Jeni Leggat-Green had been on the committee of another church before she left and joined Cotham Parish Church. She left after a hostile response to a motion she put forward to join an inclusivity initiative. It exposed ruptures within her then-parish community she hadn’t realised were there.
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“People who I had considered to be friends started saying some really horrible things, like welcoming gay people was like welcoming pedophiles into your church,” Leggat-Green tells the Cable. “It still hurts,” she says, even though two decades have passed since she and her wife left her former parish.
As Convenor of Open Table Bristol, hosted at Cotham Parish, Leggat-Green now offers support to those who have felt rejected or isolated from church. Open Table is a monthly service that’s part of a UK-wide network offering an affirming and welcoming spiritual home for LGBTQ+ people.
Leggat-Green joins me on a Zoom call along with Cotham Parish’s vicar, Revd David Stephenson, and Andy Thornton, who is the minister of Foundation, a weekly inclusive community that also meets at Cotham Parish. “I think it’s one thing to accommodate, which feels very conditional,” Stephenson says. “It’s a very different thing to create a safe space.”
We talk about the division between liberal and conservative factions of the Church in Bristol, the Ephesian Fund – a fund set up to direct giving towards orthodox ministries – and whether a split within the Church feels inevitable.
A different type of worship
Thornton stumbled upon Foundation after leaving multiple churches, and immediately knew it was the place for him. Foundation offers a space where people can contemplate their faith, but with no prescriptive idea of what church or worship should look like.
“For me, it was groundbreaking, because it was the first time that I [could] actually just go to church,” Thornton says. “I just wanted to go to church, and be part of it, and not have this huge thing, [to] feel like a problem, or feel like [acceptance] was conditional, or have shame.”
Going on to lead that community sends a strong signal to others who have felt rejected in the same way, he adds. “I think a lot of people, when they see somebody queer actually at the front, they know that there isn’t going to be a barrier – that there isn’t going to be a ceiling.”
‘Being gay is not my defining characteristic’
Jeni Leggat Green at her church. Credit: Agnes Wolfe
Debates around gender and sexuality have threatened to split the Church of England for decades. Since 2023, same-sex couples have been able to receive blessing prayers that form part of ordinary Sunday church services, but after a vote in February of this year, proposals to deliver stand-alone blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples remain off the table. The Church’s national assembly, the General Synod, voted to continue to look into the issue in the future.
Debates have until now taken place under an initiative known as Living in Love and Faith (LLF), which the General Synod voted to pause earlier this year. Leggat-Green describes the process as “brutal”, while Thornton says it feels like the goal posts are being constantly shifted.
“Being gay is not my defining characteristic,” Leggat-Green adds. “It’s not the first thing that I would tell you about myself or that I would want you to consider about myself if you met me for the first time. And I think that that’s what the Church of England is making happen.”
Revd Canon Neil Patterson has seen the LLF discussions up close from both a national and local perspective. He’s chair of campaign group Together for the Church of England, and is Vice Dean at Bristol Cathedral. He also has a personal stake in this conversation – having openly written about his experience of coming out in the Church.
I ask him about what LLF – and the disagreement over same-sex blessings and ceremonies – means for LGBTQ+ parishioners, particularly those looking to celebrate their relationship in the Church.
“I do think it means it feels like an uncertainty,” he says. “We have to offer a service that’s somewhat prescribed, and that has to not look too much like a wedding, and that feels like a kind of half-hearted welcome.”
Financial fracturing
Walking around Bristol’s churches, or doing a quick Google search, you can see the divide within the Church for yourself. Some proudly display the rainbow flag or online badges of inclusivity. Others are equally open about what they describe as a “biblical” approach to sex and marriage.
Ed Shaw at his home in Bristol. Credit: Lottie Turner
That distinction has manifested financially, too. In 2023, the Ephesian Fund was set up to enable churches and individuals to direct donations and parish share – the financial contribution each church pays to a central diocesan fund – towards “orthodox evangelical ministry”.
Last year, almost £10 million was given across 32 dioceses towards parish share using the Ephesian Fund. Parish share covers costs such as clergy’s salary, pensions, and housing. It’s unclear how big of an impact it’s having locally, as the Ephesian Fund told us it does not publish or routinely share diocese-level figures on the number of churches using the Fund. The Diocese of Bristol also couldn’t provide this data, and said it was still considering its position on the fund.
In a short statement, an Ephesian Fund spokesperson told the Cable that use of the Fund “should not be treated as a proxy for the number of churches in any diocese who hold particular convictions on the doctrine of marriage.”
One Bristol church leader, however, who is also a patron of the Fund, did open up about the use of the Fund in their church.
Ed Shaw is the Pastor of Emmanuel City Centre Church and has written extensively about being celibate and, in his own words, experiencing “same-sex attraction”. At Emmanuel Bristol, he says the Ephesian Fund has been “a really good way of encouraging our church family to keep giving generously to our local church context and also to the diocese and national side of things too.
“It’s been a way of saying to people, you can give your money to the Ephesian Fund, and it will go and support churches that you can get behind,” he says.
Others have seen the fund in a different light. A briefing paper by Together for the Church of England describes the fund as aiming “to politically pressure the Church of England to approve deeper and more formal divisions within the structures of the Church”.
“It is ultimately a way of people defining their separate identity – financially as well as everything else,” Patterson says.
In response, an Ephesian Fund spokesperson said: “The Ephesian Fund itself is not a campaigning organisation. It is a charity established to enable churches and individuals to give in a way that is consistent with the Fund’s Statement of Faith and charitable purposes, including within and for the Church of England.”
“In the context of the Church of England’s continuing debates, the Fund’s role is practical and charitable: to provide a lawful mechanism for giving and to offer confidence to donors around how their generosity is applied.”
‘I’m passionate about what I do’
The handling of LLF and the debate around same-sex blessing ceremonies have caused some LGBTQ+ people to leave the Church altogether. Others, like Thornton, have distanced themselves from the institution, instead seeking out alternative forms of worship.
“Lots of young people will know someone queer. And [they think] if my friend can’t go, why would I go?” Thornton points out.
Stephenson says it can sometimes feel “compromising” to represent the Church.
“I’m aware that, when I put my dog collar on… I can be a symbol of that institution that will be received in negative ways,” he says. “I’m not as proud of what I do as I should be, because I love what I do, and I’m passionate about what I do and what I represent.”
Can a bridge be built?
For Shaw, recognising the differences in opinion – rather than minimising divisions – feels in some ways like a unifying force. “I think the future of the Church of England is when we’re open and honest about the deep divisions and find ways of bridging them,” he says.
He provides an example of a recent exchange when someone he strongly disagreed with reached out: “It made me cry, in a nice way.”
In all of these conversations, there are small flickers of hope. Churches with very different views exist in one city – so can they exist within one Church? Pockets of communities like those found at Foundation or Open Table have also emerged and flourished within individual Church of England churches.
“The paradox of the Church of England is that it has always been falling out with itself about something, and yet somehow staggering on,” Patterson says. “Although I cannot at this point see how that is going to happen, I still feel that [a united Church] is the more likely direction in the end than otherwise.”
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