By Fiona Gardner

There is a new and fascinating biography out about Bishop Stephen Neill (1900-1984). ‘A Worldly Christian’ is a meticulously researched and referenced book by Dyron B. Daughrity, Professor of Religion at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, published this year by Lutterworth Press.

Daughrity describes Neill’s life as ‘a tumultuous one’; both his parents were missionaries and following his father’s ordination the large family moved frequently. Despite an unstable and nomadic childhood – the children were looked after ‘by a series of nannies and governesses’– Neill’s upbringing was ‘thoroughly evangelical: family prayers, Bible memorisation and recitation, unwavering faithfulness in attending church services.’ Eventually settled in Dean Close, an evangelical boarding school in Cheltenham, Neill found this ‘a consistent place to call home’ noting in his own autobiography his approval of the use of the cane which ‘certainly did me no harm’, a practice that Neill later adopted in his adult ministry. Clearly academically brilliant both at boarding school and then at Cambridge where he won numerous academic awards, Neill studied and ‘may have taken early refuge in a kind of lonely stoicism. Religion, as well as nature and circumstance, may have conspired to mold him this way … Perhaps a less austere religion would have given the church a servant less deeply damaged.’

For despite all the academic success Neill was troubled by long periods of mental and physical ill health – with insomnia, depression and temper outbursts plus exhaustion – he himself acknowledged: ‘My fierce temper, the outward expression of so many inward frustrations’. The issue of his repressed sexuality is discussed in the autobiography. Neill had a negative attitude towards women involved professionally in Christian work, and was fond of being with young men, but wrote that both homosexuality and masturbation ‘falls below the level of genuinely human activity’. His biographer comments, ‘the possibility that he was a closeted gay man should not be ruled out.’

Leaving an academic career Neill became a missionary in South India and spent over twenty years there eventually becoming Bishop of the Tinnevelly diocese in 1939. He moved into ecumenism in Geneva working for the World Council of Churches, later taking on a professorship in Hamburg, and then working in Nairobi. His last years were spent in Oxford. He wrote 65 books and numerous articles many of which are still enthusiastically read and cited, and he achieved international fame and esteem lecturing and evangelising around the world; and the book details all these successes.

Previous biographies have either chosen to not know about, ignored, or glossed over Neill’s destructive side, and it is to Daughrity’s credit that this is openly acknowledged and discussed. Neill was unable to be candid about certain chapters in his life; even when confronted with his abusive behaviour he interpreted the situation differently –placing the blame on events and refusing to accept any wrongdoing.

From his earliest years in India, Neill used the cane and later a knotted rope as a form of discipline: ‘he utilised it throughout his life when he thought someone needed to be corrected.’ He was seen as both devoted to ‘the betterment of the diocese’ and as ‘overly autocratic’. One priest ordained by Neill showed deep ambivalence, commenting on Neill’s generosity and concern with the poor, yet, ‘He was very strict in many ways. He was a disciplinarian, an autocrat, imperialistic. Highly intelligent, he used to think very little of other people’. At a time of the movement for Indian Nationalism, and the struggle for independence the known incidents that led to Neill’s resignation carry the added horror of the weight of colonial rule. Neill was later described as ‘a famous colonial missionary’, but in Africa in the early 1970s was judged as displaying ‘racism and arrogance’, with ‘a bullyish etiquette’ insensitive to the African way of doing things and ‘exploitative to the people around him.’

His modus operandi remained the same in all the documented and known incidents of abuse included in the biography, where young men would be asked to report their good and bad actions. Neill would ask if they were prepared for punishment, and once they agreed would take them into a room and beat them on their bare buttocks.

‘When they cried, Neill stopped. Neill did this all throughout his ministry, even as Bishop. Advice was given to him by his supervisors and friends, but he continued to do it. Neill would often beat young people, mainly teenagers. Normally he would beat people aged 10-25 years. Older ones who were close to him were also beaten… Many advised him to stop, but he could just not stop’.

The situation that forced Neill to resign the bishopric involved a local school teacher whose village then complained to the diocese with a number of influential figures supporting the movement to get rid of Neill. Charges of violent assault would have been brought against Neill in the Episcopal Court ‘citing a number of instances of violent assault of clergy, laymen and teachers’, so he was forced to resign despite a powerful campaign to keep him as Bishop.

Neill returned to England and in his own autobiography did not give the real reason for leaving India. He worked for a short time in the faculty of divinity in Cambridge. While researching the biography, Daughrity was contacted by the painter Patrick Hamilton who recounted Neill’s punishment for his personal failings. Hamilton wrote, ‘Certain things [Neill] did have affected my whole life and now, at the age of 83, I still find him lurking in the dark places of my mind. I believe I am the one who reported what was happening and was probably responsible for his immediate removal from Trinity in about 1947.’ A further incident was fully documented dating from Neill’s time in Nairobi in the early 1970s and finally reported to Anglican Church authorities in July 2020. The account includes the victim’s suspicion that although remaining fully clothed, Neill found the experience arousing. Importantly this victim was able to confront Neill some years later when he threatened to repeat the beating, and able to tell Neill, ‘how inappropriate it was to spank a grown man. Neill was flummoxed.’ Neill regularly visited and stayed at Yale University in the US. In 1979 an eyewitness account reported the spanking of two or three young men following a small group discussion of the Christian tradition of ‘beating the body’ as a spiritual discipline. The witness to the scene reported: ‘he combined a biblical teaching with a practice that gave him pleasure.’ One of the men reported the incident, and Neill was told not to have private meetings with students. Another documented abusive incident took place shortly before Neill died whilst a senior scholar at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. The victim was helping Neill preparing a book for publication when Neill asked the person to sit on his lap, and then discussed the need for punishment and began slapping them on the buttocks. Needless to say, this person avoided Neill as much as possible after the incident.  

Whilst Neill did consult a psychiatrist about depression, he was unable to seek treatment for his beating fetish or what his niece referred to as his ‘sado-masochism’; nor were these incidents seen as criminal – so he was never prosecuted. His status and reputation were such that whilst many senior church authorities knew about his actions including Archbishop Donald Coggan, Neill was never held to account. Indeed, when Richard Holloway disclosed the abuse in a book review of an earlier biography in 1991, Holloway was castigated by many for not focusing on Neill’s ‘fruitful life and ministry’ and ‘the brilliance of the man’. Inevitably though more victims of his perverse behaviour came forward in the 1990s as a result of the publicity. The account from the victim who disclosed in 2020 suggests that currently there is ‘a growing file on Stephen Neill’.

So, what to make of yet another sad account of abusive practices in high places? Canon Eric James who in his role as Chaplain of Trinity College, Cambridge, ‘came to know the tragic truth’ of Neill’s compulsive abusive behaviour called in 1991 for ‘psychosexual understanding’ and for members of the Church to ‘examine the psychosexual basis of much that passes for theological conviction.’ Thirty years later as the abusive so-called ‘spiritual practices’ of Peter Ball, John Smyth and Jonathan Fletcher are reluctantly dragged into the light we might wish for the same thing. It’s not just about understanding though, it is also about confronting and properly bringing to account all abuse, and offering realistic support and help to victims. There is a need for understanding how emotional deprivation and illiteracy may re-emerge in abusive behaviour and linked to these, why senior clerics find it hard to face up to the need for professional psychiatric or psychotherapeutic help. Why is mental health and sexual well-being never taken as seriously as reputation and status?

by Gilo

Some reflections by Gilo, co-editor of Letters to a Broken Church, which will be sent to both Archbishops for the members of Archbishops Council and also to the Church Commissioners.

Both the Interim Support Scheme (up and running) and the eventual Redress Scheme were agreed unanimously by Archbishops’ Council in Sept 2020. But it seems now that the Redress Scheme might not begin for at least another year. The delay is not as might be imagined entirely the work of Secretary General William Nye and his lawyers in the demesne of the Secretariat. It’s also, from what one can gather, the Church Commissioners closely guarding their assets and saying the funds are not for this purpose.

It is somewhat ironic that the two Archbishops both nominally sit as trustees of the Church Commissioners alongside four other bishops, two of whom are on the National Safeguarding Steering Group. But at least this gives survivors and our allies some room for moral leverage. Archbishop Welby is unlikely to welcome being held hostage by his machinery – on the one hand presented as supporting the call for the Redress Scheme and restorative justice, whilst at the same time having to contend with the powerful engine of the machine blocking it. That’s not a good look.

At the current moment the Interim Support Scheme (ISS) is funded by  Archbishops Council. I believe there are currently about 35 survivors being supported. The current monthly expenditure is likely to be in region of £60k plus additional capital expenditure. And there are perhaps over 10 current applications in process. Maybe closer to twenty. It’s hard to know when the Scheme might reach its first 100 applicants. Perhaps within the next four to six months. And the Scheme is likely to grow exponentially. It’s not clear how dioceses are making the information and access readily available to those in need. I hope none are blocking access to this vital service. Credit to the lead bishop, Jonathan Gibbs, for driving these schemes into existence. Constrained by structure and culture that desperately needs reform – he seems nevertheless determined to see restorative justice begin to take shape.

But the Interim Scheme is not the Redress Scheme. It’s important to maintain a clear distinction. It can be seen as the beginning of restorative justice as its focus is on rescuing people from further economic damage. But there is a way to go before the Redress Scheme begins. It should be seen as the sticking plaster, holding people towards the time when the Redress Scheme is ready. Civil claims will continue throughout all of this period. It’s important that they do. The Church’s insurer Ecclesiastical, who have played many unethical games, should not be let off the hook due to the Interim Support Scheme, and anyway the compensation paid by Ecclesiastical (derisory as it often is) should not prevent survivors from seeking support from the ISS where necessary.

I imagine the ISS Panel must find themselves treading an awkward line between the needs of survivors… and the all-seeing Nye and his lawyers. This cannot be easy. They can only make recommendations. We can only hope that few of those recommendations are being turned down. I believe the Panel and its secretary Tim Bonnett are doing the best they can to make sure people receive the support necessary at this stage. And I know the scheme has so far already saved lives. I suspect the Panel is having to push against the increasing limitations Mr Nye would seek to impose. It is disturbing that so much power lies within the hands of one figure who frankly needs to repent the reputational management circus he and Church House carried out in their handling of the Elliott Review. But that is for another day.

When the Interim Scheme started Church House lawyers sought to impose draconian and ugly Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) upon survivors involved in the scheme. But when a group of us told the Archbishops about this direct – they acted fast to get them removed.  Archbishop Welby was visibly angry – angry enough to get it actioned it within 48 hrs. We learnt several important things from this. The Archbishop hasn’t much of a clue what the operations of Church House legal department consist of, and how out of touch they might be with the Church’s thinking. But when the right hand knows what the left hand is up to – action can in fact be surprisingly rapid. When the Archbishops are motivated and working together – they can make stuff happen with astonishing urgency. Apologies were duly sent to those who had received these NDAs, and they were hurriedly removed presumably to a backdrop of red faces in Church House

At the current moment Archbishops Council is probably needing to budget £1m this year for the ISS. Easily within the capacity of their purse. It’s probable that they have set aside £5m for the scheme over the next few years. But the main holdings are under the keys of the Church Commissioners who have control over £9billion plus. They made a return of £500m this past year alone.

The Church are needing to find in the region of £1billion for the eventual Redress Scheme and if the Church Commissioners are dragging their heels, then it will not be surprising if daylight visits them and their blocking. The institutional hypocrisy is likely to be exposed. Both Archbishops and 4 other bishops sit on the CC trustees. Not a great look if they are publicly calling for the Redress Scheme while a corner of their own structure that has all the power and control is blocking it. It would look even odder if any of these bishops had major unaddressed scandals in their dioceses, that they and their diocesan structures had  done everything to push away.

The Church is likely to play out its ‘game of parts’ and pretend that pieces of the institution are separate from one another. It’s been doing this throughout decades of scandal – acting as forty+ autonomous structures when it suits, and then at other times, presenting itself as one identifiable body, the Church of England. However it plays it out, eventually the embarrassment catches up and does more damage.

So someone had better warn the Archbishops that this embarrassment could be better avoided. They closed down the NDAs on the ISS when we told them about this ugliness. So presumably they can action this and kick the Commissioners into touch, admittedly with some difficulty. But nevertheless it can be done. Especially now that we finally have two Archbishops who seem genuinely to like each other, work together well, and are keen that the new paradigm of culture change and restorative justice finally happens.

If there is a big internal passing the buck quarrel going on between the Commissioners and Archbishops Council – they might need to be honest and own this problem transparently. And allow any ensuing embarrassment to unblock the blockage. Embarrassment is usually the one thing this rickety structure responds to, and it would be far healthier at this stage if it were self-administered embarrassment.

Perhaps what may be required to help this move along might be a workshop with members of CC and Archbishops Council. A joint meeting of both members with a group of survivors at a two-day conference somewhere. With a commitment to learn direct about cost of impact in real lives. This was something two of us (Phil Johnson and I) led in a diocese in recent weeks – and it would be good to see this pattern recreated elsewhere with more stories, both men and womens’ represented. It is hugely costly work emotionally but it is not until the significant power brokers hear it for themselves and in the presence of notable allies within the structure, will they get it.

And if the two highest bodies of the Church refuse – then ask for reasons for the reluctance to be on the record so the Church can see that these bodies might be more intent on playing for PR than authentic commitment to real change and genuine justice.

Now the chances of such a workshop happening may seem as likely as Secretary General Nye turning up for work in a sombrero and calling for the introduction of continental shifts in Church House. But he knows they are badly on the back foot. They all know it. The structure is desperate to claw back moral ground. Their expensive reputation launderers and crisis managers (chiefly ‘Loofah’ Pendragon in London) have failed to scrub clean the stain of much corruption as well as multiple ongoing failures. The Church of England’s scar tissue will not begin to heal until a theological and cultural shift towards genuine and full ownership and repentance takes shape. This involves amongst many other things, a letting go of the harmful detergent offered by the likes of Pendragon which has often done more damage. The only workable medicine for the Church’s many self-inflicted wounds is the medicine of transparency – a willingness to be more transparent than transparent. Some senior figures have already made the clear shift into this new paradigm. Others have not.

There is a gulf between what bishops  officially say the Church is doing, and the backroom machinations of its power brokers and managers. It is this gulf that the lead bishops and Archbishops will need to bridge. And the best way forward might be to speak openly and transparently about the delay, who or what is causing it, and how they intend to shift this. As Martin Sewell writes on the latest Archbishop Cranmer blog:

“Question-and-Answer sessions at General Synod are frequently treated as a cat-and-mouse game by Church House, with the avoidance of giving a straight answer to an inconvenient question the preferred default option.”

There was a comment on the last blog post about what can happen when ordinary clergy ask difficult questions at a Diocesan Synod.   The particular Synod questioner, writing on this blog as ‘Margaret’, was describing the way that senior staff felt ‘uncomfortable’ because their decisions were being challenged.  This has caused me to reflect about the costs involved in speaking truth to power.  The writer then told us how her questions had led to a later awkward meeting with the Diocesan bishop.  At this meeting she was asked/told not to query such things as diocesan expenditure.  Arising out of this meeting, was the realisation that she was being cast in the role of ‘troublemaker’ by all the members of the Bishop’s senior staff.  Various hoped-for opportunities for ministerial development had then been closed to her.  Other training options and the possibility of a new post had also evaporated.  To describe the situation from another point of view, the power of patronage that had helped her up to a certain point was now being withdrawn.  When I use this word patronage in this context, I am not talking about those with the gift of presentation to a parish, I am referring more generally to those who have power within any hierarchical system to advance or hinder an individual’s career. Cutting off Margaret’s opportunities for extending her ministry was, to put it bluntly, the price that she had to pay for speaking her truth and prophesying to the system.  Those with the power, here the power of patronage, were wielding it to protect their power and their ‘right’ not to be made to feel uncomfortable in their administration of the Diocese.  

We have, of course, in Margaret’s account, only one side of the story.  I am, nevertheless, inclined to take her version seriously, especially as she mentions the earlier hints that she had been a valued member of the Diocese and once could look forward to new opportunities, even preferment.  We can imagine that, before her name became synonymous with ‘awkward’ and ‘nuisance’, the senior staff would normally have thought of her role in the Diocese with approval.  But now that she had upset the system by challenging power, her reputation had been allowed to plummet.  The issue for senior staff seemed to be, not whether she was right or wrong in her questioning. The issue was her audacity in questioning the senior office holders holding power.  It is hard to see that once the groupthink of the senior staff had come to their conclusion about Margaret’s behaviour, that there were any obvious ways to recover their favour.  Her final word on this dynamic was this: ‘Those of us who could be a voice of change, are being excluded by those who hold power’.

To be thought ill of by a single individual is not pleasant at the best of times.  When one’s reputation is trashed by a group, that is extremely difficult and hard to deal with.  We can imagine a situation where the reputation of one person is quickly decided upon within a group/committee, perhaps because of the bias and known dislike felt by one or two members.  This tendency for a group to listen to and base its opinion on unverified gossip, is what seems to have happened in the case of Father Philip Griffin.   This case will be remembered for a long time in the Church in England. It appears to be a classic example of what can happen when no individual in a working group wants to challenge the groupthink about an individual in a committee type setting.  In the Griffin case, group processes allowed a tragedy – a suicide- to take place.    It was not only the failures of protocol that here are shocking;  there is also a miasma of incompetence and prejudice all around the event.  Gossip and reputation shredding against those who did not meet with the approval of those in power in the Diocese of London, seem to be rampant in London safeguarding circles and no doubt elsewhere.   It never seemed to occur to those in charge how important it is always to disentangle innuendo from properly attested factual material.  Groupthink is a dangerous power dynamic at the best of times.  When it is weaponised and applied against individuals who are out of favour for any reason, it can be extremely dangerous and a likely cause of injustice or worse.  

Many people have been wondering over the past few months how the Church of England can carry on with so many crises and challenges to its integrity. There is surely a limit to the number of times it is realistic to say that ‘lessons will be learned’.  Some of the crises are indeed financial and practical – how do we pay the bills and find a way to keep churches open?  The greater crisis is the moral one. Does the Church speak to the nation of honesty, integrity and straightforward dealing? Alternatively, what are people seeing, when they look on? Is it just a relatively small privileged group clutching onto status and the remains of past historical glory? The report of the coroner in the Griffin case, Mary Hassall, contained one further shocking detail. It is one that reveals attitudes in the Church, which claim, as of right, privilege and status within society. The coroner was asked to avoid criticising clergy and other officials by name. This action suggested an institution in full panic mode. The Church seemed to be asking the coroner to cooperate in its projection of a manicured self-promotion. ‘We cannot let our shabby behaviour be seen by the wider public. Our reputation must at all costs be preserved even if we have presided over a terrible safeguarding failure’. The coroner also referred to 42 other clergy who have acquired tarnished reputations over the past twenty years.  We have at present no means of knowing whether any accusations against these clergy are based on solid evidence or are rooted in a mixture of gossip and innuendo. There must be an extraordinarily low level of morale in the Diocese of London at this moment. This probing of a senior management structure that tolerates sloppy oversight over its clergy and its own structures does not suggest a good setting in which to work.  The implications of this story will run and run. One thing that is quite clear is that the case for independent scrutiny of church structures in London is clearly strong.  Any independent person coming into committee settings where gossip and intrigue was shared, would surely blow a professional whistle to halt such nonsense. The question that has always to be asked is, what is the evidence? Who has made a complaint? When did the accusation first appear and who knew about it? The coroner has rightly criticised a complete failure to disentangle innuendo and gossip from properly established facts. As a final twist to the appalling suffering of Father Griffin, is the fact that the investigations against him, even if not part of a formal CDM process, here as elsewhere, were allowed to drag on interminably because no one seemed willing to make decisive decisions.

Returning to Margaret’s account discussed above, I found myself asking the question which might have occurred to my readers.  What would I do in her situation?  Would I ever challenge a diocese and its structures if I felt money was being misused or some personnel decisions were being made which appeared to be wrong? The answer is that I probably would never have done such things. I would probably be doing what most clergy do in such a situation.  That is to keep noses clean and continue their ministry without the risk of being considered a troublemaker. In other words, my critical faculties, when sitting on church committees, might have been subdued if I felt the powers of patronage present. I am sure that there are many in the Church who think like this: any thing not to damage one’s career and one’s peace of mind. In short, integrity and the exercise of the prophetic role will normally take second place to a quiet and safe life.

One of the interesting things about my retirement from full-time ministry has been the discovery of things to say about the Church.  These while still in active ministry, would never have been explored..  In reading Margaret’s account, I realise how much of what I have to say here is made possible by being in a situation of retirement.  I have reached the time of life, where from the perspective of Diocesan structures, I am completely invisible.  For reasons that I do not understand, my PTO application to replace the previous one, which expired in April 2019, has been lost in the system.  It is probably a combination of Covid, paperwork confusions and possibly administrative incompetence that has meant that I am still waiting. One good thing that has come out of this fallow time from normal retirement ministry, is the freedom to focus on the ‘different’ ministry that has come through writing this blog. I seem to be in touch with dozens of people up and down the country who are involved with (or victims of) safeguarding issues.  If my name were ever to come up at a local Bishop’s staff meeting, there would be a complete blank on all the faces present. I am unknown to all of them. While this invisibility would have mattered a great deal when I was at the height of my active ministry, it seems to be less important as I get older.  It certainly means that I have less to fear from the dreaded threat to the mental well-being of all clergy, called the CDM.

The apparent life-changing, career-changing effect of speaking prophetic truth to power that Margaret suffered in her diocese can be undertaken with a greater freedom by those of us who have, because of our retirement status, no current stake in the system. We have this freedom to say things that others cannot say because they are under the potentially arbitrary exercise of church power used against them.  It is important for others of us to use the power of the pen and the net to defend and support powerless victims of power abuse.  I salute the courage and bravery of dozens of individuals who suffer under the exercise of arbitrary power.  The freedom that my retirement status gives me means that I will always (strength permitting) be able and ready to fight on behalf of those who are bullied, exploited or treated badly by those with power in the Church.

Now is probably not the time to hold a lessons-learned enquiry into the Winchester affair. Clearly the retirement of Bishop Dakin in February 2022 is the outcome of detailed and painful negotiations, involving many stakeholders. It can hardly be said to be tidy for any of the parties.  +Dakin will leave behind various strands of his episcopal mission initiatives, for the time being, still intact.  It is, however, hard to see how these will flourish without the input of his leadership.  He has not, to judge from his published video statement, so far come to terms with the wreckage caused by his time in office.  He wants to depart with his head held high and so we are regaled with his version of what he has achieved in ten years as bishop.  Allowing him to save face in this way was, we suspect, the only way to way to achieve his cooperation.  The departure is going to be a very costly one for the Church nationally and locally.

The main question that occurs to many of us immediately is to ask: who will now want to be Bishop of Winchester and fill these particular shoes? Who will have the stamina to provide for the necessary pastoral healing for many traumatised clergy and laity who are being left behind in the diocese? Who will also have the decisive management skills to recover the financial equilibrium which the diocese needs to move into the future? Who will want the responsibility of deciding on redundancies that may now be necessary?  +Dakin appears to have created a number of new structures to further his priorities for mission.  These may no longer be required now.   We are asking a great deal of any likely successor.  Do all these qualities exist in a single person at present available?  In the secular world, one can imagine that in this situation an expensive team of consultants would be sent in to sort out the mess and then produce reports to set out possible ways forward.  That is not the way the Church normally works.  It is probably going to fall to a single episcopal figure, temporary or permanent, to gather up all the threads of the painful past and take the Diocese into the future.  Candidates without the qualities of the Archangel Gabriel need not apply!

At present there are, or are about to be, seven vacancies for diocesan bishops in England. This represents one sixth of the total of the House of Bishops.  This number of simultaneous vacancies is probably unprecedented at one moment of time.  In this blog post, I want to reflect on what we expect of our bishops in the Church of England. The first thing I need to mention is that the church does not provide any systematic training for the post. Some senior clergy are provided with elements of an MBA course but most of the episcopal skills are learned on the job.  Most bishops that are chosen probably have one or two qualities identified as making them ‘episcopabile’.  It is then hoped that, with support, other necessary skills will be picked up along the way.  The real problem for many bishops is that when they realise that they lack areas of skill needed for the episcopal task, their lives may acquire serious levels of stress.  They recognise that they cannot live up to the expectations put on them by others. 

Speaking very broadly, there are three main areas of responsibility for an Anglican Diocesan bishop.  Excellence in, or at least competence, is needed in all three if they are to achieve ‘success’ or job satisfaction.  The first gift is possibly the most commonly held by bishops, and it draws naturally on their years as parish priests. That is the pastoral gift and the skills acquired through developing its use. Congregations and clergy love it when a bishop takes the trouble to remember names and details of the personal life of the one being addressed. They also like a good listener, someone who seems to understand the various problems of church life. The pastor Bishop is going to be the one who, after his departure, is remembered with affection and gratitude.

The second area of competence much needed in a bishop is theological skills. We expect our bishops to be well educated and able to preach and teach well in a way that inspires.  In the ancient Church, the role of the bishop to be arbiter of doctrinal orthodoxy was considered important.  Today, we might require a bishop to rule on the limits of what is and what is not acceptable doctrine.  This episcopal role in speaking with authority on doctrinal matters is important, but seldom exercised.  Any reluctance by bishops to give theologically informed statements is a great loss in our present church climate.  In the absence of robust theological leadership from members of the House of Bishops, we look to other spokespeople to comment on the issues of the day with a theological perspective.  These theological articulations are not always successful but at least there are contemporary voices in the public square prepared to think theologically, even it is not often our church leaders.  One of the problems in the Winchester diocese is that there seemed to be, on the part of the Bishop, little experience or understanding of the broader traditions of Anglicanism.  A good grasp of church history and a firm respect for all the traditions of Anglicanism should also be something we can expect of all our bishops.  Any sense of having your version of Anglicanism devalued by a diocesan bishop will be a cause of stress and make for a difficult environment for the clergy to work in.

The third area of excellence required of every bishop is possibly the most difficult. It is the ability to manage, organise and supervise other people who themselves are doing a whole variety of complicated management tasks within a diocese. To take one area, the safeguarding arena, we find a maze of potential traps into which anyone in charge can easily fall. Safeguarding misjudgements and failures on the part of bishops are, it seems, extremely common. In some cases, we suspect that there has been a failure to be concerned with detail.  Another common failing is to allow the needs of the diocese or the safeguarding unit to take precedence over the individual.  Sometimes there is a failure to follow up what is going on, making the unwise assumption that everyone is on top of their tasks.  The Church has an extra problem in that it has tendency to hold on to employees well past their ‘sell-by date’ and is slow to move them on when they are clearly not performing.  There is a particular problem in redeploying the clergy themselves.  Bishops must find it stressful to know that clergyperson X is incompetent and even causing harm, but there is little that can be done practically. One of the major headaches of a future Bishop of Winchester is to know what to do with all the relatively new appointees of +Dakin. One of his controversial decisions was to take in-house responsibility for the training of ordinands. Apart from being an enormously expensive decision, this now leaves a cluster of, no doubt, well-qualified staff who may not be required in a streamlined future diocesan structure.  The mission ideas of +Dakin are also unlikely to coincide with the priorities of a future bishop.  Their value to the Diocese is questionable, particularly now that the programme leadership is being withdrawn through the resignation of the Bishop.

I do not think it is unfair to suggest that none of the bishops in the Church of England are completely competent in each of these three areas, managerial, pastoral and theological. In the secular world, as a matter of course, one would set up an academy to train candidates to achieve excellence or improvement in all these required skills. Such an academy for bishops does not, of course, exist and the lack of such an institution means that all the 42 diocesan bishops struggle on, trying to do their job in spite of serious gaps in the skills they need.  This sense of struggle, alongside actual incompetence, comes over in the one area of bishop’s work that I do hear a lot about: safeguarding.  To say that some dioceses are unable to deliver a professional and competent service in the area of safeguarding is an understatement.   In some places there seems to be near chaos.  This dysfunction is probably not always the bishop’s direct fault, but bishops still find that any blame which is embedded in the processes eventually ends up on their desk.  A recent story of poor and sloppy safeguarding practice resulted in a coroner, investigating the death of a priest Alan Griffin, writing a critical letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London.  This was an excoriating criticism of internal Anglican processes. Such cases will certainly add massively to episcopal stress. Many bishops might wish that the role was purely pastoral: the role they remember as parish priests. In practice their dealings with individuals, clergy and lay, are wrapped up with many other factors, involving legal, managerial and safeguarding issues.  Many bishops, I suspect, go to sleep at night without a sense of having been able to do anything really well. There are just too many pieces of unfinished business in their work with people and structures.  These lead to no tidy or complete outcomes.

A couple of years ago, three advertisements for suffragan bishops appeared at the same time in the Church Times. I then asked the question here on this blog, whoever would want to be a bishop? The same question has to be asked again, now that there are seven diocesan vacancies in the House of Bishops. All the compensatory perks of being a bishop – extra pay, secretarial backup, enhanced housing and increased social status – seem to pale into insignificance when laid alongside the appalling stress of the new responsibilities.  Little preparation exists within the current clerical training process.  Some people, no doubt, should be bishops.  These may be the same people who have a realistic understanding of themselves.  They may realise that their qualities and qualifications do not add up to being sufficient to ward off all the appalling potential stresses of high office. As Groucho Marx once said,  ‘i don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member’. It may be that the only people who are suitable for such high office, are those who are strongly resistant to achieving it. The ones who seek or allow themselves to be promoted to what is essentially such an impossible job are those who have, perhaps, already shown themselves disqualified from being considered.

The Church of England is in a muddle. It has managed to confuse many of its members and, indeed, some of its leaders about its vision for the future. Many people, including myself, have thought that the Church was about to embark on a new initiative to transform, or even replace, the entire parish system. Superficially, this was what two recent initiatives appeared to be saying to the Church. Helpfully, an article in Anglicans Ink has probed below the surface to discover that part of the current muddle is caused by unfortunate timing. Two distinct initiatives have been announced at approximately the same time.  In most people’s minds they have been understood to be the same.  It is small wonder that this has caused confusion.

Few people will have heard of the Church Planting initiative known as Myriad. It is operated by the Gregory Centre for Church Multiplication under its director John McGinley. John McGinley has the title of Development Enabler for the Archbishops College of Evangelists.  It was at a recent conference for Myriad that the famous, even notorious, comment about ‘key limiting factors’ was made in connection with its vision for church planting being undertaken by lay people. To quote: ‘lay-led churches release the church from key limiting factors. When you don’t need a building and a stipend and long costly college-based training for every leader of a church… then actually we can release new people to lead and new churches to form…… in church planting there are no passengers.’

It was this comment from John McGinley that caused a huge storm in the Church of England in the week leading up to General Synod. On this blog I discussed how the vision of 10,000 lay led congregations were going to face obvious problems in providing adequate safeguarding. There were many other objections to the ‘key limiting factors’ idea.  Many certainly resisted the idea that the professional status of the clergy was no longer required.  These arguments and objections have been fully aired elsewhere. To say that people were angry at this Myriad proposal is perhaps an understatement.

Most of us have never heard of the Gregory Centre and we are left wondering about this initiative called Myriad. It transpires that the Gregory Centre is an independent (meaning privately funded) organisation outside the Church of England.  Nevertheless, the Church does own and identify with many of the ideas that are put forward. It was founded and led by the Bishop of Islington, Rick Thorpe, who is the Church of England’s lead for Church Planting. Apparently, at the conference when Myriad was founded, there was an array of speakers and seminar leaders present from the Church of England.  These included the Archbishop of Canterbury and the then Archbishop of York. Leading seminars were the bishops of Lancaster, Horsham, Burnley Kensington and Dunwich. David Male, who is now the Director of Discipleship and Evangelism for the Church of England, based at Lambeth, was also a seminar leader at this conference.

Institutionally and ideologically, it is not surprising that some of the thinking and ideas emerging from the Gregory Centre have had an influence on the General Synod Paper 2223.  This was shared at Synod last weekend, and it outlined the Church’s vision and strategy for the future. But, to repeat, the two papers, Myriad and GS2223, were separately conceived initiatives.   Unfortunately for the Archbishop of York, who delivered the introduction to GS2223, it was hard to get Synod members to react to what he was introducing.  They were responding much of the time to the Myriad proposals which they had encountered for the first time in the Church Times.  The Archbishop’s words were taken up with trying to undo the misunderstandings caused by conflating both papers together. It is unfortunate that the number 10,000 also appeared twice in the GS document.  This made the possibility of confusing the listener highly likely.  The Archbishop was, in fact, speaking about a revitalised parish system within which new and inherited worshipping communities would flourish together. The paper noted that dioceses have already planned for 3500 new worshipping communities across the Church. The paper also looks for up to 3000 new churches across England to provide worshipping hubs for children and young people coming into being. The chief message was that old and new must be allowed to coexist with a degree of flexibility. Church planting initiatives are not prominent in GS2223 but it is easy to see how listeners thought they were listening to identical ideas in both papers.

Two separate presentations about the future of the church and the number 10,000 mentioned in both of them. It is not surprising that many people feel uncertain and unsettled by what the Church appears to have in store for them in the future. Even when it is explained to us that these are separate initiatives, we still have a sense of unease.  The same people seem to appear in both of these attempts to think about the future. Among them is David Male, the full-time paid employee of the Church of England and working from Lambeth. The new Bishop of Lambeth, Emma Ineson was a co-leader of the seminar on church planting when the 10,000 lay led churches idea was presented. What is her current role in the future planning vision for the Church of England?  We don’t know the answer to that question. But we do know that church planting ideas are being floated by the centre.  This will make many parochial clergy feel unsettled and insecure in their existing responsibilities. The question that many of them have is this:  how would they as a congregation cope if a well-funded HTB type church plant suddenly appeared their parish?  Are they supposed to celebrate the fact that a congregation overnight might cease to be financially viable because all the younger people have left to join this new initiative?

Against the background of these unfortunate confusions at the centre over recent initiatives, one dark area in the history of the church is being revisited in a Times story today (Thursday).  Some of the victims of the 9 o’clock Service (NOS) in Sheffield are bringing a claim against the Church for their abuse.  This compensation that has been promised by the Archbishop of Canterbury comes through a national redress scheme.  The Church at the centre is now being reminded, not only of the harm caused by a single maverick leader, but it faces serious questions about the appalling failures of oversight at the time.   Even during the less enlightened days of the 1990s, it was possible to see that the style of leadership exercised by Chris Brain was risky at best and catastrophic at worst. Since those days we have come to understand much more about narcissistic and toxic charismatic leadership styles.  Church leadership, and this is exemplified by Brain, is not always conducted benignly. In blog posts at various times, I have suggested that there is sometimes in churches a circle of narcissistic need between leaders and led which is toxic. To put it at its most simple, there are styles of leadership which allow a leader to be fed and nurtured narcissistically. He (normally a he) sets himself up with a vision, a grandiose plan which excites followers and makes him the centre of attention.  The adulation that is evoked in these followers taps into,and brings them into touch with a different set of needs, needs around being cared for and protected.  That the leader provides, often in a formulaic way. The psychoanalytic textbooks suggest that the narcissistic leader may be suffering from a deficit of parental attention, one to be assuaged by receiving adulation from others.  One can describe this dynamic exchange as the ideal narcissistic circle. The leader pays as much attention to the followers as is needed to keep them on board. Typically the leader will not get close to any but a chosen few. He needs distance or aloofness to give an aura of mystery to his persona. The followers, grateful for scraps of attention, will express their devotion and gratitude even for the smallest attention. It is a dynamic which appears to indicate vitality, enthusiasm and health in a church, but these churches are, in reality, far from flourishing.  Over a period, the narcissistic dynamics end up in breakdown.  The direction they are going in does not, in fact, resolve anything of the needs existing in leaders or led that need healing.  Narcissistic hunger for adulation is insatiable. Dependent people do not resolve their dependency needs when they are not encouraged to grow up.  In general, far too many churches keep their congregations in a permanent state of enforced infantilism.  They can grow up only when they leave.  The Church must recognise that it is often not helping people to find any sort of path to maturity; it is rather, the means to holding people in the place of immaturity.

The Church is in a muddle in more than one direction at present. It has allowed one institution on the fringe of its work to confuse General Synod with its talk of 10,000 lay led communities. It has also opened itself to further misunderstandings by its historic failure to understand the terrifying consequences of the NOS.  We have not learned  in the way that the damage, the fallout from that disaster has never been successfully assimilated in the understanding of the Church. The good ideas that are contained in the Archbishop of York’s vision and strategy paper need to be understood on their own merits and not in the context of a church planting proposal.  We also need to take a further calm look at the discussion on church planting by the Myriad organisation. My only criticism of church planting is not in the idea itself. My criticism is that we are still not good at knowing when it is dangerous to leave new initiatives unsupervised.  We still lack the proper tools of evaluation to know when such ideas are wholesome and when they are dangerous and unsafe.   NOS was a church plant but also without doubt a cult. No cult experts have ever, as far as  I know been brought in to produce a proper ‘lessons learned review’ of this dangerous frontier between church and cult   If we have not learned the lessons of NOS, such things will happen again,   Will we be ready to move forward with a new generation of church planting in the name of the Church, when we seem to have learned so little from what went disastrously wrong a generation ago?

An area of church life that is difficult to discuss without raising passions, is the topic of social class.  For many parish selection committees, there is a real dilemma which the rest of us can only imagine as we are excluded from their deliberations.  To put it at it simplest, what do you do when faced with a candidate that is a social ‘fit’ and another that is more interesting but who would find it harder to resonate with the social and political attitudes of a congregation?  There is no answer to this question, but I raise the dilemma as a background to what else I have to say connected with a safeguarding story in the Church today.

A clergyman unknown to me, had successfully served in an urban parish, having taken his considerable academic and training talents into a post where they were appreciated.  Eventually he was offered a new post.   The new congregation he was to serve were, however, among the social elite of the county.  Their politics were on the far right and considerable but subtle pressure was put on the priest to conform, at least outwardly.  At first he resisted, but gradually he found it easier to conform to the politics and conservative Christian outlook of the congregation’s older more established members.  His original mild leftie political stance softened so that it gradually started to embrace the right-wing attitudes of the congregation.  Changing his philosophical attitudes was one thing but the congregation expected him to support their campaigns for the legality of fox hunting and their resistance to low-cost housing in the area.  This changing of our priest’s political outlook might still not have been too serious, but my friend, watching his career, felt he was seeing something more serious, the corruption of his core personality.

Somewhere, In changing parishes and adopting an overall right-wing approach to life and society, our priest also acquired a new bullying hectoring style of personality.  He had always had the intellectual strength and power to get the better verbally of anyone who opposed him.  The only thing was that, in the urban parish, it had seemed inappropriate and wrong to turn on anyone with both barrels.  In his new wealthy environment, he found himself involved in more and more situations of conflict and these he fought with intellectual and political skill.  At one level my friend was noticing that the priest had become a bully and those who were not among the parish elite, were beginning to be afraid of him.   Some of the causes he fought were to do with the parish.  Others were local causes.   All the battles he was fighting brought him notoriety, press attention and co-enthusiasts, but few friends.   What my friend was noticing was a flexing of intellectual and personal power by the priest, but a decline in the levels of compassion and empathy that had been apparent before.  His intellect and his fierce verbal power were now to be avoided at all costs.  Professional standards were not being broken by his outspokenness in fighting his political and personal battles.  But, overall, he was causing damage to himself and to the reputation of the Church.

Somehow, I found myself indirectly caught up in the drama.  My link was to one of the priest’s victims.  He reached out to me after being in a difficult experience of bullying at the priest’s hands.  For a very brief moment, I considered reaching out to speak to the priest, but I quickly changed my mind.  First, I was not part of the dispute and that any word from me would, in all likelihood, make things worse.  Second, I recognised that the exercise of raw primal power that seemed now to be in evidence, would possibly have a bad unsettling effect on me.  Anger expressed against another individual, even a party not involved in a dispute, is never neutral in tone.  It can feel like a physical assault.  It is one part of the armoury used by the powerful against the weak.  How many abused victims of sexual violence have also suffered in their exposure to the primal verbal power of the bully?  This sort of power exercise is never encountered as dialogue.  It always feels like a frontal assault because the person with the damaging bullying personality appears to have lost the art of soft conciliatory words.

What I was learning from this experience, here heavily anonymised, is that those guilty of one kind of power abuse are likely also skilled at a whole range of other interpersonal power techniques, These, in various ways, in varying degrees, can hold victims in a state of abject fear.  If we take the range of abuse survivors, those whose representatives we meet on this blog, we are talking about tens of thousands of individuals.  Most, however, remain invisible.  They seldom get to see their cause aired by assessors or panels, because they believe their cases will be considered trivial when compared with the serious abuse cases.  These more subtle forms of abuse normally come to light because victims experience them alongside the serious forms of behaviours that require proper scrutiny.  Abuse survivors will also have experienced many other forms of abuse, including anger, shunning and shaming.  Their abuser will likely have honed their power skills in several directions.  Most victims of multiple power assaults, including, I suspect, myself in such a situation, will not hang around to wait for the open resolution of the wrong committed against them.  They will retreat into a safe space to lick their wounds and do everything possible to avoid further pain.  The survivors we know about, among them contributors to this blog, are among the brave souls who refuse to take the ‘easy’ path.  They stand up to be counted and take the cause of justice into the public arena.  This is by no means an easy place to occupy as institutional opponents can still aim a multitude of power weapons against them.  Abuse is, as we are constantly repeating, a multi-dimensional reality.   Those who perpetrate it are proficient at using a variety of weapons against those who challenge their power.

Since starting this blog almost eight years ago, I have probably managed to upset a few individuals along the way.  This upset has only resulted in one actual legal threat of slander.  A slight rewriting resolved the issue.   I have thus not had to suffer the sense of powerlessness or shock that follows the experience of being under a power attack arising out of the anger or aggression of another person.  But I realised, in my recent discussion about the clergyman moving to a new position that I, like most others, have little protection to fend off the consequences of serious verbal abuse.    Being shouted at, trolled or generally verbally abused is a deeply unsettling experience, even if you are innocent and the attacks are entirely misplaced or misdirected.

As a final thought on this subject of bullying or verbal abuse, I also came to one further insight.  Fending off such attacks can be achieved with the help of friends, supporters and maybe, in some cases, a friendly lawyer, but the experience is never pleasant.  When I encounter, even in my imagination, primal anger in another person I am facing up to something deeply disturbing.   Sometimes I even feel it is energised by something evil in a theological sense.  I do not claim to be able to justify such a claim, but I just get the impression that our exercise of power, both good and bad, has always a spiritual agenda or dimension.  People are built up or sometimes harmed spiritually and in other ways by the way we use our verbal power.   To misquote the passage from Exodus when Moses encountered God in the Burning Bush.  ‘When you use words with others, take off your shoes for the place where you are standing is holy ground.’

 Desmond Tutu : If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. 

I hope that most of my readers can hold to the belief that, even when they do not agree with my ideas and perspectives, I always attempt to be fair-minded.  This expression means that I try to look at the perspective of anyone who takes an opposing point of view to mine.  There are, of course, some situations and causes about which I cannot even pretend to be even-handed.   I mention, for example, the political and religious utterances of ex-President Trump.  My words on that subject will, no doubt, drip with strongly disapproving comment, alongside a bafflement that so many Americans are caught up in a cult around this man.  Somehow, they have allowed themselves to see Trump, even now, as some kind of answer to their country’s problems.

There is another topical issue in the Church where I find it impossible, even in my imagination, to be sympathetic to one side of an argument. The topic I am thinking of is the cruel persecution of Martyn Percy.  I have for a long time been supportive of Percy at Christ Church. I must admit that part of my bias in favour of his cause, has been based on ties of old friendship which go back some thirty years.  Over the past couple of years, when his story has been a topic for consideration by this blog, I have been wondering if anyone will come along with tangible evidence of serious misconduct.  Is there some hidden story that would justify the extraordinary harassment he has had to endure?  There have been hints and rumours put about by his opponents that he is some kind of sex pest.  Others suggest that there is a further narrative that has not yet been revealed.   I am reminded, in these hints, of the defenders of Trump who keep promising to deliver decisive evidence that the American 2020 election was rigged.  The protestations of Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and others never translate into hard evidence.  We are left to conclude that all such protestations are rhetorical devices.  The evidence never exists in reality but the effect of uttering such claims is sufficient to sow uncertainty in the minds of hearers.  We can suggest that something similar is happening when members of the Cathedral congregation are assured of the wickedness of their Dean, even though the evidence and nature of his felonies are never shared or revealed.

As part of my concern for this case, I have scrutinised the Internet looking for any people outside the Christ Church network who have been convinced of Percy’s guilt.  Is there, in other words, anyone in Oxford who, having heard the claims of the Sub-Dean, the Chaplain, Canon Graham Ward and other Ch Ch malcontents, genuinely believes these suggestions of serious misconduct to be true?  Does anyone really believe that the strictures of the inhibition which severely checks Percy’s movements around the college are a necessary safeguarding tool?  Even those individuals who dislike Percy because of his past stand in the Philip North/Sheffield affair, do not claim that what he did or did not do then justifies the present bullying and institutional violence.  

When a well-informed but anonymous voice appeared in my blog comments section, appearing to support the opponents of Percy, I took an immediate interest, thinking that these arguments might take the discussion to a new level.  An initial problem for my task of editing, was the absence of a name and a strongly abrasive tone taken against other commentators. These comments also suggested a high degree of access to inside College information.  I suggested to the anonymous person that aggressive comments could only be tolerated, if they were accompanied with a name.  The individual withdrew speedily, and so I knew that the comments and arguments were not sufficiently rooted in an unbiassed attempt to establish truth, to stand this kind of exposure.  The individual turned out to be a close personal friend of one of the key Christ Church plotters. Thus the suggestion that the contributions were neutral were shown to be false. 

I mention this anecdote to indicate that genuine neutrality in the Percy affair is probably impossible to find.   The reason for this is perhaps to be found in the quote from Desmond Tutu at the start.  On the one side there are a group of malcontent dons who have persuaded themselves of a series of claims about their Dean which seem to have absolutely no basis in fact.  Obviously, we have to suggest reasons for such loathing.   Here we must rely on surmise and speculation. The real reasons lie somewhere in the murky hinterland when professional jealousies, snobbery and sheer academic vindictiveness take root and flourish.   Were I to interview one known enemy of the Dean, the one who leaked appalling salacious material about him to the Daily Mail, I would find myself dealing with a mind that seems to be sick, obsessed and packed tight with resentment.  The story that was then told has never been confirmed and certainly the account was never followed up anywhere by other evidence or testimony.   It all seemed to start and finish inside the pornographic imagination of one solitary individual.  He was bent on the purpose of removing the Dean, even if it meant lying with all the resources of his imagination.

The stance I have been taking in the Percy affair has been fully, I believe, vindicated by the writing and legal brilliance of Martin Sewell.  He has been setting out clearly the legal aspects of the Percy’s case over on Archbishop Cranmer’s blog.  https://archbishopcranmer.com/institutional-bullying-in-the-church-of-england/  He presents in a forensic way an outline of all the evidence that has been mounted against Percy over several years.  One by one, we see how the legal arguments of his persecutors were demolished by senior independent legal examiners who came to adjudicate on the various claims against Percy.  Every time an individual with the status of a High Court judge examined the evidence, the case against Percy evaporated.  Please read this decisive document.  I defy anyone who reads Sewell’s article as a neutral person to remain in any doubt that that Percy is an innocent party and deserving of support from his colleagues and overseers.  The essay is especially critical of the Bishop of Oxford.  He had every opportunity to establish what was going on at the beginning of the process.  He chose rather to align himself with the accusers that we may describe as a mob.  These are they who seek to undermine the Dean by every means possible.  If any of my readers believes themselves to be among the likely extinct band of neutral observers of the case, please write to me and explain how they remain unconvinced by Sewell’s arguments.

I am writing this piece in the shadow of a forthcoming General Synod.  Martin Sewell is a well-known defender of the victims of power games of all kinds in the Church, from the falsely accused to victims of sexual violence.  His essay is compelling and powerful.  Please, Synod members, if any of you read this, listen to him if he has the chance to speak, and remember that the failure of justice in the Church is like a cancer that will possibly destroy the whole institution if it is not checked and brought under control.  If Martyn Percy is defeated by the malicious lying behaviour on the part of some senior clergy and dons, what hope have the rest of us of presenting ourselves to the world as people of integrity and honesty?  

Over the past few days there has been a flurry of discussion and debate about one of the proposals in a Vision and Strategy document to be discussed at General Synod next week-end.  One of the ideas to come forward is the idea that the Church should release the local leadership of the Church into the hands of lay people and thus bring into being some 10,000 new churches. These would meet in homes, halls, schools or wherever it was locally convenient. The implication is that trained clergy and expensive buildings are no longer fit for purpose in the task of presenting the gospel to the people of this country.  We are reminded of the expanding church in Africa, which less and less looks to clergy and buildings for its life and vitality. As one of the expensively trained clergy, I am expected to feel great indignation about this proposal. Is it meant to undermine the value of five years study and training?  This particular debate has been aired on other blogs, so I will hold back my feelings on this aspect of the discussion.

My primary concern at the possible arrival of 10,000 informal lay led congregations is not apparently the one felt by most of my fellow clergy.  Rather I am appalled at the implications in quite a different area, the area of safeguarding. How is the Church of England ever to guarantee the safety of people gathering to worship and to learn under the direction and guidance of untrained individuals?  These will be people who may have nothing more than a cursory examination of their suitability by someone outside. I have, in this blog, often expressed concern at the problem of keeping people safe. When I speak about that, I am thinking of the dangers of potentially toxic power structures that can develop in small groups over a period of time. If these groups or congregations are not supervised, the dangers to the individuals within them is considerable.

Many congregations envisaged in the Vision and Strategy document will be between 30 and 50 in number. Such a group would engender in the members, no doubt, a strong sense of belonging. I can imagine that to be a member of such a group at its beginning would be an exhilarating experience, and there will be a sense of being pioneers, re-envisioning and remaking the Church for the future. Problems arise when such groups have been in existence for some time. New dynamics then come into play after the honeymoon period.   It is these that I want to hint at in my personal critique of the 10,000 new churches idea.

A few months ago, I presented some of the ideas of Wilfred Bion regarding the dynamics of groups. He was basing his observations on work that was done with groups of shellshocked soldiers in the Second World War. His way of helping them was to get them to cooperate with one another to accomplish tasks in groups, normally between 12 and 20. He noticed, over a period of time, that there were certain patterns of behaviour in the group process.  These occurred in every case. Within the group there was always a tendency to cast around to find a leader so that everybody else could sit back and let things happen. Bion called this dynamic a dependency basic assumption. A second basic assumption that constantly appeared, was seen in the way that the group was always on the lookout to identify some other group to oppose, attack or be against.   When we describe these inevitable basic assumptions operating in groups of all sizes, we are not describing some kind of moral failing at work. What we are describing are unconscious but very powerful group dynamics which erupt into the open and interfere with the possibility of doing constructive group work.  These destructive processes can only be neutralised when they are interpreted – i.e. identified and named by a wise leader.

Alongside these unconscious processes, which seem to occur in almost every group setting, are the dynamics of narcissistic behaviour. Because every group of any size demands to be led, it is likely that in some cases there will be some leaders who emerge who use their position for the gratification of narcissistic needs.  This is already true of some clergy.  Putting it another way, leadership roles will always attract individuals who enjoy a position of power and self-inflation.  Power will then be exercised regardless of whether it serves the benefit of the group or not. I have had cause to draw the attention of my readers many times to this unhealthy dynamic.  It is a constant danger in church settings at many levels.  It is not just the clergy who are guilty of such behaviour; any official who takes some kind of control in a church structure may use it to feed a deep need for self-importance.

When we look at the many skills required of a professionally trained clergy, we might hope to find an ability to identify and challenge examples of Bion’s basic assumptions at work in their congregations.  It will be the task of a professional leader, constantly to remind people that maturity can only be found in taking responsibilities for learning, growing and questioning. It will also be a clergy role to challenge the flock over their tendency to have an inherent dislike of outsiders or those who are different. Far too many churches or groups seem to get much of their energy, not from what they do or believe, but from what they do not do.  These negative power dynamics of hating enemies, when not checked, can cause havoc in communities and congregations. The professionalism of the clergy can, we hope, keep these dangerous power dynamics in check.

Professional leadership is so much more than expertise in biblical exegesis and some understanding of church history. My fear is that small groups without access to experience and training in their leaders, may breed various forms of irrationality.  In some cases, this situation will be downright dangerous. Can we really afford to set up thousands of new congregations with no ability to check whether the dynamics are actually safe for those who are part of them?

I want to finish my piece by reminding the reader of a particular case study that preoccupied this blog in 2015. In that year a detailed report appeared describing the testimony of dozens of former members of the church known as Peniel in Brentwood Essex. I refer any who are interested in this story to go back to the blog posts for the end of 2015. Like many independent charismatic churches, Peniel began as a house group with around eight people. Over a period of around three years, the group grew into a full-size congregation. Two things happened in that time, making the place thoroughly toxic both for leader and led. What seems to have happened is that those who were part of the original founding group became inextricably bound up with the unhealthy narcissistic needs of its leader, Michael Reid. On his part he was able to give them a sense of self-worth by convincing them that they were pioneers in a special work of God. Meanwhile his own sense of self-esteem was being ramped up by adulation, the huge salary that he paid himself and the real estate empire that was gradually emerging. His behaviour, as recounted to the investigator, John Langlois, was appalling.  It did not happen overnight, but by the time that church had become a full-blown cult, everyone had forgotten what a church was for. All they knew was the present reality of Peniel.  This was to be bound to a tyrannical terrifying individual in the person of Reid.  This was the price of their ‘salvation’.  His ultimate interest was in feeding his insatiable need for power, wealth and even sexual gratification.

Few of the 10,000 new churches proposed will become mini Peniels. Some, sadly, will. There is at present just too little understanding of the dynamics of narcissistic process in the churches at present to give one confidence that untrained leaders will rise to that task of discernment and ensuring safety for all.  If the leadership of local churches ceases to be a professional responsibility, the dangers of relapsing into crude primitive power games is considerable. Who will be able to provide the safeguarding protection that is needed to allow these groups to work safely? It simply does not exist at present.   The Church might easily become a place where people come to see themselves in considerable danger.  The Church of England cannot afford, after all its earlier safeguarding catastrophes, to take such an enormous risk with its members and its reputation.