The Church of England (CofE) has begun granting blessings to same-sex couples, with a lesbian couple who also serve as Anglican clergy themselves, being among the first to receive an official blessing.
Catherine Bond and Jane Pearse, both of whom serve as associate priests in the CofE, had their homosexual relationship blessed over the weekend in Felixstowe County Suffolk, local newspaper Suffolk News reports.
Vicar Canon Andrew Dotchin blessed the pair in St John the Baptist Church, the parish where both Bond and Pearse also serve, during the Sunday Eucharist.
“We give thanks for Catherine and Jane, to the love and friendship they share, and their commitment to one another as they come before you on this day, trusting you as the keeper of all goodness, strengthening their love by your love, and gladdening their hearts with your joy,” Dotchin said.
Dotchin is also a member of the CofE General Synod, which granted permission for same-sex blessings just days prior, expressing that clergy could now bless both homosexual relationships and homosexual marriages within their parishes.
While the CofE still does not perform homosexual marriages within its churches, many are pushing for the House of Bishops to approve the recognition of gay marriage.
The CofE and the broader global Anglican Communion hold that marriage can only be between a man and a woman, voting 526 to 70 with 45 abstentions at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, a gathering of Anglican Communion Bishops that occurs every ten years, to uphold traditional Biblical definitions of marriage.
The conference also rejected same-sex union blessing and the ordination of gay and lesbian individuals who engage in homosexual activity rather than remaining celibate.
Despite this, a push, primarily from the CofE and other Anglican Churches in North America, to reform the Anglican position on same-sex couples has since divided the Anglican Communion and led to the creation of groups like the conservative Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON).
GAFCON is a series of conferences largely made up of clergy from Africa and other countries outside of England where conservative views are far more commonly held on issues like homosexuality.
Earlier this year, GAFCON rejected the primacy of the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby as the CofE has continued to become more liberal on issues of homosexuality, female ordination, and other matters of the Anglican Communion.
GAFCON released a statement in April saying:
We have no confidence that the Archbishop of Canterbury nor the other Instruments of Communion led by him (the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates’ Meetings) are able to provide a godly way forward that will be acceptable to those who are committed to the truthfulness, clarity, sufficiency, and authority of Scripture. The Instruments of Communion have failed to maintain true communion based on the Word of God and shared faith in Christ…
Successive Archbishops of Canterbury have failed to guard the faith by inviting bishops to Lambeth who have embraced or promoted practices contrary to Scripture. This failure of church discipline has been compounded by the current Archbishop of Canterbury who has himself welcomed the provision of liturgical resources to bless these practices contrary to Scripture. This renders his leadership role in the Anglican Communion entirely indefensible.
The voices of those from outside England, Europe, and North America represent around three out of every four Anglicans globally and the Anglican Church has expanded in countries like Nigeria, Kenya, and Rwanda.
The average weekly church attendance in England is just 654,000, down from 854,000 in 2019, while the total number of Anglicans in Britain was estimated at around 26 million in 2008.
Last year, UK census data revealed that the number of Christians overall in England has shrunk so much as an overall part of the population that Christians are a minority in England for the first time since the Anglo-Saxons converted from paganism in the early medieval period.
As the CofE continues to decline in membership and drift away from the only parts of the Anglican Communion that are growing, some have speculated that the Anglican Communion may formally split.
The future of the Church of England is also in question as some have called for the Church to no longer be considered the state church of England, which would end the Church’s role in the British parliament as well as its role in schools across the country.
“It’s been difficult to defend having an established church since the beginning of the 20th century, but it is now becoming a figment of the imagination. The king being the head of the Church of England made sense in 1650, but not in 2022,” Dr. Scot Peterson, a scholar of religion and the state at Corpus Christi College, Oxford stated last year.
