Questions of fornication

Posted on February 22, 2024 by fluff35

Another General Synod starts tomorrow. My bag is packed, which is just as well as I have to give a talk on Street Pastors and a report to Deanery Synod before I leave. I think I am on top of all the papers – even those which only arrived yesterday – and I feel for those who are in full-time work and have to juggle all this.

One set of papers which arrived yesterday was the list of answers to the Questions submitted, available here. I see that issues around Bible translation are still being raised. Is this in the vain hope that they are suddenly going to change people’s minds in our discussions of sexuality? I rather think that ship has sailed. 

The first example is Question 37 from Mrs Rebecca Cowburn (Ely), addressed to the Chair of the House of Bishops but being answered by the one remaining LLF Lead Bishop, Bishop Martyn Snow. This is about translating ancient Greek. She asks: 

Q.37 What steps, if any, has the House of Bishops taken to consider the findings of the research undertaken by the Revd Andrew Cornes, as outlined in his speech to General Synod in February 2023 (Report of Proceedings 2023 – General Synod February Group of Sessions, pp 161-162) and their application to the ongoing work of the House of Bishops on Living in Love and Faith and, in particular, the conclusion drawn from his findings that, to quote (page 162, para 4), “When Jesus used the word translated as porneia, all Jesus’s hearers would have assumed that he included homosexual sex”?  

This refers to Andrew Cornes saying in his speech to Synod that he had been researching for a book on this for the past seven years; it doesn’t seem to have been published yet, and an online search just revealed a quoted ‘personal communication’ making the same claim, in a book by one of his friends. The passage to which he was referring is the list of sinful thoughts that come out of the heart, in Matthew 15:19.

The answer offered by Bishop Martyn is: 

Research by a whole range of scholars was considered extensively in the first phase of the Living in Love and Faith project, by both the Biblical Studies Group and by the History Group. There is no settled and definitive judgement on whether Andrew Cornes’ view is right, and the exact meaning of porneia and what it includes continues to be disputed and is commonly translated with the generic term ‘sexual immorality’. You can find reference to this in the LLF book p. 247.

Before going any further, it made me very happy to see that a point I made to Bishop Martyn and others at a meeting – that we have the LLF resources but we sometimes seem to forget they exist – has been taken on board! 

However, the question seems to be eliding two things: what Jesus said – what was then translated into Greek as porneia – and what porneia itself means. And the answer doesn’t really address the question.

A related issue comes up in one other Question, Q89 from Mr Luke Appleton (Exeter), asking the Chair of the Faith and Order Commission:

Q.89 What is the Church of England’s current definition of fornication?  

People don’t ask little questions like that unless there is a whole lot going on behind them. I’d be rather tempted to say that most of us currently don’t use the word, but the response from the Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe is instead:

The Church of England does not keep a formal list of definition of terms. The LLF book and resources explore in detail the passages where we find the term as a translation for the original Greek word (pp. 137; 141; 246-252; 283-294. The LLF hub has additional detail on historical understandings of sexual immorality.

The LLF book gets another reference! Celebration time! 

Let’s have a look at those references, though. ‘Fornication’ isn’t in the index to the LLF book but searching pdfs clearly helped whoever composed this answer. P.137 isn’t particularly relevant. P.141 is a reference to the Higton motion of 1987. 

Pp.283-94 is the LLF book’s section on the ‘clobber texts’, including 1 Corinthians 6.9-11 which in many translations has ‘fornicators’ (Greek pornoi) alongside thieves, the greedy, and drunkards – funnily enough, they don’t seem to turn up in Questions, and the same is true of the opening section of 1 Corinthians 6 on taking fellow-Christians to the civil courts. 

But the LLF commentary on this and other ‘clobber texts’ instead focuses on two more groups in this list of those who won’t inherit the Kingdom: the malakoi (literally ‘soft’) and arsenokoitai (literally ‘male-bedders’, a word found nowhere else but echoing ‘men who lie with men’ in Leviticus 18.22), translated in the NRSV as ‘male prostitutes’ and ‘sodomites’. It doesn’t take much work to find out that there are many different understandings of both the Old and New Testament references in their different cultural contexts. But the arrangement of the list of non-inheritors suggests that ‘fornicators’/pornoi are one group, and malakoi and arsenokoitai are other groups (whatever the words mean), rather than those two being sub-categories of fornicator.

This is, of course, Paul not Jesus, so it doesn’t help when considering what Jesus would have included under whatever word ended up being translated as porneia.

For that, and for Andrew Cornes’ original claim, we can turn in the LLF book to pp.246-52, the section on ‘Jesus’ teaching on marriage’ which includes “The term porneia covers a range of sexually immoral practices but can refer more specifically to prostitution, fornication, unchastity, forbidden marriages and, metaphorically, to worshipping any but the one true God”. The passage in question is Matthew 15:19 (Mark 7.22).

Picking up that important point about metaphorical usage, I suggest that those who want to understand the term should refer to Kathy L. Gaca, The Making of Fornication: Eros, ethics and political reform in Greek philosophy and early Christianity (University of California Press, 2003), on ‘what constituted immoral sexual behaviour from an early Christian perspective, what shaped its irregularity, and why fornication had a lurid glow’ (p.19). This is a highly important book, hailed by the classicist Amy Richlin as being ‘among the dozen most important books on the history of sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean’.

On p. 20 Gaca writes:

porneia in the biblical sense of ‘fornication’ should not be confused with porneia in the non-biblical sense. Biblical porneia refers to acts of sexual intercourse and reproduction that deviate from the norm of worshipping God alone. Porneia as ‘fornication’ requires Biblical monotheism to be intelligible as a sexual rule, insofar as sexual intercourse and procreation are fornicating, and forbidden, by virtue of not being dedicated to the Lord alone.’ In the non-Biblical sense, porneia would be ‘prostitution’.

I can’t compress such a rich study into a blog post, but a key point is that she identifies the position that marriage and making love exist only for reproduction as a Pythagorean approach, not the general view of ancient Mediterranean societies. For her, fornication is specifically heterosexual: ‘men and women engaging in sexual intercourse outside of God’s ordinance system’ (124). This would include heterosexual married sex with a polytheistic spouse (158).

So, if I were answering Synod Questions:

Q.37: While the House of Bishops awaits the eventual publication of the research of Revd Andrew Cornes, it is aware of far more research on the meaning of porneia, including that of Professor Kathy Gaca on the importance of distinguishing between Biblical and non-Biblical uses of the word.

Q.89: The word ‘fornication’ is not in common use today, and users should be aware that in its original Biblical context porneia/‘fornication’ was about heterosexual, not same-sex, activity.

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One down, one to go: the LLF appointment saga continues

Posted on February 6, 2024 by fluff35

While last week was quite a week in the Church of England, this week is proving just as complicated. And it’s still only Tuesday… After last week’s shenanigans, late on Monday afternoon came the announcement of a second Interim Theological Advisor, Revd Canon Dr Jessica Martin. Full disclosure: I know Jessica because, like me, she was a member of one of the subject-based groups whose work fed into the Living in Love and Faith resources. I was in ‘History’, she was in ‘Social and Biological Sciences’. Her pedigree with Church of England sexuality discussions goes back before that, to the 2013 Pilling Report, to which she wrote the Prologue; while the full document can for some reason no longer be found on the CofE website, her text can be read here. She asked me to read drafts for two of her books and I was happy to help. I listened online when she gave the Bampton Lectures, now published as The Eucharist in Four Dimensions: The meanings of communion in contemporary culture. As a result I asked her to contribute a blog post to Via Media, which she did here; and very thoughtful and challenging it is, too. Before I met her, back in 2016 I wrote about how impressed I was by her Pilling Prologue, which I described then as a ‘shimmeringly beautiful, profound and prophetic introductory essay on the idolization of desire, which somehow cuts through all the episcopal circumlocutions and pettiness of attempts to categorise and condemn pleasure’. So, great appointment. But… I still have questions.

Yesterday’s announcement of this appointment managed to carry ‘quotes’ from ‘the Archbishops’, Bishop Robert Innes as chair of FAOC, and both new Interim Theological Advisors. Strangely, nothing there from the one remaining Lead LLF Bishop. ‘The Archbishops said: “In the last week, there has been a lot of public commentary about the appointment of the Interim Theology Adviser to the House of Bishops”’. Quite so. There was also the usual comment about ‘negative tone… especially on social media’. Well, Archbishops, give us something positive to report, something which shows that there is transparency and honesty in your processes, and something which is good news for the LGBTQIA+ people to whom you keep expressing repentance while doing so little to put that into action!

My first is: why wasn’t the new Lead Bishop for LLF announced at the same time? The absence of a name can only make people suspect that it’s proving very difficult to find someone to take on this job. And that’s problematic, if the intention is still to bring the ‘Commitments’ document to Synod later this month, as from what was said last month that document is very much a piece of work of the two Lead Bishops. As we know all too well from the safeguarding fiascos, rushing into something can lead to serious problems further down the line, so a delay may be the right thing. But it will be interesting to see whether there is a change of plan in what comes to Synod.

And my second is (again): how about process? There is much that we still don’t know about the appointment of the first of the two Interim Theological Advisors. What was the full job ad? Was it advertised beyond being circulated on the Priest-Theologian Network? (and, while we’re at it, what is that anyway?) Why was Bishop Robert Innes the one who has spoken for the initial result of that process, when the other Lead Bishop for LLF, Bishop Martyn, said in his statement that it was William Nye who needed to appoint a second Advisor? All we can reasonably surmise is that Bishop Martyn had a say in Jessica’s appointment, unlike with that of the other Advisor. Who appointed Jessica? FAOC, Bishop Robert, William Nye, the Archbishops? Was she on the original shortlist (as a theologian with experience of Pilling and of LLF thus far, she would seem to me to have been an outstanding candidate)? 

This being the Church of England, sadly, we will probably not be given the answers. I thought there was a glimmer of hope in relation to transparency when the House of Bishops decided to issue more than the usual anodyne paragraph after each of its meetings and, after the November and December meetings, indeed it did. But there is nothing about their January meeting beyond these few lines in the press release from the College of Bishops:

Following the meeting of the College, members of the House of Bishops held a short meeting to discuss Living in Love and Faith in more detail and looked forward to the lead bishops, Bishop of Newcastle Helen-Ann Hartley and Bishop of Leicester, Martyn Snow, further developing a paper for General Synod next month.

We’ll just have to wait until Friday, to see the papers for Synod. I suppose we could just have ‘Presentation by the Lead Bishop(s) for LLF’ as an item.

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Processing the process: LLF continues

Posted on February 5, 2024 by fluff35

It’s been quite a week in the Church of England – and it wasn’t even General Synod… I’d had a call from the Radio 4 Sunday programme to speak about the delay in bringing in stand-alone services of blessing for same-sex couples (since mid-December, it has been possible to use the prayers for this in existing services, but not on their own). I was happy to explain that, as confirmed by the Lead Bishops for Living in Love and Faith, the current situation is that these can’t happen until the Pastoral Guidance and Pastoral Reassurance documents are published. Well, not exactly happy: I was one of those who voted in November for the House of Bishops to consider going ahead with this, and when Synod passed this amendment it was clear that we did so because we wanted the stand-alone services now, on a trial basis. But when the House of Bishops ‘considered’ it following the Synod vote, they decided not to go ahead yet.

This ‘brief’ then expanded when the week began with an unexpected development: one of the two new Lead Bishops for LLF, Bishop Helen-Ann Hartley who – only a week before – had met representatives of the various conservative and inclusive groups, resigned from that role. Her resignation was about the appointment of a new ‘Interim Theological Advisor to the House of Bishops’. But it wasn’t about the person, or his conservative theology, or that he’d published online a now-deleted piece which doesn’t read well when the message from the LLF bishops has so far been to reset the tone and calm down. And someone should have warned him that deleted articles can be easily found, because online nothing really disappears. 

So, yesterday morning, I was on the Sunday programme with Ian Paul, who chose to ignore the facts by suggesting that it was all about the views of the person appointed. The pressures of a radio interview meant I could not come back when Dr Paul said of the newly-appointed Theological Advisor ‘Helen-Ann Hartley did make him an issue’.

No, she didn’t. Dr Paul doesn’t seem to have read Bishop Helen-Ann’s resignation letter, where she said she had decided not to continue due to ‘serious concerns relating to the recent process of appointing an Interim Theological Advisor to the House of Bishops’ (my italics: all documents referred to in this blog post are collected here on the Thinking Anglicans site). It is clear that one element of this lack of process was that neither Lead Bishop was involved in the appointment, something that was reinforced by her fellow-Lead Bishop, Bishop Martyn Snow, when he too made a statement about the terms for him remaining in this role: ‘the Co-Lead Bishops for LLF must be involved in the appointment of future Theological Advisers (we were not involved in the recent process)’ (again, my italics). Both Lead Bishops are concerned about ‘process’.

So what was this ‘process’? On the Sunday programme, Ian Paul assured us it was all entirely standard. Before answering that question, let’s step back and look at the job description which is, after all, where any appointment process starts. 

I don’t know how widely the job was advertised, but Simon Sarmiento on Thinking Anglicans traced it to something called the ‘Priest-Theologian Network’. It included this: 

The post-holder will need to be able to contribute significantly to theological and pastoral work on LLF and will need to command the respect of the very wide diversity of stakeholders with an interest in this matter. The post-holder will form part of the core team working on LLF, working closely with +Helen-Ann Hartley and +Martyn Snow as the episcopal leads on LLF.

So it’s a job which is explicitly tied closely to LLF. The new Interim Theological Advisor is clearly intended to be part of the ‘core team’, and as ‘a small working group to develop ideas’ has been set up under the LLF umbrella to look at ‘Pastoral Provision’ he will surely be part of that. ‘Pastoral Provision’? I think this is what used to be called Pastoral Reassurance – how to deal with situations which may arise when using the Prayers of Love and Faith – as well as considering whether structural changes are needed, like having bishops who have said they will never use the Prayers and who will therefore be considered acceptable for ordaining priests who also won’t. The membership of that ‘small working group’ has not yet been announced, although its existence was made public in December; I am told by the LLF team that there are still names to be added, and one of them will clearly be Helen-Ann’s successor, and another – now – the extra Theological Advisor asked for by Bishop Martyn.

So, back to the appointment procedure. There was a job ad. It went out, although I don’t know whether it just went round a network, or was public. I’m told CVs were sent in. I don’t know who did the shortlisting but again those comments on ‘process’ make it clear that the Lead Bishops were not involved. According to Bishop Robert Innes, the Chair of the Faith and Order Commission (FAOC), it culminated in an interview by a panel on which he was joined by two clergy members of FAOC, and William Nye, the Secretary-General of the Church of England and of General Synod. There’s no indication of who those two clergy members were, or how they were selected.

Why Mr Nye? Good question: maybe the most important question of all. From my own experience, Mr Nye is in every ‘room where it happens’, whether or not the list of those in a group includes him. Here, it is interesting that Bishop Martyn’s list of provisos for continuing in his own role as Lead Bishop includes ‘The Secretary-General will need to appoint a second Interim Theological Adviser to the House of Bishops’. The Secretary-General? Just a moment: I thought, from Bishop Robert’s public statements, that this was an appointment by FAOC? Who is making the decisions here?

In traditional Church of England ‘move away, nothing to see here’ style, in an interview reported in the Church Times Bishop Robert insisted of the new theological advisor that ‘He is an adviser among other advisers, and advisers come from an appropriately diverse array of positions’. 

But there’s only one Advisor to the House of Bishops at the moment, even if there may very shortly be two. There have been questions raised about why the bishops even need theological advice; they’re bishops, right? As for FAOC, it is a group of theologians, a mix of bishops and clergy with, currently, one lay person, which ‘writes theological resources and reports, to support the church’s work’. The pattern seems to be that someone asks them for a report, they go away and produce one a few years down the line, as they all have ‘day jobs’ – except for their Secretary, and that is the other role of the Theological Advisor to the House of Bishops. So for example, The Gospel, Sexual Abuse and the Church was published in 2016 after the Lead Bishop for Safeguarding asked for it to be produced. And then the documents seem to disappear from mainstream discussion, languishing on the website. It’s a pity, really, after all that work. 

It’s clear that someone – the Archbishops? William Nye? The House of Bishops? – has been working overtime since last Monday to put the LLF train back on the rails again. And with an announcement imminent as to who replaces Bishop Helen-Ann and who is added on as another Interim Theological Advisor/Secretary (presumably appointed with a transparent process that involved both Lead Bishops for LLF), it looks like another very full week until Friday, when the Synod paperwork comes out. As that needs to include the documents for two sessions on LLF, one of which was going to be the ‘commitments’ document setting out the personal commitments the two Lead Bishops want to make about the next stages of the process, and one of those is no longer in the job, this could be interesting.

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Resets, settlement, commitments and explorations… A further update on LLF

Posted on January 29, 2024 by fluff35

Following the recent College and House of Bishops, once again there were various ‘stakeholder’ meetings at Lambeth Palace Library last week, this time with the new LLF lead bishops, Helen-Ann Hartley and Martyn Snow, who – in the meeting I attended (one of three with ‘inclusive’ group reps) – disarmingly opened by telling us that they hadn’t volunteered for the role. Well, who would? After the meetings we received a note thanking us for our ‘time, engagement and honesty’, and the promise of more meetings to come (no dates offered yet).

I went to the second of these January meetings, representing General Synod Gender & Sexuality Group. There were no documents circulated in advance and we were told simply that this was ‘a chance for you to meet the new lead bishops, +Helen-Ann Hartley and +Martyn Snow, and the new Programme Manager Nick Shepherd and an opportunity for them to update you on their approach to LLF going forward’.

Perhaps some of us attending thought this would mainly be a getting-to-know-you session, but there was rather more than expected on the ‘going forward’, which was heard by many of us instead as ‘going backward’. Reflecting on my notes, it’s hard to know whether or not that is the case. 

The format of each meeting was that one of the bishops led for about 10 minutes, and then we responded, with the bishops coming in to answer or clarify. At both the Wednesday meetings, the key words offered in that brief introduction were ‘reset’ – that the church needs to ‘reset’ the LLF process because the debates in Synod have all become so shouty and polarised – and ‘settlement’ – that we need some sort of way of ‘living well with difference’. Neither are great words, as the bishops themselves acknowledged. ‘Reset’ is supposed to be about the tone of the debate, not the ‘direction of travel’. The use of ‘settlement’, of course, carries all sorts of very dodgy historical and contemporary vibes. Is it supposed to make us think of the Elizabethan Settlement? Conservative Evangelical reminders that ‘settlement’ was the word used by the Archbishop of York at the February 2023 Synod gloss over the point that he didn’t just come up with the word on his own; he was repeating a word introduced into the debate by conservatives, who repeated it several times. Vaughan Roberts used ‘mediated settlement’, Ed Shaw ‘negotiated settlement’, and the Bishop of Guildford ‘those settlement discussions’. The February speeches are all online here. The language of ‘settlement’, we were told last week, had been welcomed by the College and House of Bishops. I can see why: it is a lot less scary than ‘structural differentiation’, even if we don’t know what it means.

But ‘reset’ and ‘settlement’ are just words. Words depend on context. They can be used by someone who has one meaning in mind, but play out very differently with some who hear them. They reassure some and upset others. If ‘reset’ was supposed to be about resetting the tone, fine, but whatever our beliefs on this matter of blessing those in committed same sex relationships, we’ve all now sat through many hours of hearing people say things we found offensive; I’m told that we’ve had 25 hours of this just in the 2023 Synod meetings. Those memories will not be wiped out now.

The message that came across at the third meeting with inclusive groups, on Thursday, was different; the result of the other LLF lead bishop doing the intro? ‘Reset’ was not the focus, while instead of a ‘settlement’ per se those present were told about something called the ‘commitments’ (not mentioned at the meeting I attended on Wednesday). The plan is for the lead bishops to bring these to Synod in February, and it is these in turn which will apparently ‘form the basis for a settlement that allows as many people as possible to remain within the Church of England’; that wording comes from an article the lead bishops published in the Church Times a few hours after the third meeting ended.

One of the problems I had in processing what happened last week was trying to tie together what those of us in the three groups heard, and this Church Times piece which was already in press when we met, but was not mentioned. The bishops say there that they want a church in which ‘different views are not just accepted, but honoured’. That ties together with another speech made at the February 2023 Synod, by the Bishop of Oxford, who stated ‘I know that the Church of England will continue to need the Conservative Reformed tradition moving forward and that tradition will continue to need the wider Church.’ I wonder. I have benefitted from the broad church in my own life, but what about the conservative members who want a settlement and who have come up with a long, detailed list of ‘what do we need’, a list which uses the words orthodox/orthodoxy 30 times? How can they ‘honour’ our views, those of us who do not meet their definition of ‘orthodoxy’, which is all about same sex relationships? Do they think they need us at all, apart from the financial aspects which feature in the CEEC list: ‘clergy pensions, DAC’s, Church Commissioners investment’?

One thing that we gained from the meeting – although there would have been more time-efficient ways of communicating it – was a sense of a revised timeline. Forget the chart in GS2328 setting out the work for each quarter of each year; that’s all gone. Now we are talking about an outline of what a settlement would look like, to come to July 2024 Synod, then a further stage in February 2025. 

In our meeting with the lead bishops, we were told again that the House of Bishops has a clear majority in favour of change and a clear majority in favour of stand-alone services. And the voting figures in the public domain support that.

Following the Bishop of Oxford’s successful amendment in November, the House did indeed – as Synod asked them to do – return to the stand-alone services using the Prayers of Love and Faith at their December meeting. But the decision recorded there was still not to use stand-alone services on a trial basis, and it seems that the archbishops – not the House – were the driving force in this decision. So now it looks like there will be no trial. Perhaps the idea is that, by 2025, traditionalists will be so happy with their ‘settlement’ that they will allow the Prayers through with a two-thirds majority. Or, of course, not. There can be no guarantee. And as yet there remains no clarity as to what such a settlement would look like. By agreeing that services would be opt-in with nobody expected to go against their conscience in offering or not offering them, I thought we had already made a settlement, but that is not enough for conservatives, who want to separate themselves from the rest of the church. Let’s see what comes to February Synod; the papers are expected on 9 February.

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Keeping the church together?

Posted on January 7, 2024 by fluff35

Since I last posted here, some months have passed, but that doesn’t mean nothing has happened. We had the November Synod with hours more of ‘debate’ (which really meant people restating their positions yet again). Then, in December, after the House of Bishops meeting, blessings within existing services for people in same-sex relationships were formally commended (24 in favour, 11 against, 3 abstentions), as agreed by Synod. 

It’s hard to gauge the response among those for whom this is a step in the right direction. There’s a list of 86 clergy and readers in Birmingham Diocese who support it, but I have no idea how many couples have taken the opportunity to receive blessings. Anecdotally it seems some are waiting in the hope that a more substantial free-standing service will be permitted, something Synod encouraged by passing the Bishop of Oxford’s amendment to the November motion. I also have no idea how many congregations have any idea that this commendation has even happened; there wasn’t any sort of announcement at my middle-of-the-road church, although a couple of members of the congregation came up to ask me about it after the service. Very few people read the Church Times or listen to the Sunday programme, so the prayers may well have passed under the radar. The first day they could be used was the Third Sunday of Advent, a time when churches are busy with carol services and Christingles and Christmas Tree festivals, and when those with no strong views pro- or anti-such blessings had other things to think about.

Meanwhile, of course, those for whom these blessings are already a step too far have been busy. The Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) released more podcasts and continued its campaign to persuade the bishops to back-track. And a wider alliance of those who oppose the blessings, conveniently calling itself the Alliance, came into view. It includes the more charismatic parts of the Church of England – most notably Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) – and the traditional Anglo-Catholics, but also CEEC, in a grouping that recalls the way disparate groups united in 1985 to oppose the ordination of women, under the flag of the Association for Apostolic Ministry.

In the final days of 2023, my fellow Synod member Nic Tall published a detailed analysis of the aims of these groups, and traced back to 2016 (at least) their plans to carve out for themselves a separate section of the Church of England that would be free of any idea that lesbian and gay people are just as entitled as anyone else to find relationships of love and commitment in which sexual expression of their love may play a part. His intention was to bring to a wider audience the various CEEC moves and, with nearly 25,000 hits to date, and a piece from Andrew Goddard attacking it, his article has perhaps had that effect.

The reaction from Andrew and others was predictable, those in the Alliance insisting that this isn’t schism, but is intended as a way to keep priests and congregations within the Church of England while the bishops continue to discuss ‘pastoral provision’. That’s now the preferred term to ‘structural differentiation’; not least because, as the Bishop of London pointed out in November’s meeting of General Synod, ‘differentiation’ was used to describe apartheid – ‘apart-hood’ – in South Africa. What CEEC/the Alliance are offering is a ‘stop gap measure to stop people walking away from the Church of England, but it’s not going to be sufficient in the long run’. 

So, what exactly is the plan for the long run? When I was briefly involved in the St Hugh’s Conversations, an initially private group bringing together some liberals and some traditionalists, any interim plan had not yet been mentioned. Andrew criticises Nic for not mentioning St Hugh’s, but I’m not sure how he could have done, as the meetings were private and, even when permission was given to share their existence, we were told not to repeat who had said what, so – in contrast to the forensic tone of Nic’s article – there are no weblinks that can be given as evidence. 

For now, though, the CEEC want to identify ‘informal overseers’ who will offer ‘informal alternative spiritual oversight’ to those who have lost confidence in their bishops. It’s not clear to me whether they are expecting other groups in the Alliance to join in and request overseers too. But how could an Anglo-Catholic sign up to the CEEC’s official ‘basis of faith’? How would female overseers relate to the ‘flying bishops’ who look after those conservative evangelicals or traditional Anglo-Catholics who don’t accept the ordination of women? The choice of job title is confusing, of course, as the adjective ‘episcopal’, ‘belonging to or characteristic of bishops’, comes from the ancient Greek word episkopos, ‘one who watches over’, so, er … overseer. But these overseers aren’t bishops. 

In this ‘interim’ world, overseers will exist alongside an alternative financial system in which an individual or a parish can send their money to the ‘Ephesian Fund’ rather than pay their parish share. The Ephesian Fund will only pay out to ‘similar parishes’ among ‘the churches that CEEC serves’ [https://ceec.info/ephesian-fund/more-information/], thus undermining the current Church of England system by which wealthier parishes subsidise poorer ones in the interest of having a C of E presence in every place in the land. I know that some dioceses already have ‘Good Stewards Trusts’ (e.g. Oxford) and a church requesting support has to sign up to these Trusts’ Statement of Faith – which is explicitly ‘based upon the basis of faith of the Church of England Evangelical Council’. So it’s not clear if the Ephesian Fund replaces such Trusts, as they are both CEEC products and both have the principle that evangelical parishes should only support other evangelical parishes. It’s not clear how they decide which ones are sufficiently ‘sound’ to receive the money. The list of items in the ‘basis of faith’ already suggests a far wider range than the use of the Prayers of Love and Faith; how about the ordination of women, second marriages after divorce, as well as the nature of the atonement, the structure of the Trinity, what Holy Communion really is? The list of theological ideas over which Anglicans disagree is a very long one.

There’s a role description available for potential overseers. My thanks to Bishop Pete Broadbent for clarifying to me on Twitter/X that they can be male or female (the word ‘person’ is used throughout), which surprised me when not all conservative evangelicals accept women’s full ministry. They need to ‘fulfil the Biblical expectations of an elder as set out in the Pastoral Epistles and the Ordinal’. I guess that means 1 Timothy 3, although that is only about men: an elder (the word here is episkopos again…) must manage his household well; his children obey him, and he has a good reputation outside the church. And he must be the husband of one wife. Historically, there has been some debate about what was originally meant here. Does it mean that elders must be married – no single men need apply? The reference to ‘children’ already suggests that. Are widowers OK? Is it about ruling out polygamists, or excluding those who are remarried? Is it about excluding those who are not faithful to their wives? 

And that brings us back to marriage. The CEEC ‘basis of faith’ includes ‘the unchangeable standard of Christian marriage between one man and one woman as the proper place for sexual intimacy and the basis of the family’. There is a long history, going back to the Hebrew Bible, of seeing the relationship between God and his people in terms of a marriage. Think of Hosea and his unfaithful wife Gomer, where the message is that we are faithless like Gomer, but God comes to save us when we are about to be sold into slavery. Marriage is a metaphor for God’s relationship with Israel and then, in the New Testament, for Jesus’s relationship with the Church, the ‘Bride of Christ’. What aspect of marriage? Obviously not the sexual aspect, so is it about consent, fidelity, exclusivity, or what? And the current debate over same-sex blessings attracts the ‘marriage’ imagery too. One, surprisingly naive, comment on Nic’s blog post was ‘It is not the faithful partner who can be justly accused of splitting up the marriage but the adulterous one.’

Suppose, then, we were to take the current ‘interim’ arrangements from CEEC, and their stated longer-term goals of structural differentiation – whether that is separate provinces, separate bishops, separate ordinations, separate selection for ordination training, separate theological colleges, separate confirmation services – and put those with their statements that this is about ‘keeping the church together’ … and then we see this in terms of a ‘marriage’ between all of those who call ourselves members of the Church of England? What do we get?

Let me tell you a true story. Many years ago I went out for a work-related meal on a wintery evening. By the time we came out of the restaurant, heavy snow had fallen, the trains had all been cancelled and I wasn’t able to get home. A colleague came to my rescue, offering to put me up for the night in his study. It seemed like a good solution.

To my surprise, his ‘family arrangements’ turned out to be far from conventional. He and his wife continued to be married, and to live in the same house. But they lived apart there. Their finances were separate, they had separate rooms (a bedroom and a study each) and they’d agreed it was fine for either of them to have a lover staying over. I wasn’t there long enough to find out how the shared spaces worked; but there was only one kitchen and one fridge. It was a large and rather lovely house. There was no talk of divorce; they seemed content with the situation, although one can never really tell. I subsequently found out that there is something called a legal separation that may mean staying in the same house, for family or financial reasons, but living separate lives there. Some people do this because they haven’t been married long enough to get a divorce: others just do it and stay like that.

So is this the sort of ‘marriage’ that is envisaged by the CEEC’s quest for ‘new structures’ or ‘differentiation’? Both parties agree to stay under the same roof of the Church of England ‘house’ – because it is a lovely house – but the house is somehow divided into ‘his’ and ‘hers’? 

Now, I know that life is complicated. For example, there are couples who are married but don’t live in the same house. They are committed, but without the shared space. When Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton shared their lives (although they weren’t married in law), they famously lived in adjacent houses. An even more extreme version of that is LAT-ing – Living Apart Together – which I first came across when working in the Netherlands. You live in separate places but have an intimate relationship. But being married, living in the same house, but living apart seems like something else again.

In today’s Sunday Times there was a seasonal feature on How to Get Divorced. I learned there that

Lawyers and relationship therapists are being asked to find “creative solutions” for couples who want to split up but can’t, says Laura Mortimer, a partner at the law firm BP Collins. These include marking up floorplans to divide the house between them, and colour-coded staircases and entrances to ensure warring spouses don’t cross paths. Some devise a rota for sole use of the kitchen and sitting room. 

Colour-coded staircases? Great idea, although it does mean that you need more than one – hardly a solution for most people.

I’ve been in enough rooms – meeting rooms, not kitchens and sitting rooms – where there has been an attempt to put people with different understandings of sexuality together that I really think I hear what the conservatives, the traditionalists, are saying: essentially, that there is no Biblical precedent for same-sex marriage so same-sex couples can’t enter marriages, that sexual expression is only acceptable in marriage, and, ergo, that any physical expression of love between two people of the same sex is sinful because such a couple can’t enter a marriage. I don’t agree with that conclusion. I have agreed – reluctantly, but because I want to keep us all together – that prayers to bless people in such relationships will not be the default setting in the Church of England, and that their use will always be subject to the conscience of the person presiding at the service. Nobody has to use these prayers. But apparently that ‘opt-in’ system is not enough to reassure those who fear their own salvation is compromised by remaining in the Church of England alongside those who do use the prayers. 

Is what is now being proposed, in order to keep traditionalists safe from the rest of us, something like my colleague was doing in living together under the same roof as his wife but keeping his life apart? It’s not an ecclesiological version of ‘Living Apart Together’ because there is no intimacy. It is more like a marked-up floorpan with colour-coded staircases. And I’m left wondering: in what sense can this be seen as one denomination?

Posted in equal marriage, General Synod, Living in Love and Faith, marriage | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Is Synod polarised?

Posted on November 16, 2023 by fluff35


Another Synod, another vote. 

After – what was it, over 8 hours? – on Living in Love and Faith in February, we were back in the debating chamber for even longer at the November Synod, this time to vote on a pretty vague motion that was approving what the bishops had done to ‘implement’ what was agreed in that historic February vote; what was agreed then included lamenting and repenting of the harm done to LGBTQI+ people, welcoming the replacement of Issues in Human Sexuality with new pastoral guidance, the commending of the Prayers of Love and Faith and reporting back after they’ve been in use for five years. The February motion did not propose any change in the doctrine of marriage, and nor did the motion before us for November. Instead, the November motion acknowledges the pain on all sides and ‘encourages’ the bishops to keep on keeping on.

Again, the motion was approved by all three Houses, but this time it included an amendment proposed by the Bishop of Oxford and explicitly supported by the majority of the House of Bishops (25:16), an amendment which was passed in the House of Laity by just one vote (99:98 with 2 abstentions). 

Inevitably, there have already been voices raised to insist that this is all too close and that nothing more should happen on the Prayers of Love and Faith. Of course, if the vote had narrowly gone the other way, those voices would have been perfectly content. The three votes on amendments calling for delay – on the grounds of needing to see the ‘full legal advice’, needing to consider the Pastoral Guidance document, and needing to consider ‘structural provision’ – all failed, and failed in all three Houses, as did amendment 44 from the Bishop of Durham, which included plenty of encouraging words about acknowledging each other as ‘God’s gift’ but also a request for ‘firm provision’; this sounded rather too much like schism and was also defeated in all three Houses.

The ever-gracious Bishop Sarah stood to sum up the debate at around 15.45 yesterday. She noted that when everyone feels like they are the persecuted minority, it’s hard to get anywhere; that sexuality is not a credal issue, but unity is; and that, simply because she was given the task of leading the LLF process, she is no longer invited to sit at table with some in the church. This resonated with me; my own speech had been about the gradual admission to Communion of married people where one has a former spouse still living, and had included a reminder that they – we – are still seen as ‘adulterers’ by some in this church. It also resonated with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sad observation, at the Communion service at which he presided on the Tuesday morning, that the elephant in the room was those people who were not at the service, the implication being that these were people who regard him as a false teacher.

On the November motion as amended, the figures were 23 bishops in favour, 10 against, with 4 abstentions; 100 clergy in favour, 93 against and one abstention; 104 laity in favour, 100 against and no abstentions. 

But what do those figures really mean? Remember, this was a counted vote by Houses, which means that the names of those voting each way will be published. That means that your vote can be scrutinised by anyone: those who know you, those who think they know you but maybe don’t, those who employ you – and in the Church of England that means the clergy and those laity in paid church roles may be vulnerable – and those with whom you work. There is also a fourth option in voting: to be in the room but not to register a vote, thus not ‘outing’ yourself. Incidentally, some in the chamber could not vote yesterday, because those who are acting Bishops during a vacancy don’t have a vote.

And it’s about more than stating in public where you stand. While I was involved in the 2015-2017 Diocesan Shared Conversations, I published this about the ‘Fruit or Chocolate?’ exercise I’d witnessed during an external review of another diocese’s lay minister training. It demonstrated very clearly that those who vote together don’t choose that position for the same reasons. 

So, applying this just to the ‘Noes’ in yesterday’s vote, for some the final motion as amended went too far. For others, it did not go far enough. Some were unhappy about the secrecy of the bishops’ deliberations – in the Monday Questions session it was interesting to note that questions asking for the figures on how the bishops voted on different topics put to them in the College or the House in September-October were all met with silence, even though those figures have all been leaked and published. Some want Synod, and particularly the laity, to have more of an input. Some want to see all the legal guidance, in full detail, beyond that which has already been issued. Some aren’t fussed about those details but continue to believe that same sex committed relationships are (to quote one speaker), ‘flirting with blessing sexual immorality’. Some wouldn’t say that, but are not free to express their opinion because of their job or because of their congregation. Some are able to vote against ‘their tribe’: others are not.

‘Let us choose not to destroy each other’, said Bishop Sarah as we moved into the period of silent prayer which preceded the vote. The Church of England Evangelical Council immediately issued a press release condemning the bishops, calling the 6+ years of LLF and the many decades of previous reports on sexuality ‘hasty’, and claiming its position is the ‘orthodox’ one. As someone whose own faith journey has taken me through many different sorts of churches within the Church of England, their position – to use one of their favourite words – ‘grieves’ me. It seems like they have always wanted a split, and that there is nothing that will stop them. But a split over this? It is indeed our choice, now, whether to destroy each other – in a way that the remarriage of divorced people in church, or the ordination of women, or women bishops has not done, even though all of these seem to me to be more fundamental questions than whether or not a committed relationship of a couple can be blessed in a church service.

Posted in equal marriage, General Synod, Living in Love and Faith | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

No more delays: what the history of the remarriage of divorced people says to the LLF debate

Posted on November 14, 2023 by fluff35

(Full version of the speech to General Synod I gave today, 14 November 2023)

I am speaking against this amendment and the next two which want to halt it all until… well, as long as possible. As bishop Sarah said, this is about delaying…

I think it’s time for some history. Anyone would think there’d been nothing like this before. But there has. And it was gradual but there came several points where a decision had to be made.

Like the Bishop of Worcester, I’m an adulterer, in the eyes of some of this church, of some in this chamber. Like him, I married someone who’d been divorced. 

I want to remind members of how the church addressed the question of marriages like mine, because the history and the fears expressed have something to say to us when we are thinking about this further area of pastoral provision.

In my teens I was aware that one married couple at our church didn’t take communion, because one of them had been divorced and had a former spouse still living. So within my lifetime, it wasn’t just that marriage after divorce couldn’t happen in church: it disbarred you from receiving the sacrament. If you hadn’t realised – just think about that for a moment. But did we split the church over it? No.

Fast forward 30 years or so, and I met the man I would go on to marry. His first wife, the mother of their children, had died and he went on to marry again, a marriage which ended in divorce. It devastated him. So signing on with that Christian dating site led to a crash course in where we were on divorce in 2005. We filled in forms, were interviewed by our parish priest, and were then allowed to marry.

And before 2005? On Monday the bishop of Winchester listed all the sexuality reports. For divorce and marriage too, the Church produced report after report, alongside and in response to changes in civil law. 

The 1978 proposal was that divorced people could marry in church, with the Bishop’s permission. Lost in the house of clergy, it was sent out to the dioceses, as is also proposed in the B2 route favoured by the bishops now. Three years later: no clear result, although the dioceses agreed that such people could be admitted to Holy Communion. It grieves me that those who are pushing for ‘formal structural provision’ or ‘differentiation’ sometimes say that they won’t be able to receive communion alongside a bishop who agrees with same-sex blessings. What is wrong with us, that we so closely ring-fence the sacraments so freely offered to us? 

1984: a proposal for a service of prayer and dedication after a civil marriage, but no final approval because 31 diocesan synods rejected it. So that service WAS commended by the House of Bishops, using Canons B4 and B5, despite fears that “The appearance of the bride in white, the ringing of bells, the wedding march – would convey a misleading message which the words of the service would be unable to correct.”

Only in 2002 – three years before my marriage – was church marriage after divorce allowed; but only in ‘exceptional’ circumstances, respecting clergy consciences. At final approval, there were 36 speeches. Marathon debates: also, nothing new! And our 2023 LLF debates echo points made there: accusations of conforming to the circumstances of our age, claims that the motion should be put on hold until the final draft of the advice from the House of Bishops, discussion of Canon B30, … even concern about what was called ‘the exposed position of the parish priest’ whose responsibility it was to decide whether a marriage could take place or not (Winchester Report p.3). 

What was not discussed though was structural differentiation. When I look back over this history, I am struck that over my own lifetime we have moved from a far more restricted position for people like me – banned even from receiving communion – towards services of blessing and in due course to marriage in church. And this is despite teaching by Jesus on divorce, yet not a word spoken by him about same-sex couples. If we can stay together in a church which accepts different positions on divorce, I believe we should also be allowing blessings of same-sex couples.

A man and a woman for life: we have made pastoral provision for the second part of that, and now is the time to make pastoral provision for the first part… Responding as bishop Sarah said on Monday to real life situations.

If I can adjust words from paragraph 227 of the Lichfield Report:

“Their decision to (re)marry is their own, made after due reflection and prayer, and made in good conscience. They believe that God is calling them to this (second) marriage… They seek (1) A means of grace to encourage them along the path which they have chosen; (2) An opportunity for sharing their discovered vocation with their friends and neighbours in humility, wonder and joy; (3) An acknowledgement of the mercies of God within the family of Christ and of the continuing fellowship and acceptance of one another in the Church.” Grace, mercy, humility, wonder and joy: if we can only offer these in services of blessing, let us at least do this, to those committed and faithful and patient couples who are asking to share their vocation and give thanks for God’s mercies.

I urge you to vote in support of the motion and to reject the next three amendments which aim to delay us further.

Posted in equal marriage, General Synod, Living in Love and Faith, marriage | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Going to the top: meeting the Archbishop of Canterbury

Posted on November 4, 2023 by fluff35

(With one amendment, made on 7 November)

As regular readers know – and as I’ve said in General Synod more than once – I believe in transparency. But I also respect confidences. This can be a difficult tightrope to walk when it comes to the Church of England. At the Living with Difference meetings in September, the usual St Michael’s House Protocols (it’s OK to share the learning but don’t attribute anything) were suddenly shifted to Don’t Say Anything About The Documents. At least that’s clear.

Last Friday, I was at Lambeth Palace for a meeting. No protocols were stated for this meeting, so for the purposes of this update I am assuming ‘St Michael’s House’, but with the extra feature that it’s impossible not to attribute what’s said when there is only one person in the room who could have said it; the Archbishop of Canterbury. Because the whole point of the meeting was to bring him into the same room as representatives of the various ‘inclusive’ groups: and yes, I know, this isn’t great terminology, but nor is ‘progressive’ (suggesting an opposite of ‘regressive’) or ‘liberal’ (many of us are highly orthodox in our theology) or ‘affirming’ (we don’t affirm just anything!). We’d been given no agenda in advance, only told that the meetings were “so that we [the LLF Staff Team] are able to share with you the intentions of the bishops and so you are able to share your thoughts and concerns with us.”

When Friday’s meeting was announced, at short notice, I heard from several stakeholders that they weren’t inclined to drag themselves into London yet again for what could well be a pointless meeting. We have bitter experience of being asked at these meetings to react to various scenarios, only for an entirely different scenario to be the one that is decided upon. Eventually they concluded that they may as well go; we’re nothing if not resilient. So, there we were. Again. Only, this time, all in the same room, rather than meeting the LLF team in sub-groups (Evangelical inclusives, Catholic inclusives, etc).

And there are many groups; therefore, it was a full room. The room allocated was on the eighth floor; there are two small lifts but with the number of people attending we were asked to consider taking the stairs. And I did. As we climbed up, someone joked that this was an attempt to get rid of us all…

What follows are my recollections (I took notes so anything in double quote marks is a direct quotation) and reactions. Some of my reactions differ from those of my friend Colin Coward, who was present for Changing Attitude (England) and who has blogged here. I am not going into detail on some parts of the meeting which he mentions, although I witnessed what he describes, because I don’t want to tell other people’s stories: that’s up to them. 

We were invited to go round giving our names and the name of the group we were representing. It was clear that the Archbishop hadn’t heard of some of these groups. Then the Archbishop gave an initial comment recognising the process as “costly and painful”; I wasn’t sure whether that was about being in this particular room or the whole LLF ‘journey’. He referred in particular to the feedback he had received after the 9 October meeting of the House of Bishops, and to the more recent meeting of the House at which only around three hours were spent on LLF although there had been “private conversations with different people” as well. Just wondering here who these would be? He stated that both Archbishops want the proposals to move forward “as quickly as possible”. He said he was well aware of the splits not just in the C of E and the Anglican communion but also in every other denomination on “living appropriately and rightly” with LGBTQIA+. 

The meeting’s facilitator then said that he would be holding the circle, and stated that the purpose of the meeting was for the Archbishop to hear our responses. 90 minutes would be devoted to that, with people invited to put up their hand when they wanted to vocalise what they were thinking. He added that there were to be “no threats”, which did make me wonder what the morning meeting with ‘conservatives’ – because he and the Archbishop mentioned this meeting – had been like. (Amendment: as of 7 November, thanks to one of those at the morning meeting, we know just what it was like… ouch) After that period of sharing, we would look at the questions in a different way: I’ve no idea what that meant because we never made it to that stage. Finally, the Archbishop would respond.

People’s contributions ranged from personal stories to anonymised stories of others in their congregations to wider reflections on the process so far and on GS2328 and the B2 route in particular. Three offered documents from their organisations, including the letter from Inclusive Evangelicals which has since been published. They were presented to the Archbishop, who didn’t look thrilled and put them on the floor by his chair; I think it would have given a better impression if he had held on to them, putting them under the A4 notebook in which he was writing some of the things we said. One person commented on the large proportion of those offering for ministry who are LGBTQIA+, especially their relative “over-representation” among Deans, but although this was offered with humour the Archbishop remained stony-faced. He never looked comfortable. When I spoke I mentioned anger and sadness, and reflected that one thing I was thinking was whether the many hours I have spent on the LLF process over the last six years have been a complete waste of time. The positive from those years, I said, was the privilege of meeting the other people in the room and I also stated that I am never again prepared to be in a room where people think it’s OK to tell my friends – my friends in loving committed relationships – that they are sinners.

And then we moved directly to the Archbishop’s response. We’d already gone over time (and it turned out that another meeting was happening in that room later in the evening). This meant there were apparently only two minutes left but after stating that, the facilitator then offered him five. The Archbishop came across as very grumpy – at one point it looked like he was packing up to go home – and said he couldn’t do it in the time but he’d try to reduce the number of points to two. Looking at my notes, I can’t work out what those two were supposed to be. 

Picking up some of the language from the thoughts shared by those present, he started with “You’re not a problem to be solved” and the related “I don’t see you as ‘Other’. You are fully part of the Church”. That sounds encouraging, but he used a very unfortunate image to affirm that the grace of God extends to everyone; he has since apologised for that. He then commented on the stories which had been shared regarding people in the room being threatened and harassed, or told they were going to Hell, but he used this as an opportunity to talk about the death threats he himself has received and showed us his personal alarm; rather than acknowledging and lamenting what had been shared, that seemed like diverting what was said into something about himself. Much of what followed also came across as self-defence, talking about what he does for LGBTQIA+ asylum seekers or his record of making staff appointments that are more diverse than those of many other bishops.

But this meeting wasn’t about self-defence. It was supposed to be about listening to the others in the room. I wish I had seen more evidence of that, and I wonder whether the morning meeting with ‘conservatives’ had been so difficult that he was still trying to process it.

The original invitation had suggested we’d hear “the intentions of the bishops” as well as sharing our reactions. We didn’t get any sense of “the bishops” at all, only of this Archbishop – I think the Archbishop of York was mentioned just the once. I’ve commented already on my shock when the B2 route – no stand-alone services of blessing until a vote in Synod in 2025 – suddenly surfaced, and at the meeting we were given some sense of why the B2 route had surfaced as sounding better than the original plan, and why the very tight timetable of moving to a B2 vote in 2025 was, in his opinion, the right thing to do. But it does sound like the Archbishop, or maybe ‘the bishops’, are keen to revisit the experimental use of the stand-alone blessing services, something not currently in the proposals. 

As for 2025, clearly it’s impossible to reach the two-thirds threshold required in Synod; the Archbishop knew the figures and stated them. But, he said, the onus was on us as leaders of the ‘inclusive’ groups to use whatever means we can to change people’s views. Well, thanks, but what have we been trying to do for a very long time now? And the ‘conservatives’ have been trying to change our views, and although some people in these groups do shift their position slowly over many years, bearing in mind the years of LLF, I can’t imagine what he has in mind. We’ve been through all the arguments. We just go round in circles. The ‘conservatives’ believe they’d be ‘blessing sin’ so why would they even support the crumb currently on the table: the very restricted use of the Prayers of Love and Faith in existing services. So why would they support the stand-alone services?

I came away from the meeting feeling very tired indeed. There were powerful emotions in the room, powerful and very sad stories, and I am not convinced these were properly acknowledged. I am also confused about where the LLF process is now; neither of the two ‘lead bishops’ for LLF were in the room and, while of course the staff will feed back to them, there’s nothing quite like hearing people’s stories for yourself. I note that the LLF Steering Group is scheduled to meet on 6 November, so I assume the staff team are busy writing up the meeting at this very moment. And then what?

I now have two more questions to add to the many that occupy me when I think about my experience through the LLF ‘journey’ (by the way, the LLF ‘roadmap’ still stops in July 2023, I assume because the staff don’t have the time to update the web page). My latest questions are: whose initiative lies behind this meeting? And – even more importantly – who is now running the show?

Posted in Shared Conversations | 6 Comments

Leaky Church

Posted on October 27, 2023 by fluff35

Many churches have extended their offerings to include Messy Church, which describes itself as “a way of being church for families and others. It is Christ-centred, for all ages, based on creativity, hospitality and celebration.” Usually happening on Saturday or Sunday afternoon, this is one of many ways of involving people who don’t think church is for them.

In complete contrast is Leaky Church, an expression of church which has become even more apparent in recent weeks. Yesterday the Church Times published a story, Bishops’ divisions over same-sex marriage exposed. It revealed the surprising figures behind the recent switch from the B5A method of progressing the Prayers of Love and Faith – allowing stand-alone services for same-sex couples immediately, as ‘experimental’, with the official stuff happening further down the line – to the B2 method, where such services can’t happen until November 2025 at the earliest, after all the dioceses have commented and even then only with a two-thirds majority in each House of General Synod. Which is, of course, impossible. 

As the figures leaked yesterday show, the College of Bishops supported such stand-alone services, by a majority of 75 to 22, but the House of Bishops voted the opposite way, by 19 votes to 16. 

The Church Times received documents from, the story said, “multiple sources”. It’s interesting that people in the know thought that publicising the facts was more important than the usual church cover-up.

When I was taking part in the Living with Difference group in September, during the pre-meeting tea and coffee one of the conservative members of the group came over to me and asked me (standing rather too close to me – which I found uncomfortable) whether I’d leaked to the Church Times the list of names of those in our group. I was able to look him in the eye and say no, I hadn’t. It then came out that he thought it must be me because the same story also quoted a blog post I had written – which, of course, didn’t leak these names. It’s interesting to be the prime suspect, particularly when the whole point of this blog is to report what actually happened, insofar as I am able to do so.

And there are limits to that. When we had the Diocesan Shared Conversations back in 2015-17, they were under St Michael’s House Protocols, in which you can ‘share the learning’ but not attribute anything to people who were there: you are “free to use any information received, but neither the identity nor affiliation of the speaker, nor that of any other participant, may be revealed”. The seriousness of that rule was reinforced by us all physically signing a copy of the Protocols. I was so worried about breaching it that, when I started to blog in order to share the learning and inform the wider church what it was all about, I sent draft pieces to those running the event to ask if they were OK. They were deemed entirely OK.

When we joined the Living with Difference group we were also told that the meetings would be under St Michael’s House Protocols, but at the first meeting this was changed. And I assume that’s all I am allowed to say. I’ve stuck with the rule, although I don’t understand why we have it, and even though we didn’t sign anything in the way we did in the Shared Conversations. I’ve no idea what the House of Bishops members are told about the proceedings of their own meetings. Do these take place under the Protocols or under some other rule?

The fact that “multiple sources” have now broken ranks is revealing. The House of Bishops does not publish its minutes, so these figures would otherwise have been hidden from history. The Bishop of Ebbsfleet – present but not a voting member – wrote in his 16th October report of that 9th October meeting that “While the details of the discussions in the House of Bishops remain confidential, until minutes are published on October 20th, nevertheless that disquiet has led to a response from a number of bishops …” I thought that was odd when he wrote it, because minutes are never published. All that came out on October 20th was a press release, with no “details of discussions”, so I don’t know what he was thinking.  

So, here we are in Leaky Church. It’s a place where there is no creativity, hospitality or celebration. Rather than inviting people in, it shuts them out. Rather than transparency and honesty, it’s all about keeping secrets. Rather than modelling the Kingdom, it imposes silence, and equates power to knowledge. Surely we can do better than this?

Posted in General Synod, Living in Love and Faith, marriage, Shared Conversations | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Suspicion and fear

Posted on October 24, 2023 by fluff35

In my previous post I mentioned that point where we found out the conservative groups were down to meet the LLF team before the House of Bishops met on 9 October, and the progressive groups after. As, in the end, nothing we said seems to have made any difference to the unexpected ‘pulling the B2 rabbit out of the mitre’ at that meeting of the House, maybe there wasn’t anything sinister going on with our invitations. Or maybe there was, but the key thing was not when we were down to meet the LLF team, but when the conservatives were? But there’s something else which has since occurred to me: it’s the revealing readiness in my mind, and in the minds of the others in the progressive groups, to assume that something is wrong about having all the conservative groups scheduled to meet before the bishops and all the inclusive groups after. Should we call that ‘the hermeneutic of suspicion’? It’s churchy language, at least.

I can now add another example of how suspicious and fearful we currently are. On Friday night, I was having my first attempt at reading GS2328, but in dodgy light on a small screen. When I came to 2.1.1 of the draft Pastoral Guidance, on ‘Making transparent decisions locally’, I thought that it meant that any occasion when the Prayers are to be used in a normal service would have to be notified in advance: the wording is that the incumbent’s decision to use them should be discussed with the PCC and the wider congregation and “made known ahead of time”. So I tweeted “so, if the vicar is going to use the Prayers of Love and Faith during the Sunday service, they are advised to put out a warning in advance?! We don’t routinely pre-warn about who is preaching or which intercessions or Eucharistic prayer we are using or what the hymns are…”

Re-reading the next day, in better light on a larger screen, I concluded that I’d read this wrong, so put up a further tweet, “may have misread a section of that very long GS2328. The phrase I took to mean announcing before a service that the Prayers would be in use was ‘made known ahead of time’. Maybe it just means ‘ahead of anyone actually asking for the Prayers’? My apologies if so.” Because I want to get this right; although I’m not yet sure that I have done so. Here’s the screenshot of the relevant section.

What interests me was how willing people were to accept my initial (mis?)reading suggesting that ‘health warnings’ would be issued ahead of using the Prayers in any normal service. In tweets and messages, some people reminded me that there are parishes where they do indeed announce who is preaching at each service, or who is presiding. Personally, I don’t think it should matter; preaching isn’t a celebrity performance and I certainly don’t attend for the preacher. Who’s presiding, though, that’s something else – in a situation where some people in a parish or a team won’t accept communion from a woman, telling them that the Revd Susan Smith is presiding means they can go elsewhere. Personally, I think that’s very sad, and I also wonder how far it goes; in my own parish there used to be someone who would not even take the Host (consecrated by a man) from a woman communion assistant, although he would take the chalice from a woman. I asked him why but the explanation didn’t go beyond how he just wasn’t happy about it.

Beyond that, though, the way a suggestion of a health warning ahead of any use of the Prayers was seen by many as perfectly likely reflects the low expectations which are set by GS2328. It’s all about fear; conservative fear that – to give just one example – a lay member of the church will be picked on at work because they belong to a congregation that won’t use the Prayers. Or, to give another example, that people coming for the Prayers will wear clothes that look too wedding-y. Or that churches – apparently allowed to design their own not-a-marriage-really certificate, may include symbols that look too wedding-y (“Such certificates must not suggest or imply in their wording or design that they commemorate or are proof of a marriage” in 1.3.4: imagine the drafting of that sentence… ‘ooh, add “or design” because even if the wording is OK there may be a picture of a cake’).

All this reflects the prevailing mood. Any sense of joy, of celebration, of welcome, of blessing, has now disappeared. In its place there’s just a combination of conservatives trying to present this as gaining the maximum possible protection from a Bad Thing (in their words, ‘blessing sin’): and progressives convinced that any crumb they are given will be hedged around to make it as depressing as possible. In this climate of increasing fear, where is the faith that sets us free?

Posted in equal marriage, General Synod, Living in Love and Faith, marriage, preaching | Tagged , , , , | 13 Comments