THE Evangelical Fellowship of the Church in Wales (EFCW) has challenged any implication that it supports “coercive or abusive” conversion therapies, and describes such practices as “abhorrent”.

The Fellowship has called for “protections”, however, to allow for prayer and pastoral support “at the request” of the person involved.

In early September, at a meeting of the Church in Wales Governing Body, the Bishop of St Asaph, the Rt Revd Gregory Cameron, quoted from a letter that the Welsh Bench of Bishops sent to the EFCW in 2021, after the group had asked for clarity about the definition of conversion therapy (News, 13 September).

The EFCW had asked the Bishops whether they considered “grace-filled prayer” and “open discussion” to be a form of conversion therapy.

In their letter responding to the EFCW, the Bishops said that “these seemingly innocuous words can be used to disguise practices in which pressure is brought upon vulnerable LGBTQIA persons to submit to efforts aimed at the conversion of their sexuality, attempted exorcisms and worse.

“Such practices can be designed — consciously or unconsciously — to play on people’s sense of shame or anxiety, and signal that unless they conform to heterosexual norms they can neither be true disciples of Jesus, nor accepted members of the congregation with which they wish to become associated.”

On Tuesday, the Revd Christopher Bevan, who chairs the EFCW, told the Church Times that “the insinuation is that somehow we are part of this conversion therapy.

“When people discuss conversion therapy they often bring up these bizarre kind of things like chemical castration and corrective rape and beating and emotional blackmail, and the whole lot is lumped together without real differentiation.”

Such practices, which a statement from EFCW described as “abhorrent”, were coercive and manipulative, said Mr Bevan, who is Priest-in-Charge of the St Catwg Ministry Area in Swansea & Brecon diocese: “We do not seek to coerce or manipulate anyone about anything.”

The statements of the Welsh Bishops had not, he said, been “sufficiently clear that people who wish to be supported in Christian faith, and those who wish to support them, would not be included in this blanket ban on ‘conversion therapy’, which in itself is a rather nebulous concept”.

A long-expected ban on conversion therapy was included in the Government’s plans (News, 19 July) after legislation stalled under the previous government (News, 22 September 2023).

Mr Bevan said that he was concerned about “people who, in conscience, feel that their sexual attraction to members of the same sex is an unwanted sexual attraction for which they might seek to converse or to pray . . . and wish to remain single or celibate.

“We would wish that option to remain open without it in some way being insinuated that there’s something wrong with their decision, or that if we wish to support them in such a decision, that there’s something somehow wrong with us wishing to do so.

“We at EFCW feel that we’d like to maintain what you might call an alternative route for those who might want to explore it, and we think that the rhetoric and the statements from the Bench of Bishops would condemn such a route and misrepresent our position.”

Asked whether he would initiate a conversion about sexuality with a member of the congregation who was living with a same-sex partner, Mr Bevan said that he would “leave them to work it out for themselves as they saw fit.

“If they asked me questions about it, then I would answer them as truthfully as I could, but I wouldn’t be in the business of browbeating or manipulating them or somehow attempting to force them into anything, either emotional blackmail or social ostracisation or anything else like that,” he said.