Gay marriage tipping point for the CoE reached?

Oct 11, 2018 by

By George Conger, Anglican Ink.

The same-sex wedding, or wedding-like ceremony of two seminarians last week may have been the tipping point for the Church of England’s House of Bishops’ policies on partnered gay clergy.

Writing on his website Psephizo, the Rev. Dr. Ian Paul, a leading evangelical and member of the Archbishops’ Council has called upon the Church of England to ban same-sex unions for the clergy as the current compromise has become a farce. With Dr. Paul’s intervention, the House of Bishops may no longer be able to sustain a policy that is widely viewed as dishonest and hypocritical.

His article follows reports in the Sunday Times on 7 October 2018 of the wedding-like ceremony of two theological students. Edwin Wilton-Morgan and Taylor Wilton-Morgan, both ordinands at the Cambridge seminary Westcott House. Social media posts appeared to show the couple’s church service had all the hallmarks of a wedding and was described as one on Facebook, but in a statement given to the newspaper, the Wilton-Morgans said “the relationship descriptor used on our social media accounts was misguided.” They had entered into a same-sex civil partnership, they said.

In February 2017 Westcott House came under fire for allowing its students to hold a gay-slang version of evening prayer. One of the prayers used in the Christian worship service offered hosannas to the “Fantabulosa fairy” and ended: “Praise ye the Duchess. The Duchess’s name be praised.” Psalm 19 was reworded to refer to “O Duchess, my butchness”.

Notes attached to the service leaflet explained this had been “an attempt at queering the liturgy of evening prayer, locating the queer within the compass of faith, and recovering for the Christian tradition a sense of its own intrinsically subversive jouissance.”

The Wilton-Morgan nuptials and the disavowal that they were nuptials in the Times prompted charges of hypocrisy from conservative church leaders — and silence from the House of Bishops.

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