LLF Stumbling Steps Group Update
However...
This is not going to be easy!
The official LLF Next Steps Group, all bishops, has just put a note about its first meeting of 2021 online, and there are - how shall I say this - questions. Let's tackle just three.
Question 1.
Each diocese is being asked to provide LLF Advocates to take the process forward. The role description for the LLF advocate is long (and actually not in the update) but worth a look: here is the text of the copy I have seen, which I presume is what has been sent out generally (it came all fully LLF-ed up, with logo and everything). The highlights are mine, and I'll come back to them.
Aim
The LLF Advocate will- encourage the church communities, cathedral, chaplaincies, training centres, and deaneries in the diocese to participate in the learning activities offered by the LLF resources;
- act as a point person for gathering emerging learning;
- ensure listening to the emerging learning is taking place within their own dioceses.
A small group of LLF Advocates may be needed to find helpful and creative ways of enabling the House and College of Bishops to engage with and reflect on the implications of what is emerging from the whole- church learning.
Tasks
Diocese-facing:
- act as a point person for disseminating the resources;
- help groups to engage with them as appropriate in their different contexts;
- encourage and facilitate the formation of groups across churches, to engage with difference;
- encourage groups to capture their learning in creative ways;
- liaise with the bishop and their staff to ensure the emerging learning is heard.
Next Steps Group-facing:
- act as a point-person for reporting on how engagement is progressing, and what help/resources might be needed;
- assist with finding and training appropriate group facilitators who can train others, as appropriate.
Qualities
The LLF Advocate will need
- to be enthusiastic about the church’s engagement with the themes of identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage;
- to be committed to the LLF learning, listening and discerning process;
- to understand the significance of involving the whole people of God;
- to be – and be perceived to be – someone who respects different perspectives and are themselves willing to learn from different viewpoints.
Availability
The LLF Advocate will need to be able to commit significant time over the coming 18 months to this task. It may be that dioceses wish to involve more than one person to take this role on.
Support
The LLF Advocates will be supported by the LLF Enabling Officer as well as by the Next Steps Group.
The first sentence I highlighted would be one I would struggle with. I'm really sorry to say that I'd find it hard to encourage anyone to participate in the LLF Course. It is - in my opinion - one of the weakest things LLF has produced. It is the way we are all supposed to engage with the book, but it doesn't begin to do the book justice, it has a definite theological slant that doesn't reflect the book, it has a take on Scripture that doesn't come from the book and it is mind-numbingly simplistic at times.
I read the Course and honestly was shocked. It does not respect LGBTQ+ people, and I am afraid I'd give it a pass and read the whole book instead - the extra time really is worth it.
The second sentence I highlighted is also a problem for most LGBTQ+ people, because it asks us to engage in a false equivalency. I absolutely respect that many of my conservative friends don't agree with me theologically; but what they don't often get is that they aren't just disagreeing with me theologically. In our disagreements they are regularly dismissing my entire life. An advocate is being asked to allow this false equivalency to stand, and we LGBTQ people by and large struggle (to say the least) with that request.
Question 2
Back to the update from the Next Steps Group. After discussing Advocates, we then get this:
The Group discussed the implementation of a strategy for ‘Learning Together Safely’. The group agreed that it is crucial for the Next Steps Group to provide clear guidance on how groups can function as well and as safely as possible.
If you've read my previous blogs, you know that I never regarded LLF - the actual project - as a safe space. Like most LGBTQ+ Christians, I look with amazement at my straight colleagues when they think that all they need is a policy and suddenly the Church and its discussions will suddenly become magically safe for us.
For goodness' sake, I was offered conversion therapy prayer by someone at a small group meeting of LLF in Lambeth Palace. And nobody else at that meeting suggested that it was out of order. A policy document is not going to make me feel safe, because it would never have stopped the person from being so aggressive to me in the first place, and if that kind of behaviour by itself can't make decent people stand up and support LGBTQ+ people who are being harassed in Lambeth Palace, then a policy document isn't going to be much good.
There are no safe spaces.
And all LGBTQ+ people in the Church know this. Yet we are here. Why?
Because Jesus is our safe space, and one day, as we remain in Jesus, his love will win out. If we speak out and turn up and don't back down, then one day we will get there. But 'groups (cannot) function as well and safely as possible' for now, and there actually needs to be a recognition of this.
Seriously - this is a project of bishops and academics, yet no-one has apparently heard of the concept of Brave Space instead of Safe Space. Brave Space isn't perfect, for sure, but it it comes a lot closer to what the bishops think they are describing than the non-existent safe space they write of.
Please get real on this; constant refusal to reckon with how unsafe Church life can be (especially the LLF kind of discussions and conversations) is a serious, serious issue. And please get some of us into the room, soon, or this terrific opportunity for life and change risks running into needless buffers.
Question 3
Toward the end of the update we get this paragraph:
The Group affirmed the plans to form a Reference Group of ‘grass roots’ people who are actively involved in the life of the church. This group will act as a sounding board for engagement and feedback. Advocates will be asked to propose individuals who might join this group, with the aim of ensuring diversity in relation to age, ethnicity, sexuality, church context and tradition.
I've had a nagging question about the Advocates at the back of my mind, and I am afraid this brings it to the forefront. If I as a gay man can't use the LLF Course, and if I as a gay man struggle with the kind of false-equivalency engagement that is being asked of me, what kind of person is the Advocate likely to be?
Straight.
And that's what this paragraph says, isn't it? The Next Steps Group, bishops all, need a reference group to ground the work and so will ask the Advocates to find individuals from a range of backgrounds to help them - people who are diverse in age and ethnicity and sexuality and church context and tradition. So some on this group, found by the advocates, may be LGBTQ+. This is where we seem to come in now.
The work of engagement across the church, they say, will be done by "us", not by "you".
Hmm. I hate to complain, because, I know the bishops think this is great, and I like lots of these bishops, they are nice people, but if this was a race commission, and all the advocates were white as they reached out across the Church, and they promised to find a reference group 'with the aim of ensuring diversity in relation to age, ethnicity, sexuality, church context and tradition' do you think anyone would accept that? We are (I very much hope) a bit past the age of the White Saviour.
And so the imposition of 'Straight Saviours' on the LGBTQ+ community feels...
...well, let's go with unacceptable.
Nowhere in the role description of the Advocate is there anything about lived experience or personal understanding of LGBTQ+ life or issues or community or theology. Nowhere is there any sense of there being any need to do anything but pay lip service to LGBTQ+ people. Bring in the Straight Saviours. There were, after all, a handful of LGBTQ+ people on the original commission, so what possible cause could anyone have for asking for more?
Actually, it's slightly worse than this.
Because there is a peculiarly Anglican version of systemic homophobia going on here.
It's a commonplace that Anglicans struggle to talk about God, so we talk about the Church instead, and think that we have talked about Jesus when of course we have done nothing of the sort. Often we've done the exact opposite.
In both the Next Steps Group update and in the text of the LLF Advocates I have printed out (above), there is no mention of LGBTQ+ people. Did you spot that? We are unnamed, unmentioned, un-personned. I don't think it's intentional. But in a project set up to bring a 'radical new Christian inclusion' into being, the inability to talk about LGBTQ+ people has long been a problem for LLF. I would sit in meetings and critique texts for our absence. It seems no-one now is doing this.
This peculiarly Anglican version of systemic homophobia replaces LGBTQ+ people with mentions of LLF and sexuality. Dear bishops, that's not the same thing. We are not a book or an ethics topic. We are people. Please see us and hear us and include us.
Dear Bishops, please hear this:
The Living in Love and Faith book is a terrific resource. In it we read that we all are equally human and that God in his goodness has made a brilliantly diverse world.
Please embrace this. Seek the brilliance. And don't impose solutions on us. We are people, with names and lives and with a Saviour who loves us.
Please find the grace and kindness to treat us like that.
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