It was announced in another blog that Michael Reid, the former head of Peniel Church in Brentwood, died on Friday 13^th January 2023.  Those who have followed this blog for a long time will be familiar with the name.  My interest in this larger-than-life charismatic leader formed an important focus for this blog over a period in around 2015. 

Why was writing about Michael Reid and Peniel important to me in the early days of Surviving Church?  The simple answer is that Reid became, for me, a classic embodiment of many of the outrageous examples of spiritual power abuse that I was uncovering when I started my study of the topic 20 -30 years ago.   In the mainstream churches, by contrast, such things were being better concealed in the 90s.  My documented case studies, as readers of Ungodly Fear will know, came mainly from free churches on the fundamentalist/charismatic end of the spectrum.  Back in 1998 when I was writing the book, I was aware of Reid’s church, Peniel Brentwood, which was an independent charismatic congregation.  My wife and I visited the church and attended a service around that time, but loud alarm bells did not ring immediately.  It was only a little later, after my book had been published, that I realised that Peniel and its leader, Reid, was a vivid example of a church that contained many examples of the toxic abusive behaviour that I had been describing in my book.  I started to correspond with one Nigel Davies, a blogger whose family had been seriously damaged through membership of this congregation.  He has, right up till today, used the power of protest to demonstrate in person outside the church, now known as Trinity Brentwood.  Over the years his protests have been extended to include other congregations within the Elim network.  This is the denominational grouping that Peniel (now called Trinity Brentwood) chose to identify itself with after Reid was forcibly removed as leader in 2008.

For those of my readers who have the time/interest to look it up, there is a great deal of information on this blog from around 2015 about the appalling events in this congregation under Reid. After the forced resignation in 2008, there was a brief ‘Prague Spring’, but it soon reverted to its old controlling and abusive ways under a new leadership.  Peniel/Trinity cannot be the only church that finds it hard to face up to the legacy of a past abusive history.   Reid had been sacked for sexual misdemeanours (consensual? adultery), but the appalling trail of cultic intimidation and financial skulduggery was, arguably, even more serious.  Eventually the church agreed to investigate its own past after a credible complaint of rape was made against one of its own members.  The report that appeared in the autumn of 2015 and to which I attach a link at the end, is a very important document even seven years later. This report, written by an eminent evangelical lawyer called John Langlois, runs to some 200,000 words.  It was, and remains in my belief, the best and most vivid and detailed account of a British church committing abuse against its own membership.   At the time that it was released, I frequently referred to this Langlois report on this blog as a way of illustrating how the narcissistic behaviour of one man could create so much havoc and pain for so many.

The removal of Reid was not easily achieved.  Court cases had to be fought as Reid regarded the church buildings and plant as belonging to him personally. By 2008 the church had, through the dint of congregational financial sacrifice, acquired a considerable portfolio of property, including a large premises for a school.  This building later sold for £6m.  One part of the battle that Nigel Davies has been valiantly fighting for, is that some of this money, accumulated by the bullying techniques of Reid and his henchmen and women, should be used to compensate some of those who had lost everything in terms of education, mental health and financial stability because of their involvement in the church.  Although Reid’s name is now probably no longer discussed or remembered by the current congregation, Davies claims that much of the wealth of the church belongs morally to a past generation who were ruthlessly exploited and abused while members of Peniel.

When recording the death of an individual, it is customary to add the letters RIP to the name.  In this case I hesitate to do this.  This is because of the way that so many individuals, young and old at Peniel, lost their peace by having it taken from them.  My blogging work brought me into direct touch with several Peniel survivors, including an American girl who had come to Brentwood in the 90s to study at the so-called Peniel Bible School.  Instead of learning, this cadre of girls were exploited as cheap labourers for the Church.  Those who administered the scheme made sure that they could not escape by confiscating their passports on arrival and intercepting their letters from home.  Exploitation of vulnerable foreign girls sometimes extended to a situation of sexual abuse.   It was, in fact, in response to one specific complaint of such abuse, that the church was forced to set up Langlois’ investigation.  Also, the entire congregation had experienced forced labour, by having to turn out regularly to work on the estate and the grounds.  This was expected of the youngest children as well. All this is described in great detail in Langlois’ report.

When I was writing my commentaries in 2015 on Reid’s behaviour as revealed by Langlois, I was always hoping that such behaviour would never be found in the Church of England.  While it is true that the cult-like atmosphere of Reid’s congregation would be difficult to find in an ordinary CofE parish, there are still many, some uncomfortably close, parallels in common church leadership styles.  Langlois described many of the classic power games and techniques at work in Reid’s leadership style.  We find the typical methods of coercion and control, including shaming and ostracism.  Reid also seems to have enjoyed playing off one family against another, retaining to himself the power of supreme authority.  It is first from reading about Reid that I learned some of the classic biblical texts used by abusive leaders against those seeking accountability.  ‘Touch not the Lord’s Anointed’ and ‘Obey your leaders and defer to them’.  These were the passages quoted endlessly by Reid in the ruthless manipulation of the people in his congregation.  Obeying Reid meant, for example, cruelly turning the back on those who decided to leave, after daring to question Reid’s leadership.

Peniel/Trinity Brentwood concerns have disappeared for seven years from the discussion in this blog.  I could be said to have moved on from considering the horrors of Peniel in Brentwood.  Reid’s death, however, has had the effect of triggering a memory of his abuse horrors. I am reminded of my own reflections and attempts to understand the wickedness of Reid and the way he acted with such appalling cruelty against the people he was supposed to care for spiritually.  The Langlois report continues to remind us that spiritual/power/sexual abuse is alive and well in the Church and those of us who see this must do all we can to expel it from Christian circles.

Some concluding reflections on church power abuse, triggered by the death of Michael Reid

1 Any church leader, who works in a pre-existing or created hierarchy, will experience the temptation to obtain gratification by ‘lording it over the flock’.  A church leader needs to have a strong system of self-awareness and accountability that makes it difficult to succumb to this temptation.   Just because a candidate for ministry may begin training strongly imbued with a desire to serve, it does not mean that this sense of humility will stay the course, without the need for constant monitoring.

2 A temptation to exercise power inappropriately in a church is normally found in one or more of three areas, power/status, sex and money.  Male pastors seem to be more readily attracted by power abuses than the female.  Female power gratification does, of course, exist.   I do not need to spell out the appalling damage that sexual power abuse can wreak in a congregation whether directed against adults or children.  Financial dishonesty, or even a preoccupation with financial power can also create serious damage to a church.  It does not have to be illegal to be corrupting. It is a temptation for some to see financial success as spiritual success when it may be no such thing.  Tithing is not biblical, whatever ‘prosperity’ teachers may declare.  There is nothing in Scripture to suggest that all our charitable generosity should be directed at and through our local church and its leaders.  Indeed, handing over so much financial power to church leaders may create the conditions for abusive power that are spiritually and morally dangerous.

3.  Michael Reid’s legacy of causing pain, humiliation and lasting damage to many of his flock at Brentwood is a learned lesson to be heeded by every congregation.  A full 14 years since his forced retirement, means that only a few will now remember his life and career. The fact that there exists an extensive and detailed report of all the failings of his congregational oversight and the sheer suffering he inflicted on young and old, means that something is left, albeit negative, of his ministry.  The events and pain inflicted on so many at Brentwood between 1980 and 2008 are episodes that should never be allowed to be buried in the mists of history.

The Langlois report on Peniel Church Brentwood 2015

https://www.dropbox.com/s/e3578t7pt87jvci/Langlois%20report.pdf?dl=0

In the last couple of days an important decision from the Solicitors Regulation Authority concerning the CofE has appeared in the public domain.  It is not a story recounting outrageous immorality on the part of a church leader, though the report does have a link with the late Bishop Peter Ball and his crimes.  It recounts the unprofessional behaviour of a single individual who used to work as Registrar or chief legal officer for the Anglican Diocese of Gloucester.  The officer concerned, Christopher Peak, has now seen his registration as a solicitor removed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.  This story has some importance in the wider relationships between the Church and the legal institutions of this country.  Every member of the Church is, in a slight way, affected by the special legally enforceable rules that operate in the work of the national Church.  There are certainly hundreds of professionals who are employed to oversee legal matters in the dioceses and at a national level.  It is to be hoped that these qualified professionals will always give good service for the substantial sums of money that they earn to manage this aspect of church life.

At the heart of this legal story is not a decision or a court case.  It is the account of a total absence, over a twenty-year period, of any challenge or legal questioning over a legal saga.  The context of the case is the arrest and subsequent Caution of the then Bishop of Gloucester, Peter Ball for offences against young men.  This part of the story is well-known. Having voluntarily agreed to vacate his see in 1992, Ball went on to an active retirement ministry for some twenty years.  Eventually the case was re-examined, and Ball served a fifteen-month sentence in prison for his offences.   The part of the story that is less well known is the fact that the Gloucester Diocesan Registrar, Christopher Peak, acted as a personal solicitor to Ball when the case first came into public view in 1992.   In short, Peak agreed to negotiate with the police and the legal authorities in the task of mitigating the crimes of Ball.  In this he seems to have enjoyed a measure of success, as Ball, despite his Caution, went on to enjoy many more years of retirement ministry.  Somehow, Peak failed to recognise that it was totally inappropriate for him, as a chief diocesan legal officer, to act at the same time on behalf of his bishop under criminal investigation.  In non-legal jargon, can it ever be right to represent the interests of the diocese and an accused bishop simultaneously?  Is this not a case of a lawyer tolerating a clear conflict of interest?

The twenty-year gap that I have referred to above represents the period (1992- 2012) where Peak, the chief legal officer of a diocese, having legal responsibilities for promoting the welfare of that body, had chosen to identify with one party in a criminal case. One does not criticise Peak for taking on the role of a defence solicitor, thus presenting the best possible case for an accused party.  Peak was entitled to defend Ball, but he was not entitled to have the role of representing the interests of the diocese as its Registrar at the same time.  This conflict of interest should have been obvious to Peak as its head legal official.  It should also have been obvious to others working in a legal capacity around him.  For twenty years this situation of obvious conflict of interest was tolerated without any awareness of dissonance. Because Peak would not have been able to represent the diocese ‘without fear or favour’ in a legal case involving the former bishop and his diocese, he was compromising his ability to protect the diocese.  No doubt, there were those within the church legal system nationally, who might have spotted something wrong with the situation.  Somehow we suspect that the power of vested interests were wanting to keep a firm lid on any examination of what had gone wrong.  In the end, it was not church lawyers that blew the whistle of what had been going on; it was the work of some lawyers following the case from the National Secular Society.  It was they who, thirty years after the event, obtained this current ruling from the Solicitors Regulatory Authority.  This deemed Peak’s behaviour as worthy of official censure and sanction.

Why is this story important?   It is important for at least two reasons.  The first is that legal offences by those working for the church, when they occur, have been, historically speaking, rarely challenged.  The conflict of interest involved in having the Diocesan Registrar acting as a personal solicitor for the bishop should have been fairly obvious to anyone working in a legal capacity in Gloucester at the time.  One suspects that deference to Peak by lawyers and church dignitaries alike supressed any such challenge.  As Registrar and probably the most highly paid servant of the diocese, it was probably not difficult to overawe any potential opposition to his legal activity as personal solicitor in defending Ball.  Initially, at any rate, the diocesan clergy unanimously supported Ball and it was only later that the possibility of guilt gradually dawned on them.  The second factor is linked to the high financial rewards payable to lawyers who work for the Church. Just as Peak used his skill and power to successfully manage things legally for Ball, so we have witnessed the raw power of well-paid lawyers working openly to intimidate their victims in the case of the Christ Church/Percy case. We have discussed in earlier blogs the way that conflicts of interest were clearly apparent in that long-running saga. At Gloucester, the power of a Registrar acting as a defence lawyer must have been considerable.  We know from the Charity Commission statement that the fees charged by the church lawyers working for Christ Church and Diocese of Oxford were massive and one suspects that considerable sums of charitable money were also spent defending Ball.  We should always be able to expect the highest standards of ethical behaviour from lawyers working for the church.   Somehow the events of recent years when specialist church lawyers have been involved have meant that our confidence in the church’s legal system is not as secure as we would like it to be.

The Peak affair is something that could easily be buried under the ecclesiastical legal carpet.  It is however, I believe, saying something challenging to a future generation of church lawyers.  After failures and evidence of legal malfeasance over recent years, the wider Church will always be watching your behaviour with greater scrutiny.    In return for the millions we spend, and have spent, on legal services, we expect one thing above all.  We expect the very highest standards of morality and ethics. These are already laid down by the legal profession itself as it seeks to serve the public in a variety of contexts. Breaches of trust, conflicts of interest, protecting reputations and institutional bullying should never be found coming among church legal officers.  Also, protecting such behaviour, when practised by church dignitaries, is not part of your job.  We need the service of good lawyers to help the Church of England in its work, but we need to be able to assume that you fully share our highest ethical values, even if not necessarily our beliefs.  These values indeed already belong to your ethical and professional training.  They include respect for all, justice, equality under the law and high levels of personal integrity.  Recent failures by church lawyers in preserving such values have put many of us in a state of high alert.  We want to see that the church legal system is being used to promote the cause of justice and goodness and not a means to bolster reputation management and indulge in unjust power games which damage so many.

Having struggled through the New Year season with Covid, I make no apologies for delays in writing a few words for my readers.  For me and my wife, the virus has manifested itself as a streaming cold, a hacking cough and a high temperature and I realise that I have had little energy for writing over the past couple of weeks.  What I offer here is shorter than usual, but I trust my readers will be understanding as I try to get back to normal.

The word that sums up this season is simply the word ‘new’. I realised as I was thinking about this word that it is not one describing an objective reality. Something may be new to one person but not to another. The individual who has not yet seen an object or had a particular life experience is entitled to describe them as new on the first occasion when they are encountered.  While there are some things that are universally new to everyone, most ‘new’ experiences are only special to the individuals concerned.  This quality of newness, such as one marking an age milestone, is nevertheless very important to those involved.  The newness of marriage, parenthood, adulthood is something we commemorate and often share with others.  We recognise how important these new milestone events are in people’s lives.  By our joining in such celebrations, we help to emphasise how delighted we are to share an experience of newness in another person’s life.

Newness is not just about marking and celebrating these life milestones, whether those of other people or our own.  It also describes about a quality of living that sees the way that everything around us is constantly in a state of flux and change.  The world of nature allows us to live in a world of beauty and growth where we see constant change.  It is perhaps much easier not to notice what is is going on around us, how, for example, each day in the year has its own special quality.  The light of the sun in winter is of a different quality to that of summer.  Each season also has its own glory.  The changes and constant newness all around us are a constant source of delight and joy.  The one thing that is required to enter this world of delight is our readiness to pay attention.   It takes effort to notice the new.  Humankind has a regrettable preference for what is predictable and repeatable.  We thus find it easier to shut out anything not needed for the immediate task in hand.

The capacity to embrace newness in the world of nature by people is an attractive quality.  It makes us want to try harder to cultivate this appreciation or sense of wonder in ourselves as a way of honouring God as the creator.  There is a wonderful passage in Psalm 8 when the psalmist speaks of the ‘work of thy (God’s) fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained’.  If appreciating God’s beauty is to become an honoured part of our spiritual make-up, then we should probably take more trouble over it.  We would like to think that our recognition of the newness of everything around us, is indeed part of our Christian faith.  This may be the case, but it cannot be allowed to stand on its own.   To serve God merely by recognising his beauty in nature would be an in incomplete, even lopsided, form of faith. 

There is one further way that we are called to engage with newness.  Christianity sometimes involves deliberate activity.  We may see something that ought to be done and we determine in our minds to take the necessary actions to bring it to pass.  Knowing that the people around us have similar needs to our own allows us to make an effort to serve those needs when we can.  Every decision to speak a word of encouragement or support to another person takes courage on our part.  When we do it, it is a deliberate action and it is new in the sense that it has never happened before.  Our potential actions towards other people all have the possibility for good.   In this potentiality there is enormous hope for change, newness and even transformation.  Perhaps we make less effort for the people around us because we have started to get too used to them and take them for granted. Just as the view from our own front window becomes so familiar that we stop noticing it and take it for granted, so we so easily do the same with people.  To say that other people, even those closest to us, have so much more to be engaged with, is probably an understatement.  As with the seasons, the growth in nature and the beauty of light interacting with plants and animals, so the people around us, the ones we take for granted, have so much to appreciate about them.  It does, however, require some kind of deliberate attention or application to reveal what we should want to find in that that over-familiar, maybe even stale, relationships.  But if we believe that everything is capable of being made new, then we should give our full attention to areas of staleness in our personal lives.  To see what is new in everything and everyone around us is perhaps a truly Christian resolution for the New Year.

In Revelation 21, in a passage often read at funerals, the one seated on the Throne says, ‘Behold I make all things new’.  Exactly what is being made new in this passage needs discussion and interpretation and there is room for different opinions on this. Nevertheless the ideal of newness being a divine gift to replace brokenness, death and loss has a powerful resonance. In whatever situation we find ourselves in we are always in the need of newness.  The interesting thing is that such newness is always available if we truly look for it.  It is available in the world of beauty and nature, and this is a gift for all, regardless of any religious background.  But newness is also promised in our relationships.  As Christians we are expected to explore the possibility of new relationships.  Here we find the discourse of reconciliation, forgiveness and restoration.   These are words about newness that very much belong to the Christian narrative.  There is a great deal of hope to be found here.

The idea of New Year has a powerful resonance whether we are talking about a Christian audience or an ordinary secular one.  Both can respond to that idea that newness involves hope and possibilities for the future.  Christians have their own account about the content of their hope, but every human being can be drawn into a narrative of good things that are possible if we are prepared to make the adjustment to listen more carefully and pay attention to what is around us.   Newness in the world, in other people and breaking out of staleness and routine is part of the way that the world becomes changed.  When we see a changed world both in the world of nature or in relationships, things start to shift.  We become part of and begin to create a new and better world.   Somehow, we have begun to put into practice our participation in the changing of the world that God is still creating, the world where all things are made new.

by David Brown

As Churchgoers, can we miss the point about faith?  And can we misunderstand how prayer fits in?  Jesus was sometimes quite strong about such hazards.  We read in Matt 6.1,2 “Beware of practising your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.”  It seems we must understand at a deep level what righteousness means, and how we should then live?  For today’s culture makes success seem rather important:  success in our education maybe, success in our work, and achievements in Christian work or in raising our family?

Jesus’s own lifestyle is surely a good place to start. For He demonstrated a vivid lifestyle from heaven; as a peasant carpenter, born without status, power or privilege, contrasting strongly with lifestyles seen today in eminent people.

Yet here’s a problem, for His life, viewed this way, was a total failure. Whilst travelling around, attracting new followers, a time came when ‘many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.’ (John 6.66).  His ministry was then decisively wrecked by evil people who ‘stitched him up’ to die a public and cruel criminal’s death.  His disciples (apart from Judas Iscariot) became ‘apostles’ to continue his work.  The evidence shows that the religious leaders of his day had become deeply corrupt.  As well as murdering Jesus, this religious ‘establishment’ used continuing violence, trying to silence these Christian men and women.  Jesus’s own brother James was thrown down from a high tower, and none of the rest of them died in their own beds. A technique seemingly followed by Putin today.

A theme emerges, often unnoticed, that God chooses to deal through failure rather more than success, as the world sees it.

I must admit to being rather slow to understand and accept such important truths about the Christian life.  And slow to see that the Christian faith is not primarily a matter of morality and the effort needed to achieve it.  Morality may be a consequence of following Jesus, but it shouldn’t be an aim.  When Jesus was asked by a lawyer what he had to do to inherit eternal life, he answered “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself.”  (Luke 10:27-28). Whilst given a hugely demanding answer, the lawyer surprisingly picked up on the neighbour point rather than the larger point Jesus was making.

Then, there’s the whole subject of prayer.  I have too readily seen it as a way of bringing my own ideas to fruition—rather like using prayer as a religious ‘slot machine’.  God simply doesn’t depend on his followers to try to exercise a sort of control in this way. In his humility, Jesus showed a completely different pattern, saying: ‘I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.’ (John 6:38).  So, our top priority is to listen out for his voice to first discover what He wants of us.

There was a time in my memory when clergy were allowed to work without the constraints of safeguarding rules and health and safety awareness.  It was not, by any means, a golden era.  Two episodes still haunt me from my curacy days in the 1970s, when I ended up in the casualty department of a hospital with an injured child. In neither case was I, the organiser of the outing, held responsible as each were deemed pure accidents. I suspect that today’s risk sensitive culture might want to take a different view. The most important fact abut these episodes is that in neither case was the damage sustained by the child serious. The main thing I note here is that attitudes to risk and safety in church and elsewhere were not such a high priority in my early days of ministry.

But, in recalling these days of risk innocence, as I can call them, I have to confess that things did not always work out so well.  One particular episode involved my then Vicar taking a gamble over the integrity of a troubled young man whom he took in as a lodger at the Vicarage in my parish.  The young man was then, in 1973, about 29 and, from the details I picked up, he had had a troubled past.  This included a chaotic home life as a child and later episodes of homelessness.  Charlie, as I shall call him, did however have a strong outgoing personality and soon ingratiated himself with the congregation.  He had no full-time job but busied himself around the church plant and acted as an informal caretaker. Charlie made it his business to get on with me.  Not only were we fellow lodgers at the Vicarage, but he wanted to help at the youth club which met on a Sunday night in the church hall, and which was under my charge.  All went well for many months, and it was helpful to have another adult to help supervise the games and activities that I laid on for the young people.  There was nevertheless something not quite right in his behaviour which I could not name.  I was careful never to allow him to be alone with the young people, especially the girls.  Suddenly, everything fell apart for Charlie in the course of a single evening.  He had what appeared to be a psychotic episode and began to shout and to molest some of the girls in front of everyone.  Fortunately, the Vicar was able to come and take control of what was a very difficult situation. Charlie left the following day and I never heard from him again.  There was, incidentally, no talk of referring him on to a specialist mental health professional.

What are my thoughts on this difficult situation after a gap of almost fifty years?  From a safeguarding and health and safety perspective, Charlie was, and probably always had been, high risk.  But there was something else going in the situation which, I believe, links it to recent events in the Diocese of London.  The Vicar’s acceptance of Charlie into his confidence and home seemed to be telling us something about the Vicar’s own needs.  The area of London where we found ourselves was quite cosmopolitan and the Vicar was an ambitious Cambridge graduate.  From my perspective, there seemed always to be a tension between his social background and the mainly working-class status of his parishioners. Indeed, he appeared not to like many of them and some confided to me that this feeling was mutual. Possibly the act of investing considerable trust in Charlie was a way for the Vicar to relieve his feelings of dissonance and alienation.  Charlie was his ‘tame’ working class friend and through him he was attempting to show himself as a contemporary modern man for whom class was of no importance. The very keenness to befriend Charlie demonstrated, paradoxically, that for him class mattered a great deal.   Something similar was happening among those who were lionising Jimmy Savile during the same period.  Savile knew how to work an over-familiar cloying charm on his establishment victims.  These were the ones who gave him his opportunities for abuse.  Charlie and Savile were both adepts at allowing the privileged to feel socially sophisticated because of the faux friendships they offered to a member of another class. In Charlie’s case the mesmerising came to an end before the damage had been allowed to become too serious.

In retrospect, the act of trusting Charlie, whatever the reason, had been highly dangerous.  To be fair to my Vicar, the potentially disastrous situation was partly created by the risk innocence I have referred to.  The church structures of the time also did little to help.  There was no system of record checks, independent advice or any kind of risk assessment process.  Clergy, like my Vicar, were left to struggle by themselves with whatever wisdom and common-sense they possessed.   Sometimes this was insufficient, and their naivety and inexperience could lead them to places of extreme danger.  Also, there was the fact that clergy desperately want to do the right Christian thing and offer forgiveness to those who sought it.  The penitent sinner is hard to resist especially if he/she is one who has struggled through a lifetime of setbacks in the relationships they have made. Charlie was, by all appearances, one of these converted sinners.  Currently, clergy are less likely to follow their gut instincts but rather seek advice from a professional.  The modern profession of safeguarding offers the church of today a way to help a clergyperson find a way through some of the moral dilemmas facing them. The new world we have created for ourselves in the Church is a safety-first world.  Safety and a desire for protection from disasters and mistakes replace a reliance on instinct and gut feeling which ruled in the past. 

The current Martin Sargeant saga seems to be, though on a completely different scale, another Charlie story.  I am assuming that most of my readers will be familiar with the broad outlines of the way that Sargeant, a man with a prison record, stole £5 million from the Diocese of London after being put in charge of some of its funds. There are still a number of anomalies in the account about exactly what went on and to whom precisely he was answerable. Nevertheless, in this story, there are some striking parallels with the story of Charlie.  Sargent’s tale is another account of an apparently repentant sinner who arrives at a church and becomes trusted because he is useful.  The skills Sargeant possessed proved to be ones that are not commonly found among church people – financial wizardry and property development.  Such a man becomes looked up to by many people because of these skills.  Eventually he acquires real power, while the original dark background of his thefts and imprisonment becomes forgotten or supressed.  In retrospect we can ask why were there no checks and auditing?  Clearly, particularly by the standards of today, these administrative failings were massive.  But, by the standards of what was common practice among clergy trained forty or fifty years ago, i.e. the Bishop and the senior diocesan staff who worked with Sargeant, the situation is perhaps a little more understandable.  Having known Richard Chartres, the former Bishop of London, a little in the early years of his ministry, I recognise the clerical omnicompetence that he seemed to exhibit from the very start.  Most of the time, Chartres seems to have able to use his gifts of apparently reliable judgment to good effect.  Many in the Church and beyond were also impressed by his quick intellect and impressive gift for public speaking.  This allowed him to reach the very pinnacle of the CoE’s hierarchy.   But, in the process of appointing or, at any rate, acquiescing in the appointment of Sargeant, and then failing to oversee his actual work in the diocese, Chartres is now seen to have been trapped by the ubiquitous risk innocence I spoke about above. This, I suggest, was shared by many of his contemporaries among the clergy. What at the time may have seemed to be an inspired appointment turned out to be a major calamity.  This is one that will for ever taint his legacy.  In a nutshell, the Bishop apparently believed that his assessment of Sargeant was sound, and that he could allow the normal checks and balances of regular employment practice to be bypassed. It was a high-risk decision by the Bishop and one that has backfired badly.

There is, I believe, the further aspect in the Sargeant story which is suggestive of a further link to my Vicar’s relationship with Charlie.  I was, obviously, not close to the Chartres/Sargeant relationship but this attempt to understand its dynamic seems a reasonable one and is based on the publicly available information. The first fact to be considered is that Sargeant, from the descriptions of him as a ‘fixer’, came, like Charlie, from fairly humble social origins.  Was Sargeant also fulfilling a similar role for Bishop Chartres as Charlie had appeared to provide for my Vicar?  Was Chartres benefitting from being able to show an apparent high level of social kudos and sophistication by having, apparently in an atmosphere of relaxed informality, a working-class man like Sargeant working for him? Working closely with Sargeant would have helped Chartres to claim that he was a true man of the people, at the same time as he was mixing with royalty and other well-connected folk in society. At some point, one can imagine a firm loyalty, even personal friendship, developing between the two men, one which could ignore any social dissonance.  Any criticisms about Sargeant that Chartres might have picked up from his staff could be sat on firmly as suggesting, on the part of the complainant, some social prejudice. I find it hard to believe that Sargeant never attracted any criticism in the nine or so years he worked as Head of Operations in the diocese.  One possible explanation for this is that he was always protected by the Bishop on each occasion. My reading of the overall situation is that Chartres did indeed invest in Sargent an enormous amount of his personal trust and loyalty.  The way that Sargeant survived in his post for so long can perhaps be attributed to the near veneration and personal loyalty that Chartres seems to have felt for his right-hand man.  Was this depth of loyalty also felt by other senior staff in the London Diocese or was it the protection of the Bishop alone that kept him in post and allowed him so much power?  That discussion is going on currently within the diocese and I imagine we have not heard the last of the story.

This blog post has turned to be about one major issue that afflicted the Church in years gone by.  The culture of the Church in the past allowed the clergy a great deal of freedom (excessive?) to manage things exactly as they wished.  There was much scope for mistakes and too little support for all the variety of tasks the clergy had to undertake.  The expectations of clerical omnicompetence had some dire consequences.  The apparent failings and catastrophic losses in the Diocese of London are perhaps good examples of how this past independence culture still exerts a powerful influence today in some areas.  What the future should set down as correct behaviour for clergy remains to be seen.  Somewhere there has to be a balance between excess independence and a responsible deference to true expertise.

The idea that there is a single theologically orthodox view of the Christian God, commonly held by all Christians, is an unlikely claim. Confusing and even contradictory ideas about God exist inside our own heads and probably those of most other people.  Even if we are able fully to identify with the credal formulae of the Church, there exist in many of us less orthodox ideas that inhabit us or pay us a visit from time to time. Many of us have come to realise that our beliefs about the central tenet of the Christian faith are a work in progress.  Part of the problem is, I believe, what we were taught about God as very young children.  Teaching children about God is of course commendable and what we expect of Christian parents. But, in the mind of a 2/3-year-old, there is enormous scope for confusion over the identity of the Tooth Fairy, Father Christmas and God.  Most of our early ideas about God were probably focussed on the reassuring part of faith – the God who cares and prepares a place in heaven for us when we die.  Then at later stage, the child is possibly introduced to notions of hell and punishment.  The memories of childhood teaching about God, with all the potential for muddle that they engender, means that few people arrive at adulthood with clearly worked-out ideas on the subject.  The mature Christian may have to do quite a bit of unlearning as well as learning to arrive a place that is wholesome and helpful for the pilgrimage of the Christian journey. However hard we unlearn, elements of muddled thinking about God are almost inevitably lodged in our brains.

One of the problems I remember having, when I first encountered the Bible around the age of seven, was the different notions about God to be found in the Old Testament. There was the God who walked in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day, calling out to Adam and Eve. Then there was the God who sent terrible plagues to terrify the Egyptians. Further, there was a God sitting in heaven surrounded by celestial beings in Isaiah 6. To a small but growing child trying to wrestle with and find a workable notion of God, these wildly different pictures of what he was like were confusing. It is not surprising that Christians can grow up with some very strange beliefs. Some children, and I count myself as one of these, were left to wallow in these difficulties and contradictions in the biblical record. In many ways I was fortunate that no one tried to iron out all these problems by suggesting that such issues could be sorted out by applying a dogmatic formula.   The very untidiness of my understanding allowed me to be receptive to fresh ideas as a young adult.  These completely changed my perceptions.

 What were the ideas about God that released me so decisively from my childhood semi-fundamentalism?   At the age of 19, I was introduced to the idea of mystical vision.  Suddenly all the biblical physical descriptions of the deity ceased to be problematic.  All the writers, whether biblical or within the mystical traditions, had been struggling with the same problem.  They had to work with limitations of human language, while at the same time knowing that this was an imperfect tool.  To put it another way, all these writers were using language to evoke spiritual reality rather describe it.  The quasi-physical language about the nature of God was not to be understood as the final word or clung to as infallible teaching.  It came as a relief to be able to hear and appreciate the mystics’ teaching that the experience of God is something that inevitably goes beyond language.  Language, even biblical language, can only take us so far in the exploration of the divine.  The place of mystery, the place of unknowing was the portal into a new way of encountering God.  It dawned on me that this unknown God would provide guidance and support for the life-long journey of spiritual discovery.  This journey of discovery is one which continues to this day.

My graduate studies exposed me to the thought and language of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Even before that stage I had become familiar with one particular word used by Orthodox theologians.  This word allowed me to sense a freedom from some constraining Western ideas about the doctrine of God. The word is apothatic. It is a word which links Christian ideas about the nature of God to the teachings of a writer called Pseudo-Dionysius and through him to other Greek theologians of the first centuries.  He was an anonymous Greek theologian who was writing in the fifth century A.D. The basic idea of Dionysius was that God is beyond all human description and even words. We cannot add anything to our knowledge of God by using words of description; all we can do is to say what God is not. It may seem strange to cease to rely on words in talking about God but this tradition does find many echoes in Western theology from the mediaeval period onwards.  Apothatic theology is a healthy counterbalance to what appear to be, in the West, attempts to control what Christians think about God by what might be, sometimes, thought of as a coercive use of language.  No language or words should ever be allowed to exhaust the mystery of the divine being.

All the mystical writers, East and West, seem to have grasped the notion that God cannot be defined, or his nature described in words. In one way this inability to talk about God using words is a potential source of frustration. We are used to words being used extensively in sermons and expository preaching over the centuries. The thought that such words may be merely a pale reflection of the divine reality may appear to be making light of the work of people who have given years of effort to the study of doctrine.  But, on the other hand, apothatic theology is a gateway into a freedom and creativity. Theology is allowed to become, not a quasi-science but something more resembling poetry, an endless travelling into a deeper and deeper reality. Of course words, and especially biblical words, will continue to be used in our pulpits and in Christian teaching. But these words will be used against the background of a keen realisation of the restrictions involved in such forms of human expression.  Because God is, in some sense, beyond knowledge and human concepts, the words that are used to talk about him will always be offered with a certain humility and provisionality.

For those who write about the vision of God, there has to be a considerable reticence.  One way of conveying that unknowability found in the encounter with God is to speak of a great and all-embracing silence. This word silence is used here, not to describe the absence of sound, but more to convey the absence of human symbols and concepts. The biblical proclamation of John 1 is that out of the silence came a communication – that which is described as the Word. God speaks to us in Jesus. The eternal indescribable and unknowable God comes into a world to reveal himself in a human life. It is this extraordinary, even unexpected mystery that we celebrate at Christmas. In all the pictures and symbols which we are given at this time – light, stars and angelic hosts- there is expressed an encounter with somebody or something that goes beyond anything we can put into words. The Christmas message should help to draw us out from our normal partial understandings of God, steeped in words and concepts, to contemplate something which is so wonderful and so infinite that we recognise that we can never really get close to it.

My brief excursion into a tradition for understanding the divine nature in a different way, is a reminder to me and perhaps to my reader that it is important to understand how much about God is unknown and unknowable. When we refuse to surrender to tidy theological definitions found in the systematic textbooks, we are better able to grasp the profound mystery even in the word God.  If God ever ceases to be beyond knowledge he becomes, as the Old Testament would recognise, something like a graven image. When the early Israelites were grappling with their own battles against such false gods and the temptations of idolatry, they were helping us with our own contemporary struggles to make sense of the language connected with the divine.  I much prefer to believe in a God that defies my attempts and capacity to imagine.  I certainly do not want a God who can ever be used as a tool of coercion or fear.  That is not the God I can believe in. The God I do believe in is one who reveals himself but does not allow us ever to claim to understand or fully fathom his nature.  He will always be a God beyond knowledge.

Open Letter to Mr. Orlando Fraser KC, Chair, Charity Commission: 12^th December 2022

Editor’s Comment  This is a letter to the Charity Commission expressing something of the sense of deep frustration felt by many concerned for the work of safeguarding in the Church of England.  As a way of helping the circulation of this important document, Surviving Church is pleased to carry this letter for the information of readers of this blog.  The letter is forthright in its tone, and this reflects the sense of powerlessness and a keen sense of the lack of progress that has been made in this area over several years.  Many of the readers of this blog will share the sentiments and expression of strong feeling on the subject.  We await developments and trust that both the Charity Commission and those criticised will listen carefully to the criticisms and what is being addressed in this important letter.

Dear Sir, 

We write to the Charity Commission as a group of concerned General Synod members (past and present), clergy, laity, survivors and victims of church abuse, their advocates, as well as complainants and respondents who have been maltreated and harmed by Church of England’s safeguarding processes (including IICSA core participants). We are placing on record our common experience of the National Safeguarding Team, Independent Safeguarding Board, National Safeguarding Panel, Dioceses, Lead Bishops for Safeguarding, and those trustees presiding over this (i.e., the Archbishops’ Council). 

We are all witnesses to a highly dysfunctional church culture – one lacking in care, wisdom and responsibility – uniformly poor in responses to allegations of abuse, and subsequent complaints about corrupted, cruel and inhumane processes. These have led to despair, suicides, travesties of justice, all perpetrating much longer term pastoral and personal damage on a colossal scale. Yet nobody in the Church of England takes any responsibility for this. We have no functional leadership in safeguarding. 

We can have no further trust or confidence in these bodies, nor the individuals working within them. Nor do we harbour any hope that this will ever change. Current safeguarding processes, bodies, panels, and their personnel are incompetent, ineffective and unfit for purpose. The leadership is insincere and inaccurate in its claims that progress is being made. Conflicts of interest run rife throughout the handling of complaints.  Victims of abuse and poor process have no advocacy, and no redress. Mismanagement and misconduct are not addressed. ‘Core Groups’ lack clarity, consistency and basic competency. There are negligible signs of genuine concern for any victims. 

We judge that a General Synod vote of no confidence in the work of safeguarding in the Church of England is already long overdue. However, the Church of England as whole has demonstrated that it does not possess the will, wisdom, capability and resources to improve this work. This culpable failure and neglect stems from the persistent failure of the trustees for the Archbishops’ Council to exercise leadership and oversight. 

We believe the Church of England’s safeguarding practices must now be subjected to a formal Charity Commission investigation (i.e., a fully independent review under your auspices). This is because most recent IICSA recommendations have been treated with scant regard by the trustees, or simply evaded.  The only way forward in church safeguarding is fully independent regulation, oversight and quality control – without which there will never be transparency, fairness, accountability or proper process.

We must regrettably accept that trustees of the Archbishops’ Council have led us nowhere. We can have no more failures, fudging or fawning self-flattery. If there is to be any hope it is time to face reality. The Church of England must become subject to public standards of truth and justice. We therefore urge the Charity

Commission, using statutory powers, to order a fully independent review into these concerns. 

Yours sincerely, MARTIN SEWELL, General Synod (Lay Member, Rochester

For complete list of signatories, please consult the Thinking Anglicans website. https://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Open-Letter-to-Charity-Commission-FINAL.pdf

PRESS RELEASE ABOUT CC LETTER

News Release
Wednesday 14 December 2022
Church of England leaders and others ask the Charity Commission to intervene in the
church’s safeguarding
Signatories to an open letter say they have no confidence in current structures

51 senior leaders in the Church of England have written to the Charity Commission asking it
to investigate the church’s safeguarding practices. The signatories come from all parts of the
Church of England, including both lay and ordained members, and some who are elected
members of the church’s General Synod. They include some who have been victims of
church-based abuse, some who have been accused or complained of such abuse. They cover
the spectrum of members including evangelical, catholic, and broad church members.
Lawyers who represented church victims at the IICSA inquiry have also signed the letter.
In the letter, the signatories express serious concerns about the safeguarding policies and
practices being operated by the Church of England. The letter complains of “a highly
dysfunctional church culture – one lacking in care, wisdom and responsibility – uniformly
poor in responses to allegations of abuse”. The writers say that they have “no functional
leadership in safeguarding.”

In January 2019 Archbishop Justin Welby appeared to endorse these grievances, when he
told The Spectator “We have not yet found the proper way of dealing properly with
complainants and taking them seriously, listening to them, not telling them to shut up and
go away, which is what we did for decades. Which was evil. It’s more than just a wrong
thing: it’s a deeply evil act.” Four years later, the signatories complain that there has been
no change. They say that claims by the bishops that the church’s safeguarding is on a path of
improvement are “insincere and inaccurate.”

In November 2021, in advance of the report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual
Abuse (IICSA) the Church of England established an Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB).
But questions have been asked about the Board’s independence, resources, capacity and
expertise. The three part-time members of the ISB, were appointed and employed by the
church, raising questions about its independence. Its chair, the former Children’s
Commissioner Maggie Atkinson, has been “stood aside” from duties since the Summer
whilst multiple allegations of data breaches are investigated by the Office of the Information
Commissioner. A recent meeting called by the ISB to listen to the concerns of survivors was
so poorly advertised that it attracted no registrations or attendees, and was duly cancelled.
Mr Martin Sewell, a retired solicitor and senior member of the Church of England General
Synod, said “Trying to find where the buck stops in the Church of England has proved
impossible, so this powerful group of informed individuals have joined together to call for
the Charity Commission to hold the members of Archbishops’ Council to account for the
discharge of their trustee duties in this essential matter.”

The signatories to the letter encourage the General Synod to pass a motion of no confidence
in the church’s safeguarding arrangements at its February session. They also ask the Charity
Commission to conduct its own independent review into the Archbishop’s Council, which is
responsible for the church’s National Safeguarding Team. The Archbishop’s Council, in
common with every parish church and diocese in England, is a registered charity.
ENDS
For further information please contact
Andrew Graystone
andrew.graystone1@btinternet.com
07772 71009

Some forty years ago, at a time when I was studying the topic of Christian healing, a group of doctors came together to form the British Holistic Medical Association (BHMA).  Some of the things that these doctors were saying caught my attention, not least because they made a space for a spiritual dimension in their understanding of the healing process.  It is useful to recall some of the principles of holistic medicine as presented in 1984.  They have a certain resonance today as we find that there is a current concern for another, not dissimilar, holistic impulse.  Today doctors and members of the caring professions are being urged to become ‘trauma informed’.  In summary they are, like the doctors of the 80s, being encouraged to see illness in the human body or mind, not as the breakdown of a faulty machine, but as failures in the wider social or psychological environment to which the individual is exposed. These mental or physical illnesses are to be looked at as possibly signalling evidence of past trauma.  If such is found, it will necessitate a somewhat different approach in respect of the treatment offered as well as the ongoing care of the patient.  It will always be necessary to be alert and sensitive to the implications of this wider context of illness and distress and take steps to use this awareness to better serve the needs of those seeking help. 

The first edition of the 1984 BHMA journal set out the principles of holism as they apply to medicine. Some of these are directly relevant to the topic of trauma which we are considering in this piece. I want to list some of the key ideas of holistic medicine.  In these two parallel but related sets of ideas, the holistic and the trauma informed approaches, doctors and professional carers of all kinds are being invited to extend their horizons to incorporate fresh and broader insights about the nature of illness.  In the 80s, classical medical practice was being taken to task by holistic practitioners for seeing illness in purely material terms and failing to understand the social and spiritual aspects of dis-ease. In a similar way trauma informed care urges those looking after people who may have been affected by trauma, to be alert to all the ways that a life-changing event may have affected a patient. To be trauma informed is thus to be able to practise your caring skills from the background of a particular manifestation of holistic thinking – one that understands the wide-ranging effect of trauma on people.   

The first principles of the original 1984 statement about the then new approach in applying holism to medicine, are those that point out the error involved in breaking up the human personality into fragmented parts.  This principle has also to be strongly affirmed as we seek to attend to the needs of people who have encountered an abusive or traumatising event.  Trauma is a holistic event in the sense that it has the capacity to damage the personality at more than one level.  To pretend or assume that people can easily walk away unscathed from catastrophic episodes which they have experienced, is a betrayal of care and imagination of enormous gravity.

This point is made well in the first statement made by the 1984 holistic doctors.  Healing and harm both inevitably operate at more than one level.

The human organism is a multi-dimensional being, possessing body mind and spirit, all inextricably connected, each part affecting the whole and the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

Damage to relationships is also a matter of great importance.  The betrayal of human trust that occurs in many traumatic events needs to be responded to with considerable care

There is an interconnectedness between human beings and their environment which includes other human beings. This interconnectedness acts as a force on the functioning of the individual isolated human being.

Further holistic medicine principles focus on the one mediating wholeness.  A particular emphasis is made that the ‘healer’ should not only have healing skill but also be an individual practising self-insight.  The reference to alternative medical treatments like acupuncture may not appeal to many medically trained people today, but this was a common feature at the time.

One of the primary tasks of someone entrusted to heal, be he Dr, priest or acupuncturist, is to encourage the self innate capacity for healing of the individual industries.

To enable him to accomplish his task effectively, the healer needs to be aware of his own multidimensional levels of existence and have some expertise and ability in achieving a state of balance and state of harmony within himself – ‘Physician heal thyself’.

Clearly, the 1980s were not embarrassed by the use of the ‘he’ pronoun when talking about a healing practitioner. But the important point we take away from these insights is the gentle urging that doctors and other medical carers should break away from any narrow frames of reference.  For the 1980s conventionally trained doctor (arguably still true today), the temptation was to treat patients as living machines which operated according to mechanical laws.  Social and spiritual issues were thought to be outside the disease process.  In the 2020s, with the advent of trauma informed thinking, there is a movement to ensure that there should be a better understanding of the effects of trauma on those forced to endure the burden of experiencing various forms of distress.   The question that doctors and carers need to ask of their clients is not ‘how are you?’ but ‘what has happened to you?’ The asking of this question articulates the expectation that uncovering trauma of some kind is likely to be a regular part of helping someone who comes for help with some form of mental or physical affliction.

What exactly are we talking about in using this expression? Trauma informed approaches are not just applicable to the practice of medicine. They are relevant in all places where there are people who have experienced serious ill-usage at the hands of others during their lives. That perhaps applies to most of the population. But we need in our review of this new strand of holistic caring, some definition of the word trauma. One definition given by the Substance Abuse and Mental-Health Services in 2014, says this: ‘Individual trauma results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life-threatening and that has lasting adverse effects of the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being’. This definition will cover many of our survivor population.  The trauma for them is, as we have attested many times, not just as the result of the original harmful event but is aggravated on many occasions by the sloppy and inadequate care received later.

Providing a caring and an appropriate response to a person who has experienced trauma is extremely important and requires sensitivity and skill.  The trauma informed literature suggests a number of principles or forms of help that are needed to provide effective help for trauma victims. Many of us reading this will be thinking about church survivors and the variety of needs they have.  But, whatever the context of the trauma, the same principles will apply when supporting anyone who has been through such an experience which resembles that described in the definition in the previous paragraph.

The first principle is the importance of giving anyone who has been through traumatic experience a place of safety. The place of safety may be found in a carefully prepared physical space backed up by a personal trusted relationship.  Such elements will provide a supportive and nurturing environment for a survivor – a place of physical, emotional and psychological safety. The Church seems to be remarkably inept in this area.  We hear stories about victim/survivors having to go to the home of a bishop or even return to the place where they experienced the original trauma. From a trauma informed approach, such inattention to a survivor’s need to feel safe is insensitive and unacceptable. The task of providing such emotional and psychological safety does require considerable imagination and insight, something that the safeguarding church experts often seem to lack.

A further example of trauma-informed practice is that a survivor needs to be helped to make choices and be given goals to aim for. The trauma may have removed a sense of agency and it is the task of trauma-informed support to help give back self-determination and power to the one who has suffered. As part of rebuilding a sense of self, the interaction with the helper will demand that latter has considerable skill and patience. If anyone is to help the trauma survivor, there needs to be a commitment to the long haul.  Such care and support is expensive both in terms of financial as well as institutional resources.

Trauma informed therapy may originally be indebted to the insights of medical practitioners working with holistic principles.  But, at another level, it represents a dedication to a culture of humane care.  In the Church it behoves all of us who encounter the survivors of bullying and mistreatment of various kinds to be alert to the likely trauma burdens they carry.  When we are able more easily to intuit their needs, we will first not fall into the trap of saying the wrong thing or offering inappropriate help and support.

Coming out of a service on Advent Sunday, I commented to the preacher that the image he used to illustrate the theme of Advent was memorable.  He was telling us how he and his family once waited by the river in an area where salmon were regularly seen on their way upriver.  At any moment a fish might be seen in a flash of silver making a leap on its way back to the spawning grounds.  This waiting, he told us, was an important part of the experience. It made the whole family attentive and alert to everything else that was going on during this time of expectancy.   In other words, the enhanced awareness of the background sound of running water or the distant sound of traffic; these were all part of the waiting experience.  There was thus a focus on the present moment not often to be found in their day-to-day awareness.  And then the preacher went on to speak about Advent as a time of waiting.

As the sermon introduced a powerful and unforgettable anecdote to illustrate one aspect of the Advent message, I began to reflect on the variety and richness of the season in terms of the way it makes much use of visual symbols.   For me the most powerful image of the season is the way that we are encouraged to reflect on the light/darkness theme.  We have for example ‘casting off the works of darkness and putting on the armour of light’.  This theme is a primal one.  Everyone from the smallest child up knows the disconcerting experience of suddenly finding oneself in pitch darkness when the light fails.  Most of the time we have ways of alleviating the experience of a power blackout.  Having supplies of candles and torches if the mains power fails, our experience of absolute darkness is seldom prolonged.  But even the shortest exposure to such darkness is unsettling.  What is it about darkness that reaches to our primal fears?

In the first place, when we are in darkness, we feel vulnerable.  The vulnerability is of different kinds.  In the first place, the older among us fear stumbling over furniture or losing our balance.  Balance interacts extensively with our ability to see.  Not to see clearly is to feel unsafe.  A second reason for vulnerability and actual fear is the primitive notion that someone may use the darkness to do us harm.  Darkness potentially gives someone with hostile intent the opportunity to attack us in our state of vulnerability.  Small children, especially, project on to the dark all the things that they are afraid of.  We use the expression ‘creatures of the night’ as a generic term for all the unknown forces of darkness that we believed, especially as young children, were out to do us harm and jump out at us from dark corners.

The metaphor or symbol of darkness signifying all that is evil and frightening is, of course, balanced by the existence of light.  Just as the absence of light places most of us in a state of apprehension and fear, so the restoring of light gives us back a sense of security and confidence.  What are the features of light that change our perspective so completely?  In the first place the existence and availability of light means that we know that the dark never has the last word.  It is hardly surprising that ancient cultures believed that sun to have divine qualities as it reliably reappears each morning.  The changing of the seasons and the restoration of the ‘unconquered sun’ after the winter solstice was something to be celebrated by humans over thousands of years.  

Within the metaphor of light and darkness playing a huge part in our imaginative worlds, there are a variety of sub-themes.  There is the state of twilight, when objects appear to us, but only as shadowy forms.  Although we might be afraid of the unseen forces that we imagine can exist in the places of total darkness, the shadowy half-recognisable shapes of people may be equally terrifying.  One reason to be afraid of shadowy shapes is that we are deprived of a clear picture of the other person’s face.  Without a clear view of another person’s face, we have no means of reading their expression.  Reading the face of another person is, of course, no infallible guide to whether the other person wishes us harm, but we do gain much information from being able to see and ‘read’ the expression in another person’s face.  It is only the presence of light that makes such a scrutiny even possible. It is certainly difficult to say that we ‘love’ another person in a personal way unless we have had the chance to see their face and expressions.  Each person’s face, when illuminated, is a mirror or a pathway into their soul.

Our reflection on the symbols of light and darkness has not so far said anything directly about the theme of Advent. But somehow discussing these symbols evoked by this theme, brings us close to the central concerns of the season.  In my thinking on this imagery, I was first of all struck by some words from the Common Worship Advent blessing   In that blessing, Christ is likened to the sun working its power to scatter darkness.   The darkness presumably is a reference to the sin, the blindness and the perversity of the human race.  All this needs to be removed for the light of Christ to be able to be received by humankind.  Advent speaks of an arrival of this light as a past, present and a future event.  The advent of Christ into the realm of human affairs can be thought of in one of these timeframes or all three.  The Advent season has aspects of past, present and future in its teaching.  The symbolism of light and darkness works equally well whichever one we choose to focus on.  The Coming (Advent) of Christ inevitably involves some sort of confrontation with evil in the world or in individual human hearts.

The imagery of Advent is, in some ways, more powerful than the words we use to describe it.  Having said that, one has to be prepared to immerse oneself in the rich symbolism that we have considered.  The language of symbols is probably inexhaustible and certainly I can imagine that if two people, both with a well nurtured sense of imagination, were to sit down and think through as many ways of communicating the message of Advent using the language of symbols rather than that of words, they would likely have much to share.  I invite my reader to ponder the nature of light and darkness and the way we all relate to them as a metaphor for our Christian beliefs as well as our journey through the joys and traumas of life.  What I have in my mind is the thought of an encounter with light which simultaneously is purifying and transfiguring at the same moment.  Advent is about a triple Coming.  The Coming of the light in the birth of Christ is inseparably linked to his Coming today and the one that is to take place in the future.  Our reception to this coming of light is a kind of surrender to something gloriously bright, something that gives us the hope that God is all in all.  There is nothing inevitable about receiving that light.  It is still within our power to cower in the gloom and prefer the dark.  But the Advent and the Christmas season is a clear invitation to ‘cast off the works of darkness’ and seek to welcome with hope God’s light into our hearts and lives.  Only we know how this process of removing and scattering darkness needs to take place in each of us at a personal and practical level.  

A few words, also from Common Worship, caught my attention on Sunday.  These were read as a introduction to the Confession but they sum up well this theme of Advent as I am understanding it here.

People of God: be glad!

Your God delights in you, giving you joy for sadness and turning the dark to light.

 Be strong in hope therefore; for your God comes to save.

You are God’s children

by Fiona Gardner

A recent piece of research from Sheffield University is titled: ‘They would rather not have known and me kept my mouth shut’: The role of neutralisation in responding to the disclosure of childhood sexual abuse’¹ The research uses questionnaire data from respondents – now adults who were abused as children, and how they later experienced attempts at disclosure – and then interviews some of them. The study examines the characteristic of unsupportive responses, and how disclosures can be dismissed or denied, finding that the people disclosed to often reinforced silence by utilising a variety of what have been called ‘neutralisation techniques.’ As many readers of this website know, disclosure itself is not necessarily a ‘one off’ event, but can be a lifelong experience that is repeated in a multitude of different relationships and contexts. Ways of disrupting and ‘neutralising’ disclosures are only too familiar in the church context: denial of responsibility, denial of harm, victim blaming, questioning or blaming authority (someone else should have stopped it), and, finally, loyalty to the group (usually the institution). Such techniques a bit like rationalizations, is one way of minimising any guilt felt, and a way of avoiding the difficulties posed and doing anything about them. One technique of neutralisation that the institutional church is especially skilled at are delaying tactics – months, years, and, even decades pass with correspondence and files going missing, messages unanswered or forgotten, and changes of personnel which make following things up mind-numbingly frustrating. The effect of all this is then two-fold – one to almost ‘normalise’ abuse, and secondly, to quieten down the outrage. All this reflects something the authors of the research article suggest, which is that there are tacit social pressures not to talk about CSA openly, to not disturb things too much, to keep quiet – to minimise outrage.

However, in contrast to ‘neutralisation’ there is also a clear, explicit social encouragement for victims to speak out, to have a voice, to be listened to respectfully, to be taken seriously, to get justice, and make an impact on future responses and policies. This idea of victims ‘speaking out’ runs through all relevant reports and enquiries over the last decade. So, we have ‘Giving Victims a Voice’ – perhaps a rather condescending title, which was a report published in 2013 following the huge numbers of allegations against Jimmy Savile. Produced jointly by the NSPCC and the Metropolitan Police Service, it was described by the then Director of Public Prosecutions as marking a watershed moment highlighting various systemic failures and giving some victims serious recognition and a chance to speak out.

This May 2022, the Ministry for Justice published a consultation called ‘Delivering Justice for Victims’. The foreword by the Secretary of State for Justice, Dominic Raab (still in post at the time of writing), gives much emphasis to giving victims a louder voice; making sure their views are heard; supporting them in the search for justice, and strengthening transparency and enhanced scrutiny when victims are let down. Raab – who of course is himself under investigation for bullying – writes that no victim should ever feel like an afterthought, or peripheral to the process, disillusioned and, at worst, compound their ordeal. The cultural shift is one where victims’ voices are amplified alongside the strengthening of clear lines of oversight when things go wrong. This document may or may not come to anything, but the intention to emphasise the perspective of the victim is relevant when we consider the response of the C of E and the latest suggestions for re-working Learning Lessons Case Reviews. ‘Graham’ wrote about this in October when he commented on the draft review as a watering down – a dilution of what went before. So, given the spirit of the times, where is the amplification of victims’ voices – where the transparency, and oversight for when things go wrong. Far from amplification it seems there is a process of neutralising going on through the idea of the rather inward-looking reflective process, and limited time frame.

There is a paradox between national policies encouraging those who have been abused to speak out, at the same time as a reluctance to listen and hear what is being said. The Independent Learning Lessons Case Review on Revd Graham Gregory (GG) by Ray Galloway (February 2022)² reminds us both of the importance of really listening to victims and of the techniques of neutralisation that often hold sway. The report, which like others is a deeply upsetting read, gives us the attempts of victims to disclose – there were at least 10 known and 7 contributed to the review. Almost all disclosed at the time to their parents, and sadly of these nearly all were disbelieved. However, they did come forward as adults to speak out again –and their disclosures were poorly handled by the church.

Take the experience of one referred to as victim B, who, in 2006, attended a church Safeguarding event. Reading the course handbook caused a profound physical reaction which convinced her that she needed to report her abuser GG, and using the contact number in the handbook eventually got through to Southwark Diocese: ‘I said I’m ringing you because I don’t think I can go any further with my responsibilities at my church until I’ve actually laid to rest the ghosts of this past abuse that I’ve suffered’. Worried that GG might still be offending, victim B expected a positive response, but instead was advised that she should contact the diocese of York as GG was no longer in Southwark, and she was given the details for the archbishop. Intimidated about the proposal that she should call the archbishop herself she decided to leave it: ‘I thought, no, I can’t ring this man who I hear on Thought for the Day and see on Songs of Praise … I made that call, he told me to ring Sentamu … I did um and ah for about a week and I thought, no, I can’t do it.’

She had a better response in 2012 after Savile, when victim B phoned the NSPCC who with the police immediately acted which led to a successful criminal prosecution against GG. Her good support from the police was in sad contrast to the response of the church. The C of E sent a male pastoral support listener to the trial for both victims A and B, but as B says: ‘The impartiality of the police, or the NSPCC, was never in doubt, but how far, at that stage, has the Church of England still got one eye out for GG.’ Both victims wanted the Church to be demonstrating contrition, ‘nobody ever said sorry, until I wrote, a year after the man was convicted, to the archbishop and said … I’ve waited a year for you to reply to me.’ A personal apology was eventually given.  Irritated by the ‘cagey’ response of the church she had particular criticism for the process of gaining compensation: ‘Once you’ve had all this, you’ve gone through the court and the man’s gone to prison, you’ve gone over the awfulness so many times, blow me down, if they’re going to give you anything you have to go and say it all again to a psychiatrist, who’s desperately trying to find that you have no symptoms at all, nothing was wrong, and they can give you as little money as possible … it’s probably worse than the trial.’ On summarising her view of how the Church dealt with the issue of her abuse, victim B, whilst referring to the outcome of her abuse as being the ‘blighting of a childhood’, made a distinction between the actions of an individual DSA in Southwark and the organisation.

The report analyses the sadly familiar diocesan response of techniques of neutralisation to victim B’s disclosures – although she had kept notes of who she spoke to, and, what was said in 2006, it was stated that they had no record, or recollection of this: ‘The clear inference … is that it was not they with whom victim B had spoken, despite her having their name recorded’. The first relevant record in the diocese was made 8 years later, in 2014. Galloway states that the request for an apology lacks any real clarity in the diocesan records. The delay was put down to the bishop being abroad, the chaplain’s move to another role and an appeal from GG against his conviction. Nothing happened until victim B made her further complaint.

The report states: ‘Other than positive feedback for the DSA, when she had assumed management of the case after GG’s conviction, no examples of Good Practice were identified during the Review,’ and later referred to as ‘poor and unreasonable professional practice’. The initial telephone contact in 2006 was neither caring nor supportive. ‘The needs of the victim who reached out to the diocese were not identified nor appropriate records made. Harm had occurred to the person making contact yet that fact was not established … the advice provided, was wholly inappropriate. It not only served to inhibit the victim from disclosing the fact of her abuse, it also allowed the fact of the ongoing risk to children that GG represented to sustain.’

The report details the dreadful experiences of 7 young girls and the destructive responses of 5 dioceses (as GG moved around) including after the publication of ‘Giving Victims a Voice’ – victims were not listened to rather techniques of neutralisation were prominent – and included unkindness, lack of empathy and professionalism. For once I’m in support of Raab that the only way forward is to amplify not neutralise the voices of those who have been abused.

1. ‘They would rather not have known and me kept my mouth shut’: The role of neutralisation in responding to the disclosure of childhood sexual abuse, September 2022, Qualitative Social Work DOI: 10.1177/14733250221124300 Claire Cunnington and Tom Clark.

2. https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/Independent%20learning%20lessons%20case%20review%20-%20Graham%20Gregory.pdf