The Diocese of Salisbury has joined other dioceses who have appointed one or more chaplains or pastors with a particular ministry to support LGBTQIA+ people. The commissioning by the Bishop of Salisbury, Rt Revd Stephen Lake, took place during Evensong on Saturday, January 31 at the cathedral. The cathedral announcement said:
“. . . nine volunteer chaplains, Christians drawn from the LGBTQIA+ community and allies, will be offering confidential and non-judgemental spiritual and pastoral care to LGBTQIA+ Christians and those exploring faith, plus resources on inclusion for churches and individuals. The chaplaincy will also provide a voice from the LGBTQIA+ community to the diocese in its decision making and explore the best ways to support gay clergy and office holders.”
The Revd Kate Wyles, LGBTQIA+ chaplain for the Diocese of Salisbury, was quoted in the local paper, saying:
“We are a diverse bunch, both laypeople and ordained ministers, who offer our care and support in a variety of contexts. We hope that our commissioning will be a source of hope to many people in the diocese who tell us that they long for a more welcoming and inclusive Church of England.”
The Bishop of Salisbury introduced the service “with words of profound affirmation” and the Dean of Salisbury, Very Revd Nicholas Papadopulos, preached. It is clearly a valuable sign of progress that in a number of dioceses, chaplains are being appointed to minister to LGBTQIA+ people.
Nick’s sermon: In God’s Field Hospital
Nick Papadopulos began his sermon with the image of the Church as a field hospital with the chaplains accompanying casualties to places of safety, carrying the wounded and taking the sting out of the hurt. Later he described how God longs for our healing from the wounds of guilt, fear and shame, ignorance and prejudice, of self-hate and other’s hate, all of these being wounds inflicted by the Church. He said the sovereign remedy for all this is the presence of Christ, a presence embodied in the chaplains.
Life in the Field Hospital
After sixty eight years of life as a confirmed gay member of the Church of England, I observe from a lifetime perspective that my Church has in 2026 got around to setting up in a number of dioceses field hospitals for those it has been responsible for wounding in the past and continues to wound with possibly even more intensity in the Church today. The effective abandonment of the LLF process after several years of work, building on decades in which reports have been commissioned and sometimes published but never followed through, continues to impact LGTBTQIA+ lives. The resolution being presented by the bishops at next week’s General Synod following their abandonment of LLF is a mark of yet another deep wound being inflicted by the Church
The Bishop of Salisbury, other pro-LGBTQIA+ members of the House of Bishops and the dwindling number of closeted LGB bishops are all supposedly supportive of a Church that ceases to wound and abuse her LGBTQIA+ brothers and sisters. This is what I understand to be the commitment of the Salisbury service and was the intention of the (now retired) Archbishops in 2017 to embrace “a radical new Christian inclusion”. I don’t want to be ‘profoundly affirmed’ (+Salisbury). I want the landscape for LGBTQIA+ people in the Church of England to be transformed into a present reality of equality, inclusion and unconditional love.
During the 7 months I lived at St Saviour’s Priory in Haggerston I visited over 50 churches in that area of the Diocese of London. I learnt that the Church of England has the greatest difficulty trusting in and living and communicating that God loves you ‘just the way you are, whoever you are’. I’m sure that’s what many priests and congregations believe they are doing, but very few services communicate this fundamental truth.
Stop the abuse
I found conditionality everywhere and conditionality undermines the message. LGBTQIA+ chaplains will be needed, everywhere, for a very long time, unless the House of Bishops and General Synod and the Archbishops’ Council break the stranglehold that the conservative fundamentalism of the HTB core (but not necessarily all their church plants), the Alliance, Church Society, the Church Revitalisation Trust, Sir Paul Marshall and the Ephesians Fund have over the institution that continues to abuse LGBTQIA+ people. My message: STOP THE ABUSE! as Trump might abusively type.
‘I think we feel stuck’
On Wednesday I saved an article from the Guardian G2, ‘I think we feel stuck’ , Guardian writer Ada Edemariam’s ‘ideas interview’ with Kate Pickett. Pickett is co-author of a previous book, The Spirit Level. In her new book, The Good Society, she “gathers jaw-dropping facts about the inequality crisis in the UK – and shows creative ways to build a better, fairer, less stressed society,” Pickett writes that “at the edges of the climate crisis, or the crisis in care, or the other big problems we’re facing, we need wholesale change: nothing less than “a new social fabric for a good society.” Ada Edemariam says it feels “. . . almost transgressive to make such a big claim. Risky, even.”
As I read the article, I found myself thinking about the Salisbury chaplain’s serviced and next week’s General Synod meeting and found myself replacing Pickett’s secular political government focus with my focus on the Church of England. What is happening in the Church and the way I feel about seemed to be mirrored. What follows is the result of this transposition.
“I did need to be encouraged to find confidence in myself, to express that bigger vision. I worried a lot that it felt a bit . . . well, ‘Who am I to say these things? Who am I to say how the Church should look and what the good, inclusive church is?’” It took me a while to have the confidence to say: ‘This is what I think it should look like, what about you?’
It is so long “since we had great visions declared for us of what a healthy, inclusive, Christ-centred Church would look like” that we have somehow mislaid that type of agency. “We have fallen out of the habit of thinking that we can choose to do what it takes to create the best Christian Church possible. This is not the same as the agency we are sold every day in the secular world, which is individual; that we alone can choose to be more healthy, can choose not to commit crime, can choose through hard work and supposedly innate merit, to flourish. Can choose through prayer and attendance at church, through tithing and reading the Bible, to flourish, to win at the game of life.
The flipside of this is that if we fail, it is our own fault. The individual carries the blame, and the Church has a long history of blaming individuals for their personal failures or systemic failures of ‘traditional’ faith – for which God blames and punishes people. The challenge is to identify and create the context which best supports the aims we believe will create a healthy Christian Church and Christian lives.
If you want to be a bishop or a priest or an activist or an LGBTQIA+ chaplain or advocate, you are going to have to use stories and statistics to tell a compelling narrative that people do then think they want to commit to, because they feel it’s possible. I’m disappointed that people are not being visionary and bold and that it has taken them too long to do certain things.
A striking insight is just how much of what we assume to be immutable is actually ideology or traditional, orthodox Christian teaching and practice unchanged since NT times, which is oft repeated and simply untrue.
Thirsty for hope
The ground is probably far readier for new ideas and different ways of seeing than Bishops and activists and progressives repeatedly seem to assume. If you demonstrate bold leadership, you can carry people with you. You can convince. “People are quite thirsty. They are thirsty for hope.”