by Martin Sewell

It is around this stage of the football season that some teams performances go into free fall and they plunge inexorably towards relegation; the paying customers stay at home, morale sinks, some players “want away”: no discernible plan is evident on the field of play, and rumours of dressing room dissension emerge. Spectators watch with dismay as the ball is routinely kicked aimlessly forwards, more in hope than expectation only for the pressure to mount from the more clued-up opposition teams which purposefully continue to run rings around the hapless, week after week,

At such times a hymn tune is re-purposed on the terraces reminding the players that not only are they “sub-optimal” – but they know they are.

Clubs can respond in one of two ways.  Sometimes, like my own team Tottenham Hotspur,  they bring in a new coach with fresh ideas whose clarity of thought creates a “bounce” and the team finds a new lease of life; sometimes they appoint someone from the existing staff who continues the old culture with predictable dispiriting results.

Just before the Archbishops’ Council met to consider their response to the Wilkinson Report I wrote to the members in the vague hope of introducing a few ideas to develop a different approach to get us out of the Safeguarding morass which the current leadership and culture have created. The underlying thought was simple enough. “If things don’t change things will remain exactly the same.

In order to signal a fresh start, I offered them a list of “Do’s and Don’ts”, a few tips about how to get back onto the front foot.

Here were some of my suggestions; in the comments section below you might like to suggest a few of your own

DO

Commission and announce an immediate safeguarding investigation into the allegations contained in the Glasgow Report which are supported by expert evidence.

Consider where suspensions may be appropriate in the light of the above – be consistent in applying the same criteria which would be applied in other allegations of serious safeguarding failure.

Consider what governance and managerial failures have been highlighted in the Wilkinson Report and what steps must be taken immediately to address these.

It is understood that external auditors have been appointed to fully investigate the Gilo complaint regarding false evidence. Request confirmation of the Terms of Reference of the investigation and of the anticipated reporting timescale. Require that the report be made available to all members of the AC and the AC Audit Committee immediately it is received.

Establish an unimpeachable, independent process to investigate all of the above. Recognise that any suggestion of taint or partiality will bring huge discredit on our Church.

Prepare for significant independent oversight during the transition period between the delivery of the Jay recommendations and their implementation; business as usual will not carry credibility.

Bring a clear commitment to Synod to accept the Jay recommendations without obstruction, even if these mean that control will be removed from Archbishops/ Bishops

Issue an immediate public apology to all the former ISB members for creating an under-resourced ill-conceived ISB project with disagreement ‘baked-in”.

Where appropriate tell Synod and the public where responsibility lies for the failings identified by the Review in matters including

             Initial conceptualisation
             Poor scrutiny
             Legal ambiguity over what “Independence” means Resourcing
             Data protection responsibilities
             Poor minuting and record keeping.
             The absence of and /or resistance to proper Audit
             The “confusion” over the Terms of Reference for the ISB.

Issue a clear summary to General Synod of your responses to the Wilkinson Review;

DO NOT

Issue evasive press statements like the ones hitherto

Speak of “prioritising victims” until you have put specific radical measures in place

Attempt to limit the capacity of Synod to exercise its duty to hold all responsible parties to account.

Speak of “scapegoating” or “witch hunting”;

Speak of a fresh culture before there is hard evidence for it –“by their fruits ye shall know them”.

Advisory

Do urgently re-open consideration of the Mr X case. NOTHING absolutely NOTHING will say “ we are sorry and are changing the culture” better than treating the most harmed of victims properly. Forget “this will set a precedent” (it will not): forget “we have been advised that” – this is what Baroness Mone and the leaders of the Post Office and Fujitsu said to excuse their appalling conduct.

Instruct the Church lawyers to stop pressing victim Sophie Y  for costs which she cannot afford,  for simply seeking justice; she is a victim, and you should not replicate Post Office behaviour by using lawyers ultimately funded by congregations (even if this is via lost grant opportunities) to bully victims. There is genuine fury across the British public over the behaviour of a trusted institution. Once they have torn down one edifice, they may be hungry for another. We must not let it be our Church. You are trustees of a charity. Accept any loss and help close this down. Consider how to give justice to Sophie. Invite her to stay the current proceedings pending a proper independent investigation.

Most readers will have seen that my “ Postecoglou” approach was rejected. Instead of a few key principles clearly understood and consistently applied becoming the model for the future, we are to apply the same culture under the watchful eye of Bishop Joanne Grenfell, who will be simultaneously overseeing all the affairs of the Diocese of London during the Bishop Sarah Mullaly’s sabbatical leave.

If there are any Terms of Reference or timescale for the new Working Party, nobody has seen them. A key criticism of the Wilkinson Report was the incoherence of the conceptualisation of the ISB project. This “plan” seems to have been designed by the same people who got us into the current mess, but it will will be overseen by a Chair who openly acknowledged when she was appointed that she had no experience or specific skills in the Safeguarding field.

She will however be supported and guided by the same management team that brought us the current “success” …. Oh Wait!

Amid all the reviews and reports that are appearing on the topic of Church of England safeguarding, there is one that currently stands out for our attention.  It is written by a highly qualified clinical and forensic psychologist, David Glasgow.  He was asked to describe the psychological impact on some of the twelve survivors who were directly affected by the sudden termination of the work of the Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB) by the Archbishops’ Council.  The report that has appeared in the past seven days is not one to argue the rights and wrongs of this closure.  The concern of the author, and this is what gives the document considerable authority and power, is to provide a professional and expert assessment on the degree of damage caused to individuals through of the closure of the ISB.  His purpose is not to take a position on the rights and wrongs of this closure or place blame anywhere.  He simply wants to use his professional experience to assess and describe the damage and trauma endured by a number of the twelve individuals who had looked to the ISB for help.  They had all endured the same sudden withdrawal of support through the dissolution of the ISB. Not all of the twelve chose to engage in the process set up by Glasgow.

Glasgow’s report is not lengthy and thus it lends itself to a summary suitable for Surviving Church.  He uses the expression ‘significant harm’ in describing the impact of the event at the heart of the report – the sudden closing of the ISB with virtually no notice.  I understand that the expression, when used in a professional/legal context, is normally the prelude to immediate and often radical intervention by concerned social agencies.  This may include such a drastic action as removing a vulnerable child from their home and placing them in care.  ‘Significant harm’ in the context of the ISB closure suggests a recognition by a well-qualified professional trauma expert that the closure of the ISB was a seriously damaging event to the well-being to several individuals caught up in the process. The results of this kind of damage are clearly familiar to Glasgow as he describes the phenomena of ‘trauma related symptomology’ he observed in the survivors he interviewed  .  These are described and include ‘intrusive experiences, dissociation, defensive avoidance, dysregulation of affect, self derogation and self harm. …’  He further comments, ‘most [symptoms] I would characterise as moderate to severe’.  In these few words, especially the use of the words ‘significant harm’ and ‘severe’, we are taken into a dimension of pain and suffering that few can imagine, let alone have experienced.  The tone of the report hints that Glasgow himself was moved by the plight of those he interviewed.  The pain endured by those in the ‘severe’ category was, he noted, made worse by the trust that some of the survivors still had in the Church authorities to resolve the problem.  Some simply could not believe that the Church they had always looked up to could so utterly fail them.  The ISB had built up a level of trust with this group and the abolishing of the ISB was a cause of real anger and bewilderment.

As a professional involved with other situations of individual and corporate trauma, Glasgow asks the Church some challenging questions.  From the norms of his professional practice, he would have assumed that  the decision of the Archbishops’ Council to terminate the contracts of the remaining members of the ISB would be a decision that would only have been made after an expert risk-assessment.  The way the termination in fact took place showed no sign that an ‘appropriately qualified expert’ had been anywhere in the decision.  No expert or properly qualified assessor, Glasgow notes, ‘would fail to highlight the very significant and entirely foreseeable risk of significant harm to victims.’      Another less professional way of expressing what Glasgow is trying to say at this point is simply this.  How can the Church be so crassly incompetent and careless for the wellbeing and safety of its members?  Did they really take a decision of this order  of magnitude without taking advice about the likely consequences?  We are, perhaps, in this episode seeing the Church at the highest-level exercising power when it is quite clearly out of its depth.

Glasgow’s report concludes with a discussion on the task of rebuilding trust between survivors and victims and the Church authorities.  He has no shortcuts to offer but recognises that such a restoration of trust will be a ‘challenge’ after all that has happened.  While such reconciliation work is not within the remit of his task or his expertise, he helpfully points to literature and the potential contribution of other academic researchers who understand the level of complexities and the degree of expertise needed for such an undertaking.

In drawing attention to this highly professional piece of work and commentary to the Church of England’s somewhat failing attempts to put things right in the safeguarding sphere, I have to mention two other expected documents that have (Jan 14^th) not yet appeared. The first one is Professor Jay’s report.  This was originally promised for the end of last year.  While the reasons for delay may be totally valid, a delay of several weeks would seem to merit some kind of formal announcement.  The second document that was expected by now is a formal response or reaction from the bishops about the Wilkinson report.  It would seem to be important to have a reasonable length of time for General Synod members to study such a response before the gathering of GS in February.  Currently I am detecting an increasing dissatisfaction among some members of Synod as they come to realise that important decisions affecting the Church are being made without an adequate level of skill and expertise.     Both Wilkinson and Glasgow have drawn attention to the acute level of pain inflicted on members of the Church which can be ascribed, not only to the wickedness of malefactors, but also to the incompetent and unfeeling treatment of survivors by senior members of the Church.  Glasgow wonders whether it is now too late to bind up the broken levels of trust between survivors and those who have power in the Church.  His own prognosis is gloomy in the extreme.  He states when speaking about the task of rebuilding of trust ‘I can think of no obvious remedial steps that might usefully be taken on this issue’. Those of us who want to feel optimistic that the future may improve things in the world of safeguarding, perhaps have a duty to make our voices heard.

January/February 2024 are months when a decisive shift may take place in the Church of England.  The shift that is looked for is linked to the promised publication of a report by Professor Alexis Jay on C/E safeguarding.  This report promises to take a hard look at this area of the Church’s life and make some recommendations for the future.  None of us know what those recommendations will consist of, but we hope that they will be marked by the same fearless independence that Jay has shown up till now.  After her lengthy exposure to the internal operations of the Church of England at the highest level during the IICSA hearings, Jay knows how the system works.  It is likely that she realises that allowing the Church to continue to manage its safeguarding responsibilities in the future, without external oversight, will prove to be potentially disastrous.  Her professional background and her understanding of church dynamics in the C/E at General Synod and Archbishops’ Council level, has prompted her to take a strongly independent line right from the beginning of her investigations.  Jay has publicly stated that she will not tolerate any attempted interference which seeks to undermine or compromise the integrity of her investigations.  This strongly independent line taken by Jay is backed up by her decision to see her interviewees only in locations that have no links with church institutions.  

We still do not have the Jay report at the time of writing, but we do have hopes and expectations that it will be a thorough piece of work.  What do we know so far?  It became apparent early on in the process that Jay was not attempting to do a safeguarding survey of every diocese in the C/E.  She decided to focus on six sample dioceses. I played a tiny part in the overall process by encouraging two individuals known to me, and who lived in one of these six named dioceses, to approach her.  Both did so and reported back that they received what they felt to be highly professional and considerate attention.  The fact that Jay was there to record what was truly going on and not defend an institution involved in safeguarding, meant that each felt heard in a way quite different from that received from church authorities.  Good reports of other interviews have also been shared across social media and this gives everyone following this process good reason to believe that the eventual report will reveal truth and objectivity.

In this waiting period for Jay’s report and recommendations for the Church of England, it is natural for some of us to express our hopes and think out loud over what we would like to see.  The main finding that I would like to see as part of the Report is a conclusion that the Church should hand over completely its safeguarding responsibilities to an independent body.  Such a body would have to be financed by the Church of England, but it would be set up in a way that removed all control from bishops, Archbishops’ Council and the Secretariat at Church House.  Dismantling the existing structures that have appeared in the Church since 2015 with a confusing plethora of acronyms, would be a major piece of work.  If anyone were to propose and redesign from scratch a structure for delivering church safeguarding, it would be a very lengthy document.  I have neither the ability nor interest in even outlining such a reconstruction.  What I offer here are some thoughts on the broad areas that need to be covered by a comprehensive safeguarding body, able to do the work that needs to be done.

Long time readers of this blog will know my propensity for attempting to simplify complex problems or ideas by dividing them into three.  Safeguarding in the Church is one such immensely complicated activity, but it does, to my simple mind, allow itself to be divided up into three distinct strands.  The first manifestation of safeguarding is the point at which it touches almost every church member.  Awareness of safeguarding hazards and dangers has successfully been made part of every church activity down to the parish level.  If this process of teaching safeguarding awareness was the sole content of safeguarding activity, then the Church could be considered to have earned a ‘good’ or ‘satisfactory’ in an imaginary tick-box exercise.  But safeguarding is of course much more than this and the Church cannot in any way be said to achieve even ‘satisfactory’ in these other two strands.

If the first strand to be identified comes under the broad description of training, the second tranche of safeguarding activity may be described as legacy issues.  By these two words I am indicating the enormous amount of work that is still outstanding from the past to put right injustice and the appalling cases of neglect by the Church of vulnerable and damaged people over decades.  The skills required to put right legacy issues are, of course, quite different from those used to manage the massive training programme already undertaken by the Church.  We need a small army of legal experts, psychotherapists and financial experts alongside professional abuse-informed investigators to do the work.  It will not be cheap, and I am not going to suggest how many people it will need to do this aspect of safeguarding.  The main observation I make about this work is to say that just because safeguarding training and safeguarding legacy issues possess a word in common, it does not mean that the work and expertise required for these areas of urgent work should be done by the same people.  The compilers of training courses for the Church cannot be expected to have the necessary skills to pick up the wounded from the side of the road and minister to their emotional and physical needs.

The third area of urgently needed work is a requirement for a skilled cohort to attempt the task of rebuilding trust in the Church as a place of safety.  There has to be a huge effort in trying to wipe away the appalling reputationally destructive events of the past twenty+ years.  We might call this the public relations strand.  The Church has been employing reputation managers and experts in public communication for a long time, but it has been largely unsuccessful in convincing a sceptical public that it is doing a good job at maintaining high standards of transparency, justice and integrity.  Indeed, like a political party that has been in power too long, the Church gives the impression of repeatedly being involved in covering up its own version of sleaze.  This is linked to what looks like a complacent entitlement and an inflated sense of its own importance.  Recent comparisons with the Post Office in Britain, and the way the Church has refused to support victims or thoroughly investigate the guilt or innocence of the accused, have left a sour taste in the mouth of many onlookers.  Working for the Post Office proved to be a dangerous and costly choice for many of its employees.  Working for, or in some way supporting, the Church of England appears to be sometimes equally hazardous.  This public relations strand, which compels the Church to put considerable resources into the task of honest reputation repair, is a vital one.  If the Church demonstrates further examples of destroyed trust, then its survival as a public institution will be under serious threat.

So far, I have identified three distinct strands of safeguarding activity which the Church must engage with even if they are hugely costly in terms of finance and effort.  These strands, named as training, legacy issues and reputational repair, demand the skill and effort of highly qualified individuals and institutions.  If the Church tries to take short cuts as, for example, using the services of inexperienced unqualified people, the long-term damage to the Church will be potentially massive.  What I am hoping to see in Professor Jay’s recommendations is a move to greater professionalism as well as greater independence.  One thing I have not attempted to set out here is a new structure for safeguarding within our Church.  That is for others to do, and I would suggest that it needs to look quite different from the haphazardly evolved arrangements we have at present.  The major point I have wanted to make is that the strands of activity that together make up the enterprise we call safeguarding, require an immense variety of skills.  Lawyers are seldom trained in psychotherapy and managers are not known to be especially trauma-aware.  Setting out all the tasks that need to be done and then identifying the skill sets required, will take a great deal of work and time. I am hoping that Professor Jay also will want to say some of these things to the Church.  I am just an observer right on the edge of the safeguarding enterprise.  Those of us on the margins are sometimes entrusted with information and/or insights that may help the Church get things right in the future as it tries to repair and move on from all that has gone so wrong in the past.

The New Year is traditionally a time for a whole plethora of mixed emotions. Some of these emotions relate to the past and may include a sense of regret or disappointment.  There may also be positive feelings of achievement or success in the face of challenge.  The word ‘new’ evokes for us emotions about the future, both good and bad.  The future possesses an ambiguity.  Alongside hope and excitement there is also a sense of dread of the unknown.  We welcome the new but at the same time we cannot avoid, to a degree, fearing it.

As I was thinking about this idea of newness, especially in its positive aspects, I realised that some people cannot see to welcome the future and the newness that comes into their lives.  I am not here thinking of those who face life-limiting events like injury, poverty or illness. There is a further group of people who take limited pleasure in any thought about the newness of the future.  For this cohort, the idea of change or newness is received as potentially undermining their pattern of life. These individuals have adopted a type of rigid thinking in political or religious matters, and this makes anything new at best uncomfortable and at worst a threat.  A sterility of thought has been adopted which prevents this group from being open to any kind of newness entering their minds.  They are paid-up members of the ‘what I always say’ brigade.  They keep company with the millions of MAGA Americans who blindly follow an authoritarian leader into the desert of mindless and intellectually bankrupt mental inactivity.  The word conservative is applied to such people, though we might find this adjective rather weak as a description of individuals who refuse ever to be open to new ideas and ways of understanding.  The reward they receive for this static outlook is a sense of emotional and intellectual security.  The price that must be paid in adopting this stance is the absence of any joy in celebrating newness or the excitement of discovering fresh horizons of thought and insight.  Instead, such people live within the rigid embrace of the past and the value systems that have been handed down to them.  Newness is a contradiction of what they know and believe.  Among religious conservatives there are many who hold that truth is locked up within a single text. The permitted way of reading that text makes no provision or allowance for change. I mentioned, when discussing the defining beliefs of UCCF, how puzzled I was by the attachment to a compulsory statement of beliefs from the 19^th century.  This must be reaffirmed today by current members without deviation or change. I felt in myself a claustrophobia, a drowning sensation, by the idea that such a list could ever form the basis of my faith.  If I was compelled to affirm such a list, would I also have to turn my back on the wondrous complexity and creativity of Christian revelation that has taken place over 2000 years in every part of the globe?  The enforcers of such a document (among them many leaders of the influential con-evo constituency in the Church of England) seem to be insisting on such a stance.   They are saying in effect: ‘Here there is safety but no newness.  You are not permitted to think outside the box of defined statements.  Loyalty, obedience and correct thinking are demanded of you as the price of membership to our club.  Thinking in any other way is strictly forbidden.’

The attempt to hold conservative Christians inside the ghetto of ‘orthodoxy’ is probably far less successful than the leaders of these groups would like to think.   Policing the thinking of all the members of a congregation is an impossible task.  The current polarisation in the Church of England over attitudes to same-sex relationships would appear to suggest that entire congregations are all in tune with their leaders as to what they think.   That is improbable.   The other factor is that everyone, Christians and non-believers alike who live in our world, are automatically caught up in the wide maelstrom of evolving ideas, fashions and new ways of thinking that are constantly appearing.   In other words, we are all good at adjusting to the new.  In science, industry or human thought, ideas and inventions appear with breath-taking speed. Scientific invention is not an area where I have any speciality, but there is one feature of great inventions and discoveries that I marvel at. This is the fact that in many cases, great ideas seem to occur in more than one place at the same time.  In the case of the telephone, the light bulb and other experimenters with electric power, there seems to have been, almost literally, a race to the patent office.  Something similar seems to have been going on in the 5^th century BC in the Ancient World or 15^th century Italy.  Dozens of artists emerged simultaneously enriching our world enormously.  Discovery feels like an unstoppable process which catches up everyone somewhere in its wake.  Newness and our participation in that newness is part of being human, though there are different expressions of change according to where in the world you live.  We can also see that certain ideas which are commonplace today simply could not have been articulated even ten years earlier. Specialists from every discipline seem to have some part in thinking about or maybe even participating in this process of working out the next new idea.  It may be a genuine discovery, a fashion idea or a new literary trend.  The world of the new is an exciting place to live in.  Among Christians, only members of the Amish community make a serious attempt to resist the new as a way of being faithful to their Christian convictions.  Most of the rest of us are content to play a full part in living in (and enjoying) the modern world which welcomes newness and change.

There is a group of active Christians who are largely ignored by much of the Church so that many people in the pew are not aware of their existence.  The group I am speaking about are the phalanx of researchers and theological professionals.  For a brief time in the past, I was involved in academic research while knowing that I was never aiming to become a lecturer or teacher.  But one thing that my research period gave me was a deep respect for the task of academics in theological faculties around the country, even though their work is ignored and even despised by many in the Church.  

Academic theologians and those who work at the leading-edge of research activity are not asking the rest of us always to agree with or even understand their discoveries and insights. They are simply asking us to accept that in their theological research, new concepts and new insights are always emerging.  This process of seeing newness in theology, as in every other area of knowledge, is a valid one. It is saying that creativity and fresh thinking is part of theology and faith as it is in every other area of human learning.  Attempts by leading evangelical Christians in Britain to draw congregations and individuals into a new conservative grouping which seems to deny newness and change, is an attempt to fly in the face of reality.  Any church or congregation which sets its face against change is likely to be seen as sterile by a new generation.  A reactionary approach to theology in the name of safety and orthodoxy cannot ultimately prevail.  The Church needs to draw on the creative and exciting energy that is found in the thinking of those who embrace the future as well as in the radical changes in society that are constantly being shown us day by day.  Engaging intelligently with the new and the future is part of the task of academic thinkers and ordinary folk alike.  Do Christians really want to be identified with those who try to push back the tide, or can they engage enthusiastically with the new and what lies in the future?

Newness is a category of experience that, however disturbing to those of a conservative temperament, is an inevitable part of the human condition.  At this moment in its history, the Church of England is faced by having to choose between an embrace of the new or the retreat into a stance of rejection.  In writing this I am reminded of a line from a Sidney Carter song ‘it is from the old I travel to the new.’  The so-called liberal Christians are suggesting that there is a theology of newness which presents us with a different approach to truth.  We may not get all the precise definitions that some require.  We find, rather, it must be approached in the way we encounter beauty.  The Christian faith is not, as I have indicated many times, reducible to a formula of words; it is found in a process which involves wonder, awe and a contemplation of a reality which cannot ever be fully expressed in words.  When we arrive at this point of knowing we will be, as the hymn puts it, ‘lost in wonder, love and praise’.