At next month’s General Synod, the Church of England will try a new approach to avoiding a disastrous formal schism over homosexuality. After two days of discussing legislative matters in open session and once all outsiders have left, the 550 representatives from around the world will break into groups of 20 for three days of intensive and personal discussions about sexuality.

The idea is not to reach agreement – 30 years of wrangling have established that this is quite impossible – but to try to bring people on both sides of the debate to see their opponents as fellow Christians. Conservative evangelicals have denounced the scheme as an attempt to manipulate opinion, which of course it is. The question is whether it will work.

What’s new about this approach is that the manipulation that Justin Welby’sstrategists have in mind is not to be carried out from the top down. It is hoped that the process of facilitated conversations will allow the church’s activists gathered in the synod to take note of the social changes that are happening in their own congregations and their own families, where acceptance of gay people is becoming much more common.

This week a book of evangelical reflections on sexuality was published in which the bishop of Liverpool, the Rt Rev Paul Bayes, announced he had been “profoundly changed” by encounters with lesbian and gay Christians in his own family. The former archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, who was a tireless campaigner against the recognition of practising gay Christians in the 1990s, told a journalist last year that he had attended a gay wedding. Services of blessing, very hard to distinguish from marriage services except to the eye of a church lawyer, are quietly spreading through the Church of England.

None of this will soften the hardcore of conservative evangelical resistance to change, and it may indeed harden it. But Welby’s strategy is becoming clear: he may not be able to change the church’s official doctrine, but he can hope to minimise the threatened formal split by softening and dividing the evangelical vote. That seems to have been the process that he personally went through: 15 years ago he was a hardline evangelical vicar, but he wrote after themassacre in Orlando this month that “as Christians we must speak out in support of LGBTI people … We must pray, weep with those affected, support the bereaved, and love without qualification.”

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