Most of you won’t have read the House of Bishops report of their meeting on Wednesday 21 May 2025. This is quite understandable because it’s 22 pages long and no-one ever reads the Bishops’ totally anodyne reports. There follows an edited version of the section of the meeting dealing with Living in Love and Faith. It is followed by comments from me.

LLF Crisis in the House of Bishops

The Bishop of Winchester chaired the section on Living in Love and Faith; the Bishop of Leicester introduced the discussion noting that:

Some people had fed back that Living in Love and Faith (LLF) had taken the church backwards;
It was now harder for LGBTQI+ people to thrive within the Church of England. If this was true it was a significant issue of collective responsibility;
The issues underlying the formal LLF process were not going away and were leaking into other debates;
There was a degree of collective trauma for the Church from the last decade of trying to get to grips with the issues. Resolving this was central to issues of trust and accountability;
It was important to acknowledge the reality and seriousness of the position in which the Church of England found itself. It was approaching a stark choice between agreeing a way forward or deciding not to agree and allowing every diocese to find its own way;
Failure to reach agreement would have consequences. This would include continued pain for LGBTQI+ Christians and stress on the national vocations and discernment process;
Failure to reach agreement would not be the end of the conversation. Synod members would table Private Member’s Motions; dioceses would pass Diocesan Synod Motions. These would pass or fail by narrow margins with consequences. Cases would be tested and decided in court and new and novel procedures would be developed – with a risk of disobedience and disorder with different dioceses taking different approaches;
In this scenario there would be loss of members, of ordinands and of financial resource, with consequent impacts on clergy and lay minister morale. There would be reputational risk and the pressure from Parliament would increase;
It was possible that this was an overly pessimistic view, but the House was increasingly facing the choice of whether to lead or be led. If the House were able to lead by finding a way forward that held the Church of England together, if members were able to set aside their desires to see their argument prevail; then the Church might be able to live together with difference. The House would then return to this in detail in the Autumn.

What do I make of +Leicester’s introduction?

Phrases stick in my mind: going backwards, harder now, collective trauma, a stark choice, continued pain, disobedience and disorder, to lead or be led.

+Leicester says eight years of the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) process has taken the church backwards. It is now harder for LGBTQI+ people to thrive within the Church of England. This is the result of a significant failure of collective responsibility. The issues underlying the formal LLF process are not going away. There is a degree of collective trauma in the Church. This is the current reality. The Church of England finds itself facing a stark choice. Failure to reach agreement will result in continued pain for LGBTQI+ Christians. Failure to reach agreement would not be the end of the conversation. Chaos would result. The House faces the choice of whether to lead or be led.

Bishops fail to Lead

I think the House of Bishops’ meeting report reveals important insights about the state of their leadership of the Church of England. They are scared of the challenge they are confronted with. They set up the LLF process as the solution to the failure of the Pilling Report and the Listening Process top achieve a breakthrough. The defeat of the HoB motion in Synod in 2017 and the total failure of the Archbishops to commit themselves in any way to providing serious content to what they meant by “a radical new Christian inclusion’ has resulted in the paralysis witnessed in the May HoB meeting. The bishops still don’t have the guts to confront and implement what radical new Christian inclusion means for LGBTQIA+ people, for our friends, families, allies and congregations.

For me and for Changing Attitude England radical new Christian inclusion means equality in relationships and ministry – and that means marriage – married same-sex clergy and same-sex marriages in church. The bishops are paralyzed, unable to resolve the challenge presented by LGBTQIA+ people, paralyzed because of the threats and demands confronting them – the pressure to implement alternative episcopal oversight. The implications of making a decision one way or the other terrify them. They lack courage and vision. They fail to grasp the Gospel challenge presented by the ministry, teaching and practice of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus did not obey rules and was not a conformist. He broke the traditions, orthodox teachings and approved practices of his day, so angering the institutional hierarchy that they plotted the ultimate outcome – his arrest and death.

Someone commented on Facebook that the House believes they can continue to muddle through. The Bishop of Leicester tried to confront them with the crisis they face. Quote:

“It was important to acknowledge the reality and seriousness of the position”.

And a crisis in parishes

I have been continuing the visits to churches in the Islington episcopal area of London where I’m living temporarily. I hope to God this area is not typical of the whole Church of England – it’s certainly a massive contrast to the Diocese of Salisbury where I’ve lived for the last 22 years. Anarchy seems to have broken out in this episcopal area, sanctioned and encouraged by the bishops of Islington and Stepney, the Rt Revd Dr Ric Thorpe and the Rt Revd Dr Joanne Grenfell. Of the twelve churches I’ve worshipped in so far in the area these bishops cover, three have almost nothing that defines them as Anglican; the communion service in three of them was an incompetent, chaotic mess; three were recognisably Anglican, one with worship of deep spiritual and prophetic quality. The three others were very inclusive West End churches.

The three churches that were barely Anglican are all charismatic evangelical HTB plants or ‘failing’ churches ‘rescued’ (and funded) by the Revitalise Trust. I experienced them as being unhealthy, emotionally manipulative and superficial in the most basic elements of Christian teaching and practice. I experienced worship in the three churches that were, as I put it, a ‘chaotic mess’, as being led by people who were incompetent in knowing how to lead worship. This is presumably the result of sadly inadequate preparation wherever they were ‘trained’. The shockingly inadequate performance of Christian life and truth in these six churches is directly connected with the shockingly inadequate performance of the House of Bishops. It is the result of the failure of the bishops of Islington and Stepney to take responsibility for articulating and overseeing a Christian vision congruent with the Gospels and responsive to the global, reactionary, anxiety-ridden secular, cultural, economic and climatic regression affecting all of us.

Another friend described the House of Bishops’ meeting like this:

The HoB recognises it faces an existential crisis in its manifest failure of leadership. The items on women’s ministry are helpfully incisive and programmatic, instructing progressive change. The sexuality items are a total shit show. It’s evident that the bishops can’t agree, or agree to disagree; and despite recognising that what follows is an existential crisis for the CofE and a failure of the HoB’s credibility at any level, they are continuing to shove the pieces around the table. The one outcome of the survey work in LLF was that the bishops just make a clear decision.

Tricksters versus magicians

Sam Howson has posted a long interview with the Revd Nathan Ward, vicar in Rainham, Kent. Nathan is a magician and talked about the difference between tricksters and magicians in today’s church. Of the six churches I described above, three have almost nothing that defines them as Anglican. There are three where the communion service was an incompetent, chaotic mess. All are all trickster churches by Nathan’s definition. They are hollow, manipulative, programmatic, grooming, wanting people in church on their terms, marketing Jesus and God, efficient (or utterly inefficient) businesses, starved of mystery. Join us, help us grow, because we have to feed the greedy business machine. The other six churches have qualities Nathan identifies as magical; wired more for wonder and awe, evoking something within people’s depths. God lives in everyone, is already fully within the lives of those who walk through the church’s doors.

The minutes of the House of Bishops meeting show a hierarchy corrupted by the increasing addiction some of their members the contemporary trickster version of Christianity. The remainder seem to have permanently lost their spine and the mystical vision that provides the requisite courage.

Trickster churches offer fake claptrap, manipulating and seducing people with fake good news. We just need to be honest with each other, Nathan said, offering people as way to explore life in all its fulness.