The Churchman Ally

I went to church last Sunday. Nice service in a small country village set in rolling green fields, It was so Church of England you could have used it as a film set. The vicar who took the service was gay. His partner was there, too. Everybody knew and no one was bothered. Welcome to the church of the very near future. It is inevitable. But we are not there yet. If there are angry voices raised in mock horror at the prospect of gay marriage, it is simply because they know they are losing the argument - not only in the country but also in the Church. One day the Church will apologise to its gay members for the terrible way it has treated them. And it has much to apologise for. For what the Church has done is allow plain and simple prejudice to hide behind a cloak of religious respectability. Worse, it has actively stoked the fires of that prejudice and influenced otherwise open-minded people towards homophobia. Gay clergy have it especially bad. My own active involvement came as a result of a gay friend of mine, Jeffrey John, now the Dean of St Albans, having a bishop's job offered to him and then having that offer withdrawn after African churches went ballistic and threatened to walk away from the worldwide Anglican family. The Archbishop of Canterbury, whom I admire a great deal in many ways, allowed himself to be bullied by an angry mob into making the worst decision of his life. I thought long and hard about leaving the Church at that time. But I resolved to stay and fight from within. And it was this fight that made me friends with the great American Gene Robinson, the first out and partnered gay bishop ever. I call him great because he is a man of huge courage, having soaked up more anger and bitterness from other Christians than most of us can over imagine. He came to preach in my church back in 2008. Outside, protesters waved their silly placards. As Gene began to preach a heckler stood up and started to denounce him, pointing and shouting. It is a scene that has made it into a new film called Love Free or Die that just had its British premiere at the BFI Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. After the service, Gene stood on my church balcony overlooking the Thames, smoked a cigarette and cried It had all become too much. For every bigot in a dog collar - and there are still loads out there, of course - there are a great many people fighting hard to transform the Church from within. And change it will. For alt bough some would have you believe that the Church always stands for the same things, this is only over said by people with no grasp of history. If there is a constant, it is the belief that love is at the heart stall things and that love is to be celebrated wherever it is found. What makes homophobic Christians so foolish is that they just cannot see that love between two people is not confined to heterosexuals. They are failing at being Christians because they do not see what is there to see and celebrate. The reason I know that change in the Church is absolutely inevitable is that, as a Christian, I believe that love is the most powerful force in the world. It may take some time. And the nearer it comes, the louder will be the critics. But they have already lost.