DRIVEN by sheer curiosity, I looked up the order of service for the commissioning of “overseers” at All Souls’, Langham Place, last Friday. Twenty honorary assistant bishops and clergy were “set aside” by conservatives to give guidance to those who believe that stand-alone same-sex blessings constitute a radical departure from Christian orthodoxy.

In any competition, the All Souls’ liturgy would win hands down over the Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF). Sober, scriptural, orthodox, contemporary, the All Souls’ liturgy reads as pure Common Worship. But the PLF not only strike me as rather sentimental: as a result of the arguments about their content, they now lack the specificity that a real “blessing” requires.

Just to be clear, I am in favour of the blessing of same-sex relationships. I witnessed to the extraordinary loneliness of unwillingly celibate gay clergy in the 1960s and 1970s, and also to the reckless promiscuity in some church circles which led to deaths from AIDS. The teaching of conservative Christians at that time was simply cruel: gay men were advised to marry women, without any consideration for the suffering that this could cause both parties.

There is still serious theological work to be done on what, to me, is still the central question: what does God mean by same-sex attraction? The Living in Love and Faith process has not dealt with this. Conservatives have not come up with an answer, though they are a little kinder than they were in the 1960s. The assumption has been, all along, that a deep and lengthy pooling of experience would, in time, bring the answers that we could live with. But it has not.

None of this excuses what happened in Langham Place last Friday. It was an act of division, if not actual schism. I have been aware, for months, of rumours that hardliners really intended to split the Church on this issue, and to take advantage of the separation by forming a Church within a Church. I thought that all this was overreach and hot air, but it is already the way in which some Evangelically minded networks function: creating closed worlds linked by unaccountable networks, to ensure a steady succession of conservative and “right-thinking” ministers.

But the sheer sobriety of the liturgical effort in All Souls’ has got me wondering whether a more fundamental move is contemplated. Perhaps the new overseers see themselves as a sacred remnant, the seeds of a future Church of England in which they have taken over the structures of the Church so effectively that they end up being the only Anglicans available. They have certainly learnt to do liturgy well enough to convince.

Meanwhile, may the Lord “Give us grace seriously to lay to heart the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions” — and that, if it means anything, means us as well as them.