I sometimes find it helpful to ponder on ideas in a simple way.  I try, if possible, to reduce a theological idea down to a single word. Such a word will, no doubt, have nuances or shades of meaning which then have to be teased out. But having only one word to think about at a time helps me to preserve simplicity and clarity in my thinking.  A word which this blog is constantly wanting to return to is the word ‘power’. This is a word which, of course, is used in many different contexts.  For a start, it is a word with both positive and negative connotations.  This fact that it has no inherent goodness or evil built into it makes it a valuable word in discussion.  Everyone using it is forced to define what they are talking about and that is a good start for any dialogue.  When I mention power in the context of the church or the Christian life, no one is going to know at the outset whether I am describing something good or something negative.

.The word power in a Christian context has many positive manifestations.  If we were playing a word association game, many would come up with other positive words like Spirit, love or inspiration.  There is one particular cluster of positive words which all relate to power in the hymn, Praise my Soul the King of Heaven.  The writer refers to the experience in the Christian life of being ‘ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’.  These words each describe an experience of being empowered in a significant way.  Christianity is offering us release, newness and a sense of God’s power in our lives.  How wonderful it would be if the only experience of power that a Christian had were these positive ones.  Would that it were true that every experience of church life led to the build up of the right kind of self-esteem and self- love.  From this experience of God’s power and protection, the Christian could move seamlessly into a life of service and love for his/her fellows.  God’s power of compassion and love translated into human compassion is not a bad short description of the Kingdom of God as described by Jesus.

I expect the reader will anticipate that I have to move from the positive forms of power in the Church and the way that these are often eclipsed by negative experiences. Readers of this blog will be familiar with all the negative encounters with power that church members sometimes are compelled to endure. There will be the power games, the acts of hostility and the bullying.  In the most severe cases there will be extreme abuse, sexual or physical. Attendance at church, participation in the Christian life which promises to empower and enrich the Christian life, can become instead a savage experience of disempowerment.

There is, sadly, another misuse of power which we sometimes find in churches. This happens when the leadership of a church promises to the congregation power and prosperity or ‘health and wealth’.   God will bless them and give them his power as long as they give adequately and are obedient to all the commands of the leadership.  It does not take us long to see that this promise, by compelling subservience and dependence, is an act of taking power away from people.  We have talked about this dynamic in church many times.  It is effectively a ploy by the leadership to disempower the congregation at a stroke so that the leadership can have more power. The dynamic of the church becomes a top-down control by the leadership. What a long way is such a use of power is from the liberating freedom implied by the hymn?

Like most of my readers, I have a strong sense of the way that the Christian faith is a pathway to empowerment and the ‘glorious liberty of the children of God.’  When faith, by contrast, is presented as formulaic, legalistic and controlling, overlaid with the power of authority and threat, it is very off-putting.   It is not surprising that many people feel suffocated and oppressed by this kind of language. We find this contrast in Paul.  Sometimes he uses heavy legalistic language to speak about the faith; on other occasions he seems to rejoice in the freedom of lyrical language to describe what he knows and what he has experienced. Both are necessary, but when the liberating language of love, peace and justice is absent, what remains is not recognisably Christian.

In the last day or two I have been wrestling with a document put out by the Church of England on the setting up of an independent safeguarding structure.  This will oversee the work of the National Safeguarding Team and other national bodies in the safeguarding realm.  Such structures are, no doubt, necessary.  Nevertheless, the document is written in such a way that one feels that the only people who will engage with the process will be people who are already familiar with the heavily formulaic patterns of church-speak.  Somehow the whole safeguarding world seems to reflect the world of lawyers, managers and bureaucrats.   I already have to use Janet Fife’s useful glossary of acronyms to remember the different groups doing work in this area.  One more will confuse me, and no doubt others, who are trying to negotiate the labyrinthine world of national church organisations.  I ask myself the question.  Is this document another attempt by the Church to cling on to power to manage itself free of secular scrutiny?  How much independence is being proposed?  Is it writing documents that will exclude most ordinary Christians who should be there to respond to survivors?  What the survivors have to offer is the passion for justice, the longing for reconciliation, the prophetic challenge and the transparency of truth.   Survivors have been doing this work for years and church organisations have seldom been able to keep up.   The Church trundles along, producing more of the same and now it proposes another level of bureaucracy to face this enormous challenge of putting right past evils.  Of course, survivors are being welcomed into this new structure, but it is not one they have set up.   Will the survivors have the necessary stamina to sit with church appointed officials and argue their case in such a way that the church will respond fairly and openly.  My problem is that after reading the 20 pages of church management speak, I am really none the wiser as to how this is going to make any difference to what goes on in the Church.  It will give Janet Fife one new acronym for her glossary.  Meanwhile, where is the Church realistically going to find a survivor or two able to give this time and stamina?    We do need more of the passion that survivors can bring to the table, but is this the right way to tap into it?

Tomorrow (Saturday) General Synod has an online session to discuss this document among other pieces of business.  I am not sure what I hope will come from that discussion.  I just know that I would like to see some of the passion for the Kingdom of God come into the exchanges.  In the Church of England we need the longing for peace, truth, righteousness and justice to be injected somehow into the process of safeguarding.   The right way forward is not moving the Titanic chairs around, but the waiting on and acting with the power from on high.   That power can indeed ‘ransom, heal, restore and forgive’ the Church and allow it to find new ways of moving forward in the realm of safeguarding.   The Church must find the way of empowering survivors and victims, having for so long disempowered them in an attempt to protect its power.