Osborne Report

LGBTI+ and Church of England Teaching Documents – a history

LGBTI+ and Church of England Teaching Documents – a history

I wrote this document in July 2018 before the proposed teaching document had been renamed Living in Love and Faith. I have made minor amendments but otherwise left it unchanged. I wrote this history of the teaching documents published by the Church of England to demonstrate to myself why I was feeling so angry in 2018. I was angry because, following Pilling and the Shared Conversations, a further delay of three years was being engineered by the House of Bishops who still lacked the guts to confront the human sexuality of LGBTI+ people and the need to radically include us as equals in the Church.

Traditional or Revisionist – LGBTI+ Anglicans and the Teaching Document – a history

Traditional or Revisionist – LGBTI+ Anglicans and the Teaching Document – a history

Is the House of Bishops ready to make evolutionary and revolutionary choices about the direction in which the Church of England’s teachings about gender and sexuality will evolve? The key question about the Teaching Document for LGBTI+ members of the Church of England is: will this report achieve the radical change we now urgently need, both we who identify as LGBTI and the majority in the church for whom current teaching and practice is no longer adequate or believable?

Then and now – the Osborne Report 1989 and the House of Bishops’ Report 2017

Then and now – the Osborne Report 1989 and the House of Bishops’ Report 2017

Three weeks ago a minor anniversary passed. On 20 January 2012 the Church Times finally published the Osborne Report on its web site. The report was written in 1989 but suppressed by the House of Bishops. Here are a few excerpts from the Osborne Report which are still apposite, interwoven with some comments on and comparisons with the report from the House of Bishops’ Reflection Group on Sexuality, Marriage and Same Sex Relationships after the Shared Conversations. Osborne noted in 1989 the “considerable contrast between the attitudes which prevailed” in their youth sixty years ago compared with younger clergy. That considerable contrast has grown into a chasm, a chasm between generations and between tribes in the Church of England.