In a recent letter to Changing Attitude England, the chair of the Next Steps Group, the Bishop of London, the Rt Revd and Rt Hon Dame Sarah Mullaly wrote that “the members of the Next Steps Group are planning to engage with a wide range of stakeholder groups later this year, including members of Changing Attitude, and we look forward to that conversation in due course.” Changing Attitude England welcomes this proposal and will respond positively to the invitation. Indeed, we look forward to receiving details of the proposal as a matter of urgency given the limited time scale remaining to the LLF process.
A YouGov poll, commissioned by the Ozanne Foundation shows that a majority of members of the Church of England now support equal marriage for lesbian and gay couples despite the Church of England’s refusal to allow equal marriage or blessings in church. Changing Attitude England has been campaigning for the full equality of LGBTQIA+ people in the Church of England since 1995. The findings of the YouGov poll brings greater urgency to the need for equal marriage and ministry in the Church of England after more than four decades of exploration and study.
Davis Mac-Iyalla, now the Executive Director of the Interfaith Diversity Network of West Africa (IDNOWA), spoke against the passage of the Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill, 2021 on Thursday 17th February 2022 at the third public hearing of the Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee on the bill. The bill, effectively an anti-LGBTQIA+ bill, will if passed in its current state, criminalise Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Agender people and any person or group supporting them, including family members, bishops, priests and pastors.
In November 2021 Changing Attitude England proposed that six LGBTQIA+ people should be appointed to both the Next Steps Group (NSG) and the House of Bishops, in a way that is analogous to the appointment of senior women and to the proposal for UK Minority Ethnic / Global Majority Heritage ‘participant observers’ recommendation. The Bishop of London has replied saying that the Next Steps Group is now working on a proposal to the House of Bishops that goes at least some way to respond to this aspiration.
The Bishop of London, chair of the Next Steps Group, has replied to our letter asking the NSG to define radical new Christian inclusion. She says it is not something that can be achieved by a top-down process of publishing a definition of ‘radical new Christian inclusion’ but something that the whole church needs to discover and live out together and that is what LLF is trying to achieve. The LLF Course does not mention of radical new Christian inclusion. Apart from seven pages in the LLF Book, the bishops have provided no guidance to help people think about, let alone respond to, the vision presented by the Archbishops in 2017 and taken as a sign of hope for LGBTIQ+ people.
Changing Attitude England proposes to encourage those who support equality in relationship and ministry for LGBTIQ+ people in the Church of England to communicate their commitment to equality to the LLF hub by the end of April. We want to disrupt the complacency of the House of Bishops by organising a ‘write in’, getting the huge middle of the Church not just engaged but responding and letting the bishops know, which is exactly what the Bishop of London has pleaded for in a recent Church Times article.
In the sermon Life Abundant or Life Resisting? published in The True Wilderness Harry Williams asks whether our Christianity makes for a better and happier world or does not. He believed that quite often it does not - that Christianity in many of its forms is not a good but an evil thing. I think the theology of Living in Love and Faith draws on an unhealthy conception of God. The Christian story, it says, “is about our rebellion, disobedience and refusal to depend on one another and on God – a disorder which has infected the whole of creation. This results in a form of Christian teaching that makes the Church of England an unhappy place for me, a gay man.
In an article in the current issue of the Spectator Theo Hobson thinks this might be the year in which the Church of England sorts out its deep divisions over homosexuality. He wants to assert the centrality of liberal Anglo-Catholicism in the Church and this means treating evangelicalism with a bit less respect. Diversity must be allowed: liberal parishes must be free to conduct gay weddings, evangelical parishes must be allowed to refuse to. I disagree. The pragmatic arrangements made to tolerate dissent on the ordination of women have enshrined an utterly unchristian intolerance and prejudice in the life of the Church.
Canon Mark Oakley has coined a new word, saying “we need a brave Tutufication of the Church, allowing bishops more creativity, freedom of speech and honesty about what they believe, with a commitment to never let religion compromise justice.” I believe the entirety of the Church of England needs a far more radical ‘Tutufication’. For a start, the Church needs bishops who with the courage and independence of mind to individually Tutuficate themselves. Today’s House of Bishops is composed of men and women with none of the Christian conviction, courage, radicalism, independence of mind, freedom of heart and soul, playfulness and energy that fuelled Desmond Tutu and transformed people open enough to respond to his proclamation of God’s unconditional love, energy, truth and justice.
