Same-sex blessings ‘a bridge too far’ – Canon Dr Chris Sugden
Canon Dr Chris Sugden has spent decades defending marriage – the voluntary, exclusive, lifelong union of one man and one woman – inside the Church of England. He chairs Anglican Mainstream, sat on General Synod for nine years, and was there when GAFCON began in Jerusalem. He sat down with me for the first of two conversations, and his defence of the church starts with something he loves. Watch here.
His case begins with the parish. The Church of England divides the whole country into parishes, and a parish leader, he says, “is not just there to look after the faithful. He is there to help the faithful serve the whole community”. It is where the country still brings its “births, marriages, deaths”. That, to Chris, “is the genius of the Anglican church, quite frankly”. He emphasises that parishes are communities, not corporations.
Chris loves the Church of England, and that is why he minds what has been done to it. The church has always been broad enough to hold Anglo-Catholics, evangelicals, and modernists. What a broad church could not absorb, he says, was its own leadership blessing same-sex relationships and making those in them bishops. That “was a bridge too far”, the line where “we took a stand”.
Step out of line with the dominant C of E culture, he says, and “you are not only wrong, but you should be silenced”. No forgiveness, no way back. That is the reverse of the faith he holds, in which “there is forgiveness following repentance” – the whole point of it, he says.
He has seen it inside Synod. At York this July, a member booked a fringe meeting so that people whose lives, as Chris puts it, had changed from same-sex orientation and expression to being heterosexual could tell their own stories. Eighty-two members wrote to the archbishops asking why it had been approved. The meeting went ahead in private, but the archbishops refused the stand and public display, because it would be contrary to Synod’s own 2017 vote to support a ban on conversion practices. The church let them speak on condition that nobody saw them. The testimonies could be heard. They could not be seen.
On the Government’s draft Conversion Practices Bill, we say it should be dropped altogether. On a conference call, a Christian had asked why believers should worry about a bill that only stops them causing serious offence. That person, Chris says, has “failed to see” what sits underneath – the nature of our humanity. “Are we made male and female or not?” Answer that question wrongly and marriage goes with it, and with marriage the child’s claim on a mother and a father. Marriage, and the family raised on it, is “the bedrock of society”, and it is “under pressure”, almost under attack.
That is why Coalition for Marriage exists, and why we keep making a case many have been told is already lost. Watch Chris’s conversation, and pass it to someone who needs to hear a man who has held this ground for decades. Next Saturday, he talks about the vote in July on whether same-sex relationships are compatible with Christian discipleship, and the fourteen bishops who stopped it.