There are many questions which the long Living in Love and Faith (LLF) process and the many hours of synodical debate have avoided addressing, to the point where it isn’t even clear if we are all discussing the same things. In the General Synod debating chamber, attempts to name body parts or sexual acts inevitably disintegrate into embarrassment, accusations or obfuscation. So, when we talk about ‘sexual intimacy’, just what does that term cover? Is it just penis-in-vagina sex? Presumably not, as that would be irrelevant for a same-sex couple. Do we mean absolutely anything involving someone else’s genitals? What about one’s own, when there is nobody else with whom to be ‘intimate’? How do holding hands, kissing or massage fit into this? 

In this two-part blog post, focusing on what we mean by ‘intimate’ and ‘intimacy’, I shall start by thinking about language, euphemism and ambiguity, and reflect on what I was trying to achieve in the Private Member’s Motion I submitted to Synod in July. In the second part, I shall draw on some sources not previously used in this discussion, to consider how ‘intimacy’ has recently been used in other Church of England contexts; in a Synod formally-submitted Question, in tribunals held under the Clergy Discipline Measure and in reviews of safeguarding cases.

Beyond euphemisms

Our reaction to questions about sex may be to retreat into euphemisms. Particularly when shared by a group of friends or family, euphemisms can be a way of celebrating a common identity or remembering past incidents, but as a basis for discussing with young people the reality of relationships they are far from helpful. Some UK Christians have become lost in particularly bizarre euphemisms like that known massager Mike Pilavachi’s cringeworthy story of not opening the fridge door in case we are tempted to lick the icing off a slice of the cake within and then – gasp – may decide to eat the whole cake [1]. For Pilavachi, would the icing be OK if it were possible to stop before consuming the rest of the cake? Is that what he thought he was doing with his young interns? 

We seem to be stuck in a perpetual adolescence, wondering just how far we can go; recalling what we may have been told as teenagers, such as the advice to “get off at Edge Hill” – the station before the Liverpool Lime Street terminus. I’ve recently heard some variations on this from a few decades back, including “When you get on the bus with a boy, you can’t go all the way to Hereford, you have to get off at Dinmore Hill” and “You can go to Leeds, but you can’t go to the Lake District.” How were we supposed to follow such instructions? A woman a little younger than me, married to a member of the clergy, once told me that a side benefit of being taught that Christians should not ‘have sex’ before marriage was that she and her future husband could explore various other things which they may never otherwise have discovered. I don’t think she meant walks in the countryside which avoided the Lake District, and I doubt whether any of this was what was intended in the instruction she had received. 

I discussed the basic question of what we mean by sexual intimacy ten years ago, here, and Neil Patterson returned to it here. But here I want to change the focus to look at these questions through the lens of the broader term, ‘intimacy’, arguing that this takes us to a far deeper place located well beyond that fridge door. I’ll start in July 2026 but range back to the fifteenth century and even earlier: after all, I’m a historian.

An ambiguous motion?

That this Synod affirm that there are no fundamental objections to being in a committed, faithful, intimate same-sex relationship, and that such a relationship can be entirely compatible with Christian discipleship.

This was the original wording of the Private Member’s Motion (PMM) I brought to the July 2026 Synod, intended to allow Synod to affirm the value of those in our churches who are in committed and faithful relationships, whether civil partnerships or marriages, with someone of the same sex. I submitted in advance the required supporting paper, published before the meeting as GS 2455A, and tried to explain there what I meant by ‘intimate’ and why I had avoided what I see as the more limited language of ‘sexual intimacy’. I wrote there, “if we reduce intimacy to bodies, and indeed to specific acts of those bodies, we are not doing justice to the depth of our need for trust and closeness.” In other words, I was taking a broad approach; broader than the indeterminate physical, extending into the whole of our humanity. 

I was therefore surprised by Ed Shaw’s speech made against my motion. Ed Shaw is, of course, Ministry Director of Living Out, which offers same-sex attracted Christians just two options: celibacy for life, or marriage to a person of the opposite sex. Their current strapline is “We help people, churches and society talk about faith and sexuality” and Ed’s publications include The Intimacy Deficit. In his speech, he said, “We are created to enjoy intimacy” and urged us “to affirm a wider deeper intimacy”. Yes, Ed, I couldn’t agree more, although in your book you went even further than I would when you described intimacy with creation as a further dimension; I was just thinking about intimacy with other people, an intimacy which may also help us deepen our intimacy with God. Yet Ed’s speech claimed that my motion “promotes an unpastoral, ambiguous and limited definition of intimacy … that will be misunderstood as exclusively sexual”. But by not saying ‘sexual intimacy’, I was trying to expand the definition of intimacy! 

And I don’t think I was being ambiguous, as I did precisely what Ed suggested by going further than the physical, to embrace deep and committed and faithful relationships without enquiring into the minutiae of just who does what with whom, because we have no idea what goes on in other people’s relationships. Fixating on whatever we count as ‘sexual’ loses that key point about intimacy; that true intimacy goes well beyond specific bodily acts. I spelled this out in my supporting paper, where I wrote, “‘Intimate’ is used in this motion to recognise that deep, devoted, passionate relationships of many kinds exist, and always have existed, and that includes a range of types of physical contact.” In what way does that constitute a “limited definition”? The range can include zero!

Another conservative speaker in that July debate, Jake Madin, suggested that my motion was really all about sexual intimacy, going beyond Ed’s word “ambiguous” to suggest that the omission of the word ‘sexual’ was somehow deceptive. Had he read my supporting paper, where I explained why I did it? He also seemed to be eliding romantic relationships (apparently what I meant by “deep, devoted, passionate” – although I meant far more than that) with sexual relationships. Such an approach ignores people who have romantic relationships which are not sexual. Jake, this happens. People are different.

Real life

Historically, romance has not been a necessary part of the deal when setting up a heterosexual marriage. Church history also reveals a long debate over whether it was consent, or sex, that really made a marriage. The Western European tradition includes 1000 years of spiritual marriage and celibate marriage. I’ve written elsewhere about Elena Duglioli, born in 1472, who remained a virgin throughout her marriage, although we are told that she and her husband kissed each other and slept in each other’s arms every night (summary here). Her husband had been keen to consummate the marriage but was put off by mysterious lights appearing in the bridal chamber. I’ve also written about the suffragist and campaigner for women’s ministry, Maude Royden, and her close relationships with the Revd George William Hudson Shaw and his wife Effie. This was an emotional and spiritual love, deep and passionate, but celibate. When Effie died, Shaw and Royden married, as Effie had requested. Royden insisted that “there is a physical side to every kind of love” and she also formed close and enduring friendships with other women; Sue Morgan has written about this here. 

Fact: real life is simply more complicated than some people are prepared to notice. My motion was about going beyond bodies into deeper levels of our humanity. It was about recognising complexity rather than promoting ambiguity. 

As an aside, it’s interesting how ‘ambiguous’ can become a dirty word when used in a Synod debate. The history of Christianity demonstrates instead that ambiguity has often been a deliberate choice, made in order to keep the maximum number of sheep within the fold. See for example Judith Hahn on Roman Catholic canon law; ambiguity enables inclusion. Is the Eucharist a commemoration or a sacrifice? The English Reformation found ways around the question; the first Prayer Book has famously been described as a “masterpiece … in studied ambiguity”, with both conservatives and reformers being able to use it. Like it or not, our current liturgy continues to hold this ambiguity, allowing worshippers to believe different things about what the Eucharist ‘means’.

In the second part of this blog post, I shall move back into the current life of the Church of England to challenge the claim made by the Chairman of the Faith and Order Commission that the publications of his group use the word ‘intimacy’ according to common usage. How, in fact, is the Church of England using this language when it comes to cases of clergy disciplinary hearings and reviews of sexual abuse? 

[1] Widely reported online, e.g. https://livinginchristforteens.blogspot.com/2011/11/chocolate-and-other-temptations.html and discussed, for example, in Lucy Sixsmith, When the Music Stops and here