To Be Honest…

On February 26^th 2025, Modern Church and the Relational Church network held a joint online conversation called ‘Time for Change’. Three contributors, all members of the Modern Church Council, explored one change they would like to see. All three scripts are being published here as Modern Church blogs.

To Be Honest…

By Naomi Nixon

It feels a little like being offered a genie with three wishes to say what one change would you make in the CofE. It needs to be something specific, that we can’t wriggle out of, but it also needs to have impact, because you’re never going to have this chance again.

After much thought I decided the one thing I’d change is to make us more honest. SCM has a campaign called Honest Church, and having thought about all the other things I could call for change about, this was still my number one.

I’m very content to be a British Anglican, I don’t flirt with other denominations. But we do have some real challenges to honesty. Some of that comes from genuinely bad motives sometimes, deliberately hiding things. But mostly being both British and Anglican deals us a double dose of politeness, and it can have the terrible side effect of dishonesty.

One of the ways this is terrible for the young Christians I work with at SCM is that churches advertise themselves as welcoming and then show a dark underside which rejects them. We hear stories again and again of churches putting on welcoming student events, and freshers going along, letting their guard down and settling in for a few weeks or months. Only to be horrified when they are taken aside and told that because they are gay they can’t be in the music group, or turning up to hear a sermon which rejects them. It doesn’t feel polite to tell people from the off that some folk aren’t welcome, but it is catastrophic for a young person to experience the reality of it when it becomes clear later.

But this isn’t just a conservative church problem, only last night I was speaking at a deanery synod where a chap told me he just didn’t want people’s identity shoved in his face. I don’t care he said, be gay, you are welcome, just don’t tell me about it. And lots of our churches have that attitude. There are two problems with this. One is, in a church deeply divided about gay people, how are you supposed to know if a church is welcoming to you or not if they are too polite to talk about it? But there is a deeper problem with this failure to be honest. If we don’t name the difficult things, we aren’t changing the unjust structures of society, we are upholding them, and that is contrary to the kingdom of God.

When general synod talks about gay people, they don’t talk about the people at all. They use home made euphemisms, ‘LLF’, ‘PLF’, ‘the prayers’, ‘the pastoral guidance’. Synod has whole debates about ‘the problem’, ‘the disagreement’ and almost no speakers, including those leading on the matter, mention the reality that this is about people, actual human beings.

This dishonesty dehumanises people. It might feel uncomfortable and impolite to keep saying we disagree about prayers for same sex couples, the theology around gay people, whether the Bible affirms or rejects a gay Christian. But this is what we are talking about, and our deeply polite instinct for dishonesty is allowing our church to talk about people as problems and that never leads to good and holy outcomes.

Naomi Nixon is CEO of the Student Christian Movement