What price is too high to keep conservatives in the Church of England?

Future historians of the Church of England might look back at this weekend as the beginning of the end. A selection of bishops and members of the General Synod are meeting at a hotel in Leicester to seek a solution to the impasse over homosexuality. They hope to make a plan to take to July’s Synod: a deal that keeps conservatives in the Church. That’s got to be a good thing, hasn’t it? It depends. 

The story so far is that the Church decided in favour of same-sex blessings last year, and also in favour of new ‘pastoral guidance’ that is expected to allow gay clergy to marry, therefore officially condoning them for the first time. Conservatives, the large majority of whom are evangelicals, see this as false teaching, and are demanding their own structures. They don’t just want the right to dissent, parish by parish. That would mean being a tolerated minority, at odds with the official Church.