Readers of this blog will note that I quite often speak about the tension between liberals and conservatives within the church.  If we were to draw a line to represent the two opposite ends of opinion among Christians I do not believe that I would be quite as close to the liberal end of the continuum as some might assume.  Although I accept ‘higher’ criticism of Scripture and am relaxed about certain definitions within doctrine, there is one particular place where I part company with many liberal Christians.  The point of issue is the question of healing miracles and the possibility of healing today.  Many liberals do not accept the reality of miracles either in Jesus’ day or today. Because this is something I have studied and experienced for myself I personally have little problem with the miracles in the Bible and can accept that they still take place in some settings.   A belief in the fundamental reliability of the healing stories is not the same as saying that we must always understand mental illness as being the result of demonic possession!  I see however no problem in believing that Jesus was a healer and that this was a crucial way in which he proclaimed the reality of God’s kingdom.  Healing has always formed a large part of traditional religious practice in cultures across the world and I see no reason not to believe that Jesus made a considerable impact on his contemporaries through his practice of healing.

Clearly this subject is a vast one and I will not be able to start more than a preliminary discussion in this first blog post on the subject.  But it is important to our overall theme of abuse in the church because while the church does in some situations have a highly effective ministry of healing, it also paradoxically sometimes allows this area of activity to be one where people are damaged.

The context where ‘healing’ may well have been met by readers of this blog will probably have been a charismatic/Pentecostal setting.  Although I am not uncritical of this style of worship and church life, I do recognise that the ‘energy’ released within this setting can sometimes be powerful and transformative.  Phenomena like speaking in tongues and ecstatic states are met in many religious contexts across the world.  When looked at objectively these phenomena do often have a significant effect on those caught up in them and in certain situations that might involve physical or emotional healing.  Charismatic ‘energy’ when practised in a Christian setting is also the context for the discovery of distinctive forms of spirituality.  Prayer seems often to be rediscovered in a vital way in those who have been exposed to charismatic events.  The problem arises when Christian groups insist that everyone who has had one of these experience must subscribe to a particular theology –normally of a very conservative type.

Back in the 1970s when I first encountered charismatic phenomena and the healing that sometimes went with it, it was not associated exclusively with any particular strand of theology.  Indeed early writing on the topic in the 60s was by one Denis Bennett who came from an Anglo-Catholic Anglican background.  It was only gradually over the late 70s and 80s that the Charismatic Movement came to be dominated by conservative and fundamentalist ideology.  I am told that there are places where this stranglehold is not to be found but if it exists it is rare.  The point of this brief historical digression is to note that the healing that sometimes comes as part of the charismatic culture also gets entangled with the power games that are common within the fundamentalist styles of church life.  Thus it is perfectly possible, as has happened, for a thoroughly corrupt Christian leader who exploits his people financially and sexually nevertheless to preside over a miraculous healing event.  Morality and healing do not necessarily go together, even if it would be much tidier for our thinking if evil people were never associated with an apparently spiritual event such as healing.

What are the phenomena within the charismatic culture that sometimes result in healing, mental or physical, whether or not these are combined with a strong grasp of Christian values and belief?  The answer at its most simple is that we are meeting a type of healing that allows an individual to encounter what is known as a primal experience.  It might be a very powerful event to be connected to a long forgotten trauma through a process known to psychologists as abreaction.   Although some people might regard the process, which sometimes causes tears and laughter, as somewhat childish, there is no doubt that healing can be found sometimes within it.  But, as I have suggested in a previous post, there is enormous pressure on the charismatic leader to make sure that these events occur every time that he is on stage.  ‘Outpourings of the Spirit’ are expected night after night to prove that the speaker is an anointed man of God, and, more  cynically, it is only when healings are thought to take place that people open their wallets.  In this situation there is the temptation to fabricate healings to bolster the power and authority of the leader.  A forced, even mechanical use of charismatic gifts is seldom productive.  All too easily you have the potential for abuse as well as a great sense of let-down for those who come for healing.

In this first post on the subject of healing I am trying to present a case for the reality of healing within the charismatic/Pentecostal culture of worship and practise.  I see no reason from experience to doubt that this style of spirituality can on occasion provide the opportunity for someone to be changed from within, spiritually, emotionally and physically.  They encounter a power which can move them in such a way that age-old issues are dealt with in a carthartic or abreactive moment. Simultaneously I note that insofar as the charismatic culture has been corrupted in many places by individuals who want power for themselves, the healing events are not straightforwardly simple.  The ‘healed’ individual may for example find themselves psychologically entangled with the ‘healer’, and there may be financial or other obligations to be paid back over a period of time.  Healing sometimes happens but unless there is a strong ethical context for its occurrence we might find that the ‘healed’ sometimes move from one form of bondage into another.

Since writing about the contrast between ‘pilgrim’ Christian and conservative Christian I have been pondering about this tension that runs through the heart of the Christian faith.  I suggested then that conservative Christians were often ‘stuck’ with their understanding of what they believed.  It was presented to them in such a way that they could neither go forward nor develop what they believed.  Logically that which is perfect, in this case the conversion experience, is incapable of improvement.  Pilgrim Christians on the other hand saw the gradual discovery of truth as a never-ending journey or an adventure.

In thinking about this contrast I have come back to thinking about the slippery word in Christian vocabulary, ‘salvation’.  Salvation has of course a long history.  It is biblical and appears in both testaments.  I cannot, being away from home, look up the words in any commentaries or concordance so what I will say will be general but reasonably accurate, I trust.  The word at its most basic level of meaning has the idea of rescue.  Someone needs saving from exile, from drowning and they need to be put back on dry land.  ‘Save me from the lion’s mouth’ is a quotation that comes to mind.  ‘Save me or I perish’ is another quote that comes to me from the New Testament.  In both these quotations there is the idea of salvation being taking someone out of a situation of danger or crisis and making them safe.  This kind of salvation is the first part of a process.  We could, as conservative Christians do, see this stage of salvation as being the moment when they pass from darkness to light, when they pass from a life of despair to one of meaning.  The moment of conversion is identified with that moment of salvation.  ‘Once I was blind, now I can see.’  But as I pointed out in the earlier blog post on this topic, the individual who has this moment of conversion sees it very much in the past and typically has very little to say about what happens after that moment.  To use the language of salvation, the Christian is able to talk at length about what he/she was saved from but not a lot about what might have happened after that event.  Salvation/conversion is ‘the’ moment in the Christian life.

If we go back to our picture of salvation being equivalent to a rescue we can see that the person so rescued is lying gasping at the bottom of the boat but desperately grateful for being saved from drowning.  Nevertheless the process is somewhat incomplete.  Being rescued is important, whether from exile, drowning or from a life of sin but the state of being rescued needs to be followed up in some way.  The person so rescued needs at some point to decide what he is going to do with the life that has been given back or set on a new path.  This salvation from a terrible threat needs to be followed up with another question.  What is the life so rescued going to be for in the future?  The Christian has been saved from something but he now needs to decide what he has been saved for.

The pilgrim Christian, whether or not he/she has been through the classic conversion experience of salvation, will have a lot to say about this second stage of salvation, ‘salvation for’.  Typically the pilgrim Christian will want to talk about all the insights and new understanding of what life is for when lived in the Christian way.  My own language would want to include an ever deeper understanding of the particular pattern of life that God reveals me to follow.  God wants me to discover my gifts, talents and uniqueness and live them out in such a way that I discover myself fully.  Being ‘saved for’ is, to quote John’s gospel, to ‘live life in all its fullness’.

There is an old story told about Bishop Wescott of Durham in the 19^th century.  He was asked on a train by an earnest student as to whether he had been saved.  His answer was to quote back to the student the various words in Greek that could be translated as ‘saved’.  They represented the past, the future and the present tenses of the verb ‘sozo’ which is the Greek word for save.  I won’t complete the anecdote in case I get it wrong, but suffice to say one answer to the student from what I have said above, might be this.  ‘Do you mean what has God saved you from?’  or ‘do you mean what has God saved you for?’.  I suspect that the second part of the answer is in the long term far more vital than the first.

A complete presentation of the Christian faith should always include some idea of what is to be expected of the individual after the moment of conversion.  Many practising Christians have not in fact had the conversion moment of light and change but their faith is arguably equally strong and committed, having been imbibed gradually over a lifetime.  For various reasons some Christian groups will not recognise an individual as having a proper faith without the classic marks of a ‘proper’ conversion.  This is an attack on the integrity of faithful people and the problem is not easily resolved.  Perhaps, if conditions make it possible, a discussion might be had about the topic of salvation.  The non-conservative might point out, as I have tried to in the post, that there is more than one stage in the process of salvation.  Within the discussion, we might legitimately ask, are they speaking about ‘salvation from’ or ‘salvation for’?  Both surely have a crucial part to play in the crucial process of bringing an individual from darkness into the presence of God who wants us to flourish and live life to the full.

For two years before starting this blog with Chris, I was an active contributor to another blog which was trying to press for an apology on behalf of the victims of a notorious church near London.  This church had succeeded not only in persuading the congregation to give ten per cent of their gross income but also to remortgage their homes to give to various building projects connected with a church  school and housing for the ministers.  It transpired much later that the clergy buildings had been registered in the ministers’ names themselves and the church had to buy them back.  This is a edited version of a comment I sent to the blog and I see no point in rewriting it all.

What is the basis of this command to give to the Church (and to the leaders) power over eye-watering sums of money which are the cause of envy in other less well-endowed congregations?  The injunction about the tenth or the tithe is taken from various passages from the OT (eg Leviticus 27.30) where the people of Israel are commanded to hand over one tenth of the possessions ‘to the Lord’.  What was good enough for the people of Israel is good enough for us we might think.

But there are three problems with this convenient (and lucrative) interpretation for  ‘Health and Wealth’ Christian leaders.

First it might be queried whether giving ‘to God’ a tenth of all that you own has anything remotely to do with handing over ten per cent of your income to your local church.  One imagines that in ancient Israel there were a number of institutions that needed supporting from the tithes, say defence, the running of the justice system and possibly some kind of basic education system for the next generation of priests and administrators.  In other words the tithe was in fact a kind of Biblical taxation system.  We are all familiar with the way that taxation is enforced (or not) in this country but few of us avoid paying it.  We might claim that some of the recipients of our taxation money (health and education) are working for the Lord every much as a narrowly defined church ministry.  One likes to think that God works in many contexts.

The second objection to the tithe being a requirement of all church members is whether the church has the right to control the charitable giving of its members.  Many of us give widely to charities whether famine relief, the protection of children or the educational institution which helped us when we were young.  Even if we take seriously the need to give away a tenth of our income, should that giving all go through the church?  A minister urging, threatening his congregation to give away a tithe to God, may simply  be trying to set up a power base for his own ambitions for success and material gratification.

The third objection to ‘tithe teaching’ is that it often fails to tune in with a modern need for accountability.  Over thirty years tens of millions of pounds have been spent by and through the church. (I am referring to the particular church at this point)  Who makes the decisions for the disposal of this largesse?  Are there really accountable structures in place which share information about the dispersal of such large sums.  Do not the contributions of the people give them some rights in both knowing and deciding what happens to the money?

I write this contribution partly for new members who are struggling with the demand to hand over a tenth of your income because it is ‘biblical’.  My advice is don’t, at least not until you have looked at where the money actually goes.  The thought of paying money to pay for inflated salaries, grandiose building projects and the building of empires is not everyone’s idea of the purpose of church money.

A further point that did not seem appropriate to the followers of the other blog was the issue of power.  If you give a lot of money to a church leader without accountability you are not only providing them with a luxurious lifestyle but also with a great of power over you.  As I said in the last blog post, the more that a church has money the more power it can exert.  In the case of this particular church, the wealth of this church has  silenced potential critics among other local congregations (even though they are picking up the casualties of abuse) and also the church has been able to afford expensive lawyers to threaten individuals with the full weight of the law when they make accusations.  Money, particularly when there are no accountable structures, has the ability to bully, to cajole and generally gets it own way.  Money in short is one the tools of an abusive church.

The curse of money.

An interesting story has come out of Rome this week.  A group of 61 priest delegates of a now severely discredited group called the Legionaries of Christ have gathered in Rome for a general chapter.  For those who are not familiar with this group, it was founded by one Father Marcial Maciel.  Three years ago this founder was formally acknowledged by the Vatican to have been guilty of many crimes, including the sexual abuse of hundreds of seminarians, fathering many children and the abuse of drugs.  In addition to this Fr Maciel controlled the organisation through a personality cult which bound the followers to him in a corrupt and harmful way.   I would imagine that amid his other crimes there are likely to have been financial improprieties.  For many years this order was protected by Pope John Paul II and it is only after the death of Fr Maciel in 2002 that the crimes were acknowledged.

Why do I bring up this story?  It is because we need to understand why this order has not been abolished when the toxic dynamic of the organisation had been revealed.  The reason why it has not been abolished is simply because the Order, through its wealth, has been able to buy support from people high up in the Vatican.  The wealth of the organisation has been able to exercise influence so that the normal course of justice is not followed and the process of healing past evils is not undertaken.

In the not too distant past the Church of England operated all its activities with the endowments of the past paying for salaries and other expenses.  Any collections taken during services were dedicated for charitable purposes such as the relief of poverty.  The Book of Common Prayer refers to these collections as ‘alms’.  Until the mid-60s most clergy were paid entirely from these endowments.  It was only when inflation destroyed the value of the endowments that other forms of payment had to be found.  First the Church Commissioners picked up the cost of paying the clergy.   Later the entire cost fell on to the laity who now have to pay considerable sums in ‘quota’.  Today it costs nearly £60k to pay for one full time clergyperson, of which less than half is what they receive in pay.  The rest goes on housing, pension contributions and the diocesan staff who support the clergy.  The fact that almost all this money has to come from local sources means that money is a significant factor in church life.  If a church were to decide not to pay the parish quota then the overall budget for the diocese suffers.  Sometimes a church fails to pay for financial reasons but on other occasions it fails to pay for political reasons.  It may happen that a church council does not agree with the way the bishop has voted in a recent Synod.  In this way, particularly since the period that could rely on past endowment to pay the clergy, the lay people, the effective paymasters, have acquired more power over the church hierarchies.  It is hard for bishops to exercise authority when their power can so easily undermined by the threat of a withholding of finance.  In the non-Anglican churches where the lay people have always had to pay for their clergy, the provision and withholding of money has long been used as a weapon in political disputes.

The power of money in the churches that have it is not inconsiderable and will often prove decisive in disputes of power.  Sometimes the power struggles will be internal between leader and laity, on other occasions the dispute will be between the congregation and overseeing authority, such as a bishop.  It is often to be noted that the ‘winner’ in such disputes will often be the side that has access to the largest purse.  The churches that this blog is concerned for, are often extremely wealthy and thus able to exercise power in a variety of ways.  One particular notoriously abusive church in the London area uses its considerable resources to ‘buy in’ visiting preachers and bribe other local churches to approve of its activities by sharing their plant.  The ‘bought-in’ preachers are presented with ‘love-gifts’ worth thousands of pounds to paint a good image but in reality these gifts are bribes to help cover up decades of financial, sexual and power abuse which no one wants to face up to.  Money here has the effect of putting off the day of reckoning for that particular church.

Why are many abusive churches so wealthy?  The answer to this question lies in their ability to persuade their congregation to give one tenth of their income.  In a London context it only takes 100 adult members providing a ten per cent gift of income before tax to produce an income of half a million pounds.  I am providing in a future blog some discussion on the issue of tithing.  My opinion is that while there is a case for Christian people giving generously to the church, there are very few churches who should be the recipient of an individual’s entire charitable outlay.

This blog post is claiming that excessive income and wealth accruing to particular churches and organisations is seldom good news.  Money in the hands of corrupt people is able to corrupt both individuals and institutions, particularly when the money is used to gain or protect power.  The church I mentioned above has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds in fighting court cases against former members whose lives have been ruined by the church.  The church only possesses this money because it has been hoarded from the tithes given over the years.  As I shall explore in the future blog post, the money was given, not out of a generous heart, but through fear.  In short tithing, attendance at church and total obedience to the Pastor are all part of the package that an individual buys into as a member of many churches.  Giving money, in many cases more than can be afforded, is part of the way that Churches bind people and subdue them.  The giving of money and the disbursing of it is enmeshed with the power games that take place within the churches that abuse and harm their people.

Ever since Paul described the Christian path as resembling a race, Christians have found the image of movement and journey to describe their lives a helpful one.  The Pilgrim’s Progress is perhaps the classic description of the nature of the Christian life, a journey with set-backs as well as periods of encouragement and grounds for hope.  The activity of pilgrimage itself is a metaphor for the whole of the Christian life.  Any pilgrim who has travelled on foot, whether to Canterbury or Compostela in Spain, will know the combination of pain and expectation and joy as the journey comes to an end.  Christian living itself combines the periods of doubt with moments of insight and breakthrough.   As with pilgrimage the Christian is given the grace to persevere through ‘cloud and sunshine’.

It is on reflection a puzzle to discover that large numbers of Christians appear to reject the notion of pilgrimage in favour of a faith that puts a stress on arriving at their destination on the day of their conversion.  For many evangelical Christians the decisive moment in their lives is the experience of giving their hearts and loyalty to Christ so that he is said to be the Lord and Master of their lives.  Simultaneously they are promised infallible access to his guiding word in the text of Scripture.  The task from then on is to hold themselves safe from falling away so that when the moment of death comes they may be transported to glory.  The entire Christian journey seems to have been accomplished in a moment of time and the only place that seems possible to travel to is backwards to perdition.   That would involve a loss of the salvation so preciously gained at the moment when the individual became a Christian.  Staying in this place of conversion is an activity not totally without tension or even fear.

This way of being a Christian contrasts starkly with the way of pilgrimage that we outlined at the beginning.  It will be clear which way I prefer from the tone of my writing.  But I want to make it clear that what I have said about the evangelical/conversionist path is not meant to imply that it is entirely wrong.  The experience of conversion may be totally self-authenticating and valid for the person concerned.  The problem for me is not the moment of conversion but what happens afterwards that is the issue.  The new Christian, because he/she has received everything on the first day of the journey seems to have nowhere else to go, nothing else to explore.  They are stuck in a place of supposed fulfilment and joy but which, in reality, seems to be a place of stagnation and what appears to be sterility.  Chris has often spoken to me about the loud music that accompanies the worship of evangelical Christians who want to tell the world about the joy of conversion.  Somehow I suspect the music is loud because it enables them to bypass the activity of having to think about what comes next in their Christian lives.  I have listened (painfully sometimes) to numerous testimonies given by Christians which record their moments of conversion.  Listening to these accounts critically, two things stand out.  The first thing is that the structure of conversion experiences is very similar wherever you hear it.  While the details of time and place will obviously be unique, the formula of words is almost identical in every case.  The second thing that is striking is that normally nothing to match the conversion experience has happened since.  It is as though the Christian has been up a mountain, seen a glimpse of glory but has never been able to evoke anything like it again.

The liberal or progressive Christian, were they to give a testimony, would give a very different story.   Not for them in all probability was there a bright light on the Damascus road.  Maybe they would happier with the language of a series of flashes along the road.  None of these experiences of light was on its own sufficient to convince totally but when seen together over a period of time, the progressive Christian had been able to discern a pattern, a pattern which speaks of God.  The word that describes this way of conversion is perhaps a pilgrim faith.  The pilgrim Christian is the one who travels, sometimes alone, sometimes with others along a path which he has decided is one he wants to follow.  It leads to a destination that he wants to call truth or reality but she/he knows that until he arrives the full shape and glory of the destination will not be known.  As I have said in previous posts, the pilgrim Christian travels with this combination of faith and hope in what is fully to be revealed.

Why do I commend to my reader the way of the pilgrim Christian?  It certainly describes my own path but that is not the main reason for commending it.  Look back over my life-time I can see that the path of the pilgrim Christian has given me the freedom and the excitement to explore and discover the transcendent in many manifestations.   It is this combination of freedom and the excitement of a constant possibility of discovery that I want to commend.   This is not the time for personal autobiography except to say that being a pilgrim has given me the permission to travel and discover aspects of truth within a variety of cultures and belief systems.  It has been and still is an exciting journey and I suspect that God is not far from most human beings who seek him whether or not they are Christian.  By travelling with others who may not even speak my language or engage with my culture I may nevertheless find God in that journey.  Each new discovery, each new insight shows me beyond all doubt that anything I do know already is incomplete.  The fullness of truth, the depth of reality is always beyond and further along the road but as a pilgrim I can continue to travel towards them.

One of the themes I have touched on in various blog posts is the way that we oscillate between knowing ourselves as individuals and as part of a group.  I want to reflect on this further, particularly from a historical and cultural point of view.  A heightened awareness of this contrast can help us to know ourselves better and resist the urge to become a part of an unthinking crowd when it is not in our interests to do so.

The Life of the Tribe

When we observe the life and patterns of traditional tribal communities we notice various things about them which are very different from our own culture.  In the first place a tribal society will know only one form of education, that of being initiated into the customs and traditions of the tribe.  This may include an acute sensitivity to the natural world and the ability to track animals, using clues that we would describe as subliminal.  The tribal society will normally have its own language but this language will be by our standards probably very restricted.  If you only have a 1000 words in your language it is going to severely restrict the ideas you can articulate.  Abstract words probably don’t exist.  This restricted vocabulary and the severe limitations on educational attainment are going to have the effect of meaning that every member of the tribe is going to find it difficult or impossible in our modern sense to become individuals.  They are going to be in a cultural and psychological sense very similar to one another.  They simply do not have the tools to enter what we would understand as a process of ‘individuation’.  That would require an exposure to life beyond the tribe.

The first individuals – 6^th Century BC

Living in such tribal groups is the way that human beings have existed for most of history.  It is only in recorded history that we begin to read about individuals as we would understand them.  Of the characters in the Old Testament, the first person who stands out as having a near modern self-consciousness is the prophet Jeremiah.  He can be said to ‘exist’, a word that literally means stand out.  We can read of his inner struggles that drove him away from the support and comfort of his fellow human beings in order to follow his call from Yahweh.  The world of the 6^th century BC also saw the simultaneous emergence in other parts of the world of personalities like the Buddha. Similar individuals are found in China in the same century with the emergence of Taoism and Confucianism, and we must not forget in Europe the early Greek philosophers.  I do not want to say anything further about the events of this particular century except to say that it can be seen as a golden age for religious and cultural history.   There was nothing universal and inevitable about this dawning of individual consciousness.  For most of the next 2000 years the tribal pattern continued to exist and indeed it could be argued that it still affects a large swathe of humanity.

The rediscovery of the Individual in modern times

Tribal awareness, in contrast to individual awareness, could be said to have largely dominated the West after the collapse of the Roman empire right up to the Renaissance.  This movement was when the values of the ancient world were rediscovered in the countries of Europe.   This new education and learning only touched a relatively small elite of wealthy people but it is generally agreed that the years between 1450 – 1550 mark the beginning of the ‘modern’ period.  ‘Renaissance man’ came to be a shorthand for describing a character having a fairly modern kind of awareness.  Such a person was further refined into ‘Enlightenment man’, the 18^th century manifestation of humanity.   The shorthand motto of the Enlightenment was, as we have mentioned before, ‘dare to doubt’.  Doubting was a mark of emancipation from the past and present traditions, so that new ideas could be thought and new discoveries made.

Western education for individuality

The values of western education have for some time encouraged the emergence of individuals who can think for themselves and take part in a democratic society, itself an Enlightenment idea.  Whether our education system is successful in creating these values through education can be debated but there is a belief that the thoughts, conscience and awareness of the individual takes a prominent place in our Western societies.  People who are arrested for criminal offences are assumed to be capable of making moral choices for themselves.  As adults our choices in numerous areas of activity are honoured by the rest of society.  The latest one to be so honoured is the biological sex of our partner.

Reflecting on individuality and group identity

This post has been written in order to provoke reflection by the reader as to whether the assumption we normally operate as separate individuals is always accurate.  The patterns of consumption and the dedication to fashion would seem to be tribal behaviour.  Also as I have suggested in an earlier blog, the gang culture of the inner city may simply be a living out of tribal behaviour.  Tribal behaviour is also an evocation of the merger experience known to a small child.  A baby or a toddler has little sense of being a separate being from the mother and in situations of stress even a normally differentiated adult may long for a similar merger to take place to alleviate the pain of isolation.  It would seem, to repeat the point at the beginning, that all of us appear to oscillate between separateness and identification with others according to the situation.  Perhaps what this blog post has helped to make clear that this swinging between the two extremes is built into our genes, our human history as well having been lived out in our experience of emerging from infancy into adulthood.

The ability to say ‘I am’ is something we have been given by our education, our place in human history  and our experience of relationships.  Perhaps we need to think about this awareness and at the same time ponder our share in a common history with countless others of being part of a tribal-type of existence when our thinking, feeling and experiencing was merged with that of countless others.  That experience is not totally negative, indeed the Christian experience of worship often activates it in us.  What is perhaps most important is not whether we have one or other of these experiences at a particular moment, but to see them as both part of our human condition.  The self-awareness is the important thing so that, as in the subtle manipulation of ‘merger-needs’ by abusive churches, we have insight into what is going within our consciousness.

Conclusion and Summary

As a summary, and to draw this reflection into our main theme of abusive churches,  I need to make my point clear.  Everyone in the 21^st century exists within a continuum between a desire for total merger with others and a strong sense of separateness.  Churches understand this oscillation and can sometimes manipulate it to our disadvantage by convincing us that it is in our interest to remain at the dependent end of this continuum.  While it is not wrong to enjoy this experience of dependency on others from time to time, it is also important to have a proper understanding and insight into the process so we are not so easily exploited.  Let us rejoice in both ends of this spectrum that exist inside ourselves and not allow them to be a means to be taken advantage of by others.

After writing a blog post twice or three times a week for the past three months, I realised that there was a limit to the material that I could pull out of my memory to place in front of those who follow the blog.  So from this point on my blogs will change direction somewhat.  The material that I will be sharing will more likely refer directly to material on my book-shelves and especially to ideas that I have found helpful at some point in the past.  Thus the reader of the blog will be travelling with me on a journey as I look back to books and ideas that I have found useful over the years.  I hope my readers will want to travel on this journey that will help all of us to understand better the phenomenon that we call abusive religion.

One of the problems of trying to write a book on abusive fundamentalism as I did some 15 years ago, was getting a handle on the subject matter.  There were of course lots of books on fundamentalism but they took a whole variety of approaches that varied from the biblical to the theological ,  from the psychological to the political.  It was with some relief that I found a particular book which for the first time gave me a place on which to stand and find an overall perspective from which to look at the whole topic.  The book was entitled Righteous Religion:  Unmasking the illusions of Fundamentalism and Authoritarian Catholicism by Kathleen Ritter and Craig O’Neill.  Part of the attraction of the book was that it spoke about psychological themes without becoming too technical.  This tendency of books about psychology to be extremely technical has been something which has constantly plagued my attempts to understand the dynamics of cultic churches.  This book on the other hand had the ability to say something quite profound with no danger that the reader, new to psychology, would be overwhelmed by the jargon.

The thesis of the book is a deceptively simple one which can be outlined in the space of a single blog post.  The first principle of the book is that attendance at a church of whatever kind has the attraction of reactivating in the individual the experience of belonging to a family.  Everyone has such a desire for the safety and security of a human family built into the genes.  A church can or should provide for its members the various positive aspects of the birth family, including safety, acceptance, support and meaning.  The parallels between the needs of a young child in a family and that those of an adult belonging to a church are obviously far from exact but the same basic needs are there in both stages of human growth.

Righteous Religion then distinguishes between the healthy family and the toxic one.  At the risk of over-simplification, the normal family is seen as one where the love offered is unconditional.  However good or bad the child is, the parent never ceases to love the child without limit.  The child grows up with that security built into their awareness.  Even though misbehaviour has to be dealt with the child is never allowed to doubt that the parents’ love is solid and dependable.  In contrast to such a family there are other families where the message given is different.  We call the love in these families conditional love.  Any affection offered comes with subtle strings attached.  The message is given ‘I will show you care  and affection if….’  The conditions that are laid down normally concern the parents’ status and well-being.  ‘I will love you if you bring credit to this family by your achievements and your efforts’.  This most damaging form of conditional love is one which places on the child the need to succeed, to make the parents proud.  If for any reason success is not achieved the child is made to feel worthless as a human being both for his/her failure at the task but also for failing to receive adequate affection and love from the people he is dependent on.  The child is doubly betrayed by this toxic environment.

Ritter and O’Neill present the authoritarian church as being the equivalent to the toxic family that only cares when its expectations are met.  Acceptance and approval are only handed out to those who believe the right things, give sufficiently of their means and generally conform to the norms of the group.  Because the church has often succeeded in activating quite powerful mechanisms of need, these toxic churches are able to continue to exercise a powerful controlling and ultimately harmful hold over individuals.  Dissent is not tolerated. The member of an abusive church or cult will be reluctant to leave the group in the same way that the abused child will find it hard to let go of the toxic family.  Belonging is a stronger instinct even than the desire to avoid harm and abuse.

I have spoken in a previous blog post about the power of induced fear.  In the toxic family the child lives with the threat of being cast out into a nothingness, losing any familiarity that he has known, the sheer terror of being alone.  The toxic church has a similar trump card.  It deals in the currency not only of belonging but also claims to have the power to threaten its members with the terrors of being lost for all eternity, in a place apart from God, a place of eternal torment.  No doubt thinking about the possibility of hell evokes childhood memories of separation and terror in the adult.  This will always be a powerful tool of control.

Using the model of the church as a family is useful up to a point.   In the last resort it is a useful metaphor and the limitations of linking the two will become apparent quite quickly if the metaphor is worked too hard.  But Righteous Religion did help me at an early stage in my reading grasp one aspect of the way that one can assess the healthy and the unhealthy in church life.  It also helped me to understand how the vulnerabilities of people are taken advantage of and made the tools of control.  Frightening people into the Kingdom may make for ‘successful’ and full churches but ultimately such churches cannot necessarily be said to be healthy.  The important question that has to be asked of any church congregation is whether it is healthy.  By healthy we mean that the people have the opportunity to grow, feel affirmed, love and be loved as well as be free from fear.  The same questions can also be asked of a human family.  Most of us know what makes for a healthy environment for children to grow up in.  The least we can ask for members of our church families that they are allowed to exist with the same underlying values of acceptance, tolerance, freedom to think and be heard.  Part of the glory of a human family is that children are normally allowed to grow up different in character and ability.  Why on earth should we expect the members of the church acquire a monotonous similarity of character and belief with one another?  Long may difference and even disagreement flourish in the church just as it does in the human family!

On this blog my readers will have noted that I have put forward some outspoken, even uncomfortable statements about the Bible.  I have talked about a selective reading of passages from Scripture, finding a point of teaching from a single quotation while ignoring other passages that say something different.  The other technique, to which I strongly object, is to suggest that the only valid truth statements are those that are factual and scientific in some way.  If the Bible says, to take a random example, that God is going to make the Nile dry up (Isaiah 19.5) then presumably this is something that will have to happen one day because it is in the Bible.  For most of us truth statements come in a variety of forms – poetry, drama, story, symbol as well as factual statements.  Does it matter that people in America and across the world claim to believe that when the bible makes an apparently factual statement then that is how we have to understand it?  Yes I believe it does because in some situations this belief system causes some individuals very real harm.

In the news, as I write, is the report of the Anglican bishops in England who write that they ‘agree to disagree’ on the issue of gay relationships following the Pilling report.  Elsewhere in the world the Anglican bishops see this as a total betrayal of Anglican standards.  The Archbishops in Nigeria and Uganda, while quoting Scripture, have loudly supported moves to outlaw gay relationships by their respective governments.  While the Ugandan authorities seem to be hesitating before signing new measures into law, no such reticence is to be found in Nigeria.  Those suspected of homosexual activities are already being rounded up and put in prison.  It would not be a total exaggeration to say that ‘the Bible put them there’, even though there are many other factors, cultural, historical and social.

When we examine the rhetoric of these fervent Anglican African leaders on this topic, we frequently find the expression ‘the Bible clearly teaches’.  No doubt this is a turn of phrase that is heard in conservative pulpits across the world.  When I started to think about this expression I began to realise that this personalisation of the Bible is a nonsense statement.  Let me explain what I mean.  The Bible is a compilation of writing across many centuries and is enormously varied in the approach it takes to almost any subject you can name.  A book cannot anyway teach anything unless it is written by one person over a fairly  short period.  For me one of the fascinating discoveries of being a Bible student was to discover that Paul changed his teaching over time.   If we do not get consistency in this single writer we can name, how can we, or should we, expect consistency within the writings of other anonymous authors over centuries?  I would like to see the liberal Anglican bishops argue forcefully against this claim that the Bible has a single view on the gay issue or any other one for that matter.

I could go on to talk about all the things that are in the Bible and we like to avoid noticing, like God commanding the slaughter of women and children but that is not the point I want to end on.  I want to come back to the issue of rhetoric and the way that conservative Christians use rhetorical devices to confuse their opponents as well as their followers.  When writing about the thinking of George Lakoff in an earlier post, (December 20^th) I mentioned that he saw many of the debates between progressive and conservative in American politics being bedevilled by the manipulation and loading of language to suit the conservative point of view.  The expression ‘the Bible teaches’ or ‘the Bible clearly states’ is another rhetorical device which needs to be challenged every time it is said.  We cannot easily talk or dialogue meaningfully with such crude and unhelpful expressions which are, in the last resort, virtually meaningless statements.  We must challenge the person repeating  these slogans and suggest  that he restate his position to say, ‘in a certain period in Biblical times people believed that the following was the will of God.’  ‘The Bible clearly states’ has to be translated to say, ‘there is a passage which appears to have this understanding of God’s will.’  Having stated it thus we can then go on to have a sensible discussion about whether these ancient insights apply to us or not.  I can find numerous ideas from the Old Testament that clearly do not apply to us and each and every moral injunction from those days needs to be tested thoroughly through the prism of Christ’s revelation and the insights of modern understandings.

The Anglican bishops have been under a lot of flak for not coming on one side or the other over the gay question.  Perhaps this failure to agree is more helpful than it looks.  By agreeing not to agree they are saying loud and clearly that the church as a whole has to live with disagreements.  In other words if you want to claim the name Anglican then it is part of the course to recognise that you have to live with people who do not agree with you, without telling them that they are inspired by satanic thinking.  Anglicanism needs to exorcise intemperate intolerance.  If the conservative churches in Africa and elsewhere continue to condemn those who disagree with them, then they may need to be a parting of the ways.  There is only so long that anyone can live with another person who is unable to see any goodness or light within you.

As part of a varied ministry over 40+ years, I have for a period of around 15 years accepted the responsibility for the ministry of ‘spiritual deliverance’ in two Anglican dioceses.  The Press would no doubt describe the role as that of Exorcist but the reality was far more prosaic.  Perhaps the main qualification for doing the job was a readiness to take seriously strange phenomena that occur from time to time in people’s lives.  Typically and most commonly there could be a manifestation of physical energy with no obvious cause.  This might be described as poltergeist activity.  There might be a disturbance of things flying around or lights flashing on and off.  Normally I would be talking to a clergyman over the phone advising him how to approach the problem, the attitude to take and the things to say.  I have to say that when I went into such a situation myself the phenomena always stopped but I have absolutely no doubt that these frightening episodes were real.  Listening carefully, taking the fears seriously and offering prayers would normally calm the situation down.  Mostly I was also able to identify a particular individual who was the focus of the strange phenomena.   There was thus a duty on my part to ensure that the unconscious energy at work in that individual was somehow ‘earthed’ through careful listening and other forms of pastoral care.

The second typical event was encountering directly, or through advising a clergyman seeking advice, an individual who believed themselves ‘possessed’.  The question that I wanted to determine before anything else was where the person had learnt the language of possession.  In almost every case they had picked up the vocabulary from attendance at a Christian fellowship which had dealt in the currency of demonic activity and constant attack.  Although the language of demonic attack had been normally linked to Anglo-Catholic circles until around 40 years ago, the idea of possession has since around 1980 been normally linked to charismatic and evangelical groups.  There was a particular upsurge of interest, even paranoia, about satanic and demonic activity in the late 80s and early 90s.  As I described in an earlier blog post, aspects of this paranoia around this were, for once, taken seriously by the UK Government and a report published in 1995.  This particular paranoia, even affecting some in the wider society, has largely subsided.  (See blog post for December 4^th)

In this post I don’t want to repeat what I said in the previous one about devils, but to revisit the horror and cruelty of telling a vulnerable person that they are in thrall to a negative spiritual power of some description.  I was always open to the possibility that this was indeed the explanation for their distress but it never, as far as I could tell, turned out to be the case in practice.  In the discussions on this blog we have touched on the experience of utter powerlessness whether through poverty, social exclusion or mental illness.  When you are at the bottom of the pile, you feel unworthy of anyone’s attention and therefore expect to be ignored and humiliated by everyone.  It seems to me that the language of demonic possession is one more weapon in the tool box through which someone can make an individual feel utterly powerless.  How can you argue with a person who tells you such a thing?

The task of someone who is entrusted with the ministry of spiritual deliverance when encountering someone who believes they are ‘possessed’ is to recognise that you are dealing with someone who may have been doubly or triply burdened.  They first of all carry the stigma of the original problem whether mental or social that has allowed them to be burdened with the possession label.  Secondly they have assumed the identity of someone who is powerless to defend themselves against spiritual/demonic incursion.  Thirdly they have allowed themselves to trust in a Christian leader who, for reasons of their own, has put them in this state of utter dependency.  The relationship with such a person is little short of toxic and one wonders how they can escape it even if they run away physically from the influence of that individual.

This second kind of care entrusted to an Officer for spiritual deliverance might be described as a kind of exorcism but in practice it was an attempt to give people back some of their power after they had been doubly betrayed by the church and one of its leaders.  Once was through a doubtful dualistic teaching and secondly by a continuing toxic dependence on a church leader who wanted total dominance over vulnerable members of his (normally his) flock.  It will be apparent that I met relatively few devils doing my ‘spiritual deliverance’ work.  More frequently I met the casualties of hopelessly inept teaching and examples of ruthless exploitation of the vulnerable.

Shepherding – a story.

Among the books on my shelves is a small green volume written by one Juan Ortiz, a pastor from Buenos Aires in Argentina and published in 1975.  This small book, called Disciple, was a reflection on his ministry over the previous ten or more years.  It was to help cause a small revolution in certain parts of the evangelical churches of his time.  The history of shepherding is something I discussed in my book Ungodly Fear but I did not have then access to this key foundation document by Ortiz.

I want to list some of the key Biblical ideas that Ortiz picks up in explaining the ideas that led to the so-called Shepherding Movement.  Reading them one can see how innocent ideas can be turned, as indeed happened, into something monstrous and abusive.

According to Ortiz we are slaves of Jesus Christ and he bases this teaching on Luke 17.10.  In other words Jesus owns every part of our lives.  The idea of being the slaves of Christ is one worthy of exploration but when it becomes combined with Ortiz’s other key ideas about discipleship, it becomes subtly much more oppressive.

Ortiz in chapter 14 of the book Disciple sets out two ‘laws’ of discipleship.  The first is that ‘there is no formation without submission’.  Formation is for him a key factor in the way that Jesus discipled his followers.  In accepting his call to discipleship, the disciples submitted to his authority.  In short undergoing formation for discipleship through submission is to be a key task for every member of the church.  Most members would also have others ‘below’ them who needed to be discipled.  This process of discipling is not dissimilar to the role of parents ‘forming’ or bringing up their children.  But Ortiz quickly recognises that submission has to be something that everyone has to agree to, including the pastor.  So Ortiz sets out the second law ‘there is no submission without submission’.  Everyone was thus tied into an interlocking hierarchical structure that placed everyone in a situation of submitting to someone else but also having others submitting to them.  The church then dropped the word member in favour of the word disciple to describe an individual who formed part of this pyramid structure.  Thus everyone except the very newest members was both discipling and being discipled.  As can be imagined this networking idea proved fairly successful in the context of Argentina where the ravages of poverty, high inflation and political oppression meant that individual lives were fairly fragile.  The vision of the church that Ortiz wanted to share was one which gave nourishment, both spiritual and practical to its members up and down the network of the church.  The cell structure in his church helped to bind people closer together in the context of oppression and persecution.  Also because the way that all disciples are interlocked with others above and below them, it provided for rapid communication within the whole.

Cell structures and mutual submission might sum up the insights of Juan Ortiz who inspired the Shepherding Movement in the States and across the world.  The historical details of how shepherding spread do not concern us here but suffice to say that however well it had succeeded in Argentina, the shepherding idea was a disaster when it hit the wider church beyond South America.  When you take the words ‘submission’ and ‘discipleship’ together and draw everyone in the congregation into this structure, you give those with a penchant for enjoying power a field day.  The churches where shepherding ideas were put into practice gave to naive young Christians the power to enforce their will in every area of life over others ‘below’ them.  Thus one Christian could tell another how to live their lives – how to spend their money, the relationships they were to have and who they were to invite into their homes.  Being in submission to another did not, as it turned out, prevent excesses of immature and irresponsible behaviour.  Far from it.  The situation in numerous churches became so dire that the leaders who had welcomed the ideas into America recanted on their approval by 1975.  Needless to say, and Chris will confirm this, these ideas continued to hold sway for many years after this.  Most of the House Churches which flourished in the 80s were deeply influenced by these ideas and ideals.  As with the cults, the idea of living a communal life, sharing and submitting to a community ideal seems very attractive.  No doubt some succeeded in sustaining the ideal for a period but the snake of power abuse at work in the Garden of Eden appeared very quickly and destroyed what seemed so good at the start.

Somewhere in the writing of Ortiz are some interesting and profound insights and perhaps they should be revisited at some point.  This can, however, only be done when the sad history of the Shepherding Movement has been revisited, the countless lives wrecked and destroyed are mourned and we acknowledge in repentance what happens when scriptural ideas are taken and misapplied.