Tucked away in the thirtyone:eight Review on Jonathan Fletcher was one fascinating but revealing detail. One witness, giving evidence to the Reviewers, was speaking about his experience of Emmanuel Church Wimbledon. At a meeting for the leadership team, JF made a comment about his understanding of the Church. He said, ‘the Church was training camp rather than a hospital.’ That short, possibly throw-away, remark has lodged itself in my mind and I have been thinking through its implications. Perhaps the comment gives us an important key, not only to Fletcher’s own thinking about the Church, but to what was taught within the conservative constituency in general. We need to tease out the nuances of what is being said here. As far as I am concerned, this description raises alarm bells. My post is an attempt to explore some aspects of why I feel uncomfortable at the training camp metaphor.
Let us reflect on these two metaphors, training camp and hospital. The first type of institution is one for the cultivation of physical prowess. For the sake of brevity, I will mention two examples. In the first place, a training camp is a place where sportsmen of various kinds go to improve their skills. The young Andy Murray was, I believe, trained at a specialist tennis camp in Spain as a teenager. The same opportunity is given to many promising athletes and footballers. It takes months and years of hard work and training to reach the top ranks of sporting skill. The words, training camp, are also associated with the military. During the First World War, recruits were given a six-week basic training before being sent to the Front. In that time, they had to learn to march, to obey orders without question, as well as the brutal skills of killing the enemy before they themselves were killed. Both these examples of a training camp are united by at least one common factor. The people who went into them had already been vetted for their physical condition. In one case the candidates were already highly competent sportsmen and women. In the case of soldiers being recruited for the First War, they had all met the minimum standards of height (five feet tall) and were free from any obvious illness or disability. In short, the training camp is a place only for the physically active. No one could enter such an institution who was either disabled or weak. To be at any training camp implied that you were somewhere on the scale between minimally fit and physically excellent.
There are quite a number of scriptural passages that would appear to liken the Christian life to that of the athlete or the soldier. Paul uses the idea that the Christian life is like a competitive race. The best runner is awarded a crown. For Christians the imperishable crown, the reward of eternal life, is what focuses attention and effort. We also find military imagery in the Epistles. In Ephesians (not necessarily Pauline), we have a vivid description of a Christian clad in the armour of God in chapter 6. This armour evidently provides for the spiritual purposes of both attack and defence. Such metaphors of the Christian life, as the athlete or the soldier, are going to be of obvious appeal to anyone, but most especially to those brought up in the traditions of muscular elitist Christianity. The traditions of the Iwerne camps seem to have extolled such values, giving prominence and adulation for godly leaders, as well as prizing the values of obedience and public-school manliness. However precisely these values are defined and understood, they seem to fit in well with JF’s promotion of the training camp model, whether having a military or athletic focus. We might note once again that the vision of ‘Bash’ was for a Iwerne-trained godly elite ruling Britain. This seems to have drawn something from the prevailing political fashions of the 1930s, especially fascism. The emphasis on ‘top’ public schools, as providing the clientele for these camps, chimes in with an abiding undercurrent of elitism that is also distinctive of JF’s understanding of Christianity. He and others in this tradition also never look at the shadow side of this model. With the focus on the task of training future church leaders, the group running the camps had little time for those outside their charmed constituency. There was a tendency to look down on or despise those who were on the outside. Whether the Iwerne alumni recovered from the social elitism that they absorbed at the camps is not a question I can answer. Some certainly did not.
The ‘hospital’ model of the church is one that we can claim to read out of the Gospels and the teaching of Jesus. To take but one prominent example of the teaching of Jesus – the Beatitudes, we might ask the question. How much do they reflect the manly elitist culture of the English public school? Have those whom Jesus called blessed been to a training camp to learn the qualities valued by the Beatitudes? No, these qualities at the beginning of Matthew 5 imply the very opposite. It is almost as if Jesus, entering an elite school, walked past the successful leaders and the winners of sports cups to seek out those with ‘two left feet’ and thoroughly inept at any kind of team game. The unsporty or academically lacking are not necessarily more virtuous than the rest. They do however have one positive advantage over the leaders and the otherwise successful within the system. They do not have to be constantly worried about keeping up appearances or a reputation for success. The humble, the vulnerable and the low in status, though they have little power, also have no position to defend. Because they are, in this way, among the vulnerable, even sometimes persecuted, Jesus regards them, paradoxically, as closer to God. It is that which can make them blessed or happy.
What has this vulnerability got to do with hospitals? One of the things I learnt in the retirement role of Bank Chaplain at Carlisle hospital some years ago, was the importance of helping people come to terms with their experience of vulnerability. Whether they were seriously ill or just out of circulation for a couple of weeks, a patient in hospital has to come to terms with a new status. All the things that defined them outside the hospital are stripped away. They no longer have the role that defined them outside, as a managing director or a boss. They are patients, to be treated by the staff in the same way as everyone else. The old status that they had built for themselves as sometimes important members of society, had to give way to the new unsettling status of being a vulnerable human being, dependent on others. The status of the patient has an uncanny parallel to the status of the ordinary human being coming before God or encountering Christ. I am a strong advocate of the Orthodox Jesus Prayer which goes as follows. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’. This short prayer is special, because it reminds us of our universal vulnerable status before God. At the same time, it allows us to feel affirmed and accepted by him. The hospital is an excellent analogy for the Church because it helps us see this double reality of our humble status before God and his gracious acceptance of us. If we are ever guilty of pride and self-importance, the Church (as hospital) should remind us of our true status. In pre-Covid days, we always had the powerful symbolism of all kneeling side by side at the altar, status left at the church door. In our experience of dependency, penitence and powerlessness, we were learning to see ourselves as God sees us.
The contrast between training-camp and hospital metaphors is ultimately a political-type distinction in the way we understand Church. One seems to extol human achievement, status and thus pride. The other calls attention to the importance of vulnerability, self-knowledge and powerlessness. In writing this, the Gospel story of the pharisee and the publican comes to mind. The first paraded his power and achievements before God while the other confessed failure and sin. The latter left the Temple justified. That brief picture perhaps shows above all what the military/athletic analogies of the Church lack, the ability to see ourselves as God sees us. God seems to be in the business of looking after the vulnerable and valuing the qualities that vulnerability can bring. He is the one who ‘hath exalted the humble and meek’ and ‘filled the hungry with good things’.
I was never an attendee at the Bash camps or in any way under the influence of Christian Union type theology. I hope if I had been, my knowledge of the gospels and the reported sayings of Jesus about humility and powerlessness would have alerted me to the need to affirm and protect the values of the powerless and the vulnerable. I hope I would never have been tempted to embody any of the elitist thinking that seems to have infected many Christian institutions and congregations. The con-evo world does seem, in many places, to have distorted ideas about power. My reading of the gospel narrative suggests that God in Christ reaches out to us, but not when we are parading our importance, strength and competence. He comes to us most especially when we recognise our need of him and are prepared to engage in what Jesus calls metanoia. It is this realisation that God finds it easier to reach us when we are open and vulnerable that makes the hospital metaphor of the Church far, far more realistic. The other picture, the training camp metaphor, while not without some merit, should never be left unchallenged and uncritiqued. It should always be balanced with the Gospel emphasis that Jesus comes to us at our point of need.
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One joins in what “appears” “refreshingly different”; every now and again the big shouts (troll like) slip the red flags by us, and we wonder whether it is serious or not (until years later when we realise we should have voted with our feet far sooner).
St Paul in fact considered the “muscular christianity” kudos so much dross. Not for him the triumphal sloganeering.
Well said Stephen. “Blessed are those who know their need of God”.
Thanks, Stephen. My mind was drawn to these words by T S Eliot in East Coker:
“The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire”
I find them so fitting for this Easter season
They are certainly very apt.
A warning, however: you need permission to quote T.S. Eliot; it doesn’t come cheap; and those who hold his copyright sue people who infringe it.
A pity, isn’t it?
A wise warning. The copyright is owned by Faber and their fees start at £75 exclusive of VAT.
However, copyright is not infringed by the use of a quotation from a copyright work provided that the extent of the quotation is no more than is required by the specific purpose for which it is used, and it is accompanied by a sufficient acknowledgement of the the title and author of the work [my précis of section 30 (1ZA) of the Copyright etc., Act 1988].
John Wallace provided the statutory sufficient acknowledgment!
Thank you, Rowland
Very briefly, my view is unchanged. The UK specifically enacted the provisions which I quoted and they are not over-ridden by US legislation. They were introduced relatively recently in 2014 to cover precisely this situation. Also, the UK (England) was the country of first publication of ‘East Coker’, shortly followed in the US, but in that order.
As I have already said, I was confusing Eliot with Auden; both are Faber authors, but Auden’s rights are held in the USA and copyright laws there are stricter.
Even so, when I wished to quote a single line from Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ in a book I wrote, my publisher (DLT) said no, on the grounds that permission to quote Eliot is difficult to obtain and expensive. And that was less than 10 words!
This of course is a digression from the point of the blog but I didn’t want either John or Stephen to get into trouble. It’s a relief to find tha they won’t.
That was my purpose in commenting. But your original advice is still good for anything longer than a “quotation”.
That’s UK law, but US copyright law is stricter. Even short quotations from Eliot can incur a penalty. The usual advice is not to quote him at all.
This is a subject too complex to discuss in detail on ‘Surviving Church’. Faber & Faber assert the UK copyright ownership and specifically invite enquiries about it. There may be a reciprocal treaty with the US (I haven’t checked) and Faber’s could deal with rights in both countries.
Anyone contemplating publishing should contact them initially. Obviously I’m not talking about publication in USA.
Thanks Stephen. Vintage stuff!
What strikes me about the soldier’s armour in Ephesians six is that it is all about day to day behaviour – integrity, truth etc. These are the way we fight. The offensive weapon? A keen appreciation and use of the word of God.
What you say about being a hospital patient is right – I was completely helpless when in intensive care. However, we are saved to serve (Ephesians 2:8-9, they tend to miss out verse 9) and I have been raised back to full health so that I can be of service. What would you have me do Lord?
So let us suffer with Jesus outside the camp (Hebrews 13:13, unlucky for some?) but make sure that we are following and obeying him when we get there.
I felt moved to comment on this as a former Iwerne attendee / leader. I attended in the early 2000s for around 10 years and I found the teaching I encountered there to emphasise exactly the humility you describe here. Talks explained how any worldly status, achievements, wealth would not save us – how we would need to be dependent on Jesus.
I don’t think the focus on the supposed ‘manly culture’ and emphasis on sporting prowess was there in the early 2000s. When I first attended as a shy, not particularly sporty 14 year old, it was the leaders’ humility and selfless care of me that was an amazing witness. In worldly terms yes, these people could have boasted, but they did not – they boasted in Christ alone.
Similarly, the whole ‘reach elite schools for future leaders’ take wasn’t around; the emphasis was on reaching those who had not heard about Jesus in boarding schools. Having boarded, then worked in chaplaincy in a boarding school, I saw the need to reach the teenagers in these schools with the gospel. As they’re away from home they have little (if any) connection to a parish church or other Christian ministry. In holidays, they’re unlikely to be part of any church youth group. Iwerne was a chance for these unreached children to hear the gospel and be encouraged by other Christians of their own age if they already believed. Whether people agree or not if boarding schools is a good thing is of course up for debate, but while they still exist there is a need for ministry to those who are in them.
That certainly rings true. There is a need to bridge the gap between the informed picture given by actual attendees with first hand knowledge and the caricatures among non-attendees without first hand knowledge.
Chris, personally, I’m quite prepared to believe that not everyone was abused! And even that some people had good experiences. But you can’t offset those against the abuses that occurred. Where dreadful things were done, you can’t say it doesn’t matter because there were good things too. Not even if there were 1,000 good things. The bad thing is still just as bad. Those who have been hurt have been heard. And what was done to them must be recognised.
What has come out about Fletcher and Smyth’s behaviour is horrific and I think I’m still in shock and trying to process it.
I wanted, however, to show that Iwerne culture recently is not what it may have been in the past; that so many volunteers and attendees had no knowledge or part in some warped theology that those men used to justify their awful behaviour.
Yes, those who have been hurt should be heard, but there also seems to be a lot of commentary from other parties making assumptions about Iwerne’s current culture, despite having no first hand knowledge of it.
Hi, Stella. Nice to “meet” you. It’s a fair point. But I’m a little surprised that the powers that be at Iwerne don’t feel it’s a damaged brand. Could that be because too many don’t acknowledge a problem?
Hi Stella, welcome to Surviving Church. It’s good to hear that Iwerne has improved so much in the last couple of decades. Can you tell us if it’s now open to kids from all boarding schools, or is it still just the top 30?
Hello English Athena and Janet! Thank you for your welcome (and thank you Janet for your piece on Smyth, Fletcher and Fife – I found it really thought provoking and helpful).
Re the damaged brand and acknowledging a problem, I can only speak for myself and what I’ve seen / heard over the years. I know that the outreach in boarding schools has been regrouped geographically. Iwerne isn’t the only camp (though it seems to be the only one discussed, and it no longer exists) as there’s Lymington Rushmore, Gloddeath and Ldn too. From the way the camps began they ended up supporting Christian work in different schools and now it’s been rationalised so that Titus Trust can support schools dependent on their area, which does make a lot more sense. Not sure if that really answers your question! To me the camps do a necessary work reaching the unreached and supporting Christian teachers in boarding school that no other ministry seems to do.
Re being open to all kids from boarding school, when I attended Iwerne all those years ago I wasn’t from one of the supposed ‘top 30’ schools! Quite a few of my friends on Iwerne weren’t from the ‘top 30’ and leaders came from a variety of places – I think the ‘top 30’ thing was historical and has been massively over emphasised in the press. Now that the supporting of Christian work in boarding schools has been arranged geographically (and Iwerne itself no longer exists) I would guess any child from a boarding school could attend the camp for their area – but I haven’t asked any of the organisers so that’s not an official answer! What I do know from being a leader 10 or so years ago is that the volunteers I knew were there because they wanted unreached children in boarding schools to hear about Jesus and to support those who already know Him.
My experience comes from being at Oxford in the 90’s and I would interested to see if things have change since then. I can accept a targeted ministries to hard to reach communities. Football clubs have chaplains and so on.
However I found that the Iwerne leadership community at Oxford had a very connected confident separatist feel which went beyond the organisation of a summer camp.
They had weekly leaders prayer meeting during term, weekends away at Christmas and other activities. It seemed that their commitment to this came before their commitment to other more open activities like the CU. I wasn’t aware of this at first but it seemed to function like freemasonry in terms of opportunities and connections.
There’s an interview with William Taylor here:-
https://davidould.net/media/TaylorCMS2017.mp3
where he talks about arriving at Cambridge and Rev Mark Ruston saying that his Grandfather has been in touch and would he like to come to tea. Mark then offers one to one bible studies which sounds great until you wonder about all the other undergraduates arriving at Cambridge at the same time and what kind of welcome they got offered instead.
Warning bells would ring for me if someone offered one to one anything these days!
I totally agree with you re the William Taylor and Mark Ruston situation – it seems as if the vicar was unfairly prioritising / focusing on one particular student. It also doesn’t seem great if those who have attended Iwerne just form a clique.
I was at university in the early 2000s with other Iwerne attendees – we did have a prayer meeting / Bible study, which I must admit I found really helpful and was really instrumental in the development of my faith – but it wasn’t run by someone from the church there, just another student. Similarly, we were all encouraged to be involved with church and we went to the college / university CUs as well. My closest friend at university was from a very different background / churchmanship and was never phased by it – she just saw it as a sort of ‘horses for courses’ type of thing. I absolutely take on board that others might not have felt that way though, and it could have been discouraging for them.
I think that at the time his grandfather was a leading evangelist and probably a personal friend to Mark Ruston. So it was nothing more than meeting up with family friends at University – a very good thing when one arrives new in a large and overwhelming place?
Stella I do not always comment here as when people are writing I am deep into the next post. Just a quick point though. The blog is not about Iwerne, even it gets mentioned a lot recently. The blog is about problems of power in the Church. Iwerne and it historical legacy had a lot to do with power. The legacy of the shadow side of Fletcher and Smyth are vividly alive inside the psyche’s of many people. Those who had a happy time are OK, including all the camps where there were no power problems and especially the camps for the girls. Power and sex abuse seems to be a particularly male problem. That is why we write about it and the culture that created it. Women get abused but are not normally abusers. The issue of whether Iwerne ever comes back is of relatively small interest. What happened 40 or more years is of serious importance as people still suffer and there are people alive who failed to protect the weak. That matters very much.
While I accept the general thrust of Stephen’s comment, I would like to point out that women can be abusers too. Subtler perhaps, less physical usually, less sexual usually, but damaging all the same. In particular I am alert for personal reasons to the way in which mothers can smother their children, or manipulate them into pathways that serve the mother’s needs (perhaps fulfilling a thwarted career) or being unable to let go even into the offspring’s adulthood, thus damaging relationships.
If power abuse is a particularly male problem, I wonder if it is hardwired in. We are animals. When we were cave dwellers – which is for most of our history – and our survival depended on being hunter-gatherers, the “abuse” of power would come in very handy over other species, and over other humans as we fought (deliberate choice of word) for scarce resources. The further we have come from that environment the more those instincts have had to be sublimated. Our increasingly effete western lifestyle is not helpful.
I can certainly confirm that women are capable of abuse. At state school as a small boy, Miss S used severe sexualised smacking of boys which still makes me shudder when I think of it. She was our form teacher and used to pick on people out of the blue and summon them forward for a painful humiliation in front of the co-ed class. Usually the boys had been disruptive, but not always.
Why she chose to do this, but other successful teachers didn’t is a question I often ponder.
I also wonder the effect of her sexual sadism had on the boys she attacked.
As regards cave-dwelling however, I struggle to believe there would have been enough to go round, but I’m sure it’s a generic term for any primitive dwelling!
Indeed so.
As a nurse who has worked in mental health I can also confirm that women are capable of equal levels of abuse often of a different kind; but also of sexual abuse which can leave children traumatised for more than 50 years.
Hello!
I absolutely agree that what “happened 40 or more years is of serious importance as people still suffer and there are people alive who failed to protect the weak”.
But I think a clear differentiation needs to be made with what the culture was like and what it is like now. It seems to be frequently implied that Iwerne / Titus Trust culture has never changed. It is really important to note that this isn’t the case if we care about the children of today who may attend these camps (and may go on to be in Christian ministry themselves) – the Titus Trust is still running them, even if the name Iwerne has gone.
Surely explaining how the culture has changed gives us some much needed hope for the future as the awfulness of the abuse and failures in safeguarding of the past are rightly mourned and learnt from. I wanted to reassure others that comments like “With the focus on the task of training future church leaders, the group running the camps had little time for those outside their charmed constituency. There was a tendency to look down on or despise those who were on the outside” are no longer true.
I also think it is incredibly dismissive / inaccurate to write “the issue of whether Iwerne ever comes back is of relatively small interest” – the name has gone, but the organisation running the camps has not, nor has the mission field of the 1000s of children in prep and boarding schools around the country, unreached by other ministries.
Thanks for nuanced comments, Stella. I’d have a problem with any organisation that took only public school children. Surely, all children should be brought up in the “nurture and admonition of the Lord”? And from what I’ve seen, public school children are taught that they are special and different. The sense of entitlement is not healthy, especially in a Christian, where leaders are supposed to be servants.
Thank you for a helpful article. As to the two metaphors of training camp and hospital .. through my teens I was a regular at youth camps run by CMS. I am happy to remember these as training camps in my own discipleship and formation – as well as enormous fun. Mixed, diverse and open to all. So although I agree that with the wrong ethos and leadership it describes something that can, and has, become abusive, I am not averse to this metaphor for describing an important aspect of Christian formation and teaching. It is still much needed. I also want to say that I have known the hospital metaphor to be used unhelpfully – where a certain kind of vulnerability was emphasised in a way that avoid the growing, facing the challenges of life and faith. So I suggest that both metaphors still express an important and essential aspect of being church – but both need using with critical accountability and care.
From early childhood, and without knowing why, I have always felt uncomfortable with military language used in hymns. The words that immediately disturb me are: soldiers, fight, battle, winning and, the worst trigger of all, marching.
I am not anti military, we need our military, but I don’t want their vocabulary and metaphor in the hymns I sing, or even in the texts I read.
When I was about six, I remember my mother, supposedly reading me a bedtime story, prancing around the room, waving her arms about and shouting, ‘The sword of the Lord and of Gideon!’ I never understood why or what it had to do with me. Perhaps this is one of the origins of my discomfort.
My ultimate trigger is The Battle Hymn of the Republic with its hearty and triumphalist bumpedy bumpness – and all that interminable and ghastly marching. For those of you who love it – sorry!
Having worked for the NHS and having been a frequent customer over the years, I relate fully to the hospital model. It has taken most of a lifetime and my own husband to point out why.
Sadly Christianity, and religions are often hijacked for patriotism and so many of those hymns are basically heretical, and softer ones like “I vow to thee my country”, just analyse the full words. However both the hospital and military (and training) analogies are important they are biblical and are there for a reason but that isn’t patriotism or elitism. In Aramaic the Holy Spirit is feminine; but the “comforter” was a Greek army role similar to a sergeant major.
I agree with feeling uncomfortable with military language in hymns – yet we all know that Paul uses these analogies in his writings. Now I know that some would wish to do away with Paul altogether, or at least be very selective in the passages they use; but I don’t feel I can do that as – like it or not – they are there in Scripture.
What I think is the basis of the problem is that these passages have often been interpreted very literally to give credence to “holy warfare”, whether that be the Crusades or WW1. The hymns have also, I guess, been used unthinkingly as rabble-rousing calls to arms and even as the musical background to colonial conquests. In other words we’re back to issues of power.
I should add that I was brought up in Crusaders (now there’s a militaristic name if there ever was one!) and CSSM choruses such as “On the Victory Side” and “There’s a Fight to be Fought”, among others!
(Of course Crusaders was originally launched to target” another very specific market: boys in independent day-schools which were unreached by either public school religion or by most Sunday Schools).
In issues of power there’s a misunderstood one. The crusades, based really around political (power) Norman expansionism due to overpopulation. Those in the middle east were often fought between “christian” and “muslim” states using alliances of the “other side”.
We need, in Britain, to stop speaking approvingly of the Crusades. The narrative in the East is totally different, and our boasting makes it sound as if we approve of the abuses perpetrated.
Not sure that women are not capable of abusing their power! We’re just as bad as the lads. I’ve been got at by women who had power over me. And sometimes women are deliberate accomplices to men.
It is certainly an odd choice of words for JF to use about the church, I am not sure I entirely agree with either: although now taken over by the church itself I would say it is a congregation meaning a gathering a place of both support and encourage and much more. Indeed Stephen’s comments on selection for training camps were well made in fact his requirements were “easy” for the military selection being those at wars end. Yet the bible does contain passages on training athletes; the weak and vulnerable (though I think the Beatitudes represent something different to the Hospital analogy that Jesus does use and is present elsewhere); biblical selection for training is also odd just look at Gideon’s lack of army, or the selection of cracked pots; lastly though military training metaphors are found in the epistles Ephesians isn’t one. Ephesians gives an analogy of military equipment and how it is used to aspects of Christian living: a shield that is also offensive; a belt that all armour and equipment relies on; boots that are comfortable and practical, and go a long way; a sword that isn’t the primary weapon but designed for close fighting; moreover the things they are linked too aren’t things that before might have been linked to something military.