Unconditional acceptance, enthusiastic affirmation - A Pride Month reflection by OTN Patron Paul Bayes
Right Revd Paul Bayes, Bishop of Liverpool addressing 8,000 assembled marchers at Pride in Liverpool in 2017. PHOTO: LCR Pride.
When he became Bishop of Liverpool in 2014, in his inaugural sermon he spoke of an 'open table' made by a poor, generous carpenter who offers a place at the table to anyone who wants to sit and eat.
In July 2015 he visited the first Open Table community and charged us with a mission to give ‘the love that you share, and the openness that you manifest’ as a gift to the wider church, which struggles to receive it.
He has become an outspoken ally - In 2017 he became a patron of Pride In Liverpool and marched with the Christians At Pride group, the first Diocesan bishop in the Church of England to do so.
In 2018 he became Chair of the Ozanne Foundation, which tackles prejudice and discrimination on the grounds of sexuality and gender in religious organisations.
In 2019 he published The Table: Knowing Jesus: Prayer, Friendship, Justice which expands his vision of Christ’s church as an open table.
In 2020 he became Co-Chair of the Global Interfaith Commission on LGBT+ Lives which calling for an end to violence and criminalisation against LGBT+ people and for a global ban on conversion therapy.
WATCH Bishop Paul’s message to the Open Table Network [2.5 mins].
WATCH Bishop Paul’s Q&A with OTN Coordinator Kieran Bohan [59 mins]
IN the second of a series of reflections for Pride Month, our Patron Paul Bayes, Bishop of Liverpool, shares how his support for LCR Pride Foundation, the Liverpool City Region’s LGBT+ organisation, has been a gift to him.
This is an extract from his book The Table: Knowing Jesus: Prayer, Friendship, Justice (DLT 2019), republished with permission.
[Some years ago] I was privileged and honoured to become a Patron of Liverpool Pride, and deeply humbled to be accepted and included in the Pride community more widely.
This was not an uncontroversial step for me. Some who disapproved of my involvement with Liverpool Pride wrote to me in sorrow, and more wrote in anger.
The general sense of these communications was that I had made a mistake in conferring ‘legitimacy’ or ‘recognition’ on the LGBTI+ community by associating with the Pride events.
My own perspective was diametrically different from this. As I saw it, it was the LGBTI+ community which had conferred the honour of recognition on me, a representative of so much that had hurt and still hurts its people. Far from wanting to remind me of these millions of hurtful moments, my new friends and colleagues at Pride were unconditional in their acceptance and enthusiastic in their affirmation of a Christian (one of many on the event) who simply wanted to walk with the community and to affirm God’s love for its people. It was by this acceptance and affirmation that the gift of the poor Christ was given to me on that day.
And I responded in repentance for all that I and my community had done to demean and distress LGBTI+ human beings. I was able to speak with and share with and offer help to people on that day and subsequently. In short, through my involvement with Liverpool Pride I experienced life-changing friendship leading to repentance and ministry; the classic pattern of those who meet and sit at the carpenter’s table, as described at length elsewhere in this book.
I am human, and so I am as much in need of repentance, as broken and as sinful, as other members of the straight community, or as members of the LGBTI+/Queer community. But this is a function of our shared humanity, not of my or their orientation, and certainly not a result of anyone’s deep desire to express their love for the ones they love.
In a speech in our General Synod I was glad to be able to say that LGBTI+ orientation and identity is not a crime, not a sickness and not a sin. And I am privileged to know LGBTI+ people who in their lives have been treated as criminals or sick people or sinners and who have nonetheless come to a place of Pride in the face of all rejection, by the grace of the empty and desolate Christ and in the power of the Spirit.