This conversation is not over ...
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 16 hours ago
On 15 February 2026, Revd. Jonathan Lee, Associate Priest at St Pancras Church, Euston Road, London, addresses the unacceptable continuing inequality in the Church of England as the House of Bishops, through General Synod, this week, shut down Living and Love and Faith.
Exodus 24.12–end; Psalm 2; 2 Peter 1.16–end; Matthew 17.1–9
Before we enter Lent on Wednesday of this week, so before we start a period of preparation for the story of Jesus final journey to Jerusalem, the passion narrative, his death and his resurrection, … before we commence that period we are given the story of the transfiguration, which we have just heard, this year read from Matthew’s gospel.
This story marks the beginning of the second act in the drama of Jesus’ life: the first, his ministry around Galilee, begins with his baptism and with divine words – “this is my beloved son”; the story of Jesus’ transfiguration marks the beginning of the second act, again, with divine words “this is my beloved son”.
Through the blinding white transfigured vision of Jesus as the beloved son of God, the gospels reveal for us something of who Jesus was and how his story was going to end, even if Jesus’ disciples struggled – as perhaps we do – to understand this alongside Jesus’ predictions of his arrest, and crucifixion.
We may think that it would have been easier to end Jesus’ story – the story of his birth, his teaching and his miraculous signs, at this point in the gospels – but the transfiguration is not the end of a triumphant story; it is only a way marker and an intermission; it is a foretelling of the end of the story and a source of hope to carry on the most difficult of sometime dark journeys. And it can still, provide hope that despite what lies ahead, Christ makes the presence of God with us, possible.
Possible even if the narrative we live in leaves us in confusion and frustration or drives us to anger and despair.
This week, those who have had the time and inclination to follow proceedings at the General Synod of the Church of England, will have witnessed the end of the process called Living and Love and Faith –an unfulfilled end to a process in which proud, loud, but ultimately empty, apologies for harm and exclusion were made by bishops to LGBTQIA+ people within and beyond the Church of England; and in which, now broken, promises were given of a radical new inclusion.
Instead of any such radical or new inclusion, and in contrast to the church in Scotland and Wales - the LLF process, here, has been ended by the House of Bishops, with thin gruel; just some approved, but unsatisfactory, prayers, which, since we are also encouraged to believe that this is a matter of church doctrine, we may pray only within an existing service – presumably because God will only then listen: no blessing of relationships of same sex love; no equal right to marry for those who wish to give their whole selves to their same sex partners in the presence of God and before a congregation in church; no listening for the call of God to the priesthood on the lives of same sex married Christians; and the ongoing, and disgraceful, threat of disciplinary action against same sex attracted priests who in love and good conscience wish to marry.
Together with the thinnest of PLF prayers, the House of Bishops has left us only with an assurance of yet another working party.
Some may feel that the leadership of the House of Bishops has an equivalence with the nursey rhyme of the Grand Old Duke of York, with its excoriating criticism of his weak leadership and the futility of his command. Others would consider such a comparison is unfair; unfair that is, not to the House of Bishops, but to the 17th century duke about whom the nursery rhyme is thought to comment.
What we have witnessed over recent days, months and years - and especially the last year - is not leadership which, with futility, led battle-ready men up and down a hill with no apparent benefit; but, instead, a House of Bishops, to whom we were rightly entitled to look for godly and pastoral leadership, metaphorically visiting those of their footmen and footwomen who were already deeply injured and wounded by injustice and discrimination within the church (that is visiting our gay and queer brothers and sister who have faithfully remained within the Church of England) and then, with empty words, marching them barefoot over broken glass on a deeply painful path; out and back, to a place where, if they can bear to remain within the Church of England at all, they remain institutionally rejected.
Softly spoken words from bishops, and the House of Bishops, who now seek to explain away the last few years as regretful ‘over promising and underdelivering’; and who purport to gather a few crumbs together by saying that they now know better just how divided the church is, may be thought to fall far short of acceptable standards of leadership and to overlook that such crumbs are many decades’ old manna that now tastes putrid and rotten.
With exceptions, a fair assessment of actions and words of the last few years could tell not just of a failure of episcopal leadership but of cowardice and cruelty in the House of Bishops; it could tell of a Church of England which, due to hypocrisy, continues to become ever more distant from, and distasteful to, the population it is commanded to embrace and serve; and could tell of a church which, through its continuing rejection and controlling maltreatment of some of its most loving and missionally gifted members, is ever less recognisable as the body of Christ.
You may ask, I ask, why stay? I stay because at a local level in this church we will welcome all without condemnation, we will stand alongside all and kneel alongside all. We stay because together – we carry the flickering hope of Christ transfigured – and we believe that those divine words ‘you are my beloved child’ are there to be heard not just about Jesus in the gospels but about all the diverse and wonderful people of God’s creation, in this church and this parish and beyond.
And I stay because many gay and queer children of God wish to stay, and, through their anger and tears, wish to give loud faithful witness to the fact that they too, as close disciples of Christ, travel the mountain path of faith where, in varied and glorious ways, they too have heard the affirming call of God and have been drawn ever closer to the bright transfigured light of Christ’s justice and love.
You, my brothers and sisters, often witness, as I cannot, to knowing the love of Christ despite your regularly lived experiences of cruelty within and outside the church; and you bear living witness – as the Church of England does not yet - to two beautiful phrases:
‘see how those Christians love one another’;
and
‘Ubi caritas et amor Deus ibi est.’
You are welcome here. We cannot be the body of Christ without you.
15 February 2026
Revd. Jonathan Lee