The toxic culture of prejudice and abuse affected by public school pathology and an addiction to substitutionary atonement theology advocated by conservative evangelicals is not going to be overcome until the Church of England Synod and in particular the House of Bishops and the Archbishops’ Council are shaken into a radically changed attitude in their understanding, teaching, practice, liturgy, doctrine and corporate life leading to a dramatic change in C of E culture and teaching.

A sequence of three events in the last three weeks has conspired to create turmoil in the Church of England resulting in a crisis that will be difficult to resolve. As a result of our contemporary inability to talk openly and honestly about the God we do and don’t believe in it may well be almost impossible to agree the appointment of a new Archbishop of Canterbury. The next Archbishop will need to have the most remarkable and combined gifts of courage, vision, prophecy, awareness and resolve.

At the moment I am very aware of how books have changed me and my relationship with myself, my sexuality, the Church of England, Christianity, and God, half-way though Diarmaid MacCulloch’s recently published Lower than the Angels; A History of Sex and Christianity. It was the phrase “the divine relationship, an audacious transformation” that unlocked the door to an idea I’ve been struggling to develop for several weeks.

From my perspective, we are all compromised by the difficulty we have in freeing ourselves from the corporate, systemic, abusive, unhealthy, persistently homophobic culture of the Church of England. We are all implicated in some way by our inability to confront ‘our’ Church when she is so obviously in a deeply unhealthy state. Numbers are in free fall and people leave or avoid the Church not because they know in detail what the culture is like from the top down but because the Church, national and local, does not communicate a healthy understanding and vision of life, life in all its fulness. From both sides, conservative and progressive, there is a sense of desperation and a depressive mood. Defusing the sexuality debate, healthy as it might be, isn’t a remotely adequate initiative.

How the heck do we get to the end of LLF? Something is required that is more than simply defusing the Sexuality Debate and the Anglican Culture War that we are living with. In my spiritual life, it became more and more obvious to me that I had to do the work myself, to work on myself. Resolving the Church of England’s conflicts over sexuality and gender is still going to take a long time because we are not sufficiently investing in ourselves and developing the conceptual, prophetic, visionary, emotional, theological and spiritual resources necessary for our mutual cosmic salvation.