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Lillian Ladele |
I didn’t come to worship: how I was outed as I looked for Lillian
I MADE a confession when an elderly man started talking to me at the back of the Clerkenwell church after the Sunday service.
I hadn’t come for the service, I admitted. I was looking for Ms Lillian Ladele instead.
Ms Ladele, as readers may know, is a registrar, and a very conscientious Christian who has won a judgement against Islington Council after refusing to conduct gay civil partnership ceremonies. Ms Ladele is known to regularly attend St James Church, off Clerkenwell Green.
Around me young children were handing out tea and cakes to people after a service where the minister, the Rev Andrew Baughen, in an open neck shirt, had given a “talk”, not a sermon, in which quotes from the Bible were flashed up on screens at the front of the pews, all interspersed with clips from video films.
Hymns had been sung to the accompaniment of a small, guitar-led group.
When I told the man I was astonished by how modern the service was, he said the Bishop of London had instructed the Rev Baughen to get people back into the church. And he was clearly succeeding.
There were well over 100 in the congregation, most of them in their 20s and 30s, with babies and young children.
And Ms Ladele?
Unusually, the man regretted, Ms Ladele hadn’t turned up for the service.
“But he thought she’d been given a hard time by colleagues at Islington Town Hall.
If men wanted to live together, fine, but it was wrong, he intimated, for the church to give “leadership” sanctifying it.
All a hot topic at the current Lambeth conference.
A minute or two later, I chatted to Rev Baughen, who surprised me by saying that the man I’d spoken to was in fact his father – and the retired Bishop of Chester!
He couldn’t help regretting that while society was more “pluralist” it had become less “tolerant” of views like those of Ms Ladele, who held them in good conscience.
As I left the church, I shook hands with the man I had earlier spoken to, and said he had been “outed” by his son. “I am a retired bishop,” he smiled.
I asked him whether he was still recognised as a bishop, and he said he was.
Once a bishop always a bishop, I thought. |
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