- Boris Johnson will be replaced with a Prime Minister who is more competent, more right wing and more difficult to beat.
- A good year for Michael Gove (who is almost invisible at the moment).
- Church of Scotland General Assembly votes to allow same-sex couples to be married in church. More significantly, almost no-one leaves in a huff.
- No progress for those seeking marriage equality in the Church of England.
- US Republican Party do well at the November midterms.
- Midnight Mass will happen at St Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow – some people will still be wearing masks but it won’t be mandatory.
- Lots of people discover that cryptocurrency is not the sure thing that they thought. (Losses will disproportionately affect young people).
- Nicola Sturgeon will be forced to announce a proposed date for an Independence Referendum against her better judgement.
- Lambeth Conference will take place but some people forced to participate virtually due to continued pandemic in developing world. (No new sanctions against pro-gay provinces).
- Working from home/hybrid working becomes normalised for big companies. Consequent increase in ransomware demands.
7 responses to “Ask! Tell!”
-
Count me in as a straight supporter of gay people, clergy or lay. But count me in, too, as one who respects people’s right to privacy. As a hetersexual male, I would not expect to be asked about my sexuality, or to be pressurised into being explicit about it, had I chosen to remain unmarried.
-
I think that issues of privacy are a long way away from issues of whether one’s life should suffer for chosing to be open.
Both important issues but they are very different issues one from another.
-
I am about to “out” myself as a straight supporter of gay clergy in the Church of Ireland by getting a letter published in my local paper!
It is one thing to have a personal (private) opinion and whole different thing to go public with that view. Feels quite liberating actually!
I sort of wonder how I got to this point given that I used to be a fairly moderately against full inclusion in the life of the Church…
I suppose it is the natural result of the way my thinking has been developing over some time, especially by engagement with liberal/progressive anglican thought and seeing that there IS another way to be Christian (as opposed to the dominant conservative evangelical ethos that prevails in my part of Ireland).
-
Good for you, Steven.
My guess is that the repercussions of the Very Rev Tom Gordon and his partner coming out about their partnership are shining little rays of light all over the Church of Ireland at the moment, occassionally illuminating things which some would prefer to be kept in darkness.
> I sort of wonder how I got to this point given that I used to be a fairly moderately against full inclusion in the life of the Church…
Don’t be surprised – so was I. So were most of the people I know who now advocate on behalf of progressive causes in the church. One of the things that is happening at the moment is that the really hard line anti-gay voices are being undermined by the people they thought they could rely on. It makes loud, cross voices crosser and louder. The sound of those shrill voices is the sound of people who are being squeezed from every direction.
-
-
What’s in Kelvin’s Head?
Confusion? Compassion?
Wisdom? Folly?
Light?Darkness?[in the Johannine sense]
Humility? Arrogance?
Obedience?Disobedience?
Hopefully there’s a “next bishop” somewhere near!! -
I agree with you. One of the points I make in the letter to the Portadown Times (the original clergy statement was published in that paper on 16th Sept – see Thinking Anglicans) is that it seems that evangelical clergy in Ireland were happy with a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and it is the publicity that is causing the problem now – after all it must have been well known that Tom Gordon was living with his partner over the last 20 years!
It is also ironic that three of the signatories of the clergy statement were women – i.e., those previously ordained following the development of a generous and inclusive theology of Christian leadership (in spite of Saint Paul’s issues). They now seek to use their authority to prevent others from benefiting from the very development that they benefited from…
The only issue, I suppose, is that this development did take the Church of Ireland by surprise and the silence from the Bishops has been unhelpful.
I would be interested to know your views on the tension between acting innovatively (perhaps, unilaterally) and the need to respect the whole body of Christ etc…
The situation in TEC in respect of the ordination of Gene Robinson as Bishop, by contrast, involved an open and transparent development that went through the standard procedures of the Church. I know that in this case the issue is in respect of a civil partnership – which it was Dean Gordon’s “right” to enter under the law of the RoI but the significance of this move for the wider Church of Ireland would not have been lost in either himself or his Bishop.
I still think he did the right thing but I am sympathetic to the criticism that these issues should not, in general, be dealt with an ad hoc manner… Although in fairness to Dean Gordon I am not sure if the debate would have ever got on the table if he had not acted as he has done.
-
I think that there is a difference between electing a bishop and who a person choses to make a committment to.
One is very clearly a public office that needs the consent of the people. The other falls within someone’s personal life.
I wouldn’t say that is irrelevant and nor would I be so stupid as the recent Church of Scotland statement that said of a Church of Scotland minister entering a Civil Partnership that it was entirely a personal matter. It very clearly isn’t.
However, I would say that it requires a very different level of consent to being a bishop.
Clergy living arrangements get complicated very much more quickly than those of other people because very often they are living in housing provided by the congregation. That, if anywhere is where issues of public consent come in.
Generally speaking, I think that the provision of housing infantilises the clergy and is undesirable.
Once civil partnerships were introduced, people had the choice of either liking them or lumping them really. Clergy entering into them were an inevitable consequence of their existence.
Most people I know think that the demands of the Church of England that clergy in civil partnerships promise to be celibate demonstrate a quite disgusting pruriance on the part of bishops making such demands.
Previous Posts
-
What should ecumenical and interfaith dialogue actually be about?
I’ve taken, in the manner of Jeremy Corbyn, to asking for suggestions for things that I might write about on the blog. This article stems from a suggestion by Hugh Foy via twitter. It seems to me that in Scotland, things are very different within the ecumenical movement to where we are thinking about interfaith.…
-
Some Bisexuals are Christian (and there’s lots of them)
Today is designated as Bisexual Visibility Day and it seems to me that it is about time that I said something about the B in LGBT that is so often silenced or invisible. Some Christians are bisexual. In fact rather a lot of Christians are bisexual. Rather a lot of people now describe themselves as…
-
Don’t worry – it just religion. It won’t bother you.
Preached on 20 September 2015 In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Don’t worry, its just a religious thing. It won’t bother you.” I’d just arrived in the village. And she said, ““Don’t worry, its just a religious thing. It won’t bother…
-
Dear Straight People – Greenbelt Talk 2015
Here’s the talk I recently gave at Greenbelt. In the course of what I was saying, I threw these badges out into the crowd. The spectre of homophobia stalks the church. It is, in the language that Jesus would have understood, one of the principalities, one of the very powers of darkness. It is a…
Leave a Reply