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which was debated in february 2024 there s already an established route for new services canon b2 explained here although not everyone agrees that a standalone blessing would need to take that route allowing clergy to enter same sex civil marriages would need to be an amending canon and measure nothing new there either but no sense of wanting to start the processes meanwhile blessings of committed same sex couples continue in existing scheduled church services using the prayers of love and faith commended by the house of bishops under canon b5 so what s the problem with using these in standalone services apparently that they may look like weddings with casual attenders thinking they d been to a church marriage because frilly white dresses flowers rings whatever in the minutes of the may 2025 house of bishops meeting 6 6 revd dr casey strine told the house that the term now being used for these was symbolic actions the latter term is preferred to the earlier terminology of liturgical aesthetics one example among many of how there seems to be a lot of work on language without any action it reminds me of the restaurant at the end of the universe where after 573 committee meetings fire still has not been discovered and where the single simplest machine in the entire universe the wheel has not yet been discovered but the marketing girl deflects criticism with alright mr wiseguy if you re so clever you tell us what colour it should be of course casual attenders at all sorts of church services may not grasp the theological niceties i m not sure regular attenders grasp them all but is that really such a problem the other decision in october was that delegated episcopal ministry dem arrangements for diocesan bishops who thought one way on llf to delegate their role to other bishops who thought the opposite way for bishop y things like confirmations and ordinations was officially not going to happen and without that there would be no need for some sort of code of practice to set out how it would be happening because it wouldn t be happening the near unanimity here was no surprise as for conservatives who want their own third province i wrote about that here dem didn t go far enough while for everyone else it went too far in eroding the role of the diocesan bishop i can see that it s dangerously near to pick your own bishop and if you could do that according to their view on lesbian and gay people then why not on everything else and so we come to december according to the published agenda the december house of bishops meeting had nearly two hours allocated to llf in a meeting scheduled for just over three hours in total the 16 december press release from that meeting states that it did not as we had expected and as the press release from october had anticipated make those final decisions instead the house announced that it was going to spend more time finalising its proposals on the living in love and faith llf process the decisions made in october were not contested but work was needed to finalise the text of a letter from the house this presumably is a reference to the bishops letter which was long ago announced as one of the documents that would be issued but which has so far not come to synod in any form the language is interesting finalise to go with close and end so what s driving the llf process into the mud some possible answers would be reading the various faoc documents has made the bishops nervous the problem with this is that they don t seem to have had time to read them before the october meeting dem was a step too far for everyone pity that they couldn t have decided that before all the work was done developing a plan for local groups of dioceses that would make it possible to find conservative bishops when asked for the alliance has done brilliantly in scaring the bishops with their talk of an action day on which pccs or if they don t want to pass a motion to this effect just the vicar would announce to their diocesan bishop one or more of these statements we want to have the oversight of a different bishop we are not paying into the common fund but will only allow our money to be used to support parishes with whom we agree on theology we want ordinands to be trained in a special orthodox 1 programme rather than in the c of e theological colleges and courses bishops like the sound of a closure to llf as a process but with the onus being placed on the rest of the church to decide what to do to quote the summary of the words of bishop martyn snow at the may 2025 house of bishops failure to reach agreement would not be the end of the conversation synod members would table private member s motions dioceses would pass diocesan synod motions these would pass or fail by narrow margins with consequences as we wait for more from the bishops not just the minutes from october which would have been approved in december so i had expected to be released before now but also from their next meeting in the middle of this month we can at least see where the driving force of the alliance the church of england evangelical council ceec stands the ceec issued a press release and newsletters after the october house of bishops the key message from this group who believe that any sexual expression between two people of the same sex is a sin is that the bishops need to go even further so the alliance must continue to contend they do like their alliteration and it s not enough for them to prevent use of the prayers of love and faith in existing services they have to be taken out of use completely because they are unbiblical ceec long s for the bishops to remove the prayers they commended in 2023 and if that is not possible let s advocate for a structural rearrangement which secures orthodoxy going forward so that s the third province again and that action day originally planned for 1 december according to the alliance it s not off the table there s been what they call a pivot away from putting the plans into action but it will be happening if and when the red lines of standalone services and clergy same sex marriage are furthered note that furthered what counts as furthering that s the big question if any new group is set up to continue work on relationships and marriage will that count if the remit of such a group is to produce another document or to offer possible ways forward without actually committing to such movement is that furthering like the alliance leaders the trustees of together for the church of england met with the archbishop of york and others at lambeth palace on 5 november like them we were told that some sort of group would probably be proposed but much here depends on the wording would it be a dialogue group or something with more direction the alliance have written about their aversion to it being a steering group because that to them means furthering back to the thesaurus everyone because playing with words is so much easier than thinking about the people whose lives are most affected by the continued inertia of the church of england 1 here i am having trouble as usual in finding labels for the different views inclusive conservative used to work then the conservatives seemed to prefer to call themselves orthodox and the rest of us progressive and recently their word for us seems to be revisionists share this share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on reddit opens in new window reddit like loading posted in general synod living in love and faith tagged canon b2 ceec delegated episcopal ministry faith and order commission house of bishops marriage prayers of love and faith the alliance third province leave a comment the third province welcome to mercia posted on december 29 2025 by fluff35 mercia i wonder how many of those who read this blog realise that the third province which some conservative evangelicals are promoting already has a name even though it doesn t exist these conservatives say they are willing to remain in the church of england but only under certain conditions the main one being that our church would comprise the three provinces of york canterbury and mercia in contrast to the current masonic province of mercia which has its own badge illustrated here this mercia would not be a geographical province in the way that the current provinces of the church of england also are but it would have the same structures as the c of e in this post i want to look into the history of the idea of a third province and to explain the very different sense in which that is currently being mooted as i write this i am waiting for the minutes of the october 2025 house of bishops meeting to be released recently they have come out once the following meeting in this case the december 2025 meeting has agreed them as a correct record october was when the bishops resisted the proposals for delegated episcopal ministry dem an informal system by which those who disagreed with their diocesan bishop s position on same sex marriage could have ordinations and confirmations carried out by a different bishop nominated by their diocesan the dem proposals were an attempt to respond to conservative concerns but managed to panic not only those who found this model of the role of the bishop within the church entirely alien to anglicanism but also those who call themselves orthodox see this video from revd charlie skrine who is someone in the latter group dem was supposed to be accompanied by a code of practice intended to protect those who disagreed with their bishop on same sex marriage from either direction when dem was thrown out the code of practice also bit the dust after all why would it be needed as the bishops were not recommending any further movement on either allowing clergy to be in same sex civil marriages or extending use of the prayers of love and faith to standalone services dem was not enough for conservatives because it was not sufficiently formal not sufficiently enshrined in law and they are quite clear that what they want instead is that third province details of what this would mean in terms not only of episcopal oversight but selection for ordination training and the provision of such training were laid out in the 2020 ceec document visibly different put together from earlier ceec documents by stephen hofmeyr and martin davie for example the decision to join mercia would be made by parishes the boundaries of those parishes would be unchanged but they could plant churches in other parishes visibly different 7 5 10 mercia s doctrine would be that of the c of e at the point of its formation minus any elements that were supportive of same sex relationships and gender transition 7 5 13 what about the ordination of women previously the issue that was going to split the church and for which as we will see shortly a third province was also proposed in mercia women would remain eligible to serve in both lay and ordained roles although parishes could opt out of that and have a male bishop who shared their convictions 7 15 16 as they already can of course those on the third province s convocation and in its elected house of laity would also be on general synod but could not vote on anything that concerned the other two provinces 7 5 22 in july 2024 martin davie imagined further how mercia would work here the most conservative members of the c of e already have their provincial episcopal visitors flying bishops both anglo catholic and conservative evangelical but this only covers those who cannot accept the ordination of women that isn t the issue any longer the focus of panic has shifted to those in same sex relationships but as that quote on doctrine from visibly different shows this has been extended to include gender identity different alliances have been made over recent history between groups within the c of e who may disagree on much but who are prepared to come together briefly on those areas where they agree at the moment it s the alliance although i often find it hard to tell the difference between the alliance and one of its constituent groups the church of england evangelical council ceec the alliance includes not only ceec htb and new wine but also the traditional catholics writing in 2000 about the forms of evangelicalism around at the time monica furlong quoted w r matthews who in 1969 described the unholy alliance between the extreme protestants and the extreme anglo catholics around the moves to update the prayer book and that was nearly a century ago in 1927 extreme protestants feared the mass while extreme anglo catholics feared they might be prevented from saying the latin mass in their churches furlong s own comment is that such alliances based not on shared principle but on expediency seem rather ignoble 1 of the partners in the alliance it seems to me that it s ceec currently leading the calls for a third province but this term has meant different things over the last century how many dioceses per province in its twentieth century manifestations the possibility of a third province had been raised in the 1920s the place of the county of nottingham was under discussion in the convocation of canterbury should it be moved from canterbury to york it was pointed out that if the province of mercia ever came into being a further transplantation would be necessary church times 11 may 1923 why mercia because there had briefly been a province of mercia at the end of the eighth century 788 802 although that was rather different from anything being proposed then or now because it had a clear geography basically the midlands and it was focused on lichfield in the 1960s calls for a third province again began as a purely pragmatic idea based on gregory the great an example of finding something in church history to support what you want to do now briefly this is how it happened the 1969 synodical government measure set up our present general synod in which the house of laity votes on all matters that come before synod as part of the discussions leading up to that in october 1962 the convocation of york discussed the different ways in which the laity could be involved in church government the bishops had supported the majority report to create a general synod but the york convocation voted for the minority report which kept the convocations convocation just means a separate meeting of the house of clergy of either york or canterbury province this was about whether convocations should continue to have the final say on doctrine the bishop of manchester rt revd william greer noted that when convocation had acquired its exclusive rights in matters of doctrine the laity could no longer read or write this was no longer true at this meeting of the convocation of york a third province was proposed to be the archbishopric of lichfield formed from half of the dioceses of canterbury province in keeping with gregory the great who had limit...