Institutional religions and the institutional Church are finding this evolutionary step, the call to listen to everything until it all belongs together and we are part of it, very difficult to imagine, let alone adjust to and integrate in its teaching and practice. Sexuality, gender, inequality, economic injustice, the climate crisis, how people function and malfunction, emotionally, physically and spiritually, the well-being of our planet and environment, globalisation, artificial intelligence and the manipulation of what we take to be reality, dysfunctional political and spiritual leadership, are all requiring us to make sometimes massive adjustments to our lives in faith.

Any authoritarian system of morals, whether it ascribes authority to God or the Church (or the Bible), if it is accepted uncritically, depends on the Super-ego. It is opposed to the Christian principle of using eyes and ears to learn for oneself. Both Ego and Super-ego must grow up and forsake infantile fixations.

The mood, the environment, the culture of the Church of England in the decade from my teenage years (the nineteen sixties, by when I’d known I was gay for five years) to the nineteen nineties, was a good place in which to be gay. The whole of my being, my intuitive, experiential, feeling, creative, idealistic, introverted self, discovered that I was in a gay friendly environment despite that me also knowing that homosexuality was taboo and disapproved of by God. I now live in a spiritually depleted, hostile environment of endless battles, reports, reboots and ‘process’.

Conservatives claim that declining numbers in progressive congregations are the result of progressive, non-Biblical, non-orthodox, non-traditional, non-creedal formulations of Christianity. I claim that declining numbers are due to people abandoning the Church because people think traditional theologies are no longer believable.

The conversations I have had over the past weeks suggest the Church of England is in a state of crisis, a far less healthy state than General Synod and the House of Bishops and other progressive groups recognise. Radical transformation of Christian life and vision is required.