Almost fifty years ago I was privileged to begin a self-funded research project for a B.Litt back at my old college in Oxford.  This was to be on a theme within Orthodox theology.  One of my pressing preoccupations in the months leading up to my arrival, was the task of amassing sufficient funds to be able to pay all the bills needed for two years of study.  The whole economic environment in the UK at that time was extremely fragile and inflation was approaching 25%.  The college authorities were anxiously seeking assurance that I would not end up destitute in the middle of my studies.  One lifesaver was the offer of a part-time curacy at a parish in Oxford.  This promised to pay me just enough to pay for a room in a student house run by an ecumenical charity. 

My tasks at the parish in Oxford were not onerous and there were, apart from the Vicar, other ‘extras’ helping out at the church.  One was an extremely distinguished chaplain from Balliol College.  He appeared during the vacations, and his sermons were a privilege to listen to.  There were also two public-school chaplains in their twenties who worked most of the week at their school.  I did not get to know either of them particularly well, but I noted that they were potentially high-flyers.  Both these chaplains did in fact go on to achieve promotions within the public/private school chaplaincy network and beyond. I followed their progress with interest as both of them also rose eventually to the rank of bishop in the Church of England.  Each of them also became involved a number of serious safeguarding episodes.  Tragically, in one case, the involvement was accompanied by considerable notoriety and personal shame. The one caught up in shameful events was Bishop Peter Hullah.  I have here no new information to add to what has already been reported about him recently in both the religious and secular press. What follows is a response to the reported events and some reflection on the way that stories such as these can have a terrible impact on the entire institution.  The reverberations of the story cannot be quickly dismissed or left behind.  In summary, a story of this kind is never just about a single offender; every member of the institution who knows about a shameful episode is affected by its lasting poison in some way.  Disgrace and shame involving those at the top of an institution damage trust right through the fabric of the structure.  To some extent the safeguarding failure of a single individual creates an increased burden for all, especially in the way it increases institutional suspicion.  Meanwhile, we learn that Bishop Peter Hullah has received a lifetime ban from exercising any form of priestly ministry.

In the past I have discussed the case of Bishop Peter Ball and the effect his dramatic fall from grace had on me personally back in the 1990s.  I have reflected long and hard about the appalling institutional damage that such erring leaders can cause.  The cynical outsider believes, with some understandable justification, that these positions of status and power are sought by those who want to exploit privilege for their own benefit.  The old honourable idea that you accept rank or promotion in order to be able to serve more people, is, in these cases, completely turned upside down.  The disgrace that has come to Hullah for the admitted sexual misbehaviour towards young women, is just one part of his story.  There is another widely known strand to the narrative.  This has been around in the public domain for some time and was revealed as evidence in the IICSA hearings.   Hullah, then a headmaster at Chetham Music School in Manchester, failed to respond appropriately in the case of a member of staff caught by him abusing a pupil. The more recently revealed information is about Hullah’s earlier abusive behaviour in the 80s and 90s. it is not unreasonable for us to suggest that his own status as an abuser may have been a major contributing factor for his failure to deal correctly with the flagrant abuse which took place in front of him later.  His earlier offending would have made him potentially open to blackmail, thus completely undermining his power and effectiveness to maintain discipline across a school. ‘Do not report me otherwise details of your past abusing behaviour may come to light’.  Institutional blackmail of this kind may be far more common than we imagine.

Some individuals in positions of authority in the Church have likely been compromised in some way by making bad decisions in the past.  When others get to hear about these, it is possible that such knowledge is used as a lever to exert pressure on the one with the official responsibility.  If this is ever the case, it is easy to see how the process of justice in the Church’s disciplinary system will be seriously disrupted and undermined. This distinct possibility may perhaps account for some recent puzzling failures within the system.  When a bishop allows a priest with a serious CDM outstanding to take up a job in a new diocese, questions are likely to be asked.  Sending a ‘safe to receive’ letter to another diocese when a candidate is, to all appearances, not safe, raises a red flag over the sending bishop.  When such things happen, confidence in the system is undermined.   The cynic in each of us asks what does he/she, the bishop or archbishop, have to hide?  One speculates about the possibility of secrets from the past weighing down the man or woman holding ecclesiastical power.   There must always be among the leadership of the Church and its public relations department, a constant fear that something new may spill out into the public domain.  Should they suppress the information, as they appear to have done in the Bishop Hullah case for several months, or should they make a frank open disclosure of what has taken place with the hope that the watching public will be understanding?  Secrecy is a very hard thing to sustain.  When it is locked up in an institution, it has the tendency to ferment and swell before the inevitable explosion.  The Church of England seems to be holding many secrets at present in the safeguarding world. Each of these has the potential to do enormous further harm to the Church. 

My memory of two bright talented young clergymen in their twenties, beginning a journey towards preferment in the Church of England, is not an account opening up new detail about past scandal. Nothing then indicated that Hullah was to be a danger to women in the future. These later reports of sexual misbehaviour on the part of a bishop are still painful and wounding matters. Other stories about similar conduct from every level of the Church continue to disturb us.  To be fair to the bishops and those who have to manage these cases, it must be a cause of justified resentment that they have to spend so much time seeking to manage these narratives.  There is absolutely no glory or prestige in being the one who has the difficult task of containing scandal, so it does the least damage to the Church. Safeguarding failures such as these will feed into an overall narrative of sleaze and corruption.  The reputation of an institution is something that can take decades to build up but a short time to destroy.  We can argue about whether the polls connected with public attitudes to the institutional church are deserved or not. Justified or not, they present a powerful statement of current attitudes.  If the public believe, for example, that bishops should leave the House of Lords, this suggests that the public has a declining respect for their office.  Institutions, particularly those espousing Christian ideals and values, need everyone involved to be people of complete integrity.  There must be nothing about church people at any level that compromises their ability to ‘act justly’.  Hullah’s reported offences will have damaged and devastated many others beyond the circle of the directly abused.  How this behaviour reached out to demoralise and shock whole groups of people, staff, parents and students can only be known by those directly involved.   Hullah’s betrayal of trust is serious.  We have to remember that the Church had entrusted him the ‘care of souls’ for a large area of central southern England.  The darkness of his betrayal cannot be removed quickly.  Only time will tell how other scandals in Chichester, London and Oxford will affect the long-term safety felt among the laity and the clergy working there.  If the ordinary clergy ever feel that the failings of their senior clergy, especially bishops, are not faced up to and dealt with properly, this will have a corrosive effect on their sense of well-being.  It will take far more than platitudinous expressions of regret to extinguish the sense of institutional failure and even corruption within the system.

I end this blog post with this rather sad reflection.  At the beginning of my ministry some fifty years ago it was normal for me to look up to more experienced and senior clergy with a combination of respect and admiration.  The recent years of observing at close hand the less salubrious aspects of power and privilege in the Church, have left me with far less of that automatic deference and respect.  Each public disgrace of a church leader does affect what I feel about the Church.  I want to honour the ‘bishops and curates and all congregations committed to their charge.’  Any betrayal weakens what I desperately want to feel.

It is one of the features of the internet age that we are frequently invited to join customer surveys online.  Typically, we are asked to express our satisfaction, or lack of it, for goods or services that we have received.  Our satisfaction is to be rated on a scale of one to five or one to ten.  This scale idea, rating something according to its intensity or power, has another name, a continuum.  At any one moment we might judge ourselves high or low on a particular continuum scale when trying to assess internal sensations like our happiness, satisfaction or pain.  The continuum concept in general is a useful one because it enables one person to indicate to another something of the intensity of their feelings.  This, of course, may oscillate over a period of time. 

The continuum idea, or the concept of a sliding scale of intensity or involvement, is a helpful notion when we examine a pair of words common in safeguarding vocabulary, survivor and victim.  It has become common practice to place these two words together, connecting them with a forward slash symbol.   This is because each of the words is related to the other in meaning.  Each word represents a response to an experience of abuse.  One might be considered to be finding a place of resilience after a deeply traumatising event.  The victim on the other hand is having to endure a possibly greater level of ongoing pain which may be combined with a profound sense of powerlessness.  An abused individual may, of course, internalise aspects of the survivor and the victim experience simultaneously.  The survivor will however probably see him/herself at a different place along the continuum scale to the one who finds him/herself closer to the status of a victim.  The continuum idea is of course far from a perfect analogy.  It will be pointed out that survivor and victim are by no means at a fixed point on the scale.  Their place on our notional scale will be constantly shifting.  It will change according to a variety of factors, both internal and external.  There is always the hope that the support offered to the abused will help to move them to the position of survivor.  Beyond that we long for the survivor to find eventually a place of complete healing. 

We need to examine each of our two words in turn.  As we have already suggested, the abused individuals who lie neatly at either end of victim/survivor continuum will probably be a minority.  The rest, perhaps the majority, lie somewhere near the middle of the continuum in a constant state of oscillation.  They will have mixture of needs, some relating to their survivor identity and others to their victim status.  It is, however, helpful to set out a range of helpful responses to abused individuals in accordance with their proximity to the poles at each end of the continuum.  Let us first consider the likely needs of the individual who occupies a place which identifies them as a victim.  The word implies that the pain of their abuse is still raw and largely unprocessed.  The very core of self-identity has been assailed; their peace of mind and self-determination may have been thoroughly undermined.  If we were to summarise the likely needs of someone who self-describes as a victim, we would probably focus on their practical and therapeutic needs.  Their practical needs will relate to disturbed relationships, employment and housing needs, as well as money problems.  For help with those practical needs, the victim may need the support of a mentor or advocate.  In addition, there will be an urgent need for a range of psychotherapeutic skills that may be on offer.  As I have said elsewhere, the skills needed to help an individual abused in a religious context are rarely fully understood by psychotherapeutic professionals.  The abused will also find it difficult or impossible to accept help from representatives of the organisation which in some way enabled the abuse.  Bishops and clergy are seen as representing the institution that abused the victim and the attempts to reach out to these victims are often pushed away with anger and hostility.  Engaging with an abused victim who has been traumatised and damaged psychologically at a number of levels may be a demanding task.

The word survivor is used when we detect that a victim has moved on from the first stage of raw vulnerability and is beginning, with the help of others, to rebuild and heal.  To use the word survivor is not implying that the individual is morally or physically superior to the victim.  Rather we are encountering someone who is at a different stage along the continuum in their healing journey away from abuse.  There is one serious problem with this journey analogy.  Those who set out on a path of healing may at any point be suddenly jerked back along the path to a previous stage.  This may happen because of a triggering event which causes the body-memory of the abusive event to be re-activated in the survivor.  Another way in which a survivor re-enters the status of victim, is as the result of the crass and insensitive responses of those in authority.  These can sometimes be described as re-abuse. There is thus no steady or invariable path from to victim to survivor, only a series of moves in the right direction punctuated by periodic setbacks from time to time.

The individual who counts him/herself as a survivor may have had as torrid a time in dealing with the abuse as the victim. However, factors such as time and competent therapy have allowed him/her to move to a stronger more resilient place.  The individuals who write to me as the editor of this blog tend to be from the survivor population.  They are still vulnerable but have found the strength which allows them to use their voice to reach out to supporters.  Their needs are distinctive.  They are no longer constantly at the point of desperate vulnerability and pain.  The pain and the brokenness may be still alive and present inside them, but they seem to have reached a point where they can also look at what has happened to them and feel something other than the original pain and numbness.  Above all many feel anger.   This anger is normally focused and clear-sighted.  It recognises that abuse has taken place and that the perpetrator will have likely been responsible for abusing others.  The anger is thus often the anger of an activist and campaigner. Many survivors are ready to work hard to make sure that their suffering does not go any further.  The survivor is therefore often like a political activist.  He/she has a determination to make sure that what they have suffered has, ultimately, some meaning and can be used in some way to help others.

In thinking further about this idea of the survivor sometimes taking on the role of activist, even campaigner, there is another passion often at work.  This passion is the desire to see truth and justice firmly placed on the agenda of the institution which in some way enabled the abuse.  The word truth implies that there is a deep desire to know exactly what happened and who else may have been involved.  The survivor knows that every abusive event is part of a wider whole.  Their individual story fits into a broader narrative with many actors.  As I have said on this blog, for every individual case of abuse there are those who knew at the time that something was not right.  They hid from any kind of action which would have involved awkward questions or the disturbance of the status-quo.   Then there were others who were friends of the perpetrator but, for reasons of loyalty, did or said nothing.  A further group are those who were told at some later date about the abuse but responded with no desire to know anything more and may have tried to close the disclosure down.   Finally, there are the authorities in the church who had the responsibility for learning from the event.  This ability to engage successfully in a ‘lessons learned’ process has, as we all know, a very chequered history.  All too often the instinct of leaders is the protection of the institution at all costs and thus they are blinded to the needs of the hopeful survivor.

Survivors, through their frequent experiences of acting as passionate spokespeople, have a distinct set of needs.  They are often found ‘difficult’ because they have the habit of asking awkward questions of those who occupy positions of leadership.  The difficulty that leaders have in responding to survivors’ groups is that they, the leaders, are deeply committed to the protection of the reputation of the Church.  A leader inevitably will also be solicitous for the assets of the organisation.  The passion and activism of some survivors towards finding justice and redress for themselves and other survivors is a threat to both.  If the abused tell too much of their truth, the outside public may come to see the leadership in an unfavourable light.  Sources of income and other forms of support may start to dry up.  One of the extraordinary features of recent church scandals is that even if it becomes abundantly obvious that Leader A or Leader B has failed in terms of competence or truthfulness, they are never required to resign or even retire.  This institutional refusal by church leaders ever to own up to serious failings does not allow the Church to move on beyond the scandals in a healthy way. This means that many bad situations are left unresolved.  Like rotting meat that is not disposed of hygienically, the problems of denial, avoidance and unaccountability remain within the structure and are a permanent threat to the well-being of those on the recovery journey.  Thus, the health of the wider church is badly compromised.

Survivors and victims, in spite of setbacks, travel hopefully along a path which they trust will enable them to recover fully from their past abuse.  Both these categories of the abused are on a journey which, all too often is not completed. Those of us who belong to the band of supporters look on and note the enormous efforts being made by the Church to inhibit future cases of abuse.  The record of really meeting past survivors’ and victims’ needs is, by contrast, at best patchy.  Those who have been abused do have serious needs.  We long to see understanding and compassion on the part of the Church and its leaders for these individuals, alongside the sort of real relevant help so that they find the healing they require and deserve.

Discussion is enabled for this post

by Martin Sewell

I recently reflected upon the implications of the Charity Commission investigation into the conduct of the Christ Church Trustees and the Official Warning that now sits embarrassingly against the charity’s name on the Commission’s website. I now set out the case for a proper inquiry into the actions of cathedral clergy, Diocese and Church institutions in this case.

Within this context, it is unavoidable that reference be made to the “vestry event” accuser; that is regrettable but sadly, the case cannot be analysed in her complete absence. I shall refer to her as little as possible, for this is not about her: her complaint was accepted and officially addressed albeit not to her satisfaction. In stark contrast, Dr Percy’s complaints about faulty and corrupt processes, bias and misconduct by individuals and Church bodies alike are currently being blocked by an institution that pretends to believe in “ transparency and accountability “ but demonstrably does not. Many many survivors and bullied clergy have encountered the same issues, and some have recently shared their stories with the Charity Commission which can increasingly see that this high profile case is indicative of a persistent deeper structural disease.

The President of Tribunals made certain findings and observations which could have reset negotiations for the Dean to depart his post early, however the College and Diocese perversely refused to accept those findings. The bullying continued and to this we now turn.

The College malcontents had seen the vestry event as a golden opportunity to renew their efforts to eject the Dean by returning to the safeguarding theme and weaving a deceitful narrative of extreme risk out of very little material. The Sladen Review confirms that they were determined to use  any pretext at unconstrained cost, whether proportionate and  justified or not, to achieve their goal. They were not spending their own money.

The evidence of institutional bullying gathered pace. Ignoring alternative dispute resolution options which might have spared all parties much anguish, they ploughed on. This is what bullies do, they take control of events and manipulate for their own purposes.

The problem confronting the malcontents and their allies was the accuser’s status. In one sense it was truthful that she was “ a student studying at Christ Church” but she was not in fact a member of Oxford University; she was a student of Christchurch New Zealand University. This appears to have been potentially problematic for, although the College asserts that they are committed to “protecting their students and members of Staff”, not all University procedures applied to a “non-student “ and for whatever reason, technical or otherwise, the accuser never took recourse to the University “anti harassment” processes.  Dr Percy’s problems, of course had begun when he urged the powerful ex-Censors to revise all such procedures, which they had resisted.

Accordingly the malcontents turned to the Church to help deliver the final blow; clergy agreed . Whether this was entirely knowingly or as “useful idiots” would be one of the issues to be clarified by a full independent inquiry.  This, the Church leadership currently resolutely and irrationally opposes.

One should not forget that this was all happening at the height of the “Me too” movement. The College malcontents no doubt hoped  to capitalise upon this, not least in the hope that further allegations would be forthcoming either from his time at Christ Church or his lengthy prior involvement in education. They were to be deeply disappointed, for nothing emerged

This may be an appropriate point to address the evolution of the narrative with clarity remembering that the event had resulted in a single denied allegation of brief duration. The President of Tribunal’s decision highlighted a) no sexual element b) no serious misconduct c) no distress  asserted at the time. This was all knowable from the outset.

Cathedral Canons Ward and Peers had taken up the challenge and they, not the accuser, filed a CDM complaint after running it through Church safeguarding procedures in questionable fashion.  Canon Ward had been a leading figure at every stage of the ejection project with 32 prior rejected allegations. He was not a fit and proper person to have been given conduct of such a matter as complainant, given his immediate past history of animus against the Dean. The Bishop must have known his hostility and agenda. Nevertheless the alleged “safeguarding” allegation was processed by the Diocese and the Bishop within 24 hours. Whether this was lack of competence, inconsistency or worse is what an inquiry would need to investigate.

Insufficient care seems to have been taken in assessing the case on a number of levels. The accuser did not fit obviously within the parameters of CofE safeguarding. The accuser was not a minor, neither did she have the slightest vulnerability, indeed  as she has vociferously and properly asserted, she was fully competent adult with no vulnerabilities. She has complained that her agency has been removed; she is right – by the malcontents, their accomplices Peers and Ward, and thereafter the Church institutions. Of course her complaint  needed investigating but not under these provisions. Proper process matters and if it is credibly alleged to have been misapplied, that needs investigating.

Meanwhile a message was sent throughout the College Cathedral and School that essential precautions had to be put in place; the terms of them would have needed little adjustment had the Taxi cab rapist taken up resident on Tom Quad. These restrictions were extreme, abusive, bullying, and – dare one say it – “scandalous, immoral, and disgraceful”. Gardeners could only dig the flower beds in pairs lest the Dean set upon them! ( I kid you not)

These measures  were founded upon the infamous “ dodgy risk assessments” drawn by Ward Peers and possibly others. It was an inexpert, unregulated process which was questionable on a host of levels not least that it purported to pray in aid the endorsement of the Independent Investigator, former Lambeth Palace Safeguarding Advisor Kate Wood.

When it was publicly objected that Ms Wood did not feature on the Diocesan approved list for such work ( neither did either Canon ) she publicly distanced herself from them completely She told the Church Times that she had repeatedly asked to be extricated from association with the process. Sadly, she has been reticent about explaining more. She had properly stated in her report to the College that “this not a risk assessment”; she specifically recommended that a proper assessment could be commissioned under the Safeguarding and Clergy Discipline Regulations 2016.  The Bishop and College refused and neither have explained why.

 It gets worse; why did the Bishop not use one of the 10 approved Diocesan safeguarding experts? He needs to be vigorously pressed on why he neglected to apply proper process.  Was the malcontent Ward with 31 failed allegations to his credit, really the best person to assess the risks allegedly posed by the Dean out of these facts? You cannot duck that question though the Bishop continues to try. Frankly, it  looks biased at the very least and increasingly that he became complicit in the bullying. If there is a proper explanation an independent reviewer needs to hear and assess it. It would not not take long.

Even an assessment by Diocesan approved experts would not have properly addressed the core point in issue.

The false narrative runs as follows. “The Dean did it; the accuser alone is entitled to decide if it constitutes sexual and serious misconduct; we can extrapolate from this that he posed a total generic unspecified risk to all and sundry regardless of age sex  etc . We know better than the President of Tribunals; and we are fair. This is not bullying and no external inquiry into the  procedural  handling of the case is justified.”

This is detached from proportionality, and ordinary legal standards which have evolved through thousands of cases, decades of increasing expertise, and in full compliance with the Human Rights Act principle of the right to a fair trial.

So, I turn to to the  key question – did the Dean have a propensity to act in a way which, might disqualify him from office? The expertise to answer such a question does not lie within the skill set of  ex-social workers or  police, and certainly not with amateur Cathedral clergy; the best discipline to assist here is that of a Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist  – ask any specialist safeguarding lawyer – oh wait, the Church refuses to employ any!

 Every day of the week, such experts are routinely submitting such evaluations to assist Courts when they consider whether children who have been found to have suffered or be, likely to suffer significant harm should be returned to parents under suspicion of serious abuse.  There are hundreds of such cases each year.  The paths to these experts’ doors are well trodden for those who know the way.

You can commission  and secure such an assessment from the very best experts in the country within ten weeks for under £10k, so why on earth did  College and Bishop refuse to do this if they were seriously concerned ? There are only two explanations.

Either nobody handling this case had the slightest experience in how safeguarding risk assessments are routinely commissioned and conducted in the secular courts, or, they did know,  but maliciously refused  to go there. A proper assessment would have “ shot their fox” – game over. My working rebuttable premise is that the bullies and the useful idiots were not going to risk that, so things were left in the hands of the the compliant/incompetent Canons.

Dr Percy complains that when he challenged the risk assessments as bogus, not least in that  someone had improperly added the National CofE official logo to the Ward/Canon amateur  effort to give them false authority, the Bishop replied that they were not “risk assessments” but “ assessments of risk”, a distinction unknown in law or perhaps logic. If true, an independent Reviewer might conclude that attempting  to offer such sophistry to a highly intelligent but emotionally vulnerable complainant of bullying  compounds the offence.

Illogically, the risk assessments  were not recalibrated in the slightest degree after the President of Tribunals had ruled that the vestry event could not not constitute “serious misconduct” even if the complaint were taken completely at  face value.

The Church was variously warned about the bullying, especially after the President’s decision was delivered. The Bishop and Canons  did not like the outcome and, like the College, shamefully refused to publish a fully redacted version onto the Diocesan or Cathedral websites . This reticence was no better explained than the “confusion” over the false attribution of the dubious risk assessments to Ms Wood.

A meeting in the Cathedral heard repeated reference to “the alleged sexual assaults” unchallenged, even though the legal decision did not uphold that terminology. The Bishop never accepted the President’s authoritative expert adjudication,  the abusive risk assessments remained in place until the final settlement was concluded when all these fearful speculations……just disappeared.. magically, with the mere passing of money. They remain on record as  the Diocesan contribution to the mobbing  of the Dean – and the national Church stood by in silent complicity – and worse.

When emails were shared with Church leaders, demonstrating that the Church’s lawyers and PR team ( simultaneously acting for the College and Church in the same matter ) were trying to place defamatory stories with newspapers ( shared with the Dean by outraged journalists) nothing was done. Journalists evidently had higher standards and a better nose for impropriety than Church leaders.

Dr Percy had sent all the evidence to Church House Lambeth Palace and Bishopsthorpe Palace; still nothing happened. No “serious incident report” was sent to the Charity Commission despite  each limb of the requisite test for such a report being met. Someone had been harmed; the Dean met the criteria for being a  a “vulnerable person”,  having suffered a medically authenticated nervous breakdown ; erosive reputational  damage was being perpetrated to both victim and simultaneously, to the largest religious charity in the country It was a qualification “slam dunk”. The trustees had neglected their duty.

When pressed,  it was explained to the, by now, ex-Dean,  that he was ” not recognised as a victim” and with that revelation  the cat was let out of the bag. They just wanted him to go away.

Like many other abuse  survivors and victims of clergy bullying, the Dean was alleging institutional bullying from top to bottom, but what he brought to the table which could not be properly ignored was an evidential trail in writing. Post Sladen, institutional bullying within the secular half the Christ Church Foundation  is now established and the evidence on the ecclesiastical half is so blatant that one has to be a member of the House of Bishops to even consider denying it.

The Church Establishment had decided he “was not a victim” but crucially they did so without first asking the key basic question  “ Is he a Complainant?”

The correct approach is “ Always listen to the complainant and take what they say seriously”. Dr Percy was complaining about cathedral clergy, Bishop, Lawyers, Church House NST staff Archbishops and Archbishops Council – so who within the Church could possibly make the necessary impartial decision that he was “not a victim”? Such abandonment of analytical thinking is a consequence of bullying becoming “institutional”. The mobbing narrative grips all, and critical thinking goes out the window. Unconscious bias permeates every discussion. The Dean had become “not a victim” – just a persistent nuisance. We call this “victim blaming”.

With the implosion of the so-called Independent Safeguarding Board which now acknowledges that it has neither the independence nor capacity for such a big piece of work,  all the trustees of Archbishops Council face a problem. The Sladen Report makes it clear that each trustee has an individual duty to speak act and decide things with integrity; there is no hiding place. Cover-up is not an option,  yet there is no internal mechanism to properly investigate institutional bullying of this widespread character.

In a press interview in 2019 Archbishop Justin Welby told the Spectator “ We have not yet found the proper way of dealing with complainants and taking them seriously, listening to them,  not just telling them to shut up and go away, which is what we did for decades, which was evil- its more than just a wrong thing, it’s a deeply evil act”

I agree with 2019 Archbishop Justin; I hope 2022 Archbishop Justin does too, and that he will now lead his fellow trustees to appoint a proper, independent, senior lawyer-led inquiry into Dr Percy’s complaint of institutional bullying in this deeply disturbing case. There is no other option of integrity.

by Martin Sewell

“Actions have consequences” : this observation certainly applies in much of the everyday world and it must surely apply in the legal world of regulation and governance. Last Thursday the long awaited Review into the conduct of the Governing Body of Christ Church Oxford was published by the Charity Commission after a lengthy process of study, interviewing and fact finding; the official warning and the 20 page Sladen review are publicly accessible here

http://apps.charitycommission.gov.uk/SCHEMES/491278.PDF  

 and

https://www.turbulentpriest.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/20221109_Christ-Church-Decision-Review.pdf

they make worthwhile reading.

The persecution of Dr Martyn Percy has become one of those iconic events that may change how institutions are viewed in future. It may not be inappropriate to make a comparison with the Dreyfus Affair in Edwardian France and the UK Profumo scandal, where the standards of the old Establishment intersected with the changing standards of “Swinging Britain” in the early 1960s. One might even add the bungled bugging escapade known as  “ Watergate “ – initially dismissed by actor John Wayne as a “panty raid” but which ended with the resignation of a President.  Each began on a small scale, but then grew to have enormous cultural consequence; so, I suggest, might the Oxford debacle in College and Church alike. This is a major Establishment scandal.

We are, of course, used to hilarious caricatures of Oxford life in the novels of Tom Sharpe or Colin Dexter, where malevolence and jealousy simmer under the surface of civilised eccentric institutions, and powerful cabals plot, scheme, and even murder each other. In measured terms the Charity Commission reveals that life does indeed follow art, revealing very much a patriarchal culture in need of reform.

The report is very correct. It emphasises that the Commission does not take sides and thus confines itself to applying proper governmental standards, carefully weighing the Trustees  in the balance and finding them seriously wanting. Yet disapproval and deep concern permeates the report and consequences must follow. For all the bluster as the Trustees face their University fellows and students, they know that they have been shown to be very morally compromised indeed.

From Andrew Billen’s podcast “The Feud” we can hear much of the background story and it has featured in several blogs https://archbishopcranmer.com/tag/sir-andrew-smith/ 

The identification of the “weaponisation of safeguarding” by the malcontent dons is certainly confirmed by the Commission’s Reviewer

The significant “takeaways” from the Report are these

•          “There is a sense from reading the papers that whatever the cost of taking action against the Dean, the Charity was prepared to take it, which is not consistent with managing the Charity’s resources responsibly.”

£1.9m was spent on the Sir Andrew Smith Tribunal, which considered 27 allegations of financial misconduct against the Dean, which were dismissed and the Dean returned to office. Thereafter, the costs escalated to £6.6m largely on account of failed allegations concerning safeguarding . There are 66 Trustees; a rough and ready equal sharing of restitution to the Charity would cost each £100k.It is also noteworthy that the Dean had been prepared to leave after the Smith tribunal decision in 2019 in return for a proper Governance review and a severance package to include his legal costs of then approx £400k. That settlement eventually occurred but not until after the malcontents had rejected that option, setting themselves on a path to wasting millions. The malcontent defensive line appears, from the Sladen review, to be to blame the Dean as he would not buckle to their bullying so they had to keep throwing charitable funds at the “problem”.

•          “The Reviewer also observes that it is hard to avoid a view, having read the case files, that the trustees, or a proportion of them, were determined to remove the Dean from the Charity at almost any cost and this is exactly why the Commission has had such concern about the size of the costs incurred in the dispute with him and that this warranted consideration of an Official Warning.”

This is hugely significant. It confirms the presence of institutional bullying. If you are prepared to do whatever it takes, at whatever the cost, (using charitable funds) and your project becomes divorced from proportionality, and even due legal or accountancy process, this is the quintessence of “institutional bullying.”

One helpful external definition identifies this phenomenon as “when bullying behaviours become so entrenched within an organisation without being challenged that they become the accepted norm, and are tolerated either consciously or unconsciously or even condoned”.

•          “There was an obligation on the trustees to be accountable for the way they spent the Charity’s funds and this requires openness amongst the Governing Body about costs.”

When it comes to culpability, the trustees appear to fall into three groups. There was a core group to whom management of the ejection project was delegated. They must have a primary responsibility for the waste of funds; they have been loosely described as “the malcontents”  – the strategists who worked with the lawyers to devise and execute the plan. The second  group – the majority of trustees – let the malcontents get on with it, without exercising the proper scrutiny and control which is the fundamental responsibility of all trustees, from those of the National Trust to the smallest church PCC.

The third tiny group spoke up for integrity and proportionality but were constantly overused or ignored, they could either resign or hang on, hoping to bring their colleagues to their senses.  They were effectively victims of coercive control. They should be exempt from criticism and financial consequences.

The majority generic failure of control, curiosity and moral courage is what is termed mismanagement by the Reviewer, but a careful reader will note that the issue of “misconduct” has not been removed from the table. The review goes only to the financial element of the matter but there is also something fundamentally rotten here – and that applies equally to the Church, there were sins of commission and omission. At all levels, there have been too many moral bystanders reaching for plausible deniability.

The malignancy needs investigating wheresoever it occurred; this is not just a story about inadequate standards of accountancy . The Review looks for deeper inquiry to the independent Governance Review being conducted by Dominic Grieve KC . He is working however in accordance with terms of reference drafted by the Trustees and their lawyers. How critical that report will be and how much it examines misconduct retrospectively remains to be seen. However, things do not have to wait.

Those trustees who were kept in the dark have a continuing duty to hold the more compromised trustees to account. They certainly should ensure that they are independently legally advised, during a process what may become a competitive allocation of blame – some are plainly more guilty than others and there, possible misconduct remains the issue rather than negligence.

The Report discloses that the Trustees instructed their lawyers to persuade the Commission not to publish their proposed ‘Official Warning’ but instead to agree an action plan. The lawyers filed over 800 pages of ‘evidence’ in an attempt to prevent donors and public alike from learning about the Trustees’ failings. That is an additional cost to the Charity and one hopes that someone will make a Freedom of Information Request on that subject so that donors can see where their money has gone.

At the Oxford Diocesan Synod on 12^th November, I understand that those attending (on Zoom) were addressed by the Bishop, the Censor Theologiae, and the Archdeacon of Oxford, each of whom is in varying degrees under scrutiny as we try to unravel this sorry tale. The case for the defence was certainly adequately represented as Christ Church began to implement its crisis management strategy. The case for early resignations… not so much.

The College is was an esteemed public institution; notwithstanding assets of approx £500m.  It receives significant public funding, not least £928,000 from the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. Following very recent public political resignations there is a public mood and expectation that where those in responsible positions have been found guilty of “mismanagement or misconduct”, they should resign. Why not at Christ Church, Oxford – secular and clerical?

At the next Governing Body meeting those who knew the full picture,  can – and should – resign en bloc. The other Trustees need to act in accordance with their responsibilities for the inadequate oversight identified by the Reviewer, even if one can have a modicum of sympathy for the newly appointed and the less worldly. It may not have been easy for them as they sat as mute witnesses while the malcontents delivered a brutal and very public punishment beating to the only person with the moral courage to stand up to the patriarchal culture represented by the powerful unofficial committee of ex-Censors.

There may be greater sympathy for the silent majority however if they now find the backbone and moral compass to require each of the core malcontents to step back immediately and hand over the control of the College into new hands.

This may not be an option for long. The Charity Commission is still involved, and that issue of misconduct is not yet off the table. Pretending £6.6m of hidden expenditure (and the additional consequential loss of donor income) is not a resigning issue would be a very powerful indicator to the Regulator that the trustees still “don’t get it” and that would signify ongoing mismanagement and perhaps wilful misconduct in closing one’s eyes to the obvious.

When Martin Sergeant, the Director of Operations at the Diocese of London, stole and gambled away £6m of charity funds, he was told by the Judge to expect a custodial sentence. The malcontent trustees used the funds for which they were responsible to pursue their own disproportionate and unregulated imprudent enterprise, like reckless gamblers chasing losses: the least we can expect is resignations.

The malcontents responsible need to recognise a simple truth; they gambled the House – it is they who should bear the loss.

Because of the nature of this material, the SC editor has decided not to accept comments for this blog post.

Thursday 10^th November was a significant day in the Christ Church Oxford saga with the publication of an Official Warning by the Charity Commission (CC) to the College.  The trustees of Christ Church are found to have failed to manage the charity’s resources responsibly.  This Warning does not bring about a retrospective resolution of the dispute between the former Dean and the Governing Body (GB).  Rather it focuses its attention on what has been an extraordinary disbursement of funds by the College authorities in their attempts to rid themselves of their Dean, Martyn Percy.  The intervention by the CC is welcome as it appears to ask some of the many questions that people have been asking over the long period of this dispute.  The CC Official Warning does not address the origins or the rights and wrongs of the College dispute.  Its main finding is that £6.6m has been spent by a charitable body in ways that involve mismanagement and/or misconduct.

Surviving Church has carried several pieces on the Christ Church story and on two occasions the contributions have been challenged by lawyers working for College or the Diocese of Oxford.  It is good to be able to have one simple undisputed fact in the current story, namely the total sum spent by the College on the dispute.  This figure of £6.6m is given for the first time in the Official Warning.  The first thing that might strike anyone about this huge sum of money is that it is actually quite hard to spend on this scale. Even lawyers and public relations firms charging top London rates need to do a lot of work to be able to earn such large fees.  Having felt some surprise at the total amount of expenditure, we need also to recognise that in order for lawyers and publicity agents to do their work, there have to be clients giving instructions.  The industrial scale of the Percy dispute suggests some of the censors/members of the GB had themselves to work extremely hard in managing the dispute process. Commissioning millions of pounds of legal work and reputation management takes time and a lot of effort.  In other words, there were, among the Christ Church fellows or Students, some who gave sacrificially of their time to coordinate this work of removing the Dean. 

When someone in an organisation gives a great deal of voluntary time to further a project, we can assume that there is strong motivation to do this.  The £6.6m project at Christ Church was, at one level, a simple one, to rid the College of its Dean. Here we may pause and recognise that a group of senior members at the College seemed ready to put themselves in a place of vulnerability as well as considerable effort to accomplish this task.  There would have been numerous meetings to attend and endless conversations with lawyers to discuss strategy.  The question we have to ask on a human level is, was it worth it?   It goes without saying that the dedication of so much time to this project required persistence and energy.  It would have been a source of considerable disappointment when various legal schemes were shot down along the way.  From the Dean’s point of view all this effort to remove him from office was experienced as severe persecutory bullying with elements of cruel sadism mixed in.    He and his family did suffer appallingly but, in a kind of perverse way, to an extent so did his persecutors.  There was something mega-obsessive about what they were doing in trying to destroy the Dean professionally and reputationally.  It is hard to see that any greater good was being served, even if the Dean had been a person threatening harm to others in the College.  No, what we observed at Christ Church was what might be described as an exhibition of entitled power, mixed up with jealousy, vindictiveness and poisonous hate.  These toxic emotions will continue to sully the lives and happiness of the persecutors over many years.  The £6.6m spent on the Dean’s persecution achieved fairly little in the end.  Its main legacy is a dark shadow which even now must impinge on the happiness and well-being of the persecutors and persecuted alike.

The persecutors of Christ Church, and those who joined in from the ranks of the CofE clergy, may have lost something more than their peace of mind.  They have put at risk another important possession, personal reputation. The College itself has also severely damaged its own institutional reputation for at least a generation or two.  This would be true even if the Dean had been shown to be a malefactor, which he has not.  Any moral high ground claimed by the College was also especially undermined when one of its team allowed the (expensive) reputation managers to feed salacious and defamatory stories about the Dean to a Sunday newspaper.  Most of the story will eventually be forgotten but some will remember the narrative of an Oxford college spending extravagantly to get rid of its head.  No one will explain why this happened.  That part of the story has not really been explained to us who live as contemporaries of these extraordinary events.

Losing one’s peace of mind to engage in persecution of an individual is one thing.  To be also part of a group that is being held to account for wasting massive sums of charitable money on an ultimately futile witch-hunt is another. This will add to a feeling of acute discomfiture among some residents of Oxford.  Sadly, the Church of England, which is tied up with the College, has not at any point covered itself with glory.  The same lawyers working for the interests of the College were also working for the Diocese of Oxford.  This has created some serious conflicts of interest.  The poison originally found in the College was allowed to spill over into the Cathedral and thence out into the diocese.  The effect of the whole episode will be around with us for a long time to come.

In summary the CC has spelled out to the trustees of the College that they must put their managerial house in order.  The CC had been shocked by its discovery of the £6.6 million spent on the persecution of the Dean.  Also, it was revealed that as much as £5.3m was approved by the trustees only retrospectively.  The CC calls on the trustees to submit to the Independent Governance Review under the oversight of Dominic Grieve KC and keep the Commission informed at every stage of this process. 

The decisive intervention by the CC in the Percy/Christ Church affair will not resolve the past injustices committed against the former Dean.  That was never the aim of the CC intervention, but the Dean’s case (and thus his reputation) will be helped by the revelation of the arbitrary and irregular practices until recently in operation in the College’s administration.  When we go right back to the beginning of the dispute between Dean and College, what we find are not stories about pay and rumoured scandal but about governance and good practice in the management of the College.  Dean Percy made valiant attempts to reform this governance. He was constantly frustrated by the obstruction of vested interests who did not welcome any involvement by the Dean in administrative matters that they regarded as their own.  It is now the task, maybe, of the CC to oversee the task that the Dean had tried to put in place but was never allowed to complete.

Some reflections on Safeguarding

by Mark Bennet

This is always a good question to ask if you are trying to get an understanding of some complex system. Ofsted visited one of my schools this week, and I told the inspector that we could have all the systems and processes in the world, but governors (and directors) were always attentive to what we were doing for the pupils – schools don’t exist to create systems, but to educate pupils. In the same way the Church of England does not exist to create reports into its mistakes, but to achieve some higher and better purpose – sometimes summarised as the kingdom of God (the language can be debated, the intent is surely clear.

So in the realm of safeguarding and the Clergy Discipline Measure we tend to be dealing with things that have gone wrong, and sometimes very badly wrong. It is natural to wonder why and how, and whether there are things we can do better. And so we have reports – enough reports to fill a decent section of my bookshelf. The thing is a report by itself changes nothing. The lessons learned in producing a “lessons learned” report are learned by the person or team involved in writing the report until that learning is transferred to others. And where the lessons learned involve changes to behaviour or culture, simply reading the report will not make the change happen.

It could be so much better, and serve our core theology better, if we were to begin in a different place. A place which recognises that the doctrine of sin is not a doctrine about others, but about ourselves. So here are some thoughts, inevitably imperfect, about how it might be very different.

The first thing we might notice is that something has gone wrong. So have those responsible acted promptly and with compassion to put it right, so far as that is possible? Have reparations, healing, counselling, restoration been properly considered and robustly enacted? This surely is the very first question – have those who have been hurt been treated properly according to our espoused theology? Any report worth the name should have this as its first question, and should highlight inadequacies as an urgent priority for action.

And yet survivors are kept waiting for years. The advice given by advisers and tolerated (perhaps even welcomed) by those in positions of authority has on occasion been shocking. And we still don’t have a proper redress scheme. Why can’t we measure the effectiveness of our systems by the way that those who have been wronged are treated, and align our actions with our theology.

The second thing to notice is the unsurprising truth that people have done things wrong –from the careless oversight of someone busy under immense pressure to the deliberate commission of evil acts – human failings cover a great range. So the second set of questions is about the people immediately involved (and perhaps the systems in which they are embedded). How serious are the errors? Do they impact fitness to practice? If unaddressed, will others be at risk? What actions need to be taken in relation to those who have erred so that the future will be safer than the past?

So have those who are unfit to practice been removed from any role in which they present a danger? Have those who may be able to continue in post achieved insight into their failings and completed any necessary retraining? Have all the risk factors been identified? Has supervision been put in place to ensure that necessary personal learning has been consolidated and sustained? It is those who have made mistakes who most urgently need to learn from them – how does the Church assure itself that this has happened?

Actually that point about supervision is an important one – it is not present for most roles in the Church, and the assumption that training = effective learning, which would rightly be laughed at in a school, seems to be the operating assumption of the Church of England. We know that Bishops make mistakes – who is alongside them to challenge effectively?

The third thing – and notice it is only third – is that the circumstances of a particular case may not be isolated. Similar mistakes may be made by other people. Similar risks may be taken by people unaware of the potential consequences. This is where the questions about wider learning and wider prevention come in. How can we avoid these errors being replicated by others? And that may require more than transmission of knowledge, though the factual base will always be important context.

So three simple stages to be covered in any report

1. Putting right the wrong
2. Making robust and sustained corrections in the immediate context
3. Securing wider learning

What is difficult about that? Well one problem is that the reports we get seem to take the first two aspects as read and move swiftly to the third. That is a strategic error and we are now acutely aware that the first is rarely addressed adequately. For the second, I have already mentioned the weaknesses in supervision (monitoring could be added) and the challenge of a return to safe practice. For the third, which will be explored further below, effective organisational learning requires some attention to how organisations and people within them actually learn. Simply making recommendations in a report is not enough – as witnessed by the reports over the years which repeatedly say much the same – there is evidence that we have an organisation which is not learning, or is learning reluctantly, and there is a further danger that apparent compliance masks true learning.

But first, the problems of righting the wrong and making corrections in the immediate context. This requires some diagnosis of what has gone wrong. Often it will be easy, but complex situations sometimes arise – Christ Church in Oxford is one example (without going into detail, there are multiple and contested accounts of what has gone wrong and who is responsible). In complex cases a proper diagnosis of what has gone wrong will be a necessary prerequisite for any sensible next step. Often situational power is involved (in parishes, office holders can exercise situational power, and in some contexts orders of ministry are involved too) and in such cases it can be a challenge to secure proper independence, so that the use of situational power (proper or improper, wise or unwise) can be properly considered as part of the review.

Some of the more acute cases we hear about in reviews involve horrific abuse in the context of personal relationships. But in the Church context, it is often difficult to separate what has happened from the wider network of relationships that makes the Church community. Personal loyalties and disbelief of facts can split communities and cause the parties to a complaint to become isolated or ostracised. There is much learning to be done about how to deal with these community impacts and to heal and restore those as part of the repair of damage that has been done. That learning rarely appears in reports, and could be usefully captured and shared so that good practice can be more widely shared and nurtured.

But the reports we do have so often push learning out to those who have not been immediately involved, and there are some psychological aspects about that wider learning which those responsible for reviews (and indeed for leadership) would do well to take seriously.

One thing we should all realise is that most reports are into really bad situations which are rarely encountered. The more routine risks and challenges which face us are rarely the subject of deep analysis (now there’s a worthwhile research project). So when we read a report we can struggle to locate ourselves in it, apart from as a bystander. And that can produce a separation from the learning too – “this isn’t a report about people like me.” In terms of risk, we are looking at events which are (for all the publicity) relatively low frequency, but which have a devastating impact. If we own a doctrine of sin and human fallibility, we need, in humility, to avoid the myth of “never again” yet still to nurture the determination “not on my watch”. “Never again” is a myth about the parts of an organisation I cannot actually influence – it can separate us from the responsibility for action. “Not on my watch” is about the part which is in my remit and locates the responsibility correctly.

A second aspect is that shock has very limited pedagogical value, and again can lead to  personal separation even though it is intended to motivate. I once had to do three basic safeguarding courses in the same month. I was faced three times with the lead stories of horrific abuse which had motivated big changes in safeguarding practice, and faced with the same pictures of children who had died and their abusers. All three organisations were sincere, but I did begin to wonder at what point I would become so de-sensitised that the stories would cease to have an impact and the whole thing would become counter-productive. The routine repetition of basic material over time can easily become just that – a routine chore, rather than an occasion of learning. The pedagogical aspects of training over time need to be considered with some care, so that those completing courses are actually engaged in useful learning. And the immediate self-evaluation of a course is of limited value in understanding whether learning is established and sustained.

A third aspect is how learning sits within the organisation as a whole. If we cannot see visible learning in our leaders, we may become cynical about our own learning and revert to passive forms of compliance. In a former life as a Chartered Accountant I was involved in fraud investigations. It was well known amongst colleagues that over-regulation could be organisationally disastrous, and in fact provide occasions for fraud. What happens is that something goes wrong; the organisation doubles down on regulations designed to prevent repetition; the regulations are so burdensome that some people start to sit light to them as far as they can get away with; without the burden of regulation some of those entrepreneurial spirits achieve successes which elude those who follow the rules; the successful people are recognised and promoted; over time people learn that you can succeed only by getting round the regulations, the leaders no longer own the regulatory structure and the the risks return and are exploited once again.

It is a key aspect of leadership to direct and own the culture of compliance and risk. The attractiveness of over-regulation is that those who breach the rules can be held responsible for failures, and so the leaders will never be held accountable. (Something like this has happened in hospitals, until recently – chronic understaffing of maternity units has been elided from reviews, because what goes wrong can always be attributed in some way to frontline staff – the fact that their working conditions affect attentiveness and that staff are working well beyond safe capacity becomes a side issue. It has taken a very long time for the point to get into public discourse – one feature is the utter professionalism and care of most staff which might resist rather telling bad stories about their work).

If leaders are not seen to be taking their share of the risk, or if they are seen to be sitting light to the rules, the context for learning from a course is hugely impoverished. What people learn from observing the organisation and its leaders trumps the course almost every time.

Finally, securing wider learning is more than rolling out a course. As the Ofsted inspector remarked– I want to see teachers checking that their pupils are learning what they are being taught, and when I interview pupils I test whether they have retained what they have been taught. What are we doing in the Church of England to close the learning cycle and make sure that what is being taught is being learned and is transforming practice?

I could write much more on the subject, but I suspect that this would dilute a rather simple message, that if we are looking at reports to serve the Church well, there are, at root, three clear objectives:

1. Putting right the wrong
2. Making robust and sustained corrections in the immediate context
3. Securing wider learning

It may be that by the time the report gets written, which is usually well after the presenting events, the first and second have been attended to. But the report should say clearly whether this is the case or not. And in securing wider learning, the report will be the beginning of that process rather than the end of it.

I used to have a book on my shelves which had the title When a Church becomes a Cult.  It has not survived the house moves since retirement, so I can only remember its contents in outline.  I believe it was written with a conservative Christian perspective so that I was not in agreement with some of its presuppositions.  But the problems that the book raised, even in its title, are important ones to all of us.  However much we want to see clear water between our churches and fellowships and the so-called cults, the contrast or differences between them are not always so obvious to an onlooking public.   How many non-church people can clearly tell the difference between door-knocking Jehovah’s Witnesses and members of a local Pentecostal group? 

As the long-term readers of this blog will know, I have been a member and a participant in an international organisation which studies the groups, political and religious, that are loosely described as cults.  The organisation called ICSA (International Cultic Studies Association), has been encouraging the study of these ‘high-demand’ groups for over 40 years.  The association is aware of the difficulties of language in this area of study.  While I do not propose to offer definitions of the word cult, there is a consensus that it is appropriate to use the adjectival form, cultic, to denote the fact that there are many groups which share a family resemblance to well-known and publicly identified cults.  These latter ones would include such groups as Jim Jones’ community in Guyana, the Branch Davidians of Waco and the Korean based group, commonly called Moonies after their founder, Sun Myung Moon. 

My ICSA membership and the conversations it has allowed me to have during their conferences, has kept me constantly asking myself a key question.  While churches would normally vigorously distinguish themselves from cultic bodies, are they all justified in doing so?  This blog piece will suggest that some church bodies do stray into behaving in ways that are close to those practised by high demand cultic groups.  When they do this, it is not surprising if observers on the outside find it hard always to tell the differences between them.   The impression that the outside world picks up about the behaviour of leaders and members of some of our churches does not always conform to the highest standards of ethical behaviour.  Social media followers and readers of daily newspapers also cannot be blamed if they pick up some strange ideas about what Christians claim to believe. If the Church were to be only to be a network of closed social groups, then its public reputation and profile might not matter.  If, on the other hand, it wants to reach out to the wider society with a message, then the reputation it wants to have is of some considerable importance.

I have pondered the apparent similarities between the groups we describe as cultic and some churches. Here I want touch on three areas where there is room for misunderstandings and seeming overlap.  The first is in the area of a claim to possess utterly reliable, even infallible, texts.   For the Christian this would normally be a devotion to the Bible. On its own devotion to the words of Scripture is not in itself a sign of cultic leanings. Other groups might find their ultimate authority in other foundation texts like the Book of Mormon or the writings of L Ron Hubbard. In the second place, we would expect to find at the centre of every cultic group, and churches which resemble them, a leader who exercises a degree of charismatic and coercive control over ordinary members.  In some groups and churches this control would appear to be abusive and exploitative.  A third feature of the more dedicated cultic groups is their readiness to withdraw from mainstream society and engage in what we might regard as intense forms of community living.

In each of these three marks of behaviour or practice which can slip over into the cultic arena, we can see that some churches are not always clearly differentiated from full-blown cultic groups.  The first area where some Christian bodies seem to have much in common with cultic groups is in the way that the group treats its primary written authority.  Whether it is the Bible, or some unique revelation given to a founder, a similar dependence and devotion to that scripture can be seen.  At this point I am not arguing for or against the truth of any written authority around which a church or cultic group is organised.  I simply note that such a document is used as a touchstone for everything else.  The believer/devotee is tied to that document as the mediating force of all truth.  If a belief or form of behaviour is thought to be contradicted by the central source document, it has to be rejected.  This is what I have elsewhere called binary thinking.  Not all examples of binary thinking qualify a church to be described as cultic, but all cultic groups seem to operate with this notion that everything is either true or false.   There is no space for a gradual discovery of any new insight or revelation.  All that is important has already been written down for our learning by L Ron Hubbard, Moon or God.  From my perspective such binary thinking Christians are moving with a similar world perspective as that operating within all the cultic groups.  I have written about this attitude to truth many times.  My summary here will be to say that, if truth is found at the beginning of life’s journey, there is no possibility of discovering newness, creativity and wonder at some stage late in life. Binary thinking is a kind of intellectual cul-de-sac, and it is hard to escape from it.

Along with binary thinking there is another feature of cultic groups which they share with many Christian bodies. This is what I call the narcissistic exchange. This expression summarises a distinctive but often toxic quality of relationship found in Christian and cultic groups alike. It describes the adulation and prominence given to a leader when followers get caught up in a kind of uncritical worship of their figurehead.   It is narcissistic because first it seems to be feeding an inner need for such flattery and importance in the leader.  Often the leader is deliberately kept physically apart from the followers so as to enhance his mystique and apparent holiness.  This kind of superior detachment is apparent in both the cults and some large churches.  The inner circle around the leader is there to protect the leader/guru from getting too close to the followers. They might then see behind the curtain that the leader is an ordinary fallible human being.  The followers do, of course, have their chance to venerate a leader when he appears at a highly choreographed event like a service or gathering.  They then receive their ‘narcissistic feeding’ because the leader will do his own version of flattery towards the congregation.  He will tell them that they are the chosen saved group and he will always protect them.  The self-esteem of the individual followers is this way being fed by the scraps of attention that they receive, even at a distance. In a somewhat different context, we see something of this narcissistic exchange going on in political rallies organised by Donald Trump.

The third area of recognisably cultic experience which churches share with the cultic groups is the way that each organises the experience of community life.  Loneliness is a major problem in our society and there is particular trauma associated with growing up in Western societies. The trauma experienced by most young people is that around leaving home.  The support of parents is not always available when the adult world is first encountered. Many churches and cultic groups recognise this state of deprivation. They offer experiences of community life which may make few demands on those who come. The problem about fellowships in some churches and cultic groups is that they may be offered as a kind of palliative to the trauma of growing up.  Here you don’t have to engage with conflict and other painful learning about relationships that is the normal part of entering adulthood. To offer fellowship or an instant friendship circle to a lonely individual may act as an instant pain relief in the short term, but it may not be necessarily in the individual’s long-term interest. One of the issues much discussed at the ICSA conferences is the issue of readjustment to modern society after membership of a cult. In some cases, the individual has never had to deal with conflict, housing, money or mature relationships. At the age of 35, the ex-cult/fellowship member may find themselves all alone and unable to cope emotionally or practically with the world that they had been encouraged to leave behind at the age they joined the church or cultic group.

These three experiences, binary thinking, narcissistic exchange and claustrophobic experiences of community life – these are three areas which can create emotional, social and intellectual disability in churches and cultic groups alike.  An army of psychotherapists seem to exist in the States to help individuals recover and return to maturity and resilience, but far fewer seem to exist in Britain.  It is not that we lack qualified people to do psychotherapy, but few trained here seem to understand the religious aspects of the trauma created by cultic groups and the churches that resemble them.  The therapists in the States also face the current political madness of Trumpian inspired conspiracy theories.  This deeply corrupted thinking seems thoroughly entrenched in churches of many kinds.  To call it a political and religious craziness is probably no exaggeration

In the New Testament there is a word which is translated perfect. The Greek word, teleios, in fact means something like complete or mature. The question that we have is whether we are helping those who come to our churches to move towards completion, fulfilment and the finding of their full potential. Surely that is a good and laudable aim for all Christian churches, one that does not involve the immaturity found so many cult-like fellowships and congregations.

by Martin Sewell

“ The sky is black with chickens coming home to roost”  _{Alan Bennett}

Rarely has Alan Bennett’s  witticism  seemed more appropriate than in the Church of England as a slew of reports have begun to emerge which should call the leadership to account for multiple sins of commission, non-commission and neglect.

Autumn 2022 was always going to be a busy time for those of us who take an interest in these matters and the task is especially onerous for members of the General Synod who have to try to engage and explain all this to a membership, 60% of whom are newly elected. Getting to grips with things is easy but as an “old hand “ I must do my best to offer some pointers.

The first thing to grasp is surely this; that the Church of England does not like to hold anybody to account. It may talk of Human Rights ( especially to others) but it secured for itself an opt out from the HRA: despite occasionally referencing its principles, salting the texts of its guidelines with the language of compliance, try suing the Church for a breach and you will find what it really thinks of being held to account for its failures in these areas.

Internal processes are often opaque and those responsible unaccountable for failure so the next Synod in February will be a key test of the Church’s commitment to cultural change. Those ill treated by the Church of England will be eagerly watching to see if there are any honourable resignations or disciplinary proceedings following the reading of the promised material that is due by that time. Whether the promised reports actually arrive in time is a matter we cannot take for granted.

Let us consider what may be available for debate.

General Synod has yet to debate the report into the untimely death of Fr Alan Griffin, driven to suicide by gossip.

Nobody has seen the independent SCIE reports into the responses of the Archbishops’ offices to survivor complaints. We know they were delivered months ago but that was the last anyone heard of them; whether they disappeared under floods at Bishopsthorpe or have been consigned to an oubliette in Lambeth Palace is currently unclear.

We have seen the PCR2 reports which disclosed 383 cases of abuse which were “missed” during the first attempt at identifying historical cases. That first effort was plainly an absurd failure and whether this was by accident or design we really do need to discuss. Whatever the reason should we not be holding individuals boards and structures to account to understand how such mistakes came to be made.

Survivors have met and produced a useful list of issues about PCR2 which can be read here I have circulated this throughout the House of Bishops and have had a few positive responses for which I am grateful so it is happily not all bad news.

Worryingly, different Diocese applied different tests so this may not represent the full extent of the problem

We were promised the long delayed Makin report into the scandal of John Smyth’s crimes in the early autumn: it has still not arrived but we surely must see it by February. Much of the material is already in the public domain thanks to the work of journalist Andrew Greystone whose book “ Bleeding for Jesus “ is a thoroughly readable account of what happened. Andrew has not been paid anything for his investigative work by the Church but the Makin Review will have cost us well over £1m. Surely a Canterbury Cross would not come amiss there? I doubt he is holding his breath.

The Makin Review will shine a light into various areas of the Church where there was indifference, neglect, naivety, PR calculation and determined-cover up., Will there be repentance,  stepping back, for penitent “reflection”, or more excuses, truculence and self pity in those quarters that finally come into the light of scrutiny? That report will be worth a Synod debate of its own.

But even such an A1 scandal will be fighting for debate time. One does not envy the Business Committee as it tries to manage a full Agenda for only three days of meeting.

We have not yet mentioned the IICSA report with its recommendations and controversies.

Mandatory Reporting, Redress and the Seal of the Confessional all deserve  consideration.

How will the proposed IICSA redress scheme fit in with that already approved by the General Synod Church of England? Will it become another excuse for delay and inaction? It is not as straightforward as it looks, and desperate survivors needing help, will be anxious whether current support will be maintained whilst the alignment of schemes is being pored over by the lawyers.

Speaking of lawyers there is the whole problem of “conflict of interests “ revealed in various cases but especially that of the Oxford Scandal where the same lawyers represented the College Malcontents, the College Governing body, the Bishop of Oxford, the Diocese of Oxford, the National Church, and the Archbishop of Canterbury – all at the same time in the same matter!

Does anyone seriously think this is not problematic ? ( except for the Church lawyers  – obviously). The Solicitors Regulation Authority is looking into this and may report by February which might make matters clearer, but surely some questions might  arise as to how this was allowed happen.

We are not going to be assisted in this by the “ Independent Safeguarding Board “ – because it does not exist.

Yes, you did read that correctly.

After Court action was initiated against it by Dr Percy, the ISB raised the defence that it could not be sued as it has no legal personality in law and so cannot have litigation brought against it. It  functions as a sub-committee of the Archbishops’ Council investigating…err…th Archbishops’ Council…independently! Members of General Synod may recall that I personally asked about this during the July Question Time. I received no proper answer neither was it clear if the ISB had independent had insurance cover.  If you do not have legal personality you cannot contract for insurance or seek ICO registration to receive  store and process sensitive data . Some of us were willing to explain the conceptual chaos to the Synod but were not called in the debate.

We were assured by the ISB Chair that insurance is not such a problem because  “ We will not make mistakes”. One or two members thought this a tad hubristic and so it has proved.

The Chair had to stand back and remains non-functional because of serious data mismanagement; adverse decisions have been secured against the ISB by the Information Commissioners Office after confidential survivor data was shared by the ISB to the NST on more than one occasion; there is much to be said about the enmeshment of the ISB and the Church that it was supposed to be overseeing.  A full debate that must surely be timetabled about the ISB debacle.

We might need to ask the following. Given the constitutional expertise within Church House and access to expensive specialist  lawyers, did nobody recognise that there was a problem with the structuring of the ISB? When folk were sent out to laud its “ full independence” ( no doubt in good faith) did no insider think to correct the error? Or is it that notwithstanding all this expert opinion, none of them recognised what some of us desperately trying to warn them plainly did? I am not sure which is the more worrying answer here.

I have reported Archbishops’ Council to the Charity Commission over  important failures.

When Dr Martyn Percy complained of institutional bullying by clergy which precipitated a medically confirmed nervous breakdown, no “Serious Incident Report” was, filed with the Charity Commission, as required in accordance with Archbishop Council Trustee duties.

The complaint had not, has not, and currently will not, be properly investigated by the Church. Due process should not be discretionary.

It was not clear by what lawful means the responsibilities over Safeguarding had been passed over to an “Independent” body.The lack of a comprehensive debate was a failure of proper governance.

The investigation proposed by the ISB into the Oxford Scandal was woefully inadequate given the broad principles involved, well beyond that of the individual Percy case.

The ISB did not have the resource to properly undertake that work.

The broad thrust of this critique was tacitly accepted by the ISB which – to the credit of its two surviving part time members-  appears to “get” that they were oversold as the answers to prayers for a proper response to the Safeguarding mess the Church continues to find itself in.

I stress here that we do not need witch hunts or humiliations but the Church’s persistent failure to call error to account , coupled with miscreant lack of awareness of the harm they have done, is offensive to justice and a serious barrier to our credibility.

The public to whom our mission is directed may not understand our problems with sexuality; they may not understand the mystery of the Trinity or the theory of substitutionary atonement, but they sure can spot a wrong’un when they see one.

 If hypocritical leaders are engaging in naked showers and massages, or thrashing young men in a garden shed, with biblical texts on their lips, Jo/e Public expects a Church to do something significant about it – yesterday . If Bishops, Archdeacons etc  turn away from complaints, the public expect that they too be held meaningfully to account. If somebody is facing serious credible allegation the public don’t expected them to be quietly moved on.  If somebody is currently facing judicial process for conduct unbecoming a priest, ordinary folk don’t expect them to get a clean reference and promotion ( it happens ).

It is not hard to understand ordinary decent people are dismissive of a Church that cannot see this ; in short they expect any institution with pretentions of moral probity to act properly and certainly no worse than any secular authority.

When a Prime Minister was perceived to have not taken lock down regulations seriously enough, the public – including his erstwhile supporters, required his resignation. Such folk will plainly have zero tolerance for a Church where multiple cases of abuse, bullying and coverups are persistently met by obfuscation.

If General Synod Members arrive at Church House in February and nobody has tendered an honourable resignation, stepped back from ministry or been made subject to due process for these failures, notwithstanding all this accumulated evidence of malpractice, the public will never take us seriously again – and neither should they.