Recent rumblings within the UCCF (Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship) might never have attracted much attention but for the clumsy efforts to avoid full disclosure and transparency.  Back in December 2022, some problems in the organisation arose and resulted in the suspension of two very senior officials within the group, Richard Cunningham and Tim Rudge.  An internal enquiry on behalf of the Trustees, that was started in the early part of this year to investigate the issues behind these suspensions, has taken a significant amount of time to complete.  The report containing the results of this inquiry by Hilary Winstone KC was apparently delivered to the Trustees in June. Nothing in this report was shared with the wider public until now.  What we have now in statements from the Trustee body is a rather vague statement which suggests that there have been some issues to be resolved over the contracts and terms of service for the charity volunteers and employees.  The recruitment and support of dozens of young people who work for UCCF is a major part of the charity’s activity.  Meanwhile, the two suspended directors have apparently been found innocent of whatever accusation had led to their suspension, though it is not clear what required the suspensions in the first place.  Also, we heard another fact at the beginning of this month which was the resignation of almost half the trustees from the UCCF Trustee Board.  This included the Chairman, Chris Wilmott. Only the vaguest of reasons have been given for this event. Clearly something is going on within the organisation beyond a dispute about employment law and the practices currently used to recruit and manage those working for UCCF.

In trying to understand what might be going on in a religious organisation which many people may not have even heard of, we have first to revisit briefly the 1920s and the founding of its predecessor, IVF (Inter-Varsity Fellowship). it was realised then by evangelical church leaders across the denominations that students at university, brought up in traditionally conservative home churches, needed spiritual, social and intellectual support in order to grow in their faith. The name-change to UCCF came about in the 1970s when this work among students at university was extended to cover colleges of higher education. Christian unions attached to UCCF are currently found in almost every higher educational establishment across Britain as well as in some schools. UCCF provides a network of staff members to support these Christian Unions with training and organisational support. Almost all of these supporting staff are young and recent graduates.  They will have played an active role in their local Christian union while still undergraduates. These junior members of staff are there to help and encourage new generations of students to be active in the task of evangelism.  This is done through Bible study and prayer groups, as well as more focussed evangelistic events.

In making observations about the work of UCCF, I have the possible advantage of not knowing anyone who is currently part of the organisation.  All my comments are based on information freely available on the internet, especially the UCCF website. After studying this site, especially the potted biographies of a few of its workers and volunteers, I found myself comparing what I was reading with an institution which acts in the manner of a military organisation.  The central duty and priority for every member of this Christian army of student members was to be a follower of Christ and share freely this witness with one’s fellow students.  When not doing the work of sharing Christ with non-Christian friends, the CU requires all its members to engage with frequent attendance at prayer meetings and Bible studies.  In short, membership of a CU can be a virtually full-time occupation for both staff and ordinary members.  There would be little time for other activities apart from university studies.   The ordinary members in the structure could be likened to private soldiers in an army, while the volunteer Relay Workers are a NCO class.  Relay Workers are those who have volunteered for a ten-month period to work with the students.  Above these Relay Workers were staff members who can be considered to be acting in a junior officer rank.  They are expected to stay between three and five years working full-time with perhaps a cluster of CUs.  While Relay workers were expected to be entirely self-supporting for a single academic year, the staff members did receive some pay from a central fund.  The reality of these arrangements has been opened up in a recent Youtube video.  A former staff member spoke of his difficulties rising a third of his salary through fund-raising activities.   One imagines that many staff members find themselves subsidised by their own families.  All of the viewed sample of 120 or so members of staff that are shown on the website were inviting (begging?) the online visitor to help support them with a financial contribution.  Such a system of worker remuneration is at the very least eccentric and questionably legal.  It is not difficult to imagine that someone in UCCF has raised their concern about the exploitative culture of employing staff in this way.  It may be these strange patterns of employment have resulted in an evident unhappiness in UCCF and the suspension of the two senior directors.  My observations are of course speculations but there must be other people who regard the employment culture of UCCF as not fulfilling best practice or working for the best interests of their employees.  Another facet of this employment strategy which raises concerns, is that this way of employing staff is exploitative of youthful idealism.  Working for UCCF does not offer a secure career path, even if some go on to pursue other careers in Christian leadership. Once again employment law apparently does not look kindly on a system of compulsory redundancy after working for three to five years for the same employer.    

My description of the employment practices of UCCF as exploitative might be considered an understating of the issue in the organisation. Taking a cohort of vulnerable young people fired up with enthusiasm for God but with little experience of the world of work, and then expecting them to effectively beg part of their salary from relatives and supporters is an act of questionable honesty. Some might even describe it as something close to slavery. Clearly this culture of using young people to work for less than the going rate is one that is bound to meet a legal or moral challenge at some point. I have no idea whether the suspensions of directors and resignation of trustees has anything to do with the employment regime or not.   Clearly there needs to be a proper examination of employment practices at UCCF.  This may already have begun.

Readers of this blog know about the considerable impact of charismatic styles of Christianity among students and young people. The UCCF emerges from a different ‘tribe’ of evangelical teaching and largely sets itself apart from the charismatic style of HTB and Soul Survivor.  The same non-charismatic and quasi-military culture pertaining to UCCF was also found in the Iwerne camps.  Iwerne wanted to capture the nation’s leaders by focusing on the ‘best’ public schools.  UCCF is impelled by a similar desire to reach the educated student population of Britain with the claims of Christ.  In practice, evangelical institutions or large parishes will tend to identify with one style and culture or the other. Most large and ‘approved’ evangelical churches in our university cities, which support CU, tend to identify with the non-charismatic strand.  While I have some sympathy for the charismatic expression of evangelicalism, I find UCCF and Iwerne inspired churches decidedly old-fashioned and rigorist.  This is especially indicated in their theological statements.  The UCCF statement of belief, which consists of eleven propositions, could have been lifted straight out of a 19^th century textbook of dogmatic Protestant teaching.  From memory it remains identical to the IVF propositions set out 60 years ago when I was an undergraduate myself.  Is it a matter of pride that the same unchanging words are thought to be adequate to convey a statement of truth and belief?  The attempt to place God in a narrow straitjacket of words always seems a futile task.   Even within the New Testament itself we see the language used to describe God changing and evolving.  The writer of Mark’s gospel and that of John would not have found it easy to communicate with one another.  How is the word ‘infallible’ a helpful one when try to embrace the different cultures of truth within the Old and New Testaments?  It takes imagination beyond words to see the harmony between the differing cultures within Scripture.  Understanding truth, as having to be expressed in a precise formula of words, is not helpful for an emerging youthful faith.  One thing that all members of Christian Unions have In common is their youth.   It is, to say the least, unseemly to restrict the desire to use one’s imagination to explore the reality of God and define it in a fixed code of words which are held to be beyond discussion or imaginative interpretation.  It is also abusive and cruel to suggest that any deviation from the eleven propositions provided by UCCF is to place oneself on the path to apostasy or even eternal damnation.  Any social and emotional pressure applied on this vulnerable group within society, our student population, should be a concern those who make the laws of this country as well as all those who minister to their spiritual and emotional welfare.  It is a constant problem to those who seek to serve to minister to students who may find themselves deviating from the thinking of their Christian Unions.

Coincidentally, over the weekend I received a plea from an unknown person who is desperate to receive support from someone who can help her move away psychologically and emotionally from the damaging authoritarianism and ostracism of a Christian congregation.  I am unable to suggest any help but perhaps my readers may know of a support network of this kind.  It is much needed.  Perhaps the tensions and the divisions that are possibly evident today in UCCF may be a prelude to a new generosity and inclusive welcome among evangelicals to one another, especially in the world of supporting Christian students.  In short, the frozen culture of a century of IVF/UCCF intransigence may be ready to crack open to let in new light and truth.

Last Sunday at Carlisle Cathedral, we began a commemoration of the Safeguarding Season with a special eucharist and the launch of a dedicated prayer space in one of the side chapels.  Hitherto I have had very little awareness of the local efforts with safeguarding in my own area.  Retired clergy do not seem to be included in any mailing network for the regular dissemination of diocesan news.  What took place on the 15^th October seemed to be something much more than paying lip-service to an idea sent down from higher authority.  It felt like a genuine attempt by Canon Benjamin Carter, who holds the safeguarding brief for the cathedral chapter, to involve the congregation in this national focus.   Canon Carter was also the preacher. He knows of my safeguarding interests and he made sure that I was introduced to another local person, Antonia Sobocki. She is working in safeguarding through her Loud Fence project.  A google search will reveal the scope and importance of this international initiative for supporting abuse victims.  Antonia and I, through the medium of Zoom, had met on one previous occasion but it was good to make real, as opposed to virtual, contact on this occasion.  

In his sermon Canon Carter referred to the prayer space in Carlisle Cathedral which is being made available throughout the Safeguarding Season.  Each visitor is invited to identify with an emotion which they feel as a result of engaging with the terrible realities of abuse.  He was, of course, not unaware of the strong emotions that have been aroused in all of us as a consequence of the events in Gaza and Israel.  These emotions, whether responding to Israel/Ukraine or abuse victims, range across anger, grief, compassion and love.  Each of these was linked to a ribbon of a different colour.  I cannot recall all the different ribbons and the emotions they represent, but I was attracted to the emotion of lament, this being represented by the colour purple.  I attached my purple ribbon to the branch which formed part of the display.  This represented the feelings of anguish that I have often felt when faced with the fact of abuse alongside the grotesque failures of institutions like the Church.  Institutions have so often failed to respond adequately or to provide any kind of healing for those victims/survivors who looked to them for help.

The act of identifying with this one particular emotion involved in lament, has had the effect of making me scrutinise the word and examine my reasons for choosing it.  How does our understanding of lament relate to the enormity of church abuse with all its many ramifications?  Lament involves an expression of strong emotion. Most of the time we would rather avoid it.  Typically, it is present in the outpouring of emotion that accompanies the hearing of bad news, like the death of a loved one.  It is also a word that is used to indicate a deep sense of remorse that comes when the conscience finally reveals to us how much damage we have inflicted on others by our thoughtless or evil actions.

Although being in the presence of someone expressing a heightened sense of grief or remorse that we associate with the word lament is demanding, we know that sorrow and tears are both stages along the path of processing terrible and seemingly overwhelming pain or information.  There can be no healing without first encountering this initial spasm of grief.  Watching someone break down in tears is never comfortable for a witness, but simply being present with someone going through such an expression of lament may be all that is required of us at that moment. Any attempt to supress or bypass this lament, for fear that it may make someone embarrassed or uncomfortable, is usually unhelpful.  Such a reaction forms part of a cultural response that wants to move suffering out of sight and pretend that pain should and can always be neutralised by the right word or the right medical intervention in the form of pills. 

As I was pondering this word lament, I realised that human culture through the ages has been far more familiar with the idea of a corporate lament.  Lamenting in Scripture seems typically to be a group activity.  In Jesus’ day there were professional mourners, such as those who filled the street outside the home of Jairus when it was believed that his daughter had died.  However we react to the idea of strangers performing the task of sharing the grief with the entire community, these formal rituals of loss did serve a clear purpose.  Those closest to the departed one were clearly the most affected, but the employing of professional mourners had the effect of making each death in the area a matter of community-wide importance.  The grief of the family was being shared right across the area.  Everyone knew of the death and each person could respond by supporting the affected family in whatever way that felt right. 

This community or corporate dimension of lament brings me to a further thought.  As a parish priest I have sat with countless bereaved individuals and families over the years.  The role of the parish priest is not to utter platitudes about death but to act as a kind of echo-chamber for the bereaved as they lament their loss.  Every visitor who seeks to bring support to the bereaved is also part of the lament process. He/she plays their part by providing a safe space for the grief to find its full expression as the bereaved individual/family stumbles on their way to find acceptance and eventual wholeness once more.  Symbolically the parish priest makes present both the community love and care as well as the intangible overarching sense of a loving God who is there to comfort us in our time of lament and our journey through pain.  

Applying the word lament to the safeguarding activity of the Church, we can see a number of parallels with the bereavement process.  The original focus of a safeguarding case is not a death but a highly damaging and exploitative abuse of power.  In the majority of cases this has left a wound similar to a bereavement.  Ideally, the injured party should be met with a respectful caring individual who understands the process of abuse and is prepared to act as an echo for the lament that survivor/victim is feeling and wants to articulate.  Just as the skilled bereavement visitor gives permission for the sufferer to express all the emotions that are pouring out, so the safeguarding listener and responder is seeking to create a space to respect and honour the flood of feelings that survivor needs to express and thus understand.  The pain and lament are real and that is why, as the Archbishop of Canterbury and others have claimed many times, the feelings and emotional needs of the survivor have to be at the heart of every safeguarding event.  When we see this lament being shuffled off to the side because it makes someone important or an institution look bad, it is right that there should be a loud and vocal expression of outrage and protest.  The string of shameful events in the Church’s story over the past twenty or thirty years is a cause for deep sorrow and lament.  If the Church is ever to recover its role of providing light and inspiration for the nation, it will need to engage properly with its past shame and learn to enter the emotions that are summed up in the single word lament.  Honesty and an appropriate level of sorrow and remorse are what are required today.  Anything else resembling triumphalism or squabbling over issues which are fought to give one faction of the church power over another, seem massively petty when set against the enormous task of rediscovering the place of mercy, humility and justice that the prophet Micah so clearly sets before the Church.  Perhaps the task of reviving the Church could be boosted if our leaders were to show some true understanding of how to repent through a real experience of lament and sorrow.  It is perhaps thus we can find again our path back to experience anew the ‘steadfast love’ of God.     

Some words from Lamentations which were read to us last Sunday morning.   These are particularly appropriate as we contemplate a possible total collapse for the Church through its own failure to honour and uphold justice and integrity.  ‘The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall! My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed within me.  But this, I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases …………great is your faithfulness.’  

Over the past few years, especially since retirement, I have found myself considering the way that confession and absolution are handled at the Eucharist. The first thing that I identify as a problem is the sheer brevity of this whole section within the liturgy. Without having timed it, I calculate that the whole action, containing self-examination/ recollection, confession and declaration of forgiveness, can take less than two minutes.  Unless we have done a great deal of self-examination before the service begins, many potential sins will be forgotten or overlooked by the typical worshipper. He/she will hear the absolution without having had the opportunity to recall and confess more than a very small part of his/her undoubted sinfulness.

I have not got any quick answer to offer to this issue of the chronic brevity of this part of the liturgy as used by the Church of England. But there are some other more serious problems to be considered as we reflect on the weekly routine of receiving a declaration of God’s forgiveness for sinful humanity. The first problem is that, although we might believe that we are good at self-examination and the naming of our own sinfulness, Christian opinion is much divided about what in fact needs to be confessed.  We might all be able to agree that harming another person, especially one with an obvious vulnerability, is wrong. But then there are a whole raft of activities, typically in the sexual realm, where there is a great deal of disagreement about what constitutes sin in a Christian context. I do not propose to dwell further on this issue, but I am sure that my readers can fill the blank spaces. The problem in a nutshell is that although we readily speak about God knowing our secrets and our desires, we cannot agree about which human activities in fact constitute sinful actions and which are innocent and harmless. Our current inability to agree what is indeed sinful is surely a matter of concern.  Any ‘gracious disagreement’ that is being practised does not help the church to be seen by the outsider as being either honest or consistent.  If the secular world begins to suspect that the Christian Church lacks integrity in its thinking by not being able to state clearly what is right and wrong, it will be less inclined to listen to whatever else this Church may have to say.

A second problem concerning sin confronts us every time we engage in any kind of self-examination.  This is the fact that society has come to recognise that our own ‘grievous faults’ are dwarfed by another kind of sin – corporate sin.  Whether we like it or not, the sins that today dominate the attention of people, especially the young who are trying to make the world a better place, are those that involve us simply because we are human beings.  As a white educated male in Britain, I am granted many privileges from my position and place in society, which may have little to do with my own effort. Equally, others are severely disadvantaged by having been born in places and environments of deprivation.  The inequalities (injustices) in society are matters which involve morality and this should concern all of us who try to live lives of ethical integrity. We live in a society beset by many corporate sins that push people down : racism, classism, ageism and sexism.  These societal attitudes impact all of us, even if we do little to disseminate them. It is hard to know how to be innocent in a world of inequality.  Like many of my readers no doubt, I am sometimes baffled by all the ways that I am expected to have an attitude about issues that simply were not discussed thirty or forty years ago.  But I do recognise that the contemporary new moral issues that emerge in our society do require our attention and thought.  Avoiding them altogether should not be an option for a responsible citizen who claims to be Christian. The topical issues of our time, whether global warming, sexual equality, migration or slavery reparations, all demand that we have an informed opinion of some kind. Whatever else we are learning from living in the 21^st century, we are discovering that the possession of an informed ethical Christian outlook is not just about personal behaviour.  It requires us to think and become informed about numerous issues. In this way an engagement with corporate sin is part of contemporary modern ethics whether we wish it or not.  Complete avoidance, whether because it makes us uncomfortable or stressed, cannot be a valid position when we come before God in our regular acts of self-examination.

Personal sin, as well as our collusion in the corporate sins of today, forms much of the conversation that we are to have with God when we come before him in prayer and self-examination.  Our conscience is, or should be, compelling us to think about such things as helping charities and avoid contaminating the earth with thoughtless disposals of rubbish.   Recycling and ever greater charity donations seem to be among the contributions we can make to a practical engagement with the pressing needs of our world.  These wider corporate sins which we have touched on do make living an ethical life extremely complex.  But we are right, I believe, to see many practical environmental issues as being spiritual as well as ethical.  ‘Negligence, weakness and our own deliberate fault’ may apply to many more things than the individual acts of spite or selfishness that we are guilty of.  The ’things we have left undone’ suddenly become so much wider than remembering to show appreciation for the acts of kindness that we receive.  Becoming informed about injustice in the world, listening to stories of pain and neglect and simply giving our time and attention to another. These are all things that life and an active Christian conscience demands of us.  In writing down even a few of the tasks that our involvement in corporate sin implies, we come to see still more how inadequate the liturgical provision is for this task in Common Worship.

 The existence of corporate sin, as I have started to describe it, might make us feel thoroughly discouraged in our attempts to deal with our personal sin and failure.  I do believe, however, it is possible to recover a degree of honest integrity as we revisit the essential ethical aspects of the Christian faith. When we strip our faith down to its bare essentials we find a single command. My summary of this command is this: Practise unconditional love as Jesus did.  Working out the implications of unconditional love for us in terms of our generosity and relationships gives us a good starting place.  If we regard sin as anything that gets in the way of fulfilling this command, we have a solid foundation for beginning to see the meaning of Christian wholeness and integrity.  The question that might be asked of each one of us when we die is whether we have been individuals showing this kind of integrity -one that demonstrates the exercise of unconditional love as Jesus showed it to us. Sin in this perspective is found in any way that we fall short of this potential for love and generosity.  That is our calling – to realise this potential as far as we can.

My involvement with the safeguarding cause over the past few years has made me aware of another aspect of sin and wrongdoing which the liturgical prayers of confession do little to expose.  My summary of this 21^st century failing is what I describe as DARVO sin.   DARVO, as many of us know, is an acronym for the typical response of a guilty party when confronted with strong evidence of guilt.  Instinctively the accused person goes on to a defence mode which is first expressed as a denial.  This may be followed by attempt to attack someone else for the failing.  The third stage is to reframe or reverse the accusation so that the offender becomes somehow reframed as a victim. All these reactions and responses are made without the slightest notion of guilt or disturbed conscience. Such a DARVO response commonly occurs, as many of us have noted, when the Church makes an institutional response to cases of abuse perpetrated by its own clergy. All too often in the safeguarding narratives that I am familiar with, the original victim becomes the ‘villain’ of the narrative. Their telling of their story and what they have suffered is disturbing to the status quo.  Bishop Peter Ball successfully persuaded the then Prince of Wales that his accuser was the source of a vindictive evil.  Neil Todd, the innocent victim of this DARVO attack, took his own life.  We need constantly to be reminded of the way that DARVO sin can have far more devastating consequences for its victims than the original abuse.  Many examples of DARVO sin involve senior members of the Church of England.  Some have been exposed in the public domain.  Attacking an innocent victim or survivor by a leading church official as a way to protect the good name of the institution is a wicked devastating course of action.  These spiritual leaders have somehow been able to convince themselves and their consciences that DARVO sin, even when it involves telling lies and tolerating institutional corruption, is not sin at all.  That is a serious problem for the Church’s reputation and integrity.

I began by pointing out the issue of extreme brevity given to self-examination in the liturgy and how this raises a problem for the Church.  But in my further reflection I have come to see that not being able to agree what sin is really is a still greater dilemma.  The outside world is mystified by many of our squabbles over morality.  It will be even more unimpressed when it sees Church leaders practising DARVO sin in their misguided attempts to fend off the legitimate claims of survivors, who have suffered so long because the Church has believed that it reputation matters more than the claims of justice.  Perhaps in describing the Church we all want to see, and which would impress a waiting world, we should remind ourselves once more of the principles set out in the prophet Micah.  “Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God”.

‘How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger Isaiah 52-.7

by Fiona Gardner

This welcome messenger is one who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, and who says that God reigns. The messenger who brings news about safeguarding concerns may not be bringing peace, but is certainly bringing good news in the sense of alerting the church to the danger that may be present to children, young people, or the vulnerable. The same messenger is also helping the church towards salvation in the sense of deliverance from danger or difficulty, and alerting people to the supremacy of love and compassion over destructive abuse. The messenger might be the victim, or might be a professional in safeguarding, or a concerned member of the laity.

However, and seemingly almost inevitably, news of a safeguarding concern is generally treated as ‘bad news’ and the messenger immediately associated with this – and so often responded to with hostility – whether through passive but aggressive silence, or an active refuting. We know this through many previous safeguarding situations, where attempts to contact the hierarchy have been met with at the best reluctant acceptance and at worst indifference or denial.

Hearing of two recent experiences, has prompted me to try and understand once again what is going on. Both situations required raising a concern in local churches where no one wanted to hear; both situations meant that what could have been an opportunity to learn, change, and improve, largely led instead to defence and avoidance. In both situations barriers were raised, and the messenger in one situation treated with hostility, and in the other by largely ignoring what had been passed on. The church family shut the door, drew the curtains, tried to ignore the messenger, and for as long as they could pretended nothing was happening, until they absolutely had to respond and do something.

The psychological phenomenon of the backlash against someone who gives unwanted news is well researched; some of the findings have special relevance to situations where concerns about a potential perpetrator are raised in the church setting. Perhaps this has to be qualified – in all the situations I know and knew about where this happens, it is when the potential abuser is seen as influential and as an established part of the local church hierarchy. The sad reality invariably used to be that if someone about whom there was a concern was then described by their supporters as ‘a pillar of the community’ and ‘so good with children’ so it couldn’t possibly be that they were in any way a problem, it was right to ring alarm bells.

When you pass on information that nobody wants to hear, you often have no role whatsoever in the events other than raising the issue. But who wants what seems like bad news and, as messenger, you become the target for a misplaced backlash in the form of people liking you less, and seeing you in a negative light, even when you may be a part of the community. The news is not seen as ‘good’ in any way, although it is good news as it could make the church a safer place. It is not the potential perpetrator who has become a liability, that title has instead been attributed to the messenger.

This scenario is so familiar and so destructive to those seeking to disclose abuse, and sadly also familiar to those trying to wake the church up to the damage being done by this ‘head in the sand’ approach. How many times in the past has the person about whom concerns are raised been seen as the ‘victim’, whilst the actual person who has been abused and injured somehow becomes the oppressor. Recall the now infamous King Charles’ letter to Peter Ball in 1997 referring to the late Neil Todd:

“I can’t bear it that the frightful, terrifying man is on the loose again, doing his worst. . .

“I was visiting the vicar. . . and we were enthusing about you and your brother and he then told me that he heard that this ghastly man was up to his dastardly tricks again. . . I will see-off this horrid man if he tries anything again.”

Why turn against the person who raises safeguarding issues? Clearly raising a concern within the church once again threatens the sense that the church is a safe and benign community – a belief in the church as a sacred and holy space is violated. The messenger in disclosing what appears as unwelcome and bad news is associated with what is seen as this negative message, and so the almost immediate response is to dislike the person for disturbing the recipient’s belief system. It seems that when we hear something we’d rather not know about, we try to make sense of it, but having to do this disturbs all our accepted and established views, and so things begin to feel out of control and unsafe; this breeds a dislike of the person who has caused this disturbance to our equilibrium. Once the messenger is disliked because of the disturbing news they bring, then the actual ‘hearing’ of the concern is also tainted, and so the information is somehow muffled and distorted, so that the messenger and message are both consciously or unconsciously denigrated. In situations where supporters, a small group, and/or the congregation have been groomed by the potential perpetrator it is even harder to deliver the message, let alone get it heard.

In the recent experience where a professional in safeguarding brought news of an unwelcome situation, rather than learning something important and changing various procedures, those involved at the local level experienced the messenger’s motives as unnecessarily trouble-making, and so the expert advice given was largely ignored, until the very last moment when it had to be implemented. In the second experience, a member of the laity raised a worry about something they had seen; the main person contacted did not respond, and the ‘whistle blower’ was led to understand from another contact who did listen that there were issues of loyalty that seemed to be more powerful than the safeguarding issue.   

Generally, the attitude to people who flag up concerns and problems is ambivalent; with many who do so experiencing highly negative responses to their actions. Perhaps it’s not surprising given the pressure we were probably all exposed to as children either at school or with siblings not to ‘tell on someone’, to be a ‘snitch’ and ‘to grass on someone’ – it’s seen as a betrayal, a disloyalty to the group. It seems as if we learn at a young age that exposing wrong-doing is in some way untrustworthy, and letting the immediate peer group down.

The response to revealing wrong-doing is largely dependent on the culture of the organization, and here there are added problems in the church. More important than policy and safeguarding procedures is the culture of the organization, and the culture is driven largely by the senior leadership. It has been said that the culture of an organisation flourishes when there is an openness, where the leaders aim to and largely do the right thing, and people feel cared for, then, in turn, the people are more communal and look out for their organisation. If the leadership is right on safeguarding, then this affects the whole culture. If the church hierarchy appears uncaring and complicit in some ways with re-traumatising survivors through their negligence, then this response unfortunately trickles down one way or another to affect us all. If the culture is right about doing the ‘right thing’, then people feel able to make disclosures without fear of reprisals and repercussions.

When I was working as diocesan safeguarding advisor there were some occasions when as messenger I was treated with disdain, contempt, and sometimes downright hostility. Two experiences stick in my mind as particularly upsetting, and both when bringing some information from the police about a highly respected ‘pillar of the community’. In the first I was initially given the silent treatment, in itself a form of psychological manipulation, finally I was excused as ‘just following orders’; in other words, the defence used by Nazis to avoid taking responsibility for their terrible crimes. In the second instance I was likened by a furious group from the PCC to the Pharisees who murdered Jesus. Neither group would or could hear what was being said – the ‘news’ I was bringing was beyond bad – unforgiveable, a betrayal. A number of years later I foolishly thought the messenger bringing a safeguarding concern might be treated in a more open and positive way – but in these two experiences I have heard of the poor messenger was once again shot – though fortunately not fatally wounded.