From the ornate pulpit of the vast and ancient cathedral where fire and brimstone have reverberated down the decades, the sermon that Sunday morning took on a very different, intimate tone.The Dean of St Albans, the Very Reverend Dr Jeffrey John, was preaching to the congregation about his own personal anguish and the challenge of finding the strength to meet it.
His uplifting message, as he surveyed the absorbed faces of worshippers in St Albans Cathedral, was that all those who faced difficult challenges should be supported by their fellow men and women.
This was a fine Christian message, but it may not have been quite what it seemed.
For Dr John, who is openly gay and living in a civil partnership with a fellow cleric, is threatening to sue the Church of England for failing to appoint him a bishop.
Twice the controversial cleric has been the favourite to become one, first at Reading in 2003 and then at Southwark in 2010. And twice — despite a brilliant career — he’s been rejected.
Dean Jeffrey has now instructed specialist employment lawyers to consider suing the Church under the Equality Act 2010, which bars discrimination on the grounds of sexuality.
Such action, whatever the result, could catastrophically deepen the schism that threatens an Anglican church already dangerously divided worldwide over homosexuality.
It would almost certainly require the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, to give evidence under oath, as he is said to have blocked John’s promotion on both occasions.
Curiously, Dr John’s threats have emerged just as the Church is said to be about to review its attitude to homosexuality and reconsider allowing gay clergy in civil partnerships to be bishops.
So why the pre-emptive threats of legal action?
‘Jeffrey wants to help them reach the right decision,’ says a close observer. This is one issue, of course, where there is no ‘right’ decision. Even current teaching, allowing clergy to be gay so long as they are celibate, brings some traditionalists out in a cold sweat.
So is Dr John just another radical gay lobbyist, as his opponents insist, or is he the victim of ancient homophobic teachings that have no place in a modern world?
On the one hand, he is regarded as the liberal movement’s intellectual inspiration, and his candidacy for Southwark is thought to have been proposed by fellow campaigners knowing it would cause a row, calculating it would further their cause to drag the church ‘into the 21st century’.
On the other, one must surely sympathise with the way he and his partner of some 36 years, the Rev Grant Holmes, who is chaplain at Kingston hospital, Surrey, have been forced to live a ‘half life’ domestically for most of that time.
Even now, despite the security of a civil partnership ceremony at St Albans register office in July 2006, Dr John has had to give the Church his word that he is celibate.
They live a curious ‘not quite together’ life at the Deanery near the ancient Cathedral, whose stones date back to Norman times. Each is said to have his own bedroom, bathroom and living quarters.
Yet around the diocese they are a familiar couple, and very popular.
The Rev Holmes, 57, regularly accompanies Dean John to official functions.
Conveniently, he has been made a member of the Associate Clergy at St Albans Abbey (the old name of the cathedral) which enables him to help out, especially at Sunday school, though he does not get paid.
He also acts as Master of Ceremonies at the St Albans annual International Organ Festival .
‘Both are extremely well-loved and they attend events together and go away on holiday together,’ says Edward Hackford, former council chief executive who sits on the Cathedral’s council.
‘Grant has a great sense of humour and is very outgoing, and Jeffrey runs the best-attended cathedral in the country. His sermons are first class.’
That doesn’t sound like a relationship that threatens to undermine our established Church.
Or does it?
It sounds almost like a Bible story, how the union of two boys who grew up in pit villages 250 miles apart became the single focus of a dispute that could be a defining moment for the Church of England.
John grew up in a flat above his parents’ grocery shop in the Welsh mining village of Tonyrefail, near Cardiff.
Holmes grew up in Coxhoe, an old mining village in Co. Durham where his father was a teacher.
The two men met in 1976 at St Stephen’s House theological college, a seat of religious learning and part of the University of Oxford, where it is a light-hearted custom for some students to be given girls’ names — which, in some cases, they continue to use privately in later life.
In Dr John’s time, there was an Audrey, a Pearl, a Bobo . . . and Jeffrey himself was known as ‘Jennifer’.
He had been steered towards the comforts of religion by his mother, who brought him up alone after his father left her to live with another woman.
The local minister in Tonyrefail, the Rev Rhys Emmanual — uncle of the Welsh baritone Ivor Emmanuel — took the bright, sensitive boy under his wing and encouraged him to join the clergy.
Meanwhile in Co. Durham, Grant Holmes, a quiet, dark-haired boy, had always dreamed of entering the church to help the poor.
Almost from the moment Grant met ‘Jennifer’ at Oxford, they were inseparable.
Many years later, Dr John spoke about his relationship to a conference of Affirming Catholicism, a Church of England group which is vehemently in favour of the consecration of women and homosexuals, and unkindly referred to by opponents on the church’s evangelical-conservative wing as ‘girls at the altar and boys in bed’.
He told them how at theological college he had owned up to the principal that he was in a gay relationship and offered to leave.
He told the conference he was astonished to be congratulated by the principal and told that it would make him ‘a better human being and a better priest. He was right, it did.’
That college principal was Dr David Hope, who later became Archbishop of York, the second most important man in the church, and who has described his own sexuality as ‘a grey area’.
He retired in 2004.
After leaving college, the professional lives of John and Grant Holmes diverged.
John — known to some around the St Albans diocese as ‘Elton’ because of his passing likeness to the pop star — was an instant high-flier. Holmes was not.
After two years serving as a curate in Wales, John arrived at Magdalen College, Oxford, as assistant chaplain, and by 1984, at the tender age of 31, he was a Fellow and Dean.
His amusing style was liked by the students, who included Princess Diana’s brother, Charles (now Earl Spencer) and Darius Guppy, who was best man at the first of Spencer’s three weddings and who was later jailed for a jewellery insurance fraud.
The Rev Holmes, meanwhile, was moving through a number of modest posts before arriving at Kingston hospital, by which time John had become chancellor and canon theologian at Southwark Cathedral.
Then, in 2003, John was named the new Bishop of Reading.
There was uproar against an appointment which critics insisted went against the Christian scriptures and the ‘divinely created order and gift of marriage’.
Almost the first thing the newly enthroned Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, had to do was quell the rebellion fomented by Jeffrey John’s appointment.
There was only one way to do that — John stepped down.
Being made Dean of St Albans was his consolation prize.
But the retirement in 2010 of Dr Tom Butler as Bishop of Southwark presented John with a golden opportunity to test the church’s resolve again.
‘Jeffrey’s ambition burns very bright — quite apart from his gay campaigning,’ says one close church member.
‘He desperately wants to be a bishop.’
Southwark was used to an earthy bishop in Tom Butler, a ‘Thought for the Day’ regular on BBC Radio 4’s early-morning Today programme, who is married with two grown-up children.
Famously, shortly before Christmas in 2006, Butler returned home from a party at the Irish embassy with a head injury, which he could not explain.
He thought he might have been mugged.
Witnesses claimed, however, that Butler, having had a few drinks at the embassy, had climbed into a stranger’s car and begun throwing out children’s toys that were lying there.
Asked what he was doing, he allegedly replied: ‘I’m the Bishop of Southwark. It’s what I do.’
Jeffrey John would clearly have been a very different Bishop of Southwark — if he’d got it.
His name was among dozens of candidates nominated for the post.
The choice is made by the Crown Nominations Committee, a group of 14 senior clergy and lay members of the General Synod which convenes under the chairmanship of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
John is understood to have been high on the shortlist.
But according to a leaked memo written by committee member Dr Colin Slee, former Dean of Southwark Cathedral, he was blocked by Archbishop Williams.
There were, he said, shouting matches and arm twisting.
This would be crucial evidence at any employment tribunal, but sadly Dr Slee, who was on the church’s liberal wing, died of cancer soon after the appointment was made.
The man chosen as Southwark’s tenth bishop was the Rt Rev Christopher Chessun, 55, a bachelor.
So will a legal battle now commence?
John’s hiring of costly employment law specialist Alison Downie suggests he means business.
She won the first ever gay discrimination case against the Church of England in 2007, involving a man whom the Bishop of Hereford refused to employ as a youth worker because he was gay.
Five years later, the church continues to be in disarray.
‘If only Rowan Williams would lead,’ complains one senior cleric.
‘All he does is agonise.’