The Church of England’s General Synod will meet in York from 10 to 14 July. The agenda and papers for the meeting were released today.
There are links to the papers below the fold, grouped by the day on which they are due to be debated. There are also a number of GS Misc papers and items of deemed and contingency business.
Friday 10 July
Saturday 11 July
Sunday 12 July
Monday 13 July
Tuesday 14 July
Deemed Business
Contingency Business
GS Misc Papers
Notice Papers
Kairos Palestine Documents
“Presentations to the right of ’em…”. In my time on Synod, there was an addiction to presentations. It seems to have only got worse. And to be honest, they are not by any means all helpful or useful.
Graeme Buttery
The more I think about this the convinced I am that I no longer want to be a member of the Church of England. I am a straight man and I am not ordained but despite this I do not want to be a member of a church that believes in first and second class human beings. Of course the Bible is central to being a Christian but I don’t think it makes any sense to be completely constrained by the human understanding of the world two thousand years ago. You can’t for example ask the Bible for guidance on… Read more »
I can completely understand this feeling – the secular world is moving forward with great reforms of outdated and oppressive social values, and the Church is hobbled by its attachment to obscure and often outright offensive scriptures. But the figures speak for themselves – as the Church has carried out its noble reform towards liberalism over the last 30 years attendance has plummeted. I believe that this demonstrates the withdrawal of the Spirit from the Church as we increasingly look on God’s commandments with contempt. To think that just one more liberal reform is all we need to attract the… Read more »
I am another straight non-ordained person. I think plummeting attendance can be attributed to many factors, and liberalism is only a possible, undetermined, factor. Playing football on a Sunday morning seems much more popular. I am more likely to be found officiating at an athletics meeting with hundreds of young people participating on a Sunday morning rather than in church. I speak as a statistician/data scientist. There may also be confounding factors which affect both liberalism and attendance. Liberalism is not an irreconcilable force. Look at USA. I do agree that a single liberal reform is going to make people… Read more »
Homosexuality is not a moral choice any more than our heterosexuality is a moral choice. Scientific research (not available two thousand years ago) proves conclusively that sexual orientation is something that you are born with. So to refer to homosexuality as a “sinful desire” is both inaccurate and deeply offensive. If you believe that your heterosexual love is God given then you must also believe that homosexual love is God given since it is something you are born with not a moral choice. This leaves us with a “God of Love” who is actually a sadistic monster. He creates human… Read more »
Thanks for your post, David. I appreciate your attempts to bring in helpful scientific data. It’s not a thing the church is very good at. Back in the 1920s the gay campaigner Magnus Hirschfeld ran a research institute investigating homosexuality and transgenderism. The institute’s strapline was “Justice through Science, you should not punish somebody for what they were born as“. Sadly the Institute was raided by the Nazi student movement and his entire medical archive burnt in Babelplatz on 10 May 1933. Nevertheless it would nice to think that his “justice through science” values have not got totally lost It… Read more »
(Continued from Previous) Going back to the science, there is interesting new thinking about the “intersex brain”. Humans can be intersex chromosomally or anatomically. This essay, written by the late, much revered and much missed Stanley Mnkhouse is a helpful introduction. https://www.switchingview.com/monkhouse.pdf But regarding his section “Psychological Sex – what do I feel or experience?” – it is now known that certain parts of the brain are also gendered either male or female, and it is possible for a person to have a brain containing both male and female elements. A homosexual man like me, the research tells us, has… Read more »
Thanks.
It is, as you describe, complex and nuanced. No one rule fits all.
Imperfection is not the same as sin.
Whatever the science, the important issue is the consequences of a scientific understanding, an acceptance of ‘it is what it is’, and let’s get on with our lives.
Why these issues cause a schism in the church is beyond me.
Nigel, Thanks for your comment, and I agree with you that it is complex and nuanced. But I am slightly puzzled by your use of the word “imperfection”. Is this implying that these biological differences should be seen as imperfect? I agree that some of the doctors writing in the late 19th and early 20th century argued that these changes were pathological, and their writings have a long legacy, so I can fully understand why such words might appear today, but could I please suggest a different approach. Again this is based on modern research backing up the ideas of… Read more »
It is very tricky, nay impossible, to get the words right. I am (or used to be) an 8 stone weakling who could not run as fast as Steve Ovett. Hence I could be regarded as not fulfilling perfectly what God envisages for a young person to be. Hence I am imperfect. But not, in that sense, sinful. Similarly, I cannot remember by rote any poems, my memory ability is imperfect. I managed to obtain a history O-level without knowing the dates, or even the order, of Tudor kings and queens. We all have physical and mental imperfections. Some of… Read more »
Thanks Nigel, that’s a helpful response which I appreciate. It is often the case when discussing sexuality that problems occur due to people having different understandings of the same word.
I wonder if you were using “imperfect” in a theological context, where we are all imperfect, whereas I saw the word in a medical context, where imperfect may imply pathology and maladaptation.
Hence a slight dissonance.
Best wishes
Been thinking over dinner and a run. Perfection, creation, and imperfection. Dirac’s equation is perfect Maxwell’s equations are perfect. Simple, beautiful. But ultimately boring. Beethoven’s op 106, 109, 110, 111 are perfect Schubert’s D960 is perfect Performances are not perfect. But not a single note needs to be changed in these works. Been studying them for 50 years. They are perfect because they are DEEMED to be perfect. They are created perfect. Same with paintings. What needs changing in paintings by the masters? Nothing. They are perfect. Picasso Madonna and child? Every one of them perfect. Novels? Dostoevsky novels are… Read more »
Thanks. I do my best thinking on my bike rides. I am not an expert, but are we straying into platonic philosophy here? One can have the IDEA of the ideal object, but any human attempt to replicate the ideal will always fail in some way. But returning to Helen King’s paper. One can have the idea of a homosexual relationship or marriage. Of course any actual human relationship will be imperfect, and fail to match up to the ideal, in some way. But they can still be valid and helpful in this imperfect life. But is the simple idea… Read more »
Not sure if it got into my latest response, but recent article has
We do not regard our sexual orientation as a defect awaiting transformation.
which I agree, but is different to
We regard our sexual orientation as a perfection
because we live in an imperfect/defected world.
Everything falls apart if we consider the world is perfect and ourselves as sinless.
For me the interesting thing about CofE & its attitude to same-sex attraction is that it almost exclusively concentrates on male-to-male attraction, & similarly in the Trans debate it is the Male-to-Female issue that sees all the fire & brimstone. Lesbians & Female-to-Male Trans are virtually ignored in the CofE patriarchal world view. As for sin, the issue is not whether we are all sinners, or how far we may have fallen, but in one group setting itself up as the arbiter, and deciding that another group are so bad that ‘conversion therapy’ is in order. This despite the fact… Read more »
There are all sorts of drives, devices and desires that we are born with. Does that mean that they are all God given and therefore to be exercised?
Of course not. That is the false argument. But one musty distinguish between the action or mechanism and the goal. If the goal is love and bringing forward the kingdom of heaven, but the mechanism is a particular form of sexuality, who cares? If, on the other hand, the goal is a certain sexuality, then I am concerned. I might say ‘I am very fond of model railways, ad it doesn’t harm anybody, it is a God-given desire’ then I would worry. If I say ‘I am fond of model railways, I have great fun bonding with my grandchildren playing… Read more »
I’d think that Dr. Pangloss would not have advocated reforms, liberal or otherwise. because he always argued that everything is already for the best – he’d have said something like ‘people need more lie-ins, so it’s good that they stay in bed rather than go to church’. His original, Gottfried Leibniz, would perhaps have said that the level of church attendance is the best possible considering everything else that is going on the world. He did think that the divisions in the Church, Protestant v Catholic, were on a path to a providential outcome of unity, which he hoped to… Read more »