I am deeply grateful to Nic Tall for his blog published on ViaMedia – Plotting the division of the Church of England. Nic is a member of General Synod and Secretary of the General Synod Gender & Sexuality Group. His blog is a crucially valuable and revealing contribution showing how advanced the Church of England Evangelical Council’s (CEEC) plans are to undermine the LFF process and sabotage a decade of work to achieve greater justice and equality for LGBTQIA+ people in the church. You need to read Nic’s blog in full to be aware of the detailed planning going on in the devious, self-righteous world of conservative evangelicals. What is happening is a skilfully organised and well-financed attempt by the CEEC to impose an abusive, prejudiced, discriminatory, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, un-Christian version of God and the teaching of Jesus on the Church of England.
Nic carefully plots the plan being executed by conservative evangelicals to ‘partition’ the church, a plan originated in 2016 in the aftermath of the struggle to prevent women becoming bishops. Conservatives opposed to equality for women in the church turned to the issue of sexuality as the next place to oppose ‘progressive’ values. Their plan involves conservative parishes refusing to share resources with the wider church and turning priests and parishes away from the care of their bishop to achieve “visible differentiation and division within the Church of England”.
The plan is well resourced and engineered
In 2019/20 CEEC income doubled to £100k and by 2021/22 had increased to £176k. In the same period the Evangelical Group on General Synod (EGGS) amended its basis of faith to include conservative statements on marriage, sexuality and gender identity, effectively forcing inclusive evangelicals to withdraw from involvement with EGGS. They have formed a new group, Inclusive Evangelicals.
On 16th March 2023 the CEEC issued a statement that it was “compelled to resist” the direction approved by Synod. Seeking to draw in as many conservative supporters as possible, the CEEC began to forge alliances with other groups. These include the Traditional Catholic group on synod, New Wine, Church Revitalisation Trust and Myriad plus some charismatic evangelical church planting networks, particularly Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) network. Former HTB Vicar Nicky Gumbel has joined John Dunnett, now National Director of the CEEC, in their involvement with the CEEC plan.
Two days after the General Synod vote in November 2023 the “Ephesian Fund” was launched, closely followed by plans to create alternative structures of spiritual oversight seeking to formally divide the Church of England, though not yet going as far as pursuing formal legal provision through due synodical process.
The CEEC plan (fantasy as much of it may be) is to create by stealth a dominant ‘traditional’ ‘orthodox’ Church of England opposed to the full and equal inclusion of women and LGBTQIA+ people.
Nic Tall hopes his article will alert the overwhelming majority of church members committed to unity to resist it. He has certainly succeeded in alerting many more members of the Church of England to the advanced level of planning and financial resourcing already achieved by conservative evangelicals.
I want to go much further
It will come as no surprise to some that I want to reframe the language and categories used to describe the divisions within the Church of England. The CEEC says it is ‘re-setting the communion according to its biblical and historic roots’ Those labelled ‘progressive’ by the CEEC are accused of ‘entering into a deep darkness of rebellion to the truth of God’s word’, advocating ‘false teaching and false practice’.
I want to alert people to the way in which Christianity is being deliberately re-framed by conservative evangelicals as a religion in which the defining characteristics are prejudice, discrimination, abuse, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. The CEEC claims authority to re-define the fundamentals of the Word of God in the Bible and the Word as manifest in Jesus. The CEEC God is misogynistic, homophobic, abusive and spiritually corrupt. I do not believe this to be a Christian awareness of God, nor a humane understanding of God.
The CEEC is playing a very deliberate, very well resourced, revisionist game designed to ensure they are the major force in a dominantly conservative evangelical, abusive, prejudiced and exclusive Church of England. Such a church is not recognisably Christian to me, hostile to my gay sexual identity and opposed to my Biblical understanding of God as unconditional, infinite, intimate love encountered in creation through the silence and contemplative awareness of mystical practice.
Personal experience, global consciousness
Changing Attitude is one of many movements in the Church of England and within global spiritual communities that continues to explore the evolution of personal experience and global consciousness on our fragile planet earth.
Christianity has primarily been a patriarchal religious movement. God is represented as male in Christian iconography. Jesus’ white masculinity is fiercely defended by traditionalists and the majority of churches still exclude women from equality in ministry. Adrian Thatcher shows in his recently published book Vile Bodies how unthinkingly the Christian church has marginalised and persecuted whole sections of the human population at different times in its history. The core role of women in the Gospel narratives is still underplayed; the Church of England enshrines misogyny in its canons; LGBTQIA+ people are still abused and vilified and racism continues to infect the Church.
Unity is presented as a primary goal of the Living in Love and Faith process and Jesus’ prayer in John’s Gospel that we may be one offers a compelling vision but unity isn’t the primary task of the church. The unconditional, infinite, intimate love of God for all people irrespective of gender, sexuality, colour, age, ethnicity, ability, tribe or class is the primary gospel message. Life in all its fullness is the call to the depths of our hearts and souls proclaimed by Jesus.
We have to reprogramme ourselves and in doing so, reprogramme the church to the transformation of the essence of Christianity that is integral to church life. From the life of Jesus and beyond, the church is a body of people learning about ourselves and learning about our experience of God, rooted in the life of Jesus. The Christian church learnt a lot in the twentieth century that was transformational in our God-awareness. It is having great difficulty integrating this new awareness and vision into the essence of Christian life and teaching in the twenty-first century. The Church is living through a period of great uncertainty as to whether the Jesus we worship and the God he reveals is a model for unhealthy, abusive teaching and practice or a creative, evolutionary model opening us to and drawing us into unconditional love.
A Changing Attitude England Event: towards life in all its fullness
This is the first of a series of blogs I plan to post in January and February leading up to the event being organised by Changing Attitude England on 2nd March 2024 at St Andrew’s, Short Street in Waterloo, 10.00 to 16.00. The event has been developed from a conversation between five of us on afternoon in September. If you would like to join us in the conversation, please email your name to me ccmcoward@aol.com and I’ll communicate with you with further details.