A Reformed Anglican Reading of the Closure of the Living in Love and Faith Process
The Church is not free to reinvent its message, but is called to remain faithful to what has been entrusted to her.
In January 2026, the Church of England published an official statement from the House of Bishops announcing the conclusion of the Living in Love and Faith process, initiated to address questions of identity, sexuality, relationships, and marriage. The present text offers a theological evaluation of that document, in the light both of the episcopal statement itself and of the subsequent explanatory communication published on the official website of the Church of England.
1. A Document of Governance Rather than Confession
The House of Bishops’ document marking the conclusion of the Living in Love and Faith process is not, strictly speaking, a doctrinal or confessional text. It is, above all, a document of ecclesial governance, designed to manage a prolonged conflict, contain its institutional impact, and prevent a visible fracture within the Church of England. From a Reformed evangelical perspective, this initial observation is decisive: we are dealing with a text that administers a crisis, but neither interprets it theologically to its full depth nor resolves it.
The rhetorical density of its pastoral language, with its repeated emphasis on “process”, on “listening”, and on the “diversity of convictions held in good conscience”, stands in marked contrast to a notable reluctance to exercise doctrinal judgement. The document describes the disagreement with precision, yet refrains from offering any substantive normative clarification capable of ordering that disagreement under the authority of the Word of God as received by the Church.
From a classical Anglican standpoint, this reflects an unresolved tension between the episcopal role as guardian of order and its historic vocation as custodian of the deposit of faith. In the reading advanced by the document, the episcopate appears increasingly to assume the role of guarantor of disagreement, tasked with administering, containing, and institutionally sustaining incompatible theological positions, rather than exercising a normative doctrinal discernment that would order such disagreement in the light of received truth. In this way, the classical role of the bishop as doctor ecclesiae, understood as an authorised teacher of the Church called to instruct and to give doctrinal form to the apostolic faith, is displaced by a different figure: no longer the teacher of the faith, but the manager of the process, closer to an ecclesiastical bureaucrat than to a pastor-theologian, whose principal task is no longer to clarify the truth but to keep disagreement operational.
2. Scripture, Tradition, and Reason: A Displaced Equilibrium
Formally, the document reaffirms the classical Anglican framework of discernment through Scripture, tradition, and reason. Yet this affirmation functions more as an identity marker than as a genuinely operative principle. In the argumentative practice of the text, the classical triad is emptied of its internal balance and applied selectively. Scripture is invoked rhetorically as a general horizon of love, welcome, and faith, but is systematically avoided as a material norm capable of determining the concrete content of moral judgement. Tradition is referenced deferentially, yet redefined as an open field of equally legitimate interpretations rather than as a received inheritance bearing binding authority. Reason, by contrast, does not appear as theological reason illuminated by revelation, but as procedural, juridical, and socio-cultural reason, which in practice assumes the decisive role. Thus the classical language is retained, but its function is inverted: what is proclaimed as the normative framework is, in fact, relegated to a symbolic resource, while real discernment is displaced towards criteria external to the inherited theological logic.
From a Reformed evangelical theological perspective, this displacement cannot be regarded as minor or merely methodological. Not because the document explicitly denies the authority of Scripture, but because it functionally empties Scripture of its normative role, reducing it to a general inspirational reference, invoked to confer rhetorical legitimacy upon conclusions that are no longer governed by it. Classical language is preserved, but stripped of its real capacity to order the Church’s moral and doctrinal discernment. The result is a form of Anglicanism that speaks as though it remains within the received tradition, while acting according to a different logic altogether, producing a deeply troubling disjunction between verbal confession and ecclesial praxis.
In the terms of Article VI, Scripture is sufficient for salvation and normative for faith and life. The document does not contradict this affirmation at a declarative level, but in practice it neutralises it. Scripture is affirmed, but not obeyed; acknowledged, but not permitted to exercise its delimiting function. From a Reformed perspective, this kind of displacement is not neutral, for it silently erodes the theological integrity of ecclesial discourse and compromises the honesty with which the Church claims to submit itself to the Word it professes to honour.
3. Pastoral Ambiguity as an Ecclesial Strategy
One of the most revealing features of the text is its deliberate commitment to a carefully institutionalised pastoral ambiguity. The Prayers of Love and Faith are presented as a legitimate provision, while formal insistence is maintained on their disconnection from any doctrinal redefinition of marriage. Yet this separation between pastoral gesture and doctrinal meaning, far from being an innocent distinction, proves from a Reformed perspective to be profoundly unstable and strategically functional. It is not merely a theological clumsiness, but a mode of proceeding that allows advancement in practice of what there is no willingness to affirm explicitly at the doctrinal level.
The Reformed Anglican tradition has consistently insisted that liturgy is never neutral. Lex orandi, lex credendi is not a pious slogan but a basic theological observation: what the Church publicly prays and celebrates inevitably forms what it believes. To introduce liturgical practices that publicly affirm moral goods, while deliberately refusing to provide a coherent doctrinal articulation to sustain them, does not suspend theological judgement but displaces it. What emerges is an implicit pedagogy that gradually shapes the faith of the people of God independently of, and at times in contradiction to, the technical clarifications issued by episcopal authority.
The document appears to wager that this disjunction can be sustained over time, trusting that pastoral repetition will eventually achieve what doctrinal discernment does not dare to declare. From a theologically realistic anthropology, this expectation is not merely naïve but deeply problematic: it fails to recognise the formative power of Christian worship and refuses to acknowledge honestly that, in the life of the Church, repeated practice eventually imposes itself as lived doctrine. The result is not pastoral neutrality, but doctrinal transformation by attrition, presented under the language of caution and accompaniment.
In the name of pastoral prudence, the document thus ends up legitimising a strategy in which doctrine is not reformed by confession but eroded through the accumulation of practices, leaving the Church not with an honest discernment but with a tacit transformation that never dares to speak its own name.
4. The Episcopate as Manager of Disagreement
Ecclesiologically, the text effects a de facto redefinition of the episcopal role. The bishop appears less as doctor ecclesiae and more as arbiter of disagreement, administrator of balances, and guarantor of procedures, that is, as an ecclesiastical bureaucrat. This mutation is not accidental; it reflects a context in which the episcopate has prioritised the avoidance of visible rupture, even at the cost of indefinitely postponing doctrinal clarification.
From a Reformed Anglican perspective, this raises a grave question: can ecclesial unity be sustained indefinitely without a shared doctrinal truth to ground it?
The document entrusts the unity of the Church to procedures, codes, and working groups. Ecclesial history suggests that when revealed truth is replaced by the management of disagreement, communion survives in name only. The agenda remains intact; only its explicit declaration is postponed, in the hope that time and pastoral habituation will eventually articulate what today is not yet confessed.
5. The Theological Cost of Permanent Postponement
The conclusion of the Living in Love and Faith process is not, in reality, a theological conclusion, but a structured postponement. Processes are closed, new commissions are created, future discernment is promised. From an administrative logic, this is understandable. From a Reformed theological logic, it is deeply unsettling.
The Anglican Reformation was born from the conviction that there are moments when the Church cannot continue to defer judgement, because doing so compromises fidelity to the Gospel. The document, by contrast, assumes that time, dialogue, and process can indefinitely substitute for the necessity of a clear doctrinal decision.
The risk is not only the pastoral frustration of certain groups, but a silent erosion of the Church’s doctrinal authority, communicating that on fundamental questions of Christian life there is, and perhaps will be, no commonly binding teaching.
Put simply, the document does not say no, but not yet; it does not abandon the objective, but merely grants itself the time necessary to make it canonically viable.
6. Final Assessment
From a Reformed evangelical and Anglican perspective, this document represents a moment of inflection. Not because of what it explicitly affirms, but because of the kind of Church it presupposes and shapes: a Church capable of managing disagreements, yet increasingly reluctant to exercise doctrinal discipline; a Church rich in pastoral language, yet cautious to the point of paralysis in its moral teaching; a Church that privileges institutional peace over confessional clarity.
It is not a heretical document. Nor is it a faithful document in any strong sense. It is, rather, the portrait of a Church that has chosen to survive by containment, even where that survival entails a progressive loss of theological sharpness.
From within the Reformed Anglican tradition, the question that remains is not merely one of pastoral strategy or ecclesial politics, but of gospel integrity: can the Church speak with authority of Christ while declining to say plainly what it believes Christ teaches about faithful human life before God?
