by Andrew Graystone
In February 2019 the General Synod voted unanimously to urge its National Safeguarding Steering Group to “bring forward arrangements for redress for survivors.” An emotional debate was notable for the new Lead Bishop of Safeguarding saying that redress would require “serious money” from the church, and for Canon John Spence of the Archbishops’ Council responding that “This is not about affordability, it is about justice. . . The funds for redress will be found.”
For all the commitment implied by a unanimous vote, I’m not sure that most Synod members have fully understood what redress looks like, or indeed what the theological rationale for it might look like. There is further work to be done in understanding redress, and a great deal to be learned from other institutions have led the way. In this blog I want to offer some early theological principles that might guide the church in deciding how to manage this very practical work over the next few years. I will do so by looking at three stories from Luke’s gospel where some form of redress seems to be in play: Jesus’ parable of the Bad Priests and the Good Samaritan, his encounter with Zacchaeus the tax collector, and his brief meeting with the servant of the High Priest in the garden of Gethsemane.
The Bad Priests and the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37)
This is a parable that ought to make very painful reading for every church member, and especially for religious professionals. The priest and the Levite in Jesus’ story not only walked past the injured man; they actually crossed the road so as not to come too close to him. If this story were to be read in the context of church-based abuse, another layer of shame would apply. Imagine if the priest and Levite walked by, knowing that the victim’s injuries had been caused not by some random highwaymen, but by members of their own profession.
But I want to focus on the response of the Samaritan. First, he notices, and takes pity, and goes to the man to engage directly with him. Meeting victims at close hand is always a painful, challenging business, but this Samaritan is prepared to enter into the mess and get the victim’s blood on his own hands. This can’t have been pleasant, and it certainly wasn’t convenient. The Samaritan interrupted his own plans to look after the victim. Every human, including but not limited to Christians and their leaders, is mandated to interrupt their own plans to tend to the wounded person they meet in the street. Often we have seen church leaders resisting meeting with victims, or at best, meeting them on their own terms in their own places.
The Samaritan goes much further. He stops, goes to the victim, and takes the man with him to a place of safety. Then he takes personal care of him until it is clear that he is secure. Then he entrusts the future care of the victim to an inn-keeper, providing generous funding. Then he arranges to revisit the man, and promises to pay the bill for his future care. “‘Look after him, and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.”
Jesus invites his listeners to commend the Samaritan for his approach; stopping, getting personally involved, staying with the victim, and paying for his long-term needs. He does all this for a stranger – indeed for a natural enemy. This is not simply justice, but something far bigger. The Samaritan is being commended for a deep and costly compassion that is centred solely on the needs of the victim. We can be sure that the victim, violently attacked and robbed by strangers, was not expecting such care. Probably the attack had robbed him of far more than his money. It had destroyed his sense of safety and self-worth, and his faith in human community. The actions of the Samaritan stranger went far beyond stopping the bleeding and patching up the man’s wounds. We can imagine that in the security provided by the Samaritan’s attentive care, the man began to take the first faltering steps to rebuild his faith in the possibility of goodness, or even just in his ability to walk down the street in safety.
A redress scheme in the name of the church will be intimate, detailed, and committed over the long term, like the Samaritan’s care of his new friend. It is not for contemporary leaders to distance themselves from the debts of those who went down the road before them. Instead, they need to discover the grace in the opportunity to serve the wounded they have met by chance at the side of the road.
Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10)
The story of Zacchaeus the tax collector is well-known from Sunday School. The emphasis is often placed on Jesus’ willingness to restore even a cheating tax official to his band. Less is made of Zacchaeus’ personal redress scheme. In the story, Jesus doesn’t demand that Zacchaeus should make amends for his previous extortions. The initiative comes from Zacchaeus himself, as a response to Jesus’ unconditional welcome of him. “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”
There are two elements to Zacchaeus’ plan. The first is to divest himself of 50% of his income. Why does he do this? Presumably because he feels that the possession of so much wealth, and the power that went with it, was in itself part of the problem that had corrupted him. It doesn’t seem to matter where all this wealth goes, as long as it goes. He simply needs to be poorer in order to re-enter society as a follower of Christ.
The second element of Zacchaeus’ plan is specifically related to those he has abused. He’s not only going to pay them back; he’s going to pay them four times what he owes them. It is an act of reckless generosity. It is more than enough to restore what he stole from his victims. It goes further, restoring the relational damage between them, and then further, restoring the self-esteem of the victim, and further still– giving in excess, for the joy of giving and of receiving.
Any redress scheme in a church context that seeks to minimise reparations due, or to preserve the wealth of the offender, will be missing this vital element of excessive, joyful generosity. The church should approach the business of redress with joy and open-handed generosity. And if there are margins of error, they must fall to the benefit of the victim.
The High Priest’s Servant (Luke 22:47-51)
This tiny moment occurs at one of the high points of tension in the gospel narrative. It is so small that the other three evangelists miss it altogether. But it is a momentous act of real significance to those seeking to enact redress. Jesus is with his disciples in the garden of Gethsemane. The exhausted disciples are woken from sleep by the sudden arrival of soldiers to arrest Jesus. In the panic, Peter draws his sword and lashes out, catching the servant of the High Priest and cutting off his ear. It is a petty, ineffectual and desperate act – meaningless in defence of Jesus, but life-changing for the poor man who loses his ear.
In the midst of the melee, with his own life in imminent danger, Jesus stops everyone in their tracks. “Enough of this!” he says. He goes to the young servant, touches his ear, and miraculously heals it. Jesus didn’t cause the problem, and Peter couldn’t fix it. There were a great many other things for Jesus and the disciples to be concerned with. Yet in the heat of the moment, Jesus stops everything, and takes time to heal a man that one of his disciples has wounded.
Church leaders have many things to worry about. They are concerned with declining influence, waning finances, poor reputation and all of the problems of an increasingly secular society. Providing adequate redress for victims of abuse from previous generations must seem sometimes like an irritant; a drain on time and resources with little positive benefit to the church. And yet the ministry of healing, of which the delivery of redress is a core part, is not peripheral to the church’s mission, but the very heart of it. The church does not need to deliver redress in order that it can get on with its work of mission and ministry. Following the model of Jesus, it needs to see the delivery of redress to victims of abuse as an essential part of its ongoing mission.
If there is one common factor in all three stories it is this: in each case the actors stop what they are doing to attend to the victims. In this, the church has so far fallen short. It has tried to manage the business of safeguarding failure whilst carrying on with business as usual. There has been no national act of contrition; no moment of drawing a line. Perhaps the first step for the church in considering how to make redress to victims of abuse in its midst is to stop everything; to look into the eyes of victims, and look into the mirror. The publication of the IICSA report seems the ideal opportunity to do this. Without stopping, it is hard to see how the church as a whole will be able to tend appropriately to those it has hurt, and in doing so, receive the grace of God.
I’m waving my arms and cheering over here. This is exactly how I feel. And if someone offered four times what the church owed me, I’d bite their hands off. It might make me believe they meant it. And just, perhaps, that it might, possibly be safe to go back into the water.
What an excellent and important post, Stephen. Thank you. I hope and pray that there will be a dramatically increased willingness to stop what one is doing and attend to victims in the context of the church.
Zacchaeus’s redress scheme always caused me some confusion in Sunday school. I couldn’t “do the math”. The teacher explained that tax collectors collected tax from the people and were paid a small retainer by the state, but had some freedom or personal discretion to charge extra, keeping the profits for themselves. So wicked Zaccheaus made a ton of wealth through his own stealth tax. Assuming much of his wealth was earned this way, he gives away half his capital straight away, but the remaining bulk of it, still in essence a debt to others, how can he afford to to repay up to four times this amount? He’ll be bankrupted several times over.
I still can’t work it out.
However I believe the Church paymasters have already long since realised that the debt to Survivors, were it to be properly met, would bankrupt the Institution. That realisation is behind the delay and obfuscation we continually see, in acting for redress.
In pressing for generous redress, and I believe that we should, we should recognise the reality of what we are requesting. The money has to come from somewhere. There has been strong resistance on these pages to reducing clergy pay, benefits and pensions. So where else will the redress money come from? Liquidation? Sale of assets?
The new mission of our Church should rightly include tending the wounds of the people we ourselves have hurt, at our own cost. Agreed. However it’s hardly a strong selling point for new potential members.
I come back to the numbers. They don’t seem to add up.
Zaccheus promises to repay 4 times the amount ‘IF I have cheated anyone’ (my emphasis). Presumably there are enough people he hasn’t cheated to cover payments to those he has. Or he feels there are. Or, possibly, he’s just bragging, and confident a lot of people he’s cheated won’t approach him for redress. Some of them may have since died, after all.
The Church Commissioners may have to sell some of their assets – possibly some of the strip clubs in Soho they are said to own the freehold for – but they do seem to find money for things they want. More than £20 million for the new library at Lambeth Palace, for instance, and millions more for various Fresh Expressions and Resource Churches schemes. Those multiple millions would have done a lot for survivors.
Redress that only considers need in terms of finance will hugely miss the point. Many survivors have professional well paid jobs and though they may not be in need of finances they may be very much in need of emotional and spiritual redress and often how that is carried out will be hugely personal to them.
Yes, there are a lot of survivors who struggle with even basic living needs and where clearly financial redress would be a lifeline but to stereotype all survivors into that category is to not care enough to look at individual need.
Redress has, if it is to mean anything, be individual to the recipient.
Absolutely, Trish. Giving people money can just be an attempt to shut them up. And you should ask, engage with people. See what they want. But large sums of money are hugely symbolic. It can concentrate the mind, make those who hold power in the church pay attention, and think before they do it again. And it can protect the victim from people outside the church who may think you’re just flaky or awkward. Pointing out that it must have been real because you got £250,000 in compensation could help a lot!
Totally agree Trish.
You reckoning on £250,000 Athena!! I do understand the point you are making but a survivor who is caught in a cycle of drug/drink abuse who receives a sudden large sum of money could literally kill themselves. A few years ago if I had received a large wad there was only one place that was going! Redress done properly is difficult and the person employed to address it needs to be a grass roots realist not some white collar middle manager. It all sounds a bit twee to me at the moment.
Good point. Fortunately I never reached the point where I wouldn’t have been safe with a large lump of money.
Many thanks, Trish. This strikes me as being a very useful and important point, and I hope that it could be the subject of a future posting on this blog.
If victims are deeply damaged, and are susceptible to making poor choices as a consequence of the trauma that they have endured, then it seems to me that an essential part of the ‘recompense’ is seeing that the victim in question is rehabilitated in toto, rather than palmed off with a wad of cash.
That means the Church (or whichever agency is to pay the compensation) ought to take a holistic view of the needs of that victim. For instance, in addition to counselling the compensation could take the form of a direct redemption of debts (including mortgage debt), professional advice or payments into a pension fund which would provide for the superannuation of the victim. On occasion it might include some form of housing. In short, the objective should be to make the victim feel secure, and to provide long-term security, following the suffering endured. Therefore, the payment of a lump sum may not always be the most responsible or reliable way of providing that security.
I would wager that most people are not looking for recompense by way of ‘winnings’; rather, it seems more likely that many will have a preference for safety, and that will – in large measure – mean a form of financial security.
That precisely reflects my experience of church abuse survivors seeking redress. For far too long the leaders of the church have assumed that survivors want money, that it comes best in the form of a lump sum, and that the most appropriate people to determine the amount are the church’s insurers.
The Church of England works almost exclusively with one insurer, and that insurer courts the church by making large annual donations in return. It never seems to have occurred to anyone that the church might be grossly under-insured, or that the insurance company might have a vested interest in keeping its payments very low.
The following is an over-simplification as there are likely to be widely differing needs. As has been said, redress involves more than financial compensation, but financial compensation has to be considered and it should be fair and adequate to the specific individual survivor.
In times of minimal or negative interest rates any lump sum is highly speculative. The survivor’s age is a relevant factor in assessing future losses, whether for a certain number of years, or in appropriate cases for life. What will be a lump sum’s value in ten years’ time and after necessary drawings on the capital?
A “structured settlement” overcomes that problem if it provides periodical payments index-linked to inflation. Where appropriate, housing, loss of income and cost of counselling can all be built into such a settlement.
Inevitably it is a complex process requiring expertise which the Church is unlikely to possess in-house, and so I expect it would of necessity have to be outsourced.
This is the job description for the post Rowland. To my very untrained eye it looks OK, the trouble is most of the job descriptions look alright but then the person that gets it, however good, often can’t hold their own against the powers that be and rapidly become subsumed.
It does note the need to be able to cope with significant disagreement between stakeholders but from the people that I have spoken to that work in the church their comment is always that ‘the church is on another level when it comes to stubborness, unwillingness and (sadly) bullying.’
https://pathways.churchofengland.org/job/pathways/1989/development-manager-redress-scheme
I think it’s clear that this job is a facilitator who won’t be deciding amounts of compensation. It’s a permanent post within the NST (headed by Melissa Caslake), but you doubtless noticed this:
“In liaison with stakeholders, formulating a recommendation whether a redress scheme should be run ‘from within’ the NCIs or run by an independent body, such a recommendation to include proposals in connection with an appropriate legal framework.”
Of course there is much more in the job description.
Great post, Andrew. Thank you.
The above points are well made. However, call me a cynic, but the only thing the C of E truly understands is money.
Whichever way Survivors are to receive our redress will cost money ultimately, be it the receipt of therapy or other support or financial endowment.
If we are at all double-minded in our demand for finances, this will be pounced on by the aforementioned insurers/lawyers-who-determine-assess-settlements to REDUCE what the Church pays.
Secondly, let’s be clear about not letting the C of E anywhere near being in a position to determine HOW the Survivors receive their support, financial or otherwise. It’s far to intrusive and as we all know here, they have a strong record of re-abuse. To coin a phrase, should they mark their own homework? Please no.
Andrew, may I add my praise for this post, and suggest that it should be required reading, not only for the Archbishops’ Council, House of Bishops, the NST and the National Safeguarding Steering Group, but for all members of General Synod ahead of, and to inform, the safeguarding debate timetabled for Wednesday morning, 25 November.
Stephen, can I rightly assume that the contents of your blog posts – and the BTL comments – have been, or are regularly, forwarded to Justin Welby and Stephen Cottrell/his predecessor? Upon reading David Lamming’s contribution above, my first thought was to write to both of them, enclosing your most recent post with an accompanying plea to take notice and act accordingly. Is this something worth me doing (not that I am anyone of the slightest significance who might have any particular chance of being listened to), or is it something that has already been done many times without result?
Yes, it’s worth your doing. Even if others have already done it, the more voices the better. As a matter of fact I have already forwarded the blog to Archbishop Stephen, but that was before any comments had been added. And since he’s been preparing for this enthronement today I doubt if he’s had time to read it.
I was pleased to see that he tested this morning that he saw the archbishop’s throne as just one seat at a table at which others were welcome to sit.
Thank you, Janet. I will.
That should have been ‘texted’. Here is the full message:
‘Today I take my seat as 98th Archbishop of York with all its honour & opportunity. A bishop’s chair has different meanings. It is meant to be uncomfortable.I see it as a place around a table where all are invited & a chair where I teach about one who had no throne but a cross.’
I have no idea whether anyone forwards the material of this blog on to anybody. I certainly don’t but there are, I believe, communications people who read stuff on the net on behalf of Church House and SC may be one of the blogs that is watched. Andrew’s post is certainly of importance and I hope it will be widely read
I’m putting my bishop on to it, anyway.
We could wave to the National Safeguarding Team, and see if they wave back!
Waves madly !!!😂😂😂😂