The Bishop of London recently replied to Changing Attitude England’s letter sent in November 2021 to the Next Steps Group (NSG) following our first letter about new radical Christian inclusion sent in September . In her letter of 13 September 2021 Bishop Sarah had thanked us for clarifying again Changing Attitude’s understanding of what radical Christian inclusion means. In our November letter we asked if someone would set out in greater detail what the hierarchy’s and Living in Love and Faith’s (LLF) understanding of a radical new Christian inclusion is.
Bishop Sarah has written:
“One of the goals of the learning, listening and discerning process of LLF is to offer the whole church the opportunity to explore not just what ‘radical new Christian inclusion’ means, but how it is to be lived out at local and national levels. This depth of understanding that engages both heart and mind and that encompasses the whole church – including LGBTQIA+ people within it – is not something that can be achieved by a top-down process of publishing a definition of ‘radical new Christian inclusion’. It is something that the whole church – listening to the Spirit – needs to discover and then live out together. That is what LLF is trying to achieve.”
Radical new Christian inclusion absent from LLF Course
Changing Attitude England has this week responded. In our letter we note that the LLF Course doesn’t even mention radical new Christian inclusion. There is no introduction to the concept, let alone how it is to be lived out at local and national levels. The LLF Course offers no guide as to what ‘good, healthy, flourishing relationships in a proper 21st century understanding of being human and being sexual’ might look like. We do not believe it is possible for ‘the whole church – listening to the Spirit’ to begin to discover what radical new Christian inclusion means if the LLF Course lacks material to direct and guide participants’ exploration. The LLF Course offers nothing to help people formulate the content of a radical new Christian inclusion.
The new radical inclusive vision was also absent from GS Misc 1306, the Guide for Members of the new General Synod circulated in mid-November 2021. The Guide gives an overview of Living in Love and Faith to enable the new Synod to understand the LLF journey since the inception of the project but totally fails to mention the Archbishops’ guiding principal – to create a radical new Christian inclusion.
The process outlined by Bishop Sarah in her letter of how a definition of radical new Christian inclusion will be created is impossible without guidance from the LLF Course material. It would seem that the Archbishops’ vision has been excised from the process, a vision that requires a depth of understanding impossible to achieve without providing resources. In the LLF book, only seven of the 460 pages are dedicated to inclusion and exclusion.
Attitudes have already changed
During the past twenty years, secular society in England has engineered a legal and social transformation for LGBTIQ+ people that has integrated and transformed our place in what had been a divided world in terms of sexuality and gender. It is the Christian Church that models exclusion and division now, not the world.
We question whether one of LLF’s claimed goals is genuinely to achieve a radical new Christian inclusion. The NSG seems to hope that by engaging with the Pastoral Principles and the LLF Course a dramatic change in attitudes will occur as people learn about people with different perspectives but without changing the fidelity of various groups within the church to their incompatible understandings of Christianity and the Gospel.
Our name, Changing Attitude, was well chosen when the group was founded in 1995. We knew that LGBTIQ+ equality was not going to be achieved without both a change in Christian attitudes and teaching and a change in personal attitudes, for LGBTIQ+ people as well as the heterosexual majority.
Bottom up or top down process
We agree with Bishop Sarah that the radical full inclusion of LGBTIQ+ people in the Church of England cannot be achieved solely by a top-down process but neither can it be achieved by a solely bottom-up, grass roots process.
In her letter Bishop Sarah says she hopes that “listening to each other’s stories” and “engaging openly with the different fears, longings and convictions that are present among the people of God in the Church of England … is happening as people engage in deeper learning using the LLF resources and as we encounter one another … in our small groups and through the story films and encounters in the LLF Book.”
The LLF book (p.228) says
“Christians on all sides … can agree that the Church ought to be a community where everyone is welcome. No one should be made to feel excluded simply because of who they are.”
In their recent statement issued to mark LGBTIQ+ History Month, the archbishops reinforced this ambition:
“We … take this opportunity to lament and reject all prejudice, hatred, oppression, and violence against LGBT+ people. We pray that LGBT+ people around the world would be able to live lives free from fear and find joy in the love of God. Let us commit to building communities in which everyone experiences the unconditional love of God in Christ Jesus.”
Many LGBTIQ+ people have lived in relationships of a depth equal to straight marriage for decades. We are now manifesting a ‘radical new Christian inclusion’ by entering a civil partnership or by marrying. Radical new LGBTIQ+ Christian inclusion is already a reality in the Church of England but is barely acknowledged by the institution.
How will bishops assess the grass roots response?
The end of the learning together phase of the LLF process is less than three months away - responses to the LLF Book and Course have to be submitted by the end of April. We have less than three months in which to ensure that a definition of a radical new Christian inclusion that is fully inclusive of LGBTIQ+ people emerges. If this happens, it will be despite the failure of the LLF process.
Those responsible for the LLF material failed to provide the members of the Church of England who are participating in the LLF process with the necessary information to enable them to think through and asses the implications of the Archbishops’ vision of a radical new Christian inclusion, a vision at the heart of Changing Attitude England’s campaign for the full and equal inclusion of LGBTIQ+ people. Changing Attitude has asked the Next Steps Group how they will determine, at the end of the learning together phase, whether there has been an adequate grass roots response to synthesise a radical new Christian inclusion in the subsequent stages of the LLF process.
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