LGB Christians welcomed the Church of England’s General Synod’s decision on 15 July 2025 to do away with Issues in Human Sexuality, writes Rev Lorenzo Fernandez-Smal.
The contents of this article were released as a press release on 22 July 2025. Please email us at [email protected] for further information or comment.
This discussion or teaching document was issued 34 years ago but quickly acquired disciplinary force and became a strict test of orthodoxy in discerning vocations, selecting, appointing and preferring clergy as well as lay ministers. It preempted dialogue and therefore any earnest teaching on the matter of human sexuality.
LGB Christians rejoice that the Church’s governing body admitted that some of the assumptions in the paper now appeared injurious. What remains to be seen is whether the Church of England can provide more than some doctrinal repackaging of the same in less ‘devaluing’ vocabulary.
Issues in Human Sexuality notoriously described “homosexual practice as especially dishonourable”
Though this was admittedly not subjected to a vote, “a paper introducing the item to Synod members noted that the tone, language, and some of the assumptions in ‘Issues’ are now contextually inappropriate and appear prejudicial and offensive to many people.” Issues in Human Sexuality notoriously described “homosexual practice as especially dishonourable” and called on homosexual Christians to lead a life of abstinence as “a homophile orientation and its expression in sexual activity do not constitute a parallel and alternative form of human sexuality as complete within the terms of the created order as the heterosexual.”
More insidiously, because of its almost total failure to see anything good in same-sex relationships, but for a few platitudes about our common humanity, it encouraged lesbian and gay Christians to see themselves very differently from their straight peers: their desire for intimacy, companionship, security, self-giving, all the things that can be blessed and become a sacrament with a partner of the opposite sex, were to be seen as desires for something sinful in their case.
Though the document lamented that ‘homophiles are wrongly made to feel devalued by the traditional teaching of the church,’ it offered no further guidance than inviting them to ‘embrace self-denial, gladly and trustfully opening themselves to the power of God’s grace to order and fulfil their personalities…on a path of great faithfulness, travelled often under the weight of a very heavy cross.’
Farewell to all that.
Will Living in Love and Faith succeed where all others have failed? Even that has floundered.
Revd Lorenzo Fernandez-Smal is Leader of the LGB Christians Core Team and a vicar in Battersea, London, UK.
Background
The Church of England’s journey to this point is long, complex, fractious, very expensive and still not decisively concluded.
Beginning in 1957 when its Moral Welfare Council urged the Wolfenden Committee to decriminalise homosexuality the CofE is still not at the end of its tortuous quest for an agreed theological or legal position. Both Archbishops of Canterbury in the 50’s and 60’s, Geoffrey Fisher and Michael Ramsey advocated acceptance, to varying degrees, and urged the House of Lords to implement its recommendations. Parliament took until 1967 to partially decriminalise (male) homosexuality and it was not fully decriminalised until 2013, having faced opposition at every stage from the CofE (and other Churches) to key sexual equality and non-discrimination provisions. A position it still stands by. Until these key discriminatory exemptions are removed from the statue book legalised homophobia remains enshrined in law thanks to the Churches now legally protected institutional homophobia.
68 years later the Church of England betrays all the hallmarks of still being confused, contradictory and deeply conflicted. Despite the quietly forgotten Gloucester Report (1979), the suppressed Osborne Report (1989), the sunk Windsor Report of Archbishop Eames (2004), the ineffectual Piling Report (2013), numerous General Synod motions, Primates Meetings, Anglican Consultative Council entreaties, Lambeth Conference Resolutions, Diocesan, Deanery and Parish motions, litigation and Consistory Court Cases, all it has been able to do is expunge, so far as it can, the profoundly homophobic Issues in Human Sexuality published no less than 34 years ago.
But its legacy lives on. The vacuum it leaves has to be filled to avoid having nothing of value (or worse) to say to LGB people and our friends.