I have recently been introduced to some helpful ideas which set out a pattern of behaviour which often describes the relationship between an abuser and the victim.  In September 2018 many of us watched the confrontation between the nominee for the Supreme Court in America, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, and his accuser Christine Ford.  The confrontation was remarkable because, against all the odds, a woman was prepared to stand up to enormous power of a judge in front of a huge audience and tell a wholly credible story of sexual abuse.  Although the American Senate believed the judge and confirmed his onward path to the Supreme Court, I and countless others felt that Kavanaugh was lying.  His performance was poor, and the bluster and contrived anger demonstrated at the hearing bore all the hallmarks of male entitlement and dominance.  Whatever the final truth in this story (my reading of this story may yet be shown to be wrong), it was still a clear illustration of why so many women are afraid of coming forward to tell their stories of abuse.   Christine Ford deserved to be believed but, on this occasion, bravery and apparent integrity failed to win through.

The Christine Ford story is one that is found all over the world in countless settings and contexts, including the Church.  An abused individual finds the courage to stand up for themselves but then the abuser is able to deflect the accusation and effectively turn the tables around.  The victim is then portrayed as an offender for daring to suggest that the abuser has done anything wrong.  This scenario of turning the tables by a perpetrator against their accuser has acquired a name, or at any rate an acronym.  It is called DARVO.  This stands for Deny, Attack and Reverse Victim and Offender.  Those who study this phenomenon have claimed that this is not just a common reaction, but it is almost the inevitable reaction adopted by many who find themselves in a situation of being accused of sexual or other violence.

A recent article by Jennifer Freyd and others explores DARVO in more detail. https://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/defineDARVO.html   It has a lot to say about the psychology of this response and it also explores the experience of victims.  The details of much of this analysis do not really concern us here.  But we do note the salient fact that DARVO will be encountered in many, if not most, cases of accusation against an abuse perpetrator.  Such a response will make the job of investigators much more complicated.  They are faced with the testimony of an abused individual alongside the self-justificatory rhetoric of the accused.

What might be going here?  As I reflected about DARVO in its relation to the present issues in the Church of England with abusers and victims/survivors, I found myself noticing a possible theological dimension.  The sexual abuse of the young or vulnerable is a terrible crime.  The victim has been treated as a thing, suitable only as a means for gratification by a dominant abuser.  The awfulness of the crime is such that one can imagine that any perpetrator, brought up in a Christian environment, would have to wall off reflecting on the abuse so that it was separated from the areas of the mind that process conscience and Christian morality.  In short, the perpetrator will perform almost every kind of intellectual gymnastics to avoid admitting the evil of the act.  DARVO is thus one part of the ways we might expect a person of conscience to deal with his/her crime.  The abuser is probably unlikely ever to say simply ‘I did wrong, please forgive me’.  The DARVO mechanism would cause the abuser to claim, for example that, among other things, the young person cooperated in the abuse.  They should also be in some way be grateful to the perpetrator for helping them in the task of learning about their sexual identity.  In the case of adult adulterous relationships, a variety of innocent-sounding excuses may be found to justify and avoid the evil of the action.  Everything will be admitted but not the fact that the Christian leader/youth worker was abusing power and using another person for the purposes of sexual gratification.  Understanding this DARVO mechanism is then a valuable tool in the analysis of the complicated dynamics between victim and abuser.

The dynamics of DARVO which effectively silence and blame millions of victims of abuse across the world do not just apply to individuals.  Readers of this blog will be quick to notice that DARVO is a mechanism applied by institutions.  Several of the experiences recorded in Andrew Graystone’s booklets relate to this process.  All too frequently the abused person is made to feel that they are the enemy in bringing forward accusations against church leaders.  Because they ask for justice from the wider institution and a proper hearing of their case, the church is sometimes felt to swing into action against them.  The use of lawyers and NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) is a perfect example of the Attack part of the acronym.  It certainly makes the survivor feel more like a victim than before.  Whenever the church behaves in a way that is putting the reputation of the institution first, this certainly can be said to fulfil the Deny part.  The victim, as the result of the abuse, ends up feeling on the far side of a wall of partition with the church on the other side.  When this happens, something has clearly gone wrong in what might have been a process of healing.  Once the victim feels that he/she is the ‘problem’, then there is certainly a case for saying that the Reverse Victim and Offender aspect has taken place.

DARVO is thus a useful concept for helping us to think about the dynamics of power in both an individual as well as an institutional setting.  I hope that my attempts, as here, to survey ideas that appear all the time in psychology and the other social sciences are found helpful.  They are offered in the hope that the various disciplines can in different ways be applied to the puzzling and damaging incidence of power abuse in our churches.  For too long even the thought that power is sometimes used by church leaders to harm individuals was not admitted.  Perhaps DARVO is one way of understanding how and why this happens so that we can talk about it with greater clarity in the future.

Ten years ago, I used to belong to an organisation called Bridge Builders.  This group, with links to the Mennonite Church, specialises in training church people to take part in mediation and sorting out the conflicts that inevitably affect churches from time to time.  Although I was on a list of possible mediators for a time, the few requests that came in were impracticable for reasons of geography or timing.  So, my potential skills as a mediator were never properly tested.  The training was not however a waste of time.  What I learned about mediation has proved useful in other contexts, not least in trying to understand the extraordinary problems that seem to bedevil the relationships between abuse survivors and the authorities of the church. 

I should start by saying that mediation skills are designed to help two groups/individuals or more who are in conflict or strong disagreement with one another.  The assumption is that each side diverges in the matter of a strongly held principle.  It may be a local matter or a theological principle like the ordination of women or the gay issue. There also may be a conflict of leadership styles between a minister and his assistant.  Mediation as a process is not appropriate as a way of bridging a chasm between an abuse perpetrator and their victim.  The break that will have occurred in the course of an abuse episode between a victim/survivor and the offending institution/perpetrator cannot be repaired through the skills of a mediator.  Mediation skills are about getting two more or less equal sides to listen to one another and to work out a way forward.  The attempt to make a victim listen to the self-justifying rhetoric of a perpetrator will probably be counter-productive and potentially the cause of further harm to the victim.   Victims need protection from having to deal with the delusional and narcissistic attitudes of their abusers.

As I thought about the way that mediation has little to offer in abuse situations, I began to think of conflict situations where such a process might be useful in congregations.  The analogy that I began to explore in my mind was one of a boys’ school.  Based on my memories of what used to take place in such institutions some 55 years ago, I began to see how words like mediation, reconciliation and forgiveness might work in this context.  The first scenario would be two school boys in a situation of conflict as the result of a long-standing rivalry.  They could be in competition over a girl friend or who should be the captain of a sport’s team.  For various reasons the rivalry might reach such a pitch that someone could suggest mediation.  Mediation could work if both sides accepted the process.  The causes of rivalry would be heard out in a calm environment and hopefully a new understanding of the issues would be reached by both sides. 

In contrast to a rivalry potentially resolved by mediation, we encounter in our imaginary boys’ school a situation of bullying, physical or mental.  Such situations are hard to resolve and certainly the methods used would not be those of mediation.  When one person has been bullied or damaged by another, the process of making things right will be costly and for that reason seldom attempted.  Issues like justice and compensation will all have to be worked out if there is to be a path towards full resolution and reconciliation.  A third party who wanted to help achieve this healing would have to be wise in all these areas of human interaction.  There is nothing easy or automatic about bringing people together who have been divided by an act of cruelty or gratuitous misuse of power.

A further level of complexity is reached when, at our school, a boy with prefect’s responsibility misuses his power.   For someone to bring full reconciliation into the situation, the school leaders would have to be involved as it was the power afforded to him by the school authorities that has been misused.  In practice the issue would probably not be properly faced but, if it were, one possible outcome would be that the prefect would be disciplined or demoted. Clearly power, when given to an individual, needs to be seen to be used consistently and fairly.   It is only in a corrupt institution that a misuse of institutional power is routinely covered up as a way of protecting the reputation of the whole school.  When this reputation becomes more important than the attempt to promote good relationships at every level, then something has been compromised and even destroyed.

It will be clear that, in describing a hypothetical school that is trying to do the correct thing in repairing relationships and making them as right as possible, I could be describing the Church.  Mediation for one kind of dispute is possible while the gifts of forgiveness and reconciliation can be deployed for others.  Being at peace with others is an aim to work for in every congregation and perhaps, under the leadership of exceptional clergy, something near it can be achieved.  But the disease of misusing institutional power is so common that it is sometimes very hard to find the place of safety and shalom for which all long.   Sometimes we even forget to expect it because a culture of bullying and power games has become endemic in many of our congregations.  Everyone learns to avoid closeness or trust, even while paying lip service to notions of love and mutual acceptance. 

To return to an earlier blog on institutional narcissism, the Church all too easily becomes mired in institutional dysfunction without really realising that there is anything wrong.  It is the casual mistreatment of the weak and abused to protect the interests of the strong that is the serious accusation of many survivors at present.  If they are wrong is making the claim that survivors are routinely neglected and ignored, then we need to see the evidence to refute it.  I have not seen it.

Today (Tuesday) Andrew Graystone has sent a short pamphlet to every member of the Church of England General Synod which is meeting this week in London.  https://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Stones-not-Bread-Revisited.pdf  The booklet is entitled We asked for Bread but you gave us Stones. One year on.  It is a follow-up to the one produced a year ago at the London General Synod which I attended as a visitor.  This was my way of showing solidarity with a small group of survivors who were gathering to make a protest.  This protest was to coincide with the debate that was to take place on safeguarding in the context of the then upcoming hearings by IICSA on the Church of England. 

The situation at this February’s Synod is that there is no scheduled debate on the topic of safeguarding.  It may be that the word safeguarding is not even mentioned.  Several questions on the topic have been put, but given the fact that they appear as questions 95 and 96 on the Q & A document, it is probable that any supplementary follow-up points will be crowded out by other topics.   The Church of England is giving a great (disproportionate?) deal of energy to transgender issues at present

To return to Andrew’s booklet.  The second page is an introduction to survivors’ testimonies, and he makes a telling comment about the elephant in the chamber.  This Synod is due to debate evangelism, a term that implies that there is an audience out there waiting to hear what the Church has to say.  This potential audience, unlike the Church itself, sees only a rather large elephant when looking at the evangelising community.  This all too visible elephant is the fact that the church continues ‘to re-abuse and neglect its own victims’.  Andrew goes on ‘You cannot preach repentance until you have repented.  You cannot speak about the love of God whilst you treat survivors with cruelty.’

This second edition of Bread and Stones then educates the reader through a series of vivid testimonies in case the evil of what is going on some parts of the church has been forgotten.  The elephant, so visible to the general public, is carefully described.  No reader of the booklet can make the excuse that, somehow, they were unaware of the problem.   Last July Jo Kind, a survivor, spoke to full Synod at its meeting in York.  She received a welcoming response by members.  It seemed that Synod might finally be ‘getting it’ over the issue of the importance of dealing properly with survivors.  Sadly, Jo reports in the booklet that ‘the treatment meted out by the diocese since then has been terrible.  Just when there seemed hope of openness and reconciliation, I felt mistrusted and controlled.’ 

The insight that Good News will never be heard by our nation until the Church gets things right over abuse is an important one.  The failures that are recorded which lead to ‘re-abuse’ are not inadequate compensation payments, but mostly simple failures of compassion and human contact.  The defensiveness towards victims by members of the hierarchy is particularly striking.  Broken promises, delay and secrecy litter the accounts made by the ten survivors who have contributed to Andrew’s booklet.  Last month the Archbishop of Canterbury made a telling statement in an interview in the Spectator which seemed to show a real understanding of the issue.  He said ‘we have not found the proper way of dealing with complainants …. not telling them to shut up and go away, which is what we did for decades.  Which was evil.  It’s more than just a wrong thing: it’s a deeply evil act.’

This statement by the Archbishop sadly still reflects the present reality as far as the ten survivors represented in the booklet are concerned.  One male survivor asks the question.  ‘Has anyone seen a positive testimony of a survivor engaging with the Church of England?’  The question is unanswered but clearly, if any such positive testimony were to be had from among this cohort of survivors, it would have been recorded. 

What do the survivors look for? Speaking from the evidence of the two booklets, as well as my own engagement with survivors, there seem to be certain simple things that are demanded.  The first is transparency.   Too many letters and communications seem to disappear into filing cabinets, or possibly shredders, where they can be forgotten or ignored.  Making a serious complaint against a church leader should engage the minds of those who manage the church with a compelling urgency.  While some aspects of the process may have to be kept confidential, the main thrust of the enquiry and process should be shared as far as possible with the victim.  The police treatment of victims seems to be able to combine the pursuit of justice with an openness of information for the victims.  Certainly, openness and good communication are aspects of caring that should be able to exist in a church that speaks about love.

The second part of the treatment that survivors need is even simpler.  It is human care and concern.  The first thing that any human being has to offer to another who is going through a crisis is the hug or embrace.  Why is it so difficult for leaders to show ordinary human compassion when a story of abuse emerges?  Even when these stories are decades old, the survivor needs to feel that he/she will encounter human sympathy.  The old excuse that such human compassion might compromise legal processes has been shown to be an urban myth.   If it is not dead, the latest published advice from the Ecclesiastical Insurance company should have finally killed it off.  Love shown to a victim does not make a church liable for an increased pay-out.  It is striking that of the ten victims recorded in Andrew’s booklet, not one in fact mentioned compensation.  Even if financial need is there among their requirements, it is not by any means at the top of the list.

I hope that all members of General Synod this week will read Andrew’s booklet.  I hope also that the hierarchy of the church will listen better to these survivors.  Andrew reminds us that ignoring the elephant in the chamber could prove very costly indeed for the church and its long-term survival.  Recognising this evil, the abuse and re-abuse of victims, is an important first step.  In many ways it is, arguably,  the most urgent task for the church today.

Looking back over the decades of working as a parish priest, I remember with gratitude the enormous and necessary help given by lay volunteers. When the church has a group of dedicated people who are prepared to give time and expertise to the work of the church, the morale of the whole church (especially the clergy) is boosted considerably. Without these lay volunteers, things can become extremely difficult. I once heard of a clergyman who had to act as a churchwarden and treasurer in his parish because no one was prepared to fill these posts.

There are two aspects of lay volunteers working in churches that I want to explore. The first issue is a practical one. In the church of my childhood, there was always a group of church women who had never worked outside the home.  These were prepared to run the Sunday school and the various organisations that each church would sponsor. More recently the women of the parish would go out to work.  But working life for both sexes was often still the prelude to a long retirement, starting at the age of 60/65.  Retired people often had skills and energy and could potentially offer up to 15/20 years of active service to their local parish churches. In 2005, in my final parish, I was able to recruit as churchwarden a retired senior teacher who had run a department of 14 other teachers. She was just 60 and had plenty of energy for the post. These golden years for the recruitment of energetic and active volunteers for church work are arguably now over.  Professional women no longer retire at 60 and the value of pensions has begun to shrink. I wonder how long it will be before the church begins to feel the real cost of these social changes which reduce the availability of volunteers.

The lay volunteers on which the churches rely will always have more to give if they have age and energy on their side. If one waits until the age of 67 is reached, one cannot expect the same amount of energy and service to be on offer to a local parish church. So far, the generation that retired at the beginning of their 60s are still reasonably active. Thinking of my own church, from which I retired in 2010, I can see that there is a generation of church volunteers who will not be easily replaced. Up and down the country the now 70-75-year-olds who have carried the work of the church for up to 15 years will simply not have the stamina to continue in a few years time. Is anyone facing up to this potential volunteer crisis in the churches of all kinds in Britain?

The second issue about volunteer labour in our churches is the need to take stock over the way they are treated by the full-time clergy. Many older clergy have become so used to recruiting volunteers without difficulty over the years, that they are not prepared for the future volunteer crisis that may be looming. In a previous blog we suggest that there may also be a potential crisis of morale among the clergy themselves when they find that they cannot fulfil all the expectations laid on them.  A similar crunch point may hit their lay volunteers.  If a layperson agrees to become churchwarden but then finds that he/she is required to be acting treasurer as well, there is going to be unhappiness.  I am not aware that anyone has given attention to this potential crisis.  For the reasons I have outlined we have to imagine that there is going to be a tipping point in the future. In short, recruiting volunteers to support the practical work of the church may become the most difficult part of the work of a church leader.

The word volunteer speaks of the fact that an individual is never compelled to do the job that is asked of them. It is offered as an act of goodwill and without any sense of compulsion. The full-time person in the parish cannot easily walk away when things get tough, but the volunteer can.  This future scarcity should change the dynamic of the way that leaders relate to these volunteers.  Although this blog is about power abuse in churches, a shortage of volunteers is one thing that could in fact make things better in this area.  Saying thank you to the volunteers, listening to their issues and generally treating them well is something that could be forced on all clergy by necessity.  The alternative of employing professionals to do many of the administrative tasks may be an option for better-off churches but not the majority.

The church has not quite reached the crisis point over its volunteer work-force but that moment may not be far off.  The time may arrive when volunteers are so scarce that the practical and administrative tasks are simply not being done in many smaller churches.  One way of delaying that moment will be for church leaders to learn how to treat their volunteers with profound respect, honour and dignity.  For some clergy this will be a revolution in attitude.  They will also need good teaching about the dynamics of power in institutions and real understanding of enabling and working with teams.  The traditional patriarchal patterns of working, where a male priest gave the orders and everyone rushed to obey, will no longer suffice.  This reflection on the role of volunteers will, I hope, require my readers to think about their own local situation.  Are your church leaders aware of a future crisis?  If they are, are they helping the situation by an effort to overcome their narcissism and grandiosity and treating their volunteers with greater honour and respect?  If that is happening, then perhaps something good is emerging alongside a potential crisis and break-down within many church structures in our country.

Long term visitors to this blog will know that at the heart of my interests is a fascination with the outworking of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).  This personality disorder can be seen to be at the heart of much of the dynamics of harmful behaviour both in individual relationships and in institutional settings like the Church. 

Before we examine, what I want to call, institutional narcissism, we need to return to the classic psychoanalytic understandings of the word narcissism.  In offering a brief summary of the current thinking on the term, we should be aware that like PTSD, NPD has only been in circulation as an idea since around 1980.  As a word that has entered wide public awareness, narcissism has only been in existence for around a dozen years.  Narcissism’s essential meaning, which most people are now familiar with, has the idea of self-inflation.  Such self-aggrandisement, combined with a readiness to ‘feed’ off others in a relationship, has become easily recognisable for countless people.   Dysfunctional power relationships in families and institutions can often be identified as an outworking of NPD.

The psychoanalysts who laboriously described the dynamics of narcissism to their professional colleagues in the 1970s, paving the way for it to enter the official classificatory manuals, offered theories about its origins.  Narcissism was, in summary, the result of a child failing to create a core ‘self’.  Without that self at the centre of the personality, the child and later adult would find it necessary to reach out to fill this empty space with compensatory attachments and relationships.  There would be an ongoing narcissistic hunger for parental-type attention and praise.  Such hunger often proved to be insatiable, leaving the sufferer deeply wounded for the whole of his/her life.  Some narcissists do achieve a level of stability and success, at least superficially.  They obtain, by cunning and manipulation, a context in which they can control others sufficiently to hide their woundedness.  For a time, they are the heart and soul of the party before some crisis exposes the fragility that lies deep down in every narcissist. 

As with most psychological disorders, one suspects that NPD exists on a continuum.  Possibly every human being alive is a victim to some extent of this disturbance.  The question is whether it becomes a disorder able to disturb ordinary flourishing.   Within the literature there is, as I have discussed before on this blog, a suggestion that some find that a hitherto unacknowledged  narcissism is brought out by particular settings.  A typical example of ‘acquired situational narcissism’ (ASN) might be a pop star beginning to enjoy fame and having a constant supply of ‘girl-friends’ ready to oblige at any time.  More central to our concern is the ASN awoken in an individual promoted to a bishopric or the House of Lords.  A sense of self-aggrandisement and importance is granted through the new role.  The enjoyment of privilege is not in itself a bad thing, but it becomes serious if the new preferment removes an individual from his old ways of relating to others.  The thought that that ‘I am now too important to be bothered with the likes of you’ is a dangerous notion.  It is effectively poisoning the soul of a hitherto straightforward person.

The idea that I am wrestling with at present is the notion of institutional narcissism.  By this term I am thinking of the way that when people become important in their own eyes, above ordinary mortals, they use institutions to consolidate that superiority.  One of the ways that Michael Reid of Peniel expressed the toxic power he enjoyed over his followers was to confront them with the institution he had built.  He literally pointed to the church and the real estate it owned and challenged his opponents with the question.  ‘Who is God showing his favour to?’  In short, money property and influence were the tangible backing forces of narcissistic behaviour.  The institution was a means for exercising power over others. 

As I thought about the way narcissists build their power around the institutions they have created, the image of a sea-creature building for itself a shell came to mind.  The shell is the means to protect the vulnerable core of the narcissistic leader.  We see this process happening all over the world in a religious context.  Plant and wealth equals power and, as such, helps to protect the vulnerable narcissistic leader from challenge.  A particular extreme example is found among Scientologists.  All over the world they are converting large buildings to be bases for their activities.  The only problem is that there are not enough people interested to go to these buildings.  They form an empty shell to give the illusion of power and influence which does not in fact exist.

The sea creature analogy can be taken one stage further.  The hermit crab is known to use the empty shells of other creatures to provide protection for itself.  I am wondering if in fact that the Church of England, with its complex system of rank, preferment and privilege, is proving an unhealthy environment where narcissistic behaviour can flourish.  In other words, the sheer number and variety of protective shells that litter the Church’s landscape provides a rich soil for the incubation of many examples of an institutional narcissism.  Even if we assume that the Church of England clergy do not possess a greater number of damaged selves than the rest of the population, it might be argued that there is greater possibility for ASM to emerge, thanks to the extent of the many institutional props or shells that exist.   

I leave my reader not with clear answers but with a number of questions.  Is the structure of the Church conducive to unhealthy power dynamics?  Do our leaders unconsciously slide into narcissistic ways of thinking as the result of preferment?  When they exercise power in a church setting, are they mindful of the way that such power should only be exercised in the name of the institution and is never personal to them?  These questions and other are relevant not only to bishops and senior clergy, but they are worth asking of clergy of every rank and seniority.  One thing that occurs to me is that a better understanding of all the different manifestations of narcissism in the church would make the institution a far healthier place than it is at present.

One of the mysteries of the Anglican situation in the early 21^st century is the way that the sexual activity of its members has come to occupy such a central stage.  Many of us grew up in a time when discussing what went on in people’s bedrooms was a taboo.  The swing from past reticence to the current situation, where one’s orthodoxy is judged by what one thinks of other people’s sexual preferences, is extraordinary.  Historians in the future may look back to our time with puzzlement and ask this question of our generation.  Why did the Anglicans of that era fight over this topic of sex, when there were so many other more important crises for them to confront – global warming, refugees, poverty and war?

 I am in the process of reading a book which may give us a few pointers on our way to answering this question.  It is a book about the rise and fall of a church network in America called Mars Hill.  Situated in Seattle it was founded by the charismatic leader, Mark Driscoll. His youth and energy attracted thousands of young adults as members.  The church eventually shut its doors in 2014 after credible accusations of power abuse.  On this occasion it was not the story of a powerful leader taking sexual advantage of vulnerable young women.  Rather it seems to have been a case of an empire builder who became intoxicated by raw power and wealth.  He controlled not only a cluster of physical congregations in the Seattle area, but his influence stretched world-wide through successful on-line franchising of his preaching.

What was the secret of Driscoll’s success before he came to grief?  One secret of the attractiveness of his preaching was that he was frequently prepared to speak about an area of life that most of us, understandably, have shied away from when in the pulpit – sex and its enjoyment in married life.   For Driscoll there was a biblical duty for all couples to go into marriage with a determination to enjoy it in all its physical potential.  In short Driscoll was fascinated, some would say obsessed, by the sexual aspect of married life.  Making so much of the physical aspects of marriage, was a kind of exploration into what might be described as sacred pornography.  He made the most of passages in the Song of Songs to explore the physical side of married life.  It is not to be wondered at that his audience, consisting mainly of those in their twenties and thirties, were captivated and enthralled at his preaching. 

The book by Jessica Johnson that discusses these ideas of Driscoll has the intriguing title Biblical Porn.  This was published at the end of last year and it gives us detailed material about much of the teaching at Mars Hill.  The emphasis of the book is not however an analysis of texts and Driscoll’s use of them.   More importantly for our purposes, it explores the way that these teachings impacted on the individuals who heard them and tried to live by them.

We have already hinted at the fact that a preacher, who uses passages from the Song of Songs, may be appealing to the prurient levels of the personality.  Ostensibly Driscoll was teaching his young hearers about ‘biblical marriage’.  What he was doing at another level was to draw these young people into a trap of his making.  His preaching was, in other words, an effective scheme to gain power for himself.   Having gained their curiosity and attention, the next stage was to put the men and the women into confessional groups.  Here they were expected to ‘confess’ their sexual sins, whether fantasising about members of the opposite sex, pornography, pre-marital relationships or other activities deemed to be sinful.  Having engaged in this opening up, the members were then effectively in state of bondage to the leadership.  From that point on, all their future sexual activity would be under scrutiny.  Driscoll also seems to have freely used the information garnered in the confession sessions.  This came up as illustrative material in follow-up sermons.  The ‘sins’ and weaknesses of congregational members were also packaged up and effectively sold on to be ‘entertainment’ for Driscoll’s followers all round the world. 

The ideal of biblical marriage which Driscoll claimed to want for his followers also did not prove to be easily obtainable.  Although he extolled how wonderful it was to enjoy ‘biblical sex’, one imagines that there would have been frequent cases of ‘performance anxiety’ on the part of the men.  Worse still were the potential pitfalls for the women.  Not only were they enjoined to be constantly at the disposal of their menfolk for sexual purposes, they were also held to be in some way responsible if the men strayed into pornography or looking at other women.  There is a lot in the sermons about women needing to make themselves seductively attractive and alluring as a way of keeping their men from straying. 

Driscoll’s control over those who had bought into his ideas for biblical marriage had the hall-marks of a typical cult.  The original lure was the titillation of listening to sexually-explicit sermons.  This was followed by the time of confession.  Once anyone had arrived at this point, it was almost impossible to draw back.  The church now had control over them through knowing many of their guilt-laden secrets.  All that remained was for them to try and attain the goal that had originally sounded so wonderful, biblical marriage.  If they failed, as many of them must inevitably have done, they were held in this permanent thrall of feeling defeated.  This would make them still more dependent on the leadership to help them move forward in some way.  As with members of a cult, this dependence on the leadership would have been laced with a deep sense of guilt and fear.  Many of them realised by now that giving away their sexual privacy had not been a good idea.  Every one of these Mars Hill members should have had, in the beginning, a notice on their bedroom doors which stated quite clearly: ‘Keep out, our sex life is none of your business.’

Allowing a church to get deeply involved with the sex life of its members is always going to be a hazardous and potentially harmful activity.  Of course, there will be times when a church leader is forced to say that betrayal or sexual misbehaviour by a congregant is an issue which needs to be faced and dealt with.  The more pervasive sins that are encountered in a day-to-day situation will be the ones that relate to greed, selfishness or cruelty.  Thanks to the public discourse of many conservative Christians, many people regard Christianity as only ever concerned about sexual sin.   This is a very damaging to the Christian cause.  It is also a gross distortion to the forms of behaviour that Jesus sought to outlaw.  He was far more interested in exposing hypocrisy and power abuse (Matthew 23).  When an excessive preoccupation with sexual behaviour is encouraged by Christian leaders, the truly important moral issues of the day are overlooked.

Mark Driscoll is a good example of how easy it is to get people feeling energised by playing the ‘sex card’.  This made sure that his churches were places to attract plenty of attention, as well as arousing a maelstrom of feelings and passions among his hearers.  Something similar seems to be happening every time a conservative preacher or church leader today talks about LGBT issues in a condemnatory way.  People are made to feel strongly because talk of sexual behaviour always stirs people in a deeply personal area of their lives.  What we see, when petitions are signed against liberal bishops, is the manipulation and stirring of strong human passions using rhetorical devices.  Anglican Christianity is cheapened and discredited when it indulges in this kind of rousing of primal passion by popular preachers.  We need, for issues as important as these, clear and calm discussion to replace the cheap and ill-thought out use of mass control techniques.    

I have recently encountered the work of Professor Gordon Turnbull, the internationally acclaimed expert on the topic of trauma.  His professional training is that of a psychiatrist but, unlike the majority in his profession, he has always used the minimum of drug therapy with his patients.  In focusing on treating trauma and PTSD, he has changed the lives of many.  He has not just brought relief and healing to his patients but has succeeded in changing some of the attitudes of his notoriously conservative profession.  

Turnbull’s 2011 book, Trauma, is part autobiography and part exploration of the therapy that can be offered to many sufferers of post-traumatic stress.  Having read the book over the past few days on Kindle, I find that my brain is now buzzing with ideas as to how Turnbull’s thinking and theoretical models illuminate many of the problems of spiritual and sexual abuse in the churches. There are many ideas to be shared but here I can only touch on a few.  One major claim made by Turnbull is that significant trauma is something that touches up to half the British population.  This is something he brings out in an internet discussion with Rob Hopkins. Trauma is the consequence not only of car accidents, plane crashes and episodes of war but it can be the result of everyday episodes of controlling behaviour.  If one person controls the life of another over a period, there can be profound effects on an individual’s ‘psychology and maturation’.   Taking this further we can see that society provides many opportunities for people to become victims of trauma within socially approved institutions.  We ‘allow’ husbands to control their wives or adult children their parents, all within the parameters of legally tolerated behaviour.  Readers of this blog will not be surprised to note that I began to think immediately of the ways that churches can be guilty of trauma-inducing behaviour.  The church does little to question congregations where the Bible is used as a tool of intimidation.  Acceptable behaviour within some traditions includes the constant reminder of the existence of hell and how eternal damnation awaits those who stray from a narrowly defined path of behaviour.   Although these applications of his ideas are not found in the book, I am sure that Turnbull would identify ‘Jane’ as a sufferer of PTSD. Her reported ‘glazing’ and ‘dissociation’ appear to be a common feature of post-traumatic experience.  They are part of the survival method used by the brain to try to process experiences of violent attack from the outside.

There is a lot of information about the physiology of trauma in both the book and the internet article.  One key message that I picked up from both is that a trauma response, such as PTSD, is in no way to be identified as a mental illness.  It is rather to be understood as the way a brain attempts to cope with traumatic or stressful events.   Stress events naturally range in their severity from the mild to the severe.  When these events go beyond a certain point in severity or length of exposure, something gives way.  The fight-flight response is activated first.  If this is ineffective, a freeze response may take over.

Turnbull describes the way that many people are affected by trauma more or less continuously.  This would apply typically to women in violent marriages or people who live in dangerous neighbourhoods.  Such people would be in a state of ‘hyper-vigilance’ and exhibit signs of paranoia in their day to day interaction with others.   A constant sense of danger will over-stimulate the brain into a kind of overdrive of alertness and stress.

Living with constant stress is, to put it mildly, detrimental to good health.  The body will typically look for addictive substances as a way of blocking out these internally stressful reactions.  Such addictions carry their own health risks on top of the high blood-pressure, neurological disease and digestive problems that come with high levels of traumatic stress.  Turnbull mentions how nomads in Africa who live without this stress do not suffer from these illnesses. 

One very interesting point in the Hopkins article is the observation made by Turnbull about creativity.  To summarise, he explains how dealing with severe stress will lessen or even destroy creativity.  He takes the example of the NHS.  When a hospital comes into a stressful episode, the ability of the staff to come up with a creative response to the crisis is undermined.  From the outside, solutions might seem easy to put into place.  From the inside, because imagination and creativity is paralysed by the stress, everything becomes harder to solve.

In this short piece I am only able to share a tiny part of what Turnbull has shared.  The main book goes into much more detail about Turnbull’s own life story.  In particular, he records the details of his battles with the medical establishment to change attitudes and the understanding of trauma and its treatment.  

For the rest of this post, I want to reflect on Turnbull’s claim about the ubiquity of trauma and how this may impact our understanding of the Church.  My summary of the situation is that the Church is an unwelcome contributor to the existence of stress in society.  At the same time, it has the resources both to neutralise and heal much of the same trauma and stress that we find all around us.

The first thing to be said is that, at its worst, the Church can be seen as responsible for inducing an environment of fear which contributes to serious and persistent trauma.   When an individual is reminded of the reality of hell every Sunday, that can be considered an example of the persistent control that Turnbull describes as being a cause of trauma.  By contrast Jesus seems to have read Turnbull’s book.  One key message we read in the Gospels is a simple one: ‘Do not be afraid’.  The word that sums up what Jesus came to bring is contained in the Hebrew word ‘shalom’.  This word sums up everything that is an antidote to stress and trauma.  It draws on the idea of reconciled relationships, forgiveness and the freedom that comes when we let go of the urge to have power, domination or control.  When we summarise Christian teaching as being a command to love, we are summarising the impulse to allow everyone, even those we do not like particularly, to flourish and discover their true shalom.  In that peace there is no trauma or stress.  Perhaps shalom is the gift that the Church has to offer to a world where there is so much in the way of trauma and the stress that follows it.

In recent days we have been reading about the letter from 2000 Christians addressed to the Archbishops.  These signatories are arguing that the Church should not allow the flourishing of transgendered individuals.  The existence of such people offends the biblical world view of conservative Christians.  This implied condemnation of people who do not somehow fit a narrow mould of ‘normality’ is, to me, a kind of blasphemy.  From Turnbull’s perspective there is being enacted an attempt to control a group.  In this place of desired control, they are effectively being placed in a situation of trauma.  Thankfully most of them will not willingly surrender to this controlling categorisation.  This is because many other Christians, apart from conservatives, read the gospels in a different way.  For them Jesus speaks of acceptance, tolerance, inclusion and love.   I for one will always want to protect transgendered people from listening to dangerous expressions of traumatic rejection.  I will read the gospel again and again to reassure myself that the Jesus I follow is indeed one who cared about wholeness and deliverance from trauma.  He it is, who invites everyone, rich, poor, male, female, transgendered and every other condition into a place of rest.  ‘Come unto me all ye that are laden (traumatised) and I will give you rest’.

Today, February 1, is the second anniversary of the Channel 4 programme about the John Smyth scandal. In many ways this scandal remains the greatest open wound among Anglican abuse scandals that has yet to heal.  What went on in a hut in a Winchester garden between 1979 and 1981 has never been properly resolved.   Although Smyth acted alone, the way that his actions involved so many others, victims and supporters, is mind-blowing.   Although his behaviour was not actively condoned by anyone else, the networks he belonged to allowed him to escape scrutiny and justice for the rest of his life.  Those who passively supported Smyth have also been allowed to escape questioning.  Although the extent of exactly who knew about his nefarious activities is in dispute, it is apparent that a whole tranche of well-connected Christian individuals did know what was going on.  These people are in some cases still alive, but they have never been questioned in a formal way.  The common denominator was a link with the camps at Iwerne Minster.  Smyth had been chairman of the trustees for these camps, so he would have known and been known by everyone active in this network at the time.  As has been stated on various occasions in this blog and elsewhere, the camps at Iwerne in Dorset brought together, as participants or supporters, a wealthy elite within the evangelical world.  To this day the Titus Trustees continue this same work, the task of evangelising a privileged sector of English society, public school boys.

When the scandal of John Smyth’s behaviour broke with the screening of the Channel 4 programme, everyone expected that there would be a full enquiry about what had been revealed. While the probing eyes of IICSA have been allowed to dig deep into the Chichester Diocese and the Peter Ball affair, no such enquiry has been conducted into the affair of John Smyth. When Smyth died in August last year, a press release from the C/E safeguarding bishop, Peter Hancock, was released.  He stated that ‘It is important now that all those organisations linked with this case work together to look at a lessons learned review, whilst continuing to offer formal and informal support to those who have come forward as survivors.’  The promised enquiry (and the support for survivors) seems to have vanished into thin air.  One of the problems may be that the Titus Trustees, who maintain fierce independence from the wider church when it suits them, may simply have refused to cooperate.   There was also a statement from Archbishop Welby which expressed an unequivocal apology for the role which the Church of England played in this deplorable affair. We might have expected that somewhere in the past two years some practical steps would be taken to begin to put right the appalling legacy of Smith’s toxic behaviour.  But that does not appear to have happened.

There are believed to be at least 20 Smyth victims in Britain at this time. Based on the comments made on Twitter by one of them, Archbishop Welby has not met with any of them personally. I am not here going to get into the argument about how much the Archbishop himself knew of the activities of Smyth before it came into the public domain; even if he did not, it is quite clear that there was a serious conspiracy of silence among many other leading evangelicals in England about the whole matter. This cover-up and denial have exacerbated the pain of Smyth’s victims.  Simultaneously a necessary challenge to the corrupt culture within evangelicalism which allowed Smyth’s toxic beliefs to flourish, has never been properly aired.

What could have happened in the past two years to make the Smyth episode resolve itself in some way rather than fester like a tank of stagnant water? I have a few suggestions.

• The Church of England even though it was not responsible for Smyth in a formal way, should, in the spirit of Welby’s apology, hold an enquiry. This would allow the questioning of key witnesses to establish who knew what and when.  Several of the members of Smyth’s network which drew up the Ruston report in 1982 are still alive and none have given any public account of what they knew. The ability of Smyth to flee to Africa subsequently and be financially sustained by a group of wealthy evangelical sponsors, especially the Coleman family, needs to be properly explored.

• The second area, which needs to be explored by an enquiry, is the aberrant theology which undergirded Smyth’s behaviour. The biblical quotations with which Smyth intimidated his victims need to be understood. If there are still any evangelicals who believe such things as painful chastisement being of spiritual benefit, let them come forward and argue these extraordinary notions. If they disagree with these ideas, then that also needs to be heard.  We need to know in 2019 that such toxic ideas about suffering and salvation have no place even in the darkest places of the Christian imagination. By allowing Smyth to flee the country and by sending considerable sums of money to support him, parts of the evangelical establishment seem never to have distanced themselves from him and his ideas right up to the time of his death. We need to understand more fully what this long-term support of Smyth by prominent and wealthy evangelicals implies about their own involvement in this dark area of Christian history.

• The third area of action that is needed is for the Titus Trustees to accept some responsibility for the care and support of those who suffered so grievously as the consequence of the incompetence of their predecessors on the Iwerne Trust.  It has been noted that the Titus Trustees have control over considerable sums of money. They should be shamed into making a substantial contribution to the psychological welfare of Smyth’s victims. If they do not, their future work and the work of the Iwerne camps will be permanently tainted by their historic association with the activities of John Smyth. Is that what they really want to hand on to the next generation of their campers whom they hope to influence in the future?

Two years have passed since the Channel 4 programme and we are still waiting for some movement to take place.  We look to the Titus Trustee as inheritors of the Iwerne tradition or to the Church of England, some of whose members helped to promote Smyth and his dangerous ideology. If nothing is done, one wonders how peace can ever return to the Church.  There is still a bitter legacy to be addressed – a legacy involving brutal physical abuse, inflicted in the name of a corrupt theology.   We are still waiting for the process of healing to  begin.