One of the most devastating discoveries that a person can make is that the company or firm they work for is corrupt in some way.  They then have to make a choice.   Do they resign forthwith and attempt whistleblowing as they leave the company?  Do they supress the knowledge of the dishonest practices or, worse still, collude with them in some way?  I am sure there are other options that my readers can come up with as a response to ethical failures in an institution.  The fact remains that many workplaces, and this can include churches and educational establishments, have stepped over to the dark side.  It need not be financial corruption, but there may be a culture of rampant racism, misogyny or homophobia.  Another problem could be endemic institutional bullying or sexual harassment.  How does one cope with the fact that a boss or overseers are tolerating or even condoning misconduct?  I wonder how the workers in France who worked in the manufacture of cladding for buildings felt when they realised that their factory and their bosses had been complicit in the terrible Grenfell fire.

Organisations, companies and religious groups are all places where terrible things can happen.  It is right for official enquiries to be set up to examine when things go badly wrong and how appalling events happen because of institutional failure.  Only the major scandals of abuse and dishonesty are exposed in this way.  Minor injustices continue, causing untold misery for the victims of such behaviour.  As I ponder these sobering thoughts about work organisations I ask myself the question:  can we locate corruption in an institution?  Does it get grafted into an organisation so that it becomes somehow endemic in that institution?  Alternatively, is it only to be found in the attitudes and actions of those who are responsible for the corrupting behaviour?

The answer to the question is that organisations are never totally corrupted.  New leaders arrive and, as if by a miracle, the old atmosphere that tolerated evil can be quickly swept away.  It seldom happens overnight because people who have worked in toxic or claustrophobic environments need time to get used to a new broom.   As I have already mentioned, congregations can also be corrupted when the wrong people are in charge. Every institution will be open to the same dangers.  The people who lead are normally in the position to bring about the changes that are needed to make the institution flourish. Bullying, misogyny and homophobia, to take three examples, can be banished from the workplace, the college or the congregation.  Every institution can overcome systemic evil if it puts its mind to it.

Returning to the example of the Church, as an institution with which most readers of this blog are familiar, we can suggest that it exists at two levels.  One is the Platonic ‘ideal’ of the Church.  It is the place where Christians learn to worship God, follow their master Christ and receive the power of the Spirit to live their transformed lives.  Such a one sentence description of the Church is bound to fail as a full description, but we can allow it for the moment, as we contemplate the messy reality that we, in fact, encounter week by week.  Christians are very good at pretending that the ideal is the reality they deal with most of the time.  By doing this they make themselves unable to see the more human realities in front of them.  The fantasy perfect church and infallible leaders are what they pine after, and so they create that reality in their minds, even if it does not in fact exist.    

When we think about the Church having this double reality, divine and human, we also recognise that it shares one thing with every other organisation.  Organisations, like human beings, have an inbuilt instinct for survival.  Churches will use all means available to help them continue to exist.  Some methods, as we have indicated, may be  rooted in human selfishness while others will look to what we call transcendent realities. This double rootedness, in human selfishness and divine inspiration, creates its own problems.  If we try to pretend that the Church is normally in accord with God’s will, we are in danger of giving bad behaviour a ‘get out of jail free’ card as we fail to look carefully at the motivation and behaviour of leaders.  We also are sucked into believing that anyone with a position of authority is automatically to be trusted.  The Conservative Evangelical world is working through the problems of having trusted Ravi Zacharias and Jonathan Fletcher for decades.   Each man was placed, not in a potentially fallible human category, but in a ‘divinely inspired and uniquely blessed by God’ group.  To trust someone who turns out to be an abuser is a major cause of stumbling and loss of faith.  The only antidote for this shattering and disillusionment of Christian followers is that all leaders avoid what we call the celebrity culture.  Creating Christian celebrities is a high-risk strategy.  All of them will turn out to be human and fallible like the rest of us.  That is not to say that they are all guilty of deceiving followers, but that we should always avoid treating any such leaders as super-human.

The record of the Church of England leadership, with its management of safeguarding events over the past twenty years, is extremely patchy.  Most church members would love to believe that their leaders always know what they are doing.  They are supposed to be helping the flock to be as close as possible to the ‘ideal’ of church life, the one revealed to us by Scripture.  But what we find in reality is that the guardians of church life are far more wrapped up in management issues and ensuring that the church institution survives.  In some ways this instinct is natural and to be expected.  But it is the way this survival priority has been put into effect that causes us alarm.  Looking back a number of years to the Ball scandal, we watched how the Church protected itself by hiding information.  Important letters sent to Lambeth Palace about Ball’s behaviour were never shared with the police.  The other institutional tactic that has been used, is to bully and intimidate those who bring complaints to the Church about their past abuse.  The ‘myth’ of appropriate concern for survivors is often merely an idea inside the minds of bishops and others in authority.  The reality is sometimes bullying behaviour, and this has been subcontracted to lawyers who are employed by the church leadership.  A gay clergyman can hear, as happened recently, his behaviour described as being like bestiality.  Because the remark was made by a lawyer instructed by the Church, the church authorities avoided taking blame for the remark.  The Julie Macfarlane case was described as being a ‘brutal’ struggle just to be heard by the Church.  Once again it was not the bishops and the church leaders that were doing the persecution directly; it was the lawyers working on their behalf.  The Church, in pursuing such tactics, has survived as an institution with its money and structure mostly intact.  But the cost of ensuring this survival has been extremely high.  The Church can still believe in and proclaim its ideal manifestation, the worship of God etc., but fewer and fewer people will see that vision.  Somehow the ideal has become increasingly obscured by murky behaviour on the part of those who lead it.

The Christ Church affair rumbles on.  We have long given up expecting to see compassion, fairness, even-handedness and transparency in this affair.  As with other cases, we see a lawyer-coordinated campaign of persecution being waged against one individual.  The official acts of aggressive behaviour against the Dean may have been planned and put into effect by lawyers, but they are assisted by others who pile in, for reasons of their own, to enhance the cruelty.  There are many bystanders who share guilt.  Whatever guilty acts may have been committed by an individual, nobody deserves to be so thoroughly undermined by a campaign of such deliberate and targeted brutality.  Where is the pastoral care for the Dean?  Where is the concern for his welfare? This should apply to him, as any other person who is suffering breakdown because of persecution.   As an outsider I am particularly shocked by the way that the Church authorities in London and Oxford see fit to conduct a simultaneous campaign of persecution.  If the Bishop of Oxford believes that his Dean has done something terrible, is there not still enough imaginative care around in Oxford to stand back and let the other College process work its way through?  No, the Dean has to face persecution from two directions at once, the Church and the College.  All this is being done when he is off sick with serious mental trauma, caused by three years of attack.  He should not now be having to marshal his defence against any such attacks.  The story of vicious mental cruelty against the Dean is worthy of a third world country, to be reported by Amnesty International in one of their reports.  I am wondering whether the Church has stopped to think how it is conniving in something truly sickening and barbaric. This cruelty by the Church (and College) is what will be remembered long after the rest of the dispute is forgotten.

Over the centuries the Church was able to justify its actions, however arbitrary, because it believed it was doing the will of God.  The safeguarding failures and the treatment of survivors by official bodies have recently been so appalling that even the Church has stopped trying to pretend that God is anywhere to be found in its actions.  They are, to quote Archbishop Sentamu, sometimes ‘shabby and shambolic’. In all these episodes, the Church and its reputation is a heavy loser.  The Ball case showed a system that did not want to stick up for victims but instead sought the approval of the great and the good supporting one of their own.  The Elliot review showed a Church once again that could not take action to do anything to care for an abuse victim.  Rather it hid behind insurance company lawyers as a way of fending off challenges to its institutional complacency.  The Macfarlane case showed again how far the Church was prepared to defend itself, using lawyers to fight tooth and nail to avoid admitting manifest failures.  The ongoing Christ Church saga has involved two bishops of the Church, each with a record of safeguarding failures.  It may be a coincidence that the attacks on a sick man arrived virtually on the same day.  This may have something to do with the fact the same lawyer is involved in both cases.  Winckworth Sherwood, her employer, have a vested interest in keeping the case going as long as possible.  Charitable funds from both College and Church have been poured out like water to fund this devilish project.  Christ Church, the diocese of Oxford and the Church of England all come out of this very badly.  Yet we believe there is much more information to come out.   We trust that it will soon see the light of day.