At next month’s General Synod, the Church of England will try a new approach to avoiding a disastrous formal schism over homosexuality. After two days of discussing legislative matters in open session and once all outsiders have left, the 550 representatives from around the world will break into groups of 20 for three days of intensive and personal discussions about sexuality.
The idea is not to reach agreement ”“ 30 years of wrangling have established that this is quite impossible ”“ but to try to bring people on both sides of the debate to see their opponents as fellow Christians. Conservative evangelicals have denounced the scheme as an attempt to manipulate opinion, which of course it is. The question is whether it will work.
What’s new about this approach is that the manipulation that Justin Welby’s strategists have in mind is not to be carried out from the top down. It is hoped that the process of facilitated conversations will allow the church’s activists gathered in the synod to take note of the social changes that are happening in their own congregations and their own families, where acceptance of gay people is becoming much more common.
This week a book of evangelical reflections on sexuality was published in which the bishop of Liverpool, the Rt Rev Paul Bayes, announced he had been “profoundly changed” by encounters with lesbian and gay Christians in his own family…
Of course it will work. The local option has been a tried and tested option since bishops stopped prosecuting Anglo Catholics a century and more ago. Unexpectedly, by making elbow room for their innovations, the Anglo Catholics opened the door for the tactic to be used for other innovations with which they profoundly disagreed.
I think of the local option over remarriage in church after divorce in the 80s, and then over the ordination of women in the 90s, and then as part of the accommodation around women bishops. That something like it will be used successfully again is to be expected. (The CofE has not managed to sustain either its pastoral practice in the face of changing civil marriage law – ever).
The only difference here is the attempt by the bishops not just to ensure the desired outcome but to control the debate. Even so – it feels to me like Groundhog Day. Here we go again…