Jayne Ozanne ViaMedia.News Bishops: Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are!
Jayne Manfredi ViaMedia.News Earth Accuses Earth: Responding to Cancel Culture
Colin Coward Unadulterated Love LLF Next Steps Group plans to engage with stakeholder groups
LGBTQ Faith UK Learning from the playground – lessons for Living in Love and Faith
I appreciated Jayne Ozanne’s perceptive article about the need for Bishops to ‘declare their hand ‘ on the acceptability – or not – of LGBTI+ people in the Church; both as members of the Body of Christ and in leadership as clergy (or even bishops). I think one of the most perceptive of Jayne’s comments was this one: “The scandal here is not that we have gay bishops in the House of Bishops, but that we have gay bishops who do not feel safe enough to come out within the House of Bishops.” This problem is not unique to bishops.… Read more »
Yes, ‘Learning from the playground’ would be a good strategy. “We need to address the fear, ignorance, power, prejudice, hypocrisy and most of all the silence. In other words, the bishops need to follow their own pastoral principles.” The Diocesan Shared Conversations addressed what they presented as the main “underlying cause of conflict”, namely the way we approach the Bible; the archive still has the booklets for this, ‘Grace and Disagreement’ (https://www.churchofengland.org/about/leadership-and-governance/general-synod/bishops/shared-conversations-archive). I am now wondering whether that really was the main cause. Any thoughts?
I was at one of the early shared conversations. The big difference seemed to me to be about sin and love. Some participants seems to have to bring sin into every conversation. Do we love God or are we afraid of God?
I think the LLF process needed to spend more time finding out from people what they see the disagreement as being about, rather than trying to tell us what each side thinks. Less teaching, more learning would have been helpful.
Jayne overlooks the point with the bishops is that they have been chosen precisely because they are company men and women. They will stick rigidly to the company’s position that we like gays only if they eschew sexual intimacy. So we have the absurdity of partnered gay bishops urging sexual abstinence. Jesus’ teaching is almost exclusively focussed on money, power and hypocrisy, not sex. Young people don’t have any time for the contorted position of the CofE and see us as hypocrites.
Collectively at least, the Church is a hypocrite.
I read this recently published article and thought it is highly relevant to LLF. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/interpretation-stacking-verses/. My impression is that LLF encourages verse stacking – in both directions. What is missing for me is an emphasis on the broad principles underlying Jesus’s earthly ministry. Which is why I think LGBT Faith UK are right to use a playground argument analogy.