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
Many thanks, but I have to ask why there needs to be a ‘lead bishop’ for safeguarding or, indeed, for anything else. It seems to me that the primary task of the relevant lead bishop is to act as a lightning rod for all of the inadequacies of the particular section of the Church which s/he has to answer for.
Anyway, there also wouldn’t need to be such a provision if all of the Church’s safeguarding operations (whether national or diocesan) were scrapped and vested in a fully independent national safeguarding body overseeing all institutional with safeguarding responsibilities. Not just for children, as IICA proposed.
I think it’s a bit like a Primary School having a specialist in maths, or in history. All the teachers are expected to teach all subjects, but it does mean they may be less knowledgeable in some areas. So they talk over their lesson plan with the specialist.
Obviously all the bishops are responsible for safeguarding on their own patches, whether they like it or not. Seeming to pass the buck onto a newbie, who clearly doesn’t have any authority over any of them, is a disingenuous distraction.
Normal service from the C of E continues.
It would be interesting to ask the Lead Bishop what she expects to do in her new role, and how she, and we, will know at the end of three years whether or not she has done it.
Targets can be very helpful. But we are not her line manager! I wonder if the ABC has set her targets, and whether these will be discussed at an annual assessment for example? I’d guess not!
The members of the Church are in a position somewhat analogous to the shareholders of a company. They are not the line managers of the directors, but they have a realistic expectation that the directors should account to them for what they do and how they do it.
Good point. Well put.
There are two distinct categories of Church abuse again highlighted by Stephen’s post. The abuse of children and young people by clergy, and the second category of the abuse of clergy by the invention or exaggeration of claims against them, to manipulate them generally with the purpose of silencing or removing them.
My own direct experience was abuse at school by a priest, but it’s the second category which now needs to be maintained in the limelight of public scrutiny. There isn’t a person on the planet who doesn’t know about the abuse of the young and the Church’s dead response a matter of record. But the external scrutiny has good momentum. Keep it up.
The attempts at controlling clergy by vicious manipulation including that infamous manoeuvre, the CDM, need a lot more scrutiny. ChristChurch was an important “test case” to expose the depths to which people in power are prepared to stoop to protect their territories. They lost.
Safeguarding is treated cynically by the Church and weaponised. The Sargeant fall out is a further illustration of this. Power is exercised without due process. A great deal more needs to be done to keep these cases in the public eye and support their victims and survivors.
There is a third category – abuse of adults by clergy. This, too, is damaging, as is the bullying which is all too rife in the C of E. We need another Reformation.
Thank you, Stephen, for posting this extremely valuable and insightful article”
“It allows those with power, but hidden behind the scenes in the Church, to retain their control of the whole process…”
Rather says it all. While there are good individuals within the CofE who bravely stand up for victims, by and large the prevailing institutional culture is as identified by IICSA — “clericalism” and “tribalism”.
In the case of the Bishop of London and her London bishops, the diocese is an abyss of Luther Pendragon-driven cover-up of clergy abuse and victimisation of whistleblowers — what Martyn Percy calls “project-managed persecution”. The Diocesan-led persecution of Fr Alan Griffin, Survivor N and other London cases heartily call into question the thinking behind this latest appointment.
As you say, Joanne Grenfell, as Bishop of Stepney, has some serious explaining to do in relation to shocking safeguarding issues on her own doorstep, and as she takes up her role, what chummy relationships/conflicts of interest might obtain with clerics and bishops at the heart of these scandals.
As the song you’ve published addresses, collusion and multiple conflicts of interest are the soundtrack of the CofE under the likes of Welby and Mullally.
Found Church of England Newspaper article on the safeguarding disasters in the Diocese of London and Stepney
https://www.churchofenglandblog.com/post/how-is-the-church-to-tackle-safeguarding
https://www.churchofenglandblog.com/post/william_campbell-taylor
A correction regarding Winchester diocese and Luther Pendragon – they parted company last September, 2022 -some of us in the diocese demanded they be sacked for the amount of money it was costing and their utter ineptitude (hope that doesn’t get me into trouble with libel) – I could tell a couple of stories, but not necessary now they have been given their “P45” after pressure.
Thank you PE for updating us over the Winchester Diocese. I had looked at the website, which last year placed LP as part of the diocesan structure. Glad that this situation has changed for the better. Perhaps you could find out how much was spent on such ‘crisis-management’ services to warn off any other diocese who might consider employing them!
Thanks Stephen: it was costing around £78,000 a year: I suggested employing a proper publicity officer: the response was “having a chief of communications would cost £80K”; to which I suggested a part time publicity officer for three days a week coupled with running the website could be achieved at £40K, and we didn’t need yet another grandiose title to what is a humble servant job..
I think they have two part time communications officers now – maybe my advice was heeded..
It’s intriguing as to what they actually did for the money. When you strip out VAT it comes to £65k which doesn’t buy a great deal of high level “crisis management” consultancy especially considering the amount they might need for the pickle they’d been in, but would pay for more ordinary advice around simple press releases etc. it still swallows huge amounts of widows’ mites though.
Law firms engaged in this kind of work, or indeed any other contractor, can maintain high fee levels if an oligopoly pertains. However with questions over, for example, competence, the prestige for a position in such a firm can decline. Key personnel leaving can exacerbate the decline in quality.
I think it’s necessary to say again that Luther Pendragon are not a law firm. When I last checked, no lawyer was listed in their management team. I realise that your comment isn’t necessarily referring specifically to them.
Having had cause to call on the Bishop for Safeguarding for personal and more general advocacy I can honestly say it is the most pointless role there is. Quick tip though to anyone trying to get their attention copy in Meg Munn, it gets a quick response, even better challenge her and the Bishop will rush in to defend her. What a lot of nonsense but they will have an all female set up of safeguarding Bishops with this new one, all very woke I’m sure! They can be the next Spice girls – girls rule Ok.
I am familiar with some of the safeguarding “goings on” in the Diocese of London, and was involved in supporting and publicising the song referred to in Stephen’s article.
Having lived through Ireland’s convulsions around Catholic Church abuse, nothing compares to the professionalised ruthlessness and cruelty of the responses of the Anglican Church, including the Bishop of London’s employment of the likes of Luther Pendragon.
The Lead Safeguarding appointment of the Bishop of Stepney disturbs me a lot given her closeness to these local scandals and the personalities involved. There needs to be a public statement from her and/or the spineless Clergy Discipline Commission about this.
In Ireland it took popular mass demonstrations, boycotts and withholding parishioner financial contributions to bring the Catholic Church to its knees on abuse.
Agreed. The news links show halfway down the article a letter of complaint from July 2018 addressed to the Bishop of London and signed by a dozen or so local people from the City of London ward where a Hackney/Stepney vicar who is subject to CDMs and safeguarding/other complaints was their local political councillor:
https://www.churchofenglandblog.com/post/william_campbell-taylor
The local people in the multi-signature letter make various allegations relating to abuse, stalking, bullying and dishonesty that allegedly affected multiple victims, and they pointedly comment on the actions of the Bishop of Stepney and staff over the years:
“We have a particular concern, also, that there have been Church figures in [name of alleged vicar-abuser]’s own diocesan area of Stepney who appear to have actively granted permission and supported his entry and political advancement in our Portsoken community despite concerns about this man being made known”.
Given that the said vicar is I understand apparently interested in again standing as a political candidate for Alderman in this year’s City of London election, it would be a fair question to ask the new Stepney “Lead Bishop for Safeguarding” if she again will be granting permission to this vicar under her authority to stand in these elections.
Should be a good litmus test of her Lead Safeguarding Bishop positions.