Global South Anglican

In a thoughtful response to the St Andrew’s Day Statement of 1996 Rowan Williams asked how the authors might address “the good news” to a certain type of homosexual Christian for whom he had a special concern.[1] Speaking in the first person, this Christian (to whom we shall assign the masculine pronoun) declares: (i) that he desires to live in obedience to Christ; (ii) he is unable to see himself reflected in the description of homosexuals in Romans 1, since he is not “rejecting something I know in the depths of my being”; (iii) that he conducts a life of moral struggle like other Christians; and (iv) that it is “hard to hear good news” from a church which insists his condition is spiritually compromised. This question frames very neatly the challenge the church faces. We may wonder whether the Archbishop’s ideal homosexual Christian is too idealised. We may wonder whether he is typical. But doubts of this kind are no reason to refuse the challenge. If there are homosexual Christians who see themselves in this way, then, precisely because they intend to take the disciplines of the Christian life with perfect seriousness, we may and must listen and speak to them with perfect seriousness about the good news in Jesus Christ. However, there is another question that ought to be raised alongside the first, and addressed to anyone who sees him- or herself, in this portrait of the homosexual Christian. To raise this second question is not to evade the first; rather, it is to search out the shape that an answer to the first must take. This second question, too, is put by Rowan Williams: “How does the homosexually inclined person show Christ to the world?” For if the gay Christian is to be addressed as a believer and a disciple, a recipient of the good news, he has to be addressed as a potential evangelist, too. But we must take this second question a little further. The good news meant for the human race is meant for the church, too. What good news does the gay Christian have to bring to the church?

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