The expression ‘toxic masculinity’ has recently entered the vocabulary of the politically and socially aware, especially in the States. It describes an angry and aggressive attempt by men to control the levers of power in society and elsewhere. From the perspective of women, this takeover reflects a continuation of an age-old patriarchy in society. This declared that men have a God-given right to be supreme and take control over women and children. The voices of women are thus not always heard because men have occupied many of the places of influence and control.

This week, in the forum of the American Senate, we have seen this ancient conflict on display. A woman who credibly claims to have been assaulted by a rich privileged young man 36 years ago gave her testimony. Against her was the accused, Judge Brett Kavanaugh. He responded with the angry impetuous male voice of someone who seems never to have had his male superiority challenged. The anger was directed not only against the female accuser; it was also aimed at anyone who asked him to give some account of his actions and memories of the time. The responses were often simply petulant and bad-tempered. To me they seemed like the response of a child who has always been pampered and allowed to have anything he wants.

After listening to the judge’s unconvincing defence, we have learnt certain facts about his religious past. The private school he attended was a Jesuit school and subsequently Brett Kavanaugh became involved in an extremely conservative group called the Federalist Society. This is a group of lawyers dedicated to promoting right wing causes. These centre around issues that inflame all religious conservatives, and they include birth control, anti-abortion and the restriction of gay rights. Of the 18 senior lawyers on Trump’s long list for Supreme Court nominations, 16 have been suggested and backed by this Society. With Supreme Court opinion now finely balanced, Trump’s nominations are all designed to push the Court into making future judgments which will promote the values and ethics of the Right. These are typically the masculine values that want to control women and their bodies.

It would be right to claim that Biblical patriarchy and ultra-right politics are close allies. The Church of Rome, to put it mildly, has always had a problem with understanding the perspective of women. This blindness to the complexities of female experience is shared by a large swathe of Protestant ‘biblical’ opinion. There the vagaries of female experience can, it is assumed, be swept away by declaring that every woman should come under the ‘covering’ of a man. This may be her husband or father. We have on this blog discussed the ‘biblical’ commands for women to obey men in every sphere. Clearly such sentiments have little to commend them in the 21st Century. But pressure groups like the Federalist Society, Bible Colleges and other fundamentalist/right-wing groups within American society still provide a home for people who are drawn to these reactionary ideas.

At the IICSA hearings in July, on Peter Ball, we heard evidence for what appears to be a ‘toxic masculinity’ at the heart of the Anglican Church. A men-only dining club that meets regularly at Lambeth Palace, known as Nobody’s Friends, appears to be a gathering for socially very well-connected Anglicans. Although originally high church in its origins, the club provides an opportunity for a privileged church group to network and sometimes lobby those in authority in the Church. Lord Lloyd, a long-time member, sent a letter to Archbishop Carey on behalf of Peter Ball. His letter contained the words ‘May I presume on a brief acquaintance at dinners of Nobody’s Friends?’ The IICSA hearing referred to a Daily Mail report about Nobody’s Friends as ‘centred on a strong core of bishops, ex-Tory ministers …. a highly secretive, all male group representing Britain’s most entrenched professions and institutions.’

The Nobody’s Friends dining group has been described as ‘private’ rather than a secret group, but it still represents an exclusive world of male privilege within the heart of the Anglican establishment. When Bishop John Bickersteth once revealed that his appointment to Bath and Wells followed his being ‘spotted’ at a Nobody’s dinner, we began to get the feeling that the values of our church may incline towards corporate and institutional interests rather than a personal morality based on the Sermon on the Mount. Is this perhaps a male versus a female thing? Are women perhaps better at understanding the imperative of always keeping personal morality to the fore while men value the power and privileges of the institution as things to be protected at all costs?

The experience of survivors of sexual abuse reporting to authority seems to take two forms. Sometimes they meet genuine compassion and care, whether from individual bishops or Diocesan Advisers. On other occasions they encounter the harsh edge of a system whose chief value seems to be to protect itself. I have loosely described these two approaches as female and male respectively. Obviously not all men are comfortable with the world represented by men-only dining clubs. Such groups all too easily use the power of their connections to believe themselves naturally at the pinnacle of entitlement within the institution. Similarly, not all women in power are necessarily going to stick up for an individual survivor when the weight of the privileged institution threatens to crush them. Nevertheless, my crude simplification picks up something important that is active both in American society and in ‘private’ places within our national church. Toxic masculinity and the ‘old-boy network’ are still forces to be reckoned with. We also saw it in operation among Iwerne connected evangelicals when they succeeded in spiriting John Smyth out of the country to Zimbabwe where he could no longer embarrass his old friends.

Sexual abuse scandals in the Church of England are never just about failing individuals such as Ball and Smyth. These scandals go further, to implicate others who influenced them in institutions, sometimes those which were the providers of great privilege. Subsequently, similar groups gathered round to protect them as best they could when things went wrong.

Toxic masculinity seems to be found as an underlying value in both politics and religion. It takes as a given the underlying assumption that the male of the species is superior to the female. All the morality that flows out of this assumption is inevitably toxic. It needs to be constantly challenged and exorcised from our thinking and our theology.

Further information on Nobody’s Friends can be found on the Wikipedia page

In 2003, I left the Church of England for what turned out to be a pre-retirement post in the Episcopal Church in Scotland. It was in the days before Common Tenure for the clergy had been introduced. Before CT a vicar or a bishop had rights and privileges of freehold and this made him/her almost unsackable. The Church had, some years earlier, succeeded in setting an age limit forcing clergy to retire at 70. By 2003 there were only a small number of clerics who had been appointed before 1975 that could hang on in their posts until a date of their own choosing. The history of the Church of England might well be different if one particular diocesan bishop, appointed in the early 70s, had been forced to retire at a seemly age.

Common Tenure, as a structure for managing the terms of employment for incumbents and bishops, has now become almost universal in the Church of England. Here and there you will find vicars who were appointed under the old rules and thus still enjoy the considerable privileges of the freehold system. The vast majority of clerics now hold their posts subject to the conditions set out in the new legislation. I do not propose to spell out all these terms. Suffice to say, CT represents a considerable weakening of the old freehold system. The clergy are promised, in return, a degree of support by those who employ them. Each clergyperson is also to be supported by members of the senior Diocesan staff and assessed on a regular basis. But alongside new systems of support come new methods for maintaining discipline among the clergy. The rules and procedures of the so-called Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM) came into effect in 2006.

The process of writing about and supporting survivors of church abusive power has brought me into touch with CDM in several of its aspects. It was referred to several times in Matt’s Ineson’s story. I had not realised, until reporting Matt’s account for the first time, that it is possible for anyone to take out a complaint against a cleric using a downloadable form. Matt used the legislation to make complaints against several bishops for their numerous failures to pass on his disclosures of sexual abuse. This ability on the part of anyone to make a complaint about a bishop under the terms of the CDM was something new to me. One of the comments on my post about Matt corrected me on my assumption that CDM complaints against bishops were hitherto unheard of. One had been used against Bishop Wallace Benn around 2011.

Looking at CDM with the fresh eyes of someone who has only recently encountered it, I am struck by several things. The first thing is that it constitutes a complete legal structure but all of it is managed within the institution of the Church. There are no outside referees like an ombudsman. At the heart of the system is the bishop of the diocese. He has the power, according to a helpful flow-chart issued by the Diocese of Exeter, to declare a case of complaint to be of insufficient interest or substance to take further. Even when the complaint is taken to the next stage the bishop still has the power to take no further action. It is only with the bishop’s consent that the most serious cases come to a tribunal for assessment. These will be the cases that are serious but do not fall under the orbit of criminal law. At each stage the accused/respondent has the right of appeal.

The making a diocesan bishop into a judge/jury over some difficult and intractable situations of misbehaviour by clerics would seem an almost intolerable burden and responsibility. To go back to a point made in an earlier post, how can the chief pastor of the diocese successfully or easily fulfil this role? Do bishops on the eve of their appointments realise how difficult and costly this contradictory role, simultaneously caring and judging, is going to be?

Further points have been raised by others. The fact that the church has created a self-contained legal structure for itself means that the church has to fund a new class of lawyers to service it. Specialist lawyers never come cheap and so, if an accused individual has to face a church tribunal, who pays for his/her defence? What safeguards are in place to protect the individual from bullies and mischief makers that are to be found taking advantage of the system? The unhappy experience of a former Bishop of Gloucester right at the end of his ministry sends a chill through the heart of every serving clergyperson in the Church of England. Every case of false accusation helps to undermine the situation of real victims who look to the church for justice and redress.

The question of financing CDM cases leads into a final thought – the question of delay and time. In the case of a respondent waiting to hear the result of a case against him/her, how long is reasonable? Months of waiting to hear a case will put an almost unbearable strain on the clergyperson and their families. Reading through the pages of legislation that deal with all the issues from original complaint to final resolution suggests that months/years may well have passed. Large sums of money will also have been spent.

I end this short reflection with a question. Has the Church of England created a monster in its system called the Clergy Discipline Measure? Is anyone actively looking to see if a more compassionate structure can be created? Anecdotal evidence suggests that CDM is a cause of a great deal of unhappiness as well as enormous amounts of work and expense for those who administer it. Is it just one more factor that causes many clergy to feel under stress, further lowering their already fragile morale? Perhaps those who have had direct experience of the Measure could write on this post.

Many years ago, when I was an incumbent, I was the victim of a crime. The St George’s flag which flew outside my church was stolen. While most flags of this kind are flown from the top of a tower, the church in Lechlade boasted a spire and so we had to use a flag pole in front of the church building. The churchwarden and I reported the crime to the police and we were assigned a case number for the purposes of an insurance claim. A few weeks later I received a letter in the post from the organisation called Victim Support. Was I, as the victim of a crime, in need of support? At the time, it seemed rather amusing that I might be traumatised by the loss of a flag, but I quickly realised that it was important to respect this approach. Many, if not most crimes, affect people quite badly and it is good to know that there are volunteers prepared to care for individuals who are victims of a criminal act.

The crimes/misdemeanours that I am concerned about today are those that have damaged individuals in a church setting – the abuse, the bullying and the things that so easily go wrong when power is misused. Followers of my blog posts will be already familiar with the numerous permutations of the evil that can be perpetrated on the innocent, even by church people. IICSA and the Press have made us all familiar with some now notorious episodes of wrong-doing and the Church’s weak responses to many of them. Now the Church of England has set up comprehensive safeguarding structures in an attempt to put these incidents firmly into the past. These structures embrace every level of church life, from the local parish church to the House of Bishops. They are designed to offer safety and protection for children and vulnerable adults and protect them from the scourge of sexual abuse. To help us understand how the whole system is supposed to work in practice, the Church published an explanatory booklet last October. It has the uninformative title of Key Roles and Responsibilities of Church Office Holders and Bodies Practice Guidance. This title does not give away its purpose in relation to the Church’s new safeguarding structures. One wonders whether the obscurity of the title was a deliberate ploy to keep this valuable information away from all but those professionally involved in the complex world of Church safeguarding and its implementation.

Why do I bring this document up for examination in my blog? It is because I am curious to see whether the new profession of safeguarding in the Church, with all its various committees, really understands the experience of survivors and victims of sexual abuse. Does the Church propose to parallel Victim Support? Is there anything that responds to the testimony of those who contributed to Andrew Graystone’s powerful booklet, presented to members of General Synod in February? The overall message of that booklet, We Asked for Bread, was that the experience of being ignored by the Church and its officers was far worse than the original experience of abuse.

I spent a hour or more reading Key Roles and I did find some scattered references to survivors and victims. The bulk of the text, however, talks about setting up good professional practice for safeguarding in dioceses and parishes. When speaking about the National Safeguarding Team there was one strange statement. The role of the NST is to ‘develop and implement national survivors engagement and support work’. I am not clear what this pithy statement actually means. It is mentioned alongside twelve other statements about the NST role, none of which mention victims of abuse. The Bishop of the Diocese is required to ‘ensure that the diocese provides arrangements to support survivors of abuse’. Obviously, such arrangements would require funds. But, when we look at the role of the Church Commissioners we only find a reference to funding legal costs ‘for litigation relating to safeguarding cases.’ One wonders why the litigation funds are needed. Are they by chance for funding QCs to defend the Church when survivors begin to seek legal redress in the absence of any other kind of support?

It is when we get to the description of the Diocesan Safeguarding Advisers (DSA) role that we first find some real engagement with the existence and needs of survivors of past sexual abuse. A diocese is required to have in place ‘authorised listeners or an externally provided service to support victims/survivors of church abuse.’ A footnote links this requirement to an earlier document published by the Church in 2011, Responding Well to those who have been Sexually Abused. This earlier document represented a real effort by the Church to spell out a response to the needs of the sexually abused. It was not just focused on survivors of abuse by church leaders but any who had suffered such abuse and who now looked to the church for help. Because this kind of abuse was then not normally linked to church leaders, the 2011 document has none of the defensiveness that has descended on the more recent responses on the part of bishops and senior church people. This earlier document is also not hedged about with the concerns of lawyers and insurance companies. It is able to take a compassionate, pastoral look at abuse and show real concern as well as professional competence in this area. There is insight into such things as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the way that listening is an essential part of responding to a survivor.

The situation is further explained in the appendices of Key Roles when the ‘duties and responsibilities’ of a DSA are spelt out. There are 14 of these. No 5 states that the DSA is to ‘give advice, information and support to victims/survivors of abuse and ensure that the diocese responds well to those who have suffered abuse.’ This requirement, when placed alongside all the other 13, seems to allow some wriggle room for those who do not want to engage properly with the needs of survivors. I have heard of some excellent work by individual DSAs who, without extra funds or professional resources, work hard for victims/survivors. Equally I have heard of DSAs who are so buried beneath the requirements of risk assessments and training courses that they find no time for the care of real survivors.

The sentiments of the 2011 document read like a Church which wants to reach out in compassion to victims of abuse. The 2017 booklet reads like a bureaucratic attempt to tell the world that the Church is behaving legally and correctly. Sadly, what is in fact revealed in 2017 is an institution lacking in soul, one which is desperately trying to defend itself from legal liability and other criticisms such as those that it expects to receive in due time from IICSA.

I began my piece with an example of the way that a secular institution responds to victims of crime. Can the Church really hold its head up high when it cannot better the Victim Support letter that I received all those years ago? In retrospect, even though it was not needed, I honour and respect the efforts of those who reached out to me in this way.

‘The Lord God has given me…… skill to console the weary with a word in the morning’. These are words from Isaiah that were read last Sunday in church. They started me off thinking about what the word ‘weary’ might mean in the context. I realised very quickly that the prophet was not talking about people who had slept badly or worked too hard. He seems to be speaking about people who were demoralised or psychologically defeated. They needed to hear something that would boost their morale. The word morale is most typically used to describe the attitude which is needed in time of war. It is important equally both for fighting troops and the civilians who have remained at home. When there is a collapse in morale, that is often the prelude to defeat. A government will do everything it can to promote this positive state of mind which we call morale, particularly when a nation is going through the crisis of war.

Morale is one of those words which involves a number of facets. For soldiers to feel able to engage in the stressful activity of fighting effectively, their external circumstances must first be OK. They cannot fight if they do not eat properly or do not have dry conditions in which to sleep. Soldiers need also the loving support of family far away. Emails, telephone communication and letters from home are all almost as essential as adequate food. A further vital part of maintaining good morale are the relationships with their fellow soldiers. It is important to have that strong sense of solidarity with others which is so important for mental well-being. The same thing is needed in their relationship with their officers. They need to be able to trust those over them and have confidence in their leadership decisions. Without the companionship and all the other supports I have mentioned, the ordinary soldier would all too easily collapse mentally and psychologically in a situation of stress brought on by battle.

I once asked an Archdeacon about the morale of the clergy he knew. I asked the question how many of the clergy in his area could be said to have good morale. He said about 50%. I went on to ask whether that meant that the other 50% were in low morale. He replied simply yes, but went into no further detail. It is this issue of the morale of Church of England clergy today that I am concerned about. I know that many bishops would claim that all or most of their clergy are in good spirits – their mental health is functioning well, and they are doing an excellent job. My memory of serving as a parish priest for 40 years is that, with one honourable exception, I never felt able to share anything with a bishop which touched on areas of personal vulnerability. In other words, I never wanted to open up to a bishop in a way that might have allowed a pastoral relationship to evolve. The reason for this was not fear or excessive deference. It was simply that I perceived that a bishop, whatever his pastoral gifts, is first and foremost the guardian of the power of patronage in the church. That power, whether a bishop likes it or not, will always create formality and a certain distance in many relationships with their clergy. I cannot be the only member of the clergy who felt it important to keep my head down when around bishops, those who could potentially make or break my professional future. I raise the question whether any bishop in the Church can really be said to know his/her clergy at depth.

In the year 2018 there are many reasons for clergy to feel under constant stress. This can be because the expectations on clergy have increased and the number of churches they have to look after grow ever more numerous. These external sources of stress have to be added to any internal pressures of domestic or psychological strain. When levels of stress go beyond a certain point, they quickly affect morale badly. Given the fact that few clergy admit stress or ‘weariness’, it will never be easy to quantify the problem across the country. There is a lot at stake to ensure that any problems are hidden as long as possible. A clergyman is not only singularly unqualified for other professions, particularly after middle age, he also has his home and the well-being of family to think about. Breakdown or collapse in a clergy person create a situation that is dire. For every member of the clergy who leaves because of some kind of breakdown, there must be others who struggle on with low morale and in a permanent state of being close to the edge of a cliff.

The purpose of writing this blog is simply to suggest that from anecdotal evidence there is a growing crisis of morale among the Church of England clergy. I know that there will be many who will protest this suggestion to be false. Complete evidence for such a suggestion is clearly lacking. The opposite affirmation is also unsupported by available evidence. We have to base our assessment on anecdote and indirect evidence. Even if my surmise is a complete misreading of the available evidence, I believe that it is still right to bring up this issue of morale in the church. As with the issue of past abuses, failure to discuss a topic does not make it go away. We need a system that will allow the airing of this problem without putting the lives and futures of clergy under threat. Clergy, it can be admitted, enjoy a high level of job security. But the price they have to pay for that privilege is, I believe, very high.

Over the next 20 years, I believe that we are going to face several crises within the parish system. The constant adding of extra churches to each benefice is going to cause increasing stress on the smaller numbers of full-time clergy. While there may be more non-stipendiary clergy coming on stream, these will be deployed to prop up what is already an unwieldy system close to collapse. Another Archdeacon I used to know, who worked in a rural diocese, was proud of the fact that he had succeeded in closing over a dozen churches. He had thus relieved the strain on several country benefices. Since he left the area, no further churches had been closed. What he had started was, he felt, a real contribution to the possibility of the very survival of the church in the countryside.

It is the contention of this post that there are many weary clergy in the biblical sense. Much of this weariness is hidden. I have suggested that once again poorly understood power dynamics may lie at the heart of this crisis. Just as the IICSA has shown us how negligent episcopal oversight can hide an epidemic of child sexual abuse for decades, so we see how detachment from the hierarchy can hide from view the real stresses of the parochial system. The revolution that needs to take place has not only to reform the structures but to change some of the unhappy dynamics of communication that exist within the institution itself. Once again, this blog is pleading for a better understanding of the way that power works within the church.

Throughout this year 2018, the Church of England has been facing up to the horrors of past failures in the area of safeguarding. Under the close examination of the Independent Inquiry (IICSA), set up by the Conservative Government of Britain, Catholics and Anglicans have been forced to listen to the accounts of their terrible shortcomings in the realm of child protection. We have read the written findings of the Inquiry in respect of the Catholic institutions of Downside and Ampleforth. Here concern for the welfare and safety of children took second place to the preservation of the monastic establishments in charge of these schools. In due course, we will be reading written reports about what the Inquiry thinks about the conduct of the Church of England in respect of the Diocese of Chichester and the way it handled the serious offending of Bishop Peter Ball. No doubt the incredulous tone of the questioning lawyers on the Inquiry will be translated into a serious critique of church functioning at every level. Relatively few people listened to the evidence of the Chichester and Bishop Peter hearings as they were under way. Many more, however, will be exposed to the full sordid details of these cases when the written reports appear in the months ahead.

While the IICSA process has been going on in England, something similar has been completed on the other side of the world in Australia. The Royal Commission on Child Abuse in Australia has come to an end after several years of hearings and work. It has produced a massive amount of paper, with reports criticising many institutions including the Catholic and the Anglican churches. In all, the Commission has identified 16,000 child victims. It has proposed that the organisations named in the abuse reports should contribute to a massive national fund of £2.2 billion pounds to offer redress to surviving victims. This allows each identified victim to receive up to £84,000. This will allow them to receive counselling and provide other forms of care for their needs. All the Churches identified as complicit are required to provide substantial, even crippling, contributions from their funds. They see their contribution as of vital importance to indicate that they are serious in their expressions of regret for what has taken place in the past.

This cataclysmic effect on the assets of Australian Anglican Church can be felt by looking at one small diocese, the Diocese of Tasmania. My interest in this diocese is not just because of the terrible financial burden with which they have to cope, but in the way that the Bishop and his people seem to realise the importance of getting things right with the past even though much of their assets of buildings and money will be wiped out at a stroke. A diocese with 43 church buildings is going to have to raise £8 million as its contribution to the national fund. Richard Condie, the Bishop, has written sensitively and movingly to his people about the issues that they face. It requires his diocese to sell almost half their buildings and land, including church buildings and rectories. He knows that many church people will protest at the decision of the Synod to do this. People are asking him: why should the church today have to suffer because of the sins of other people in the past? His answer is a challenging one. He says that the sacrifice that has to be made is ‘the way of the cross’. He goes on: ‘The Lord Jesus suffered for the sins of the whole world, including mine and yours, so that we could find forgiveness and restoration. In a small way our sacrifice now models his sacrifice for us. It is a profoundly Christian thing to do’.

I leave my reader to imagine the pressure on a English Bishop and a Diocesan Synod if there was a proposal to sell off half the diocesan assets to put right the abusive behaviour of church people in the past. The fact that Bishop Condie has so far prevailed in his planned proposals suggests that in Australia at any rate, Anglican Christians are taking the issue of past abuses very seriously indeed. The sentiments of understanding towards survivors also confirms this impression. The Bishop talks of ‘reaching out to survivors of sexual abuse who have been hurt in our churches in this way. Many survivors have lifelong scars including psychological distress, depression and anxiety. Many have failed marriages and have found it hard to keep meaningful employment because of their trauma. The stories are truly heartbreaking’. The money that is required for redress payments ‘go some way to alleviating the monetary costs of the abuse in survivors’ lives. But more than that, redress gives clear acknowledgement from us, that the abuse happened and provides a means for ongoing support through counselling. I beg you when counting the cost of redress in your parish, to remember his people. They are our primary concern.’

In thinking about the extraordinary events in the Australian churches that are unfolding this summer, as they come to terms with the aftermath of the Royal Commission, we should imagine ourselves two years ahead. By 2020 our Inquiry will have delivered its written reports and the full horror of sexual abuse in the churches (and elsewhere) will be revealed. In facing this future crisis, the churches will need decisive leadership and a readiness to make some substantial material sacrifices, even if not on the scale of the Diocese of Tasmania. All our bishops will need to be able to say to people that it will cost a great deal to put right the evils of the past. The same leadership will need to acknowledge the suffering of survivors and how they need compassion and help, not shunning and rejection. The Church in Australia, as expressed by the words of Bishop Condie, recognizes that complete honesty and acceptance of the evils of the past is the way that they can move into the future. Denial, cover-up and dishonesty on the part of senior church people, who believe that they are protecting the institution, is not a way forward. As I have said before, elaborate schemes for serving children in a church setting will be of limited value if all the clergy are tainted with the label of paedophiles. The Church in England must get on board with this new word – redress. That way we can show that we do understand the past and, rather than cover it up, we want to make a new beginning.

The short message is that the Anglican Church in Australia and its leaders seem to ‘get it’. Showing proper empathy for survivors is the first stage in helping the church face up to and overcome the problems of the past. Just as we do not yet know the full impact of Brexit on our national life, so the Church of England has not yet calculated how damaging and demoralising the frequent stories of child abuse are to its work and mission. In this post I want to challenge our bishops to look hard at the Australian experience and be ready to provide the kind of leadership that we will need if we are to survive waves of reputational damage that are still to emerge. It will cost a great deal of money. Such sacrifices today, by acknowledging the appalling wrongs of the past make possible a better future.

Over the week-end I have been away at conference attended by a number of clergy. Most of them were retired and we did our usual ‘it wasn’t like that in our day’ patter. More interesting for me was to hear from lay people present who told stories about their parishes and especially their vicars. None of these lay people was entirely happy with their local churches. It was not just to do with boring sermons or failures in the pastoral care. The issue that stood out from my conversations was that many of the clergy that were talked about were showing strong signs of insecurity. It seemed that several of them felt themselves to be in a permanent state of mild warfare with their congregations.

In one of the comments in response to my recent piece about Church teams was a telling anecdote. This declared that during an Anglican interregnum a ministry team had flourished, discussing the community, national issues and theological ideas. All this came to an end when the new vicar arrived. Then the nearest thing to a group discussion was to talk about rotas. I heard two similar stories from lay individuals at my conference. Priests had been appointed to their parishes straight out of curacies or parishes where only a single style of worship or functioning had been found. This narrow range of experience meant that the new vicars had only one choice before them; they had to try and transpose the patterns of their training parish on to their new situation. The problem for these new young vicars was that there was no plan B when the transplant of ideas to the new place failed to work with the existing congregation. Typically, the old congregation voted with their feet to be replaced by other Christians from the area who wanted the trendy style of worship on offer. The process of replacing one congregation with another group of people was accomplished through what I would regard as coercive techniques. Leadership often became authoritarian in style, at least till the uncomprehending members had finally departed or moved to a quiet corner at the very back of the church.

In an ideal world it should be possible to combine the old and the new in a single parish. It should be possible to merge the old values of the Anglican pattern – pastoral care, dignified reverent worship and good intelligent preaching – with new experimental patterns of church life. The reason that this so often does not happen is quite simply that many of the clergy who are coming into the system today do not know anything about the old styles and rhythms of parochial life in the Church of England. The popularity of the new wineskins of contemporary music and ministry styles has had the result that, for many clergy today, these models of church life are all they have ever known. Trying to impose the patterns of St Helen’s Bishopsgate or Holy Trinity Brompton on the twenty strong congregation of Much-Binding-in the-Marsh is likely to cause unhappiness on all sides. The vicar feels frustrated that the congregation are ‘stick in the muds’ and the congregation seem unable to flourish with these new styles of church life. ‘Slow church’ and ‘frenetic church’ do not easily mix. This clash of styles will result either in the vicar giving up in frustration and moving on, or the original congregation being driven away by an increasingly coercive style of authoritarian leadership.

In the Church of England today are many individuals who have been brought to faith in the context of a large successful preaching/charismatic church in the middle of London or one of the large cities. Many of these churches have developed styles of theology or worship practice which have become increasingly divorced from traditional Anglican practice. It is not for me to critique at this point the theology or worship style of centres like HTB or St Helen’s Bishopsgate but they are far from being typical of the wider scene of Anglicanism in this country. These larger churches produce a disproportionate number of ordinands. On the face of it that is a source of congratulation. But it is also a cause of numerous problems for the future. Some of the lucky ones are appointed to serve at a church which is a total fit with the church which sponsored them. The rest, the majority of these newly minted clergy, have to be deployed in ‘ordinary’ parishes where it is impossible for them to spread their wings without causing conflict and unhappiness. But these enthusiastic clergy know nothing else, so in one way we cannot blame them for the common pattern of grief and sadness that descends on the churches that they arrive to ‘take over’.

Overseeing this increasing but hidden problem in many C of E parishes are the bishops. Many of them recognise that the parochial system is under increasing strain. It is no longer possible, particularly in the North, to find sufficient clergy to man all the posts that are viable. All over the country there are unfilled posts because no one wants to apply for them. Appointing a young inexperienced charismatic clergyman or woman to a parish which has no desire to become a mini HTB will still be a potential disaster for all concerned. Somehow from the bishop’s perspective, it is better to have the post filled than empty. History will perhaps judge differently. Allowing the large number of clergy to be trained from one dominant tradition which has little understanding of the wider Anglican perspective, is a recipe for not only disaster but also much unhappiness. Whenever a parish has accommodated the culture and style of one priest, trained in the shadow of a mighty charismatic or evangelical ministry elsewhere, we know or suspect that the ‘takeover’ has been achieved at some considerable cost in terms of lives and loyalties turned upside down.

Earlier this week, on Monday 3rd September, the Daily Telegraph carried a story to indicate that Steven Croft, the Bishop of Oxford, was being called in by the police for questioning under caution. This relates to a story that has been circulating for some months about his failure to act in the case of Matt Ineson when Bishop of Sheffield. Matt, as we have recorded in another blog post, was abused as a child of 16 by the Rev Trevor Devamanikkam. His earlier story was set out here in some detail a year ago. The account http://survivingchurch.org/2017/07/09/safeguarding-and-child-abuse-case-of-matt-ineson/ reveals how Matt disclosed several times to his bishops in the Diocese of Sheffield and to the Archbishop of York. Individually and collectively they not only failed to take action to inhibit his abuser or tell the police, but they also blanked Matt and offered him no help pastorally or practically.

Matt has successfully kept the story alive at great cost to himself and his career. Although an ordained priest he felt under such pressure from the ‘othering’ he received by the bishops that he felt compelled to retire from his post as a Vicar in Rotherham in 2013. His financial situation is bleak and the emotional cost of trying to be heard in the Church over more than six years has taken its toll. The blanking of Matt by bishops who did nothing to support him has no doubt been done in the hope and expectation by them that he would eventually disappear from the scene. This has not happened; Matt took out, with the help of a lawyer, legal proceedings against the church using the provisions of the Clergy Disciplinary Measure (2003). This piece of Church of England legislation enables anyone to make a formal complaint against a member of the clergy. So far it has never, except in Matt’s case, been taken out against a serving bishop. Up till now, the Church has managed to stall these proceedings by citing time limits and other devices, but Matt’s case has clearly caused waves among church lawyers. The compilers of the new legislation did not expect that any bishops would be named in such cases. Because bishops inevitably become involved in the process of hearing CDM complaints against ordinary clergy, the system comes under strain when these adjudicators are challenged themselves for unprofessional/unbecoming behaviour. There does not seem to be any provision for what should happen when the Archbishop handling a complaint is himself the subject of a complaint.

Matt’s CDM complaints against Steven Croft, now Bishop of Oxford, are not however the focus of the current Telegraph story. The Telegraph article is concerned with the fact that the episode has gone beyond a CDM complaint to become a matter for the police and the civil authorities. They want to question Bishop Croft formally under caution in a matter that touches on possible criminal behaviour. It remains to be seen whether this questioning will result in any kind of prosecution. The whole case is made far more serious because the alleged perpetrator, Trevor Devamanikkam, died at his own hand on the eve of his trial in 2017. If he had been challenged at the time of the original disclosures (2012-2013) and the police informed, he would not have been an ongoing danger to society for five further years. Also, more seriously, no help was offered to him to prevent a descent into a spiral of despair which led to his suicide.

The reporter Harry Farley at the Telegraph published the details of the civil legal process that is under way against Bishop Croft. The questions to be asked of him by the police no doubt will cover their enquiries over what the Bishop knew and when. This topic was given a full airing on a television programme for BBC Yorkshire earlier this year. On camera Matt gave a clear and cogent account of the facts of his assault and he recounted his fruitless attempts to disclose the event to the church authorities. I have not read the Telegraph story in full -as it is behind a paywall- but the very existence and publication of this story in the post Cliff Richard environment means that it must have been carefully worded. No doubt newspaper lawyers will have checked this story with particular care.

Matt is a fairly prolific Twitter contributor, so it is possible to see what are some of the current outstanding issues from his perspective. We also have recorded something of Bishop Croft’s response to the case. The Oxford Mail on Monday pm put out a rapid response from an Oxford Diocesan spokesman. It stated that ‘Church leaders are refuting the suggestion that the Bishop of Oxford failed to pass on allegations of rape against a vicar’. During the Radio 4 broadcast in July 2017 Bishop Croft was asked why he had not passed Matt’s written disclosure to him, which dates back to 2013, to the police. The response was that he had taken the unilateral decision not to pass on the disclosure because he personally didn’t consider there was sufficient in it to pass on. This was a clear breach of safeguarding procedures. As the reported offence happened not in Oxford but in Sheffield, it is hard to know what ‘Church leaders’ are being referred to in the Mail account. A common-sense reading of the situation is that Bishop has telephoned the communications officer for the diocese and told him what to say to the Oxford Mail. It is to be hoped that the Mail, if they cover the story again, will take a more questioning and nuanced approach to the story.

The other part of the story which attracts our curiosity is a reference to ‘written records and notes taken at the time’ by Bishop Croft. These were, according to the Mail report, ‘taken at the time (and) give a different picture’. Matt has protested that he has never been offered any sight of such documents. As an outside observer, I would have expected any such documents to have been given a long time ago to an independent person for examination and scrutiny. The fact that the Bishop has apparently failed to share them with anyone in six years, is curious. Throughout the CDM process they have never been produced. As this process has been underway for 2 ½ years the failure to produce these papers is a serious matter. This fact is particularly striking in the context of the upcoming police interview which has been planned and known about for several months.

The CDM process that Matt has initiated is still yet to be fully resolved. Although it is entirely separate from the questioning under caution by the police of Bishop Croft, the two have of course become muddled up in people’s minds. One thing we have learned in the last 48 hours is that a key legal figure active no doubt in both the church and civil cases was closely identified with the alleged abuser, the late Trevor Devamanikkam. The Provincial Registrar for Canterbury, who also happens to be the Oxford Diocesan Registrar, John Rees, once served as curate in a parish in Leeds where Trevor Devamanikkam was Priest in Charge. This is obviously something known but never revealed by Rees himself, Bishop Croft, Archbishop Welby or anybody else. The multiple conflicts of interest make his involvement untenable. The fact that this information has only just come to light would imply that the Bishop and his advisers were banking on the case not proceeding this far. Such a disclosure puts the legal team in the Oxford Diocese somewhat on the back foot as there are clearly conflicts of interest here for both the civil and ecclesiastical cases.

In view of these legal problems which Matt has brought to our attention in the past couple of days, it is hard to see how proper church legal processes can move forward smoothly towards resolution. Also, now that the civil authorities are becoming involved in the case, these CDM cases are less likely to disappear. The only logical defence for Bishop Croft is to attack the veracity of Matt and his claims of disclosure, in other words call him a liar-attack the victim. Whatever the final outcome of these sorry episodes, it will have the consequence of a victim going once more through the mill of being disbelieved, facing the power of senior churchmen, lawyers and others trying to undermine his narrative. Having studied Matt’s case, I have to say that my assessment points to his complete truthfulness and honesty. He deserves to win through, even though the full weight of the establishment is being wheeled on in an attempt to crush and discredit him.

The proliferation of legal cases, civil and ecclesiastical is likely to end up costing the Church of England a great deal of money, reputation and time. One cannot help but think that had there been professional standards of procedure as well as good ethical behaviour at the beginning, the Church would have saved itself much grief. Even now there is room for apology to the victim by the church for what he has suffered. He deserves that far more than being the object of vilification in what is probably now a vain attempt to protect the Church institution. How much do we keep hearing about institutional reputation being chosen in preference to truth, honesty and compassion?

When I was in America recently, I kept seeing a book on display whose title intrigued me. The title was The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. When I got back to the UK I tracked down a copy of the book to see if it has anything to say to the issue of teams as they operate in the Church. The short answer is that the book was not terribly helpful for church use. The context and setting of teams in business, which is what the book was describing, is such a long way from what the Church calls teams. But for all their radical differences, teams everywhere still have in common the existence of dysfunction.

Trying to read a book about teams has made me think afresh about my own love/hate relationship with the Church team idea throughout my ministry. Let me say quickly that I have never worked in a formal team situation. There have been times when I felt it would have been helpful to discuss difficult pastoral/theological issues with trusted colleagues. But, overall, I am glad that the situation never in fact arose. I witnessed what was the effect that team working had on others. I know that I would have suffered far more than I would have prospered.

Let me mention some objections to the so-called Team-Ministry idea as it is practised in the Anglican church today. In secular teams, the kind that function together to build Crossrail or motorways, there are groups of highly trained professionals who come together to make a project a reality. Each member of the team has been specially chosen and will have the needed expertise for the project and years of training. At a meeting of the management team, their expertise is listened to carefully and weighed up by the fellow team members and the person in charge. Everyone present is essential to the project and thus there is respect and dignity being offered to each person in the room. Each member of the Team may also be in charge of hundreds of workers under his/her instructions.

Church teams, such as those which come together to run a large parish, do not necessarily seek to balance complementary skills in ministry. The team is normally a group of random clergy who agree to work in this way. One of the Team is designated Team Rector who will oversee team meetings. He or she will probably have been ordained for a longer time with greater experience than the others. The members of the Team will typically be fairly junior clergy who have been ordained only two or three years. While each of them may accept some overall responsibility for an area of work across the whole, the main work will be done on their own patch. This is the part of their job-description where they are solely in charge. Team meetings, when they are expected to show enthusiasm for the large entity which constitutes the Team Ministry, will often be regarded as a chore.

One problem bedevils every Team ministry that I have ever encountered. The major handicap that I identify for successful team functioning within an Anglican parish situation is that there is now far less consensus about what a parish is for and how it should establish priorities. I have mentioned before the anecdote about the words spoken to a distressed woman linked to my church who called on an Anglican minister. He simply said to her ‘We don’t do pastoral’. By that he meant that he was only interested in swelling the numbers of ‘saved’ individuals through converting them to Christ. The bread and butter tasks of mundane caring for people, helping them through the pain and joy of everyday life in or out of church had passed him by. In vivid language, he saw his ministry as snatching branches out of the fire so that they would not be destroyed. This of course is not the only area of differing opinion about how parishes should run. The huge changes in the approach to visiting parishioners in their homes could create an enormous wedge and make me unsuitable for most Team ministries.

A second big problem for teams in the church today is the legacy of patriarchy. For centuries men have pontificated in church affairs and said what will happen and how it should happen. This tradition has never been a good foundation for team working. Entirely absent has been the idea that junior members of staff might have something valuable to offer the whole through their youth or education. I never remember any of my ‘training’ Vicars showing any interest in things I had studied in college. The patriarchal assumptions at the time of my curacies set out the pattern that the assistant curate was there to be the passive receptacle of the wisdom of the experienced priest.

I could go on to talk about the petty jealousies and rivalries that appear in team functioning in or out of the church. But that would only dovetail into what my readers would already know of their own exposure to the difficulties of working in a team. Many would summarise these issues as the ‘ego-problem’.But, in spite of difficulties, I still believe it is legitimate to sketch out the outline of what might be good team functioning. My thoughts for this come under five headings.

A team exists because of the underlying assumption that every member of the team has a vital contribution to make to the success of the whole project.

Each member of a team has the right to be properly heard with respect.

The team leader is there to ensure overall responsibility for the project but his/her views and insights do not necessarily carry greater weight than those of the team members.

The proceedings of team meetings should be carefully minuted. It should normally be assumed that these minutes are in the public domain unless there are cogent reasons for that not to be the case.

It is important that there should always be full disclosure of the source of information or ideas when external material is introduced by team members. This will ensure that team functioning is not compromised by unseen coercion from outside.

Respect, openness, tolerance and equal dignity are all hallmarks of secular teams and one feels that the same rules should apply to Church teams. But, rather than applying higher ethical standards than the secular world in teamwork, the Church seems to fall short in many respects. The word ‘team’ is quickly added to many new initiatives in the Church even when the groundwork to ensure proper team functioning has not been done.

I want to finish with a topical example from the Church of England. Five years ago the national Church started to expand its central work on Safeguarding as it became apparent that one person could not manage the work on their own. Problems have begun to surface as one person has exploded into a taskforce of thirteen and a half full time posts, collectively known as the National Safeguarding Team (NST). By calling itself a team, the Church gives out a totally false message about the way it is in fact functioning. The NST fails as a team because first it does not operate with openness and clarity. There are also serious problems of accountability to external groups, such as the House of Bishops. Where do its ultimate loyalties lie? It has no clearly defined stated aims. Survivors might expect that their interests would be properly represented by at least some of the members of this team, but this is apparently not the case. The methods of the NST operating are so opaque that many are calling for its abolition as being not fit for purpose.

The word team has been freely adopted by the Church over the years. This reflection is suggesting that the Church has in many cases debased the use of the word by simply failing to address what the meaning of the word might really involve. The NST is the latest in a long line of failures to grapple with the central question that Christians might ask. What might a team look like in a Christian context? We do not possess any models to point to at the moment.