As regular readers know – and as I’ve said in General Synod more than once – I believe in transparency. But I also respect confidences. This can be a difficult tightrope to walk when it comes to the Church of England. At the Living with Difference meetings in September, the usual St Michael’s House Protocols (it’s OK to share the learning but don’t attribute anything) were suddenly shifted to Don’t Say Anything About The Documents. At least that’s clear.
Last Friday, I was at Lambeth Palace for a meeting. No protocols were stated for this meeting, so for the purposes of this update I am assuming ‘St Michael’s House’, but with the extra feature that it’s impossible not to attribute what’s said when there is only one person in the room who could have said it; the Archbishop of Canterbury. Because the whole point of the meeting was to bring him into the same room as representatives of the various ‘inclusive’ groups: and yes, I know, this isn’t great terminology, but nor is ‘progressive’ (suggesting an opposite of ‘regressive’) or ‘liberal’ (many of us are highly orthodox in our theology) or ‘affirming’ (we don’t affirm just anything!). We’d been given no agenda in advance, only told that the meetings were “so that we [the LLF Staff Team] are able to share with you the intentions of the bishops and so you are able to share your thoughts and concerns with us.”
When Friday’s meeting was announced, at short notice, I heard from several stakeholders that they weren’t inclined to drag themselves into London yet again for what could well be a pointless meeting. We have bitter experience of being asked at these meetings to react to various scenarios, only for an entirely different scenario to be the one that is decided upon. Eventually they concluded that they may as well go; we’re nothing if not resilient. So, there we were. Again. Only, this time, all in the same room, rather than meeting the LLF team in sub-groups (Evangelical inclusives, Catholic inclusives, etc).
And there are many groups; therefore, it was a full room. The room allocated was on the eighth floor; there are two small lifts but with the number of people attending we were asked to consider taking the stairs. And I did. As we climbed up, someone joked that this was an attempt to get rid of us all…
What follows are my recollections (I took notes so anything in double quote marks is a direct quotation) and reactions. Some of my reactions differ from those of my friend Colin Coward, who was present for Changing Attitude (England) and who has blogged here. I am not going into detail on some parts of the meeting which he mentions, although I witnessed what he describes, because I don’t want to tell other people’s stories: that’s up to them.
We were invited to go round giving our names and the name of the group we were representing. It was clear that the Archbishop hadn’t heard of some of these groups. Then the Archbishop gave an initial comment recognising the process as “costly and painful”; I wasn’t sure whether that was about being in this particular room or the whole LLF ‘journey’. He referred in particular to the feedback he had received after the 9 October meeting of the House of Bishops, and to the more recent meeting of the House at which only around three hours were spent on LLF although there had been “private conversations with different people” as well. Just wondering here who these would be? He stated that both Archbishops want the proposals to move forward “as quickly as possible”. He said he was well aware of the splits not just in the C of E and the Anglican communion but also in every other denomination on “living appropriately and rightly” with LGBTQIA+.
The meeting’s facilitator then said that he would be holding the circle, and stated that the purpose of the meeting was for the Archbishop to hear our responses. 90 minutes would be devoted to that, with people invited to put up their hand when they wanted to vocalise what they were thinking. He added that there were to be “no threats”, which did make me wonder what the morning meeting with ‘conservatives’ – because he and the Archbishop mentioned this meeting – had been like. After that period of sharing, we would look at the questions in a different way: I’ve no idea what that meant because we never made it to that stage. Finally, the Archbishop would respond.
Read it all at Shared-Conversations.com
