by Anon

If you follow football, you’ll know that when a team fails to perform, they often dismiss the manager. In the 21^st century, Watford has changed its managers 24 times. Other clubs with significant managerial turnover include Chelsea and Nottingham Forest. Leeds United, Sunderland, and Crystal Palace have all experienced 20 or more permanent managerial changes since 2000. In contrast, Arsenal and Manchester City have had the fewest managerial changes.

Of course, leading a denomination is nothing like managing a football club. Yet there are some striking parallels. Supporters have expectations. Season ticket holders – or the regulars and frequent attendees – will know that the fanbase is wider than those just turning up every week in the cold for a couple of hours. Football, like religion, is an all-consuming affair. There is morale to consider. And performance on and off the field. The parallels are plain to see.

At its most basic level, psychologically, supporting an underperforming team can be a miserable and frustrating experience. Everyone on the terraces – or in the pews, for that matter – will have an opinion on who to select and play, tactics, and management. They can all do a better job than the manager.

Of course, denominations tend not to sack their managers (or “let them go”) unless they have no choice. Welby went. In Wales, Archbishop Andrew John (Anglican) and the national team parted company. In Scotland, Archbishop Keith O’Brien (Roman Catholic) also resigned. Performances and perceptions do matter.

Sarah Mullally has been managing the Church of England side for several months. So, it’s still early in her tenure. There are the coaching grounds in Canterbury, but the main stadium is at Lambeth Palace. This is a national team with a respected global pedigree and international following. Appointed in October 2025, Mullally took up the reins in March 2026. She’s the first female appointee to take the role. Like all new managers, many were ready to believe that this time it would be different (even if they could remember thinking that last time).

After all, it would be fair to say that the last half-century has been a ropey affair for managing the Church of England team. When the England football team won the World Cup in 1966, Michael Ramsey was Archbishop of Canterbury. Coggan and Runcie followed. In the run-up to the millennium, it was the turn of Carey, who was replaced by Williams, before being succeeded by Welby. And now Mullally. Modern Archbishops tend to average a ten-year stint.

Like her immediate predecessors, Mullally’s brief will have been to turn around the fortunes of a national denomination that is haemorrhaging support, experiencing a marked decline in prestige, unable to recover its international marque, and struggling with morale, results and overall performance. The terraces (or the proverbial pews) have levels of expectation and hope. They always do.

But the modern era for this game is tempered with realism, and the statistics are brutal. Only one in five of the population opted for a Church of England funeral in 2024; 80% chose an alternative. The figure for weddings is rapidly collapsing to one in ten of the population, with 90% choosing not to involve the Church of England.  In 2024, infant baptisms conducted by the Church of England accounted for 5% of newborns. National figures for confirmations were 22,000 in 2010, but by 2024, that figure had halved to 11,000. By any yardstick, those numbers are grim.

As a supporter or pundit following a football team, you can see how the team and the manager are performing from the statistics. The numbers don’t lie. They tell a story. Points accrued, goals scored, possession percentages, and the like all point to results. You can tell the fans as much as you like that your team played a great match and deserved something from the game, but were just unlucky this week. Or that things will be turned around next season. So, you must have the time to rebuild the squad, and the fans will just need to be patient.

The trouble is, for the Church of England, the fans have had this message from the Board of Directors for the best part of half a century. New managers come and go. Players, likewise. But the team continues to slide in national standing, and the decline internationally is even more marked and alarming. Here, parallels between the national church and the governance of England as a nation are striking. There have been seven Prime Ministers in the last ten years (Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer and Burnham). Perhaps running the country might be compared to the difficulty of managing Chelsea, Watford, or Nottingham Forest? Yet with expectations running way too high (and some might say unrealistic given the global context), mediocrity and mere survival are not tolerated.

According to one recent commentator (Claire Berlinski, ‘Changing the Undertaker Won’t Halt the Decline’, The Cosmopolitan Globalist, June 24, 2026), “Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer – each in a different way was consumed by the same unresolved event…the country keeps changing the undertaker and wondering why the corpse remains dead.” The same could certainly be said of Scotland’s football efforts at the 2026 World Cup campaign. But a change of managers won’t help, as Tom English noted (c.f., ‘Scotland’s ill-fated World Cup story finally at a sorry end’, 28 June 2006: https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/c5yzdwz890go). There were multiple layers to Scotland’s failure. As might be said of Church of England bishops too, Scotland’s team was “a squad full of endeavour…but the collective is decidedly average at best”.

And it’s hard to argue with those numbers. In the FIFA world rankings, Scotland sit at 42, so it would be a stretch to suddenly break into the top 30 at the group stages of the World Cup. England sit in fourth place in the FIFA world rankings, which suggests a spot in the semi-finals but not beyond. That is where it ended for England. They did great, for sure, finishing third, and the nation can be proud. They really can. But what is it about the hubris of a nation that presumes it deserves to do better?  The fans may well be full of passion and optimism. But that doesn’t increase the chances of outperforming the ranking. Many views from the pews would concur. Likewise, from the voters. The football team, the country and its national church are stories of struggle (or perhaps slow decline?). We need to engage with and accept that reality, not keep denying it, pretending we can somehow cheat it.

A selection of the more memorable books from the 20^th and 21^st centuries, all suggest a catalogue of collapse – an English empire descending into decay:  Decline and Fall (Evelyn Waugh, 1928), The Strange Death of Liberal England (George Dangerfield, 1935), The Collapse of British Power (Correlli Barnett, 1972), Farewell the Trumpets (Jan Morris 1980), Britain in Decline (Andrew Gamble, 1994), The Abolition of Britain (Peter Hitchens, 1999), The Strange Death of English Conservatism (Sam Tanenhaus 2005), The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (Piers Brendon, 2008), English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Martin Wiener, 2011), and Can We (Britain) Be Great Again? (Jeremy Hunt, 2025). These are mere samples. But no country produces a Library of Lament such as this unless despair afflicts the national psyche.

Why is England in decline? While this situation partly stems from the loss of its empire, the deeper issue lies in the nation’s inability to develop a suitable post-imperial governing identity. The country has clung to the habits, symbols, and structures of a former world power, even as its economy shrinks and industrial regions decay. This has led to a political landscape that confuses sovereignty with productivity and values nostalgia over strategic vision.

But the decline began even before the empire began to fade. England, as the first industrial nation, initially benefited from advantages that later became rigidities, such as outdated factories, management practices, class structures, educational biases, financial habits, and a political elite focused more on imperial administration than on industrial modernisation.

In the 1960s and 1970s, political theorist Tom Nairn and historian Perry Anderson formulated their theory of English decline. They argued that early English capitalist success allowed outdated institutions and class structures to endure, in contrast to continental European countries such as Germany, which modernised through efficient administrative tiers and effective education systems. For England, the triumphs of the past become the blight of the present. The grip of nostalgia on the psyche of its national church is also part of this problematic ecology.

The English are still chewing on the thick curdled whey of Empire Glory Days. That makes realities hard to stomach, and sober realism is an even harder sell. The Church of England’s national demise, to say nothing of the global Anglican Communion’s rapid dissolution and increasingly fractious divisions, is fully part of this story too. It is also hard to manage a team that doesn’t really want to be managed.

As with politics and football, so with the Church of England? In which case, Mullally is a symptom of our times, and no cause of malaise. There was a time when new leadership in the Church of England represented genuine change. So mere managerial competence will not be enough, and besides, the Church of England is already weary – some may even say cynical and suspicious – of bold new visions.

The 21^st century has seen far too much promised (mostly about growth), and far too little delivered. As with the country, the national church needs the leadership to provide a cohesive spiritual, theological, emotional, and moral account of the institution that is honest and truthful too. That is simply lacking. So, there is no credible visualisation for better days ahead.

As politicians will confirm, technocratic improvements often falter when public frustration is high. Church of England clergy and laity are disenchanted and demoralised by the clear signs of decline in the quality of episcopal oversight and support they currently receive.  Anger over the deterioration in the standard of spiritual and pastoral care at the hands of senior staff they encounter is further fuelled by bloated diocesan staffing levels and burdensome, intrusive bureaucratic processes. Clergy and laity feel that their hard work no longer matters and that their endeavours don’t even guarantee that their future ministry will be valued. They suspect, with good reason, that their leaders lack a credible plan for recovery, or possibly even for survival.

The clergy and laity need a leadership that can hear, articulate and understand their concerns and unhappiness. But instead of articulating their discontent, the Church of England’s hierarchy merely seems content to manage it.

The Church of England will not be saved by more strategies. Or worse, glossing over the ingrained depression and disenchantment with more PR. For Mullally, presenting herself as a competent Archbishop could be dangerously misleading, as it suggests that effective administration can resolve much deeper structural problems. When it doesn’t, one risks being seen as disingenuous.

Church leaders need to educate the clergy, laity, and the wider public about what truly matters in mission and ministry. But Mullally is not a teacher, so that aspect of leadership (the need to inspire through rich public theology and spiritual wisdom) is essentially out of range. Mullally may say many of the right things. But whether she can or will deliver is questionable.

For example, she recently called for clergy to be treated with more care and respect, mindful of the overwhelming evidence we have for the stress and mental health issues that clergy regularly report in surveys. Mullally seems to be (wilfully?) indifferent to the notion that the primary cause of the harm clergy experience is the diocesan hierarchy and structures of the very institution she represents. Yet Mullally addresses the abuse and harm clergy are reporting as though it were perpetrated by some vague third party. But the Memo from the employees and volunteers to HQ could hardly be plainer: “you are the problem”.

As the recent report from Veronica Hope Hailey confirms, there is ‘pervasive distrust’ in the Church of England’s leadership which can only be restored through accountability. That must begin from the top, with the Church of England’s leadership becoming accountable and transparent for their actions. Without this, they will not be trusted by clergy and laity, and nor will they deserve to be. (https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2024-06/gs-2354-trust-and-trustworthiness-within-the-church-of-england-a-preliminary-report.pdf) 

There are no quick fixes for these troubles. History teaches that we must live through long social and cultural cycles that we can neither control nor evade. Part of the cost and vocation of leadership is to make the burden of such times more bearable for everyone else, if we can. Changing Prime Ministers, Archbishops, or football team managers is unlikely to transform the ultimate destiny of a country, church, or soccer squad, magically turning them into winners overnight.

Football-wise, these decades have been tough to endure. Disenchantment still reigns. As for overseeing the Church of England, scaling back ever-increasing layers of managerialism will now be very welcome. If trust is to return, clergy and laity want leadership that is pastoral, compassionate, honest, accountable, humble, transparent, spiritually wise, and theologically rich. History will be the ultimate judge of how the Church of England was managed in our time.

by Kieran Fitzsimons

Editorial Introduction Over the past twenty years or so we have become increasingly aware of the part played by human sexuality in our understanding of the dynamics of church life. In this piece by Kieran we are invited to think about music within the life of the Church and the way it too affects all of us at a primal level. Recognising this power of music in church settings is the key to understanding and, when necessary, neutralising some of the destructive passions aroused by differing musical styles (and different styles of singing and playing). In this way music can be released to play its part in enriching the act of worship and bringing us closer to the divine.

1. I’m a retired school music teacher and cathedral musician.  For 20 years I’ve been using recent study and research into how music affects people – such work has profound implications for music in education and in the Church.  I’ve also been struck by what Stephen Parsons and Fiona Gardner (among others) have written recently about issues of power and control in the Church, manifest in horrible sexual deviancy.

2. I believe that there are connections here, because unhealthy appetites for power and control are seen in music too – I’ll outline two real examples.  Also there’s the same tendency towards institutional ‘cover-up’ and what I call ‘polishing the outside of the vessel’ (Matt 23) when wrong is done in either context – Safeguarding or music.

3. I’ve known many churches where clergy (‘high’ and ‘low’ alike) wanted to control music and musicians in what Fiona calls ‘asymmetrical’ relationships.  One ‘high’ vicar got through six organists in ten years and tried to ‘micro-manage’ a professional musician by very detailed instructions on how to use the organ.  She complained to the bishop, who supported her and told the vicar to stop it.  He didn’t.  Other organists got the same detailed instructions but now marked ‘confidential’.

4. Another vicar, very ‘low’ (his ‘Con Evo’ church was growing in numbers, especially attracting students), also got through organists – I was ‘organist 3 of 4’ in six years.  He turned against each one, and his curate (who did appreciate music) said on record that he’d had to ‘intercede’ for each – there was false accusation.  We might say ‘faults on both sides’, but remarkably the young man before me was both a good musician and a sincere ‘Con Evo’ – pew bible open during readings in the service, and so on.  Even that didn’t satisfy the vicar.  He used the pejorative term ‘emotional’ about anyone whose views didn’t suit him but always sang very loudly – the way people do at football matches.  I felt sure that this showed an emotional need, but I didn’t know what it was.

5. We need to ask how and why such things happen, irrespective of ‘high’, ‘low’, or any other Church identity.  Music (like sex) has primal influence.  Our understanding of this, and of people’s musical development, is transformed by new methods for detecting the response to music of very young babies.  An unborn baby’s hearing is fully developed by about half-way through gestation, so when Mum plays her choice of music, the baby hears it too.  Newborn babies respond more to that music than to other sounds.  Such insights are not new; wise people (especially mothers) have known them intuitively for perhaps thousands of years.  Now science backs them up.

6. Babies are more sensitive to melodic patterns than to pitch itself.  If a familiar ‘tune’ is played, moved up or down by a few semitones, the baby is comfortable; but if the set of intervals itself is changed there can be a strong reaction.  Composers handling their melodic material know many techniques (e.g. repetition, sequence, and development) which help to make a piece of music effective; now we can start to see how and why.

7. Some non-Western cultures or societies show much more awareness than ours of ordinary people’s musical potential.  In the early 1950s, American researchers (John Messenger et al.) spent time with the Anang Ibibo tribe in Nigeria and were amazed.  All the tribespeople, including small children, knew a huge range of traditional songs and dance routines.  The researchers couldn’t discuss ‘non-musical’ (or ‘tone-deaf’) people, because the Anang language had no equivalent concept – I hope it still hasn’t.

8. That American research was published in 1958, but I only read about it 50 years later in a new book, Psychology for Musicians (Lehmann, Sloboda, and Woody, 2007).  Perhaps it was neglected because at first there wasn’t ‘hard science’ to back it up – now there is.  I’ve seen it cited in other places since.  It may be worth mentioning that John Sloboda is an emeritus professor at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and was previously Professor of Psychology at Keele University – an unusual ‘trajectory’.  He has contributed to ‘the literature’ on Church music.

9. Rev. John L Bell, of the Iona Community, writes about ‘vocal disenfranchisement’ (The Singing Thing, 2 volumes, 2000 and 2007).  I believe him that this is a largely European – and especially British – problem.  As many as one in four British adults believe that they can’t sing, always because they were told this early in life by someone whose opinion they trusted. 

10. All of the above strongly suggests that if our development (emotional, sexual, or musical) hasn’t been healthy in early life, seemingly irrational adult behaviour may result – in the examples I’ve given, a ‘high’ vicar defying his own bishop, and a ‘low’ one turning against a sincere Evangelical musician.  The second, as I found out later (too late), had been brought up in a strict religious sect, in whose services women had to sit apart from men.  Perhaps not surprisingly, both vicars (‘high’ and ‘low’) had a restrictive view of what females could do in the Church.

11. These examples may show resentment – what Stephen calls envy leading to ‘festering jealousy’.  It might become disguised, even hidden beneath consciousness.  Of course, such insight is from recent study, and may be news to many church officials – especially the older and more influential ones.  It wasn’t in their own study or training.

12. I’m keen to try and spread more modern awareness, and to contribute to better understanding of how Church music affects us all – in whatever kind of church.  That would also mean challenging the false conflation of good music with ‘privilege’ – and the myth of ‘non-musical’ people.  I don’t think that such a challenge would be ‘dumbing down’.  I respect capable, sincere cathedral music colleagues, but my experience in schools is that ordinary children can be drawn up to high expectations.  This is also possible with adults – though in a way ‘the younger the better’.

13. If readers are interested, I can present some ‘Case Studies’ more fully.  During a bit of university research in late 2001 I consulted Robin Rees, whose 1991 PhD and 1993 book Weary And Ill at Ease had included three such studies of churches with problems and conflict about music.  Robin concluded each ‘case’ with questions which an individual reader, or a group, might consider and discuss – something which we could potentially do via the ‘blog’, helped by the scientifically-informed understanding now available to us.  Knowing the ‘how and why’ of unwelcome past issues may help us to improve on them.

Kieran Fitzsimons

by Anon

“He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.  His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”  (Luke 3:16, 17)

As it happens, I am writing this reflection on the feast day of John the Baptist. In the northern hemisphere, this is also the longest day of the year – after which, the days grow shorter. So, it seems appropriate to write about one of John the Baptist’s most memorable phrases (above), also repeated in Matthew (3:12).

Readers will doubtless know that winnowing is the process of separating chaff from grain and removing pests from stored cereal, usually following threshing. This involves throwing the mixture into the air, allowing the wind to blow away the lighter chaff while the heavier grains fall back down to the ground, where they are gathered. Techniques for winnowing can include using a fan, fork, basket, or shovel on harvested grain. The chaff scatters to the wind.

True, John the Baptist would not have known about the modern usage of the word chaff, but he would have easily understood it. Chaff is material used in military operations as an active decoy. Chaff, originally known as Düppel, is a radar countermeasure that disperses thin strips of aluminium or plastic to create metallic clouds. These clouds confuse radar systems by appearing as separate targets. Modern military forces use chaff to mislead active radar-homing missiles. Aircraft and warships are equipped with chaff-dispensing systems for self-defence.

Government PR regularly uses chaff (i.e., releasing a critical report on a ‘bad news day’ where it will hopefully get buried by other, more grave headlines). Likewise, the Church of England (CofE) frequently deploys chaff in its safeguarding efforts. The sheer scale of CofE safeguarding disinformation and puffery points to very deliberate PR strategies that pump chaff out into the public sphere at every opportunity.  It is there to confuse, distract and evade any detection of the real problems. The CofE’s safeguarding work is mostly chaff, not wheat.

What does the CofE’s safeguarding work hope to evade by these endless clouds of chaff? In a word, exposure. The fear is of being targeted by any authority that might threaten independent external scrutiny. Accountability must be avoided at all costs. So, chaff clouds are the order of the day. As many as possible. God forbid that Parliament or the Charity Commission might shine a spotlight on the incompetence, vested interests and corruption that drives CofE safeguarding. Preserve us, Lord, from the secular courts finally taking up a case from a survivor or victim that investigates CofE processes. For we know, Lord, that we have no processes that are fit for purpose. Not one.

So, concealing chaff clouds are the answer. Decoys and distractions can mask the dithering and facile pretence of running systems that could never otherwise be trusted or command confidence. Chaff helps the CofE to evade detection. General Synod should be the Threshing Floor for seeing through all this, sifting, discerning, weighing, and judging. But if you take a look at the Agenda for York’s General Synod in July, you’ll see that chaff is everywhere. You can’t move for the stuff.

Yet members of the General Synod are benumbed and utterly somnolent. The powers-that-be running the agenda from the podium learned long ago how to euthanise Synod members and meetings. It’s all status theatre, replete with wigs, gowns, and the pretence of debate and democracy led from the front. Anyone with an ounce of common sense, a prophetic cell in their body, or a conscience knows Synod is a waste of time. There’s no accountability and zero transparency. Watch, and you’ll see consecutive days comprising choking clouds of chaff.

But these days, CofE safeguarding has evolved into a publication: Chaff Weekly. This is no surprise, as one must remember that the Archbishop of York inadvertently let the cat out of the bag at a General Synod gathering only a few years ago, when he told the assembly that the purpose of all their effort and expenditure was “to safeguard the church”. A slip of the tongue, for sure, but a truism if ever there was one. The CofE’s leadership in safeguarding is engaged in a reputational endeavour. All other statements and claims made by CofE safeguarding – “we are listening to survivors; victims are at the front and centre of our concerns; we’re improving our processes; there will be a lessons learned review; blah, blah, blah, etc” – are subordinate to the Archbishops’ very telling, inadvertent admission.

The goal of CofE safeguarding is the preservation of its reputation and the avoidance of ceding accountability and transparency to any independent external body. That ‘safeguarding journey’ needs a lot of chaff, as the major task is to avoid embarrassing detections. This requires clouds of chaff to be released on a regular basis.

Just take a look at some recent chaff. In May, “the House [of Bishops] discussed the start of work on a review of the definition of safeguarding, to examine whether the Church’s structures and processes are established in a way that can best ensure everyone it comes into contact with is kept safe from harm.” (Minutes of the House of Bishops Meeting, York, 21 May 2026). So, another review is in the offing, which can presumably review the previous reviews, and probably suggest another working party to look into the next steps…which can then be subject to another review.

On June 11^th, 2026 (Saint Barnabas Day is celebrated – ironically, Patron Saint of Encouragement), the NST launched another consultation on safeguarding. How many consultations does the CofE need? There is no finite number. Lord, may the heavens rain with downpours of endless chaff upon your church. (see: https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2026/12-june/news/uk/church-of-england-s-definition-of-safeguarding-could-be-broadened)

Much of this chaff is proactive and designed to conceal the deeper problems. During the John Smyth (Makin Report), David Tudor, Mike Pilavachi, Jonathan and David Fletcher debacles, and with the reprise of the Chris Brain scandal, CofE safeguarding chaff clouds have had to thicken and rain much more frequently. Otherwise, scrutiny might detect the difficult things hiding in plain sight (I Cor. 4:5).

So, rooting through recent copies of the CofE’s safeguarding Chaff Weekly we can see that the CofE appointed Sir Stuart Carlton as the new Chair of the Redress Scheme Steering Board (27 February 2026). Sounds good? Yet the Redress Scheme is meant to be completely independent of the CofE. But no matter. Anyway, we’ve not heard a pipsqueak from Sir Stuart since this announcement.

Likewise, Nazir Afzal, appointed as the new CofE chair of the National Safeguarding Panel (11 September 2024). Sounds good? But nothing is really known of Mr. Afzal’s role, his current whereabouts, or how this appointment fits into another one of the CofE’s Safeguarding Reviews of Reviews (a free monthly supplement with Chaff Weekly).

On 30 September 2025, Chaff Weekly reported that “Dame Christine Ryan [has been] appointed Executive Chair of Safeguarding Structures Programme Board” (whatever that is). Sounds good? But nine months on, the silence is deafening. It remains the case that there is still no body – independent, professional, internal or external – overseeing the CofE where you could complain about their poor or unjust safeguarding procedures and hold bishops and officers accountable for their actions or inaction. The CofE leadership wants to keep it that way.

My older back copies of Chaff Weekly report that Lesley Ann Ryder has been appointed as the independent co-chair for the Safeguarding Response Group (April 2024). Sounds good? But don’t be doing too much digging. The CofE’s chatty chaff press release trills that Ms. Ryder is “an experienced CEO who has worked in national and local government and the health and charity sectors…[and] has been appointed the independent co-chair of the Response Group looking at two important reports on independence and safeguarding in the Church of England.”

But a quick check of her 16 appointments at Companies House doesn’t readily align with the claims in her LinkedIn profile. Apart from the two family-owned companies (Anume and C2S Management), Ryder’s average tenure for any directorship was 12.3 months. Around 50% of her business experience was in the lottery and gambling industry, and in commercial trading to raise money for hospices. (NB: Barbara Kahan was listed as the other Director for Ryder’s Anume. Born in 1931, Kahan was listed by Companies House as holding 2,277 other directorships and credited with having started more than 25,000 businesses. So, sounds good?). Ryder holds no qualifications in safeguarding, social work or social policy, nor does she cite any relevant safeguarding expertise.

Ryder lists Cambridge University as her alma mater, but has no degree from there, though she did attend a course in learning to speak French at the Department of Continuing Education (2008), and claimed to be “invited onto a postgraduate certificate course”, but no indication that she did so.  But we’ve heard nothing from her since the April 2024 Chaff Weekly fanfare.

The press releases on the NSP, RSSB, SSPB, SRG – so many new chaff-like bodies and debris have been commissioned – feature lovely, fetching photos of the appointees. Any nervous church and Synod members from the Home Counties are bound to feel comforted by the press releases and the people posing for their pictures. After all, these folk all look so, well, reassuring.

By now, you should have twigged that Chaff Weekly is one of the country’s leading newspapers for making new announcements, in order to conceal the fact that nothing is actually happening. Nor is it going to happen. That is the point. Chaff Weekly publishes chaff. And chaff, by definition, is expendable rubbish designed to fake movements and camouflage any real intentions.

Anyway, you can make your own chaff. How about designating 2027 as the Safeguarding Investigations into Lessons Learned Year – SILLY 2027, for short? What about a new consultation looking into Renewing Integral Safeguarding Knowledge – RISK, for short? There is bound to be somebody willing to chair this work, and the press release and flattering portrait will be a cinch for the chaff merchants. Everything can be put on hold until the group reports back to Synod (later). The trick is to look busy, whilst doing nothing.

The use of the CofE’s “favourite go-to-survivors” is also part of the chaff cloud (or smokescreen?). Despite this very, very small select group not enjoying the trust or confidence of the very much bigger and broader range of victims and survivors, the CofE likes to keep things tight and “in the family”.

One of the ‘chosen’ claims to have fronted participation and lived experience in a 40+ year career in education, social care, and children’s rights across the voluntary, statutory, and faith sectors. But a quick check of their profile shows this 40+-year career somehow began whilst they were still in school. It just doesn’t stack up. Nor does the claim to have got a distinction in a three-year taught university degree course in under two years. But never mind. This individual – a CofE favourite appointee – just sits on every safeguarding panel going.

Then there are our regular columnists for Chaff Weekly. There is the Robert and Joanne column – taking it in turns to be the ‘Lead Safeguarding Bishop’. Again, this sounds good? Until you realise neither possesses any qualification in social work nor is a member of any relevant recognised professional body.

Another columnist is Alexander Kubeyinje, National Director of Safeguarding. Chaff Weekly sometimes interviews him too. In the Strategic Review of Safeguarding (2025) – again, sounds good? – he tells us how great everything is and how well it is all going. Thank goodness for such high standards of independent reporting. The CofE’s safeguarding chaff must always sound professional. Chaff Weekly will deliver that message in spades. The lack of accountability and transparency is imperative.

When John the Baptist spoke of wheat and chaff, his listeners would have instantly understood that the chaff symbolised oppressive systems that must be discarded. That, to separate the wheat from the chaff, was a call to dismantle unjust structures and empower the oppressed. Seeing the chaff for what it represents presses the church to prophetically identify and eliminate its own harmful and abusive practices. And that if there is to be any radical hope, separating the chaff from the grain will be transformative, and permit a just and truthful church to emerge from the ashes of the old, flawed systems.

The CofE safeguarding leadership wants no such thing. They merely seek more subscribers to Chaff Weekly. Perhaps you might be tempted? But as the Gospel of Matthew (3:12) reminds us, “His (Jesus’) winnowing fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly clean out his threshing floor, and gather the wheat into the barn; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire”. We already know how this will end. Sounds good to me.