by Martin Sewell

On Thursday morning the Church of England announced that the Chair of the so called “Independent’ Safeguarding Board, Maggie Atkinson had resigned.

 https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2022/5-august/news/uk/independent-safeguarding-chair-steps-back-after-second-data-breach

This latest act in the tragi-comedy which is the ISB, came at the end of a lengthy period of the Chair being “stood back” – in truth suspended by the Church – but even from that time, the Archbishops’ Council was still maintaining the fiction that it was not controlling the very body whose role was in part to hold its parent body to account. The announcement of both the “standing back”, and the resignation were published on the CofE website; this is not insignificant; a truly independent body would have been reporting its own comings and goings.

If you read the terms of the announcement – and we must now be clear that the news management is largely in the hands of the CofE Communications Department – it was all very respectful and amicable; evidently the Chair was leaving partly to spend more time with her family. If you believe this is the top and tail of the story, I have a lovely bridge in New York to sell you – ‘real cheap.”

Ms Atkinson’s resignation comes at the conclusion of a process of contractually “enforced conciliation” – an oxymoron – which was never likely to have a happy outcome after eight months of estrangement seasoned with findings of adverse data mishandling by the Chair.  Survivors were reporting a loss of confidence in her, and one can hardly be surprised that the Survivor Advocate Jasvinder Sanghera took their concerns very seriously. Without survivor confidence the ISB is incapable of functioning properly.

As I ponder the facts and watch the consequences unfold over the next few weeks I am put in mind of the late political interviewer Robin Day who explained late in his career that he usually began an interview with one simple question in his mind.  “Why is this bastard lying to me”?

Perhaps we are obliged to proceed with a little more Synodical decorum, but the sentiment is worth holding onto, as we doubtless hear developments, speculations, explanations and press statements assuring us that this time it will all be different.

Introducing Ms Atkinson to General Synod in February 2022 the Lead Safeguarding Bishop Jonathan Gibbs hailed the ISB as “ fully independent “ – a sentiment the new Chair echoed, Some members of General Synod were already slightly sceptical and were seeking clarifications

Modest attempts were made to encourage the development of key performance indicators and to endow the fledgling body with executive powers to hold bishops to account , but these attempts were swiftly closed down by a wrecking procedural motion; the writing was beginning to appear on the wall. The message was “Some are more committed to independence transparency and accountability than others.”

It has taken a lot of persistent questioning by interested parties to winkle out the truth about the constitutional position of the ISB. It is now conceded that the ISB is not an independent body in law. – indeed , when sued in Court by Dr Martyn Percy,  a defence to this effect was filed in these plain terms! 

What is not widely known is that not only has the then Chair fallen foul of the Office Information Commissioner for data breaches,  but the advertisement for a Business Development Manager for the ISB was referred to the Advertising Standards Authority, which ruled that it was misleading! The position was advertised by the CofE – so how was the position or the purported body “Independent “? The CofE was ruled to have advertised misleadingly to applicants about the role and function of the body to be served.  Tragi-comedy had descended into farce. Luckily the successful candidate was not actually misled: he moved across from being Business Manager to the NST, so that’s alright then

But at least we now know that  ISB was and is wholly and closely controlled in terms of ambit and resource by Archbishops Council. Two very serious questions flow from this?

When the ISB Chair and Lead Bishop were insisting the ISB was “fully independent” they may well have been speaking in good faith, but did nobody know this was false or erroneous? Perhaps one can accept that a bona fide error was made but this raises the equally concerning issue of lack of competence. Which is it? 

Attempts to engage the Audit Committee in a clarifying investigation were resisted by the Archbishops at the last Synod. The Chair of the Audit Committee told Synod that oversight of the ISB was not within her committee’s scope of activity, but we now know that this too was mistaken. A letter from the Audit Committee Chair correcting that error was sent to the Synod Member who raised the question, but the correction has yet to be circulated to all Synod members.

So now we know that the Audit Committee can look into these matters and it needs to do so as a matter of urgency.

The appointment  of Ms Atkinson’s temporary replacement brings additional important issues to light .The former MP Meg Munn  who is taking over, currently numbers amongst her career portfolio of offices, that of member of the National Safeguarding Steering Group  and Chair of the National Safeguarding Panel. Whether she and /or either of those bodies played any part in the original conceptualisation of the ISB or the current shenanigans is unclear. So much is and will remain unclear; General Synod has not been allowed to debate these problems and may not be in July.

One might have assumed that the interim role would have fallen to the Survivor Advocate who has been the de facto voice of the body, since Ms Atkinson has been “stepped back”. However, Jasvinder Sanghera appears to have been nudged aside, with Ms Munn imposed upon her and her colleague Steve Reeves without any notice, still less consultation, neither were survivors consulted.

One might be critical of the slow pace of change, and even perhaps of the naivety of the ISB members; sometimes they appeared to be talking a better game than they delivered within the complex and tangled institution that is the CofE.

What cannot be denied however is that Ms Sanghera and Mr Reeves have brought bona fides to their task and devoted a lot of time to talking to Survivors, gaining their confidence. The effects of the imposition of the Archbishops’ Council ‘s choice of Chair  into this difficult situation without any consultation with the very group that has been abused and ignored by the Church for far too long, is yet another example of the arrogance of power that taints so much that the Church does in this area.

Already some survivors have told me that they have notified Ms Sanghera that they do not consent to their data being shared with Ms Munn. This hoists the Archbishops’ Council with its own petard. If the ISB is not a body in law, and if Ms Munn joins the other two members with self-employed contractor status only, in the absence of data sharing consents from each survivor individually, Ms Munn cannot be admitted to the very data she should have, in order to perform the tasks required. She cannot be passported into the office if the ISB has no formal identity, though she can, of course chair meetings.  Having said that, those meetings have all the makings of being tense affairs given the circumstances and suspicions described above.

Of course, the cynic might think that this is intended to provoke a crisis and/or resignations leaving the field free for a second go at creating an ISB Mark II

This brings us back to our old friends “Transparency and Accountability”. Leaving aside how Ms Munn got to this position, how can she be contracted in one capacity to chair the National Safeguarding Panel – (which surely have some directive roles) whilst simultaneously chairing the very body that will evaluate the complaints from those suffering the allegedly unsound fruits of her labours elsewhere in the building?. Yet again one is driven to the conclusion that the Church of England cannot see a conflict of interest it does not like.

Worse still, if you were a new survivor thinking of bringing your issues to this organisation when others have testified to IICSA that the wished they had never done so, would you seriously entrust your safety and wellbeing to an organisation in this degree of disarray? I would not.

I was about ten years old when my father bought the autobiographical book by C.S.Lewis, Surprised by Joy.  I remember this book appearing. My father, an Anglican parish priest, did not buy many books in the 50s, so this purchase was a significant event.  I was attracted to looking at the book for two reasons.  First of all I was intrigued by the title. I wondered what surprise and joy had to do with each other. Secondly, it was written by the same author who was responsible for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.  My godfather, the proprietor of the Church Times, had sent me a copy of this latter book (alas no longer in my possession!) for Christmas 1950.  It was, I believe, a review copy.  The newspaper had received it, but it had not been sent out to any of their contributors.  The text of the book had initially stretched my reading ability but, by 1955, I would have been a fully paid-up member of the Friends of Narnia, if such an organisation had existed.  The Narnia books fed the imagination of many children such as myself, and a passionate immersion in the world of witches, talking beavers and fauns was an important part of my emotional and religious formation. 

At the age of ten my quick survey of the new book that my father had bought, told me that this was not written for Narnia addicts.   But the thing that did remain in my memory was, as I have indicated, the title.  Over the years it has been helpful to ponder these words and try to make sense of them within my own experience. The two key words are not naturally linked together, but they are brought together by Lewis into a kind of partnership.  My child brain recognised an element of paradox even though it was obviously beyond my ability to articulate anything like that at that time.  It took years of maturing reflection to begin to make sense of these words.

The word surprise contains within it a suggestion of something that is new or unexpected.   Lewis was presumably telling his audience that his discovery of Christianity was sudden and unlooked for.  I have no ability to unlock this particular puzzle of what the author actually meant by using the words in his title, as the copy my father had has long since vanished and I have not read it subsequently.  My focus is, not on what Lewis himself might have meant, but how the actual words of his carefully chosen title impacted on a young Christian trying to make sense of faith.

One of the challenges for a child growing up in the Christian faith is to find sufficient space for the individual variation of spiritual awareness.  From around the age of seven at a very religious boarding school, I became aware of the fact that Christian adults were very anxious that children should practise a correct version of the faith.  I was learning from my headmaster and his wife a type of Christianity that worked within strictly controlled parameters.  My exposure to this narrow didactic evangelical teaching only lasted for two school terms and in the autumn term of 1953, I exchanged the world of Scripture Union and frequent extempore prayer for the quite different environment of a cathedral choir school.  One illustrative model to describe the change is the contrast between a fast-flowing narrow stream to being carried along by a slow-moving river.  There was at the choir school a far greater breadth in the way the Christian faith was taught and received.  The access to church music and magnificent medieval architecture created a form of learning, which was less instruction than an inculcation into a broad culture stretching back through the centuries.  The constant access to beauty in music and architecture spoke to layers of our being in ways that went beyond words.  In short, we were learning to practise faith in a context that took seriously every part of our being.   The Christian faith was for most of us a language, an experience that reached into mind, emotion, heart and soul.

Thanks to this privileged Christian formation I received, one which focused on a breadth of understanding and human flourishing rather than to narrow definitions of truth, I found later that I had the intellectual and spiritual tools to resist the authoritarian fundamentalisms which are offered to young people.  I was always aware that Christian truth was able to cross numerous boundaries of culture, language and ethnicity that exist across the world.  Any attempt to define Christian experience in terms of a single culture seemed an insult to the sheer exuberant variety of human cultures that have appeared over the centuries and across the world.  To take one topical example, is it likely or probable that one manifestation of human relationships be privileged above all others?  Is it realistic to believe that the last word on human patterns of living and relationships has been said?  To return to our C.S.Lewis book title, where is the surprise in this kind of faith?   Another word which suggests surprise is the word newness.  I have had cause more than once in my blog reflections to refer to the words ascribed to the risen Christ, ‘Behold I make all things new’.  Newness suggests the unexpected and the unforeseen.  It certainly keeps us on our toes when we believe that the newness of God may break into our lives at any moment.     

The early Fathers of the Church, notably Gregory of Nyssa, were very struck by the passage from Exodus where Moses held communion with God in a cloud.  The cloud was for these writers a highly suggestive analogy to describe the fact that God has no shape or form.  To have any communication with God, one has to use the language of mystery and unknowability.  In one passage an evocative description of the divine mystery was held to be like travelling from ‘glory to glory’.   This is a way of saying that the Christian journey is to be understood as an endless movement into the depths of God’s being.  Words like unknowability, depth and inexpressibility all litter the language of mystical discourse.   Our C.S.Lewis word, surprise, fits well into this type of discourse and way of speaking.  It also seems very far from some forms of conservative Christian discourse which put a high (too high?) premium on exact orthodox definitions of the language that are required to be used to convey our understanding of God.

The second main word in C.S.Lewis’s book title, joy, is another word that lends itself to reflection.  Among the many things that can be said about joy is that it describes the feeling when something or someone is received after a long period of waiting.  Joy is felt by parents when they hold a loved infant for the first time.  Joy is felt when people are reunited after a long time apart.  There is also the biblical hint that joy is at the heart of whatever precisely is encountered when we die.  The master who left his servants in charge when going abroad in Matthew 25, tells them to use his money well.  Those who succeed in the set task are invited to ‘enter into the joy of thy lord’.  The forms of joy that are available to us on this earth are suggestive of the fact that the values contained in them, such as reconciliation, peace and beauty, find their fulfilment in the world beyond.  In short, the word joy sums up the Christian hope of what ‘God has prepared for those who love him.’   What we can see here does not compare with the splendour of what is to come, but it contains a sufficient hint to allow us to live with great hope and anticipation.

There are not many book titles I know that hint at an understanding of the Christian faith so thoroughly attractive as this.  Having at an early age brought these two words together in my understanding, I was never tempted by other versions of faith which, even as a child, I recognised as involving a measure of coercion and fear.  The C.S.Lewis version of the Christian faith was always pointing me to a God I could believe in, a God who draws us to himself.  The God I believe in is one to whom we say, in the words of St Augustine, ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.’ 

There are words in English that can have, according to their context, a positive or negative meaning.  We can refer to a person with strong convictions in a positive way; alternatively, the word conviction implies that the individual is somehow deluded and worthy of our pity.  Conviction may be an attachment to the latest conspiracy theory or perhaps to a deeply held spiritual insight.  The second use of the word is one that attracts approval, something which is not true of the first. The context in the way a word like this is used helps us to know which way we are expected to understand it.   

A second word with potentially positive and negative connotations is the word ‘ambition’.  Ambition is frequently thought of in a positive way.  A young person setting out on a career is expected to be ambitious.  The implication is that he/she will use their skills in their chosen profession to achieve promotion, increased pay, and greater responsibility.   We congratulate the hospital registrar we know who is raised to be a consultant.    The Army captain who becomes a major also attracts our congratulations.  In hierarchical systems with clearly defined promotion scales, the mechanism of rising through the ranks is well set out.  Some make it to the top of their profession, while many others languish in a much lowlier role.   Sometimes the ‘failures’ leave the hierarchical system they are in altogether, to find a different job in which they feel that they can go up a new hierarchical ladder.  

Climbing hierarchies in the workplace is a normal part of life and we do not give it a great deal of thought.  But the existence of a motivation or ambition, which energises the individual to do what is necessary to climb the ladder of promotion, is worth thinking about.  What binds together every example of ambition I can think of, is that the ambitious person is out to achieve power.   Such power is not in itself bad or good, but it has the potential to be either.  When we list all the positive examples of personal power available to the ambitious person, there are many that are good.  Power allows one’s personal contribution in an organisation to be heard more readily.  Being taken more seriously by others at your workplace is gratifying.  There are, of course, material benefits in promotion – higher salary, bigger house and maybe opportunities for travel.  Ambition allows one to enjoy the perks of status and prestige.

The mention of prestige and status brings us to the point when positive and negative aspects of ambition begin to interact.  The enjoyment of being important can become something that can subtly change the individual.  Readers of this blog will be used to my mention of narcissistic issues.  The classic case of a narcissistic disorder is found when a individual, deprived of the right kind of attention as a small child, finds ways of extracting attention as an adult from those around them.  Being important in an institution becomes not just enjoyable, but we can find here a kind of addiction to receiving flattery and adulation from those lower in a hierarchy.  Ambition has allowed the individual to reach the dangerous and toxic point where they sustain ‘narcissistic feeding’ at the expense of others in the organisation who have less power.

We have now arrived at the point where we can see ambition being used, on occasion, as a means to obtain the kind of power that helps the individual assuage emotional wounds stemming from childhood traumas.  The ambition that that may have started off well has now become something potentially harmful and toxic.  Bullies in a hierarchical institution achieve their gratification and self-soothing because their ambition has placed them in a setting where they can do so.  At some point a positive responsible ambition has been twisted into something negative.  The positives of good ambition have been changed to become the negatives of self-gratification and narcissistic exploitation of others.

This reflection brings me into a consideration of ambition in the Church and especially in our own C/E.  We might begin by asking ourselves whether hierarchical ambition should ever have any part to play in an institution founded by Jesus.  Whether good or bad, we see very quickly that ambition is far from absent in the Church as we know it.  As a young curate in the 70s, I was ambitious, but not to become a bishop or archdeacon. My ambition was to rise above the status of a curate to gain some control over my living conditions and unsympathetic treatment by training incumbents.  In my first curacy my living accommodation was separated from another flat by a piece of hardboard.  I found myself forced to sleep between 9 and 11am every day to make up for lost sleep caused by wailing infants downstairs.  My second curacy required me to live in the Vicarage with no access to a private phone.   My ambition was to rise above these serious limitations to my well-being.   Eventually I did achieve an ambition to be a parish priest and along the way I managed to develop other specialist ministries in ecumenism and healing.

Having spent over forty years in the parochial ministry, I have been able to observe individuals among the clergy caught up in what we might describe as an ‘ambition-bug’.  Their behaviour and their anxiety to be known in the right places and by the right people seemed obvious.  These efforts seldom achieved their aim.   My own good fortune was to recognise that I had no ambitions to climb any ladder of clerical ambition so that such aspirations did not affect me.  What are the motivations for clergy to aspire for preferment and additional responsibility?  Among the positive motivations for seeking to be promoted in the Church are a recognition that one actually has the right gifts for a particular role.  Gifts of music or liturgical administration might funnel some off into cathedral work. Some individuals also have to exercise gifts of administration as archdeacons or bishops.  But, recognising this, we cannot ignore the words of Jesus on the topic of ambition and promotion among his disciples.  He stated that whoever wants to be the greatest among you must learn to copy him and be the servant of all.  In actual practice we know how difficult it is for bishops to spend much time with individuals.  One wonders whether being tied up with endless structures and committees is sometimes a deliberate ploy by senior clergy to avoid spending time with actual people.  The time that I was given to speak to a bishop, one to one, over my forty years of active ministry, amounts to less than three hours. Today, the new flurry over safeguarding has seen our diocesan bishops presiding over ever more complex patterns of administration with the oversight of safeguarding experts.  One thing that bishops do not appear to do is to spend more time with abuse survivors, hearing their story and weeping with them in their pain.    It is almost as if the safeguarding juggernaut of today is designed to be a means to separate the reality of people in pain from those who have successfully climbed the ladder of promotion.  Is ambition in the Church an indirect way for chosen clergy to escape the brutal reality of people’s pain? 

I mentioned earlier that ambition in the church and elsewhere seldom ends up with a happily ever after scenario.  Two things mean that any church dignitary, whether bishop, archdeacon or cathedral dean, is likely to face some highly difficult situations directly related to survivors of abuse of various kinds.  There is no doubt that the church structures are being ‘stress-tested’ by all the revelations of abuse and bullying that are current in the church today.  Now that much of the traditional deference towards bishops and others has been stripped away, the nakedness and fallibility of dignitaries is exposed to view.  In the past dozen or so years, the ubiquity of the internet has made it impossible to hide from the past.  Access to newspapers, official reports with their findings and recommendations, is available to all.   The second thing that has started to catch up with the Church is the way that serious training for pastoral care among clergy seems less of a priority than it used to be.  Shorter part-time courses of training must make it more difficult for the educators of the clergy to impart the pastoral wisdom that was possible in the age of universal residential training.  Some of the crass statements or missteps coming from bishops and others show a chronic failure of sensitivity and human insight.  The expression ‘trauma-informed’ has entered the safeguarding discourse recently.  Few of those in the hierarchy or the among the safeguarding establishment seem to have much idea of what it means.  In the absence or failure of an adequate pastoral response to survivors, the damage encountered by them is experienced and described quite simply as institutional re-abuse.

Clergy within the CofE who feel an ambition to take on roles among the higher ranks of clergy follow that path with a health-warning.  There appear to be at present many among the top tiers of the hierarchy who are stressed to the point of burn-out.  At what point will the burden of such office be seen, in some places, to be so universally and clearly toxic, that candidates will simply refuse to be considered?  I have already suggested that the highly prestigious post of Bishop of Winchester will be very difficult to fill.  The pressures on the holder of that post will be massive.  The same thing goes for the post of Sub-Dean of Christ Church.  The powers that be may believe that, in spite of all the malfeasance and thorough nastiness circulating around the College, there are willing and suitable candidates available.  That assumption remains to be tested. When the path of ambition in the Church of England is shown up to be a road with impossible obstacles to be negotiated, something drastic will need to change in the way the whole Church is organised.

It is some months since Surviving Church last looked at the ongoing saga of Christ Church in Oxford.  Over the past few days, we have heard, without a great deal of surprise, that the College and the Diocese have appointed Canon Professor Sarah Foot to the post of Dean vacated by Martyn Percy.  The question about whether Canon Foot will make a good Dean is not a topic I feel qualified to comment on.  But there are some observations about this appointment to be made.   One major challenge for the new Dean exists which will define her legacy.  Is she able to help heal the entire institution, Cathedral and College, from the bitter divisions of the last five years of conflict?

Canon Foot was ordained deacon and priest in 2017. Once ordained her former lay canon status changed to become that of residentiary canon of the Cathedral.  Her path to ordination had by no means been conventional or straightforward.   Indeed, it took place against the background of some difficult issues in her private life.  She certainly needed the backing of Dean Percy.  Shortly afterwards, the cordial relationship that had existed between the two went downhill, and Canon Foot became a leading figure in the cabal seeking to remove the Dean.  This campaign became both personal and deeply unpleasant.  Apart from attempting to spread salacious rumours around Oxford in an attempt to smear the Dean, this group laid a series of 27 formal accusations against him before a retired High Court judge, Andrew Smith.  He held a tribunal in 2018.  All the accusations were dismissed one by one, but the campaign to discredit the Dean continued.  Canon Foot had been deeply involved in the tribunal and during it acted as a prosecution witness for the College.   The underlying reasons for the fracture between the Dean and this cabal of senior staff in the College (and canons at the Cathedral) have never been fully explained.  Clearly, to judge by the enormous amount of energy that was expended on this campaign, and which incurred the expenditure of vast amounts of money (£7m), there was a great deal of malice flowing around the College.  Whether it was politically wise to hand over the running of a college to a highly partisan participant in a dispute is a debatable topic.  The powers that be were clearly keen to fill the post as quickly as possible.  It would also have been well-nigh impossible to appoint an outsider with speed when there are so many unresolved tensions from the recent past.  Whatever the wisdom or otherwise of this appointment, there is plenty of work for a new Dean to do, not least coping with the fractured relationships.   This task will be difficult as, both within Christ Church and Oxford University as a whole, the new Dean is well-known for having taken a strongly partisan stance in the dispute.   Probably the best we can say about the appointment is that it makes sense for an institution going through a period of trauma and transition to act this way after a time of extreme turbulence.    Nevertheless, after these storms, the acting captain of the ship will still need a great deal of skill to bring the battered vessel into calmer waters.  At that point, fresh leadership will be required – a person of calibre, but well outside the miasma of recent politics at the College.

Returning to one piece of information in the public domain, concerning the division between Christ Church and its Dean, we may mention the huge financial and reputational cost of the dispute.  Together with the other ‘plotters’ on the Governing Body, Canon Foot approved the extraordinary expenditure of £7m in the attempts to remove the former Dean.  How such a huge amount of money was needed for the task is unclear, but the income of various law firms and reputation managers have benefitted considerably.  The costs to the College in terms of its reputation has also been massive.  Numerous alumni who might have contributed to the College have withdrawn their donations and potential bequests are being withheld.  No exact figures are available, but I have seen the total figure of a £20 million loss mentioned.

The enquiry into the Christ Church statutes and systems of governance by Dominic Grieve KC has begun.  No doubt the difficult underlying issue of whether the Dean of Christ Church should always be an ordained Anglican priest will, at some point, be faced.  Canon Foot appears to see herself as an interim holder of the post, pending any possible major changes to the constitution of the College that may be recommended by the different enquiries. At this moment it does make sense to appoint an available in-house candidate who meets the current requirements.  I have no doubt that Canon Foot will have made some careful assessment of the existing and potential problems of the College/Cathedral.  The challenges are enormous.   She will be carrying the additional burden of having been identified firmly with one group of members of the Governing Body and it remains to be seen if she can ever fulfil the role of being a unifying figure.   

Another crisis awaits the new Dean.  At the Cathedral the clergy are now severely depleted since the departure of the Sub-Dean at the end of last year.  A replacement Sub-Dean is urgently needed, but it is unclear whether the post will be attractive to able applicants. The legacy of tension at the College and Cathedral does not suddenly disappear.  Richard Peers, the Sub-Dean left Oxford after barely two years in post with some unresolved disciplinary issues hanging over him.  These were in connection with his alleged activities seeking to destroy the Dean.  All the bishops in the Church in Wales knew about the cloud hanging over their new Dean of Llandaff, yet this appointment was still allowed to go ahead.  Promoting individuals is one ploy that the Church of England uses to resolve disciplinary problems.   We certainly hope to see some clearing of the air at Oxford Cathedral before new staff are appointed there.  

We have already, in this blog post, identified one major problem for Canon Foot as the new Dean. Any belief that her predecessor deserved the three-year period of persecution that he suffered, even though Judge Andrew Smith found him innocent of all 27 charges brought against him, will make it hard to lead the College into a new stage in its history.  Still less will she be seen as a figure of reconciliation. It is hard to see how she will manage to dissipate the toxicity of the past. The atmosphere at Christ Church will likely remain poisonous for some time to come and people will continue to choke on the fumes of the hatreds that were stirred up only a short time ago.  It is almost appropriate to speak of a need for spiritual deliverance.

What of the Diocese of Oxford?  From the beginning of the dispute, the Bishop of Oxford has not been public with any support for the Dean of his Cathedral as a torrent of persecution and attack enveloped him.  Whatever the reason for an apparent animus, it was quite evident to anyone with pastoral awareness that it was an almost impossible task for the Dean to hold out against so much pressure coming from College, Cathedral, and diocese simultaneously.  Considerable goodwill for Dean Percy existed among many diocesan clergy.  It must have created some difficulty for these clergy who wanted to maintain a loyalty to Bishop and Dean at the same time.  The referral of Dean Percy to the National Safeguarding Team over the early months of 2020, over alleged failures of safeguarding, turned out to be a completely fabricated event.   In the end, Bishop Gibbs, the Lead Bishop for Safeguarding, called out this church-led act of persecution.  The accusations were withdrawn, and the six-month suspension came to an end.  After the previous long period of suspension over accusations, which the high court judge Andrew Smith had examined and thrown out, one might have hoped that the NST could have acted with greater alacrity.  Certainly, the Diocese of Oxford did little to help deliver justice in this case.

In this rapid recap of disastrous events at Christ Church and in the Cathedral and Diocese of Oxford, we can see how it was, perhaps, inevitable that a ‘safe’ candidate, such as Canon Foot, would be appointed.  Because there was a certain inevitability that a safe predictable insider would take on the role, it is important that we should look beyond Canon Foot and see whether we can discern the outlines of a new style College/Cathedral/Diocese partnership evolving in Oxford.  Can we see an individual emerging with all the necessary skills existing in the same person?  The answer to my rhetorical question is that I cannot foresee anyone with this needed set of qualities appearing for at least fifty years.  Anglican clergy with the necessary political and academic skills are thin on the ground and a lot of water must flow under the bridge so that the events of the recent past can be forgotten.  In my view, a lay appointment is an all but inevitable recommendation of the Dominic Grieve report.  In the meantime, while Canon Foot is unlikely to pursue a reform agenda, she will be forced to keep the old extravagance of the Governors firmly kept in check.  The Charity Commission have indicated that they still taking a close interest in the governance and expenditure of the College.  Dominic Grieve’s forthcoming report will also, as with the CC, not tolerate sloppy systems of governance in the future.  In short, the Percy ‘affair’ is potentially forcing on the College a series of reforming protocols.  These will put a strong check on the privileged entitlement culture formerly found at Christ Church.  Whatever else Dean Percy achieved, his tenure as Dean seems to have cracked open a closed system which had operated without proper challenge or scrutiny.  The genie is out of the bottle and no one can return it even though, for the time being, a devoted member of the old guard has taken over the reins.  Far from being an enviable position to find herself in, we see many intolerable stresses being placed on the new Dean of Christ Church.  The new Dean will be facing, not an intransigent Governing Body, but the full force of state-run regulatory bodies which have no time or patience for poorly managed educational establishments.

 The CofE has also promised some kind of internal enquiry over the Church missteps of the past five years in Oxford.  It still must resolve various CDMs and official complaints.  Both Cathedral and College need to know what has gone wrong.  It is only in that way that a new broom can come in and do the equivalent of cleaning the Augean Stables.  One penalty for failing to understand what has gone wrong is that the calibre of future members of staff, prepared to enter such a toxic unhealed setting, will be low.  Christ Church may appear to be the most beautiful setting for clergy and academics to work together in the country.  But, unless the inner causes of conflict that have been widely visible since 2017 are understood and exorcised, the rewards available to those working there will be mixed with intolerable levels of stress which no one should have to endure.

In recent days and weeks, those of us who take an interest in safeguarding concerns in the Church of England have noticed a level of confusion and incoherence in this area among the senior levels of church management.  The latest misstep on the part of our church leaders is that surrounding the appointment of David Urquhart, the former Bishop of Birmingham to the role of Bishop to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York (BACY).  This appointment caused a negative reaction among some survivor groups. Bishop Urquhart has been publicly named in at least two cases of serious failure over safeguarding cases.  Here it is not necessary to dwell on these well-rehearsed lapses or failures of judgment on his part.  Rather we question the wisdom of allowing any individual who has so evidently attracted serious criticisms to his name to be, once again, prominent on the stage of national church decision making.

On this occasion Lambeth Palace (LP) has responded to criticisms by announcing that the safeguarding part of the post of BACY is to be handed to Ijeoma Ajibade, Chief of Staff at Lambeth Palace. This does not, in fact, sound like a clarification but more like a panic response or reaction to the criticism.  No one has indicated that this holder of the post of Chief of Staff has any qualifications or experience in the safeguarding field. In fact of the three key people who oversee the CofE’s efforts in this arena, the head of the NST, the Lead Bishop and now the Archbishops’ Chief of Staff, each may have varying degrees of professional experience and backgrounds relevant to their roles. However, the task of applying these to the complex structure of the CofE and the centres of real power in the Church is extremely challenging for newcomers. Whether any of them have the authority to effect necessary change is something that can by no means taken for granted.  Is LP continuing with its delusion that as long as there is someone with the job title of safeguarding, then everything will come out all right?  In view of the countless ways that things can go wrong, that is a short-sighted assumption to make.

 When the auditors of SCIE were writing their report last year, they were clearly assuming that the bishop replacing Emma Ineson (the former BACY) would have her safeguarding brief as part of their job-description.  LP (and its lawyers!) also had access to the report for several months beforehand.  No one at the review stage of the report saw fit to correct this perfectly reasonable assumption on the part of SCIE.  Questions arise about how this apparent panic response and muddle ever arose.  Had senior people at the Palace and Church House simply forgotten about the Urquhart’s safeguarding failures or is this yet another example of senior figures in the CofE failing to grasp the importance of understanding safeguarding from the survivors’ perspective?  The SCIE report, as we saw, drew attention to a serious failure of empathy for survivors at LP.  Perhaps this is just a further example of such insensitivity in operation. The SCIE report also identified bullying and fear among the junior staff and a reticence for taking unwelcome news ‘upstairs’.

Meanwhile further confusion continues at the Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB).  We have to remember that this group received significant blanking from General Synod in February.  The controllers of the agenda at Synod did not allow even the existence of the group to be mentioned in the published agenda.  This blanking does not allow us to know what the ISB thinks it has achieved in the first year of its existence.  The three individuals chosen to make up the ISB all bring significant life-experience to their roles.. But we still do not yet have a sense of what they feel able to do, in supporting and critiquing safeguarding work across the CofE. It is still hard to discern what they expect to achieve and how their work dovetails into all the other safeguarding initiatives being undertaken at present. They also do not seem to know whether the powers that be in the Church will allow them to be effective.  Several major stumbling blocks stand in their way.  One is, as we have already reported, the stepping back of the Chair, Maggie Atkinson. This took place months ago, and we had expected that some kind of resolution to this problem might have been achieved by now.  It is hard to see how the rest of the Board can achieve very much in the light of this major impediment.  It is an absurd situation. A second factor standing in the way of being an effective operation is that the two remaining active members are employed part-time.  Jasvinda Sangera, the survivors’ advocate, is said to be employed by the Archbishops’ Council for one or two days a week.  This may provide sufficient time to write reports, but it will not be sufficient for the task of finding survivors and creating robust lines of communication with them.  Nor will it allow them to undertake major investigations or detailed case work.  There seems to be an acceptance on the part of the remaining ISB members that their capacity to perform the tasks that the Archbishops’ Council might hand to them is beyond their resources, manpower and financial. Such candour on their part is important and welcome.

The recent SCIE report about LP provoked a vigorous response from Ms Sangera of the ISB and this was published on their website.  In it she first calls for ‘a less complicated system so that survivors have clear referral pathways supported by a team.’  Clearly, she has met a number of survivors and this is also reflected in her second demand.  She knows all about delay and ignored pleas for this group, since these are constantly encountered.  She asks those who receive such pleas for help to provide ‘actions in good time that provide updates and assurances to those they serve in safeguarding’.   All this is summed up by a plea from Ms Sangera that the church authorities ‘should prioritise arrangements for identifying and responding to complaints about safeguarding received by the Palace, which this report states is hampered by the lack of a comprehensive complaints system’.

Clearly Ms Sangera has some good ideas for safeguarding and many survivors might feel heartened by the thought that there is an apparently independent voice articulating some of their needs.  She also appears to have a good grasp of the way that church structures are frequently ineffective in meeting the real needs of survivors.  But the serious problems of delivery remain.  One we have already mentioned, the part-time commitment of the ISB members and its depleted strength.  The other complaint that I have heard is that, even after a year of operation, the ISB has failed to become widely known.  Much communication these days takes place on Twitter and Facebook.  The ISB profile on Twitter is virtually non-existent.  Any campaigning organisation in 2023 should be working hard to identify followers and activists in the field.  Even though the ISB has professional and paid PR support, there seems to be minimal online activity and the website is not easy to find. The website, when you find it, contains very little information of help to survivors.   Surely a well-funded organisation like the ISB can devise ways of creating interest in its work and having a strong online presence?

The safeguarding world of the CofE is not, as far as one can see, in good health at present.  The bureaucracy at the centre, whether in Church House or LP does not communicate a loving or empathetic face to survivors.  The difficulty that these official structures have in showing compassion and care, has an unfortunate result.  When individuals, who actually do possess human compassion, work within these structures, they can quickly become disillusioned.  These unresponsive structures evidently sap the morale of staff every bit as much as through their dealing with angry and frustrated survivors.

One by one people of empathy seem to be squeezed out of these bureaucratic systems because they are often, quite simply, fairly toxic environments to work in.  We have seen the high turnover of staff at the NST, and it is clear from the published material from the ISB, that its individual members have not found it easy to find their way within the total system.  The CofE is, like most other organisations, instinctively programmed to put its own its own survival and existence as the highest value.  The demands of safeguarding are seen by many to attack the two things that are held to be vital to the CofE’s survival – its assets and reputation.  The task of dealing justly and honourably with survivors may assist with the integrity of the Church, but any substantial alignment with honesty and just dealing is seen by some to undermine the wider institution in terms of its material well-being and institutional power.

We have begun to see how some of the serious reputational issues that the Church is currently facing may be a direct consequence of failings in the safeguarding sphere.  Getting things right in this area is thoroughly hard work and there are signs of weariness and loss of stamina among many involved clergy and lay-people.  They dread hearing the word safeguarding in any church context.  Even though many people inside the CofE do not want to hear anything further about protecting the vulnerable, any further failings in this area will weaken and undermine the structure of the whole Church.  We need to hear the survivors; we need the reconcilers and healers. In short we need to find again the values of integrity, honesty and justice in our Church.  Whenever we lose sight of these things, we are in danger of seeing the Church itself disappear in the course of one or two generations.  The writing is on the wall when we suddenly discover that men and women of competence and integrity no longer want to seek leadership roles in what has started to become a discredited institution.  It is alarming that none of the Diocesan bishops is prepared to step forward and shoulder the responsibility of Lead Bishop for Safeguarding. They fear, as I tried to explain in the last blog post, being swallowed up by dishonesty and even corruption because they detect that integrity, honesty and justice no longer really matter in the Church of England.

One of the words that is at the forefront of Christian observance during Lent is self-examination.  This implies that a good Christian should give time to trawl through memory and awareness to discover whether his/her behaviour has worsened or improved over the previous weeks and months.  There is a strong emphasis in much Christian writing on personal responsibility for one’s sin and the need to seek forgiveness.  Some do this kind of self-examination alone, while others seek out another Christian to act as a mentor/confessor.  Whichever method of self-scrutiny is adopted, there is the hope that we are somehow moving towards a goal of knowing ourselves better under God, and becoming more righteous people.  The Christian pilgrimage should always involve this kind of effort to penetrate through the fog of self-deceit and self-delusion of which we are all guilty.

As a child I was required to learn by heart a large section of the Prayer Book Catechism, especially the section on the duty towards God and neighbour.   The words about keeping our hands ‘from picking and stealing’ and keeping ‘my body in temperance, soberness and chastity’ made quite an impression.  What remains in me of this style of instruction is a memory that the Christian journey seemed rather bleak and lonely. One thing that was never emphasised was that the life of discipleship involved other people.  The Catechism seemed to be encouraging us to think of Christian life as a lonely individual trek, avoiding sin as best we could.  The way of life was very much one between the individual and God.  Self-examination was one way that we kept, or tried to keep, these lines of communication open.  At the risk of caricature, one could describe this path to self-examination as being of the ‘8am said communion’ variety of Christian observance.

Two things have become increasingly apparent to me since those long-ago days of the 1950s.  In the first place it has become clear to me that sin is not, and never has been, only a matter of individuals surrendering to temptation. We have become dramatically aware of the corporate dimension to sin.  At one level this corporate sin is not something we can do much about. Human responsibility for war, climate change and poverty go far beyond the capabilities of individuals to resolve, even those who run whole countries.  There is, however, a responsibility to make ourselves prayerfully informed of these big issues like racism and the various forms of phobia directed at minorities the world over.  Just because we cannot sort out a problem does not release us from all responsibility for concerning ourselves with it.  Corporate sins continue to exist as social and political realities, and we live in that world. None of us, anyway, can claim total innocence in our personal relationships to them.   Each of us may be guilty of harbouring some secret sympathy for one or other of these social evils, even when such collusion may be totally hidden. A temptation to sympathise with, say, misogyny or homophobia may be something we never admit to, but it is perhaps still to be found deep within our psyches.  Such attachments to corporate sin need to be owned up to in our hearts, even if we never act on them or express out loud any attraction to them.  We may be ‘guilty’ in some sense for this failure to root out such attitudes in ourselves. 

The second thing that has changed for me is a new awareness of the ways in which sin has a habit of attaching itself to groups of people, and then progressively corrupting everyone in that network.  We are not talking about the big issues like racism, world poverty or climate change.  As Jesus said ‘the poor you have with you always’.  There is an indication here that he recognised that, while our actions will help that situation, it will not make it disappear.  The corporate evil for which we do have considerable responsibility is of a different order.  It is found, for example, in the act of a passive colluding in a committee decision which is obviously wrong.  A readiness to go along with a group decision for the sake of a quiet life is a common manifestation of this kind of sin today.  Allowing an evil to take place because we are intimidated by a powerful chairman or misplaced loyalties is a manifestation of personal failing, even if we have not, individually, done or said anything.  We still carry guilt from our refusal to confront what may be a clear evil in front of us.

One of the things I have learnt In my role as an advocate for survivors, is to see clearly the corporate miasma of evil which can spread from the malevolence of a few to envelop groups and even large institutions.  When a group within an institution decides to turn on an individual for reasons of their own, they seem to find ways of pressuring the bystander to join in this campaign of persecution.  Such bullying behaviour is not in any way condoned by the bystander, but a failure to speak up makes them a collaborator and an enabler of injustice.  Again and again, even at the highest levels of authority in the Church, I have become aware of dynamics within committees that fail to challenge malevolence, and thus allow acts of evil to take place.  The guilt that is spread across a colluding group is not the same as a deliberate act of choosing wrongdoing.  We find here a different sort of evil, the evil of passive collusion.  It appeals to a desire for a quiet life but also feeds on a weakened sense of justice and truth in those present.  This tolerance of evil may be an act of cowardice, but the consequences are still serious.  Evil is permitted to slip through the net; the consciences of those involved are not operating effectively. 

In this blog piece I have identified three areas of failure which should lead us to confession and a request for forgiveness from God.  Two of these areas of evil are arenas where it is possible to see our measure of responsibility.   The third is, we have indicated, outside our control, but we are still required to attend to it, pray about it and do what we can to alleviate the pain caused by it.  I am, of course, talking about the evils of war, famine, poverty and natural disasters.  Leaving these to one side for a moment, I want to reiterate my focus on the area of life where we collude with evil without perhaps realising that we are doing it.  Although we have done nothing wrong ourselves, we find ourselves sucked into supporting, or at least not challenging, the evil designs of others.   They need us to agree with them and passively support their nefarious purposes.   They need us, as passive bystanders, to add weight of some kind to whatever evil design they are planning against other individuals.  The fact that it is not us planning or thinking evil about another does not let us off the hook.  If we do not stand up to evil when we see it, we are allowing that evil to flourish and so we  must share the guilt.

I am sure most of my readers who have been following this blog can think of examples of occasions in the Church where real evil is attempted in a group by two or three individuals, aided and abetted by others who do not stand up to the perpetrators and challenge what is going on.  There are many stories I hear about, not recorded in the public domain, where such colluding with evil is being practised.  In a committee of eight people, what do we say about the five who say nothing in order not to rock the boat and upset those with a hidden, or not so hidden, agenda?  Colluding with evil, as I describe it, is infecting and corrupting even church members and their leaders.  The ones who collude are possibly unaware of the evil that they are enabling.  Because they are part of a group, their individual conscience is in some way disconnected.  It is only personal evil for which they ever feel responsible.  The need for each person to accept individual responsibility for the actions of the whole, is sadly not well understood in church settings.  ‘Evil flourishes when good people do nothing’.

There is a story in the gospels about a widow who makes demands of a judge to hear her case.  Time after time she is rebuffed.  Eventually, her sheer persistence and a readiness to make herself a thorough nuisance, persuades the judge to accede to her request to be heard.  The implication is that without having made herself a cause of serious irritation for the judge, the widow would not have received any hearing of her case.

The complaining widow finds a possible echo in the many people who cry out for justice by taking their complaints of church abuse and bullying to those in authority – the CofE bishops/leaders.  Then, having failed to find there what they believe to be a just solution to their complaints, some try taking their case to what they believe to be the highest legal and moral authority in the Church of England – Lambeth Palace (LP) and the Archbishop of Canterbury who lives there.  Out of sheer desperation and losing hope of finding anyone else to listen to their story and their appeals for justice, many individuals in the Church end up trying to communicate with the Palace.   The recent Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) report on LP casts an unflattering view of the way that these appeals for help from survivors and victims have been processed and responded to.  Even though LP employs a number of full-time staff to answer letters and receive phone calls from the public, there has been little sign that safeguarding cases have been reacted to with an adequate degree of skill, compassion or expertise.  The overall message, that is shared by those who spoke to the auditors who wrote the 80-page SCIE report, suggests that few seem to be heard effectively.  What might an abused person expect from a phone conversation with an employee at LP?  They might expect that the call would, at the very least, be logged in some way.  They would expect some kind of response if individuals or churches were mentioned as being dangerous to church members.  If they made follow-up phone calls, they might reasonably hope to speak to the same person that they had poured out their story to earlier.  Instead of these things, survivors have been fed with formal stereotyped responses which do not appear to want to understand the detailed content of what is being shared.  Another way of putting it is to say that there seems to be no indication that those who work in the section of the Palace that deals with safeguarding correspondence and emails, possess the required degree of compassionate and intelligent understanding of the needs of survivors.

The SCIE report sets out a scenario at LP where ordinary common-sense responsiveness was not being applied.  Many survivors who spoke to the auditors of SCIE, felt let down, marginalised and thus re-abused by the protocols in operation at LP.  While they were hearing public pronouncements from the Archbishop, that survivors’ concerns were at the heart of the Church’s safeguarding work, the reality seemed very different.  The reality was countless examples of institutional betrayal.  It came over as an organisation that did not know how to care, having neither the resources of expertise or manpower to tackle this enormous task.  That such extra resources were needed, in terms of training, focus and money, should have been obvious to anyone who had the measure of the abuse crisis.  That things were allowed to stagger on, under resourced and without any sense of urgency, for such a long time, speaks of weak management and lack of vision at the top.

Although I am, like everyone else, reading of the institutional failures of the leadership and direction of LP from a distance, there is a sense that I feel quite close to what is being described.  My reason for saying this is that like others, I am regularly approached by some of the same army of abused individuals who seek help.  Having written on this blog about the broad topic of power and its abuse in the church for almost ten years, I ‘meet’ online dozens of individuals who want to tell me their story.  Some of these stories become a blog contribution in their own right.  The abuse survivor who is able to write up their story seems to find some comfort in seeing his/her experiences published on the blog.  It is in this way that I have been cast into the role of an unseen confessor to a variety of men and women with a safeguarding story to tell.

Having accidentally become a listener to the painful experiences of others in this safeguarding arena, I have allowed myself to have some opinions on the topic of survivors’ needs.  When a survivor with a level of distress contacts a total stranger like me or one of the enquiry staff at LP, there are some common factors.  Those who email me out of the blue probably do not think of me as a stranger, as I have, over the years, revealed a considerable amount of personal information about myself.  I do express opinions as well, which may not be to the taste of all my readers.  Opinions and information about my theological perspective at least give my readers enough information to know whether they feel they can trust me with sensitive information of their own. 

Those who have suffered an abusive episode in the church want to tell someone about it.  Telling the story to someone without any role in the church is perhaps far easier than negotiating a complicated complaints process.  My role and the role of the blog as a whole is to provide a listening post.  Nobody who writes on the blog expects (thank goodness!) anyone to wave a magic wand and bring perpetrators to account and produce thousands of pounds of restitution money.  They expect to be listened to with respect and patience.  I want to go on to suggest what I consider to be the minimum requirements of a listening ministry from my perspective.   This is normally all I can offer to those who ring, and it may be all that can realistically be offered to the majority of those who contact LP.  We might hope that the Palace would be offering continuous training for such a ministry.

Requirements for a listening ministry.

Confidentiality

The sharing of deeply personal information is an act of trust.  I need hardly say that such information, though shared, still belongs to the sharer.  As such it cannot be divulged without the permission of the one revealing it.  There are obviously some exceptions but, in practice, the disclosure of actual criminality is not an everyday occurrence. Far more typical is the disclosure of cruel and incompetent care by so-called professionals in the aftermath of an abusive event.

Background knowledge

One particular strength among the small band of advocates for and members of the survivor community is that they understand well the setting and background of what has been going on.  They have read and studied the reports and enquiries and will know other people active in the field of survivor advocacy.  The expertise and background knowledge of survivors and their advocates is far greater than the majority of the professionals employed by the National Church Institutions (NCI).  It is a constant source of frustration that events that took place more than a year or two before are not known about among many professionals.  The really vital task of remembering and providing ‘narrative wisdom’ has been easier since the launch of the website ‘House of Survivors’. I strongly commend it.

 Humanity and trauma informed experience

Some understanding of the psychological pain of survivors is important.  Dealing with trauma in another person is never easy but the listener can at least learn not to be surprised at sudden outbursts of anger or emotion that can appear within the listening process.  Listening will be articulating our desire to understand even when it may be difficult both for the one who is entrusted with such information and the one who is sharing it.

Continuity so that story is only told once.

One of the constant irritants for the one who is raising a complaint against an individual or an institution is the need to tell the story repeatedly to different bodies.  Also, the last thing a survivor wants to hear is that, having painfully told their personal story, he/she then finds it has not been properly recorded or that it has disappeared into the system. The survivor is desperate to be heard and, if the story is not thought important enough to be listened to with real attention, it is experienced as a profound betrayal.  This was evidently a frequent event at LP in their interactions with the survivor community.  

Practical support where possible.  Contacts, resources and practical help.   

A large institution like the CofE should want to be seen to support survivors in every possible way.  Placing resources into the effort to help those whom we now know to form a considerable cohort of abused individuals, is a sign of compassion but also of seriousness.  LP has access not only to funds but also to people with considerable experience of legal and therapeutic matters who are needed to help the wounded back to a path of wholeness.  A lot can be done to help and rebuild the CofE’s safeguarding reputation if imagination and energy are put into the task.

The Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) has spoken.  The Council members have called on every evangelical church, member or leader, to action in response to General Synod’s decisions on marriage in London in early February.  If every individual who self-describes as an evangelical were to follow the CEEC’s call, it could possibly mark the end of the Church of England as a body which celebrates diversity and inclusivity.  In summary, the CEEC seems to be trying to transform the CofE to become more like an evangelical sect.  This new body would have a very selective and tenuous link with its past Anglican traditions.  Its roots and nourishment from its catholic past would be erased from memory.  In its place there would be highly selective reading of Anglican history. This would privilege a group of 16^th century Protestant Divines over most other periods of the rich Anglican experience.  Simultaneously there would be no interest in maintaining the goodwill of the vast mass of the people of England.  Another way of putting this would be to say that the CEEC is actively seeking to create a new Church of England quite different from its traditional and current manifestations.  It would then be hard, in any sense, to refer to it as our national Church.

These are strong words, but I have identified in my mind three ways that the two recent documents issued by the CEEC can be read as a direct or indirect attack on the identity of the CofE as we know it. One is a six-page document to ‘evangelicals’ to take ‘appropriate actions’ following the Synod vote. The other is a call to the same group to write letters of protest to the various non-CEEC bishops that oversee their parishes and networks.  Were every ‘evangelical’ to follow these instructions, I can see a blizzard of pressure on the institution that would become intolerable for existing church structures and the leadership which has to deal with it. 

The first way in which the CofE is already facing threats to its existence and integrity, is that it contains within it groups and factions predisposed to show intolerance to others.  The ultra-conservative wing, represented by the CEEC, implicitly questions the right of those with moderate or liberal opinions to have a place within the fold.  There is the assumption that the CEEC and its linked organisations alone have a claim on biblical truth and thus the true Anglican tradition.  This is based on a ‘correct’ interpretation of the Bible and knowing how it is to be understood.  Those of us who have spent substantial amounts of time reading and studying Scripture over the years know that any claims of certainty when interpreting Scripture are likely to be questionable. There is hardly ever such a thing as a universally agreed understanding of a single passage of Scripture.  Many disputes from the past, like the authorship of the book of Isaiah, are answered with ‘political’ rather than scholarly tools.  The belief in an ability to arrive at certainty in many areas of biblical interpretation remains a chimera. Even the smallest amount of exposure to so-called ‘higher criticism’, which includes some knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, reveals how difficult it is to reach universally agreed interpretations.  There also has to be room for our understandings to evolve and change.  The assumption that Calvinist (or Catholic) biblical interpretations are somehow always correct is thus highly questionable.  This is particularly true for those of us who have studied theology in a non-sectarian setting.  The CEEC may represent a phalanx of Christian opinion that believes it possible to settle on fixed or final opinions about scriptural truth, but this position in no way represents the wider Anglican tradition.  The ‘liberal’ opposing point of view to the CEEC comes from those who simply do not believe in settled opinions or unchallengeable answers in theology.  For us, whether professionally educated or open to new insights at every point in our Christian pilgrimage, there is a simple demand for our right to hold on to our evolving understandings of scripture.  No one I know wants to deny that right to the conservative interpreters; they do however object when the fundamentalist wing represented by CEEC seems to suggest that all ‘liberal’, questioning thinking should be declared heretical and outlawed in the CofE.  Would the CEEC want to destroy the places of learning, – places where discussion, debate and differences of opinion coexist – to be destroyed in favour of a monochrome conservative Anglicanism?  The claim to possess the ‘truth’ in Christian teaching carries with it this implied threat.  Unless you agree with us and follow our implied assumptions about truth, we believe that you have to disappear in the interests of having a Bible-based, orthodox pure body.  To put things at its simplest, the CEEC would like all who do not agree with its teaching to go away, allowing approved evangelicals alone to ‘preach the Gospel’ as the Council understands it.

The second way that the CEEC is creating serious stress for the CofE is in the document that calls for a blizzard of letter writing to bishops.  The letter is to contain the points that are provided in a document helpfully provided by the CEEC.  All the letters which may come from individuals or parishes will say the same thing.  In CEEC’s words the letter ‘will call on our bishops to joyfully reaffirm the Bible’s teaching on marriage and sex as good news for individuals and for society as a whole.’  The comment I make to this call for letters to be written, is to contemplate the effect on those who receive such missives.  If I received 5000 such letters from a group of unknown people, I would feel very pressured and not know how to react.  What is the CEEC really trying to achieve with this document?  I could make various guesses but one thing I know that will happen, is that this action will result in stress and a sense of demoralisation among these senior Anglican leaders.

Through my blogging activities I can recall times when I have been made aware of failures among the episcopate in the safeguarding arena.  Such failures are patently visible in today’s SCIE report on Lambeth Palace. Whatever else is true, bishops and archbishops have to endure, whether or not deserved, a great deal of stress as part of their job. Whether CEEC means to increase their stress or not, it is obvious that the emails and letters that all the bishops can expect will clog up their letter boxes and in-trays for weeks to come.  Ignoring all these missives may be one way of dealing with the flood, but others may feel obliged to answer each one.  Putting extra stress on bishops is one way of making their role seem decidedly unattractive.  Is the plan of the CEEC to wear down this body of CofE leaders so that they buckle under the stress?  Will the office of CofE bishop now be seen, more clearly than ever, to be a poisoned chalice so that no one of ability would want the role?  Are there still enough able men and women in the system willing to risk their happiness and stability to take on such a task?  If the office and role of bishop ever became so toxic that suitable potential candidates refused to take it on, that would create a crisis for the Church.  Very quickly that would become destructive to the well-being of the whole body.  Perhaps the  CEEC is plotting to have its own cohort of nominees to step in, if the traditional pool of likely candidates dries up.

The third way that the activities of the CEEC are a threat to the whole CofE is through the way the current tensions over same sex marriage are being viewed by the public.  Most fair-minded non church people accept that there is a debate to be had over the nature of marriage and the issue of same-sex relationships.  Only a few will take the view that there is nothing to be discussed because some authority, whether the Bible or some religious expert, has decreed a final answer to the problem.  I cannot imagine that the wider public will ever, in Britain, favour the right-wing or authoritarian approach to the issue.  In short, any ‘victory’ by the CEEC in the current debates would in no way make the ‘gospel’ attractive to the bulk of the population.  If anything, we might see a deeper estrangement between British society and what remains of the Church.  Society has shifted irrevocably.  Short of something like a Trumpian revolution in Britain, it is impossible to imagine that opinions about private sexual morality will substantially change in the next fifty years.  To summarise, any further insistence on equating the Christian faith with reactionary attitudes on sexual morality will severely compromise the already weakened contract between the CofE and society.  The genius of Anglicanism to be a broad church, tolerating a wide variety of opinions and attitudes, will be gone for ever.

The provocative question in the title of this piece can now receive an attempted answer.  There is, no doubt, no deliberate intention to undermine the CofE on the part of the CEEC.  Nevertheless, their actions, which have been taken in the light of the recent Synod debate, have damaging institutional consequences.  Putting pressure on all the bishops is fairly harmful to their morale and thus to the wider organisation.  Thrusting all our bishops into an unwanted political maelstrom also creates a situation profoundly unhelpful to their wellbeing.   No one desires that anyone should suffer in this way, but the suffering and consequent stress to the whole institution is real.  Challenging the large section of the church we call liberals, by questioning their honesty and even their right to exist as bone-fide Christians, is a serious form of bullying.  Such bullying is debilitating and may contribute further to a weakening of the Church.  Our attempt to remain loyal members of an institution which such behaviour is found is hard to sustain.

Many readers of this blog will be observers of an episode in Kentucky which has been dubbed the Asbury Revival.  Asbury is the home of a small Christian university, and its chapel is the site of a continuous act of worship which has been going on for a fortnight.  People have been travelling from all over the States, and beyond, to attend this service where the claim is that God is working a revival which will spread soon to other places all over the world.  In some ways it resembles the Toronto Blessing.  There are significant differences, the main one being that Asbury has not thrown up yet any named leaders.  Toronto Airport Chapel where the earlier ‘revival’ took place in 1994, was ably led by professional clergy who coordinated the events for several months.

Revivals are complicated things to assess, and part of me was hoping that this Asbury event would quickly fizzle into obscurity before I had to say anything or even think about it.  Then one of the Surviving Church readers sent me an email asking me directly what I thought might be going on.  I answered him fairly quickly but, in the process of doing so, I found my mind generating ideas and thoughts which I find worth sharing with my wider readership.

As long-term readers of this blog will know, I have some personal history of exposure to charismatic events and teaching.  Back in the early 1980s I would say that I identified with aspects of charismatic spirituality.  This fed into several years of an active healing ministry with my wife.  Over a period, I was led to write two books on the topic of healing and address meetings around the country.  Something changed for me in the 1990s when many Christians who openly identified with charismatic styles of theology seemed to insist, increasingly, on a hard-edged style of theology.  I could not follow or identify with this.  I have, from my undergraduate days, found what I describe as the Bible proof text method of doing theology a dishonest and frankly incomprehensible way of discovering the mystery of God.  The opening up that the charismatic styles of prayer had taught me, and which allowed me to share deeper insights, could not be sustained in the presence of Christians whose main concern was to establish whether I was ‘sound’.  By the standards of a card-carrying conservative Christian, I did not pass this test of soundness.

Returning to the phenomenon of Ashbury and the revival that is believed to be taking place, I begin with a number of observations.  The first thing to note is that, in the chapel where the revival is supposed to be happening, there is a dominating preponderance of young people. Of course we would expect this in a university chapel but the bulk of the visitors, of which there are many, are also young. In common with the flag-ship revival churches up and down Britain, we find an apparent resonance between such churches and the emotional and spiritual needs of the young.  The second factual observation I make is the style of music.   I am not sure how to describe the dominating style of music that inevitably appears at a revival event.   Much of what I have listened to on YouTube seems to belong to a slow repetitive style, where there is a strong preference for a minor key.  The distinct reflective mode of this music style helps to further a distinctive mood which seems to enthral the audience.  The appeal does not seem to wane, even over long periods of time.  In my continuing attempt to be as objective as possible, I note that this style of music, culturally speaking, does not fit in with the taste of many older people – the over 35 cohort.  Whatever the spiritual significance of Asbury may prove to be, there is clearly also a strong cultural dimension at work.  If this is a real revival, the cynic might suggest that the Holy Spirit is only interested in working among middle-class Americans of student age.

I have on this blog, in the past, offered my observations on the way that conservative/revivalist Christianity seems normally to be far more accessible to the student-age population than to older Christians.  No doubt someone has done some research on why this should be from the cultural/psychological perspective.  I do not know where such research may be written up, so my remarks here have to be rooted in what I have observed over a lifetime of what goes on in churches of all kinds.  My summary claim, based on my observations of Christian life, is that there is something spiritually genuine at the heart of some so-called revivals, including this one.  Nevertheless, it is not the universal panacea for a declining Church in our culture.  It is unrealistic, indeed impertinent, to expect all Christians across the world to recognise in events like Asbury a full embrace of Christian truth as they have known it. The Christian phenomenon, as it manifests itself across the world, is too varied and too diverse to be wrapped up in one single cultural manifestation.  We would be guilty of cultural and spiritual imperialism to claim such a thing.

I have used the word ‘genuine’ to describe what is going on at Asbury University.  I want to explain how, from my point of view, it contains something to teach all of us.  I have expressed a certain number of qualifying caveats to my welcome of the idea of an Asbury revival, but I want now to consider the potential positives.  I begin with some words of Jesus when he said something to the effect of ‘unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven’.  I have, with countless other preachers, struggled with the meaning of these words.  There is probably no single meaning, but Jesus may be recognising something about the way children apprehend reality much more directly than those of mature age.  Christians of student age, the ones now experiencing revival in Kentucky, seem closer to this capacity to experience a primal spiritual awareness than the older among us. To use the analogy of the onion, older people have far more layers to strip away than the young.  I am wondering whether the ability of ‘gospel music’ to promote stillness and spiritual awareness among some of the young is something we need to understand far better.  Might it not be that this style of music is allowing many young people to regress to the ‘childlike’, even naïve, awareness of God by children that Jesus commended?   This is something that the older among us find increasingly difficult to do.

In my days of studying the phenomenon of Christian healing in the 80s and 90s, I was puzzled by the way that, while ‘miracles’ happened from time to time, there was no way that, from the outside, one could predict who was going to receive healing and who not.  What I observed was that prayer for healing was a worthwhile activity which was sometimes answered by transforming events.  Without going into detail, there was one ingredient that could always be found in every healing episode.  Christians call this ingredient faith.  I use this word rather tentatively as it has gathered to itself a number of connotations which I believe are unhelpful.  I, for one, want to link it back to the childlike primal reaching out to the other, in an attitude of hope and expectation.  This is what Jesus seems to have commended.  It is the sentiment that one hopes to be at the heart of the Asbury revival.  Those who experience this link, this momentary reconnection with God, will find something that lasts, maybe even for a lifetime. 

Will the revival last?  My answer is affected by what I see of the history of revivals.  The power of revival events seems to be hard to maintain.   The energy in them seems to dissipate.  Worse still, the spontaneity of revival is so often destroyed because the unholy juggernauts of institutions appear.  These are the ones that try to attach every new spiritual movement to a money-making machine.  Also, the new experience of ‘faith’ discovered by many individuals, is forcibly diverted into another sort of faith.  This is the one that requires those affected to assent to doctrinal formulae which may have little connection to what they have experienced. This unholy process is vividly described in the book by Reuben Alves, Protestantism and Repression. Asbury may well leave something behind, even if not what Christian leaders want to see – full churches and financial strength for the church institutions.  There may be clusters of new spiritual power inside the hearts of men and women around the world.  This comes as the result of having been for a short time in a new active communication with the transcendent power we call God.

  My hopes for Asbury are tempered with a realistic understanding of the human capacity to destroy spiritual energy because of power games, control and money.  Many of my readers will have shared my dismay at the way institutions so often corrupt those who are part of them.  If there is something alive and spiritually genuine about what is being experienced at this small Christian university in Kentucky, we pray that it may survive these dangers of being controlled by people who are concerned only for their own purposes.  We will see over a period of time whether the parts of it that seem to be genuine, are indeed of God.  If they are, we trust that they will be allowed to remain of God.

I think it was Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, who spoke about the mean between extremes.  What he was talking about was the fact that there are many experiences or descriptions which attach to people or things where one of two extremes can dominate. The place somewhere in the middle is probably the best place to be. A sherry can be a very sweet variety or one that that is very dry.  Most people would opt for something in between. Gardeners know that growing vegetables to the largest size possible does not necessarily produce a crop which is particularly palatable.  There is an optimum medium size where flavour is at its best.  The same principle applies when we want to help people be at the most effective when seeking to influence others.  Loud aggressive shouting at one end and passive feeble whining at the other do not deliver the required results.  Most people would opt for a degree of firmness which is neither abject surrender nor overwhelming coercion and aggression.  Somehow, we attempt to arrive at a middle point that allows us to resolve differences in a drama-free way.   As a further example of this moderation principle, we can imagine the reasoning of those who drink alcohol.  Most of them would probably agree that, just because they enjoy drinking, this is not a reason for becoming drunk every time alcohol is freely available. Moderating our behaviour and our beliefs from potentially extreme positions is an expedient path to take in a world where people try to live together amicably.  The ‘mean’, the moderate position, is likely to be a dominant one in most walks of life.  Nevertheless, we still sometimes meet up with the individual who takes a very hard line in a belief system or a behaviour preference.  Most of the time, in practice, we try to avoid anything that others might describe as an extreme.  The middle way is what is acceptable in the majority of situations.

Being a parent has taught many of us the importance of teaching what moderate behaviour looks like.  For example, we try to teach children the values of sharing, waiting for their turn and generally being considerate to others.  We are also aware of the importance of learning to stick up for oneself in a situation where there is bullying behaviour.   We do not want our children to be manipulated or taken advantage of.  One word that is banded about in this connection is the word self-esteem.  It is a word that implies that the child (or adult) has found the middle way between being crushed by the control of others and the use of excessive verbal or physical force to get one’s own way.  The cultivation of self-esteem is something that continues right the way through life.  What is it exactly?  Most people would agree that to have self-esteem is to be able to apply one’s abilities and gifts in the task of living without crushing others or being dominated by them.  We neither want to be the person who gives way excessively or be seen as the bully who insists that everyone sees the world in one particular way and uses power to achieve this end.

Esteem is one of those somewhat slippery words that is quite hard to define.  It often refers to the respect we feel for a person of integrity and giftedness.  Esteem is something that people give to one another right across the gamut of human relationships.  To have self-esteem is generally a way of describing our internal sense of finding our place within a community and enjoying a realistic sense of belonging.  The one without any self-esteem is the isolated individual, or the pariah who feels adrift within a community.  He/she has no networks of support to help him/her hold on to a secure sense of identity.  

If self-esteem belongs to the one occupying a realistic place on the spectrum of having a balanced place of affirmation within a community, we can sketch out what happens when someone privileged demands that others honour them at every opportunity.  This may be the way that someone who is rich, powerful or entitled believes others should treat them.  They may introduce their approach to others with the words ‘don’t you know who I am?’ In some cases, we are describing someone with strong narcissistic tendencies.  If the individual concerned is the kind that also always insists on the use of titles or some other method of signifying superior status, we may suspect that there may be a problem of esteem deprivation from the past, particularly in childhood.  In short, the adult who lacks self-esteem may be very similar to someone who is seeking to be affirmed and their status acknowledged at every opportunity.  Both are reaching out for something that may not have been provided when they were growing up.

When we enter the world of suspected narcissistic pathology, we find that it is accompanied by what can only be described as addictive elements.  The bullying boss or the controlling fellow worker not only behaves badly towards others in the firm, but we also sense a desperate need in him/her to behave like this.  The ability to make people frightened of you or walk on eggshells around you, seems to be satisfying some pathological need.  Coercion and control are often ways that people operate almost by habit.  This may be a way of self-medicating for a lack of adequate self-esteem which was denied to them in their early years.  Many bullies are unhappy because they never had a place in their neighbourhood or family where they were valued just for being what they are.  Esteem, real esteem, had perhaps been denied them when young, so that they have had to develop new ways of compelling, through acts of aggression, some faux esteem from others.  If they have access to any institutional power, they may use this as a way to keep themselves feeling important.  Because of this, those who are below them in the hierarchy may have to suffer from this bullying/narcissistic behaviour.

It goes without saying that this kind of bullying coercion is not infrequently found in the church.  One might say that because the church operates on a strict hierarchical basis, it will attract candidates for office precisely because self-esteem needs can easily be met by those who become part of this hierarchy.  One of the things that I have found difficult to deal with in my time as a clergyman is the way that the profession of the clergy seems to create, for a significant minority, a mindset that offers its members the same ‘rewards’ as those sought by narcissists.  Among them are status, messianism and grandiosity.  We have all met clergy who seem to bathe in the esteem that comes from having a deferential group around them. This constant need for gratification through their status and importance is also sustained by an unhealthy enjoyment of titles and special clothes.  I have written in the past about this narcissism that is indulged in by some clergy.  Regardless of exactly how the position is used for this kind of gratification, the esteem that clergy enjoy through their status has seldom been a healthy impulse in creating a community that follows the example of Jesus.

The possession of adequate levels of self-esteem is far from being an unworthy aspiration.  We want every human being to know the security that comes from having a realistic knowledge of themselves and a place within a secure community or family.  When individuals stray away from this place of equilibrium in their self-esteem, we find that they may encounter desperation and unhappiness.  Those individuals who are ambitious, wanting to ‘get ahead’ in the levels of esteem they believe they are entitled to, may be working through an esteem deficit and childhood memories of humiliation and shame.  The miasma of power games and competition which we find, even in the church, can sometimes be interpreted as the antics of those who are using church structures in their needy, even addictive, attempt to rise above their own personal past traumas. 

In summary, we find that there are three sources for creating a true lasting self-esteem which we all need for contented living.  We need our own self-esteem to be backed up by our self-knowledge as we described in the previous paragraph.   This is supplemented and affirmed by the acceptance that we receive from others.  They give us esteem insofar as they recognise the true value of what we are now and have been.   Most people are not impressed by anything less than true character showing integrity and truth.   Success in worldly terms is not necessarily a sign that we deserve esteem from our fellows. We have witnessed over the last week a great deal of behaviour which lacks this honesty and integrity.  Senior members of the Church speak in a way that shows that loyalties belong more to a Christian institution than to God in whose name it exists. When this happens, the individual concerned deserves to lose our respect and our esteem.   The final source of our self-esteem is from God himself.  I have not the time here to describe the ways that Christian teaching is sometimes distorted to imply that God does not accept us unconditionally.  If a teaching of human depravity is internalised too far, it can itself cause profound damage to our legitimate attempts to find Christian self-esteem.  That discussion is for another time.  It is sufficient to say that I do not believe that we are required to engage with self-loathing as implied by some classic preaching techniques. The command to love God is balanced by the realisation and recognition that he loves us.  Being loved as we are is a key part of Christian teaching.  It is the foundation of genuine, lasting and true self-esteem.  The power games that we see played out in church and elsewhere by individuals who are addicted to forms of shallow glory and esteem, come to be seen as empty and vain.  When Satan showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world in their glory, Jesus was not impressed.  One is tempted to wonder whether our Church, by offering to those in influence superficial esteem alongside power and glory, has led these leaders along a path quite different from the one of humility that Jesus followed.