I recently received an email from someone I do not know about something he had read on this blog. It concerned the name of an offender that appeared on the bottom of the Open Letter from a group of survivors and published here in the lead up to General Synod. The name of the offender, known personally to my correspondent, is not important to share here. The writer of the email had done his own research and he knew that the inclusion of this name on the Open Letter was not based on gossip but rooted in solid reliable testimony.
Apart from expressing a sense of shock in the email, the writer had an interesting piece of information to share. He revealed that in spite of all the allegations against this clergyman, which had also freely appeared on Twitter and other social media and among the organisations that look after the interests of survivors, it was completely unknown or discussed in his former congregation. For whatever reason the congregation has chosen to be (been compelled to be?) kept completely in the dark. We must assume that the current leadership of this still flourishing church made a decision to keep this information from the congregation. Something similar seems to have been attempted within the REFORM/ReNew networks of congregations in their attempts to deal with the fall-out arising from the Jonathan Fletcher saga. What might be the explanation for these attempts to block information from a church? Neither of the explanations offered here suggests especially honourable or honest motivations. One line of reasoning on the part of leaders might be to consider that the failings of a leader are likely to undermine the faith of followers if they become public. Another fear that such leaders might feel is to consider that any sort of criticism of an erring leader is in fact an attack on the theology represented by the accused former leader. This sense of scandal, as having a ‘political’ dimension, will often enter into the calculations of those who control what congregations are allowed to think and know. Conservative evangelical congregations where many of the current crop of scandals are found, are not known for the free and open transmission of information. Holding on to power, money and influence seems to be more powerful than the sharing of truth, freedom and growth.
As I began to think through this attempt to ‘protect’ individuals and congregations from facing up to scandal, I realised that there is something profoundly toxic, even evil, about this behaviour. I imagined two parents of a pre-pubescent child who are offered access to a new drug. This drug, they are told, will circumvent all the tantrums, pain and conflict which may arrive with the onset of the teen-age years. They will have an ever-compliant child who will never be guilty of slamming doors and raising levels of stress and conflict in the home. Were the parent to buy into this wonder-drug, we know that it would raise many ethical issues, not to mention long-term potential psychological problems. Passing through stages of conflict or adjustment are part of life. They cannot be bypassed successfully without causing problems elsewhere. In summary we would say that it is at best immoral, at worst evil, to behave as the church leaders are doing at one particular church, where details of past abusive conduct are being deliberately hidden.
In contrast, I want in this post to think about the positive aspects of openness in dealing with scandal. Scandals of course will happen in churches of every tradition but there are ways of dealing with such events in a positive way rather than going down the road of denial and cover-up. The positive way of dealing with negative events is perhaps illumined by the pattern set out by Elizabeth Kubler Ross in her description of the grief process. Her pattern can be applied to any negative event faced by communities or individuals, such as a death or bereavement. Everyone accepts that it is not a good idea to encourage anyone to be in denial when a death takes place. The task of honest support for a bereaved person is what we can give them. They need someone to be there as they adjust painfully and slowly to this new reality of their loss. Sometimes a priest is asked to collude with the bereaved person’s attempt to deny that the death has happened. Both in the grieving process and in the honest confrontation with a terrible wrong-doing by a trusted leader, some of the other aspects of Kubler-Ross’ process may come to the fore. Institutionally these reactions can be seen in no particular order. We may well find the anger, the depression and the bargaining in various guises. In whatever way these stages emerge, each of these emotions may be needed at some stage as a way of adjusting to and at the same time dealing with a shocking event. The important thing is that the final stage of acceptance is eventually reached without any attempt to take short cuts. The whole process will require honesty, openness and candour on the part of a congregation faced with crisis. Acceptance is also a stage on the way to facing the future. A failure even to begin the process will freeze a congregation at the stage of denial. This is because the leaders deem it too risky or too painful to move the congregation towards healing.
One of the issues that we touched on in the last blog post is the state of idealisation that can bind a charismatic leaders to their followers even after they have died. Idealisation of another human being is likely to be in the long term an unhealthy bond. The ‘worshipper’ will always have a tendency to ascribe qualities to their adored leader which probably don’t exist except in the imaginations of the follower. Challenging idealisation of leaders in churches is always a healthy thing to do so that any situation of human frailty will be coped with far better. Betrayal of trust by a revered leader will always be tragic and painful. But it would easier to deal with if every leader had already constantly reminded the congregation that they shared the same humanity and fallibility with them, the congregation members. It is the superhuman, god-like status of some leaders thrown up by the narcissistic process that is so damaging. Having a ‘super-star’ for a leader may fill seats and increase church income, but it is a potentially a construction of fantasy which can easily collapse and fall. Some leaders protect their god-like status by never being visible except on stage. There they are surrounded by clever lighting effects which are impressive to followers. When faith in God is damaged by the collapse into scandal of the celebrity preacher, one has to ask whether it was God or the preacher who had been at the centre of the action inside the followers’ heads.
Dependent passive relationships with fallible narcissistic leaders seem to be at the heart of many scandals and breakdowns in church life. Such relationships will always exist because inside many of us is a wounded relationship with a parent. By wounded I mean something incomplete rather than necessarily highly traumatic. Whatever it is, it will render large numbers of us vulnerable to some extent to a leader who promises to re-parent us with offers to connect us to the ultimate parent, God himself. That promise is also at the heart of the ‘cult’ contract. It is helping to sort out these various layers of vulnerability and need that should be a major task of Christian leadership. Sadly, we find that some of these leaders prefer to keep us in the place of dependency so that we can be exploited to suit their own needs and desire for gratification.
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In some cases the organisational responses to these kinds of things seem to me to have a dynamic of shame – the issues touch the heart of identity and the organisation can’t cope. That is not to say that these dynamics are healthy or good, but that they are there. One of the problems is that the dynamics of sin and forgiveness are well-known and wrongly applied and people/organisations imagine they have done what is necessary, but the shame remains unnamed and unaddressed.
In the course of my travels I periodically attend services at ‘successful’ churches. These are invariably plants or churches which might once have operated in the dry-as-dust evangelical tradition (think Donald Coggan or Charlie Moule) but which were, ineluctably, transformed in the 1970s and 1980s through the influence of the charismatic movement and its variants.
These churches – which are rarer than many liberals might suppose – seem to me to come in two forms: (i) the middle class church, which may have a residuum of charismatic worship, and where the demographic is securely middle aged and elderly, though with a moderate leaven of the young; and (ii) ‘Boden’ churches, which are stocked full of affluent professionals, which will frequently have a significant mass of teenagers – invariably the progeny of their middle class parents. They are most common in prosperous suburbs and dormitory towns. On occasion, variants of these churches are to be found in places like university cities (St Saviour’s Guildford, St Peter’s Brighton, St Mildred’s Canterbury, St Thomas’ Norwich, St Leonard’s Exeter, St Andrew the Great/the Round Church Cambridge, Holy Trinity Cambridge, St Ebbe’s Oxford, St Aldate’s Oxford, Greyfriars Reading, etc., etc.), which are generally also impregnably middle class; another variant is the City church which comes close (albeit implicitly) to a gospel of wealth – Bishopsgate (the Vatican/Geneva of Reform) and its offshoots are instances of this.
All churches are clubs of a kind, but the churches I have referred to above are cultic clubs, which are somewhat hermetically sealed from the outside world, not merely by dogma and indoctrination but by the fact that they are social markets for people within broadly the same income distribution, having the same aspirations and the same political opinions. They are clubs in which there is the implication that each and every member will be rewarded in proportion to his/her participation in, and [financial] contribution to, said club. Clubs rely on trust; to reveal something as infra dig as a past history of abuse would be to shatter that trust and, more importantly, the income streams that derive from that trust and which are cultivated and exploited to fund ‘mission’ (usually to other middle class communities where revenues are to be had). Thus, suppressing the truth is the means which justifies, in their view, the superior ends.
Now, of course, what I have written above is a crude generalisation, and there are occasionally successful churches in immiserated areas. In addition, I have frequently been impressed by the quality of what is on offer at these churches. However, I have seldom felt so much an outsider when attending them, as if I have intruded upon a private party. Perhaps I am being unfair, for which I apologise.
It is not insignificant that Jonathan Fletcher operated in Wimbledon – arguably one of the most Boden-ish redoubts of south-west London.
The last time I visited, not too long ago, St Mildred’s Canterbury was a fairly small, mostly older, worshipping community of the Anglo-Catholic persuasion. Do you perhaps mean St Mary Bredin (SMB) Canterbury? Otherwise, things have changed a lot and rather suddenly (!)
Anon – Yes, I certainly do mean St Mary Bredin! – a silly mistake as I have relatives who live only a few metres away from it and I used to worship in what was then the City Centre benefice under David Hayes in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Apologies for that.
St Mildred (with the lost St Mary de Castro), and where said relatives had their wedding and their children their baptisms, does indeed have a small congregation, but it can count itself lucky that it was not blitzed (like the old St Mary Bredin, which was within the walls) or shuttered with the wave of closures in the ’70s and early ’80s (Holy Cross, St Mary Northgate, St Alphege’s, St Margaret’s and St Gregory’s). St Mary Bredin was one of only a handful of churches in the Canterbury diocese which seemed to me to have a flourishing congregation of young people (others were St Paul’s Deal and St Luke’s Maidstone).
My long memory stretches back to being present when St Mary’s Bredin was opened after the war. It was 1957 or 58. I understand that it is sometimes called St Mary’s Breadbin by locals. At least one of it former Vicars became a bishop. I can’t recall his name.
Many thanks! I haven’t heard the breadbin moniker/jibe for ages! I think the bishop might be Jonathan Gledhill, who was appointed to Lichfield from St Mary Bredin.
Actually, I thought it was a less intimidating church than some of the other ‘successful’ evangelical churches I have attended.
I sense you might have Canterbury connections. This is what the breadbin looked like before it was made over by the Luftwaffe and relocated to the Old Dover Road: http://www.machadoink.com/St%20Mary%20Bredin.htm. Five of the fifteen ancient parish churches of Canterbury which survived the Reformation remain in use, though one of these (St Dunstan’s) was not actually in the ancient county corporate of Canterbury, but ‘in Kent’. A famous little fragment of the Greyfriars is also used for weekday worship, as are the ancient Eastbridge, St John’s Northgate and Maynard & Cotton Hospital chapels. They did have a service in St Alphege to commemorate the millenium of his martyrdom, but it seems it is now used as a school shop (it was a cafe for a while in the 1980s). St Mary Northgate was used for occasional school assemblies (which I guess counts as worship), but I don’t know its current use.
Please do free to moderate as this is obviously hopelessly off-point! Many thanks!
I’m surprised that you refer to Donald Coggan as of ‘dry as dust’ tradition. I heard him preach in 1987 and it’s one of the few sermons in my sermon-drenched life I actually remember. He was a kind man, too. I had an American friend who was on the staff of a US cathedral. While she and her husband were on a visit to London she went into labour 3 months prematurely, and the baby was given a 50% chance of survival. The US cathedral rang Coggan’s office and requested a priest be sent to the hospital to pray with the family. It was late evening but Coggan went himself. The baby lived, and Coggan stayed in contact for many years afterwards.
Coggan was a good leader, but didn’t have the kind of dangerous charisma which so often causes trouble. We need more leaders like him.
Re. ‘cultic clubs’, I think the Church Growth Movement exacerbated this. When I was a curate at St. Michael-le-Belfrey (1989-92) the CG people’s advice was to deliberately target social cohorts. St. Mike’s had previously been organised around area groups, and the famous evening service was a blend of traditional and modern in an effort to keep everyone together. On CG recommendation the 3 services were targeted at, respectively, older couples/young professionals; families; and young people. The evening service choir/music group was disbanded and a rock band took its place. Home groups were reorganised around the service attended.
It was an enormous upheaval. I was leading the 9.15 service (older couples/young professionals) and one immediate result was that our young singles lost contact with families and children; previously many of them had been ‘adopted’ into families. Families, on the other hand, lost their single babysitters. In the former area groups, it was usual to meet in the home of a couple with children so both parents could be present. But when everyone in a group was half of a couple with children this didn’t work any more, and those parents could no longer attend consistently. And there was no longer one service in which everyone could meet up and feel there was something for them.
I think there is something inherently unChristian about this. We are all supposed to be united in Christ, whatever our background. The Church is strongest, and the best witness, when people of different ages and classes can mix as equals, and serve and learn from each other.
Hear, hear!
Yes, the phrase dry-as-dust was quite inappropriate, and I much regret it. I have read of Lord Coggan being referred to as ‘subfusc’. What I was trying to convey was a sort of formal and erudite ‘no frills’ style of BCP evangelicalism of which he was one of the last prominent exponents (he was, of course, a superb Hebraist).
Indeed, I encountered him a couple of times in Canterbury, before and after his move from Sissinghurst to Winchester. A nicer man could scarcely be imagined, and I cherish a handwritten letter I received from him as a schoolboy, where he was obviously at pains to deal with my idiotic queries with generosity and respect (an approach markedly different from that of his successor).
Several anecdotes stand out, which validate your excellent points: a few years ago I met someone in north-west Essex who recounted his experiences as a curate in north-east Kent. Dr Coggan has visited the parish (unlike his successors he worked assiduously as a diocesan). One of the parishioners had suffered a personal loss and Coggan took the trouble to take him aside for a considerable period of time to comfort him, and then apparently had an extended pastoral correspondence with this parishioner – in the midst of his numerous official duties.
In north Norfolk, I met another retired clergyman who recounted his experience as an incumbent near Hull, with Coggan going around his parish in great detail, always being available, always ready to provide careful and considerate advice, including to parish officers and other laity; not in any de haut en bas manner, but as a counsellor and friend – and then being exceptionally kind (by taking services) when this clergyman suffered a personal tragedy.
At Frittenden in Kent, where he took services in retirement, of bellowing “Stop! Start again!” if he felt any hymn singing was too insipid, which galvanised even the most incompetent singers.
At St Swithin-upon-Kingsgate in Winchester, a delightful church accessed via a staircase, where he would also take services, and then prove himself very proficient on the piano, and where he was remembered with great affection.
Then a number of clergy in Canterbury diocese who esteemed him as the best diocesan they had had. In view of all this, and much more, I can begin to understand why Geoffrey Fisher should have favoured Coggan as his successor. Yes, he could sometimes be maladroit (he raised Cardinal Heenan’s blood pressure with some well-meaning, if tactless, statements and his ‘call to the nation’ was perhaps misconceived), but he embodied all the finest Christian virtues.
Your point about divided congregations is apt; I have sometimes found services which cater to specific demographics somewhat divisive – also family services (which are frequently social gatherings where parents can meet other parents) must perforce exclude those who are not in a state of [happy] marriage and who will therefore be more alone, and all the more…
vulnerable.
I have remarked elsewhere that St Swithun-upon-Kingsgate must be unique in having a former Archbishop of Canterbury as its ‘pianist’ (there being no organ there). But also remarkable, that tiny but venerable church was also the place of his funeral service, followed a month later by a memorial service in Winchester Cathedral. His cremated ashes returned to Canterbury for interment in the Cathedral there. At St Swithun he is commemorated by his initials carved on a bench end.
Many thanks! I went there about six years ago (having long wished to worship there); it is a gem, and I found the congregation charming. Winchester was unusual in once having four churches in gateways (also Northgate, Westgate and Eastgate), with only Kingsgate surviving; Canterbury had two (Northgate and Ridingate, both gone); the only comparable extant examples I can recall are Wareham (St Martin’s on the Walls) and, much more convincingly, the chapel of Lord Leycester’s hospital in Warwick (over the Westgate and used daily, with St Peter’s in the Eastgate now being a holiday let).
Janet has mentioned the importance of sound preaching. This is something I understand Donald Coggan was very keen to encourage: for instance he paid good attention to the Six Preachers, whom he wanted to be incumbents from the diocese with a particular flair for scholarship and their gifts in the pulpit. He supported them with some care (he would visit the likes of Basil Minchin – the liturgical scholar and co-founder of the society of SS Alban and Sergius, at his parsonage at Lynsted, or Derek Ingram Hill at the Master’s Lodge in Canterbury; indeed, he saw to it that Ingram Hill received a stall, despite the latter having only a few years to go until retirement). Under his successors Six Preachers were appointed from without the diocese, and the position has tended to lapse into an honorific. That said, the Church has sometimes had a diffident relationship with the ars predicandi: Elizabeth I was prepared to countenance one licensed preacher per diocese; she thought that quite enough, even for massive dioceses like Lincoln or York.
Isn’t there an upstairs tiny church somewhere in York? I can’t remember any details at all, and I could be totally mistaken.
I hope Stephen will permit a slight diversion from the topic. Winchester’s Westgate survives, but its church to which you refer, as you say, has long ceased to exist, becoming successively a prison and now a small and very attractive museum. From its roof there are spectacular views of the city.
Your correspondent’s experience is typical. News blackouts in the offender’s church are to be anticipated every time and not just because of the leaders’ actions. As individuals we close out what we don’t want to hear.
For example, I love cricket but dislike football. I watch any news I can find relating to cricket, but screen out football stuff. As Stephen alludes, a lot of our “now” has origins with our parents. My father hated sport because he wasn’t very good at it (but his own father was) and my mother loved and played cricket. Cricket on TV was about the only telly we were allowed to watch for any length of time. Conversely I was brought up in a time of frequent reports of soccer hooliganism, hence my aversion to football by association.
We “edit” our own news feeds. I follow this blog and many of its contributors on social media. I’m asking questions about power abuse, and want answers. It’s a driver. It’s not my only driver fortunately, but an important one nonetheless.
Those of us who idealise our esteemed leaders are looking generally only for data which supports our beliefs about them. Outsiders might be astonished about how we haven’t heard about X or Y. “It’s in the Telegraph for heavens sake.” We weren’t looking. We blocked our ears.
I too have many friends who ( I imagine perhaps) look awkwardly at me for speaking out. Why don’t they want to know?
People are notoriously reluctant to be analysed. We hide in our closed communities with consummate ease. If I can stretch the cricket analogy a little more (apologies to most I suspect!) I can now watch cricket everyday all around the world on TV, or streamed. I don’t even have to think about trying to like football. I can be as narrow minded as I like. My dependency on the all-encompassing world I enjoy is only limited by the time I have available.
The analogy breaks down with sport because of the overt transparency there is now. When some cricketers tried to hide sandpaper down their trousers for the purposes of ball tampering, 22 high definition TV cameras picked up the action. The offenders were publicly and suitably disciplined.
Their are fewer heroes in sport now, and it is healthier for it. With drug testing, media scrutiny, public disciplinary boards and the like, even minor misdeeds are picked up early and stopped.
Abusive, controlling, suffocating “leadership” in some of our churches, still has a long way to go before being opened up and addressed.
This does seem to me to be an extension of the low opinion many clergy have of the intelligence and maturity of their congregations. I frequently find a presumption that the people won’t understand, so they babyfy them! Obviously, that would include not wanting to tell them bad news.
This is a good post, with good comments, all of which I believe to be true. The reason for not informing the congregation, sometimes staggeringly not even informing all of the ministry team, is usually explained as because it contrary to the offenders data protection. That is basically a load of nonsense as safeguarding always takes priority over data protection but it is convenient. If the truth is told about the leader the organization loses any hope of blaming and scapegoating the victim and that seems to remain their preference.
Leaders are held in high esteem, a good deal of transference takes place between them and parishioners so as Steve rightly says congregations simply don’t want to hear and are all too willing to accept it was the fault of someone else.
Furthermore usually by the time a diocese has actually got around to doing anything, like in JF’s case, the abuse has been going on for years, opportunities to deal with it have been frequently missed and that all gets a bit messy to explain.
I am not sure if the church actually wants to protect the miscreant leader but it most certainly wants to protect the institution.
Two distinguished contributors here make key assertions about the state of “church” in the last few decades.
1. (Janet Fife) Sermons are so poor as to be almost impossible to recall. Yet the sermon, certainly in evangelical circles, is meant to be the central source of Christian education. Incidentally, and if I have understood her correctly, I share her sentiments.
2.(Froghole) many apparently “successful” churches run largely as exclusive clubs. Actually this has been my own experience latterly. At one point I attended a church outside my immediate area, but in the end felt I really didn’t earn enough to belong.
This is surely many thousands of miles away from what church should look like.
Whilst not exactly the initial subject of this thread, I do think this is an important subject for future discussion.
Steve, thank you for calling me a ‘distinguished contributor’!
But actually, I meant merely to say I didn’t find Coggan ‘dry as dust’, rather than to denigrate preaching in general.
Having said that, it wouldn’t be surprising if the standard of preaching has in fact degenerated in recent times. Good preaching not only takes a good deal of time to prepare a particular sermon; it also stems from a lifestyle in which a lot of time is devoted to study and prayer. Bp. Stephen Neill observed that to preach well it’s important to read a lot of fiction and poetry. Very few, if any clergy, have time for all that nowadays.
My last parish was a single benefice, but even so I could easily find myself preaching 5 times a week – not counting assemblies, funerals, and weddings. Then there is the huge load of admin; meetings; home visits; preparing people for baptism, confirmation, and weddings….
I agree about poor preaching. My experience suggests good preaching is rare. And I’ve heard clergy saying it isn’t a good method of teaching. Well, not if it’s rubbish, no!