From time to time we hear about people working in various institutions, like the police or the Civil Service, who call out some murky or corrupt behaviour within their organisation. We call this action whistleblowing.  It may be that someone brings to light financial irregularities or an intolerable level of oppressive hatred towards minorities.  Such behaviour may involve misogyny or homophobia and this behaviour has become impossible for the bystander to tolerate.  The whistle-blower is the one who speaks out. In most cases we hear about, we discover that the costs to the individual speaking out in this way have been considerable.  Whether it is the blowback from colleagues, whose bad behaviour is exposed, or a heavy institutional response from the top of the organisation, the whistle-blower usually has to pay a heavy price and put up with the stress that comes as the result of his/her whistleblowing activity.  In summary we would suggest that whistleblowing is a hazardous, even heroic, undertaking.

When we take a look at organisations in general, I think it would be true to state that whistleblowing is rare.  The reasons for this are worth thinking about.  It is far from clear that fear of persecution from colleagues is the main factor in repressing whistleblowing.  A more straightforward explanation that inhibits the normal member of an institution ‘spilling the beans’, is simple loyalty to the group.  This would be the normal dominating thought of most people in, say, a firm or factory.  The rule of not ratting on your workmates or colleagues is normally going to create a far stronger inhibition than ideas of morality or a loyalty to a higher good.

The bonds that tie individuals to an organisation are, of course, not just considerations of simple loyalty to the group.  We can imagine a variety of scenarios where circumstances or events create an unquestioned bond to a group which is hard to challenge.  As an extreme example, we have all watched films where the gang leader ties the gang member into the group by forcing him or her to commit a crime.  Once the new gang member has robbed a bank or shot someone, it is hard for them to have any way back from their new status as gang member.  A blackmail situation has been activated.  No one says it out loud, but the threat is always there.  If we get arrested and go to prison, then so do you.   It is hard to see any obvious way out of this conundrum.

From the extremes of a blackmail scenario in a criminal gang, one can imagine many other lesser ways that tie the individual to the group so that whistleblowing becomes unthinkable.  The idea of loyalty sounds like an honourable value, but in many situations, it simply means that the individual has become acculturated to a particular way of doing things.  We recognise that such group acculturation often does not have honourable outcomes.  A group of men might bond together with a common interest in macho activity.  This might include the domination of, or even cruelty, to the women in their lives.  Other movements or groups may indulge in wild conspiracy theories or normalise phobic behaviour towards minorities.  I find it hard to understand how groups of Christians can sometimes act with so much hatred towards those they do not like, such as gays or liberals, unless there are social benefits attaching them to this kind of group loyalty.  Feeling good because your group hates the despised ‘other’ seems a remarkable inversion of Christian values.  But it seems to exist in church settings just the same, seemingly impossible to challenge.

Before we return to a consideration of the whistleblowing phenomenon, it is important to linger for a moment on the account of group behaviour in a church context told by Yvonne and David Shemmings in their reflection on the child-abuse saga in the Diocese of Chichester. https://houseofsurvivors.org/shared-files/1186/?Shemmings_Report_ib4lHC8.pdf  One suggestion that the Shemmings investigated was whether the abuse was organised.  The evidence that was uncovered did not lead them to suggest a conspiracy of abuse.  Rather they found such abuse was to some extent normalised in certain clergy networks so that offending clergy knew others who were, if not active abusers, able to look the other way if any evidence of such behaviour came their way.  In this we are naming another group phenomenon which militates against whistleblowing, the almost sacred devotion to the preservation of secrets.  Supressing information by insisting that others keep secrets is a very powerful dynamic within groups.  Having a secret, knowing something that others do not know, allows an individual to feel endowed with a sense of power and privilege.  One surmises that the popularity of Masonic groups is partly to do with the promise of secrets that will only be divulged to a privileged few.  Cultic groups like Scientology also peddle in secrets about the origin of the universe.  The power of Scientology has lessened considerably since much of this ‘secret’ hidden knowledge has been leaked out to all and sundry.  More powerful than the meaning of masonic symbols and myths and theories about the beginning of the universe, are the human secrets that actually exist in groups like churches.  Sometimes these secrets include hidden episodes of shame which relate to important leaders.  Such leaders are controlled by the fact that, at any moment, documents or oral testimonies could be released which would destroy their reputation and authority.  Where does real institutional power lie in such a complicated situation? The real power in the group probably belongs to the one who possesses the shameful secret, as long as no one has any past secret to reveal about them.  Organisations which alternatively reveal and hide such secrets for political reasons are toxic environments to work in but they are found within the Church as in other organisations. One would prefer the attempt to blow fresh air into an institution through whistleblowing to the rancid air of power games and nervous stress that permeate so many organisations, including our own.

When we return to our consideration of whistleblowing, we might want to express our surprise that it ever happens.  The whistle-blower has not only to face social ostracism and even violence from those guilty of bad behaviour.  He/she has also to overcome the extensive social inhibitors that operate when we are part of any group.  Nobody wants to ‘shop mates’.  We have to conclude that,. when whistleblowing does happen, there need to be some highly principled and brave individuals at the heart of it.  As a general rule we might want to suggest that such people are more likely to be worthy of our admiration than the opposite.  Of course, there may be unworthy reasons for whistleblowing, but I also want to suggest that the person who breaks through all the social inhibitors to stand up and declare the truth is a brave unusual person. 

In our survey of discussing why whistleblowing is a rare phenomenon in society and its organisations, we have noted that the reasons for this rarity have much to do with the nature of groups and organisations and the way they normalise and control our behaviour.  Some of this institutional control is honourable but much is not.  The dynamics of groups can make for a sense of stability but often that stability is very fragile because of the misdeeds and secrecy that can often be hidden within these groups.  Currently the Church itself is going through a number of crises, as its ability to be open and honest with its members is being challenged.  When an institution shows itself unable to be open and honest and selective over the information it shares, an atmosphere of mistrust is created.  Those who challenge the narrative that the Church is ‘on a journey’ to deliver the highest standards of safeguarding to survivors, find that they, along with whistle-blowers everywhere, suffer the sanctions I have described. The Church has considerable institutional power to hit out at such critics which include those who are already victims of church-based trauma.  The sight of a religious-based organisation playing dirty tricks, involving the heavy use of institutional and legal power, is not very edifying.  As I have suggested before, the reverberations of these battles can never achieve what is desired, the protection of the power and assets of the organisation.   What they do achieve is an atmosphere of unease, and a weakening of loyalty on the part of ordinary members towards the leadership. 

The next meeting of General Synod is likely to show up the cracks that exist between the official narrative of unity and competence in the church and the real situation of muddle and intrigue that seems to exist at the centre.  I have nothing useful to add to the gay marriage debate, but feel that an equal amount of time should been given to looking at the present state of safeguarding.  There is, it can be confidently asserted, a great deal of unhappiness in the Church over safeguarding.  The problems do not seem to relate to the training that is being widely shared across the Church but in the reluctance of the Church authorities to speak frankly of what has gone wrong in the past. Coverups, silence and persecution of whistle-blowers creates a toxic environment in which few can flourish or grow.  Whistleblowing is a messy inefficient way of sharing truth, but it is an improvement on all the secrecy that seems to exist at the heart of our national Church. The hints that we are given suggest that maintaining the status-quo in the CofE safeguarding narrative is not only almost impossible for those in charge, but a cause of unbearable stress.  Stress creates burn-out and we have seen a suggestion of this in the rapid turnover of those heading up the NST since its start in 2015.  The forthcoming Synod safeguarding debate on February 9^th will be instructive.  Will the message be ‘business as usual’ or will there be a hint of changes, the kind that whistle-blowers seek to introduce to their organisations everywhere.

by Martin Sewell

When the General Synod of the Church of England meets next week in London, all the attention will be on the well publicised issue of same sex marriage. This is not unreasonable, but it also means that another of the major issues undermining the Church in the eyes of the public, has been pushed way down the agenda. The continuing  issue of the Church’s poor response to survivors and victims is important and it deserves no less publicity.

Unlike so much that goes on at Synod, this is a scandal which is entirely self made and capable of ready resolution, if only there was the desire, drive, commitment, and competence to do so.

Importantly there is significant grass roots unity on these matters across all the traditions; there is no theology in favour of abuse and bullying, and there are people of principle across the traditions who set aside other differences and keep banging their heads against the institutional brick wall whilst the leadership chant their mantra “ we are on a journey”.

Synod members cannot fix climate change, they are gridlocked over gay marriage and most of the general public are not paying attention anyway; the public does know however, that the Church has a well documented history of letting survivors down very badly – often for decades. A bold initiative in this area would demonstrate that we “practise what we preach”. We are still waiting for it.

In February 2023,  Safeguarding has been relegated to the “ graveyard slot” on Thursday afternoon when some folks will be getting ready to catch trains to Truro or Carlisle. It is hardly worth staying for. All members will be offered is a “ presentation with questions” – one question permitted each. That is no basis upon which to hold power to account and that is entirely why General Synod has found itself managed into impotence by the House of Bishops and Church House.

This time however, a group of survivors have prepared their own briefing which is being offered to the Synod members – 60% of whom are new and vulnerable to the kind of blandishments which have stonewalled survivors for years.

This briefing can be read here at https://houseofsurvivors.org/shared-files/1822/?SYNOD-SAFEGUARDING-BRIEFING-FINAL.pdf

Its clarity and focus contrasts significantly with the official report to Synod GS2293 https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-01/GS%202293%20Safeguarding.pdf which is reeks of management-speak and is almost unreadable which cynics might think is not accidental.

There is a  clearer second report GS1335 https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-01/GS%20Misc%201335%20NST%20update.pdf one passage of which  does deserve particular attention. In it, the newly appointed Director of the National Safeguarding Team Alexander Kubeyinje raises the important issue of the abuse that his team members are occasionally subjected to.

I have met Alex on one occasion. I found him a good attentive listener and I wish him well in his role. It helps enormously that he has been recruited from the same secular safeguarding culture in which I practiced as a lawyer and so we are very much “on the same page in terms of how things are best done. We can get down to business without  the preliminary of “comparing notes”.

I am therefore very happy to highlight and endorse his plea for his staff to be respectfully treated and to unequivocally to condemn any improper behaviour. He writes

3.1.  I have been taken aback with the amount of abuse, bullying and harassment that colleagues receive and threat to life on occasions. This has predominately been from a small number of survivors , advocates and others who have concerns with regards to safeguarding across the wider church community . The NST are at the forefront of this abuse which has a detrimental impact on them and their families. I have not witnessed or been informed of any bullying or harassment within the NCI’s .

3.2.  All of them come to work to do a good job, but this is often received with abuse and harassment. However, there is not always a sense of how staff can be protected from such horrific abuse and bullying.

3.3.  As a Church we do have a duty of care to them. There are both legal and moral obligations to protect staff from this. As a result of this, staff will often shut down and not want to engage with the people who are abusing staff which in turn has a detrimental effect on all involved. It must be noted this behaviour is across the NCI’s and is directed from the wider church community to every level of the organisation.

Nobody and nothing should detract from that message, but I think it is proper to make a simple reference to the 1987 Cleveland Report which is one of the foundational documents of the secular safeguarding culture from which both Alex and I come.

Chapter 13.18 of that report addressed a similar issue in respect of parents whose children were at risk of removal by social workers – sometimes a necessary but always an acutely stressful time for all involved. Baroness Elizabeth Butler Sloss wrote

“Families who are in crisis have a heightened emotional response. Anger aggressive destructive behaviour and the possibility of violent impulsive reactions may need to be faced.  The social worker needs to maintain an open structured relationship with the family whatever the social workers personal feelings, it is important to avoid a judgemental or accusatory attitude towards a parent who is a possible perpetrator; the risk of suicide amongst perpetrators who are able to acknowledge their abusive behaviour to themselves or others must be recognised….. Social workers must develop the skill of respecting and supporting the persons without endorsing or colluding with their acknowledged or suspected patterns of behaviour”.

That which is true of stressed perpetrators is no less true of the Church’s innocent victims who routinely find their lives in tatters, in chronic and acute need and running up against  what they perceive to be an unsympathetic bureaucratic structure. When you have walked a few paces in their shoes, being passed from pillar to post around a variety of Church layers at Diocesan and National level with everyone passing the buck and nobody holding ultimate responsibility,  you may not condone –  but you understand why people end up raging against the machine.

Alex is right in bringing this to our attention, but how quickly we are able to solve this particular problem will surely depend on how quickly and effectively we grasp the handful of nettles which make up so many aspects of the Church’s current safeguarding dysfunctionality.

We know we have to put proper structures in place  for the benefit of our victims: we know that doing so can only be for the benefit of the Church’s reputation. Alex, inadvertently but entirely properly and relevantly,  offers a third reason to make our structures and systems as smooth  accessible transparent and effective as possible  – we owe it to our staff who bear the brunt of the frustration caused by the ineffectuality of the current Church  leadership

The Church of England is to have yet another Lead Bishop for Safeguarding.  The Bishop of Stepney, Joanne Grenfell is to take up this difficult but important task at the end of March.  She takes over from Jonathan Gibbs, the Bishop of Rochester.

Any bishop who is unfortunate to have this safeguarding role laid upon them, would seem to deserve our sympathies.  It is a task almost impossible to do satisfactorily.  Why do I say this?  Regardless of experience, qualifications and background knowledge, any bishop who takes on this role is almost bound to fail to win approval from all the stakeholders.  A safeguarding lead bishop from day 1 is going to be pulled in two strongly opposing directions.  These are probably impossible to reconcile.  On the one side there is the army of survivors and victims who believe that a senior Church of England figure will have the power to resolve their complaints against the system, either as someone falsely accused, or as a survivor.  The lead bishop may have enormous compassion for these individuals caught up in the safeguarding meat grinder.  In practice he/she has neither the time nor authority to do anything significant to change the situation for them.  On the opposite side there are the people of power in Church House or Lambeth Palace who ultimately make the decisions about the mechanisms of safeguarding.  For them, the Lead Bishop is an important bulwark of defence against the torrent of complaints that regularly come from members of the church to the central bodies.  The Lead Bishop has to be discouraged by these men of power from making any promises – financial or pastoral – that cannot be met.  Everything in the church’s protocol must be done in an orderly fashion.  In practice, this involves delay and spinning out cases so that the minimum resources have to be used up in dealing with the endless safeguarding torrent.  How any individual could survive having these two contradictory roles at the same time – listening to the pain of victims and defending the institution – is beyond me.

One detail about the lead safeguarding role announcement now being handed on to +Joanne, and which comes to her rescue, is the fact that appointment is only to be held for three years.  There are two ways of looking at this time limit.  One is to note that three years are by no means long enough to get to grips with all the multiplicities of knowledge that are potentially required of anyone doing this job.  I have, on this blog, set out some of the skills that I believe are required from an individual seeking to be considered a safeguarding expert.  They are clearly likely to be beyond the capability of any single individual.  An understanding of law, psychodynamic theory, organization theory, history, theology and trauma studies should ideally be expected of anyone claiming even a modicum of expertise.  This list could be lengthened further.  Safeguarding is not a set of skills that can be acquired overnight. 

The brevity of the term of office for the safeguarding lead can be understood to have another purpose.   Alongside the difficulty of fulfilling the expectations that I mentioned above, there is another way that a brief period of office can serve a valuable purpose.  It allows those with power, but hidden behind the scenes in the Church, to retain their control of the whole process.   No one who serves only three years in any role within an organisation, is ever to be fully on top of the skills that they need.  By default, those who appoint them (and control them) will always have the power to set the agenda over the way the job is done.  Scope for independent initiative in this area is extremely limited.  The same constraints seem to apply to anyone holding senior office in the CofE. From the Archbishop downwards, senior clergy all appear to be speaking from a single agreed script.  This has all the appearance of being thought up and curated by invisible teams of advisers and public relations personnel.

When we take a closer look at the situation of the current Bishop of Stepney, we find additional factors in the appointment that are a cause for concern.  These may seriously compromise her ability to do the job.  +Joanne is said to be experienced on safeguarding matters, and this interest would certainly have given her detailed knowledge of what has been happening in her area of London.  She will know all the background detail of two major safeguarding episodes. Many would refer to them as scandals.  She will be aware, in the first place, of all the anxiety raised among many of her clergy in her area over the ‘information dump’ made by Martin Sargeant at the end of his time working for the diocese.  There are many threads to this story, but the one that must have touched +Joanne (and given her sleepless nights) was the anxiety experienced by many of her clergy who lived with the thought that some uncorroborated safeguarding accusation was going to be made against them. No one has accepted any responsibility for Father Griffin’s suicide.  No doubt more information will emerge but, until it does, there is, I understand, a state of acute mistrust among many clergy over the behaviour of senior staff in the Diocese.  They must have serious questions as to whether the senior clergy are capable of bringing the sequence of events that were set off by the Griffin suicide to some satisfactory conclusion.

Another safeguarding episode that continues to haunt the part of London over which Joanne has episcopal oversight, is the case of Survivor N.  The details of this story have appeared the Church of England Newspaper and elsewhere.  It will certainly be familiar to +Joanne, even though she was not Bishop of Stepney as the time of the alleged offences. It is unnecessary for me to name the individuals mentioned in the saga.  In summary, it is a highly credible story of homosexual abuse with a CDM taken out against a well-connected clergyman who holds a post in Joanne’s area. Because of the power/status of the alleged offender, Survivor N was subject to some unpleasant harassment, including legal threats from the diocesan lawyers.  The failures in this case seem to have been chronic on the part of the Diocesan authorities.  Even though the whole episode started before +Joanne’s time, and her personal leadership is not a issue in the case, she is still part of a senior team responsible for bringing justice and closure to the events. Survivor N was let down very badly and was driven to attempt suicide. The current failure is in the fact that the case has still not, to my knowledge, reached a conclusion.  The pattern that seems to prevail is that, when  CDMs are taken out against senior clergy, the eventual judgements are not given any publicity.  In this case the complaint and the victim’s pain received an international notoriety.  This was to do with coverage in the press, and partly because a song about the case was composed and performed by a well-known Irish folk group.  We hope that the CDM complaints will not be allowed to fade away.  I also hope my readers will listen to this song from last August 2022 and feel some of the passionate anger expressed by the musicians on behalf of the victim/survivor.  https://survivingchurch.org/2022/08/29/a-song-from-ireland-in-support-of-survivors-of-church-abuse/  The survivor himself was much helped by the thought that an internationally acclaimed music group had taken up his cause in standing up to the power of the London Diocese.

One of the features of the lyrics of the song, Collusion, is the naming of a firm, employed by the London diocese for crisis management, that took a full part in the persecution of Survivor N. This crisis management company, Luther Pendragon, is also used by the Church of England centrally as well as at least three dioceses, including Winchester and Oxford.  The reputation of this firm with other survivors is, to say the least, extremely low.

+Joanne thus now finds herself in a diocese plagued with some serious unresolved safeguarding episodes.  There may well be others not in the public domain.  Regardless of the personal and professional skills that +Joanne can bring to the post, one cannot help but question whether a diocese with such serious outstanding safeguarding crises is the right platform from which to advise the national Church.  Is it not difficult to promote good practice right across the Church of England dioceses when the situation in the home diocese is, to say the least, messy and confused?  The job of being lead bishop on safeguarding is a tough and unglamorous undertaking.  Can we realistically expect excellent service from a junior bishop who seems already to have a plate-full of safeguarding issues to deal with in her own local area?

I end with the final lines of the lyrics about Survivor N’s story.  It raises a question for my readers and all who have responsibility for bringing justice and compassion to the Church.

I sing of gentle people daring to complain

I do not sing for vengeance, I do not sing for gain

I sing that Christianity be Christian once again

It was announced in another blog that Michael Reid, the former head of Peniel Church in Brentwood, died on Friday 13^th January 2023.  Those who have followed this blog for a long time will be familiar with the name.  My interest in this larger-than-life charismatic leader formed an important focus for this blog over a period in around 2015. 

Why was writing about Michael Reid and Peniel important to me in the early days of Surviving Church?  The simple answer is that Reid became, for me, a classic embodiment of many of the outrageous examples of spiritual power abuse that I was uncovering when I started my study of the topic 20 -30 years ago.   In the mainstream churches, by contrast, such things were being better concealed in the 90s.  My documented case studies, as readers of Ungodly Fear will know, came mainly from free churches on the fundamentalist/charismatic end of the spectrum.  Back in 1998 when I was writing the book, I was aware of Reid’s church, Peniel Brentwood, which was an independent charismatic congregation.  My wife and I visited the church and attended a service around that time, but loud alarm bells did not ring immediately.  It was only a little later, after my book had been published, that I realised that Peniel and its leader, Reid, was a vivid example of a church that contained many examples of the toxic abusive behaviour that I had been describing in my book.  I started to correspond with one Nigel Davies, a blogger whose family had been seriously damaged through membership of this congregation.  He has, right up till today, used the power of protest to demonstrate in person outside the church, now known as Trinity Brentwood.  Over the years his protests have been extended to include other congregations within the Elim network.  This is the denominational grouping that Peniel (now called Trinity Brentwood) chose to identify itself with after Reid was forcibly removed as leader in 2008.

For those of my readers who have the time/interest to look it up, there is a great deal of information on this blog from around 2015 about the appalling events in this congregation under Reid. After the forced resignation in 2008, there was a brief ‘Prague Spring’, but it soon reverted to its old controlling and abusive ways under a new leadership.  Peniel/Trinity cannot be the only church that finds it hard to face up to the legacy of a past abusive history.   Reid had been sacked for sexual misdemeanours (consensual? adultery), but the appalling trail of cultic intimidation and financial skulduggery was, arguably, even more serious.  Eventually the church agreed to investigate its own past after a credible complaint of rape was made against one of its own members.  The report that appeared in the autumn of 2015 and to which I attach a link at the end, is a very important document even seven years later. This report, written by an eminent evangelical lawyer called John Langlois, runs to some 200,000 words.  It was, and remains in my belief, the best and most vivid and detailed account of a British church committing abuse against its own membership.   At the time that it was released, I frequently referred to this Langlois report on this blog as a way of illustrating how the narcissistic behaviour of one man could create so much havoc and pain for so many.

The removal of Reid was not easily achieved.  Court cases had to be fought as Reid regarded the church buildings and plant as belonging to him personally. By 2008 the church had, through the dint of congregational financial sacrifice, acquired a considerable portfolio of property, including a large premises for a school.  This building later sold for £6m.  One part of the battle that Nigel Davies has been valiantly fighting for, is that some of this money, accumulated by the bullying techniques of Reid and his henchmen and women, should be used to compensate some of those who had lost everything in terms of education, mental health and financial stability because of their involvement in the church.  Although Reid’s name is now probably no longer discussed or remembered by the current congregation, Davies claims that much of the wealth of the church belongs morally to a past generation who were ruthlessly exploited and abused while members of Peniel.

When recording the death of an individual, it is customary to add the letters RIP to the name.  In this case I hesitate to do this.  This is because of the way that so many individuals, young and old at Peniel, lost their peace by having it taken from them.  My blogging work brought me into direct touch with several Peniel survivors, including an American girl who had come to Brentwood in the 90s to study at the so-called Peniel Bible School.  Instead of learning, this cadre of girls were exploited as cheap labourers for the Church.  Those who administered the scheme made sure that they could not escape by confiscating their passports on arrival and intercepting their letters from home.  Exploitation of vulnerable foreign girls sometimes extended to a situation of sexual abuse.   It was, in fact, in response to one specific complaint of such abuse, that the church was forced to set up Langlois’ investigation.  Also, the entire congregation had experienced forced labour, by having to turn out regularly to work on the estate and the grounds.  This was expected of the youngest children as well. All this is described in great detail in Langlois’ report.

When I was writing my commentaries in 2015 on Reid’s behaviour as revealed by Langlois, I was always hoping that such behaviour would never be found in the Church of England.  While it is true that the cult-like atmosphere of Reid’s congregation would be difficult to find in an ordinary CofE parish, there are still many, some uncomfortably close, parallels in common church leadership styles.  Langlois described many of the classic power games and techniques at work in Reid’s leadership style.  We find the typical methods of coercion and control, including shaming and ostracism.  Reid also seems to have enjoyed playing off one family against another, retaining to himself the power of supreme authority.  It is first from reading about Reid that I learned some of the classic biblical texts used by abusive leaders against those seeking accountability.  ‘Touch not the Lord’s Anointed’ and ‘Obey your leaders and defer to them’.  These were the passages quoted endlessly by Reid in the ruthless manipulation of the people in his congregation.  Obeying Reid meant, for example, cruelly turning the back on those who decided to leave, after daring to question Reid’s leadership.

Peniel/Trinity Brentwood concerns have disappeared for seven years from the discussion in this blog.  I could be said to have moved on from considering the horrors of Peniel in Brentwood.  Reid’s death, however, has had the effect of triggering a memory of his abuse horrors. I am reminded of my own reflections and attempts to understand the wickedness of Reid and the way he acted with such appalling cruelty against the people he was supposed to care for spiritually.  The Langlois report continues to remind us that spiritual/power/sexual abuse is alive and well in the Church and those of us who see this must do all we can to expel it from Christian circles.

Some concluding reflections on church power abuse, triggered by the death of Michael Reid

1 Any church leader, who works in a pre-existing or created hierarchy, will experience the temptation to obtain gratification by ‘lording it over the flock’.  A church leader needs to have a strong system of self-awareness and accountability that makes it difficult to succumb to this temptation.   Just because a candidate for ministry may begin training strongly imbued with a desire to serve, it does not mean that this sense of humility will stay the course, without the need for constant monitoring.

2 A temptation to exercise power inappropriately in a church is normally found in one or more of three areas, power/status, sex and money.  Male pastors seem to be more readily attracted by power abuses than the female.  Female power gratification does, of course, exist.   I do not need to spell out the appalling damage that sexual power abuse can wreak in a congregation whether directed against adults or children.  Financial dishonesty, or even a preoccupation with financial power can also create serious damage to a church.  It does not have to be illegal to be corrupting. It is a temptation for some to see financial success as spiritual success when it may be no such thing.  Tithing is not biblical, whatever ‘prosperity’ teachers may declare.  There is nothing in Scripture to suggest that all our charitable generosity should be directed at and through our local church and its leaders.  Indeed, handing over so much financial power to church leaders may create the conditions for abusive power that are spiritually and morally dangerous.

3.  Michael Reid’s legacy of causing pain, humiliation and lasting damage to many of his flock at Brentwood is a learned lesson to be heeded by every congregation.  A full 14 years since his forced retirement, means that only a few will now remember his life and career. The fact that there exists an extensive and detailed report of all the failings of his congregational oversight and the sheer suffering he inflicted on young and old, means that something is left, albeit negative, of his ministry.  The events and pain inflicted on so many at Brentwood between 1980 and 2008 are episodes that should never be allowed to be buried in the mists of history.

The Langlois report on Peniel Church Brentwood 2015

https://www.dropbox.com/s/e3578t7pt87jvci/Langlois%20report.pdf?dl=0

In the last couple of days an important decision from the Solicitors Regulation Authority concerning the CofE has appeared in the public domain.  It is not a story recounting outrageous immorality on the part of a church leader, though the report does have a link with the late Bishop Peter Ball and his crimes.  It recounts the unprofessional behaviour of a single individual who used to work as Registrar or chief legal officer for the Anglican Diocese of Gloucester.  The officer concerned, Christopher Peak, has now seen his registration as a solicitor removed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.  This story has some importance in the wider relationships between the Church and the legal institutions of this country.  Every member of the Church is, in a slight way, affected by the special legally enforceable rules that operate in the work of the national Church.  There are certainly hundreds of professionals who are employed to oversee legal matters in the dioceses and at a national level.  It is to be hoped that these qualified professionals will always give good service for the substantial sums of money that they earn to manage this aspect of church life.

At the heart of this legal story is not a decision or a court case.  It is the account of a total absence, over a twenty-year period, of any challenge or legal questioning over a legal saga.  The context of the case is the arrest and subsequent Caution of the then Bishop of Gloucester, Peter Ball for offences against young men.  This part of the story is well-known. Having voluntarily agreed to vacate his see in 1992, Ball went on to an active retirement ministry for some twenty years.  Eventually the case was re-examined, and Ball served a fifteen-month sentence in prison for his offences.   The part of the story that is less well known is the fact that the Gloucester Diocesan Registrar, Christopher Peak, acted as a personal solicitor to Ball when the case first came into public view in 1992.   In short, Peak agreed to negotiate with the police and the legal authorities in the task of mitigating the crimes of Ball.  In this he seems to have enjoyed a measure of success, as Ball, despite his Caution, went on to enjoy many more years of retirement ministry.  Somehow, Peak failed to recognise that it was totally inappropriate for him, as a chief diocesan legal officer, to act at the same time on behalf of his bishop under criminal investigation.  In non-legal jargon, can it ever be right to represent the interests of the diocese and an accused bishop simultaneously?  Is this not a case of a lawyer tolerating a clear conflict of interest?

The twenty-year gap that I have referred to above represents the period (1992- 2012) where Peak, the chief legal officer of a diocese, having legal responsibilities for promoting the welfare of that body, had chosen to identify with one party in a criminal case. One does not criticise Peak for taking on the role of a defence solicitor, thus presenting the best possible case for an accused party.  Peak was entitled to defend Ball, but he was not entitled to have the role of representing the interests of the diocese as its Registrar at the same time.  This conflict of interest should have been obvious to Peak as its head legal official.  It should also have been obvious to others working in a legal capacity around him.  For twenty years this situation of obvious conflict of interest was tolerated without any awareness of dissonance. Because Peak would not have been able to represent the diocese ‘without fear or favour’ in a legal case involving the former bishop and his diocese, he was compromising his ability to protect the diocese.  No doubt, there were those within the church legal system nationally, who might have spotted something wrong with the situation.  Somehow we suspect that the power of vested interests were wanting to keep a firm lid on any examination of what had gone wrong.  In the end, it was not church lawyers that blew the whistle of what had been going on; it was the work of some lawyers following the case from the National Secular Society.  It was they who, thirty years after the event, obtained this current ruling from the Solicitors Regulatory Authority.  This deemed Peak’s behaviour as worthy of official censure and sanction.

Why is this story important?   It is important for at least two reasons.  The first is that legal offences by those working for the church, when they occur, have been, historically speaking, rarely challenged.  The conflict of interest involved in having the Diocesan Registrar acting as a personal solicitor for the bishop should have been fairly obvious to anyone working in a legal capacity in Gloucester at the time.  One suspects that deference to Peak by lawyers and church dignitaries alike supressed any such challenge.  As Registrar and probably the most highly paid servant of the diocese, it was probably not difficult to overawe any potential opposition to his legal activity as personal solicitor in defending Ball.  Initially, at any rate, the diocesan clergy unanimously supported Ball and it was only later that the possibility of guilt gradually dawned on them.  The second factor is linked to the high financial rewards payable to lawyers who work for the Church. Just as Peak used his skill and power to successfully manage things legally for Ball, so we have witnessed the raw power of well-paid lawyers working openly to intimidate their victims in the case of the Christ Church/Percy case. We have discussed in earlier blogs the way that conflicts of interest were clearly apparent in that long-running saga. At Gloucester, the power of a Registrar acting as a defence lawyer must have been considerable.  We know from the Charity Commission statement that the fees charged by the church lawyers working for Christ Church and Diocese of Oxford were massive and one suspects that considerable sums of charitable money were also spent defending Ball.  We should always be able to expect the highest standards of ethical behaviour from lawyers working for the church.   Somehow the events of recent years when specialist church lawyers have been involved have meant that our confidence in the church’s legal system is not as secure as we would like it to be.

The Peak affair is something that could easily be buried under the ecclesiastical legal carpet.  It is however, I believe, saying something challenging to a future generation of church lawyers.  After failures and evidence of legal malfeasance over recent years, the wider Church will always be watching your behaviour with greater scrutiny.    In return for the millions we spend, and have spent, on legal services, we expect one thing above all.  We expect the very highest standards of morality and ethics. These are already laid down by the legal profession itself as it seeks to serve the public in a variety of contexts. Breaches of trust, conflicts of interest, protecting reputations and institutional bullying should never be found coming among church legal officers.  Also, protecting such behaviour, when practised by church dignitaries, is not part of your job.  We need the service of good lawyers to help the Church of England in its work, but we need to be able to assume that you fully share our highest ethical values, even if not necessarily our beliefs.  These values indeed already belong to your ethical and professional training.  They include respect for all, justice, equality under the law and high levels of personal integrity.  Recent failures by church lawyers in preserving such values have put many of us in a state of high alert.  We want to see that the church legal system is being used to promote the cause of justice and goodness and not a means to bolster reputation management and indulge in unjust power games which damage so many.

Having struggled through the New Year season with Covid, I make no apologies for delays in writing a few words for my readers.  For me and my wife, the virus has manifested itself as a streaming cold, a hacking cough and a high temperature and I realise that I have had little energy for writing over the past couple of weeks.  What I offer here is shorter than usual, but I trust my readers will be understanding as I try to get back to normal.

The word that sums up this season is simply the word ‘new’. I realised as I was thinking about this word that it is not one describing an objective reality. Something may be new to one person but not to another. The individual who has not yet seen an object or had a particular life experience is entitled to describe them as new on the first occasion when they are encountered.  While there are some things that are universally new to everyone, most ‘new’ experiences are only special to the individuals concerned.  This quality of newness, such as one marking an age milestone, is nevertheless very important to those involved.  The newness of marriage, parenthood, adulthood is something we commemorate and often share with others.  We recognise how important these new milestone events are in people’s lives.  By our joining in such celebrations, we help to emphasise how delighted we are to share an experience of newness in another person’s life.

Newness is not just about marking and celebrating these life milestones, whether those of other people or our own.  It also describes about a quality of living that sees the way that everything around us is constantly in a state of flux and change.  The world of nature allows us to live in a world of beauty and growth where we see constant change.  It is perhaps much easier not to notice what is is going on around us, how, for example, each day in the year has its own special quality.  The light of the sun in winter is of a different quality to that of summer.  Each season also has its own glory.  The changes and constant newness all around us are a constant source of delight and joy.  The one thing that is required to enter this world of delight is our readiness to pay attention.   It takes effort to notice the new.  Humankind has a regrettable preference for what is predictable and repeatable.  We thus find it easier to shut out anything not needed for the immediate task in hand.

The capacity to embrace newness in the world of nature by people is an attractive quality.  It makes us want to try harder to cultivate this appreciation or sense of wonder in ourselves as a way of honouring God as the creator.  There is a wonderful passage in Psalm 8 when the psalmist speaks of the ‘work of thy (God’s) fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained’.  If appreciating God’s beauty is to become an honoured part of our spiritual make-up, then we should probably take more trouble over it.  We would like to think that our recognition of the newness of everything around us, is indeed part of our Christian faith.  This may be the case, but it cannot be allowed to stand on its own.   To serve God merely by recognising his beauty in nature would be an in incomplete, even lopsided, form of faith. 

There is one further way that we are called to engage with newness.  Christianity sometimes involves deliberate activity.  We may see something that ought to be done and we determine in our minds to take the necessary actions to bring it to pass.  Knowing that the people around us have similar needs to our own allows us to make an effort to serve those needs when we can.  Every decision to speak a word of encouragement or support to another person takes courage on our part.  When we do it, it is a deliberate action and it is new in the sense that it has never happened before.  Our potential actions towards other people all have the possibility for good.   In this potentiality there is enormous hope for change, newness and even transformation.  Perhaps we make less effort for the people around us because we have started to get too used to them and take them for granted. Just as the view from our own front window becomes so familiar that we stop noticing it and take it for granted, so we so easily do the same with people.  To say that other people, even those closest to us, have so much more to be engaged with, is probably an understatement.  As with the seasons, the growth in nature and the beauty of light interacting with plants and animals, so the people around us, the ones we take for granted, have so much to appreciate about them.  It does, however, require some kind of deliberate attention or application to reveal what we should want to find in that that over-familiar, maybe even stale, relationships.  But if we believe that everything is capable of being made new, then we should give our full attention to areas of staleness in our personal lives.  To see what is new in everything and everyone around us is perhaps a truly Christian resolution for the New Year.

In Revelation 21, in a passage often read at funerals, the one seated on the Throne says, ‘Behold I make all things new’.  Exactly what is being made new in this passage needs discussion and interpretation and there is room for different opinions on this. Nevertheless the ideal of newness being a divine gift to replace brokenness, death and loss has a powerful resonance. In whatever situation we find ourselves in we are always in the need of newness.  The interesting thing is that such newness is always available if we truly look for it.  It is available in the world of beauty and nature, and this is a gift for all, regardless of any religious background.  But newness is also promised in our relationships.  As Christians we are expected to explore the possibility of new relationships.  Here we find the discourse of reconciliation, forgiveness and restoration.   These are words about newness that very much belong to the Christian narrative.  There is a great deal of hope to be found here.

The idea of New Year has a powerful resonance whether we are talking about a Christian audience or an ordinary secular one.  Both can respond to that idea that newness involves hope and possibilities for the future.  Christians have their own account about the content of their hope, but every human being can be drawn into a narrative of good things that are possible if we are prepared to make the adjustment to listen more carefully and pay attention to what is around us.   Newness in the world, in other people and breaking out of staleness and routine is part of the way that the world becomes changed.  When we see a changed world both in the world of nature or in relationships, things start to shift.  We become part of and begin to create a new and better world.   Somehow, we have begun to put into practice our participation in the changing of the world that God is still creating, the world where all things are made new.