A LONG awaited and controversial service in Southwark Cathedral on Saturday night to mark the 20th anniversary of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement has brought out into the open the apparently irreconcilable differences within the Church of England over homosexuality.
While 2,000 supporters of the LGCM met in the cathedral for a service which began with their choir singing Ag Criost an Siol (and continued with the whole congregation singing St Patrick's Breastplate), opponents had been gathering in some 50 churches across England to pray that gays and lesbians would repent of their "evil acts". But outside the cathedral itself there was only a handful of protesters carrying placards with biblical quotations denouncing homosexual activity - and one rather oddly asserting: "Dunblane demands a total ban on sodomy: a partial ban is not acceptable."
In his sermon the Bishop of Guildford, the Rt Rev John Gladwin (a former secretary of the Church of England's Board for Social Responsibility), acknowledged the tension, even conflict, between the Church's understanding of its tradition and what gay and lesbian people found to be good and creative in their lives. "That is no reason for abandoning the tradition," he said.
But he disappointed his listeners - though, to his amazement, he was warmly applauded at the end of his sermon - by refusing to sanction any idea of same sex "marriages". He pointed out that marriage was not something we created for our own convenience but was a God given basic building block of a loving and ordered community. "You and I live in a culture in danger of privatising marriage by reducing it to a personal arrangement between two people," he went on. "It is not surprising, if that is all it is, that people begin to think that any private arrangement between two people should be treated as if it were marriage.
"But that falls well short of the Christian tradition. Let me say gently to you, and I know this is not going to be easy to hear: we cannot solve our dilemma by turning cohabitation or same sex relationships into marriage."