Reverend Steven Foster:

I believe in the separation of church and state. We do not want to get too much into binaries in some of these discussions about religion. When it comes to my faith, and Jesus coming alongside the marginalised, that informs me about my passion for the marginalised and those who would be sidelined or easily overlooked. My ethical concerns are hard to separate in that sense, given that Jesus's greatest conflict was with religious leaders. We fully acknowledge religious harm where it has obviously happened.

With regard to how we seek to work out our faith, in our committee we talked this through more fully in 2020 but even as we were emailing this past week, I could hear the tensions. I have people close to me for whom this is a whole lot more personal than it is for me. My fellow Methodists and other Christians are seeking to work out our faith in a real-world sense without saying that we all have the exact same views on everything.

That is just to underline the complexity and yet the clarity of compassion for all and how we are seeking to work it out.