A FRESH way forward on Living in Love and Faith (LLF) shall be presented to the General Synod later this month, within the hope of “rebuilding trust” lost over the past yr.
The now sole lead bishop for LLF, the Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Revd Martyn Snow, explained his recent “broad Church” approach on the Synod press briefing in Church House, Westminster, on Friday.
His former co-lead bishop, the Bishop of Newcastle, Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, resigned from the position last week over the appointment of a recent interim theological adviser who has expressed conservative views on sexuality (News, 2 February).
Bishop Snow said that, though he had not himself voted for the Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF), he was now committed to delivering on the selections already taken by each the Synod and the House of Bishops.
But this progress must not be made on the expense of the Church’s unity, he warned on Friday. “Proceeding by narrow majorities with votes being won by one or two votes will leave us with serious problems within the years to return. We need the rebuilding of trust.”
He was bringing to the Synod ten “commitments” around which, he hoped, the Church could unite, despite its deep disagreements over sexuality and marriage.
To model the transparency that he hoped to cultivate, the Bishops had included, for the primary time, legal advice given to them of their paper on LLF, he said.
These annexes set out different options open to the Bishops for the remaining elements of the LLF package still to be implemented: stand-alone services of blessing for same-sex couples, and pastoral guidance on whether gay clergy are permitted to enter into same-sex civil marriages.
Synod members, Bishop Snow said, should now give you the chance to understand the difficulties that the House of Bishops found itself in implementing the Synod’s narrow votes in favour of the PLF. “Some of this will not be straightforward and can need labor,” he said.
Rather than simply force votes on each remaining open issue and proceed on small majorities, the Synod should select a path of “reconciliation”, and coalesce around a settlement acceptable to as many factions as possible.
In his LLF paper, Living in Love, Faith, and Reconciliation, Bishop Snow writes: “We are at a crossroads — either we have now reached the purpose of separation, accepting that our opponents shouldn’t be a part of the Church — or we must shift the controversy to the query of how we live well with difference.”
This lasting settlement must recognise the “craving of the center ground”, he writes: the “overwhelming majority” of churchpeople who want LGBTQ+ people to accepted and valued recognise that considering changes to doctrine will inevitably be a slow and thoughtful process.
“Our argument due to this fact is for a renewal of the ‘broad Church’ approach during which the gifts of various traditions are valued, honoured, and exchanged in a healthy way.”
Among the ten commitments are guarantees of freedom of conscience for clergy to make use of or reject the PLF as they need, with the support of their bishops, and a moratorium on reopening the query of same-sex marriage in church for the rest of this Synod (until 2026).
There are also commitments to bringing within the stand-alone PLF services on an experimental basis, but not before the pastoral guidance and reassurance for conservatives have been finalised.
The eighth commitment is to “explor[ing] the method” for allowing priests and lay ministers to enter into same-sex civil marriages, with the proviso that individual bishops can be free, on conscience grounds, to not ordain or license any such clergy.
Finally, the bishops make a commitment to exploring “the minimum formal structural changes mandatory to enable as many as possible to remain throughout the Church of England”.
The annexes of the paper include detailed discussion of two of probably the most contentious issues still to be determined within the LLF process: easy methods to provide the stand-alone services of blessing for same-sex couples, and easy methods to change the pastoral guidance in order that gay clergy can enter into same-sex marriages.
The legal advice to the House of Bishops indicates that using Canon B5A — which allows the Archbishops to authorise recent liturgies for a trial period, and which was endorsed by the Synod in November’s debate (News, 23 November 2023) — to introduce stand-alone services can be novel and lift a “considerable risk of legal challenge within the courts”.
Furthermore, the complete Canon B2 synodical authorisation process couldn’t begin until the experimental phase had finished. During the two-year synodical proceedings, stand-alone services wouldn’t be permitted. This raised difficult pastoral concerns, and would also significantly lengthen the time before stand-alone services might be authorised permanently.
Whether preceded by a trial period or not, using Canon B2 to authorise the services synodically would ultimately require a two-thirds majority vote in each House of the Synod, a bar that no LLF motion has yet come near reaching.
The alternative approach to using Canon B5 — easy commendation by the Bishops — was the initial plan, and has already been used to introduce the PLF in regular services, the paper notes.
But using this for stand-alone services would create significant legal risks for priests, the recommendation continues, as commendation by the House of Bishops doesn’t determine whether the services are lawful and never contrary to doctrine.
“The bishops have listened and take very seriously the concerns around ministers bearing the legal risk of using the PLF,” the paper says; and that is why alternative routes are actually being explored.
Other options include Canon B4.2, which allows the Archbishops to authorise recent services for their very own provinces; or Canon B4.3, which provides diocesan bishops an identical power over their dioceses. Both routes could still leave the Archbishops or bishops personally liable to legal challenge, the recommendation notes.
The second annex to the paper dives into the query of allowing clergy to enter same-sex marriages, saying that this is not any easier.
There was a narrow majority of 18-15 (with two abstentions) within the House of Bishops in favour of permitting gay priests to marry, but no decision has yet been made on how this will be put into practice. “The query of easy methods to do that, pastorally, theologically and legally, will not be straightforward,” the document says.
Three options are being considered, each with compromises. One can be for the bishops to declare formally in a teaching document that civil same-sex marriage was not at odds with the Church’s teaching on holy matrimony. The advice says, nonetheless, that there’s a “significant risk” that this might be seen as a change in doctrine, which the House and Synod have already said that they don’t want.
The second option can be for the Bishops to allow gay clergy to marry as a purely pastoral accommodation during a “time of uncertainty”, but this might expose clerics to potential legal cases within the courts.
Third, the Bishops could uphold teaching that same-sex civil marriage remained outside the bounds of C of E doctrine, but agree simply to not implement discipline on this area. This route, nonetheless, wouldn’t prevent individuals’ bringing Clergy Discipline Measure proceedings against gay married priests; nor would it not stop a postcode lottery developing, whereby conservative bishops continued to implement the discipline while liberal dioceses didn’t.
The paper concludes without recommending any of the choices set out for either authorising stand-alone services or permitting gay clergy to marry. It also doesn’t offer any detail on what settlement will eventually be offered to conservatives, although Bishop Snow said that he hoped to bring “outline” proposals to the Synod in York in July.
There are also other LLF elements still to be implemented, the document continues, including the appointment of an independent reviewer to watch usage of the PLF (an appointment needs to be complete by the tip of the yr) and establishing a Pastoral Consultative Group to advise clergy and bishops on issues surrounding marriage, sex, and identity. The group’s membership needs to be identified by the summer, and it is predicted to start out work by the tip of the yr.
