Bishop Gene Robinson to retire in 2013

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

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Four wasted decades - the Anglican inability to engage with homosexuality

There is a thread running through the Anglican Communion’s engagement with homosexuality that I find curious - the inability to grasp the nettle despite tentative initiatives over 4 decades. I’m interested in the history of the Anglican Communion’s failure to grasp the nettle and wonder if there are lessons to be learnt.

In 2005 The Episcopal Church produced a response to the request made in the Windsor Report 2004 that the church explains how a person living in a same gender union may be eligible to lead the flock of Christ. TEC presented ‘To Set Our Hope on Christ’ (TSOHOC) to the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Nottingham in 2005. I attended the presentation. Since then the report seems largely to have been forgotten but I recently re-read it.

A long appendix outlines the historical development of beliefs and policies regarding sexuality in the Episcopal Church, USA. It was at the General Convention in 1967, two years before the Stonewall riots of 1969 (the key event that led to the modern gay rights movement), that a resolution was passed instructing the Executive Council to 1) Initiate studies to express Christian attitudes with respect to ... homosexuality; and 2) Develop an educational program designed to communicate such attitudes to the Church at large.

What struck me re-reading the report is that nothing happened as a result of the resolution. The report, says TSOHOC, was probably referred to staff, since there is no mention of a follow-up study, a bare mention of homosexuality in the 1970 General Convention Journal, and a cryptic entry in the minutes of a House of Bishops meeting in 1972. Integrity was founded in 1974 and General Convention dealt substantively with homosexuality for the first time in 1976, nine years after the 1967 resolution.

The Windsor Report Appendix Three reprints resolution 10 from the Lambeth Conference 1978 and Resolution 64 from 1988. Resolution 10 ‘recognised the need for deep and dispassionate study of the question of homosexuality ...’ Unlike TSOHOC, the Windsor Report doesn’t say what happened in the decade following Lambeth 1978 nor Lambeth 1988. Does the silence mean that nothing at all happened? As far as I’m aware, no action was initiated in relation to homosexuality. Resolution 10 also addressed marriage and family life, broken marriages, abortion and genetic engineering. Were they deaslt with? Who was responsible for the failure to initiate action on Resolutions 10 and 64 recommendations about homosexuality – the Anglican Communion Office?

In the 1950s Church of England bishops were among those who advocated for reform of the law in relation to homosexuality which resulted in the 1967 Act. There was a confidence in arguing for decriminalisation, at the same time upholding ‘traditional church teaching’. The confidence exhibited then has evaporated over the following five decades. Why – what happened?

Post Stonewall 1969 LGBT people became more articulate and visible and more confident in arguing and campaigning for change. We were pretty much invisible in the 1950s and yet the Church of England was well-aware that homosexuality was an internal as much as an external issue.

Why did General Convention take 9 years to respond and the Anglican Communion 20 years - by which time forces of opposition had time to organise, with Tony Higton’s 1987 General Synod motion and the 1997 Kuala Lumpur Statement.

Was it simply that those who were responsible for initiating action were incompetent, or was it a failure of nerve, a fear of engaging with homosexuality, prejudice, lack of confidence? I would love to hear from someone who was at Lambeth 1987 or 1988 or working for the Anglican Communion Office then. Even more curious, how did those resolutions get onto the agenda in the first place? If there was enough confidence to table the resolutions, why the inability to take action after Lambeth? Now, we can only speculate how different the landscape might be today if the Communion had started deep and dispassionate study in 1978.

What is the Communion avoiding now? The most strident voices in the Communion are either demonising homosexuality or trying to marginalize the pro-gay Christian experience by presenting ex-gay ministries as the solution. The majority in the Communion would like to be persuaded that there is no such reality as homosexuality, no gay gene to prove that I exist in my gay identity. What a contrast with Church of England bishops in the 1950s. At least they were under no illusion as to the reality of homosexuality and the effect on a minority group of criminalizing sexual activity.

It has been left to the secular realm and to a minority of courageous Provinces and Christians to maintain the campaign not just for equality but at the moment for the very survival of LGBT lives in Africa. Christians who dare to make the case for LGBT people and exemplify mature, adult gay experience and ideals are vilified.

So what lesson can we draw from five decades of Anglican history? Never, never let the Communion forget that the Body of Christ includes lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Never, never allow the church off the hook, never let the church escape judgment for its prejudice towards LGBT people. Never lose faith in Christ, whose unconditional love embraces all of us.

Archbishop accused of abrogation of responsibility in gay debate

Bishop Peter Selby, patron of Changing Attitude England, delivered a devastating critique of the Anglican Covenant, the Archbishop of Canterbury and, above all, the church’s treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in a paper he presented to Inclusive Church's residential conference Word on the Street last week. Bishop Peter named thoughts that many in CA have been articulating for some years now.

As he rightly said, for many people, not just LGBT, our situation in the Church is far worse than it was during Archbishop George Carey’s time - and this is something for which the Archbishop needs to own some responsibility. Bishop Peter said he has “a responsibility to acknowledge the distress that is being inflicted on LGBT people by the teaching that is being proclaimed and the characteristic style of the debate.”

Peter Selby makes his comments in the context of criticising the reflections the Archbishop of Canterbury produced following the 2009 General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA - Communion, Covenant and our Anglican Future. The Archbishop uses the “I am totally opposed to homophobia, but ...” line of argument at the beginning of the reflections. It is necessary, says our patron, to be honest as well as passionate when making strong denunciations of homophobic behaviour or attitudes of any kind, and the Archbishop is not being honest.

The evidence leaves no room for doubt that homosexuality is the battleground chosen by 'traditionalists' seeking to halt what they see as liberal control of Anglicanism. Homosexuality is the chosen issue precisely because of the visceral responses which it arouses and the energies it allows to be tapped; it provides fuel for the debate. Peter Selby says the Archbishop is complicit in the way that energy is being used despite his personal opposition to homophobia. He does not understand the devastating effect the constant abusive and destructive campaign being waged by conservatives is having. The Archbishop does not name or criticise the dishonesty, bullying and threats that characterise the neo-conservative, radical reformers who style themselves ‘mainstream’ and ‘orthodox’ with such outrageous arrogance that they maintain other Anglicans are not recognisably Christian.

The decisions and actions of numerous provinces, the bullying, the threats, the withdrawal of communion, the unilateral invasions of others' territories – these have all made Anglicanism quite unrecognizable to a significant number of people, says Peter Selby. I think they are making Anglicanism unrecognisable to millions, here in the UK and elsewhere in the Communion.

Peter Selby says he had hoped that the Archbishop of Canetrbury’s giftedness in connecting with people and issues out of a deep and prayerful theological mind might assist all of us, whichever 'side' we were on, to move to a larger perception of this complex reality from which might eventually come a new paradigm of thinking which would change us all. The hope was that he might have united us and helped us us find ways of speaking that do not cause hurt to those LGBT people over whose bodies and lives the church is arguing.

Instead, the Archbishop has come near to “a total abrogation of any attempt to help us to think freshly about sexuality.” Instead, he has taken on an exclusive concern with finding ecclesio-political answers to the current panic. Out of the systemic malaise we inhabit has come an overwhelming false consciousness. Self-preservation as a Communion is the over-riding concern. The Archbishop is depriving us of his ministry of discernment about the issues in dispute.

There is an element of personal choice in the midst of the overwhelming pressure the Archbishop is subjected to. In Christ on Trial, Rowan Williams wrote:

“I long for the Church to be more truly itself, and for me this involves changing its stance on war, sex, investment and many other difficult matters. I believe in all conscience that my questions and my disagreements are all of God. Yet I must also learn to live in and attend to the Church as it is, to do the prosaic things that can be and must be done now and to work at my relations now with the people who will not listen to me or those like me - because what God asks of me is not to live in the ideal future but to live with honesty and attentiveness in the present, i.e. to be at home.”
Christ on Trial, p.85f

Bishop Peter Selby concludes that allowing the 'prosaic things' to condition patterns of thought results in false consciousness and that, it seems is where the Archbishop has arrived.

When words are no better than silence, one should remain silent

A married, ordained heterosexual posted an anonymous comment on Monday 27th’s blog about the Archbishop’s Reflections on General Convention. The comments were far too valuable to be left there, read by the few, so I am posting them here as blog in their own right. Thank you, anonymous, for your wisdom.

Anonymous:

As I read the comments all I feel is a profound sadness.

To those who would quote scripture or cite tradition, they would do well to meditate upon the Christ who welcomed all but challenged those with fixed perceptions of 'who is in, who is out' in God's Kingdom. Our Lord welcomes the lepers, the adulterers, the Samaritans AND the Pharisees, The Romans, etc. I will not use the word 'sinners' - that was imposed on him by those who would judge. He simply welcomed openly, challenged where necessary, loved totally.

What Jesus condemned, quite voraciously, were those who placed burdens upon those simply trying to feel their way in finding God and reminded us all of the need for humility when proclaiming the limits of God's love: Judge not, lest ye be judged.

For those who would point to isolated scriptural texts or point to tradition, let's remember a Christ who sat lightly to the letter of Shabbat restriction, placed mercy above the death of an adulterous woman and rejoiced at a Samaritan's faith - hmmm - all of which would have been roundly condemned by many of the religious professionals of his time.

As Anglicans, our way has always been the three ingredients of scripture, tradition and rationality, feeding each other in dialogue and within a context. We are not a Church of Sola Scriptura - the Anglican Communion fought long within itself for a modest approach that counted all things as provisional before the unfolding of the Kingdom. For me at least, that is the great gift Anglicanism has given the world. It would be a shame now for the World to do so much better with it than us.

I am heterosexual, married, ordained and I will rejoice in the day when matters of sexuality, race and gender are placed in the context of all are one in Christ.

As for Rowan, there I feel truly depressed. He is a man of amazing talent and I respect his theological talents. I believe him to be a man of integrity trying to do what he thinks is right in the longer term. How long, though, must we be asked to understand the African context and yet not have the same requirement to understand the North American context, or any other for that matter? Today we remember William Wilberforce. As he was continually forced to go back to the drawing board men and women suffered greatly. Do we not find ourselves shocked that such suffering continued as those in power repeatedly said 'no' or the much more sinister 'we need to wait until the time is right' - a euphemism for 'we'll keep our economic power base for as long as we can thank you very much'.

If there should be a moratorium, perhaps it should not be on Provinces acting on their discerned conscience but rather on the continual war of words, which seems far more destructive and pours shame on the Church in the eyes of those we would seek to call into Christ's Kingdom. As a Zen saying has it - 'when words are no better than silence, one should remain silent'.

Perhaps it will be in silence that we will truly end up walking the road God wished us to walk down. It may be naive hope but at least it's a good one. If not, then at least in silence we can leave it all to the love and the judgement of the One who alone is fit to judge any of us.

So now I will follow my own advice and be silent!

Archbishop's Reflections impossible for Changing Attitude supporters to accept

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s reflections on the Episcopal Church's 2009 General Convention are going to satisfy very few, if any, people. Perhaps that’s the intention.

Conservatives posting on Stand Firm think this is just a form of words to ‘suggest’ TEC is little bit ‘hasty but not wrong while the rest of the communion is just slow and dumb. Conservatives think +Rowan Williams and +Katherine Jefferts Shori are allies. The Archbishop is judged to be not orthodox but 100% liberal to his core and in grave theological and moral error throughout, determined to keep TEC in the family, no matter what, and willing to redefine the Anglican Communion in order to do so.

On Thinking Anglicans Fr Mark, a partnered gay priest, comments that he was:

“brought up in a Church of England which has all my life surrounded me with partnered gay priests and laypeople. I find this really horribly and personally offensive in its degree of failure to recognise the lived reality of members of the Church of England. According to this statement, no-one living in a same-sex relationship can ‘have a representative function’ in the Church. That means farewell to partnered gay singers, organists, teachers in church schools, as well as clergy in civil partnerships.”

The Archbishop of Canterbury says: “ … no Anglican has any business reinforcing prejudice against LGBT people, questioning their human dignity and civil liberties or their place within the Body of Christ.” We in CA agree with that. The “particularly bitter and unpleasant atmosphere of the debate over sexuality, in which unexamined prejudice is still so much in evidence and accusations of bad faith and bigotry are so readily thrown around” which the Archbishop describes is bitter and prejudiced exactly because of the church’s traditional teaching about homosexuality.

He then recommends a course of action which does just that – reinforces prejudice and questions human dignity and our place in the Body of Christ. The Archbishop writes that it is hard to see how a partnered lesbian or gay person “can act in the necessarily representative role that the ordained ministry, especially the episcopate” requires because “a person living in such a union cannot without serious incongruity have a representative function in a Church whose public teaching is at odds with their lifestyle.”

That puts the Archbishop of Canterbury at odds not just with the supporters of Changing Attitude but with the majority of the bishops, priests and lay people of the Church of England. Members of our congregations no longer believe that the church can draw lines where it used to. The CofE I know has always ordained partnered lesbian and gay people. Bishops have turned a blind eye to the partners of lesbian and gay clergy. With the advent of Civil Partnerships the majority and priests and laity can see no reason why the church should not bless those unions and that is true even of FoCA and HTB churches. Couples are welcome by most congregations who see no reason why faithfully partnered people should not be ordained and minister to them.

If the process of accepting the Anglican Covenant, and the Covenant itself, is intended to impose the teaching of Lambeth 1.10 for the indefinite future then Changing Attitude is totally opposed to the Covenant. We will work with our partners in the church to ensure that the Church of England never adopts a Covenant designed to inhibit our full place in the church of God.

With our brothers and sisters in the USA and Canada, we refuse to accept the imposition of a moratorium on our place in the church. We are here now, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, single and partnered, lay and ordained. Our sexual identity is not malleable but as with every person, we hope to mature with age.
We are not leaving the church, not denying our orders, not abandoning the love and intimacy of our partners to whom we remain more faithful than the church is faithful to us.

One trustee of Changing Attitude identified three things in the Reflections that make life impossible for LGBT Anglicans:

1. Does the Archbishop really and truly expect LGBT Anglicans living in 21st century western countries to wait a matter of decades until churches entrenched in deeply homophobic African cultures have come to terms with same-sex relationships before we are allowed to form relationships?

2. Does the Archbishop really expect those of us living in long-term relationships, whether the church recognises them or not, to break up with our partners and live solitary lives, even though there is nothing in our conscience or our own theology which would suggest it was a bad thing? Or is he happy for us to lead those 'lifestyles', as he puts it, as long as we keep them separate from our church and our God?

3. In paragraph 14 the Archbishop talks about a local church becoming 'isolated and imprisoned in its own cultural environment'. At the moment the Church of England is isolated and imprisoned from her own cultural environment. We are being expected to cling onto outdated and desperately damaging prejudices from our past, which impair and undermine our mission to our own society. What use is a church which is 'in communion' with churches overseas, but is a laughing stock and a peddler of bigotry within its own constituency?