THE Church of England’s Living in Love and Faith process, begun greater than eight years ago in hopes of achieving a consensus on sexuality (News, 17 February 2017), has come under fire from each progressive and conservative quarters after the selections taken on the recent House of Bishops meeting (News, 17 October).
The Bishops decided that there should be further synodical processes for stand-alone services of blessing for same-sex couples and for reconsideration of the bar on clerics’ getting into same-sex marriages.
“Episcopal authority has never been weaker because the seventeenth Century,” wrote the Rector of St Giles’s, Newcastle-under-Lyme, with Butterton, the Revd Joshua Penduck, in a blog post. He suggested that there had been a scarcity of due process, attributable to “stupidity”, a “rush to create a latest settlement”, and “a scarcity of honesty about what such a process could achieve”.
“The indisputable fact that the legal advice has only just been released is a mark of how needlessly painful the method has been,” he wrote. LLF had benefited no one: neither the LGBTQ+ community nor conservatives who were “weary, exhausted and feeling vulnerable”. “There is now less cohesion within the Church of England than ever before.”
Bishops had “come to sound less like episcopal centres of unity and more like powerful activists”, he suggested.
He described how, in his own parish, the LLF conversations begun in 2020 through the Covid-19 pandemic had produced “shouting, hurtful and insensitive comments, dreadful theology, grandstanding, and talking past each other”, and the departure of his PCC secretary.
In one other piece published last week, the Dean of Canterbury, the Very Revd David Monteith, wrote that the House of Bishops’ statement had made him see “that no significant change is probably going in my life span. . . Why, in case you really do think that we reside without true repentance and are unworthy of blessings, do you not only eliminate us as that’s the conclusion of the logic now received on this settled view?
“Dealing with internalised homophobia is usually a life’s work for lots of us, with the kindly welcome and acceptance by our Christian communities often being a key a part of that healing. I discovered my life and heart constrict as I received this news once more; being told loudly and clearly that our minority lives and loves must remain marginal, hidden and uncatered-for like a vegetarian in Eighties France. . .
“Many agree that it’s now far harder for us within the church than it was 30+ years ago. The tide is popping on this planet with gains in equality now being questioned and lots of, including me, are fearful that what we see with far-right parties elsewhere, we might even see here too. . . I don’t think we will trust the church to defend us if such a terrible day got here. We wouldn’t justify care.”
Preaching in Southwark Cathedral on Sunday, its Dean, the Very Revd Dr Mark Oakley, said that reading Dean Monteith’s article had left him wanting to “scream silently inside, because I recognised a lot of it”.
“In all of the church debates in over 30 years of ministry, I actually have to inform you that I haven’t recognised myself,” he said. St Paul’s description of those that “exchanged their passion from natural to unnatural” didn’t describe him, he said.
“It wasn’t like that. I didn’t select anything. I discovered who I used to be, and it wasn’t easy. I knew people beat up people like me; the Government was telling people not to show children about people like me; the newspapers were naming people like me; the Church was excluding people like me in the event that they were honest: they said Paul said I used to be unnatural and sinful and pointed to those lines in Romans.
“And I read, and I still read, and I don’t see myself, nor anyone I do know like me. I don’t recognise my heart there, my should be loved and to like, my longing to not spend my life alone or afraid.”
On Wednesday, the Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Revd Martyn Snow, who stepped down because the LLF lead earlier this 12 months after 18 months (News, 13 June), said that he had been “dismayed to read comments suggesting the entire process has been a waste of time.
“Not only is that this disrespectful to those for whom LLF provided an area for the expression of their pain — I spent many hours hearing the pain being experienced by a wide selection of individuals — but it surely also assumes that there was a greater way that our disagreements could possibly be resolved. The LLF process has been removed from perfect (I actually have learnt much through my mistakes), but it surely was an try and model how individuals with different deeply held convictions could show love and look after each other.
“Society desperately needs this; and if the Church doesn’t model this, our witness is seriously diminished. Whatever happens at General Synod next 12 months, the query of how we live along with differences will remain. I hope there will likely be some constructive suggestions for the way we do that.”
Letters, page 15
