All posts by Stephen Parsons

About Stephen Parsons

Stephen is a retired Anglican priest living at present in Cumbria. He has taken a special interest in the issues around health and healing in the Church but also when the Church is a place of harm and abuse. He has published books on both these issues and is at present particularly interested in understanding how power works at every level in the Church. He is always interested in making contact with others who are concerned with these issues.

The Parable of the Safeguarding Seed. Matthew 13

 (From The Bang-up-to-Date Improvised Version)

by Anon

 The Parable of the Sower

Jesus told them many things in parables, saying: “A church leader went out to sow some safeguarding seed. But some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Others seed fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. Though it sprang up quickly, when the sun came up, the plants withered because they were scorched and had no soil for root. Other seed fell among thorns, which choked the plants.”

The disciples asked, “What on earth is the meaning of this parable?”

And Jesus replied: “The safeguarding seed is good, but it needs proper soil to grow, and an expert planter that knows what they are doing. In this parable, the ground is the church. The birds are the individuals who know how to steal the seed before it takes root. The rocks are the committees at diocesan level, who look as though they will support and sustain the seed. But this is bad soil, and after a brief growth spurt, the plant wilts and dies. All Diocesan soil is like this.

“But the weeds are the national-level bodies that do not want good things to grow. They hate righteous and proper processes that are rooted in justice, accountability, truth and sustainable goodness. Like weeds, they seek to block the light from the plants that are sown under them. These weeds will always strangle the life out of anything good. These are the thistles and knotweed that I have warned you about before. Beware of the leavening bad influence of these Teachers of the Law, and the Sadducees, Scribes and Pharisees, for they undermine and overshadow everything that comes near them.”

The Parable of the Weeds

Then Jesus told them another parable about weeds: “The church is like a pastor-farmer who sowed good safeguarding seed in God’s field.  But while everyone was asleep, an enemy came and deliberately planted weeds among the wheat. So when the wheat sprouted and formed heads, weeds also appeared.”

“The farmworkers came to the pastor-farmer and said, ‘Did you not sow the good seed in your field? So where did these weeds come from?’ The pastor-farmer replied: ‘An enemy did this’. The farmworkers asked, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’ 

The pastor-farmer replied ‘No, because while you pull up the weeds, you will uproot the wheat with them.  Let both grow together until the harvest. Then I will tell the harvesters to collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned, and then to gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’”

The Parable of the Weeds Explained

Later, the disciples came to Jesus and asked him to explain the parable of the weeds in the field. Jesus said: “The one sowing the safeguarding seed is a faithful servant, and committed to justice, truth and the church being a good place where all can grow and flourish. The field is the church.”

“The weeds are those who want to place impediments in the way of those who seek justice and truth, and bring light to the places of darkness, and life to the barren.  The weeds are those who seek to uproot the victims of abuse and survivors seeking justice. The weeds seek to strangle the life and light out of systems that yield transparency, accountability, justice and truth.”

“The weeds are the work of the enemy, but the weeds think the field of the church is theirs to grow in, and so they cultivate it for themselves. The weeds pretend to be good angels, but in reality they are just agents of the enemy. The weeds seek to destroy or delay the day of harvest and reckoning. All of their resources seek to cover up everything up and stop the seeds of truth sprouting. The weeds stop the light getting to the ground, and they conceal all manner of evil and corruption.”

The harvesters are the true angels – experts, advocates and supporters – who will fight and campaign to have the weeds removed and the ground cleared, so that the good safeguarding seed can grow. They toil away at the ground level, trying to enrich the soil, and so work tirelessly to remove the stones and rocks. They also know who plants the weeds.”

The Parables of the Mustard Seed and the Sourdough

Jesus told them another parable: “Safeguarding is like a mustard seed, which someone took and planted in their field. It is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches, and find safety in their nests and the shelter of the branches.”

Jesus told them another parable: “Safeguarding is like the special mould that a person baking bread takes and mixes into their blend flour, until it is all worked through into the sourdough ready for baking.”

The Parables of the Mustard Seed and the Sourdough Explained

The disciples again asked Jesus “What on earth do you mean by these parables?”

Jesus said to them: “The mustard tree is what the church is meant to become – a place of abundant life, fragrant blossom, seeds, fruit, shade, shelter, support for nesting birds and their young, many insects, moss and more besides. The church is from the tiniest seed of faith. As a tree, it cannot choose what it hosts, and for whom it provides food, home and shade.”

The disciples were puzzled, and asked Jesus why he did not speak of yeast, but chose instead to speak of common leaven.

Jesus replied: “Nobody has any yeast at home, as it is so rare and expensive. A baker can make bread that is unleavened and flat. Or, the baker can use their own leaven – the culture-mould that every household possesses. When I have told you before of the need to ‘guard against the leaven of Scribes and the Pharisees’, I infer their culture-mould will corrupt every batch of dough. Their bread will either be puffed-up and full of hot air. Or, it will be dense, lifeless and sour-tasting. The leaven of the Scribes and Pharisees is like the rulers of the church: their influence corrupts everything.”

Jesus did not say anything to them without using a parable.  So was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophets: “I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world. To those who have ears, listen”.

Commentary

Leslie Hunter, in The Seed and the Fruit (SCM, 1953, p.12), offers this parable: As the threats of war and the cries of the dispossessed were sounding in our ears, humanity fell into an uneasy sleep.  In our sleep we dreamed that we entered the spacious store in which the gifts of God to humanity are kept, and addressed the angel behind the counter, saying: ‘We have run out of the fruits of the Spirit.  Can you restock us?’  When the angel seemed about to say ‘no’, we burst out: ‘In place of violence, terrorism, war, afflictions and injustice, lying and lust, we need love, joy, peace, integrity, discipline.  Without these we shall all be lost’.  And then the angel behind the counter replied, ‘We do not stock fruits here.  Only seeds.’ There are only safeguarding seeds. It is such a pity about the soil.

An Open Letter to Professor Alexis Jay as she begins work to produce a Future Safeguarding Programme for the Church of England

Dear Professor Jay,

No doubt you will have received many representations from different people who are concerned about the safeguarding crisis in the Church of England.  You will have heard from survivors and victims as well as safeguarding professionals at various levels.  Some will have experience from outside the Church, while others will have observed the safeguarding system from within the institution.  The Church, or more precisely the Archbishops’ Council and the Lead Bishop, have chosen you to look at the confusion that at present exists in the system and try to make some sense of the tangled threads of safeguarding.  Clearly you face a herculean task. You also realise that whatever recommendations you make will not satisfy everyone.

I am writing to you neither as a survivor nor as an expert.  My only claim for having something useful to say is that I have been reflecting on the problem of institutional power in the Church for some thirty years.   Before that I was, as a child, a direct witness to the power politics being played out in the precincts at Canterbury Cathedral in the 1950s.  Churches and parishes, in my experience, have always been somewhat dangerous places.  Sexual violence is only one of the potential hazards that lurks within the institution of the Church.  Far more common are simple everyday power games that can cause so much misery and unhappiness to those who are the targets.  They suffer because of individuals whose personalities make them natural bullies and control freaks.  Such personalities are, sadly, frequently encountered in the Church.

My blog Surviving Church has, for almost ten years, been reflecting on this issue of inappropriate use of power in the Church.  The comments of those who read these reflections have enriched what I have had to offer based on my experience and reading over several decades.  What follows in this open letter is not offered as advice or suggestions.  It is, rather, a series of observations on your difficult task.  These are rooted in my considerable experience of living within and working for the Church of England.  Like you I have listened to the group we refer to as survivors.  We both know how the personalities of vulnerable people subject to bullying or violent acts are damaged, sometimes very seriously.  For some in this group the damage is permanent and they are true victims, worthy of our deepest compassion and our tears.

The context of your appointment is the dissolution of the Independent Safeguarding Board, a church initiative which existed for only a couple of years. It does not take an expert to recognise that the sinews of support that have been created at a personal level between survivors and members of the Board are precious as well as delicate.  The task of bringing appropriate healing to individuals who suffer from trauma is different for every case.  There appears to be ample evidence that Jasvinder and Steve have been contributing to the slow building up of personal trust between some survivors and potential sources of help.   Survivors were beginning to feel that the Church that had often let them down was maybe allowing (and paying for) a process that might eventually allow them stand on their own feet.

Disbanding the ISB in such a sudden and brutal way has been an act of violence with, potentially, terrifying consequences.   The two images that come to mind are both medical in flavour.  The first one is a plaster covering a large unhealed wound.  For some reason the doctor in charge decides to rip off the plaster early.  This interrupts the healing process and makes the wound liable to become re-infected.  The second image is an intensive care ward in a hospital.  Here are several patients wired up to machines which keep them alive.  Closing the ISB was, for the survivors who were engaged with the Board, like having a plaster ripped off or having the electricity supplying life-support machines turned off suddenly and without notice.    One particular ‘patient’, Mr X, for whom the ISB had commissioned a report, is in imminent danger of financial ruin.  The Report, known as the Spindler Review https://houseofsurvivors.org/2023/03/28/isb-spindler-review/  recommended immediate practical support to protect him from financial disaster, especially as a financial institution is set to call in debt on Friday 28th July.  His situation and the account of institutional harm caused to him have been known for a long time.  There is no excuse for this lapse of justice and failure in the restitution process.  It reveals a devastating institutional inertia on the part of the church authorities.

Mr X is one individual who is seeing that the hoped for institutional support is being swept away like a child’s sandcastle on a beach.  Many others, who had begun to feel bonds of trust being created by the two active members of the now dissolved ISB, had dared to hope.  Hope for something better after the experiences of devastating abuse at the hands of institutions or individuals involved with the Church is something fragile and precious. It is this collapse of hope that represents the true cost to the abused in the Church of England.  Few if any of the victims/survivors would put cash at the top of their list of needs in the aftermath of their original abuse event.   It is the regaining of a sense of justice, the removal of deep shame and trauma that the survivors seek.  The sudden closing down of one avenue to receive these things has the potential to traumatise and set back the welfare of hundreds, even thousands, of survivors.

Much of what has happened in the Church over recent decades has led to a serious state of anxiety in many survivors.  It is best summed up in the single word trauma.  As someone who has attempted, in a very small way, to respond to the trauma of the survivors who contact me, I recognise how the care of even one traumatised individual can be a demanding undertaking.  One problem that has bedevilled the work of advocates, therapists and those who, like me, offer friendship to those who have met abuse, is that these survivors do not normally find in those who have authority in the church any trauma-informed response to their plight.  In other words, the response is seldom ‘how are you’ but rather a display of body language which is both defensive and embarrassed.   The preservation and protection of the church institution seems to be at the top of the agenda.  No doubt this stance is encouraged by lawyers and public relations experts who regard it as their task to protect the institution at all costs. 

 As an outsider in your relations with the Church of England, Professor Jay, you have one enormous advantage.  You are in a position to look carefully at what seems to be going wrong in the church’s safeguarding efforts without having the burdens of any institutional loyalty.  The wounded and traumatised army of survivors want you to help them to find truth, integrity and justice for their situation.  They have been let down, not only by the evil behaviour of individuals, but by widespread institutional failings.  With your help, they hope to see robust recommendations which will bring light and healing to dark places.  Sorting out safeguarding will commit the Church of England to enormous costs.   These costs are not just about finance.  They are also about getting used to a better way of doing things and creating new structures that will promote integrity and justice for the future. 

A final word.  One crucial failing in the Church that we, the observers and the critics of the institution, have noticed is the way power operates within its structures.  We hope you will come to your own conclusions on this vital issue and address it in your recommendations.  Many of us want to see damaging power networks challenged, so that the forces of transparency and democracy can flourish better.   You have an important contribution to make to the restoration of the Church’s weakened integrity.  Maybe also the long process of repairing the Church’s damaged reputation in the eyes of the nation by radical self-examination is something your words can promote and encourage. We sincerely hope that what you produce in your report will help our flawed, even failing, national Church.   Somehow, we all want it to return to its essential and urgent task of proclaiming the work of God and serving the nation.

Stephen Parsons, Greystoke, Cumbria.

Tylers Green: Looking at Past Abuses with the Insights of Today.

 One of the interesting features of a recently published Lessons Learned Review about events at the parish of Tylers Green, in the Diocese of Oxford, is the frequent use of the expression ‘spiritual abuse’.  The authors of this review, Elaine and Patrick Hopkinson, use this term often in describing the malfeasance of the Reverend Michael Hall at St Margaret’s Church between 1981 and 2000. During that period this expression was not in common use as a shorthand for a range of harmful behaviours. perpetrated by some church leaders against members of their congregations. We could speculate as to why this term spiritual abuse has taken such a long time to emerge as a way of describing poor behaviour by the clergy.  One reason is that no one then wanted to admit that a man of the cloth (women were not incumbents until the last years of the century) would ever act malevolently.   It was also not an expression available to clerical victims to help them describe their pain. Those in oversight roles in the Oxford diocese seemed, for a variety of reasons, to be unable to check the tragic twenty-year period of harsh and harmful behaviour on the part of Mr Hall.  Another new concept used by the Review authors, one that finds its origin in domestic dysfunction, is the term coercion and control.  These words have gained a currency only at the beginning of the present century to describe non—violent controlling behaviour used against another.  The law of the land now recognises such behaviour as potentially criminal, especially in the context of abusive domestic relationships where the victim is typically female.  The language of coercive control allows the law to identify a situation where men (typically) may control and humiliate others without the use of physical force. It has taken society a long time to understand fully the nature of such things as threatening and coercive behaviour against a weaker party in a relationship.

Mr Hall’s offences and the descriptions of them that are made in this Review, attracted my attention for two key reasons.  First, the twenty-year period of Mr Hall’s time as an incumbent of the Church of England dovetail very closely to my own time as a Vicar in in two English dioceses.  In short, the parochial environment, especially the account of the interactions with figures in authority in the Church, are similar to what I knew at that time in other dioceses.   Bishops and Archdeacons in those days were fairly remote figures and the freehold system could effectively screen the hierarchy from involvement in ordinary parishes.  A short summary of the pattern of the bonding between the parishes and the centre would be to say that it was, at best, weak.  It would also have been possible for a Vicar to remain at arm’s length for long periods of time from any contact with fellow clergy, if he chose it that way.  I have thus some feel for the situation described in the Review about the way that bishops, archdeacons and other church overseeing authorities could be, during the twenty years of Hall’s incumbency, kept firmly out of the way.   The ill-tempered and forceful actions of a determined freehold incumbent, bent on exploiting his legal status, would be enough to terrify any bishop.  While the system of freehold worked fairly well for incumbents, it never worked well for bishops when faced with a Vicar known to be harming members of his flock.  Whatever we may think now of the operation of CDMs or its current proposed replacement, the situation in the 80s and 90s gave far too little power to the those in episcopal authority to check clerical malfeasance.

The second reason that the Tylers Green Review has attracted my attention picks up my interests on a more personal level.  Having written a book on Christian healing in the 80s, I was, in the 90s, invited to join a committee in London which had some supervisory powers for accrediting healing organisations.  To obtain this accreditation, these organisations had to be open to being visited and to be free from scandal and ethical lapses.    I was present when some truly dreadful abuses by individual healing organisations were discussed.  The saga of the Nine O’Clock Service in Sheffield was not in fact within our organisational remit, but I found that the committee work had sensitised me to have some insight as to what was going on at the church at Sheffield.  The link between sexual misbehaviour and religious leadership was at that time something quite hard for many to admit or understand.  From 1995 onwards I was beginning to explore why and how certain forms of spiritual practice could be a prelude to truly dreadful and harmful behaviour on the part of Christian leaders. 

I think it was in 1997 that my reading on abusive power and forms of exploitation within the Church was consolidated into a book proposal for Lion Publishers.  The commissioning editor did not find it easy to sell my text to his superiors when I eventually presented the manuscript at the end of 1999.  Nevertheless, the work, Ungodly Fear, was well received as an attempt to explore the way that power, spiritual and authoritarian, could be abused in church settings.  People knew that church abuse was taking place but there was then little help in understanding the psychological and theological context of what was going on.  In much of my book I was writing about spiritual abuse, but this expression had not then been formulated so it was not available to me to use.

After the book appeared in 2000, I began to read more widely to see in the psychological literature whether there were writings about power abuse, personal and institutional, that could be applied to the Church.  To summarise, in my reading on the topic over several years, I stumbled on the notion of narcissism.  There I saw clearly that the so-called narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) was something that well described the self-inflation evident in many Christian and cultic leaders involved in abuse.  I pursued this idea at my first presentation to the International Cultic Studies Association at their conference at Trieste in 2011.  Being then a new boy in this organisation, I was surprised to discover that it was considered a novel idea.  Since then, the notion has become commonplace and reading the Tylers Green Review, it can be offered as revealing a further interpretation of the dysfunction apparent in the extraordinarily harmful behaviour of Michael Hall.

I am well aware of the warnings in the psychoanalytic literature against applying the diagnosis of NPD to someone who is not accessible to detailed examination.  My use of the narcissism label is not in any way offered as a professional diagnosis for Michael Hall.  Nevertheless, using the idea of narcissism we are helped to have a coherent pattern of understanding allowing us to see many of the salient aspects of Hall’s personality described in the Review as a coherent whole.   The phenomena of extreme anger, litigious and threatening behaviour and apparent indifference to the pain and suffering of others, are all part of the typical NPD profile.  The word narcissism is also now frequently used to describe an insatiable appetite for power and importance.  I would maintain that whether or not we claim the diagnosis of a full personality disorder for Hall, the categories attached to the ideas of narcissism are appropriately applied as a description of his behaviour. 

So far, we have seen how the reviewers of 2023 have had the categories of coercive control and spiritual abuse at their disposal and have made good use of them.  Thankfully the use of term spiritual abuse has passed into general use in spite of the defensive paper put out by the Evangelical Alliance in 2018, saying that it was an unnecessary expression.   No doubt they may have felt that ‘conversion-therapy’ and hellfire preaching from some of their members could be regarded as spiritually abusive.  Some of us do indeed believe that certain strands of preaching are designed to foment terror in their hearers.  When fear, reinforced by aggressive preaching dominates an institution for twenty years, as at Tylers Green, is it any wonder that the observer might describe this as spiritual abuse?

The reviewers of 2023 have been allowed to think in the categories of the current age when looking at the past behaviour of Michael Hall in the events that took place 20 to 40 years ago.   The expression, spiritual abuse and the ideas around coercion and control, have greatly assisted their task.  To these two expressions, I have added a third, narcissism and the various ideas that are associated with the word.  The cultic world has already widely adopted into its discourse concepts like ‘toxic narcissism’ to describe the damaging behaviour of individuals like Donald Trump and Michael Hall who seem incapable of acting in a truly altruistic way.  Perhaps we should face up to the terrifying thought that there are, among our existing leaders, a number who are afflicted in this way.  For reasons deep in their psychological make-up, some Christian leaders are incapable of acting in a way that builds up another.  Unless such leaders are named and inhibited, they will have the power to create the same appalling damage as was created in a parish in the Oxford diocese 20 -40 years ago.  One thing has changed in the intervening time, and we should use it to good effect.   This is our ability to articulate and describe better what may be going on inside the minds of individuals who lead us.  The battle to prevent another Michael Hall appearing is a serious struggle and will require enormous resources of psychological insight as well as wisdom of leadership and management. Even a small number of destructive leaders can wreak terrifying damage on an institution like the Church.  The task of neutralising the impact of toxic leaders as well as the individuals who use their power to abuse in other ways is urgent and should demand much of our energy and resources. 

Is anyone safe in the Church of England?

By Caroline Newman

This article is sent in by a reader of the blog.  The author is of African Caribbean background. The article gives us a perspective on power dynamics and safeguarding issues in the Church that we have not hitherto encountered on this blog.  Caroline’s struggles with the ‘system’ in her battle over safeguarding will be familiar to many of my readers, but the added layer of reactionary racial attitudes gives her account a special power and topical relevance. All of us need to be sensitised to the voices of a community which historically has found it hard to make its voice heard. Caroline is thus helping all of us to think about power issues and church safeguarding in a new way.

I was born in the 1960s and my parents are of the Windrush generation. This article contains my experience of church and my opinion about ongoing matters in the diocese in which I live and worship.

 I have attended various churches throughout my life.  I started out in a Pentecostal church. Recently, I have been questioning why I go to church at all and if it is necessary.  Aren’t church people supposed to be better than the rest?  Aren’t “heathens” supposed to look up to us?  Aren’t we supposed to lead “non-Christians” to Jesus and ultimately to join us in church?

In 2012 I started attending a Church of England church in a diocese in the south of England.  The vicar was from Pakistan and of Asian descent.  Prior to his arrival the church had always had white male vicars.  Apparently this vicar was not the first choice of the members, who are mainly older and white.  Their first choice (white male) withdrew and the second choice, the Asian vicar was appointed.  Members of the church have told me he was “forced onto them” by the Bishop.

The Asian vicar told me that the members of the church “made my life hell”.  He told me that they refused to help him.  They were disruptive of his efforts at PCC meetings.  I wondered why his son, daughter and nephew were always up at the altar serving and generally helping him.  He told me that the members “don’t want to work with him or help him so he has to use whoever will help him”.  I told him “it didn’t look right” having all brown people on the altar and all the white people not on the altar but on the benches, those who still came.  Black and brown people were in the minority although that number grew while he was the incumbent.  Non-whites felt welcomed by him.

Members of the church told me “he has a funny accent”, “we can’t understand what he is saying”, he is “always late requesting assistance or in the planning of services”.  They said this is the reason why they won’t work with him.  Because he asked them too late and was “disorganised”.  The vicar stayed over 7 years at the parish after which he was promoted to Archdeacon in another area.  The vicar told me that he had implored the Diocese to introduce unconscious bias training but they had refused.  The vicar also told me that whenever he would report racism to the Bishop he was told to “hang in there”.  They took no action to provide training or to raise the issue of race discrimination with the members of the church or even with the Parochial Church Council. 

I should say that since we started attending the church, black women have tolerated various micro aggressions by the white members; questions and comments about our hair and clothes, wanting to touch our hair or just touching it without permission, being misnamed and mixed up with each other. Black members of the worship team were told they could not sing cultural songs as the members would not like it.  Their attire was scrutinised and criticised.  We were told “this is not a black church”.   I was even told that if I did not like it I should “go to Jesus House” (a majority black church).

Then came the pandemic and various “lockdowns”.  In May 2021 the PCC appointed a new vicar, a white male, with whom they were happy.  I was appointed a churchwarden in April 2021.

As soon as I started to get involved with the church I experienced race discrimination.  I also heard racist and sexist insults about other church employees (eastern Europeans) by the white English members.  I was most uncomfortable with the racism and sexism.  Initially I kept quiet.  Although I felt obliged to call out the casual racism towards others, at first I did not address the racism I personally experienced. Then in July 2021 my position became intolerable when I experienced direct racial discrimination by the other Churchwarden (a white woman).

I reported this to the new vicar, hoping that he would at least use his position to tackle the issue of racial discrimination and perhaps recommend training for the leadership team. Instead, he turned on me and took the side of the other churchwarden and decided that I had to be moved on.  Together they manufactured disciplinary situations and tried to force me out of the position because I had made accusations of discrimination. It was textbook victimisation.

I also had a report of a safeguarding concern.  I reported the race discrimination and safeguarding concerns to the bishops of the diocese and the chair of the PCC.  Their instincts were to make excuses for the vicar “he’s inexperienced”; “he didn’t mean any harm”; “it was meant as a compliment” and to sweep it under the carpet.  The diocese tried to force me to sign an NDA so I could not discuss my report with anyone.  It was clear from the start that they did not want the take the race discrimination or the safeguarding situation seriously. They just wanted to protect the vicar and the reputation of the diocese.  I declined the offer of mediation and an enforced NDA. I was then told they could not investigate the vicar as only the Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM) process could do that.  I would have to pursue that myself.  I had never heard of a CDM. So, while they were investigating the churchwarden and employees for race discrimination, I completed the CDM.  The investigation was of course a white wash designed to protect the vicar. 

Then the tsunami of victimisation by church members started against me and the person they believed had made the safeguarding report.  The victimisation against me continues to today. I was even subjected to verbal abuse and harassment at the church and had to involve the police. Because it was deemed a racially aggravated offence, a criminal investigation was carried out.  I have now taken my claim against the diocese, the PCC, the vicar and others who have harassed, victimised or abused me to the Employment Tribunal.  Instead of trying to resolve the issues and take responsibility and accountability, the diocese, the vicar and the PCC (funded by Ecclesiastical Insurance) are arguing that a churchwarden elected by the parishioners, appointed by the Bishop as his representative in the Parish and appointed as a trustee of the PCC (a registered charity) does not have the status or standing to take a claim to the Tribunal to address the issues.

I wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury telling him what was going on in the diocese.  I told him that I was being coerced into signing an NDA even though he had decreed that NDAs should not be used.  My first letter was ignored.  Then I wrote again and I received a reply to this second letter.  He essentially said these issues are delegated to the diocese.  This sounded very familiar to the issues raised by the survivor of abuser, the late Trevor Devamanikkam when the Diocese declined to take responsibility for dealing with abuse.

Soul Survivor Watford (SSW)

I left my church in July 2022, as a result of the victimisation.  I started going to Soul Survivor after trying several other churches in July 2022.  I like Soul Survivor and just as we were settling there we were informed on 4 April 2023 that Mike Pilavachi was being investigated for serious safeguarding issues.

There were some things about SSW that had caused me discomfort.  Firstly, the leadership had said on several occasions that SSW “aimed for family, and settled for a mess”.   With the background I have and the experiences I have had in life, in churches and in organisations I felt this would become a problem, even before this issue with Mike Pilavachi came to light.  If you settle for a mess you will have a mess.  I had checked the website and there were none of the governance policies that should be there according to the law and the Church of England’s own guidance. 

I was shocked when I heard the content of the statement about Mike.  I felt traumatised because I had left the other church because of abuse and safeguarding concerns in a church.  I have been crying a lot since then as I weep for the church and the young people having some affinity with what they have gone through.

Mike was suspended followed by some of the other pastors in the church.  I was surprised to learn of the allegations against Mike.  I was not surprised to learn that people in senior positions in Soul Survivor and the diocese knew of the allegations and did nothing.  This fits with my experience of the Church of England.  Ignore it when it is happening and then try and sweep it under the carpet.  Protect the vicar and the reputation of the Church of  England at all costs.

I have become increasingly concerned about the investigation that is taking place by the safeguarding team in the diocese and the National Safeguarding team.

It is my firm belief that the authorities of my diocese should have no part in the investigation of the historical and current safeguarding issues at Soul Survivor.  I now believe firmly that this investigation should be carried out by an independent body.

I agree wholeheartedly with others that the Church has failed in relation to protecting victims of sexual abuse, spiritual abuse and racial abuse.

I say this not to diminish the serious issues raised in the safeguarding investigation but to point to a pattern of conduct from my diocese in relation to protecting vulnerable people from abuse.  Discriminatory abuse is included in the Bishop’s guidance on safeguarding but it has not been taken seriously locally.  Abuse in church has to stop.  In my experience the diocese is incapable of management and leadership. The Church needs to bring in professional advisers and, if necessary, professional experts to help them sort out the mess they have created.

Well run and funded corporations struggle with these issues so it is inevitable that most clergy will be incapable of dealing with these issues.

Too many people have been left broken by abuse in churches.  I agree with Gavin Drake that the Church of England is not a safe place for vulnerable people. But they don’t care.  Sadly, they are more interested in preserving the institution than protecting the people they are called to serve.

.

Archbishops’ Council faces Challenge

Last Sunday at General Synod in York, something seemed to crack.  The power dynamics that have kept the members of the Church of England hierarchy firmly in charge. shifted significantly to favour voices from the floor in a decisive way.  At a critical moment, it seemed that the rule book of Synod would prevail to suppress the manifest desire of the gathering to hear from the two sacked members of the Independent Safeguarding Board.  On the fourth? attempt, a procedural arrangement was found to allow them to speak.  Jasvinder Sanghera and Steve Reeves who, until two days ago, were members of the ISB, were allowed to present Synod with their perspective on the recent struggles to bring clarity and decency to the whole tarnished record of safeguarding in the Church of England.

 Any examination of the power struggles that have  been going on around the CofE on safeguarding will have noticed that survivors and their supporters have grown in confidence in recent times.  This is in no small way thanks to the ability of the internet to allow communication between supporters of this cause to flow freely and quickly.  The power of the ‘establishment’ to dictate a version of reality that suggests consistent competence and good judgment on the part of senior members of the Church, has been increasingly questioned and challenged.  Finally, the voice of the weak, illustrated in the Gospels by the importunate widow, has broken through decisively to claim the moral and political high ground.  It is quite clear that institutional power as represented by the Archbishops’ Council did not hold the version of truth that the bulk of Synod members wanted to affirm.  They applauded the cause of the abuse survivors and those working for them, especially Jasvinder and Steve.  Attempts by the platform to control the narrative and show the Church of England as a consistently compassionate and competent body seem to have totally failed.

Overall the dynamics of power within the Church of England have proved remarkably stable over the centuries.  Looking at the office of bishop, we see how anyone achieving this rank in the past acquired automatic access to the highest social and legal institutions in the land.  Even the manner of your dress was meant to impress your social inferiors with an aura of high status and power.  The ordinary folk did not disagree with a figure who could claim superior learning, the authority of God and the law of the land on his side.  Whether the advent of women to the status of bishop will do much to change this still powerful dynamic is unclear.  What still seems to be true is that, despite many changes in society, bishops still possess considerable power and influence over others.  Synodical government in the CofE and the later institution of Archbishops’ Council (AC) by Archbishop Carey attempted to inject a more collegiate feel to the office but the influence of each individual bishop is still strong.  Currently, particularly over the past day or two, the role of the AC has come under scrutiny.  Although the membership of this body, which includes lay and clerical members is known, much of what they do and the way decisions are reached is shrouded in mystery, since no minutes are published.  It is also unclear who has the most powerful voice within this Council. The episcopal voice nevertheless appears to be strong. We are also assured that the Council decision to dissolve the ISB was unanimous.  There is however a suggestion, based on some informal remarks of Archbishop Justin, that both Archbishops wanted a pause in putting this decision into effect.  It would be expected that someone on this Council would have realised how utterly devastating to survivors the precipitate dissolution of the Board would prove to be.  The sudden withdrawal of support to dozens of survivors would be a reckless action and probably seriously detrimental to their well-being.  A ‘unanimous’ decision on this point would indicate a lack of heart as well as a political insensitivity to the mood of Synod as well as the wider Church. It is hard to believe that a true representative body containing so many illustrious members of the national Church would be so totally lacking in emotional intelligence and good old fashioned common sense.  If the decision to abolish the ISB was indeed unanimous, then this should give us serious concern for the calibre of those who manage the affairs of the Church at the highest level.

July 2023 will be remembered in the CofE as the time when some of the old patterns of unquestioning obedience to bishops and their power was challenged.  Another momentous day took place in the Winchester diocese two years ago when a group of courageous clergy and laity made it known that they intended to propose a vote of no confidence in their bishop.  For those in stipendiary positions this was a high-risk action.  Bishops have considerable power over the careers and livelihoods of active clergy, and it was possible that some careers would be blighted for ever because an individual had been identified as a ‘troublemaker’. Promotion in the Church seems to work well some of the time, but it is easy to become ‘non-grata’ for taking a strong line or taking up an unpopular cause.  I am also aware of at least two recent cases of the opposite – favouritism.  Two individuals have been preferred or promoted in the middle of serious CDM processes against them.   The question arises:-  Was this individual being promoted to remove them from indiscretions in their old post? Was there a hope that all the CDM problems would thus somehow vanish?  Are sending or receiving bishops in the CofE, by ignoring an unresolved CDM, colluding with what is effectively a corrupt procedure?  I mention these two CDM processes left hanging because they indicate that at least four bishops are using their authority to steamroller the statutory systems of justice so as to favour individuals.  Arbitrary decision making by bishops is likely to be an issue in many parts of the church, but it is only occasionally, as during this past week, that the curtain is pulled back sufficiently for us to see arguably dishonest, even shameful activity among our leaders on the AC. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before laity and clergy routinely question episcopal decisions that are made.  Of course, the bishops may be correct in their judgements but equally they may be wrong.  No one should ever be penalised for not adopting the necessary awe and deference to the fathers and mothers in God.

The speeches given by Jasvinder and Steve this week at York will have considerable impact on the future of church safeguarding.  They will also make it much more difficult for people with power in the church to ignore the needs of survivors and the abused. I suspect that every bishop in the CofE will feel the effect of the fresh air of decency, justice and fair play that were on display at York.  Any future attempt by those In authority to favour the institution over abuse sufferers will find that task far harder.  They will be less inclined to ignore or suppress systems of justice because they can.  Rather they may be inclined to look for the path that indeed puts the survivor at the centre rather than the reputational and financial interests of the Church.  We will see.  At the very least we hope to have a clearer sense of the way that everyone in the Church, from archbishops downwards, can work together with the standards of love, justice, openness and healing right at the top of the agenda.

Wrestling with Jellyfish

       by Janet Fife

Originally published in The Church of England Newspaper and reproduced with permission

Trying to get the Church of England to deal with a complaint of sexual abuse is like wrestling with a jellyfish – you can’t get a grip on it, and the tentacles keep whipping round and stinging you when you least expect it.

The labyrinthine complexity of the Church’s safeguarding structures is partly to blame.  A couple of years ago I put together a safeguarding glossary in an attempt to  help survivors and others  in their dealings with the Church. https://survivingchurch.org/2020/12/15/alphabet-soup-a-glossary-of-safeguarding . It ran to 5 1/2 pages.  If I were to write it now it would be even longer.  The remit of the various church safeguarding bodies is often unclear and they overlap. We may contact our bishop or diocesan safeguarding officer, only to have staff from one of the 5 national safeguarding bodies reply.  We may get no response at all.  Our case can be picked up, dropped, resumed, then dropped again. This would be unacceptable if we were dealing with the gas company – but our complaints concern the most traumatic, painful, and humiliating events of our lives. Each time we speak to someone about the abuse it takes courage and enormous amounts of psychological energy, and at that time we are very vulnerable. And when our complaint is passed from pillar to post within the Church of England’s ‘safeguarding’ system, we are forced to retell our stories over and over.

Reviews, inquiries, and data access requests have revealed lies told by bishops and other personnel. Survivors are sometimes referred to in internal correspondence in denigrating terms, rather than with compassion. It’s no wonder that the Church’s treatment of survivors has been labelled ‘re-abuse’. This would be terrible if the Church were doing it to people who had come for help after being attacked by an atheist.  To treat in this way people who are victims of crimes committed by the Church’s own representatives is unforgiveable.

The damage done is real. Survivors subject to this re-abuse have become depressed and unable to work. Many have lost their faith; some have lost their businesses or homes. A few have taken their own lives. The Church of England is answerable to God for their blood.

The Church’s abusive treatment of survivors has been repeatedly criticised by reviews and inquiries, and by the statutory Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). The latter identified the culture of the Church as of serious concern, contributing to both the poor treatment of complainants and to opportunities for abuse to occur.

The Independent Safeguarding Board was set up in 2021 in response to recommendations by IICSA.  There were concerns from the beginning:  the Board was not independent. It seemed yet another deception practised on vulnerable people by Church authorities. Understandably many survivors, having had such shabby treatment already, didn’t trust the ISB or anyone working for the Church.

Three very highly qualified people were appointed to the ISB. Steve Reeves and Jasvinder Sanghera CBE, the Board’s Survivor Advocate, slowly and painstakingly began to gain the trust of the survivors they were working with.  The Chair, Dr. Maggie Atkinson, proved a different story.  She ‘stepped back’ and then resigned after three complaints of confidential data breaches were upheld by the Information Commissioner.

The two archbishops imposed Meg Munn on the ISB as temporary Chair, without consulting the two existing members or survivors, and in violation of the Board’s terms of reference. Ms Munn had a serious conflict of interest, since she also chaired the National Safeguarding Panel and was a member of the National Safeguarding Steering Group. As Chair of the ISB she would be required to audit her own work on the NSP and NSSG. And in her NSP role she had gained a bad reputation among survivors for her refusal to engage meaningfully with victims, and what was considered her poor response to people in critical situations.

Around 80 survivors of C of E abuse protested Ms. Munn’s appointment; a number requested that their data not be shared with Ms. Munn. Jasvinder and Steve also objected. It was obvious that Ms Munn could not function as Chair of the ISB under these circumstances. But the Archbishops, instead of backtracking, doubled down.  As Jasvinder commented, ‘‘I have to say that in my role I have experienced a disregard for the wishes of the survivor community at every point. I’ve been an advocate for victims/survivors for over three decades and I have never experienced anything like this before.’

Last week the two ISB members who many survivors had begun to trust were sacked, leaving the one survivors didn’t trust to tidy up. Those working with the ISB had their support suddenly withdrawn without notice, and without alternative arrangements being put in place. Everyone who has done C4 safeguarding knows how dangerous that is. There is uncertainty about who has now has access to survivors’ confidential data. What happens to the case reviews that were being conducted by Jasvinder and Steve?  The message tweeted by the ISB on Monday, 26 June didn’t reassure survivors:

‘Morning. We’re back from annual leave and what a week to miss! Understandably there is a lot in the inbox and we will be in touch with everyone who has reached out to us over the next couple of days. Please email contact@independent-safeguarding.org if you need anything.’

The anxiety and psychological damage inflicted on survivors is immense – and it was done knowingly and deliberately by the Archbishops and the Archbishops’ Council.  They should heed Ezekiel’s words: ‘Should not shepherds take care of the flock? You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost.…. This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I am against the shepherds and will hold them accountable for my flock (Ez. 34:1-10 NIV).’

Was the Independent Safeguarding Board ever Independent? The Archbishops Set Out Their Position to a Complainant

The Archbishop of York wrote to a complainant regarding several serious cases of miscarriage and misconduct of process and injustices in safeguarding policy and practice, to which the individual has been repeatedly subjected. The diocese concerned, Lambeth Palace staff and the NST were all culpable of serious errors, misconduct and coverups. Nothing was done. The email from the Archbishop of York is dated 29 March 2022 (with emphasis added in bold):

Dear XXXX

I hope this finds you well, or at least better than you were.

So many letters have been flying around that I have to confess I have possibly read them in the wrong order. However, I do know that is how it seems to you, and I get that.

Neither do I completely understand why referring the serious issues you raise to the Independent Safeguarding Board isn’t the best way of trying to independently understand what has happened and plot a better way forward.

For a long time people have accused the Church of England of marking its own homework. I share that concern. Hence, I have been a champion of independence over scrutiny of safeguarding for many years. Now that this Independent Board exists I believe it presents the best (and maybe the only) way of taking your complaints and concerns seriously, holding the Church of England to account and enabling us, where necessary, to change.

Now I know your concerns are much wider than your own particular case, and of course I am aware of the pain that others have experienced. And as you may or may not recall I have also myself been subject to investigation myself, so I have a very small taste of how this can feel and what it does to you.

You remind me in one of your letters that evil flourishes when good people do nothing. But we are not doing nothing. We are setting up an Independent Board to scrutinise safeguarding in the Church of England and provide a place where grievances, concerns and alleged injustices can be brought.

That may not be enough. But it has barely started, and I believe it needs to be given a chance.

Evil also flourishes when good people stop talking to each other or only communicate with megaphones.

Or where good people who are trying – often under the radar – to bring about change are so stymied and defined by the mistakes of the past that the very real hope that has been worked for a long time is not given an opportunity to work.

I don’t want us to get into that place. And of course I am dismayed  at some of the actions you propose making.  I honestly believe that there is a better way of having your legitimate concerns addressed.

And here I don’t want to put things in writing, not because I fear being quoted – though I note your intention to publish correspondence – but because words on a page don’t have a tone of voice. And I want to communicate to you how dearly I hope to bring change and development to safeguarding, but I also want to say that I truly believe real progress has been made and I see it in the way that we are responding to many survivors at the moment, and I could quote several recent examples where people have thanked me for the care and support they have received. I don’t want this put in jeopardy. I know you don’t either.

So this is where I am now. Archbishop Justin and I are proposing that all your concerns are laid before the Independent Board. That is what it is there for.

Help me understand why this is not an acceptable way forward. Or bear with me, and give this a chance.

With my prayers and very best wishes,

++Stephen

Terms of Reference were duly published by the ISB for independently assessing the grievances in question. However, the Terms of Reference did not engage with the grievances, and specifically excluded them. After objections were raised, both Archbishops reiterated the independence and integrity of the ISB  in a joint letter (June 14th 2022).

Readers are invited to form their own view as to whether or not the Archbishops regarded the ISB as acting independently and competently in complex safeguarding cases? There is no mention of Phase One or Phase Two.

Dear XXXX

Thank you for your email to both of us.

We realise that we don’t have a common view about what ‘independent’ looks like, but it is difficult to see how the Church could be overseen by any body in this area without contributing to its costs. The ISB is still a new body and it is entirely appropriate that this matter is referred to it.

As you know the ISB has drafted the terms of reference for the work it thinks is appropriate to do and, having discussed the matter on several occasions we really do think we need to afford them the space to do that work. It is a source of continued disappointment to us that you don’t have confidence in this and are unwilling to participate. As we understand it, the invitation to be involved remains open and we hope you realise this.

You seem convinced that the dice are loaded against you before the game has begun. We categorically don’t believe this is the case. As Stephen has consistently repeatedly said whenever you have spoken, we both believe there are important questions to be asked and issues to be addressed. It is our belief that the ISB will do this and we have both worked hard towards its establishment and creation. Moreover, they have indicated that they will be able to report by the autumn this year.

Why not then cooperate with the process, let them make their report, and then see where we are? How could this possibly be worse than the situation we are in at the moment? We have been part of a process that has referred this to the ISB. They have said that they will look at this and report back.

So can we invite you again to reconsider your opposition to cooperating with this process and also, if we may, reconsider the language you use to sometimes besmirch those who are actually trying to help you and move this forward. We are amongst those people and so is Maggie Atkinson. Please think about giving [Maggie] the space and time she needs. If it turns out you’re right, and the whole thing is a sham, and the ISB is in the pockets of those who are against you, then that will become clear. We, however, do not believe it for a moment. And, if we are honest, can’t quite understand why you have reached this conclusion, and wonder whether you have considered how others might interpret this?

With every blessing,

The Most Revd & Rt Hon Justin Welby The Most Revd & Rt Hon Stephen Cottrell Archbishop of Canterbury Archbishop of York

Footnotes: This investigation was subsequently removed from the ISB. Maggie Atkinson was suspended and then dismissed for data breaches. Although William Nye cancelled the investigation, no other process of inquiry is yet in place. The Archbishops’ Council have now sacked the ISB.

Jerusalem to Jericho -a Parable about Safeguarding

The telling of stories was one way that Jesus used to communicate truths about God and human behaviour.  Preachers in the church know how, when we read and study these stories, they keep on giving.  There is never only a single interpretation to the parables that we find in the gospels.  There are always new facets of meaning and insight to be extracted as we ponder them over a lifetime.  It is also perhaps legitimate to try to imagine the stories as they might be retold today with another teller and another context.  Here is an example of how one well-known parable might be retold to resonate with some of our contemporary issues.

Travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho is a dangerous business.  I never know whom I might meet when I travel that way.  Sometimes people are after my money and possessions and sometimes they simply want to recruit me into one of their gangs so I can work for them and bring others under gang control.  If I were to be young, there is the added danger of being harassed or worse.  The journey along that way always makes travelling very stressful indeed.  I would rather not do it, but my whole livelihood depends on it.

As a frequent traveller I know others who make the journey regularly.  So far, I have managed not to suffer the humiliation of being stripped naked, wounded and left half dead.  I gather from talking to survivors that not all the bandits on the road are true outlaws.  Some are well respected members of the Samaritan community, and they go in for banditry during their spare time.  One or two of these part-time bandits have been brought to justice. The religious ones among them seem to get off and go free.  When the Romans get involved, which is not very often, then justice seems to happen. They are disowned by their community and get sent to prison.  Others, especially the ‘religious’ ones, are let off on some technicality.  I also hear about individuals within the religious hierarchy who refuse to testify against their chums when they are brought to justice.  The higher up the chain of religious importance you are, the more likely it is that you will be let off.

Recently I have heard about a new initiative designed to help travellers on the Jerusalem-Jericho Road.  The organiser is a Gentile, and he has studied abroad in things like law and philosophy.   This fact alone and his independence of the religious establishment gives us travellers confidence.  If it were organised by anyone linked to the important people in the Samaritan hierarchy, none of us would be able to trust it.  This Gentile is a true independent and will not be compromised by any of the strands of loyalty that have linked some of the bandits to the top people in the Samaritan network.  The main part of the new initiative involves organising safe spaces for travellers in danger.  The organisation has been able to recruit Innkeepers along the way to help in the project.  All of them are being thoroughly vetted to make sure that their inns are safe for vulnerable travellers.  They will be trained in first aid and self-defence skills.  All will have emergency funds to tide over any travellers who have had all their money stolen. 

For a time, the scheme has worked well.  The Priests at the top of the Samaritan network are also gradually being forced to own up to their past connections to the bandits.  Many links, that some of those convicted of terrible crimes have had with people of religious importance in Samaria, have been brought to light. All members of the ruling body have been on safeguarding training.   Now they can recognise the way that abuse of power is not only found in armed robbery but also in the way the Priests conduct their business in everyday religious administration.  Also, they have come to understand how money raising is not the same thing as common extortion.  People are everywhere learning to question and hold to account those who have positions of religious importance.

Recently a terrible event occurred on the Jerusalem Jericho Road which reminded us of the old days of banditry when things were really bad.  A traveller was beaten and left for dead on the roadside.  He was not rendered unconscious so he was able to tell us what happened while he was waiting for help.  Two people passed on the other side of the road.  He recognised both of them as being members of the Samaritan religious leadership.  He knew that each had been on several levels of safeguarding training.  This had been arranged by the Priests for everyone working in and around Samaria.  They will know what to do, the traveller thought.  But no, it seems that helping a wounded traveller is too complicated; there are too many forms to fill in and the witness might get something wrong when they try to apply the high priest regulations to the situation.  Worse still, if too many questions are asked, it may turn out that the bandits are themselves Jews in good standing.  Helping to bring a fellow Samaritan to justice would be betrayal.  Passing by on the other side is the best strategy in this situation.

Fortunately, one of my group, the Survivor Supporters Cabal (SSC), was on hand nearby and quickly helped the wounded traveller to a designated inn where he would be safe.  Here he was able to recover his strength and tell his story.  He was able to describe his attackers as well as those who declined to help him.  Both groups were identifiable, but the religious authorities in Samaria refused to get involved.  But even more serious was the response as a result of all the publicity to this new case.  New pressure has been placed on my network in SSC by the religious establishment.  The religious authorities cannot stop the volunteer workers, but they can undermine the livelihoods of those who work in the inn network project.  Overnight the secretary, who makes sure that the safe inns who help travellers are properly supplied with money and first-aid material, was sacked and the financial support for the project withdrawn.  The Priests of Samaria were not prepared to offer any help to a project which showed them up in a bad light.

The result of this latest outrage and the totally inept response to it is twofold.  Lots of people are asking questions and the top religious authorities are starting to look really shamed and embarrassed.  Because the member of SSC and the inn keeper’s (a gentile) help was so vital and effective, the religious authorities now want to try to hit back.   There is a plan to buy up all the inns that are part of the support network and make sure that they are only run by approved Samaritans in good standing. Only the high priests’ regulations are to be followed when it comes to rescuing wounded travellers.  It is obvious that the authorities do not want to do the necessary work of making sure that the road is kept safe and that those who are wounded get appropriate help.  Perhaps it is because the whole structure of the ruling authorities in Samaria has become so tangled and wrapped up in human power games, that the will to do the necessary work of reform is simply not present.

Team Ministries and Minster Communities in the Church of England.

Throughout my time of ministry in the Anglican Church (1970 -2010) I have been aware of the idea of team ministries.  Back in the 70s, the role of a team vicar, working collaboratively with others in a large multi-cantered parish, seemed a considerable improvement on being a lowly assistant curate.  My own second post, after two years back at university, was somewhere between a team vicar position and a curacy.  How the division of labour worked out in practice is not important here, but I was given enough independent responsibility to be able to lead and build up two small congregations on the edge of the main town parish with minimal interference from the centre.  This allowed me to feel that I was on my way towards a post of complete independence as a ‘proper’ vicar.    This ambition was realised when I took over the charge of a cluster of villages in Herefordshire in 1979.

Looking back over my ministry, I think that I can truthfully say that no clergyperson I have met has ever tried to convince me that working in a team of clergy was a desirable long-term career option.  The assumption that was built into our college training in the 60s was that we were all destined to become independent incumbents in charge of a parish.  Some specially gifted individuals might possibly be aiming for an archdeaconry or a post in a cathedral.  The junior team ministry posts that were available might form a staging post in the early part of a clerical career.  The then legal time limit of five years for team vicar posts was an indication that that would be the maximum time to serve in such a role.

Working in a clerical team did have certain things going for it on paper.  There could be the opportunity to specialise in the areas where one felt gifted or had some special skill.  Then there was the assumption of receiving spiritual or practical support from one or more colleagues and being able to say the daily offices with others.  Being part of a staff team would surely overcome any sense of ministerial loneliness that individual clergy might feel. 

The positives that were held out for team working were often outweighed by the drawbacks of this style of operation.  The five-year rule for team vicars (now abolished) meant that there was seldom any proper continuity in clergy teams.  People were always on the move; someone was always on the point of leaving or settling in. The only person in the team with any sort of employment security was the Team Rector.  When one person in the team, the leader, had an employment security denied to the junior members of the team it made for instability.  Such teams operated in a distinctly hierarchical fashion and it is hard to use the word team to describe the power dynamics normally at work. For all practical purposes the so-called team ministries of the past operated as large parishes with a rector exercising considerable power over several curates/team vicars.  It is hard to claim that these junior vicars were not acting and feeling like traditional curates of old.  Most curates/team vicars, if my experience was anything like typical, could not wait to be given their own distinct area of responsibility and become fully fledged freehold incumbents.

I have to confess that I have not been close to any team ministry situation over the past twenty-five years, so it is possible that Church of England team ministries are flourishing in the 2020s.  What I have been sketching out about the clergy applies to the 80s and 90s, but the literature I have encountered on the dynamics of parishes does not suggest that the old team ministry structure is now held up anywhere as a model of good parish functioning.  One major factor, which was true in my generation of clergy was that, speaking generally, the clergy were neither by training nor temperament good team players.  There were a number of reasons for this. The first of these is that, thanks to the vagaries of background and training, each clergyperson emerged from theological college with a distinctive brand of churchmanship.  Alongside the evangelical clergy there were the catholic and liberal wings.  These latter used to be far more dominant in the 70s and 80s.  The broad labels of churchmanship hid beneath them a large number of subcategories of theological preference.  From a practical point of view, it was easier to allow a distinct churchmanship to be worked out in the setting of a single parish by one clergyperson in charge.  The alternative was having a convinced conservative evangelical working alongside an individual taking his/her guidance from a battered copy of the Anglo-Catholic Ritual Notes and this did not make for an easy or harmonious working environment.  Tastes in the styles of music deemed suitable for Sunday worship could also create serious tensions.  But it was not just the variety of theological outlook that made groups of clergy suspicious and slightly tense in each other’s company.  Another real tension in the clergy of the past, and no doubt today, was the awareness of the avenues of promotion.  Many clergy of my acquaintance spent a lot of time trying to move in the right circles where they might be spotted and marked for preferment to a cathedral or even a bishopric.  Ambition in the Church of England was, and no doubt is, a strong factor which spills out to create an atmosphere of tension in clergy gatherings.

Why do my reflections and last century memories of the institution of team ministries come to be discussed in 2023?  The reason for this is that two English dioceses, Truro and Leicester, seem in my opinion, to be re-inventing and promoting a brand-new version of the old team ministry model.   This model called Mission Community or something similar, intends over a period to place every clergyperson, stipendiary and non, to work in what looks very much like one of the team ministries of the past.   The main difference today is that these Mission Communities will be responsible for large groupings of 20- 30 existing parishes and perhaps up to 35 church buildings.  The similarity is in the way that all the clergy will be required to work collaboratively.  Most of these Mission Communities will be overseen by an experienced stipendiary leader.  He or she will preside over the other clergy (paid and unpaid) and lay people working in large teams.  The Leicester diocese are bringing in this pattern fairly imminently, and the pattern will evolve over a number of years as the posts of currently serving clergy become vacant.  The very first of these mission communities is to be based the parish of Launde and will be known as the Launde Minster Community.  The Community will eventually be responsible for 35 churches and 24 parishes.

Having only worked with a quite different pattern of parish life, I look at these new patterns of ministry with concern.  The lay people in the pew will no longer have an identified individual clergyperson with whom to bond.  The person taking a service on a particular Sunday will depend on the allocation/rota made in the administrator’s office and overseen by the senior stipendiary provided for the minster group.   It goes without saying that, for lay people, this will be experienced as a backward development.  If each member of the team only appears at one particular church every three months or so, this will make it hard for substantial pastoral bonds ever to be formed between the clergy and individual members of the congregation. 

I have looked at all the financial and practical reasons for the decision of Truro and Leicester dioceses to go down this minster model of management of the clergy and parishes.  This is the only arrangement that is currently affordable with the available financial resources.  My reflection here is not trying to suggest that these practical issues can be ignored, but simply to make the point that this model of working the system is unlikely to be attractive to the clergy for similar reasons to their old lack of enthusiasm for the team ministry concept.  If I am right, older clergy still aspire to being pastorally independent in their working environment.  The thought of being part of a minster group is not professionally attractive.  Many of the stipendiary clergy who have been trained in ways that I am familiar with, will still see home visiting and the pastoral care of individuals to be at the very heart of what they were trained for and want to do on a daily basis.  Organising immensely complicated rotas is an activity and skill set that has very little appeal, even with the help of professional secretarial staff.  Whatever is true about the future of the clerical calling, I cannot see that it has become more attractive or rewarding through these current patterns that are being organised for the future.  There may be some who welcome the brave new world of teams and Minster Communities but clearly there are many, both clerical and lay, who are seriously worried about a failure of morale if this pattern becomes more general.  The old traditional pattern of a vicar labouring within a community so that he/she becomes a fixed feature of community life, will no longer be found.  What seems to be on offer appears to fail everyone, congregation, clergy and the communities themselves.

Nostalgia for a past, where pastoral care rather than management was at the top of a parish priest’s agenda, is probably a futile indulgence.  My understanding of human nature would suggest that there are many who look back to the days before Mission Communities when the emphasis was on parish care, and the non-church goers and their needs were, when possible, treated with equal respect with those who attended services.  The care of the ancient buildings fell on the obligation of every resident in the parish and not to the few who attended.  Somehow quite substantial sums of money flowed from the communities themselves to sustain church buildings.   These were regarded with affection even if the use of them was limited for most to times of national rejoicing or mourning.  Goodwill from the community, both for the institution as well as the building could be counted on in my experience.  Will this survive the depersonalisation of church life that the ‘monster’ parish system may create?

Reflections on Mentoring in Church Life

Looking back over 70+ years of reasonably active church membership, I have been reflecting on one feature which has only come into my conscious focus recently.  The feature that I want to mention is that of being accompanied or mentored by others as I have tried to move along in my Christian pilgrimage.  The idea of mentorship that I have in mind at the moment is probably something broader than that which is generally meant by the term.  I am referring to all the people, (most of them now dead) who have in any way accompanied me and allowed the spiritual self to feel nurtured and encouraged in the attempts to practise Christian discipleship.

The individuals who, in a wide sense, mentored us in our faith will almost certainly include a number of people whom we never personally got to know at all.  Even those with whom we had some kind of relationship may never have had any idea that we looked up to them in this way.  Thus, the mentoring relationships we feel we have had with them may have been totally one sided.  For example, we may have felt a strong identification with an author whose work or writing has made us feel alive in a special way.  The vast majority of the authors that have inspired me are now firmly dead but something of their truth remains alive inside me.  We thus often remain deeply attached to books that contain writing which led to new spiritual insight for us, even if they were penned centuries ago. 

The notion of the Christian journey involving a strong sense of being supported by a ‘cloud of witnesses’ is probably familiar to most of us.  Perhaps, like me, we have not given it much attention.  Mentoring in this broad sense is something that is found in many of the privileged conversations that have been afforded to those of us who are clergy.  We have been mentored during our attendance at the bedside of the dying or in the flash of comprehension in the eyes of a confirmation candidate.  The examples I could give go on but I have probably said enough to evoke the wider meaning I am giving here to this word mentoring.  Whatever word we might choose to convey this idea of outside encouragement in the journey of Christian discipleship, it is clearly important to all of us. 

The task of recognising the fact of being mentored in the way I describe, brings us to another, possibly disturbing, thought and question.  Have I at any time in my life been depended on or looked up to as an exemplar of Christian discipleship and encouragement?  If so, have those who looked up to me been served well, or have they felt let down when they learnt more about me as a person?  Those of us who are clergy or who occupy positions of responsibility cannot help having people looking up to us as some sort of of model for what a Christian should look like.  This is why any scandals by clergy or senior leaders in the Church are so incredibly harmful.  Just as the family life of a clergyman comes under scrutiny by his or her parishioners, so every bishop and others at the higher levels in the church carry an enormous responsibility for modelling what a good Christian life should look like.  As a mentor in the broad way I have suggested, a bishop will be obliged to carry on his or her shoulders the projection of maybe thousands of fellow Christians.  In summary they, the Christians in the pews, want to see examples in their leaders of a good Christian life.   They want to model themselves on their leaders and see a living example of what faith actually involves in practice.

The mentoring relationships which allow Christians to support and encourage one another, do not, as we have suggested, necessarily involve an active relationship between people.  A public profile or even a reputation for godliness may be all that is required for the ‘virtual’ mentoring and sharing of Christian encouragement to begin to take place.  The main quality that I believe one Christian wants to see in another is an utterly reliable integrity. Christians are looking for someone else on whom to model themselves, and will be hoping to find, not holy words coming from the mouth, but a consistency of character that allows them to feel they can completely trust the other person.  The exemplar, the person attracting the projection of others, needs to be, in the modern idiom, a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) type.  WYSIWYG people are not perfect; they are flawed like everyone else.  But we look to them for consistency and reliability.  We don’t want to discover that there are areas of toxic behaviour just below the surface.  All the relationships we have, in and outside the Church, are based on trust.  It is deeply upsetting and disturbing when an old friend is found to have been stealing money from his company for years to feed a gambling addiction. The effect on families when one of its members has been involved in creating pornography will always be devastating.  Anyone exposed to revelations of this kind, which involve a betrayal of trust, may likely start to feel paranoid and suspicious of everyone around them.  Trust in other people’s integrity, whether in the Church or outside, is a glue that holds families, congregations and institutions together.   When this glue starts to dissolve or fails to work, the future is bleak for these institutions to hold together or even survive.

In recent times, we have lived though some shocking revelations in public life which have undermined our trust in many institutions in this country.  Stability in our political life, our police forces, the educational institutions and our churches has always been part of the background security we have enjoyed.   Relying on these institutions to play their part in providing this overall stability has been crucial to our sense of well-being and safety.  The current undermining of this sense of security because of failings in these same institutions is a serious matter.   In our political life the absence or decay of trust may lead to solutions that are deemed extreme, like fascism or other totalist ideologies.  When such extreme systems appear in any country, it can take decades for the balanced approach to political life to be re-established.

The current danger that I see potentially damaging, even destroying, the fabric of the Church of England is an emergence of cynicism or lack of trust at every level of church life.  If our bishops for any reason are no longer looked up to as exemplars of honest and godly behaviour, this cynicism may quickly spread to every other level of church life.  If the protection of the privileges, power and resources of the institution becomes the highest value for those who control and manage the Church of England, then I can only see a future of decay and weakness ahead.   Those of us who care for the values of integrity, justice and holiness, the WYSIWYG values of total honesty and love, will continue to stand by them.  On our own we can do little to save our political or religious institutions.  But together, with those others who believe in these values contained in absolute integrity, we may be able to do something to help rebuild true communities.   Finding once again our ability to be strengthened and supported by the absolute Christian integrity of others, we may be playing a part to serve our Church and helping it not only to survive but flourish in the future.