There is something missing in the public conversation about human connection and community identified by Catharine Viner in a recent Guardian article. I observe that human connection and community are also missing in the Church of England. Discovering this essence would be a valuable outcome of changing attitudes, helping people develop lives well-lived and enriching all our lives, engaging with unadulterated love and living life in all its fulness.
How do we turn the practical reality of Church of England parishes, churches, clergy and laity already providing a national network of inclusive, affirming congregations celebrating full inclusion into a vote in General Synod to change the Canons and rules that prevent lesbian and gay couples (and clergy in particular marrying and being married in church? It has to be a campaign that focuses time, attention and energy on the bishops.
The bishops are not in control of what we the people do sexually. From a young age, what the bishops said I could or couldn't do sexually (not that I actually knew back then what they said) has never affected the decisions and choices I've made. What I have done and do sexually and intimately is far too significant and deeply personal to me that I’ve never had a conversation with a bishop about sex.
What next, then, for a Christian faith that is being largely abandoned by those countries in which it was once prominent? It seems essential that the churches should pay close attention to what they believe and to acknowledge the harm they cause. There is too much emphasis in the churches on mission at the expense of reflection. An abusive God cannot be wished away. Secular cultures are right to reject him. Their rejection is a sign of moral health. The question is whether any version of Christian faith is now possible.
Eighty-two members of the General Synod have written to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York asking why a fringe event and exhibition space at the July 2026 Synod have been approved. The letter asks the Archbishops to exercise their discretionary powers as Presidents to uphold the Church’s safeguarding guidance and the ethos of the Church of England.
Adrian Thatcher has written a book that redraws fundamentals of Christian theologies, beliefs and practice, fundamentals of Christian orthodoxy and tradition that have been used to deny, over the centuries and into the present century, equality in the kingdom of God to various categories of people: women, black, brown, LGBTQIA+, other faiths, divorced, the sexually active outside marriage, the solo sexually active, and the myriad other ways in which people default from God’s long accepted norms of acceptability. Adrian has done something even more dramatic. He has redrawn our map of God.
Churches, Synagogues, Mosques, Gurdwaras, should be gatherings of people learning the dynamics of human relationship according to the life, teaching and practice of wisdom people - Jesus Christ for Christians – showing us how to live life in all its fulness as open, self-aware individuals, deepening through spiritual practice and commitment, our self-awareness as members of self-aware communities.
The troubled industrial adventure of the twentieth century has morphed into what is now an even more deeply troubled AI nightmare. We are losing, or have lost, the power to control what is happening in the development of AI and LLMs. Loss of the personal dimension has become even more serious. We have lost the wisdom stream in Christianity life, teaching and practice. The stream of the last century is now barely a trickle.
A few weeks ago I began to talk with close friends about my excitement at rediscovering the wisdom of books that had inspired my faith in earlier decades. One friend suggest I should write a book about, say, eight of them, 40,000 words describing what the Church needs to learn today from their wisdom and insight.
The Church doesn’t begin to understand what it is about its teaching, culture and practice that forms sexually and emotionally immature, inadequate and unhealthy personalities. I’m very happy to visit churches with different traditions and styles of worship. I am not prepared to anticipate that in many churches, there will be a silent, unspoken, unadvertised prejudice against people because of their gender or sexuality.
There is something missing in the public conversation about human connection and community identified by Catharine Viner in a recent Guardian article. I observe that human connection and community are also missing in the Church of England. Discovering this essence would be a valuable outcome of changing attitudes, helping people develop lives well-lived and enriching all our lives, engaging with unadulterated love and living life in all its fulness.
