Robert Thompson, priest, friend and ally, has shared the speech he would have given in Thursday afternoon’s General Synod Living in Love and Faith debate at Church House, Westminster, had he been present and not at home recovering from eye surgery. He says it is perhaps fitting that he write now about sight — because the question before synod is whether the Church of England is willing to see clearly.
My friends in Christ at Synod and beyond,
I speak to you as a gay man.
I speak to you as a gay priest.
And I speak to you as someone who has served this Church faithfully, sacrificially, and publicly since I was 25.
So let us dispense with polite abstraction.
This debate is not about “issues”.
It is not about “sensitivities”.
It is not about “both sides”.
It is about whether the Church will continue to treat queer love as a tolerated irregularity or recognise it as a site of grace.
For decades LGBTQIA+ people have carried the spiritual burden of this institution’s hesitation. We have been told to wait. To be patient. To understand process. To appreciate nuance. Meanwhile we have baptised children, buried the dead, preached the gospel, and prayed the liturgies, knowing that our own covenanted love remains the one thing the Church cannot quite bring itself to bless without qualification.
Let that hypocrisy sink in.
We are trusted to absolve sin.
We are trusted to consecrate the Eucharist.
We are trusted to proclaim resurrection.
But somehow our own love is too theologically dangerous to name in prayer.
What exactly are we afraid of?
If we believe in the fruits of the Spirit, then look at queer Christian couples. Look at fidelity. Look at endurance. Look at self-giving love forged in adversity. Look at people who stayed in a Church that debated their legitimacy year after year and still showed up on Sunday to serve.
If that is not sanctification, what is?
We are told this is about doctrine. But doctrine is not a museum exhibit sealed behind glass. The Church has changed its teaching before: on slavery, on usury, on the role of women, on remarriage after divorce. Each time there were those who insisted the sky would fall. It did not. The Spirit did not resign (and at this point I would like to make it clearer that rumours that I am the Holy Spirit or very much askew. It is quite clear that the Holy Spirit is always female.) The Church did not collapse.
What did collapse was prejudice dressed up as permanence.
So let us be honest: the refusal to recognise same-sex love as capable of holy covenant is not theological caution. It is theological fear.
And fear to use Sarah’s presidential mantra is a poor shepherd. It does not lead to care it completely lacks compassion.
When people argue that blessing same-sex couples would “undermine marriage,” what they are really saying is that queer love is intrinsically inferior, that it can never bear the same sacramental weight.
I reject that.
Not defensively.
Not angrily.
But theologically.
Because I know queer couples whose lives display the gospel more vividly than many heterosexual marriages the Church blesses without hesitation.
And if we are going to talk about unity, let us not weaponise it.
Unity that requires queer clergy to remain permanently provisional is not unity. It is containment. It is a velvet-lined closet.
We cannot preach that every human being is made in the image of God and then behave as though queer intimacy is an unfortunate glitch in creation.
I am not asking this Synod to indulge sentimentality. I am asking for moral clarity.
Queer Christians are not an exception to the pattern of grace. We are evidence of it.
And let me say something uncomfortable but necessary: the spiritual harm done by our equivocation is real. Young LGBTQIA+ Christians are watching. They are listening. They are deciding whether the Church’s God is safe to trust. If all they hear is caution and caveat, they will conclude — reasonably — that they are second-tier citizens in the Kingdom.
And they will leave.
Not because they hate the Church.
But because they cannot survive in it.
Not because they hate God.
But because they cannot see God in the church
I love Jesus Christ.
I love Jesus Christ with such a passionate love.
It was my completely extraordinary spiritually intimate relationship with Christ, when I was a teenager, when I began to realise the sexual desire that was within my own soul both mind and body, that yet again he literally came to save me.
You are loved Robert.
You are special Robert
You were known by me even before you were formed in the womb Robert.
It was these words of Christ to me that kept me going. Nearly 40 years later it is the same words that keep me going now.
I love this Church. I have given my life to it. I have served it in hospices and hospitals, in communities where injustice is so desperately concrete and poverty is literally the struggle to put the daily bread on the table for your children. I preach about a Saviour who breaks chains and restores dignity. I pray that my ministry somehow gives to the wonderful people of the that I serve some hope.
But I cannot, I cannot any longer, in good conscience, preach liberation on Sunday and accept spiritual diminishment on Monday. I cannot. I will not. I will simply be me.
You are loved Robert.
You are special Robert
You were known by me even before you were formed in the womb Robert.
If we are authorising prayers, let us stop pretending they are neutral. They are a step toward telling the truth: that God’s grace is not confined to heterosexual experience.
And if we cannot yet say that openly, then let us at least stop implying that queer holiness is an experiment.
I am a priest.
I am a gay man.
Those realities are not in tension.
They are reconciled in Christ.
The question is not whether queer people belong in this Church.
We already sustain it.
The question is whether the Church will finally have the courage to bless what God has been blessing all along.
Thank you.