The Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM) of the Church of England was in action this month, examining the past actions of two senior Anglican clergy.  These were the investigations and findings in the cases of Canon Andrew Cornes and Bishop Paul Butler.  In the case of Paul Butler, there has been an admission of misconduct, though we have not so far been provided with the details of the complaint against him.  Without access to new information, my reactions to his case, if any, will have to be held back for a future occasion. The Cornes judgement has been in the public domain for a week or two and was delivered after an examination of an alleged failure on his part back in 1982.  The complaint against him was in relation to a case of serious professional neglect. This involved his failure to take appropriate action after having information disclosed to him about the behaviour of the notorious abuser, John Smyth.  Cornes was then a curate at the important London parish of All Souls Langham Place.  He had always been part of the Iwerne network but was never a major player. In his book on the Iwerne network, Bleeding for Jesus, Andrew Graystone only mentions Cornes once. Nevertheless, in Makin’s account, Cornes’ lapse was found to be a significant one.  Having received this first-hand information about Smyth’s behaviour from one of his victims, Cornes then failed to take any appropriate action.  He believed that the information he had received was being handled by someone else.  We could describe Cornes’ behaviour, at the very least, as neglectful of the responsibility required of a priest to care for a vulnerable person.  In his defence it was argued that modern safeguarding priorities, structures and concerns were not in operation 44 years ago.  For this reason, it was argued, Cornes, in his early 30s, could not have been expected to report to anyone the information shared with him by the Smyth victim.  The disciplinary tribunal considered this defence but concluded that his professional obligation to care for those who revealed such a disclosure, would have required him to act on this information, thus helping to protect other potential victims from harm.  While he may have shared something of what he knew, these efforts were not followed up.  This neglect allowed the abuse to continue.

I do not know Cornes and our paths have never crossed.  I do however feel a connection with him and his story, since he is only a few years younger than me and the reported events took place in 1982, at a time when I was finding my clerical feet as a young incumbent near Hereford.  Cornes’ clerical professional path has followed a very different pattern to mine and his career has been one of some distinction.   I had begun an independent role as an incumbent in 1979.  This followed two curacies in the Canterbury diocese and a self-funded time of research for two years.  Attaining this post of sole responsibility brought me to a place of cherished freedom and independence, with the opportunity to create something new.   Cornes’ professional trajectory went in a very different direction.  Instead of moving from a team situation to one where he had sole charge, Cornes opted, after his first curacy, to serve a nine year second curacy at the high profile conservative evangelical parish of All Souls Langham Place.  This is one of the London parishes which employ numerous curates.  This pattern of employing a dozen or more clergy creates a very different parochial model to the traditional one.  Within this system, ambitious conservative clergy are given the opportunity to polish their theological and preaching credentials so that they come to the notice of the ‘right’ people, those who employ patronage power within the conservative network. The movers and shakers within that world would see you and eventually you would come to occupy one of the ‘plum’ livings around the country that identify with the All Souls/St Ebbes Oxford style of Evangelicalism.  The churches of this ilk, typically in university cities, are deeply involved with the ministry to students.  The Christian Union network looks to this powerful cluster of churches right across the country to cooperate with its efforts of evangelism.  Working with these churches, there is an active pattern of study groups, prayer teams and numerous other activities that make membership a demanding commitment. 

The tribunal declared that Cornes’ failure to report about Smyth’s behaviour made him guilty of a serious lapse of professional behaviour, even judging the episode by the standards of 1982.  This was long before safeguarding was a ‘thing’ in the Church.  I do not intend to repeat all the arguments that led up to this judgement, apart from noting that they seem eminently reasonable.  Having lived through the period of the early 80s as an incumbent I have tried to think what I would have done faced with the same situation as Cornes.  I believe that in 1982, also in my 30s, and three years into my first incumbency I would never have attempted to deal with such a disclosure alone.  I would have consulted the oldest and wisest priest in the Deanery (who was acting as an unofficial mentor) and sought his advice.  I suspect that he would have directed me, or come with me, to the Archdeacon or suffragan bishop.  Cornes’ failure to do something similar was, I believe, the result of his training and early ministry having placed him in what was effectively a cultic institution.  There are many similarities between the Iwerne network and a full-blown cult.  Each followed a tightly defined version of Christian  orthodoxy which was set out by controlling leaders.  Iwerne’s potential for good was deeply compromised by the behaviour of Smyth and both the Fletcher brothers.  Certainly, the combined capacity to mediate harm by the three, John Smyth, Jonathan F. and David F. was massive, even though many still claim to be grateful for their teaching and ministry.  Cornes had been, like many other alumni of Iwerne, faithfully following the teaching of his mentors while aspiring to eventual leadership in the network.  At this early stage of his life, he would still have been integrated into the black/white cultic thinking of Bash and his followers.  Control by mentors to ensure correct thinking and beliefs would have been part of the quasi-cultic experience.  Are any of us surprised that an intelligent young Christian leader, under these influences, would have failed to take an independent stand when receiving a disclosure of abuse by a cult leader of such charisma and charm?   Independence of thought, especially over moral issues, was not going to be well developed in a young Iwerne alumnus such as Cornes, even in his early thirties.  My own experience of meeting members of that conservative culture during that period was to find myself encountering, not an individual personal appropriation of the Christian faith, but meeting the confident and fluent belief system of a ‘sound’ adherent.  In the immortal words of Adrian Plass, the young Cornes would likely still have been still turning to a metaphorical leader to discover what ‘we think’.  He would have found it quite hard to reconcile two dissonant realities.  There was on the one side the heroic gospel preacher (Smyth) whose gifts of oratory had inspired and encouraged young men like him over many summer camps.  Then there were reports of the same admired individual committing barbaric actions against dozens of men and boys.  One way to process such unpalatable information was to minimise and supress it.  That is what Cornes seems to have done.

 The second cultic aspect of Iwerne theology and culture that seems to be relevant in this situation is its tribal nature.  I have written about the collective mindset carried over from the English public school system and which finds a home in the Iwerne camps and in certain parts of the Church.  The values of loyalty to the team and not letting the side down were extremely important in all the schools that recruited for Iwerne.  For Cornes, there was likely a strong loyalty to this tribe he had grown up with through school, university Christian Unions, theological college and the All Souls network.  All these encounters had made him an honoured and important member of the evangelical tribe.  In this early stage of his life, he would, we have suggested, still have been operating according to the simplistic codes of thinking and morality taught by Bash and his successors to countless generations of young men of his background.  There would have been strong resistance to doing anything or thinking anything that might have been considered disloyalty to this tribe. In summary we seem to be describing the behaviour of a young man enmeshed into a state of dependency and immaturity by the Iwerne cult.    No doubt the post-cult mature Andrew Cornes eventually appeared, having escaped from the spiritual constrictions of his youth. I am confident that the theological method of Bash, which was to apply a favourite bible quote to deal with every problem, would eventually have been set aside.  Iwerne had never encouraged theological reflection, but the needs of ministry demanded it.

Andrew Cornes is, some would think unfairly, being held to account for what he did not, and perhaps could not, do 44 years ago.  He was, it seems, faced with a moral dilemma which the received theology of Iwerne was unable to resolve.  The wider intellectual and spiritual resources of the Christian faith, I would argue, had been denied him by his narrow restricted cultic Christian education and so he failed to make the right call.  By allowing John Smyth, David Fletcher and his brother Jonathan to act as mentors, those within the Iwerne experience were hardly likely to promote wholesome moral teaching among their hearers. Is it surprising the moral teaching imbibed by Cornes as a young man, was off-centre, to say the least?   The finding of the tribunal against Cornes may be quite simply a judgement, not against him personally, but against what many would see to be a morally compromised version of Christianity.  Even now Conservative Evangelical teaching is being allowed to have enormous power in our universities and other institutions where young people are being taught the faith.  In some respects, the black-white thinking of conservative theology is not just wrong – it is often actually traumatising and dangerous to those who hear it. 

At the end of this tribunal process we have a wounded elderly priest who has, no doubt, given of himself to the Church faithfully and loyally over many years.  I am certain that, with his evident gifts, he has been a blessing to many.   The conclusion of the Tribunal has not made a finding against his personal morality which, no doubt, is excellent.  What it has done is, indirectly, to expose the spiritual dangers of poor Christian teaching given by men (in the conservative tradition) who are seduced by the gratifications of power and influence over others.  The procession of leading conservative men who have now been revealed as corrupt, abusive and self-serving is alarming to any who want the Church to be a force for good in our society.  Andrew Cornes, is not, and never has been, as far as I know one, of those who directly harms others.  He is, or has been, for the reasons we have started to explore, in some sense, himself a victim or survivor of an abusive cultic manifestation of Christianity.