The Possibility of Difference

I was at a meeting recently. One of those meetings where a gay person is invited to 'try to explain' how the church might change. We'd been talking for a while, when the guy who was in charge said something that I presumed was an innocent mistake - the kind of theological comment that unthinkingly reduces gay people to something less than full humanity. So I stepped in and did a bit of explaining as to why I got what he was saying, but perhaps it might be useful to understand how that actually affects LGBTQI+ people. When I stopped, the guy in charge looked over at someone else and said - 'Hmm. Perhaps we ought to try and find some queer theology on this.' I wondered what he thought I'd been offering. I wondered if he'd heard anything I'd said. I wondered if it would have helped if I'd run up a rainbow flag or played disco music while I spoke. It felt like banging my head against a brick wall, because clearly nothing was going to change as a re...

The Archbishop of Canterbury has had a bit of a torrid time recently on LGBTI+ issues. Publicity around the Lambeth Conference next year is going a bit awry; Justin Welby's very well-publicised debacle over rescinded invitations to same-sex spouses of gay bishops is the unwanted gift that keeps giving. This week the Archbishop was reported in The Times as saying: “I had to take what is a really difficult and painful decision to say, in order for the conference to be as representative as possible and get all the bishops there and not have the risk of some provinces not coming because they felt I was pushing the envelope too far, that I couldn’t ask all the spouses.” Goodness, we feel your pain. It must be extraordinarily hard to be a straight, white, male, married bishop in the Church today. The Twitter response has been creative. Here are three: I do feel a bit of sympathy for him. Being part of the Living in Love and Faith project (the House of Bishops co...

EQUAL is a new campaign, seeking to enable same-sex couples to marry within the Church of England. The law currently allows any heterosexual couple living in a parish to marry in their local church (regardless of creed, race, age or - often - previous marital status) whilst a faithful worshipping gay couple are prevented by the same law from celebrating their marriage in a C of E church. EQUAL seeks to redress this imbalance. It also seeks to enable clergy who want to marry someone of the same sex to do so. And, importantly, it aims to achieve all of this while protecting both the conscience of those who in good faith cannot conduct such marriages, and enabling all clergy who wish to provide this pastoral care. Usually, I am against signing online letters and things of this nature, but in this case I am glad to have made an exception! This isn't a negative body or a complaint machine: it is a campaign that seeks to bring equality for every person while respecting those who ...