From time to time I look back over my life and thank God for people and institutions that I have been able to trust and rely on. As a child I learnt that many friendships with those of my own age could be extremely fickle. A friendly face one day could change into a scheming bully the next. Life taught me that you had to be on the alert for the frequent changes of mood in the children around you so you could adjust your response accordingly. In contrast to these constantly changing moods of my contemporaries, the world of adults offered an opening to something much more stable. It is among these adults, or a number of them, that there were some who were prepared to befriend a child and help in the task of interpreting a confusing world. Parents, however good, could never answer all the questions one had about life. I remember the proprietor of an antique shop who for years tolerated my browsing through his wares even though I was not in a position to buy anything. Then there was an old man who sat day after day near our playground and welcomed conversation and the sharing of his wisdom. The elderly of the 50s were all Victorians and they provided a glimpse of another world, one without cars or machines. The existence of terrible disease and shorter life-expectancy seemed somehow to be partly compensated for by a strong moral order and decency in society.
It is this cohort of adults who offered friendship to me when I was a child to whom I owe an enormous debt Some were teachers, some clergy and some were random people I met elsewhere, even on the bus or train. Yes, I was allowed on occasion to travel on a bus alone at the age of 5 with two old pennies in my clutched hand to pay the fare. Adults, known or unknown, were a breed that my young self saw as a resource for help, friendship or information. There were obviously places that were off-limits but fortunately my overall sense of trust in the stranger was never betrayed. Others of my generation will no doubt look back to their childhood and also remember a sense of overall security with adults who had not been through anything resembling our safeguarding training. There was an inbuilt wisdom in the child that knew that accepting sweets from someone who was a stranger was somehow risky. We also knew that in a crowded place, the vast majority of the adults present were on one’s side and would react instantly if a child showed signs of fear or discomfort.
I could go on to describe particular people that helped me gain a perspective on life and provided the mentorship within an environment of trust that was so important when eventually making the choices I made about the future. I am aware from the perspective of today that I may have sometimes been in risky situations. There were, no doubt, dangerous adults who used more relaxed attitudes and access to children for their own nefarious purposes. Fortunately for me, at any rate, the freer atmosphere between adults and children did provide the many benefits of knowing and interacting with a wide range of people. Growing up in this pre-safeguarding era may have had some dangers, but for those whose trust was not betrayed by deviant adults, there was a sense of a society of people who were generally good, friendly and looking out for us.
I mentioned the existence of trust in the minds of most children that coexisted with a sense that grownups were a breed on your side for the most part. There were also trustworthy institutions like the corner shop, the public library, the church, the school and the doctor’s surgery. Each represented to the child the wider society, one which had predictability and security. It comes as something of an unpleasant shock to discover how far the general public have withdrawn from trusting these same institutions and those who work for them. The results of a recent survey which suggests that trust in society’s institutions has severely diminished over the decades. This contrasts with the positive way that many of us experienced them as we grew up actively trusting both people and the institutions of society. One might have hoped that the Church had retained some of its traditional standing It would appear that the Church of England elicits the same diminished amount of trust and confidence as our political parties. The figures are well below 50%. Other institutions like the police and schools have also seen their standing downgraded in the eyes of the public. The decline of trust in the C/E is striking, even alarming. The one institution still attracting our loyalty and confidence is the National Health Service, though it remains to be seen whether this trust will survive the Letby scandal and the results of midwife failures in parts of England.
The Church of England, in losing a large amount of the goodwill that it used to enjoy a few decades ago, faces a crisis. The trust that a clerical collar used to attract to itself can no longer be taken for granted. Indeed, there are many places in society where the dog collar invites ridicule and/or hostility. What are the reasons for this diminishment of trust? There are probably a number of reasons we could bring forward. Some of them are particular to the Church, while others relate to a distrust of institutions in general. Safeguarding scandals that have reached the public domain have obviously poisoned attitudes among many people. It is not a single scandal that creates a change of atmosphere. It is in the way that people see a scandal-racked institution which appears to do nothing obvious or effective to change the situation. The Church of England employs quite a large number of people to manage its reputation both nationally and locally. When these professionals merely repeat formulaic words about learning lessons and tightening up protocols and no one in the organisation ever resigns or accepts any responsibility, the public is not going to be impressed. The horrors of abuse and the incredibly damaging cover-ups that follow have poisoned attitudes to the church institution. Can we really be surprised that trust in the Church has fallen to levels that now threaten its very survival as a national institution?
In a blog post as short as this I cannot solve the problems of the C/E in a few words. I can, however, point to a few principles that could help to rebuild trust above its miserable trust score of 38% before it is too late. One of the most important aspects of the Church is that it finds much energy as a body when it successfully relates to local areas. It tries hard to employ people who are recognised as honest and trusted within their local patch. Forty years ago we used to hear the slogan: Small is beautiful. We need a rediscovery of this principle and relearn that large complex but anonymous structures are not what most people hanker after. The mega-church has little to offer an elderly person who remembers a parish church where all were valued and all had a place within the whole. The Church must be a place where the traditional values of trust and honesty are highly honoured. People must find in their local church not only a sense of safety and trust but the opportunity to discover their giftedness for love and service. The church should become a place where all ‘know even as they are known’ – to misquote St Paul. Honesty, transparency and justice are all values that everyone wants for the Church, both those within and those looking in. If we can rediscover these simple moral truths to replace power games, secrecy, greed and emotional gratification, then the Church might once again connect with the British people.
These thoughts are written with a sense of nostalgia for the possibility of living in a society and a Church where trust is taken for granted. Perhaps it is an unrealistic dream to have, but we can still hold out the thought that it should be possible to find it in a group familiar with the teaching of Jesus. The greatest frustration for any Christian is to see dishonesty and failure of trust becoming endemic among Church leaders. In another area of society – politics, there is the constant cry of citizens is to find politicians who genuinely serve their constituents and not themselves. Such figures do appear on the scene from time to time but all too easily they seem to be outnumbered by those on the make. Can we not expect the ethical honesty we ask of politicians to be found among our church leaders? It should be a simple matter to find Christ-like values in a Christian organisation but somehow even that assumption of goodness still seems often to be absent!
The church was probably never meant to be an institution. The early church was a growing body of believers, not a mega church, but a disparate movement of ordinary people meeting in homes and maybe marketplaces, not especially settled but spreading like wildfires across the globe.
As soon as groups start to coalesce, you quickly find buildings and hierarchies and administrations and centralised management and control. Add to that considerable and accumulated wealth, and before long those at the top appear to have completely forgotten what the whole thing was meant to be for. They no longer need gods at all. They are it.
In 2024 the Church of England is only very dimly aware of the decline in public estimation it has descended to. Does it even care? There are precious few signs of any serious attempt to restore its reputation.
Most other organisations have to manage their cash flow and budgets carefully. Few have deep reserves to carry on making losses year on year without significant cuts, bankruptcy or branch closures. Although the latter has been going on relentlessly (I gather) with church closures, there is no suggestion that Church reserves are anywhere near exhaustion, and this enables them to carry on with “business as usual”, ie oblivious to the repeated calls for major change, including profound and sincere repentance for the abuses glossed over in its midst.
Having said there is no sight of change, and implying before this only being likely to occur upon severe financial impairment, I can’t be the only one to wonder about the payroll being a day late. Typically this is a harbinger of financial mismanagement. It was ridiculous to blame a junior clerk. That , to me, rather gave the game away. I hope I’m wrong, at least for the sake of those thousands relying on their stipends to live.
Thank you. In 1952 Bertrand Russell reflected that one of the great changes of his life was the decline in public standards – that it was impossible to comprehend (from the vantage point of 1952) how ‘massively solid’ things were during his youth in the 1870s. And yet how massively solid do the 1950s seem from the vantage point of today. I often look over old newspapers (and knew a good many Victorians and Edwardians myself – my best friends), and I simply don’t think people can really comprehend the extent of the degradation of the public space, and how deeply public discourse has fallen into a pit of the ephemeral, the trivial, the inconsequential, the lurid, the fetishistic, the prurient. Contemporary society drifts along a sea of trash. A ‘dumbed down’ society soon becomes easily capable of being manipulated.
It is not hard to understand why institutions like the Church are now held in such low esteem. Their fixation on their own image is in almost inverse proportion to their actual reputation. So they say little of worth when there is actually quite a lot to be said. Take the response of the Church to what is going on in the Levant. It is all of a piece with the response of Britain’s abject media and political class, which has cleaved to a form of false equivalence, has adopted differentiated standards to different ethnic groups (of a kind which is quite baldly racist) and is treating international law as if it is something to be applied on a highly selective and self-interested basis.
The Church has had almost nothing to say about the present remarkable suffering, and what little it has said has been so insipid, so equivocal, so brief and so rare, as to be frankly worthless. This is not merely a failure on the part of the episcopate (which can, of course, be expected), but of the vast mass of the clergy, who are either cowed, do not care or actually agree – sometimes enthusiastically – with the present racist predicates of British policy (I have seen painful evidence of this on other sites). It is almost as if there is a total black-out on the subject.
And yet again, we see an entitled, interminable and self-interested bourgeois fixation on certain preferences (important though it may be) completely crowding out any form of discourse about people actually being blown up, strafed, buried in rubble, tortured, starved and poisoned in very large numbers, and with the full complicity of the Western powers. It is as if the Church has largely lost its moral sense.
This, for me, has been almost the last straw. I did once like – indeed love – the Church. However, my dreams have turned to disillusionment, and its response to present mass suffering is now so pitiful and pathetic, that I am afraid I now hold it in some contempt. That contempt also applies to the media and political class. How very far we are from Gladstone’s response to the Bulgarian massacres or Bell’s to the saturation bombing of Germany.
Perhaps the advertising booklet sent with the Church Times today might give a clue: its strap line is: “We are honoured to have brought comfort to over 1000 places of worship” courtesy of The Church Cushion Co!
Instead of taking up our cross to follow Christ, we are encouraged just to sit on comfortable seats – a far remove from getting up early to serve a 7.00 am mass, from the queues of penitents before the major feasts, from attending four services on a Sunday…….when I was a boy seventy years ago.
I don’t think that physical discomfort is actually required for Christian worship. I’ve never found that a chilled and sore bum or painful hips help me to focus my attention on God.
Surely mutual trust in its structures is the bedrock of any civilised society?
Lose trust and everything else very quickly falls apart. Sadly, knowing of the various ‘miscarriages of justice’ (more commonly known as frame ups) carried out by corrupt or incompetent police officers (or those under political pressure to get a result) which have happened during my lifetime has caused me to lose faith in the British justice system. Likewise, not just Mr Smythe and those like him, but the cover-up, delay and general wool-pulling of the church, putting reputation before truth and justice leaves me without any sense of trust or faith in the organised church.
And the tragedy is that once that trust has gone, it can be a very long time, if ever, to regain it.
In response to this and Stephen’s memories of trust I should like to add another essential element of those days which is, ‘a sense of honour’.
When we were children if anyone said ,”on my honour” we knew they were telling the truth and believed them without question. When we were older, if a teacher asked who had committed some misdeed that girl would own up (I went to an all girls’ school where the sense of honour was strong).
Now in the Church of England, of all places, there seems to be no sense of honour. In my four years of supporting Kenneth in a false accusation I am appalled by its lack. In my comparatively small experience I can name four bishops, one Dean and two canons who have told lies in order to preserve their own reputations to the detriment of justice, thereby furthering the destruction of the life of an innocent man.
Through this blog and Thinking Anglicans I read of others. Within the cause of safeguarding and justice for survivors by the Church of England there seems to be no sense of honour and no admittance of wrong.
Worse still, there there is no shame about the lack of either.
Thank you Stephen.I agree that there is distrust of large institutions as there are always people grappling for power and disillusionment amongst the rest. However there must be a strong ratio of genuine Christlike members of the church who believe in something better.