After yesterday's anger at *that* CEEC video, here's my attempt at a 'winsome' response...
I shouldn’t have watched it, but I did.
This week the Church of England Evangelical Council posted a video on youtube, presenting their response to the Living in Love and Faith process.

Having grown up in a relatively conservative evangelical church, I was not surprised by what they presented – but it still made me angry. Perhaps watching the video was triggering of trauma from years ago. I don’t like being told that I don’t take the Bible seriously.

I don’t like being told that I’m living faithlessly – or permissively, or just giving into the sexual mores of the wider culture. I don’t like being told that the Bible is clear - when the history of the Church shows that patently it is not.

I am not a radical. I am a believer in mutual flourishing.
I can understand why many Christians want to hold to the understanding of marriage that they have grown up with, and we shouldn’t be too impatient when it comes to history.
So why was I so angry?

For me, the idea of the presupposition is important to how I approach disagreement and conflict. The presupposition urges us to see the best motives behind the arguments of those we disagree with, because we trust that the Holy Spirit is working in all our lives as Christians.

Instead of generous disagreement, I felt the video made insinuations about the character, values and agenda of Christians who are seeking new ways of being faithful.

I was angry because the video was not historically honest. The approach that they insisted on referring to as the ‘orthodox’ position is, after all, a fairly recent innovation in the history of Christianity -

– and even that ideal has shifted and changed over the centuries, as our society has slowly become more equal for women. We must never forget that for most of the Church’s history, the ‘Ideal’ was not marriage and the nuclear family, but consecrated celibacy, living in community.

For much of the Church’s history, there was not even a liturgy for the marriage service. At the time of the Reformation, the merchant class of Europe, married, literate and devout, could not accept they were second class Christians because they were not monks and nuns and friars

We should not be dewy eyed, or naive about the unbalanced power relationships in early modern marriages – but I believe the reformers’ desire to see marriage as an ideal, changed it as an institution.

Instead of being viewed as socially necessary, but a bit sordid, and the second class way of being a Christian, marriage came to be seen as a place to grow in virtue, love and the fruit of the Spirit.

It is ironic that 5 centuries later, this bold and generous innovation of the Reformation era is now seen as ‘traditional’ and ‘orthodox’. It is sad that this vision of marriage is now being used to exclude, negate, and diminish the relationships of many LGBT Christians...

– who are not seeking a more permissive, relaxed or selfish approach to sexual ethics and their relationships, but who simply want to be seen as equal – and not second class citizens in the Church.

Just as the institution of marriage was changed for the good in the wake of the Reformation, so I pray and hope that fully welcoming LGBT relationships will not be watering down Christian sexual ethics – but extending them.