When the 15th Archbishop of Wales was enthroned in 2025 at Newport Cathedral it made worldwide headlines – for the Most Reverend Cherry Vann is the first gay archbishop in the world.
So, as part of LGBTQ+ History Month I visited the Archbishop for a chat.
As earlier articles have quoted Her Grace saying that people had left the church because she was both a woman and gay, I asked her, ‘how many?’ She replied ‘Not very many, a few when we introduced the blessing of civil partnerships and civil marriages. The big criticism has come from the Global South Churches in Africa and South America. I’ve been called a heretic, apostate, and that my election would be putting people’s souls at risk. I am aware that it’s caused a lot of turmoil in the Anglican community.’
I asked what arguments do they give? ‘That we’re going against the will of God, we’re contravening what it says in scripture. We’re living lives of sin by deliberately and intentionally going against God’s Word.’ I remarked upon the apparent hypocrisy of cherry picking, and she agreed, ‘Yes, and we’re all guilty of it. We all like to find things that resonate with our own position, but you know as well as I, that that the church was complicit in apartheid, that the Church backed slavery in past centuries. But we have to remain committed to being what the Bible says to us in our day and in our context. We all bring a particular lens to anything we read, the lens of our upbringing, the lens of our experience, the lens of our particular country. Part of the task of being a Christian is to try and understand what the broad themes of the Bible are, because the gospel, the good news, is about new life and new hope in Jesus Christ. God has gifted us the gift of love, our relationships with one another – a real gift when they’re based in love, mutual, support and faithfulness; and I can’t see why God would condemn a relationship that I believe has been a blessing, not just to me and my partner Wendy, but to other people.’
Yet it was not until she came to Wales that she came out. Read it all in Nation Cymru