UK’s first non-binary priest says ‘love of God’ helped them accept their gender

The UK’s first non-binary priest has said they felt “affirmed by God” after reading passages about men and women in “dry and dusty” religious essays while training to become a vicar.

Bingo Allison, 36, works as a vicar in Liverpool and previously held conservative beliefs about religion and LGBTQ+ people.

Chatting to This Morning hosts Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield on Wednesday (11 January), Allison told the presenters that they came across a ‘choice’ between their religious calling and their personal identity while undergoing vicar training.

The priest revealed to the pair that Allison “had an epiphany” while studying Genesis 1-3 in the Old Testament of the Bible. Previously, they thought that their identity and religious beliefs could not be compatible and regularly worried about the joining of the pair.

“I was at vicar training college at the time and so I was choosing between my calling and this identity – everything about how I’d been brought up so far had said that this is a choice that you have to make,” Allison said.

“It has this verse that says, ‘male and female, God created them’ and I just kept coming back to this verse and thinking, ‘Well, there it is, there’s my decision – I have to choose between this God that created just male and just female, or my identity that doesn’t feel male or female.'”

Allison told the presenters they felt “the presence and love of God”, which helped them accept their identity.

The priest said they realised a decision between being non-binary and a priest wasn’t necessary and the two could work together.

“In this very dry and dusty academic essay, I felt the presence and love of God – and I had to stop, I had to pray, I had to sing a bit,” Allison added.

“I just really felt that God affirmed me in who I was and that I didn’t have to make this choice.”

Allison previously said they felt LGBTQ+ people were a “blessing to the church”.

Wales’ trans priest

In Wales, Rev Sarah Jones is a proud transgender woman and priest who continuously works to promote the acceptance of LGBTQ+ within Christianity. Jones has been a parish priest at St John the Baptist Church in Cardiff for nearly four years.

She told ITV News that she wants to see churches as a welcoming place for the LGBTQ+ community at large.

“I meet a lot of LGBT people who say they didn’t think they would be welcome in a church. Sometimes people are quite tearful, I mean, they actually say, ‘Oh, I always thought about going to church, but I really thought I would not be welcome'”, she said.

“And so it is actually very nice to be able to say, look, there are different sorts of churches with different sorts of views on all sorts of things. But there are a lot more inclusive churches than you might think.

“If I could make someone just feel that they would be welcome in a church somewhere in Wales or in the United Kingdom, or in the faith community, or even a member of another faith, gosh, that would be a really good thing.”