Dear Bishop Sarah
As editor and contributors to Letters to a Broken Church, we congratulate you on your recent appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury. You have our good wishes. You will be taking on impossibly heavy burdens, and too often amid hostility simply for being a woman. We have no wish to add to those burdens.
You will be aware of our conviction that safeguarding and the care of complainants should be at the top of the Church’s agenda – and therefore of your agenda – for two reasons:
1) caring for the vulnerable should be a priority for every church and charitable organisation;

2) we presume that as Archbishop of Canterbury you will wish the Church of England to continue in good health. But if it continues to mishandle safeguarding complaints as it has in the past, and too often does at present, abuse scandals have the potential to cripple or even to destroy the Church.

We would like to offer you our assistance. We are arranging for a copy of Letters to a Broken Church to be sent to you under separate cover. We offer, among us, experience and expertise as survivors, abuse lawyers, theologians, sociologists, liturgists, journalists, and campaigners. We are ready to put that expertise at your disposal. In addition, we can bring you up to date on progress, if any, on the cases we describe in our book. You have only to ask. We hope you will work with us, and with other survivors and survivor advocates, in our mission on behalf of survivors of church abuse everywhere.

With best wishes,
Yours very sincerely,
Rev Janet Fife
Natalie Collins
Dr. Andrew Graystone
Rev Rosie Harper
Jo Kind
Matthew Ineson
Rev Stephen Parsons, Surviving Church
Rev Prof Martyn Percy
Martin Sewell
Simon Barrow, Ekklesia (publisher)