The Changing Attitude Blog

New web site location for the CA blog

2011-03-09T21:51:00.002Z

Dear followers of the CA blog,

A new Changing Attitude web site has been under construction since November and is now just about ready to go live - which it should in the next 24 hours. The new site is an exciting opportuinty for us to increase content and present the extraordinary breadth of work undertaken by our supporters and local groups across the country as well as our media and lobbying work.

This blog will become an integral feature of the new site, and you'll be able to follow us on Twitter (if the Director ever finds time to work it out) and our Facebook page will also be integrated.

We thank you for your support in following our work and my musings and hope you will find the new web site provides a sharper focus for the campaigns we are pursuing in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion to transform the place of LGBT people in our Church.

Blessings,
Colin

Ash Wednesday

2011-03-09T14:30:00.004Z

What kind of Lenten discipline does my heart and soul seek this year? I yearn to inhabit more deeply my experience of God in which I feel called and invited to live by love, grace, Spirit, by the infinite, eternal, transforming, creative, sacred energy of life.

In contrast there is the Church, with its expectation of prayerful discipline through Lent and the suppression of pleasures, desires and addictions. The Church is an institution which requires people to live by rules and laws (Biblical or otherwise) creating in the process categories which include and exclude.

Far from encouraging people to live into and believe in the sacred energy of life the Church divides the human community in categories of people in which some are less entitled than others to the fullness of their humanity.

Today’s lessons can be read as providing support for a disciplined Lent but I found evidence for a contrary perspective when I read them this morning.

Isaiah 1.10-18 rejects as futile the countless sacrifices and idolatrous ceremonies and instead encourages the people to do good, pursue justice, guide the oppressed; uphold the rights of the fatherless and plead the widow’s cause. But it was the next verse, 19, which caught my attention: “... you will eat the best that earth yields.” The problem is, the first half of the verse will be taken to support those who believe Lent is about following the rules: “If you are willing to obey ...” it begins.

1 Timothy 6.6-19 concludes with an invitation to fix our hopes on “God, who richly provides all things for us to enjoy.” We are exhorted "... to do good and to be rich in well-doing ...” and if we follow the advice, we will “... grasp the life that is life indeed.”

Luke 15.11-end is of course the parable of the Prodigal Son. As I read it, I wondered why the Church drills verse 21 into us: “Father, I have sinned against God and against you; I am no longer fit to be called your son” rather than verse 20: “While he was still a long way off his father saw him, and his heart went out to him; he ran to meet him, flung his arms round him, and kissed him.” This is the God I yearn to encounter and who in truth I do encounter, but often with no thanks to the Church, especially since I’m a gay man.

My life task, the task I will adopt this Lent and for the remainder of my life, (in the words of James O’Dea who I heard speaking in North Reddish, Manchester last Sunday) is: “... to grow and deepen our awareness of the concentrated living essence which has the capacity to align us with our own core. And not only to wake up to who it is we really are but who we can become in those moments when greatness, wisdom or unusual generosity are called for.”

My project for Lent may seem to be very different from the traditional Lenten disciplines but I suspect it is something which resonates with many more people than the fasting tradition and is in truth much closer to the teaching of Jesus who clearly experienced in his body, heart and soul a tender intimacy and love which is the essence of his Father.

Writes James O’Dea:

“These moments when you are picked up and carried towards the seemingly infinite reserves of essence are a reminder that the truly great adventure in your life is the fullest realisation of your inner wholeness and where it wants to take you.”

“When you begin to surrender to ‘I don’t know’ you break the control that false certainty has over your life. Admitting doubt is a dimension of the authentic journey of faith.”

My faith, my spiritual life, is anchored in an hour of deep attention every morning where I discover an inner awareness that is carrying me through all of life’s many challenges and difficulties. This is a faith which has no need of an intermediary between me and my Life, life in all its fullness, eating the best that earth yields. This is Life filled with a raw, elemental energy - a truly spirit-anchored, inner, soul life.

Jesus’ reply to the Pharisees in response to their question about the greatest commandment in the law is: ‘“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.” That is the greatest, the first commandment. The second is like it: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’

For those of us who have or are struggling with deep anxieties about whether or not we have been created as we experience ourselves in the core of our being – lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender – or who are haunted by the many prejudices of the Church against us, leading us to question whether our SELF is to be honoured, loved and cherished, James O’Dea’s statement about the first commandment needs to be internalised and trusted as a true reflection of Jesus’ teaching – to love our neighbour and to love God as we love ourselves:

“The first commandment is ‘Be yourself.’ It is a commandment which strikes terror in the hearts of many. We wonder, ‘Do I have permission to be myself? How will I be received if I am really myself? Is it safe to be myself? Who am I?' And sometimes we find ourselves utterly amazed: ‘Wow, how did I achieve that? I had no idea I was capable of such things! Where are these incredible ideas and feelings coming from? What is this charged feeling I have about my own destiny? How do I stay true to myself?’

I pray that all followers of Changing Attitude, our supporters, trustees, patrons and the Director himself; will have a holy, healthy and creative Lent in which we are enriched and nourished by a deepening awareness of God’s tender love in the very core of our being.

Colin Coward

Changing Attitude England’s campaign for civil partnerships to be held in Church of England churches.

2011-02-17T13:33:00.002Z

Changing Attitude England welcomes today’s government announcement that it plans to remove the ban in England and Wales on civil partnership registrations being held on religious premises. Changing Attitude expects to be involved in the public consultation on the detail of the changes to be made before the new arrangements are implemented.

Changing Attitude will now campaign more directly for the Church of England to allow civil partnerships and the blessing of same-sex relationships to be celebrated in church buildings. The trustees are already formulating the details of our campaign and we invite all who are working and praying for our Church to become fully inclusive of and welcoming to LGBT people to support the campaign by becoming a supporter of Changing Attitude or sending a donation. We are going to need all the resources, practical and financial, that we can muster.

Church House and a number of conservative Christian lobby groups have already issued negative statements about the government proposal, statements which misrepresent the reality of life in the Church and the careful proposals being made by the government.

The Communications Office at Church House, Westminster, issued a statement “on behalf of the Church of England”. On whose behalf was it issued? It wasn’t issued on behalf of the tens of thousands of Anglicans who support the blessing of same-sex relationships in church.

The statement says the House of Bishops has consistently been clear that the Church of England should not provide services of blessing for those who register civil partnerships. This is absolutely not true. Changing Attitude knows that about 50% of diocesan bishops have either actively encouraged lesbian and gay clergy to enter a civil partnership or deliberately ignored those who do and have taken no action against them. Blessings of civil partnerships in church, sometimes with the formal permission of the Parochial Church Council, take place routinely in England. The House of Bishops has not been consistently clear. It is colluding in a state of affairs in which many bishops dissent from their agreed pastoral statement. Changing Attitude will be asking the House of Bishops to research the numbers of licensed lesbian and gay clergy who have contracted a civil partnership and those who have blessed same-sex relationships.

The Church House statement says there may be a number of difficult and unintended consequences for churches and faiths. It says change could only be brought after proper and careful consideration of all the issues involved, to ensure that the intended freedom for all denominations over these matters is genuinely secured. Lesbian and gay members of the Church of England, our friends, families and congregations, are also among those seeking freedom – the freedom to have relationships blessed by God in our parish churches.

The government recognises the place of individual conscience and says the provision will be permissive and religious organisations that do not wish to host civil partnerships will not be required to do so.

Anglican Mainstream has issued a statement containing deliberate misinformation. The policy of issuing false information followed by the conservative evangelical lobby groups is something that we will monitor and challenge as our campaign develops.

Anglican Mainstream claims that “public figures have been terrified to be seen as ‘anti-gay’, hence their unwillingness to discuss and debate LGBT issues. Moreover, many are relatively ignorant, and as the subject matter is not everyone’s ‘thing’, they have neither known nor been too curious to find out.” This is far from the truth, a deliberately constructed lie. I don’t know any public figures who are terrified to be seen as anti-gay. If there are politicians and public figures who are anti-gay or who are ignorant of the experience of LGBT people in our society, they should rightly be ashamed of their prejudice and ignorance.

Anglican Mainstream says the state is claiming the right to dictate morality and the gay religious lobby is using the government and sympathetic quasi-Christian groups to do its bidding. That comes as news to Changing Attitude (and who are these quasi-Christian groups?). Mainstream says that being ‘gay’ is now perceived like being ‘black’ etc. Yes, it is – prejudice against LGBT people in our society is now seen for what it is – prejudice. Mainstream claims that complete ‘gayification’ of religion, including the CoE, is on the cards. That isn’t part of Changing Attitude’s aims and objectives. We simply want a Church in which we are free to pray, worship and love faithfully.

Anglican Mainstream then raises all the old canards - the damage of gay marriage on children; members of other sexual minorities whose demand for rights actually place in question the legitimacy of the LGBT agenda; public health issues; and the significant loss of religious liberty.

The Christian Institute, Christian Concern and Reform are also concerned to protect themselves against the possibility, now and in the future, of any kind of legal action being brought against churches which conscientiously disagree with civil partnerships because permission often turns rapidly into coercion. They list faith-based adoption agencies, Christian marriage registrars and Christian B & B owners as examples of those who have been coerced as a result of legislation.

Christians who are committed to ending the injustice perpetrated by Churches against their LGBT members don’t want coercive legislation. We want to be given the freedom, the space, in which our Christian lives and ministries can flourish, space where we can celebrate in church with our friends the life commitment we make with our partners, in love and prayer.

Colin Coward

Civil Partnerships and Gay Marriage in church - yes, we want it NOW!

2011-02-14T16:47:00.004Z

St Valentine’s Day is a good day on which to welcome the leaked news that later this week the government is expected to announce full marriage equality for gays and lesbians under reforms to the marriage law as well as allowing civil partnerships to be held in religious buildings.

Changing Attitude England has been involved in consultations with the government that tested public and LGBT opinion before the decision was made. We will now campaign vigorously for the Church of England to adopt the changes being proposed by the government, open Church of England doors to welcome gay marriages and civil partnerships and grant clergy persons the freedom to preside over and register them.

The Archbishop of York has other ideas. He says he “believes in a liberal democracy, and actually wants equality with everybody,” but the Church of England does not support the introduction of gay marriages or civil partnerships being held in churches. Sadly, Sentamu doesn't want equality for LGBT Christians.

A Church of England spokesman said: “Given the Church’s view on the nature of marriage, the House of Bishops has consistently been clear that the Church of England should not provide services of blessing for those who register civil partnerships.” He said the change will “lead to inconsistencies with civil marriage, have unexplored impacts, and lead to confusion, with a number of difficult and unintended consequences for churches and faiths. Any change could therefore only be brought after proper and careful consideration of all the issues involved, to ensure that the intended freedom for all denominations over these matters is genuinely secured.”

Here’s the arrogant Church of England again, claiming the right to oppose equality legislation and gay marriage in church on the grounds that it is protecting all other denominations.

LGBT Anglicans and our families and friends want this change enacted as much as our friends in the Quakers, Unitarians and in Liberal Judaism. The spokesperson doesn’t speak for us but for a controlling and unrepresentative minority at the centre of church affairs. He doesn’t even speak for the House of Bishops but for their mythic Pastoral Statement on Civil Partnerships, observed as much in the breach.

The argument against change has become untenable in the church. Last week at General Synod I learnt of yet another bishop who has encouraged a priest to contract a civil partnership to provide both him and his partner with the appropriate emotional and legal security that partnerships can provide.

We know what church spokesmen say about the House of Bishops and it’s a fantasy. The House of Bishops is not clear. It is deeply divided and dishonest. It is impossible for bishops to speak the truth to one another. This dishonesty seeps into national church life and affects LGBT Anglicans and clergy. In practice the majority of bishops affirm LGBT people to the extent of knowingly approving blessings and civil partnerships. The rest are still blissfully and dangerously ignorant of the LGBT clergy in their diocese or act dishonestly – the Archbishop of York being a prime example.

I took part in an interview on this morning’s Radio4 Today programme with Rod Thomas, chair of Reform. As one friend commented, I’m not sure he and I were answering the same questions! The card which Reform, Anglican Mainstream, Forward in Faith (home to so many closet gays), and other conservative groups are going to play is the inequality of the proposals.

Rod claims that if a right is given for anything to happen, perverse consequences follow as we are discovering in Europe. I’m not sure what it is that’s happening in Europe that makes Rod so anxious. The crux for him is that the legislation that will have vicars up before the courts. They will have to permit gay weddings and civil partnerships to take place even if they are against it. It’s unfair, you see, as the Bed & Breakfast and Christian Registrar cases show – Christians are now the victims of legal and social change.

Rod then played the numbers card. There were 6000 civil partnerships last year and 250,000 marriages. There are fewer civil partnerships and plenty of places where they can now take place, so why add church buildings as a venue? Why? - because many LGBT Christians want to get married and contract civil partnerships in church, Rod, that’s why. Reform doesn’t represent the whole Christian community. It represents a set of very theologically-minded Christians for whom the Bible is the sole source of authority.

We will have to wait and see how permissive the proposed legislation is when it is published. A Whitehall source told the Sunday Times: “This is not just about gay rights but about religious freedom. Quakers and liberal Judaism want to do this. Attitudes have changed to gay marriage. We are going to look at what legislative steps we could begin to make gay marriage possible.”

Exactly, it’s about religious freedom, and we who are Anglicans and part of the Changing Attitude network want the freedom to celebrate our love and relationships in church – legally and without fear of being judged and condemned.

My guess is that not all churches will be forced to host civil partnership ceremonies under the legislation and individual priests will be free to refuse to conduct such ceremonies, just as they can decline to marry divorced people. But I hope all Church of England buildings will become available for civil partnerships.

The Changing Attitude trustees meet next Saturday in Derby and our campaign for equality, truth and justice in the Church of England for LGBT people will be a major focus of our discussions. To enable us to campaign effectively for change in General Synod and the House of Bishops, please send a donation or become a supporter of Changing Attitude right now!

Colin Coward
Director of Changing Attitude England

The murder of David Kato – Michael Kimindu of CA Kenya writes an open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury

2011-02-01T11:41:00.004Z

Dear Archbishop Williams,

Happy New Year, may God endow you with wisdom to lead
the people of God in the Anglican Communion and globally.

I take this opportunity to thank you for adding your voice to the call for an end to homophobia and bigotry, the result of which may have contributed to the death of our brother David Kato. The death of David and the root cause may not lie in the position held by the Church of Uganda alone.

Since 2009, missionaries of hate and homophobia especially from USA have been spreading false teachings and interpretations on some selected texts of the Bible to some Charismatic Pentecostal believers, the results of which include the Bahati Anti-Homosexual Bill. Ignorance of the holistic interpretation of Scripture on the part of these missionaries of hate and their converts is much to blame.

These missionaries take advantage of the poverty affecting most of their followers, who are vulnerable, enticing them with money. Some of those confessing healing from homosexuality are heterosexuals who are simply after money. Homosexuality, like HIV/AIDS, has attracted large interest from people who see it as a way of getting rich. Even well meaning allies are accused of being affirming for the sake of money from the USA and EU Countries.

Personally, I have been involved in LGBTI advocacy for the last 7 years. I was at the last Lambeth Conference as part of the Voices of Witness Africa and I am the Coordinator for Other Sheep East Africa. David Kato, an Anglican, was part of Other Sheep Chapter Uganda.

Your Grace, homophobia in Africa cannot be fought by one denomination let alone one religion. It is time now for the Ecumenical Movement to take a step towards the concerted effort to fight homophobia. Leaving every member denomination to have their own position is not helpful. How many people are enough to wake up the WCC to action?

Christians alone will not win, Interfaith cooperation is necessary, and even then non-religious communities have to be included in this campaign. You have heard the false claim that homosexuality is imported from Europe and America. Africans do not formally talk about human sexuality including same-sex even when they come across it. They know sexual acts of all forms take place, but bury their heads like the proverbial ostrich.

If we are to save Africa, homophobia will have to be fought from all fronts, but the army must be united. Deliberate disunity among early missionaries succeeded in dividing the people hence creating suspicions which haunt us to this day. Homosexuals are homosexuals whatever religion or culture.

It is my plea to you and those in a similar position to think of new approaches in the fight against homophobia.

Poverty eradication should not be left out as a strategy in fighting homophobia. So is holistic theological training in our theological Institutions. Time is now to embrace Jesus' teaching on the importance of LETTING THE TARES TO GROW WITH THE WHEAT.

My last point to Your Grace is for the fight against homophobia in Africa to be led by an African Human Resource to avoid the claim that the West is imposing homosexuality on Africa.

I hope you will find some of these ideas useful.

Your obedient servant,

Rev. Michael Nzuki Kimindu, Anglican Priest
Changing Attitude Kenya contact
Coordinator for Other Sheep, East Africa
MCC Licensed, but Anglican flesh and blood

To enable Michael to develop his work with Changing Attitude and Other Sheep in Kenya, please send a donation or become a supporter. The time for action is now and the need is urgent.

Primates’ statement on David Kato's murder brings them closer to the moment of truth

2011-01-31T18:12:00.004Z

The Primates issued a statement following their meeting in Dublin, supporting the Archbishop of Canterbury’s response. They described the murder as horrific and joined him in saying that no one should have to live in fear because of the bigotry of others.

They quoted from three Anglican documents in support of their judgment:

“We reiterate that ‘the victimisation or diminishment of human beings whose affections happen to be ordered towards people of the same sex is anathema to us’” (Primates Meeting 2005).

“We reaffirm that ‘any demonising of homosexual persons, or their ill treatment, is totally against Christian charity and basic principles of pastoral care’” (The Windsor Report).

“We call on all our people to minister pastorally and sensitively to all irrespective of sexual orientation and condemn irrational fear of gay people.” (1998 Lambeth Conference).

I’ve been highlighting the positive elements of Lambeth 1.10, The Windsor Report and other Anglican statements for many years. It seems to me that this is a huge development, the Primates themselves highlighting sentences that affirm the place of LGBT people in the Church and condemn anything that demonises us or provokes ill-treatment.

The next step is a difficult one to make for conservative Christians for whom the Bible is their prime source of authority, let alone for Global South Primates and bishops who believe the Bible judges and condemns lesbian and gay people and legitimizes our persecution. They wouldn’t have agreed the statement, of course, and I wonder what will happen if and when they return to the table.

But let’s stay with the conservatives, many of whom I meet often and count as friends. I think the Primates have drawn closer to the point where the conflict between so-called traditional Christian teaching and the Gospel demands of love and justice, including God’s love for ‘homosexual persons’ who are ‘full members of the Body of Christ’ becomes impossible to resolve.

The Anglican Communion will NEVER overcome its homophobia, NEVER be able to ensure that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are free from persecution and demonisation, NEVER be committed to our welcome and full inclusion, until it changes its mind and rejects all aspects of teaching and Biblical interpretation which count us as less than others.

Changing Attitude England will never cease reminding the Church, Synods, bishops, Primates, Instruments of Unity, that there is no alternative but to commit to the full inclusion of LGBT people, admitting us to every order of ministry and blessing our relationships and lives which are marked by love every bit as profound, deep, complex and holy as heterosexual marriage.

David Kato’s murder marks the beginning of a new campaign which will not end until justice has been achieved.

Colin Coward

Get on board with the Changing Attitude campaign for justice and full equality for LGBT people – become a supporter or send a donation

David Kato RIP

2011-01-29T16:26:00.009Z

David Kato, was attacked and beaten to death with a hammer at his home in Kampala on Wednesday 26 January 2011. David was known as ‘the grandfather of the kuchus”, a brave and passionately committed activist who had been campaigning for gay rights for more than a decade. He had been leading the campaign against David Bahati’s Anti-homosexuality bill, which demands that homosexuals be executed and which has intensified the climate of hatred and prejudice against LGBT people not only in Uganda but across Africa.

Changing Attitude England has been campaigning for fifteen years for the full inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in the Anglican Communion. By implication, we are campaigning against everything, every attitude, every theological position, every use of scripture, every sermon, teaching and episcopal attitude which allows or encourages prejudice and hatred against LGBT people.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, issued a statement following the murder. He said, in part: “No one should have to live in such fear because of the bigotry of others. This is a moment to take very serious stock and to address those attitudes of mind which endanger the lives of men and women belonging to sexual minorities.”

Changing Attitude England welcomes the Archbishop’s forthright stance. Following David’s murder, the time has come to demand that the Anglican Communion abandons the parts of the teaching enshrined in Lambeth Conference resolution 1.10 of 1998 that rejects homosexual practice as being incompatible with scripture (para. 4) and cannot advise the legitimizing or blessing of same sex unions nor ordaining those involved in same gender unions (para 5).

The Anglican Communion must move to adopt as policy the commitments made in paras 3 and 5 to assure homosexual people that they are loved by God and are full members of the body of Christ, and to minister pastorally and sensitively to all irrespective of sexual orientation.

The Most Revd Henry Orombi, Primate of Uganda, is one of 7 Primates who have absented themselves from the Primates’ meeting in Dublin this week because The Most Revd Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church is present and because of TEC’s policy which breaks the moratoria on ordaining gay bishops and allowing same sex blessings.

TEC has led the way towards the full inclusion of LGBT people in the Church and in the global Christian community, reflecting theologically on human sexuality and listening for over 30 years to LGBT people. TEC has committed itself to integrating us into every level of Church life. For doing this it is demonized. Conservatives, in the words of Canon Chris Sugden, bear false witness against The Episcopal Church and claim, wrongly, that Anglicans have been persecuted and driven from their homes, buildings and jobs in the USA and Canada.

In contrast, the Church of Uganda in a statement issued on 9 February 2010, whilst not fully endorsing the Bahati bill, argued that homosexual behaviour should be prohibited and penalized and the licensing of organisations which promote homosexuality should be prohibited. In conclusion it reiterated the Church of Uganda’s desire to provide love and care for all God’s people “caught up in any sin” (which is not what Lambeth 1.10 says).

A local Anglican priest, the Revd Thomas Musoke, at Friday's funeral for David Kato, grabbed the microphone in the middle of the ceremony and decried homosexuality, causing a fight to break out and leading villagers to refuse to bury the body. Reports say he screamed:

"The world has gone crazy. People are turning away from the scriptures. They should turn back, they should abandon what they are doing. You cannot start admiring a fellow man. It is ungodly.”

One woman responded:

"Who are you to judge others? We have not come to fight. You are not the judge of us. As long as he's gone to God his creator, who are we to judge Kato?"

Marking a stark contrast with the attitude of the Church of Uganda, the Kampala-based Daily Monitor carried an editorial comment which concluded:

“People like David Kato and others who might be gay are Ugandans and enjoy the same rights and protections of the law as heterosexuals. We cannot send them into exile neither, lock them away, or hang them. We need to have an honest discussion about how to ensure that their rights are upheld without violating the rights of other Ugandans. Peaceful and stable societies only emerge when we understand and try to accommodate those who are different from us, or who disagree with us – not by ostracising or killing them.”

Changing Attitude England calls on every Province of the Anglican Communion to urgently review attitudes to homosexuality.

The abusive use of Lambeth 1.10 which focuses on negative, judgmental attitudes towards LGBT people must be reversed.

Affirmation of the unconditional love of God for all people, pastoral care and support which is undiscriminating, and opposition to homophobia and all prejudice against LGBT people must become the policy of the Communion.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has said that this is a moment to take very serious stock and to address those attitudes of mind which endanger the lives of men and women belonging to sexual minorities.

The Primates who are meeting in Dublin have an opportunity to reflect on the effect of Christian teaching which diminishes the humanity of LGBT people and puts our lives in danger. They must initiate a review of Lambeth Resolution 1.10 in response to David’s murder, the continuing violence against LGBT people in the global community and the loss of so many faithful LGBT Anglicans who are abandoning the Church they love because of its deeply ingrained prejudice.

The Anglican Consultative Council and the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion must engage in a similar review of Anglican policy when they next meet.

The next meeting of the Lambeth Conference in 2018 will be too late. By then, more LGBT activists and individuals will have been murdered and more teenagers committed suicide, and tens of thousands of LGBT Anglicans will continue to live in secrecy and in fear for their safety and their lives.

The need for action to combat the evil of prejudice and violence against LGBT people is urgent and changes in Anglican Communion teaching and policy must be made NOW.

Colin Coward

To enable Changing Attitude England to campaign for urgent change in Anglican Communion policy towards our LGBT members please become a supporter or make a donation.

On not being present at the Primate’s meeting

2011-01-24T12:51:00.006Z

I’m going to be absent from the Primate’s meeting in Dublin. Will my presence be missed? Not in the same way as the absence of about a quarter of the Primates themselves.

I was present in Dar Es Salaam with Davis Ma-Iyalla, Caro Hall and Scott Gunn, a number of international journalists and lobbyists and a significant number of local journalists. I was present in Alexandria with a diminished number of journalists and lobbyists and no one from the local media.

Who is going to be there in Dublin to monitor events, patrol the outer limits of the meeting and influence Primates (as happened at Dromantine), or even attend the final press conference? The Global South Primates will be absent, removing the incentive to be there of those most addictive of lobbyists David Virtue and Chris Sugden.

The absent Primates will not be there to engage with their brothers and sister in plenary and group discussions, dinner table and after dinner conversations, nor in the making of decisions, prayingrotyh together or the breaking of bread. That’s one of the reasons they will not be present, of course. They refused to share communion at Dromantine, and at Alexandria, communion was abandoned.

But it is still not clear whether their absence is another stage of deconstruction of the Anglican Communion and another building block in their movement to form a separate Communion. They might portray such a Communion as a rebirth of the historical, ‘orthodox’ Anglican Communion which TEC has abandoned, or as a new international church network independent of the authority of Canterbury.

An article about the French essayist Montaigne and
research involving macaque monkeys in the Guardian review on Saturday by Saul Frampton suggested that there is indeed something of much greater significance in the absence of a number of Primates and even in my own absence from the Primates’ meeting.

Montaigne was concerned with the power of personal presence in moral life and a fascination with how people act on, influence and affect each other through their physical being. I connect this with Christian ideas of incarnation and real presence. We are more fully ourselves and more truly living the divine nature when we are more fully embodied and really present.

A team of neuroscientists at the University of Parma discovered something surprising about the behaviour of certain neurons in the brains of macaque monkeys. The neurons fired not only when the monkeys grasped food but when they saw the experimenter grasp it. These neurons have come to be known as “mirror neurons” or “empathy neurons”. Similar neurons have been found in humans.

Saul Frampton connects this discovery with the intuition of Montaigne and of David Hume who argued that “No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathise with others”. The research has shown that humans do indeed have an inbuilt imitative, sympathetic capacity.

Frampton asks why, if mirror neurons are such an important factor in our makeup, human history is not a series of pacts, congresses, get-togethers (and successful Lambeth Conferences and Primates’ Meetings) to which all are drawn, rather than a chain of wars and massacres? Hi answer, drawn from Montaigne’s essays, which constitute not only an argument for people’s capacity for sympathy, but also an extended disquisition on how and why it breaks down, is that our ability to feel sympathy with others is directly proportional to our proximity to them.

Montaigne’s language of emotion is couched in a language of spatial intimacy: we feel “close to”, attached to” and “touched” by others. For Montaigne, human proximity is at the heart of morality. Piety is easily faked, says Frampton: “Its essence is abstract and hidden; its forms easy and ceremonial.” But “to hold pleasant and reasonable conversation with oneself and one’s family ... this is rarer and more difficult to achieve”.

This link between moral urgency and proximity is something that seems to be hard-wired within us. The scientific research suggests that mirror neurons can fire in ways that are dependent on spatial proximity. Our moral responses to others seem to be more vivid and more relevant to ourselves the nearer the other person is. Following from this, Montaigne says, is a fragile but significant fact: that the preservation of our moral awareness relies on the nearness between us.

Frampton concludes his article with a story about Montaigne meeting the Pope, showing that even the Pope was not immune from the affective influence of the nearness of others. Nor are Anglican Primates, and the decision of some to boycott the meeting has the effect of keeping themselves at a safe distance from the energies, emotions and ideas of their brother and sister Primates.

I don’t need Montaigne’s essays or macaque monkey research to tell me something I believe and know in the core of my being; that God calls us to relationship and intimacy; that getting close to other people, especially those we find difficult and who hold different views, can be uncomfortable, risky and challenging. This is the essence of the Christian faith, of the parable of the good Samaritan, the sheep and the goats, the story of the woman at the well and the power of the crucifixion itself, of Jesus standing in the same place as Pilate, and nailed between two thieves.

I expect priests, bishops and Primates (above all) to be up to the task of being open to one another, capable of trust, not blame. Archbishop Rowan sets a courageous example, opening himself to the presence of others and making himself vulnerable in the process. So has Nigerian Bishop Josiah Idowu-Fearon.

This isn’t an argument conservatives can ever win. One day they will have to deal with the presence of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in their Global South Provinces – better sooner than later.

The ability or inability of people be in the same room, get close, and relate to each other, is a far bigger issue than the claim that in ordaining gay priests and bishops, the Church has abandoned the historic teaching of the Church and torn the fabric of our life together at its deepest level. What tears human beings apart at the deepest level is the refusal to acknowledge another person’s humanity and enter their presence with respect and love.

Colin Coward

Become a supporter of Changing Attitude and help us create a Church in which love and intimacy are the marks of Christian witness or make a donation.

Changing Attitude Ireland statement on the Anglican Primates’ Meeting in Dublin

2011-01-23T12:39:00.003Z

Our sister group, Changing Attitude Ireland, has issued a statement today, 22nd January 2011, in advance of the Primates' meeting which begins on Tuesday 25th:

As the senior bishops from Anglican Churches worldwide prepare to meet in Dublin for their Primates’ Meeting (25th-31st January) there has been a call on the Irish Government by an Irish Anglican group to request the visiting Archbishops to address the problem of Christian-backed persecution of gay persons.

The call comes from Changing Attitude Ireland and its Secretary the Church of Ireland clergyman Canon Charles Kenny requests Ireland’s new Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Brian Cowen, who is also the Prime Minister, “to maintain the interest shown by the Department of Foreign affairs under his predecessor Micheal Martin in the persecution of gay persons in Uganda and Malawi”.

Dr Richard O’Leary of Changing Attitude Ireland called in addition on Mr Cowen “to match the concern of his former British counterpart, Prime Minister Gordon Brown when Mr Brown used the November 2009 meeting of the Commonwealth to speak out about the threat to gay persons from the Ugandan government”.

Dr O’Leary said “In the month that Ireland recognised Civil Partnership for same-sex couples, let us not forget the recent violence against and imprisonment of a gay couple in Malawi”. He continued “Archbishop Rowan Williams and the leaders of the Anglican Communion who are meeting in Dublin this week need to assume their responsibilities in tackling homophobia and the Churches collusion in it”. Canon Charles Kenny added “The Meeting of the Anglican Primates takes place over a whole week so I think they should be capable of finding some time to discuss the scandal of homophobia that exists in the Church, especially in Uganda, Malawi and Nigeria.” The Primates from all the Provinces of the Anglican Communion have been invited to the Meeting in Dublin by the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams and are hosted by the Primate of all Ireland, Archbishop Alan Harper.

Last year the Ugandan parliament was presented with a draconian Anti-Homosexuality Bill which would introduce the death penalty for some behaviour by gay persons. The Irish government is a major development aid donor to Uganda and Malawi and last June the Director of the Human Rights Unit in the Irish Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs was briefed in Dublin by the retired Anglican Ugandan Bishop Christopher Senyonjo on the problem of the Christian-backed anti-gay crusade in Uganda. Bishop Senyonjo in his address at Christ Church Cathedral Dublin called for education to counteract homophobia because, "I have found that a lot of the prejudice against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people comes from ignorance." Bishop Senyonjo, a rare courageous voice in the conservative Anglican Church in Uganda, and who speaks in support of gay persons, visited Ireland on the invitation of Changing Attitude Ireland, and urged people in Britain and Ireland to oppose the Bill.

Canon Charles Kenny

Secretary, Changing Attitude Ireland
1st Floor War Memorial Building,
9-13 Waring St,
Belfast
BT1 2DX
UK +44(0)28 90669632
e-mail: changingattitudeireland@hotmail.co.uk
www.changingattitudeireland.org

Towards an understanding of human sexuality at Windsor

2011-01-20T11:51:00.005Z

I’ve been invited to take part in what is described as a major Consultation at St George’s House, Windsor with the title ‘Nurturing the Nature? Towards an Understanding of Human Sexuality’. It begins today at 4pm and ends tomorrow at 3pm which doesn’t allow much time for genuine engagement and discussion.

The invitation says:

…the intention is to work towards a greater understanding of issues pertinent to human sexuality. In order to reach such understanding, and therefore for society to make appropriate judgements on sexual morality, important questions about religious and cultural principles, biology and lifestyle need to be tackled.

It is the aim of the Consultation to explore some of the different perspectives in current thinking about human sexuality. Among the questions the Consultation will seek to address are:

How appropriate are traditional religious and physiological attitudes towards sexual practice and sexuality in the contemporary world?
Is there any evidence to suggest that sexual identity is conditioned by genetics rather than by conscience? How do we respond to this evidence?
Is freedom of lifestyle choice a helpful way to approach sexual ethics? How serious are the risks to sexual health?
To what extent are individuals and institutions still governed by prejudice or social conditioning in their views of sexual ethics?

At the last minute, the person invited to deliver the second of two papers was unable to attend. I have been invited to present a paper on the theme ‘Sexuality and Equality – Attitudes to Sexuality in Contemporary Society’. I’ve done my best to prepare a paper, consulting the Changing Attitude trustees and my Facebook friends. Robert Key, member of Salisbury Diocesan Synod was among those who responded.

The protocol of St George’s House says that the identity of speakers or participants may not be divulged but information received while at a Consultation can be used freely. I may publish my paper here following the Consultation but I can’t reveal who the other contributors are. Reports of Consultations are published only if that is the collective decision of the participants. Participants are encouraged to speak openly, listen carefully and be open to the possibility of changing your mind.

It is an environment receptive to new ideas, to taking risks, to living at the intellectual edge, a focus that encourages creative thinking, informed debate and imaginative engagement. Not much like the environment of the Church of England, then. I’ve participated in previous Consultations at St George’s, the previous one in 2006.

I am less patient with church attitudes to LGBT people now than I was in 2006. If St George’s is genuine about taking risks and encouraging creative thinking, then the Consultation has the potential to excite me. But if I’m expected to talk about being gay as a lifestyle choice and even worse, spend time debating whether my orientation is the result of nature or nurture or a gay gene, then I’m not going to be engaged. Changing Attitude has moved beyond the expectation of the Church that LGBT people have to change and conform to norms, teachings and laws which have no relevance to us and are used to inflict terrible damage and pain.

Colin Coward

To enable Changing Attitude to participate in gatherings such as this, please join Changing Attitude or send a donation to help our work in transforming church attitudes.

Judge defines a change in attitudes – wakey-wakey time for the Church

2011-01-18T12:41:00.004Z

At Bristol County Court, Judge Rutherford has ruled that the Christian owners of a hotel who refused to allow a gay couple a double room acted unlawfully. He said that, in the past 50 years, social attitudes in Britain had changed and it was inevitable that laws would "cut across" some people's beliefs. He awarded each of them £1,800 each in damages. He said:

"It is a very clear example of how social attitudes have changed over the years for it is not so very long ago that these beliefs of the defendants would have been those accepted as normal by society at large. Now it is the other way around."

The Bull’s, owners of he hotel, discriminated not only against lesbian and gay couples but against heterosexual couples who chose not to marry but live as a couple. If they had refused a heterosexual couple a double room, would the couple also have won a case of discrimination? How many hotels and B&B’s are there in the UK which would refuse to let unmarried straight couples occupy a double room?

The last 10 years have seen a transformation in social attitudes to LGBT people as the judge said. Views that were normal a decade or two ago are now seen as unacceptable and illegal. One of the places where such prejudice is still acceptable is in certain areas of some Christian denominations.

The Christian Institute and Anglican Mainstream will claim that such views are not prejudiced, are held with integrity, and are what all Christians believe. They are wrong. Most Christians in the UK have overcome their prejudice about same-sex relationships. It is a minority who are holding the Church of England (in particular) to ransom. General Synod and the House of Bishops are constrained by the undue influence of conservative lobby groups and the strongly held views of a small number of leaders elsewhere in the Communion. They are doing untold to damage to Christian witness and ministry in this country.

UK social attitudes towards LGBT people have changed dramatically in my lifetime, and the attitudes of the majority of Christians have changed as well. Their faith is not determined by a fundamentalist or literal reading of the Bible but by a relationship with God which is nurtured by an experience of love, truth and justice.

Will the Church learn anything from this judgement? I hope to God the answer is yes, but sadly, I think business will continue as usual. The Christian Institute will maintain that Christians are being subjected to discrimination. So am I, a gay Christian man, along with many of my friends.

The institutional Church will continue to allow itself to be intimidated by those holding what they claim are traditional Christian views which enable them to maintain a culture of prejudice, dishonesty, abuse and corruption in the Church. It’s time for change, bishops and Archbishops and members of General Synod. You are out of touch with the majority of people in this country, with the majority of Christians and with people’s awareness of God. People know the church is peddling a lie about God. That’s why they’ve deserted the Church in droves. God is about the outrageous, creative, infinite possibilities of holy love, not about policing adult sleeping arrangements in a Cornish hotel.

Colin Coward

Please support our work to overcome prejudice and discrimination in the Church by becoming a supporter of Changing Attitude or sending a donation.

We'll keep the Trans flag flying here

2011-01-09T22:56:00.003Z

Changing Attitude’s work for LBGT people is, as Colin has said many times, well-respected for its integrity – and that includes its work with Trans people. Through our links with Trans Christian group, the Sibyls, and other Trans organisations we have gained a reputation for being able to offer advice and support to Trans people, especially if they are having difficulty with their church during their transition, or when they wish to marry in church, and I will be posting some simple guidance on these and other matters on our new website.

Our blog posts too have sometimes been important in promoting networking. My recent obituary of the late Sonia Burgess, for example, did this in two ways.

http://changingattitude-england.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html

It immediately prompted Trans Media Watch to ask us to join their campaign to improve the portrayal of Trans people’s lives in the media and the organisation has been added as a link on the Changing Attitude website.

http://www.transmediawatch.org.uk/tmw/pages/tmw101.asp

A few weeks later I was approached for an interview by Observer journalist, Elizabeth Day, and her lyrical and comprehensive feature about Sonia/David was published in that paper today and is also available here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jan/09/david-burgess-sonia-lawyer-death

In a beautiful, but tragically broken, and often polarised world what we do seems little enough, but we know, from the feedback we receive, that it is important for us - as an organisation, and as individuals - to continue to demonstrate the same combination of strength and gentleness, courage and compassion which was, it transpires, incredibly highly developed in Sonia’s life and work.

Trans people in India

2011-01-08T21:47:00.006Z

Face Book, as Colin has noted, has been a great resource for LGBT people in Africa – and just recently the Trustees of Changing Attitude have begun to realise its potential.

I’m grateful to Face Book for this link relating to Trans people, posted by my friend Cameron Partridge, of TransEpsicopal, about the work of the Church Missionary Society with the transgender community in the Pune area of India.

http://mission.typepad.com/church_mission_society_cm/

During the podcast you will hear Stephen Edison refer to India’s trans people as the lowest social group of all – partly, it seems, because many of them have to rely on the sex trade to make a living - and yet, paradoxically, who are in demand still for their spirituality, especially blessings at weddings and at funerals.

Interestingly he doesn’t use the Hindu term ‘Hijra’ and seems to imply, incorrectly I would guess, that many Indian males seek castration because of same-sex attraction (though it is believed that this does happen in some societies, Iran for example, where homosexuality is unacceptable).

Scholars and activists debate whether Hijras and other cross-gender phenomena in traditional societies are the equivalent of trans people in the West. I’m sure that they are, and that one reason why this is questioned is a lack of historical awareness of cross-gender variance in Western culture, with the consequence that ‘transsexualism’ can be dismissed by some as a 20^th Century invention. Treatment options for trans people have certainly expanded in the last eighty years but ‘transitioning’ from one gender to another seems to have existed throughout human history.

Towards the end of the podcast Stephen refers specifically to ‘transsexual people’ as distinct from the broader term ‘transgender’ with which the item begins, which seems to continue the westernization of the client group.

As well as providing training so that clients can aspire to mainstream jobs he and his co-mission partner Lalita Edwards are trying to ‘change attitudes’ – YES, the phrase is actually used – so that employers will be willing to take them on. God bless the CMS!

Changing attitudes in Africa in 2011

2010-12-31T13:13:00.004Z

Changing Attitude has a small foothold, a presence, in three African countries. In Nigeria, Uche was appointed Director earlier this year to succeed Davis Mac-Iyalla. He is working with a small group to reactivate the local groups and plan for change in 2011. In Kenya, Michael Kimindu is making connections with bishops and with groups like the Mother’s Union in dioceses, inviting them to listen to LGBT Kenyans. The group around him in Nairobi continue to meet for worship. In Ghana, Richard is leading a group of gay Christians who meet twice a week in Accra, encouraging them to be confident in their faith and their commitment to Christ and the church as gay Christians.

These are small beginnings in a huge continent where attitudes to human sexuality are beset by prejudice, hostility and unexamined beliefs. British colonial law and C19th theology and Christian teaching are the foundation underlying African attitudes to homosexuality.

The search for love
The rapid spread of mobile phones and access to the internet across Africa in the last decade is transforming the awareness of LGBT people, most of whom are under 30. Ten years ago, young gay Africans began to discover gay dating sites such as gaydar and manjam. Many still access these sites but are repeatedly disappointed by their failure to meet the man of their dreams. What they repeatedly tell me is that all the other guys want is sex, revealing that what many also seek is love, a relationship, commitment, someone who will take them and respect them. These are elusive ideals in reality for LGBT Africans.

Facebook
Their frustration and inability to connect with others who share their desire to meet a life partner has begun to change, however, in the last two years, thanks to Facebook. There are now thousands of LGBT Nigerians and tens of thousands of LGBT Africans with profiles on Facebook. They are increasingly confident in indicating their sexuality on their profiles – ‘interested in men and women, relationship status complicated’.

Young LGBT Africans are becoming more confident, posting pictures of their real selves (though many, to protect themselves, still post pictures from dating sites, or of gay icons, or avoid pictures altogether). The more adventurous and confident post pictures taken with gay friends or a partner or of themselves in camp poses. It has become much easier for those with internet access and a Facebook profile to meet other LGBT people in their locality, in safety online and with greater safety face to face (blackmail is a common feature on gay dating sites).

Loving relationships become a reality
The result of this access to real people, online, who can get to know as you chat with them in real time, watch them on a web cam, and then arrange to meet for a date is that the loving relationships that young gay Africans have dreamed of are becoming a reality in their lives – potentially permanent, faithful, stable, loving relationships. Older generations complied with powerful social and family obligations by marrying and having children while discretely having a same-sex lover as an adjunct to the marriage. The new generation is not following the same, dishonest, damaging path.

They have access to information about gay rights in the west, marriage equality, civil partnerships and the undreamt of levels of freedom we enjoy in society if not yet in our churches. They long for the freedom we enjoy to live openly and inevitably, many of them dream of escaping to the west because change in the entrenched African culture of intense prejudice and violence against LGBT people seems an impossible dream.

Despite that, some Nigerians are reporting a growth of tolerance in some parts of Nigerian society and the opening of social space where LGBT people have more freedom to reveal their identity. But the huge majority remain hidden, meeting other LGBT people clandestinely.

The desperate need for change
Tens of thousands of LGBT Africans are desperate for change. Africa is sitting on a hidden reality, millions of LGBT people, with a growing confidence in their identity, engaging with each other online and their networks of friends, but hidden from their families, school mates, straight friends, and of course, in their churches. African bishops, priests and congregations have no idea how many LGBT people worship alongside them every Sunday.

Change has to happen and will happen, but how, and when? This is the question I am raising with the leaders in Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria and with other African LGBT leaders for whom the question and the challenge is becoming increasingly insistent.

Colin Coward

To enable Changing Attitude’s work across the Communion to be developed and help provide modest resources to our African brothers and sisters, please make a donation or become a supporter of Changing Attitude England.

The Church of England’s dramatic disconnect

2010-12-30T13:55:00.005Z

The George Careys, Michael Scott-Joynts and Andrea Minichiello Williams (recently elected to General Synod, Director of the “Christian Legal Centre”) of the Church of England think that Anglicans (their type of CofE Anglican, of course) are now a persecuted minority that need protected legal status.

To me that sounds like an acknowledgment of reality – and failure. Just under 3% of the population attend Church of England services once a month and under 2% attend worship weekly, statistics show. We are indeed a minority, with seats in the Lords, the Established Church of our country, with a status and privileges way beyond our significance. It’s difficult stand back and gain a realistic picture of where we, Christians in general, C of E in particular, fit into British society. It is clearly even more difficult for those living with privileged status like bishops and retired Archbishops.

It’s difficult for Anglicans at the parish church level as well. I meet with a local support group once a month to talk about my work for Changing Attitude. The conversation is often about frustrations at the local as well as the national and international level. At the last meeting, we talked about the congregation to which most of us belong. Why is it so difficult to capture a vision of Christianity inspired by Jesus’ teaching and prophetic ministry? Why do so many feel they are just going through the motions?

My answer is that we are all victims of our normative environment, family, school, locality and church. We internalize values and ideas and they become ‘normal’, self-referential and self-reinforcing. The way we have come to read and interpret the Bible becomes normative, the way we worship, pray, conceptualise God, all become not just ‘normal’ but universally true.

Those of us of a certain age carry assumptions and expectations about church life and worship which we can see no longer work, when we are able to ‘take them out’ and examine them. There is a deep frustration and disillusion among many, of which church attitudes to sexuality and relationships are but one symptom.

It is hard for people to understand what their frustration is about and even harder to have any vision of what action they might take to change it for the better. That’s because the church is locked into maintenance mode (fabric and financial) and is on the defensive, as Carey and company repeatedly show us.

Even younger and supposedly more alert bishops like Tim Thornton, recently moved from Sherborne to Truro, can write an article about civil partnerships and marriage for the Daily Telegraph which is defensive and badly argued. He talks about the blessing of ‘homosexual practice, to put it in crude terms’ which is, from Changing Attitude’s perspective, to put it in very crude terms indeed, Tim.

Bishop Tim thinks the most significant thing is the danger of a confusion between different things, marriage and civil partnerships, which, “if we open ourselves up to blurring that difference ... would be unhelpful for all concerned.” This is a problem for a minority, for bishops who spinelessly toe the line and other Christians who still think gay relationships are unlike heterosexual relationships.

The advice to me from his replacement in Sherborne, Graham Kings, is that I should “lie low for the moment.” I suppose Graham wants me to act like a bishop.

From where I sit in Salisbury Diocese, the edifice looks insane at times, most especially around the way the church colludes in negative teaching about LGBT people and forces people into closets which our leaders seem all too willing to hide inside. There is a collusive corruption and deep dishonesty in our Church.

My heart aches and yearns not simply for a change in church attitudes towards human sexuality but for a church which inspires me and nourishes me spiritually and expresses a vision of God which responds to the age we are living into, a future in which God is doing so many creative, new things. What do we get in reality? George Carey, Michael Nazir Ali, Michael Scott Joynt, Andrea Minichiello Williams. God help us.

This is what we are up against. This is what +Rowan is up against. This is what the Holy Spirit is up against - impoverished, defensive lack of courage and imagination. The Church of England is trapped in a dualistic mode of thinking, nostalgia for a time when there was more ‘certainty’, fear of change and difference and of human beings, some of whom might be growing into greater maturity and spiritual depths despite the best efforts of the Church to restrain them and dull their hearts and minds.

Well, pooh to that! I am not a Christian who is a member of a persecuted minority in England and I don’t need legal protection to live my faith. I have a dream of a Christian community that is inspired, imaginative, creative, filled with energy, genuine in friendship and love, open, risk-taking. Rather New Testament, in fact, Christ-like, even Pauline in challenging the old and responding to the new.

So yes to marriage equality and civil partnerships, yes to new visions of God’s activity in the whole of creation (and not just the 2% the C of E tries to numb each week), yes to our campaign for equality in ministry for all, LGBT as well as straight, yes to a passionate, creative Christian witness and vision in the UK that is true to the infinite holiness of God.

Colin Coward

To help Changing Attitude campaign for a new paradigm in the church, please become a supporter or make a donation to our work.

Dreaming non-dualistic dreams and seeing visions of a new creation

2010-12-29T16:43:00.007Z

We arrive at the end of 2010 with an ‘us and them’ duality still firmly embedded in the mindset of some Christian leaders. Us and them as in we who are Christians set against Moslems, we who are Bible-believing Christians set against those who have deserted the tradition, we who are faithful to Jesus set against those who have abandoned Biblical teaching, we who are destined for salvation set against those who are following Satan’s path to hell and damnation, we who are heterosexual and happily married set against those sexually licentious lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people who are promiscuous and engage in perverted sexual practices.

The Telegraph reports that Lord Carey has written to the Prime Minister. Carey highlights one subject he defines as particularly contentious - the clash of rights between homosexuals and Christians - as if these are distinct groups at war across a great divide.

Lord Carey mindlessly repeats the belief that those who hold traditional Christian viewpoints, “in common with millions across the globe and across history, suddenly find their position labelled discriminatory and prejudiced and then discover that it has effectively become a legal bar to public service.”

In the same vein, the ever-reliable Bishop of Winchester, Michael Scott-Joynt, told the BBC’s World This Weekend: “The problem is that there is a really quite widespread perception among Christians that there is growing up something of an imbalance in the legal position with regard to the freedom of Christians and people of other faiths to pursue the calling of their faith in public life, in public service.”

It doesn’t seem to occur to George Carey or Michael Scott-Joynt that Christians such as myself and the patrons and trustees and supporters of Changing Attitude and the tens thousands of LGBT Christians and their friends and families, hold a very different view of what it means to be a Christian, in deep prayerfulness and with great integrity.

The polarities which these two bishops wish not simply to defend, but extend the reach of, are in my view a danger to the health and safety of individuals, of our society and of the well-being of our planet and the global community.

They want to protect minority traditions, an exclusive idea of God and salvation, an us and them mentality, and a defensive, judgmental system of salvation.

This is not the vision of God’s creative energy and of the incarnation which inspires (too small a word – how about fuels?) my faith and my work in Changing Attitude.

“The Word became flesh; he made his home among us, and we saw his glory, such glory as befits the Father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” John 1.14

“He is the image of the invisible God; his is the primacy over all creation. In him everything in heaven and on earth was created … the whole universe has been created through him and for him. He exists before all things and all things are held together in him. For in him, God in all his fullness chose to dwell.” Colossians 1.15-17, 19

All things are created in the image of God, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and our loves and relationships.

Does the future of creation lie with those who want to preserve, defend and protect old paradigm, dualistic patterns of theology and human relationships? Will the Church continue to judge and find wanting those of us who are simply different from what the majority assumed to be ‘normal’?

Are those of us who dream of a new heaven and a new earth, a new paradigm, who dream dreams and see visions of the things which the apostles and evangelists were inspired and enlightened by, are we going to live more deeply into our vision of the Kingdom of God in 2011?

The apostles, evangelists and witnesses were given revelations into the nature of God and creation which can still transform our emotional, cognitive and imaginative ability to dream our own dreams and have confidence in our vision of this finite creation with its infinite potentialities which can transcend our destructive, dualistic thinking.

Today’s visionaries and dreamers include Desmond Tutu, Esther Mombo, Jack Spong, Elizabeth Stuart, Ken Wilber, Carter Heyward, Marcus Borg, Grace Jantzen, Thomas Moore, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Richard Holloway, Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, James Alison, Nomfundo Walaza, Richard Rohr, Jenny Plane Te Paa, Gideon Byamugisha and many, many others.

More tomorrow!

Colin Coward

To support the work of Changing Attitude in bringing a non-dualistic, LGBT inclusive vision to the church, please become a supporter or make a donation

Lesbian and gay members of Changing Attitude to be interviewed for Kenyan TV

2010-12-07T17:11:00.003Z

The Revd Michael Kimindu, contact person for Changing Attitude Kenya, reports that he has been asked by NTV Kenya , part of the Nation Media Group to assist them in finding gay and lesbian couples who are prepared to be interviewed in order to give a positive human face to Kenyan lesbian and gay people. This is also intended to challenge the orders to arrest lesbian and gay people given by the Kenyan Prime Minister. The TV company asked Michael to accompany them so that the LGBTI people could be confident in allowing themselves to be interviewed and he will feature as the Pastor for the LGBTI Christian community.

Michael made contact with people in Mombasa, 445km south east of Nairobi, the major sea port on the Indian ocean coast. He travelled to Mombasa Tuesday last week arriving at 9pm. With his help, the NTV team was able to interview a gay couple and two single gay men and a lesbian. They also met an Italian gay couple but could not interview them, which would be seen to support the false idea that white people are the source of homosexuality in Africa. The Italians were visiting the Kenyan couple.

They left Mombasa on Saturday travelling by night bus back to Nairobi, and on Sunday took another night bus to Kisumu in western Kenya. Kisumu is the third largest city 320 KM from Nairobi situated on the shores of Lake Victoria.

Michael had made contact with two organisations working with LGBTI people and they were able to interview two couples, one gay, one lesbian. They also met a Dutch gay man but couldn’t interview him for the same reasons as in Mombasa. Some of those interviewed were willing to be filmed facing the camera but others requested that their faces were not filmed.

Tomorrow afternoon a group is coming to Michael’s house in Nairobi. So far 10 Anglicans and 2 Roman Catholics have promised to come, members of the Changing Attitude group in Kenya. NTV plan to record the service led by Michael and then conduct interviews.

For those who like to know how Changing Attitude might benefit financially from this media interest, Michael says that NTV paid his transport and hotel costs and will refund the bus fares for the group and following editing, will pay a token of appreciation to the group. Michael, being a good Anglican, will offer tea and soft drinks.

In small ways such as this, Changing Attitude Kenya is enabling LGBTI voices to be heard and faces to be seen on Kenyan TV. This is a remarkable achievement by Michael who also works as a pastor for Other Sheep Ministries and as an MCC minister.

Colin Coward

To enable us to continue to provide occasional support for Michael Kimindu in Kenya and campaign for change in the Anglican Communion, please join Changing Attitude or make a donation.

Moving at the pace of the slowest?

2010-12-05T17:40:00.004Z

‘Standing on the platform’ indeed! It serves me right for blogging about waving off the Covenant Express – last night, at King’s Cross Station, our train to Leeds was cancelled and the revised timetable offered the delights of ‘extended running times and further delays’. Reluctantly, for I had been keen to see my family in Yorkshire, we returned home.

Ever since I first heard the analogy of the train departing from the station as a description of a community setting out to realise a vision I have been interested in those 'left behind on the platform’. It seemed to me then, as it does now, that they would not be forgotten by the other passengers, that they would be able ‘catch up’ if they needed to, and that the platform is at least a starting point, but that their reluctance to join in a particular excursion could not be allowed to hold up the entire train.

Very often, in parish life, the people who oppose the vision, or are unenthusiastic about it, can offer a valuable critique, and prevent the community rushing off in a wrong direction. But once a community has done its homework, and is all fired up and ready to go, it should be able to move towards the vision without being inhibited by those who are still unconvinced: their resistance cannot be allowed to act as a break on the project, otherwise one is moving only at the pace of the slowest, which would mean, in the end, stagnation and torpor.

In the Anglican Communion it sometimes seems as if we are being invited to move at the rate of the slowest. The Covenant certainly sounds like that. Jean Mayland, a Changing Attitude Patron, has said many times that if the Anglican Covenant had been in place thirty or forty years ago the ordination of women to the priesthood would probably never have been permitted. The pioneering ordinations to the diaconate, priesthood and episcopate by individual Provinces did cause offence in other Provinces of the Communion at the time and might, therefore, have resulted in requests for ‘gracious restraint’ or even ‘withdrawal’ from aspects of the Communion for awhile. Instead of the rest of the Communion being enabled to catch the vision, there would have been a clampdown on this particular development, and a firm hand on the break.

But doesn’t the Apostle Paul counsel going at the slowest person’s pace when he writes about not offending the ‘weaker brother’ over the eating of meat sacrificed to idols; not pursuing one’s Christian freedom if it causes another to fall (1 Corinthians 8)? Presumably such texts shaped the thinking of the architects of the moratoria, and weigh heavily with those who are in favour of the Covenant, but are the parallels just? Isn’t the ordination of women, like the full inclusion of LGBT and T people, more on a par with ‘non-negotiable’ Pauline teaching about the Church as a community that must include both Jews and Gentiles? For Paul there was no concession to the weakest or the slowest over the inclusive nature of the Church – the Gentiles were most definitely ‘in’.

This gracious inclusiveness of the gospel has to be our starting point. Far from the onus being on organisations such as ours, or individual LGB and T people, to make their case for belonging to, and participation in, the Church, the onus is on those who disagree with us, to justify their opposition, which does not stack up either in humanitarian terms, or theologically.

At the moment it is too soon to say whether it is they or we who will be left standing on the platform. We would like to put a break on a train that seems to be heading towards an authoritarian destination where LGB and T people will be less welcome even than they are now; our opponents appear to fear a runaway train that is racing towards unbridled freedom and chaos. It all looks horribly like 'a train crash waiting to happen'. I hope I’m wrong about that!

From the vanguard to the rearguard: standing on the platform waving off the Covenant Express

2010-12-03T14:55:00.007Z

Back in the 1990s the diocese recommended my benefice (two parishes) and the one next-door (three parishes) to ‘cluster’. We were described as ‘the untidy end of the deanery’ and it did make sense: the five parishes (three quite rural; two semi-suburban) did indeed encircle, physically, a growing conurbation. No matter that there had been, for decades, intense rivalries between the two benefices and former incumbents, the current ‘leadership’ believed that it was right to proceed with the idea because our communities (church and civil) would be the beneficiaries of this co-operation, and one of the first things we did together was the Alpha Course.

As you can imagine not everyone was enamoured with the notion of ‘clustering’ and an image was used to describe the various responses to the emerging vision for the future. It was a bit like setting out on a train journey: some people (the leadership of the parish) were driving the engine; others, who had caught the vision, were sitting in the various carriages, front or back, depending on the degree to which they had bought into the clustering project; and finally, as the Cluster Express began to leave the station, some people were left behind on the platform.

As one of those in the ‘driving seat’ I found it a very helpful analogy. There were some people who we were never going to convince to board the ‘train’ but that shouldn’t prevent it from setting off and perhaps, once things began to move, the people on the platform would recognise what they were missing and try to catch up (like F.W. Robertson who was left behind at Euston Station in 1849, as his lover moved off in the departing train, and overtook it later on the way to Chester).

I’d like to play a little with this analogy in terms of current Anglican politics. First of all, we had the inclusion train, with the Episcopal Church and Canada in the driving seat. Lots of people were excited by this vision and keen to ride in the carriages of its train because they knew that it wasn’t just about sexuality (gay bishops and same-sex blessings) but signalled respect, justice and equality for all who were oppressed whether it be because of gender, race, or disability.

But some of the other drivers didn’t see it like that and did all that they could to derail this train. That made the rail company very nervous and so they tried to push the inclusion train into a siding and in its place began to assemble another train, with four carriages. It was called the Covenant Express and it looked a bit strange: not quite like any other train that the people had seen before. Some were shocked by it, others afraid that once you got on it you wouldn’t actually move very far or very fast, in fact, that you’d end up going nowhere; but others loved it, extolled it, and warned, that if you didn’t climb aboard, well, you’d probably end up on that rusty old inclusion train, either stuck in a siding, or, if the company decided it was OK, allowed on the network, but not on the main track.

So here I am, a liberal Christian, once (in my own estimation at least) in the vanguard, but now, most definitely in the rearguard, standing on the platform waving off – with no regrets - the Covenant Express. Should we try to derail it – of course! Do we have the wherewithal? Probably not, but it would be interesting to find out. In the meantime we can only hope that the commuters will see it for what it is and shove into a siding and the sideline of history where it belongs.

Are you still there?

2010-12-02T17:43:00.004Z

'One thing surprises me: that you, Sharon and Robert are still members of mainstream churches'. We were at the LGBT Health Summit 2010 held at Hatfield University in September http://www.lgbthealth.co.uk/past-summits/2010-summit/ The Revd Sharon Ferguson, Metropolitan Community Church minister and CEO of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, and Hospital Chaplain the Revd Robert Mitchell, had joined me there to lead the workshop – which has its origin in my collaboration with fellow Sibyl Michelle O'Brien - 'Gender, sexuality and spirituality: exploring the interplay' http://www.lgbthealth.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Gender-Sexuality-Spirituality.pdf

Of the three hundred forty delegates fifty-five registered for this workshop, an indication of the huge interest in spirituality and it was a subject that sat well with the conference theme 'the emotional connection: healthy mind, health body' (the host organisation was an NHS mental health Trust). I spoke about sexuality, Sharon about gender while Robert focused on spirituality, emphasising its breadth, and that many people who do not belong to, or identify with, religious organisations, may have a profound and meaningful spirituality. Nevertheless, the three presenters were all ordained ministers – Sharon in suit and clerical collar – and hence the observation, made privately after the session, by one participant, who was surprised that we were - given the perceived narrowness of the churches, including a grudging attitude to gender equality, institutional homophobia, etc. - still willing to belong.

As a minister of a Church that was founded specifically to include gay people, and with a wonderful record of inclusion, Sharon's position, to me at any rate (I can't speak for Robert), looks less contradictory than mine, but maybe the comment was not just about the inclusion agenda but expressed an alienation from the whole culture of organised religion by those who were formed by it and once part of it, and who now, having 'moved on,' are surprised that others have stayed.

Over the years there have been a number of occasions when I have despaired of the councils of the Church of England. Now, in an era when HIV infection can be treated so successfully we can easily forget the hysteria of the mid-1980s and how some people, who disagreed with the Revd Tony Higton, signed his Private Members motion about 'personal morality' in order to separate the gay issue from that of HIV, which achieved the sensitive debate on AIDS that they had wanted followed by the catastrophic compromise motion now enshrined as official Church of England policy.

http://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/socialpublic/marriagefamily/humanrelationships/humansexuality/

Some priests resigned then, Jeremy Younger's resignation being the most public, but resigning, as my husband pointed out at the time, would not help the people in our parish (though some might have been glad to be rid of me). Recently I found copies of the letters I wrote to the Synod members from my diocese prior to the 'Higton Debate' and its outcome, negative as it was, led to experiences that would have a profound effect on me personally, breaking down internal defences and barriers and enabling me to 'come out' publicly two years later, though that phrase 'coming out' does not do justice to what was, in fact, a confession or testimony to the Divine love.

A Mirfield Father, on being told of this, commented that my position was 'untenable' but he was proved wrong, and with the backing of my bishop, the loving support of parishioners, and – a not inconsiderable factor – the benefit of freehold, I was able to stay for another eleven years. Sometimes, as LGB or T people it is absolutely essential that we stay put and stand firm for by so doing we bear witness to the fact, for example, that one can be both a priest and gay or a Christian and trans.

This is not an easy calling to live out; to leave or transfer to another Church might – though who knows until you try it – seem an easier option; but somehow you are held there – it might be partly due to habit, or convention, or the need for stability, though my hope is that is mainly a response to God's call to be there, and stay there, because that is where you belong.

And if the institution should so change that it begins to deny and abuse you? What then? Have we reached that point now, considering the ease with which the General Synod has sent off the Covenant for consideration by the dioceses? Or is that (like 1987) yet another bit of tactical voting (in which case it will probably go wrong)? This post is becoming longer than I intended so let me come back to these questions in another one.

What will the pattern of the Anglican Communion look like in 10 years time?

2010-12-02T12:11:00.004Z

The Anglican Communion is being reconfigured at the moment. We who campaign for the full inclusion of LGBT people fear that in 10 years time we might find ourselves marginalised and excluded.

The narrative of those conservative Anglican bodies and individuals opposed to the full inclusion of LGBT people claim that it is the Episcopal Church that has ‘walked apart’. In practice, the groups that have walked apart and distanced themselves from the Anglican Communion are those which have failed to participate in the Councils of the Church – the Lambeth Conference, Primates Meeting and Anglican Consultative Council. There is a growing and, to me, bewildering array of these bodies and alliances – ACNA, Global South, GAFCON, FCA, ACI, CANA, AMiA, etc. These are also the groups which refuse to act on the parts of Lambeth 1.10 and the Windsor Report which advocate listening to and the pastoral care of LGBT people. The multiplicity of groups also shows dramatically that those who edge towards schism are unable to agree an alternative identity or strategy between themselves.

Strategies for dealing with the dynamic
People in favour of full inclusion advocate a range of strategies that might be adopted in response to this dynamic. Many ideas are posted in the comments on Thinking Anglicans. Let’s take a look at some of them:

• Form a new diocese of the Episcopal Church in England. This would need to create local churches where the pro-inclusion people could worship with the like-minded. I can’t see it happening and it isn’t what I want. Devizes already has 3 Anglican churches, one evangelical, one opposed to the ordination of women, one striving to be open and fully-inclusive. I want to be worshipping in a Church of England parish church that is properly Anglican in ethos – that’s the challenge, a challenge that my Rector is totally committed to engage with, as are the majority of the congregation.
• Create our own, alternative ‘liberal’ Anglican Communion, parallel with the conservative bodies. If the Church of England is a part of a liberal realignment, then the campaign for full inclusion will have been successful. If the Church of England is not a part of this new alignment, then it will be yet another schismatic Anglican Church and at the moment, that is most certainly not what Changing Attitude is campaigning for.
• Encourage TEC to withdraw from the Instruments of Communion and continue with its own polity in – isolation? That would be to throw another bone to the conservative forces (as +Rowan has repeatedly done, which may or may not turn out to have been a good strategy). The lesson is that the bones never satisfy them, of course. They will continue to scheme and chew away at any liberal, inclusive presence in the Church wherever they find it, CofE or Canada, Australia or South Africa, until they (in their fantasy) have destroyed everything which is against their reading of the Word of God.
• Campaign for a vote against the Anglican Covenant by the Church of England. For this to be effective, practical action must be taken now to canvass, lobby and persuade members of every diocesan synod to vote against when it is tabled for debate to ensure that a majority of dioceses vote NO before it returns to General Synod.
• With GAFCON withdrawing from the Primates Meeting and many Provinces not having attended the last Lambeth Conference, why shouldn’t those Provinces remaining fully committed to the Communion, including the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church of Canada and the Church of England, sign the Covenant and work with the other Provinces who sign to reconfigure it to reflect Anglican polity more properly, deleting Section 4 entirely. Such a strategy is uncertain of success and is very unlikely to happen.
• Other individuals have moved out of the Church of England, either abandoning the Church entirely or their membership of a local congregation or moving into a different denomination – the Unitarian Church in the case of Adrian Worsfold, the Metropolitan Community Church for some LGBT Anglicans. Yet others continue to worship both in their parish church and with another congregation where they find a more open ethos and/or a deeper spirituality.

In 20 years time?
The outcome I fear most is that the mainstream denominations will have successfully opposed the full inclusion of LGBT people in 20 years time, and will have moved in the opposite direction, barely tolerating us, excluding us from ministry at every level and treating us as ‘intrinsically disordered’. Those LGBT people living in societies which have legislated for equality will by then, if they have any sense of self-worth, abandoned the Church.

A less extreme outcome would see a fragmentation of denominations, schisms and realignments into churches with either a conservative, reactionary ethos or a radical, inclusive ethos. This may well turn out to be the least-worst and only practicable outcome.

There is a third possibility. The global community is slowly, painfully slowly, being educated into knowing that LGBT people are present in every culture and every community. This largely secular movement will impact on faith communities everywhere, destabilizing their ability to deny the real presence of LGBT people WITHIN their own communities. Other signs give hope for a third possible outcome. The attitudes of the Primates who are announcing unilaterally the policy of their Provinces do not consult their bishops and priests and do not represent the views of their people. It’s impossible to know what their people really think because deference to those in authority inhibits their ability to think and speak freely - just ask Michael Kimindu in Kenya or Bishop Ssenyonjo in Uganda. Global South Provinces in the next 10 to 20 years may well change as the culture changes around them and this generation of leaders retires and lose influence.

One comment on Thinking Anglicans describes GAFCON as having no shame, capable of doing anything to further their ends, failing to stay true even to their own principles - demanding orthodoxy yet violating church order, lacking of integrity, plotting and planning, characterized by machinations.

Strategies for achieving change
How can those of us who are faithful to God and the Spirit and to the ethos of the Anglican Communion counter the conservative movement whilst maintaining our own ethos and without adopting their ruthless, unscrupulous tactics? I think the challenge is almost impossible, were it not for my faith that conservative, reactionary forces do not have unique access to the flow of God’s creative presence in the world and from my perspective, are actively working against the flow of the Spirit.

Changing Attitude is totally committed to full inclusion of all the baptized, including all LGBT people, in every Province of the Anglican Communion, and to the Anglican ethos of scripture, tradition and reason. We have demonstrated our commitment by being the only pro-inclusion group to have been present at the Lambeth Conferences in 1998 and 2008, every meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council since Nottingham in 2005 and Primates meetings since Dar Es Salaam in 2007.

The strategy of pro-inclusion groups has to be to oppose the Covenant if there is any possibility that it will be used to inhibit progress towards overturning Christian prejudice against LGBT people. Our strategy also has to be positive, committed to building relationships with bishops and Primates across Provincial boundaries and with the Instruments of Communion, being present and not abandoning territory to conservatives, working out what practical action we can take which will make a real difference to the outcome. I’m not an idealistic dreamer (well, not only). I am also always looking for the practical strategies that are going to affect outcomes favourably for us.

Say No to the Covenant has to be more than an internet campaign. Say yes to LGBT people has to be more than saying no to the Covenant or strategising for our own schismatic body. And however we campaign, we have to do it in a more Christian, Bible-centred, holy way than those who wish to suppress us.

Colin Coward

To enable us to continue to campaign for the full inclusion of LGBT people in every Province of the Anglican Communion, please become a supporter of Changing Attitude or donate to our work

Should LGBT Anglicans be more suspicious of the Covenant?

2010-11-30T18:19:00.002Z

Erika Baker in a comment on the last blog and Adrian Worsfold and Church Ferret (naughty little creature) on Facebook, have raised questions about the blog which they think was too tolerant in stance and tone, I suspect.

I decided that +Rowan’s Presidential address should be take absolutely at face value. There are other leaders in the Communion whose words I would not take at face value.

I also think you have to look at what has happened in the 13 years since the Kuala Lumpur statement was published (which initiated the conservative campaign against LGBT people) and make a balanced assessment. They have repeatedly issued threats and challenges, to evict other Provinces, that the Communion is already split, the net torn, they have absented themselves from Lambeth and Primates meetings and refused to share Communion, and where has it got them?

Bishop Graham Kings made a case on the Radio4 Sunday programme for the GAFCON group being marginal to other conservative evangelicals in the Communion who have not rejected the Covenant. I think Bishop Graham is being fanciful. The Primates he named have announced that they are not attending the Primates meeting, so they are absenting themselves and abusing one of the Instruments of Communion and the Archbishop of Canterbury. They will not be present to contribute to any decision making process. Canada and TEC will.

The Covenant will not come into force for at least 3 years, 3 years in which the conservatives will almost certainly absent themselves from the next ACC meeting and the following Primates’ meeting. Do you imagine that they will suddenly march back in once other Provinces have signed the Covenant and demand to be allowed to sign and take over the Communion? I know they might, their tactics are that crazy, but I think it’s highly unlikely, and who’d want to be a part of such a Communion?

Bishop Graham also pointed out that the GAFCON Primates can’t make a unilateral decision about not signing the Covenant and that the decision will have to be put to each Province. These are Primates who are making unilateral, authoritarian decisions without any democracy or reference to their Province or House of Bishops and I think it highly likely that the decision they announced last week will stand.

These Primates do not represent the opinions of their bishops. I have now had many reports about the unhappiness of individual bishops in Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya who disagree with their Primate. Other tensions are building in these Provinces, and Primates eventually reach retirement dates. This generation with its extreme version of Anglicanism will not live forever.

Erika commented that Rowan clearly said that actions in one place have consequences for the Communion, whether we like it or not. Yes, but not necessarily only in one direction. The Global South/GAFCON/FCA axis has been allowed huge latitude and their actions tolerated in a way which for me and many others feels intolerable. But after 10 years of posturing and threats, they haven’t got what they demanded.

Removing TEC from the Anglican-Orthodox dialogue certainly isn’t what the conservatives had in mind when they demanded punishment. Better they hadn’t been excluded at all, but it isn’t exactly onerous, is it?

The Covenant may need nothing more than a group of only 15 people stating loudly that they feel offended before the offender has relational consequences imposed on them by the offended and Father Jake may be right in identifying just what those relational consequences are, and it might come to pass that punitive action is taken against a Province and they are removed from the ACC Schedule of Membership.

I’m not pointing out to Rowan that we LGBT people really have been playing ball all this time. I’m living the faith in prayer and love and I’m not walking away and I’m not going to stop reminding the Communion of the presence of LGBT people in every Province and the scandal of homophobia and prejudice and support for punitive legislation.

I am not becoming co-dependent and I am not colluding with my own abuse. The point at which Changing Attitude did either of those things would be seen very clearly, I think, and rightly challenged by all who care about the full inclusion of the tens of thousands of LGBT people in the Communion.

I think a lot has changed in the last 10 years, and the Church of England has become more isolated in our society and is continuing to isolate itself. There is a lack of courage and integrity in individual members of the House of Bishops and in the corporate institutions of the Church at times, and there are also shining examples of truth-telling, courage and integrity, and I would name Jeffrey John, Christina Rees, Colin Slee and Nick Holtham among others.

The Church of England might collude in applying the Covenant unwisely, punitively and against LGBT people 5 or 10 years down the road if it continues to allow what I consider to be unchristian forces to determine the culture of our Church.

This is all ‘my opinion’ and others will vehemently disagree with me. To some, it does indeed look as if nothing that happened in the Anglican Communion in the last 10 years has been wise, measured and politically middle of the road. People, good people have left and others are considering leaving, in despair at the unbelievable dishonesty practiced by some bishops. I think it’s a scandal but it doesn’t get reported because those of us who know these things don’t want to make life difficult for those in the circles around us. We all, CA, IC, the Coalition, WATCH, make calculated political decisions.

The Global South conservatives think God is on their side and not on the side of LGBT people. That is their fatal mistake. God is on everyone’s side, and God knows that the theologies we all construct are sometimes fatally flawed.

I may not have Permission to Officiate at the moment (and that’s another, confidential story) but I know I am loved, blessed, welcomed, enriched by God, journeying into the Kingdom of God, whatever foul things the conservatives say about me as a gay man, because I have a deep, prayerful relationship with God, a relationship to which they seem blinded – and there’s many a quote I could make from Scripture to support my claim. But I’ll leave it there.

Colin Coward

To enable us to continue to campaign for the full inclusion of LGBT people in every Province of the Anglican Communion, please become a supporter of Changing Attitude or donate to our work.

Anglican Covenant – dangerous progress in Synod? Or GAFCON statement – dangerous threat withdraws?

2010-11-29T09:37:00.006Z

Archbishop Rowan began his presidential address to Synod in Church House last week by referring to a sermon preached by John Wesley on 'The Catholic Spirit' which opened with a text from II Kings 10.15: 'He greeted him and said, "Is your heart true to mine, as my heart is to yours?" Jehonadab replied, "Yes." "If so," Jehu said, "Give me your hand."'

Rowan urged Synod to surprise those who are looking on by demonstrating their loyalty to each other: 'Is your heart true to mine?' Loyalty grows and flourishes when we spend time together exploring God who has brought us together - if our hearts are true to each other, different things become possible, Rowan said.

Being true to each other, in our hearts, is to me obvious and fundamental to our Christian life and witness. Heart truth is important to the life of General Synod, the Church of England, the Anglican Communion, and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Anglicans. Is the Anglican Covenant going to lead us into more heart truth?

GAFCON/FCA statement
As Rowan was delivering his address a statement was released by a group of Anglican leaders under the GAFCON/FCA banner, a statement which had been written at least two weeks earlier. The statement is almost, but not quite, a declaration of independence from Canterbury.

Those issuing the statement declare that they will no longer maintain an illusion of normalcy and will join other Primates from the Global South in absenting themselves from the next Primates’ meeting to be held in Ireland.

They further declare that the current text of the Anglican Covenant is fatally flawed and so support for it is no longer appropriate.

They plan to expand their ministry through other Anglican Provinces taking the ‘theological clarity’ of the Jerusalem Declaration as a solid foundation on which to engage with other Anglicans - those who affirm Biblical theological foundations of what Anglicans have always believed and practiced. They invite people in England ‘to re-affirm what they have always believed in Anglicanism by adopting the Jerusalem Declaration as a statement of their own faith and join with us in partnership in working to win the world to Christ’.

The statement rejects the Anglican Covenant, the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primates’ meeting, the Anglican Communion as at present constituted and swathes of Anglican history, experience and tradition. I might describe it as both audacious and abusive – audacious in its rejection of truth and abusive to issue it deliberately at the same moment as the Archbishop of Canterbury is asking in an adult way for Christian hearts to be true to one another and loyal to God.

The Anglican Covenant
In his address, the Archbishop of Canterbury said:

“it is an illusion to think that without some changes the Communion will carry on as usual, and a greater illusion to think that the Church of England can somehow derail the entire process. The unpalatable fact is that certain decisions in any province affect all. We may think they shouldn't, but they simply do. If we ignore this, we ignore what is already a real danger, the piece-by-piece dissolution of the Communion and the emergence of new structures in which relation to the Church of England and the See of Canterbury are likely not to figure significantly.”

The GAFCON/FCA leaders had already decided to derail the process and begun the dissolution of the Communion by setting out to create new structures which will exclude the Church of England and the See of Canterbury. Rowan, your words to Synod were taken to heart by those present, Synod members and those like me in the public gallery. Of course it is right to expect us to relate in ways that are mature, loyal, exploring God together, hearts true to each other. What then of the GAFCON leaders – are you going to ask them to behave in an equally mature way? That won’t be easy since they are already going to absent themselves from your presence.
The Archbishop continued to address the Covenant and the whole paragraph is worth quoting in full:

“The Covenant offers the possibility of a voluntary promise to consult. And it also recognises that even after consultation there may still be disagreement, that such disagreement may result in rupture of some aspects of communion, and that this needs to be managed in a careful and orderly way. Now the risk and reality of such rupture is already there, make no mistake. The question is whether we are able to make an intelligent decision about how we deal with it. To say yes to the Covenant is not to tie our hands. But it is to recognise that we have the option of tying our hands if we judge, after consultation, that the divisive effects of some steps are too costly. The question is how far we feel able to go in making our decisions in such a way as to keep the trust of our fellow-Anglicans in other contexts. If we decide that this is not the kind of relationship we want with other Anglicans, well and good. But it has consequences. Whatever happens, with or without the Covenant, the Communion will not simply stay the same. Historic allegiances cannot be taken for granted. They will survive and develop only if we can build up durable and adult bonds of fellowship.”

Managing it in a careful and orderly way has already been made impossible by the arrogant and aggressive actions of the GAFCON leaders, supported by a minority of members of General Synod. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to deal with the challenges of covenant and communion in an intelligent, relational, heart to heart way when people are acting so abusively. Changing Attitude is committed to adult behaviour, but the temptation to infantile responses is strong when Communion leaders act in infantile ways themselves.

The Synod motion moved by the Bishop of Bristol, Michael Hill, asked ‘That the draft Act of Synod adopting the Anglican Communion Covenant be considered.’ It was passed by a large majority and will now be sent to the dioceses for discussion. The Church of England did not, last week, adopt the Anglican Covenant, as some have asserted. England is continuing to discuss the Covenant and explore our differences of opinion.
In Rowan’s words, the Covenant offers the possibility of a voluntary promise to consult ... and disagreements need to be managed in a careful and orderly way.

“It does not invent a new orthodoxy or a new system of doctrinal policing or a centralised authority, quite explicitly declaring that it does not seek to override any province's canonical autonomy. After such a number of discussions and revisions, it is dispiriting to see the Covenant still being represented as a tool of exclusion and tyranny.”

Those of us who are anxious about the effects of the Covenant on progress towards the full inclusion in the Body of Christ of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are yet to be convinced that it is not possible to use it in a tyrannical and exclusionary way. If the GAFCON Primates (with others) have already decided to leave the Anglican Communion then there is not only less anxiety about the Covenant being used in a punitive way, there is no longer any real need for a Covenant at all.

Same-sex unions
Earlier in his address, the Archbishop had talked about the Communion’s approach to the ‘still bitterly divisive issue’ of same-sex unions.

He said:

“The need for some thoughtful engagement that will help us understand how people who read the same Bible and share the same baptism can come to strongly diverse conclusions is getting more urgent, because I sense that in the last few years the debate on sexuality has not really moved much.”

“And if we are not to be purely tribal about this, we need the chance for some sort of discussion that is not dominated by the need to make an instant decision or to react to developments and pressures elsewhere.”

Leaders and supporters of Changing Attitude are among those who have engaged in patient and thoughtful theological discussion in many different contexts and with a wide variety of opinions. We are committed to continuing conversation and exploration but the patience of many LGBT Anglicans is being tested to the extreme. We are living with an understanding of our own integrity in Christ which means that we deliberately ignore the guidelines adopted by the Church – Issues in Human Sexuality, Lambeth 1.10 and the House of Bishops’ pastoral statement on Civil Partnerships. The conversation and exploration can continue within the Church but we have already moved beyond.

Rowan asked for the help of Synod in working with him to create an ambience where better understanding may happen, taking the debate forward without the pressure of feeling we have some single and all-important decision to make. He pointed to the success of the 'Continuing Indaba' project in creating many such spaces for face-to- face discussion across cultures, considering a wide range of actually and potentially divisive matters. It has, he said, been pursued with heroic energy and imagination by many people of profoundly diverse convictions in the Communion and needs prayer and support.

We LGBT people in the UK and North America have personal security and legal protections which enable us to pursue our goals in the Communion with confidence, engaging openly with the Church. In other, socially conservative parts of the Communion, homophobia and prejudice in Church and society mean that open conversation is impossible and LGBT people remain invisible.

I am increasingly concerned about their safety and security and their inability to live spiritually, with integrity, in relationship with other Christians, when Anglican leadership in Nigerian, Uganda, Kenya and elsewhere equivocates about or actively supports punitive legislation. They need an active campaign for freedom and justice now, not at a time to suit the patient theological discussions within the Communion.

Susan Russell on her blog An Inch at a Time displays a Get out of the covenant free card and has her own take on what happened last week. Now that the folks the Anglican covenant was designed to keep at the table have turned their noses up at it, she says, it seems that sacrificing the vocations and relationships of the LGBT baptized on the altar of Anglican Unity becomes redundant at best and throwing out historic Anglican comprehensivness in response to hysteric Anglican politics becomes ridiculous at least.

The Episcopal Church instead of studying the Anglican Covenant that's already failed to hold the Communion together needs instead to be studying how to create something that will bring us together. “Like maybe focusing on the values that unite us rather than the issues that divide us. Like building a church for the 21st century that worries about who will COME if we proclaim the Good News of God available to all rather than who might LEAVE if we include everybody.”

Will sending the Anglican Covenant to be discussed in the dioceses have a negative effect regarding progress for LGBT people or does the statement from the GAFCON leaders have a beneficial effect which far outweighs any potential negative from the Covenant?

Colin Coward

To enable us to maintain a relational, principled, heart-true campaign for LGBT people in the Anglican Communion, please become a supporter of Changing Attitude or donate to our work.

Bishop Gene Robinson to retire in 2013

2010-11-07T14:44:00.004Z

Bishop Gene Robinson has announced his plan to retire as Bishop of New Hampshire in January 2013 when he will be 65 to give the diocese enough time to elect a new bishop. He will be retiring when he is 7 years below the mandatory retirement age for Episcopal bishops of 72. He made the announcement at the end of his diocesan annual convention and gave, as reasons for his early departure, the toll taken on him and on the diocese having been at the centre of international controversy.

He said: "Death threats, and the now-worldwide controversy surrounding your election of me as bishop, have been a constant strain, not just on me, but on my beloved husband, Mark, who has faithfully stood with me every minute of the last seven years, and in some ways, you. While I believe that these attitudes, mostly outside the diocese, have not distracted me from my service to you, I would be less than honest if I didn't say that they have certainly added a burden and certain anxiety to my episcopate."

I first met Bishop Gene at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church held in Minneapolis in 2003. The pressure on him was already intense and the Convention was marked by false rumours about him, designed to influence approval of his election. He retreated to a protected space leaving others to navigate the media and the conservative storm opposing his election.

In 2005 he came to England for the first time as bishop to address Changing Attitude’s 10th Anniversary Service at St Martin-in-the-Fields. He received a prolonged standing ovation and, as he said in his announcement yesterday, made "the case for God and for God's church – either to those who have never known God's unimaginable love, or to those who have been ill-treated, in the name of a judgmental God, and who have left the church."

Riazat Butt of the Guardian phoned me for a comment at 10 this morning, catching me as I was about to leave for the 10.30 Communion at St John’s Devizes. When I first read the news, I felt sad that he will be retiring. He has made visible for tens of thousands of LGBT Anglicans the reality that we are present in every Province of the Communion, in every congregation, many of us ordained, some bishops and primates. He won’t retire into invisibility and by 2013 further lesbian or gay bishops bishops may have been elected to join Mary Glasspool.

Bishop Gene’s election in 2003 did indeed transform the landscape, and he has had to lie with the responsibility for, and consequences of, that transformation. At last we had somebody as a bishop who was fully visible and embodied the quality of life so many of us long for, a committed, faithful and loving relationship as a Christian.

He has borne the cost as an iconic figure on behalf of LGBT Anglicans. But his visible presence is the tip of an iceberg. There are many thousands, if not tens of thousands, of LGBT Anglicans who experience stress, anxiety, pressure, depression and at the extreme, suicidal feelings. I know that this is true from the Changing Attitude England network and from friends and colleagues in the Church of England.

Increasingly, I know it to be true in Africa and across the Anglican Communion. A young gay Kenyan Anglican told me yesterday that he “is living in great stigmatization due to my sexual orientation. I don’t want anyone to know. Please help me and keep my secrets close. Thank you for that understanding. I have disclosed to you so much more than I have ever done to anyone else.”

It is people like this lonely, desperate, isolated gay Kenyan, who longs for the kind of loving relationship enjoyed by Gene and Mark, that Gene has been an icon for. He has, thanks goodness, had Mark beside him, a diocese which took him to his heart, and a personal resourcefulness and spirituality. Most Africans have none of these resources beyond a deep commitment to their faith and to Jesus the Christ.

One conservative response to Bishop Gene’s announcement has been to accuse him of playing the victim card. After 7 years of abuse and vilification by primates, bishops and conservative pressure groups in the Anglican Communion, I might have hoped that some Christian love and wisdom might have begun to surface by now, but no, the evil and lies and misrepresentation of truth continues. Riazat reports that s spokesman for the Global Anglican Future Conference, Gafcon, said the "agonising dispute" over homosexuality was not about the New Hampshire bishop "personally". Now I wonder who might have made such a disingenuous statement?

Colin Coward

To help us continue and develop our commitment to the full inclusion of LGBT people in the Church of England and of the Episcopal Church in the Anglican Communion, please become a supporter of Changing Attitude England or make a donation.

Changing Attitude trustees develop our vision and strategy for the coming year

2010-11-03T14:33:00.007Z

The trustees and Director of Changing Attitude met at the Peace Centre in Tadcaster from Friday afternoon to Sunday lunchtime for a residential meeting. Meeting for 48 hours provides time for us to talk at length (and some of us are good at that!) reflect at leisure and discuss both the practical needs of Changing Attitude and our strategy and vision. Our vision is developing and unfolding all the time and our strategic initiatives need to evolve and change in response to the developing vision.

On Friday evening for 2 hours and for the first hour on Saturday morning, I introduced a reflection (outlined in a previous blog) on the way in which we envisage or conceptualise ourselves in relationship to God and to the creation in which we dwell. I have become aware that we use religious language in ways traditional and radical which risk misunderstandings, and I wanted to check whether there was a common mind among the trustees of our theology, spirituality, ethics and morality. We discovered that there is, having cleared up misunderstandings and misconceptions along the way.

In the past decade, global communications have evolved at an exponentially dramatic rate. Decoding DNA, the exploration of deep space, the origins of the universe in the Big Bang, have expanded our awareness of the finite and the infinite in similarly dramatic ways. The evolutionary pace of the church, in response to the changed status of LGBT people in British society, for example, proceeds at a snail’s pace. The resistance in the church to granting any kind of equality or dignity to LGBT people is viewed with astonishment by those who are unaware that minority forces in the Church of England combine with a commitment to maintain unity in the Anglican Communion to prevent progress to full inclusion. The church looks like a dinosaur compared with the transformation of spiritual and scientific imagination and vision in the global community. We in Changing Attitude have no doubt that many are alienated by the Church’s lack of courage and vision. It takes extraordinary and often perverse determination to stay in the church, working for the full inclusion of LGBT people, when it is so dishonest in its practice and so

The extensive agenda covered several major topics, and I will write briefly about the most significant.

Marriage and Civil Partnerships
The agenda for marriage and civil partnerships for LGBT people has developed dramatically in the last 6 months with OutRage! advocating equality for all. The trustees agreed that we should be campaigning for equality in the Church of England, recognizing that our supporters have a variety of views, and we are campaigning for the freedom to make a choice, including the blessing of relationships and marriage in church.

Day Conference
The overnight conference planned for October didn’t take place because too few people were able to come, apart from Birmingham residents who wanted a non-residential event. Instead of a residential conference for Changing Attitude group leaders and Diocesan contacts we are planning two one-day conferences, one in Nottingham in May and the second in London in the autumn. The vision is to create days set in the context of a Eucharist which will help create a flourishing environment for LGBT Christians in particular and for all who yearn to participate in worship in which our dreams and longings for God, for intimacy, truth, tenderness and justice can find expression. It’s an ambitious aim, but we have an ambitious vision for the days and planning will begin immediately, finding churches which will create the environment in which we can pray, praise and worship with passion and glory.

LGBT Anglican Coalition
The Coalition meets this coming Saturday in Waterloo. Jeremy Timm is chairing the meeting on behalf of Changing Attitude – the group responsible for preparing the agenda this time. The chair rotates every 6 months. Some of the issues discussed at our residential will be brought to the Coalition as the more appropriate context for them to be dealt with. The issues include a strategy for General Synod and encouraging LGBT people with vocations, which we would like to develop in consultation with the Clergy Consultation.

Women in the Episcopate
The Director and every trustee is committed 100% to the successful passage of legislation which will open the episcopate to women.

Readers
Our campaign to discover whether the Church has a policy for Readers which equates them with the ordained ministry is progressing slowly. Progress has been made, and Jeremy Timm agreed to draft an article for submission to the Church Times.

Web site
The web site is being redesigned at the moment and should be online in November. We want to include brief videos on the site in the mode of the ‘It Gets Better’ campaign in the USA, with people describing their faith as someone who is LGB or T or supportive of our full inclusion. This is a project we hope to develop very quickly – if we can master the technology!

Sunday Eucharist
After a final session on Sunday morning, we concluded our time together with a Eucharist in the room we had set aside for prayer and meditation. Jeremy Pemberton had prepared a service in which we were primarily silent together. It brought the energy of our discussions into our worship, calmed and focused us as we broke bread and shared wine, absorbing the stillness and beauty of our creator and celebrating our faith in God’s infinite presence and love.

Our vision and our goals are ambitious. We are striving in faith for the Kingdom of God, in which all are welcome in a Church where all can flourish.

Colin Coward

To help us develop our vision and turn our strategy into reality, please become a supporter of Changing Attitude England or make a donation.

Two cheers for Bishop Stephen Platten

2010-11-01T14:41:00.003Z

Stephen Platten, Bishop of Wakefield, in an article in the Church Times last Friday has come out in support of a renewed listening, real listening, to the voices of LGBT people in LGCM and Changing Attitude. He says the Church of God and not just the Church of England should take a lead in encouraging real listening which allows for the possibility of a change of heart if not, he says, our own moral outlook.

The article was received enthusiastically by the trustees of Changing Attitude who met over the weekend in Tadcaster and they wanted me to blog about it, post an article on the web site and write to Bishop Stephen and the Church Times - and I will do all those things, starting here.

Having re-read the article, I want to be more critical, especially since bishop Stephen wants the Church universal to take a lead in ‘real’ listening. My first message back to Bishop Stephen is that it’s a bit rich to ask the Church to take a lead in ‘real’ listening. The Church is so far behind secular society which having undertaken a process of 'real listening' has mostly dealt with the ethical, moral, emotional and legal dimensions of homophobia and has already transformed the landscape for LGBT people. It is primarily in the church, and in particular pockets of society, in football, in schools that homophobia continues.

Bishop Stephen says the Church is not unlike our culture in which there are a variety of views with both calls for equality and rampant homophobia. I do not meet rampant homophobia in society, but in the church I meet an all-persuasive prejudice which has a rampantly homophobic effect. Try getting appointed to a new post in the church if you are in a civil partnership or recommending to a lesbian, gay or transgender seeker a church in which you can confidently guarantee they are going to receive a prejudice–free welcome. Changing Attitude has just 30 churches out of 10,000 listed in our Welcoming and Open scheme.

Perhaps the Church serves a purpose as a place where all this can be discussed, says Bishop Stephen, though he admits it would need to bring people together to claim to be that place. ‘All this’ is discussed freely in pubs and bars and cafes, homes and offices across the country. It’s in the Church that people have the greatest difficulty discussing human sexuality freely and openly. In my own church, which in a comment on a previous post a member denies is homophobic, I am told that it’s better for me not to constantly talk about being gay but keep it quiet. It isn’t something I talk about or preach about, but simply being there with my partner is too much for some of the congregtion – that’s homophobia, Frances.

Bishop Stephen thinks stereotypes would break down if Christians simply sat down with gay people, whether active, single, in committed relationships or not. I’m not so sure. For starters, outside the Church it’s immaterial whether gay people are active, single or in a committed relationship. The Church agenda is not society’s agenda. The moral and ethical attitude of the Church to gay relationships is not relevant and won’t be until the Church overcomes it’s institutionalized homophobia. Then people might attend to what the Church has to say about the ethics of gay relationships.

Bishop Stephen wonders when most diocesan synods last sought a presentation from gay Christians about their life in Christ or dioceses last held day conferences on sexuality and faith. The trustees of Changing Attitude wondered whether there was any chance of the newly elected General Synod passing legislation which might change the two most pressing issues for LGBT Anglicans – equality in selection and training for ministry and in clergy appointments and the blessing of gay relationships in church.

We concluded that there is almost zero chance of this happening in the current quinquennium. When General Synod or the House of Bishops finally get around to a homophobic-free discussion and attitude it will be totally irrelevant to LGBT people whose place in society was transformed by the legislative changes introduced by the last government.

The trustees were taken by Bishop Stephen’s use of the phrase ‘human flourishing’ in his last paragraph. The gospel, he says, obliges us to build a healthy society which is both sensitive to all and responsible in deriving a moral code that promotes human flourishing, and that’s not how it feels at the moment for lesbian and gay people. Actually, for many it does feel as if that’s what our society promotes – it’s the Church that doesn’t.

Can we now expect Bishop Stephen himself to take a lead by persuading the House of Bishops to listen directly to the experience of LGBT people in an open way that allows for a real possibility of a change of heart, and will he consult the LGBT Anglican Coalition, which includes both LGCM and Changing Attitude, to hear our proposals for legislation which we would like General Synod to pass?

Colin Coward

Changing Attitude needs your help to get the Church to listen accurately to LGBT people and to pursue our campaign to change to church. Please become a supporter or make a donation.

Sonia

2010-10-31T21:48:00.012Z

Sonia made a deep impression on me from our first meeting, in January last year, at a Rainbow Space evening at St Anne’s Soho, where she was then a member of the congregation. An entirely passable Trans woman, with a beautiful face, I was surprised to learn from her, on that occasion, that she was not living full-time as a woman but still worked as a male. Unnecessarily diffident about her feminine appearance/presentation and even about her work as a human rights lawyer, which we now know was of the highest quality, I had hoped, on that occasion, that she would join Sibyls, Christian spirituality for transgender people, which she subsequently did.

The last time I saw her was in June this year, over dinner at the Sibyls’ London meeting, following Evening Prayer at St Anne’s. With a mass of bubble hair, and a Zara shopping bag at her side containing her latest purchase, she looked lovely, and over the meal, characteristically, took a newer, younger, disabled member under her wing.

My husband and I sat opposite them, enjoying her company and the conversation, during which I learned three things that I did not know about Sonia: she and I grew up in the same part of England, where our paths could have crossed, but didn’t; that she too had been a student in Cambridge, Sonia being a few years ahead of me; which was the third thing I discovered about her that night - although I’d assumed that she was younger than me, she was in fact older by about five years. As the summer months passed I continued to hear from a friend about how well Sonia was settling into her new church where she had begun to participate enthusiastically in the life and ministry of the congregation.

Autumn arrived, the beginning of the dark months which, in my experience, have frequently led me into a period of personal upheaval and psychological shadow. A week ago, on Monday 25^thOctober, in the early evening, I was angry and agitated as I began undoing all the work I had been engaged in earlier that day and which was not right. I had no idea of course that at the very same time Sonia was in mortal danger.

The next evening, when Rob arrived home, he immediately drew my attention to the front page of the free London paper where the headline read: “Man in dress ‘pushed’ to his death on tube”. It seemed needlessly sensational, if not bordering on the offensive. Evidently there was a story here, and one that, whatever the details, was almost bound to have a trans-related angle. According to the reporters commuters had seen two women, one younger than the other, interacting excitedly with each other at the edge of the platform at Kings Cross underground station, one of whom then either fell, or was pushed, into the path of the oncoming tube train. Witnesses were shocked and travel chaos ensued. Police attending the scene discovered that the dead woman was a biological male.

It sounded a very strange case indeed. Never, though, even for a moment, did Sonia come to mind as the likely victim, but the next evening, by which time further information was appearing in the press, though not the name of the deceased, a friend from Sibyls rang to inform me that Sonia was indeed the person who had died. So began my grief at her loss, combined with disappointment and anger at much of the press coverage with its insensitive and inaccurate stereotypes of ‘a bloke in a frock’: an image far removed from the petite, fashionable woman I had known for the past couple of years. Commuters’ first impressions of her had been spot on, and whatever her anatomy might be, she was, in heart, and soul, and yes, when dressed, in body, a loving and lovely woman.

And even though she continued to present as a male in her working life, perhaps there too she operated as a female in masculine clothing; certainly, her family have emphasised that although she worked in male mode they would prefer her to be known as Sonia, because that is who she was. Meanwhile, her colleagues have paid tribute to her pioneering work as a human rights lawyer, and the landmark cases for which she was responsible, making her death not just the loss of a precious human being who will be sorely missed, but of a professional lawyer with a passion for justice and the marginalised who still had much to give to society.

This weekend, praying at the Eucharist with the Changing Attitude Trustees, I watched as leaves fell from the trees – light, delicate, beautiful – and thought of Sonia and the fragility of human life. She appeared physically fragile and yet, as her working life demonstrates, she had tremendous courage, strength and determination, and it is shocking that she should have died in the circumstances that she did, not gently, like the falling leaves, but violently and in public view.

Privacy, for all people, is a human right that promotes dignity and a sense of self-worth, and is particularly precious to Transgender people as they approach, hover on, or begin to cross gender boundaries, while negotiating this process with significant others in their lives; and yet, as the coverage of Sonia’s death shows, in late 2010, despite the media having being responsible for greater general knowledge about Trans people’s lives, in death a Trans woman can still be stigmatized by the press in the grossest possible way by referring to her as a ‘man’ or by the use of male pronouns. The Telegraph on-line report, somewhat surprisingly, was an exception, and exemplary in referring to Sonia throughout as a woman, which is what she was.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8086759/Murder-inquiry-after-woman-pushed-under-Tube-train-at-Kings-Cross-station-during-joke.html

Let’s hear it too for the journalist who knocked a dozen or more years off her age – Sonia would have loved that!

Lead us into all truth with words that take shape in our hearts

2010-10-28T18:30:00.002+01:00

In 1975 when Canon Nigel Harley, then Rector of St Michael’s Basingstoke where I worshipped, asked me if I was going to be ordained, I had no idea whether I had a vocation or not. I thought about the question overnight, took a risk, and the next day asked Nigel to put my name forward. At each stage of the subsequent selection process I felt a greater conviction that what I was doing was absolutely the right thing.

I didn’t believe in the creeds as factual statements of truth, nor did I believe in the Bible with any greater degree of certainty, the Book of Common Prayer had always been a stumbling block liturgically and theologically and the 39 Articles were archaic. Nor did I have a more coherent or defined understanding of the Eucharist and a conviction about it’s efficacy. The level of my conviction about creeds, scripture and communion remained roughly as they had been formed in my teens and twenties, from reading Honest to God and allied books by Eric James and others, engaging with South Bank Religion, and learning from a holy incumbent and an innovative curate at my childhood church.

My relationship with the creeds, the BCP and the 39 Articles hasn’t grown any closer with the passage of time – quite the reverse. It has always been somewhat indifferent. Their influence on my Christian formation has been primarily negative. However, my relationship with scripture is renewed daily and my eyes continue to be opened and my heart and soul nourished and nurtured by the Bible. My relationship with the Eucharist remains ambivalent. I know it’s good for me to be there but it’s rarely an unalloyed spiritual pleasure – something to do with the words and theology of hymns, the tunes, clergy voices, sermon content, the disembodied, cerebral routine.

I have been formed by daily reading of the Bible, prayer and meditation and a largely intuitive, innate sense of what I’m about as a Christian, living the life without ever quite knowing where I was on the path. I was convinced of certain truths about what it means to be a Christian gleaned from the Bible and the pattern of Jesus, moving more deeply into a contemplative pattern of prayer, rooted in the body, in the present moment, infinite and intimate.

I live by intuition, by an innate sense of who God is calling me to be and become as a follower of the Way. My sexuality is formed in the same way, by intuition and an innate awareness, conviction, of who I am in Christ. Nothing the church teaches is ever going to get in the way of my conviction about the nature of God and the nature of my own sexuality. The church is so, so wrong about my gay identity. From my perspective it is also often wrong about the nature of God, creation and the spiritual life.

Dogmas, creedal formulations, approved liturgies, ‘orthodox’ biblical interpretation, none of these has really inspired my search for the God of love, truth, justice and a life lived towards God. I have been inspired in my life of prayer and by the holy, unorthodox, saintly people who have accompanied me on my journey.

And now I’m reaching a double crisis. The Anglican Communion’s inability to deal with my sexuality is intolerable. Christian (and Moslem) teaching and preaching about homosexuality affects millions of people across the globe, consigning them to lives of fear, hatred, self-doubt, depression, lies and lovelessness. Homophobia describes a global mental and emotional attitude of prejudice and fear of difference. I hate it because it is hate-full, and time is running out for the church because millions of LGBT people need to be freed, now, from the yoke of ignorance and oppression. I’m in crisis because my heart screams with pain for my brothers and sisters whose lives are made intolerable by religion.

The second crisis concerns the way in which the church constructs its identity around allegiance to dogmas and formularies, concepts of sin, guilt and judgement, concepts of God and God’s relationship with the world and creation. We are still so incredibly obsessed by law rather than grace and by rules of belonging. We are tribal, literal in our beliefs, failing to respond to the potentially liberating insights of scientific research and discovery, spiritual renewal and global imagination.

I’m not going to explain this very well, but the God who encounters me and who I encounter in Jesus of Nazareth continues to be trapped by a failure of imagination and courage in the church – and I know it will always be so – that’s the nature of institutions and human systems. But we live at a time when people’s perspectives and imaginations are being transformed by new discoveries. They know there is more to life, to being fully alive and spiritual, than either secular agencies or the churches offer.

The church has become a battleground not just around the issue of human sexuality but for the survival of my integrity and my innate spirituality and faith. I don’t believe for one moment that God is concerned about our conformity to rules and dogmas, creeds and doctrinal formulations that define individual denominations and congregations. What I yearn towards is my immersion in the infinite, divine energy of love, goodness, truth, creativity and justice. Against this there is no law.

The trustees of Changing Attitude meet this weekend for a 3 day residential near York. Reflecting on our faith and spirituality, on the authenticity of our Christian lives and on our dynamic encounter with God which fuels our campaign for justice for LGBT people will occupy much of our time together. Next week I may be able to develop this theme further, with more insight into my own soul and greater clarity about how the Spirit is speaking to the churches.

Colin Coward

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Time for change – in depth

2010-10-21T20:49:00.004+01:00

The tensions in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion surrounding the space it allows lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people to occupy is reaching breaking point, I suspect. It is certainly driving many of us LGBT Anglicans who live within this insane dualism to the edge. In civil society we can contract civil partnerships (marriage in all but name) and create social lives which are largely free from anxiety about being gay, adult and equal. In the church we are a problem, a source of tension, guilt and embarrassment, a threat to unity and for some, a sinful body to be healed or an evil to be eradicated.

The practice of the Church of England encourages dishonesty, secrecy, collusion, fear, bad pastoral practice and bad theology. LGBT people either tolerate this unhealthy state of affairs, rail against it, or leave the church.

I don’t have the patience to wait while bishops revisit ‘Issues in Human Sexuality’ – it needs to be binned. I don’t have the patience to wait for the church to opt to treat the key biblical texts about same-sex activity in the same way it has treated texts about divorce, remarriage, slavery, the wearing of hats, the length of hair and the role of women in leadership, let alone the patience for the church to come to a common theological mind about homosexuality.

I want to be part of a church which no longer has an issue with my innate identity as a gay man, nor my visibility in church, nor my relationship with my life partner. I want to be part of a church which has overcome its uncertainty about the place of women and LGBT people in ministry, lay and ordained.

Tensions are reaching breaking point in the Communion, having been stretched in one direction by the Episcopal Church’s election as bishops of a partnered gay man and a partnered lesbian and in the other direction by conservative leaders and networks organising schismatic, transgressive movements.

Two weeks ago I was sent a scan of the Ugandan Rolling Stone front page naming Uganda’s 100 “top” homosexuals, including a picture of Bishop Christopher Senyonjo and a yellow banner saying “hang them”. The report has now been picked up by western media and websites. The Bishop of New York has written to the Archbishop of Canterbury and I’ve been asked whether the Archbishop is going to condemn the naming of and demand to hang Bishop Christopher (who of course is not gay) and the 99 other named homosexuals. Lambeth Palace usually tells me that private representations are being made and that these are felt to be more appropriate and effective than a public statement.

Changing Attitude may have acquiesced in this apparently reasonable justification of behind-the-scenes diplomacy for too long. The risk to the lives, security and emotional and physical well-being of LGBT people in Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, the UK, USA and elsewhere is too serious now for subtle diplomacy to be an appropriate response.

Homophobic individuals, newspapers, governments and churches need to know that the Anglican Communion condemns unequivocally all violence and prejudice against LGBT people (which is the Archbishop’s stated position). The fear of upsetting certain Anglican Primates, bishops and pressure groups inhibits a proper reaction.

In England, bodies have been busy planning their departure for the ordinariate or forming new pressure groups – the Society of St Wilfrid and St Hilda or the Society of St Augustine for the Anglican Mainstreamers – or not so mainstream following this development.

Archbishops and Popes and bishops don’t like schisms. They are symbols of unity and managing and containing threats of schism are a high priority compared with naming and condemning threats to the lives and well-being of vulnerable minority groups such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

Condemning sexism and homophobia should be a priority, alongside the condemnation of racism, fascism, rapacious capitalism and fundamentalism. The position of the Anglican Communion and the Archbishop of Canterbury should be to unequivocally support the dignity and full inclusion of LGBT people in church and society.

In the Communion, every action taken against LGBT people should be condemned and challenged. The Church of Uganda has allowed Bishop Christopher Senyonjo to be vilified, impoverished and threatened with death in the Ugandan press. The church should have immediately condemned the Rolling Stone report.

In England, LGBT Anglicans must now work towards converting the House of Bishops and General Synod from their various shades of prejudice, intolerance, passive tolerance and active if circumspect welcome for LGBT people into a radical change of church teaching and practice. There should be no discrimination against LGBT people in congregational life or ordained ministry and access to all the sacraments, including the blessing of relationships and the marriage of same-sex couples.

A great deal of time, energy and attention has been given to the parish of St Peter’s Folkestone and to the four bishops who may leave the Church of England to join the ordinariate. Those thinking of leaving the Church of England issue threats and a bishop calls the church vicious, vindictive and fascist because they are negative, against things, ordained women, gay relationships, gay bishops (funny, that one), theologies of justice and peace. Their departure opens up space for people who feel differently, theologise differently and have a very different awareness of how God is active in their lives.

A mini-storm has been going on in the church where I worship following front page stories and pictures in the local paper about the civil partnership my partner and I are planning to contract. Some people have left the congregation, others have arrived, and the balance between conservatives and progressives has changed. Those arriving can’t fathom why the church is so obsessed in a negative way about women and gay people. God is about love, compassion, integration, justice and truth, isn’t s/he? they ask.

The sermon the Archbishop of Canterbury preached in India seems apposite. "Sometimes we have listened to the past," he said. "We have identified ourselves with our ancestors in faith. Sometimes we have listened to our own unconverted hearts and used the church of God for our own ends, welcoming people like us and rejecting those who make us uncomfortable. And when any of those things happens, the Church begins to fall apart. The wounds in the Body get wider and deeper, and we find ourselves giving great energy to justifying our decision not to be together. As we stop listening to one another, we stop listening to Christ. Whether this happens in the name of nationality or tradition or pride of achievement or purity of teaching, the effect is the same tragedy."

It would be easy to say the church is falling apart because it doesn’t unconditionally welcome women or lesbians or gays or bisexuals or transgender people or black people or people from different social strata – people “not like us”. Christians find it very difficult to listen to Christ and don’t find listening to each other much easier sometimes. A Reflections group meets monthly at my church to meditate together and talk about spirituality and faith. The conversation is very tentative because the members are unsure of their experience and of the language to describe their faith. We are learning together how inadequate the church has been in providing us with the resources to go deeper into ourselves and into God.

+Rowan was one of the people who provided me with the basic tools. If he were to focus on one thing which might stop splits from occurring in the Communion, it would be to teach people and churches how to go deeper, really deep into silence and stillness, heart and body and emotions, mystery and unknowing. But we live in a Christian era, internationally, when attending to ourselves and God in depth is one of the last things people want to commit their lives to.

Colin Coward

Please help us to instill mature patterns of behaviour and deeper spiritual roots in the Anglican Communion by becoming a supporter of Changing Attitude or by making a donation.

LGBT Anglican Coalition writes to Archbishop of Canterbury about sexuality, celibacy and secrecy

2010-10-12T09:28:00.005+01:00

The LGBT Anglican Coalition, a network of eight Anglican groups, wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury following his interview in The Times. The Coalition has issued the following press release, and below is a copy of the letter sent to the Archbishop.

LGBT Anglican Coalition Press Release 11 October 2010
Time to accept gay bishops, says Anglican Coalition

In a recent interview with The Times the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was unclear whether celibate but partnered gay clergy are acceptable as bishops in the Church of England. The archbishop stated his unwillingness to consider partnered gay men and lesbians as bishops because of their ‘particular choice of life, a partnership, and what the Church has to say about that.’

The LGBT Anglican Coalition believes that acceptance should be extended beyond those who are celibate, but says:

‘Your statement has also left ambiguity regarding those in loving life-long but celibate relationships. Such people would appear to be complying fully with the requirements of “Issues in Human Sexuality” and yet still seem to be excluded simply on the grounds of some other people’s disapproval. If this is not your intention, we ask you to clarify what you meant. Given that you said that you “have no problem” with gay bishops who are celibate, we would ask you to make clear your position on the acceptability for higher office of celibate gay clergy who are in civil partnerships.’

In a letter sent to the Archbishop, the Coalition criticizes the Archbishop’s remarks as ‘hurtful and undermining to the many lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people who have been called to ordained ministry but not to celibacy’. The Coalition calls the Church of England to a renewed study of sexuality in the light of modern scientific and theological understanding.

The letter is also highly critical of the culture of secrecy, fear and dishonesty around human sexuality which is blighting the Church of England, and damaging our witness to society, and which urgently needs to be dispelled. It says that, ‘in numerous Church of England parishes, worshippers fully accept LGBT people, whether single or partnered, and believe that all forms of ministry should be open to God’s children regardless of sexual orientation.’

ENDS

Full Text of Letter to the Archbishop

Dear Archbishop Rowan

We are deeply dismayed that, in an interview with The Times, you stated your unwillingness to consider partnered gay men and lesbians as bishops because of their ‘particular choice of life, a partnership, and what the Church has to say about that.’ This is not only hurtful and undermining to the many lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people who have been called to ordained ministry but not to celibacy – a valued but rare vocation among people of any sexual orientation – but also to the life and witness of the Church of England.

Your statement has also left ambiguity regarding those in loving life-long but celibate relationships. Such people would appear to be complying fully with the requirements of ‘Issues in Human Sexuality’ and yet still seem to be excluded simply on the grounds of some other people’s disapproval. If this is not your intention, we ask you to clarify what you meant. Given that you said that you ‘have no problem’ with gay bishops who are celibate, we would ask you to make clear your position on the acceptability for higher office of celibate gay clergy who are in civil partnerships.

As Archbishop of Canterbury, we expect you to encourage the Church of England to continue to strive thoughtfully and prayerfully to discern God's will on human sexuality, taking account of the findings of theologians and scientists and in conversation with other Anglicans and the wider church. It is regrettable that some bishops elsewhere in the Anglican Communion remain unwilling to enter into dialogue with those in their own dioceses who are lesbian or gay, or to take note of the diligent work of scholars through which Christians can develop an ever-richer understanding of God’s creation, our place within it and where the Holy Spirit is leading us. However this must not deter us from acting justly and lovingly in the context of our own mission and ministry.

Increasingly, eminent theologians have come to accept that Christians who are neither heterosexual nor called to celibacy may acceptably enter into committed relationships with members of the same sex, in which they can grow more responsive to God’s love and be more faithful in following Christ. Likewise, in numerous Church of England parishes, worshippers fully accept LGBT people, whether single or partnered, and believe that all forms of ministry should be open to God’s children regardless of sexual orientation. Meanwhile, social and natural scientists have helped to throw fresh light on the complexity and diversity of life on earth and the role of same-sex as well as opposite-sex attraction.

As Sister Rosemary CHN, representing Religious Communities, explained in a debate in General Synod in 2004:

‘For those of us under religious vows, who treasure celibacy as call and gift, the idea of forced celibacy is as abhorrent as the idea of forced marriage...

‘Some gay clergy have reluctantly accepted celibacy as an imposed discipline. Some of these, I feel sure, have found that through their struggles they have been given grace... For others, however, misery remains just misery, and they are exposed to the danger of a kind of withering of the heart, which makes them less able to love anybody.

‘Christians who are happily married can bear witness to the way in which a partner's love can be both a means of grace and a school of the Lord's service: a channel of God's love to them and through them. Gay Christians in committed relationships say that it is the same for them. When I observe the quality of their lives, and feel warmed and healed by their friendship, I know that it is true.’

We regret that any senior clergy in the Church of England should seem to be moving in the opposite direction from ordinary members in order to placate the small minority among us who are fiercely opposed to greater inclusion and even some in other churches who also object. It is important that they, like the rest of us, be challenged to understand that the church is not the possession of one faction and that theological diversity is part of our inheritance as Anglicans. There is a culture of secrecy, fear and dishonesty around human sexuality which is blighting the Church of England, and damaging our witness to society, and which urgently needs to be dispelled.

We urge you to acknowledge the contribution of so many LGBT people, often partnered, to the ministry of the church, and to promote rigorous and prayerful study of the issues involved in the light of present knowledge.

Yours sincerely

Jeremy Timm, Changing Attitude

On behalf of the LGBT Anglican Coalition

Accepting Evangelicals www.acceptingevangelicals.org

Changing Attitude www.changingattitude.org.uk

The Clergy Consultation www.clergyconsultation.org

Courage www.courage.org.uk

The Evangelical Fellowship for Lesbian and Gay Christians www.eflgc.org.uk

Inclusive Church www.inclusivechurch2.net

The Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement www.lgcm.org.uk

The Sibyls www.sibyls.co.uk

Moderating and deleting inappropriate behaviour by Primates and bishops in the Anglican Communion

2010-10-10T11:51:00.002+01:00

‘Anonymous’ continues to post comments to this blog. I have to read them to decide whether to post or bin them. It’s tedious. Sometimes I contemplate posting the less offensive in a spirit of openness and generosity, but think again. Tolerance and generosity are admirable qualities. But why would readers of a blog dedicated to the full inclusion of LGBT people in the Anglican Communion want to read counter arguments about statistics proving that gay relationships don’t last and gay men die 10 years earlier than heterosexuals or that discriminating against homosexuality is more humane than affirming something that is mutually self-destructive? You see, I knew you didn’t want to read this!

The campaign against the full inclusion of LGBT people in the Communion was launched in Kuala Lumpur in 1997. I arrived at the Lambeth Conference in 1998 feeling positive and optimistic, have been invited by Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane of Cape Town to make a presentation (with others) to the section dealing with human sexuality. We were denied, and spent the next three weeks trying to get a hearing from whoever would listen to us. Kuala Lumpur had already achieved its goal – demonize homosexuals – from which the attempted exorcism of Richard Kirker was a natural outcome. The plenary debate was a coup for the rabid, anti-gay conservative mob (for that is what they felt like) presided over by George Carey, then Archbishop, as if they represented normal Christian behaviour and attitudes.

We were thrown onto the defensive. Meanwhile, civil society in the UK began to work it’s way swiftly towards accepting LGBT people as full members of society, educated by a government which placed equality high on the agenda. We LGBT Christians lived in a state of confusion between a progressive state and a regressive Church. Let’s put it bluntly – the Church became an insecure, hostile, negative, homophobic, abusive place for LGBT people, driving gay Christians back into the closet. Conservatives set out to deliberately to attack us, eroding our faith and spirituality in the process.

Some of their tactics, as I commented in yesterday’s blog, have been abusive and infantile. We were having to defend ourselves against this background of anti-gay rhetoric to which was added a campaign to marginalize not just us, but any church, Province, Primate or bishop who supported us.

An extraordinary, dangerous change took place. Ideas about human sexuality and models of behaviour which find legitimacy in the Bible became accepted as appropriate in the Anglican Communion when they were being recognised in the secular world as prejudiced, homophobic and wrong.

Laws were introduced in the UK to protect the rights and dignity of LGBT people. In the church our rights and dignity have been and are under constant attack. In the USA, where equality for LGBT people is still being campaigned for, supporters of LGBT equality in the Episcopal Church have argued their case in the Communion and American society with force and clarity, and been repeatedly attacked for doing so.

In the ‘tolerant’ ‘broad’ Church of England we have been far more passive. I think we failed to recognise abusive, intolerant, infantile behaviour for what it is when conservatives have repeatedly behaved in this way.

The Archbishop of Canterbury found himself enmeshed in this dynamic following Gene Robinson’s election and the vitriolic campaign against Jeffrey John led by members of General Synod. The Archbishop has been treated by other Primates and bishops in the most abusive, unchristian, infantile way sometimes. +Rowan is a Christian leader of immense dignity, emotional and intellectual maturity, wisdom, grace, tenderness and love and has endured unbearable pain and anguish for most of the eight years he has been Archbishop. We, LGBT people, have added to the tension, by simply being who we are, wanting to be recognised appropriately and arguing accordingly.

We LGBT Christian advocates allowed the conservatives to distract our attention, pushing us onto the defensive, having to develop counter-arguments to their anti-gay rhetoric. I’m trying to look at the picture in a different way now. Conservatives have focused Church attention on disagreements about human sexuality, basing their arguments on particular interpretations of scripture, tradition and reason. There are other interpretations, as many theologians have articulated, the Archbishop of Canterbury among them.

Enmeshed in these arguments, played out in mini-dramas in ACC Nottingham and Jamaica, Primates in Dromantine, Dar Es Salaam and Alexandria, Lambeth ’98, the offices of Lambeth Palace and the Anglican Communion, GAFCON, FoCA, CANA, ACNA etc., we have been unable to focus proper attention on the abusive, immature, manipulative behaviour of many of the participants in these dramas.

It has happened many, many times, but Bishop David Anderson’s advice to conservative Anglican Primates treat the next Primates’ meeting as a battleground at which they can scheme to outflank the Presiding Bishop and the Archbishop of Canterbury is a prime example and Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini’s reference to homosexuality as being ‘moral genocide’ another.

We will never, never come to a mature understanding of human sexuality and the place of LGBT people in society and church while bishops and Primates behave like this. They are setting an appalling, unchristian example before our Church, our Provinces and our congregations. Theirs is a disgraceful example of leadership, authority, power and spirituality.

I see this behaviour being acted out at General Synod debates on women in the episcopate, in the schismatic church bodies in North America and in the attitude towards LGBT people expressed by the majority of African Primates.

The Anglican Communion is faced with a huge challenge. How can the key decision making bodies, the Anglican Consultative Council, the Primates meeting and the Lambeth Conference (were the conservatives to attend) make considered, theologically competent, emotionally mature, adult decisions, when some of the participants are not able to act in a mature, adult way?

The comments posted by ‘anonymous’ may be given credence in the worlds of North American schismatics, English misogynists and African Provinces where concepts of sexual difference are novel, but at least I can moderate them and delete them when they are inappropriate. It’s not so easy to moderate and delete inappropriate behaviour from the Anglican Communion.

Colin Coward

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The Christian behaviour of Primates - do we expect appropriate or abusive, adult or infantile?

2010-10-09T17:07:00.006+01:00

Should we expect senior Anglican leaders to behave in a mature, adult, non-abusive way? I raise the question as a result of reports ahead of the next Primates meeting to be held in Dublin in February.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has invited all the Primates, including the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Dr Katherine Jefferts Schori. The Archbishop of the Indian Ocean, the Most Revd Ian Ernest has already confirmed that he will not attend the next Primates’ Meeting because the US Presiding Bishop will be present. He wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury in the summer urging him to exclude her from future Primates’ Meetings and telling the Archbishop that he will not attend if his conditions are not fulfilled.

Presenting the Archbishop of Canterbury with conditions about your attendance at the Primates meeting is inappropriate. If the Archbishop has invited the Presiding Bishop and she is attending, whatever the difference of opinion in the Communion, Primates should be gracious and generous enough in their pattern of Christian life to attend. Ian Ernest issues threats and is trying to manipulate the Archbishop and it isn’t mature behaviour.

Global South Primates in general are apparently meeting later this month to discuss whether they will boycott Dublin, refusing en masse to attend.

The Rt Revd David Anderson, a suffragan bishop within the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, urges a different course of action in a letter which can be read here.

He encourages conservative bishops to attend and advises them that if Dr Jefferts Schori is there, they should either shut her out of the room or remove “by force of numbers” the Presiding Bishop of the American Episcopal Church (not physically, he says, but by either voting her off the ‘island’, or recessing to another room and not letting her in). Male power in action – how gallant.

The action proposed by Bishop David Anderson is infantile. If Dr Williams objects to this action he says, the meeting could go ahead in a separate room without the Archbishop. When my outraged infant considers what action I might dream of taking in response to something that has made me angry, I quickly see it for what it is and dismiss it, turning to a more adult course of action. Not so Bishop David Anderson.

He writes that without the orthodox Primates in attendance it could be a dangerous meeting, giving opinion and credence to teachings and beliefs that are not representative of orthodox Anglicanism. He doesn’t believe staying home from the field of battle helps win a war over the truth and nature of Christianity within Anglicanism.

As he contemplates a meeting of the Primates of the Anglican Communion, he sees war, a battle, something dangerous.

What’s more important – that partnered lesbian and gay people who chose as adults to express their love sexually in a relationship should be excluded from the Communion unless they change their behaviour and cease having sex, or that those who are responsible for the pastoral, moral and theological life of the Communion should model mature, adult, appropriate Christian behaviour?

For 7 years I have observed those Anglican leaders who claim to be orthodox acting and speaking in ways that are immature, sometimes infantile and abusive. My personal opinion as a gay Christian is that the behaviour of this group is doing far more damage to the Church than I am doing in expressing love for my partner.

Colin Coward

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The appointment of bishops – interviews introduced – is this news?

2010-10-05T11:53:00.003+01:00

Behind the scenes all sorts of conversations are taking place amongst those of us dreaming of and working for a Church of England and Anglican Communion in which justice is done, women and LGBT people fully included, and where decisions are made in an adult way in an open process and communicated with clarity. At present in England a culture of secrecy predominates.

The LGBT Anglican Coalition is working creatively in relationship with Inclusive Church and Thinking Anglicans. The focus of our work is varied but there is a great capacity to be generous towards each other and to share dreams, ideas and strategies. We are, at heart, a fellowship of Christians, Anglicans, some with big egos, some with very practical skills, who enjoy working towards a common goal in the context of warm friendship.

That’s an introduction to yet another example of the way in which the Church of England works. It raises further questions about the culture of the Church and the way changes are made and communicated, reinforcing my belief that the whole system needs a dramatic and radical change of ethos. Information about change slides unwillingly into the public arena and often comes to light by sheer chance.

Thanks to Simon Sarmiento and Peter Owen at Thinking Anglicans I’ve learnt a bit more about the processes of the Crown Nominations Commission (CNC).

Simon wondered if I had been referring to Jeffrey John and Southwark in a previous post. Jeffrey certainly knew he had been nominated, says Simon, because everybody nominated nowadays is asked to supply documentation to the commission. Starting last week with the Bradford meeting, those still remaining on the list for the second CNC meeting are asked to attend the CNC for interview. So they definitely know they have been nominated.

I wondered how widespread the knowledge about the change in interviewing practice that started with Bradford is. And I wondered what inadequacies are still in the system.

Peter says he’s not aware that there has been any formal announcement about interviews being introduced. Isn’t it surprising that such a significant change which affects the appointment of new bishops has happened without people really knowing? Those attending interviews will know and the members of the CNC will know. But the current version of the guide to the process (Briefing for Members of Vacancy in See Committees) prepared by the Archbishops' Appointments Secretary that you can download here is dated November 2009 and makes no mention of interviews.

Peter spoke to a member of the CNC who thinks people were told at July's General Synod but Peter (who was there) doesn't recall hearing anything. He says it could have been in a GS Misc paper or a notice that wasn't given to the press; it being somewhat hit or miss which papers are given to the press or put online. The first he knew that interviews had actually started was when he happened to see it mentioned on the Salisbury diocesan website when he was looking for something else.

This whole process highlights what is so wrong about the way the Church of England functions and the way bishops come to be. At present they are nominated, which may or may not be better than being appointed. A committee which meets in secret recommends the nomination following consultation. But the process is not transparent. Bishops are not elected as in the Episcopal Church, and the TEC process is such a novelty for the CofE and the rest Communion that few are aware that in the USA bishops are ELECTED – and meet real, ordinary people in the diocese first, so that the opinions and experience of the people of the diocese can be taken into account.

There are advantages and disadvantages, just as there were when diocesans appointed suffragans with a greater degree of freedom and Prime Ministers were able to impose their will on the process of diocesan appointments. At least back then we got some bishops with strong characters and personalities – but we also got the mavericks.

The second thing that is clearly wrong is the lack of transparency in making changes in the process of appointing bishops. Most of the changes being made in CNC procedures follow from recommendations made in the 2001 Perry report, although the report didn’t think interviews were a good idea. The Church, each diocese, those of us for whom the appointment of bishops matters a lot – women, LGBT clergy and others – need to know when the system has changed and why and how, because it can work to our very serious disadvantage as many supporters of CA have and are finding to their cost.

I wonder who is being best served by the current process. Is it the wider church, the people of the diocese, or is it, as I suspect, those who function within the system with a mindset that needs to control the process and the information that is made available publicly.

Colin Coward

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How to make a difference - but first, examples of dysfunction and abuse in the Church

2010-10-04T14:20:00.002+01:00

In my post on Saturday about the existence of gay Primates and bishops I accused the Church of England and the Anglican Communion of being infected by a culture of fear, secrecy, bigotry, intimidation, abuse, dishonesty and collusion – quite a list! I argued that the Church is going to be healthier and more Christian the more it is able to be transparent, open and honest.

I was made aware last week of the dysfunctional workings of the Crown Nominations Commission. Leaks about the deliberations of the Commission have wounded individual priests who were not asked in advance whether they wished to be nominated but who learnt subsequently that they had been rejected. None of us likes to feel rejected, especially when we are rejected in our absence with no opportunity to speak for ourselves.

I also learnt about a priest whose appointment as an incumbent was about to be announced when the diocesan bishop intervened at the last moment and vetoed the appointment – because the priest is gay. LGBT clergy can experience rejection after rejection and never know for sure whether they were not appointed because another candidate had clearly superior gifts or because of their sexuality. These rejections play on your mind – is my sexuality the reason that I have been rejected – again – and this is even more true if you have been open and honest and taken risks. So resentment against the Church and bishops builds together with a feeling that it is better to join the ranks of those who dissemble, hiding their sexuality and their partner.

The corrupting, corrosive influence of dishonesty and secrecy impinges everywhere in the life of our Church, a fear driven by a group estimated in the UK at 1.5% of the population in the latest Social Attitudes survey (though I suspect the survey underestimates the total, certainly in the House of Bishops). Forward in Faith is an organisation in which a far higher percentage of its membership than the national population is gay (not sure about lesbians). It is also one of the most homophobic environments in which to be gay, in deep denial about the sexuality of its gay priests. It isn’t surprising that it behaves corporately in such a negative, defensive way. There is a sickness at the core of this group from its leadership down which denies that gay men form a significant percentage of its membership. Being gay is not an impediment to being a Christian, a priest, a bishop, but in my view, being misogynistic, dishonest, less than your true self, is an impediment.

Let me turn to another example – the presence of lobby groups at the Primates meetings in Dromantine and Dar Es Salaam. There is a world of difference between being present to report on the meeting and to socialise with Primates and organising an operations centre in close proximity or even in the same hotel where briefing papers can be written and distributed and strategy meetings held – with conservative Primates. Ask ++Rowan and other Primates who were present about the corrosive effect of these Primates and individuals from Anglican Mainstream England and VirtueOnline USA on the trust and atmosphere inside the meeting.

What about the refusal to receive communion alongside other Primates or the refusal to attend Lambeth, the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion or the Primates meeting? Isn’t this absence a denial of Christian friendship and charity, a refusal to acknowledge another’s humanity? Isn’t this utterly basic to our identity in Christ? Sadly not. Conservatives stay away because those they want to eradicate from the Communion were invited and dared to attend. It’s happening again as preparations are made for the Primates meeting in Dublin in January 2011. These threats are utterly, totally unchristian. We should not be intimidated by them and name them accurately, as actions which corrupt the life of the Church.

Yet another example – I was told by someone who chanced on them that conservative evangelicals in the English House of Bishops meet separately in the course of HoB meetings at which they discuss strategies designed to undermine and challenge the Archbishops and the mind of the House (except that there isn’t a Mind of the House but 5 or more competing sub-sets of bishops). Other groups of self-interested bishops may meet, for all I know, but this developing pattern further undermines the coherence and integrity of the House.

One bishop, not a member of the House, Alan Wilson of Buckingham, who describes himself as the most junior of the junior (no Alan, I’m more lowly and insignificant than you!) wrote on Facebook that he sees the problem exactly and it's not about the ethics of sexual identity but our own integrity as a Church. Bishops are supposed to care for the wellbeing of the Church and any organisation that loses touch with its own values threatens its own credibility. The ethics of lying are pretty simple (thou shalt not bear false witness).

How do we work towards changing this culture of secrecy and dishonesty? I maintain that it is corrosive of healthy church life, together with the behaviour of closeted LGBT people and the impact of lobby groups which are unhealthily obsessed with other people’s sexuality.

Take small steps
There are many small ways in which we can be doing something that changes the dynamic of our church life. Becoming aware, having courage to initiate conversations, remembering to question what doesn’t feel right, learning to listen to your inner voice.

Perspective
Getting the current state of affairs into a better perspective, ++Rowan, ++John, House of Bishops, General Synod, would be a dramatically significant first step. The behaviour of many in the Communion (independent of their views about homosexuality) is a disgrace which is infecting and corrupting the Church.

Build relationships
Create networks, relationships and friendships at every level of church life – and across difference – don’t allow others to marginalise us in their attempt to portray themselves as victims. It’s more difficult to be secretive, to organise conspiracies and to project onto others when you are in relationship with people rather than in denial of their presence and when you allow a holy light to shine on the encounters.

Pray
Well, obviously, for a gay activist, prayer comes first, 7am every morning! Pray openly, reflectively, trustingly, quietly attentive, yearning and listening to the loving, gentle, tender, intimate presence of God in your heart and soul. Trust – trust God, trust God’s infinite variety and complexity and simplicity in creation. Tune in to your own experience of God and trust, and pray for imagination, vision and enlightenment.

Colin Coward

Changing Attitude needs all the help we can get to further our campaign to change Anglican attitudes. To contribute to our work by becoming a supporter, please click here; or to make a donation click here.

Kenyan Government Minister urges acceptance of lesbian and gay people

2010-10-03T14:31:00.005+01:00

The Revd Michael Kimindu, Changing Attitude’s contact person in Kenya, has alerted me to pro-gay comments made by a Kenyan Government Minister. Special Programmes Minister Esther Murugi (second from right in the photo taken at the symposium) told participants at a national symposium on HIV/Aids held last Thursday in Mombasa which targetted homosexuals, lesbians and sex workers that the government had no option but to address the community’s concerns.

She asked Kenyans to accept prostitutes and homosexuals as part of the society. "We have to accept people the way they are and embrace them in the society. We need to learn to live with men who have sex with other men… we are in the 21st century and things have changed,” she told the symposium. Ms Murugi said the group was an independent constituency and should not be stigmatised because of sexual inclination.

Michael is clearly excited by this development and told me that the minister is on their side in recommending acceptance of lesbian and gay people, embracing them in society and allowing them to marry. He met 5 Anglicans, all from the same congregation, at a gathering of LGBT people on 25th September. They promised to introduce Michael to many other lesbian and gay Anglicans and he says that there is evident interest in becoming involved with Changing Attitude.

Churches condemn the Minister’s remarks
The Federation of Evangelical Indigenous Christian Churches of Kenya (FEICCK) representing more than 74 churches petitioned the President Mwai Kibaki to sack the Cabinet Minister over her remarks. FEICCK chairman Bishop Dr Joseph Methu said: “This should happen in the shortest time possible; failure to which we shall not be left with any other option other than to ask those who care about righteousness and morality to demonstrate against her.“

Ms Murugi discredited her reputation and was unfit to hold public office, he said, warning of street demonstrations. Dr Methu stressed that unless intended to invite God’s wrath, Kenyans should not dare to allow homosexuality and lesbianism to thrive in the country.

“God will punish all forms of immorality despite who is promoting it and at whatever level. We have observed Hon Murugi Transforming herself to becoming a trouble shooter and one who makes statements focused on demeaning and antagonizing the faith community in Kenya“ he told the Nation. He said the faith community in Kenya respects the rights of all persons but will oppose all forms of propagation of ungodliness and immorality.

Moslem reaction
The organising secretary of the Council of Imams and Preachers of Kenya, Sheikh Mohammed Khalifa, said the utterances were “satanic and contrary to Africa culture”. “God in his holy books (Quran and Bible) cursed homosexuality and directed us to fight it. The minister has offended Kenyans who passed a new constitution that criminalises the vice,” he said.

Sheikh Khalifa urged President Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga to take stern action against the minister. The Kenya National Muslim Advisory Council chairman Sheikh Juma Ngao demanded that Ms Murugi resign or be sacked. “The minister and National Aids Control Council officials should create their own country which allows homosexual, lesbian and prostitution acts,” he said.

Colin Coward

Support for Changing Attitude's developing work in Kenya is urgently needed. Please consider joining as a supporter or make a donation for Michael Kimindu's pioneering work in Kenya

Do gay bishops and primates exist?

2010-10-02T15:40:00.005+01:00

I am utterly fed up with being talked about as if I don’t exist, by which I mean don’t exist authentically as a gay man as if I am mistaken in my awareness of my own identity. I am utterly sick and tired of having Genesis 2 (male and female he created them), Leviticus 18.22 (you must not lie with a man as with a woman) and Romans 1.27 (and men, giving up natural relations with women, too burn with lust for one another) quoted and thrown at me as defining me as a corrupt, inadequate Christian.

For 55 years I have known my identity and I have never wavered in knowing my identity despite the 55 years in which the church has tried to undermine, chip away at and denigrate my own self-knowledge and self-confidence. For 50 years I have been maturing in faith and prayer. The constantly corrosive narrative of doubt about LGBT identity, gay maturity, gay love, gay fidelity, in the Anglican Communion and other faith communities sickens me every day (and at times in my life, literally sickened me).

Archbishop Rowan’s inability to be crystal clear about the identity, Christian fidelity and integrity of my many hundreds of LGBT friends across the Communion, some of whom are friends we share, is both intolerable – and understandable. I understand why people have a different perspective on life and life’s priorities from me – I try to be a tolerant, generous, inclusive Anglican.

I want to try and explain something which I have found hard to think about and articulate clearly but which has come increasingly into focus. I had an incredibly valuable conversation with Andrew Goddard of Fulcrum yesterday in Pimlico where his wife Lis is now Vicar of St James-the-Less. Andrew and I first met some 10 years ago and we have continued to meet regularly and enjoy an extensive conversation in which we have both travelled a long way. Talking with Andrew, who is evangelical, orthodox and traditional in his own terms, has helped me learn about myself and explore my own theology, ethics and faith. We are nowhere as far apart now in our theology and thinking as we were ten years ago, but there are still important areas of difference. Our extended conversation offers an important model to the Anglican Communion, one that I have no doubt has the blessing of Archbishop Rowan.

Yesterday with Andrew, I was able to describe with more clarity than ever before why I have deep confidence in my awareness of my sexual identity, my faith and life with God, my prayerfulness and the integrity of my calling as a priest who is gay and partnered and does not have a vocation to celibacy. What is unusual about the conversation with Andrew is that I can tell him these things, a conservative Christian, with such freedom and clarity. Usually I am conscious of the need to be cautious, defensive and self-protective when engaging with less-generous people.

Let me try and take a next step in my thoughts (in my mind these things are all connected, but it doesn’t appear quite so obvious when I try and write them down).

On Thursday I attended the Westminster Media Forum Seminar on Reflecting Diversity – the LGBT Community and the Media. Another element in my thought process came into focus. Peter Tatchell talked about the double-standard of the BBC towards LGBT issues compared with black, Jewish or Moslem issues. The BBC still sometimes presents inappropriate gay stereotypes and interviews people with extremely homophobic views such as Stephen Green of Christian Voice ‘for the sake of balance’ who, if he represents anyone, represents a tiny minority on the extreme Christian fringe. Despite this, he was given a privileged role in Sunday Morning Live on BBC 1 last Sunday, having been flown to the Belfast studio when Sharon Fergusson and myself were confined to web cams at home.

When dealing with black or Jewish issues, the BBC does not wheel out neo-Nazis or anti-Semites to provide balance but in discussions about lesbian and gay issues uses Stephen Green, a homophobe. In the context of the BBC it is generally to be expected that zero tolerance will be given towards racism or prejudice against Jews and Moslems whereas in parts of the Christian community prejudice against Jews, Moslems and women, let alone LGBT people, is held to be appropriate and justified by scripture and tradition.

NO PREJUDICE which demeans or diminishes another human being created by God is tolerable in my reading of the New Testament and the teaching of Jesus Christ. The first and greatest commandment is to love God, neighbour and self. My goodness, doesn’t Christianity have a lot to learn about prejudice, abuse and intolerance.

The next step in my thoughts – how to tackle this institutionalised, incredibly powerful prejudice against LGBT people in Christianity? Dealing with it in the BBC or the Conservative party has been child’s play compared with the Church.
Every week I discover more and more about the corrupting effect of secrecy in the Church. This week I learnt something more about the dynamics of the Crown Nominations Commission and the appointment of bishops, having already blogged about gay Primates and gay Church of England bishops. On Thinking Anglicans, Bill Dilworth questioned whether there really are 3 gay Primates and Doug said he is interested to know if there is some secret list of Bishops and Primates who happen to be gay
.
Why can’t I name them? Why is the Church left guessing as to their identity? It is because of the hostility, aggression, prejudice and homophobia that is unleashed in the Anglican Communion when a gay or lesbian priest is elected as a bishop in the USA or enters the frame as a candidate in England. I put these numbers into the conversation because of the invisibility of gay Primates and bishops. Their invisibility is connected not only to the culture of institutionalised prejudice in the Anglican Communion but to deeply corrosive and corrupting culture of institutionalised secrecy and fear in the Church of England. This culture inhibits me from freely naming those bishops and Primates.

The culture of secrecy and dishonesty, the inability to be open and transparent and to communicate effectively affects Lambeth Palace, Church House, the Crown Nominations Commission, the Anglican Communion Office, General Synod, dioceses and parishes. It means that people either second-guess information or are left in ignorance. The culture is rampant and is corrupting the life of the Christian community. Every dimension of Church life is affected. People are intimidated by those who I might sometimes want to describe as prejudiced, loud mouthed bigots but whose self-image is as defenders of orthodoxy and tradition. They intimidate the ability of the Archbishop of Canterbury to speak and act freely and they intimidate me – but I have far less to lose.

At the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Jamaica in 2009 I was challenged by leading conservative campaigners to justify why I claimed in the plural that there are three gay Primates. It was the claim of gay Primates in the plural that offended them. They demanded that I prove it by naming them. I refused to tell them because I do not believe it is right to violate people’s privacy and ‘out’ anyone who prefers to remain in the closet.

So how do I know there are three gay Primates? I know one of them personally. I know who the others are and the fact that there are three was confirmed in a conversation in the departure lounge at the airport in Cairo as we were flying back to the UK. I am tempted to name the person, but that would place him or her in a very difficult position and I have no wish to do so. This is the effect of the culture of secrecy and intimidation. It inhibits me from writing freely out of respect for a Christian friend and ensures the invisibility of so many potential gay and lesbian Christian role models.

How do I know there are between 10 and 13 gay bishops in the Church of England? Some I know personally. Friends and colleagues of other bishops repeatedly confirm to me that their friend or colleague is gay. One of them, Peter Wheatley, Bishop of Edmonton, was named as gay and partnered in the national press when first appointed, repeated at the time of Jeffrey John’s trauma in Reading. Two were members of my post-ordination training group in Southwark. One I trained alongside in Cambridge. Some are married, most are single.

The teaching of the Church of England says that being gay is no bar to being appointed as a bishop, and that even being in a Civil Partnership is no bar so long as the relationship is celibate. We know that these Church of England rules cannot be applied as a result of the aggressively hostile campaign against Jeffrey John when he was nominated for Reading in 2003 and the more recent furore over the possibility that he was being considered for Southwark. Bishops who are gay know that were they to come out and talk about their sexuality they would become the focus of abuse and a campaign by conservatives to remove them There would also be an inappropriate focus on their sexuality which would follow them wherever they went. Some of the homophobes in the Church of England would set out to research their past, and I know that some of them have pasts they would prefer to keep hidden.

So the 3 gay Primates and the 10 to 13 gay CofE bishops remain invisible. I understand why they are so discrete. As I know from my own bitter experience, the consequences of being open and visible can be traumatic - hate letters, innuendo, loss of PTO or licence, unwanted attention and media interest. But until openly gay bishops are able to be appointed or until serving gay bishops can safely come out, the Church continues to live with a false reality and their experience and witness is unavailable to the Church. There are no role models (except in the USA), no bishops who can describe their experience or be interviewed by the media (except in the USA), none who can talk personally about their experience in the Primates Meeting, English House of Bishops, in General Synod or their own Diocesan Synod.

Until the culture of fear and secrecy in the Church of England changes, the bigotry is challenged and our Church becomes a place which is free from prejudice against LGBT people, the Episcopal Church will remain the only place where LGBT people can come out and be elected as bishops. I’m tempted to start a new campaign. The culture of secrecy, intimidation and abuse in the Church of England has got to be challenged, undermined and changed.

Colin Coward

Changing Attitude needs all the help we can get to further our campaign to change Anglican attitudes. To contribute to our work by becoming a supporter, please click here; or to make a donation click here.

Gay bishops still don’t exist in the public domain (except in the USA)

2010-09-29T12:25:00.003+01:00

"Gay bishops are all right by me, says Archbishop" was the front page headline in The Times on Saturday. More accurate but far less enticing might have been the line proposed in a comment on Thinking Anglicans - "Single, celibate, preferably virgin and never-once-promoted-gay-equality bishops are all right by me."

I’ve now read the Times interview with the Archbishop in its entirety and want to begin by focussing on something that wasn’t reported elsewhere but is key to my Christian life and witness. Archbishop Rowan told his interviewer that “... the point of praying is to open yourself up to God so God can do what he wants with you. You come with empty hands, as silent as you can be and say, ‘Over to you.’ So you could say the function was to make you the person God wants you to be – in the full awareness that that might not be quite the person you think you want to be.”

Yes indeed. Prayer is opening yourself up to God and both ++Rowan and I pray in a similar way. The intention is to make you the person God wants you to be, and there’s the rub. Does God want me to be a priest? Does God want me to be gay? Does God want me to be celibate? Does God want me to love my partner and enjoy my life with him to the full? What do I do when these conflict, as they do at the moment? When I centre in prayer and say, ‘Over to you’, God still seems to be saying that each of these aspects of me are part of the person God wants me to be.

When Tom Butler became Bishop of Southwark in 1998 I had been given Permission to Officiate (PTO) by his predecessor, Bishop Roy Williamson, having left parish ministry and licence in 1995 when I founded Changing Attitude. Tom arrived having accepted a mandate from Archbishop George Carey that Southwark needed sorting out and the liberal, pro-gay tendency brought to heel. When my PTO needed to be renewed, I met Bishop Tom and he asked me to write a letter confirming my pattern of life. I said I could write such a letter but we would mean different things by it. He acknowledged that would be so. I wrote the letter and my PTO was renewed.

A year later, I came out as having a partner and not being celibate in front
of Bishop Tom at a meeting of the Southwark Lesbian and Gay Support Network. Twenty minutes later, David Page, then Vicar of St Barnabas Clapham Common (with freehold) and chair of Changing Attitude Trustees, did the same, telling Tom that he was about to celebrate his 25th anniversary with his life partner. David continued as Vicar, Tom refused to renew my PTO.

I met David Stancliffe, then Bishop of Salisbury, for the first time in the garden of Buckingham Palace at a garden party held during the Lambeth Conference of 1998. Later, hearing that Tom had refused me a PTO, David offered me one in Salisbury Diocese, where I had no connection apart from my parents living in the diocese. Questions about relationships and celibacy weren’t asked. A year later I accepted, so that when I moved to Devizes 7 years ago with my partner I already held a PTO in the diocese. The PTO was renewed for 3 years on 14 May 2007 by Bishop Stephen Conway of Ramsbury.

In the Times interview, Archbishop Rowan said “there’s no problem about a gay person who’s a bishop … there are traditionally, historically, standards that the clergy are expected to observe. So there’s always a question about the personal life of the clergy.” The interviewer commented that it is an unappealing idea that the Church makes such unnatural demands on its clergy.

If there is no problem with a celibate gay person being a bishop, why are none of the 3 gay Primates in the Anglican Communion able to be open about their sexuality and why are none of the 10 to 13 gay bishops in the Church of England able to be publicly open? Some are married, some or single and celibate, some are not, all are closeted. The recently published survey estimated that 1.5% of the UK are gay or bisexual. Eight percent of Anglican Primates are gay and 10% of Church of England Bishops.

Why have I tucked these statistics away so far down this post? - because it is dangerously unsafe in the Anglican Communion to be openly gay in Nigeria or Uganda and still unsafe to be openly gay (and partnered) in parts of the Church of England. I feel less safe this morning than I did 6 weeks ago before the question of our Civil Partnership became such a contentious issue at the local, diocesan, national and international church levels.

Gay bishops and LGBT clergy are able to exist in the Church of England under two separate conditions. Either they stay in the closet and the Church doesn’t know they are gay (or pretends it doesn’t know) or they live under the care of a bishop who ignores church teaching and the claims made by the Archbishop of Canterbury and licenses and PTOs are given in full knowledge of someone’s sexuality and relational status.

This is intolerable and is what makes me so angry with the Church. Gay bishops are clearly not all right, and it is still impossible in England for the Archbishop to preside over a Church which ordains bishops who are known to be gay. At the moment, we don’t, knowingly, have any gay bishops. Instead, we have don’t ask, don’t tell (Tom Butler’s preferred model in his early Southwark days), dishonesty, duplicity, secrecy, denial – anything but transparency and truth. This is not conducive to a good, holy, Christian pattern of life.

Colin Coward

Changing Attitude needs all the help we can get to further our campaign to change Anglican attitudes. To contribute to our work by becoming a supporter, please click here; or to make a donation click here.

Yearning for change in the Anglican Communion - discrimination wrong, affirmation right

2010-09-27T11:54:00.004+01:00

I want to add my thoughts to those posted by Christina yesterday on the Times interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Ruth Gledhill’s blog and The Times leader. I haven’t read any of The Times material directly, only what is available outside the firewall, so I may be commenting on inaccurate reports and I’m going to be cautious.

The Archbishop, according to Ruth, seems to have said both that he has issues about a "particular choice of life", which makes the question of gay ordination more problematic than the ordination of women because for women, that’s simply about who and what they are.

I think (though I can’t be sure) that the Archbishop is not saying that being gay is a particular choice of life (because he then goes on to say that gay celibate Christians can serve as bishops in the Church of England) but that a choice to live a non-celibate life as a gay priest or bishop is problematic.

Canon Dr Vinay Samuel has commented on the Archbishop’s interview on Anglican Mainstream. He questions the Archbishop’s assumption that being gay is who some people are, that we are not simply different in the way that some people are male, some female, some white, some black. He claims that there is still “no incontrovertible evidence to suggest that orientation is not a choice but an inherited characteristic … although many liberal proponents used orientation to mean an inherited trait.”

Orthodox Anglicans insist, he says, that gay sexual orientation is “a feeling, a choice or even possibly an outcome of certain psycho-social pressures and upbringing” and “[m]ore than two decades of research in many fields has failed to confirm that gays are born that way.” This is Anglican Mainstream’s belief and Vinay Samuel disagrees with it. He says that “if someone believes strongly that they are gay, the church is not rejecting that self understanding out of hand. It may challenge it but it is willing to accept as the way that individual understands his/her sexuality.”

I believe in the core of my being, my identity in creation and in Christ, that I am gay. To suggest, as Mainstream does, that I am mistaken about my core identity, is wounding and destructive of my whole being. Whatever the Archbishop of Canterbury says about what I am and am not allowed to do as a gay Christian priest, I need to know incontrovertibly, to use Vinay Samuel’s word, that who I understand myself to be is who I really am, and that the Church of England acknowledges my self-identity and the Anglican Communion acknowledges the identity of those across the Communion who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

If there are minority campaign groups such as Anglican Mainstream who wish to argue that I am mistaken in my self-identity, they have to freedom to do so, of course. If the Anglican Communion, in the person of the Archbishop of Canterbury or the other Instruments of Communion, fails to recognise me for who I believe I am, along with tens of thousands of other Anglicans, then our differences are profoundly serious.

The Archbishop says that from his appointment to Canterbury eight years ago he was “conscious” of the issue of homosexuality as “a wound in the whole ministry”. I hope this means that there is a wound in the whole ministry of the world-wide Communion because gay people are present as priests and bishops and parts of the Communion experience our very presence as problematic, a wound – not that being gay itself is the wound.

He said that being gay is no bar to being ordained as a priest or bishop. “To put it very simply, there’s no problem about a gay person who’s a bishop.” I take that to mean that the concerns I express above are answered by the Archbishop. I am gay and I am a priest. But Ruth queries the Archbishop. Is there really NO PROBLEM with being gay and ordained?

There are traditionally, historically, standards that the clergy are expected to observe, such as fidelity in marriage. Lesbian and gay Christians are not challenging the church’s traditional, historic standard of the expectation of fidelity in relationship. We are questioning why lesbian and gay adults who form permanent, faithful, stable relationships should not make vows to each other in the presence of God and our congregation and have our covenant relationships blessed by the church, at least equivalent to marriage.

Ruth asked the Archbishop what is wrong with a gay bishop having a partner. “I think because the scriptural and traditional approach to this doesn’t give much ground for being positive about it. The Church at the moment doesn’t quite know what to make of it...” When asked if the Archbishop personally wished it could be overcome in some way there was silence and then: “Pass.”

It’s true that the Church corporately doesn’t know what to make of it. I would disagree that the scriptural and traditional approach doesn’t give much ground for being positive and here is one of the places that much more work needs to be done.

Is it really so difficult for the Archbishop to say what’s wrong with having partnered gay bishops, asks Ruth. He continued: “We’re in the middle of vastly difficult conversations about it, and I don’t want to put thumbs on scales.” I don’t think I understand what he means by thumbs on scales, but I most certainly understand that the conversations are vastly difficult, and not only in Africa, South America or Asia.

The conversations in my home church in Devizes about our Civil Partnership and the intention to follow it with a Communion service celebrating friendship have been intense. Some people who have been friends for 6 years have shuned me, others have left the congregation. The added pressure on our incumbent became intolerable with the result that he has taken time off. At the micro and the macro level, conversation is difficult and relationships become severed.

I am committed to developing relationships across difference following the example modeled by the Archbishop. It means going out of your way to take risks, cross the street towards people, not the other way in order to avoid them, and turning up in places where you are unlikely to receive an enthusiastic welcome from other Anglicans. The Anglican Communion, local, national and international, is not very good at doing this.

The Times leader says that in seeking a settlement within Anglicanism: “Dr Williams risks diminishing its prophetic voice. If he were to worry less about politics, he might find the resources to strengthen Anglicanism and find spiritual fulfillment of his own. For with his profound theological insight, Dr Williams is better placed than anyone to, in the words of Matthew’s Gospel, discern the signs of the times.”

Rowan’s spirituality and profound theological insight has been a core part of my inspiration since I learnt from him in lectures at Westcott House and more crucially, from joining him every morning in the chapel for 30 minutes of contemplation.

Meditating with other people every day in this way leads into an experience of prayer and encounter with God that has deepened with the passing years and infuses my work for Changing Attitude as much as it infuses the Archbishop’s ministry and role in the Communion. I can’t help but wish, with The Times, that he use his historic role of interpretation in the tradition of Christendom to affirm as a Christian leader and a theologian that discrimination against homosexuals is wrong. I wish for more, of course – that he positively affirm that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are loved by God and welcomed unreservedly by the Church, with our partners, into the threefold ministry.

Colin Coward

Changing Attitude needs all the help we can get to further our campaign to change Anglican attitudes. To contribute to our work by becoming a supporter, please click here; or to make a donation click here.

TUCKED AWAY BEHIND THE PAY WALL ...

2010-09-26T17:25:00.004+01:00

of The Times is an extensive interview with Archbishop Rowan, recorded just prior to the recent visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the United Kingdom. Many items were covered, apparently, but it is the Archbishop’s remarks about gay bishops that have been extensively reported and commented on.

According to the summaries I have seen, Archbishop Rowan acknowledged that it is acceptable, according to Scripture and Tradition, for someone who is gay to be ordained as a bishop, but not for them to enter into a same-sex relationship. They must, he contends, be celibate and remain so.

This is very much the line taken by Issues in Human Sexuality (1991) with regard to the clergy as a whole, but clerical celibacy has never been an expectation in Anglicanism, indeed, from the days of Archbishop Cranmer and his – initially ‘secret’ - wife, the reverse is true, and it seems very strange that Anglicans should be advocating this particular option at a time when, according to recent polls, priestly celibacy, a requirement of the Roman Catholic priesthood, is being questioned, for various reasons, by the laity of that Church.

According to the summaries I have read so far the Archbishop bases his argument on Tradition, but the tradition – or traditions – within the Church, especially the Church of England, about same-sex relationships have been extremely varied. A study (such as Peter Coleman’s Christian Attitudes to Homosexuality) of the relevant texts, be they biblical or ecclesiastical, will, almost inevitably, give the impression that the Church has taken a mainly negative view of homosexuality, but beyond and around these texts has been the pastoral practice of clergy and congregations, which has often, in past years at least, been welcoming and friendly to gay people. Indeed, whatever the number of gay people as a percentage of the total population, http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/2010/09/25/archbishop-there-is-no-incontrovertible-evidence-that-gays-are-born-that-way/ it is well-known that the priesthood, certainly in twentieth century England, has been a gay-friendly profession, and hence the significant number of gay clergy.

The support given by Archbishop Michael Ramsey, and other bishops in the House of Lords, which led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 is itself part of the Anglican tradition, and while it may be argued that they were only keen to end the scandal of police entrapment, and were not advocating homosexual equality, this piece of our history is a reminder that, since then, we have been in an entirely new situation as regards same-sex relationships, rendering it insufficient simply to invoke Scripture and Tradition – except in the broadest sense of loving fidelity. The emergence of gay couples and families has presented the Church with a novel situation (though there are historical examples of same-sex covenants of friendship) which is not properly addressed by simply restating the Christian ideal of marriage as the union of a man and a woman, unless perhaps, behind that, there has been an intuition, never actually stated but almost implicit, that marriage might provide a model for same-sex couples as well.

However, let us accept, for a moment, the idea that a gay person called to be a bishop must be celibate; why then, we may ask, was it not possible in 2003 for Dr Jeffrey John to be consecrated as Bishop of Reading, given that he was known to be celibate at that time? The interviewer asked this question and in answering it Archbishop Rowan apologised for the episode, but, as I recall, the objection to Dr John was not that he was sexually active, it was that he had advocated, in contradiction to ‘the Tradition’, Christian partnerships that were ‘permanent, faithful and stable’. His preferment to the episcopate was quashed on the basis of his teaching something other than the official party line on this matter, a test of religious orthodoxy that has become even more stringent since then, in that every ordinand, as well as every bishop in the Church Of England, is required to ‘submit’ to the teaching on homosexuality contained in the ‘discussion document’ Issues in Human Sexuality, a step that has made the Church of England, in spite of repeated denials, institutionally homophobic, and that is completely contrary to the spirit of intellectual freedom and enquiry that has, hitherto, been one of Anglicanism’s most prized traditions.

The Global South missionary delusion

2010-09-23T09:29:00.004+01:00

Shopping for yam and Knorr chicken stock cubes in Brixton market last week, I was served by a Nigerian guy who had arrived in the UK 10 years ago when he was 22. He asked if I had visited Nigeria. Nope, I said. Why not? I told him that I’d visited Ghana 4 times and felt safe there, but was uncertain about safety in Nigeria. I should go, he said, Nigeria is safer than Brixton. After a few more exchanges, I decided to take the risk of telling him I was afraid to visit because I’m gay and have a public profile. Being gay is not a problem for him, he said. Would it have been a problem when he was in Nigeria, I asked – Yes. Have his views changed as a result of being in the UK? Yes.

In an article for Evangelicals Now entitled The Africans are coming, available on Anglican Mainstream, Canon Chris Sugden writes about the second all-African Bishops Conference in Entebbe, Uganda. He says the African Anglican Church is now going to move on to the front foot and actively promote orthodox Christian faith “from everywhere to anywhere.” They think that the Anglican Church in the West has forgotten or abandoned many of the foundations of the Christian gospel that we brought to Africa. Africa will now take responsibility for bringing that biblical gospel back to the missionary homelands.

Oh the glory of the conservative evangelical world view, shared by Canon Chris Sugden and, as I think he assumes, millions of Anglicans in every part of the world apart from those white, western Provinces infected by the terrible disease of liberal revisionism. Conservatives, of course, are faithful, orthodox and Biblical in a way which I, gay, white and western, am not according to the judgment of Global South leaders. I would like to suggest that their judgment has a tad of a tendency to arrogance.

What they fail to understand in their myopic wisdom is that there are tens of thousands of African and Caribbean Anglicans in this country who do not share the Global South theology and message. Africans living in the UK do not hold the attitudes expressed by some (and I stress that it is not all) of the bishops in Entebbe. Many Africans arriving in the UK and the USA are changed by their experience and revise their views on issues such as homosexuality.

The congregation I served in Wandsworth, South London, was 50/50 black and white, the black members coming from west and east Africa and the Caribbeans from Jamaica, St Lucia and other countries. All of them were at ease with me being gay.

Anglican Mainstream and their allies in the Global South live in a fantasy bubble in which they fantasize about rescuing western Anglicans from our faithlessness and perversion. Such arrogance …

They are not alone in failing to have an accurate picture of the UK, thanks in part to the work of Anglican Mainstream. The Pope is reported as having had an about-turn, saying yesterday that his visit to Britain had enabled him “to see how much the Christian legacy is still strong and active at every level of social life” and how he had the opportunity to get to know “a people rich in culture and faith”. This is in stark contrast to the warning he had issued before arriving and experiencing the UK for himself. He had warned against “aggressive forms of secularism” and an aide had described Britain as prey to an “aggressive new atheism”.

Chris Sugden concedes that none of the conservative primates claims to know or possess the whole truth but continues that church has been entrusted with the “faith once delivered to the saints” and to witness to the truth entrusted to it – as if we in the west do not have such faith but the conservatives do.

There is something appallingly wrong in Chris’s description of African and Caribbean Anglicans who have come to live in the UK. We have long welcomed overseas Anglicans to the UK and treated them as “objects of mission”, says Chris. Well, excuse me, but I have never treated overseas Anglicans as “objects of mission”. I have welcomed them as co-workers in the Gospel. Those who have worked with me would be shocked at Chris’s description of them.

Chris then makes another grave error of ignorance or deliberation. They live here, he says, with children and grandchildren born in these islands. Many have senior roles in public life – members of the House of Lords, leaders of Trades Unions, senior doctors. He then writes about examples of recent months (well-publicised by Anglican Mainstream) of Christians of African origin standing up for Christian witness in their workplace and losing their jobs as a result.

These people are a tiny minority of the African and Caribbean Christians living in this country, who have integrated into UK society and continue to live their faith with commitment and passion, but without some of the prejudices that the Global South would like to import to the west.

Chris quotes Vinay Samuel who asks: “What is the new that the African Anglicans will bring to Britain? What has God given them in their experience in the intervening century which is something that Britain needs?” It’s a question worth asking, because they do bring new perspectives and insights. African Christians do themselves less than justice in claiming to bring back to the UK solely the gospel we have forgotten, says Chris. The African peoples have faced the legacy of slavery, colonialism, racism, their own internal conflicts, the oppression of their own rulers and the challenges of economic poverty. They have a rich understanding of the nature and resources of the Christian faith in addressing such matters.

This is indeed a valuable resource. And we have other, equally valuable resources to contribute. I’ve just finished reading A Simplified Life by Verena Schiller, a member of the Community of the Holy Name who has lived as a hermit in North Wales for the last 25 years. She writes that “Our masks do not fool God but neither are they removed until the time is right and we begin to see them for ourselves. There is a great deal of painful discovery on this journey to where God is the centre and the context.” “[I]n a life that is attuned to the sense that we are not ultimately in control this transformation does begin and we are gradually brought home to ourselves.”

“Through prayer, through attentiveness and stillness at our heart’s centre, we are gradually transformed and begin to discern the way forward, the path to tread. And this ‘transformation’ is contagious; it ripples out in ways of which we are unaware. We respond where we see compassion and love in others. Love stands at the intersection of our inhumanity to one another and our ravaging of the earth, and begin to transform it.”

Verena writes from her roots in the Celtic eremitical tradition. It is a Christian path shared by many in Changing Attitude and amongst those working for a transformed, inclusive church. We in the west still follow an authentic Christian path, steeped in prayer and faithful practice, whatever the Global South leaders may think about us and however much they believe us to be in need of missionary endeavour because we have lost the true Gospel. We haven’t!

Colin Coward

Changing Attitude needs all the help we can get to further our campaign to change Anglican attitudes. To contribute to our work by becoming a supporter, please click here; or to make a donation click here.

Changing Attitude's contribution to the House of Bishop's working groups

2010-09-22T11:43:00.005+01:00

The Archbishop of Canterbury appointed two groups with four bishops in each, one broadly conservative, the other broadly liberal, which John Saxbee, Bishop of Lincoln and CA patron, has convened. He aksed Changing Attitude to send our thoughts and after consulting with our local groups and supporters online, the following comments have been forwarded:

Issues in Human Sexuality
Issues in Human Sexuality should be abandoned as a document defining Church of England teaching about the sexuality of LGBT people. Public perception is that the Church has a pathological pre-occupation with human sexuality. The official Church of England position is deeply at odds with what the majority of people in our congregations think and the practice of many bishops towards LGBT clergy and laity. For the majority of church goers human sexuality is not an issue. They want the church to welcome and grant equality to LGBT people. People find the church's teaching about homosexuality wrong or irrelevant, reinforcing the view that Christianity is irrelevant and repressive. The churches disapproval of homosexuality has driven many people away from its doors and caused considerable pain to others.

Positive same-sex ethic
The church should develop a positive ethic for same-sex relationships stressing fidelity and commitment.

Mission and evangelism - the gospel for LGBT people
What is the gospel of Jesus Christ for LGBT people as they discover that they are accepted by wider society? The secular world is setting the agenda for liberation in the UK and western cultures and society accepts LGBT people and grants equal rights. Conservative Christian attitudes lead many LGBT people who attend church to hide or deny their sexuality. Some LGBT people still experience bigotry, hatred, and prejudice. The church should speak out strongly against bigotry and prejudice.

LGBT ordination and ministry
A vocation to the priesthood for LGBT people should be tested without reference to their sexuality. The recommendation sometimes made to become a Reader isn't a solution – some bishops impose ‘Issues’ as a requirement for Readers. The House of Bishops should adopt a policy that Canon C4 paragraph 1 (ordination) does not exclude men and women whose sexual orientation is to persons of the same sex, and who are "of virtuous conversation and good repute and such as to be of wholesome example and pattern to the flock of Christ". Many LGBT clergy are forced to live a lie and hide their sexuality because they fear disclosure may affect their chances of preferment or appointment to a new post within their diocese.

Relationships and Civil Partnerships
Faithful committed gay relationships have positive moral value and deserve the church’s support not condemnation. Civil partnerships should be celebrated and blessed in church. General Synod should approve a public liturgy for Prayer and Dedication of a Civil Partnership. Commitment to a life-partner should be equally acceptable for clergy and lay people. Acceptance of gay relationships does not weaken or undermine heterosexual marriage. Heterosexual marriage is not the only place for children to be raised. Gay couples can be good parents too.

Nurture or nature
Homosexuality is not a matter of choice. Gay identity is real, not chosen.

Reparative therapy
The experience of LGBT people who have undergone reparative therapy is that it is harmful and should not be approved by the Church.

Intersex and Transgender
‘Issues’ is deeply flawed because it takes little account of intersex and transgender people. Both transgender and intersex are matters of gender identity rather than sexuality. Intersex is a medical condition not necessarily related to either gender identity or sexuality. Intersex disturbs hetero-normative assumptions about sex, gender and sexuality.

Anglican diversity
We need to affirm Anglican diversity, living with widely varying Christian attitudes. The church should allow room for pastoral and theological development. Reality is more complex than the habitual conservative/liberal dualism.

House of Bishops
There is a diversity of opinion and practice in the House of Bishops. Some bishops dissent from the Church's current official position. Bishops need to have the courage of their convictions and speak more truthfully.

Colin Coward

Changing Attitude needs all the help we can get to further our campaign to change Anglican attitudes. To contribute to our work by becoming a supporter, please click here; or to make a donation click here.

Polyamoury right or wrong? – a response to Peter Ould

2010-09-14T20:23:00.002+01:00

El-staplador posted a comment on yesterday’s blog: “…as someone who believes that Christians can be involved in polyamorous relationships with love and integrity, I was extremely disappointed to read your comment equating it with paedophilia and bestiality. Please don't dismiss other Christians' reality and truth because it doesn't match up with your own.”

Linking polyamory with paedophilia, bestiality and homosexuality is one of Anglican Mainstream's tactics and a particular obsession of Lisa Nolland with whom I was interviewed recently on Radio 5 Live. It is a strategy Mainstream uses repeatedly to denigrate all forms of relationship and intimacy which they categorise as deviant from their definition of God's norm. Anglican Mainstream’s strategy is to undermine the holiness and integrity of those who follow a Christian path different from theirs.

Because my reply to El-staplador was as carefully phrased as my original blog, Peter Ould asked whether I am in favour of (some) polyandrous relationships as within God's will for humans?

I am in favour of faithful, monogamous, life-long relationships between two consenting adults. (I was going to write ‘mature adults’ but that would beg a lot of questions. Are heterosexual married adults who obsess about bestiality, paedophilia and polyandry in order to denigrate gay relationships mature? Some people who marry are clearly not mature emotionally.) I am also in favour of same-sex life partnerships and I would like the church to make provision for Civil Partnerships to be contracted and blessed in church. I would further like there to be greater spiritual and symbolic equivalence between marriage and civil partnerships.

I condemn relationships which are abusive. Paedophilia and bestiality are both abusive of others and self. My attitude towards paedophiles is nuanced because I have in the past been friends with people who were themselves abused as children, some of whom went on to abuse children themselves. I have no experience of bestiality.

Changing Attitude exists to advocate for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Anglicans Christians. We are not advocates of polyandry and I have no direct experience of polyandrous relationships or those who advocate for them and I do not personally advocate for equality for polyandrous relationships.

My moral opinion about and personal experience of relationships involving more than two people is that they can be unstable and painful for one or more of the people involved.

This week I have been hearing about the pain experienced by people in both heterosexual and gay polyandrous relationships. In one case, a second wife and child was brought into an existing African marriage with deeply distressing results, despite the determination of the first wife to be generous and try and make it work. In the gay case, three men who maintained a triangular relationship when one of the three was living in Africa have discovered that living permanently together in the UK is far more challenging and has destabilized the dynamics between them. But I know of many couple relationships that are unhappy and unstable. There are many reasons for this, not least that individuals mature in different ways and become different from the person their partner first met or married. All relationships are demanding and complex and need deep love and determination to make them work creatively.

Peter Ould’s morality is nuanced and so is mine. Peter says he can understand the situation where a polygamist becomes a Christian and where the moral thing to do is not automatically divorce the polygamous wives, since that would make them destitute.

Peter says he is happy to state that polyandry is not moral and Christians should not enter into polyandrous relationships, since the Biblical model for sexual activity is one male and one female for life, in marriage.

Those following the weekday lectionary will have been reading about King David’s concubines and are about to read of King Solomon’s love of many foreign women and his 700 wives and 300 concubines. Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus Christ tells us that Jesus was descended from a line including David and Solomon (through Bathsheba).

The model I take from the Bible is that God works creatively through varieties of relationships and human activity often without judging or condemning them. His Son is birthed through a family line which undermines the claim that the Biblical model for sexual activity is exclusively one male and one female for life, in marriage. Conservatives will disagree with me.

We live in a church which allows people who have been divorced to be remarried in church. This might be interpreted as faithful to Old Testament practice even if contrary to the teaching of Jesus. I believe there are models of fidelity which Christians should advocate and which are healthy models for all human beings, gay and straight. I also believe that human beings always have and always will have difficulty conforming to these models and pastoral sensitivity and human and divine compassion responds generously and appropriately to all of us.

I believe it is as important to learn compassion as it is to be clear about our moral stance, and that sometimes, a nuanced response is more appropriate and pastoral than making an unequivocal moral statement. If I fail sometimes to make clear judgments about the moral behaviour of particular individuals with the result that some see me subtly condoning polyandry, then so be it. I believe that anyone who takes the Bible absolutely literally, Genesis 2.23, Leviticus 20.13, 1 Kings 11.3 and Mark 10.11, must also allow for polygamous and polyandrous relationships as well as fidelity in marriage and the stoning of homosexuals.

I believe that the tactic of repeatedly linking LGBT people with bestiality and paedophilia in an attempt to insinuate that LGBT are abusive in the same way is morally wrong.

I live in world of dilemmas. I am a well aware that I don’t need to make ambivalent comments about polyandry to bring down on myself the vitriol of conservative elements in the church. A glance at the comments on Stand Firm or following the Daily Mail article about my Civil Partnership show how many Christians are ready to post poisonous judgmental comments. I’m not un-used to bad publicity but still take my time when writing for the blog in an attempt to be as honest and truthful as possible. It’s good to be challenged to come clean about my moral and ethical position.

Colin Coward

Changing Attitude needs all the help we can get to maintain our principled stance in support of LGBT people in the Anglican Communion. To become a supporter, click here; to make a donation click here.

The turmoil of media attention

2010-09-13T09:29:00.002+01:00

For three weeks I’ve been unable to settle and write for the blog. I’ve not been able to focus on any one event or experience because all of them seem to interconnect in various ways. We are about changing attitudes in the Anglican Communion to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people but I can’t quite work out how to do it at the moment - where our focus should be and what the next target is.

The event which triggered my inertia was the moment the news of my planned civil partnership, originally scheduled to take place on 9 October, hit the national press followed swiftly by international web reports. The CP won’t happen on that day for two reasons. We haven’t yet received approval from the UK Border Agency to register (my partner being a Nigerian national) and the fact that we most definitely do not want a media circus surrounding the communion service which will follow the CP.

News of the CP and celebration with friends in church went global when the Daily Mail posted a story from the Western Daily Press on their web site. It was picked up by the Sun, the Telegraph and the Press Association (who at least did me the courtesy of phoning and going through every detail to check accuracy). It spread swiftly on the internet with the result that my partner’s family in Nigeria were informed via the Nigerian daily papers and weekly magazines. The Primates and bishops meeting in Entebbe, Uganda for the All Africa Bishops Conference were also well-briefed – with misinformation, of course, because the Daily Mail headline alone contained 5 errors. This was partly my mistake – I didn’t take time to correct errors in the original June BBC Wiltshire interview on which subsequent reports were based. I’ve reported the Mail to the Press Complaints Commission.

Reactions to the news have been broadly predictable. Comments online ranged from warmly supportive to viciously bigoted and prejudiced. We received a number of hate mail letters which we reported to the police. They have been taken away for forensic examination. Yesterday morning I made a statement about the one letter containing a name and address and someone in Liverpool will be getting a visit from the local police. Anti-gay graffiti was scrawled in the porch of our church in Devizes (a C12th listed building, so delicate cleaning was required) following a news item about us in the Devizes Gazette. The local Anglo-catholic church (which opposes the ordination of women, claims to adhere to the 39 Articles, but uses the Roman Missal and has weekly benediction) wrote to the paper strongly opposing our intention of celebrating our friendship with a Communion service. They claimed that this is “not just inappropriate but disgraceful - even blasphemous” and that we are attacking “the Christian faith at its very foundation.” Three other priests in the deanery have said they want to be invited to the service!

Less expected for me was what happened in church Sunday morning a week ago when I presided at the 10.30 Communion. One person walked out during the first hymn and at least 3 members of the choir didn’t receive communion and refused to acknowledge me after the service (and have refused to acknowledge my partner in town). These are people I have come to know during the 6 years I have been worshipping in Devizes, key people in the congregation who have heard me preach, entertained me to supper, received communion from me, an openly gay man worshipping each Sunday with my partner. What has changed for them? They won’t speak to me so I haven’t been able to ask them.

The majority of the congregation have been affirming and supportive, many of them enthusiastically so. But it’s the minority who refuse to acknowledge us who create the pain and raise bigger questions. Who did they think I was prior to discovering that we are proposing to contract a civil partnership followed by a service in church? What Christian values and principles do they live by? What divisions has this created in the congregation? Do they reflect the fault lines in the Anglican Communion? I’ve found it hard to answer the last question as I’ve tried to process the events and experience of the last three weeks. There are, of course, various fault lines and ingredients that create the divisions.

Fault lines in the Anglican Communion were revealed on a recent visit to Nigeria by seven members of Guildford Diocese, including the diocesan bishop, the Rt Rev Christopher Hill and his wife Hilary. They met the Primate of all Nigeria, the Most Rev Nicholas Okoh.

The Archbishop re-iterated his assurance of unalloyed cooperation and partnership with people who have complete faith and confidence in the undiluted word of God. He said the challenge the communion is facing at the moment is that of a section of the West who are promoting homosexuality, lesbianism and approving liturgies for same sex marriage. He said this is an issue that must be seriously addressed if the communion is to sustain the unity and oneness that has existed over the years. So, homosexuality is the fault line, the issue which creates schism.

I live with my Nigerian partner, an Anglican, so in one respect the world of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) and the Church of England are not worlds apart but intimately intertwined. Members of the Church of Nigeria co-habit and form or plan to form Civil Partnerships with members of the Church of England. My partner and I are not alone in this.

I suspect (though I may be wrong) that Archbishop Nicholas (whom I met notwithstanding his attempt to avoid me in Dar es Salaam) thinks this reality of gay people and gay relationships doesn’t exist. In his world there are no gay Nigerians, or no gay Anglican Nigerians, so the reality in which I live can’t in truth be real. In our interpretation of God’s word in the Bible and the place of power and authority in the church, we couldn’t be more worlds apart. Archbishop Nicholas thinks I am living a mistaken category of being – there is no such thing as a homosexual Christian, and I can’t be a true Anglican priest if I live with a gay partner.

A dogmatic allegiance to the undiluted Word of God could be said to identify those lying on one side of the Anglican fault line. The primacy of loving, open, generous, truthful human relationships might be said to lie broadly on the other, relationships which are sometimes confusing, vulnerable and tentative, not only with other people but with God, in prayer lives and with the Bible. I don’t dilute the Bible but I do interrogate it and mine it for truth and wisdom.

When you are being bashed about by strongly-opinionated people, some with deeply held prejudices and an intolerance of difference, it can be hard to remember that building relationships not only with the like-minded but more vitally with those of an opposite mind-set is the Christian task of Changing Attitude. I believe it is the vocation given to all by God who calls us to follow the Lord Jesus Christ, wherever he leads us.

There is no escape for me from trying to build relationships across the divide with all in the Anglican Communion. The vision we have is of a radically inclusive church, here in Devizes and across the dioceses of Nigeria. The changes we seek will only come about by crossing boundaries and creating radically transgressive relationships.

That’s a tough challenge when organists, choristers and readers refuse to acknowledge the presence and ministry of partnered gay priests at a local level and when on the international stage, a Nigerian bishop runs away from a gay activist priest, bishops refuse to attend the Lambeth Conference, others are refused admittance for being gay and partnered and Primates refuse to attend communion at which the Archbishop of Canterbury presides.

There are times when behaviour and attitudes to LGBT people in the Communion are not only intolerable but become almost evil. I hate it when people deliberately distort our reality and truth and link our campaign for dignified recognition of our place in God’s creation and the church with secular campaigns claiming acceptance for paedophiles, those drawn to bestiality and those advocating polyandrous relationships. This happened repeatedly in a recent interview I participated in on Radio 5 Live.

So, calm down, Colin, breathe deeply and slowly, keep praying, consult widely, remember who you are and to what God has called you, and keep the faith.

I bought a newly-published book last week by Verena Schiller, A Simplified Life. Verena is an Anglican religious sister of the Community of the Holy Name who for the last 25 years has lived as a hermit on the Lleyn Peninsula in North Wales, close to Aberdaron where Jim Cotter is the priest. She writes:

“Unless we begin to know ourselves with greater honesty and truth, how can we relate to God and through him to the entire world? The masks that we wear and the defences that we erect all distance us from one another, let alone from God. No life or relationship that is not built on honesty and truth can develop wholesomely. Inevitably it will founder. Yet paradoxically it is the very search for God that opens the way to self-knowledge and the possibility of a growing honesty and truth of our whole being.”

Colin Coward

A successful, anti-gay African Bishops Conference in Entebbe?

2010-08-29T18:27:00.003+01:00

Arguing about the divisions in the Anglican Communion over homosexuality feels futile sometimes.

The bishops who gathered in Entebbe last week think they represent the majority, the true Christians, for whom homosexuality is the most evil abomination imaginable. I do not belong to such a group. If their interpretation of Jesus’ teaching leads them to this conclusion, then why should they not leave and form an exclusive church that is cleansed of the evil they imagine?

The Ugandan Daily Monitor reports comments from three of the Archbishops present last week.

The Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, Henry Luke Orombi, said: “Homosexuality is evil, abnormal and unnatural as per the Bible. It is a culturally unacceptable practice. Although there is a lot of pressure, we cannot turn our hands to support it. We are saying homosexuality is not compatible with the word of God. We are saying that this culture of other people is against the traditional belief of marriage held by the Anglican Communion.”

The Archbishop’s views do not represent those of other Provinces, Primates, bishops and churches, nor the mind of the Anglican Communion. No Anglican Communion report describes homosexuality as evil, abnormal and unnatural. But it’s futile to note this, to question why Henry Orombi says such things and gets away with it. He refutes Lambeth 1.10 and the Windsor Report, which call for an ongoing process of listening and discernment and urges Provinces to “reassess, in the light of … study and because of our concern for human rights, its care for and attitude towards persons of homosexual orientation.”

The Archbishop of the Province of Indian Ocean, Ian Ernest, said the teachings of homosexuality are irrelevant to the needs of Africans and are unrepresentative demographically.

If he had said irrelevant to the needs of some Africans, he would have been more accurate. But he didn’t. He ignored the millions of Africans who identify confidently as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. He ignored their families and friends and congregations. He ignored the effect his dishonesty has on the integrity of individual bishops, congregations, Primates (including those Primates who are gay) and on the integrity of the whole Communion.

Archbishop Nicholas Okoh of Nigeria said homosexuality is a result of some people engaged in making their culture to be superior to the biblical teachings. “Homosexuality is not a new phenomenon in the society but the only trouble is that the issues dividing us now are very difficult to handle. They are threatening the unity of the church because they disobey the authority of the scriptures. It is two sided; while some people want to be obedient to their culture to determine the content of the church, others say no and it must be the guidance of the bible,” he said.

It’s something of a breakthrough that Nicholas Okoh accepts that homosexuality is not a new phenomenon in society. But he claims that it is we who are threatening the unity of the church, obeying culture rather than scripture. He forgets that the change in attitudes to the slave trade happened in part because people challenged assumptions about scripture from the perspective of culture.

On Wednesday the Daily Monitor reported that the Prime Minister, Prof. Apolo Nsibambi, commended African bishops for rejecting the practice of homosexuality in the church. “I thank the church in Africa for being exemplary by not accepting homosexuality… they see that it is not acceptable in the society where they serve,” Prof. Nsibambi said. He added: “We should not persecute them but I think it is wrong and we cannot recognise them because it is wrong like ordaining a gay bishop.”

His qualification in the last sentence is significant. The Prime Minister told a recent visitor (who reported the conversation to me) that the Anti-homosexuality Bill is dead and will not be passed into law. Politicians are not following where bishops would like to drive them – towards further vilification and persecution of LGBT people.

The Daily Monitor thinks the anti-homosexuality voices from the bishops are a likely boost to proponents of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. It would seem the monitor is wrong – the bishops are simply propounding their own prejudice.

It’s hard work, maintaining calm opposition to the views held by Africa Primates and bishops, and to be confident that one day, LGBT people in Africa and Asia will achieve the freedom to live with dignity in society with the justice and protection we have come to value in the UK.

I pray to God that enough people will hold to the positives in the Windsor Report, which others in the Communion are determined to deny in an attempt to exterminate lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people from their consciousness, their Provinces and their culture.

Colin Coward

Ugandan Bishops threaten to confront the Archbishop of Canterbury about homosexuality in Entebbe next week

2010-08-20T11:19:00.004+01:00

I’m now regretting my decision not to fly to Uganda next Monday to report from the All African Bishops Conference (AABC) meeting from August 23 to 29 in Entebbe.

A report published today by Icebreakersuganda says that the Ugandan bishops have been meeting in Mukono for the bi-annual three day provincial assembly. In the course of the meeting they reaffirmed their opposition to gay rights and gay acceptance in the Church of Uganda and vowed to confront the Archbishop of Canterbury over his stand on homosexuality and gay bishops serving in the church at the All Africa Bishops Conference next week.

Archbishop Rowan could probably do without me adding complexity to the mix, but as I’ve learnt at other meetings, there’s value in having someone present able to report from a different perspective.

The Ugandan bishops promised to let Archbishop Rowan know where they stand with him and also make it clear that they will never agree with him on the issue of homosexuals in the church.

During the Mukono meeting, Henry Orombi, the Archbishop of Uganda (pictured above with Eluid Wabukala, Archbishop of Kenya) said they would not break away from Canterbury but would not cooperate with it until after Archbishop Rowan Williams changed his stance on homosexuality in the church or retired as Archbishop.

Speaking at the opening of the three-day provincial Assembly in Mukono, Archbishop Orombi noted that the Communion has lost credibility. He proposed that the Church of Uganda engages church structures at a very minimal level until godly faith and order have been restored.

“I can assure you that we have tried as a church to participate in the processes, but they are dominated by western elites, whose main interest is advancing a vision of Anglicanism that we do not know or recognise. We are a voice crying in the wilderness,” he said. “What I can tell you is that the Anglican Church is very broken. It has been torn at its deepest level, and it is a very dysfunctional family of the provincial churches. It is very sad for me to see how far down the church has gone.”

The Monitor reports that at the same meeting, the Principal Judge of the High Court of Uganda, Justice James Ogoola, called for love and tolerance to diversity. He said when love met justice in Israel, the nation blossomed and noted that there was a need to deeply reflect on the fear of God. He said: “The church and the court must ascend to the mountain top, hold high the flag and stay at the forefront of the effort to dispense love and justice to the desperate and the disenchanted and to the oppressed and the suppressed.”

I suppose it doesn’t cross the minds of the Archbishop and Judge to remember that the same sentiments were expressed when black people were fighting for freedom from slavery in the USA, and the same Biblical roots have inspired the Christian campaign to free lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people from an oppressive and prejudiced church.

The Archbishop of the Church of Kenya, Eluid Wabukala, was also present at the meeting and asked church leaders to reinvent their attitude in the interest of the church’s development. “I know it is good to always question the credibility of some developments but don’t get paralysed,” Bishop Wabukala said. “Let your leadership always know seasons of growth to accord the opportunity to church to develop.”

‘Reinventing Attitudes’ now there’s another good name for an LGBT Christian campaign group.

Colin Coward

Ugandan LGBT people disappearing as the All Africa Bishops Conference prepares to meet

2010-08-16T18:24:00.004+01:00

Leonard Clark Beardsley’s recent blog reminded me to check gayuganda’s blog on Sunday. Gug hasn’t posted since 15 July when he reported that:

They've had a journalist infiltrate the Kampala gay community to try and ferret out what makes gay boys tick. It's not the first time this sort of thing has happened and the only thing that sets it apart is that this journalist has made a clumsy attempt to be balanced. That said, this journalist simply knows too much about the gay community for me to believe that he didn't get embedded deeper than he admits. And that is a great cause for discomfort.

The tactics the journalist are pretty basic and that he seems to be so successful merely attests to the humanity in all of us. But it is also a wake-up call for those Ugandan gay boys who seem unable to take the simplest precautions in this day and age when stalkers, blackmailers and malevolent people are on the prowl, with gay boys and girls as their target.

Gug confessed that he is more paranoid than lots of people. He has helped make connections and lessened LGBT isolation in more than one way, yet continues to be anonymous, gay, and closeted, and damned shy! Some have more to lose than others. It is very hard to live in self denial; and sometimes recklessness takes the place of despair.

Maybe I am just a coward, he concluded. And since then, nothing. No post and no response to emails. Alarm bells have been ringing furiously since the weekend.

On Saturday I went to Black Gay Pride held in the grounds of Regents College, Regents Park, London, on Saturday, helping Davis Mac-Iyalla, my partner and others on the Changing Attitude stall. Davis introduced me to a gay Ugandan who has been granted asylum in the UK, an Anglican living and worshipping in Southsea. He told me that many lesbian and gay Ugandans have been arrested in recent months. Why hasn’t this been reported, I asked him. Because the Ugandan media are afraid of being prosecuted under the terms of Bahati’s Anti-homosexuality Bill, even though it hasn’t been passed into law yet, he said.
I emailed gug again when I arrived home, plus other Ugandan contacts, but I still haven’t received a response.

Leonard also alerted me to the All Africa Bishops Conference which is being held at the Imperial Resort Beach Hotel, Entebbe, from 23rd – 29th August 2010, when 400 African Anglican bishops will be hosted by the Church of Uganda. The Archbishop of Canterbury is preaching at the opening service at 9am on Tuesday 24th.

The conference web site contains information about the conference, including the programme (though the final 2 days are missing).

On Wednesday morning there is a presentation on Nurturing Harmonious and Dignified Communities which includes Managing Diversity & Mechanisms for Conflict Management, Protection of the Vulnerable: Children and Protection of the Vulnerable: Women. The second presentation on Thursday morning is Disempowering the Powerful and Empowering the Vulnerable. Homosexuality is most definitely not on the agenda, I’m told, partly to ensure that the South African bishops feel comfortable enough to attend.

My immediate response was to explore whether it is possible to fly to Uganda next Monday, report on the conference and try and make contact with some of the LGBT groups and individuals I know in Kampala. Visas can be obtained in 24 hours, hotels and flights are available, but funding isn’t, time is short, and my safety is a concern to those close to me. If I were to go, I would certainly be the only openly gay person present and almost certainly the only person reporting from a pro-gay, pro-inclusion, pro-TEC perspective.

The Church of Uganda is determined not to give ground in the Anglican Communion, even if many in the church believe that too much attention has been given to homosexuality, but the lives and security of LGBT Ugandans, people like gug and my other Ugandan friends, remain at risk for as long as the prejudice and attitudes fuelled by the Bahati Bill remain unchallenged.

Colin Coward

Changing Attitude at Brighton Pride

2010-08-09T20:55:00.010+01:00

Changing Attitude Sussex marched with other faith groups on Saturday through the centre of Brighton on Saturday. Our section was led by a Metropolitan Community Church banner, followed by Unitarians, Quakers and a Jewish group with Changing Attitude and LGCM following. We were, as in Manchester last year and Leeds and London this year, greeted enthusiastically.

We were joined by various people as the Parade progressed, people who clearly wanted to identify with us as Christians.

Several of us wore clerical shirts but the presence of dog collars seemed less of a surprise to the Brighton Pride crowd than in Manchester or Leeds - perhaps Brighton has long been used to exotic costumes, making priests unremarkable!

I’m discovering how different Pride celebrations and parades are in different parts of England. Leeds is still comparatively small but the market place and party area is open for all and a lot or personal contact and conversation is possible. The Manchester party is ticket only and more exclusive. Brighton parade is a total contrast. Something like 150,000 people enjoy a huge range of market stalls, food outlets, disco tents and fairground rides at Preston Park. The sound level makes conversation almost impossible but the atmosphere is electric.

At 4pm the church of St John the Evangelist, five minute's walk from Preston Park, the church's 'back garden', held a service to welcome, listen, affirm and value. The church had felt uncomfortable in the past with the way protestors at previous Prides had given a negative impression of Christian attitudes. The service was meditative and healing.

Colin Coward

Broken Hearts and New Creation – James Alison’s latest book launched at CA London and Southwark meeting

2010-08-04T13:45:00.006+01:00

Changing Attitude London and Southwark held a book launch yesterday evening at St Martin-in-the-Fields for two books by James Alison. The focus was on Broken Hearts and New Creations: Intimations of a Great Reversal but the recently revised and republished Raising Abel was also available. Both books can be ordered through the Changing Attitude web site which has one of the most comprehensive online lists of LGBT Christian books (Please let me know of other books that should be added).

Over 100 people came to hear James respond to questions about Broken Hearts from Clare Herbert, co-convenor of the group. Introducing the interview, Brendan Walsh, DLT’s commissioning editor, described the impact James’s books have made on professional theologians and others. He is, said Brendan, every serious theologian’s favourite theologian – after themselves. He is doing great theology that has real visceral impact.

What has changed?
James said what has changed for Catholics is that being gay has been taken out of the field of doctrine into the human sciences. An anthropological breakthrough has taken place and it is now a grave mistake to think about homosexuality as a theological problem. The basic question is now – Is there such a thing as being gay or lesbian? Is it a form or vice or a pathology? Only in the last 50 years has it been possible to say there is a regularly occurring minority variant which is not pathological, and this is now a real piece of human knowledge which is having big effects in the theological sphere. But we are talking about it in the anthropological sphere now – talking about who are these lesbian and gay humans who are undergoing grace.

Being our self
It is really difficult to step out from being reactive and from defining ourselves over against anyone else as if I can only be myself over against those who are different or who I fear are persecuting me. Becoming who I am going to be involves a huge amount of letting go.

False trails of sameness and difference
Difference, said James, is much exaggerated – there is much more sameness around than difference. Liking people who are like us can be very difficult and we are challenged not to run away from nor be disgusted or frightened when we discover how alike we are to someone else we have been judging. There can be no moral discourse without a basic sense of liking someone and recognising that we are the same as each other.

Being Church
It is difficult to ask for what we really want because we are not really sure who we are becoming and therefore, what that might be. Other people want us to become “this person”, the one who fits their idea of us, not our true self. We are failing to be the true church if we don’t make this true, utterly authentic space available to people in which the true self can be found.

Finding faith
James was asked how people can find this kind of faith against apparently impossible odds. So much Christian discourse about faith is emotional blackmail, he responded, the threat that if you don’t believe X or Y you will go to hell. To quote from the book:

“The word ‘God’ for too long has been a cold word describing a powerful object. ‘Creation’ has for too long been a serious, stable, safe background on which a heavy, human morality can be erected, and against which self-regarding approval can be granted. What Jesus did has for too long been described in emotionally blackmailing terms, pushing people into contorted forms of asceticism and fake goodness.”

But there is, he said, a habitual confidence given us by another, the Other other, in whose hands we can relax. How on earth do people find that? – by asking for it. He didn’t call it prayer but prayer it might be. Faith has to be found through discovering that God likes us and understands that we are frightened of self-appreciation. If someone likes you, you drop the mask. Relaxation is the result of someone liking you. Jesus says of God, you can trust me, I am not out to get you. God is nudging us to drop the mask.

Gay activism
Is there a place in his theology for gay activism and if there is, should we be focussing on gay pride or gay marriage? – yes, attend to both was his answer. We wouldn’t be where we are if it wasn’t for the early activists, GLF, Stonewall, Gay Pride, etc, they opened the doors for us. He was concerned that too much attention might be focussed on gay activism in the church and the amount of emotional and mental energy that goes into trying to change the church. Let’s invest our time and energy where it can make a difference and not invest in fighting a paper tiger – the church will catch up eventually.

Different Christianity
We should be investing our time and energy now in creating a new Christianity that is going to look so different in one hundred years time. So much is up for grabs and we should be trying to get people to re-imagine themselves and their faith. To quote the book again, “We have to be sitting alongside our brother frauds and working out, with their help, and with fear and trembling, what it looks like to be hoiked off into the new Creation.”

Colin Coward

Changing Attitude England needs resources not to fight the paper tiger but to achieve real change, taking the infinite love of God to Brighton Pride this Saturday as we did in Leeds last Sunday. To have a stall and march with our banners in a gay pride costs about £250. Please click to join Changing Attitude or make a donation

Changing Attitude at Leeds Pride

2010-08-02T17:27:00.017+01:00

One of the commitments Changing Attitude has made this year is to become more involved with the various Pride events taking place around the country. This weekend it was Norwich and Leeds and I preached at the Pride Eucharist at All Hallows Leeds at 10.30 on Sunday morning.

Following lunch we drove to Leeds parish church before taking leaflets to the stall in the market place and the banners to Millenium Square where crowds were congregating for the beginning of the march.

The Some Christians are Gay banner atracted instant attention and people wanted to be photographed in front of it throughout the march.

We also had the Christians Together at Pride banners which had first been used at London Pride this year.

Our stall in the market place in the heart of Leed's gay quarter was up and running from 1pm and attracting a lot of attention and a great variety of conversations.

Body and face painting was available across the road from us, and the gifted artists created some amazing transformations.

Conservative Christian web sites would have you believe that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are obsessed with curious sexual practices and use gay pride events to dress provocatively. The following picture shows the crowds in Leeds, thronging the gay quarter beneath the main railway line to York. I always wonder who are the sexually obsessed people when I mingle in an LGBT crowd, where orindary people have an opportunity to express their extraordinary, creative, God-created selves for a day.

Those of us who marched and staffed the stall all day from All Hallows church and other congregations in Leeds, lay and ordained had an amazing time. Many people asked us those of us wearing clerical collars whether we were really priests. such is the damage being done by conservative Christians to the image of the church. People at Pride expect Christians to be strongly prejudiced and anti-gay. When people discovered that we were straight and gay people marching in solidarity with LGBT people, there was instant delight.

Jack Parkes, aka Doorman Priest, has posted a report of his experience at Leeds Pride for the first time (encountering students past and present) and he's worth reading for a more extensive account of Pride and for the what it feels like for a straight priest to be there where assumptions about your sexuality can't easily be explained away.

Every time Changing Attitude and other pro-LGBT Christian groups and congregations are present at gay prides across the country, we reach out and communicate God's love and passion for all humankind in our infinte and glorious diverity. Praise be to God!

Colin Coward

Marriage equality for LGBT people is now firmly on the agenda, including marriage in church

2010-07-29T09:11:00.003+01:00

Reports of the meeting held on Tuesday afternoon in a House of Commons Committee room with Lynne Featherstone MP, Equalities Minister, and five civil servants have been issued by Peter Tatchell and Pink News. Also present were Ben Summerskill, chief executive of Stonewall, the Rev Sharon Ferguson of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, Paul Martin of the Lesbian and Gay Foundation Manchester, and myself.

The meeting was the first of a series of private meetings being held this week by the government's equalities office with interested parties to to look at possible next steps for civil partnerships including the possibility of holding civil partnerships for gay couples in church and the option of extending civil marriage to same-sex couples. I don’t know whether the government’s consultation extends to meeting with Christian leaders opposed to marriage equality in church for LGBT people though Lynne Featherstone is reported as acknowledging that any consultation would take into account the views of those who are vehemently opposed to equal marriage.

Four of the five LGBT leaders present argued strongly for full marriage equality. Stonewall is not opposed to marriage equality but does not see it as a priority.

My focus was on the Church of England, which as the established church with bishops in the House of Lords and strong conservative lobby groups, has undue influence on the progress of legal reforms that affect the lives of LGBT people in general and Christians in particular.

The meeting attempted to identify the difference between civil partnerships and marriage and why we were so adamant that we wanted equality. The legal provisions are effectively exactly the same. There are two practical differences: in marriage, vows are exchanged whereas the registration of a civil partnership requires a register to be signed; and civil partnerships cannot be contracted in religious buildings. LGBT people want the freedom to commit ourselves to one another in the same way by the exchange of vows and rings – in church.

The real difference lies in people’s perception. They habitually call civil partnerships ‘marriage’ and this is what they perceive them to be in all but name. Families, friends, colleagues and members of their congregation see gay couples getting married, with all the significance of meaning that attaches to marriage.

The nature of marriage has already been significantly reconstructed by cultural, social and religious changes in the past 50 years and has always been an institution subject to revision and change. The Church of England has changed the nature of marriage radically by accepting that couples have the freedom to use contraception and to remarry in church following divorce.

Feminists and some LGBT people do not want to adopt the values of marriage, seeing it as indelibly patriarchal or embodying commitments they do not want to make. LGBT people will inevitably further deconstruct and reconstruct the nature of marriage. I would argue that Christian LGBT people want marriage to be a covenant relationship focused on the loving relationship between a couple who intend life-long fidelity mirroring God’s covenantal relationship with us and all creation.

Peter and Sharon have both said they felt the meeting had ignored their main concern of winning the right to full marriage equality. Sharon said: "It just wasn't taken on board how strongly we feel that civil partnerships are discriminatory. They are not equal to marriage." She thought that the equalities office just wanted us to say we were happy with religious civil partnerships and then to silence us so they could go to the faith groups and tell them they didn't have to worry about gay marriage. Peter said: "The meeting mostly focused on civil partnerships in church. I got the impression that the coalition government doesn't feel confident enough to push ahead with same-sex civil marriage."

Peter, arguing for full equality, said that marriage is the gold standard and civil partnerships are second best. They are not equality. A separate law is not an equal law. Civil partnerships create a two-tier system of partnership recognition: one law for heterosexuals, civil marriage, and another law for same-sex couples, civil partnerships. In reverse, he argues that the homophobia of the ban on same-sex civil marriage is now compounded by the heterophobia of the ban on opposite-sex civil partnerships. Just as a gay couple cannot have a civil marriage, a straight couple cannot have a civil partnership.

Peter urged the coalition government to undertake a public consultation to determine whether the ban on gay marriage ought to be lifted. He said it should invite representations from individuals and organisations and, on the basis of the submissions received, decide if the ban should stay or go.

Changing Attitude needs to focus on the reaction of the Church of England to the proposal to extend the registration of civil partnerships to religious premises and to the desire for full marriage equality. We have to think carefully about educating the church and to building a coalition of groups, parishes and church leaders who will be committed to work with us to achieve our goal.

Colin Coward

Marriage equality for LGBT people

2010-07-26T10:31:00.001+01:00

Tony Baldry MP, the Second Church Estates Commission spoke on Saturday morning in the General Synod debate about women in the episcopacy. It will be his task to steer the legislation through the House of Commons. He said the equality agenda now played strongly across all parties, and the difficult task of steering through the legislation would be impossible “if there is a scintilla of a suggestion that women bishops are in some way second-class bishops”.

On Saturday afternoon Robert Key, the former MP for Salisbury, spoke following the vote against the Archbishops’ amendment, when a number of speakers asked for the debate to be suspended until Monday or for a 10 minute break, to enable people to recover emotionally from the trauma of the loss. Robert effectively told Synod to grow up, behave like adults and get on with it (which Synod did, though some found behaving more like adults rather difficult).

Both Tony Baldry and Robert Key were criticised following their speeches. They were told in a very forthright manner that parliament wasn’t going to be allowed to dictate to the church as to what it should believe or who it should ordain. Church knew better than Parliament the will and mind of God.

What I found most disturbing was the passion and length of applause from Synod following the criticism. I was frightened by the arrogant, self-satisfied tone of righteousness and absolute rightness that was present. It felt as if the majority of Synod were applauding, though I didn’t think to look and check how many were actually clapping.

Tomorrow afternoon I’m attending the discussion about the next stage for civil partnerships at the Home Office at the invitation of Lynne Featherstone MP, the Minister for Equalities. Clearly, many members of General Synod would be critical of this initiative for a variety reasons, not least of which would be that they think God speaks and acts through General Synod and not through government initiatives, especially in relationship to gay marriage.

Last week, I said that I expect to meet people with far more understanding of the place of LGBT people in the Kingdom of God than many of those Christians who hold such strong views about homosexuality. I think that tomorrow, God is much more likely to be breaking into our lives and breaking out of the traps the church sets for God. It’s the dynamic which James Alison describes in Broken Hearts and New Creations and Raising Abel (both books which I wholeheartedly recommend!).

The government is grasping what the church cannot and what LGBT people often are afraid to grasp – the nettle of absolutely equality in marriage. Marriage is not a heterosexual institution and lesbian and gay people are not in a different category from straight people, nor are we unworthy of marriage.

The government is helping many of us, lesbian, gay, heterosexual, bisexual, transgender, evangelical, catholic, Christian, agnostic, atheist, see something about the nature of marriage which we have found difficult to recognise.

James Alison asks whether:

“Our sexual desire is something in need of a process of humanisation so that it can be part of a relationship of bodily presence to another, tending to build the partner up, enrich and delight them as well as care for them, tend to them and be stretched into age and death alongside them ... a process of bodily involvement with another that we have found ourselves being sucked into being given a self we did not know, but rejoice to see as something we are becoming, something holy.”

God is present in potential everywhere, contrary to the idea about God held by a significant number of General Synod members. God works unseen and unacknowledged in the lives of every human being, and can mysteriously draw us together through love into relationships and encounters which can themselves become processes of transformation, growth and change.

Thanks to those of you who responded to last week’s blog and made the point so forcibly to me. I will be arguing for full equality at tomorrow’s meeting. I have no doubt that full equality is what God knows is right and proper for all people, and that includes lesbian and gay Christians.

Colin Coward

Issues in Human Sexuality – where do you think the C of E should go next?

2010-07-23T08:59:00.002+01:00

Changing Attitude has known for some months that two groups of bishops have been meeting to discuss how the House of Bishops might take forward Issues in Human Sexuality. There are four bishops in each group and one is broadly conservative/traditional and the other more liberal/progressive. The groups were initiated by the Archbishop of Canterbury who invited the 8 bishops. The Bishop of Lincoln convenes the liberal group and the Bishop of Birmingham the more conservative group.

The two groups are being brought together in October for a meeting with Archbishop Rowan. The liberal group has already agreed a statement setting out their position.

Changing Attitude has been asked by the Bishop of Lincoln to speak for ourselves and add our own ideas about how we would like to see the issue addressed. As John Saxbee says, we all know we are in a very different place from where we were when Issues in Human Sexuality was issued.

The trustees of Changing Attitude meet tomorrow, Saturday 24th, in London and the invitation to respond will be on the agenda. I would like to invite all those reading this to respond to me with your thoughts and ideas – some headings for discussion is how Bishop John puts it.

Heading this blog ‘...where do you think the C of E should go next?’ invites an all too obvious response because many of us think that Issues was a deeply flawed document in the first place and should now be binned. It might have had value as a discussion document back then, it has no value for us as a policy document now.

So, what would you like Changing Attitude to set before the bishops who will meet in October? Please email your ideas to colin@changingattitude.org and I will collate and forward them to John Saxbee.

Colin Coward

Changing Attitude in conversation with government ministers about the next stage for civil partnerships

2010-07-21T10:18:00.003+01:00

Changing Attitude, LGCM, Stonewall, LGB Consortium, Lesbian and Gay Foundation and Outrage have been invited by Lynne Featherstone MP, the Minister for Equalities, to a discussion at the Home Office on Tuesday 27th July. With Jeremy Timm, the chair of trustees, I will be representing CA.

This is part of the coalition government’s commitment to talk to those with a key interest in what the next stage should be for civil partnerships. This now includes, in the government’s careful phrasing, that “…some religious organisations can allow same-sex couples the opportunity to register their relationship in a religious setting if they wish to do so.”

The conversation next week results from the amendment made to the Equality Act 2010 which makes it possible to remove the express prohibition on civil partnerships taking place on religious premises.

Simon Hughes, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, said on Monday in a video interview that the government will give gay couples the right to civil marriage. He predicted that the change would be made before the next general election.

He said: "It would be appropriate in Britain in 2010, 2011, for there to be the ability for civil marriage for straight people and gay people equally. That's different of course from faith ceremonies which are matters for the faith communities… they have to decide what recognition to give. The state ought to give equality. We’re halfway there. I think we ought to be able to get there in this parliament.”

The coalition government is coming under increasing pressure to provide full marriage equality. Changing Attitude supports the move to grant full equality to lesbian and gay couples and more significantly for those of us who are Christian and Anglican, to allow civil partnerships to be registered and celebrated in church buildings by priests acting as the registrar.

The government is moving much faster than the Church of England, which will find itself even more out of synch with the local communities which we are in theory called to serve in this country. The church’s attitude to LGBT people affects not only gay individuals directly but families, friends, colleagues and congregations.

This isn’t a question for us simply of equality or not being out-of-step with secular society. I believe that society is reaching a place of truth in God that recognises the full and equal humanity in creation of LGBT people. There are other, rich biblical truths, metaphors, narratives and theologies about relationship, sexuality, intimacy and marriage to be set against Leviticus 18.22 and Romans 1.18-32.

Next Tuesday I expect to meet people with far more understanding of the place of LGBT people in the Kingdom of God than many of those Christians who hold such strong views about me and my kind.

Colin Coward

LGBT Christians can only be relaxed and happy when they can be open about their sexuality

2010-07-16T14:39:00.006+01:00

John Browne, former chief executive of BP, has written in today’s Guardian about his resignation in 2007. He had broken up with a boyfriend and made an untrue statement in an attempt to prevent his sexuality from becoming public. He says David Laws’ recent resignation from the Government suggests that public figures continue to feel they have no choice but to cover up their sexuality.

When he was “outed” John Browne was overwhelmed by the support and friendship of many people. It turned out to be a blessing. His life is much happier now, he feels much more relaxed about being open with people and wishes it could have been this way from the start, but the spectre of earlier intolerance cast a long shadow over his life.

The biggest problem with concealing your sexuality is walling yourself off from the people closest to you, he says. Being open about your sexuality is about being honest with the people who know you the best and love you the most. Keeping it secret denies friends and family the chance to know who you really are. I would add that in the church context, this is also true for congregations and their priests and bishops. Hiding a core part of your identity is unhealthy and conceals the truth from the other.

Coming out is much easier in the UK now but John Browne writes that the business world remains more intolerant of homosexuality than other walks of life. As we know all too well, the Anglican Communion is an institution more like the UK business world in this respect.

The Archbishop of Nigeria, Nicholas Okoh addressed a press conference in Abuja on Wednesday. He referred to the need to protect Christian interests by speaking out against the invading army of homosexuality, lesbianism and bisexual lifestyle. He said same sex marriage, paedophilia and all sexual pervasions should be roundly condemned by all who accept the authority of Scripture over human life. He repeated the lie that the church in the West has vowed to use money to spread the homosexual lifestyle in African societies and churches and the myth that the sin of homosexuality destroyed the communities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Millions of LGBT people in the Anglican Communion live within societies where attitudes are intolerant and aggressively hostile at best and at worst, advocate hatred, abuse and imprisonment.

Our campaign in the Communion has to work for the eradication of church teaching and attitudes about LGBT people that are dehumanizing and dangerous for the health of the whole church as well as for individual LGBT people, our families and congregations.

Archbishop Nicholas Okoh is representative of all Anglican Primates, bishops, theologians, leaders and teachers who continue to live with unexamined prejudice. It is a scandal that many UK and North American leaders fuel the prejudice of Africans and fuel their prejudice with financial support. Support comes mainly from conservative evangelical groups.

‘Evangelical’ is a word which covers a huge range of Christian belief and practice, from those who advocate extreme intolerance towards LGBT at one extreme to pro-gay attitudes at the opposite end of the spectrum. To the left of the pro-gay groups are people with genuinely held theological reasons for supporting Anglican policy as exemplified in Lambeth 1.10 and Issues in Human Sexuality.

I have no doubt that John Browne would say the church must remove all intolerant, prejudiced teaching about homosexuality and create an environment in which gay people have the freedom and confidence to live openly and honestly, true to the self God has created.

Some would immediately dispute that as Christian teaching because the Bible says otherwise. They are simply wrong.

Colin Coward

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General Synod and women bishops - is the Holy Spirit calling the church to adulthood?

2010-07-11T16:44:00.004+01:00

My laptop expired yesterday before I was able to blog. Initially I felt depressed and began to panic - how could I get online, and what was I going to do here at Synod if I couldn't report on events as they unfolded? Then I told myself to calm down and that it wasn't the end of the world. Maybe it was God's way of telling me that I wasn't here to blog but simply to be present, alongside my friends on General Synod for whom the next 2 days were going to be stressful and momentous.

Thanks to my partner's laptop, I am at last able to come online and read reactions to yesterday's debate, having attended the Eucharist in the Minster this morning and a WATCH meeting at lunchtime. The effect on me of my laptop crashing is not to be compared in scale with the effect of yesterday's vote on those who either oppose outright the opening of the episcopate to women or can live with it only if a woman-bishop-free space is created for them on their terms.

I think there is a similarity in my emotional reaction, however, with those who were distressed by yesterday's vote. Thirty minutes after my laptop crashed, I was able to pause, engage my adult self, and say, okay, this is where I am, deal with this present reality. I calmed down and resumed life without laptop.

Yesterday afternoon, some Synod members began to have Anglican tantrums, wanting to terminate the debate until they felt better, walking out when this was refused, discussing how they might overturn the decision when the debate resumes on Monday and issuing threats, yet again, about schism, money and splits. Anglican Mainstream reports that senior Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical leaders met yesterday evening to request an urgent meeting with both Archbishops to discuss the matter before Synod resumes on Monday morning. How to overturn the decision was the substance of their meeting.

Anglican Mainstream also claims the amendment was lost on a "procedural device" (their phrase and inverted commas) of requiring a two-thirds vote in all three houses, the clergy voting 50-50 and thus defeating the amendment. Firstly, it wasn't split 50-50, the clergy vote was 85 for, 90 against with 5 abstentions. The vote could have been taken by Synod in its entirety, in which case the amendment would have passed, but it had voted for a vote by Houses. An earlier crucial vote two years ago on women in the episcopate legislation was taken by synod, not by houses, and on that occasion ensured that progress was made. The Holy Spirit seems to be telling Synod in subtle ways to get on with it.

The Archbishops are understandably distressed that their amendment was lost. It was their baby. But they were trying in some way to reinstate provisions for those opposed which have been most thoroughly explored over the past two years and rejected.

My take on yesterday's vote is this. The Holy Spirit is guiding the Church of England into adulthood, to maturity as the Body of Christ. Yesterday she said, once again, Grow Up! It is time to welcome women into the episcopate. I call you friends, adult friends.

All sides in the debate now have painful emotions to work through. Those in favour of women in the episcopate feel somewhat guilty at the pain they have induced in others. But that doesn't mean you need to capitulate to emotional immaturity or blackmail on either side. Be generous, grow up, hold your nerve and vote for what in your heart you believe to be right.

I, of course, have a personal interest in this. I am in favour of the inclusion of women at every level of church ministry. One day General Synod will be asked to vote on the place of LGBT people in the Church of England in respect of Civil Partnerships and the ordination of those with partners. It will need a very mature, emotionally confident group of people on Synod to achieve a positive, pro-gay vote.

Yesterday's vote has laid another foundation stone. I believe members of Synod, Archbishops, bishops, priests and laity, will digest what has happened. Some will continue to feel hurt and in their inner world, feel marginalized or rejected. Others will reflect and adjust to the apparently new environment in which they find themselves. If we are not able to grow and change we will remain a church addicted to immature emotional attachments, to the idealised past and to the tyranny of the child which lurks in each of us.

Colin Coward

Southwark failure damages Church of England

2010-07-09T10:29:00.001+01:00

LGBT Anglican Coalition Press Release 8 May 2010

Both recent meetings of the Crown Nominations Commission to choose a new
bishop for the Diocese of Southwark have been the subject of serious leaks
to a newspaper. This has resulted in huge personal pain and distress for
one candidate, Dr Jeffrey John, Dean of St Albans, for the second time in
seven years. It is particularly outrageous that some senior church
officials have suggested the leaks were engineered by supporters of Dr
John, rather than by those opposed to his nomination.

It has brought the Church of England into even further disrepute with the
general public, who will regard it rightly or wrongly, as another
example of the blatant homophobia that exists in the Church.

Once again the Church has failed to act with courage. The whole Commission
must be held responsible for this, regardless of whether the source of the
leak was an elected member, an ex-officio member, or one of the staff in
attendance at what is supposed to be a totally confidential meeting.

It is essential that a thorough independent enquiry be held immediately to
determine who was responsible. There should also be an urgent review of
the process of appointing bishops, as the present arrangements are not fit
for purpose, and an open and transparent procedure is clearly necessary.

Notes for Editors

1. The Anglican Coalition is here to provide UK-based Christian LGBT
organisations with opportunities to create resources for the Anglican
community and to develop a shared voice for the full acceptance of LGBT
people in the Anglican Communion.

2. The Coalition members are:

Accepting Evangelicals www.acceptingevangelicals.org
Changing Attitude www.changingattitude.org.uk
The Clergy Consultation www.clergyconsultation.org
Courage www.courage.org.uk
The Evangelical Fellowship for Lesbian and Gay Christians www.eflgc.org.uk
Inclusive Church www.inclusivechurch2.net
The Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement lgcm.org.uk
The Sibyls www.sibyls.co.uk

3. For more information contact:
Revd Canon Giles Goddard 07762 373 674 or Simon Sarmiento 07906 445695
or the LGBT Anglican Coalition Website www.lgbtac.org.uk

Driving to General Synod immersed in the infinite love of God

2010-07-09T09:48:00.004+01:00

I should be packing my bags and the Changing Attitude materials for our stand at General Synod in preparation for the drive north at 11am, but blogging is addictive. The blog received 2,500 hits yesterday and nearly 3,000 on Tuesday when the gay Ugandan story was posted.

I was sitting outside my house at 6.50 this morning drinking my second mug of Darjeeling when the Guardian arrived with the headline ‘'Williams under siege over gay bishop veto'. I read the articles by Stephen Bates, Riazat Butt and Andrew Brown and then said the morning office and settled to meditate. For 35 minutes I was more fully present than any morning this week, resting in awareness of the rich diversity and beauty around me and the infinite goodness and love of God flowing through creation, ever present in the reality which is God. I’d previously read this morning’s lectionary passage from 2 Corinthians 4:

It is not ourselves we proclaim; we proclaim Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’s sake. For the God who said, ‘Out of darkness light shall shine,’ has caused his light to shine in our hearts, the light which is knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

This is a deep reality for me as I pray and meditate each morning. It is a deep reality for many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Christians who know in the depths of their hearts and souls the light that shines and the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. We are here and now living into the deepest faith and a profound experience of the presence of God. We are not leaving God and we know that God will never abandon us nor any other beings in creation. Talks of splits in the church is, at this level of deep contemplation and prayer, irrelevant, because we know that nothing can separate us from the love of God.

It is in awareness of these deepest realities that I will drive to York and a meeting of General Synod which takes place when the Church of England faces intense media scrutiny yet again over its attitude to women and gays. My prayers are for a decision in Synod which grants the potential in legislation for full equality in the episcopate for women.

My heart was unsettled as I went to sleep last night. My friend Andrew Goddard had emailed, taken aback by my Wednesday blog blaming evangelicals for leaking information from the Crown Nominations Commission. We had sat in the sun in Andrew’s garden in Bristol last Friday, talking mostly about scapegoating. I’ve just read Raising Abel by James Alison.

Andrew commented that I might be fuelling suspicions and speculating in unhelpful ways about who in the Church of England could be to blame, leading to scapegoating kicking in again in powerful ways whether against Rowan or Jeffrey John or Colin Slee or Chris Sugden or whoever.

I take Andrew’s reflection very seriously. I am committed to a path in which I believe that Jesus’ death and resurrection opened the capacity for us to cease scapegoating each other and stop projecting our fear and blame onto other groups. Only, absolutely only, when we cease to do this, do we have the potential to stop the rot and live with others into the Kingdom of God.

Time to pack! I can do no better than sign off with the final sentence from the email Andrew Goddard sent me as I was writing:

Trust that in midst of a pretty traumatic Synod you and all there - especially Rowan! - will continue to know God's loving presence and peace.

Colin Coward - on the road to York

Lord Hope says right-wing evangelical churches indulge in rampant homophobic teaching

2010-07-08T15:51:00.002+01:00

Yesterday the panel of five Supreme Court justices ruled unanimously to allow the appeals from two gay men, from Cameroon and Iran, who had been refused asylum on the grounds they could hide their sexuality by behaving discreetly.

Lord Hope, who read out the judgement, said: "To compel a homosexual person to pretend that his sexuality does not exist or suppress the behaviour by which to manifest itself is to deny his fundamental right to be who he is. Homosexuals are as much entitled to freedom of association with others who are of the same sexual orientation as people who are straight."

What interests me are the comments he added later. He said that for many years some countries had simply insisted homosexuality did not exist, which avoided the evil of persecution. However, anti-gay sentiment had dramatically worsened in some places, fanned by "the rampant homophobic teaching that right-wing evangelical Christian churches indulge in throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa" and "the ultra-conservative interpretation of Islamic law that prevails in Iran".

If I used the phrase “rampant homophobic teaching that right-wing evangelical Christian churches indulge in” I might have been hauled over the coals by the Changing Attitude trustees for using intemperate and provocative language. I would expect to have been attacked by conservative evangelical groups in the UK and USA who work in alliance with African Provinces, bishops and Primates to whose public comments about homosexuality Lord Hope’s criticism applies.

The teaching of right-wing evangelical Christian churches is indeed often rampantly homophobic. Their western allies who deny that their own teaching is homophobic are responsible for endorsing the prejudice and hate of others and of campaigning and arguing for their right not just to hold such views in the Anglican Communion but for those views to influence Anglican teaching and policy.

The furore over the appointment of the next bishop of Southwark has a direct connection with the homophobia identified by Lord Hope. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Crown Nominations Commission and the potential for Canon Jeffrey John to be appointed bishop have been infected by the anti-homosexual views of conservative evangelicals.

Belief in the false report of the beheading of a gay member of Integrity Uganda gained traction because such a horrendous act is now all too possible in Uganda, Nigeria and other African countries where people like Bahati whip up hatred by propounding the most extreme and abusive accounts of gay behaviour.

Groups such as Anglican Mainstream in this country are engaged in similar activity by repeatedly posting news about paedophilia, bestiality, polyamoury, AIDS, converasion therapy and ‘cures’ for homosexuality. Why do they do it? To prove that homosexual people are intrinsically drawn to extreme forms of sexual behaviour. The tactic is wicked.

The applicant to the Supreme Court from Cameroon, identified as HT, had been told he should relocate elsewhere in his country and be "more discreet" in future. He had been attacked by an angry mob at home after being seen kissing his partner. He has been fighting removal from the UK for the past four years. He told the BBC. "I cannot go back and hide who I am or lie about my sexuality." In Cameroon jail sentences for homosexuality range from six months to five years.

The other application was from a 31-year-old Iranian gay man, who was attacked and expelled from school when his homosexuality was discovered. Like HT, he had been told he could be "reasonably expected to tolerate" conditions back home that would require him to be discreet and avoid persecution. Punishment for homosexual acts ranges from public flogging to execution in Iran.

Two members of Changing Attitude Nigeria have already been granted asylum in the UK and one of them, Davis Mac-Iyalla the founder, continues to work to achieve justice and safety for other vulnerable gay Africans.

Christians should be campaigning for justice and protection for LGBT people in Africa. Those who misuse the Bible to teach that homosexuality is sinful and gay people should be condemned must be challenged. Prejudice must be overcome so that homosexuals no longer need to hide their identity in their home country nor need to seek asylum here.

A massive re-education of christian attitudes towards homosexuality is still urgently needed. Lambeth Resolution 1.10 was and is a disaster for the Anglican Communion, let alone for those of us who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. This is most especially true for those trying to live in cultures where prejudice is endemic, reinforced by Christian taboos.

Colin Coward

Jeffrey John will not be the next Bishop of Southwark

2010-07-07T22:10:00.003+01:00

Jonathan Wynne-Jones has ‘revealed’ in the Telegraph that Jeffrey John is not to be nominated as the next Bishop of Southwark. Neither, so I am told, will Nick Holtham, Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, be nominated.

This is painfully disappointing news for Jeffrey, who has lived through a week in which his identity and reputation have been pored over, analysed and attacked once again by conservative forces in the church in a way which I can only describe as poisonous. Those who claim the moral and ethical high ground in the church behave in ways which are scandalous and unchristian.

Anglican Mainstream deliberately left a link to the lecture that Dr Jeffrey John gave to the Post Lambeth 1998 Affirming Catholicism Conference entitled “The Church and Homosexuality : Post-Lambeth Reflections” at the top of their home page until this evening, when it suddenly disappeared, its work done.

How was Jonathan able to leak the news? Because someone on the Crown Nomination Commission for the Southwark appointment ignored the absolute confidentiality of the group and deliberately leaked information about yesterday’s meeting to a conservative hostile to Jeffrey and LGBT people in the church. That person, for a second time, passed the information to Jonathan Wynne-Jones - one of the non-voting members, perhaps?

Conservative Evangelicals are ruthless in their determination to win total control of the church, even if in the process, they destroy the Church of England’s ability to communicate the gospel to the nation, and destroy the unity of the Anglican Communion, by whatever unprincipled, destructive means possible.

Archbishop Rowan was apparently so furious about the first leak that he unilaterally vetoed Jeffrey’s name, betraying his friend for a second time and handing an apparent victory to the conservatives who seem to be successfully controlling him. Archbishop Rowan would have directed his anger in a more healthy direction if he had targetted the people inside and outside the Commission who have deliberately sabotaged its work.

Jonathan lists a number of reasons why this is bad news. I think he omits far more important reasons why it is bad news. It is a capitulation to forces within the Church of England and the Anglican Communion which represent a reactionary attitude to scripture and a negative attitude towards the glory, goodness and infinite variety and beauty of God’s creation.

It communicates an image of the church and Christianity to our nation in which we are perceived to be bigoted, prejudiced, narrow-minded and lacking in the primary Christian virtue of love.

It may be the final opportunity to nominate Jeffrey to a diocese and it may be the last opportunity the Archbishop of Canterbury has to appoint an openly gay person as a bishop, but that isn’t what matters tonight, because the Church of England still has closeted gay bishops and an increasing number of open and partnered LGBT priests.

Reform, Anglican Mainstream, Stand Firm, VirtueOnline and the other conservative forces in the church don’t seem to understand that God simply calls LGBT into faith and ministry and we find ways of inhabiting space in the church in which, despite the painful attacks and scandalous dishonesty, remains a place in which we can live into the Kingdom of God, creating by our presence and example, a church which is in the process of welcoming all, saints and sinners, redeemed and in need of redemption, all on the way to a holy transformation.

Tonight, the church stinks. Tomorrow in the dawn light, it will become glorious again for this gay priest and for my many, many friends, gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, lay, ordained, bishops and archbishops, for whom it is our glorious home. There is nothing, not even betrayal by a member of the Crown Nominations Commission, that can ever separate us from the infinite love of God in Jesus Christ.

Colin Coward

Is Archbishop Henry Orombi implicated in the false report issued by Revd Erich Kasirye?

2010-07-07T15:47:00.004+01:00

The report about the Uganda gay man found beheaded in a farm latrine which we posted on Monday turns out to contain both truth and falsehood. A severed head was indeed found in a latrine and there is a newspaper report in the Daily Monitor and a video on You Tube showing the gruesome discovery unfolding.

The search for the missing priest, the Rev Henry Kayizzi Nsubuga, was reported at VirtueOnline and also seems to be true.

I apologise for all those who have been misled because I posted the report before further investigative work had been undertaken to check its veracity and to those who have been waiting all day for a response.

Integrity USA
Integrity USA have been told by Bishop Christopher Senyonjo that he did not make the comments attributed to him in the report.

The Rev Erich Kasirye is not the General Secretary of Integrity Uganda.

I doubt if the claim that a joint search team of Integrity Uganda and Namirembe Diocese to find the severed head of another gay man is true, nor are many other details in the report. The names are not congruent with the YouTube video.

Victor Mukasa
The original report by Erich Kasirye was emailed to the SOGI list which had been receiving reports for the past week from activists and media about the disappearance and murder of LGBTI people from Integrity Uganda.

Victor Mukasa of the Research and Policy Associate for East, Central and Horn of Africa, International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Cape Town, has reported on research into the truth of the claims.

He has been in touch with Bishop Christopher Ssenyonjo, officials from the Uganda LGBT Security Committee and Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG). All are undertaking their investigations into the reports.

Bishop Christopher said he was not aware of any disappearances or murder of any Integrity Uganda members. He said that he had read and listened to news in Uganda about a missing priest, but not about any Integrity Uganda members.

The Bishop has informed Victor that he has not made the comments in the original report and is not aware of the murder of the young man named Pascali.

Integrity Uganda
John Clinton-Bradley of Integrity USA alerted me to the presence of the Revd Erich Kasiyre’s name in the report posted on Monday, indicating that the story might be false. Tracking information about Erich Kasiyre has taken me most of the day. Here’s what I have discovered so far.

Erich was indeed involved with Integrity Uganda, having been one of the founders in 2000 and serving frequently as its chief spokesperson.

When Michael Hopkins, then President of Integrity, visited Uganda in 2002 he met Fr Kasiyre who had been prohibited from exercising his ministry in the diocese along with Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, the retired bishop of West Buganda.

Erich came to the UK in 2003 at LGCM’s expense to participate, in theory, in LGCM’s Half Way to Lambeth Conference. I met him several times in London but he failed to arrive at the conference in Manchester and was reported to be attending medical appointments in London.

In February 2004 Integrity USA issued a statement “concerning troubling accounts of the activities of one of the members of the leadership team of Integrity Uganda, the Rev. Erich Kasirye.”

It became clear that Fr. Kasirye had been involved in a number of scams in order to raise money for himself personally using his connection with Integrity Uganda. In January 2004 he solicited funds from a number of organizations and individuals through an online LGBT Anglican Group claiming to have been imprisoned because he had been helping at the Integrity LGBT Anglican Centre in Uganda. Erich’s ‘wife’ and another person, ‘Lt. Josephine’, provided daily information regarding his arrest, soliciting funds to help him. Leonardo Ricardo was one of those people taken in by Erich and was persuaded to send $1,000.

Later reports suggest that Archbishop Henry Orombi rehabilitated Fr Erich Kasiyre, asking¨ Erich to serve and recruit and ¨save¨ Episcopal Church parishes from ¨unholy¨ practices in the U.S.A. for Bishop Samuel Ssekkadde, Diocese of Namirembe in 2005.

Diocesan Mission Coordinator
In May 2005 Fr Kasirye resurfaced in the new position of Diocesan Mission Coordinator for Bishop Samuel Ssekkadde in the Diocese of Namirembe. This was almost certainly the cover for another scam. Erich was sending an email headed: Looking for a diocese or Province that will give you cover?

"This is to inform you that my Diocese would like to adopt a parish in the States which is orthodox and lacks ecclesiastical protection.
Kindly let us know those churches which might need some pastoral and personal support. We are very much aware of the poisonous efforts of the revisionist forces which face orthodox churches in ECUSA-and we do not want them to be vulnerable. The Diocese of Namirembe recently celebrated its 150 years. Of course the question that springs to mind is why not ask why an orthodox US bishop to do this?¨ Fr. Eric Kasirye
Provincial youth and Student's Secretary
Rev. Eric Kasirye
P.O.Box 14123, Kampala

David Virtue
David Virtue was one of the recipients, reporting in 2005 that “ I got a note this week from the Rev. Erich Kasirye, Diocesan Mission Coordinator for Bishop Samuel Ssekkadde, in the Diocese of Namirembe. This was the first Diocese in East and Central Africa which now has over 5 million membership.” (Note that David is obsessed with numbers). He couldn’t have been taken in by a scam, could he?

It’s not clear to me whether Erich Kasirye has genuinely been restored to an official post in the Church of Uganda nor how he might have benefitted financially from the letter written as Diocesan Mission Coordinator nor the present letter about the murdered gay man.

Archbishop Henry Orombi
However, in David Virtue’s 25 May 2010 report of Bishop Christopher Senyonjo’s presence at the consecration of Mary Glasspool, David (who seems to be in direct communication with Archbishop Henry Orombi and was sent the letter which Orombi sent to Archbishop Rowan Williams prior to the Lambeth Conference in 2008) reports Henry Orombi's comments at length.

When asked why Bishop Christopher was promoting the Integrity organization on his speaking tour of the USA and Ireland, Orombi said it was purely for the money: "The good news is that his assistant the Rev. Eric Kasirye has left him and returned to the church. Praise God."

Archbishop Henry Orombi seems to be directly implicated with the Revd Erich Kasiyre and therefore with the false report of the beheading of a member of Integrity Uganda.

Colin Coward

Conservative evangelicals threaten to split church, defy bishops and withdraw financial support

2010-07-06T11:16:00.004+01:00

Western societies have learnt a great deal in the past century about the way human beings behave and construct themselves in social systems. We have learnt about our capacity for self-delusion and how easy it is for individuals and groups of people to ally themselves with a cause which history reveals to be a gross error.

We in the west have learnt that equality for minority groups in society has to be worked and campaigned for positively. This is not simply a question of human rights but of justice for those children of God who are marginalised and abused by the majority because of perceived differences. This is prejudice. Minority groups pursuing a prejudiced agenda are now driving a wedge into the Anglican Communion.

Andrew Brown speculates that the leak about Jeffrey John came not from the liberals but from conservative evangelicals. It is the conservatives who are spoiling for a fight, he says.

‘They’ have been spoiling for fights since 1997 when they began to organise their campaign against homosexuality which resulted in the Lambeth 1998 Resolution 1.10. ‘They’ have waged a determined, aggressive campaign against homosexuality in general and against particular individuals for the past 13 years.

‘They’ claim to represent the majority of people in the Anglican Communion. The people they claim to represent have never been formally asked about their views on homosexuality and have certainly never exercised a democratic vote.

In England a minority held the church to ransom when Jeffrey John was appointed to Reading and are attempting to do the same again now his name is in the frame for Southwark. They are doing it by issuing threats to split the church, seek alternative Episcopal oversight, withdraw financial support and deny canonical obedience to bishops they refuse to acknowledge or respect.

This is how conservative evangelicals are reacting to the news about Jeffrey John and Southwark and I don’t recognise the issuing of threats as Christian. It is abusive behaviour. I could quote Biblical passages to support my claim but their abuse includes dishonest and selective use of Scripture.

Reform warns that the church could split if Jeffrey John is made bishop of Southwark. Paul Dawson said it would cause very serious damage within the Church of England and precipitate the sort of split that has happened in America. This threat comes from small conservative groups and individuals in the Church of England, but the threat is real.

Anglican Mainstream, represented by Chris Sugden, say a number of clergy and parishes would not take the oath of canonical obedience to the bishop and would seek alternative episcopal oversight elsewhere. What has happened in America will happen here.

Ray Skinner, rector of Morden in the diocese of Southwark, says there will be a formal divide. He claims there are two groups already within the Church of England, Inclusive Church and the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans.

He claims that both are linking with other Anglican provinces. A Reform spokesman says that to appoint Jeffrey would send a very clear signal that the diocese of Southwark wants to walk in a different direction to the Church of England's doctrine. Both statements are lies, though I’m not sure Ray or the spokesman realise they are telling lies.

Inclusive Church and Changing Attitude have both developed strong relationships with bishops and primates in different parts of the Anglican Communion. These relationships strengthen our commitment to our unity in Christ as Christians first and Anglicans second. We are not and never will threaten to split the Communion.

Reform and Anglican Mainstream are threatening the church in various ways, one of which is to split from the Church of Anglican and form alliances with other groups who oppose truth and justice for LGBT and want to replace allegiance to Canterbury with a new, independent Anglican body.

A small group of conservative parishes in Southwark have been agitating for independence for some time now, causing bishop Tom Butler a great deal of distress. I know that some of the priests in no way represent the majority in their congregations.

The shocking thing about this whole campaign in the Anglican Communion is that a few self-appointed, media savvy men are holding the church to ransom and seeking to destroy its unity and fellowship in Christ.

Faced with such abusive and destructive behaviour, it is sometimes difficult to maintain Christian charity and not respond in kind. I was being so careful to maintain my composure during the Premier Radio interview with Chris Sugden yesterday that I was lost for words at the end and had no idea what to say. Changing Attitude continues to be committed to achieving full equality for LGBT people in the Anglican Communion and committed to the Communion as a Christian body which has always respected difference and diversity.

Thank goodness for God, who is not going to be phased as we vulnerable human beings are, by the vainglorious threats of a minority who are spoiling for a fight.

Colin Coward

Uganda missing gay man found beheaded in a farm latrine while the CofE worries about Jeffrey John

2010-07-05T17:37:00.005+01:00

I have just finished a live discussion on Premier Radio with Chris Sugden about the possibility of Jeffrey John being recommended for Southwark by the Crown Nomination Commission meeting this afternoon.

Chris said ‘so what’ in response to me when I said that his appointment would be good in that it would bring honesty and integrity to the church and a role model not only for LGBT people but for our families, friends, colleagues and congregations. It would also be a landmark in those parts of the Communion where hostility to LGBT people is dominant.

News from Uganda which surfaced today highlights why change in church teaching and practice towards homosexuality is imperative and urgent.

A search for a missing pro-gay priest, the Rev Henry Kayizzi Nsubuga, who disappeared almost two and half weeks ago after delivering a scathing speech at St. Paul's Church, Kanyanya supporting homosexuality in Uganda, led the joint search team of Integrity Uganda and Namirembe Diocese to the severed head of another person. The head was found in a pit latrine on the farm of Badru Kiggundu, the Electoral Commission Chairman, in Makindye Sabagabo, Wakiso District.

Judith Nabakooba, a police spokesperson, identified the head as that of Pasikali Kashusbe, one of the workers on Kigggundu’s farm and a member of Integrity Uganda. Pasikali and his partner Abbey are youth workers with Integrity Uganda charged with the responsibility of mobilising young LGBT people in activities which build community capacity to face up to the challenge of homophobia, especially in the area of attitude change and care through drama and sports activities.

According to the police, a mutilated torso which was earlier in the week discovered in Kabuuma Zone, about half a kilometre away from Kiggundu’s farm was probably Pasikali’s The torso was described as belonging to a young man and had no genitals.

Pasikali went missing over three and half weeks ago when the country was celebrating Uganda Martyrs Day. All efforts by his partner Abbey and other family members to find him had been fruitless.

Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, Chairperson of Integrity Uganda lamented the murder of this young man as ‘absurd’ adding that, ‘clearly, the values of tolerance and social inclusion are sadly being sacrificed on the altar of state ignorance, ineptness and good old colonial stupidity’.

Homosexual acts are criminalized in Uganda under a sodomy law inherited from British colonial times, although punishments were substantially strengthened in 1990. Uganda government officials have regularly threatened and harassed lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Ugandans. In October 2004, James Nsaba Buturo, the country’s information minister at the time, ordered police to investigate and “take appropriate action against” a gay association allegedly organized at Uganda’s Makerere University.

State-owned media have repeatedly called for stronger measures against homosexual conduct. On July 6, 2005, an article in the government-owned New Vision newspaper urged authorities to crack down on homosexuality, saying, “The police should visit the holes mentioned in the press, spy on the perverts, arrest and prosecute them”.

The climax of state inspired homophobia was in Mr. Bahati’s draft legislation called the Anti Homosexual Bill which if enacted would broaden the criminalisation of homosexuality by introducing the death penalty to people who have homosexual relations. Until then, there seems to be a new form of state fanaticism leveled against sexual minorities in Uganda -of missing LGBTI peoples who are picked by plain clothed security and found beheaded in latrines.

The Rev Erich Kasirye, General Secretary, Integrity Uganda, said:

‘Pasikali and his partner Abbey joined Integrity Uganda in June 2007 and during the last three years, Integrity Uganda has seen an increase in coordination and harmonisation of youth activities. Pasikali emphasized the promotion of the concept of care across the continuum through the formation of voluntary home care groups for young LGBTIs who continue to live in fear. He will be greatly missed by the entire LGBTI fraternity’.

Integrity Uganda has declared today, Monday 5th July as day of mourning for countless many LGBTI people who continue to go missing in the name of state homophobia and a requiem mass will be held at 2pm. Pasikali will be laid to rest at his ancestral home in Ikumba sub-county of Kabale district in Mbarara Region on Tuesday 6th July 2010 at 4pm.

Pasikali’s death is tragic, and stands as a reason why the Anglican Communion must change its teaching on homosexuality. There is no reason why the consciences of those who oppose the full inclusion of LGBT people should be allow to inhibit change in the church. The prevention of torture and murder of any individual must always be the first priority, ensuring that all citizens and Christians can live in an environment of love, security and affirmation.

The longer the argument about avoiding splits and schism in the church continues in the face of the horrendous legislation proposed in Uganda and the murder of LGBT people in the UK and the USA as well as Uganda and other African countries, the more insistent becomes the call for change in the church, NOW. We are committed to radical change in the Anglican Communion. Now is the time to become a supporter of changing attitude, working together with groups in the UK, North America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand to achieve change which is holy, just and timely.

Colin Coward