Sarah Coakley Church Times Bring theology back to the parishes
Colin Coward Unadulterated Love Full equality in ministry and relationships for LGBTQIA+ people — Unadulterated Love
Stephen Parsons Surviving Church Gratification and Power – A Problem for the Church
Helen King Premier Christianity I’m celebrating the UK’s first female archbishop. I don’t care that she is in a civil partnership
I strongly support what Colin Coward wants but I believe that how the demand is phrased matters very much. LGBTQ+ Christians have most certainly been treated disgracefully by the Church of England but they are not the only minority group to feel excluded and unwanted. In a triumph for inclusion and equality a Lesbian woman with a loving partner has just been elected Archbishop of Wales. Archbishop Cherry’s vision and ministry has the capacity to transform the Anglican Communion and I pray that it will. Cherry Vann emphasizes small things: welcome, inclusion, kindness, mutual respect, community and perhaps most important… Read more »
“Inclusion shouldn’t be the exclusive preserve of liberals.”
In my experience, whenever an attempt is made in Anglican circles (and I include my own Episcopal subset) to be inclusive of both liberals and conservatives–especially when it concerns sexuality and/or gender–it is the conservatives who exclude themselves, on the grounds that any meeting with those on the other side will “taint” them.
Try being a gender critical gay man or woman, you’ll experience the inclusion from both sides, it’s great.
As an ordinary congregation member (albeit in an English parish, not a Welsh one) I’d firstly like to wish Cherry Vann well in her new post. Comments about her ministry on past TA threads have been universally complimentary, and she sounds to be a very competent and Godly person. I wish we had more like her. In terms of the British church her appointment must be a major ‘first’ simply by virtue of her being a woman archbishop, never mind her marital status or sexuality. In the workaday world I live in the last two are irrelevant; the fact she’s… Read more »
In respect of same-sex marriage, the doctrinal stumbling block is marriage’s third ‘good’: being open to the gift of children. As a priest happy to offer Eucharist for single-sex couples, I still struggle with the question: ‘does this good have the bandwidth to embrace same-sex marriages?’ In 1977 the C of E caught up liturgically with St Augustine in ordering the goods of permanence and fidelity before offspring. Not to rank them, but in recognition of their mutuality: permanence and fidelity providing the foundation in which children can flourish. The procreative purpose of marriage remained – the one good without… Read more »
This is a complex question which needs detailed and nuanced debate. The first question to ask is how has contraception changed the rules of the game. If the “mutuality: permanence and fidelity” of marriage is necessary to provide “the foundation in which children can flourish”, then a ban on sex before marriage can be argued as being necessary if it prevents the birth of children outside marriage. But in these days of widespread contraception then is such a ban still necessary? It seems to me that even within Christian networks the ban on sex before marriage is widely ignored by… Read more »