In the past few days, a fundamentalist preacher in the States, Pastor Burnett Robinson, has resigned as the Senior Pastor of the Grand Concourse Seventh-day Adventist Church in New York. Robinson got into trouble for saying that it is OK for a Christian man to rape his wife.  Even though Robinson’s denomination is a somewhat heterodox fringe group, this interpretation of scripture is probably not far off that preached by other bible-believing congregations in the States. Once you have bought into the idea that the Bible is to be relied on to speak authoritatively on the topic of matrimonial relations, you might well come up with an abusive interpretation of the words: The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband (1 Cor 7.) The other much quoted passage about male-female relationships is the one that speaks of wives submitting to their husbands. However, it has to be quickly pointed out that these interpretations can only be maintained if these passages are quoted omitting their context. The Corinthians passage contains these further words: Equally the husband cannot claim his body as his own, it is his wife’s. The attempt to encourage what is essentially a criminal act, by quoting half of a verse, is quickly seen as invalid and outrageous. Any Christian can see that manipulation of the meaning of a scriptural passage in this way is completely out of order. It has absolutely nothing to do with any debate about the authority of scripture for Christians. An incomplete quotation of any passage, whether from the Bible or from literature generally, will frequently distort meaning.  Such distortion has to be resisted regardless of one’s background theology.  What Pastor Robinson has attempted to do is to spin a false reading of the text and this is effectively an attack on integrity and truth.  Can the perpetrator of such a lie ever be trusted again?

The word that has crept into the discussion of this biblical quotation is the word context. Clearly the meaning of the Corinthians passage changes significantly when It is completed by the second half of the verse.  We have other insights to gain from studying this verse segment by placing it not only in the context of the whole verse, but also in the setting of Paul’s overall ideas on women.  These seem to have varied over his writing career. What he had to say about women seems to change, possibly according to his mood. In one key passage he lyrically describes the differences between the sexes as having no importance. On other occasions his approach is legalistic, some would say oppressive. Because of this variety of approaches to women, we cannot say that Paul had a consistent attitude.  Thus, we cannot just take any single passage and build an entire edifice of belief and practice around it. We need to understand the total context of Paul’s thinking on the topic and make a judgement about which verse, or section most closely represents his assumed core thinking.  This task is in no way straightforward. There are plenty of other problematic passages in Paul, and elsewhere, where we hesitate to pronounce them as normative for contemporary Christian behaviour. I am thinking here particularly of assumptions about slavery and the rearing of children. These topics go beyond today’s blog discussion. What I want to emphasise at this moment is how important it is always to read every biblical passage, not as an isolated fragment of God’s teaching, but as one which emerges out of a context. The context is one which may be partly theological and partly cultural. Removing any saying or teaching from its original context is likely to lead to a distortion of meaning.  The removal of Pastor Robinson from office for doing just this was justifiable and necessary.

Understanding how a biblical injunction or segment of Christian truth fits within its original context is to begin to see the importance of in-depth bible study and scholarship. To understand any passage of scripture at depth, one has to get out of a pik ‘n’ mix approach. This is the way of approaching scripture as a mine full of quotable treasures surrounded by other passages of much less interest for the task of preaching. Another image that comes to me to describe a failure to engage scripture at sufficient depth, is to regard the study of scripture as being like negotiating a raging torrent.  Many preachers are fearful of getting wet, so they avail themselves of a series of large steppingstones provided to ensure a safe passage across.  These steppingstones are the safe memorised quotations which can be confidently inserted into any sermon.  These give the impression of a complete doctrinal orthodoxy in Christian teaching.  The actual situation, which most ‘liberal’ preachers have discovered, is that the ‘truth’ of Scripture is not to be found on the safe stones that appear above the torrent, but sometimes in the depths of the dangerous waters.  Biblical scholars, and those who read their works, are used to getting thoroughly soaked in the waters of this torrent.  Another problem about the fast-flowing torrent is that the bottom, a place where we would like to stand securely, is sometimes hard to find. This makes these scholars into pilgrim explorers of unknown regions. Studying Scripture at depth with the tools of critical analysis and a familiarity with ancient languages is a tough call.  Few preachers can give the time for this kind of study. But one thing can be asked of every single preacher who ascends a pulpit on a Sunday morning. Just because the detail of biblical scholarship is not part of your training, it is wrong to condemn it because it appears superficially to undermine faith as you understand it.  Many biblical scholars are men and women of faith. Perhaps two things make their journeys different from the simplistic approach to Scripture which the people in Pastor Robinson’s congregation have followed. In the first place, scholarly informed preachers take the context of the words of Scripture very seriously indeed. They see connections and meanings which cannot be glimpsed if we read Scripture only as a series of proof texts accommodating a preconceived doctrinal pattern. The second aspect of the scholarly approach is that the task of exploration is undertaken with no sense of fear. The scholars know that their findings, like those in science, may be changed or reformulated in a short space of time. That experience of provisionality does not put them off their task. They accept the fact that much of the church misunderstands their vocation to follow the fearless but untidy uncovering of truth wherever it leads.

Much modern Christian preaching seems to consist of teaching the Bible in easy to remember slogans. Just as the preacher has kept his/her feet dry by not exploring the depths of the torrent, so the listeners are not encouraged to ask questions or explore the deeper realms of their own individual spiritual journeys. Many Christians would prefer to understand their Christian journey as an adventure through dangerous rapids rather than walking along a path carefully manicured, with tidy lawns and predictable views.  I venture to suggest that the real task of pastoral care is the task of accompaniment through a life of spiritual discovery rather than the handing on of safe religious platitudes.  The formulaic package of truth is often what is on offer, not a deep understanding of spiritual experience. The former version of truth has no nuance about it. There is no flexibility in the words in which it is expressed.  Above all there is no sense in which this kind of faith emerges from a context which engages with tradition, language and truth.  The word truth is of course another of those slippery words which can divide people as much as unite them. It is hard to agree in words on what truth in fact is. Part of the problem is that truth needs words and somehow these words often prove inadequate to express its nature. Truth in other words, normally transcends our words and concepts.

I enter this difficult and politically contentious world of scriptural interpretation because I am aware of the way that some preaching is causing real harm to groups of people. The damage caused to sexual minorities and women who are trying to be faithful to their husbands in a ‘biblical’ way, is extensive. I comment on these topics in order to help some people to become more aware of what is going on.  What is, in fact, going on in many situations, when the Christian rhetoric is stripped away from the situation, is the assertion of male domination over women.  It is that that needs to be challenged. Power abuse in the name of the Bible is always blasphemous and to be resisted.  In the case of Pastor Robinson, it was so outrageous that it could be dealt with quickly. In most other contexts where the Bible is used to oppress women, that persecution may be subtle, hidden and unchallenged.  My response to those who misuse the Bible to hurt others, is to say, you have failed to understand. You are taking biblical words out of context. Shame on you for failing to understand and share the wider picture, the proclamation of the transforming love that Jesus came to bring.

I have been recently reading a book by an American author called Wade Mullen.  His book, Something’s Not Right is full of provocative insights about the dynamics of churches, especially those which incubate abusive practices.  Early on in the book, he introduces an important theme about the way that secrecy finds a place in many congregations and can be a source of toxic harm. Mullen identifies five types of secrecy.  For this post I find it easier, even at the risk of leaving something out, to present a shorter list of three.  My attempt to categorise the way secrecy operates in churches thus departs from Mullen’s more detailed classification.  The shorter incomplete list also makes a concession to a memory that finds a description with only three headings far easier to manage than one with five.  The important thing is that we recognise that secrecy, as experienced in churches, comes in more than one guise.  These headings need to be separated from one another for the sake of clarity and understanding. In this way we can appreciate what might be going on when secrecy in its different manifestations is operating in the life of a church congregation.

Overall, a secret is probably best defined as a piece of information that is kept hidden for one of a number of reasons.  Many of us grew up in families where there were family secrets which had never been discussed for decades, even lifetimes.  There was perhaps the cousin who had spent time in prison or the aunt who had a child out of wedlock. Today there are still families where illegitimacy is never discussed and adopted children are never told about their past.  Nevertheless, generally the tendency is now to hold on to fewer family secrets than in the past.  The notion of stigma of course still exists, but now there are probably fewer reasons to feel it today in the way our Victorian ancestors experienced it.  Today we regard many of the secrets of the past as revealing tragedy rather than wickedness.  Contemporary social attitudes have helped us all to let go of many of the old reasons for hanging on to family secrets.

As I thought through the nature of secrets that can exist in our church communities, I realised that many continue to do harm.  I want first to speak of deep secrets which Mullen calls dark.  The experience by an individual of past sexual abuse within a church context could be described in this way.  A fiendishly evil act is perpetrated against a child. The damage done to the young person is made far worse by a promise imposed on the child by the perpetrator.  What has happened must never be revealed. The child grows up with the deep secret which is like a place of darkness inside the soul.  It cannot be visited or brought to the light. There must be many people in our churches carrying such deep secrets about which the rest of the world knows nothing. Many such secret-burdened victims attend church.  Even if they succeed in burying their secrets, these hidden events can be said to live within the individual concerned, accomplishing their dark work of harm to the psyche. The external manifestations of a buried secret may be mental or physical.  Mental afflictions like PTSD, depression or a dissociative disorder can be the public manifestations of a buried secret. The same secret also lives on inside one other personality, that of the perpetrator.  It is hard to see how the action of abusing an innocent child can ever be forgotten or brushed out of existence in some way, merely because it is not spoken about. Even if the secrets of a perpetrator or victim are never spoken of, their capacity to affect the life of a congregation is significant. Spiritual and psychological woundedness in a person cannot always be prevented from spreading itself around to affect others in unpredictable ways. Some secret carriers may, of course, learn through skilled help to overcome the traumas of the past, but many do not.  

Deep secrets are not the only kind that afflict and sometimes poison our church communities.  Guided in part by Mullen’s analysis, I want to address two further ways that secrecy enters the church bloodstream in negative ways.   The first of these two types is what I want to call control by secrecy.  A powerful group in a church community holds on to its power by excluding all but a favoured few from having access to important information. This form of holding power, by restricting access to information, is summed up in the aphorism ‘knowledge is power’.  A vivid example of the way this type of secrecy operates is in the summary report of the Bishop’s commissioners to the parish of Wymondham.  The way that information about PCC decisions and details of the finances were restricted to a few favoured people was a factor in the general sense of dysfunction that was creating much unhappiness in the congregation.  Obviously, there are some things that have to be kept confidential in any organisation. But it is not uncommon for the people in charge to control information as a way of consolidating power and influence for themselves.  Any democratic organisation will want to share details of decision making, allowing the people they represent to know how things are being done on their behalf.   Without proper information all those outside the charmed group of leaders, the in-crowd, are left without any knowledge of what is being decided on their behalf. 

A third use of secrecy is also about control but in this form, it is about control of an individual. One person threatens to reveal the private information of another unless they cooperate to do the blackmailer’s bidding.  We normally associate blackmail with money, but there are many ways in which the power of threatening to reveal secrets is used to obtain other ends. With children it may be used just to feel the momentary thrill of being powerful over someone else.  In writing these words, I can remember an incident at my boarding school when I was 11 or 12. The school bully was threatening to tell a secret about me to everyone. My ‘shameful’ secret centred around my journey home from the school on several occasions by bicycle on a Sunday afternoon during the summer term. It was a thirteen-mile journey, but my brother and I managed it fairly easily.  For the journey back to school the bicycles would be loaded up on to the family car roof rack.  The bully had got the impression that we had claimed to have cycled the journey in both directions.  He then reported to me the information that my father had been seen lifting the bicycles off the rack. I think I succeeded in persuading him that there was never any claim on my part to cycle 26 miles in a single afternoon.  I thus managed to convince him that there was no secret plot to persuade the world that I was a stamina cyclist. 

The possession of secret information about another person can lead to an exploitative relationship over them for a long time. The one who possesses the secret can, if they wish, manipulate the other person by making implicit or explicit threats.   Unless you do what I ask, I will release your secret.  We saw the way that Bishop Peter Ball was able to manipulate and blackmail his victims once he had made them feel guilty over aspects of their sexuality.   The sheer force of Ball’s personality had already extracted from them their intimate personal secrets. We can imagine many similar scenarios in a church abuse situation where the knowledge of personal sexual secrets is then twisted to make someone vulnerable to further abuse.  Other church situations can be imagined where individuals reveal to a pastor their deep personal secrets, only to find themselves emotionally in bondage to the same spiritual leader.  The revelation of personal information to another always has the potential to be exploited by that person.  Churches contain their share of manipulators and blackmailers as anywhere else.

Secrecy is deeply embedded in the dynamics of power abuse, both on the personal and the institutional level.  The church should, of course, be a place where we can share our deepest truths and vulnerabilities without any fear of betrayal.  No one should ever have to find their entrusted secrets being revealed to others.  The cults have always used this dynamic of persuading an individual to hand over everything, their money and their intimate secrets to ensure that the individual concerned can never leave.  The threat of revealing shame laden events in one’s life is one way that such cultic groups can exert so much power over their followers.  All too often we can see the way that the process of uncovering a person’s private vulnerabilities is the prelude to a life of exploitation and an experience of brokenness.

Secrets are, in the last resort, precious and fragile things. The exposing of our own secrets to another and the receiving those of others can be a quasi-sacred process.  If sharing of secrets can be a precious, even a holy thing, the Church should try to become a place where we can do this really well. The successful sharing of secrets with another person is a place on the way to building complete trust in that person.  Trust of this kind is part of the range of components that together create love and community, both of which are among the values that Christians look for. When trust disappears and a betrayal of our vulnerabilities takes place, we find fragmentation and isolation.  May the Church find itself better able to be a place committed to the preservation of justice, truth and integrity. 

When the book of Jonah reports that God changed his mind over the destruction of Nineveh, the reason given for this decision was the repentance of the people. The idea of God changing his mind occurs in other parts of the Old Testament, notably in the story of Abraham pleading for the city of Sodom.  The total number of righteous people in the city, which would justify its survival, is gradually negotiated down by Abraham’s pleadings.  Both these accounts show that, for the writers of these books, the changing of decisions or opinion is something that happens. It is not something that has to be resisted at all costs.  If God can be seen to repent of the decisions that he has made, then the same can occur for ordinary humans. It is certainly not to be regarded as a matter of shame or disgrace.

Why and when do people change their mind over decisions they have made? I think there are three main reasons, all of which are honourable. In the first place, an individual may obtain new information about a situation.  This forces him or her to rethink what they have decided. Then there is the activity of another person, the persuader, as we see in the Abraham story. The art of persuasion or rhetoric is often able to shift a person’s decision, especially if it is done with skill.  Finally, some people change their mind over something because they take the time to reflect about it. Attitudes and opinions seldom stay the same over periods of time. We know of course people for whom the opposite is true.  It is a matter of pride that their opinions about other people and ideas remains firmly fixed and unchanged.   I refer to them as the ‘what I always say’ brigade.  This dogmatic frame of mind is not especially attractive as a human trait, but it is widely encountered in church circles.

In spite of the examples of God changing his mind in the pages of Scripture, most people find it difficult to change their minds once they have made a decision.  We may suggest a number of reasons for this. One is that it is thought to be a sign of weakness not to maintain an opinion or attitude once it has been clearly stated. Fixed opinions are considered to be a sign of human strength.  Strong unchanging convictions are widely celebrated in some Christian circles. It is also a source of pride for some to say ‘I am never wrong in my opinions’. Groups of people with strong unyielding opinions also gain much self-esteem in belonging to groups that cannot and will not falter in their convictions.  Many Christians gravitate to such groups.  These are often associated to what we would broadly describe as a conservative approach to the Bible. Many so-called Bible believers hold on to a single version of the truth thought to be revealed in Scripture. When beliefs are held in this way, it does not allow for much in the way of flexibility of thought or the ability to change one’s mind about anything.

Over the past week we have seen a welcome change of mind on the part of the Archbishop of Canterbury.  This change of mind is connected with comments he made about George Bell, the late Bishop of Chichester, who died in 1958.  Bell’s memory had been tainted by the suggestion that he had been responsible for a case of child abuse in the early 50s.  Welby’s apology and change of mind over his remarks has allowed a great man’s memory to be recovered for the future. My own interest and concern for Bell’s reputation goes back to the time when I knew him, or, rather learnt to recognise him as he strode across the precincts of Canterbury during the last months of his life. In some way this slight personal contact has made me solicitous for his memory. It is unnecessary for us to speculate on the real reasons for Welby’s change of mind. We just need to accept it and be grateful for it.

In the world of safeguarding there are other current examples of injustice which cry out to be resolved, if only the accusers would carefully examine all the evidence and follow through, without endless hold-ups, to act on what that evidence tells us.  One case that is never far from this blog is the situation at Christ Church Oxford and the involvement of the Church in the dispute.  The state of play there has reached a kind of impasse between the Dean, the Bishop of Oxford and the NST.  Various church investigations have taken place, and these have all concluded that there are no further steps to be taken in the investigation of Percy’s behaviour by the Church.  Martin Sewell in a question at General Synod on Tuesday afternoon summed up the situation very succinctly and well.  He asked: ‘Would the Church be ‘stating unequivocally and clearly that, from the point of view of the national church, there is currently no impediment to the Dean of Christ Church resuming his ministry as soon as his health allows it’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7rAldeH2Oc question comes at 4 hr 11 min Sewell was doing two things simultaneously with this question.  His first challenge was to the church authorities, asking them to state clearly if there were other accusations against the Dean, not so far aired, and which justify seeing him as a continuing safeguarding risk.  If there were, this might explain the endless delays in the church legal processes.  He was also pointing out that, as far he could see, the legal processes of the Church against the Dean were now exhausted, leaving no justifiable reason in church law for continuing to enforce impediments against the Dean.  it is important to understand that the rules applied at General Synod Question Time are very restrictive and strictly enforced. The point has to be made in two or three sentences. Had he more time, Sewell might have highlighted what some of us know.

If there were any serious concern in the Bishop of Oxford’s mind that the Dean presents a risk of sufficient weight to justify the extraordinary strictures imposed upon him by the College and Cathedral, he and the National Church institutions  have available to them the provisions of the 2016 Safeguarding Clergy Risk Assessment rules by which a proper independent professional would both define what “the risk” is supposed to be ( which nobody has yet put in the public domain ) and what proportionate steps – if any – are needed to manage it.

Currently the Bishop clings to a highly discredited set of risk assessments prepared by nobody with expertise, both hostile to the Dean and who attributed their work to persons who denied all knowledge of it. 

The fifteen seconds that followed Sewell’s question were instructive to watch.  Bishop Jonathan Gibbs, as the lead bishop for safeguarding, came up with the official response.  What he actually said about going by the book in the way the Church operated in these matters, was not addressing the point that Sewell had raised.  Before giving this non-answer, the Bishop appeared mute.  He looked around for help to answer the question, but nothing was offered. it was clear that neither he nor any of the lawyers or church officials had any proper responses to Sewell’s question. We are left to conclude that there is currently no legitimate reason for the Church authorities to collude and cooperate with the bullying and persecution of the Dean by members of the College Governing Body.  The truth of the situation is that the Church nationally has been sucked into a whirlpool of professional jealousies within the College and aided and abetted by factions within the Diocese of Oxford.  This is proving impossible to resolve in the absence of decisive leadership and a strong grasp of the principles of justice.  Bishop Jonathan is not senior enough within the system to make the necessary decisions to sort out this problem. Change in the situation can only come from authority higher than he represents. Tuesday afternoon showed that he had no answers and none to suggest.  There needs to be a readiness on the part of those senior to him to be prepared, as Archbishop Welby has done, to engage in a decisive change of mind.  Someone in the Church needs to ‘repent of the evil that he had purposed’ against the Dean of Christ Church so relationships and morale can be restored.

Archbishop Welby has set an example to the whole Church that it is possible to be wrong and be prepared to admit to it.  I hope and expect that many people have welcomed this gesture.  In the safeguarding world it is particularly welcomed, especially if it proves to be the beginning of a trend to openness and justice in the Church.  Church leaders, from archbishops downwards, know how much harm has been done by refusing to engage with the fact that people in authority get things wrong, sometimes tragically wrong.  The Archbishop has asked for a leaner, humbler church.  What better place to start that with a Church takes really seriously the place of apology, the place where there is no shame in saying publicly ‘Sorry I got it wrong; let me try my best to put it right.’  That is what is urgently required in the Christ Church tragedy to help restore integrity to the entire body.

One of the features of an interregnum in a parish is that those left in charge are often reluctant to make decisions pending the arrival of a new vicar.  ‘Wait until the new vicar arrives’ is the cry of many hard-pressed churchwardens over some intractable problem.   When I became an incumbent, back in 1979, of a group of parishes in Herefordshire, I was fortunate that the in-tray only consisted of one query about a memorial stone which had been left till my arrival by the churchwardens.  It turned out to be a matter of spending time with a widow explaining why a particular choice of words would look strange after a period of time.  I don’t recall the details, but at least it could be sorted within 24 hours of my induction. The in-trays for most arriving clergy are usually far fuller than that. Some decisions are the difficult problems that have been left unresolved from the time of their predecessors. The failure to make a decision is, in many cases, a fear of having to favour one of two or more parish factions. From the very beginning a new vicar is closely watched to see which group he/she is likely to support. Decision making becomes a political matter of trying to balance the interests of competing groups.  Whatever choice is made is going to be wrong for someone.

If the in-trays of parish clergy are often full on day one of an incumbency, the same is also true for bishops.  The newly arrived Bishop of Norwich, Graham Usher, inherited a particularly intractable problem when he took up office in 2019 – the problem of Wymondham Abbey. This parish has been plagued with unhappiness and conflict for some time and no doubt the filing cabinet of the previous Bishop of Norwich contained letters and the minutes of meetings on the topic. In his own words, when speaking about this correspondence generated by the problem, Bishop Graham stated that ‘these matters have monopolised a huge amount of my time since becoming Bishop of Norwich.’  What the Bishop is stating is that this one parish has given him a great deal of stress and aggravation. This, no doubt, has affected the time and attention available to him for the care of the rest of the Diocese.  In an attempt to deal with the issue rather than let it continue to fester, the Bishop set up a Bishop’s Visitation to the parish.  The seven-page document that has been recently released is a summary of the report made by three commissioners appointed to conduct the Visitation on the Bishop’s behalf.  The document also sets out the Bishop’s Directions as to the way that each of the identified problems in the parish should be dealt with. It is essentially a public rebuke of what the Bishop has determined to be the damaging behaviour on the part the Vicar and some of the parish officials This published document is dated All Saints Day 2021 and it has been picked up by several newspapers, including The Times.  https://www.dioceseofnorwich.org/app/uploads/2021/11/Wymondham-Directions-Final-All-Saints-Day-2021.pdf

A word about the Vicar of Wymondham, Catherine Relf-Pennington .  Her professional record does not appear in my online Crockford directory of the clergy, but she has been Vicar there since 2017.  The Crockford details the recent staffing of the parish, and this tells us that Catherine came to the parish as a curate in 2014. It is highly unusual for a curate to be ‘promoted’ to Vicar. Such a move can possibly suggest that the post was hard to fill, but that part of the story is not in the public domain.  Wymondham was not Catherine’s training parish as, according to an earlier printed Crockford, she had already served as an incumbent for five years.  Before that, her career was fragmentary.  She served two curacies of a year each and was briefly an assistant at the American Episcopal church in Paris.  Her training and ordination were all in Australia.

The headline of the public document about Wymondham is that the Vicar has been ‘directed’ by her bishop to apologise to her congregation for aspects of her ministry.   A public rebuke of this kind is unusual, and the question immediately arises: is she being treated fairly?  My normal inclination when hearing about clerical misdemeanours is to start with an assumption every priest has a combination of strengths and weaknesses.   Some may be excellent preachers but very poor at administration.  Others may be excellent pastors but find delegating an impossible task.  Every clergyperson I have ever known is good at some parts of the total package and less competent or even weak in other aspects.  My first inclination is to look for the strengths in ministry and then see if the weaknesses come anywhere near cancelling out these strengths.  The report, unfortunately, does nothing to help us see the Vicar in a positive light.   After reading the document about the ministry at Wymondham, one is not given enough information to make a informed judgement about whether there are positive aspects in her ministry.  Although it is said that there were some ‘who are appreciative of the Vicar’s ministry and the work she has done’  we are not told in which sphere this appreciated work is found.  We find ourselves making our assessments of the situation without having all the facts we would like.

The document containing Bishop Graham’s Directions does not pull it punches in listing the issues connected with relationships, property, finance and administration that are being raised against the Vicar and a significant cohort of PCC members.  The list reads like a parish horror movie.   Most of us know parishes where aspects of church life have broken down but, in the case of Wymondham, it seems that almost every aspect of the parish life has fallen apart.  Without going into too much detail, the Churchwardens and PCC are in a bitter dispute with the Diocese over the maintenance and siting of the Vicarage.  No parish share has been paid for several years, thus depriving the Diocese of a significant slice of its expected income.  This failure seems to be part of a PCC resentment over the Vicarage disputes. The finances of the Church are in a state of disorder generally, with money being spent outside proper supervision.  Auditing has become problematic, and it is evident that it has become difficult to know what is going on in this area.  Issues over the place of music in the church remain to be resolved as the Vicar appears not to have an appreciation for the musical heritage in Wymondham.  Pastoral care of the elderly and the young has also suffered.

The reader might wonder why the many problems raised had not be brought up in a complaint against the Vicar under CDM rules.  Apparently two CDM complaints from 2019 and 2020 are still ongoing.  Bishop Graham, no doubt under legal and pastoral advice, is making his main Direction as a way of clearing these out of the way in one dramatic gesture.  He states: ‘the incumbent is directed to meet with all the complainants in person .. and to apologise to them without reservation for the behaviour which gave rise to the allegations which they raised.’   This is the language of a bold leader, but it will require considerable gifts of humility on the part of the Vicar to comply.  It is this exercise of a bishop’s authority that has attracted attention in the press and no doubt throughout the Church.  It also indicates that Bishop Graham has taken onboard the fact that the legal processes involved in CDMs do not often achieve good outcomes.  In this blog we are constantly reminded of the fact that legal processes involved in safeguarding cases often leave behind lasting bitterness and enormous expense.  The simple letter or word of apology may be the soft word that turns away wrath.  This is what is needed in so many places in the Church at present.   We desperately need other such apologies ‘without reservation’. We need the powerful in the Church from Archbishops downwards to be able to make this kind of gesture ‘without reservation’ to the wronged and abused. Here we are not talking about the original abuse (that may require legal remedies) but for all the ways that the Church has compounded the abuse by defensive unloving tactics – playing the legal games which inevitably batter down the weak.

A number of final questions arise which I am sure are being addressed in the Diocese of Norwich at present.  How was the original appointment made when clearly the Vicar does not show evident aptitude for many of the routine tasks of parish life?  Did not the somewhat eccentric CV raise questions?  Is it ever a good thing to appoint a curate to become the incumbent of the parish, unless there are extraordinary circumstances?

The Wymondham case may prove to be a decisive moment in the history of the way that power is administered in parishes and dioceses.  Bishop Graham has staked the moral power and authority given to him as a bishop to ‘direct’ an erring person to retract what is clearly poor behaviour.  We hope it will work and, as a sweetener, the Bishop is offering to expunge all the legal CDM processes in the pipeline at a stroke.  If his directions are not followed, then the price to be paid by the parish will be extremely high.  The disputes will remain, and the diocesan and episcopal support structures will be unavailable to help the parish move into the future.   The proud traditions of a church community based at one of the finest church buildings in the East of England will be dimmed, if not extinguished altogether.    If the apology is indeed offered and accepted that will, importantly, also set a magnificent precedent for the wider church.  We will all be richer if such an act of public restoration is achieved.   The Church will be seen to be fulfilling its vocation to be a place where broken relationships are restored, and justice is achieved without a single lawyer or reputation manger anywhere in sight.  Then it might be properly said:   See how these Christians love one another. 

Going Public: A Survivor’s Journey from Grief to Action Between the Lines, by Julie Macfarlane 2020

Reading the sorry history of the Church of England and its response to sexual abuse survivors over the past 10 years, one detects some profound failures of understanding and communication. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the account given us by Professor Julie Macfarlane in her chronicle of her fight against the legal forces deployed against her by the Church.  The book details these struggles, when she sought to obtain justice for herself as a victim of sexual violence perpetrated by a member of the Church of England clergy.

Macfarlane’s early story needs to be told in an abbreviated form.  As a child growing up in Chichester, she was sexually abused by a priest for several years from the ag of 16.  Her life was naturally seriously affected by the abuse.  Nevertheless, in spite of later suffering from repeated bouts of cancer and the typical PSTD symptoms experienced by many victims, she managed to build a successful career in the law, eventually becoming a Law Professor in Canada.  It is Macfarlane’s legal background which gives her account of her struggles a particular power and distinct perspective.  When she found out that her abuser was still operating as an Anglican priest in Western Australia, she used her professional contacts and know-how to ensure that he was prevented from ministering as an Anglican.  She later discovered that he simply joined another denomination.  This inability of the church and the law to put a block on an individual who was a known abuser stimulated her into further action.  Her motive was simply that this priest, Meirion Griffiths, should cease to be a danger to other vulnerable people.  The book that Macfarlane wrote, Going Public is her account of costly struggle to achieve this.  The story concludes with Griffiths sent to prison in England for eight years at the start of 2020.

The shocking part of the book, which must have had considerable impact among the higher echelons of the Church of England, is the account of what can only be described as her ‘hand to hand’ combat with the expensive lawyers employed by the Church.  There is in her story confirmation of the tactics that Gilo has reported of the Church and its insurers, using aggressive and bullying questioning by lawyers to try to avoid paying more than nominal amounts in compensation. The methods to attempt to discredit her testimony on the part of church lawyers were similar to those used in rape trials.  In summary, the defence lawyer or here the insurer’s lawyer, attempted to trash her reputation as an abuse victim as much as possible.  This is apparently considered normal practice in these kinds of hearings.  We also heard about the use by the Church of a ‘tame’ psychiatrist with no professional experience of dealing with child sexual abuse.  He was prepared to write reports, sometimes without even meeting the victims, that would suggest that there were other episodes in a victim’s life which were responsible for the present mental anguish caused by the abuse.

Professor Julie Macfarlane’s legal and moral victory over the legal forces ranged against her, was not just a victory for herself.  It was a victory potentially to be shared by all survivors who are seeking to hold the Church to account for what they have suffered.  As part of her financial settlement, she has, with the help of her students in Canada put forward suggestions for a new protocol for these kinds of cases.  This protocol was published in 2016 as a statement by EIO of their new guiding principles.  I am unclear whether this initiative has been followed through with an external appraisal.   Macfarlane has also succeeded in correcting the assumption, apparently held by senior officials in the Church, that it has no say in the methods used by its lawyers in compensation cases after abuse.  This has been shown to be untrue. We certainly never again want to see the nadir of church non-responsiveness to abuse victims which was reached when two archbishops publicly failed to engage with Matt Ineson.  Both men had been invited to say a word to Matt who was sitting near them at the IICSA hearings. Both declined.  This was, no doubt, on the ‘advice of lawyers’.  The Church has been in thrall to an understanding of the rules around compensation which suggested that it is necessary to withold all communication with victims when there is some kind of legal case pending.  In fact, the Compensation Act of 2006 says the complete opposite.   Words of apology do not and cannot affect the outcome of compensation cases.

I am going to make an assumption that the Church of England is in the process of adopting a number of new legal and pastoral protocols following the Macfarlane case.  I have no knowledge of whether that is in fact the case.  All I can say is that, from what I am hearing, the appetite for aggressively defending the Church against abuse claims seems to have changed in tone over recent months.  What still remains to be done? if there is a will to reform the protocols and make it easier for victim/survivors to receive a hearing and a just response, how can the church authorities show that they mean business?  The short answer is that there is a need for the Church, as any large institution, to communicate in writing with victims/survivors to offer a meaningful apology   To get a hint of what it might look like, we need to look at the actions of the Australian government towards the tens of thousands of unmarried women who were forced to give up children for adoption.  The Australian government has written to each of these women expressing its sorrow, regret and apology.  The impression I get from reading about this decision, which dates back to 2013, is that it has been much appreciated by the women concerned.  A government apology, according to one woman, lifts the stain of quasi-criminality that has hung over her throughout her life.  The letter represents a kind of judicial pardon, even if no crime had ever been committed.  These mothers had been marked with a kind of taint which made them feel less than complete members of society. 

In Britain there is now a movement to obtain something similar from our government.  Once again it would mean an enormous amount to women who have suffered the trauma of losing their children and the taint of illegitimacy to receive such a letter.  I am unclear whether financial compensation is due to be paid, but the general impression is that such payments are not to the fore when the women come forward seeking to receive recognition for what they have had to suffer over decades.  They want a written apology as it will substantially contribute to a measure of emotional healing as they approach the end of life.

Readers of this blog will have probably already anticipated where the discussion is taking us.  At a time when the appalling extent of institutionally enabled sexual abuse and bullying has been acknowledged by the Church, perhaps the institution needs to get ahead of the game and think creatively about how they are going to respond to so many who have been doubly harmed – by the abuse and the crass church treatment that came afterwards.  The Australian example indicates to us the power of the apology.  Apologies are not only appropriate gestures by actual perpetrators of crimes but they can also be made by those who preside as leaders of the institutions that allowed the criminals to exist.  The Canadian government deemed it appropriate to apologise to the members of the First Nations groups who were forcibly placed in boarding schools, destroying their languages and culture.  There are presumably experts who have studied this issue of the effectiveness of such apologies.  Certainly, the Church should have a contribution to make in this area with its access to an understanding of forgiveness and the restoration of relationships.  To judge from my interactions with survivors, I would express the belief that apologies, if they are made with the right words and the right motivation, could do an enormous amount to change the atmosphere in the Church as it faces up to its appalling record in the safeguarding disasters of the past ten years.

What would an apology look like?  I am not in  a position to offer a blueprint but I would suggest that it needs to attempt at least the following aims. It goes without saying that such letters should be prompt and not give the impression of unwillingness and endless delays.

• Any written apology must communicate integrity.  This means that all cliché must be rigorously avoided and the words chosen extremely carefully.
• The survivor should have control over whether their apology will be shared and made public by them (ie no NDAs).
• Reference to biblical material may be inserted, but quotations from the Bible cannot be the ‘shut down discussion’ type.   They need to illustrate and fill out central Christian concerns for truth and justice as well as forgiveness.
• A letter of apology will need to involve the insights of survivors to assist the writer in avoiding insincere sounding phrases.  The survivors are the experts in language that avoids cant.
• The way that the writer is involved needs to be spelt out.  A bishop of a diocese is in an indirect way identified with the good and bad of his predecessors.  This relationship may be tangential, but it is still there.  A bishop of Gloucester is, for good and for ill, the inheritor of Peter Ball’s abuse.  The diocese carries that terrible story in its history and in its blood stream.  Anything said by a current bishop must reflect that sense of retrospective shame in some way.  When it comes to Archbishops or leaders of religious networks such as ReNew, the critical task is to find the correct level of identification with the horrors of the past.  Where guilt exists, it needs to be owned up to.  This will include the guilt of cover-up, secrecy or the dismissive demeaning treatment of survivors.  The best thing for everyone is to have a thorough understanding and sense of the history of abuse.  This will come from listening to survivors and reading the reports which are now numerous.  Knowing the past is to ensure that that past is properly respected so that the abuse cannot easily happen again.  Denying the past or trivialising it is a certain to communicate a lack of sincere sorrow for everything which has happened.  Survivors will sense very quickly if a leader tries to distant him/herself from the past we all share..

The story of Julie Macfarlane is in part an account of deeply destructive attitudes put out by church leaders and their lawyers which did so much harm to a generation of survivors.    Her story was only published barely a year ago and there is still a great deal to be done to respond to her story by the whole Church.  In the words of Psalm 51 ‘shame (still) covers our face’.

The path towards institutional healing for the Church of England in its appalling failures over safeguarding will not be completed over night.  When the task of absorbing the lessons of Makin, the Christ Church debacle, in which senior members of the Church have played a less than honourable role, and other similar stories is done, the final stage of reaching out to survivors can begin.  It could, of course, begin sooner, but I sense that there are perhaps still too many ambivalent feelings among the potential authors of such letters to make the task straightforward.  The church institution and its leaders need time, but in the meantime there are many would-be volunteers able to help those leaders plan for this final and crucial gesture of reconciliation to its suffering abused members.

For various reasons which I cannot explain here, I no longer preach in church.  Like the other members of the congregation in my local parish, I sit in the pew and seek edification from the sermons that are presented.  I make here no generalised comment about the sermons I hear, but I do confess to having one frequent distracting thought.  This is perhaps to be expected in a retired preacher.    The question I often have in my mind is this:  If I had the responsibility for preaching today, which aspects of the readings would I wish to explore in a sermon?

These musings normally have a congregation of just one, so I thought it would be interesting to see whether my thoughts of today (November 7^th) could be turned into a blog post.  In other words, I offer today notes on a sermon that was in my mind, but which was not in fact preached.

 In our church we used the three readings for the third Sunday before Advent.  The first was the account of Jonah preaching to the enormous city of Nineveh, where, much to his chagrin, the people repented, making God’s destruction of the city unnecessary.  The second was a passage from Hebrews 9 and the third was the account of Mark describing the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.  Here Jesus announces the nearness of the kingdom of God and the need for repentance. 

I have always found the Epistle to the Hebrews a work full of fascinating insights.  I once had to read and study it thoroughly as it was a set text at university.  At the very beginning of these studies, I was greatly relieved to be released by all the commentaries from having to suppose that the epistle was written by Paul.    My NEB version simply refers to it as ‘a letter to Hebrews’.  The consensus is that the author is an anonymous writer, possibly from Alexandria, working in a distinctive Hellenised Jewish culture.  Nothing in the actual text requires us to ascribe it to Paul himself.

Although a very early date is sometimes suggested for the epistle to Hebrews, theologically speaking the gospels always take precedence over the epistles.  In Mark’s reading we have those intriguing words of Jesus: ‘the kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe the good news’.  Members of a congregation will have heard these words many times before, but the preacher needs to suggest that it is very easy for us to misinterpret or read our own meanings into these words.  It is important to ponder what the kingship or rule of God might involve.  The effort to interpret these words will necessitate some exercise of the imagination.  As a place to start, I would suggest that the kingdom of God is quite simply that place where God’s rule or will is in operation.   The important thing is that we think of the kingdom as an active reality, a power, a dynamic moving towards us in the words and actions of Jesus, seeking to claim our allegiance and attention.  The act of receiving this movement of God towards us requires that we turn to face him.  The 180 degree turn is what is implied in this much misunderstood word translated ‘repent’.  The word is a translation of the Greek word ‘metanoeite’.  This word implies much more than the English word repent suggests.  There is this further meaning of openness and receptivity.  In other words, Jesus is telling us to be open and alert to a new movement of God which his ministry is inaugurating.  It is not only a movement located to a particular moment in time.  God’s kingdom is to be a constant reality in our lives.  This reality has come near and every time we close our eyes in prayer or worship we may encounter it.  We should also increasingly learn to be sensitised to kingdom reality in our relationships, especially in those who need our help. The saying of Jesus which begins ‘Inasmuch as you did it to the least …..’ comes to mind, One visual illustration of this process would be to liken receiving the kingdom as being like  getting into a river and allowing the water to rush right over our heads, so that we are thoroughly drenched with it.

The second part of the address would be an attempt to link the Hebrews passage to Mark’s account of the Kingdom.  Probably, for time reasons, I could not do this in the course of a single sermon.  But there is one central point in the Hebrews epistle which I believe needs to be grasped by members of a congregation.   Most people trying to read this epistle are thoroughly defeated by the extensive typology of Jewish sacrifice with which the book is loaded.  But there is one simple reality which the book is trying to share with us, even though the language it uses is often highly complex and convoluted. ‘ Jesus entered heaven’, Hebrews tells us, ‘now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf’.  This one sentence sums the whole argument of the book in the space of a few words.  What is it saying?   It is saying that Jesus in his death and resurrection comes with us into God’s presence.  The words ‘with us’ are key.  Humanity, that of Jesus and of ourselves, is caught up in this movement towards God.  Somehow God accepts us because we are in him.  As the old communion hymn puts it, ‘look on us as found in him’.

To put this Hebrews message even more simply, I would remind my audience of an experience of going to see someone important when a child.   The child is in awe of the powerful person, the new headmaster or some other exalted being whom they have not yet met.  The situation is, however, rectified because someone elects to accompany the child as he/she enters the august presence.  Metaphorically we hold the hands of our protector so that we can meet the important person with our head held high.  Our weakness and nervousness caused by our extreme youth is counteracted by having the hand of our protector to hold.  Something like this is being described in Hebrews.  Jesus is the one who opens the door, holds our hand and stands alongside us as we come into the presence of God himself.  In a small way this happens every time we pray or receive the sacrament.  The promise of Hebrews is that this  support or solidarity with us is a permanent reality so that we, with all who identify with Christ, can ultimately hope to be united with God in a dimension of light and glory beyond time and space. 

The message of the sermon that was not preached last Sunday is that there are two distinct modes of encounter with God in Christ on the Christian journey.  One is as we encounter him moving towards us in the divine mystery we describe as the Kingdom.  The other is in and through the act of our identification with Christ in his ascent to heaven. Because we belong to him, identify with him, we can share his access to the Father.  Both movements towards Christ by a Christian pilgrim are outside time.  Because we think in literal terms, we might want to describe these encounters with God using the language of space – up and down.   Such spatial ideas must never be taken too literally but the language of symbol can often help us to grasp divine realities.

This blog post is probably aimed more at the audience with which I started eight years ago in 2013 than the more recent readers.  These early followers were the Christian survivors for whom faith had been made hard by authoritarian dogmatism or those who had been treated appallingly by their leaders in acts of abuse.  Those who find my reflections helpful on this blog may value these attempts explain my way through the numerous stumbling blocks that Christianity is so good at erecting to confuse and discourage us.  This would-be sermon is offered to any who need encouragement to see things a little more clearly along their Christian pilgrimage.

One of the advantages of growing older is that I have many more memories to recall than those that are available to a younger person. Recently I found myself thinking back to my days as a member of Keble College Oxford in the mid-60s.  Our Warden, Austin Farrer, was a highly eccentric individual, a priest steeped in a version of Anglo-Catholicism which, even then, seemed somewhat old-fashioned. I was in the college choir, and it was said that the organ scholar had been encouraged to choose mass settings with lengthy versions of the Agnus Dei to make space for the Warden’s devotions at that part of the service. I got a further insight into these devotions when, at weekday services, I sometimes acted as a server. The devotions lasted just as long in these said services, and they were distinctively accompanied by much tapping of the chest.  The words that were offered sotto-voce in prayer seemed to be prayers and sections of the psalms in Latin. This added to the strangeness and solemnity of the occasion. 

The act of coming before the altar to declare one’s unworthiness of God’s mercy and grace is evoked for me by this memory of the distinctive sound of chest tapping all those years ago. I do not use Latin nor chest tapping but I picked up from the Warden something about the importance of humble reverence before the consecrated sacrament.  This has never left me. A single word surrounds this distinctive Anglo-Catholic piety in the presence of the sacrament – unworthiness.  The prayers of approach all seem to repeat this sentiment, ‘I am not worthy to receive you’. 

This sense of unworthiness in Catholic piety is something that I am not qualified to speak about with any expertise, but I think it would be true to say that it is a key sentiment within Catholic devotional practice.  Alongside it comes the distinctive Catholic concern for purging of sin following confession, public or private. Whatever we individually think about sacramental confession these days, the aim of the practice seems to have the worthy goal of increasing self-knowledge in the individual penitent.  A major problem for Christians and for everybody else is a common tendency to have false ideas about one’s own personality and character.  The ancient Greeks took very seriously the importance of learning the truth about oneself.  Today we are far more likely to go in the opposite direction, creating an image of ourselves which we think is appealing to others, but which may not be engaging much with our core selves. The narcissist, about whom we are constantly speaking on this blog, is a prime example of this behaviour taken to an extreme. In its fully developed version, narcissism is all about show and no substance. The people around the narcissist are expected to collude with this false image put out by the afflicted one.  These colluding ‘friends’ are kept in place by a combination of the threat of the narcissist’s irrational anger and the use by him/her of flattery and other forms of manipulative behaviour. The whole thing ends up as a kind of dance around the narcissist.  One thing that has effectively been banished is any true self-knowledge, the kind that Catholic forms of confession were supposed to uncover and then respond to appropriately.

It is, of course, not just Catholic traditions that teach about the work of self-knowledge, repentance, and forgiveness.  Words used by Christians in every tradition, like contrition, mortification, remorse, and sorrow all play a part in describing the feelings of a convicted sinner.  There is, however, a danger of developing obsessive behaviour in this task of self-examination.  Here we merely note the existence of a pit of despair where some Christians find themselves in their efforts to be freed from sin.  Clearly some boundary has been crossed where healthy self-knowledge has changed into unhealthy morbid obsessive feelings. It would be the task of a spiritual director to guide the penitent out of this place of despair.  The opposite failing is that of an over-optimistic detachment from the core self, where there is always the potential for fallible sinful behaviour.  This remains the commoner scenario.  What is true of the individual is also true of the group.  We have often noticed occasions when whole swathes of Christians have somehow been unable to identify the enormity of sinful behaviour taking place in their midst.  Typically, an influential but flawed Christian leader has gained a controlling influence in this constituency or network of churches.  Their importance or charismatic status somehow means that everyone expects them to be beyond the possibility of wrongdoing.  Charisma and the dynamics of narcissism have then skewed the ability of large groups of people to see evil and to recognise that they and their leaders are capable of the most dreadful forms of damaging behaviour. 

The classic text in the New Testament about self-examination and self-knowledge is the passage about the tax-gatherer and the Pharisee.  This audience will know the story well.  It was the tax-gatherer who stood afar off and ‘beat upon his breast’ who left the Temple ‘justified’.   The behaviour of the tax-gatherer reminds one of Psalm 51 where there is confession of sin without any attempt to make excuses or mitigating explanations. ‘Against thee only have I sinned and done evil in thy sight….. thou requirest truth in the inward parts.’  The Bible does not give any encouragement to us that we can bury our failings, either by excuses or by observing a silence that would somehow magically make the whole thing go away.

In the aftermath of the exposure of the Smyth/Fletcher scandals and the publication of Graystone’s book, I looked for some response or reaction from those Christians who acted as the complicit bystanders and enablers of Smyth and Fletcher.  Surely, I thought, there will be at least one person who would publicly recognise the way they had been caught up in a cult-like movement which made them, even indirectly, complicit in the evil?  When sin on an industrial scale is exposed, one looks to some bystanders to be able to stand up and say:  ‘Help! I was blind, misled or bamboozled into thinking that all was well.  It wasn’t and what can I now do to help put things right?’  That voice of the concerned but guilty bystander has been completely missing, at least in public.  There have been no cries of: ‘If only I had known earlier then I would have worked to support and love the victims of these appalling evils.’ 

The silence of leaders in the Church Society/ReNew/Titus constituency, in responding to Graystone’s revelations, has been deafening. One can only suggest that it seems a sensitivity for recognising evil, individual and corporate, has been somehow blunted for many Christians.  Is it that the topic of sin in this conservative culture has become so bound up with the issue of sexual partnerships, that the network no longer has the energy to face other more serious failings, like those of ignoring the needs of a wounded neighbour?  Is concern for reputation, power and money so much more important than following the example of the tax-gatherer in the Lucan passage?   It was striking that one leader, who could, a long time ago, have done so much to stave off the pain of countless others, chose, with his supporters, to attack Graystone rather than showing an ounce of self-scrutiny or self-examination for his part in the whole narrative. 

Alongside the failures of the Titus etc network to show evidence of understanding that the Christian faith involves acknowledging fault and sin, we also have the tone-deaf response of the wider Church to the broad range of safeguarding failures.  Nowhere among the many apologies to survivors put out by bishops and archbishops do we hear the genuinely remorseful tone adopted by the author of Psalm 51.  Rather we hear the PR language of ‘lessons will be learned’, sincere personal apologies and regret.  If only the statements from the centre could sometimes convey a real human response of human vulnerability and even brokenness that is appropriate to the occasion. If only these episcopal expressions of sorrow could reflect what we learn of repentance from Luke’s tax-gatherer.

Returning to the memory with which this reflection began, I realise that the sound of the chest being tapped has communicated to me something further about the nature of sin, something which seems to bypass many in today’s church.  The gentle smiting of one’s own chest is a symbolic acceptance of each individual’s personal responsibility for sin. This tap on the chest is pointing us back to ourselves and nowhere else.   We cannot hide or unload that responsibility on to other people or an institution.  In any attempt to remove ourselves from responsibility, we allow evil to fester because no one else is going to own up to it or take responsibility for it.  This ‘pass the parcel’ approach to the evil of abuse has created a monster that has been destructive and deeply damaging to the Church.  What we and the whole Church need to see and identify with is the tax-gatherer standing afar off who ‘would not even raise his eyes to heaven but beat upon his breast, saying: “God have mercy on me, sinner that I am”.’

It is a prudent part of managing a large company anywhere in the world to employ specialists in public relations and communications.  Such people will have the background to speak to the press and write all the documents needed to maintain a good impression with the watching press and the general public.  At an annual general meeting, a CEO will no doubt call on his/her publicity experts to help the framing of the address so that the strengths of the company are well presented and then reported in the press the following day.

The work of public relations specialists is no doubt a key component of corporate business life everywhere.  We know that the good reputation of a company really matters.  In the case of a company with a quotation on the stock exchange, good publicity will boost the price, while stories of mistakes or bad behaviour will do the opposite.   Even those of us who do not hold shares are indirectly caught up in this market.  Whether or not companies flourish is of importance to the whole of society.   The pensions of millions depend on decent valuations of quoted companies.  Consequently, it matters to all of us that the companies are run efficiently and ethically. Only on Monday we heard about a report concerning the departure of the CEO of Barclays, Jes Staley.  He had been linked to the notorious Jeffrey Epstein and this resulted in a fall in the value of Barclays shares.

The Church of England, like other large organisations, employs specialists in public relations as well as communications experts.   They will maintain websites and make sure that the press has a place to go to to find out information and understanding of new initiatives taken by the national Church.   Each individual diocese will also maintain their own departments for this kind of work locally.  These of course will vary in size according to the relative size and wealth of the diocese.  In recent years, we would expect that these communication departments will have grown.  The exponential rise in information with the arrival of the internet has had the effect of creating a need for more communication specialists.  Experts are also needed to monitor the way that that information about the Church, good and bad, is being shared with the public. I entertain the fantasy that even something as ordinary as this blog is being monitored by someone working for the national Church. Someone needs to make sure that the opinions of ordinary people are somewhere recorded and filed away in a database.

Ii is instructive to watch the way that public companies react when some major crisis arises over their governance or performance.  At the start of a crisis, the publicity machine sends out a reassuring message that everything is under control and that the Board, or whoever is in charge, has contingency plans to get through the crisis. Then, at some point in the middle of any crisis, we see a different tone being injected into the communication bulletins that emerge from the company.  It is at this point that we may detect that the task of communication has been handed over to external specialists – the crisis/scandal management team.  These are the bought-in specialists who offer their services to companies in crisis. They do the difficult task of selling a failing or possibly dishonest company to a public whose trust in the company is under severe strain.

Until I started writing this blog, I had never heard of the expression crisis or scandal management.   I had no knowledge that it was possible to employ people to defend an organisation when it was up against the wall in terms of its reputation and integrity.  It does of course make some sense for such people to exist, as they make attempts to preserve a company from collapse and bankruptcy.   No doubt, in the task of defending the collapsing company, they may have been obliged to exaggerate or bend the truth to accommodate the needs of the moment.   But perhaps that is all par for the course.  Lies or, at any rate, half-truths are to be expected when so much is at stake.  If the institution does finally collapse, the bent truths that may have been told in its defence somehow get forgotten.  The world moves on and there is a corporate shrug of the shoulders with the realisation that some people will do anything and use deceit to preserve assets and wealth.

Having been ignorant of the existence of reputation/crisis management, I was quite surprised to discover that it is not just companies that use such specialists but also the church.  The challenge to the institution caused by numerous safeguarding failures has meant that parts of the church have been obliged to retain the service of not just their own public relations departments but also these external crisis specialists.  There is one particular firm favoured by the Church of England for reputation management, Luther Pendragon (LP).  This firm has been retained at considerable expense by the dioceses of London and Winchester, among others. I make no judgement as to the nature or quality of its services.  Rather I have to question why any English diocese should ever need to go to specialists beyond their own publicity departments.  The use of crisis/scandal management firms seems to be an ominous decision for any church or diocese to follow.

There is an interesting and revealing section of Graystone’s book, Bleeding for Jesus, when he describes the meeting he had with the Titus trustees.  They were having to face the revelation of extensive evidence of Smyth’s malfeasance, and they wanted Graystone to help them manage it.  Graystone recommended that they make a clean admission of the material they had and appoint someone to investigate Smyth and how the situation had arisen.  The trustees ignored his advice and opted for the path of secrecy with the hope that the scandal would remain hidden. Of course, it did not and the damage to the Iwerne brand and the supporting organisations has been enormous.   Truth is one thing that refuses to be buried for ever.

The use of public relations skills is probably always a legitimate path for an organisation to follow.  Introducing this further expertise of reputation/crisis management advice from outside does, however, raises alarm bells.  The innocent outsider will immediately ask the question: what have they got to hide?  When secrets become endemic in any organisation, the spiritual and psychological health begins to decline. We learn that LP’s expertise has been valued by English dioceses such as Winchester, London, Oxford as well as Christ Church College and the central C of E.  The question that we need to ask each of them is, what have you got to hide that you need such specialist help?  There is enough in the public domain to suggest that the workload for LP in responding to each of these clients has been extensive.  This has ensured a considerable flow of funds from the offerings of the church faithful to the highly paid consultancy directors.

The world of public companies is such that we can understand any desperate publicity attempts to stop them collapsing with all the damage that will result to wealth and well-being.  The Church, perhaps, should be a world apart from the corporate commercial world.  We would like to believe that the Church in every manifestation will be a place of integrity, honesty and openness to truth.  Why would the Church ever need the services of crisis management specialists?  If we learn that such specialists are being used to manage reputations and crises, that will send a corporate shudder through the whole church. The ordinary member will rightly question what else is going on when the Church believes it important to pay people to promote secrecy and suppress information.  They will again keep asking the question, what have they got to hide?  When trust starts to go, then so much else disappears.

Crises will happen to any organisation.  When they happen, then, as Graystone advised Titus, the best approach is to make a clean breast. People generally accept the existence of scandal in an organisation as long as they feel they are not being lied to at the same time.  In the recent eruption of safeguarding scandals, people have found that they have been lied to by authority figures in the Church who might have known better.  Few people now trust the Church to manage safeguarding, but the Church still clings to its power in this as though it can manage it inhouse.  The tales of incompetence increase, and the bonds of trust decrease between leaders and led.  How long before the system breaks apart through the dissolution of these invisible bonds between the faithful in the pew and their leaders?  I cannot answer that question, but I can continue to challenge the Church to become more a place of integrity, truth and transparency.  It does not need crisis management firms to make a success of that.  It just needs to pay greater attention to its own foundation documents.  It needs to hear one statement repeated.  It is the truth that will set you free.

Few people go through a career without at some point experiencing work-place bullying.  It probably happens to most people, even if only as a single episode. The effect is still wounding.  Two groups in society might hope to avoid this particular experience of pain.  One is the group of workers who work for themselves.  These include the self-employed tradespeople and others who have their own businesses. Also, there is another group who can withdraw from stressful interactions with others which may involve bullying.  These are the bosses, those who reach the top of a hierarchy.  They still have to negotiate stress, but the stress involved in making decisions and being in charge is apparently less damaging to well-being than being at the sometimes arbitrary beck and call of a work boss.

New insights about the way that everyday workplace stress affects the health and longevity of individual lives were uncovered by two UK government sponsored studies of the civil service starting in the 1960s.   These were conducted by Sir Michael Marmot, a distinguished epidemiologist. His task was to examine the health of civil servants and to find out if the place of an individual within the well-defined hierarchy of the civil service could be correlated with levels of health and mortality.  The findings excluded things like pre-existing conditions etc., but what was uncovered was still striking. In summary, quality of health and life expectancy went up as the individual rose in the ranks.  The bosses at the top enjoyed significantly better quality of health than those working at the bottom of the pyramid.  The issue was not economic, nor class related, as everyone in the service was adequately remunerated.  The only factor that could be identified was the greater levels of stress experienced by those who were paid to obey the orders of others above them.  Something about being under the control of others creates a stress response that is observed to take a toll on people.  This particular type of stress is not faced by those who have control over their working lives.

Marmot was not looking for examples of bullying and I have no reason to suggest that UK civil service is a hotbed of such behaviour.   Clearly it will exist there, as everywhere else, but we would hope it would be mitigated by effective complaints processes.  But whenever it does exist, we may see it as adding to the levels of stress experienced in the workplace.  The ‘normal’ type of stress is simply being in a place where everyday control and supervision of workers is in operation.  This is part of the culture of most workplaces.  There is then, sometimes, a second level, the intensification of stress which comes as the result of experiencing bullying at the place of work.   If, as Marmot would claim, the first ‘ordinary’ work experience is stressful with life-changing physical consequences, then we can postulate that a bullying culture may well tip many people into experiencing acute distress, sometimes manifesting itself as physical or mental illness.  Bullying in the workplace is thus a serious threat to the health and well-being of many working people. 

 Last week I described my own experiences of dealing with the stress of being a curate.  Others in the comment section have added their own stories. Fortunately, the behaviour I experienced as bullying was time limited. I did have the option to escape from the arbitrary whims of a very volatile boss.   I was then able to recover my psychological stamina so as to be able to continue as a member of the clergy. Not all achieve this, and, anecdotally, many clergy leave ministry altogether after a number of years.  Negative experiences of bullying from their fellow clergy (and sometimes parishioners) may be among the causes.  By always keeping a low profile in my parish, I never had to endure stressful encounters with bishops and archdeacons. There were also some good experiences of teamwork.  My ministry required me at various times to work in a part time team context. These particular teams were the support groups I gathered to assist me in the various diocesan roles I have, at different times, undertaken.  As far as the main parish role was concerned, I have only worked as a sole incumbent, though normally supported by retired colleagues and supportive church councils.

Returning to the theme of workplace bullying which we suspect is extremely common in UK society, we find that the textbooks are reluctant to offer a definition to cover every case of its incidence.  As a suggested starter I would see bullying at work to be taking place when the power that one individual has over another is deliberately weaponised to cause distress.  In the absence of widely agreed definitions, most discussions bring up the word aggression to cover what they mean when talking about bullying.  The discussions also indicate that bullying behaviour is often linked back to poor nurturing as a child.  That discussion has to be left to one side.  One distinction I discovered early on in the literature about bullying is that there is a distinction to be made between affective aggression and instrumental aggression.  The first is bullying behaviour which involves emotion arousing or some kind of gratification for the bully.  These emotions might also involve anger, jealousy or revenge.  Instrumental bullying is when power is exerted over another to extract some desired end from the victim.  Bullying of this kind might have as its end sexual favours being demanded, or possibly the handing over of money.

In the last blog post I mentioned that the presence of an individual with narcissistic tendencies would likely cause havoc to the smooth functioning of a clergy team.  Something similar would happen if a priest with bullying tendencies was either a member of or, worse still, put in charge of a parish, a cathedral or even a diocese.  One of the problems of raising this topic of bullying in the church is that all we have to guide us as to its frequency is anecdotal evidence.  It is likely that bishops know about many cases of bullying which come to their attention, just as they hear about abuse cases.  For obvious reasons this information is sensitive and unlikely to be shared beyond a diocesan boundary or even within bishops’ staff meetings.  We simply do not have this kind of statistical information.  The absence of reliable data should not mean that we should not bring up the topic.  The Church at large is still catching up, after it claimed in 2009 only to know about 13 cases of sexual abuse in its records.  This was a massive case of institutional blindness. The fallout from that self-deluding nonsense is still being worked through.  At the time it became the received narrative and no one was able to challenge these absurd figures for at least another six years.  The incidence of bullying at every level of the Church may be its next hidden shame.  Should we not start talking about it rather pretending it does not happen?  Do we wish to suffer from chronic institutional blindness a second time?

The problem of clergy (and sometimes lay people) who bully other clergy and parishioners is an issue which has never been far away. Speaking from the evidence of my own observations, I can say that I have watched while clergy I know, forced to work with bullies, have had breakdowns.  Some of these, like abuse survivors, have gone on to experience serious illnesses and even suffered premature death through being exposed to a highly bullying culture.  The link between high stress and illness can never be proven and thus it is impossible to produce statistics of this problem.  I do not need to dwell further on my own early experiences as a priest, but I noted that nearly half those who were ordained deacon with me had disappeared from Crockford twenty years later.  Those who speak of teams and consistent good working relationships between the clergy as being the norm, are not describing the Church as I have found it in some places. Of course excellence in this area exists, but so do tragic examples of bullying and power abuse.  

Looking back, particularly over the past thirty years, we have been regaled by a variety of accounts in the Church involving bullying and power abuse.  The stories in the public domain include the dysfunctions involving Lincoln Cathedral in the 90s.  Even the mediation skills of Desmond Tutu could not sort out that particular problem.  Some other cathedrals have been described to me in the past as hotbeds of tensions and stress because of poor relationships. The current tensions in Winchester and among Scottish Episcopalians in Aberdeen can only be imagined, since much of the the detail is only hinted at in the public domain material.   Both bishops have, no doubt, been able to justify their behaviour as a valid exercise of episcopal authority.  In each case, it would seem that problems have been known about for some time.  Nevertheless, the people in a position to do something were unable or unwilling to step in to stop the situation getting out of hand.  We see a Church that is unwilling to grasp nettles in time to stop problems causing lasting damage

Every time I hear of a case of bullying, I think of the victims.  Actual bullying in the workplace is far more serious than the stress of not having control over your working life. The latter was the major factor leading to stress identified by Marmot in his study.  When we add bullying into the mix, we are talking about a major contributor to poor physical health and shortened lives.  In other words what has been going on in churches and cathedrals, as in Oxford, Winchester and Aberdeen, has the potential to damage lives in a real physical sense.  Incidents and allegations of bullying need always to be taken extremely seriously.  The environment that is created is so foul that it brings shame on the church for the damage it is known to be doing.  Many of us are part of that church.  We each share some responsibility for that shame.  The way forward for us as individuals is to dedicate ourselves to working hard, in whatever way is open to us, to fight to remove this scourge of bullying from our churches.

From early childhood I have always had a strong emotional reaction to beautiful things.  Some of these are natural and some man-made.  Beauty is revealed in many places, from the cry of a newborn child and the glories of a sunset to the intricacies of a mediaeval illustrated manuscript.  This existence of beauty in the world has imprinted in me, from early years, two important theological ideas. One is that beauty is a manifestation of truth every bit as precious and lasting as the truth contained in a list of propositions or statements.   If something were to say that God is beauty and that beauty, in whatever form it manifests itself, partakes of God, I would have no problem with such an insight.  A second way that the identification of God with beauty is helpful, is that, just as God exists beyond time and outside space, so the same thing can be said of beauty.  Beauty, in the way I understand it, will always be something transcendent, outside time and space.

At school, the study of classics brought me into me touch with Plato’s notion of ideas. This is the theory that everything in the world was related to an ‘idea’ or ‘form’ of itself in another dimension. The extent to which anything  approached its ideal, was the extent to which it was most truly real. A horse approaches the ideal of horsiness as it resembles this ‘form’ of a perfect transcendent horse. Plato’s abstract ideas may make no sense from a western trained thinker’s point of view but they form an important background for the understanding of parts of the New Testament and the theology of the early Church.  Whether you find Plato’s thinking and speculations helpful or not, this idea of a real world transcending and giving reality to our present one, has been a powerful, even captivating idea over the centuries of western thought. 

Platonic ideas, particularly as they were absorbed and reconstructed by the Greek fathers, formed part of my theological formation.  Culturally they are at odds with the precise world of the 18^th century enlightenment model as understood by the Western traditions. This personal appropriation of Platonism saved me from two theological perspectives which are, I believe, unhelpful to many people.  The first is the idea that only words can contain and define the divine reality in what is known as propositional thinking.  Such thinking is found among the Reformers and their successors.  It is also believed that nothing can be said about God unless it is rooted in the words of Scripture. Patristic insights that God is unknowable or beyond the capacity of human thought find little place in reformed theology.  A second application of enlightenment thinking is associated with liberal Protestantism.  This also, in a different way, tries to present Christianity as far as possible within the framework of modern scientific and philosophical thought.  Stories of miracles have a habit of being explained away rather than pointing to the limitations of human language and experience.  This appeal to rationality as defined by 18^th century philosophers like Locke and Hume is a strong influence in much of modern liberal theological discourse.

When I say I prefer Plato to the Enlightenment, I am not suggesting that one is right and the other wrong.  I see no binary tension here. I want to affirm Plato and his followers alongside enlightenment rationality. Both have their place. Plato provides us with a way of approaching the mystery of God which has proved very popular over the centuries.  From his speculations we acquire a language with which to speak about what is perhaps unspeakable and beyond reason.  Western logic finds this hard to do.  The word ‘mystery’ itself introduces us to this distinct way of reasoning.  The word is formed from a Greek word muo which means to be silent. Mystery is thus a reality which drives one to a place which has no words.  The ancient world was familiar with mystery religions of all kinds.  I doubt that our modern culture would find them easy to understand or reinterpret, however hard we try to be ‘ecumenical’. Various salvific myths were staged for the initiates in the mysteries. making effective use of light and darkness.  These dramas were designed to create a sense of religious crisis in the postulant.  The dramatic light shows put on by NOS in Sheffield, Hillsong and similar megachurches are, paradoxically, the closest that our culture goes in reproducing something of the religious impact of the ancient mystery religions.  As the Old Testament reading from Isaiah this morning (Sunday) puts it: ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’  This is the God beyond words, beyond concepts.  To speak at all about him we need the metaphors and images of the mystics and spiritual explorers from ancient times till today.

Returning to our title, the Greek thinkers, both pagan and Christian, had a strong attachment to beauty.   The idea or ‘form’ of beauty was something very close to their idea of God.  It was a young Greek theologian, Christos Jannaras, who, in the 60s, wrote a book in which he expressed the idea that the understanding of beauty was something that Orthodox theological tradition did well and that it was something they had to offer to the worldwide church.   This notion has followed me through the fifty+ years since I first heard it. I have, as a consequence, been keen to explore the links that seem to exist between the notion of God and beauty in whatever manifestation it appears.  There are still places in the Christian west where beauty remains a key component of worship and is understood to help bring people to God.  There are artists, poets and musicians in our culture who still help to make this vital connection between the human spirit and the God who reveals himself as beauty to so many. Of course, only a very few artists and merchants of beauty confess a Christian faith, but each of them, in different ways, are teaching us to use our God given sensitivity and awareness of beauty.  This frequently points us to God. I am grateful to all of them.

The association between God and beauty has had some practical consequences for the way I practise the Christian faith.  There will some who will not approve when I say that I have been protected from versions of Christianity that put a great deal of emphasis on the notion that to utter the correct formula of belief is somehow to ensure salvation. I feel also that I have been preserved from another exclusivist notion that there is but a single version of truth.  To belong to the spiritual world known to the mystics and represented by the word mystery, is to realise that every version of truth is one that tries to approach or come close to truth rather than to own it. To say that to know Christ is to know God does not give us the right to exclude others who use language and ideas in completely different ways. The language of mystery is above all a language that insists on humility in the face of ultimately unknowable truth. From my perspective, any exclusivism in theology is divisive and the cause of endless pain and distracting struggles for the Church.  Anglicanism in its classical form has always insisted on one special claim of inclusivism which allows me to feel at home.  It declares itself, not to be the Church but to be part of something bigger and wider – the Catholic church.  In other words, it looks beyond itself, to the Orthodox and the Catholics for its self-definition.  It enjoys, even celebrates, this self-understanding of fuzzy boundaries. There are, of course, boundaries of what is or is not acceptable in Christian teaching but probably not in the places that many people want to put them. Many older Anglicans regret an apparent shift in direction, away from this inclusive feel over its boundaries to a position of strict doctrinal correctness.  The more the Church tries to tighten the edges of its structure against others, the more it ceases to be a place of welcome.

The examples of beauty in our world are endless. Not everyone will be sensitised to more than a few of these manifestations but everyone can be taught the way that the language of beauty is a path to spiritual awareness.  Clearly in our utilitarian world, few people speak the language of beauty well.  Those who speak it at all, are, I believe, not far from God.  They may not yet speak the conventional language of Christianity but, with help from people who already have made that connection, they may be able themselves to cross over to a position of faith.  The words of the hymn will come alive for them: O worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness.