Learning points from a vicar’s story
• Some Christian approaches to trans people are harmful – we’ll say more about them in later chapters – and should be avoided.
• Listening to a trans person – or their loved one – telling their story can be very moving and lead to new learning and even, in some cases, ‘a revelation’.
• Being trans is not ungodly – again we’ll say much more about this later in the book. At this stage it is enough just to note that your role is to reassure the person that they are loved by God as they are (just as we would reassure someone who is not trans).
Methodology
We have employed several methods that are well-established in practical theology. A brief outline of each method follows here.
The pastoral cycle
The pastoral cycle is often traced back to Roman Catholic social action movements in the early 20th century. It has been a key method in practical theology and an important tool within Latin American Liberation Theology (see below and Chapter 5) but is relevant wherever injustice or exclusion need to be addressed.
A typical cycle involves several stages, for example Ballard and Pritchard’s (2006, first published 1996, pp.85–86) four stage model: Experience – Exploration – Reflection – Action (see Figure 1.1 below).
What all models have in common is that human experience (including the social context) will be taken seriously in the process. Practical theology, alert to power dynamics and the constant risk of injustice, tends to start from human experience, and only then begins to explore what is happening, drawing on the social sciences in dialogue with Christian sources.
Figure 1.1
Several theological methods are available at the reflective stage. In our work we are drawn to praxis models that combine lived experience with theory and narrative approaches, which are usually people’s stories in their own words. We then make links with the fundamental Christian story. This intense engagement with a situation, and its significance, needs to lead to action and the kind of change that will improve people’s lives.
This informed shift from experience, via learning, theory and reflection, to action is highly suited to a book of this kind, where the anticipated outcome is that you will want to change some things about your church life to make it more hospitable to trans people. Nor are such actions the final step, for the pastoral cycle is a spiral which means that current good practice will need to be examined, reviewed and improved on. We gladly invite you to use these kinds of tools to improve on the good practice we are advocating in this book.
Liberation Theology
The overriding belief in Liberation Theology is that God prefers the poor and oppressed and that blessing comes from the margins rather than the centre of the Church. Liberation Theology believes our duty as Christians is to challenge oppression in all its forms. Liberation Theology started in the 1970s as a critique of the economic and social oppressions of the South American poor. In the past 50 years it has broadened to explore and critique the systems of oppression that exist within the Church and wider society. Holland and Henriot (1983, first published 1980, p.28) pose three questions about social class, which seem equally pertinent in relation to trans people, or any other social minority:
1. Who makes the decisions?
2. Who benefits from the decisions?
3. Who bears the cost of the decisions?
Liberation Theology means we first have to listen to those who are oppressed and then ask, ‘Where is God in this experience?’ and ‘What is an appropriate Christian response?’ To this end we conducted workshops and interviews and have used the information we gained from them to write this book.
Narrative theology
A notable phenomenon when Christians discuss trans people is the criticism of relying too heavily on trans people’s stories, combined with the claim that the Church ‘still needs to do the theology’ about transgender people. We make no apology for grounding our approach here in trans people’s stories and dispute the idea that trans people’s stories and the Church’s theology about them can be separated in this way.
Given that the Bible is largely a collection of stories, it’s intriguing that the Church has a history of ignoring stories when it suits its purpose, as Don Cupitt (1995, first published 1991, p.42) has pointed out:
At the drop of a hat theologians would reel off the old philosophical criticisms of pagan myths, images and sacrifices. Yet somehow they tacitly exempted their own narratives, images and rituals from the same criticism… It was all very odd. Philosophy condemned stories for stirring up our emotions and seducing us into identifying ourselves with the central characters. But if this is generally a bad thing, how does it suddenly become a good thing when the central character is St Ursula or Jesus?
Rowan Williams (1979, pp.2–3) explains how the Incarnation of God in human form in the person of Jesus Christ is the most powerful critique and counterbalance to this tendency:
By affirming that all ‘meaning’, every assertion about the significance of life and reality, must be judged by reference to a brief succession of contingent events in Palestine, Christianity – almost without realizing it – closed off the path to ‘timeless truth’… Even when Christian writers use language suggesting such a picture, there are strong forces pulling in an opposite direction, demanding the affirmation of history, and thus of human change and growth, as significant. If the heart of ‘meaning’ is a human story, a story of growth, conflict and death, every human story, with all its oddity and ambivalence, becomes open to interpretation in terms of God’s saving work.
It is our conviction that all of us have much to learn, both spiritually and theologically from the stories of the Christian trans people and their loved ones that we interviewed for this book.
Group interviews
Interview participants were recruited via internet networks such as the Facebook group, Christians for LGBTI+ Equality. The times, dates and locations of the groups – held in London and the north of England in the spring of 2018 – were advertised on these forums and people were encouraged to come and participate. People self-selected to participate and were told very clearly that they could withdraw at any time.
Two different workshops were held on the same day in both locations. The first was a discussion group with trans people about how to make the Church more trans friendly which is reported in Chapter 6. The second group was the parents and partners who came with their loved one to take part in the second group, and these findings are reported in Chapter 4. We also quote our participants throughout the book.
The purpose of the interviews was explained,