This Church edict on sex isn’t exactly Christian!

On sunday morning, a friend — dragging along his scraggy Welsh terrier — knocked on the door of my cottage and suggested a bracing walk on the nearby heath then a pub lunch under the brilliant blue of a cloudless winter day.

i told him i’d love to, but was going to church.

a familiar cloud crossed his face — the cloud i always see when mentioning my faith to someone who can’t quite understand my belief in god.

yes, i am a paid-up — but very flawed — Christian who goes to church most weeks and it gives me great succour.

so it was a bracing moment when i read that the Church of england, my Church, declared that loving, longterm couples in civil partnerships should not have sex. Bishops have decreed that those in these legal and publicly declared unions should remain celibate.

Bejesus, where does that leave me, a woman who isn’t married — though not through lack of trying — nor in a civil partnership; but one who, whisper it, occasionally shares her bed?

in one sense the Church is right: the Bible is clear that sex outside marriage is a sin. yet half of all couples with children are not married. are the bishops condemning them all to the fires of Hell? doesn’t sound very Christian to me.

it’s clearly a conundrum. But in my view these are holy waters into which the C of e should not be venturing. their adjudication is bonkers and alienating to many of their flock.

since the 1980s, the number of Brits who say they’re Christians has fallen from two-thirds to just over a third. a quarter of the 15,000 anglican parish churches have fewer than 16 worshippers. More people go to watch my beloved spurs than sunday service.

so what do the clever bishops do? utter an edict that will drive even more congregants from the pews.

Being Christian has always been about inclusion, not exclusion, particularly if it’s based on an ideal of married life to which many aspire — but which not everyone can achieve.

it is self-inflicted folly for them to make such judgments on our modern lives. and, in any case, wasn’t it Mary Magdalene — a fallen woman — who Christ welcomed and who anointed His feet?

it’s hard enough to be a practising Christian these days without being considered a bit of a weirdo. the last thing the Church should be doing is making it even harder.