Ten years ago today, I got married to Laurence Cunnington. The next morning’s Mail on Sunday headlined its story about us, “Church of England plunged into crisis”.

Ten years on, there are a few things I want to note.

First of all, I want to say thank you. To Laurence, above all, of course – but what I want to say to him is for him only. To our families, who have been deeply loving and supportive to us. To our many friends, far and near, who still give us so much encouragement, and particularly those who vocally supported us in the brouhaha that followed our wedding. To Sean and Helen and Justin and Susannah and their staff for being both an expert and extremely generous legal team. And to the late and much lamented Alan Wilson, who was an expert witness and supporter in my case, and who I have no doubt will be remembered as one of the great Christians of our time.

The second thing to say is that the Mail on Sunday’s estimate of the significance of one couple getting married was ridiculous. The paper was not wrong to say that the Church of England was, and remains, in crisis, it’s just that our marrying had almost nothing to do with the causes of that crisis.

Thirdly, the Church of England’s bishops panicked, and decided it was going to need to adopt an egregiously unpleasant policy of exclusion towards any clergy entering same-sex marriages. The house of bishops’ Valentine’s Day Pastoral Guidance, which had appeared less than two months previously, very late in the day considering the law had changed the previous summer, gave them some cover for this policy. Their fear was that a trickle might become a flood. So here let me pay tribute to the others who have been shut out of ministry because they dared to marry the people they loved: Andrew Foreshew-Cain, Jeremy Davies and Jeremy Timm.

The policy was enacted in a haphazard way, differently in different dioceses, according to the whim of various diocesans. Not one of us has been charged with conduct unbecoming to a clerk in Holy Orders (or in Jeremy Timm’s case a Reader) – they couldn’t try using the Clergy Discipline Measure, because part of their concern was about the doctrine of marriage, and cases involving doctrine should be tried under the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Measure 1963. This arcane, expensive and unwieldy measure has never been used.

The bishops resorted to the more usual tactic of passive aggression. Those that did not agree with this policy fell in with it. And in that the trickle dried up, it worked.

Fourthly, on what is for us a day of great happiness, let it be said that they were wrong about same-sex marriages; there is no evidence at all to suggest that they have spoiled or weakened marriage as an institution. Punishing people for marrying is unjust and immoral, and, in a country where these marriages are now commonplace, far more scandalous than the marriages themselves.

Fifthly, I know that the way the Church of England treats LGBTQ+ people has made a wreckage of many people’s faith. Add to that all those whose faith has been destroyed by the way we have treated sexual abuse survivors, women, BME/GMH people, and people with disabilities, and the numbers escalate rapidly. And it is not only people belonging to these groups: I have a friend who gave up going to church with her young children because of what she saw as the pernicious views of the church. So perhaps the crisis is, to some extent, of the church’s own making, by disregarding Christ’s own teaching about caring for the outsiders and the vulnerable.

Remedying some of the many injustices around these groups, seeing the wood for the trees, and determining not just to speak, but to do better, just might begin to restore to our church some of its lost credibility. As far as I am concerned, I remain excluded from formal ministry sine die, something which, having been imposed without any due process, seems inherently unjust.

On this anniversary day we let all thoughts of the ‘crisis’ we created go: we could not be happier and are grateful for every day together.