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 It didn’t just use language that we now find outdated, it used language that was prejudicial at the time and deeply harmful to huge numbers of people.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

15 responses to “Some Bisexuals are Christian (and there’s lots of them)”

Rosemary Hannah

23/09/2015

I never realised I was bi until I fell in love with a woman. I think the essential point I would like to make is that I am not in a relationship with a woman because I fancied making love to a woman from a desire for novelty, nor, especially, because I wanted to make love to a, to some woman. I fell in love with a single, available woman, and a woman who was free to love me, and did love me. One very particular person. And because we love each other, we make love to each other. That, I think, is what some conservatives miss.

Reply
Chris Mayo

23/09/2015

One of the clearest and best reflections on bisexuality and sexual fluidity. A beautiful offering that will speak to the hearts of many. Thank you Kelvin.

Reply
Antonio

24/09/2015

In order for one to have a solid “Christian” argument it must be historically accurate, theological sound, and Spirit-filled. You provided none of these. You did not quote one Scripture, one theologian, or even state that the information that you received was directly from G-d through personal devotion such as prayer.

What you said was very well written, and reflects growing trends in modern society, but that was all. In order to convince more people you should at least quote St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas and provide evidence that can be found in the Hebrew Bible, as well as the Greek New Testament.

Your argument was neither Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, nor Protestant.

Reply
1. Kelvin
  
  24/09/2015
  
  Bless you for your comment, Antonio. I’m struggling though to think how I could have explained more clearly that I don’t think the bible to be a complete and adequate explanation of modern day human sexuality. For the same reasons, interesting though they are, I don’t think that Augustine nor Aquinas explain it all either.
  
  And of course, I am neither Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic nor Protestant.
  
  Reply
2. JCF
  
  04/10/2015
  
  Can we please-please-PLEASE come to the realization that when a (self-identified) Christian states something, we can just ASSUME that this Christian has been formed in a way that is, FOR THEM, “historically accurate, theological sound, and Spirit-filled”, and go on from there? That not every self-disclosure requires a point-by-point unpacking of First Principles?
  
  Reply
Rosemary Hannah

24/09/2015

If I was inclined to be very naughty I might inquire how Antionio can possibly establish the need for a Christian argument to meet his criteria without his calling on the criteria and creating a perfect circle.

Reply
1. Martin W.
  
  05/10/2015
  
  It isn’t ‘a perfect circle’. What he said is perfectly clear. The Apostolic Christian faith is based on the teaching of the Apostles, not our perceptions. That faith is found in the New Testament. Kevin, despite his protests(!), is very much a protestant of the modern liberal kind.
  
  Reply
Pam

04/10/2015

You’re not Protestant Kelvin?

Thanks for your thoughts on this subject.

Reply
1. Kelvin
  
  04/10/2015
  
  No, I’m not Protestant.
  
  Reply
  1. Pam
    
    04/10/2015
    
    I’m not sure what I am (faith-wise). It’s a great feeling.
    
    Reply
Alan McManus

11/10/2015

I’m Roman Catholic, I attend St Mary’s and those RC parish churches where I feel welcome (that’s one, in the whole of Scotland, at the moment) I have had relationships with men and with women, I dislike labels but admit they have their uses (I don’t know one bisexual person who doesn’t feel the same) I often am taken for gay and sometimes for strait and I usually don’t bother correcting people. I agree with every word Kelvin has said above and if anyone wants scriptural and other related references they can follow the link I’ve posted.

Reply
Alan McManus

11/10/2015

I mean by clicking on my name. Kelvin can you add a “share this post” button, with options for Facebook, Twitter etc.?

Reply
etseq

14/10/2015

The starting premise of this sermon is wrong and poisons everything that follows. Despite the ecstatic headlines promoting the results of two flawed “yougov” surveys, all of the larger, reputable, quantitative polling find the relative percentages of sexual orientation/identity, sexual relations between members of the same sex, and same sex sexual attraction remarkably stable over the last several decades. Yougov is really more of a marketing company than a professional polling firm – the only scientifically legitimate survey work in the UK is done by the government and some universities. So in the US it would be less Pew and more Zogby, with virtually no quality control over the design of the questions and reliance on cheap internet surveys with low response rates and little attempt at a representative sample.
This particular “survey” doesn’t pass the laugh test, especially the meaningless claim that half of UK youth are “non-heterosexual” (no legit sexuality study would ever be so heterocentric as to lump such a broad range of identities into one binary description) was based on a really bad screening question that prompted for a kinsey number (which is meaningless to most people and leads to guessing). Since the Kinsey scale is range it is similar to other likert scales, which prime respondents to to skew responses towards a median, you can’t reliably use it as a proxy for orientation categories. Even then, the only shift was in the 0-1 kinsey range, which is just as likely a statistical blip than any useful shift in self-identified orientation, desire or behavior.
Hate to be debbie downer but the gold standard in population surveys in the UK is the British Social Attitudes Survey and like the GSS in the US, the percentages for sexual orientation, same sex behavior and same sex desire have all remained fairly stable over the 30 or so years – 2-4%/6-8%/8-12% for each category, with some slight variations.

Reply
1. Kelvin
  
  14/10/2015
  
  What sermon?
  
  Reply
Kathleen Jowitt

22/10/2015

First of all, thank you for this post, and apologies for the lateness of this comment. A lot of what you’ve written here resonates – I’m a bisexual Christian, a woman who has been married to a man for the last six years, but who knows that a future partner could be of any gender. For me, being out about my bisexuality is a simple acknowledgement of fact, a matter of integrity and honesty – I look straight, but I’m not, and, while other people’s assumptions about me are their business, it doesn’t hurt to remind them that there are more people in church than ‘gay’ and ‘straight’.

I would urge caution when using the ‘everyone is bisexual really’ line. (This post is very helpful on the question: http://www.uncharted-worlds.org/blog/2008/12/not-everyone-is-bisexual/) While I don’t think this is the way that you’re using it here, it is often used to silence and erase bisexual experience. Those of us who specifically identify as bisexual experience distinct problems and joys – the internalised biphobia, wondering whether we’re *really* bisexual even after a series of crushes on people of any and all genders, the tedious ‘you’re confused! make your mind up!’ from straight and gay acquaintances alike – and then the relief of meeting someone who *gets* it, who doesn’t question your identity, who accepts your judgement of who you are rather than extrapolating from their own incomplete dataset of what they know and assume of you. I don’t believe that’s something that everyone experiences.

Not everyone is bisexual; in fact, the only person whose bisexuality I can make a judgement on is my own. It’s only a small step from ‘everyone is bisexual’ to ‘no one is bisexual’.

Reply