I have many times referred to the desire among conservative Christians to find complete reliability in their interaction with Holy Scripture.  Through the medium of preaching, the ‘clear teaching’ of God can be shared among the faithful as they gather for worship in churches around the world. There is, however, only one actual place where God’s teaching seems to be totally transparent and clear. That is inside the mind of the authoritative preacher. Within the preacher’s brain, all the difficulties in the text seem to be resolved and tidied up.  Outside the preacher’s head, there is another world.  This is the place where conscientious students of Scripture struggle with the challenge of detailed examination of the Bible.  In this world there are many difficulties and problems to be wrestled with and clear answers are not always to be found.  I am not now going to say more on the numerous problems that arise when a preacher claims perfect consistency and reliability for the Bible.   My purpose in this blog piece is to introduce a fresh concept which I have just encountered. This concept can, I believe, help us to have a realistic and more profound appreciation of Holy Scripture. The idea I want to share is what I call reverse translation.  In simple terms we are attempting to read  the Bible as far as we can by understanding the thought forms and words of those who authored Scripture.  Through this exercise we may find we have greater awareness of some of the critical issues around the study of Scripture.  We can also find through it a sense of hope and a strengthening for our faith, as we get a little closer to those who wrote the Bible.

I want, first, to emphasise a preoccupation of mine about the importance of words and their correct interpretation in any serious study of the Bible.  It is sometimes important to spend a fair amount of time on a key word to extract its full meaning.  Those of us who have knowledge of a foreign language know how difficult it can be to find the exact equivalent in English for a foreign word.  This also may be true when we speak the same language as the other person.  Their cultural background may be different from our own and they can use words in a different way from us.  The same problem exists in a pronounced way when we try to understand texts that were written two thousand or more years ago. I am not going to claim that every Christian needs to learn Greek and Hebrew. But I would suggest that all those who teach from a pulpit need to have some awareness of these languages and the way they function.  Quite often the pronouncement that Scripture is clear and straightforward is not what any of the commentaries are claiming.  A little humility needs to be exercised as well as self-knowledge if Scripture is not to be used a means of self-aggrandisement.  Another trap that some preachers fall into is to weaponize Scripture.  What is delivered from the pulpit is not an exposition of God’s will, but a parade of their human prejudice, wrapped up in carefully chosen words taken from Scripture.  The words are frequently wrenched from their context and because of this they lose much of their original meaning.

In common with many theological students of my generation, I had to have a reasonable grounding in New Testament Greek. I did also take some instruction in Hebrew but gave that up before the end of my undergraduate studies. I make no claims of expertise here, but I am aware of the many problems that face us if we always claim to have a totally reliable translation of an Old or New Testament passage. The more one is exposed to these original languages, the greater is a reluctance to use words like infallible to describe Scripture. I remember a day in my Hebrew class when the teacher admitted that the translation of one particular Hebrew word was a matter of guesswork. Somewhere in the distant past, the understanding of the meaning of this word, even among Jewish scholars, had been lost.

The problems of engaging with ancient texts is not a way of saying that we must learn these languages for ourselves. What we can do is to be aware that there are many scriptural words in English which have a quite different feel when we engage in a reverse translation.  While most English translations of biblical words and ideas may be fairly accurate, this does not mean that we should be unaware or uninterested in the wider context or framework of understanding that was in operation for the original writer.  It is sometimes helpful to consult a variety of English translations.  This will help us to see that the work of translation is sometimes a matter of conveying the sense of an entire passage rather than just the meaning of individual words. To focus on individual words in Scripture can, however, be helpful.  As I have said in earlier blogs, Hebrew words often contain a range of meanings rather than a single English equivalent. The simplest best-known example of this is in the word commonly used greeting word in modern Hebrew – Shalom. The word can convey a whole range of positive experiences that we wish for the one whom we are greeting. It contains the idea of peace, prosperity, reconciliation and wholeness. Even from this single example, it is clear that the Hebrew language treats words in a somewhat different way to English. Words are used not so much as a way of defining meaning, but rather as a way of clustering together and evoking meanings.

In the small ecumenical study group that I belong to, we have decided, at my suggestion, to look at the Lord’s Prayer and try to do a reverse translation to the version given in the Aramaic New Testament, known as the Peshitta. This version will be very close to the actual words that Jesus himself used. Aramaic was his likely first language and was used by him for teaching. Nobody is expecting to become knowledgeable in this language but the wrestling with individual words and using the insights of commentators and what they can tell us about their meaning, will help us to hear something new in the prayer.  In short, reverse translation may be a means of obtaining a new appreciation of the way that familiar words can be appropriated and understood in a completely fresh manner.

What might this exercise in glimpsing the words and meanings of an ancient biblical worldview achieve?  Looking at the Aramaic words which, like Hebrew, evoke meaning and experience, will make us all, hopefully, a little more reluctant to claim that we have the meaning of any text completely sorted.  Allowing ourselves to be exposed to the thinking and feeling of a completely different culture is itself a lesson in a new and fresh way of humbly apprehending truth. We have already suggested that English does not have a single word to translate shalom. Similarly, the Lord’s Prayer, when encountered through the words used by the Aramaic New Testament is going to have a different feeling about it. To repeat, words in Hebrew evoke meaning. It is therefore wrong to suggest that in this exercise of reverse translation we will arrive at the kinds of defined meanings that would justify the adjectives infallible or inerrant. Reverse translation takes us further away from such ideas.   Theories of Scripture being without error have an 18^th century flavour.  They certainly have little to do with the thought world of the Bible.

I was speaking to someone who said that he had been recently released from what he described as the fundamentalist horror of his upbringing. He realised now that truth was not something that was handed to him from an authoritative controlling preacher but was result of personal discovery and growth. He knew that, now he had abandoned the same reliable but narrow teaching of his conservative evangelical background, his understandings would be untidy.  Although his past beliefs had offered him safety, they came with the intolerable additional burden of constant fear.  Somehow uncertainty was a price worth paying for the complete release from this fear that had haunted him since childhood. In short, he recognised that the God, now revealing himself to him as compassion and love, was not the same one who had terrified him most of his life.  I encouraged him in the thought that while we cannot expect to have all the answers in this lifetime, there are always enough hints of truth and goodness around us to guide us into a place of shalom in all of its manifestations.

Surviving Church has now been going for almost 10 years and I am contemplating soon laying down my pen, so to speak and to focus on other things. The world of church politics is not a place where I feel comfortable and I have probably said most of what I can usefully say about abuse, safeguarding, church bullying and narcissism among church leaders. Even if the number of posts I put up here becomes fewer, I will still be available for email correspondence with those who wish to engage with me on the issues which have preoccupied me for almost 30 years. One of the welcome by-products of writing this blog has been the communication with a variety of strangers. They have shared experience and queries and I have tried to answer these to the best of my ability. I am very happy to continue such communication as long as it is required.

There is a book by the American political commentator, George Lakoff, which much appealed to me when I read it some eight years ago.  It had the intriguing title Don’t Think of an Elephant.  The point of the title is that when you tell someone that they are not permitted to think about a thing or a topic, that forbidden object will automatically immediately come into your mind.  No one can avoid thinking about a topic once it has been brought to one’s attention.  Human nature and the thinking processes cannot be manipulated in this way to accommodate the requirements of authority, however much they might like it.

In the aftermath of the news that Mike Pilavachi, the founder of Soul Survivor, is stepping back from ministry while an investigation is held into safeguarding concerns, we are told ‘not (to) speculate or discuss this more widely, including on social media, while the process runs its course’.  This statement is put out on behalf of the trustees of Soul Survivor, the Diocese of St Albans and the NST.   Clearly someone believes that any reflection on the implications of sentences containing together the words, safeguarding, Pilavachi and stepping back, can be supressed as though they had never been said.  The elephant has now been named and it is inevitable that people will want to react to the little that has so far been shared in the public domain.  A responsible blogger, as I hope I am, is not going to claim to have new information on the matter based on rumour or speculation.  However, there is already enough information in the public domain to see, even in the bare outlines of the story, a matter of significant public interest.  It is also of massive concern to the Anglican circles of charismatic evangelicals where Pilavachi has held a position of some importance.

Soul Survivor, the organisation over which Pilavachi has presided and guided over three decades, has seen around 35,000 young people in Britain pass through its camps.  The stepping back of its founder will inevitably cause consternation to these young people who will have regarded their camp leader with enormous respect, if not veneration.  The dynamic of charismatic Christianity very much draws on a process involving hero-worship or projection.   Having had no personal knowledge of the Soul Survivor organisation before this past week, I can make no further observations as to the inner workings of this, on the surface, highly successful and powerful organisation for the evangelisation of young people in Britain.

Although I cannot say very much about Pilavachi and his style of operation, there are some interesting parallels that can be made with another Anglican youth ministry which appeared at the same time in the 90s: the Nine O’Clock Service in Sheffield.  The parallels are not perfect, and I do not want to suggest that the leader of NOS, Chris Brain and his known abusive behaviour towards women, is being echoed in the current Soul Survivor inquiries.  The true parallels seem to occur in two main ways.  First, both these networks have had a focus on ministering to young people.  Secondly, because of the considerable level of success in each case, the organisations operated by Brain and Pilavachi have been able to negotiate a considerable degree of independence from traditional Anglican structures, while remaining part of the whole.  It is this semi-detached relationship with the CofE that I want to reflect on as it appears in each organisation.  The wider Church seemed to gain a great deal from this oversight, but it also puts itself in a position of peril if things were to go wrong.

It is one of the contemporary claims of the 21^st century CofE to have a variety of structures within the whole.  These have a flexibility and are able to adapt to a variety of ecclesial situations.  Alongside the traditional parish structure, which relates a parish to others in a deanery and is answerable to an archdeacon and a bishop, there are a variety of other ways of doing ‘church’ under the Anglican umbrella.  Many Anglican Christians in Britain belong nominally to a diocese, but they have structures of oversight which are little to do with traditional deaneries and dioceses.  These churches, often with a distinctive conservative evangelical flavour, are far more likely to relate only to other like-minded congregations within their own particular network.  The networks have names like AMiE, GAFCON, ReNew or New Wine.  Some owe their identity to an association with a particular prominent mother church like Holy Trinity Brompton.   The mother church may be the one that planted their congregation sometime in the past.  Thus, we have a considerable percentage of churches that exist in a variety of independent ecclesiastical bubbles.  The clergy, who serve one or other of these network congregations, will often move only to other congregations which are part of their group.  Many clergy who serve within these networks will have begun their ministries in the ‘mother ship’ which has in a quasi-episcopal role over these satellite congregations.  It is notable how some key mega-churches have up to a dozen curates.  These junior clergy are all waiting for the opportunity to serve in a congregation within their own network.  Such appointments are made not by bishops, as far as one can gather, but by patrons and others powerful positions in the network.  One of the claims made about Jonathan Fletcher is that he possessed the patronage power equivalent to several bishops.  He had the undisputed power to place favoured junior clergy in the parishes that once looked to him as their unofficial leader.  It would be true to say that the occupants of many key evangelical parishes today owe their position originally to the patronage and support of Fletcher in his exercising considerable power within the broad evangelical network.

Soul Survivor began as a group receiving support from its founding congregation of St Andrew’s Chorley Wood.  Here Mike Pilavachi worked as a youth leader.  This church came to prominence in the 80s and 90s under the somewhat eccentric leadership of Bishop David Pytches.  It was one of the first networks to promote what we can describe as charismatic evangelical worship.  In this it was indebted to a number of transatlantic contacts.   St Andrews was deeply involved in promoting the Kansas City Prophets and later the Toronto Blessing in 1994.  There is not the space to recount the story of Pilavachi’s initiative but, suffice to say, his organisation has been, in the three decades of its existence, a massive influence on Anglican youth work and latterly on helping churches to exercise leadership.  While we are unable to shed any further light on what may be being discussed as part of the current investigation process, we can comment that any ministries focussing on work with youth are always extremely vulnerable to safeguarding problems.

We have already mentioned the rise and fall of the Nine O’Clock Service which appeared at the same time as Soul Survivor.  In each case the organisation negotiated for itself a considerable degree of independence from CofE structures.  Both NOS and Soul Survivor, in not dissimilar ways, have been known for the large numbers of young people at their services.  The readiness by the diocesan authorities to allow a semi-independent group to have control over finances (and safeguarding) was bound to be a risky matter.  In the case of NOS, Brain was allowed total control of the group, while at the same time accepting the nominal control and oversight of the Diocese of Sheffield through being ordained as a priest.   There seems to have been an implicit hope that Brain’s success in attracting large numbers of young people would somehow rub off on to the wider Anglican structures.   When things were running well, everybody wanted to be part of the action, from the Archbishop of Canterbury (George Carey) downwards.   Being identified with such avant-garde thinking in theology and liturgy, made the CofE appear to be up to date and in touch with popular culture. Brain had appeared to be discovering a new way of attracting young people to a modern expression of church through his grasp of technical wizardry and grand theatrical effects.  Theologically speaking, he owed inspiration to ideas propounded in the States by Matthew Fox and his Creation Spirituality.

In the case of Soul Survivor, the powerful personality of Pilavachi also seems to have established a leading role in his organisation.   In the annual youth camps which were held every year up to 2019, Pilavachi appears to have been a crucial presence.  Also, he exercised a quasi-episcopal role in drawing together a cluster of affiliated parishes and congregations (not all Anglican) to be part of a Soul Survivor network.  The temporary relinquishing of the leadership role by Pilavachi may create serious problems for the successful functioning of this network.  The sheer force of a charismatic personality like Pilavachi’s is always important in holding together such a network. This need for such leadership cannot be underestimated.  Only time will tell how the network will manage to hold together if the stepping back is anything more than extremely short-lived.  

My brief mention of the role of a charismatic leader in holding together a group, large or small, is one that is familiar to students of cults.  I have written myself about this dynamic as it is a familiar theme of cult studies and social theory.  At its simplest form, there is a common tendency among most human beings to search for, in situations of stress, another on whom to project their longing to feel safe. Young adults, the 18-35 group, are especially vulnerable to this dynamic.  There is an argument for claiming that everyone who ministers pastorally to young people in the churches, is ministering to a vulnerable segment of the population.   As such there should be a special training for anyone engaging with this cohort in the name of the church to understand, at a considerable level of professionalism and expertise, the potential hazards of what could go wrong.

There is of course much more to be said on the dynamics of groups involving young people.  One thing that became abundantly clear after the NOS debacle was the sense of the Anglican authorities being totally out of their depth in dealing with the matter after the whole thing blew up.  In view of the importance and wide-reaching influence of Soul Survivor, it is to be hoped that whatever may need to be done to recover the situation with the organisation, it will be done with wisdom and proper expertise.  The ability to influence large numbers of young people and speak to their spiritual needs is a great privilege but also carries great risks.  The topic is too important for all of us to allow anyone to shut down our discussion of what needs to be done in the future.

There is one word which opens up for us some important aspects of the Holy Week drama.  The word is betrayal. In our liturgical commemoration of the Passion drama, we are, early on, witnesses of the betrayal by Judas.  Then there is the somewhat different manifestation of betrayal by Peter during the trial of Jesus. In reminding my readers of these particular moments of betrayal in the Passion narrative, I am not intending to launch into a full Holy Week meditation.  Rather I want us to reflect on the meaning of the word betrayal and the way that it touches us in our personal and social lives.

In considering these two betrayals mentioned in the Holy Week narrative, we can see that there is more than one way of approaching the word. First there is betrayal as an objective fact. Jesus is delivered into the hands of the authorities by the actions of Judas, a member of his group and then later disowned by another disciple, Peter. Then there is the subjective side to this act of betrayal.  We have to imagine all the feelings that would have been aroused in Jesus because of the actions of both Peter and Judas. The objective betrayals were accompanied by the shattering awareness for Jesus that profound prior relationships were being attacked and, in one case, destroyed. Further emotions are recorded in the account of Peter’s betrayal. There was, for Peter, the emotion of anger in the denials.  Later there were profound tears of contrition and regret. Before we leave the words recorded in Scripture about betrayal, I want to remind my reader of the psalmist (Psalm 55) who also experienced the deep pain of betrayal by a close friend. He expresses the thought that if it had been an open enemy who had betrayed him, ‘then I could have borne it’.  The fact that it was a friend made the betrayal doubly painful and unbearable.  Most of us can probably remember occasions where similar things have happened to us.  I can remember an incident from the time I first went to public school at the age of 14. It was quite a culture shock to go from a school with 60 boys to one with 350.  On the very first day I struck up a friendship with a boy from another house who sat immediately behind me in the class I was in. It was a relief to know that there was a potential ally literally watching my back, and this helped me to cope with the sheer strangeness of everything around me. Imagine my shock and disappointment when the same boy, for reasons that remain obscure to me, shortly afterwards decided to stick a pin through the canvas webbing of the chair I was sitting on. It was not the pain that I felt most of all. It was a sense of betrayal that a potential friendship had been so suddenly destroyed. All of us have probably known this experience of trusting an individual, only to have our trust in that person wiped out by some act of betrayal. All of us want to believe that those close to us are incapable of such acts. Most of the time, thankfully, we are right.  Then, once in a while we are completely dumbfounded by an action taken against us by someone we thought we knew well.  This revealed a hidden malevolence which we did not understand and probably had never seen before

My involvement in listening to stories of abusive behaviour in church contexts has made me aware of the way that otherwise loving people even in churches can turn out to have a dark side.  In the one place where we believe sound caring relationships are promoted and valued, it is shocking to discover acts of betrayal which merit the description of abusive or exploitative.  As we are never tired of saying in this blog, acts of betrayal are not just found in the original abusive episode; they are also frequently in the way the survivor, seeking help, is treated by church people in authority. Betrayal is thus experienced by the abused person in a double act of violence. Through abuse, a youth leader might destroy our sense of safety and well-being in a church, but then the same thing happens when we, the abused, reach out for help from another respected leader. Even if these leaders are held up by others as totally trustworthy with high reputations, the experience in fact we have gained is one of double betrayal.

One of the issues that the 31:8 review about Emmanuel church Wimbledon struggled with was trying to make sense of the two sides of the Vicar, Jonathan Fletcher (JF). He was the possessor of ‘positive characteristics and (was) highly regarded’.  At the same time he ‘could nonetheless display entirely inappropriate, abusive and harmful behaviour which render (him) unfit for office.’   It is clear from the review that JF was found to be charismatic, charming and an inspiring teacher of Scripture. He presented to many grateful acolytes, both this charm and his apparent deep pastoral concern for them.  At the same time there was a darker, exploitative and sinister side to his personality. Some experienced bullying and others were victims of entirely inappropriate behaviour, both sexual and psychological. The review tries to grapple with this double-sided reality.  One heading in the review articulates the paradox with the words ‘the myth of homogeneity.  I had to pause to work out what the review author meant by these words.  He/she was pointing to the phenomenon that individuals, particularly Christians, have a tendency to lump individuals into an ‘all-good’ or ‘all-bad’ category.   Such lazy thinking does not allow for the possibility that any individual may combine good and bad in the same personality. The 31:8 review is challenging us, in using this expression the myth of homogeneity, to see that theories of all-goodness or all badness in an individual are unsafe, even dangerous, notions to entertain.  The charm of the charismatic figure must never allow us to leave anyone with a free pass to be unsupervised and unchallenged for the way they interact with others. Everyone is potentially capable of exploitative evil.  To put it another way, everyone is capable of betraying their good persona and surrendering to a dark, even evil, expression of themselves.  There must always be structures in place which inhibit and stand against any inappropriate crossing of boundaries. This is where so much abuse and exploitation is to be found.  On a positive note, this checking of boundaries in people’s behaviour may have the desired effect of driving away bad behaviour.  We need a dominance of goodness and total integrity in an institution to allow people to trust and feel safe again.  The opposite sense, fear and constant suspicion, is a high price to pay because some church leaders are too lazy or unwilling to do the necessary work of effective safeguarding for all members of a Church.

The myth of homogeneity is a useful expression to have in our minds as we try to understand why there are currently so many problems in the safeguarding world of the Church of England. Just because someone has passed through various hoops to become a Christian leader and a person commanding trust, it does not mean that they should ever be left unsupervised or beyond challenge in the realm of human relationships and the oversight of justice. A person may reach the status of being a spiritual director of some renown, but a potential for something to go wrong still remains. I am constantly disappointed in the way that I hear of otherwise honourable people in the church behaving, not necessarily abusively, but in ways that are a betrayal of the roles they hold as guardians of justice and integrity in the church. Because Christians talk about holiness, it is often assumed that all members of the Church are incapable of dishonest or dishonourable behaviour.  As far as church leaders are concerned, we all too often see protection of the institution being put well above the need for personal integrity. Homogeneity in individuals is indeed a myth.  Outward charm is not infrequently combined with self-seeking and actual malfeasance. Eventually some objective scrutiny from outside bodies, even that provided by a secular state, may be needed.  It will perhaps be the necessary price we have to pay to get things properly safe and fit for purpose in the task of the Church to protect the vulnerable.

Our theme of betrayal began when we considered particular episodes among the events of Holy Week.  From there we moved on to consider our own experience of being let down by others, and, maybe, the times we have been guilty of failing in this way.  It may be part of our Holy Week meditation to reflect on the ways that we have been guilty of betrayal whether of Jesus or other people. As we contemplate our own collusion in the guilt of actual betrayal, we are perhaps better able to see that our good intentions can be interlaced with evil and exploitative motivation. Even if evil is not the central reality in the core of our being, we still need to be working all the time at expelling selfishness as much as we can. The first stage of expending evil is to recognise that it exists. Perhaps this Holy Week we can continue the task of greater  self-knowledge so that we can individually and corporately become the instruments of God’s active love and goodness in the world.

by Martin Sewell

On Thursday morning the Church of England announced that the Chair of the so called “Independent’ Safeguarding Board, Maggie Atkinson had resigned.

 https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2022/5-august/news/uk/independent-safeguarding-chair-steps-back-after-second-data-breach

This latest act in the tragi-comedy which is the ISB, came at the end of a lengthy period of the Chair being “stood back” – in truth suspended by the Church – but even from that time, the Archbishops’ Council was still maintaining the fiction that it was not controlling the very body whose role was in part to hold its parent body to account. The announcement of both the “standing back”, and the resignation were published on the CofE website; this is not insignificant; a truly independent body would have been reporting its own comings and goings.

If you read the terms of the announcement – and we must now be clear that the news management is largely in the hands of the CofE Communications Department – it was all very respectful and amicable; evidently the Chair was leaving partly to spend more time with her family. If you believe this is the top and tail of the story, I have a lovely bridge in New York to sell you – ‘real cheap.”

Ms Atkinson’s resignation comes at the conclusion of a process of contractually “enforced conciliation” – an oxymoron – which was never likely to have a happy outcome after eight months of estrangement seasoned with findings of adverse data mishandling by the Chair.  Survivors were reporting a loss of confidence in her, and one can hardly be surprised that the Survivor Advocate Jasvinder Sanghera took their concerns very seriously. Without survivor confidence the ISB is incapable of functioning properly.

As I ponder the facts and watch the consequences unfold over the next few weeks I am put in mind of the late political interviewer Robin Day who explained late in his career that he usually began an interview with one simple question in his mind.  “Why is this bastard lying to me”?

Perhaps we are obliged to proceed with a little more Synodical decorum, but the sentiment is worth holding onto, as we doubtless hear developments, speculations, explanations and press statements assuring us that this time it will all be different.

Introducing Ms Atkinson to General Synod in February 2022 the Lead Safeguarding Bishop Jonathan Gibbs hailed the ISB as “ fully independent “ – a sentiment the new Chair echoed, Some members of General Synod were already slightly sceptical and were seeking clarifications

Modest attempts were made to encourage the development of key performance indicators and to endow the fledgling body with executive powers to hold bishops to account , but these attempts were swiftly closed down by a wrecking procedural motion; the writing was beginning to appear on the wall. The message was “Some are more committed to independence transparency and accountability than others.”

It has taken a lot of persistent questioning by interested parties to winkle out the truth about the constitutional position of the ISB. It is now conceded that the ISB is not an independent body in law. – indeed , when sued in Court by Dr Martyn Percy,  a defence to this effect was filed in these plain terms! 

What is not widely known is that not only has the then Chair fallen foul of the Office Information Commissioner for data breaches,  but the advertisement for a Business Development Manager for the ISB was referred to the Advertising Standards Authority, which ruled that it was misleading! The position was advertised by the CofE – so how was the position or the purported body “Independent “? The CofE was ruled to have advertised misleadingly to applicants about the role and function of the body to be served.  Tragi-comedy had descended into farce. Luckily the successful candidate was not actually misled: he moved across from being Business Manager to the NST, so that’s alright then

But at least we now know that  ISB was and is wholly and closely controlled in terms of ambit and resource by Archbishops Council. Two very serious questions flow from this?

When the ISB Chair and Lead Bishop were insisting the ISB was “fully independent” they may well have been speaking in good faith, but did nobody know this was false or erroneous? Perhaps one can accept that a bona fide error was made but this raises the equally concerning issue of lack of competence. Which is it? 

Attempts to engage the Audit Committee in a clarifying investigation were resisted by the Archbishops at the last Synod. The Chair of the Audit Committee told Synod that oversight of the ISB was not within her committee’s scope of activity, but we now know that this too was mistaken. A letter from the Audit Committee Chair correcting that error was sent to the Synod Member who raised the question, but the correction has yet to be circulated to all Synod members.

So now we know that the Audit Committee can look into these matters and it needs to do so as a matter of urgency.

The appointment  of Ms Atkinson’s temporary replacement brings additional important issues to light .The former MP Meg Munn  who is taking over, currently numbers amongst her career portfolio of offices, that of member of the National Safeguarding Steering Group  and Chair of the National Safeguarding Panel. Whether she and /or either of those bodies played any part in the original conceptualisation of the ISB or the current shenanigans is unclear. So much is and will remain unclear; General Synod has not been allowed to debate these problems and may not be in July.

One might have assumed that the interim role would have fallen to the Survivor Advocate who has been the de facto voice of the body, since Ms Atkinson has been “stepped back”. However, Jasvinder Sanghera appears to have been nudged aside, with Ms Munn imposed upon her and her colleague Steve Reeves without any notice, still less consultation, neither were survivors consulted.

One might be critical of the slow pace of change, and even perhaps of the naivety of the ISB members; sometimes they appeared to be talking a better game than they delivered within the complex and tangled institution that is the CofE.

What cannot be denied however is that Ms Sanghera and Mr Reeves have brought bona fides to their task and devoted a lot of time to talking to Survivors, gaining their confidence. The effects of the imposition of the Archbishops’ Council ‘s choice of Chair  into this difficult situation without any consultation with the very group that has been abused and ignored by the Church for far too long, is yet another example of the arrogance of power that taints so much that the Church does in this area.

Already some survivors have told me that they have notified Ms Sanghera that they do not consent to their data being shared with Ms Munn. This hoists the Archbishops’ Council with its own petard. If the ISB is not a body in law, and if Ms Munn joins the other two members with self-employed contractor status only, in the absence of data sharing consents from each survivor individually, Ms Munn cannot be admitted to the very data she should have, in order to perform the tasks required. She cannot be passported into the office if the ISB has no formal identity, though she can, of course chair meetings.  Having said that, those meetings have all the makings of being tense affairs given the circumstances and suspicions described above.

Of course, the cynic might think that this is intended to provoke a crisis and/or resignations leaving the field free for a second go at creating an ISB Mark II

This brings us back to our old friends “Transparency and Accountability”. Leaving aside how Ms Munn got to this position, how can she be contracted in one capacity to chair the National Safeguarding Panel – (which surely have some directive roles) whilst simultaneously chairing the very body that will evaluate the complaints from those suffering the allegedly unsound fruits of her labours elsewhere in the building?. Yet again one is driven to the conclusion that the Church of England cannot see a conflict of interest it does not like.

Worse still, if you were a new survivor thinking of bringing your issues to this organisation when others have testified to IICSA that the wished they had never done so, would you seriously entrust your safety and wellbeing to an organisation in this degree of disarray? I would not.