What is in Kelvin's Head?

“Issues” is no more

15/07/2025
Earlier today, the General Synod of the Church of England took a hugely significant step. It removed a document called “Issues in Human Sexuality” from the discernment process for people being assessed for clerical vocations in the Church of England.

Oh, I can hear you yawning from here. But it really is important and this is a significant step forward.

“Issues” as it has come to be known became a touchstone for the Church of England. It was originally a statement from the Church of England Bishops about what they thought about sex and sexuality. It was never intended to become something that people had to agree with before they could be considered for ordination but it became so. Of course being the Church of England, people tried to make a distinction between agreeing with the document and agreeing to live in compliance with the document. Such corrosive thinking simply led people to tell lies and I’ve always thought that all Christians were agreed that telling lies was a bad thing that none of us should do.

Issues was horrendous back in the 1990s when it was introduced. It set different sexual standards for clergy and laity, it referred to gay people as homophiles, it stated that bisexual people were inherently unfaithful to partners, it seemed to condone conversion therapy and much more. It didn’t just use language that we now find outdated, it used language that was prejudicial at the time and deeply harmful to huge numbers of people. I was trying to become an ordinand when it was published. It was devastating.

It affected other parts of the Anglican Communion too. I know people who trained for ministry in Scotland who were told that living within the no-sex-for-the-homophiles boundaries of Issues was expected of them too. And many of us went to Selection Conferences for ministry that took place in the Church of England where the selectors were trained to expect potential ordinands to indicate that they would live within the boundaries of this document. For a while, we sent clergy from Scotland on Selection Conferences in England with a letter stating that this document didn’t apply in Scotland. But we were still using a system that was based entirely around discrimination against lesbian, gay and bisexual people. (I don’t think transgender people were addressed in the document).

My thoughts today are with those whose vocations were crushed by Issues. And those who managed to have vocations upheld but whose personal lives were damaged by it. Some people lived unhappy lives that might have been completely different. My particular thoughts tonight are of a wonderful priest I once worked with whose love never spoke its name. He loved another priest and remained closeted – living or seeming to be living within Issues because that is what his church expected of him. When he died, his obituary in the Church Times did not mention the love of his life. He was presumed to be living within the boundaries of Issues and he died being presumed to be living within it. It is a simple reality that some people were expected to lie in life and could not have truths told when they died. (And that meant others who were beloved by clergy sometimes went unacknowledged and were ignored at funerals).

For the sake of him and hundreds of others whose lives have been harmed by this document both within and beyond the Church of England, I welcome the fact that Issues is now gone.

And now the next questions.

Will the Church of England stop selling Issues and presumably making money from the wretched document? It is still on sale on Amazon after all.

And more importantly for everyone.
- When will we hear apologies from church leaders for the harms that churches have done in relation to policies on human sexuality?
- How will UK churches communicate their repentance for previous harms done, to churches in other parts of the world which have enthusiastically endorsed such policies in response to their adoption here – particularly those churches which think of the Church of England as their mother church?
- What will compensation for the anti-gay policies of churches eventually look like?
Church of England, gay, Issues, issues in human sexuality, lesbian, LGBT, synod

7 responses to “Reclaiming the web”

Paul Hutchinson

14/10/2015

Thank you for making me think in a different direction just before pausing for lunch. I have never had a blog, so came quite late to Internet social discourse, and have engaged more since joining one major network in 2010 and another in early 2014 – normally using those networks rather than a comment box such as this. Not all of us are natural creators of substantial original content, but like to be thoughtful in brief exchange, and so both those major networks, though cursed with many difficulties, serve those brief exchanges quite well. I do agree that the endless recycling of links (on both of them) can be wearying, and I do wish that some old friends would be a little more self-critical. But the price of any kind of social discourse is that one is vulnerable to the otherness of the other.
I feel I ought to be writing a more substantial comment here, but hope that this is enough. The time is not always there to offer deeper reflection: but sometimes a blogger needs to hear at least a small splash from the stone thrown down the well!

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1. Kelvin
  
  14/10/2015
  
  Thanks for the comment, Paul. I’m aware that not everyone is a content creator, but perhaps what I miss is the sense of discovering different communities online and keeping the comments more or less in one place helps with that.
  
  The glory days of 50 or more comments on a post are probably over. I suspect I mourn the sense of community being created even more than I miss the interesting reflections of others. Retweets and shares are always welcome – but they are the means of amplification. Becoming loud isn’t the same as becoming wise, nor the same as becoming connected.
  
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Seph

14/10/2015

It’s a damnable shame—and mostly the fault of Facebook. Twitter at least has an etiquette of sorts, wherein it is considered impolite not to respond to the original tweet, which is usually made by the blogger in question.

Facebook, in short, is the scourge of the Internet. I have often been in groups which have decided to do all of their organizing on Facebook, despite my protests that I’m not on Facebook and don’t want to be, and really an e-mail list would be just as easy, and would they like me to set one up. This inevitably leads to my marginalization within the group, as no-one bothers to keep me abreast of the discussions to which I am not party.

Can you tell I’m upset about this?

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Daniel Lamont

14/10/2015

I am only an occasional user of Facebook but I know what you mean, Kelvin. And indeed, I never read the comments ‘below the line’ on newspapers like ‘The Guardian’. You offer some useful advice. I read yours and one or two other blogs on a regular basis but don’t always comment. However, I can see that the author of a blog would like some feedback. I would be sad not to have the blogs that I do read because they do give me a sense of what people are thinking and an odd sense of community.

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Father Ron Smith

14/10/2015

My own contribution to the blogopshere is, I’m afraid, Father Kelvin, limited to comments I make on other people’s blogs (such as ‘Thinking Anglicans’ and ‘Anglican Down Under’ – a local NZ forum; plus my own blog ‘kiwianglo’, where i pluck articles that interest me personally from the web and provide my own commentary. This still interests me, personally, and provides my few readers with information they might not otherwise be bothered to glean for themselves. Like you, I am no longer an avid Facebook fan.

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David Campbell

16/10/2015

Hi Kelvin – thoughtful as ever – and yours is invariably the first blog I turn to each day. That you bring pressing issues to a wider audience and to people who know, or used to know, the church you serve is a great thing. I’m still blogging relatively strongly, but it’s certainly a different blogging experience when work is set in a very different context and especially community from previously, writing these days mainly for myself about things that interest me, although not quite at the address you have in your Blog Roll. http://www.limpingtowardsthesunrise.com is where it’s “all” happening.

Reply
1. Kelvin
  
  16/10/2015
  
  Thanks David – nice to hear from you. I’ve amended the link.
  
  I don’t think many people use blogrolls to find blogs these days but whenever I remove it my mother complains…
  
  Reply