LLF: Living in Limbo Forever

Some Sheep May Wander During Consultation

I do not come from a church background. My involvement extended to an annual appearance at Christmas carols — usually under mild duress — motivated largely by heating, candles, and a mince pie.

So when I began work as a Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser, it was a shock to the system. I had stepped into a culture I knew nothing about. The Church has its own language, customs, and dialects — opaque to outsiders and rarely explained. Acronyms are deployed without translation, as though fluency is assumed.

Early in my role, I hid in the toilets and Googled “What is a PCC?” in the hope of appearing competent.

When I found myself in a management meeting as the newly arrived safeguarding adviser — a lay observer in a collar-heavy room — I was utterly fascinated.

The dynamics.

The factions.

And what appeared to me to be an almost obsessive preoccupation with sex.

Then someone said it:

“Shall we talk about LLF?”

Before going any further, let me be absolutely clear: this is not an attempt to trivialise LLF. It is serious, complex, and deeply personal, carrying real emotional and spiritual weight — and pain — for many people.

What follows is not theology. It is observation. Specifically, what reliably happens in the room when those three letters enter the air.

Oxygen levels fall.

Chairs creak.

Someone suddenly needs the toilet.

And the room divides into three distinct tribes.

First: those who sigh deeply.

They stare into the middle distance like veterans recalling The War. They have survived seven LLF courses, dozens of Zoom consultations, and an unquantifiable number of hours spent “listening well.”

They have listened well.

They have listened long.

They have listened into oblivion.

They are not dismissive. They are not rude. They are carrying the accumulated weight of years of emotionally charged, circular conversations — and they know exactly how quickly this can go wrong.

Their sigh is not indifference, but the body remembering what the voice dares not speak.

Second: the enthusiastic theologians.

LLF booklets appear like Pokémon cards.

“If we turn to page 237…”

Their intentions are sincere. They genuinely believe clarity, nuance, and considered citation will help. For them, precision is pastoral; if the argument can be properly framed, perhaps the room can be stabilised.

They are not trying to dominate the conversation. They are trying to save it.

Meanwhile, everyone else looks one quotation away from dissociation.

You can feel the energy seep out as pages are flipped, as the discussion drifts away from lived experience and further into abstraction.

Third: the flight-risk laity.

They came for the tea and biscuits.

Now they’re calculating whether they can escape without making eye contact with the Bishop.

One of them is seriously discerning whether to fake an emergency. They are silently mapping exit routes.

They do not want conflict, doctrine, or to accidentally trigger a vote. They would simply like to stop being looked at as though their facial expression might decide the future of the Church of England.

They are not disengaged. They are overwhelmed.

Beneath the sighing, the quoting, and the discreet watch-checking lies something less amusing: a shared fear of saying the wrong thing about something that matters immeasurably, in rooms that do not feel safe enough to hold it.

By this point, the Bishop is usually perspiring and flushing— like someone attempting to broker the Treaty of Versailles while perched on a rackety office chair, armed only with a flip-chart and the phrase “walking together.”

Eventually, the inevitable is offered:

“Perhaps this could continue at another meeting.”

For the first and only time in the meeting the room achieves perfect unity.

Please. God. No.

In any other organisation I’ve worked in, an obsession with managing feelings while indefinitely deferring decisions would be flagged as a risk. In church settings, it is often mistaken for progress.

And somewhere along the way, some sheep really do wander — not because they don’t care, but because endless consultation without containment is not neutral. It drains people quietly, politely, and thoroughly.

This isn’t a theological verdict, and it’s not primarily a safeguarding observation. It’s simply what I’ve observed over the last few years working in this setting.

If walking together never involves deciding where you’re going, it stops being pastoral care and becomes crowd control.

Michelle Burns

~ Guarding the Flock

Writing this blog takes time, care, and a lot of tea. If it’s been helpful to you, you’re very welcome to buy me a cuppa as a small way of supporting it. No pressure at all – I’m just glad you’re here - M