by Tony Rucinski, Coalition for Marriage
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.
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.