by Gilo
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Since her appointment as Lead Safeguarding Bishop in mid-January, Joanne Grenfell has posted on everything on her Twitter account BUT safeguarding. In the four+ months since the Bishop of Stepney has been given this key role, she appears to be missing in action.
Imagine a Lead Bishop for the Environment ignoring harm done to forests, rivers, oceans, biodiversity! It would be strange not to say perverse. As it happens the Bishop for the Environment, Graham Usher, has done about half a dozen social media things in relation to his role during May alone. One particularly striking tweet was of the confirmation card sent to candidates in mid-May with a picture depicting a tree laden with animals in the process of being cut down. This powerful illustration by Nat Morley titled ‘The Tree of Life 6th Mass Extinction’ showed the ‘Environment Bishop’ unafraid of public visibility in his role. Another senior figure, Anne Hollinghurst, acting Bishop of Birmingham, attended Extinction Rebellion’s The Big One protest in Westminster in April.
But in the Church of England’s safeguarding structure we now have a Lead bishop perceived as silent to the harm and re-abuse being done to survivors on an almost daily basis; a bishop who seems to have decided the best course of action with this critical portion of a portfolio is to stay hidden beneath the mantle of the structure and hope the three years passes her by with little to no impact. There’s a rather more sinister possibility: perhaps the bishop has been instructed to follow this course.
What a difference from the part played by Peter Hancock, the last really pastoral bishop in this role. Woefully misguided and misinformed about mandatory reporting as he was, and at times out of his depth – he was nevertheless regarded with affection by many survivors and seen as someone who genuinely cared. He struggled to make a difference. He met with survivors. He went out of his way. It mattered to him that the Church was as dishonest and cruel and complacent as he eventually realized was the case. It was to be his tragedy and ours that weasel ecclesiocrats inside both Church House and Lambeth Palace ran merry rings round him to the point that he became deeply angered and stressed by their machinations. It was widely known that he was livid with Lambeth Palace following Archbishop Welby’s Ch 4 interview. Apparently he had not been informed it was happening, and found himself fielding the anger of Smyth victims at the array of untruths expressed in the course of the interview.
It is also widely known that Jonathan Gibbs experienced moral and emotional exhaustion at the cynicism he found in the culture of the House of Bishops. He was at one time on the verge of quitting the role. I urged him to go (if that was his intention) with a bang and not a whimper. He clung on but seemed to lose any heart in the role and in his last year as Lead bishop resembled a man desperately seeking a demob suit. The sight of him at that shameful Synod last year, sounding like a strangulated Jackanory presenter against the backdrop of brazenly strategic silencing of questions from the platform, was really pitiful. I think by that stage everyone knew he was a spent force who’d lost any power of persuasion that he might at one stage have had.
It is clear to all watchers that the Lead Bishops have their hands on rubber levers which effect little to no change. The power lies behind them on the platform of the carefully stage-managed theatre of Synod. The real levers are in the hands of those who control Synod, control the NST, control Archbishops Council, control the Comms in Church House, manage the Church’s response to Reviews and Reports, control the long drawn out delay to the Redress Scheme, and ultimately control the presentational mirage of ‘journey of change’ in this broken structure. The real levers are operated by the Nyebots while Lead Bishops must be content to handle rubber levers.
Survivors could be forgiven for thinking the Lead Safeguarding role is now little more than a purgatorial stepping stone to a bigger mitre. Do the three years and field your way through the unethical mess of it all and we’ll give you a diocese. That seems to be the way it works. Anyone remember the anger felt by survivors after the Synod? When a list of failures and major questions about accountability were skipped over and erased by a deeply cynical Archbishops Council. It was to be hoped that the next Lead Bishop would at least start with visible drive and recognition of the anger and hurt expressed by survivors, some resolve to mend bridges and show herself impelled by the call for justice, redress and institutional honesty.
But so far there has been little sign that this bishop is doing much else than marking time in a thankless role. Meanwhile the situation is worsening. Is worse now than it was during the time of IICSA. The Church of England is fighting fires on all fronts. Church groups across the evangelical world are waking up to the potentially huge scale of ramifications in the Soul Survivor scandal. Publication of the long awaited Makin Review is around the corner later this year and is likely to be as critical of senior figures and their awareness combined with the ability to look the other way, as has been the Devamanikkam Report. There is renewed interest in the media in the Church’s failure to deliver a Redress Scheme and its re-abusive treatment of survivors in the meantime. The Spindler/Reeves Review recently published on House of Survivors site is a coruscating report into the Church’s continuing cruelty in just one case alone. In the coming weeks a fresh complaint concerning dishonesty and corporate corruption inside the heart of the Archbishops Council will land on the desks of both Archbishops. And so it goes on…
Just this morning a Synod Member with many years experience in corporate investigations tells me, “We need a 10,000 watt spotlight on this organisation as I see so many corporate governance failures which I think need a total clean-up. We choose clergy to be shepherds of flocks, not to run billion pound organisations. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when this proves to be beyond their competence. David was great at dealing with Goliath but proved to have many flaws when he became King. One of the issues is whether the problem is the King or the KIng’s advisers.”
I suspect the Lead bishop is overwhelmed by the sheer number of fires in her department, and overwhelmed too by the multitude of conflicts of interest apparent beneath the surface of the Church’s handling of so much of this crisis. But she will need quickly to find her voice and her courage, and show survivors that she has the moral strength to fight the injustice and intransigence of her structures on our behalf. She will need to step out from behind the purple enclosure and look behind her with a critical eye and call out serious wrongdoing within the hierarchy and their structure. Survivors need to see a Lead Bishop with tenacity to match that of survivors. Quiet complicity with institutional complacency, cruelty and corruption is no longer an option. It looks like negligence and begs the question: is the Bishop even trying to do the job?
Gilo