by Hatty Calbus

The British are known to be mad. But in the maiming of their privileged young, they are criminally insane. So observed Etonian John le Carré. There is finally more awareness of boarding schools’ insane maiming, particularly of now middle aged and elderly men, my focus here. Another Etonian, Alex Renton, reviewing Robert Verkaik’s Posh Boys: How the English Public Schools Ruin Britain refers to “the toxification of British public life by the private school system.” That toxification, particularly by boarding schools, very much affects the Church of England. In his BBC radio series, Nicky Campbell included, among former boarders wielding power, religious leaders. In Sex, Power, Control: Responding to Abuse in the Institutional Church, Fiona Gardner emphasises “the embedded cultural ethos of the public school and boarding school which permeates the church hierarchy.” It is necessary to admit the maiming and find help to heal. Most never try and, therefore, should not be spiritual leaders. I want to show that, among the Church hierarchy, over-representation of untreated boarding school survivors, or untreated boarders – which I’ll abbreviate to UBs – has caused immense harm. I am focusing on men because they continue to do the most damage, although such women, often identifiable by their brittleness, can also devastate in positions of power. The network I wrote about previously, with Iwerne-imbued HTB having connections to four big recent abuse scandals in the Church of England, yet chosen as a standard-bearer, comes almost entirely from this world. It  is not yet clear whether HTB’s Revitalise Trust will continue to play such a central role under Archbishop Sarah Mullally. Even if she reduces it, its effects will not disappear quickly.

Charles Spencer, in his painful memoir, A Very Private School (whose compelling account of his abusive prep school shouldn’t need justification as a resource) asks, “Why were parents blithely sending us away, to live with adults and children who were total strangers, in a clear rejection of family?” Children are meant to live with their parents, not be abandoned by them, yet boarding school means childhood in what former vicar Mark Stibbe called “orphanages for the privileged.” The actor Dominic West said being left as a small child “… had a major effect on me – it was the worst feeling I ever had, very similar to the grief when my parents died. It’s the same thing really; you think you’ve lost your parents.” Psychotherapist Joy Schaverien, identified an ABCD of ‘Boarding School Syndrome’: abandonment, bereavement, captivity and dissociation. Penny Pickles and Helen OdellMiller, in her obituary, elaborated: “‘A’ stood for the abandonment and rupture children felt when they were taken to school and left there with strangers. ‘B’ was for bereavement and the sudden loss of all that was familiar: family surroundings, friends, toys, routine, even food … ‘C’ indicated captivity, the realisation that there was no way out from rigid and often punishing routines, no escape, even though some tried to run away.  This could lead to ‘D’, dissociation and the development of a false self that they felt helped them to be brave and cut them off from their true feelings

Those at less dangerous schools still experienced significant distorting, including when school was safer than home. Schaverien’s colleague Nick Duffell, drawing on neuroscience research, says “the case has been proven that forging early bonds and developing relational abilities foster brain matter development.” So rupturing children’s most crucial relational bonds must mean impairment. Stibbe, whose subsequent relational damage led to the breakup of his marriage and end of his ministry, lists boarders’ deprivations: love, home, safety, childhood, siblings, innocence and freedom. Even the thicker-skinned cannot be unaffected – which those around them tend to know all too well.

Piers Cross, part of a group, including Duffell, who made the documentary Boarding on Insanity was quoted in a Guardian article: “Take David Cameron. He described being sent to boarding school at seven as ‘brutal and bizarre’ and recalled ‘frequent beatings’. He lost a stone in weight during a single term (my italics). Tony Blair tried to run away aged 14, making his way to Newcastle airport in a bid to escape. There are so many of these stories

Spencer says, “I’d regularly consider shooting myself in the foot with one of my father’s shotguns: physical agony seemed preferable to the psychological torture of being sent away to that place again.” However much former pupils might want to minimise it afterwards, these schools inflicted appalling suffering on children.

 As well as the beating and bullying, with constant access to prey, boarding schools have, of course, also been paedophiles’ perfect hunting grounds. Teachers are the obvious perpetrators, but there is the less well-known cycle of older boys abusing younger. Boys not abused themselves saw their peers abused. A further aspect Spencer shows is the meeting of physical and sexual abuse in paedophile sadism – it is obvious where Smyth and Fletcher came from.

Dr Elly Hanson is the clinical psychologist consulted for the Makin Review, which observes, “Of note in Dr Hanson’s analysis is reference to boarding school culture and practices, in which she describes how often very young children are separated from their families for long periods of time and therefore ‘come to lack strong, secure attachments and an understanding of healthy relationships. This can make them more vulnerable’ to exploitation and abuse, ‘especially when perpetrated by someone in the guise of a ‘father figure’. Dr Hanson goes on to explain the vulnerability and needs of those that were targeted by John Smyth ‘… needs are especially acute during adolescence, and become more so when children are placed in boarding school – and furthermore it appears that John [sic] targeted those that he perceived as having deeper unmet needs (in other words particular vulnerabilities)’ . This explanation correlates to the experiences of several victims who described describe vulnerability because of family relationship breakdown and/or boarding school attendance.”

Makin also points out that “the [Iwerne] movement pursued an explicit strategy of trying to convert to it boys that were deemed of high rank (educated at elite private schools, athletic, attractive and so forth), because such individuals were seen as having more potential to influence society (that such an unjust and inequitable society exists was embraced rather than challenged).” These schools perpetuate what Gardner calls  “the complacent culture and tradition of elite masculine power.” Iwerne was born again as the Titus Trust, whose homepage still invites only those from private schools on its holidays. Why, if not to perpetuate that elite power in the Church?

I’ll counter here the defence of UBs who send their own children to boarding schools that they have completely changed. There is still the separation from family and shall note that Dr Hanson writes of pupils’ vulnerability in the present, not just historically. Penelope Brown, in the interviews cited above said, “Generally, the schools are safer than they used to be [a low bar] and the majority of staff are doing their best. But the inconvenient truth that none will confront is this: in the vast majority of cases, children simply aren’t better growing up away from their family. If it’s safe for a child to be at home, that’s where they should be.”

Safeguarding children in private schools has finally caught up with state schools (only fully in 2020), reducing the risk from teachers and removing the impunity abusers enjoyed for so long. But the movement Everyone’s Invited is an online platform where girls, initially primarily from boarding and private schools, shared anonymous testimonies about sexual harassment, assault and rape culture perpetrated at their schools by boys with psyches pornified online. One imagines older boys still abuse younger ones too.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56558487 What makes the experience at boarding schools still so terrible is that, as happened to those old boys who now run – these days not everything, but still an awful lot of it, especially in the Church of England – there is no escape: victims are trapped with their predators in well-appointed prisons.

A significant reason parents still send their children to boarding schools is to ensure they acquire the prestige, social markers and social connections of the British elite.  Some people will think that obviously only an envious Trotskyite would object to this and want to highlight connections between untreated boarding school survivors and indifference to abuse, but the saying “The foundation of every state is the education of its youth” also applies to the Church. Yes, abuse happens in all sorts of spiritual traditions and at different social levels. My point, to repeat, is that the involvement of UBs almost guarantees a terribly inadequate response, which has been evident in the network in which HTB sits, most notably with John Smyth and Jonathan Fletcher.

I shall attempt to show first harmful traits of people who have not dealt with their maiming; then, if they have not become perpetrators themselves, how their defences engage when they are confronted with others’ abuse; and finally I shall suggest counter actions.

Just recently I had an email from abroad, wanting to know if I had any comments about what we may call ‘the bishop problem’.  He may have read a piece in The Times and  a blog piece that I wrote in past months pointing out the difficulty that the Church of England seems to be having in finding good candidates for its senior posts.  In fact, the problem is not just about finding suitable candidates but also retaining them after they have been nominated and put in post.  Readers of Surviving Church will be aware of the recent issues that have attached themselves to the nomination of the Bishop of Warwick and the fact that a complaint has caused a delay in Canon Tim Lomax’s consecration.  Then there are three recent cases of diocesan Bishops having to ‘stand back’ or resign.  At present there are more ‘acting’ bishops leading dioceses than has ever been the case before.  The existing meticulous protocols surrounding the appointment of bishops, especially diocesans, mean that the Crown Nominations Committee responsible for this task is forced to work slowly.  This helps to explain why things seem to move at a glacial pace.  This is a source of considerable frustration for those in vacant dioceses who have to face a wait of two or more years for a new episcopal leader to appear.  This slow pace of identifying and appointing good candidates does not fit well with a situation where there are several unexpected departures by senior figures in the church.     

Today we have a situation in which there are eight or nine diocesan episcopal vacancies or announced vacancies.  One other diocese (Salisbury) is awaiting a decision as to whether its bishop is in any way guilty of an unspecified offence. To put replacements in each of these posts is going to absorb an enormous amount of energy and skill on the part of highly qualified but busy people who do the work of scrutiny and nomination. Because many of the same people are involved in the nomination processes across the country, these eight vacancies are going to create considerable strain on the institution of the Church of England.  Even if things go as smoothly as possible, we can expect that the whole process will take two to three years.  To judge from the experience of the recent past, appointments at this level almost inevitably meet obstacles along the way.    In the recent attempt to make an appointment of the Bishop of Durham, a post that traditionally that has attracted candidates of the highest calibre, a preferred candidate withdrew in the middle of the nominating process.  Let us, for a moment, assume that things do go well and that the eight posts are filled from the existing pool of candidates in as little as two years.  Most of the appointments will be made from those who have already cut their teeth as suffragan bishops.  In practice, those who act as suffragans are not always ready for the substantial increase of responsibility that comes with a diocesan post.  They may have seen enough of this level of pressurised operation to know that they do not have the stamina for the endless decision making and committee work that goes with a diocesan episcopal post.  They may also have witnessed from the inside a series of blunders and errors on the part of the previous holder of the role. They know that many of the problems left behind cannot be resolved by a simple exercise of their institutional power.  There are, for example, incidents of serious unprofessional behaviour by clergy which do not go away easily. The power to remove clergy from office is very difficult to implement.   But with our optimal timetable, we are going, for the moment, to assume that the present list of vacancies disappears, and that a new generation of episcopal candidates appears from the ranks of ordinary clergy replace the suffragans who have stepped up to fill the diocesan vacancies.  What can possibly go wrong?  

In Italian there is a word to describe candidates for the Papacy, men who are the right age and possess the right background for consideration to the top job. They are described as papabile.  The word ‘episcabile’ does not exist in any language, but we need such a word to denote individuals who are potentially able to fill the diocesan vacancies and also provide a new generation of suffragan bishops.  For the sake of argument, I am going to assume that there are candidates across the Church able and qualified, now or in the future, to function as senior bishops for the Church of England.  The problem is that these episcabile men and women are relatively few in number.  In the first place there is nothing in the training that clergy currently receive (or have received) that makes them potentially ready to do the job of a bishop at any level.  The training that is provided is for the role of a parish priest.  It is only a small number that enter the select cohort that enables them to reach a place where they can become episcabile.  A few ordinary parish priests bring management or intellectual skills from previous careers that make them potentially able to be on a path to take one of the bishop roles.  But these are few in number since, as we have noted in earlier posts, the skills required are so extensive.  Also, some of those who possess the right qualities to be episcopal candidates will quickly make it clear that they have absolutely no interest in taking on the enormous stresses required of those in episcopal leadership.  My cohort of episcabile clergy instantly shrinks to a very small number.

The next thing which shrinks the cohort still further is the inevitable safeguarding scrutiny.   Today, a problem for clergy right across the board is not only whether they have themselves a clean bill of bill of health over power abuse, safeguarding training and bullying incidents, but whether they may have failed to report such behaviour in others.  Further names disappear from our list because some on it knew of a safeguarding episode and failed to do anything about it.  Some safeguarding lapses are obviously more serious than others.  Speaking generally, it is a matter of record that several senior clergy in the Church of England do seem to have a flawed safeguarding record hanging over them.  Some of the accusations of cover-up or failure to respond must result in considerable strain for those who occupy these places of high office.  Resilience and the possession of a very thick skin to cope with criticism, whether or not justified, is always required of those who have climbed the pole of promotion in our national Church.

Among the many other qualities required of our present and future bishops is a good theological brain.  We find that across the Church there are reasonable number of those who have taken their study beyond the basics, and received doctorates from eminent universities in topics that may be relevant to the task of effective episcopal oversight.  But the current leadership has not so far been known for inspirational leadership in the area of theological teaching.  We may have to wait some time for this situation to change.  It is a long time since the wider church or, indeed, the general public, listened to the theological reflections and insights of senior clergy.  An enormous amount of energy has been expended on the topic of marriage and sexual ethics.  The outsider looking in might conclude that there are no other topics worth discussing in the Church.  Can no one in leadership articulate better how the Church is bearer of ‘Good News’?

My final observation in what is a somewhat gloomy prognosis for the Church of England and its present and future bishops, is to note a serious division that is emerging within parishes across the country.   Once upon a time the task of the Church and the parishes that make up its public face, was easy to identify.  The Church of England had a duty of care potentially to the whole population.  It was the institution which offered to provide spiritual support and reassurance from birth to the grave.  The church building found in every community was a spiritual symbol of this divine concern for all.  Now the focus seems in many places to be about entertainment and providing a model of church life that has appeal to the youthful sector of society.  This section of the church believes that it has found the formula for growing the church.  A combination of gospel songs, attractive young charismatic personalities and a guaranteed creation of intense emotional experience is thought to be the key to the church’s future.  The skills of the past, such as ministry to the sick and dying and engaging with the church’s rich liturgical and theological traditions seem to have gone right out of fashion among many recently ordained clergy.  The point that really concerns me, and many clergy from my generation is that there will shortly arise a generation of clergy and bishops who know nothing of the richness of the past.  The HTB charismatic tradition has an important place within the Anglican fold, but the same tradition can become truly toxic and dangerous the moment it sets itself up as the sole and only valid expression of Christianity for Britain.  Conservative readings of Scripture may have a place in the total scheme of things in our engagement with the Bible.  But they provide a very poor model if they are expected to carry the weight of being the only valid approach to the riches of the Bible.  The bishops of today and tomorrow need to ensure that there is a true mixed economy within our church.  The presumption by the wealthy HTB parishes to dictate to the rest which parts of the Anglican tradition are most highly honoured is ultimately deeply destructive to the whole Church of England.  Let us hope and pray that there are still enough prayerful men and women in the Church of England who have the experience, knowledge and wisdom to fill the vacant sees at Diocesan level (listed below) and the next generations of suffragans to follow. 

• Lincoln: Became vacant on October 1, 2026 (following the retirement of Stephen Conway).
• Manchester: Announcement on March 4, 2026, with the see becoming vacant on August 1, 2027 (following David Walker’s retirement).
• Guildford: Vacant since March 3, 2026 (following the death of Andrew Watson).
• Lichfield: Vacant from September 30, 2026 (following Michael Ipgrave’s retirement).
• Chichester: Vacant from June 1, 2026 (following Martin Warner’s retirement).
• Southwark: Vacant from August 5, 2026 (following Christopher Chessun’s retirement).
• Oxford: Vacant from August 1, 2026 (following Steven Croft’s retirement).
• London: Vacant from January 28, 2026 (following Sarah Mullally’s translation).
• Liverpool: Vacant following the departure of John Perumbalath.

by Anon

Once upon a time, the CofE marked the departure of its clergy and lay staff with a Farewell Service. A homily might be given, and gratitude expressed for all the work a departing staff member had done, the help and support they had provided to others and to the church, and for their tireless, faithful vocation.  Refreshments might follow, perhaps some speeches, and maybe a gift or some flowers.

Even in pared-down dioceses on their uppers, you could at least anticipate a short liturgy with the bishop in the chapel of a diocesan HQ, followed by the small conference sandwich selection from M&S. But I suspect that nothing like this was prepared for Dame Christine Ryan, who suddenly stepped down from her role as the CofE’s Executive Chair of Safeguarding Structures Programme Board (whatever that is) after barely a year in post. (Her appointment was only announced at the end of September 2025).

And so, in the spirit of Private Eye’s fictitious poet-in-residence, E.J. Thribb, here are some lines to mark her departure.

So, Farewell then,

To Dame Christine Ryan

Executive Chair of the Church of England’s

“Safeguarding Structures Programme Board”,

(Whatever that was).

We never found out what it did.

Or was eventually supposed to do.

It must be strange to leave a job

That never really started

And was probably just a sinecure.

Which is why I imagine you left.

Once you discovered

You were just another CofE safeguarding mannequin

Only there for window dressing.

Keith’s mum says

It’s all smoke and mirrors anyway.

And that Mr Nye makes all these jobs up

To keep the Charity Commission distracted

As well as General Synod confused.

And that nothing will ever happen.

Which is why you had to organise your own farewell.

Private Eye recently exposed accountability and transparency failures at the highest levels of Church of England governance (no. 1682, Summer 2026, p. 49). It dubbed William Nye, Secretary General of the Archbishops’ Council and General Synod, “Head of Exceptionalism” and named Simon Gallagher, Director of the Central Secretariat, and Alex McGregor, Head of Legal Affairs, as complicit in oversight and management lacking meaningful accountability. Victims of Church of England sexual abuse – and those accused, falsely or otherwise – will testify that decision-makers on truth and justice appear to operate above the law.

This seems like a good moment to remind readers of Surviving Church that it was only in July this year that we noted that the CofE’s favourite publication, Chaff Weekly, had carried a press announcement on 30 September 2025, reporting that  “Dame Christine Ryan [has been] appointed Executive Chair of Safeguarding Structures Programme Board” (whatever that is)….”. We noted that this

“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.”

We went on to comment that

“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….”.

Commenting on the Church of England’s report on trust and accountability (‘Trust and Trustworthiness’, July 2027, General Synod Paper 2457: https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2026-07/gs-2457-renewing-trust-addressing-the-challenges-of-trustworthiness-in-the-church-of-england-v2.pdf), Archbishop Sarah Mullally said, “if hope is the fruit, trust is the root”. Yet the fruit remains bitter because the governance in Lambeth Palace in safeguarding and so many other areas lacks any meaningful accountability and transparency. Without cultivating them, trust is impossible.

The scale of the problem was recently set out in a letter to the Editor of the Church Times (11th September 2026) from Dr Andrew Graystone, who writes (under the subheading ‘Accountability and Church of England Bishops’):

Madam, — During the House of Lords debate on the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, the Bishop of Manchester, Dr David Walker, told the chamber that “public bodies need scrutiny” (News, 4 September). The Bill, which is sometimes referred to as “the Hillsborough law”, is intended to replace the offence of misconduct in public office with a new “duty of candour” for public authorities. Dr Walker went on to say: “When authority figures are not held properly accountable, and denial and defensiveness are enabled, our communities are further fragmented.”

He is right, of course; and yet denial and defensiveness precisely characterise the experience of so many victims and survivors of abuse in the Church of England. One example is the refusal of the National Safeguarding Team to publish the “independent” review of its handling of the case of the former Bishop of Liverpool Dr John Perumbalath. Another is the complete failure of the Church to hold serving bishops and archbishops accountable for their failings in the case of John Smyth. I could give many more.

The offence of misconduct in public office was always obscure and ill-defined, though it had its uses. It was the offence under which Bishop Peter Ball was convicted after abusing young men for decades. Unfortunately, the new law, as it is currently drafted, will not apply to bishops. So, ironically, the Bill that Dr Walker is championing will have the perverse effect of making it easier for bishops to avoid scrutiny.

Is that really what the Church wants, as it seeks to rebuild on the ruins of public trust and confidence?

Graystone’s perceptive letter recalls decades of police and institutional cover-up over the 1989 Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield, where inadequate crowd control needlessly killed 97 Liverpool fans. He rightly highlights the Church of England’s similar conduct in safeguarding controversies.

Safeguarding serves as ecclesial virtue signalling and reputation management, rarely truth or justice. The continued use of ‘insiders’ for supposedly ‘independent’ reviews of difficult cases reflects corporate nepotism: the church ultimately cares only about itself.

In this culture, trust quickly erodes, prompting church members and clergy to disengage and withdraw. Church of England safeguarding remains unregulated, unlicensed, unaccountable, and largely unprofessional, leaving abuse victims and the falsely accused to navigate labyrinthine processes driven more by PR than truth or justice. Increasingly, many choose to leave instead.

By claiming that “safeguarding in the church is everyone’s responsibility,” the CofE originators of that phrase mean the very opposite: in the Church of England, no person or body ultimately takes responsibility. Which is why Dame Christine and others start looking for the exit door shortly after they arrive.

Next up is the Redress Scheme, where once again the CofE hierarchy has sought to stack the deck with its chosen ‘insiders’ whilst all the while claiming that these appointees are ‘independent’. Nobody believes or trusts any announcement from Lambeth Palace.

And on safeguarding, the CofE hierarchy seems to be spending all its money on window dressing to avoid the day of humiliation when the Charity Commission or Parliament finally imposes independent external regulation. But for victims of abuse and those damaged by the CofE’s corrupted and incompetent safeguarding procedures, that day cannot come soon enough.

Meanwhile, we wish Dame Christine well as she departs.  The CofE press release doesn’t say why she left, or even whether she had somewhere else to go.  We suspect she eventually realised she was wasting her time as another mannequin in the CofE’s safeguarding shop window. We are sorry that there was no Farewell Service of any kind for her, or any event to mark twelve months of, er, frustration at the reigning culture of inaction and inertia in Lambeth Palace.

The growing list of those who have left the Church of England over its safeguarding debacles gets longer and longer with each passing week. Soon there will be nobody left at all, other than a few bishops and a handful of senior Lambeth Palace staff, insisting all is well, and that change is coming “at pace”. Will the last person to leave please turn out the lights?

There are some words in the English language that are not very useful unless they are placed in a clear context or have an adjective attached to them.  One of these words is charisma.  This is a word that has currency in a religious setting, but it also belongs in a number of other contexts, including the political and sociological.  In any use of the word there has also to be some indication as to whether the word is signifying something good or something toxic.  The word used on its own carries no value judgment built into its meaning.  We see the negative use of the word as it was applied to the notorious and evil career of Chris Brain.  He was brought to account in the course of the past week at a courthouse in London.  The ministry he engaged in in Sheffield in the 80s and 90s certainly possessed charisma, but the word here does not denote anything good or wholesome.  In fact, the character of the charisma on display was that of ruthless control and exploitation.   It is this negative meaning that we project on to the word as we think of the Brain ministry over seven or eight years in Sheffield. 

Why am I focussing on this single word charisma?  It is because I believe that understanding charisma in its negative manifestation helps us to understand better the horror of the events in Sheffield thirty years ago. It may also help us to build institutional structures that make it difficult or impossible to repeat them.  Before we think further about charisma operating in its negative manifestation, we need to think about its meaning with its neutral connotation.  The word, when stripped of both its negative and positive connotations, is one that is descriptive of a quality of human personality that is able to attract and impress others.  The charismatic personality has considerable relational power.  This power can be said to simultaneously charm, dazzle and intrigue those drawn into its orbit.  The charismatic personality is also one that creates followers and admirers around him (normally a him) even while keeping the bulk of these followers at a safe distance.  Getting close to a charismatic leader is a status achieved only by a few.  The cult leader, who is the typical expression of a negative exploitative form of charisma, will somehow know exactly how to share with followers enough attention to keep them loyal but also subservient.  In many cases, this subservience makes the follower ripe for exploitation.  We can summarise our understanding of the word by noting that charisma implies a form of intense relationship for an acolyte, which is fascinating, mysterious, but also dangerous.  The picture of a moth attracted to a flame is a good analogy.  Getting too close to the charismatic personality may burn or harm some of those who are drawn to it.

The story of Brain’s tenure of the so called Nine O’Clock Service (NOS) in Sheffield has been told sufficiently often not to need repeating here.  Most of what happened in this ministry between 1988 and its collapse in 1995 can be gathered from reading Roland Howard’s book, The Rise and Fall of the Nine O’Clock Service.  This book appeared remarkably quickly after the events it records.  The fact that it has taken a further three decades for the story to come out fully and for justice to be obtained, has allowed the suffering of the victims to be grievously prolonged.  The recent statement from some of Brain’s 19 victims contained these words. “Shame on the Church of England who never came and asked us a single question about what had gone wrong, at the time of disclosure, or for the intervening 30 years. Who sat on the sidelines, smug and self-satisfied while the pews filled? Who ignored the warning signs because it was in their vested interest to do so.? Who failed utterly in their duty of care?”

Two things strike me about these words.  It is clear that the powers that be in the Church of England failed to engage with the massive suffering of the victims because first, it was too costly and complex to deal with.  Too many important people in the Church had colluded with the ‘success’ of NOS, right up to the level of the Archbishop of Canterbury.  The apparent ‘success’ of the experiment was such that no one was prepared later to question a number of anomalies and concerns that were brushed under the diocesan carpet when NOS was given a CofE imprimatur.  The words of the victims speak about a hierarchy who were ‘smug and self-satisfied while the pews filled’.  This is another way of saying that it is OK to cut corners of training and scrutiny as long as the scheme or experiment makes the Church look good.  Filling pews has to take precedence over all else – safety, goodness and truth.

The second thing that should have been clear to Church leaders in the 80s is the risks and dangers of church life when it seems to gather most of its energy from the dynamics of crowd behaviour.  Anyone with the slightest understanding of modern history, and that would have included all the bench of bishops in 1995, would have had cause to feel concern over the phenomenon of crowd dynamics and some of the potential dangers that such large gatherings can cause for church congregations.  The ability of a crowd, a political rally or a football crowd, to destroy rational thinking and decision making must have occurred to our church leaders as they surveyed the revival activity in Brain’s Sheffield church.  Brain’s gatherings would have exhibited many of the danger signals of crowd behaviour that had been exhibited 50+ years before in Rome, Berlin and Nurenberg.  Why does it never occur to church people that mobs, rallies and crowds are given to volatile and irrational behaviour?  When people come into such environments, they can quickly become vulnerable and suggestible.  This suggestibility puts them in a place of danger.   Safeguarding training has been alerting us for decades to the idea of grooming by powerful personalities.  Does no one see clearly that a charismatic environment is also a place which, in the hands of the unscrupulous, can lead to exploitation of various kinds?  Needless to say, there are wholesome charismatic ministries, those which never use the dynamics of the crowd as a tool of exploitation.  But every ministry that we describe as charismatic needs to be closely mentored to ensure that the dynamics of the crowd manipulated by a charismatic leader have not introduced a dangerous toxic harm into our church life.

The lesson of Chris Brain is larger than a single serious lapse of professional ministerial conduct by a leader.  The lesson that was not learnt in the 90s is that any preacher, whose ministry can be described a ‘charismatic’, will always need careful monitoring to protect them from the vulnerabilities of this role and the dangerous dynamics that seem to emerge in so many settings of this kind. Nobody blew a whistle on Mike Pilavachi even though the Brain episode must have alerted many responsible church leaders to the possibility that the charisma he possessed was being used for his gratification.   When abusive behaviour is revealed as having taken place at major hubs of church life in Britain (St Ebbes Oxford) over long periods of time, one sadly contemplates how poison has been absorbed not only by victims, but also by those who stood by and said nothing.  Every flawed ministry has allowed poison to flow through the veins of the Church of England.   Allowing a few leaders, like Brain, to go to prison will not solve anything until we insist on proper oversight for all who exercise spiritual authority.  We desperately need men and women with spotless integrity to lead our church.  The recent cases of bishops ‘standing back’ has left us all wondering where the next generation of trustworthy leaders is going to come from. 

I have spoken about the different contexts in which charisma is exercised within the church.  I should conclude this piece by pointing us to the charismatic power that we ascribe to the ‘Lord the giver of life’.   The charismatic gift that is the most needed today by the church is not the gift of tongues or the gift of administration.  It is the gift of leadership that should have exercised discernment, wisdom and integrity, one that would have been able to spot the terrible damaging failure in the ministries of Brain, Pilavachi etc.   Our bishops who are to be chosen in the next few months need to have the spiritual gift of integrity for themselves and for those they oversee.  Perhaps the next ten twenty years will rebuild some of the institutional trust that has been tragically lost recently.  A slogan that was around in the 80s needs to be asked again.  ‘Is your Church worth joining?’.  Much depends on the answer we can honestly give.

One of the responsibilities that I accepted in my early days as an incumbent in the 80s was the role of a diocesan ecumenical officer.   I would not claim that I was overburdened by this task.  There were a number of invitations from deanery synods to be responded to.  At the time, the person taking the ecumenical role was expected to guide clergy and lay people towards an understanding of ecumenical documents like Baptism Eucharist and Ministry and the ARCIC reports.   All these discussions were encouraging us to believe that there was a real possibility of Christian unity in our lifetimes. 

At some point after 1990, the impetus towards church unity lost its energy and momentum so that today, any interest in reconciling theological differences between the denominations seems hardly to exist. 2026 sees many of the old divisions as intractable as ever.  Alongside the differences noted in the past, there are new divisions which exist.  These are in a completely different place from those we struggled with in the 80s.  The possibility of bringing unity to the Churches seems as far away as ever.  However, there are cracks and fissures that now appear to separate Christian bodies in 2026 that were not typically found in old theological debates or disagreements on how to interpret classical doctrines.  The current differences that are found are often those that exist within denominations.  These are the contrasting styles of culture or worship style.   Two neighbouring CofE churches might each officially claim to belong to the national church, but the differences between them are now so marked that members of the first church find it hard or impossible to worship in the second.  One church has opted for what they believe to be a ‘seeker-friendly’ approach to worship with long periods of time given to singing and attractive worship songs.  The other church may have clung to a traditional formula of hymns and Anglican liturgy.  This way of maintaining the words and familiar music from early childhood is to communicate and maintain a sense of the timelessness and beauty of God.  It is difficult to see how these different approaches can ever be reconciled as they are so radically divergent from each other. 

A recent book by John Leach, Anglicans Who Don’t Like Liturgy, gives us an enormously helpful insight into understanding this new pattern of church division.  What we find today is that, while many churches have not totally abandoned their search for Christian unity, they have become so far wedded to their particular cultures of worship that they have little incentive to look elsewhere.  Leach’s research seems to confirm the existence of real division among Christians in their radically different choices of worship style.  Many Anglican Christians, through being attracted to the vigour and exuberance of charismatic networks, have been swept up into this new style of worship.  This style originates from the work of John Wimber in the 80s and his workshops in London and Sheffield.  Leach’s study focusses on two current strands, that of Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) and the network known as New Wine.   Some have characterised this music style as ‘soft rock’.  Culturally, aesthetically and theologically we can say that this style is a long way from traditional Anglican liturgical styles of worship. Not only do we have diverging styles and cultures for worship, we find, according to Leach, a conscious and deliberate intention by some advocates of the new charismatic styles to reject the liturgical traditions of the Anglican past. We can describe many such Anglican congregations today as ‘non-liturgical’ or even ‘ex-liturgical’.

Leach’s study looks at three worship styles within Anglicanism that are current today.  Two of them come from the ‘modern’ worship song tradition and are demonstrated within New Wine circles and the HTB network.  The third strand is the classical Anglican pattern of worship.  Worship in this pattern may involve a highly trained choir, as in our Anglican cathedrals, but the main feature of liturgy is the careful use of liturgical texts which have been composed with enormous care by generations of skilled liturgists.  Although Leach himself places himself within the charismatic culture, it is clear that he has enormous sympathy for the tradition within Anglicanism that is responsible for current texts and liturgies.   His aim, revealed right at the end of the book, is to see if there is any way that the positive features of the liturgical traditions can be woven into the energy and vibrancy of charismatic worship.  For that ever to be a reality, there would have to be a far greater knowledge of the opposite traditions of the Church of England than there is at present.  It would not be wrong to suggest that currently little such mutual comprehension exists.

To return to Leach’s detailed study of the worship song style of New Wine churches and the HTB network, I learnt many intriguing details.   One difference that he was able to note in listening to hundreds of songs used in these two distinct strands of charismatic-style worship, was that HTB is prone to a constant revising of the musical repertoire.  In other words, it appears that the organisers of music at HTB invest a huge amount of time (and money) in listening to and presenting songs that have only just been released.  New Wine churches on the other hand tend to use older musical material suitable for the purposes of evangelism.  All these churches in the charismatic tradition regarded singing as the most important ingredient of the service.  In Leach’s words, ‘Worship, understood as extended periods of singing, has the function of taking worshippers on a journey towards a moment, or a state, intimacy with God through the Holy Spirit.’   It is in reflecting on this sentence that we begin to recognise how charismatic worship is in contrast with more traditional understandings of worship through the use of liturgy. 

I want at this point to stand aside from Leach’s discussion about the relative merits and appeal of the non-liturgical charismatic traditions, especially for young people, and attempt in my own words and from my experience to make a case for Anglican liturgy.   When I attend a traditional Anglican service, I do not expect necessarily to have an ‘experience’ of God, whether or not it is described as a moment of intimacy.  The purpose of liturgy is to allow me to be part of a pattern of prayer that is far larger than my individual  prayer.  Church worship uses traditional words and phrases which have a force and familiarity given them through their repetition.  When I am using ‘common prayer’ I am drawn into a dimension that unites me with my fellow worshippers.  I am also united with Christians the world over who are praying at the same moment.  My sense of connection also extends across time.  Anglican liturgy draws us into an activity that has been going over many centuries, and, in the service, we are also given a sense of connection with a glorious past.  Time and space are eclipsed and for a moment we may have a powerful sense of how all things, including ourselves, are connected in God.

Leach’s book is one that is worth studying for its positive appraisal of the meaning of worship, whether in the charismatic or liturgical style.  The new ecumenism of worship, if such a thing were to exist, would require us to move forward in seeking to teach Christians to value the worship experiences of others.  At present, if we examine the contrasting styles of charismatic worship alongside liturgical, we will probably have no difficulty in understanding the reasons for wanting to reject it – the one we do not use.  Of course, liturgical patterns are rejected because they can become dry and over-formal to the point of meaninglessness.  Equally, charismatic music can be criticised for descending into a cultivation of feelings which are self-indulgent to the point of selfishness. What Leach has done in his writing is to demonstrate clearly that instead of choosing one approach or the other, we can move towards this new ecumenism of worship.  At present in the Church of England, we are divided because of our preferences in the area of music and worship.  Perhaps with some proper study and intelligent appreciation of all these traditions we can learn to respect the styles of other people and move towards an ecumenical reconciliation that seemed to become too difficult for the generation that came before us.