One of the important tasks for a parish priest, or anyone involved in Christian instruction, is to help a learning group, like a confirmation class, to deal with symbolic language.  Leaving symbolic language to interpret itself without any explanation is a recipe for confusion in a young mind.  We have recently been celebrating the feast of the Ascension.  This event, told in profoundly symbolic language, cries out for interpretation so that we can make some sense of the text and what it is trying to tell us.  We also need to explore the heavily symbolic language of other parts of the Bible, including the Book of Revelation.  Young minds can, I believe, cope with the insight that says that symbolic language is a distinct way of communicating truth.  In using it we are not committing ourselves to a belief that heaven is somewhere above the clouds.  Some conservative teaching about the Bible seems to force the young person to believe that there is no other of dealing with symbolic language.  It has to be either literally true or false.  I have not come across any conservative teaching which explores a more nuanced way of approaching the issue of symbols in Scripture.  Binary ways of thinking seem to be built into the conservative approaches to the Bible.  Such dogmatic assumptions and beliefs by a whole swathe of conservative Christians will lead to an insistence that the story of Jesus ascending into the sky (like Elijah before him) has to be believed as a physical event in front of eyewitnesses.  Liberal Christians want to affirm that the language about God and his self-revelation is not always told in the language of historical fact.  Quite often, the language of symbols is used to evoke truth and divine reality which defy the use of words.  Factual statements we call scientific represent a genre of discourse which only works in certain settings.  The important issue for us now is to help our fellow Christians to know that there are alternative understandings to the notion of Jesus literally ascending into a cloud.  We are not required to follow the ancient writers in their ideas about the nature of the universe and the precise physical location of the Risen /Ascended Christ.

Teaching about symbols and the way that they can communicate truth to us in the Bible and elsewhere, is, I believe, a vital part of Christian formation. One of the privileges of my own theological formation was to spend 10 months among the Orthodox in Greece and elsewhere.  I learnt many things through this exposure to a different cultural form of Christianity. Perhaps the most important thing that I learned was the ability to approach truth without depending on the analytic tools of the 18^th century Enlightenment.  An Orthodox worshipper does not come to church to listen to intellectual sermons. He/she comes to see.  Church is a place for religious contemplation through the use of the eyes.  Truth is represented largely through visual symbols.  Venerating an icon and watching the highly visual drama of the Liturgy are the core means of accessing spiritual reality and the Divine mystery.  Such a way of experiencing the Divine is not somehow superior to our cultural heritage.  It is simply different.  The traditions of the Enlightenment of course have penetrated much of modern secular Greek thought but the value of symbols as a way to encounter deeper reality remains intact within the theological traditions of Orthodoxy.  Many in the West are drawn to this contemplative style of approaching truth.  It is a way that bypasses the dry logical methods of Western rationalism.   There are other areas of knowledge where these Western methods of knowing seem to fall short.  We know from ordinary human experience that certain important human realities cannot be embraced by the language of logic or proof. Merely to observe a mother and child interacting on a park bench, is to grasp a reality that cannot be fully contained in the language of a precise verbal formulae. Love, a word which embraces human relationships as well as a fundamental attitude to the world, clearly defies definition.

It is my belief that the task of teaching all Christians, young and old, how to relate better to the rich symbolic language of hymns and scripture readings is a vital task. Trying to fit every visual, symbolic description into the straightjacket of scientific categories is clearly impossible and unhelpful. Every mature Christian should have grown out of the need to hold on to the idea that every statement is some kind of literal description of reality. We should be proud of the fact that the Christian faith and scriptures provide us with a portal into a world of profound truth.  We describe this reality as transcendent and it is certainly beyond our ability to measure or control it. To tell a young teenage candidate that the word symbol is an entrance into a deeper richer world is to help them.   If he/she is ever left with the idea that statements in Scripture are either literally true or false, that is immensely impoverishing. The word symbol means, literally, something which has been thrown together or connected with another reality.  The word suggests absence and presence at the same time. We could, in many cases, make a translation of the word by calling it a door. The Ascension season hymns on Sunday morning were especially full symbolic language.  Jesus is the one who ascends to be with his Father in a place of light and glory. How we deal with this language is enormously important.  We need this language of Ascension, but we do not solve the problem of what it means by insisting that we take it literally.

The week we are in, is now building up to the feast of Pentecost. While I was reflecting during the Sunday morning’s service, I found myself making a contrast between the symbolic language of Ascension and the relatively concrete description of the coming of the Holy Spirit. Of course, we find symbolic expressions in the Acts account of the coming of the Spirit. We have the clearly symbolic language of tongues of flame.  But this choice of words communicates physical realities, energy, power and heat.  These words also communicate the concrete ideas of inspiration and insight.  Explaining the importance of the Pentecost feast to our imaginary confirmation candidate, we might want to emphasise two key, but not necessarily religious, ideas of power and inspiration.  Both these words have a currency in everyday experience as well in our moments of religious insight.

If I were having to teach about the feast of Pentecost to a congregation, I would attempt to tap into the everyday experiences of each of those listening.  I would ask about their experience when they are consciously looking for guidance to do the right thing in a difficult situation. Putting aside the language of flames, wind and excitement, I would ask them to relate to the other more mundane ideas that maybe are evoked in them by the symbolic descriptions of the Holy Spirit.  Most people can describe what inspiration means to them at a personal level.  It has to do with the unexpected surge of energy and insight comes to us when we are open to receive it. Obviously, the word will have a variety of meanings, only some of which will be spiritual.  But I suspect that when people do grapple with the word, they will find themselves not far from what Christians are talking about when they refer to the one who is the Lord, the Giver of Life. It is certainly important to link the human experience of inspiration with the whole encounter we associate with prayer and the search for spiritual guidance.

The teaching about the Spirit also brings us once more to consider the word power in a human context.   We talk about power a great deal on this blog but often in its negative manifestations. But, of course, there are positive forms of human power.  It is because of this power from the ‘Giver of Life’ that we understand ourselves to be both human and. at the same time, spiritual creatures. When I reflect on my own spiritual experience of power, it will link into the extraordinary way that that I have sometimes found the resources to do a particular work or overcome a particular problem which seemed at first impossible. Coming through difficult experiences and finding that I had said words which I did not know I possessed, has made me realise that the power, the energy and inspiration of the Holy Spirit is quite often around us and in us. Of course, Pentecost is a festival mainly for the whole Church.  But it is also a festival for each individual Christian as he/she struggles to move forward along the Christian path. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life, can be interpreted to say that we believe God is acting through his Spirit in us when we open ourselves to him.  The language of Pentecost according to Scripture is close to the language of twenty first century experience.  It is the language of power and inspiration, guiding us and leading us through life.

My insight last Sunday morning was see that this season of Ascension-tide begins with the most densely symbolic part of Scripture and ends with the practical language of inspiration and power at Pentecost. Christians are the heirs to both forms of teaching, the symbolic language and the more grounded and practical. The symbols of Ascension appeal to our imagination and our capacity to see God through the medium of highly visual language. The more concrete account of the day of Pentecost brings us back to the way that some ordinary human experience intersects with the divine.  Pentecost may indeed be the feast of the birth of the Church, but it is also the feast of individual divine inspiration and power.  It takes areas of our human experience and gives to them some access to an encounter with the divine.  Through the Holy Spirit we are allowed to experience the highest expression of power, as our life is linked to the vitality and Spirit of God himself.

In the late summer of 1972 I was in the Syrian city of Aleppo searching for a hotel room.   Why I was there is a complicated saga, but it was a combination of a fascination for the so-called Dead Cities of Northern Syria and an interest in the Christian minorities in the country.  At the time, aged 27, I regarded myself as young, and thus able to put up with discomfort and squalor in the places where I stayed.  Getting to Lebanon and Syria had been an expensive business, so the money available for hotels was limited.  I finally arrived at a suitably cheap establishment where the cost of a night’s slumber was 25 pence.  For that I had to sleep in a dormitory under sheets of doubtful cleanliness. Three years later I visited the same city, and I went again in search of the Hotel Ugarit as before.  When I arrived I found that something had changed.  It was not the hotel that had changed, but the change was in me.  Over the three intervening years, my tolerance for cheap seedy hotels had vanished.  I needed a room to myself and the possibility of washing in warm water.  Between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty, at some level, I had developed an adult need for comfort and cleanliness.  I was no longer the young man putting up with squalor; I was now the adult.

Everyone who has reached their thirties will have different memories, but most will remember a moment when they realised they had become properly adult.  The experience of being grown-up is, of course, a very subjective thing, but the majority who have passed through their twenties, would recognise that, whatever the law says, eighteen is only the beginning of the process of becoming adult.  The social psychologists in this century have invented a new expression, emerging adults, to describe the period between legal adulthood and the full acceptance of adult responsibilities.  We are talking about such things as the responsibilities of a mortgage, parenthood and a place of full independence from parents.  Different writers mark out this transitional phase in various ways but the eleven years between 18 and 29 is a typical suggestion.  Whatever period we reckon is needed for making the change from adolescent to full adulthood is probably not important.  What is important is for all of us to recognise how much is changing during these ‘emerging’ years.  We could say that the process of growing up is going on at equal speed as it had done when we were teenagers. 

The parents of small children are often nostalgic for the stage of childhood that has just passed.  The putting ‘away of childish things’ is something that parents often feel more upset about than the children themselves.  We do, however, recognise helping children to negotiate each stage of growing older as a vital part of parenting.  The needs of a nine year old are different from the needs of a seven year old.  The wise parent is constantly having to adapt to the new reality of an endless series of changes which accompany every stage of growth.  There is a constant sense of newness as the child grows older; some changes seem to happen over a matter of weeks. 

I begin this blog piece with a preamble about growth and change as an introduction to a serious question about the way the Church responds to the young adults in its care.  Emerging adults are an area of apparent success for the Church, especially in the university towns of Britain.  There are many congregations where the average age seems to be about 28.  It is clear from such statistics that churches do have an appeal for many young people, especially as they enter this transitional period between 18 and the early twenties.  The first question that arises is whether the Church is successfully serving this cohort as it grows older.  Is it truly sensitive to the numerous but subtle changes that are taking place throughout the twenties into the thirties? 

It seems clear that many young people enter their twenties with a readiness to trust leaders and accept their parental style of oversight.  There is enough left of childhood compliance to follow the wishes and desires of older people.  The result is that many of them will also readily accept the authoritative style of many con evo churches.  Among other things, evangelical churches emphasise the unchanging word of God, together with the need for obedience to the authority of appointed leaders.  If this obedience is not a problem for eighteen year olds, there may be an increasing resistance by older members.  Here I refer to the 25+ group.  They may well chafe at conservative teaching on sexual matters as they move through their twenties. At this stage, they may well be letting go of a variety of dependence habits in other areas of life.  From a developmental perspective, we would expect that a twenty-five year old would begin to question the certainties of other aspects of conservative Christian teaching.  There are signs that this does indeed happen, particularly as many alternative sources of information are freely available to these young people.

In the past, week two pieces of information have come my way to bring this issue of the Church serving the needs of emerging adults to the fore of my thinking.  In the first place there was the article by Charles Foster about the effect of Iwerne/Titus camps on generations of public-school boys.  As part of the commentary there seemed to be a consensus that the teaching of the camps had created a persistent nostalgic longing in these young men.  Rather than looking forward to adulthood with its ever greater intellectual and spiritual opportunities for service and growth, there was a regressive pull back to the golden days of teenage summers at the camps.  Christianity in other words was being experienced as a force for nostalgic regression and immaturity.  Some would describe it as a recipe for infantilisation.

Alongside the apparent immaturity of many con evo males who used to attend Iwerne summer camps, another serious issue has come to my attention.  I received an email from a woman this week who has been attending a church plant for the past 15 years.  She joined the plant at the beginning of its life and for a year or two everything seemed to glow with the light of newness and love.  The minister was the same age as the young congregation and this at first seemed appropriate.  But it was less appropriate when what was required of the minister was maturity and wisdom to help sort out relationship breakdowns among the closely (too close?) knit community.  Without the skills of mediation to offer, such fallings out merely festered until one or other of the aggrieved parties walked away.  The implications of leaving a congregation of this kind were severe for this one individual I shall call Joan. Joan was leaving behind her entire social network and all her emotional means of support.  London is not a good place to be alone, but the church plant had held the implicit promise never to allow her to be in that situation.  As with a cult she had bought the ‘package’ of an enveloping social community which would be there to carry her into the future, spiritually and socially.  Worse still, by leaving the church, she came face to face with the appalling realisation that the church had kept her in exactly the same place, in terms of her maturity, as where she had been when she entered fifteen years before.  In other words, instead of growing up and adapting to the world in the myriad ways that other emerging adults in society were doing, she was, relatively speaking, still immature and ill-equipped to deal with life outside the church.  The Church plant culture had successfully taught her habits of intellectual and social dependence on others.  She had been deprived of the insight that, as the years sped by, she was changing along with her emotional, intellectual and social needs.  The reasonably intelligent woman of thirty or thirty-five has quite different social and spiritual needs from the twenty three year old.  My light-hearted personal anecdote at the beginning was meant to illustrate just how quickly the needs and requirements of a young person can change over a short timespan.

The con evo churches that we have been hearing a lot about in recent weeks have enormous responsibility to care for the young people who come to them.  They also have the task of preventing the kind of tragedy that Joan is suffering.  Teaching an unchanging Gospel in a way that makes no provision for the evolving intellect and personality of a young person is a kind of enforced infantilisation.  It may be appropriate for children and very young adults, but it is not sound educational practice for those in their later twenties and thirties.  The inflexibility of message and teaching found in many conservative congregations is, arguably. a kind of intellectual abuse.  What we know, what we feel and what we understand is in a constant state of flux as we grow older.  Trying to pretend otherwise is an act of emotional cruelty.  I am reminded of the custom within China up till the end of the 19^th century of binding the feet of girls and young women.  This is a kind of parable of a belief system that is in denial of the fact that the human mind and body are for ever changing and growing.   To say, as many Christian teachers do, that ‘my teaching is the true everlasting, unchanging Gospel’, is a kind of blasphemy   Teaching, social learning and spiritual growth all need to be, as far as possible, age and maturity appropriate.  Is the leader also using the ideal of a perfect community as a way of bringing a group together so that they can serve his narcissistic needs for domination?    My liberal background makes me instantly nervous when a church leader claims to be teaching the only true gospel and that everyone, regardless of age and maturity, can flourish in this uniquely safe environment.  They do not.  The inconvenient fact is that the uniqueness of each of us, the differences of our growth and understanding mean that we will always need to find churches and spiritual settings of infinite variety.  Despotic teaching is a kind of abuse.  Those who internalise the idea that there is only one expression of truth are trapped into an immaturity which has life-long consequences.  They are trapped and unhappy in a place that damns them if they stay and damns them if they leave.  Like Joan, poor pastoral sensitivity has put them in a place of emptiness and near despair.

From time to time, I feel myself drawn back to books which have, in different ways, been crucial in changing the way I think about religious themes.  After spending a couple of years thinking and writing about fundamentalism and charismatic phenomena in the 90s, I was still unable to come up with a psychological theory which offered some insight to explain the dynamics of what I was seeing.  Around 2005 I came across the work of Len Oakes.  He is an Australian scholar who wrote an important book in 1997, Prophetic Charisma:  The Psychology of Revolutionary Personalities.  Almost immediately I became captivated by his key thesis. The central idea of the book is that there are sometimes connections to be noted between the mysterious power and skills of certain leaders in the religious charismatic world and the profile of an individual who suffers from a clinically defined narcissistic personality.  When I am speaking about such a personality, I need to emphasise that most of what I am describing here is something at one end of a wide spectrum of behaviours.  Many of these are not problematic. The word narcissism on its own is not a diagnosis of any kind and It is quite often a part of simply being human.  It only becomes a problem when we see it in its pathological manifestations. Oakes’ own interest in the topic came about through his own need to understand a charismatic group in the 1970s of which he had been a member. At some point he changed his role within that community from being a member to becoming a student and chronicler of the dynamics of his group.  His book eventually became a study of charismatic religious leaders from a variety of traditions, including his own, over a period of some 20 years.

When I was writing my own study of Christian fundamentalism and charismatic groups in the 1990s, this word narcissism appeared nowhere in my vocabulary or understanding.  I knew the word but at that time the pioneering work of Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg in the 1970s was unknown to me or anyone else I knew. These two scholars were, between them, laying the foundations for the then new category of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  This reached the wider public as a category of mental disorder in the 3^rd Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual published in 1980.  Since that time, the concept of narcissism has grown from a fairly narrowly defined clinical term within the psychoanalytic literature to become a common word used to describe behaviours which are in many cases harmless.  Our own use in this blog piece will follow that of Oakes.  His observations tend to be concerned with the pathological toxic examples of narcissism, thus following closely Kohut’s case studies. This categorising was embedded in some quite dense and complex psychoanalytic ideas.  These conceptualisations have, so far, stood the test of time and even those who disagree with him still use Kohut’s insights as a starting point. 

 When we talk about religious charisma, we are confronting the mysterious phenomena by which some Christian leaders have an almost magical power over their followers.  We find it difficult to understand what is going on in a Toronto Blessing type of event.   The happenings are simultaneously fascinating and, at the same time, a little frightening. It is not just, of course, in religious settings that we observe such charisma.  It can appear in political or indeed in any institutional setting.  Oakes takes the word and begins to demystify much of it as he links it, with the help of Kohut’s theories, with the grandiosity, the messianism and the enormous self-confidence that are key manifestations of classic narcissistic behaviour.  

Kohut originally saw a link between charisma and chronic narcissism, when he noticed how charismatic leaders were similar to a group of his patients who possessed severe narcissistic symptoms. His patients were not, of course, capable of any leadership role, but they possessed, like charismatic leaders, an enormous self-confidence together with an extraordinary lack of self-doubt. They also felt themselves to be invincible, possessing totally unrealistic and grandiose fantasies about themselves and their powers. These typical symptoms of the narcissistic personality in its clinical manifestation also acted like a shell, covering over an extremely fragile core.  The psychoanalytic treatment for this disorder had as its aim the restructuring and rebuilding of this core personality, one which had been hollowed out by adverse childhood experiences.  But, even as he was treating these patients, Kohut could not help but notice the way that, in many cases, they possessed acute almost psychic sensitivity to others.  This was however a negative sensitivity.  It worked in such a way to enable the narcissistic patient to manipulate other people to serve his (normally his) needs or purposes.  The other person was, in the process, becoming simply a source of potential psychological gratification for the patient. Thus, other people had one purpose, to be a kind of extension of the narcissist’s own ego.  It was only in and through exploiting and dominating others in this way that the narcissist felt himself alive.  In this way all his relationships were parasitic.  Dominance and control of others were a key part of the narcissistic personality.

Oakes uses these observations of Kohut about the narcissistic personality and its closeness to the characteristics of some possessors of charismatic gifts to form the heart of his study. His own experience of being a member of a cult had allowed him to see at close hand the typical external facets of narcissism, grandiosity and over-confidence.  These were combined with an inner emptiness and dependence on other people to feed and allow the narcissist to flourish. Oakes helps us a great deal by penetrating and rearticulating the dense prose of Kohut himself. Although Kohut was writing in English, his background and training was as a Freudian psychoanalyst in Austria. His English style is convoluted and quite hard to unravel. In a few pages of the book Prophetic Charisma, Oakes explains in fairly straightforward language the key ideas of narcissism and its origins. He tells us how a child, according to Kohut’s theory, with the wrong kind of parenting can develop the distortions of the severe narcissistic personality. Narcissism, in its clinical version, emerges as the result of the child receiving either too little or too much parental attention. At the risk of over-simplification, we have explained to us by Kohut and Oakes, how there is an optimum way for a child to build, with the help of parents, a secure sense of self. When there is inadequate attention, the child has a desperate sense of loss.  At the other extreme there may be too much attention, depriving a child ever of experiencing frustration and learning to deal with it.  This can lead to the child being unable to handle the inevitable setbacks of real life where things do not go his way as an adult.  Both these distortions of parenting can lead to the kind of clinically disordered behaviour we associate with narcissistic illness.  Needless to say, the word has greatly expanded out of its original clinical setting to signify almost any kind of self-centred behaviour.  This fact that the word can simultaneously refer to a clinical condition as well as ordinary human self-absorption means that we have to use the word with great care.  But, however we use the word, every use of it owes something to the clinical examples of it set out by Heinz Kohut before his death in 1981.

Why do I find this book by Oakes so compelling? It is because it enabled me, at a time when I was puzzling over the dynamics of charismatic churches, to see how a therapeutically trained writer could account for some of the strange goings-on in that world.  It is not all bad. Some people might actually benefit from being with a charismatic leader for a limited time.  There are good things to be learned from the vision, the energy and even the giftedness that comes out as insight and gifts of healing. Problems arise when such relationships are allowed to go on for too long.  Charisma has a life-cycle of its own and eventually all parties become disillusioned and damaged so that we can talk about a kind of narcissistic collapse.

One of the things that I find fascinating is that, although there has been this breakthrough in the understanding of the dynamics of charisma, little seems to have penetrated into church circles to encourage critical reflection on the powerful institutions in the Church which practise this style of church life.  The work of Len Oakes should be taught compulsorily in places like theological colleges and in in-service training for senior clergy leaders.  The language of narcissism also has something to say to other safeguarding disasters we have seen over the past fifteen years.  Although Oakes has focussed on the charismatic styles of church life, pathological narcissism is clearly found in the dynamics of other parts of the Church.  Oakes’ study could be used to unlock and interpret many of the disasters and dysfunctions of leadership that we see in our churches.  In some of the major parishes of the Church of England narcissistic processes are obvious, if one has the eyes and insight to see them. The phenomenon of self-satisfied influential leaders standing in pulpits receiving the acclaim of dutiful acolytes is all too common.  Whenever a clergy leader feels himself to be the target of idealising dynamics, that is a time for self-examination and reflection.  A great deal of the observable power operating in the church is sustained by what we can describe as pure narcissism.  There is much more to be said on this theme, but space prevents further discussion here.  It is sufficient to conclude by suggesting that much of what we see as power in the church is less than healthy for those involved.  It will always be unhealthy to be caught up in narcissistic cycles of self-importance and grandiosity.   The stories of Jonathan Fletcher and Peter Ball can both be re-told with an emphasis in each case of strong narcissistic dynamics at work.   That fact alone should alert us to the need to understand the crucial importance of Len Oakes’ work. 

by Charles Foster

At the revue at the end of the Iwerne camps we sang a sentimental song:

‘Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, at Iwerne Minister with [David] Fletcher & Co….It won’t be long before we all pack up and go.’

Our wistfulness was misconceived. We never did pack up and go. Or, rather, the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer went with us wherever we went, as the Ark went with the Israelites.

That’s how we liked it. Iwerne was great. We were fed lasagne by willowy lady helpers, from whose ranks we were expected to select our brides – the dams of the next generation of the Elect. And the senior officers fed us with a few theological formulae – mostly from 19th century America rather than 1st century Palestine.

For budding boys wrestling with the complexities of evolving personality and sexuality, and fearfully though dimly aware of a seething jungle of nuance outside the camp gates, the simplicity was intoxicating. Assent to A, B, and C, stay out of your girlfriend’s knickers, never, ever stray beyond the camp gates, and all would be well in this world and the next. Iwerne would look after you. It held the keys of death, hell, and the merchant bank of your choice.

No wonder we stayed. It looked like a fantastic deal. We treasured our badges of membership: the inflections of the voice, the uniform, the allusions, the delicious acronyms which confounded the state-schooled heathen. We listened to camp talks every Sunday in the Iwerne churches. Whatever the season, and whether the church was in London, Oxford, Cambridge, or beyond the edge of the mapped world in somewhere like Durham, the sermon was always really in summery rural Dorset, because our God could do what He liked with time and space, and His throne was near Blandford Forum and his season was the summer. Every week, happily and wonderfully, we heard the same talks, by the same people, using the same illustrations and the same jokes, all delivered by voices just like ours. We no more expected the content of a talk to be altered than we expected the text of Mark’s gospel to be updated. We believed in the infallibility of the talks as originally given. We’d have been outraged by any change.

What was being preached, of course, was The Gospel.  We knew this because we’d been told it, with unimpeachable authority, in Dorset. We knew too that whatever was not preached by one of us was not the Gospel, and therefore suspect. We alone, having received the Gospel at the Dorset well-spring, were its true custodians. We alone knew how to enunciate it.

How did one get to see God? By listening to the pastiche of the Bible encoded in the formulae, which in turn were encoded in us and in our culture.And here the real danger began, for, we came to believe, one could not distinguish between message and messenger. As individuals we fell short. But the culture of which we were part did not. How could it? It was part of the Gospel itself. So if and insofar as we were good, enculturated Iwerne chaps, to see God we had only to look in the shaving mirror.

‘Iwerne is my church’, Jonathan Fletcher is said to have said. Everything about Iwerne’s self-containedness and suspicion of non-Iwernism suggests that by this he really meant ‘Iwerne is the church.’ Think about that. The church isn’t the eternal community of the redeemed, serenaded and guarded by hosts of angels and archangels, the bride of Christ, boasting of its extravagant poverty, its hospitals, and its martyrs. It’s a set of boys’ camps and the middle class cabal to which campership gives life membership. If you’re a leading light in that church – as Jonathan Fletcher certainly was – what are you saying about yourself by saying that Iwerne is the church?  

Twitter now knows the culture as #Fletcherculture, and uses the word ‘narcissism’ to denote one of its most toxic components. That usage is accurate, but it should be understood that at the root of the narcissism is a conflation of Gospel and Self which occurs because of a conflation of Self and culture. The victim-blaming we’ve seen in the aftermath of the Fletcher scandal occurs at least partly because to criticise the person is to criticise the Gospel/Culture embodied in that person. Mock the plummy inflections, and you’re mocking the voice of God. Criticise his anointed, and you’re denouncing Him.

Yet more fundamental than our tribal and theological loyalties was our loyalty to the innocence of the Dorset summer, in all its suffocating, liberating simplicity. To betray the culture was to betray the Gospel, and so to be damned. It was also to betray our own childhood. To live in the Iwerne culture was consciously to hang onto childhood; to make a daily decision to arrest our theological, spiritual and intellectual development. And to do so in the name of God, because God met with us in Dorset in an unmistakable, unmediated way, handing each of us our life-plan. We followed St Paul, choosing to remain in the state we were in when we were called. Paul was talking about matrimonial status: we took him to refer to childhood. We were theologically infantile because we were actually infantile, and remained actually infantile because we were theologically infantile.

All this came naturally to us, for the catastrophe of boarding school had left us all emotionally stunted (see Mark Stibbe’s brilliant and heartbreaking Home at Last on this, and Joy Schaverien’s more academic Boarding School Syndrome: The psychological trauma of the ‘privileged’ child). We were only too glad to hear not only that our stuntedness was not pathological, but that it was what God decreed.

I feel sorry for the Iwerne-ites, and for myself as one of them. But I feel even more sorry for the non-Iwerne-ites who go to their churches. It’s one thing to be fossilized in one’s own past; it’s quite another to be fossilized in someone else’s – to live, vicariously and unconsciously, the perpetual childhood of your vicar, without even having the genuine comfort, enjoyed by him, of remembered cream teas. If you’re in an English Anglican Conservative Evangelical church there’s a sporting chance that, whatever your age, gender or background, you’re really a rather lost, constipated public schoolboy, but without the perks.

The senior officers were fond of quoting Luther’s alleged words at us: ‘Here I stand….’ But where were they urging us to stand? In our own childhood, of course. In Dorset. Inside the camp. To this day our cosmic dramas are played out against a mental backdrop of leafy lanes, windsurfing in Poole harbour, tennis with the eternally bronzed Jonathan Fletcher, earnest walks round the playing field with the dormitory officer, games of ‘ragger’ (a game unique to Iwerne, for the unique Iwerne people we are), and the tuck shop (known, masonically, as the ‘Old Firm’). All our prayers are tightly focused, barked out in a martial voice, and kept short because David Fletcher hated long prayers.

The injunction ‘Stand!’, I now see, is, like so much Iwerne-speak, theological window-dressing for a defence of the culture: for a defence of ourselves, just the way we are. It’s engendered by fear. The status quo is fragile. Dissenters need to be vigorously suppressed. Iwerne Christianity is at its most muscular when it wields its cold shoulders. The culture and theology, being inseparable, are sacred. The childhood Gospel – the childish Gospel – must not be challenged. If it is, we know at some deep, unexamined level, it will fail. The Gospel is not a lion that needs to be unleashed, but a sickly pussy-cat that needs to be nursed.

Stand! You don’t go through the door of a Iwerne church wondering nervously where the tsunami of the Holy Spirit is going to leave you at the end of the service. If you’re doing the right thing you’ll be standing in exactly the same place at the end. Stand! You don’t expect a mystical, transformative encounter: you had that encounter once and for all, in person or by proxy, years ago in Dorset.

Stand! Stand in the camp, because if you don’t you’ll be like one of the ones outside; the outside where time flows, minds change, people grow up, and where there is real love, grief, mess, contingency and joy; where nothing worth having fits into a formula.

‘All reality is iconoclastic’, wrote C. S. Lewis. ‘The earthly beloved, even in this life, continually triumphs over your mere idea of her.’ Reality, that is, is process. It is an unfolding, as our lives, if they’re real, are meant to be an unfolding.God, as the ground of all being, smashes up the laughably inadequate ways in which we frame him or her (including the pronouns we use). This is wholly uncontroversial in all the historic Christian traditions – and (it sadly needs to be said) doesn’t begin to mean that one has to deny (for instance) the historicity of the resurrection, the literal, biological understanding of the virgin birth, or the possibility of immutable ontological facts or moral truths. But it is the antithesis of much conservative evangelical theology, whose connection with historic Christianity is often slender. It is particularly the antithesis of that iteration which whispers that God, like the dinosaurs in the cliffs of the Jurassic coast very near Iwerne, is petrified in our childhood, and that we therefore have to live in our childhood or our vicar’s in order to live a godly life.

Fletcherculture is a disease of both theology and psyche. But it doesn’t have to be terminal. Get the theology right, and the peculiar, peculiarly dangerous, and downright sacrilegious narcissism of Fletcherculture is much less likely.

[this should be read in conjunction with earlier article by Charles http://survivingchurch.org/2019/11/26/smyth-fletcher-iwerne-and-the-theology-of-the-divided-self-charles-foster/ ]

We have recently been watching one of the films on Netflix which takes as its background the political life of Korea.  In this Korean film, the main character is a scientist who, after a terrorist attack, finds himself president of the whole country.  Innocent of political life and devoid of ambition in this arena, he has to negotiate his way through the strong political forces in the country.  He also needs to make the decisions which he believes to be for the good of all, rather than for his personal benefit or that of a particular political faction. 

The confrontation between the rationality and objectivity of an independent technocrat and the experience of seasoned politicians, is the basic theme of the film.  All the experienced politicians know that holding on to their own and their party’s power is a major part of what they do.   The idea that there could be an honest broker in their midst, completely uninterested in personal power is a major challenge to the assumptions of the whole system.   Serving a country in a way that meets the democratic hopes of the people is, of course, held up as the ultimate end of government, but the reward for the successful politicians is also personal and institutional power.   Along the way there may have been ethical shortcuts, betrayals, dishonesty and even lying.  The unspoken question of the film is whether there can ever be technologies of government, uncorrupted by political power-games.  Do we always have to submit ourselves to be ruled by people who are motivated by a desire for influence and power?  Can there ever be such a thing as a ‘science’ of government?

When we talk about politics, whether it be in government, the Church or in any other organisation, we are referring to that messy overlap between the hoped-for flourishing of an institution and the personal ambitions of those who pull the levers within.  Politics will always be in some way linked to the process of gaining (or losing) power in an institution.  Many people can be motivated by the offer of power.  Many also firmly believe that they can hold it without succumbing to any of its dangerous seductions.  For others, power represents the opportunity of acquiring wealth.  At the national level currently in the UK, we are told that politics makes some individuals, such as Boris Johnson, poorer in the medium term.  Johnson was able to make far more money writing newspaper columns than the £150K he receives as head of the country.  In the longer term there are huge rewards to be obtained from book deals and speech fees, but these are not available in the here and now.  The rewards of high office do not include, in most Western democracies at any rate, instant wealth.  The evident corruption of former President Trump and his cronies is, hopefully, to be regarded as a rare exception to what we would like to think are the norms of political life among democracies in the West.

If instant wealth is not afforded to our rulers, we can allow that there are, in the short term, perks to be had which make up somewhat for the stresses of political responsibility.   We have already alighted on the single word, power.  Even without the promise of instant wealth, there are various ways of enjoying its possession.  There is the simple gratification of having people around you open doors, chauffeur your car, and generally pay attention to all your domestic needs.  Wherever you go, you become the centre of attention.  Such attention may be enjoyable; equally it may be a burden.  One thing is clear is that the experience of having this kind of power and being the centre of attention may change and corrupt the individual.  The personality becomes so used to being thought of as superior or special that when this flattery is no longer available there are withdrawal symptoms, similar to the withdrawal from an addictive drug.  This expectation of a constant supply of ‘feeding’ and adulation is an early indication of a narcissistic disorder. 

We need to go back one stage to this phenomenon of power and think about the way that it is enjoyed by those who possess it.  I find it helpful to think about power and its enjoyment along a continuum.  At one end there is the completely altruistic person whose only use of power is to achieve change and subsequent flourishing for a group of people. S/He enjoys the satisfaction and pleasure of a job well-done. To serve or love so that another may flourish is close to a definition of Christian love. This was the only reward sought by the non-political leader in the Korean film.  A leader who tirelessly works to take a country out of a crisis caused by war or economic collapse deserves the applause of those who benefit and the positive verdict of history.  This is precisely what we would like to see in all our politicians in Church and State or wherever they hold sway.  If only this were the norm.

Along the continuum are found those whose motives and actions are a mixture of altruism and selfishness.  Seldom are motives ever completely pure.   At the far end of the continuum of power, we see the malignant narcissist.  This is the individual who seems to be ‘milking’ every occasion as an opportunity for self-aggrandisement and the humiliation and exploitation of others.  In some cases, there seems to be a total absence of any concern for other people in the exercise of this power.   All we see is endless self-gratification and self-inflation.  To call those who operate at the exploitative end of the scale of narcissistic behaviour is to raise further issues.  Are they behaving this way because they ‘need’ the gratification that power provides to protect a fragile ego?  Alternatively, and more commonly, are they just enjoying the exercise of power because it is there.  Are they, in other words, what I call ‘situational narcissists?’ 

The spectrum/continuum we have described in the way power is used/misused, is observable right across the board.  We can observe both extremes in operation in places as diverse as schools, vicarages, company offices and bishops’ palaces.  Individuals may sometimes be observed moving down the spectrum. From originally using power only to serve others, they may find themselves over the year approaching the other end of the spectrum.  Here power is used typically to gratify the self at the expense of others.  When I mentioned my sketch idea in the last blog, I should also have suggested that theological students learn to recognise the narcissistic contaminants that creep into the use of power.  The question might be asked.  To what extent is power operating here in a way that serves the one who has it?  How should this use of power be described on a narcissistic spectrum?  Obviously there will be times when motivations are not obvious.  A desire to serve can be mixed up with an urge to satisfy self-needs.  But it is the wrestling with these questions that is important.  We repeat one issue that was mentioned last time.  It will normally be almost impossible to challenge the individual in a place of narcissistic power.  Alongside the power that is possessed to control an institution will be found the skilled use of tools to defend and deflect all challenges.  In short, the narcissist can make life very unpleasant for those who try to stand up to him/her.

The recent book that very powerfully describes the extreme abuses of power through narcissistic processes is one by Daniel Shaw, Traumatic Narcissism.  I mention this book especially to draw attention to the title.  It is a work that explores how the extremes of narcissistic behaviour can do immense harm.  Harm is caused by any abuser but also the hurt is enhanced by the bystander/leader with no insight into the processes at work in the abuse.  The abuse we meet sometimes in church settings is traumatic, even catastrophic.   There is plenty more to be explored in this area.  I am setting down a few pointers here for developing a set of categories that can be used when we see dysfunctional and exploitative leadership in a church setting. 

We began this blog by suggesting that politics is best thought of as the way leaders choose to deploy institutional and personal power.  With this understanding we can see that politics can be a much larger concept than just that found in the seat of government.  While politics and power in themselves are both neutral concepts, politicians in every setting will use power in any number of ways, depending on such things as psychological need or personal morality.  Politics needs the injection of other disciplines, like philosophy, ethics and economics to evaluate its workings and interpret what is going on.   These amateur attempts at analysis and commentary in this blog may help some of my readers to penetrate a little better in understanding the functioning and culture of church power.  I sometimes feel we are travelling down a dark tunnel with few lights to guide our understanding of the way power is deployed and experienced.   We all the time need better signposts to help us avoid completely floundering in incomprehension and confusion.  That is a dangerous place to be, not only for the individual but for the whole Church.

There have been two occasions when I might have been on the staff at a theological college.  On the first occasion I was asked to apply for a post, while, on the second occasion, I was on a short-list of four candidates after making an application for the job.  Neither episode came to anything and so no ordinands ever had the dubious benefit of learning from my parish experience or my theological insights. 

These two possible encounters with the world of teaching ordinands have led me to ponder the question: what do I want future clergy to learn from their training?  This is partly a question to myself about what I regret never having been taught.  In my day, the late sixties, there was an attempt to make us aware of our own inner processes by exposing us to the then fashionable teachings of group dynamics.  One thing that was not taught then was the dynamics of institutions and the way that roles are exercised within them.  To put it another way, we never learned to see how people and institutions interact.  People – clergy and laity – might have psychological issues to sort out.  The Church itself, as an entity of power, was not considered as a problem within the total picture.  Topics like the psychoanalysis of institutions did not exist and we certainly had few insights into the nature of power and the way it exercises an important role in the life of the Church and within the personalities of those who lead it.

From the perspective of retirement, I can now look back and recall how some of the clergy I used to know, played ‘power-games’.  Nothing in their training had taught them to question how they used the power that they possessed as parish priests.  It is obvious now, from the perspective of thirty or forty years after the event, that perhaps only a minority of clergy knew the meaning of humility.  Many used their status as Vicar, Rector or Canon as a way of boosting their self-esteem.  The Church institution was being used like a giant esteem filling station.  Whenever a sense of social fragility was felt inside them, they went off to refill, so that they regained once more some of the prestige that their Church role was giving them.  They might act out this power in a variety of ways – raising their voice unnecessarily, showing impatience or in some way belittling another person without a word being said.  This way of using the institution to define their value and meet their self-esteem needs is what I call institutional narcissism.  It is not just in the Church you find it; it is equally evident elsewhere, especially in political life.  It is also visible at every level in the church, from bishops downwards.  It is certainly visible among celebrity preachers and leaders in the con-evo constituency.  Failures here have been explored recently in the aftermath of the Jonathan Fletcher Review. Anyone using the Church in some way to promote their self-importance has made power into a problem.  Such people are often not aware of any misuse of power, but this institutional narcissism has begun to corrupt all their relationships and their effectiveness as pastors is seriously compromised.

In my musings about how to reduce ‘power-games’ in the Church, I have invented for myself a fantasy role as a teacher in a theological college. I have decided in that role that there should be for every student a series of classes using role play as a way for participants to learn about power.  I would write a series of sketches which show typical scenarios in a parish.  Some might involve day to day encounters with parishioners going about their voluntary tasks.  Other sketches might portray staff meetings or chapter meetings.  There would certainly be at least one to illustrate a difficult meeting with a bishop, with a curate telling him that his Vicar was guilty of sexual offences. The one thing that all these sketches would have in common is that an issue of power is implicit in each one of them.  The question for the watching group is to identify who in the scene has power and how is that power acquired?  How is the power being deployed?  What are the feelings of the various characters in the sketch?  Is the first person aware of the feelings of the other?  What is the best outcome for all concerned?  I would expect that the teacher would frequently have to remind the students that there is much more going on that is evident on first watching.  Certainly, after doing this exercise a few times, the student might become more aware of hidden, even subconscious, power issues.  I would also want to share the insight that the place of meeting can affect the power dynamics in an encounter.  If a bishop expects a young curate to share deeply personal stuff in the setting of his palace, then he will probably be disappointed.  What was missing in the story of A and the Bishop of Durham in the last post, was the failure of imagination and empathy.  No group of students would be allowed to watch a sketch of such a meeting without being made fully aware of all the many possible nuances contained in that encounter.  To most of us they may seem obvious, but to clergy from an older generation, empathy, imagination and an awareness of power dynamics seem to have been in short supply.

One of the dramatic changes to parish life that has begun some years ago, but has now, maybe, become encoded by covid, is the end of clergy visiting parishioners in their own homes.  Issues of safeguarding no doubt come into the reasoning, but I have also heard the excuse given that there is no time available for such an activity.  Clergy of my generation clearly regret the loss of this parish activity but I want to raise an important factor which is nothing to do our feelings of sadness. It would seem clear that the absence of home visiting may affect the issue of power dynamics and the relationship between church leaders and the congregation.  When I used to enter the home of one of my parishioners, I was always there as guest.  That is, when we think about it, a power relationship, putting parishioner above priest.  The host is the one in charge.  If the Vicar only ever sees his/her flock in the study or having coffee after church, the priest-people power differential is fixed in one direction.  Even if there is no desire for the clergyman ever to misuse his/her power, the encounter on the ‘home-turf’ of the priest will inevitably determine the dynamic of the relationship.  To restore the balance, as it were, in the power dynamic between priest and parishioner, home visits perform a vital role.  Home visits, in my estimation, help to put the power dynamics of the parish into a far healthier frame.

Understanding power dynamics in the Church, whether at the parish level or within the hierarchy, will always be an important task.  The problem is that that powerful people do not enjoy being challenged for the way that they use that power.  Sometimes one would love to challenge a pompous senior church functionary, but such behaviour might be a career wrecking move.   Politeness and expedience will mean that much power abuse and narcissistic behaviour remains unchallenged.  It will continue to damage the institution and the individuals within it.  Perhaps my idea of role play exercises is a safe way of helping would be clergy to become aware of how the unconscious exercise of their power can harm both themselves and others for whom they have pastoral responsibility.

‘Heads I win, tails you lose’.  This is a trick children’s game that may or may not still be played today. It certainly is a description of situations that adults find themselves in from time to time.  We are faced with a scenario where every single reaction or response has drawbacks. We know we will be in a losing situation whichever avenue we follow.  Whatever we decide to do, in whatever way we react, the result will be damaging to us in some way. 

At this point I should be able to provide the perfect anecdote to illustrate what we can call the ‘lose lose’ situation.  Issues that centre round the care of the elderly or children’s education come to mind.  Should the gifted child pursue a talent for music or academic ability?  Should the elderly relative go into a home where they are physically safe, or should they remain at risk living on their own but with their own things around them?  These sorts of dilemma face us constantly.  Every decision we make may involve some form of loss or a less than perfect outcome. 

In the safeguarding context there is one classic ‘lose-lose’ situation that has been faced by many survivors over the decades.   An individual is abused by a member of the church, their vicar or some other person in authority.  If they are a child, they might possibly tell a parent, though it seems that the majority of such cases go unreported for years, even decades.  Eventually the abused victim, by now a young adult, becomes aware that the situation was deeply harmful to them and they now need help.  A further consideration may be that the perpetrator needs to be stopped from harming others.  What should the survivor do?  From an adult perspective, this is clearly a lose-lose situation.  To tell others will likely involve activating legal processes, insurance assessors and, worst of all, challenging a Church that seems primarily interested in promoting itself as a place of honesty, love and safely.  The story that the abused individual is now revealing is bound to disturb that carefully constructed narrative.  It will be resisted by the idealising dynamics of the institution and its legal and episcopal guardians.  Is the survivor able to stand up to this kind of resistance?

The alternative to reporting or disclosing abuse is, of course, not to say a thing.  Because of all the difficulties of disclosing, many, if not most, victims/survivors of abuse do not reveal any of what they had to suffer.  Some may disclose privately to a spouse or a therapist, but many more are reluctant to admit to what happened to them as a child or young person.  There is not the space here to do more than hint at the damage caused by undisclosed abuse.  It may wreak damage both to mental well-being as well as physical.  It may damage future relationships.  We have explored a little in the past about such issues as dissociative identity disorder.  Here past trauma is lodged outside active consciousness.  In this cut-off part of the mind, it can adversely affect the general capacity of the mind to know contentment and generally flourish.  Therapies of various kinds can alleviate the effects of abuse, but if it is not faced or owned up to at all, the likely legacy is almost certainly serious and life-long.

What this post is attempting to communicate is that the abuse survivor in the Church often faces a bleak outcome.  The options or choice to disclose or not to disclose both have ‘lose’ outcomes.  In short, the survivor is like a child who listens to those words, ‘heads I win, tails you lose’.  In this post I want to tell the story of ‘Survivor 3’, a victim of Granville Gibson, the convicted offender who served in and later became an Archdeacon in the Diocese of Durham.  The events surrounding Survivor 3’s abuse took place in the 1980s but the story that is told illustrates attitudes and assumptions that are unlikely to have disappeared completely from sight even today. 

Survivor 3 (I shall refer to him as A) was not in the category of a child or a vulnerable adult when the offences against him took place as a curate under the charge of Gibson.  His story is recorded both in the Review written by Dr Stephanie Hill of the case and in a privately printed memoir written by A himself.  As a curate in his twenties, A first became aware of problems when a parishioner reported seeing Gibson kissing a young male refugee who was seeking support.  A spoke to another priest who told him that if he reported the incident, he would be ‘hung out to dry’.  A then himself experienced a sexual assault by Gibson which left A confused and uncertain what to do.  In a twist to the narrative Gibson then confided in A, confessing that he had a ’homosexual spirit’ which caused him to have numerous affairs across the parish.  While not telling A any details, Gibson forced him into the role of an adviser, asking him what he should do.  A decided (fatefully as it turned out) to go to the Bishop of the Diocese, John Habgood.  It is obviously difficult to tease out all the details of the interview, but clearly it was a difficult situation for A.  A major factor was the power issue, first between curate and vicar and also between curate and diocesan bishop.  No records of this meeting exist.  They were either never taken or subsequently destroyed.  Habgood later told A that Gibson had denied the allegations.  He, for his part, should stop listening to ‘vexatious gossip and causing problems’.  The parishioner who had witnessed the assault on the young refugee was never spoken to.

The story goes from bad to worse.  The relationship between vicar and curate deteriorated as Gibson used his power to belittle A’s personal character and professional reputation.  In short, A experienced vividly the Church in full self-preservation mode.  As the result of Gibson’s hostility, A soon found himself forced to resign his curacy as well as his home.  It was only thanks to family and friends that he was able gradually to put his life back together.   In later years A has had a highly creative ministry exploring the relevance of Celtic spirituality to the Church and new explorations of community life.

The fateful decision of A to go and see Bishop Habgood to share his problems about Gibson was a point of no return.  He had suffered sexual abuse himself at the hands of Gibson and he knew that his vicar was a danger to others. What realistically did the Church expect A to do?  The question has to be asked again and again as this story is shared by new generations of safeguarding professionals.   It is sad that this story has publicly, through the Hill Review, placed questions over the posthumous reputation of one who latterly was a greatly admired Archbishop of York.  It is clear from A’s testimony that Habgood had little insight into power dynamics in the Church.  He also showed no apparent understanding of the vicar-curate relationship, let alone the dynamics involved when a young curate entered into the presence of his bishop, to whom he had sworn canonical obedience.  There appears to have been no insight on the part of Habgood over the conflict of emotions for a curate to tell such a dreadful narrative.  I do hope that such poor pastoral interaction with very junior clergy is no longer found among the bishops.  Speaking from my own memory of that stage in my ministry, I can imagine how much courage it took for A to approach Habgood in the first place.  There was nothing vexatious or gossipy about this act.      

To return to the impossible dilemma of the abuse survivor.  It is a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t.  The very least that the current crop of safeguarding professionals can take from the story, is a readiness to learn from it.  To say that we do not do things like this any more is not enough.  We have to be able to say:  Yes, we have systems in place that allow a survivor to come forward and tell his/her story without ever being accused of gossip or being shamed.  They should also not have to risk being re-abused in any way.  Where was the pastoral support?  Where was the simple pastoral imagination that could make sense of the disclosure?  It was not on display then and are we sure that we have yet got things right for the future?  Stories like A’s experience must be used in the teaching of safeguarding.  The Church must be ready to hang its head in shame and say ‘No, this can never happen again’.                                                                                                                 

Dear Bishop Emma,

I am writing to you as one of many who want to congratulate you on your new appointment to the post at Lambeth, helping both our Archbishops.  No doubt you will be receiving plenty of advice from those who know you and from others who have expectations of what you might be able to contribute through this position to help the Church move into the future.  I write as one of the numerous retired clergy in your current diocese, but we have never met.  My interest now is to offer thoughts on one important part of your job.  This is the aspect of your role which is to advise the Archbishops on how to respond effectively to the avalanche of safeguarding and abuse issues that swamp the inboxes of those in authority in the Church.

I note that Gilo has already written to you recommending reading matter.  As you have responded to him, saying that you visit my blog, Surviving Church from time to time, I am going to assume that you will see this open letter at some point.  It comes with some thoughts of mine on what you might seek to achieve in this very complex, even messy, world of safeguarding.  First of all a word about my own ‘qualifications’ in this area.  Simply stated I have none, not even that being a survivor.  I also have no training in any of the relevant skills around safeguarding, like social work, law or psychology.  But I can claim to have taken an informed interest in the issue of power abuse in the Church over twenty-five years, having written a published book on the topic in 2000.  I also have had the experience of an ordinary parish priest.  My blog has posted well over 600 articles, the majority written by me.  This writing has, over time, resulted in an extensive correspondence with a variety of survivors of church abuse.  I remain in touch with many people who, I believe, have a great deal to offer the Church in terms of making things better in the future.

This issue of what the cohort of survivors have to offer to the whole Church is the first thing I want to raise with you.  Obviously, the oversight of safeguarding is only one element in your future job specification at Lambeth, but I hope you will regard it as an important one.  I want to state my firm conviction that the witness of abuse survivors is one the most valuable untapped resources the Church possesses in terms of successfully sorting out safeguarding for the future.  Financial compensation for survivors may be a part of it of what is needed.  Equally as important, I believe, is the creation of a new culture where survivors are properly listened to.  Their suffering and lasting pain must never be treated as merely something to be managed, before being lost in a large filing cabinet somewhere.  

One of the problems you will find very quickly is that the current crop of survivors’ testimonies is bringing much damage to the Church’s reputation and credibility in society.   Stories of predatory clergymen and organists abusing children of course sells newspapers.  The temptation is for the Church to attempt to respond to such stories by reassuring the public that vetting is better, training is better and that the future promises a safer Church for all.  These attempts to create the conditions for the Church to be a safe space are commendable.  But they lack one important ingredient.  This ingredient is one that I have already mentioned, the task of effective listening.  Some dioceses have made strides in this area … whilst others hardly at all.

There are two important ways that listening to survivors is a vital ingredient of the Church’s future response to the Safeguarding crisis.  The first thing is that it is only by listening to their stories that the solid foundations of future reform can be built.   Survivors need to know that the team of highly trained specialists are starting from a place of real understanding and insight before they start to plan and build for a better future.  The key to understanding is, above all, empathetic listening to existing survivors’ stories.  I believe that these stories are vitally important for you and others to hear in at least two ways.

Listening intently to what survivors have to say is crucial, as we have already indicated, because new policies can only work when they are rooted in what has already happened.  Sticking plasters cannot work unless there is a surface for them to be attached to.  So often the cry from survivors is that the authorities are trying to find solutions for the future when the Church stills seems determined to ignore or bury so much of what has already happened.  The first thing that survivors need to know is that the raw pain of abuse and re-abuse has been acknowledged.  This might lead to any one of number of potential responses.  One idea could be be a survivors’ day in the Church calendar, with special liturgical resources provided to be used by all.  A Day of Reconciliation between survivors and leading bishops might be organised at a major cathedral.   Above all, the torrid story of what sufferers have been through has somehow to enter the consciences and awareness of everyone, especially those who are making policy and taking decisions in this area. 

Survivors have another gift for the Church which has not been used.  They have memory which is not only of their personal stories.  One of the problems that has accompanied the never-ending renewal of the safeguarding structures at the centre of the Church, is the loss of corporate memory.  However skilled or highly qualified a new appointee may be, they cannot do the job properly if they do not know the stories of abuse that are scattered around in the Church’s memory.   Many survivors are walking encyclopaedias of the reports, the notorious individuals and parishes where abuses took place. They will have a finely nuanced understanding of the wider narrative that lies behind the IICSA reports.  They know the bits of the jigsaw, including many missing pieces.  One hour with a survivor will teach you far more than five hours of reading reports.  For one thing, a report cannot evaluate the impact of an abusing individual.  It cannot fill in the real emotions of fear, disorientation and deep loss that were experienced in the abusive event, nor the frustration of dealing with decades long of disclosures that were walked away from, or the corruption and cover-ups that survivors have had to fight a way through.  Written reports may record facts, but they can never reveal the raw emotion of past shameful events in the Church.  If you watched the recent Panorama programme on racism, you will remember the dramatic moment when Clive Myrie slapped down the  great pile of reports connected with the Church and racism in front of the Archbishop of York.  A similar quantity of reports and reviews have been made in the Church’s response to safeguarding – and their recommendations frequently ignored or ‘retranslated’ to suit the spin of lawyers and communications people and the PR management of Archbishops Council. Gilo has recommended books, most of which you appear to have read.  I am going to recommend that you meet survivors as a matter of urgency.  They will probably have a quite different perspective to the professionals and the experts on safeguarding, but you will get closer to the raw truth of what needs to be done in the next few years.  It is so important that you meet these people who carry all this knowledge in their heads and have strong well-informed ideas about how the Church might get things right in the future. 

Bishop Emma, there is an enormous urgency for you to help to put things right in the area of safeguarding.  The greatest contribution you can make on day one is a determination to listen carefully to all the voices clamouring for your attention in this area.  There will be professional input as well as the voice of survivors.   But as you hear each voice speaking, I would like you to think and ask yourself what each one represents.  The question that might be going through your head is this.  What perspective does this person represent?  Do they speak on behalf of smooth management and control, are they on the side of legal correctness, or are they promoting gospel imperatives of reconciliation, truth and goodness?  Gilo has a powerful image that he often returns to, the idea of bureaucratic institutions ‘hoovering up’ those who come into their orbit.  What he is saying and perhaps I am also saying is that the survivor community are urging you to retain your independence, your gospel convictions and your personal integrity as you enter what has become the political minefield of safeguarding in the Church of England.  Independence in this area will be hard to maintain, but if you succeed you will be doing something historically important for the Church. This may help to redeem the culture of a church leadership which has seemed very broken, but will also bring some healing to survivors.

Stephen Parsons Retired Priest living in Greystoke Cumbria.

The revelations about David Cameron working for a private finance company, where standards of ethics were not of the highest, have reminded us of the Nolan Principles.  These were formulated in 1995 by Lord Nolan and were offered as a statement of what was expected on those who accepted posts in government and public life.  The press and opposition politicians have been revisiting these seven principals.  They want to remind their audiences of the way that those in government, from the Prime Minister downwards, sometimes appear to be guilty of serious ethical lapses while carrying out their public duties.  While it is not my intention here to get involved in making judgments about the behaviour of politicians and senior civil servants, I can, for the purposes of this article, remind my readers of the seven words that sum up the Nolan Principles.  They are respectively Selflessness, Integrity, Objectivity, Accountability, Openness, Honesty and Leadership.

These seven principles of conduct in public life could, of course, merit a separate blog for each of them.  My purpose in listing them is to remind the reader that values and principles within institutions matter.   We have the right to expect that the people who represent us in public life and manage the country on our behalf follow ethical guidelines.  In listing these seven principles of public life, I am aware that there is no equivalent list in church life.  We do not have a statement that sets out the ethical basis for the way that, for example, church legal protocols are managed.  Is the principle of openness ever compatible with Non-Disclosure Agreements that are sometimes part of legal cases connected with abuse awards?  Is not the obsessive secrecy that has existed in the parts of the Church which knew about Smyth, but refused to say anything, another example of non-compliance to Nolan principles?   In short, the Church needs a set of its own principles – Church Nolan Principles.  These could then be appealed to whenever ethical standards are under attack or possibly being betrayed.

In thinking about the possibility of a set of principles that might help to guide the Church in the future, I realised very quickly that the Church in some areas of its life, can operate in ways that are a complete antithesis to ordinary standards of behaviour.  Taking this thought further, I have come up with a set of seven negative principles that churches sometimes follow.  Most of these impact on the ethical behaviour of the Church.  The examples that I give of these failures of standards, could be illustrated from various areas of church life.  For the purpose of this post I have chosen to make my points by looking at the recent thirtyone:eight Review on Jonathan Fletcher.  It is there we can see clearly what I choose to call seven anti-principles of church life.  These examples of poor behaviour each constitute a kind of shadow to the ideals that Nolan wanted to be enshrined in public life.  Some of these church anti-principles were found in JF himself and many still pervade the culture that nurtured him and over which he presided to the harm of many.   Let us look at each one of these, and see how they are illustrated by incidents or situations in the thirtyone:eight Review.

The first anti-principle that was revealed in the Review is the one that always gives priority to the interests of the institution over the needs of the individual.  The survival and the preservation of the institution’s power, in this case the con-evo constituency, will always take precedence over everything else.  We can call this anti-principle, the priority of institutional power.  This first anti-principle has two aspects or sub anti-principles.  The first of these is defensive in tone.   It will seek to push back any challenges to the whole by a whistle-blower or any other kind of challenger.  To make this defence, there are a number of powerful weapons at hand.  First there is shunning and shaming, followed by threats of various kinds.  The ultimate weapon is expulsion.    In the case of a religious group, like the ReNew constituency, expulsion is much more threatening than just being required to leave the organisation.  It has the implied threat of eternal punishment because you no longer belong to the ‘saved’ group.  These various weapons of control over difficult or dissident members, have had the result that, up till now, few individual voices have been heard in this group beyond the circle of its leaders.  The group entity has always prevailed in its determination to preserve the interests of the whole against those who question or challenge.

The second part of this anti-principle of group protection is the active encouragement of actions or inactions that preserve the group.  This anti-principle is about doing things or not doing them so that the interests of the institution may prevail.   The fulfilment of this second anti-principle is especially illustrated by the extraordinary inaction and failure of anyone in the ReNew circles to say anything about Smyth or JF.  This studied passivity of an entire cohort of Christian believers went on for over forty years.  It also accounts for what I referred to in a blog post as the ‘Great Silence’ that descended over the con-evo world after the offences of JF were first revealed in 2019.  The Review has used one word to account for this silence, the word ‘fear’.   It is this fear cultivated among insiders combined with an obsessive loyalty to the system that has helped to protect the organisation for so long.  Loyalty, fear and desperate protectionism towards the system/group have pervaded the con-evo world.  The institution prevailed by excluding the dissidents and whistle-blowers and by forcing loyal members to remain in passive faithful dependence.

The third anti-principle which is to be found more among the leaders of the con-evo constituency and tacitly tolerated among the followers can be summarised in this way.   It is the ‘born to rule’ anti-principle.  Someone has to be in charge, the reasoning goes, so those who went to the right schools/camps and knew the right people have an inbuilt and unchallengeable right to be leaders.  Leaders like the current crop of ReNew leaders who have assumed power in this way, want everyone to believe that their motives for taking charge are entirely altruistic.  However, there is no discernible democratic or accountable process through which to raise questions about suitability when they get things wrong.  Leaders who are appointed according to the rules of nepotism and the school tie may or may not be good and altruistic.  But whatever their qualities, they certainly need to be clearly accountable.  The fact that JF presided over the same congregation for thirty years was likely to be extremely unhealthy for all concerned.  But, being answerable to no one but himself, he could indulge his power and narcissistic needs free from any challenge.

Secrecy is another anti-principle to be discerned in the thirtyone:report.  We find secrecy in mysterious meetings among ReNew leaders where no minutes were produced or any record of who was present.  We can also refer to the way that the value of secrecy was sustained by the miasma of fear.  It was this anti-principle of secrecy that, protected known miscreants over long periods of time.  Secrecy was and is a necessary principle of the ‘school tie’ type of governance we have touched on above.

Secrecy is closely linked to another anti-principle, that of manipulation of the truth.  Some of the ReNew leaders spoke of not knowing anything of the JF allegations until the early part of 2019.  (+Rod Thomas has now made it clear that he knew in the autumn of 2018.) These are claims that are, frankly, difficult to believe.  The Diocese of Southwark was making detailed investigations into JFs behaviour in 2016 before the PTO was withdrawn (or surrendered) at the beginning of 2017.  This part of the story is important, and it is a pity that the Southwark authorities contributed, apparently, nothing to the Review. But even without the testimony of the Southwark team, it is hard for us to believe that none of the detailed enquiries into JF’s behaviour got back to the ReNew leaders.  It is also difficult to imagine that a thorough investigation took place which did not involve in any way the bishop in charge of the constituency of which JF was a key leading member.  We are also not helped to understand how a PTO suspension was to be enforced without anyone, not even the overseeing bishop, being told.  How is anyone reading the Review to make sense of these lacunae of information?  One additional fact that I have gleaned from a completely different source is that JF was ‘marched off’ one of the Iwerne camps in the summer of 2017.  Even if it might possibly have been the summer of 2018, that is still something that could not have taken place except at the instruction of someone in authority.  From what we know of the hierarchical system in operation in ReNew, somebody very senior was taking sanctions against JF in the summer of 2017 (or 2018).  That does not fit in with the protestations of William Taylor or +Rod Thomas and the others that they only discovered in late 2018/early 2019..

 The ‘orthodoxy’ of the ReNew group is seen to be an all-pervading system which does not tolerate discussion or disagreement.  JF, in his own writings, showed himself keen on the notion that truth never changes.  This could be seen as a pervading theological principle that is continued to this day.  I want to call this an anti-principle, but I have to acknowledge that this anti-principle is not one that involves ethics or morality.  Thus it is quite different from the others I have mentioned so far.

Nolan mentions, in his final point, the word leadership.  By this he is drawing attention to the fact that it is important for anybody in an organisation to be able to take a lead, when necessary, to challenge bad or dishonest practice.  There is little evidence of this kind of leadership in the rank and file of the con-evo world.   Rather the power of intimidation, the fear of being labelled ‘unsound’ and thus to be shunned, effectively sustains the status-quo even now in the world over which JF used to preside.

I wish that that the whole Church and its constituent parts, including those under the ReNew umbrella, could aspire to something similar to the seven ethical principles of Lord Nolan.  The civil service and the government of this country try to follow them, at least in theory.  Even when they fail, these institutions do one better than the Church.  Not only does the Church not even have an equivalent list of principles, but it often seems to operate from the negative list that I have set out.  The anti-principles that I have named here, are doing and will continue to do enormous damage to our national Church.

Responding to Abuse in the Institutional Church
by Fiona Gardner

by Cliff James

A profoundly intelligent, insightful and inspiring book, ‘Sex, Power, Control’ is essential reading for anyone who cares for social justice. 

Much of the public discourse around clergy abuse has focused on the acts that were committed, the institutional cover-ups, performative apologies and promises that “things have changed”. This traditional response oversimplifies the issue by re-imagining the abuser as a singular problem, a one-off “rotten apple”, who is mythologised as essentially “evil” and whose casting out – or incarceration – is supposed to provide reassurance that the system has been purified, the danger safely exorcised. 

In contrast to these traditional, oversimplified discourses, Fiona Gardner casts a powerful and intellectually forensic spotlight onto clerical abuse. She delves deeply into the psychologies of individual abusers, and into the “groupthink” of institutional hierarchies that have protected the abuser and vilified the victims. Arguably more importantly, she scrutinises the structural systems of power in patriarchal society that continue to engender abusive personalities and abusive behavioural patterns. We are left in no doubt that, until these systems of power and privilege are changed, our flawed society will continue to produce abusive personality types, particularly among those who are fast-tracked into positions of authority. 

In fundamental ways, the analytical reach of ‘Sex, Power, Control’ extends far beyond the Church of England; it provides critical insights into how our hierarchical, class-based society reproduces narcissistic, emotionally damaged and damaging personality types within the higher echelons of the Establishment. Gardner highlights the fact that a significant percentage of clergy were privately educated, as were most of the senior leadership of the Church. One brilliantly perceptive excerpt from the chapter on British public schools illustrates the damaging effect of this elitist education far more clearly than I could hope to summarise:

“The training of boys on the playing fields of public schools was supposed to produce ‘manly’ men … at the forefront of empire… This outdated ethos lingers on, partly because men who went to public schools (as did their fathers and grandfathers before them) are still dominant in positions of power in the core of the establishment… This means that there is a difficulty in changing the structure of the institutional church because the commitment of a powerful group to the institution derives not only from the institution itself, but also from their earlier experience of having been formed, apart from parents and family, to be part of the elite.”

In a later passage, she elaborates on the links between such an elitist education and patterns of abusive behaviour: “It is feeling entitled to be present, entitled to be there, entitled to be heard, entitled to be recognised, entitled to be promoted and …. entitled to have sexual conquests where and when you want and to beat others the way you were beaten. This is also entitlement but destructive entitlement – the ‘it didn’t do me any harm’ kind.”

These passages take on a greater relevance when one considers that 64% of the current Conservative Cabinet went to such fee-paying schools (compared to 7% of the general public)1. It may also cast some light on why the current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson – himself an Old Etonian – infamously and flippantly dismissed the IICSA inquiry (into historic cases of sex abuse in the Establishment) as “malarkey” and said money “was being spaffed up a wall, you know, on some investigation into historic child abuse.”

Johnson’s comments perfectly encapsulate Gardner’s point, that the British private education system fosters a patriarchal obsession with rules and authoritarianism; with devotion to the team and a dislike of “snitching” and “tale-telling”; with the veneration of a “manly” toughness of character, an acceptance of (even an admiration for) the bully, and the suppression of emotions; with a distrust of women, the mocking of any feminine traits in men, and minimal empathy for those who are perceived as weak or vulnerable.

In stark contrast to the emotional illiteracy fostered by the British Establishment and its private education apparatuses, Garner’s tone throughout the book remains emotionally intelligent, humane and empathetic while firmly analytical. Her approach is informed by her extensive experience as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, as a social worker, and as a safeguarding adviser to the Church of England. It is doubtful that anyone without this range of expertise could have produced a work so rich in psychological and sociological insights, while simultaneously and adeptly navigating the Byzantine labyrinths of the institutional Church.

In particular, her personal experience of working within the Church environment gives a greater depth and resonance to her analysis. In one stand-out incident, Gardner describes how – while providing safeguarding training to a group of bishops and other high-ranking clergy – she was surprised to see that several clergymen were laughing during a survivor’s account of being sexually abused as a child. “[I] can’t understand why she doesn’t pull herself together,” one of the clergy commented of the survivor, while another said, “she [the victim] had such a boring voice and went on and on”.

It would be satisfyingly easy to simply condemn the inhumanity of these clergymen, to regard them as “rotten apples”, and to go no further than outrage. However, Gardner does dare to go further: she interrogates the elitist system that produces such patriarchal ideology and normalises such abnormal behaviour. It is the system, she reminds us, that is the problem. Unless and until the existing systems of power in our society are changed, the abuse and the defence of abuse will continue unabated.

Notwithstanding the accounts of abuse and the equally reprehensible collusion by those in the church hierarchy, ‘Sex, Power, Control’ remains an inspiring and hopeful book. Gardner reminds us that change is possible, perhaps even inevitable, and that – more often than not – it is actuated by those on the margins. In this respect, the book celebrates the determination and courage of numerous survivors – such as Gilo, Janet Lord, Matthew Ineson and Phil Johnson – who continue to fight for the transformations that the institution, if left unchallenged, would never dream of making for itself.

It would be impossible to overstate the importance and relevance of ‘Sex, Power, Control’. It is not merely an analysis of abuse within the Church of England, but an exploration of those harmful patriarchal assumptions and structures that fracture the whole of society. The essence of this argument is, I think, best captured by Gardner’s use of a Carl Jung quote in the final chapter: “Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking”.

1 – ‘Two-Thirds of Boris Johnson’s Cabinet Went To Private Schools’, The Guardian, Amy Walker, 25/7/2019

Cliff James is a novelist and the author of a philosophical travelogue, Life As A Kite. As a survivor, his work appears in Letters To A Broken Church and he features in the BBC’s documentary The Church’s Darkest Secret.