An Anglican Long View – What Future for an Inclusive Communion?
3pm Friday 24 February in the Darnell Room, St John’s Cathedral, 373 Ann St Brisbane
With recent decisions at the Church of England synod in the news and the Anglican Church in Australia faced with division and discord, many are wondering where the future path may be found for an inclusive communion. Jayne Ozanne, director of the Ozanne Foundation and well known gay evangelical and thought leader, joins us on her Australian speaking tour to explore where we find ourselves in the Anglican church and how we could shape a hopeful future together.
Jayne Ozanne is a prominent gay evangelical who works to ensure full inclusion of all LGBTQ+ people, particularly LGBTQ+ people of faith. She is Director of the Ozanne Foundation, which works with religious organisations to eliminate discrimination based on sexuality or gender identity. In December 2020, she set up and launched the Global Interfaith Commission on LGBT+ Lives, which brings together hundreds of senior religious leaders from around the world to call for an end of violence and criminalisation of LGBT+ people, for a global ban on “conversion therapy” and who have agreed a set of Safeguarding Principles to Protect LGBT+ Lives.
Jayne is also the Founder and Chair of the UK’s Ban Conversion Therapy Coalition, which brings together over 80 organisations that are campaigning for a full ban on conversion practices. This builds on her work with faith communities, most notably the 2017 debate in the Church of England, which she led, and which called on the government to ban it. In 2019 she was appointed the government’s LGBT Advisory Panel, from which she resigned in 2021 due to its slow progress on a ban. She then went on to form the Ban Conversion Therapy Legal Forum, which brought together some of the most senior international human rights lawyers in the UK, to help set out to the government how to effectively ban “conversion therapy”, particularly religious practices.
Jayne is actively engaged through her writings and broadcasts in helping religious groups develop and promote a positive ethic towards lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people. Her tag line is “Unashamedly Gay, Unashamedly Christian” and as such works to be a role model for LGBT people of faith.