This is an article from

Theology Wales:
the Church and Homosexuality

 

 

Full contents:

Guest Editor's Introduction
- Rev Jenny Wigley

Presidential Address
- Archbishop Barry Morgan

Same-sex relationships
- Bishop Richard Harries

The freeing of Anglican identities - Rev Dr Lorraine Cavanagh

Facing up to our differences
- Rev Jean Mayland

Same-sex unions
- Rev Dr Will Strange

Homosexuality - the biblical evidence
- Rev Prof DP Davies

Engaging with the scriptures
- Canon Robert Paterson

A view from the pews
- Tim Heywood

 

A view from the pews

Tim Heywood

Tim Heywood has lived and worked in Cardiff for the past 6 years. Born and raised on a farm in North Devon, he worked for Voluntary Services Overseas in Uganda for 5 years before taking up a career in the NHS. He has an MBA in health service management and has worked as a health service manager for the last 16 years.

I want to start by making one thing clear: the fact that I am gay is not a big issue for me. I'm a senior manager and Executive Board member of an NHS Trust and for years now, I've been open about my sexuality with work colleagues, friends and family. I am not aware that my sexuality, or other peoples' knowledge of it, has adversely affected my career; I have been appointed to several senior management positions by people who were well aware of my sexual orientation. It has not created difficult working relationships with peers and subordinates, or compromised my ability to do a challenging management job.

As far as family and friends are concerned, my being gay has not shaken my parents' love for me, nor has it deprived me of friends or meaningful relationships. I've had my share of knocks and setbacks, of course, and will doubtless have more. But.

My sexuality is part of my identity with which I'm quite comfortable - it is about as much of an issue as my Devonian accent or my inability to kick a football straight: just in there with all the many other things that make me who I am.

• What are the most important things in your own sense of identity?
• Are you surprised that Tim sees being gay as just one of the many things that make him who he is?

I am very aware that these words would not have been written a generation ago. Expressing gay sexuality was, of course, illegal until 1967; just as it was illegal for women to vote until 1918, and it's not so very long ago that we got around to making slavery illegal in Britain. None of these changes was achieved without a struggle and those in the vanguard often paid dearly. My freedom to write this has been bought at a price, but it is a price I feel very fortunate not to have been called on to pay personally. So there will be nothing from me about a tortured journey through abuse, rejection or self-denial. I have heard plenty of those stories and many have moved me or made me angry, but they are not experiences I can claim to have shared.

I want to start, not with my discovery that I was gay (which would be difficult, as I cannot recall any moment of discovery. I am sure I have always known, certainly before I knew any words to describe it) but with my coming out as a Christian, a process that began only 4 years ago. This was not an easy decision to take and I can explain why: I think that I have a reasonable level of fundamental self-belief and it is a quality for which I thank my parents.

I have learnt over the years that one of the most essential pre-requisites to building a capacity to love others is the ability to believe in and love yourself. Furthermore, one of the best ways to build your self-belief and capacity to love is to avoid the company of individuals or institutions that regard you as inherently inferior, or of lesser potential than anyone else.My decision to return to church after 25 years was difficult because I believed the Church to be just such an institution.

Many would argue that the fact the Church finds it necessary to have a debate about the acceptability of homosexuality at all is sufficient evidence to justify my trepidation. However, I don't want to use these pages to follow that argument - there is plenty of that elsewhere. What I want to share is my experience of taking the step of returning to church, as my experience has not been quite what I expected.

But first, I need to offer a brief explanation of why I had any desire to cross the threshold of a church anyway. I was brought up broadly as an Anglican and have always been interested in spirituality, but gave up on the Church by the time I was sixteen. Over the succeeding years I have explored a number of different traditions, including Buddhism,Tai-Chi and Transcendental Meditation. I have attempted to follow the arguments of Western philosophers supporting religious, agnostic and atheistic ideologies. Overall, I have learned much that continues to be very useful to me in navigating my way through life. However, none of this gave me a completely satisfactory answer to the fundamental question of who, or what, I am.

In struggling with this question, I came to realise that we communicate meaning about such fundamental questions, not by analysing, dissecting and intellectualising, but by telling stories. So if you ask me who I am, I am likely to start with the story of my life - where I was born; who were my parents; significant life events that have influenced me, and so on. However, I also realise that my birth is not really a sufficient starting point:my life has been influenced by the story of my parents' lives and of others who have been significant to me.Therefore, I have been influenced by the stories they were told and events that shaped their lives; and so the story stretches back, through the generations and interwoven layers.At some point in the past,my antecedents first heard the stories contained in the Bible. Few would doubt the impact those stories have had on the development and identity of our society as a whole and I believe that the same is true for me as an individual. Whether I like it or not, the Christian story is part of who I am, and it was the desire to reconnect with that part of my story that first got me back through the church door.

What follows here is another part of my story; the story of some of the things that happened after I crossed the threshold. Like most stories (including, I increasingly realise, those in the Bible) it is likely to mean different things to different people. I cannot be sure what meaning it will communicate to anyone who reads it, but I hope at least that it is worth sharing.

St Margaret's on a Sunday morning is probably much like many Anglican Churches across the UK. During my first visit, the congregation looked suitably self-conscious when it came to the 'Peace', but their smiles and hand-shakes were warm enough without being effusive. The liturgy brought back enough old memories to stop me feeling too alienated and whilst the sermon may not have been inspiring, I found nothing that offended me. After the service, I stayed for coffee and people did talk to me. In short, there was no pressure, but enough warmth to make me feel I would be welcome if I chose to come back. So I did, and over the following weeks started to get to know some people and to let them get to know me.

For years, my practical approach to personal integrity in 'getting to know you' type conversations has been to accord my sexual orientation about as much importance as my marital status. So, whilst I would never use sexuality as a conversational opener,my answer to the direct question: 'Are you married?' is quite likely to be 'No, I'm gay'.That was the approach I used during the post-service coffee at St Margaret's and I didn't notice it cause anyone to reach for the heart pills! In some cases the conversation just moved straight on to other issues. In others, my honesty seemed to liberate other people to disclose things about themselves, or their own relationships. There was nothing momentous, but it wasn't long before I was invited to help on the church soup run, or to the pub after a prayer meeting. Within a few months I was on the sidesman rota and the following year I found myself, albeit slightly bemused, as a new member of the Parochial Church Council. Nobody had rejected me. It seemed they had recognised what small talents I might be able to bring and were encouraging me to use them.

• Has anyone ever said to you "No, I'm gay" (or similar words?)
• What did you - or might you - feel and say?
• What do you think the wider Church can learn by the way the St Margaret's congregation responded?

Later that year, I first made contact with the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement (LGCM), mainly because I was interested in their publications and booklist, but I discovered that there is an active group in South Wales, so started to attend some of their meetings. For several years the LGCM has hosted a 'Carols for Christmas' evening in the Quaker Meeting House in Cardiff and at the November monthly meeting we were asked if we would distribute advertising fliers to suitable venues around Cardiff. The Church Hall near St Margaret's is regularly used by other groups and it occurred to me that it would be good to display a flier in the Hall porch. I spoke to the Parish Secretary who was very positive and agreed that certainly there was no problem with me putting up a poster (which was very modest, A5 and salmon pink).

The following Sunday, to my slight disappointment, but not complete surprise, the flier had disappeared from the notice board. The parish secretary was at coffee and I joked to her that it seemed that the drawing pins had not been a strong as I had hoped. She, however, was less than amused and asked me to give her some spare copies so that she could replace the poster if it 'fell down' again. Over the next three weeks, it did indeed disappear, several times.However, each time this happened, she replaced it. I later found out that the week before the Carol Service she actually ran out of copies, but the following Sunday there was still a copy on the board. She had made an extra copy: twice as large and a rather more eye-catching shade of pink!

The reason I am recounting this is that it was the first time I realised that in my local church I wasn't just passively accepted, but actively supported. It wasn't me that was campaigning, but a heterosexual committed Christian who believed that taking that poster down was wrong and was willing to do something practical about it. During the subsequent two years, there have been other examples of active support. Last year, eight of my friends from St Margaret's were there at the Quaker Meeting House for the LGCM service. They talked about it afterwards and told other members of the congregation how much they had enjoyed it.That made me feel proud and it made me feel like I belonged.

As in many churches, a parish newsletter magazine periodically appears at the back of St Margaret's. The Editor is an intelligent and wellread woman who manages to balance internal communication alongside some challenging and thought provoking contributions from local or published sources. During the course of last year, she included an excerpt from the Rector's letter of another parish, which railed against the evils of 'liberalism' and included the following:

. Yet I love people of all sorts and conditions: those of other faiths, homosexuals and lesbians, drug addicts, blasphemers, thieves and murderers, but that does not mean I approve of their actions.. I love them so much, I want to see them saved in Christ Jesus.

At the end of the article the Editor's note questioned whether we parishioners would agree with the Rector's views, or would take a different stance and asked us to write in with our opinions. In my response, which was published the following month, I included the following:

As a gay man, maybe the Rector intends me to feel comforted by the news that he loves me, helpfully categorising me alongside drug addicts, blasphemers, thieves and murderers. However, feeling patronised always gets my back right up and I doubt that my fellow travellers, singled out to be special recipients of the Rector's love will feel much different.

• Re-read the other Rector's letter putting something that applies to you in the place of "lesbians and gays" e.g. divorcees, parents whose grown up children live with their partners, Christians who drink alcohol, those who advocate smacking small children. Do you still feel loved?
• How better can Christian people express their concern for those whose behaviour they consider sinful?

Happily, such ranting has not been my experience of attending St Margaret's. Sometimes I have to listen hard, but God speaks to me as much from the pews as from the pulpit, showing me examples of what it is like to not judge, to show love without pontificating about it and to be welcomed as a fellow traveller on a spiritual journey where we might not have easy answers, but we can make progress together much faster than we ever could on our own.

The interesting thing was what happened when the newsletter was published: a number of people came up to me to thank me for the letter and to say they agreed with me. These were not high profile church people, but they surprised me. They included a young mother from the Sunday school and an older member of the Church choir. One said she admired my 'bravery'. I was flattered that someone thought I was brave, even if I was puzzled that she regarded writing such a simple letter to a church magazine as demonstrating it.

I am not describing these experiences because I think they are extraordinary. I suspect that St Margaret's is actually a very ordinary church with a congregation not very different from hundreds of others. But I do sometimes wonder if the Church hierarchy knows as much about the views of its congregations as it thinks it does.

Confronted with real flesh-and-blood gay people, rather than abstract ideas or moral positions, I suspect that the fearful, the suspicious and non-accepting will generally be found to be a far smaller minority than is currently assumed.

However, my return-to-church experience has not all been positive and there is one other experience that I feel compelled to include here. Just before Christmas last year, I was given the news that a cleric from another part of the Province had heard, that I had heard, that he was gay. The fact was that I had met him a couple of times and had assumed that he was. I have many friends who are gay from many walks of life, including teachers, doctors, a senior naval officer and a police constable.The prospect of a gay 'man of the cloth' is neither shocking nor particularly newsworthy to me.

However, on Christmas Eve I learned that he was very upset at the prospect that I might tell people and of the potential consequences for him. I was in the usual frenzy of last minute preparation before driving off to Devon for the Christmas break, but confronted by the prospect of his distress, the only response I could think of was to make a diversion en route to Devon to try and give him some reassurance. He is a warm and friendly man and he welcomed me at his door before we went through to his front room to talk. Our conversation probably only lasted 15 minutes, while I tried to reassure him that I was not in the business of 'outing' anybody. But in that time I learned that he was frightened that if people found out he was gay it would be so catastrophic that his church would be closed and he would lose his livelihood. I also found out that he had never felt able to tell his own parents that he was gay, or that he had a partner, and was frightened of how they might react.

I wanted to give him a hug and tell him it would all be alright; that the Church was not so fragile that it would fall apart at such news, and that all gay people face the difficult 'what will my parents think' question, although parents generally know their off-spring better than we give them credit for. But I didn't feel able to. In particular, I felt unsure about an institution whose leaders are sometimes forced to live so divorced from their own integrity. As a manager I've been through the hoop of leadership development courses on several occasions. One thing I have learnt is the necessity for a good leader to have integrity, and that you cannot have integrity towards others without integrity towards yourself. I do not think the Church is different from any other organisation in that respect.

• What do you understand about living with integrity?
• What are the ways in which Church leaders live divorced from their own integrity?

So that is the story of my return to church so far. Personally, I have found active support there, even if it is not the main thing I was seeking. My friendships and support networks outside the church have also remained intact, even if I have sometimes been strongly challenged (mostly in the pub, or over the dinner table) about why I have any desire to be associated with an institution that is so out of touch with the modern world. But most of all, I have the support of a partner.He is not the greatest church-goer, but he does come to church with me sometimes and when he does, he is made welcome. For the record,my relationship with him, in all its facets, is one of the most rewarding, challenging and life enhancing influences in my life, and I thank God for it.

• In the light of your own understanding of the rightness or wrongness of homosexual relationships, how can you enable the church to be a place where homosexual women and men feel welcomed and supported in their journey of faith?