Patiently

This week the Church of England College of Bishops (the larger gathering of all the English bishops) gather in Hertfordshire to make final decisions on how they will respond to the Living in Love and Faith process, and to decide what recommendations they will bring to General Synod in the New Year.

It’s crunch time.

Will they fudge the issue and consign LGBTQ+ people to more years of pain? Or will they finally repent of their failure and (as Jayne Ozanne powerfully writes) at last decide to care for all their sheep? Equally?

Living in Love and Faith (LLF) has been quite the thing. I’ve written on this site about it repeatedly. It has been a model of how not to do an inclusion project, with the power always held by a (vast) majority of straight people who have firmly known what is best for LGBTQ+ people at every turn, even when the LGBTQ+ people allowed into the room have cried out against them.

And yet…

And yet God is good.

We are told that the numbers are against change. The General Synod that was elected last year is so evenly matched between extremists on both sides that no real move is possible, and the bishops have to work out some kind of political compromise because the reality of the situation is so dire.

And yet God is good.

‘Extremists on both sides.’

It is extreme in this sentence to believe a gay person is the full equal of a straight person - and that reveals the institutional homophobia of the people who think they run the Church of England. Let's be clear - it is unacceptable to think of equality as extremism. People who look at me or Jayne or the Campaign for Equal Marriage and see extremists should understand that what they are seeing are human beings denied simple, fundamental aspects of their humanity by a Church that claims to stand for fulness of life for all. 

Such denial is extremism.

But that’s not what’s meant by ‘both sides’. 

The denial is the general status quo. 

‘Both sides’ refers on one hand to those who seek any change, and on the other to those who fight tooth and claw to further exclude those who seek change. 

Now: it is sometimes genuinely hard for those of us who have heard remarkable things said of us to want to sit with those who have said remarkable things. I mean, remarkable things. Things that make us much less human, but said with smiling, kind faces, as if to bless. 

The weight of these things lies heavy. People who should be raising us up do anything but, but smile and smile and curse us again. 

It is hard to want to sit with such people.

But such are people, loved by Jesus, and (if I may speak personally and not for anyone else here) though I struggle to forgive the deep pain inflicted, I also know that judgement is above my pay grade.

Having experienced exclusion, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else.

So I might gently suggest that ‘both sides’ are not equal when one side wishes the other excluded from God’s church, and one (though struggling with the consequences and the reality of what it means to make such a decision) will not make such a wish.

As LGBTQ+ people, we have lived suffering extremism all our lives, and it has not been called ‘extremism’. It has simply been life. Such words and actions and attitudes have come from pulpits and pews and bishops’ palaces. 

And yet God is good.

What I seek is not for others to be pushed out of God's Church. It's just to be allowed to be as God has made me, and as God has made me, to worship. 

So I will pray for the bishops meeting in Hertfordshire this week, trusting not in their kindness, or their sense of what is just, or in them as decent people with the best interests of all in their care.

They too are just people, and all the weight of the world rests on their shoulders. I critique their failure, because much is required of those who will lead God’s flock; I then step back and thank God I am not and never will be a bishop, with such a charge weighing on my heart. 

And ultimately my trust is not in bishops. Bless them. (And I am grateful to have such a good diocesan as my own bishop, whose gentle and well-reasoned conversion to the cause of equality even wins over the secular press...) 

God is good, and God’s purposes will not be confounded. God will bless us and God will love all God’s people. I may see everything I hope to see soon, or not so soon; but I will see it. God is good and every person may rest and rise and live and love within God’s goodness. 

Crunch time? That was a long time ago, on a hill far away. And the whole Creation has been groaning and yearning ever since for the revelation of all the children of God. So we hope; and wait.

And maybe, just maybe, this week (by God's kindness and grace) we will draw a little closer to something better.