergy could be allowed to be relicensed, if they entered a same-sex civil marriage. None of this is exactly new. I’ve noted here that much of it had already been laid out in other synodical papers which have already come to Synod, such as GS2346 which was debated in February 2024. There’s already an established route for new services, Canon B2 (explained here), although not everyone agrees that a standalone blessing would need to take that route. Allowing clergy to enter same-sex civil marriages would need to be an “amending canon and measure”. Nothing new there either. But no sense of wanting to start the processes.

Meanwhile, blessings of committed same-sex couples continue in existing, scheduled church services, using thePrayers of Love and Faith commended by the House of Bishops under Canon B5. So what’s the problem with using these in standalone services? Apparently that they may look like weddings, with casual attenders thinking they’d been to a church marriage because … frilly white dresses, flowers, rings, whatever. In the Minutes of the May 2025 House of Bishops meeting (6.6), Revd Dr Casey Strine told the House that the term now being used for these was “symbolic actions. The latter term is preferred to the earlier terminology of liturgical aesthetics”. One example among many of how there seems to be a lot of work on language without any action. It reminds me of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where after 573 committee meetings fire still has not been discovered, and where the “single simplest machine in the entire Universe” – the wheel – has not yet been discovered, but the “marketing girl” deflects criticism with “Alright, Mr. Wiseguy, if you’re so clever, you tell us what colour it should be.”

Of course, casual attenders at all sorts of church services may not grasp the theological niceties. I’m not sure regular attenders grasp them all. But is that really such a problem?

The other decision in October was that Delegated Episcopal Ministry (DEM) – arrangements for diocesan bishops who thought one way on LLF to delegate their role to other bishops who thought the opposite way, for bishop-y things like confirmations and ordinations – was officially not going to happen. And without that, there would be no need for some sort of code of practice to set out how it would be happening. Because it wouldn’t be happening! The “near unanimity” here was no surprise, as for conservatives who want their own “third province” – I wrote about that here – DEM didn’t go far enough, while for everyone else it went too far in eroding the role of the diocesan bishop. I can see that; it’s dangerously near to “pick your own bishop” and if you could do that according to their view on lesbian and gay people then why not on everything else?

And so we come to December. According to the published agenda, the December House of Bishops meeting had nearly two hours allocated to LLF in a meeting scheduled for just over three hours in total. The 16 December press release from that meeting states that it did not, as we had expected and as the press release from October had anticipated, make those “Final decisions”. Instead, the House announced that it was going “to spend more time finalising its proposals on the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) process”; the decisions made in October “were not contested” but work was needed “to finalise” the text of a letter from the House. This, presumably, is a reference to the Bishops’ Letter, which was long ago announced as one of the documents that would be issued but which has so far not come to Synod in any form. The language is interesting: ‘finalise’, to go with ‘close’ and ‘end’.

So what’s driving the LLF process into the mud?

Some possible answers would be:

• Reading the various FAOC documents has made the bishops nervous (the problem with this is that they don’t seem to have had time to read them before the October meeting)
• DEM was A Step Too Far for everyone (pity that they couldn’t have decided that before all the work was done developing a plan for local groups of dioceses that would make it possible to find conservative bishops when asked for)
• The Alliance has done brilliantly in scaring the bishops with their talk of an Action Day on which PCCs or – if they don’t want to pass a motion to this effect – just the vicar would announce to their diocesan bishop one or more of these statements: we want to have the oversight of a different bishop/we are not paying into the common fund but will only allow our money to be used to support parishes with whom we agree on theology/we want ordinands to be trained in a special “orthodox” [1] programme rather than in the C of E theological colleges and courses.
• Bishops like the sound of a closure to LLF as a ‘process’ but with the onus being placed on the rest of the church to decide what to do. To quote the summary of the words of Bishop Martyn Snow at the May 2025 House of Bishops, “Failure to reach agreement would not be the end of the conversation. Synod members would table Private Member’s Motions; dioceses would pass Diocesan Synod Motions. These would pass or fail by narrow margins with consequences.”

As we wait for more from the bishops – not just the minutes from October, which would have been approved in December so I had expected to be released before now, but also from their next meeting in the middle of this month – we can at least see where the driving force of The Alliance, the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC), stands.

The CEEC issued a press release and newsletters after the October House of Bishops. The key message from this group, who believe that any sexual expression between two people of the same sex is a sin, is that the bishops need to go even further, so The Alliance must “continue to contend” (they do like their alliteration). And it’s not enough for them to prevent use of the Prayers of Love and Faith in existing services: they have to be taken out of use completely, because they are “unbiblical”. CEEC “long[s] for the bishops to remove the prayers they commended in 2023” and “If that is not possible – let’s advocate for a structural rearrangement which secures orthodoxy going forward.” So that’s the third province again.

And that Action Day, originally planned for 1 December? According to The Alliance, it’s not off the table; there’s been what they call a “pivot” away from putting the plans into action, but it will be happening “if and when the red lines of standalone services and clergy same-sex marriage are furthered.”

Note that: “furthered”. What counts as “furthering”? That’s the big question. If any new group is set up to continue work on relationships and marriage, will that count? If the remit of such a group is to produce another document, or to offer possible ways forward without actually committing to such movement, is that “furthering”? Like The Alliance leaders, the trustees of Together for the Church of England met with the Archbishop of York and others at Lambeth Palace on 5 November. Like them, we were told that some sort of group would probably be proposed. But much here depends on the wording. Would it be a “dialogue” group or something with more direction? The Alliance have written about their aversion to it being a “steering” group because that, to them, means “furthering”. Back to the thesaurus, everyone. 

Because playing with words is so much easier than thinking about the people whose lives are most affected by the continued inertia of the Church of England.

[1] Here I am having trouble, as usual, in finding labels for the different views. Inclusive/conservative used to work; then the conservatives seemed to prefer to call themselves orthodox and the rest of us progressive; and recently their word for us seems to be ‘revisionists’.