Over the past 10 years within the Church of England "what had become an increasingly open and affirming church, a church where every bishop I served with knew that I was gay, has become polarised, prejudiced, unsafe," a Church of England priest said in Dublin during a sermon at Trinity College chapel yesterday.
In his sermon 'Holy Irrelevant? The Church and LGBT Affirmation', Rev Colin Coward said that since 1998 "my church, the Church of England, and my country, Great Britain, have drifted apart. The state has legislated steadily to overturn the discrimination practised against LGBT [ Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered] people".
The director of Changing Attitude, a group working for LGBT affirmation in the Anglican communion, continued that "the church has attempted to move in the opposite direction, securing opt-outs from legislation to enable it to discriminate more effectively against LGBT people than in the past. LGBT people are now less safe in the ministry of the church than they were 20 or 30 years ago, and lay people are denied the opportunity to have relationships blessed in any circumstances."
Rev Coward said "the Anglican Churches of Britain and Ireland are no longer isolated provinces, able to think about and respond to the LGBT people in their midst without reference to the worldwide Anglican communion and the storm which erupted following the election and consecration of Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003."
Referring to the continuing controversy within Anglicanism since then, he asked whether to "misrepresent other Christians in the Anglican communion in the way the conservatives are doing is not an evil in itself, bearing false witness against Christian neighbours".
He continued that "a small number of individuals, primates and priests, have been masterminding a movement which hoped to evict the [ US] Episcopal Church from the Anglican Communion, secure the resignation of archbishop [ of Canterbury] Rowan Williams, and transfer the power and leadership of the communion to the Global South leaders."