I argued in Part 1 of this piece that euphemisms don’t get us very far; I considered whether the language of intimacy is hindering our discussions of sexuality, and whether we need to have a far broader concept of what it can cover. I now want to turn to Church of England usage of ‘intimate’ and ‘intimacy’, outside the rarefied circles of General Synod.

Consummation 

I mentioned Living Out in Part 1 of this blog post, noting that it promotes celibacy for life as one of the only two options available for anyone attracted to people of their own sex. This use of celibacy is very different from the traditional structures in which is seen as a calling and a gift, rather than something about which one is offered no choice because of one’s sexuality. In some parts of the Church of England, lifelong celibacy is not only part of religious profession – for monks and nuns, often living in community – but also features outside these communities in the “single consecrated life”. Neither religious profession nor the single consecrated life has any necessary connection with one’s sexual orientation. 

For many people, singleness and virginity are very different things. But in church contexts there is pressure to combine them; I’ve written elsewhere about virginity and what it means today in an era where “born-again virgins” have become a thing. Let’s consider an extreme case of a person who has written about her call to virginity: Bernadette Lang. She is a traditional Roman Catholic, an online influencer and author of Skandalöse Liebe (2024): her account of how she came to ‘marry’ Jesus as a consecrated virgin, in answer to the question she heard him ask, “Do you want to belong to me?” The ceremony, which she describes as a wedding, involved her wearing a white dress and arriving at Salzburg Cathedral with her bridesmaids in an open carriage drawn by horses; for those of us aware of the various ‘mustn’t look like a wedding’ guidelines applied to any service using the Prayers of Love and Faith, it’s striking how clearly this ceremony of consecration looks precisely and deliberately like a wedding. 

Lang uses the language of intimacy. She writes and speaks about her “exclusive relationship with Jesus”, about experiencing “a very profound form of intimacy”, “a healthy intimacy with God … with a consummation in eternity”.[1] While her prostration before the altar at the Cathedral ceremony recalls an ordination, or making a religious profession, she has said that she did not feel called to the religious life because a nun is under a vow of obedience to her bishop whereas she remains independent, but also that she thought the life of a religious community would be “very uncool”, “putting on the same unattractive dress every day”, whereas she yearned to feel beautiful. [2] She has written that she feels Jesus “in my garden”.[3]

This use of the terminology of intimacy – and of consummation – develops in a particular direction the imagery of the Church as the bride of Christ. It goes well beyond the physical, and seems to suggest only this “profound form of intimacy” is really “healthy”.

Foreplay

Back to the Church of England, where discussions of celibacy can still be more about the practicalities of living as a single person than about intimacy. At the July 2026 Synod, the Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe, in his role as Chair of the Faith and Order Commission, was asked to define intimacy. This was in one of the formal Questions sessions which, as usual, were enlisted to provide some foreplay leading up to an agenda item; in this case, to my PMM. Anna de Castro asked this Question: 

“In the context of the Living in Love and Faith process, what meaning has FAOC given to the word ‘intimate’?” 

In a particularly fine example of evasion, the Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe replied: 

“FAOC has not found it necessary to explore the meaning of intimate and to provide a more technical definition to the word than offered by its common usage.”

So that’s all right, then. It’s clearly a trick question, so the answer must be to avoid saying anything that could be inflammatory, and to brush the question aside by insisting that we all know what we mean. But that means we don’t need to decide whether or not we mean the same thing. As discussed here, intimacy can cover a small Italian restaurant, personal care, a deep knowledge, and a close friendship. 

Back to those July 2026 Questions. Another, from Richard Denno, pushed on whether using the Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF) with a same-sex couple means making some sort of “assumption as to their sexual relationships”. Like everyone else on Synod, Mr Denno had the opportunity to see the draft pastoral guidance for using the PLF, GS 2386, issued in February 2025, which explicitly stated that the PLF “make no assumptions with regard to sexual intimacy”. But that simple statement is clearly not enough for those who think that some assumptions are surely hidden in the prayers.

The reply from the Archbishop of York repeated once again that 

“The PLF make no assumptions with regards to sexual intimacy… It would not be appropriate for a minister to ask questions that concentrate on the details of any couple’s intimate relationship – whether this is a couple asking for the PLF, or an opposite sex wedding couple.” 

This helpfully makes the point that we are not only talking about same-sex couples when we think about intimacy. 

Legally intimate

It seems to me that many uses of ‘intimacy’ are limited to the physical, but as I said in Part 1 I think that intimacy goes far deeper than what we do with our bodies. As someone on a LLF working group while the LLF book was being written, I have access to earlier drafts as well as to the published version. One draft included, on relationships in general, “Many of these relationships involve some level of real intimacy on an emotional and often a physical level and that too brings life”; a useful reminder that it’s not all about bodies. This seems to have been diluted in the published version (p.32) in the section on Marriage and the gift of sex where we have a reference to the love between man and woman in the Song of Songs and “the physical intimacy for which they yearn”.[4]

So in this final section, I want to consider how the word has recently been used in other Church of England contexts; in tribunals held under the Clergy Discipline Measure and in reviews of safeguarding cases. I will therefore be discussing abuse, and this may be disturbing for some readers. When we consider how ‘intimacy’ and ‘sexual intimacy’ are used in these contexts, the “common usage” view put forward by the Bishop in Europe seems particularly disingenuous. 

In the published reports of tribunals convened under the Clergy Discipline Measure, when it comes to sex, for obvious reasons, the preference is for forensic and explicit detail. Gone are all those euphemisms and circumlocutions: no ambiguity. In investigating misconduct, these reports from the shadow side of the Church of England are often willing to call a penis a penis; to use phrases like “capable of maintaining an erection”; to discuss the appearance of a respondent’s genitalia; and, alongside clear descriptions like “oral sex” or “vaginal sex”, are able to quote the actual language used between people who aren’t constrained by the protocols of Synod, such as “consensual shag”. 

What happens to the noun, intimacy, or the adjective, intimate, here? When tribunals use the language of ‘intimacy’ they usually, but not inevitably, mean something involving somebody’s genitals, but they don’t always mean penis-in-vagina. For example, the following phrases are used in the written determination of a 2003 hearing for a case involving a member of the clergy and an under-age girl; “their relationship … entered a more intimate phase”; “He touched her intimately and made her touch him” … “frequent mutual kissing and sexual intimacy (but not intercourse beyond oral sex and digital penetration)” (https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2018-11/decision-marsh.pdf). So here, while intimacy does not automatically mean penis-in-vagina, it is a very physical usage involving genitalia. A further category referred to in another tribunal report is the “intimate relationship falling short of adultery”, which raises many different questions of the ‘how far can you go?’ variety.

In these reports, the language of intimacy also features in regard to friendship, but the line is a thin one; sharing a bed when a person has night terrors can be part of an “intimate friendship” but not if this is done “repeatedly”.

In a recently-published independent review of a case of serious abuse, one of the accused – Revd B – spoke of being “briefly intimate together” but “denied it led to sexual intercourse”. Here, ‘intimacy’ seems to mean kissing. He “admitted to ‘some brief moments of inappropriate intimate behaviour’ at a conference centre” on another occasion. As with sharing a bed, is a little bit of intimacy, so long as it is not done “repeatedly”, somehow acceptable? 

This brief survey suggests that tribunal reports and reviews of cases of abuse demonstrate no “common usage” for either intimacy or intimate. Using the language of intimacy is not shorthand for vaginal sex; the language may be used if there is some contact with someone else’s genitals; but it also covers lying in the same bed, or kissing. In all these cases, it is purely physical.

And then there’s the disturbing abuse of Scripture which features in the Diocese of St Albans’ recent report into St Andrew’s, Chorleywood:

“I would meet him [a youth worker] in his home and sometimes in his bedroom. On one occasion when I was either 16 or 17 years old, I was invited round and he gave me wine and alcohol. He moved around on the sofa so that I was on top of him and then drew me in to kiss him on his lips. He made reference to scripture about ‘the intimacy of Jonathan and David’ to justify what he was doing and he then kissed me.” Here, the language of intimacy is used coercively on a young person. 

In all the cases discussed in this section, we could not be further away from the committed, faithful relationships to which I was referring in the original wording of my PMM. Returning to Part 1 of this post, I agree with Ed Shaw that “we are created to enjoy intimacy” and that we need “to affirm a wider deeper intimacy”. Intimacy with other people can be – in the words used by Bernadette Lang for her marriage to Jesus – “healthy” and “profound”. It can be beautiful and powerful, deep and lasting, and I think the term is devalued by using it as shorthand for particular physical actions; like some of our torturous debates in Synod, these legal discussions reduce our being to body parts. Created in the image of God, we are so much more than this. It seems to me that the real challenge is whether we can negotiate our different expressions of loving relationships with others according to our firm convictions, while not judging those who make other choices. On the evidence of the PMM debate, apparently we can’t.

[1]  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrQ7LLVNm8Y; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhBwLs7YULo; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdiRkdohm2w.

[2] Bernadette Lang, Skandalöse Liebe, Basel, Fontis-Verlag, 2024, p.73: “sehr uncool”; J. Andrew Doole, ‘Beauty and the Beast: Biblical Intimacy according to Bernadette Lang and Mark Driscoll’ in Nicole M. Bauer and J. Andrew Doole (eds), (De)Constructing Gender Politics in Contemporary Christian Discourse, V&R unipress, Göttingen, 147-165, pp.93, 149, 151; https://catholicvote.org/exclusive-interview-with-consecrated-virgin/.

[3] Lang, Skandalöse Liebe, p.169 (“In meinem Garten”).

[4] See further Doole, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ on the different uses of Song of Songs made in recent years by Bernadette Lang and Mark Driscoll, to support their respective images of Jesus as a fairytale prince or as a man’s man.