Church vows to keep medieval marriage banns to attract youth

The Church of England must never forget that only a man and a woman can know this grace of God

THE Church of England has voted to preserve the medieval tradition of reading the marriage banns in an attempt to keep up congregation numbers among young people.

Members of the General Synod, the governing body of the Anglican Church, said ditching the popular tradition would mean losing an important source of new worshippers.

The tradition, which dates back to 1215, involves reading the couple’s names out loud during three services and praying for them in the lead-up to their union.

Couples do not have to attend but, during yesterday’s debate over a proposed change to the rules, ministers said that many came to church specifically to hear the banns being read. Just under 45,000 people got married in Church of England churches in 2015.

The plan, which was rejected by all three houses of the synod – the bish- ops, clergy and laity – would have required couples to go to civil registrars to arrange church weddings.

Supporters argued that priests already have too much to do without administering marriages and checking passports. But opponents said the banns were an important way of get- ting young couples to attend their local church. Cherry Vann, the Archdeacon of Rochdale, said: “It gives us access to 90,000 people in the 18-45 age group which is the age group that we struggle to reach.”

She said she also knew a vicar who had first come to church to hear her own banns read and urged the Church not to “shoot ourselves in the foot” by stopping the tradition. The Rev Kate Stacey, a vicar from Oxford, told the debate that banns “attract people into church” while sending them to a civil office would force them to deal with a “faceless bureaucracy” instead.

A controversial bishops’ report about gay marriage will be debated and voted on by Church members today. Many have said they will vote to reject the report, which said gay and lesbian people were welcome in the Church, but that the policy not to allow gay marriage would not change.

A protest by gay rights groups outside the synod is planned.

The synod is also expected to call on the Government to impose tighter regulations on fixed-odds betting terminals.

The synod approved new rules which allow Salvation Army members to preach in churches for the first time since the Christian charity was founded in 1865.

‘It gives us access to 90,000 people in the 18-45 age group, which is the group that we struggle to reach’

Yesterday, sweethearts of the same sex were able to exchange Valentine cards purchased, for the first time, from that bellwether of Middle England’s tastes, Sainsbury’s. Today, the General Synod of the Church of England meets and will be asked, inter alia, to “take note of ” (that is, approve) a report from its bishops that holy matrimony can only ever be between one man and one woman.

Cue siren voices from the gay and transgender lobby claiming cruelty and heartlessness from our established Church, discriminating against those Christians of the same gender who want to celebrate their lifelong, loving commitment to each other in vows made before their God. Surely further evidence, if it were needed, of an institution stuck in its bigoted past and out of touch with its own committed and loving clergy and congregants?

Well, no. For a start, the Church isn’t a supermarket, responding to the demands of customers, though it may look like it sometimes. But, more importantly, the House of Bishops, led in this instance by the estimable Bishop of Norwich, Graham James, who is no creepy old patsy, has got its report about right. And I say that as one of the Church’s hand-wringing, bleeding-heart liberals.

I don’t seek to paraphrase the bishops’ report when I say that our liturgy for the marriage service is crystal clear on this. It is a “gift of God in creation” in which a man and a woman may know the grace of God and, in this way, be united “as Christ is united with his bride, the Church”. It is “a way of life made holy by God” and blessed by Christ’s attendance at just such a union at Cana, in Galilee. And one of its three sacramental purposes is “the increase of mankind”, put more bluntly in the Book of Common Prayer as “the procreation of children”, reflected in the conjugality of the two sexes that enter into marriage.

That is just what it is. We may, as a society and as a Church, want to change it into something else and we are at liberty to do so. But have the implications of doing so been properly considered? I don’t think they have.

A measure of the paucity of the debate so far is that supporters of gay marriage have been allowed to pretend that all we’re doing at a church wedding is celebrating the commitment of two people who love each other. That’s not true. Yes, love is the fuel that drives the engine of marriage, but marriage itself is doing and representing other spiritual and societal things (see above).

Were it just about two people loving each other then there would be an inescapable logic to the idea that a mother and son or brother and sister should be allowed to marry each other, otherwise gay couples could legitimately be accused of pulling up the ladder to marriage from others in the way that they have accused heterosexual couples of doing to them.

This argument is caricatured by cutting-edge Radio 4 comedians as belonging to red-faced buffers from the shires blustering: “They’ll be saying I can marry my labrador next!” But that’s plain silly. The point of the incest analogy is to demonstrate that loving commitment isn’t a sufficiency for marriage. Unless gay campaigners are saying it should be confined to people who can legally have sex. But that would mean that marriage is only about sexual union, which it isn’t (again, see above).

What we’re considering is what we start to unravel once we make marriage something it hasn’t been before – not a thought that detained David Cameron, who as prime minister allowed gay marriage as a means of burnishing his socially liberal credentials. Cameron did this, he explained, because he was a Conservative. That’s a matter for the Tories and we shouldn’t intrude on private grief. But the General Synod has to decide what to actually do about it. It’s a shame that the Church finds itself at such odds with what a secular state has decided marriage now is. Had we had a new liturgy for blessing civil partnerships in church – as we should, if we’re in the business of blessing God’s love wherever we find it – we might have avoided this.

That said, the Church, not for the first time, has an opportunity as well as a responsibility to clear up the mess left after the wedding party by lazy politicians. George Pitcher is rector of the parish of Waldron in East Sussex