Those of us who were ordained some years ago will sometimes express puzzlement at the terminology used to describe the work of the parish church today.  We may have a special problem with the word ‘mission’ as it is sprinkled throughout many church documents.  I expressed bafflement at the use of the word by the diocese of Winchester.  The diocesan slogan, ‘Living the Mission of Jesus’ has no obvious meaning, even though we could hazard a guess at what the author had in mind.  I wonder what the next Bishop of Winchester will do with this catchphrase and whether it will be quietly shelved along with other initiatives designed to make the diocese more mission aware.  For clergy of my vintage, mission in a parish was what we were trying to do all the time.  The work of prayer and worship, good pastoral care, learning and spiritual growth gave to each congregation a spiritual dynamic which, we hoped, would overflow into the wider community.  People did not necessarily come to the church, but the faithful living out of the reality of God by those who did, could act like yeast working on the dough.  There was mission and growth, though such growth was seldom spectacular. The Church, in short, was an institution which, in many places, dovetailed into the wider society.  This was in spite of the fact that only a small minority supported it by their presence and their financial giving. As William Temple put it, the Church is the only organisation set up for the benefit of those who are not its members.

The mission imperative being loudly proposed for congregations everywhere has now become so ubiquitous in church documents that many are wondering if this involves a fundamental change in the old understanding of the role of the parish church in society.  Mission seems to mean making new disciples as the number one priority.  The implications of this understanding of the word are profound, practically and theologically.  The old model saw the presence of God everywhere, even among those who did not attend church or want anything to do with the Church’s teaching.  The new use of the word mission seems to regard society beyond the congregation being a mission-field, full of the unsaved.  Everyone who does not come to church is deemed to be in need of saving or rescuing.   The imperative is for us to go out to rescue these unsaved people and pull them out of the fire as though they were burning sticks which are potentially lost for ever.  The older gentle agnosticism about the fate of non-churchgoers that the yeast dough model implied, seems to be out of fashion.    The old vision of the parish church being a spiritual hub at the heart of every community also seems to be less in vogue.  We believed that when the prayerful and dedicated work of Christian people in a community is being accomplished, there will always be trickle of new people coming in.  They will arrive wanting to find what it is that inspires these acts of service and generosity on the part of Christians. 

In each of the parishes where I have served, I have always had the privilege and responsibility for setting the priorities for the church’s efforts in service and outreach.  I would not have found it easy to do this alongside people who do not share my ‘fuzzy edge’ approach to ministry.  By this term I am describing a reluctance to say that one person is a Christian while another is not.  When we get into making a decision about who is ‘saved’ and who is damned, we are in dangerous territory.  Fuzzy edge theology allows one to reach out to respond to need without speculating over the state of the individual’s immortal soul.  That is the task of God alone.  Visiting right across the community and the care of the sick, the elderly and the dying were always at the top of my priorities.  Any narrow focus on mission would have been difficult to sustain alongside my role and that of my parish as having the task of service and care.  Working solo for most of my ministry did have some advantages.  I did not have to justify every decision as to how my time was allocated. One practical outcome of my prioritising visiting was that in a population of two and half thousand, I seldom had to bury anyone that I did not know.  In those days, the 90s, when we were burying most of those who died in the parish, I never found myself without some prior knowledge of the departed. Good neighbour schemes and my own pattern of visiting ensured that I was able to maintain links with the entire elderly population.

When the Archbishops of Canterbury and York both speak about the retention of the parish church as an important ingredient in future church life, I imagine that each has been influenced by their memories which are similar to my own.  As former incumbents, they will each remember the importance and value of the autonomy given to them by the parish system. And yet at the moment, we are being presented from different directions with something quite different from that way of doing things.  This surely must make both them and the many clergy trained before the turn of the millennium quite uncomfortable.

The Diocese of Leicester is holding a Synod this coming Saturday the 9^th.  Members attending are voting on a proposal that Synod will approve the diocesan framework of Minster Communities (MCs). The proposal is that the 340 churches and 220 parishes in the diocese be brought into clusters within 20 to 25 of these MCs. Serving the MCs will be 80 to 90 stipendiary staff. The main focus word for these MCs is the word mission. Each one will consist of a group of parishes combined with Fresh Expressions churches and schools, all brought together to conduct the task of mission. Overseeing each MC will be a diverse ministry team.  This will consist of clergy, licensed lay ministers and Head Teachers.

The Minster model of ministry, as it is called, has a history going back over a thousand years to Saxon times.  One central hub church oversees various smaller worship centres in a fixed area. In one modern manifestation of this principle, church planting by a central well-supported church, has successfully introduced new disciples into the congregation.  The church planting schemes sponsored by charismatic churches as HTB in London and Hillsong in Sydney have achieved some success.   I am not aware of this model being tried in a non-charismatic/HTB context.  The way the scheme in this setting operates is a bit like a MacDonald’s franchise.  A pre-packaged style of church outreach, complete with message, music and leadership is taken by a small group into an empty building or a redundant church.  This small founding group tend to be young, enthusiastic and able to respond to the modern styles of music on offer.  The seed congregation then reach out to other young people like themselves and the congregation quite often, in terms of numbers, takes off.   Whatever we think about Holy Trinity Brompton and its impressive mission outreach, it is clear that it does not operate in traditional Anglican ways. At its heart is a single model of teaching and truth which most clergy would find oppressive or even claustrophobic. Most clergy value the inclusive range of styles offered by traditional Anglicanism, and they enjoy the opportunity to be flexible in their ministry.  Many of the older parish priests among us will also wonder how far the HTB style of ministry serves the over 60s.  Their expectation of the local parish is more towards to discovering those aspects of faith which offer reassurance during their final years.   Making new disciples may be one of the priorities of a parish.  However, if mission is ever made the sole or main focus of the parish, as seems to be the case in the Leicester proposal, then other things will get crowded out and ignored. These are precisely the things that are traditional parish priest, such as me, would miss dreadfully.

The Leicester paper is perhaps typical of new thinking within the Church of England about the future of parish life. On close inspection it fails to embrace the traditional Anglican respect for diversity.  This can only be preserved in a large number of semi-autonomous units.  Currently we tolerate an enormous diversity in the way clergy are trained.  We cannot then immediately remove this respect and practice of a wide variety of cultures soon after the candidate has left theological college to become part of one of these monolithic MCs.   They will, of course, not necessarily be following the HTB model in every case, but it is still hard to see how each MC will establish a working theological/cultural model of the Anglican style which all in leadership can agree to follow.  A corporate shudder has gone through the entire Church of England recently when we discovered how many of our current generation of theological leaders have been nurtured through the quasi-cultic mentoring system practised at the Iwerne camps. The MC idea will never be able to accommodate the sheer variety of important (and valuable) theological differences in the Church. If some Anglican traditions have, for the sake of agreement, to be suppressed within a MC, then there will be a build-up of tension.  It will give rise to the same kind of unhappiness that we have seen in the Winchester diocese. In Winchester the church authorities seemed to have believed that a slogan heavy version of conservative theology could unite the diocese.  That was a dangerous damaging fantasy.  I fear also that pretending that MCs can each embody the cultural and theological breadth of Anglicanism will also prove to be a fantasy. This will have far reaching consequences for the happiness of clergy and people in the Leicester diocese.

Both Archbishops have protested that the parish system is safe under their watch. The debate to take place in Leicester on Saturday would seem to weaken that promise. The only way that the Leicester diocese can be theologically and structurally united under a scheme of this kind, is if every clergyman were to be a fully paid-up member of something similar to the HTB methods of church planting and mission.  That seems to be the only successful current example of the MC idea actually in operation. As the HTB way of doing things does not enjoy widespread support, are the authorities expecting to expel from the diocese anyone who does not wish to become part of this great untried experiment to bring about their desire for mission and discipling? How can such a scenario come to pass? The only way would be to simply sack those clergy who cannot work in such a structure.  Are we to see a Winchester type culling of posts/clergy who do not fit into a conservative vision for the future of the whole diocese? That would appear to be a terrible cost, one the church cannot afford.

One of the questions raised in Andrew Graystone’s book, Bleeding for Jesus, is whether the Iwerne movement should be considered a cult?  He writes (p200): I sometimes reflect on whether it would be appropriate to call the Iwerne movement a cult. It is a rather arbitrary classification, since there is no agreed definition of a cult; one person’s cult is another person’s highly successful religious movement. The boundary between what is legitimate exercise of religious freedom and what is abusive mind-control can be hard to draw. This makes it all the more important to determine some markers of orthodoxy, if only for the protection of vulnerable believers. I want here to reflect further on this question. Graystone’s mention of this word cult allows us to explore further to see if the Iwerne movement strays into this dangerous territory.  Here, in the world of so-called cults, people can sometimes suffer real harm.   I have lived with the word and the realities implicit in it for over a decade through my membership of the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA).  I have come to see that the word cult is a useful shorthand for particular harmful religious or political groups.  Usually, however, the word needs to be avoided.  The main reason for side-stepping the word cult is that its use, in some contexts, is disputed and the cause of misunderstanding.  The problematic nature of the word is especially found in two areas of discourse.

1.  The word cult has, I believe, no validity in a court of law.  It is not acceptable for the simple reason it has no universally accepted meaning.  If lawyers cannot agree on what a word means, the best that can be done is to find other words or expressions that do have meaning and precision in a court of law.  This has happened as we shall see below.
2. The word cult is highly contentious among some scholars and students of contemporary religious movements.  There are some scholars who are extremely hesitant to identify any religious group as being intrinsically harmful.  Calling a group a cult is a kind of name-calling, and does little to convey precisely what is being asserted about it.  If people have indeed been, in some way, harmed by choosing to join a religious group, it was as the result of a mature personal decision, assuming they were adults when they joined.  They have to accept their responsibility for having made a bad choice.  These scholars will also argue over expressions like brainwashing and indoctrination, querying whether such things even exist.  Other scholars, more sympathetic to the cult idea, will want to emphasise the involuntary aspects of cult membership.  Genuine choice may have been absent in the recruitment process at the beginning of membership.  The literature explores how joining a harmful cultic group can take place at a moment of extreme psychological vulnerability.  There may be, for example, an acute need to belong.  The guru or cult leader may also be exercising any one of a variety of coercive psychological techniques, such as chanting or hypnosis, to draw members in.  The leader’s motivation may be to serve his own psychological needs.  These are being met by the exercise of domination and control over others.  The typical young person’s search for meaning and certainty provides an opportunity for a leader to gain kudos, personal power and maybe other sources of gratification.

Andrew Graystone’s original question and the title to this post is probably then unanswerable because of these problems that cluster around this use of the word at the centre of the question.  Nevertheless, such a question, even when unanswered, remains an important one, even if we need a change of wording.  Fortunately, legal terminology comes to our rescue by providing two expressions which do have currency in legal discourse.  It is these words/terms that point to the possibility that, at some time in the future, the legal system may become more active in the oversight of what we might consider to be harmful expressions of religious practice.  Most of the readers of this blog will be familiar from their own experience of religiously inspired activities that can, on occasion, do serious harm to adherents. 

The two expressions which have currency in legal terminology and are useful in describing what many people mean by cult, are the terms ‘undue influence’ and ‘coercive ‘control’.  Undue influence is a legal term which goes back centuries in English law. It implies that one party is exercising influence over another in order to persuade them to act in ways that do not benefit their interests. It is normally used in legal arguments relating to money or property matters.   A good example would be where a vulnerable person comes under pressure to change their will.  There is one fascinating English legal case from the 19^th century which brings the concept of undue influence into a religious context. A young woman had joined a Roman Catholic community in the 19^th-century.  She was deemed by a court to be unable to decide on the right way to administer her property, once she had become a full member of the community. The community of nuns was felt to exercise an undue influence over her so that she was no longer deemed to be a free agent in making decisions.  The principle of undue influence has not, as far as I know, been brought up in any more recent cases involving a religious group.  Clearly there is a potential for this 19^th century precedent to be applicable if, for example, a Moonie member hands over all the family fortune to a bank account in South Korea.

It does not take a great deal of imagination to see that undue influence could be said to apply to other situations in a religious context.  An unscrupulous cultic leader might demand sexual favours from a new member as part of the cost of belonging to the group.  Other rules of a group which demand an oppressive conformity may undermine the individuality of a member.  This also could be considered undue influence.  Those of us who are concerned for victims and survivors of all kinds have observed many times the way that people are coerced and controlled by others in a religious setting. This single word control is a good description of what we see in operation in many authoritarian religious groups.  The control exercised in such a setting is seldom experienced as a benign act.

I want to suggest that the way our original question can be asked, avoiding the contentious word cult, is this. Have the Iwerne camps used undue influence and authoritarian/coercive control over their members?  Are the members in any way harmed by some aspect of the teaching or the authoritarian culture of the camps?  I do not offer a definitive answer to this question, but Graystone’s evidence points to numerous ways in which the camps seem emotionally and spiritually unhealthy places.  This is quite apart from the beatings that some of the attendees received.

As a way of extending the reader’s appreciation and understanding of the systems of authoritarian control, I want to introduce my reader to the BITE model of control proposed by Steven Hassan.  He is a cult expert living in the States and I have had the pleasure of meeting him at several of the ICSA conferences that I attended.  This is a gathering of experts in authoritarian groups from all over the world.

Hassan suggests that there are four areas of control that authoritarian groups/cults use with their members. Each one corresponds to one of the letters in the word BITE.  Here I can only offer the barest outline of how these control methods work in so-called cults.  Some methods are gentle while others involve a level of open compulsion.  BITE stands for Behaviour, Information, Thought and Emotion. The first, behaviour control, requires the individual who has joined a group to conform to a laid down pattern in the way they live their life.  Certainly, Graystone’s account describes the conforming tendencies among Iwerne alumni, including the amusing anecdote from a member of a college at which some Iwerne men attended for ordination training.  The fellow student noticed that Iwerne men seemed always to dress in identical ways, all using identical Filofaxes.

The second area of control exercised by closed authoritarian groups is the control of information.  The Iwerne movement like many other religious groups does not encourage reading theological books beyond a small carefully vetted range of works.  The version of the Bible used by Nash was always the King James version.  Bible studies were used to present the approved teaching of the group rather than lead on to any kind of personal exploration of the text. To be a Iwerne man, you had to know and be a confident expositor of this official teaching of the movement.  Such teaching, according to Graystone, was bereft of theological nuance or depth. Such control of access to information leads into the third of Hassan’s categories – thought control.  We have often described in this blog the black/white, binary thinking of conservative Christian groups.  Needless to say, such narrowness of thinking will produce an imagination deficit.  Such a control of thinking will also never be able to produce much in the way of newness or creativity in theological understanding.   The maps of reality adopted by Iwerne men as part of their tribal identity, will prevent the emerging of healthy intellectual or spiritual development.  They will also find it extremely hard to learn from or relate to other Christians who come from different traditions.

The final letter in the acronym BITE is E for emotional control. If you are part of a religious movement like Iwerne, you will be encouraged to think and feel in predictable ways. One negative emotion that was prominent in the 31:8 report about the ministry of Jonathan Fletcher was the presence of fear. Alongside fear is the constant activation of guilt in the individual.  This was a common feature of many of the Iwerne evening teaching sessions.  Feeling constantly guilty and afraid seems to be a crucial part of the Iwerne emotional identity. Certainly, we saw the evident results of emotional control at Iwerne, particularly among Smyth’s victims.  Through no fault of their own, they found it near impossible to understand the terrible things being done to them, let alone talk to others about it.  They had been ruthlessly manipulated, not just by Smyth but by the mind and emotion numbing routines of the camps.

The question with which we began needs to be rephrased. Do the Iwerne camps, based on the evidence provided by Graystone, show aspects of authoritarian control and undue influence which Hassan so clearly describes in his BITE model? If the question is phrased like this, then the answer has to be a categoric yes. Our conclusion has to be that to a greater or lesser extent, generations of conservative Iwerne Christians have been exposed to a mind changing experience.  This has, to varying degrees, negatively changed them and inculcated in many of them a harmful, mind-numbing version of the Christian faith. That is a terrible and terrifying conclusion to be extracted from Graystone’s book.

by ‘Angela’

Recently I received this account from a reader of the blog.  It gives us an insight into the way that power can sometimes operate destructively in a parish.  Here, a ministry exercised by an apparently competent woman priest has been undermined and possibly destroyed by the actions of a determined clique of parishioners who were against her.  Many others have been damaged by the fall-out, including the writer herself.  Our narrator does not offer us explanations which uncover the true motivations of those who were attacking the ministry of the Vicar.    No doubt misogyny was playing its part, together with an unconscious patriarchy.   Those who are reared on a diet of male superiority may find the role of women in authority hard to accept. We have, at the same time, to be open to the possibility that there may be a counter-narrative to this account. Some salient facts in the account do, however, suggest that the perspective of the writer is largely an accurate one.  She speaks of two meetings, presumably organised by the diocese, to resolve the hostile activities of the ‘clique’ and find out the grounds for the complaints.  If such meetings took place and there was no agreement of any kind hammered out by the disputing parties, then this diocese appears not to be employing adequately trained mediators.  Mediation skills are essential in any organisation.  When disputes of this kind are not able to be resolved, then the costs, human and financial, are likely to be massive.  An ability to understand and resolve issues of institutional power is one of the central pleadings of this blog.  We all have witnessed the massive ‘cost’ of the Winchester affair, in terms of destroyed morale and sheer financial losses, when mediation failed.  Events which involve escalating dysfunctions of power in the Church seem to be increasingly common. The Church must find ways of stopping mini disasters like the one recounted below, from happening.  Mediation and true reconciliation are not just words, but positive weapons in the struggle to re-establish truth and integrity in the Church.  Without them the Church cannot have a bright future.

Angela’s Account

I have been a member of my parish for many, many years, a small rural church. After the retirement of the former Vicar, a young female priest was appointed to the post. She was very welcoming, warm and pleasant with everyone. This was her first position of sole charge, and she was anxious to do things correctly.  We were aware that good support was our responsibility so that she could more easily settle into her ministry with us.  Her sermons were outstanding, and this new Vicar brought a modern approach to the ministry during the difficult period of lockdown – zoom meetings, live streaming services and covid secure precautions for everyone.

Quite early on in her ministry, a senior male member of our PCC began to ignore emails and requests from the Vicar.   This we could not understand. This hostility and unkindness became public when this PCC member berated the Vicar in front of everyone at the Annual Parish Meeting.  The complaint had something to do with his position in the church.  Many parishioners were naturally upset to witness this outburst.  He was also accusing other church officers of always doing things ‘by the book’ in the way they carried out their church duties.

The new Vicar made many attempts at reconciliation with the PCC member, but these were not effective. Quite soon there followed a churchwarden announcing that he was stepping down from his duties for ‘personal reasons’.  This churchwarden was conspicuously avoiding the services when the Vicar was present, only attending when she was taking services at the main benefice church.

The hostility towards the Vicar by this churchwarden extended to actions aiming to undermine her position.  Then a small group of people started to complain about the Vicar’s sermons.  These had always satisfied the majority of the members of the congregation. Complaints turned into tutting and shaking of heads during the service.  The next stage was a refusal to go up for communion when the Vicar was present.  This was not the case when a visitor took the service.  Such actively negative behaviour was distressing to witness for the other members of the congregation. It could be described as a mobbing situation.  It was as though this group were determined to demonise the Vicar and destroy her confidence.

It was very hard to establish exactly what was going on.  She tried as far as possible to meet each complaint or challenge in a calm way.  She was always apologising for any possible misunderstandings in the church and always trying to make sure everyone was included in all the decisions made by her and the Church Council.  The small clique of parishioners who were undermining and unsettling the Vicar seemed to be threatened by the fact that she had authority in the church.  It was not the fact that this authority was used aggressively or inappropriately.  It was simply the fact that such spiritual authority existed in a church congregation.  

The hostility towards the Vicar was then extended to anyone who showed appreciation or support for her.  The bullying, undermining and isolating was turned on to them.  After a few months the situation became so bad that the Vicar’s health started to suffer.   She decided that her ministry had become untenable and made arrangements to move away to another church. 

Many parishioners were extremely upset at losing this young enthusiastic joyous and kind Vicar.

Our diocese did intervene on two occasions by holding meetings to air the issues and seek some kind of resolution to the problems.  Both were unsuccessful in stopping the bullying and preventing the continuing negative narratives aimed at the Vicar.  Those PCC members who supported the Vicar began to leave the church.  They could not tolerate witnessing the abusive behaviour being exhibited towards the Vicar. Overall church attendance also dropped off at this time.  People were aware there was ill feeling within the PCC and elsewhere.

I did manage to discuss the whole situation with our parish safeguarding officer. She did take it up and report to her link person in the Diocese, the DSO. He acted immediately on receiving the report and passed it on up the Diocese. Unfortunately no one in the diocesan safeguarding team saw fit to take the report seriously, so no action resulted on the part of the authorities to help the situation.

The PCC members who had supported the Vicar’s ministry asked for a meeting with a representative from the diocese.  This individual told us that he was sorry about the Vicar leaving in response to the bullying.  He claimed that there was nothing that could be done about it, but it was suggested by them that relationships needed to be addressed prior to a new Vicar being appointed.

Our young Vicar left our church with a bad atmosphere caused by the clique.  

I have witnessed the following: Bullying, mobbing, obfuscation of the truth, intimidation, abuse of power and control, sexism and duplicitous actions.

 l am saddened, disappointed and angry at how slowly the Church of England approached and dealt with this situation.  Thus, very quickly it escalated into a very damaging situation for our church.

I have since left the church due to the impact on my mental health.

I lost my Vicar, my church and my health.

Those who were responsible for the unacceptable behaviour stayed in the church and they seemed to act with complete impunity. 

It is an experience l do not ever want to repeat.

The book, Bleeding for Jesus, John Smyth and the cult of Iwerne camps (BFJ), which I received on Friday, has nothing resembling a good or tidy conclusion. There are indeed some good people scattered here and there in the narrative and these help to mitigate what is an appalling tale of cruelty, moral failure and indifference which fill the pages. The book by Andrew Graystone is one that shocks and depresses one at the same time. The only hero in the story is perhaps the author himself.  Some in the story deserve our respect as innocent victims but only a small few deserve any admiration for their actions and Christian behaviour.  Graystone’s narrative, in its clear simplicity, helps us to make sense of what is, much of the time, a total horror story.  BFJ represents an extraordinary piece of research. The detail in it is mind blowing and, as far as one can tell, completely accurate.  If there are errors, as some have already claimed, they do not detract from the main thrust of the book and its meticulous attention to detail.  Graystone has evidently spoken to hundreds of people and mastered thousands of pages of documents. The work he has done is part of a wider but necessary movement to bring light into murky areas of Church safeguarding failures from the past.

The outline of the story of John Smyth and his nefarious behaviour towards a group of young privileged public-school boys in England is already well known. Graystone manages to provide a lot more detail through his patient questioning of witnesses who witnessed the events of 40 years ago and others more recent. The book well conveys the social and theological claustrophobia which have long been a feature of the Iwerne camps. Graystone has great sympathy and understanding for the emotional deprivation felt by many of the campers, educated in privileged schools. Smyth also well understood this vulnerability.  This could lead to a desperate need in some boys, sundered apart from families at an early age, to have an understanding adult in their lives. Smyth offered himself to fit a paternal role for some of them.  Using this position of proxy father, Smyth persuaded over 20 boys in England to undergo savage beatings at his home in Winchester.  Somehow the pain of these beatings was thought to bring the recipient closer to a Father God.  We are given a glimpse of a fundamentalist theology which could be so easily twisted to become toxic and suit Smyth’s nefarious purposes. The Iwerne theology taught to generations of its alumni, is also revealed to be, in fact, remarkably shallow and superficial.

Much of the brand-new information in the book, apart from the extensive filling in of many gaps of Smyth’s association with Iwerne camps in the 70s and early 80s, is the African material. Graystone was enabled to travel to Zimbabwe and South Africa in pursuit of his research about Smyth and he explains the hitherto little-known story of Smyth’s nefarious activities with boys’ camps under the auspices of his missionary society, Zambesi Ministries.  It is in Africa that we find a number of individuals who seem to have stood up to Smyth and tried to resist his influence and power. There was the lawyer David Coltart and a group of ministers in Bulawayo who openly challenged his violence towards the boys in the camps in the name of discipline. This took place in 1995.  Smyth’s connections with funding institutions in Britain and Zimbabwean politicians meant that every time the law seemed finally to be catching up on him, some intervention or legal trick rescued him.  Even though he survived each of these brushes with the legal system, he eventually realised that he would need to move on again.  This he did in the early part of 2001 when he and his family moved to South Africa.

The saddest part of the book is the complete failure of the safeguarding establishment in England to tackle the problem of Smyth when information began to leak out about him in 2013. Nobody wanted to hear the testimony of ‘Graham’, one of Smyth’s victims from Winchester College. He first disclosed his abuse by Smyth in March 2012 to his local Vicar in Cambridge, Alasdair Paine.  It took 22 months before he was enabled to see a trained therapist in January 2014.  Meanwhile the whole country had become sensitised to the issue of historic sexual abuse of the young after the emergence of the Savile scandal in 2012.  It is quite clear from Graystone’s research that there were dozens of people in the Iwerne network, including Paine, who were potentially able to confirm the credibility of Graham’s account.  Some had been sitting on information about Smyth for the previous 30 years. Graystone’s meticulous research reveals many of the names of people in fact who knew that Smyth was still dangerous.  He was a recognisable danger to any young people in Africa who crossed his path.  It was also a form of racism that allowed English leaders to think that, if Smyth was in Africa, at least he was no longer able to be a threat to them or their reputations. They carefully allowed themselves not to think about these potential innocent victims of Smyth’s considerable capacity for cruel and inhuman behaviour. The Church of England and the NST have shown little interest in the African victims, and no known attempt has been made to investigate the African abuse, let alone reach out to them. The casual racism continues.

I do not propose to add anything to the debate about how much our current Archbishop of Canterbury knew about the affair. Like many other people who had heard that something was amiss with Smyth which required him to leave the country, he may have thought that all was well, as long as the problem was not in Britain. One factual piece of information which is not in dispute is that Archbishop Welby personally knows many of the known victims, including Graham, from his own Iwerne days.  He has, until very recently, seemed strangely reluctant to meet them and offer them any kind of reassurance or pastoral support.

The greatest imputation of guilt has to be laid at the door of some of the conservative Christians who were supporters of the Iwerne work.  Some of these leaders, over 100 according to the evidence gathered by Graystone, have deliberately suppressed information about what they knew for a long time. Graystone is open about naming individuals that he believes had knowledge of the scandal and others who funded Smyth’s departure to Africa in 1984.  At the top of the list is David Fletcher.  He ran the camps for many years and was asked to be godfather to Smyth’s son, known as PJ.  He and his brother Jonathan were key figures, not only in the Iwerne network but in the wider con-evo world.  Many of those who had known and worked with Smyth were sufficiently powerful within the conservative networks to have been able to check Smyth’s activities once people had been alerted to his evil practices.  Rather, information was kept within a relatively charmed group of senior Iwerne leaders.  The wounded survivors, known to number 26 by 1982 were allowed to suffer without any support.

It remains to be seen how much impact this book will have on the morale of members of the Church, whether in the hierarchy or in the pew. The potential damage to the ability to trust the Church to manage its own affairs is enormous. Reading Greystone’s account makes one feel it is only ever interested in preserving its institutional reputation. This was certainly a factor in the case of the Winchester College leadership, back in the early 80s when the Smyth scandal first broke.

Andrew Graystone himself becomes part of the overall narrative when he was called in 2014 to help the Titus trustees manage the emerging Smyth scandal. He recommended to them, having read all the paperwork they provided, that they should make a clean breast of all that they knew about Smyth’s activities and commission an enquiry. That was too much for the trustees and they severed contact with Graystone soon after. This book in many ways is a delayed attempt to make the full disclosure that Titus should have made back in 2015. Because it comes from a source other than Titus itself, the reputation of the Trust is bound to be seriously damaged.  Neither the Trust nor the Church of England as a whole seems able to reach up to a necessary standard of honesty and openness. Will the Church be able to recognise the part of the institution and its own senior members in this sorry tale?  Already the only response is to quibble about details in the narrative.  If there are errors of fact in the text, they are very few and certainly they do not devalue the incredibly detailed reporting which Graystone has provided. One thing that my rapid reaction cannot do, is to say where this story will go. Once again in the history of safeguarding, we are being told a message we have heard many times before.  The Church cannot move forward unless it embraces a narrative of honesty, clarity and integrity. Without these things, the institution is once again seen to be failing to provide a moral example under God. It is failing both its own members and the whole nation.

A few years ago, I was giving a paper on Joan of Arc. The details of that talk are not important here, except for one point I made. Joan’s command of an army to fight the English around the city of Orleans in the early 1430s was an exceptional event.  Socially she was of fairly humble stock, certainly not officer class. Her authority to command soldiers had to be given to her and supported by someone who actually had the legal/feudal power to occupy a leadership role.   Those who had this were always the ones with noble or aristocratic connections.  They occupied places within the fixed hierarchy which was built into the whole of mediaeval society.  Allowing a person of humble roots to take command of soldiers was highly unusual and it is this event which conveys to us something of the remarkable impact that Joan made on her contemporaries and the soldiers she commanded.

The word hierarchy is a Greek word.  Some of the thinking about the idea of rank and hierarchy in both church and state can be linked back to two 5^th century Greek works attributed to an anonymous writer known to us as the Pseudo-Dionysius. This writer, deeply affected by Platonic ideas, saw the world as a fixed order emanating from God.  At the top were various orders of angels.  Lower down, where these orders became visible in our world, we see the ranks of divinely imbued ecclesiastical orders of bishops. priests, deacons and monks.  By extension, later writers saw kingship as belonging to this same priestly hierarchy.  Elements of this thinking, that make the coronation rite into a kind of episcopal consecration, can still be found in our contemporary coronation liturgies.  Such ideas also fed into feudal notions which saw the ranks of society as being irrevocably fixed, with kings, bishops and feudal lords all occupying exalted places within a hierarchy of being.  Echoes of this thinking can also be found in the children’s hymn from Victorian times.  The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate…  

While the power of the nobility in British society is much diminished, the House of Lords still reminds us that hierarchical ideas are embedded in our way of life.   There is still some sense that the King or Queen is at the top of a divinely ordered system of privilege and power. The Church also retains some of its mediaeval structures with regard to the exercise of its authority. Within the Church in Britain, the main administrative unit is of course the individual diocese. In charge of each of these units is the local bishop.  Ecclesiastically the bishop has some of what we can call feudal power at his/her disposal. The bishop is the place of last appeal when there are disputes or disciplinary matters to be resolved within the diocese. Naturally, there are checks and balances in the system, but recently, we have been witnessing how difficult it is to hold bishops to account when things go wrong with the episcopal role as a dispenser of justice.  There are two ongoing cases of bishops in Britain who have been accused of exercising their authority in an arbitrary and coercive manner.  My purpose here is not to review the rights and wrongs of these cases, but to point out how extraordinarily difficult and damaging for a hierarchical system it is when the person at the top of a pyramid structure of power stands accused of malfeasance.  It is as though, during a court case, when an accused is about to be condemned for a terrible crime, the judge is suddenly revealed to be himself also guilty of crimes. For the justice/hierarchical system to work for the many, we need the judge or the bishop to be morally beyond reproach.  The whole system takes its stability from the probity of those who oversee its functioning and have been appointed for this purpose.  Justice and fairness in Church and society is dependent on our being always able to trust the hierarchs in charge. Any failure on their part is not about individual lapses of ethics or competence; it is about a crack in the whole system and the trust that people expect to have in it. When the system experiences any such fracture, the cost of repairing it is very high indeed.

 Historically speaking, our trust and reliance on bishops and others with judiciary responsibilities has not been misplaced for the most part (at least in modern times).  The broad tradition of absolute probity has had the result that the system has not needed to develop protocols to be able to call a diocesan bishop to account when they appear to abuse their power in some way. This is why it is so important that, before senior appointments are made, a proper and thorough scrutiny of past performance by a candidate is undertaken.  Theoretically under the rules of CDM, a bishop in the Church of England can be reported to the Archbishop of the Province when authority is abused.  In practice, as we have seen in the case of the Bishop of Winchester, there is little precedent to call on to help resolve such a scenario.  Bishops are supposed to be beyond even the possibility of moral or institutional failure. 

This blog post does not claim to have any privileged information about the situation in Winchester or Aberdeen, but a single word seems to describe the reported behaviour of each hierarch -bullying.   It is not important for us to determine the degree and extent of guilt in each case, but we can safely say that any accusation against a diocesan bishop is extremely serious for the reasons we have mentioned above.  We are not just talking about individual reputations at stake.  We are referring to people being able to trust the structure and the justice system in the Church as reliable and trustworthy.  Most people would never choose to work for an institution that that has allowed injustices and bullying to take place at the highest level.  The hundreds who work for the diocese of Winchester are seriously affected by the events there.  At the very least we can speak of an instability right across the whole diocese.  The effect on morale of everyone at any level in the diocese is also likely to be severe.  The person at the top embodies the entire structure in him/herself and every piece of work in the diocese is done to some extent in the name of its chief officer.  Fewer people are involved in the Scottish situation, but the effect of the destabilising of the structure of the Diocese of Aberdeen and the College of Bishops is likely to be felt right across the entire Scottish Episcopal Church.

Every Christian can be thought to operate at two levels.  They each have a personal faith and relationship with God.   At another level they expect to have their faith reinforced and nurtured by the institutions they belong to, their local congregation and other networks they identify with.  In recent days we have also been reading about some Christian networks in England which have been reported to be failing in terms of integrity and honesty.  Andrew Graystone’s book is not primarily about the behaviour of a single individual, however great the suffering Smyth caused to many people.  It is a story of certain institutions/mini-hierarchies, here those aligned to the conservative evangelical faction of the Church of England, which chose to bury the truth about this evil for 40 years.  At each stage we see culpability in many of those at the top of the structures failing the cause of transparency and justice.  Those at the top of the Iwerne/Titus/REFORM/SU hierarchies have a particular case to answer.  They had the power to redeem or mitigate the situation, but they chose rather to continue the omerta and cover-up, simultaneously damaging the whole con evo edifice in Britain.  Graystone’s narrative is likely to point out the difficulty of trusting the word of leaders when these have failed for so long and so comprehensively in regard to their constituency. 

Go up and down the streets of Jerusalem, look around and consider, search through her squares. If you can find but one person who deals honestly and seeks the truth, I will forgive this city.  Those who want to believe in the Anglican Church, whether in its local or national manifestations, will no doubt know some in leadership who deal honestly and seek the truth.  The numbers, nevertheless, are not as large as they should be.  As I prepare to read Bleeding for Jesus sometime this week, I shall be looking for any individual among the leaders in that whole sorry tale who fulfils the role of honest truth-broker.  I suspect that I will have considerable difficulty in nominating anyone for this role.  Jeremiah certainly seems to have failed in his search.

The fate of any institution where the leadership is weak or worse still, corrupt, is bleak.  There may be many honest good individuals working for and within such a structure.  However, whenever the hard work of the just and honourable foot-soldiers finds no mirror among the leaders, the possibility of maintaining good morale overall is likely to be weakened.  Word coming out of the London diocese at present speaks of seriously damaged morale in the aftermath of dysfunctional leadership over Fr Griffin’s case.  Institutions find it hard to flourish or survive when honest open leadership is absent.

Today’s blog is gloomy, but this perhaps is a reflection of my mood as I scan the church news at present.  I have been struck forcibly by the likely difficulties in filling the cluster of episcopal vacancies that have come on stream recently.  I applaud those who allow their names to go forward just as I salute any who are taking on the immensely difficult task of serving on General Synod for the next few years.  Let us all hope and pray that the Church may find the leadership and integrity it desperately needs throughout the structure, and that this may help to save the whole weakened edifice.  This has been so sorely weakened by problems at the top of the hierarchy in our national Church.

by Gilo and Tony

Tony and Gilo are members of the Church of England’s Survivor Reference Group. They have done much work together to bring necessary daylight to the unethical operations of the Church’s legal and insurer framework. They were both also the catalysts for the Interim Support Scheme. It was their work with an advocate which created the template for the ISS which is now helping many dozens of survivors, and growing exponentially all the time. 

The 2021 Headlinemoney Awards took place in the City of London this past week. These awards celebrate exceptional journalism from across the UK’s financial press and media. Headlinemoney website states that a central aspect of these awards is that “all the winners are decided by their peers following an extensive submission, shortlisting and judging process.” This is the industry recognising and validating its own, and signalling worthy journalists as voices to watch. 

Jen Frost of Insurance Post has written half a dozen articles on the complex and often difficult-to-report experiences that survivors have of the insurance response to our situations. Frost won two awards at this week’s Headlinemoney event. The first, for General Insurance Journalist of the Year, was shared jointly with Dean Sobers of WhichMoney. 

The second for Story of the Year Award was for her reporting on Tony’s case and the courageous exposure of the litigation strategies of Paula Jefferson (Berrymans Lace Mawer BLM) and Ecclesiastical Insurance (EIG). See the story below.  

https://www.postonline.co.uk/claims/4602976/ecclesiastical-faces-fresh-allegations-of-unethical-treatment-as-case-of-suicide-watch-claimant-comes-to-light

Why is this significant? It is the industry recognising Jen Frost as a serious investigative journalist. And crucially it is recognition of the valid criticism ranged at BLM and EIG for their unethical and aggressive litigation strategies in this case. Standouts in the story were Paula Jefferson’s use of a medical expert who delivered a report on behalf of the Church without even meeting the survivor. This was swiftly followed by sudden withdrawal of an earlier settlement offer whilst the survivor was in hospital on suicide watch. Causal percentages were applied in a derisory manner. Frost’s other reports also referenced callous language used about survivors by Ecclesiastical and BLM. 

There will be embarrassment in many quarters. Not least for Mark Hews CEO of EIG who has been feverishly rescuing his company’s reputation with a £million giveaway to charities and a renewed effort to win the loyalty of clergy with sabbatical grants. 

There will be acute embarrassment for Paula Jefferson who must by now be wishing she had acted with a modicum of ethical awareness in this as in many other cases. Jefferson will be aware that her working methods and the culture she has engendered at BLM has brought considerable damage to the reputation of their client the Church of England. We understand that EIG has been given clear instruction from the Church that any further deployment of Professor Tony Maden in these cases must now be considered unacceptable and unwelcome. Maden was for a long time Jefferson’s constant travel companion in the defence of other institutions in addition to the Church of England. It seems they worked in tandem and regularly deployed bewildering arguments such as ‘genetic predisposition’ and ‘cognitive predisposition’ in an alarming number of cases. In lay terms, the argument goes like this – the survivor was already pre-programmed through genetic history (birth, parental history) to develop such mental health conditions as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression, anxiety, bi-polar condition, etc. And abuse had little or nothing to do with it. You will see they used the argument against Phil Johnson below.

https://www.postonline.co.uk/claims/7681106/former-broadmoor-psychiatrist-faces-investigation-for-role-in-ecclesiastical-abuse-claims

Abuse survivors, who typically have tried to suppress the trauma of the experiences for years (many for decades), need particular sensitivity and hand holding whilst within the civil claims process.  Re-counting and re-living our experiences, as is necessary for the process, is extremely triggering and can render the survivor re-traumatised, muted and vulnerable from the cumulative impact and protracted timeline of it all. Church of England survivors instead, have been met by BLM lawyers, in expensive corporate suits, smartly disguising the strategy and ethical intention of a gangster’s disgruntled Rottweiler. The Church of England has been complicit in this gangsterism and then pretended disdainfully that this gangsterism has nothing to do with it, its hands are clean. 

In Tony’s case there was an application of jiggery pokery abstract mathematics which resulted in a 5% causal figure – all of which had no relation whatsoever to his experience. These methods have been routine in the circus practised by Jefferson and her partners. This carefully calculated adversarial operation has managed the reputation and purse strings of their client.  But this has been wholly at the expense of survivors who have had life-long impact arrogantly and patronisingly belittled, resulting in further bullying, betrayal and abuse of power.

This award should be embarrassing for Archbishop Welby and other bishops (Paul Butler, Martin Warner, and others) who were first told of Jefferson’s and EIG’s unethical tactics many years ago by Phil Johnson. It will be embarrassing for Sarah Mullally, Bishop of London, who had a golden opportunity to address the behaviours of the Church’s insurer following the Church of England’s Elliott Review – but chose instead to walk away and silence every request that the Church address the public dissembling by EIG. Ditto the NST who during the Graham Tilby era did likewise, presumably under instruction from their managers. Survivors were left to fend for ourselves against a cruel system of reabuse, and struggle to bring daylight to what had been going on. 

It should be particularly embarrassing for William Nye, Secretary General of Archbishops’ Council, who has presided over a distinctly seedy culture in Church House of direct complicity with the insurer in a circus of reputation management. Under his watch Church House comms, legal department and disturbingly, the NST, all took part in a ‘retranslation’ of review recommendations for the purposes of reputation management for the insurer and the Church. 

http://survivingchurch.org/2020/09/15/thoughts-on-the-elliott-review-translation-by-archbishops-council/

And yet despite the efforts of all involved within Church House to airbrush this from history.. a plucky young journalist has now been recognised by her industry peers for her exposure of the shadowy and unethical underbelly of what passes for civil litigation defence in this country in relation to survivors of abuse. The industry itself is having to wake up. Frost’s award follows hard on the heels of the Association of British Insurers issuing new guidelines to its members on many of these unethical practices that Frost has helped expose. 

https://www.postonline.co.uk/claims/7868456/abi-publishes-child-sexual-abuse-claims-handling-code-in-response-to-inquiry

The Church is now having to create a Redress Fund in the region of £500m to £1billion to meet its responsibility for the repair of so many lives abused and institutionally re-abused and damaged. Ecclesiastical Insurance and its owner AllChurches Trust is being called upon by us to give £100m towards this Redress Fund as a mark of corporate repentance for its serial re-abuse of survivors. 

Whether or not the Church continues to use the services of Paula Jefferson is up to them, but survivors have insisted that Jefferson and BLM are kept well away from any involvement in the Redress. Her approach to the care and repair of survivors is considered offensive and grotesque by us and renders her unfit to be involved in further work with survivors.

As to Maden? In April this year a new Practice Direction 1A protecting vulnerable witnesses came into effect  (https://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/procedure-rules/civil/rules/part01/practice-direction-1a-participation-of-vulnerable-parties-or-witnesses).  Designed to specifically ensure that both sides of the civil case are on equal footing.  It will significantly improve the handling of vulnerable parties.  For the first time claimants can challenge what they might perceive as adversarial tactics if they give good reason why.  This does not address past cases, but has already had an impact as the following approved court judgement from Liverpool County Court earlier this year demonstrates:

“I have come to the conclusion on balance that her seeing Professor Maden, in view of the information out there on him, in view of his acting for high profile Defendants, in view of his CV and the balance of his Defendant work, on the balance of probabilities would be likely to impede the evidence of the Claimant given to him. I, therefore, accede to the request that the Defendant should have a consultant psychiatrist of their choosing but not Professor Maden.”

Ouch!

We suspect that any embarrassment any of the above experience will remain hidden. The Church has been fearful of acknowledging its part played in the gangsterism of its lawyers and insurer. And has a remarkable ability to absorb embarrassment and pretend it is not there. But they must now move on swiftly with the repair and rebuilding of lives.

We close by saying Award Well Deserved! Congratulations Jen Frost. 

Tony and Gilo

Editor writes: This is the first, we hope, of several comments on Andrew Graystone’s important new book, Bleeding For Jesus. We hope also to publish a response by Andrew to some of the early comments which have appeared, even though the publication date is only today September 6th. I also propose sharing whatever observations I have to make after I receive my copy and have had a chance to read it. They may be other reactions in the pipeline which Surviving Church is happy to carry. There is an urgent need to explore this vital new book on the topic of power abuse in the Church and it lasting impact on members.

Two weeks ago, my attention was directed to the publication by the Titus Trustees of a Timeline https://www.titustrust.org/john-smyth/  which they had produced to assist everyone in understanding the actions of the Trust and its de facto predecessor the Iwerne Trust, in the longstanding saga of the John Smyth sadistic abuse of multiple victims 40 years ago. This was a welcome development for two reasons.

First, this information is useful and long overdue. Second, Titus, knowing – and in fairness not complaining – about my interest in these matters, wanted me to know that they were as good as their promise, via an intermediary, to advise me when it became available.

This engagement with a known and vocal critic is progress; honest dialogue is important even as we wait for the CofE Report which is already two years in the making, and unlikely to be available before next year at the earliest.

The Church has recently announced that it wants to receive all submissions by the end of September; that deadline is not at all well known or publicised; some of us are inclined to the benevolent view that if significant new revelations were to come forward later, the Church would hardly refuse to receive them..

There is however, currently no work being done on Smyth’s abusive activities in Africa where 90 African boys were beaten in a replication of his UK activities thanks to the negligence of those whose only thought was of moving their little local problem on, regardless of the unlikelihood that a leopard would change its spots. That deficiency needs to be urgently remedied in the light of the book’s revelations.

Although the Makin Report will not be in the headlines, for a while, the story is now, thanks to the journalist Andrew Greystone’s detailed book on the Smyth scandal and its aftermath. “ Bleeding for Jesus” https://www.eden.co.uk/christian-books/the-church/bleeding-for-jesus/  which was reviewed in the Guardian here https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/21/bleeding-for-jesus-book-tells-story-of-qc-who-pitilessly-abused-young-men

It is hard to believe that the Titus document was not published with one eye on the book’s publication. I do not blame the Trustees for that: they are not the same Trustees who made the original decisions although their perspective was inevitably shaped by the information recorded by that generation of leaders. Some of the recorded explanations on which the  new regime relied would inevitably have been self serving by those those responsible at the time.

We shall undoubtedly be hearing a lot about this book in the coming weeks for a variety of reasons. First it is drawn from primary sources.; victims have trusted the author and have given full co-operation. Second, Andrew Graystone has  extensively  interviewed Smyth’s own son and that offers fascinating fresh perspectives. Third, he has been to Africa to follow up the story which no-one else has. Fourth, he became interested in the story when he was originally engaged by the Titus Trust itself, to act as their PR advisor,  and thus was given much inside information. Fifth, knowing that the book was ready for publication, Lambeth Palace requested and was given an advance copy following an inducing offer to provide a Foreward, commending it to be read as an important contribution to this longstanding saga, which it is. However, the book does not include such a Foreward…….

The book will to be read carefully and reviewed in its own right, but anyone seeking to understand how the CofE and its Iwerne Conservative Evangelical wing  have approached this matter will do well to start with an examination the Titus timeline.

Already there are some interesting revelations which even the earliest victims who came forward, did not know. The story was known to have been buried in the early days, ostensibly in the interests of the beaten boys/young men, although by no means all were consulted, and  neither were all the parents of those under age at the time of the crimes.

Journalist Anne Atkins played an early significant role in bringing the matter forward in her newspaper column, but what leaps off the page for me is that on 8 November 2012, the matter was raised with the then Iwerne Trustees by one of their own people described only as R1.

I understand that what is not made clear in the Titus Timeline is that R1 is the woman who ran the girls counterpart camp at Lymington. This needs to be more fully  explained. I understand that this information is contained in a separate report by James Stileman, a senior member of Titus staff, which has not been put into the public domain, and that relevant parts from the report do not feature in the Timeline. That needs to be remedied and amplified if the commitment of the new Trustees to openness is to be maintained.

We learn that only three Trustees and four Titus Trust employees were told of the 2012 disclosures, and they jointly made a deliberate decision not to tell the whole Board.  That is extraordinary. Even if  it were believed that the transfer of the going concern from Iwerne to Titus had severed the legal responsibility (which is itself contentious),  the Titus Trust undoubtedly had a reputational interest in knowing and addressing the allegations, and all trustees ought, for that reason alone, to have been told the complete truth. Hiding such information in such circumstances certainly looks like somebody was covering up.

 We further learn that the original Ruston Report http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/970485/27843482/1519929269713/The+Ruston+Report+on+John+Smyth+1993.pdf?token=b5ZM1XU9leAUV05%2BfBelEJFZCiE%3D which identified that crime had occurred, was also not shared with all who ought to have been told, and  that it was consigned to a sealed envelope and stored for many years in Chairman Giles Rawlinson’s attic and thus kept away from future Trustees eyes. That too looks like cover-up.

One adds to this the fact when the scandal began to break in 2012,  the other trustees had to wait 19 months to be told the truth, and even then it took another four months before the police were approached. When the former and then current Chairs of Titus Trust, Revd David Fletcher and Giles Rawlinson were unanimously asked to resign, and did so at a meeting on 29 November 2014, nobody seemed to think it appropriate to notify the Church of England that a priest had behaved so badly that he had to be required to step aside as a Charity Trustee for reasons of Safeguarding mishandling.

Given the above, the assertion in the concluding summary of the timeline that there was “no cover-up” may attract a certain scepticism. If the new trustees are saying that that this was the old regime’s view, one would accept this as a historical observation. To appear to adopt and defend that view does look like a serious own goal on their part. It is not the best way to salvage a tarnished reputation. There is plenty in the book to show that cover up, wilful blindness and blinkered loyalty was exactly what was going on..

This is doubly the case when one notes that the decision to go “low key” was against the advice of not one but two PR advisors. Both, Andrew Graystone and a Christian journalist Andrew Boyd advised the earlierTrustees to be proactive open and honest; their advice was not followed.

The “no cover up”  narrative falls further into disrepute when one remembers that Titus is but part of a wider Iwerne Conservative Evangelical community. When the facts of Smyth were taken to Winchester College where many of its victims had been prepared and encouraged to attend Iwerne by the Christian Forum, teacher Peter Krackenberger wrote to summarise the way that part of the constituency viewed the matter. “Basically everyone’s reaction was magnificent and just what we could have hoped for. After the initial shock and horror, all parties are agreed that discretion is by far the best policy and that there is no merit in the information being spread any further.” [Italicised words underlined in original]

The current Titus trustees are entitled to suggest that there was previously a small group which knew all, but elected to be  economical with the truth when dealing with their fellow trustees. They might be entitled to say that some trustees were less than vigorous in their curiosity. They might even want to be legalistic, steering clear of moral considerations, though that is not exactly a good look for “ Bible based Christians”. What cannot be said with much credibility however, is that there was not a widespread consensus amongst their constituency leadership to avoid having these matter known and scrutinised, because that would reflect very badly upon the entire Iwerne/ “Bash Nash” project.

The victims have compiled a list of 125 people who are likely to have known something was amiss, and yet turned a blind eye. Many of them are named in the book with full particulars of their deficiencies. Andrew Graystone explains that when he learned of the facts he felt that he could not join them in leaving it to others to act – walking by on the other side of the road like so many. That is why he has written the book. He will take severe flak for it; his willingness to do so is to his credit. The very publication will force the unwilling to be frank against their former instincts.

One of the victims issued his own statement addressing evasiveness within the Timeline.

https://anglican.ink/2021/08/21/smyth-victims-respond-to-titus-trust-document-dump/ which includes the following,

“The Titus timeline covers only 2012-2017 and ignores the 30 year period when senior Iwerne camp leaders, and two Trustees of Titus Trust until 2015, had known about the abuse throughout the period. The apology does not mention the scores of African children, younger than the UK victims, who were abused. There is no apology for the failures in 1982 to stop John Smyth QC from ever working with children again”.

“Titus response hides behind their long-claimed legal distinction between Iwerne Trust and Titus Trust, when the latter took over the assets, the responsibilities, the camps and even the Trustees of Iwerne Trust. The trust hides behind legal advice to claim no responsibility, and their response from 2012-17 is devoid of Christian care and compassion”.

When the Graystone book is widely read there is likely to be a necessary revision of how we view the timeline and perhaps how the Trustees then understand the story: it will be more fully rounded than what currently available to them through the incomplete notes and recollections upon which they have necessarily relied.

The story of Smyth and the wider cover up is much more complex and unpleasant. It will not be hard to see why there is no encouragement to read the book from the CofE.There will be much discomfort in Lambeth Palace, Church House and amongst the big beasts of Iwerne Conservative Evangelicalism.

The story is not, as a non-Iwerne Conservative Evangelical colleague properly pointed out to me, representative of the entire Evangelical constituency, the vast majority of whom are properly disgusted by what they are learning.

As more people read it, it is going to be a very big story for the Church, and its fall out will last well into the work of the next General Synod.

We are already hearing allegations from those criticised that the book has inaccuracies. Personal statements have been issued. Those assertions, the context, and motivation will need to be carefully considered.

Fundamentally however, the importance of “Bleeding for Jesus” lies not in its author, his motives or any factual controversies: it is important because it is the first comprehensive account by and on behalf of the victims, both in the UK and in Africa, of crimes by John Smyth and the cover up by the Iwerne Trustees and officers who knew the facts and chose to look the other way. That is where the primary focus of the discussion needs to be.

The Best Catholics in the World: The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship

by Derek Scally (Penguin, 2021).

This review article was sent in anonymously to Surviving Church

On the same day that I finished reading Derek Scally’s fine book, the report on the Metropolitan Police and their cover-ups of the 1987 Daniel Morgan murder was also published.  1987 is a half a lifetime away, yet the report still made for harrowing reading. Daniel Morgan was a private investigator, and in March 1987, after interviewing someone in a pub and taking some notes, he was found in the pub carpark with an axe in his head.  He had been murdered, and his wallet was left, but his notes from his trouser pocket stolen. The murder remains unsolved. The report recorded that the Metropolitan Police had “repeatedly failed to take a fresh, thorough and critical look at past failings”. In one telling passage the report noted,

“Concealing or denying failings, for the sake of the organisation’s public image, is dishonesty on the part of the organisation for reputational benefit and constitutes a form of institutional corruption”.

Readers of this blog will not need to be alerted to the connections between the Church of England’s politburo overseeing safeguarding, set against potential reputational damage, and the criticism of the Metropolitan Police.  We all know how each mini-saga of incompetent investigation for victims and the falsely accused alike ends.  Spoiler alert: wait for the Lessons-Learned Review. 

Derek Scally is a journalist and a Dubliner, spending decades reporting on the changes in Germany before, during and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.  Scally often returned home to Dublin from Berlin, and one Christmas Eve went to Mass. He was puzzled and troubled by what he found.

Journalism, like good research, is merely organised curiosity: poking and prying with purpose. Journalists and researchers know the least questioned assumptions are often the most questionable. Journalists, like researchers, understand the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, and record in astonishment (or sometimes dismay and despair) that which could not be guessed.  Journalists, like researchers, ask awkward questions, and take little at face value.  Some are locked up for this; others are quietly done away with.

As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once opined, a wise person doesn’t give you the right answers, but they do pose the right questions. Scally is full of wise insight and he has plenty of pertinent questions. 

On visits home he found more memories than congregants in the church where he had once been an altar boy. Not for the first time, the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland brings to mind the fall of another powerful ideology – East German Communism.

Yet Scally was puzzled by how the Germans have moved on from not one, but three huge and monumental historical, social and cultural traumas in the twentieth century.  The first was the Great War, or more specifically its aftermath, which saddled the country with debt and social conditions that eventually bred slavish loyalty to a dictatorship and political ideology rooted in a punitive quest for Aryan purity.  The holocaust was one of only several consequences.  The Second World War, and the holocaust, was the next trauma.  So shocking was the scale of industrial killing, that some would never believe it.  Third, the Cold War divide, and in East Germany, the feared and unaccountable Stasi, with their millions of miles of files on citizens.  This was Neighbourhood Watch with a dark twist: anyone could report anybody and anything they thought suspicious. Make an allegation lurid enough, and your neighbour might be relocated before morning: forwarding address unknown.

As Scally points out, the fundamental ingredient at the heart of late twentieth and twenty-first century German transformation lies in truthfulness. The three traumas above are on every school curriculum.  No education is complete without the obligatory trip to the holocaust museum, or seminars about Stasi-led ‘purges’ that flouted natural law and justice. As the Old Testament proverb has it, “our fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (Ezekiel 18: 2).  The answer to the proverb is education.  As for children’s teeth then, so now: you teach; you educate; you set an example now – if you want to change the future.

While Germans are engaging truthfully and earnestly with their past, Scally sees nothing comparable going on in his native land, and as he remarks, if you raise the question of child-abuse in the Irish Catholic church, the subject is quickly changed, or the discussion shut down.  Bishops, clergy and laity all collude. No-one wants to talk about it. And as the church won’t deal with its past, it cannot escape it.  The shadow of abuse lives inside church like a cancer too unbearable to contemplate. 

So the shame festers and grows.  Without authentic and truthful engagement, the past simply will not die.  So without a death, there can be no resurrection, and no transformation.  The church remains locked in denial and cognitive dissonance.  Perhaps things were not quite so bad after all?  Perhaps we can pin the blame on the journalists for stirring it all up?  Or perhaps pin blame on a handful of bad clergy, nuns or other religious orders? Or perhaps blame those whining and whingeing victims (again)? God, they don’t half go on and on, don’t they? (Matthew 15: 23 – the disciples came to Jesus and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us…”).

The German lesson is this: a society or group that cannot truthfully take responsibility for its sins and failings is destined for atrophy and doomed to die.  This may take a long time, but wither and perish it will. Denial is not a cure.  Partial treatment, not an option. The Church of England hangs on to its safeguarding practices, frozen in grimacing rictus, hoping to avoid its own demise.  In so doing, it strings out the death throes of its culture of incompetence and secrecy, entitlement and arrogance, abusiveness and favouritism.  But worst of all, because it won’t accept its end – its death – there is no resurrection, and therefore no hope.  As Martin Sewell perceptively noted in a recent blog for Archbishop Cranmer,

“…we currently have across multiple layers of the Church of England a culture of evolved helplessness. It suits the Church that its arcane and devolved structures keep the buck constantly in motion until everyone loses interest after we have a ‘learned-lessons review’ which is not publicly available and nobody reads…”.

I think “evolved helplessness” puts it perfectly.  The “banality of evil” – that memorable phrase of Hannah Arendt – is accepted as normative within the Church of England’s safeguarding culture.  The system is systemically abusive.  NST investigations are outsourced to unlicensed, unaccountable, untrained and unregulated self-employed ‘consultants’.  They make life-changing determinations and can issue ministry-ending judgments on clergy who happen to be licensed, trained, regulated and accountable.  These ‘consultants’, are basically hired mercenaries.  The clergy are given no legal rights or representation at these Core Groups.  The Core Groups are populated by unlicensed, unaccountable, untrained and unregulated persons. The process as a whole, whether you are the victim or a defendant, is a cruel carousel of torment that never stops, and won’t let you off.

Perhaps like me you are weary of the recurring cycle of lame excuses that sanction poor procedures, poor practice, and poor prelates.  The Church of England’s NST has managed to say little more than “oops” to the Canon Paul Overend debacle, and express some apparent regret.  In the wake of Father Alan Griffin’s suicide, it barely managed “oh dear”.  But you should not be at all worried. No, you really shouldn’t.  Because there will be (repeat spoiler alert) a ‘Lessons-Learned Review’. 

But I see no lessons learned. I see no pedagogy of transformation, let alone one of revolution. I see no change. I see no educators or good practitioners.  I see no evidence that any lessons will be even noted, let alone learned.  I see no commitment to authentic change.  I see a lot of energy going into excuses, denials, cover-ups, changing the subject, spinning, and extensive efforts expended on reputational management, avoidance of responsibility and liability.  And of course, even if the Lessons-Learned Review was ever written, the NST do not publish them.  They remain, Stasi-like, ‘secrets’; although given the nicer nomenclature of ‘confidential’.

The brilliant essayist Dave Foster Wallace (himself an addict, and who sadly committed suicide) noted, the irony for addicts: “the substance being abused suggests itself as the solution to the problem it created”.  The Church of England is addicted to its own self-importance and self-sufficiency.  Like an addict, it does not think it needs help, let alone some twelve-step programme with all that mutual accountability.  Like an addict, it is hooked on the very substance that is destroying the body. How else can I explain a recent chat with a Bishop that went like this:

Me: Don’t you think it would be better, safer and more trustworthy for the Church of England to outsource its safeguarding to an independent body, properly regulated, like doctors, solicitors and barristers have?  That way, when there were complaints or investigations, the church could not be accused of setting and marking its own homework?

Bishop: Oh no, we can’t have that!  We have to be able to manage our own system.  What would it look like if we gave this up?

Me: Well, better, fairer, more trustworthy, transparent and reliable for one thing.  But maybe the lawyers and medics have got this all wrong?

Bishop: Hmmm…I’ll have to think about this. [i.e., code for ‘delete’].

Our safeguarding practice is now so unsafe that it has become as wicked as any of the abuse it was supposed to be addressing.  But where will we find a Bishop today with courage and conviction to take responsibility, and act?  I see no signs of hope.

The Best Catholics in the World is the remarkable result of Derek Scally’s three-year odyssey. He takes us on a quest to unravel the tight hold the Church once had on the Irish.  Scally travels the length and breadth of Ireland and across Europe, going to Masses, novenas, shrines and seminaries, talking to those who have abandoned the Church and those who have just about held on; to survivors and campaigners; to writers, historians, psychologists and others. He probes and prods with church officials, priests and religious along the way.  This is a book about not one, but two nations: dealing with those murky, difficult questions that face any society coming to terms with its troubling past.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn once opined that there is always this fallacious belief that “it would not be the same here and now…”, and such evil would now be impossible. He did not agree. Hannah Arendt, our foremost scholar of totalitarianism, said this: “totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” That is part of the reason why Donald Trump got away with so much. He once said: “I value loyalty above everything else, more than brains, more than drive and more than energy”.

Trump’s exultation of personal loyalty over expertise is exactlywhat we see in the safeguarding leadership of the Church of England now.  Those leading the church claim that we are making progress on all fronts. In truth, we are locked in an endless, cruel slow circularity, bound to obeisance by an Omertà-likecode of enforced loyalty.  Don’t rock the boat; stay on message.  Or else.

What do you get if you combine Kafka, Orwell, a Stephen King horror film and an Ealing comedy?  Probably something like the NST. As George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four) wrote, “if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”.  That was Orwell.  But it could just as easily have been Tutu, Gandhi, Mandela or Martin Luther King. Or Jesus.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote “not to speak is to speak; not to act is to act”. Yet Church of England safeguarding potters on with its selective silence, indifference and amnesia.  When things get difficult, it just runs to the small first-aid box in the corner and reaches for the gauze-plaster of PR and a press statement.  Eventually, the whole body will be covered in sticking plaster, from top to toe.  We will no longer be able to see the body. But sticking plaster will not be enough.  It never was or will be.  When, I wonder, will this Church of England learn the German lesson?

The discussion in the previous post about teenage Christianity has caused me to reflect on the experiences I went through at school and later.  My boarding school took Christianity and chapel life seriously but there were no institutions like a Christian Union with links to summer camps.   There was a small group called the Vivian Redlich society, named after an old boy who had died in Papua at the hands of the Japanese while serving as a missionary in WW2.  This group did Bible studies and listened to talks.   It did not meet frequently enough to encourage any form of over-excited enthusiasm in the participants.  The school, nevertheless, allowed a steady respect for Christianity which was sufficient for me to leave to read theology at university without any expressions of surprise from masters or other boys.  You could describe my school in the early 60s as an institution which provided a stable setting for emerging priestly vocations in several of its boys.  It was not trying too hard to create that vocation through any form of hard sell Christianity.

My lack of any kind of hot-house Christian experiences as a teenager, was, in fact, something that served me well in later years.   I arrived at university with a freedom and a keenness to explore what the faith was all about.  I had at that point no strong preference for any expression of the faith which could claim my undivided loyalty.  In spite of pressure from Christian Union types in my college to attend their meetings, I had enough understanding of the wider setting of Christianity to realise that Christian Unions were, in one way, just one expression of the faith among many.  I wanted to experience many of these other manifestations of the faith.  In this I was like a hungry person entering a room with a huge variety of foods available to sample.  There were meetings of Quakers to visit, Orthodox liturgies to attend and glorious music to be heard across the city in various college chapels including my own.  Those sucked immediately into the Christian Union vortex were being invited into one small room with only a single dish on offer. Though I attended such meetings a few times, I realised that to be in thrall to the notion that the meetings of the Christian Union presented the sole expression of Christian truth was not where I wanted to be. It would have been severely limiting to my early awareness of the huge cultural and theological diversity existing within Christianity.  What my other discoveries of the faith were telling me was that the journey to find faith and truth was going to be complex and never totally complete.  The beginning of adult life was certainly not the time to close any options down.  There would always be this personal adventure of discovery, with perspectives to be explored, which would reveal the enormous variety implied in the word truth.  Intellectually and aesthetically, the task of learning to be a Christian, as well as teaching others to share in it, is a life-long undertaking with many twists along the way.

Surviving Church began as a blog for individuals who, at an early age, had been ‘converted’ into a conservative form of Christianity. Subsequently they may have found it limiting for their ability to flourish as full human beings.  I wrote short pieces which had a single underlying message.  It was to say that the version of Christianity you follow (and this applies to me) can always be broadened and extended beyond what you have so far learnt and experienced.  If any Christian leader tries to tie you to a single version of truth, theology or music style, you can be fairly certain that the narrowness they proclaim is their narrowness, not that of Christianity itself.  I personally find it deeply disturbing to hear words like ‘the Bible teaches’, ‘infallible’ or the authority of the Word of God.  Every time such words or expressions are used, we are witnessing a power manoeuvre.  An attempt is being made to suck the hearer into the vortex I mentioned earlier.  It is a place where there is no discussion or disagreement tolerated.  It is a place that I dread the most – the position of being under the control of someone who is living in a place representing a sole version of truth.  If he has deficits in his understanding (and that is is true of all of us), these same limits will be shared by all those under his control.   Of course, authoritative statements will sometimes be uttered with the preacher’s learning and insight to back them up.  Nevertheless, it will always be dangerous to root one’s entire Christian understanding on the fallible and incomplete grasp of truth held by a single individual.  For me, Christianity is found, not in boldly proclaimed statements of doctrine; it is found along the journey of faith which is subtly different for each pilgrim.   It does not allow any of us to say we have arrived this side of the grave.  The best that a preacher can do is to explore and interpret the written truth of Scripture and share how these words have guided and inspired him/her along the path. 

At the very beginning of Mark’s gospel, the text speaks of the good news, the euaggelion.  What is the good news?  It is not a new idea, a system of beliefs or a political system.  It is the announcement of the Kingdom of God drawing close.   Even Jesus was pointing his hearers beyond himself to the activity of God in the world.  While he himself was the means of God drawing close, the invitation at that moment was not to believe something but to become part of something, a new reality breaking through.  Over the centuries the Church has forgotten to see that the task of teaching and preaching is never about the preacher him/herself.  It is about what is being revealed through the words used.  The picture that comes to mind is the showman who stands up and pulls back a curtain to show some visual wonder.  The thing seen is to be the centre of attention, not the puller of the curtain.  The existence and creation of so-called celebrity preachers to me is a kind of blasphemous take on the task of preaching.  It focusses on the person doing the preaching and not on the message being shared.  The Idea of celebrity in a pulpit is also likely to cause the kind of dependency culture that is so unhealthy for the growth to maturity that each Christian should be engaged in.  Although I no longer practise the ministry or preach, the question I used to have for each of my flock was not: are you sound? But are you growing in understanding and depth? Are you becoming more and more the people you are capable of being?  In looking at the dynamics of a sermon, the focus should be on the relationship between the message and the would-be recipient, not between the preacher and his/her audience.

At the risk of repeating myself I want to reiterate my point about the dangers of focussing on a preacher, when the emphasis should normally be on the task of the healthy growing of Christians.  Even dead preachers, like Billy Graham, John Wimber or David Watson can sometimes trap individuals in an endless cycle of dependency so that they, because of their attachment, can never grow beyond a certain point.  If the people who introduce us to the ‘glorious liberty of the sons of God’ do their job properly, they leave the scene quickly after pulling back the curtain.  What is then remembered is not the preacher but what was shared on a crucial life-changing occasion.  I am also fortunate that in spite of the limitations of my school Christian education, I was never trapped by a system of belief and thinking which wanted me to accept or reject a system of thinking and belief in one great indigestible lump.   Rather, I was allowed to take on examining the claims of the Christian faith over a lifetime.  The faith has many facets, and it needs copious amounts of time to examine them.    It cannot be done in one brief emotional moment by a vulnerable, possibly manipulated, teenager trying to identify his or her adult Christian identity.

Today’s blog is somewhat personal, but I sense that at least some of my readers are also ready to revisit their experiences, good and bad in their Christian pasts.  I regard myself as fortunate to have had many experiences of exploring the Christian faith through travel and one-time links to universities in Switzerland and Greece.   My good fortune was not just the things I learnt and places I visited but the in the fact that, even at an early age, my education had not closed me down to being able to learn and experience new things within the sheer variety of Christian culture and witness.  The influence of places like Iwerne camps and the many centres of ‘sound’ conservative Christian teaching may represent where many Christians wish to be, but I sense that some may come to regret that they believed it possible to limit their experience of God to one cultural manifestation.  God seems to be found in so many places and we should rejoice in that.

by Edmund Weiner

Most of the recent interest in the Iwerne camps has focussed on the period from the late 70s onwards when John Smyth and the Fletcher brothers were prominent in the camps and their organisation. It is easy to forget that there was an earlier, perhaps more innocent, period in the history of the camps.  Here is a personal account by Edmund Weiner who remembers the founder, E J H Nash (Bash) and the impact he still had over the boy campers in that period. From this time, the early 70s, we have some intriguing memories of both Fletcher brothers, particularly Jonathan. Jonathan was then emerging into a leadership role.  This piece helps to give us some feel for the personalities of both brothers when they were themselves young(ish) men.

In the summer term of 1969 I was in my first year at Christ Church, Oxford. I had just been ‘converted’ to evangelical Christianity through the college Christian Union group, which was very vigorous and contained several associates of VPS (Varsity Public Schools), then the proper name for what was informally called ‘Iwerne Minster’ or ‘Iwerne’ (though the actual venue was the nearby Clayesmore School). I presume that my public school background had been noted, since I received a visit from David Fletcher, the ‘Commandant’ of the Iwerne Minster camp.

DF invited me to come for a week to Iwerne Minster in the vacation, as a ‘Senior Camper’, which I duly did, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Senior Campers worked extremely hard doing various daily chores. One of mine was making up dozens of bottles of orange and lemon squash for outings. Another, a group activity, was making hundreds of sandwiches for packed lunches. We laid tables and did a certain amount of cleaning. We rushed from our chores to prayer meetings and bible studies with the officers that were held in addition to the talks laid on for the junior campers. We also paid a fee for the privilege of being there!

At that time, ‘Bash’, the Revd E. J. H. Nash, was still active. He wasn’t seen much during the early part of the programme, which consisted of a series of talks from officers, gradually building up to the evening when campers were challenged to make a commitment to Christ. The key talk on that evening was given by Bash. I think I only met him once and wasn’t especially impressed, whereas there were other officers, such as DF, whom I liked very much. I also remember being in a meeting where John Smyth was present, possibly only for a short visit, but I don’t know if I actually met him.

I loved the camaraderie and eagerly absorbed the teaching. I attended (I think) two more camps during my undergraduate years. I was also invited to a largeish gathering of officers and senior campers in Eastbourne, where there were again bible studies and prayer meetings. I can remember little about it, apart from walking along the Seven Sisters.

I was told that I was one of the few participants they had ever had from Westminster School, which I think they regarded as a future mission field, as it had no Christian Union. Possibly it was hoped that I would be able to assist with outreach there. The background to this, if I am not mistaken, is that a boy’s participation in a camp was by invitation, and that depended on there being a VPS staff member teaching at their school and running a Christian group which they attended.

After attending these camps, I was invited to join a few handpicked VPS men for several days at a kind of retreat (I’m sure that wasn’t what they called it!) in Cumbria. I think this must have been the summer of 1970. Jonathan Fletcher kindly drove me and C (later to become a bishop) from near our homes on the outskirts of London to this event. I had met JF before; in fact I think he may have visited me in college in his brother’s company. But I got the impression that he was very much the junior player while DF was the big noise: I think he was not long out of theological college.

The ‘retreat’ took place in a guest house in the country, I think in Broughton, near Barrow in Furness. We met each day in a chintzy parlour containing a harmonium, which accompanied our singing of the good old CSSM choruses familiar from Iwerne. The leader of the gathering was David Fletcher. I suppose JF assisted. I think the purpose was to train us to become officers — leaders at Iwerne or the associated camps. We were about half a dozen, all undergraduates. Apart from C and myself, there were at least three Oxford men, who later became evangelical clergy, and a single Cambridge man whose name I’ve forgotten. Three of those present were from my college.

I can remember very little of the programme, except that towards the end we each had to write and present a short evangelistic talk of the typical VPS kind. I walked round the garden in a somewhat desperate state trying to manufacture something suitable to put in my little filofax-style book, which was standard equipment. I think I knew in my heart that I was not VPS officer material, and didn’t particularly want to be. I am still a lay Christian (now very much not evangelical), and thankful for it.

What I remember much better were the leisure activities, several of which had slightly disturbing aspects. On one afternoon we had a hill climbing expedition. We parked in a field and proceeded up into the fells. The walk was fine until we reached Striding Edge. No one had prepared those of us who were not familiar with the Lake District for this. It is a path where fatalities are not infrequent. Of course, there was no compulsion to tackle Striding Edge, but some on the walk did so. The rest of us descended via an extremely precipitous scree. My apprehensions about this were assuaged by the calm support of C, who was an experienced hill walker. As far as I can remember there was no mention of special equipment or safety precautions at all. When we met up at the cars, we were faced by an irate farmer: the vehicles were illicitly parked in his field. An unedifying confrontation was in progress. It disturbed me that Christians who were apparently familiar with the area should show such disregard for private property.

On another day we drove into Barrow and had a look around. I was in JF’s car. On the way JF indulged in a little prank. This consisted of pulling up near a person walking along the road, winding down the window as if to ask for directions, calling out ‘Straight on?’ in a questioning tone, and then driving off. On our way home through the suburbs, JF instigated another prank. P, the smallest member of the party, was dropped off to join the tail of a long bus queue. We then drove round the block and back to the bus queue, where we screeched to a sudden halt. Two big members of the party leapt out of the car, seized P, and bundled him, pretending to protest, into the car, which then roared away, leaving the bus queue wondering if they had witnessed a kidnapping. Neither prank seemed at all funny, and even if they had been, they have always struck me as inconsistent with Christian behaviour.

In 1971, at the end of my last term as an undergraduate, I was again offered the chance to attend a VPS camp during the summer vacation. I cannot now remember if this went with a change of status up to officer, but I have a vague memory that the camp might have been the Lymington one rather than Iwerne. As it happened, my parents had planned for us to spend the whole summer with my sister in Cyprus, and as this clashed with the VPS camp, I declined the offer. And that was the end of any invitations to be involved with VPS.

An important point to make is that I never witnessed improper behaviour or improper suggestions of any sort. But I do think that the conduct of the ‘retreat’ points to a certain recklessness and a cavalier attitude to the concerns and rights of other people, which can be encountered quite widely among conservative evangelicals with a public school background.

While I hold no brief for Smyth, the VPS, or the evangelical wing of the C of E, I would like to point out that the Guardian review of Andrew Graystone’s book strikes me as over-sensationalized. The VPS camps were not ‘military style’. It’s true that the Revd Nash introduced some absurd military labels for the staff, but they didn’t mean anything. There were absolutely no military style activities, only lots of sports, games, and expeditions, plus the services at which the evangelical version of the Christian faith was presented. Nor was there, to my knowledge, any undue pressure to be converted: I’m quite sure that a 16 year old presented with an ideology is mature enough to make a choice (or was in the 1960s — I first chose to become a Christian on my own at 15).

Talk about ‘recruits’ is also silly. Commitment to Christ was, obviously, a qualification for being on the staff (many of them were clergy or ordinands), but the public school boys who attended were just children attending a camp. I’m not aware that there was an emphasis on, or indeed any teaching about, ‘purity’ (if that refers to sexual behaviour). By far the most important thing about a VPS man was that he should be both ‘keen’ (i.e. dedicated to ‘witnessing’) and ‘sound’.

It’s also really silly to describe the VPS as a ‘cult’. A cult is a church-like movement which takes over both individuals and families, brainwashes them, and controls their lives. The boys did not become cult members — they went back to their rather privileged homes and schools and carried on just as before, except that some of them began to practise Christianity. As regards the staff, clearly they were and are part of an organized pressure group within the church that requires strict adherence to conservative evangelicalism, but membership is entirely voluntary.

This is not to say that the VPS wasn’t or isn’t sinister, in the same way that all the para-church groups operating behind the scenes in the C of E are sinister. The VPS network operated in a semi-secret way. It heavily influenced the University Christian Unions (at least at Oxbridge) without openly declaring itself. Back in the 1970s, my fiance and I dropped in on C at Wycliffe Hall for a cup of tea; C suddenly became sheepish and apologized for having to rush away to a hush-hush prayer meeting (a VPS one).

The other unpleasant aspect of VPS, correctly identified in the Guardian, was its concentration on privileged young people, aiming with great success at getting public schoolboys to become the future leaders of the C of E. In this it resembles the now moribund Moral Rearmament movement, which targeted ‘key men’ who might be expected to become political leaders. Frank Buchmann, MRA’s founder, of course, was greatly influenced by the Keswick movement, which also underlies the evangelicalism of the VPS.

I hope what I’ve written corrects some false emphases in the presentation of ‘Iwerne’. Its badness is a little more subtle than the picture painted by sensationalistic journalism.