Full equality in ministry and relationships for LGBTQIA+ people remains the only goal for those Christians living healthy spiritual and sexual lives in contemporary society, a society in which modelling non-abusive sexual intimacy within and outside marriage for heterosexuals is as important as achieving equality for LGBTQIA+ people. It’s time to table a motion proposing a total overhaul of the Church’s teaching on sex and marriage.
The Christian Church in general and the Church of England in particular is not manifesting, to my way of thinking, a healthy, creative, Christ-centred vision of God – a vision rooted in the teaching and life and wisdom of Jesus and of those men and women he invited to follow him and share his journey and who responded to his invitation.
The nineteen organisations and networks listed on this blog share, in my mind, a common interest, purpose and vision. They/We, are working towards the formulation of an answer to the existential question that haunts me – What kind of God do we believe in? A common, shared vision emerges from the statements of each group – one people in Christ, in creation, in shared experience and the pursuit of love, truth and justice, a vision that understands the universal, cosmic essence of the sacred, holy, divine presence in creation and in all of life and every human body, heart and soul.
We, diverse members of the human race, are one body, and the groups within the Christian Church that identify as progressive and inclusive, OneBodyOneFaith, Together, Equal, Changing Attitude England, Inclusive Evangelicals, Open Table Network and LGB Christians, Modern Church, Inclusive Church, Student Christian Movement, WATCH, Sea of Faith and Progressive Christianity Movement,
need to address the challenges presented by this year’s attacks on our identities and freedoms – and reform our relationships to create a unified working Body.
I am deeply conscious that my beliefs are thought to be dangerously out of tune with the Biblical, orthodox, traditional Christian matrix that many still observe. I am also out of tune with some members of my own ‘tribe’, the progressive reformers and transformers. And I am most deeply conscious of the world of 2025 in which the American President is wreaking havoc on global political, financial, trading and relational networks and institutions that have formed the bedrock of my life as a white, Western European 1945-born boy. I am also living in a Christian era riven by disagreements about gender and sexuality, traumatised by the unearthing of abuse, sexual and emotional, and that has yet to confront what Berger was struggling with in 1968 – what kind of God do we believe in?
I’ve written this blog because I believe that we are “called” do something about the theologies and teachings and ideas of God and Jesus that are commonplace in today’s Church despite what we are able to explore and despite our supposed evolution from the traumas of a century in which two world wars were fought.
I believe epiphany experiences are as much internal as well as external experiences. Indeed, epiphanies are in a sense entirely internal. They is nothing without us, our bodies, our body chemistry, our evolved mechanisms for sensing and interpreting the world around us. Transcendent reality ‘exists’ within us as much as it ‘exists’ beyond us, is more knowable within us if we can but find the courage to trust our intuition.
How do we inhabit our personal faith and other vital Christian values, essentials and meanings (at least as I have come to understand them) in the context in the Post-Truth Trump world, reeling from the effects of tariffs and this week’s response to the security ‘leak’ where the world doesn’t know what to do about the death, the evisceration, of Truth?
