It has become difficult to know how to respond to yet more stories of scandal in the Church of England.  My readers will know all about the ‘Liverpool affair’ by the time this blog appears, so I do not need to recount all the allegations and denials that have appeared in the Press and elsewhere over the past couple of days. The blog wants to focus, not on the details of the possible sexual harassments perpetrated by a diocesan bishop, but on some of the ways that stories like this are deeply harmful, even ruinous, for the morale of the national Church, not to mention its reputation. 

At this moment, the allegations of misconduct against Bishop Perumbalath have not been proven, though there is an implied acceptance of some degree of wrongdoing indicated by the fact of the bishop’s resignation announcement.    Even before his position as bishop became impossible to support, in the face of widespread pressure from his senior colleagues in the diocese, it was unfortunate, to say the least, to read the bishop’s name in the same sentences as allegation, police caution and harassment.  The whole sequence of events will need to be thoroughly investigated since the Channel 4 reports raise as many concerns over the Church response to the affair as they do from the allegations by the two women involved.   In short, a resignation should not allow the details of suspected abuses to remain buried.  I am sure I speak for many when I say that the saga raises numerous questions about safeguarding professionalism, appointment processes, people skills and serious failings of management in the wider C/E.  

It is important to note that a diocesan bishop sits over a large organisation, like the Liverpool Diocese, and has a relationship with many people.  This will involve having an enormous amount of trust placed in him/her.  Any deviation from a meticulous observing of the boundaries that properly belong to the ethical ordering of church relationships, will probably be a cause of serious harm.  The higher up the hierarchy that such an abusive event takes place, the greater the harm.  Just as a local parish priest sets an example and the tone for the ordering of good harmonious relationships within his/her parish, so a bishop sets an example for an entire diocese.  It is not unreasonable for clergy to want to project on to the person in charge and see them as a model for their ministry.  At the service of induction to a parish, the bishop formally delegates his/her authority to the new incumbent.  In effect the authority he/she exercises in the parish is episcopal in nature.  Authority is flowing in two directions.  It matters greatly to the authorising bishop that the parish priest is competent and honest, just as it matters to the priest that the bishop is a person of utter integrity.

The ’Liverpool affair’ is a matter of far more importance that just a determination of the motivation of one individual in authority and whether they did or did not stray into abusive behaviour.  It is about the damage to tendons of trust that hold together and connect a fragile human organisation, which is here a diocese of the C/E.  When I was ordained some 54 years ago, I had a sense of committing myself to God while committing myself to a human institution we call Church.  The existence of holier, more intelligent and wiser priests in this body across the country meant that my own limitations were less crucial than if I had been attempting to do the job all on my own.  Of course, the clergy look to the Holy Spirit for guidance and help to do their task of teaching and caring; they also find themselves looking to other clergy to encourage them whether through chance meeting or reading material written in books or on the internet.  Ministry is individual but it is also in an important sense corporate.  We need the clergy we look up to and admire to have the solid reliability that we associate with the word integrity.  It really matters to each of us and our individual ministries when the honesty and just dealing of one of our number is questioned or challenged in some way. 

It matters very much indeed to the clergy and people of the Diocese of Liverpool that the issues concerning their now former bishop are fully investigated and dealt with in the best possible way.  It is also of concern to the rest of us, not only in Liverpool, that the truth of what has happened is known and responded to without some kind of cover-up.  The truth is what enables the people of God to look forward to the future work of the Church in Liverpool and elsewhere.  Part of the future will depend on how well we have faced up to and dealt with the past.  In spite of rules created by the church, that reckon that one year is sufficient time to process an episode of sexual harassment, the reality is that the legacy of abusive behaviour currently weighs heavily on the C/E and the institution can never be whole until it is dealt with.  Many people in the Church would love it if a page could be turned and a new beginning declared.  That might be possible if it were just a matter of dealing with the sin and frailty of human offenders.   The problem, shown in stark outline by the current episode, is that human frailty is not only in the abuse perpetrators but also inside the systems that the Church operates.  There are found to be, on every occasion when a major scandal breaks, archaic processes that are unfit for purpose.  Does anyone really believe today that the requirement to launch a complaint within a year of an alleged offence always serves justice?  The ‘professionals’ in the NST, in the offices of church lawyers overseeing safeguarding and the secret committees choosing bishops, must all allow their judgements to be scrutinised.  When appointments are made to posts where candidates can, if left their own devices, do potentially great harm, this should be a moment for forensic questioning.  Sorting out not only malfeasance by church people, but also checking abuse that is made possible by inadequate processes is a huge task, but it must be undertaken.

The Liverpool affair will probably be lost to the memories of the vast majority of those who are currently shocked and dismayed by what it suggests about the C/E.   For those who do remember anything of the allegations in ten years’ time, the memory will be as much about the confused and muddled response to the allegations, with its constant appeal to process than the actual details of the claimed assaults.   The response to every scandal is an appeal to ‘learn lessons’.  If we were really learning lessons, somehow one feels that the response to the Liverpool affair would have been far better than it is so far.  Is there even a small hope that things will be better this time?

Most members of the clergy living in Britain are familiar with the experience of being interviewed.  Posts are, these days, advertised in the Church Times and would-be incumbents and other more senior posts face a grilling from a group of individuals to establish whether they are the right person for the role.  The interview process now replaces, for the most part, the older method of an anonymous committee of two or three individuals meeting informally to decide who should be appointed for a post, regardless of whether they were looking for a change.  Sometimes the ‘committee’ appears to have been a single individual.  Normally a male, this individual felt he had the combination of experience, good judgment and maybe, a little guidance from the Holy Spirit to make the appointment on his own.  A combination of patronage, secrecy and networking seemed to carry along the appointment process.  Who can now say whether it was a successful system with all its evident potential for corrupt favouritism? 

In my years as an incumbent, I too applied for posts via the Church Times.  The number of times that I was called for interview but failed to get the advertised post does not need to be revealed.  I can admit the fact that I was offered a vacant post after interview on three occasions.  Twice, over a twenty-year period, I accepted the offer.  On the third occasion I realised, for practical and family reasons, that the offered post was an impossible undertaking and so withdrew.  There were other posts that revealed themselves as being unsuitable for a variety of reasons.   The interview process often revealed appalling impediments attached to an advertised post.  The result was that I received the ‘unsuccessful’ letter with a certain relief.  Dioceses then seemed reluctant to spend money on vicarages.  My first vicarage (obtained without an interview!) was heated by paraffin heaters because the diocese was convinced that an incumbent on £3k would not be able to afford to keep a central heating system running.  Today those same paraffin heaters would be condemned on health and safety grounds, particularly in a home occupied by very small children.

Returning to the interview experience, I believe that most people would concur with the notion that the appointments system works reasonably well when all posts are advertised and interviews take place.    The advantage of the interview process is to provide a check on any strong bias felt by an individual member of the panel towards the candidates.  A young mother on the panel may have a strong preference for a man or woman with youngish children.  This strong preference needs to be balanced by a need for appropriate experience of a parish, particularly one comparable to the advertised post.  A chair person will guide the committee into understanding the choices on offer.  He/she will understand that there will be a need for compromise somewhere.  You cannot realistically expect any candidate to have every qualification that the selecting committee have asked for.

The task of an interviewing committee to choose the right person for a post will require old-fashioned human wisdom, especially in its chair person. This is the kind that is obtained by living life with a good dose of curiosity and common sense.  Wisdom of this kind can rise above the short-term politics of the parish and its vested interests.  It manages to gather a variety of threads and see what might work in terms of character and personality as they face up to the challenges of the post on offer.  Wisdom of this type is far more than a box-ticking exercise. It is always needed when evaluating an individual and requires a particular kind of maturity. The ability to discern the right candidates for important posts is an important, even vital, skill and we should expect it in those we appoint to the most senior posts in the Church.  

In recent weeks, as we have been absorbing the implications of the public failings of both Archbishops in England, many of us have been struck by one thing that is, on reflection, totally unexpected..  Whatever may have been the wrong decisions taken by these two men in their response to and management of scandal, one other failing binds them together.  Each of them is guilty of being hoodwinked by powerful charismatic (in its secular sense) personalities and promoting or favouring individuals in roles where they were able to be a serious threat and danger to others.  In the case of Welby, one can, for the moment, try to overlook his failure to understand the deviance of John Smyth, but the same is not true of his dealings with Mike Pilavachi and the Soul Survivor organisation.  Clearly Welby believed he had enough information on Pilavachi to award him a Lambeth award.  Superficially Soul Survivor was a success story, but a man or woman with the kind of wisdom mentioned above, would have asked searching questions about this ministry.  Welby had been associated with the evangelical charismatic scene for over thirty years.  He must, on at least some occasions, encountered or heard about its excesses.  The rise and fall of the Nine O’Clock Service in Sheffield, another toxic movement in the 90s attractive to young people, must have been noted by him.    Although expounding a different theological vision, NOS functioned with similar crowd dynamics.  It is hard to believe that Welby never had a conversation about NOS in the years that followed its collapse.  Naive is not a strong enough word for his apparent failure to evaluate and have a ‘lessons learned’ opinion about what had happened there and notice striking parallels with the later Soul Survivor phenomenon.  If we can expect a degree of wisdom on the part of every chair of an appointment committee in a parish church up and down the country, surely, we can expect it of an archbishop, even when blinded by the ‘success’ of a Pilavachi or the business ‘skills’ of one Paula Vennells. 

Failing to pick up on the weaknesses or incompetence of another person can have serious, even devastating, consequences for other ordinary members of a church organisation.   A similar failure of discernment is found in our other Archbishop, Stephen Cottrell.  Apart from serious questions about the inadequacy of his actions with regard to David Tudor, the disgraced priest in the Chelmsford Diocese, there is the breath-taking fact, revealed by the BBC, that Cottrell, when Bishop of Chelmsford, described Tudor as a ‘Rolls Royce priest’. This was said when he knew about the court cases involving Tudor and all the other information accessible to him in the personnel files.   The comment clearly shows Cottrell to have been in a measure of awe of Tudor’s strong personality.  At this point I am reminded of the story of the choosing and anointing of David by the prophet Samuel.  The comment is made that Yahweh does not look at the outward attractiveness and strength of the individual but at the heart.  Surely our Archbishops should be skilled and adept at looking at the ‘heart’ of candidates for promotion or preferment.  If they lack this skill themselves, do not they have access to professional help in this area, because of their exalted roles in the church?   We expect wisdom in committees choosing a parish priest; how much more do we expect it from those at the top of our church hierarchy?

This blog post has not meant to be in any way an attack on the character of archbishops, past or present.  It is rather a plea for a better understanding of the science of how to pick people for preferment in the Church.  We need high degrees of skill in this area from the people who have the ability to rise above the expedient, the popular or the political.  The values we long for in the Church of England in this uncertain period of its history are, to repeat, wisdom and profound integrity.   Archbishops and, indeed, all Christians should be people of discernment and good judgement and know how to recognise it in others.  If poor judgement in the issue of recruitment is exercised at the highest levels in the Church, it is going to be repeated at all the lower levels.  When square pegs are regularly put into round holes, the morale of the whole institution quickly suffers and goes into a spiral of decline.  For this reason alone, if for no other, we must insist that enormous care is taken in the system of appointments for church posts.  A church dignitary making an error of judgment over a management matter is one thing, and it probably can be, with effort, reversed.  A senior person consistently failing to exercise the highest levels of judgement and discernment with appointments will damage and even destroy the fabric of an entire institution.   The failure of judgement that existed with George Carey (and other bishops) and the NOS experiment, together with a similar naivety prevailing between Welby and Soul Survivor, has been a serious cancer for the Church of England.  The failure to manage the Tudor affair on the part of Cottrell is also an indication of an institutional malaise in the church.  If the top people cannot spot and weed out the seriously corrupt in the system, how can ordinary Christians put their trust in, let alone work for the structure?  

 The message from this rather sad post is a simple one.  It calls on church people to come forward and make sure that the people of the highest calibre and integrity occupy the top positions in the Church.  Among the priorities in this ability requirement list, is the need for inner goodness, complete honesty and trustworthiness.  The Church of the future is not impressed with the institutional defensiveness of church leaders of the past.  We have the opportunity to put things right but that chance may not for ever be available to us when the next safeguarding earthquake hits the Church of England.

One of the perennial questions in all the discussions about safeguarding, in whatever context, is how to establish exactly who are the ‘vulnerable adults’ to be protected from harm. No one argues against the idea that all children under 18 should be always regarded as vulnerable.  Children need constant protection from any adults who might wish them harm of some kind.   However, the creation of a fixed boundary between those under and those over 18 will often feel arbitrary and unsatisfactory.  Men and women do not suddenly acquire wisdom and the ability to protect themselves after reaching a particular birthday.  Thus, we have, in law and in the regulations that apply to social care, further attempts to describe the idea of vulnerability as it might apply to adults who have passed their 18^th birthday.   Without repeating these definitions, a vulnerable adult is any individual who is considered in need of an appropriate level of social or legal protection because of some mental or physical affliction.  In many cases the existence of vulnerability is clear to the observer.  The legal system does not pursue a case against someone who is deemed ‘unfit to plead’.  Social workers become involved with other manifestations of vulnerability in parents, where their children are clearly uncared for, physically or mentally.   Formal definitions of who is considered a vulnerable adult can easily be found through a google search.  These definitions are going to be similar whether we encounter them in a social work context or in the setting of a church.  Such definitions are fairly limited; some examples of what we might think should be regarded as coming into this category from a common-sense perspective are excluded.  Is the adult brought up in extreme poverty and only able to survive through shop lifting to be judged in precisely the same way as someone who commits the same crime in a position of affluence?  Vulnerability can be experienced in a whole host of contexts and the official definitions can only capture part of the reality.  Every adult may also enter an experience of vulnerability at some stage in their lives. It is not a question of a fixed character trait; it may be one of situation and circumstance.  An obvious and clear example I can mention is to say that any individual who suffers bereavement and the loss of a partner should be considered vulnerable.  There are other displays of mental affliction, like severe depression, which affect judgement and decision making.  Whatever definitions are offered us in official government documents and the safeguarding literature, vulnerability is probably a characteristic of every human being at some point in their lives. Instead of attempting to define the meaning of vulnerability, perhaps we should show the qualities of an individual who has been taught how to flourish and be able, as the Prayer Book puts it in prayer for the Sovereign, ‘to have a right judgment in all things’.  I would like to see a list of definitions as to what to look for in the fully functioning human being who has achieved the stage of not in any way deserving the description of ‘vulnerable’.  These definitions would probably only apply to a relatively small group.

I have recently come across a collection of online videos produced by a filmmaker Sam Howson who has had years of experience in the evangelical/charismatic world. He recognises and discusses the dilemmas faced by this culture and he says some interesting things about the ministry of Mike Pilavachi.   Among the useful insights shared by Howson is summed up in a two-word heading – Adult Grooming.  Grooming, the gradual building up of a trusting but potentially exploitable bonding by one who is powerful with another who is less powerful, is a well-understood dynamic in abusive relationships.  Most people can see that the victim of such a relationship is clearly ‘vulnerable’, and Howson shows how the victims of grooming come from right across the age spectrum.  In short, anyone can be made vulnerable when leaders, skilled in the art of grooming, direct these abilities on to another human being.    

So far, we have identified three groups of people with different relationships to vulnerability.  The first group are those that society and the caring professions identify as lacking agency and are in some way in need of care and protection.  This group would include the sick, the frail and all children under 18, Then there is another group which consists of people who are the self-sufficient types.  This group manage their lives with strength and confidence and make a point of refusing to admit any degree of vulnerability in their lives.  This relatively small group are typically found among the leaders in an organisation like the Church.  They have been conditioned by their social and educational background to believe that any sign of vulnerability is also sign of weakness and thus incompatible with the status of a leader.  They thus put themselves above the experience of vulnerable individuals and simultaneously resist experiencing any identification with them.  Is this disavowal of the survivor’s experience in church context on the part of leaders, and so frequently complained about by them, part of the psychological profile of the church leaders who deal insensitively with survivors?  Is this another aspect of the narcissism that we have claimed is so rampant among the ‘ruling elite’ who manage our church but seem so disconnected from the pain and grief of those who have suffered abuse at the hands of church servants.

The third category of the ‘vulnerable’ are the bulk of church members.  They are not formally vulnerable or among the abused or damaged in some way; rather they recognise that they are, together with the vast majority, susceptible in some situations to bullying, controlling techniques like grooming or other forms of abuse.  They are vulnerable in the sense that they have no built-in methods of complete protection from such behaviour.  They may have some self-protection techniques, such as a degree of institutional status.  This may not prove to be sufficient to see off the groomer, the manipulator or the bully.  The victim will not aways have the right words or support to help them emerge unscathed from someone else’s bad behaviour.   The group of ‘vulnerable’ adults that Howson is especially referring to in his videos are young people who have been manipulated by well-established group techniques of crowd control.  There are also widely used methods of using music to render individuals open to particular mood states.  Those of us outside this culture of charismatic ‘worship’ have surely good reason to ask about this style of music.  Is this music directing a highly susceptible (vulnerable) congregation to find God or is it somehow cementing the control of a leader over a large group of young people? In criticising a figure like Mike Pilavachi, one would welcome far more informed discussion about the part music plays in creating a vulnerability to different forms of manipulation.   If there is a form of control being exercised at such events as Soul Survivor; is it not about time that some expressions of worship were examined and understood as grooming and thus a safeguarding matter?

Howson’s reference to ‘grooming adults’ seems to be saying, as I have been, that control in a negative sense is a risk for far more people than just for those who are officially labelled as vulnerable.  Most people are vulnerable at some point in their lives.  This potentiality for being vulnerable goes up exponentially when they enter a crowd situation, skilfully manipulated by a toxic narcissistic leader. We need to understand these dynamics far better that we do as they flow through ordinary and charismatic churches alike.  Ordinary Christians are convinced, often after minimal reflection, that the music and charged atmosphere in a church gathering is inevitably the work of God.  There is no questioning or doubting. The lack of any scrutiny as to what is going on, makes these congregations vulnerable in a dangerous sense. Without scrutiny many Christians of the student generation become susceptible to grooming.  They are thus ripe for emotional, financial or even sexual abuse.  The tools of discernment are currently needed more than ever before.  Unless the Pilavachis, Fletchers and Balls are called out and named before they wreak havoc, ordinary Christians will continue to be in danger and the church is everywhere weakened and discredited with the wider public. Each church scandal that appears in the pages of the Daily Telegraph inevitably weakens the church’s witness, and the power to transform society retreats further from the realms of possibility.

To conclude.   Sam Howson is helping us to see more clearly that grooming and other forms of manipulation are a potential threat to large numbers of ordinary church members. While most church congregations are led by individuals of the highest integrity and skill, the recent decades have revealed examples of the dangerous havoc wreaked on ordinary congregations by leaders interested in wielding power.  Their victims would never normally have been considered vulnerable, but opportunistic leaders have made them so.  We note that the particular group most in danger of becoming vulnerable to malign activity of maverick leaders are the student population that are drawn to crowded ‘successful’ churches in the university cities of Britain.  Historically speaking, this group seems to have suffered the most from predatory power-hungry leaders. The protection of this cohort from such exploitation, before it happens, should be the priority of older church leaders who have acquired wisdom and maturity through having moved in many settings and have learnt to identify the wholesome from what may be toxic and abusive.

by Stephen Parsons

One of the battles that parents fight is in persuading their child to apologise to another child.   Billy hits his playmate Joe in a fit of irritation or pique, and clearly, Joe needs to hear Billy apologise if relations are to be restored.  There may be more at stake than just harmony between these two boys.  The two sets of parents have an agreement about babysitting each other’s children, and they cannot abandon this arrangement without affecting adult work schedules and the after-school pick-up rota.  Saying sorry with sincerity and feeling has become a matter of urgency and importance, if a carefully constructed edifice of childcare is not to be impacted, and even collapse, because two small boys have fallen out and refuse to play together in peace.

At this stage in his life, Billy has learnt how to say sorry in a way that does not signify any real content.  There is a particular sing-song intonation which says, ‘I am saying the words, but I don’t really mean them’.   The parent recognises this fake intonation and gets the child to repeat the words of apology until they sound more or less authentic.  It is a contest of wills but the parent battles on because he/she knows the issues that are at stake apart from babysitting rotas.  Authentic apologies do count for something.  Without them relationships are damaged and may be broken irrevocably.

The sing-song way of saying sorry, which is the offending child’s first attempt to respond to the adult’s demand for an apology, has its correspondence in adult life.  Adults do not use sing-song ways of communicating non-authenticity.  They have other verbal techniques.  Certain formulae, used in apologies, sound correct and sincere, but are, in fact, meaningless and shallow.  Expressions like ‘I regret any pain you may have felt, but it was caused inadvertently’ are the stock in trade for insincere apologies and professional speech writers alike.  Such expressions sound good but fail because, although they may appear heart-felt, they lack the quality of real remorse and sincerity which needs to be present in any proper apology.  In writing this piece, I am reflecting on the ideas and thoughts of ‘Graham’ who has written a piece for Via Media https://viamedia.news/2025/01/01/justice-and-moving-on/ on the giving and receiving of apology.    Graham is a Smyth survivor and disclosed to a number of bishops including ++Justin in 2013 about the abuse.  What he describes is his need for real understanding and human compassion from those who received the information about what he had had to endure.  What he in fact received were the sounds of drawbridges being pulled up and the castle (the Church of England) going into full defence mode.  The casualties of this process are sincerity, honesty, transparency and truth.  Many people (including myself) have pointed out the catastrophe that has transformed the national Church into a body that seems only to understand how to make insincere and shallow apologies.  The wider public has learnt, from experiences like that of being a parent, how to recognise when apologies are fake and insincere.  Listening to the crafted statements from one of the ‘reputation management’ firms, it is not difficult to spot if we have the genuine article among the fake, formulaic and ultimately meaningless statements of apology.  Just as parents recognise the insincere apologies sometimes uttered by their own children, ordinary people are very good at recognising the difference between genuine apologies and the fake formulaic versions.

It would be an interesting exercise to compile a list of words and phrases used by professional writers of official statements of apology.   Many such statements will include words like regret, unintentional and words implying that a decision was taken with good intentions but later proved to be wrong.  Two things will normally be absent from such statements.  One is any sense of real human feeling at the way things have been disastrous and catastrophic for the victims and survivors.  The imagined manual for official writers of apologies does not provide for such levels of empathy.  The expressions of regret provided for in our mythical manual can never plumb the depths of human feeling that survivors look for from those who are supposed to be offering words of comfort and support that a victim might find helpful. 

The second thing that never appears in our statement of healing words from leaders and people of power is an understanding of the ‘institutional alienation’ experienced by the survivors.  The survivor has detected, in their experience of abuse, not only a clear breach of ethical behaviour on the part of an individual, but also a sluggish even obstructionist response by an entire institution.  The Church so often seems to retreat into a lock-down mode when one of their servants is accused.  It is extraordinary that, even after ten years of active and supposedly professional guidance of safeguarding by bodies like the NST, people still find the ‘system’ impossible to negotiate without an incredible amount of perseverance.  As we enter the New Year of 2025, it should be possible for our church leaders to provide a far more survivor-friendly environment for those seeking justice and who have already suffered.  Those servants of the church who are being accused of such things as bullying and other forms of abuse, particularly when they belong to the upper ranks of the clergy, are seemingly able to call on the services of highly skilled (and expensive) lawyers.  The lay person who has experienced serious bullying at the hands of a vindictive church leader normally has no support in trying to be heard.  The more a church leader rises through the ranks, the greater the level of institutional protection is available.  The recent resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury appears to contradict my words about institutional protection, but no doubt there are other unseen factors in the story which made this particular event inevitable.

‘Graham’, in his moving piece in Via Media, to which we have already referred,has drawn our attention to the failures of the system to provide the words or the actions that might have helped him to find a greater measure of healing over the past ten+ years.  He speaks for all survivors in his plea for words to be shared that truly convey empathy and feeling.  Individuals in positions of authority are representative of a broader constituency; their words count and, if they communicate genuine remorse and sorrow, these may be instruments of healing.  Healing is also enabled when the ‘mighty … are put down from their seat’.  In other words, when important leaders express their sorrow in humble, everyday terms that ordinary people understand, something shifts in the dynamics of the whole process.  The section in Graham’s piece that describes looking into the eyes of those who seek reconciliation is powerful.  It chimes well with what I have said in my last blog post about the quality of reconciliation that can be achieved through a common experience of tears.  Sharing together the same human emotions of joy as well as sorrow is among the ways that we learn to be reconciled with other human beings.  These emotions are expressed in words but also in our body language.  Graham’s reflection about the connection that can be established by human beings simply looking at one another in a kind of visual embrace is powerful.  Reading his words takes us into a world where words are transcended, and primacy is given to what is real in terms of human relationships and spiritual truth.

2025 will be a challenging one for our Church of England.  The might of the institution is being challenged and the status quo of power and privilege it retains can no longer be taken as the final word.  Perhaps with the current awareness of the need to take the abused and damaged section of our Church far more seriously, we are glimpsing a Magnificat Church, one where the ‘humble and meek’ are ‘exalted’, taken seriously and even to be put in charge.  What we are also learning in the current leadership crisis is that institutions need to be held properly accountable and be flexible so that they earn the respect of those they claim to represent and serve.  The right of the Church to hold a place of honour in a society, where it no longer commands universal respect, needs to be challenged and questioned.  Above all, we want those outside the Church to look in and see only honesty and truth.  Our next Archbishop has the urgent task to call us all back to these basics.  Let us hope he/she has the insight, the vision and the wisdom to be able to do it.