Tim Guymer, a gay lay member of the Church of England based in Norwich, an accredited spiritual director, has shared with the Changing Attitude England group the email he sent to the Bishop of Norwich having completed the Living in Love and Faith course. Tim identifies some of the key failings of the course. Tim’s email is a powerful testimony to the effect the LLF course material has on LGBTIQ+ people and allies who are deeply committed to the Church of England but increasingly alienated by the Church’s systemic prejudice towards us. I asked him if we could share his critique in the hope of encouraging others – you reading this – both to write to your bishop and send feedback to llf@churchofengland.org about your own experience of the course and the effect it had on you.
Dear Bishop Graham
I/we have recently completed a series of five sessions following the “Living in Love and Faith” course which the Church has asked parishes to go through. It has been a valuable experience in some respects, but a chastening and even chilling one in others. You have asked for people to send you their reflections, and therefore I offer mine.
I am a gay man who was confirmed (in a Cambridge college chapel) just as the 1991 “Issues in Human Sexuality” report was published. This came as a massive shower of cold water after, and to some extent washing away, a process of coming both to adult faith and to an acceptance of my sexuality which had gone hand in hand in the immensely loving and pastoral hands of the then-chaplain, Rev Brendan Clover. After considerable struggle, I had come to accept myself as a child of God, beloved and totally cherished exactly as I am, with the same potential for human relationships as any other human being. As I say, this was all chilled and replaced by a very chilly acceptance, in which I had become an issue rather than a person.
Sadly, the LLF Course confirmed to me that this is still where the Church is, thirty years later, after the Holy Spirit, as she so often has, had given up on the Church and moved the world light years in its acceptance of partnered homosexual people as a valid expression of human potential both for sexual fulfilment and for love in all its shades.
My evidence for saying this comes chiefly from the way the non-personal content was handled. First, it is not evident to anyone other than evangelicals why the only non-personal content was based on biblical texts: that is just not how the rest of us, especially liberals, think. We trust God to be at work in the world and trace the activity of the Holy Spirit there. We do not treat the Bible as being exclusively the self-revelation of God; it is as much the cultural self-reflection of human beings. Creation can be trusted as giving witness to its creator, and areas such as psychology and sociology can therefore usefully be drawn on for their insights.
Likewise, all the speakers were priests. There are theologians who are not ordained, and it would have been useful and interesting to hear from them. Only voices institutionally bound to the current position of the Church, or to minor, already tolerated variations on that position, were given the opportunity to speak with authority.
Many of the personal stories were painful. I was particularly affected by Alex’s story, because he perpetuates a number of lies which have been prevalent in the Church for decades, if not centuries. He appears to have been convinced that expression of his sexuality is dirty, and he cannot have a relationship which reflects and echoes the love of God. Instead, he is living a life which cripples the expression of his sexuality and allows only an emotional life by proxy; one could almost say parasitically on the lives of others. Of course he can contribute to those lives as well, but he was implying that only celibacy allows gay people to make such contributions, and this position was not challenged in spite of being profoundly insulting to those non-heterosexual people who manage to be in sexual relationships and still have a fully functioning relational life of their own, encompassing heterosexual friends and family.
The story of the couple one of whom was driven out of his leadership of a home group following his marriage was likewise deeply affecting, as indeed were all the other stories. There was something strange about the way in which it was taken as being natural that all of the homosexual speakers had had their ministry curtailed or crippled by the Church because of their sexuality. Just once, I longed for someone to rend their garments, at least metaphorically, to acknowledge the violence and blasphemy that this was and is.
There are two terms that this debate urgently needs: spiritual abuse and institutional privilege. The films made it abundantly clear that the Church believes that it is its institutional privilege to perpetuate spiritual abuse indefinitely, especially in and through those who attempt to serve the Kingdom of God through it. The violence done to people’s lives was evident, clear and vibrant, and in massive contrast to the weak and feeble teaching offered from the chair of authority. If the Church cannot change this it will die, and it will deserve to, because the Holy :Spirit will not indefinitely suffer it to abuse the children of God, her children, in the way that it believes it has the privilege to do, in the name of institutional preservation and the resistance to the challenge of life and growth which God herself took on in the Incarnation.
There are also hundreds of voices who are programmatically excluded – those driven or kept out of the church by its ongoing treatment of the inconvenient, which is how those of unusual sexuality or gender expression are routinely (though not universally) treated, as are those with mental health difficulties and with many other forms of difference which has them treated as “other”. The fact that no voices from outside the church were heard in the course itself is another sign of the Church’s timidity, and its refusal to listen to the holy spirt at work in feral mode.
Change and grow; or die. That is the choice the Church faces, and on the evidence of this feeble, inadequate course, the church has chosen to die. I hope and pray I am wrong. A significant part of me hopes that the Church goes through death and releases the love, energy and commitment currently being poured into sustaining its dying structures so that something new and altogether better at embodying the abundant life of the resurrection can grow. This would be painful for all concerned, but might be the only path leading to the release abundant resurrection life.