THE Evangelical Fellowship of the Church in Wales (EFCW) has challenged any implication that it supports “coercive or abusive” conversion therapies, and describes such practices as “abhorrent”.
The Fellowship has called for “protections”, nevertheless, to permit for prayer and pastoral support “on the request” of the person involved.
In early September, at a gathering of the Church in Wales Governing Body, the Bishop of St Asaph, the Rt Revd Gregory Cameron, quoted from a letter that the Welsh Bench of Bishops sent to the EFCW in 2021, after the group had asked for clarity concerning the definition of conversion therapy (News, 13 September).
The EFCW had asked the Bishops whether or not they considered “grace-filled prayer” and “open discussion” to be a type of conversion therapy.
In their letter responding to the EFCW, the Bishops said that “these seemingly innocuous words may be used to disguise practices wherein pressure is brought upon vulnerable LGBTQIA individuals to undergo efforts geared toward the conversion of their sexuality, attempted exorcisms and worse.
“Such practices may be designed — consciously or unconsciously — to play on people’s sense of shame or anxiety, and signal that unless they conform to heterosexual norms they will neither be true disciples of Jesus, nor accepted members of the congregation with which they need to change into associated.”
On Tuesday, the Revd Christopher Bevan, who chairs the EFCW, told the Church Times that “the insinuation is that one way or the other we’re a part of this conversion therapy.
“When people discuss conversion therapy they often bring up these bizarre type of things like chemical castration and corrective rape and beating and emotional blackmail, and the whole thing is lumped together without real differentiation.”
Such practices, which an announcement from EFCW described as “abhorrent”, were coercive and manipulative, said Mr Bevan, who’s Priest-in-Charge of the St Catwg Ministry Area in Swansea & Brecon diocese: “We don’t seek to coerce or manipulate anyone about anything.”
The statements of the Welsh Bishops had not, he said, been “sufficiently clear that individuals who want to be supported in Christian faith, and people who want to support them, wouldn’t be included on this blanket ban on ‘conversion therapy’, which in itself is a quite nebulous concept”.
An extended-expected ban on conversion therapy was included within the Government’s plans (News, 19 July) after laws stalled under the previous government (News, 22 September 2023).
Mr Bevan said that he was concerned about “individuals who, in conscience, feel that their sexual attraction to members of the identical sex is an unwanted sexual attraction for which they may seek to converse or to hope . . . and want to stay single or celibate.
“We would need that choice to remain open without it in a roundabout way being insinuated that there’s something incorrect with their decision, or that if we want to support them in such a choice, that there’s something one way or the other incorrect with us wishing to accomplish that.
“We at EFCW feel that we’d like to take care of what you may call an alternate route for many who might wish to explore it, and we predict that the rhetoric and the statements from the Bench of Bishops would condemn such a route and misrepresent our position.”
Asked whether he would initiate a conversion about sexuality with a member of the congregation who was living with a same-sex partner, Mr Bevan said that he would “leave them to work it out for themselves as they saw fit.
“If they asked me questions on it, then I’d answer them as truthfully as I could, but I wouldn’t be within the business of browbeating or manipulating them or one way or the other attempting to force them into anything, either emotional blackmail or social ostracisation or anything like that,” he said.
