The Bishops decided that there must be further synodical processes for stand-alone services of blessing for same-sex couples and for reconsideration of the bar on clerics’ entering into same-sex marriages.
“Episcopal authority has never been weaker since the 17th Century,” wrote the Rector of St Giles’s, Newcastle-under-Lyme, with Butterton, the Revd Joshua Penduck, in a blog post. He suggested that there had been a lack of due process, attributable to “stupidity”, a “rush to create a new settlement”, and “a lack of honesty about what such a process could achieve”.
“The fact that the legal advice has only just been released is a mark of how needlessly painful the process has been,” he wrote. LLF had benefited nobody: neither the LGBTQ+ community nor conservatives who were “weary, exhausted and feeling vulnerable”. “There is now less cohesion in the Church of England than ever before.”
Bishops had “come to sound less like episcopal centres of unity and more like powerful activists”, he suggested.
The Church of England’s #LLF process, begun more than eight years ago in hopes of achieving a consensus on sexuality, has come under fire from both progressive and conservative quarters after the decisions taken at the recent House of Bishops meetinghttps://t.co/DUCoo1dBDO
— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) October 30, 2025