The death of the Living in Love and Faith project has not settled well with liberals in the Church of England. Last month, the House of Bishops announced the effective end of the gay-blessings saga that has divided England’s national church for almost three long years.
After belatedly taking more theological and legal advice, the bishops concluded that the only way to make further progress on Prayers of Love and Faith—a suite of liturgies and blessings for same-sex couples—would require supermajorities in the church’s governing body that simply do not exist.
And so, although a consistent majority of liberals in this General Synod not only endorsed gay blessings but longed to introduce same-sex church marriage, the PLF train has run into the buffers.
Most likely, there will not be an option for progressive parishes to hold standalone blessings outside of regular Sunday worship, once the big prize sought by the liberal wing. Neither will the ban on gay clergy entering civil marriages be lifted, something the bishops once intimated they would also do.
There have been some conservative mutterings about another consequence of the fizzling out of Living in Love and Faith: a plan to allow conservative churches to opt out of the oversight of their liberal bishops and instead come under the care of a like-minded bishop elsewhere has also been killed off.
But the major ructions have come from the liberal faction. Much energized by the last three years of battling to move gay blessings over the line, progressives in the C of E have been left bereft and, increasingly, angry.
‘A Pastoral Failure’
Together for the Church of England, the main liberal pressure group, issued a statement lamenting what it described as the “pastoral failure by those to whom we look as our chief shepherds.” The update from the bishops has caused “overwhelming” grief and pain for LGBT people, the group said, and appeared to have been prompted by a “relentless campaign … focusing on details of procedure and law” led by conservatives.
“It may be that to offer a true welcome to same-sex couples, law or canon needs to change,” Together said. “But that is what synod does, all the time, and we stand ready to work for change and inclusion by whatever means necessary.”
Others offered more personal grief at the death of their hopes for a more LGBT-affirming church. The Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, David Monteith—who is in a same-sex civil union—wrote an impassioned blog post that spoke of his deep hurt. “I found my life and heart constrict as I received this news once again; being told loudly and clearly that our minority lives and loves must remain marginal, hidden and uncatered-for like a vegetarian in 1980s France.”
The sweeping apology endorsed by the synod toward LGBT people back in 2023 at the launch of the Prayers now rang hollow, Monteith added. “Micro-aggressions and visceral fear and anger continue to be experienced by us. The new Christian inclusion is but fantasy.”
Similar remarks came from Dean Mark Oakley of Southwark Cathedral, who is also gay. Reading the bishops’ statement made it hard for him “not to conclude that the Church of England is still homophobic and does not believe in the equality of love,” Oakley said in a sermon shortly after the announcement.
Some bishops known to be supportive of Prayers of Love and Faith have tried to assuage the anger and sadness from their liberal allies. Bishop David Walker of Manchester wrote a lengthy letter to his diocese explaining that introducing standalone services of blessing or letting gay clergy marry would have come at too high a price.
In order to move the necessary laws through the synod would have required buying off conservatives with a de facto church within a church. And it was this the bishops, even the liberals, could not stomach as “guardians of the unity of the church,” Walker wrote.
Similarly, Bishop Joanne Grenfell of St. Edmundsbury and Ipswich said in an interview with The Church Times that the price of proceeding on PLF had become too high.
Defying the Bishops
But in the absence of a strong episcopal backlash, some progressives are striking out on their own. The Rev. Simon Butler, a liberal vicar who was previously a well-known synod member, kicked things off by writing in a blog post that he would defy the bishops and offer standalone same-sex blessings anyway.
In fact, he has been doing so for months already. “The pastoral task laid upon me by my ordination vows and the mission of God in this community is more important than allowing an illegitimate request from the House of Bishops to get in the way,” Butler wrote.
The gauntlet having been thrown down, several high-profile liberal priests have joined Butler’s cause and pledged to also offer renegade blessings. The ecumenical Inclusive Church network has published an open letter for its members to sign that encourages the use of the Prayers “in every context as a step towards the equality we must seek.”
Chantal Noppen, the national coordinator for Inclusive Church, said the bishops’ climbdown on blessings seemed to have been driven by fear, especially legal concerns that endorsing standalone services could open clergy to modern-day heresy trials from conservatives. “It feels not just like a betrayal, but far worse, because it feels very much like a capitulation to being bullied.”
She said the open letter was tacitly encouraging clergy who felt compelled to follow their consciences and disregard the bishops. And if this brought on legal challenges, then so be it. There was no church law or rule that barred her from offering standalone gay blessings, but simply a request from the bishops to refrain.
“And because us woolly liberals are all nicey-nicey, we’ve respected that,” she said. “But actually, if enough of us say ‘Well, we’re going to do this because we believe it’s right and this has been discerned and prayed through, and the mandate is there,’ then actually we shouldn’t be scared.”
Too often the liberal wing has been outgunned by harder-edged uncompromising conservatives, Noppen argued, and so it was time for those on her side to stiffen their spines and became just a touch more “rebellious.”
“I don’t think that bishops are God,” she said. “I don’t think that all of them are as honest, transparent, and prayerful as they could be.”
Yes, they could strip her of a license to officiate (she no longer leads a parish in her new role at Inclusive Church) and make life difficult, but liberal clergy had to decide if they came into ministry for an institution or for the people, she said. “It’s not about the bishops, it’s about the people of God, and especially as the Church of England it’s about being here for everybody, no matter what. The pastoral need and duty of care of people will always come first.”
‘Upholding Sound Doctrine’
But bravado alone may not be sufficient to overcome the hurdles. The Church of England has now published the legal and theological advice that spooked the bishops into effectively ending the Prayers journey, and it does not make easy reading for liberals.
The church’s Faith and Order Commission, a theologically balanced group of bishops and theologians, released three reports on November 5, as well as guidance from the head of the Church of England’s legal office, the Rev. Alex McGregor.
The first report, “The Nature of Doctrine and The Living God,” describes the Church of England’s doctrine as “communally authorised knowledge about God warranted by the Holy Scriptures.” Scriptural grounding is essential, the report argues, because “human sinfulness corrupts our reason,” and communally authorized doctrine “plays a regulative role in the community.”
The report does not deny the possibility of doctrinal development—indeed, it outlines multiple models for such development—but also describes it as “a potentially unhelpful notion,” and pushes back hard at simplistic appeals to social change. Its emphasis on doctrine as “regulative” limits the scope for justifying practice in tension with doctrine on “pastoral” grounds.
“The Doctrine of Marriage and the Prayers of Love and Faith: Texts and Contexts,” a second paper, describes Prayers of Love and Faith, in their current form, as a pastoral resource, and makes a strong distinction between private and public contexts for prayer. Because public prayer makes authoritative doctrinal statements, its words and ritual context should be scrutinized carefully, the report said.
The paper urges caution about introducing “bespoke services” of same-sex blessing, as well as ritual actions like exchanging rings, making vows, and separate processions into the service that would make the blessing look more like a wedding. These “may be seen by some to communicate ecclesial endorsement of a couple’s relationship as a whole, including its sexual dimension. This is true even though the actual words avoid nuptial or sacramental formulae.”
The report also highlights the danger of allowing widely divergent practice on pastoral grounds, stating that “the question is not simply whether the Church can tolerate difference, but whether it can do so while preserving a coherent witness to its own teaching. If liturgical practice is allowed to diverge from doctrinal principle, then the Church’s claim to be a confessing body—one that worships according to what it believes—may be placed in jeopardy.”
The third and longest report, “The Exercise of Discipline and Clergy Exemplarity in the Church of England: The Case of Same-Sex Civil Marriages,” begins from the first paper’s emphasis on doctrine’s regulative role within the church and clergy’s vowed responsibility to serve as exemplars of holy living.
Given the Church of England’s traditional doctrine of marriage, the report lays out three possible paths by which clergy could be ordained or licensed while in a same-sex civil marriage. Two are unlikely. The doctrine of marriage could be changed (an option that was taken off the table at the beginning of LLF). Bishops could unilaterally choose to relax discipline, a path “potentially resulting in legal challenges and increased confusion over such matters,” which the bishops specifically rejected at their September meetings.
The third possibility would be setting up a system of “pastoral accommodation” akin to one set up in the 1990s to allow the ordination and licensing of clergy who have remarried and have a living former spouse (an unwieldy system that General Synod recently decided to redesign). The report says that further investigation is needed to determine if permitting clergy to enter a same-sex civil marriage could be at variance with established doctrine other than the doctrine of marriage and if the practice would permit clergy to “live in what was not a faithful witness or wholesome example,” i.e., if it would indirectly sanction forbidden sexual activity.
Legal guidance about the Living in Love and Faith proposals was also released in unredacted form for the first time in the eight-year discussion. The advice says that a full process of liturgical revision (under Canon B2, which requires a two-thirds majority in all three houses of General Synod) is “the most secure way of bringing bespoke services into use.” It lays out a two-year timeline for undertaking such a process, though progressives would need to substantially increase their representation in synod at next summer’s elections before even clearing the first hurdle.
The report even questions the basis of the current provision for use of the Prayers and Love and Faith, which the House of Bishops had commended. “Commendation of forms of service has conventionally been the unanimous decision” of the bishops, it said, but when “a significant number of bishops dissent, it cannot be said that the episcopate is of a common mind that a form of service meets the requirement that it is ‘neither contrary to, nor indicative of any departure from, the doctrine of the Church of England in any essential matter.’”
The report further warns that changing the Church of England’s doctrine of marriage would be a complex undertaking that may even require an amendment to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer—which requires an Act of Parliament, something not attempted since 1928. It also says that bishops who wish to turn a blind eye to clergy in same-sex marriage risk violating their duty to “teach and uphold sound and wholesome doctrine.”
It adds, “What it plainly is not lawfully open to a bishop to do is to declare that no clergy in his or her diocese will face discipline if they enter into a same sex marriage.”
Butler and the other renegade liberals counter this by arguing that Anglican clergy have always had the right to create their own services for pastoral situations when official liturgies are silent, and they remain unconvinced that even bespoke blessings violate the church’s doctrine.
Indeed, they point out that on the other end of the spectrum, both conservative evangelicals and traditionalist Anglo-Catholics regularly ignore liturgical requirements or layer on unauthorized worship practices. This technical law-breaking goes entirely unpunished by the bishops, Butler added.
Assuming these are not simply empty words, the ball will soon be knocked back into the conservatives’ court. If a movement of liberal priests blessing gay couples in defiance of the bishops does arise, how will both their factional opponents and the institutional church respond?
It is hard to imagine many bishops choosing to smash open the hornets’ nest and attempt to discipline these clergy, even if the theologians and lawyers conclude their actions are unlawful. And so it may be up to the conservatives to follow through on their convictions and challenge what they believe are illegal blessings in ecclesiastical court.
Tim Wyatt is a freelance church news journalist in the UK, and the author of The Critical Friend newsletter on Substack (tswyatt.substack.com).
The Rev. Mark Michael is editor-in-chief of The Living Church. An Episcopal priest, he has reported widely on global Anglicanism, and also writes about church history, liturgy, and pastoral ministry.
