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Has Living in Love and Faith come to an end? An open letter to the Archbishop of York

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Has Living in Love and Faith come to an end? An open letter to the Archbishop of York

Dear Stephen

I read with interest your address to York Diocesan Synod on 5th July, and one word leapt out for me: ‘final’. Near the end of your address, you comment:

The Living in Love and Faith process is not yet complete. Some final proposals will be brought to the February 2026 meeting of the General Synod.

If that is the case, I am and countless others (on all sides of this debate) will be delighted. This has been a disastrous and divisive process since 2017; I wonder whether you realise how damaging it has been, and whether you will ever publicly acknowledge that. It sprang out of Justin’s spontaneous and ill-conceived phrase “radical new Christian inclusion rooted in scripture and Christian theology” which was both incoherent (how can this be new if it’s rooted in existing theology?) and immediately open to misinterpretation—almost everybody who wanted to see change forgot the second half of the phrase.

And this summer’s ‘consultation’—which has been widely rejected, since there have been no new proposals to consider—have amply illustrated that. In every diocese that has discussed it, as far as I can tell, the discussion has highlighted how divided we are, and that the LLF process, far from enable us to ‘live with difference’, has exacerbated division. I suspect the conversation in York won’t have been much different.

But there were other comments in your address that I feel I need to respond to.

The church was divided on how to receive and celebrate the presence in our congregations and the ministry of people in stable, committed same-sex relationships.

Well, this all depends on what you mean by ‘the church’. The Church of England is not divided at all in its doctrine. As you know very well, canon law is very clear on both where we get our doctrine (that is, our understanding and our teaching; ‘doctrine’ is just the Latin-based word for teaching), and what our doctrine of marriage is:

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Personality, persona, and leading worship

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Personality, persona, and leading worship

Graham Hunter writes: I have spent a good deal of time in recent years reflecting on questions of personality, role and my impact on others in my work as a Vicar in an inner-city east London parish. 

In my early years in ministry, if anything was going wrong, or was troublesome and challenging, I would tend to assume the fault lay with others: ‘It’s not me, it’s you!’ (Indeed, I took some consolation in the phrase of an American community organiser: ‘You’ve gotta change the people, or you’ve gotta change the people’.)

However, as the years in ministry have progressed, I’ve become more interested in self-examination and reflection to understand how my strengths and weaknesses, priorities and blind-spots have an impact on others around me. It’s often commented that ‘as goes the leader so goes the church’—or in the world of education, ‘as goes the headteacher, so goes the school’. This is a central premise of emotionally healthy leadership insights from Pete Scazzero and others. 

Now, I think there’s a whole other conversation about organisational structures and family systems theory to explore as well—but for my purposes here, let’s stick to the question of how we understand our ‘self’ and our impact on others. I’ve taken to saying that for me it’s a matter of self-awareness for self-regulation. (To take this further, John Calvin said ‘without knowledge of self, there can be no knowledge of God’. But that will have to be a different article.)

A recent Grove Booklet by John and Paul Leach has been really helpful for me to articulate some of my thoughts on this subject—and in particular in how it explores the question of persona in public leadership. The booklet is entitled ‘Who Am I As A Worship Leader?’ but the authors are clear that this is not just about those who lead the congregational singing from the guitar or keyboard, but rather anyone who is involved in the leading of public worship services.

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Seven surprising things about the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10

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Seven surprising things about the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10

The Sunday gospel lectionary reading for Trinity 4 in Year C is Luke 10.25-37, most commonly known as the Parable of the Good Samaritan. I suspect many people preaching on this will be looking to wring some new truth from this, but might well lapse back into the ‘Jesus wants us to do good to others’ trope. It might be hard to find anything new to say on such a well-known story—such is the power of Jesus’ story telling that the phrase ‘pass by on the other side’ and the description of someone as a ‘Good Samaritan’ have passed into proverbial English use (though I don’t know if that is true of other cultures and languages).

But as I have reflected on the story, it occurs to me that there are a number of common misuses of this text.

Antinomianism: ‘Jesus wanted to do away with legalism and the Mosaic law; in the end, all that matters is caring for people’.
Reductionism: ‘Jesus only gave us two commandments, and both of them were positive’.
Moral ‘oughterism’: ‘Jesus told us that we ought to care for people, so this I what we ought to do.’
Liberal inclusivism: ‘The parable uses a despised outsider as the model of right action, so the truth is found in the lives of the marginalised.’
Some careful attention to the biblical text addresses these issues and offers us a better understanding of what is going on, and highlights seven surprising things that we might not have noticed.

First, we need to note that, though the story Jesus tells is only in Luke, the question of which is the greatest commandment comes in all three Synoptic gospels. It is not clear whether each of the writers puts his own interpretive angle on the encounter, or whether in fact this question arose on more than one occasion; if Jesus did indeed minister for the best part of three years (as the Fourth Gospel suggests), then the latter option is highly likely.

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