by Hatty Calbus

           Something common to the recent abuse scandals in the Church of England has been a connection with HTB. The latest is with Mike Pilavachi and Soul Survivor, whose evangelising success and closeness used to be hymned by Nicky Gumbel. https://x.com/god_loves_women/status/1658531348347342848?s=61&t=Ao5_W_2mTy-7Nu6qyWc4Mw Much of this is well known, but drawing out connections needs the background. The network is so dense I’m likely to have missed links. (And it might be better represented diagrammatically, if anyone would like to have a go.)

            The Iwerne Evangelical summer camps were founded for boys and youths from the best public schools by EJ Nash (‘Bash’ – 1898-1982, Trinity College, Cambridge, curate at Emmanuel Church, Wimbledon). Nash was succeeded by Revd David Fletcher (1932), whose brother Jonathan Fletcher (1942, curate at St Sepulchre’s/the Round Church, Cambridge 1972-76), like Pilavachi, was granted a longterm abuser’s fiefdom, in his case at Emmanuel Church. Jonathan Fletcher attended Iwerne from 1955-2017 (many facts here come from Andrew Graystone’s book Bleeding for Jesus). John Smyth (1941, Jesus College, Cambridge, lawyer) was chairman of the Iwerne Trust from 1974-81. He and Jonathan Fletcher both felt entitled to indulge a taste for homoerotic sadism, exploiting many youths in their spiritual care, who were manipulated into massages and/or naked beatings.

            Within that elite world, the existence of both groups of prey was an open secret for decades. But Smyth died in 2018 saved by other best-public-school-Christians from the justice system. An inquiry has, to say the least, lacked urgency. Fletcher was only finally investigated when victims resorted to the press.  A hushed up investigation into Smyth in 1982 (by coincidence, the year Fletcher arrived in Wimbledon), was carried out by Mark Ruston (1916, Jesus College, Cambridge, vicar at St Sepulchre’s/the Round Church, Cambridge). Justin Welby (1956, Eton, Trinity College, Cambridge) was a Iwerne ‘officer’ (it was all very military and manly) who gave talks. He lodged with Ruston in Cambridge and was mentored by him. Ruston also mentored Jonathan Fletcher. Fletcher in turn mentored both Welby and Nicky Gumbel (1955, Eton, Trinity College, Cambridge, ex-lawyer).

          A pronounced Iwerne and HTB senior-clergy duplication is joined by the overlap of both with Eton and Cambridge, especially Trinity College (“filthy rich,” says The Tab), which occurs so often I’ll now abbreviate it to TCC. There are HTB’s three vicars up to 2017: John Collins (1925-2022, Clare College, Cambridge), Sandy Millar (1939, Eton, TCC, ex-lawyer), who put Welby forward for ordination, Nicky Gumbel (1955, Eton, TCC, ex-lawyer) and Gumbel’s close friend from school Nicky Lee (1954, Eton, TCC) who was associate vicar. There’s also former curate John Irvine (1949, ex-lawyer), involved in the early Alpha course who led HTB’s first ‘plant’. And Welby, having been brought to faith at TCC by Lee, was a lay leader at HTB, mentored by Collins and put forward for ordination by Millar.

           Revd John Stott (1921-2011, TCC), an adjutant and camp secretary at Iwerne, was not at HTB, but is much cited by Gumbel. Millar was not at Iwerne, but was a lawyer contemporary of Smyth’s at Cambridge. Bishop Richard Chartres (1947, TCC) was not at Iwerne, but attended HTB’s Focus holiday every year, and like Millar, Welby, Gumbel and Lee was at TCC. Welby, Gumbel and Lee were Eton and TCC contemporaries and friends.

           And then there are the Colmans. Sue Colman (1959) was a curate at HTB. She and her husband Jamie (1958, Eton, lawyer) donated Malsanger Park, which HTB described as its “home in the country.” Jamie Colman was at Eton with Welby, Gumbel and Lee, preceded by Millar. He was mentored by Smyth. Irvine, Millar and Gumbel were lawyers before they were HTB clergy, Jamie Colman was a lawyer married to HTB clergy. And Smyth was also a lawyer, the professional and Church connection with Jamie Colman leading him and his wife having to admit to giving Smyth hundreds of thousands of pounds over nearly thirty years till 2017, “despite knowing that the barrister had admitted beating boys and showering naked with them.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/10/colmans-mustard-heir-admits-charity-funded-child-abuse-barrister/ Gumbel appointed Sue Colman safeguarding minister at HTB. Smyth and his wife stayed in the flat of another lawyer – fellow barrister, HTB lay leader and friend of Gumbel, Jane Auld, in 2016.

          I wrote previously about Timothy Storey’s abuse. He is in prison for abusing girls as young as thirteen. The vicar at his hunting ground, St Michael’s, Belgravia, was Charles Marnham (1951, Jesus College, Cambridge). Marnham was previously the HTB curate who devised the Alpha Course. I have not been able to discover if he is another Iwerne alumnus. St Michael’s is a small church, but Marnham apparently not only noticed nothing amiss with his youth worker’s behaviour with girls, but made him responsible for safeguarding training. After Storey’s convictions, he made no statement and still saw no need to put any safeguarding information on the church’s website.

          One victim told the church authorities of her abuse and Storey was withdrawn from ordination training but was employed as administrative assistant in a London parish. When one of the victims reported her rape, she had received the response that the Church must consider Storey’s “welfare and needs.”  https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2016/26-february/news/uk/diocese-admits-safeguarding-failure-over-rapist-ordinand A further senior clergyman to put Storey before his victims, Hugh Valentine (1956) was the diocesan safeguarding adviser. https://www.iicsa.org.uk/reports-recommendations/publications/investigation/anglican-church/pen-portraits.html There was a curate at HTB, John Valentine (1963), who prior to that was at St Michael’s with Marnham. He was only at HTB two years and may be  completely blameless, and unrelated to Hugh Valentine, but given how it works, relationship looks likely.

          And there is one final, significant lawyer: Jonathan Coad. Like Marnham and Ruston, he is a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, former bass player in the band at HTB, bass player at an HTB plant. Described by Private Eye as a “legal bruiser,” he advertises his services as “protecting top brand and corporate reputations” and is currently helping Soul Survivor, whose “brand” has been rather damaged by Pilavachi. “A grateful Justin Welby” – in Coad’s words – has been another client. Private Eye reported that Welby “likes to point out that the church’s central safeguarding budget has grown exponentially under his leadership” – without mentioning that the criteria for giving compensation to survivors have been tightened and ten times less money has been spent on them than lawyers.

          The density of the connections might distract from the wider question of why HTB has links to all four recent Anglican abuse scandals. Within the network, there are those who might be called ‘abuse adjacent’ and there is the question of complicity and collusion. Some will protest, “Guilt by association!” – but their world is tightly tribal, which has worked mostly to their advantage. Apart from the institutional bonds, there is the supper party circuit. A common feature of abuse is those nearby not knowing. But there are always people denying, avoiding, minimising, deflecting, rationalising, seeing without seeing, hearing without hearing. https://www.premierchristianity.com/features/soul-survivors-the-inside-story-of-how-mike-pilavachis-abuse-was-uncovered/17824.article And, to state the obvious, particular responsibility lies with those in positions of responsibility. There’s a sharp comment in the Meghan Markle drama Suits. When a director pleads he didn’t know about some fraud, one of the hotshot Harvard lawyers retorts, “It was his goddam job to know.”

          It might be said that those who don’t see abusers as abusers won’t see their victims as victims – and recognise their devastation. This can become all too clear when the abuse finally gets exposed. The senior leader in this network is obviously Welby. Gumbel has no hierarchical role but certainly a very elevated unofficial position and, with his leadership conferences, leadership courses and leadership podcast, could surely have something expected from him. He wrote of Fletcher in 2012, “My admiration for Jonathan knows no bounds.” Graystone says Smyth and Welby exchanged Christmas cards till the mid-nineties and Private Eye has reportedthatWelby also sent Smyth money. https://x.com/frstevenhilton/status/1813710323410706754?s=61&t=Ao5_W_2mTy-7Nu6qyWc4Mw Both Gumbel and Welby were then clergy. When everything came out, Welby did speak belatedly, and, victims said, inadequately, about Smyth. His eventual comments to Premier Radio about Pilavachi seemed oddly inarticulate and again inadequate (“Here was a youth work that was remarkable on the appearance, but was abusive, deeply abusive, internally … there was abuse. We need to be honest about that. We need to be transparent. I, from all that I hear and are going on asking questions. The work on transparency is being well done.”) There seems to be no record of any comment of his about Fletcher and Storey’s protracted abuses, which also continued far into the era of safeguarding procedures.

          Gumbel has made no comment about Pilavachi, despite victims being part of HTB’s ‘family’. https://x.com/drstevelewis/status/1778074172406595726?s=61&t=Ao5_W_2mTy-7Nu6qyWc4Mw Nor, despite his Iwerne involvement, did he make a statement showing concern for Smyth or Fletcher’s victims. And there is his close connection with the Colmans, who were so invested in Smyth. When a woman was raped at HTB’s Focus holiday in 2018, the police said she was receiving support from specialist officers. The church issued a cold little statement saying it was a police matter. As a former lawyer, Gumbel would have known he could express pastoral care without prejudicing the case. After the revelations comes absence.

          Welby comes from HTB and has made it central to the future of the Church – despite the money and megachurch influence I previously tried to show are safeguarding red flags, despite Revitalise patron Chartres with his terrible safeguarding record and despite links to the four recent Anglican abuse scandals. The problem is not Welby and Gumbel’s vulnerability when they were very young to Iwerne, but their apparent fear, as powerful adults, of facing what abuse is and does. The robbed, beaten victim bleeds in the road while the priest looks the other way and keeps walking. 

Attending conferences abroad has become an increasingly difficult undertaking for me as I get older.  I have doubts that I will want to face the challenges of Manchester airport during the holiday period in the future.  However, this year the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) chose the vibrant and attractive city of Barcelona in which to hold their annual three-day event.  I attended and presented a paper on the issue of exorcism and the way it is sometimes used inappropriately as a way of ‘caring’ for members of the LGBTQ+ community.  This theme has become topical through some recent events in the Diocese of Sheffield.

The blog is not going to be a rehash of my words at the conference as most of this material has been shared with my blog readers over the years. I want, rather, to try and share a few of the main insights of some key contributors.  These are those whose professional life has been dedicated to supporting and rebuilding those whose lives have been devastated through their membership of malign and controlling political or religious groups.

One topical idea circulating in the conversations and papers was the notion that a large sector of the population in the States is being recruited to join a massive societal cult under its leader, Donald Trump.  The mechanisms that bind so many people to such a human leader, so eminently unsuitable for this leadership role, are not easy to explain.  It seems we have to explore the ideas that come from attachment theory.  All human beings, as children, pass through the stage of making strong attachments before they eventually become secure independent adults who know who they are and what they stand for.  Another way of expressing this idea is to say that we aim to develop a strong core personality.  This normal process may be disturbed in one of two ways.  Some individuals never grow up in the sense that they continue to need their early attachment relationships for psychological survival.  Others have made it through to the adult stage but then some serious experience of stress pushes them back to a childhood stage of vulnerability and an immature dependence on others.  This vulnerability of immature dependence is found in many people.  A failed marriage or the loss of a job may place the individual in a place where he or she is now ripe for recruitment to a cause or a person at the heart of a cultic group.   Instead of having a strong mature personality at the centre, the vulnerable dependent person reaches out to find a strength in attaching him/herself to another.  This may be a person or an idea/movement.  From this attachment comes a ready-made instant cluster of ideas and opinions.  No longer does one have to think or make decisions; the cult/ideology/cause/strong man does it for you.  The individual personality, as far as it can be said to exist, has become largely an extension of the movement and of the leader at its head.  The MAGA types in America have allowed Trumpism to be their mode of awareness.   This way of thinking has the immediate advantage of relieving any stress involved in thought and reflection.   To be able to say ‘this is what we think’ also gives the individual a reliable and gratifying sense of personal power and agency, a power mediated by the membership of the movement or the cult.

In the academic circles where the issue of cults is studied, the notion of ‘brainwashing’ has largely gone out of fashion.  Rather than having something removed from the mind, the cult member has had something added on.  The cult member is thought to have acquired a cult personality which may have successfully overlaid the true or core personality. This core is never in fact destroyed and it is the task of the therapist to excavate the buried core personality, a complex task.  The fact is that there are precious few therapists in the UK who understand the dynamics of cultic groups.  It requires a particular kind of insight to help extract this core personality which needs bringing to the surface and allowed once again to be the salient expression of who I or you are.

This model of thinking that presents the personality as possessing several layers is quite a challenging one to all our thinking about ourselves.  How much of our presented personality is an extra defensive screen to keep others from knowing us too well?  No one is likely to arrive at the perfect balance between living out the core self and the opposite extreme of hiding behind a variety of masks or defensive personae.  Somewhere we try to achieve a ‘good-enough’ position which allows us to give and receive love in a way that nourishes us and at same time transforms and supports the people around us. 

The conference in Barcelona was largely using the discourse of secular therapy in its efforts to provide support for cult victims.  These victims had suffered because of the toxic and harmful ideas emanating from extreme political or religious groups. What was not brought up was, of course, any theological or biblical teaching that would help stop us falling into this trap of putting on a personality that betrayed or buried our true core identities.  One of my favourite passages from Paul is the one where he expresses his joy at the thought that one day he ‘shall know even as I also am known’.  This suggests to me that the Christian task is to have a great deal of concern for finding out our true identity and cutting through self-deceit.  Such acquired fake personalities are at the heart of the cult problem.  The Church of course also has a problem in this area.  For example, how many of us have been to services where we feel caught up in an imposed but inappropriate jollity which is completely out of sync with the actual mood of the congregation.  It is also vitally important for pastors dealing with individuals to discern what their clients are really feeling as opposed to coming to the ‘correct’ solution to their problem. Joy and sorrow are both part of human experience and thus being alongside another person may involve sharing their happiness or sitting with them in their pain.  Once again, we have a passage that shows how Paul is able to reach and affirm the full reality of another human when he says, ‘rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep’.  The capacity in this way to give of ourselves to others in need is one of the greatest gifts we have to offer.

The ICSA conference has left me with insight as to the way human beings are all somewhere on a journey towards authenticity or what we describe as wholeness or integrity.  My Christian faith, together with my understanding of cult exploitation, has given me insight into the many ways this process can be disrupted when someone with an narcissistic appetite for power and gratification is allowed to corrupt and interfere with another person’s journey.   The ways that we can hurt or be damaged by others, not least by being made to become something we are not in ways to benefit them, are examples of the power of evil at work.  Somewhere in the middle of all the horror of human exploitation and abuse, whether in the cults or churches, there are biblical images that show what true relationships look like.  Although some Christians seem very adept at extracting from scripture those texts and passages that assist them in nefarious activities of abuse, we can also find models that show us decisively how to love in a way that does what it is meant to do.  It should ideally be all that strives to build up, transform and help others to find life in all its fullness.  Although the world of relationships is seemingly hard to engage with, without ever causing any harm to another, we do have the possibility of evaluating our motives. This allows us to enable true transformative goodness to flow through us.   Sometimes the apparent good and generous act turns out not to be so, but merely to bring benefit to the doer.  Christian discernment and the traditions of ethical goodness should help us to know fairly accurately when things are genuinely altruistic and Christ-like.    Christians cannot always be counted on to provide shining examples of human goodness but, at the very least, we should expect Christians to recognise goodness when they see it. Sadly, the safeguarding catastrophes of the past two or three decades have borne witness to a blunted and impoverished awareness of the nature of goodness, even among those who should be our esteemed leaders. 

       by Hatty Calbus  

In my pieces about the influence of HTB, I looked at its charity, the Revitalise Trust, and the questionability of some of its trustees, then at the safeguarding danger of following the megachurch model. The two issues come together in another member of the leadership body, its Patron Richard Chartres, Bishop of London from 1995 to 2017, who used to attend HTB’s Focus annual summer holiday, with his loud shirts a humorous tradition. For teenagers and vulnerable adults, Chartres’ approach to safeguarding could be much less amusing.

        Just before he retired from the biggest diocese in the country in 2017, he complained about the frustrations Church bureaucracy had caused him.  https://www.premier.org.uk/News/UK/Bishop-of-London-speaks-of-career-frustrations-ahead-of-retirement This dislike of bureaucracy may partly explain his lack of oversight of Martin Sargeant, whom he appointed as Head of Operations, and who in December 2022 was jailed for five years for defrauding the diocese of £5.2 million over a decade. It was unclear how much of that money had been donated by parishioners. An investigation in 2023 found that Sargeant was seen by other staff to be acting “with the authority of the Bishop.”

          Chartres’ dislike of bureaucracy definitely extended to safeguarding procedures for vulnerable adults. For several years the diocesan website included his opinion that the law protecting adults judged to be at risk was “the elaboration of defensive bureaucracy based on a culture of suspicion” and he put “vulnerable adults” in political-correctness-gone-mad quotation marks [I have a printout of the webpage.]. This critique was there at least as late as October 2012. There had been a legal requirement since the 2006 Vulnerable Groups Act to have a policy and procedures for vulnerable adults as well as children. London was the last diocese in the country, Anglican or Catholic, to comply, and by some time, not meeting the requirement till the end of 2012. In 2011, he claimed it was up to individual churches if they wanted to apply the safeguards required by law [in a letter]. https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2013/27-september/comment/opinion/the-hidden-scandal-of-adult-abuse

           The lack of oversight of Martin Sargeant and dismissal of the need for care to be taken with vulnerable adults came together terribly when a suicide attempt by Fr Alan Griffin was ignored and Sargeant also decided he had used underage rent boys. Fr Griffin converted to Roman Catholicism and these allegations were passed on to the Diocese of Westminster. He killed himself. The coroner, Mary Hassell, reported that the allegations were “supported by no complainant, no witness and no accuser.” She commented on “the breadth of the systemic and individual failings.”  https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2021/23-july/news/uk/church-s-safeguarding-blunders-could-cause-more-deaths-coroner-warns A review in 2022 noted,“It is abundantly clear that [Sargeant] was allowed to function with little accountability or supervision during the tenure of the former Bishop.”  It also suggested that he “chose to leave his post when the new Bishop came into post, partly because of her insistence on greater accountability.” According to the Church Times, “The report found that there was insufficient understanding of appropriate practice when it came to handling safeguarding allegations.”          

          The case of church youth worker and ordinand Timothy Storey in 2016 showed Chartres’ attitude to safeguarding children and teenagers was no better. This was a shocking case, all the more so because rather than historical abuse, it involved a recent predator operating for years when strict child safeguarding should have been assumed, but where there was, in Judge Philip Katz’s words, “wholesale failure.”

          Storey was convicted in 2014 of grooming hundreds of children on Facebook, sexual assault, inciting children to engage in sexual activity and making indecent images of children, and jailed for three years. In 2016 he was convicted on three counts of rape and jailed for fifteen years. From 2002-2008, he had not only been able to work as a youth pastor at St Michael’s, Belgravia, but trained other youth pastors in child safeguarding and was put forward for ordination. Complaints only seem to have been recorded in 2008 and 2009, despite how prolific his abuse was in the youth group and at church camps.

         When two of Storey’s teenage victims reported their rapes to Chartres, Storey was withdrawn from ordination training. No help was given to the victims, though Chartres told one of them who had written to him that he would pray for her “at the end of the week.” https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3160116/Bishop-London-s-apology-joke-says-alleged-rape-victim-Oxford-youth-pastor.html But then Storey had been personally sponsored in his application for ordination by Chartres. Judge Katz said his protestations of innocence reeked of “false religiosity,” yet this false religiosity was apparently invisible to one of the most senior churchmen in the country. And the Diocese of London was actually ‘slated’ (the Church Times’ word) by Katz for lying. https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2016/22-april/news/uk/judge-slates-london-diocese-over-storey-case  Katz accused the diocese of a “shameful misrepresentation of the truth” when at the end of the trial, a spokesman claimed they had acted appropriately at all times, and implied the police were at fault for not properly pursuing the matter earlier. Katz said the police had “investigated diligently and sensitively — something the diocese had been incapable of.” https://www.premier.org.uk/News/UK/Judge-s-fury-at-Diocese-of-London-after-rape-sentencing

  https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2016/26-february/news/uk/diocese-admits-safeguarding-failure-over-rapist-ordinand The 2020 IICSA report says Storey was permitted to continue working with children, as he expressed remorse. He was assessed to be “basically a good man who could be an effective priest.”

          After the trial, the diocese claimed safeguarding had been much better since 2010, yet, to repeat, Chartres’ criticism of safeguarding procedures was still on the website late in 2012 and there was no policy and procedure for vulnerable adults till the end of 2012, so the law was still being broken. And St Michael’s continued to have nothing on its website about safeguarding: no policy, no contact details. When I questioned this, the woman I spoke to there was “shocked and horrified” and was going to pass it straight on. Eighteen months later there was still nothing. It took a couple more years.          

          None of this puts Justin Welby in a good light either. Large question marks have been placed by John Smyth’s victims and Channel 4 over how much he knew about his abuse, but there should be none over what he knew about Chartres, as Storey’s trials were reported in the press. Yet Welby said nothing. When he told the IICSA  inquiry in 2018 that clergy were given training that made it “quite clear” that if a safeguarding issue were not reported it was a disciplinary matter, he omitted to say how recently this had failed to happen in London. Three months after Storey’s second sentencing, Chartres was on the stage at HTB’s 2016 summer holiday being extravagantly feted. Welby, there on the stage with him, described him as “quite simply one of the best, if not the best, bishop that we’ve had in the Church of England since the Reformation.” https://m.youtube.com/watch?sns=em&v=pA9j17re5CE (2 mins 42). This is supposed to square with a Church of England spokesperson’s statement after Smyth’s death in 2018 that “Safeguarding has always been an absolute priority of [Welby’s] ministry.” And then his reported choice to succeed Chartres, fitting his businessification of the Church, was Paula Vennells, whose leadership of the Post Office, similarly to Chartres with Martin Sargeant, featured suicides.

          Rather than resigning in disgrace, Richard Chartres retired in 2017 accepting outpourings of praise and the grandeur of a peerage, becoming the Right Reverend and Right Honourable the Lord Chartres GCVO – Baron Chartres, of Wilton in the County of Wiltshire. And none of the above was deemed serious enough to disqualify him from being appointed Patron of Revitalise, the charity to a significant degree determining the Church’s direction. To give him such a prominent role shows a continuing disregard for victims. For all the periodic bouts of handwringing and pious statements, how is anyone to believe that those with most power in the Church of England really care if lives are destroyed by abuse?