Quite frequently in safeguarding contexts we hear the expression ‘vulnerable adults’ or ‘adults at risk’.  Without getting into detailed definitions of what these terms mean, we are referring to a group of people who, for various reasons, are in danger of different types of exploitation.  The expression ‘at risk’ is one that is not usually a self-description.  It is more likely to be used by someone in authority who wants to help and support someone in another group who may be in some sort of danger.  Our perspective on what it means to be at risk or vulnerable, comes normally from someone on the outside looking in.

This current blog post is written from the perspective and experience of an individual who readily accepts that he is part of the ‘at risk’ group. Robert, as we shall call him, knows that a lifetime of mental fragility, caused originally by a brain injury at the age of 11, has placed him with a constant need for help and support.  I am telling something of Robert’s story because it contains his alarming account of an encounter with a Christian congregation.  The attempts by a church to heal Robert of his mental distress have considerably added to his pain.  It is alarming to discover that apparently well-meaning folk are permitted to diagnose brain injury as demonic possession.  Society should surely offer some protection for vulnerable adults like Robert from utterly dangerous practices like these.  For me it is a privilege to be entrusted with Robert’s story. I ask the reader to enter imaginatively into Robert’s account as a way of gaining insight into the experience of the mentally impaired with their vulnerability.  Most of us would recognise the inappropriateness of what Robert had to endure as a recipient of Christian ministry.  That such things go on in in 2022 should be a cause of shame to all of us.  The ‘demonic abuse’ label for the mentally ill may not be mainstream Anglican thinking, but it is probably not hard to find similar combinations of bullying and abusive practices in a CofE context.  I tell Robert’s story as a way of offering a critique of a strand of teaching and theology. It threatens to severely damage members of vulnerable groups in our society and also bring discredit on the entire Church.  Finding one’s voice in any situation of abuse in the Church is hard.  The victims of abuse do not normally have the resources or stamina to fight their way to being heard by people of influence and authority in the Church.  The same predicament is doubly true for the mentally afflicted.  Allowing Robert, who has been through church-induced suffering, to find his voice, is something that Surviving Church is proud to do.

Before we get into Robert’s account, I should mention that I have received the CofE training offered to those who practise deliverance ministries and have acted as a spiritual deliverance adviser for two dioceses.   I am alert to the possible reality of demons, but also I am aware of how they seem more frequently to be created by an overheated and possibly disturbed exercise of the human imagination. 

Robert’s disastrous head injury at the age of 11, caused by a car accident, led to a later diagnosis of bipolar disorder.  This required frequent visits to mental hospitals from the age of 20.  For a time his life was marked by frequent episodes of self-harm, leaving him with scars all over the body.  A salient fact that Robert shared with me, relevant to his being able later to reach out to a retired clergyman, was that in his earlier years he had obtained an A level in religious studies.

In the late autumn of 2021 now aged 44, Robert was introduced by a friend to a Pentecostal Church near his home in the North-East.   After a lifetime of chronic depression and mental illness he was open to the possibility that a church might help in his desperate search for peace of mind.  Robert was sufficiently knowledgeable about the Bible to notice that the local pastor, Bill, was using Scripture arbitrarily as a way of backing up his personal theories.  Two themes seemed to dominate what Bill had to say.  The first was a strong emphasis on Bill’s ‘visions’ and the second was to point out the need to resist the ubiquitous presence of demons.  Unfortunately for Robert, the friend who had introduced him to the church told the pastor that he believed Robert to be possessed by a demon.  In an interesting turn of phrase, the friend described the situation as ‘fertile ground to reap a harvest’.  Bill then proceeded to exorcise Robert.  The deliverance prayer brought in a variety of phrases which must have been confusing to Robert.  The prayer mentioned ‘generational curses’ and ‘soul ties’ as well as ‘unholy oaths’ and witchcraft.  In short, through a fairly short prayer, Robert was being initiated into a paranoid universe.

After the prayer, two acolytes, who were present started to speak in tongues.   Bill then commanded the demon to name itself, but all Robert could do was to stare blankly at him.  Bill then declared that the demon had left but there were more demons to be cast out.   So the process was repeated week after week, the only difference being that Robert was sometimes responding to the prayers with an emotional outburst of tears.

It seems that Bill was new to performing exorcisms, but the level of drama created by Robert’s tears convinced him and other members of the congregation that this ministry was the new direction for the church.  By word of mouth, people started coming to be exorcised and the acolytes decided that they too had developed the power to remove demons.  Robert’s observation about the whole process was that it was a bit like a mesmerism show.  After a time of chanting Bill would consult a ‘demon manual’ before telling the person in front of him what demons were there.  Apparently one can consult a spirits list helpfully provided by Google.  All the attempts at removing the demons were accompanied by suitable shouting and screaming to fit into the prevailing atmosphere.

Robert’s concern is probably the same as my readers.  Is it ethical to take a group of highly vulnerable people, those with mental problems, the homeless, substance addicted, sexually abused etc and tell them that they have demons in them?  Who would be responsible if a person left such a service and threw themselves under a train?  Robert was also burdened or, should we say, controlled by being told the following.  His brain injury had been healed by prayer and the demons banished.  Nevertheless, the healing was provisional on his continuing to attend the church every week.

Further burdens were placed on Robert by the church.  His demons could have been passed on to previous girlfriends through the act of intercourse.  Also, a rape suffered by a previous girlfriend would have infected her with demons.  Her demons would have mixed with Robert’s demons.  Another abused girl was told that her demons could not depart unless she forgave her abuser.  Another man with mental health problems was told that his family had been cursed by witchcraft a hundred years earlier. 

In the middle of all this madness the two acolytes who had been present at the first exorcism and had decided that this was now their special calling to ‘practise’ exorcism and they wanted to use Robert as a guinea pig.  They admitted that they did not know anything about it but carried on anyway.  In one of these sessions, Robert had a laughing fit which led into a serious episode of self-harm with razor blades.  Up to that point Robert had been free of this form of behaviour for twenty years.

Robert shared with me in his email a series of other themes of Pentecostal teaching that were presented to him.  One of these mentioned the language of demonic strongholds.  Ephesians 6 with its militaristic language was constantly appealed to.  This chapter can be read as an instruction to Christians to see the whole Christian life as an endless battling with demons and Satan.  Much of the new teaching was being reinforced by an institution called the Northern School for Prophetic Ministry.  Here, for £350, members of the church could learn how to prophesy and cast out demons. It seems that Robert became a suitable ‘patient’ to practise on.  No thought seems to have been given to the ethical implications of using him in this way.

Various other bizarre items of teaching on demons and their activity were mentioned.  Many of them have become widespread in the States.  Expressions like ‘demonic portals’ and the Courts of Heaven find their place on videos freely available on Youtube.  My own tolerance for being up to date with this paranoid universe is probably limited, so I won’t weary my reader with sharing any more.  Robert in writing to me was no doubt processing all the dreadful things that had happened to him and said to him.  He was realising that he had found the means to escape from their grasp.  But that was not true for all the others who had fallen into the trap of believing that this church could rescue them from their vulnerabilities.  I finish with a plea from Robert in his own words.  It is a plea to me personally, but I read it as a plea to the wider church from a vulnerable victim who has fallen victim to unethical, possibly illegal, behaviour which somehow claims the name of Christian. The only way that such behaviour can be checked is by other Christians (like us) standing up and saying clearly: Not in our Name.

 I am writing this to you, because I believe what they are doing is morally wrong, in that they have no formal training in counselling. Yet they are telling vulnerable people that they are full of demons and they can cast them out. As I have previously stated they will character assassinate me, saying I’m paranoid, or alcohol-dependent (who isn’t after lock down?). But I give you a litmus test: ask them to swear on a Bible or on Jesus that what I have written is lies.

Few of us have lived through a moment in history that could truly be described as revolutionary.  The historians among us can point to certain pivotal episodes that powerfully changed for ever the experience of whole countries and the individuals within them.  Three political upheavals come to mind which have a clear claim to be called true revolutions.  In each case the populations are still experiencing the effect of what then took place.  These revolutions that come high on the seismic scale are, respectively, the American (1776), the French (1789) and the Russian (1917).  There have of course been numerous other lesser revolutions in Britain and elsewhere, but none come close to these three I have named. In each of them there was radical change – change that happened almost overnight.   

What are the features of a revolutionary event that make it significant and history-changing?  The word implies a turning upside down of the old order.  The old has passed away for ever, never to return. An entire population may be forced to accept a new reality about the way they are governed.  Resources of property and power may be reordered.  Sometimes the rich and powerful are deliberately persecuted, and an entire new class of people is created to manage the new system.  The only time in my life that I have witnessed, at first-hand, events which were thought at the time to be a revolution, are the political upheavals in Greece in 1967-8.  I watched the way that the traditional intelligentsia was shoved into the shadows (or prison) and a new bullying class of bureaucrats elevated to run the government and the police.  In short, officialdom became harsh and coercive.  Fear of strangers became the norm. The person you were speaking to might be an informer reporting to the State.  What I am briefly describing has been the norm for many unfortunate nations, and, tragically, is once again being reasserted in the occupied areas of Ukraine.  The deep irony of so many of these oppressive regimes is that they believe themselves to be pursuing commendable revolutionary aims.  In the case of Russia and the political oppression of parts of Ukraine today, the political justifications (removing Nazis) have turned out to be totally spurious. 

The word revolution is one that can also be applied to an event in any institution where dramatic irreversible changes take place.  Looking back over the past ten years in the CofE I detect three events that are revolutionary in the sense that they were unprecedented and at the same time irreversible.  To describe any event as revolutionary is of course a subjective assessment, but I would suggest that as the result of these three moments something really important has taken place.  The first pivotal moment for the CofE, and indeed for the whole of British society, was the revelation of the horrendous behaviour of Jimmy Savile in 2012.  I do not intend to dwell on this evil individual and his nefarious behaviour, but rather comment briefly on the seismic shift in attitudes which we witnessed throughout every institution.   After Savile, many abused individuals were able to come forward to disclose their stories and know that they would now likely be believed.  Many British institutions have had to face up to the presence of sexually abusive individuals within them.  The way that football, athletics, schools, and prisons were found to be infested with many abuse cases is an issue that we are still dealing with. The CofE, along with many other institutions, has been compelled to allocate considerable sums of money to provide training and expertise for both its employees and its members to deal with this massive problem.  Safeguarding for the vulnerable, however much we may critique its implementation, is something that is here to stay.  From a historical perspective, I see a direct link between Savile’s dreadful behaviour and the setting up of our NST in 2015.

Locating a second revolutionary moment in the CofE takes us away from the world of safeguarding to another theme often considered by this blog, the exercise of power in the Church by bishops.  It could be claimed that in our CofE, the power of the bishop to teach, admonish and discipline has been traditionally unchallenged.  In recent decades we have seen the growing influence of synods, but these have not claimed ownership of all manifestations of traditional episcopal power.  The power available to diocesan bishops remains considerable.  If a bishop decides to use his power arbitrarily, even tyrannically, there is nothing readily available in the system which has the right to challenge it. Only criminal activity or breaches of safeguarding rules are subject to sanctions exercised by other authorities.  Traditionally, the system has worked through the expedient of extremely careful vetting and formation for senior posts in the Church.

 The second revolution in the CofE took place in the Winchester Diocese in 2021 when a group of senior clergy expressed their intention to propose a vote of no confidence in their diocesan, Tim Dakin, at the Synod.  +Tim was not being accused of safeguarding or criminal offences but rather of presiding over a regime of bullying, fear and the destruction of morale in the diocese.  As far as I can tell, such a challenge against a bishop has never before been recorded in the CofE.  The fact that this threat ultimately led to the retirement of +Tim indicates that a powerful precedent has been set.  It is now possible for Synods to challenge the power of bishops when they are believed to be abusing this power.  Diocesan Synods would only ever rarely seek to propose such a vote, but the way that bishops exercise their power in the future must surely subtly change to take account of this event in 2021.  Another such challenge may well resurface at some future point in another diocese.  The genie is out of the bottle and cannot be put back.

The third revolution that has taken place in recent weeks is the extraordinary sight of a bishop seeking to control criticism of his actions by resorting to legal processes and the threat of a defamation suit.  Such an action has never, as far as I can gather, happened before in the Church.  I am course referring to the recent story of a CofE bishop publicly trying to shut down critical comments made on the Archbishop Cranmer blog.  The basic issue here is not who is right in the interpretation of the events under dispute.  The question that has to be faced is whether a bishop or, indeed, the wider CofE, stands to gain anything from an extraordinary and clunky demonstration of episcopal power.  Threatening anyone with legal action, before other methods of conciliation have been explored fully, does not make good publicity for the Church. Indeed, even the threat of such action may change the way that bishops are regarded in the future.  The public will be aware that such legal action costs money and institutions which spend money in this way rapidly undermine a willingness to provide voluntary donations in the future.  The law is a clumsy way of settling disputes at the best of times.  When legal processes are used by an organisation which purports to believe in reconciliation, love and goodwill, something looks out of kilter.  A bishop is known as the chief pastor in his/her diocese and any recourse to legal threats seems to be a denial of all the values implicit in a pastoral relationship.   My instinct tells me that this precedent of invoking the law to intimidate someone who is raising their voice to challenge power will not end well.  It will have a variety of unforeseen and possibly damaging consequences both locally and nationally.  I doubt if the bishop, using the sledgehammer of legal methods, has thought all these through. The political climate of the Anglican Church is already fractious over matters of sexuality and doctrine.   Opening fresh ‘fronts’ with critics in new areas is wasteful of energy and much needed resources.  The Diocesan Synod in this case will be concerned to see any of their charitable funds expended in this way.  There will, rightly, be calls for mediation and dialogue rather than the use of the blunt methods of a legal process.  The story, whatever its outcome, will be long remembered and the reputation of all bishops diminished in the eyes of many people.  The ordinary churchgoing population of the diocese will also have less incentive to attend, let alone give generously to their local churches. 

Three events or episodes- each may be seen as revolutionary in their implications for the life and functioning of the CofE.   Each episode was an unprecedented moment which has perhaps changed the history of the CofE for all time.   First, we are all living in a post-Savile world.  That horrendous episode forced everyone including members of churches to take the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable more seriously than before.  The enforced retirement of the Bishop of Winchester has changed the idea that bishops in the CofE are beyond criticism or accountability.  In the same way the use of legal threats against an individual for exploring what happened in a notorious episode of power abuse within the church, suggests that the role of bishop currently needs re-examination and re-discovery if the idea of episcopal oversight is to remain a viable and helpful one for the Church of the future.

Writing a recent blog, I found myself reflecting how we sometimes make decisions and take actions based on firm convictions that exist inside us. On other occasions we find ourselves thinking and behaving in ways that more reflect the values and attitudes of the people around us.  We could categorise these two modes as, respectively, individual and tribal behaviour.  At my boarding school in my teens, we were all required to join the Combined Cadet Force (CCF).  Most of us accepted this as part of the price of living in a post-war world where there was a vague possibility of a foreign army invading Britain.  Only one boy argued his way out of this obligation on the grounds of a convinced pacifism.  I was impressed with the fact that he argued his case in front of the headmaster and successfully convinced him of his personal convictions.  The idea of having a conviction which went right against the assumption of the crowd was then something new to me.  It was and is so much easier to go along with whatever everyone else is thinking or doing.  The voice of the crowd, or the tribe, is a powerful force and few of us will resist it unless there are exceptional circumstances.  The crowd mind is also a place of apparent strength.   To embrace it in religion or politics is also to feel safe and protected from the isolation and the sense of weakness that can come as the result of going it alone.

The ability to preserve a unique personality and individuality in the face of the tribal forces around is a huge challenge, especially for the young.  We are constantly being pulled in several directions simultaneously.  A lot of the energy we feel is coming from the groups around us, urging us to fit in.  In addition, another part of us is fully aware that we are unique.  We do have our own convictions as well as a functioning conscience.  Thus, we have an individual contribution to make either to the family or to the wider society.  Nevertheless, the constant pull towards conformity and practising other forms of group behaviour persists.  It is a balancing act and probably few of us get it right much of the time. Perhaps the most important task is for us to recognise that there is a struggle to be had in working out who we are individually and the temptation to go along with the easier option of tribal behaviour. Having some awareness of this struggle will perhaps prevent us ever going too far down the path of mindless conformity.  The place of balance is one which is worth searching for even if we do not always find it.

We often, in talking about balance between extremes, refer to the idea of a continuum.  This word evokes the picture of a measuring rod with people choosing which place to occupy along its length.  Some will cluster at one end, others in the middle, while others will find themselves at the far end.  Two examples of continuums will be familiar to all my readers.  The first is to be found in politics, where the language of left, right and centre is firmly embedded into our discourse.  We are also aware of the way that a quasi-political language exists to describe church practices.  We speak about extremes of conservative evangelical belief or high church practice as though people occupy a place somewhere on this scale.  Most politically active adults find themselves remaining fairly securely identified at one point on the political continuum and this may not change over a lifetime.  Others consciously move up or down this scale, reflecting changing convictions or different life experiences.  In a church context we might say of an individual who moves from a conservative stance to an open evangelical position that he/she has moved towards the centre.

Returning to the contrast we began with, the distinction between tribal and individual conscience-driven behaviour, I have come to see that both ways of functioning exist along continuums.  It is never a case that one sort of behaviour is right and the other wrong, it is always a question of balance.  To take the, person who acts out of his/her conviction or sense of independence, there is the distinct possibility that their individuality has been taken to an extreme.  We have a word to describe the extreme of individuality, and the word is narcissism.  When somebody acts out a personalised agenda with absolutely no sense of what others are thinking, that is not likely to result in acceptable behaviour.  The descriptions of narcissism, which include the ideas of entitlement, grandiosity and failure of empathy, all point to a crass insensitive individuality which is not acceptable.  In other words, the fact that an individual is not looking to the tribe for cues on how to behave does not make them an example of heroic and commendable independence.   Their behaviour can be harmful and destructive to others. 

If narcissistic individuality is at one end an extreme of poor behaviour, we can imagine that we might find at the other end an isolated sad individual who has withdrawn into a place of complete non-engagement with others.   This place of non-engagement is not to be judged on moral grounds, as the cause of such a stance may have much more to do with upbringing and poor nurture.   We mention it because, describing in brief these two ends of the individual continuum, we can be more aware of a central balanced point which is the optimum place to be.  I leave it to my readers to imagine what the ‘mean between extremes’, as Aristotle might have put it, looks like.  If we know we have to avoid the crass exploitative manipulations of the narcissist and the sad place occupied by the isolated individual, most of us will have some sense what the optimum place of individual functioning will look like.

The second continuum, where we need to find a place of balance, is the one where we recognise that our human functioning requires us to fit in with the tribe or crowd.  We recognise how this external force is exerting pressure on us.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  What is bad potentially is when we cannot ever see that this force is working on us.   At that moment we are a part of a tribe.  We need, for example, to have some understanding that the socialist ideas that we expound are linked to the social circles we move in.  To claim that our political convictions are uniquely worked out by our intellect and individual conscience is probably dishonest.  This is not wicked in any way, but it marks a failure of insight which may make us less empathetic to the position of others.  It would be unrealistic to suggest that what other people think or say has no bearing on our actions and thoughts.  Again, it is a question of balance.  The continuum for this crowd behaviour will have, as one extreme, the place where the individual is completely dominated by the group – the ‘we think’ brigade.  Nothing original is permitted inside our heads and every stance we take has to be in accordance with what the leader or group have decreed.  We see this type of behaviour in cults but also, sadly, in churches.  Some churches are quite good at destroying the individuality of their members to create a uniformity which is destructive of a balanced humanity.  I am not clear what the opposite extreme of this continuum looks like, but it might belong to the person who believes that they can live without community but in a proud self-sufficiency.  However we describe the two ends of the community/tribal spectrum, we know that there is a place of balance in the continuum where such things as mutuality, love and interdependence can flourish.  We need other people and other people need us.   Getting that particular balance right takes skill and experiment.  To use another word that has cropped up recently in these blogs, we need to be oscillating along the spectrum to find the right place to allow both our individual thinking and our social existence to flourish.

This reflection has attempted to explore something of the dilemmas of being human.  The word that we keep coming back to is the word balance.  Being human and Christian, we need to find a balance in our lives.  We need to avoid the extremes of self-inflation/narcissism and over exposure to the dehumanising of crowd/tribal behaviour.  Those who lead us will accomplish their responsibilities so much better if they are aware of these dynamics which seek to trap us in human conceit and self-inflation or, alternatively, destructive self-deprecation. 

My thoughts on balance within our lives, finding altruistic love for others rather than selfish exploitative behaviour, are naturally inspired by Christian ideals.  Fitting together these ideas about the place of balance and seeing how they are exemplified in the teaching of Jesus is still a work in progress.  Meanwhile I sense that we can see Jesus as one who well understood the competing pressures of individuality and belonging to groups. Sometimes that tension which he faced led to family fallings-out.  What was going on in Jesus’ mind when he uttered those memorable words in front of his mother and family?  ‘Who is my mother and who are my brothers?’ This same Jesus showed an acute sense of family when he uttered the words from the cross ‘Behold thy mother’ to the beloved disciple.  Jesus lived the same tension of living out a unique vocation with balancing a human need to belong.  All of us have in different ways to resolve this tension of individuality and belonging.  It is something that comes with fact of being human.  Awareness of the problem is a first step in finding a way forward that does justice to our well-being and flourishing as Christian men and women,

Up till now I have avoided writing anything about the Scottish Episcopal Church (SEC) in this blog.  I still have personal contacts with that Church having worked as a Rector in a congregation (charge) on the edge of Edinburgh for 7½ years.   In many ways these were the happiest years of my ministry. Having returned to England in retirement, I have wanted to retain the fantasy that things such as bullying and safeguarding problems did not happen in Scotland.  When a problem arose last year in the diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney, linked to possible power abuse, I hoped in vain that the issue would quickly go away.  I was keen to believe that the saga could be resolved in a way that would not disturb my idealised memories of the SEC.

On Saturday last, the 11th of June, the Scottish edition of The Times carried a story which brought up-to-date news of the ongoing saga of Bishop Anne Dyer, the SEC Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney. In summary, the diocese of Aberdeen has been troubled for some time by stories of alleged bullying and abuses of power by the bishop. Bishop Dyer, who had been Warden of Cranmer Hall Durham, was appointed Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney in 2018. The appointment had been complicated by the fact that the normal protocols for choosing a bishop by election had failed to produce an agreed candidate.  In such a situation the choice is left to the College of seven Scottish bishops. Up to this point no woman had ever been selected for the office of Bishop in the SEC and there were among the clergy of the diocese a number who objected to such an appointment. The problems that have arisen subsequently are apparently nothing to do with the gender of the bishop but with her management style. Scottish Episcopal dioceses are, by English standards, extremely small (Aberdeen has 48 churches and around 25 clergy).  Clergy and bishops meet up far more often would be the case in England. If there are any personal difficulties or clashes, they will become disruptive very quickly.

The immediate cause of a dysfunction in the diocese related to the state of disrepair at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Aberdeen. Without going into overmuch detail, the bishop decided that she would nominate another church in Aberdeen to be a pro-Cathedral, pending some long-term resolution of what should happen to the cathedral building. The whole question of how to merge clergy and congregations seems to have been poorly handled.  Great resentment was generated among various stakeholders, including the musicians at both churches. Bishop Dyer’s people skills seem not to have been of the highest and the whole confrontation became serious and very public.  One respected senior clergyman in the diocese had his licence removed by the bishop. When this crisis spilled over into the wider church, the College of Bishops asked Professor Iain Torrance to conduct an enquiry and make recommendations as to what should be done. Iain Torrance is a highly respected figure in church and Scottish circles and has acted as Moderator of the Church of Scotland.  The report, published in a digest form, seems thorough and professional. One comparison we might make with similar reports in England is that the whole exercise was completed in a few months and the SEC received Torrance’s services without charge.  In summary, Torrance concluded that the evidence pointed to the conclusion that Bishop Dyer should be urged to stand down because her position as bishop was ‘irrecoverable’. 

The College of Bishops now found itself in a dilemma. Should they accept this report and encourage Bishop Dyer to retire or should they ignore the report and seek some other way forward?   It seems that the bishops have placed the Torrance report into a pending file.  Earlier this year, the College asked a group of three mediators to try and solve the breakdown of communication between Bishop Dyer and some members of her diocese. Meanwhile the Bishop seems to be working, but the Torrance report hanging over her must lessen her authority.  The College of Bishops are in a difficult situation. If the mediation effort that they have set up fails, what other options of resolving this problem are left to them?  As in England, bishops are authorities to themselves and there is no other legal authority able to force Bishop Dyer to retire.  We need also to remember that it was difficult to find a suitable candidate for bishop last time.  Next time, after these ‘local difficulties’, it will be still harder to find an acceptable candidate. The College of Bishops relate to one another as equals.  No individual possesses the authority to tell one of their number what to do. Bishop Mark Strange of Moray, Ross and Caithness is the current Primus. His status is that of first among equals, primus inter pares. He does not have the role or authority of an Archbishop

The new information published by the Saturday Times adds another dimension to the story and puts further pressure on Bishop Dyer, and indeed on the College of Bishops. The reported story relates how a lawyer called Peter Murray working in a legal firm called Ledingham Chalmers, took on work for the bishop and the diocese.  The story reminds us of the way that sometimes bishops in England, under some sort of pressure or challenges to their authority resort to expensive legal options. The diocese of Aberdeen is, of course, tiny by English standards. Also with each charge responsible for paying and housing its clergy, the sums for which the diocese is responsible are probably small.  Without having any figures in front of me, I am guessing that the annual total budget for a diocese in Scotland would seldom exceed £250k.  In the years before Bishop Dyer’s appointment in 2018 in, the diocese typically spent £3k a year in legal fees. The Times story centres around the fact that, since Bishop Dyer’s appointment, the diocese of Aberdeen has spent £120k on lawyers at Ledingham Chalmers. Peter Murray, the lawyer named as receiving this largesse, is also a trustee of the diocese and a personal friend and supporter of Bishop.  It would appear reasonable to suppose that the vast increase of expenditure was directly connected to the litigious environment that Bishop Dyer’s management style has created.  There seem to have been no checks and balances to challenge the way that this money was being expended.  Readers of this blog will be familiar with the theme of charitable money being spent to preserve and protect the personal/professional interests of individual bishops and their circle.

In retelling this story about the SEC and the way that, once again, charitable money ends up in the pockets of well to do lawyers protecting institutional interests and reputations, one has a sense of sadness. Lawyers do have a part to play in church management and administration, but one weeps for any situation where churches or dioceses are paying out large sums to legal personnel who fail to observe the highest standards of ethical behaviour.  The problems in Aberdeen have now been compounded to a point where it is hard to see how this particular story will have a happy ending.  The College of Bishops have placed their trust in a mediation process which will now be more difficult to resolve in the light of these new revelations of financial mismanagement. The Scottish equivalent of the Charity Commission will no doubt be involved, and an investigation ordered.  Once again, we will have the unedifying spectacle of a report which will show how the charitable contributions of the faithful have been allowed to pass into the hands of lawyers without any obvious benefit for the public good.

I write this blog post with a sense of sadness and disappointment. Whenever a scandal, sexual or financial, breaks there is always a weakening of trust in the institution involved.  The Church of England has seen a steady loosening of trust towards its leaders over recent years. When trust is weakened in this way, the strength and integrity of the whole institution is lessened.  I wish I could see a positive outcome for the present SEC crisis. What we really require is some strong inspirational and  decisive leadership. This is also required for the Church of England.  It is currently hard to see where this will come from. It certainly is not much in evidence at the present time.

One of the features of the Christ Church Saga is that there is now far too much information for anyone but the most assiduous individual to process. There are literally thousands of online pages of facts, speculation, claim and counterclaim. Most people will end up with only a subjective impression of what has been going on in the College and Cathedral over the past four years. Even if they arrive at a conclusion about what they believe to be the truth, few would be able to marshal all the necessary facts that would allow them to argue confidently either for or against the Dean.    Ordering all the information in a way that will convince a third party of the stance we are taking is probably not possible for most of us.   Having said all that, I am and always have been a supporter of Dean Percy. This is a position I arrived at based on a knowledge of his character over some thirty years, but also backed up through my, no doubt incomplete, study of the available online information.  I know that by saying that I have to be extremely careful in how I present my supporting material.  First, I know that writing on the topic can bring threats of legal action by the teams of lawyers actively protecting the College and the Diocese of Oxford.  Secondly there is the question that I have already alluded to.  I recognise that a supportive position requires a fluency in all the facts surrounding the case and this I cannot claim to have.  Out of my study of all the massive amounts of material available, I find myself left with three outstanding questions.  If I were to be able to find the full answer to these questions, I believe I would be a long way towards having an insight into what is, for me, the most interesting part of the Percy saga – the motives and feelings of those who persecuted him over four years. Reducing the whole Percygate saga into a reflection on the motives of certain individuals caught up in a nightmarish event, is not meant to be an accusatory rant.  The story, however, lends itself to such speculation and questions.  Perhaps the best we can do is to arrive at a place of puzzlement over the behaviour of otherwise highly intelligent human beings.  I hope that, by pondering the questions I pose, my reader can perhaps be helped to have a new, more manageable, grasp of important parts of the story.  Asking pertinent questions, even when we cannot provide complete answers, is surely a valid way to penetrate deeper into the truth of what has been going on in Oxford over the past few years.

My concern in asking questions about Percygate is not to uncover new facts but to understand a little better the dynamics of the affair and how it was set in motion.  There are episodes within the saga that cry out for explanations at a number of levels.  Much of the time we do not have answers to these questions.  We have only our surmise and speculation. The asking of questions is still a useful thing to do as it helps us to understand better.  This first question I have centres around the original confrontation between the Dean and members of his Governing Body (GB) when a group led by the Christ Church Censors sought to remove him from his post for “immoral, scandalous or disgraceful conduct”.  In 2019, in the course of this dispute, the accusation was taken to a formal Tribunal.  Here a retired judge, Sir Andrew Smith, presided and heard 27 charges. . The hearing took place over 11 days in June and July 2019.  When the judgment was given in August, it resulted in a near total vindication of the Dean.  All the charges against him were overturned. My first question concerns the circulation of this Smith report.  All the members of the GB were technically party to the prosecution of the Dean, but the group of Censors and ex-Censors, overseeing this prosecution, decided that the report should not be read in its entirety by all the members.  The redacted version that they were allowed to read omitted mention of the misbehaviour of certain individuals and also left out an appendix 5.  Here Sir Andrew had spelt out the details of unpleasant, even vitriolic, e-mail exchanges between certain members of the GB about the Dean.  Members of the GB were explicitly forbidden to read the full unredacted version later forwarded to them by Jonathan Aitken.  They were instructed to return their copies unopened and unread. My first question is simply this. What were the grounds which led the committee of Censors and ex-Censors to believe that it was right or just to make this demand of the GB? In issuing such a prohibition, the Censors seemed to be treating the wider GB as children, children who could not be entrusted with sensitive information. Whatever the detailed answer to my question might be, it is clear that the Censors and ex-Censors, the dominant clique in the GB, wanted to ensure that they were in control of the flow of information within the College. This single episode in the whole saga reveals an aspect within the story that puts these Censors in an unfavourable light. Whenever important information is denied to those who have a legal right to see it, we are likely to suggest that there is here little regard for justice, transparency and proper process.  Evidently power games are being played out rather than the neutral pursuit of justice.

The next question I have to ask comes from a later stage in the whole process. It is at the point after the accusation of improper behaviour has been made against the Dean in October 2020 over what is commonly summarised as ‘Hairgate’.  The allegation against the Dean was responded to by both the Church and the College authorities. Because of the accusation, the Dean was required immediately again to cease his duties in the cathedral and College.  The Church process required the taking out of a CDM against the Dean.  As part of the procedure, an independent reviewer, Kate Wood, was brought in to make a factual report and also recommendations to the Bishop and the NST.  My second question does not focus on any of the interviews with the complainant or the Dean but on one particular aspect of the CDM process. A CDM requires that a risk assessment be drawn up.   This will set out the conditions under which an accused person should be managed, pending some kind of hearing.  Somebody – it has never been established who – produced a most extraordinary document which was meant to set out the risks posed by the Dean. The document has the hall marks of being an inhouse piece of work.  In this risk assessment, the writer appeared to believe that the Dean was a danger, even a potential sex predator, to every individual working in in the College. Overnight he was prevented from having any contact with a single person in the College on the grounds that he was a danger to them. My second question is not about the authorship of this extraordinary document. My question is simply this.  Who within Christ Church, the diocese of Oxford, the Bishop’s staff and the safeguarding team actually believed in the contents of this document and that it in any way reflected reality? It appears that this risk assessment was ‘approved’ by the entire diocesan staff, in spite of its murky origins.  It is hard to see how anyone close to Christ Church or the Diocese had any reason to suppose from the available information that the Dean was a danger to anyone. It has been pointed out that the Bishop had the authority to seek help in drawing up a risk assessment which would be uncontaminated by either the politics of the Cathedral or Christ Church.   Instead, the Bishop stood by this homemade document of doubtful provenance.   I am told that there are ten qualified people in the Oxford area able to do this work of risk assessment. As we all know, the subsequent judgment by Dame Sarah Asplin declared that the alleged offence, if it took place, was not overtly sexual and did not merit a Tribunal process.  Dean Percy had never had other accusations made against him of sexual misbehaviour. We are left unable to explain how a group of Church officials suddenly became caught up in an extraordinary group fantasy.  This postulated that there was among them a sexual predator of such rapacity that everyone in the College and Cathedral needed protection from him. The results of this calumny have been seriously harmful and far-reaching to the morale of the Cathedral and the whole diocese.

The final question is about the future. When, at some time in the future, the full story of the Great Persecution is told and the details of the motivations and the skulduggery uncovered, we might hope for the wounds to begin to heal.  In the meantime, we await the arrival of the forces of reason and justice, perhaps mediated by the Charity Commission.  Their verdict would do much to tidy up the terrible legacy of this affair.  One thing is certain is that the reputation of individuals in Christ Church and the Church of England has been badly damaged.  It is also apparent that some individuals have allegedly behaved in a truly wicked fashion, leading to a major scandal which will take decades to heal. My final question is this.   Is the Church of England prepared to use its considerable powers under the Clergy Disciplinary Measure to sanction and discipline its clerical members if they are shown to have been involved in gross misbehaviour towards the Dean?  Spite, malevolence, and jealousy all seem to play a part in the saga, alongside a kind of group insanity.  The Church has a duty, if it finds this kind of irrational bullying, to show its displeasure and demand sanctions from those found to be guilty. Some are also calling for an Archepiscopal Visitation to the whole Diocese of Oxford, like the one carried out for Chichester in 2011. The nature of the alleged misbehaviours may be different, but their effect, in terms of weakening the reputation of the entire Church of England, is comparable. If the Church at the highest level ignores what has happened in Oxford, that will be one more nail in the coffin for the reputation of the Church in the wider society.

For further fresh insights into the affair, please consult the Nineveh Website. https://nineveh.live/?page_id=75

        by Janet Fife

I arrived at my office in the church to find a cartoon taped to my door. It depicted a smoking church, with shaken and singed members of the congregation departing. One of them says to the minister on his way out, ‘Nice to hear a good old-fashioned sermon again, Rev.’  Someone had pencilled in underneath, ‘We’ll have the fire extinguishers ready!’ I can’t remember what text I’d been assigned to preach on that Sunday – I was still a curate – but clearly I’d gained a reputation for preaching some pretty judgmental sermons.

That was part of the tradition I’d grown up in, where preachers ‘dangled sinners over hell’, like the 18th C preacher Jonathan Edwards, or ‘challenged’ their hearers ‘to within an inch of their lives’. It was all done in love, of course:  people had to be ‘convicted of their sin’ before they would turn to God. So in all earnestness I would declare that ‘God is not impressed’ by this or that aspect of human behaviour.  I knew very definitely what was right and would please God, and what was wrong and would make God angry. Certainty is so reassuring.

It was at some point after that cartoon was left on my door that I sat in that same office preparing a sermon.  And an inner voice said to me, very clearly, ‘It isn’t your job to convince people that they’re sinners. That’s the job of the Holy Spirit.’ (See John 16:8.) I saw then that my role was not to convince (‘convict’, in evangelical parlance) people that they were sinners, but to attend to those who were already worried about their sin.  To those people I might minister forgiveness, healing, restoration. Or, as often happened, I might reassure them that they had done nothing wrong. I recall one woman, who came to see me who was tormented by guilt and could find no peace. Her offence? On her first ever visit to church she had taken communion, not knowing she ought to have been confirmed before taking part.

Many of us will, at one time or another, have taken part in a social media conversation among Christians where some of the participants refuse to accept that there is more than one valid point of view on a contentious topic. Not content with merely stating their own views, they imply that anyone holding a different opinion is wilfully disobedient to God. ‘The Bible clearly says, x, y, or z, and everyone who wants to obey God agrees with me.’ There is no recognition that faithful Christians might differ as to the interpretation of the Bible or the will of God; no nuance. If others in the discussion quote Bible verses that appear to contradict their stance, they ignore them or explain them away. If opposing arguments are backed up by citing Bible scholars, those authorities are dismissed as unsound or second rate. Nothing can shake their apparently impenetrable assurance that there is only one version of the truth, and it is theirs.

This is not a new phenomenon. St. Paul, writing to the Romans, said: ‘Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarrelling over disputable matters. One person’s faith allows them to eat anything, but another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. The one who eats everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does, for God has accepted them.  Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.’ (Rom. 14:1-4 NIV).

The question of whether or not to eat meat may not sound too serious to us, but to first-century Christians living in Gentile cities it posed a serious dilemma. Much of the meat sold in the market came from animals which had been sacrificed in a pagan temple. Therefore, the meat on a Christian’s plate might well have been sacrificed to an idol. To some, knowing the idols had no real existence, this didn’t pose much of an issue. Others felt strongly that it was a risk no Christian should take.  This might be that they believed the idols had demonic power, or because the believers had converted from the other religion and were afraid of being lured into slipping back, or for some other reason. For whatever reason, they contended that true Christians ought to make their devotion to Christ alone clear by abstaining from meat. Real Christians were veggies.

I was born in 1953, and in my lifetime the defining issues of ‘soundness’ for evangelicals have included the following:  not wearing make-up (for women); not having long hair or beards (for men); not dancing, drinking, smoking, playing cards, listening to rock music, or seeing films; the right beliefs about the Second Coming of Christ, the Tribulation, Rapture, and Millennium; predestination vs. free will; the authority and infallibility of Scripture; eschewing vestments, candles and incense in church; wearing a cross rather than a crucifix; opposing the ordination of women; and believing homosexuality to be sinful.

Some of these are still contentious issues, but the heat went out of others long ago. And while British evangelicals have never been much exercised over dispensationalism and the details of the Rapture, their American equivalents never had a problem with cosmetics. My mother, speaking to a church ladies’ group in the Chicago suburbs in the 1960s, recounted how shocked British evangelicals had been when the Billy Graham team arrived in England in 1956, and the wives were wearing make-up. Unfortunately, it turned out there were several of those same wives in her audience, and they were affronted. That was the last time my mother ever spoke in public.

Anglo-Catholics will have their own shibboleths, as will traditionalists. Observing Ascension Day on a Sunday; the position a priest takes when celebrating; whether ‘virtual’ Communion is valid: almost anything can be loaded with immense and eternal significance. I have known charismatics maintain that everything from paisley fabrics to Body Shop products are demonic and must be eschewed by truly devoted Christians.

Which all reminds me of the therapists’ axiom:  ‘The presenting problem is never the real problem.’ The real issue is not eating meat, the infallibility of Scripture, or LGBT people. The real issue is a deep, unspoken fear that God cannot possibly love us enough to accept us despite all our sins and mistakes. It’s a dread of what happens when we die. It’s a (probably unacknowledged) rage that has to find an  acceptable outlet when Christians are expected to instantly forgive and forget even the most terrible wrongs committed against them. Or it’s the preacher’s own guilt projected onto others, as with my abusive father or my colleague Geoff, who was outed by the News of the World as ‘the dirty dean of Salford’ after advertising ‘Happily married man seeks sex with no strings attached’.

It took me years, even after I stopped preaching judgment on people, to realise that the eagerness to do so sprang from my buried anger at my father and other abusers. I had grown up among evangelicals who believed that the ‘abundant life’ Christ brought meant we should always be smiling and full of joy. And two vicars had counselled me that I must forgive my father for the abuse; one even told me that if I was still angry after a single session of prayer I must be ‘demonised’. So what acceptable outlet could I find for my rage, other than to condemn those who could safely be regarded as sinners? One of my greatest regrets, looking back over my life, is the people I damaged by doing so.

I wonder if Paul had similar regrets. At any rate he, the ‘Pharisee of the ‘Pharisees’, the absolute stickler for the letter of the Jewish law, writes to the Romans that it is the punctilious Christians who have the weaker faith. This is of course the opposite  of what I was brought up to believe. It seems also to be the reverse of what many contemporary conservative evangelicals still believe.  The CEEC (Church of England Evangelical Council) has this week issued a video which includes the following statements:

‘If you and I disagree about what the Bible says is good, and what can receive the affirmation of God…we have a fundamental problem.’

‘We can’t agree to disagree on these foundational issues of sexuality and Christian living because Jesus says they’re issues of eternal significance.’

‘This particular issue goes to the heart of what we believe, not particularly because of what people do in their bedrooms, but because of what it says about God.’

The video is, as you will have guessed, about whether the Church of England should be accepting of same sex relationships: but over the years and the centuries the same things might have been said about many another issue which is now not an issue. The speakers will all have been absolutely sincere in their belief that LGBT+ is the most important and defining topic for the Church of our day, but it’s not clear to many of us that they are right. If Jesus said anything at all about homosexuality the gospel writers didn’t record it; and how can affirming gay Christians say anything bad about God?

However, I don’t intend to get into a discussion here about homosexuality; my theme is our tendency to judge each other about decisions which are really between the individual believer and God. We rightly condemn those activities which harm others:  slavery, theft, adultery, violence, sexual abuse, slander, and so on. We are right, too, to be truthful about corruption and injustice where we find it. But I now believe that we should be very slow to call sinful those activities that don’t harm anyone else. We don’t know what God is doing in someone else’s life, but we do know that it’s the Holy Spirit’s job to nudge them if what they are doing is displeasing to God. I end by parapharasing Paul’s wise advice to the Romans:

‘The one who is liberal must not treat with contempt the one who is conservative, and the one who is conservative must not judge the liberal, for God has accepted them.  Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.’