by Robert Thompson

Remain here with me. Watch and pray. Matthew 26:38

Safeguarding failures in the Church of England are often discussed in procedural terms: governance, independence, lines of accountability, and the adequacy of review processes. These questions matter, and they deserve serious attention. But they do not, on their own, explain why safeguarding crises continue to recur, even after repeated assurances that “lessons have been learned.”

What is increasingly clear is that the problem is not only structural. It is theological.

The theologian Marika Rose has argued that Christian theology is marked by a persistent desire for innocence: a wish to present the Church as fundamentally good, morally coherent, and well-intentioned, even when confronted with evidence of harm. In her work A Theology of Failure: Žižek Against Christian Innocence, Rose suggests that theology repeatedly seeks to protect itself from failure, rather than allowing failure to speak truthfully.

This insight has particular resonance for Anglican safeguarding culture.

The Church of England often responds to safeguarding breakdowns by emphasising process: the independence of reviews, the robustness of structures, the good faith of those involved. These claims are not necessarily false. But they function theologically. They reassure the institution that, whatever has gone wrong, its moral core remains intact.

For survivors, this reassurance often lands very differently.

The insistence on institutional good intentions can feel like a refusal to remain with the depth of harm that has occurred. Anger and grief are treated as threats to stability. Calls for accountability are experienced as challenges to ecclesial unity. The result is a culture in which safeguarding is endlessly reformed but rarely re-imagined.

Rose’s theology helps name what is happening here. Failure is treated as an interruption to the Church’s life, something to be resolved so that normal service can resume. But a theology of failure insists that breakdown is not merely accidental. It reveals something true about how power, authority, and self-understanding operate within Christian institutions.

This matters because Anglican ecclesiology is often tempted to resolve safeguarding tension by appeal to balance: pastoral care on the one hand, institutional continuity on the other; accountability tempered by grace; truth held alongside unity. These instincts are deeply Anglican, and often admirable. But they can also function as mechanisms of avoidance, softening the force of failure before it has been properly faced.

The cross challenges this instinct. At the heart of Christian faith is not balance, but exposure. Authority collapses. Innocence is stripped away. Religious power is revealed as capable of grave harm. Any safeguarding theology that rushes too quickly to reconciliation or restoration risks bypassing the truth that the cross discloses.

This is where Anglican debates about safeguarding independence often falter. Independence is treated as a technical solution, rather than as a moral and theological demand. Reviews are expected to restore trust, rather than to tell the truth, whatever the cost. When independence becomes a means of institutional reassurance rather than institutional vulnerability, it reproduces the very dynamics it claims to address.

A theology of failure suggests a different posture. It does not deny the importance of structure, policy, or leadership. But it insists that the Church must relinquish the desire to appear innocent. It must accept that some failures permanently wound the institution, and that trust cannot be managed back into existence.

For bishops and senior leaders, this is an uncomfortable position. They are tasked with holding the Church together, maintaining public witness, and preventing collapse. But when stability is prioritised over truth, the Church risks repeating the conditions under which harm occurred.

Safeguarding reform that is not accompanied by theological honesty will remain fragile. Procedures may improve. Language may change. But survivors will continue to sense when the institution is more concerned with its own coherence than with their reality.

The Church of England does not need to become flawless in order to safeguard well. It needs to become truthful. That truthfulness will not always look like success. It may look like loss of confidence, loss of authority, and loss of control.

A theology of failure does not offer a programme for renewal. It offers a discipline of staying with what has gone wrong, without rushing to redeem the institution’s image. In the long run, that discipline may be the only ground on which genuine safeguarding culture can grow.

The gospel already gives us a language for this moment. In Gethsemane, Jesus does not ask his disciples to act, resolve, or redeem. He asks them to remain: “Stay here with me. Watch and pray.” Their failure is not cruelty but flight — an inability to remain present to fear, grief, and impending loss.

Safeguarding cultures fail in much the same way. The rush to process, closure, and reassurance often masks a deeper refusal to stay awake to what has been revealed. A theology of failure is, at heart, a Gethsemane theology: a discipline of presence that resists sleep, refuses innocence, and remains with truth long enough for something other than self-protection to emerge.

Until the Church learns to remain with failure without rushing to redeem itself, safeguarding reform will remain fragile and the gospel’s judgement will remain quietly in place: then he came and found them sleeping (Matthew 26:40).