‘Nothing justifies violence or coercion. Christian relationships are to be marked by love, gentleness and respect.’  These are words uttered by the new Archbishop of Sydney in Australia, Kanishka Raffel, but they could be spoken by a Christian leader anywhere in the world.  I begin this blog post with something completely unremarkable and obvious for a Christian.  It is, however, quite hard to find to find these qualities in some sections of the Church.  To illustrate my point, that violence stalks the Church in some places, I draw attention to some recent episodes that haunt our imaginations (or at least they do mine).

The first episode is the fear-laden culture that thirtyone-eight claimed to have found in its investigation of Jonathan Fletcher.  This fear that the report drew attention to, was the generalised atmosphere that pervaded the entire constituency where Fletcher held influence.  This inhibited people coming forward to say what they knew.  I have it on good authority that something similar has been found in the John Smyth enquiry.  Few of the witnesses have come forward with any degree of enthusiasm, even though they might have seen evil or worse still, suffered grievously at the hands of Smyth.  It seems that a fear of what might happen if they came forward, was the overriding concern that still motivates their actions.  This appears far stronger than any desire for truth and justice. 

We need to pause here while we ponder the link between violence and fear.  The word violence implies the potential threat, not only of having to endure physical mistreatment. There may also be the threat of receiving other debilitating experiences like shame, the destruction of self-esteem and total demoralisation.  The sharp word, the put-down phrase and the outburst of anger are all potentially tools of violence, effective in different ways of controlling people and ensuring their silence. In a way I feel no anger for anyone, as in the Fletcher enquiry, who fails to come forward after being subjugated by such non-physical violence.  It is also possible to be motivated by fear without realising that this fear exists.  It is a fear that may have become normative in the environment you inhabit.  It is only when you are asked questions about what you know that a sense of irrational fear and protectiveness towards your abusive mentors might kick in.  It might also dawn upon you at the same time, that what you had always thought of as respect and reverence, was in fact simply fear.  The Fletcher/Smyth culture seems to have been full of violence in this sense.  Many people who held these two characters in awe were also afraid of them.  The followers lived with a kind of dread about what one of those two, or their supporters, might do.  For a long period, there was this threat of violence which could undermine the safety and well-being of any who had the temerity to challenge such leaders or even their memory.    

When we extend the meaning of this word violence to include all these forms of threat and coercion, we can claim to see this widely in operation in the Oxford Percy case.  When words like troll are used against supporters of Percy, the visible hand of stronger threatening and bullying behaviour is not far away.  Who would ever have thought that anyone would find it necessary to block the gentle Angela Tilby for saying what everyone else is thinking about the car crash at Christ Church? The case against Percy seems entirely in the hands of individuals who have some interest in removing him from his post. Everyone else is appalled at the public display of injustice and violence against the Dean. I am still looking to find a single individual, without any personal stake in the confused nexus of cathedral and college, who supports the brutal campaign against Percy.  In all the months of persecution, no one has come up with a solid accusation of moral failing, apart from the hair-touching allegation.  The pattern for every other case of sexual abuse offender I have ever looked at, is that a perpetrator is almost never a one-off offender.  There is a pattern of misbehaviour over months and years.  No such pattern has emerged for Percy, and he is certainly not, as one of his accusers has suggested, a second Peter Ball. 

Actions of actual violence towards the Dean can be seen in the absurd over the top inhibitions placed on him by unnamed lawyers.  As Gilo has said these restrictions might be considered suitable for a notorious sex-offender like Worboys were he ever to be let out on bail.  Applied to the Dean they are acts of violence, even torture.  I have been reading up my notes for a lecture on shunning to be given, by me, to at an online conference in Chester in September.  The literature on the topic suggests that the instigators aim to deprive an individual of normal human contact.  This is a form of torture contributing, as in Percy’s case, to breakdown.  In some cases, this kind of cruel inhumane treatment leads to suicide.  The failure of Church leaders, the NST and the Diocese of Oxford to identify, or even notice, the utter barbarity that has been going on at Christ Church for over two years is extraordinary.  Is there some corporate madness going on at Christ Church that has infected so many other clergy and church leaders to collude with utterly ruthless and cruel behaviour?  From the outside these acts of violence are completely incomprehensible.  No justifying explanation has been offered at any point to indicate what might really be going on.  We on the outside are left to suspect that somewhere the Dean has threatened powerful vested interests.  It will probably have something to do with endowments or professional jealousies.  Dean Percy is the sort of person to question and challenge the status quo and the sense of entitlement that powerful people hold tightly to themselves.  The longer the dispute goes on, the more one is suspicious of the motives of those who have put so much effort to get rid of him.

The words violence and torture are not words that we ever expect to use in the context of church life.  But once we decouple their association with waterboarding and the rack, we see that they are proper words to use for any action which is designed solely to engender fear.  Many Christians in fact live within environments where fear is a dominant fact of life.  It may be found among followers of abusive charismatic leaders; it may be experienced by hard-pressed parish priests where the parish is failing to fit in with the vision of the diocese. Because of this, combined with financial shortfall, there is threat of redundancy, a scenario apparently encountered in the Diocese of Winchester.  Continuing fear may exist among the victims of a sexual abuser, or those who are accused, often unjustly, of being an abuser.  Fear, threat and coercion are sadly used as deliberate weapons to undermine and destroy others.  Somehow the Church has failed to notice how much that this is going on today.

The Archbishop of Sydney will not see this post, but if he were to see it, I would plead with him to understand how much violence and torture already exists in our churches.  It may not be the physical kind, but it appears as a violence engendering fear and utter demoralisation.  It is just as deadly to whomever has to face and endure it.  Perhaps one of the tasks of this blog is to help a few people to become more actively sensitised to the existence of the church violence that affects so many people.  Some are the victims of exploitative behaviour by abusers.  Others are the victims of persecution by institutions.  All are victims of the abuse of power.  Each one is precious in the sight of God and need his protection as well as ours as far as we can give it.

A flurry of activity has occurred recently on the St Helen’s Bishopsgate website.  This comes about as the Church authorities there respond to criticisms that their Rector, William Taylor, had held back over what he knew of John Smyth and Jonathan Fletcher.  To remind my readers, Jonathan Fletcher was the subject of an investigation by 31:8, the safeguarding organisation.  31:8, in their investigation, which appeared last month, reported that Fletcher had a wide influence in the con evo world and that some of this personal power was used abusively and destructively against individuals.  John Smyth is still being investigated by Keith Makin, but the broad outlines of his story are known.  For around four years between 1978 and 1982, Smyth possessed a cult-like hold over a group of young men, including the young Taylor who was a student in Cambridge after attending Eton. He was the subject of three episodes of beating in the garden shed in Winchester in the summer and winter of 1981.

The open letter to the congregation from the St Helen’s churchwardens strongly refutes the claim that their Rector knew anything untoward about the abusive behaviour of Jonathan Fletcher until February 2019.  They appeal to the findings of a law firm, Edward Connor Solicitors, who had investigated whether or not Taylor had knowledge of Fletcher’s activities at an earlier period. They concluded that he did not. A parallel pattern of complete ignorance of the facts is also reported for Archbishop Welby in respect of John Smyth before late 2013. Some of the speculation which had led onlookers to a contrary conclusion was built on the fact that both Taylor and Welby were moving in circles of people who definitely did know.  In Taylor’s case there is also an acknowledged bond of friendship with Fletcher. There is in addition a widely reported claim that Fletcher was ‘marched off’ a Iwerne camp in the summer of 2017.  Such an event could not have happened unless there was authority from leaders within the constituency approving the action.  Rumours are also bound to proliferate over the fact Taylor has said almost nothing in public about the known facts of the Fletcher scandal during the period from June 2019 – June 2021.  Silence by a prominent leader, who knows an accused person following the revelation of a public scandal, is not a good look.   Taylor has known Fletcher since his school days through the Iwerne network and, in addition, Taylor has also been the de-facto leader of the whole conservative Christian constituency since around 2013.   We might also have expected some open expressions of regret and apology from him in June 2019 when the Daily Telegraph story first broke.  It is hardly surprising that some people have come to believe that this silence from him and other conservative leaders are attempts to bury scandal from public view.  Two years is long time to wait for a public response to a major church scandal by one of its notable leaders and spokesmen.  

The new revelation in the churchwardens’ letter is that Taylor was, as a young adult, a victim of John Smyth’s beatings and its accompanying theology (he refers to it as a cult). This evokes for me the image of a personality with two stages of self-expression.  The first personality is that of the young man, the victim and sufferer of Smyth’s malevolent intentions.  The other personality is the one that appears at the point when the influence of Smyth is finally overcome.  At this point the moral awareness and responsibility of the young Taylor changes to being that of an active responsible agent.  Anyone looking on would have felt deep compassion for the first young personality, still under the thrall of Smyth.  In the straight jacket of pain and corrupt Christian ideas, Taylor was, for a time at any rate, a victim of something toxic and horrible.  But the young Taylor seems to have passed through that victim period as well as can be expected.   After five years in the army, he was able to proceed to ordination training and ordination.   At some point Taylor adopted the new personality which we can describe as that of the survivor rather than the victim.  Only he can say when that moment may have occurred.   When in a state of victimhood, the focus would have been on raw survival and his own healing.  All his moral decisions would rightly have promoted his own well-being.  As part of the process of recovery, Taylor would first have had to process the toxic teaching of his one-time mentor/abuser, especially in the light of the new pastoral responsibilities for the spiritual health of others.  One awareness that would now belong to him was an understanding of the dangers of the cultic bond that had been forged between him and Smyth.   Once Taylor had completed his transition from victim to survivor, we now would hope to see him giving real attention to stop what had happened to him happening to anyone else.  This is where the story is incomplete.  We are left with a series of questions.  I know nothing of Taylor’s actual record in the safeguarding realm, but I am aware of occasions when his potential influence might have radically changed the Smyth story.  On his appointment as Rector of St Helen’s Bishopsgate in 1998, Taylor obtained a position of great influence in the Church of England and within the con evo constituency.  Subsequent organisational changes in that network have been driven by him personally.  I understand that the ReNew constituency has come into being largely as the result of his vision and energy.     Since the retirement of Jonathan Fletcher in 2013, Taylor has been considered by many as the most influential individual in the conservative Anglican network. My questions to Taylor are the following.

1. Did you suspect back in the 80s and since that that there might have been, apart from yourself, other survivors and victims of Smyth that needed help?
2.  Did it at any stage worry you that those who enabled Smyth to go to Africa and allowing him to live there, were putting the lives and souls of young men in physical and spiritual danger?  Did you have any knowledge of the financial arrangements (the Colmans) that enabled the Smyth family to disappear from Britain?
3. Why did you not help us bring this all to light sooner – there was no necessity to “ out yourself” ? indeed I understand that some who knew or strongly suspected your victim status were very very careful to respect your privacy.

The letter from the churchwardens of St Helens is designed to make us feel compassion for Taylor as a Smyth victim.  I, however, have indicated that I see two separate personalities for Taylor. One is indeed the Smyth victim aged late teens and early twenties. For him I have compassion and sadness at what he had to endure at the hands of John Smyth. But there is another persona for Taylor. Here is the Taylor more or less fully recovered from the early bad experiences and now able to accept the privileges and responsibilities of power and leadership. While he may still be referred to as a survivor of Smyth, one cannot treat him any more with kid gloves when there are aspects of the use of his power that need to be challenged in the present.  This Smyth survivor is, we trust, recovered from the spiritual and emotional battering he received 40 years ago.  We must be allowed to ask these direct questions because he is now a powerful adult leader with the capacity to make a difference.  The questions are being asked by an individual who believes that the current abuse trials of the Church of England could have been dealt with far better if everyone, Archbishops downwards, had listened to their consciences rather than fighting to protect reputations and institutions.  Since the Channel 4 programme in Feb 2017 about John Smyth, there have been a chorus of voices asking questions.  It has taken a long time for institutional silence to give way to the beginnings of accountability and openness.  William Taylor and St Helen’s are an influential part of the whole and they must not only do the right thing but be seen to be doing the right thing.   The accusations of secrecy and dishonesty can be levelled at every part of the Church.  It is not merely a con evo problem.  It is rather a problem for all institutions.  As long as institutional secrecy and dishonesty pervade the Church, the process of continued healing for abuse will be halted and hindered.  No one wishes that.  William Taylor, who was once an abuse victim, has clear and vital responsibilities for leadership in this safeguarding task.  He is a church leader, and we need his leadership in theisvital area of church life.

The judgement by Dame Sarah Asplin should have marked the end of at least one major strand in the Percy affair at Christ Church Oxford.  It was meant to be the conclusion of the CDM process first initiated by Canon Graham Ward against the Dean back on November 5^th 2020.  This process began as a response to an incident of alleged ‘sexual harassment’ on October 4^th, by Percy against a Ms X in the vestry    The process had been handed over to the Bishop of Birmingham as the Bishop of Oxford believed himself unable to oversee the process on the grounds of existing involvement.  Two things have hindered any move to completion following Dame Sarah’s judgement.  First there has been absolutely no comment coming from the sponsors or enablers of the CDM process to say that the process is complete and that they accept the judgement.  We had always felt that silence throughout the process was particularly unfortunate in respect of the Bishop of Oxford.  At the beginning of the whole episode, at the time when a group of senior CC members were attempting to remove the Dean, we heard little in the way of support from Bishop Steven Croft.  As Dean Percy is the Dean of the Diocese of Oxford Cathedral, some measure of solidarity or support might have been expected from this source.  But as time has gone on, the complete absence of any supportive comment from the Diocesan Bishop has changed the nature of this pervading silence.  Earlier it could be interpreted as indicating neutrality.  Now the same silence feels like active hostility.  To say nothing by way of comment to the ruling by Dame Sarah is particularly indicative that Bishop Croft’s sympathies are not supportive of his Cathedral’s Dean. 

This suggested hostility of the Bishop of Oxford towards the Dean is an unfortunate scenario, to put it mildly.  Bishop Croft cannot, because of this, ever act as a mediator between the College and Dean.  The recent failure to say anything supportive, even after the Asplin judgement, shows that the Bishop is likely, in fact,  to be in active sympathy with the Dean’s enemies in the College.  This one-sideness is no doubt helped by the fact that lawyers acting for both the College and Diocese come from the same firm, Winckworth Sherwood.  This firm has received fees, totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds, from one or other of these sources to harass and persecute the Dean. 

The Asplin judgement has not halted the College’s intention to proceed with its own tribunal.  In a recent public statement, it has referred to the judgement as an assessment which had no bearing on the College’s determination to carry out its own processes.  This summary dismissal of the judgement of a high court judge seems high-handed.  In my last post I mentioned the possible involvement of the Charity Commission.  They had expressed unease at the quantity of money being spent on a case which was far from charitable in intention.  In spite of the College finding senior lawyers to offer their opinions about the legitimacy of the various legal steps being taken to get rid of the Dean, the Dame Sarah judgement cannot be so easily dismissed.  The other glaring issue is how a tribunal set up by the College can command respect for its processes when two of the members are appointed from within the College.  One of them is to represent the Cathedral constituency of the foundation.   I understand that the Archdeacon of Oxford, the Venerable Jonathan Chaffey, has been nominated.  Here lies a further problem.  The Archdeacon is one of the members of the Cathedral Chapter involved in overseeing the recent CDM process against Dean Percy.  If the Archdeacon has been part of the hostile, now discredited, attack on the Dean through the CDM, it would seem that he should be unable to offer himself in a quasi-judicial role in this other case.  The conduct of the College so far, in the five separate attempts to rid themselves of the Dean, means that they seem to have developed a nonchalant disregard for the rules of process.  What is a mere judgement by a High Court Judge when you control the assets (totalling a half billion) of a venerable institution with links to the monarchy?  The overall demeanour of the Christ Church senior members towards a single vulnerable individual has been hard to understand.  The College was founded with a charitable and Christian purpose and these qualities have become almost entirely invisible in recent years.  From the outside, Christ Church seems to stand for the values of bullying, chronic insensitivity to pain, cruelty and the abuse of power.  Any compassion that might have been shown to a suffering individual and his family has apparently been entirely absent.  Whatever else the eye-wateringly expensive tribunal may seek to achieve, it will not succeed in persuading anyone looking on that the College or Chapter is behaving either charitably or in any way with Christian values. 

Quite apart from the fate of Dean Percy, we need to have regard for the for the fate of the College, its reputation in the University and among the university institutions across the country.  The campaign against the Dean has had an obsessive quality which does little to attract or create admiration among those who look on.  If the dons succeed in destroying and removing their Dean, who will praise or congratulate them for this?  Even if somewhere in the ongoing programme of persecution, a sliver of justification exists, it is certainly invisible to the onlooker.  The same failure to exercise any form of Christian compassion or understanding can be laid at the feet of the senior hierarchy of the Oxford diocese.  The problem for the church is that relationships and institutional dynamics have become so corrupted by these examples of poor behaviour that the whole institution will take years to recover.  Are we to see no resignations or apologies after the highest legal authority trashed the enormous act of hate, vitriol and bullying against a single individual in the CDM process?  There are many caught up in that act of crowd madness.  Reputations have been shredded by the incomprehensible rush to judgment and persecution.  How long will the toxicity take to clear in the Cathedral chapter?  Ten years ?  Fifteen?  Certainly, no other institution will be in a hurry to employ existing members of this group, when the values of normal ethics have been so thoroughly turned upside down and forgotten.  This is not about a story about a defenceless young woman facing up to power and a sex-mad Dean.  No, the story started several years before.  The causes of the persecution are not all available to us but we can surmise a saga of professional jealousy with the preservation of privilege and power all playing their part.  Whatever the origin of Percygate, it is not edifying or a good advertisement for Christian values.  In the middle of all the recrimination against the Dean, it has been forgotten that Ms X showed a Christian willingness to meet the Dean and resolve the issue between them. This was forbidden by those who needed her testimony to add to the accusation against him. All those who have stoked up the story and cause so much institutional as well as individual damage have much to answer for.  The judgement of history will not be kind to the perpetrators of such terrifying institutional bullying and cruelty. 

It is entirely disproportionate that this matter should be referred to a tribunal.   With these and other similar words, Dame Sarah Asplin, the President of Tribunals and the most senior legal voice in the Church of England, delivered her verdict on the Martyn Percy affair.  The legal effect of this judgement is that process of the complaint under the Clergy Discipline Measure has been killed stone dead.   When and how all the existing Kafkaesque prohibitions imposed by the church lawyers against Dean Percy will be lifted, remains to be seen.

The CDM against the Christ Church Dean has been dragged out over seven months, backed by several members of the Chapter at the Cathedral, two diocesan bishops and other senior advisers and church officials. The effect of heaping so much in the way of blame and calumny on one person has created an environment of tension, toxicity and hatred in a relatively small institution.  The church authorities who backed the CDM should, by the norms of natural justice, face a day of reckoning.  The public have watched the horror of so much institutional loathing being poured out on to Percy.  Every single person involved in this calculated organised torture should have to do something to help mitigate the poison that has spread so far within the Church around Oxford.   If there is no sign of remorse or regret for this behaviour, the implicated church authorities are going to symbolise psychological bullying in the eyes of many.  It has taken a top legal mind to see the obvious.  Whatever was said or done in the vestry on that October Sunday, the alleged offense does not merit a tribunal.  Such a response ‘is entirely disproportionate’.

What happens next?  Clearly the Church CDM proceedings against the Dean have nowhere to go.  The Core Group will have nothing further to discuss and the entire CDM process and the sanctions they imposed should be allowed to fade away.  Quite how the Church authorities, the Bishops, the National Safeguarding Team and the local safeguarding group who allowed this accusation to get so far will explain things, remains to be seen.  Perhaps the silver lining is that the whole CDM process discussed in an earlier blog, will be further undermined and discredited in the eyes of reasonable people, inside and beyond the Church.  If this Christ Church nonsense reflects the workings of the church justice system, then we definitely deserve something better.

But, of course, Dean Percy still faces another legal process, the tribunal being set up by the College to judge whether his actions are ‘immoral, scandalous or (of a) disgraceful nature’.  This tribunal has an independent judge appointed and two internal assessors.  Clearly the two internal assessors could outvote the independent chairman Rachel Crasnow QC.  We can hope that Dame Sarah Asplin’s existing assessment will carry some weight in this other process.  In which universe can it be claimed that touching someone’s hair in a non-sexual manner is immoral disgraceful behaviour.   On the side of natural justice is also the fact that the Charity Commission is watching.   They have already served notice back in January that they dislike the fact that Christ Church trustees have been spending exorbitant sums of money on this vendetta against the Dean.  If they regard the next tribunal process as in any way falling outsides the College’s charitable purposes, the individual trustees will be expected to be personally liable for the cost.  Each trustee could be required to pay around £56,000 to the case if the CC deem it necessary.  It may be that the independent judge will take a similar view to Dame Sarah and declare the proposed punishment of the Dean disproportionate to the alleged offense.  Even if she was outvoted by the internal assessors, that fact would be noted by the Commission.  Can the College really claim that charitable money is being expended for charitable purposes with these tribunals against the Dean?  The Church has also just spent vast sums on its own CDM process and now the College wants to repeat their first tribunal process.  The total spent in 2018 came to millions.

The judgement of Dame Sarah Asplin is an important step towards justice for Dean Percy and the rediscovery of common sense in a college in Oxford in crisis.   We are possibly looking at the end of the beginning in the process.  Many institutions and individuals are effectively on trial in the Percy affair. Reputations are being put at risk for decades to come. It is not just the Cathedral that has suffered a blow to its reputation; it is also the Diocese of Oxford, its safeguarding team and the NST.  The integrities of a range of individuals, from clergy, within and beyond the Cathedral, to a number of disgruntled dons, are being put under close examination.  Already the judgement by Dame Asplin has exposed the disproportionate reactions by those who were involved in the CDM process.  The inhibitions against the Dean in the name of preserving the safety of the College community, have been so absurd as to discredit and devalue the whole process.  This is not the time to go back over this long-lasting saga.  Clearly my readers will long ago have made up their mind as to whether Martyn is a ‘sex-pest’ or the grossly wronged persecuted victim of vindictive misbehaviour. 

What can we hope for?  We can hope that attempts by the Church of England to incriminate Dean Percy will cease immediately and that a little shame may descend on at least some of those who have ‘bigged-up’ what is, even to take the worst interpretation, hardly a serious sexual assault.  All the elements of vindictiveness need to be challenged.  The Church, in spite of its teaching, is, however, not good at saying sorry.  The second thing we can hope for is that the second tribunal set up by the College against its Dean may be seen to be a potential threat to the financial well-being of the trustees.  The Charity Commission may become, like the Chair of Tribunals, the purveyor of reason, common sense and proportionate dealing within the ugliness of an internal dispute within a college.  It is unlikely that the path forward will be smooth, but we do dare hope, one day, for peace and justice to descend on this corner of the Church and one embattled college in Oxford,

In many ways, the final 30 years of the 20^th century were a golden age to be a clergyman in the Church of England. Various issues affecting the profession had found resolution during that time. The first was a levelling up of stipends so that the wide anomalies of pay that had existed in pre-war years no longer prevailed. A second privilege was for the beneficed clergy to have had the security of the freehold. This meant that, assuming that no criminal activity was involved, most difficulties or challenges could be resolved by simply patiently sitting it out. The word ‘living’ meant precisely that. One could stay in a parish right up to the age of retirement. Decent pensions had been established so that many clergy would go on to live useful lives after retirement, free of poverty.   The old system of secure tenure, needless to say, had incubated abuses of various kinds.   Incompetence or immorality which did not break the law of the land might be hidden and never dealt with. Freehold allowed an eminently unsuitable clergyman to remain in his vicarage without doing any work and obtaining a full salary.  Anthony Trollope recounts the 16 year sojourn in Italy of Canon Stanhope for ‘health reasons’.  If you were determined to be idle and give your life to collecting butterflies or alcohol consumption, there was very little the system could do about it.

The relatively recent reforms of clergy freehold regulations have given us the system of Common Tenure. Although the wide-ranging privileges pertaining to freehold have been modified, the clergy of the Church of England still enjoy a great deal of employment protection.  Gross idleness still exists and there are stories of clergy who have so completely alienated their congregations that they preside over an empty church on a Sunday morning. The Common Tenure system does not find it simple or easy to cope swiftly with a situation of pastoral breakdown. There are regulations in place to resolve these situations, but quite often everyone sits around waiting for an upcoming compulsory retirement. It is still very difficult to move on an Anglican clergyman, as long they are innocent of any criminal behaviour.

Back in 2003 the church introduced the Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM) and this came into effect in 2006.  This was to allow the Church to operate a streamlined system of holding clergy accountable in the event of malfeasance.  It would also provide mechanisms for any complaints against the clergy to be heard beyond the parish where he/she worked.  The alleged offences did not have to be criminal in nature.  This Measure came into effect in 2006.  Overall, the CDM has not done a great deal to make the system better for all parties.  It has in fact done much to undermine the sense of security that the clergy used to enjoy.  Complaints under CDM rules are allocated to internal processes within a diocese.  The most serious cases come before the diocesan bishop who acts as both judge and jury in some cases. Archdeacons and church lawyers have a part to play in the quasi-legal decisions that emerge from these processes.   In spite of some revisions to the Measure in 2016, the Sheldon Trust, based in Exeter, still reports massive stress and unhappiness caused by this legislation. If the clergy of my generation enjoyed too much in the way of legal protection against complainants, then the clergy of this generation have on occasion become vulnerable to harassment and even persecution through the exercise of this Measure.

In the past week the Sheldon document entitled ‘I was handed over to the dogs’: lived experience, clerical trauma and the handling of complaints against clergy in the Church of England, has appeared. This is a harrowing document, and, in many ways, it could be sufficient on its own to put off an ordinand from pursuing his/her vocation. It speaks about the lived experience of stress, uncertainty and life changing fear that can come to anyone who has had to enter the legal processes of the CDM. The current document is also presented as a response to the central Church seeking to replace the old legislation of 2003/2016. Up till this point Sheldon has regarded itself as a partner with the Church in redrafting this legislation and offering its expertise in helping the Church find a replacement for what has gone before. The point has been reached where the Trust no longer feels able to continue this partnership. The gulf of understanding between the two parties has become so wide that the Trust no longer wants to give energy to this process of reform because of the way the Church is conducting this process. In short, the Sheldon Trust is saying to the Church (my precis) ‘we tried to help you but your response to the research we have offered to share with you has been feeble.  We have given a lot of time trying to show what an utter monster the CDM has become. If you don’t want to listen then you have to accept that we have to withdraw from the process of cooperation and advice.  Our research showed that your legislation just been a source of cruelty and terrible pain for many of your clergy.  The vast majority of CDM victims are found to be innocent of any moral failure but they still made to pass through a crucible of life-changing pain. You have received our analysis of what is wrong.   You will now have to carry on a reform of the process on your own’.

The Church of England, in short, is being left to make huge changes in its legislation to deal with disciplinary matters connected with the clergy. There have been many accounts of the way the CDMs issued against the clergy have functioned. Two descriptions well sums up the process, inconsistent and devoid of compassion.  Some CDM processes have spawned the tortured institution of core groups.  It has, however, been noticed on many occasions that few of these core groups are deployed against the bishops themselves. There is, as far as I know, currently no shortage of CDMs in the system somewhere, lodged against bishops.  The protocols of the CDM generally does not find it easy to scrutinise the behaviour of senior clergy and so, in most cases, these CDMs of bishops etc seems to be automatically dismissed when they reach the attention of an Archbishop. What the Church is being asked to do in creating a new structure for legislation is indeed massive. The Church of England needs the data gathered by the Sheldon Trust and the collective wisdom amassed by their listening work with over-stressed clergy.  These are among those who have experienced real trauma over the years following the arrival of the CDM.  It is hard to know whether the Church has the human and organisational resources to produce a new model to replace the CDM failure.  The House of Bishops has already agreed that the CDM process is not fit for purpose.  In spite of this, it does nothing to halt the notorious Kafkaesque process being played out at Christchurch Oxford. The recent revelations by Private Eye about the restrictions being imposed on the Dean under CDM protocols are grotesque.

How do we see the future of the CDM process or its replacement? The answer is that the labour and time required to create such a new process is enormous. A group of people, with the combined skills of theology, law and pastoral common sense, would need to spend a couple of years working out how the whole process of clergy discipline can be reimagined. Do we have these resources? We probably do, but the people I have spoken with, suggest that we need this work to be done by a completely new set of church officials.  The original authors and current overseers of the CDM legislation need to be swept aside.  Someone, or better, a group, needs fresh ideas about the best ways to resolve conflict in parishes, while recognising that a system of discipline for clergy is still needed. The Sheldon reports suggest that many complaints have nothing to do with bullying or abuse, but frequently centre on issues of churchmanship. We need perhaps also a new breed of bishops which can get to the heart of such disputes between clergy and laity because they understand the pastoral needs of both sides.   In saying this, we are returning to a familiar cry.  Give us bishops who are pastors to their clergy rather than judges over them.

I should finish this piece with a brief reflection on the enormously difficult task that faces anyone with authority in the Church having to sort out the problems of the Diocese of Winchester. If Bishop Dakin is unable to agree to whatever is proposed to solve the crisis, the conflict could become very difficult.  A diocesan bishop in the House of Lords, even after a public challenge of this kind, still has a great deal of legal clout in the Church.  No individual or group at present oversees the bishop of a diocese, and no one is entrusted with the authority to question his/her decisions.  The fact of a Diocesan Synod opposing its bishop is, I believe, unprecedented and the ramifications are wide.  Church law does not seem to allow for a diocesan bishop to be guilty of anything untoward and there are no obvious precedents.  The Bishop Ball case is not a precedent since the current complaints about +Dakin are not about criminal behaviour.  CDMs against bishops normally seem to fail, no doubt, on the assumption that bishops are always above unworthy or unethical behaviour.   The CDM process failed to anticipate bishops ever coming under scrutiny. Rules and sanctions are for the ‘lower’ clergy. The solution to what has been called by some as Dakingate, is at present unknowable. Whatever happens to bring an end to the current tension, it will require a great deal of money and the attention of legal fixers in somewhat the same way as the Channel Islands breakdown. One has to ask in this situation whether all the right skills are available to the Church at the centre.  Do we have the resources of law, pastoral skill and insight that can resolve these dramatic and catastrophic disruptions to the system?

It is ironic that these two major areas of church life which require so much in the way of leadership and technical and legal skill should be taking place during the sabbatical of the Archbishop of Canterbury. One hopes and prays that wise heads will prevail and that we as a Church will come through. Wisdom in high places is what is required, and we pray that it may be found.

My own personal knowledge of the Winchester Diocese is slight.  Apart from once leading a two day residential workshop for the Continuing Ministerial Programme some twenty-five years ago, I have had no other dealings with the Diocese.  Nevertheless, I find myself wanting to understand more fully what is behind the announcement several days ago that the Bishop of Winchester is ‘stepping back for six weeks from his duties’. 

What can any outsider, like me, hope to uncover about this situation beyond the terse announcement from the Bishop of Southampton?   Thanks to the internet, the answer is quite a lot.  Two major sources of information are available to us.  One is the free and frank discussion by insiders on the website Thinking Anglicans.  Supplementing that, there are a variety of fascinating, if sometimes difficult to understand, documents about Diocesan policy that have been produced at various times during +Tim Dakin’s tenure as Bishop.  A third source of information on the Diocesan website sets out +Dakin’s own professional and academic background.  As some are now questioning whether the original appointment of +Dakin to his present post was justified, it is natural that these qualifications are being examined with close attention.  A copy of his doctoral dissertation is available online for inspection for any who wish to read it.  This was awarded by Winchester University in 2020.

My starting place for looking at these questions is a document, a job specification for a post in the Winchester Diocese, dated 25^th September 2019.  It is for a post called a Church Growth Missioner. The post did not appear to be filled at the time.  Nevertheless, we have something that would have been read by all would be applicants for the post.  It gives those of us on the outside of the diocese a good snapshot as to how the Bishop and his School of Mission saw the progress of his ambitious plans for the Diocese.  Backed up by other evidence from internally published documents, we would be right to think that these published ideas are a good summary of the Bishop’s own thinking about what he wanted to see for the priorities for the Winchester Diocese and its parishes. 

According to this first document, the Diocesan Synod in 2013 had committed itself to four strategic priorities in its move to becoming a ‘mission-shaped diocese’.  In summary, these priorities committed the Diocese to 1) authentic discipleship, 2) a reimagining of the Church, 3) to be agents of social transformation and 4) belonging together in Christ.  To undergird this vision the Bishop had summarised the ‘mission of Jesus’ in three words.  These were to be passionate, pioneering and prophetic.  These ‘P’ words had, I believe, formed the substance of the enthronement sermon given by +Dakin in 2012.  Another somewhat curious word appears in the Missioner job description – sodal.  The spell check on my computer is querying whether such a word exists, but +Dakin explains that it refers to the aspects of ministry beyond the conventional parish ministry.  These are sector ministries, chaplaincy, fresh expressions and new forms of church.  Moving a conservative establishment like the Diocese of Winchester to such radical ways of thinking and practice was always likely to be a tough call.  The issue is perhaps not whether the Bishop’s ideas and aspirations were right or wrong, but whether it was ever realistic to expect such old and new structures would be able to come together friction free.  Can sodal ever be reconciled with ‘modal’, the more conventional methods of parish life and ministry?  Just as importantly can a whole diocese receive inspiration from heavily jargonised slogans of questionable meaning such as ‘living the mission of Jesus’?  For some years, all the parishes of the Winchester Diocese have been struggling with a further mission initiative, known as Mission Action Plans (MAP).  Every benefice, large or small, was required to draw up a local MAP.  This would then be updated every few years.  My expectation is that all such Diocesan initiatives would have introduced into many parishes an inordinate amount of stress and pressure.  Surviving these frequent demands on energy and time would not have left parish priests with much stamina to continue with the day to day pastoral care of their existing congregations.

Churchmanship is thought by some to be at the heart of the present resistance of many senior leaders to the oversight of +Dakin.  No doubt a clash between conventional ways of being church and mission-focused ideas originally forged in Africa and elsewhere overseas was likely.  But the chief mistake, according to +Dakin’s critics was to expect any church model for growth to be suitable for every situation.  That is just not the way the Church of England works.  The Church Missionary Society (CMS) where +Dakin had worked as Chief Executive, is a conservative organisation and this, added to the fact that he had little understanding or experience of English parish life, made a culture clash almost inevitable. In Anglicanism, one size can never fit all.  Few church leaders would even have attempted such an attempt to lay down a single model of church life for every parish in the diocese.  The only other place in the world attempting such a thing is the Diocese of Sydney in Australia.  The attempt there has been a cause of much unhappiness.  I have no idea whether +Dakin wants all ordinands to be trained locally (Sydney-style), but that would have been a logical next step for a monochrome mission-focussed diocese to take.  Reading the documents put out by the diocese gives one no sense of any varieties of churchmanship being celebrated or even tolerated in the parishes.  There is no acknowledgement of the gifts that different traditions can make to the whole.  I can imagine that more traditional and catholic parishes are feeling under siege under this episcopacy.  They would welcome the opportunity to catch their breath during this episcopal ‘stepping back’.

Whenever a public figure is questioned over their ability to do a job, there will always be someone who goes back to look at the appointment process to see if all protocols were followed.  It has been widely commented on that +Dakin had no parish experience in the Church of England and that has come to be a important issue in the discussion about his suitability to be appointed as the bishop of a diocese in 2011.  A second area of query is his formation and training for the priesthood and his other academic qualifications.   There are various breaks in +Dakin’s published CVs which have not been accounted for.  His first BA degree is from a University in Plymouth followed by a MTh in 1987.  The MTh was obtained from King’s College London and, according to Wikipedia, this was linked to ‘ordination training’.  As far as I know the days of ordination training at Kings were long over by 1987.  Students who studied at Kings went on elsewhere to complete training.  Even if that year in London was counted for full time training, it was a very short period.  Most ordination candidates were then required to do at least two years.  The missing period between 1987 and 1993 also needs clarification.  What was the young Dakin doing at that time?  The published account on the Diocesan website refers to him being in Oxford doing doctoral research with no dates given. Did this time of study in any way link with ordination training or formation? 

The circumstances of his ordination, already discussed on Thinking Anglicans, need to be explained further.  The account that is given suggests that the ordination was in 1993 when he took up the job of Principal of Carlile College in Nairobi.  Was this ordination authorised by an English bishop issuing what I believe are called ‘letters dismissary’?  Had he passed through an English selection conference which could then be activated in Africa? Was anyone in England involved with his ordination in Africa?  The Crockford entry we have, also seems to suggest that the curacy at Nairobi only came into operation the year after he was made Deacon – in 1994.  In short, the ‘title parish’ seems only to have been added to the process of his ordination as a kind of afterthought.

The gaps and queries we have about one of the most senior prelates in the Church of England are legitimate.  No one is suggesting actual academic fraud but there are outstanding questions that that leave loose ends.   Over the next six weeks the question of whether +Dakin is ever to return to his post at Winchester has to be resolved.  One would like simultaneously to have these additional queries about his academic and ordination credentials cleared up once and for all.  As things stand at present, the suggestion that +Dakin is underqualified and has been over-promoted is hard to argue against.  That would also, by implication, cast a finger of blame against unnamed individuals who presided over his episcopal appointment. Was his appointment to Winchester by any chance an expedient to extricate him from his CMS post where, by the accounts of those who knew him then, he was the cause of much unhappiness?  Almost all diocesan bishops have first served as suffragans so as to prove their worth before taking on a diocese.   Is the failure to observe this convention in this case now a reason never again to break it?  The ‘stepping back’ of a diocesan bishop in the face of pressure by his Synod and senior clergy is unprecedented in the history of the Church of England.   Is this the beginning of a new calibration of power in the Church?  Will power now return to the same Synods who represent the grass roots of the parishes to make autocratic and arbitrary decision making by prelates impossible?  There are many possible positive possibilities for the future.  The task of reallocating power in the Church will not happen overnight, but, when it happens, we may see something healthier, wiser and more just in our national Church.  Let us hope so.

In a statement today (Thursday) the Archbishop of Canterbury has said ‘everyone who knew about the abuse perpetrated by the late John Smyth and failed to report it will be investigated by the National Safeguarding Team’.

This extract from the online story by Madeline Davies will be included in the printed version of the Church Times coming out tomorrow, Friday. On the face of it, these words have to be considered as fantasy because the number of people who knew about Smyth in the period between 1982 and 2012 number at least a hundred.   The idea of any organisation investigating a hundred people without enormous resources of manpower and time is risible. But there is a further aspect to the statement by the Archbishop. Many of these presumed witnesses had been known to him personally both in his undergraduate years and later.  He has moved close to these same circles for much of his ministry. He must have had at the very least a suspicion about who knew what, even if  he had limited knowledge of the detail before he was properly briefed in 2013. Since that revelation in 2013, it must have hung heavily upon him as a Christian that so many people he had once looked up to were among the colluders and bystanders for one who did so much evil and caused so much pain.  The pain was not just physical; the actions reverberated right through the networks of loyalty and friendship that bound the constituencies of evangelicals together.  The con evo group which had protected Smyth and his crimes for over 30 years has successfully kept its silence.  Is a promise of an investigation now, forty years on, going to undo any of the damage that the silence had so dramatically prolonged?

The full investigation announced by the Archbishop today, together with his full personal apology to the victims of John Smyth, is additional to the Makin enquiry. This latter is now a full 12 months behind schedule. The report is believed to have turned out to be a long way from completion and we are unlikely to see anything during this calendar year 2021. Even if people are now revealing what they know to Keith Makin, this information has been proving difficult to acquire.  The code of silence and fear that we noted in the Fletcher enquiry seems to be routine in the con-evo circles that Smyth occupied. Assuming a successful completion of the Makin report, we would hope to see the full story revealed by this time next year. What will it show? It will probably show that numbers of people had some inkling that something was amiss, but it was not in their paygrade or their responsibility to do anything about it. Meanwhile considerable sums of money, from private charitable trusts run by the Colman family, were spent on allowing Smyth to take up a post in Zimbabwe and then South Africa where he was free to groom and abuse young men once again.  We must never forget the fate of Guide Nyachuru, whose death should hang heavy on the consciences of all who facilitated the departure of Smyth to Africa.

We need to return to the Archbishop’s statement once more. It is breath-taking in its implications. If everyone who knew Smyth and was in some position to disclose comes to a total of 100 individuals, where are the resources to come from to make this kind of enquiry?  We are not just talking about individuals here and there, we are also talking about entire institutions which were deeply implicated in the story.  There are many stories of corporate failure to add that of individuals.  Just to list the institutions implicated in the Smyth story, we have quite a formidable group. We have the Titus/Iwerne trustees, Winchester College, Scripture Union and the entire REFORM network at the time. There are also several large parishes where the Iwerne influence was strong. There is also the question of the funding bodies that enabled the Zambezi Mission to come into being. The full story of what John Smyth did overseas has yet to be told. Are there institutions in Zimbabwe and South Africa to be investigated for enabling his activities? How does one set up enquiries into so many groups and organisations? The obvious answer is that it is impossible.

When we come to the individuals who knew, or may have suspected, that something was seriously wrong, we are dealing with quite a large group of current leaders in the con evo world. Obviously, many of them were extremely young at the time but we need to hear directly from them.  Hugh Palmer, the former Vicar of All Souls Langham Place, is named in some accounts as knowing the events of the past around Smyth.  The slightly younger generation of leaders, like William Taylor, need to come forward and tell everything they knew.  Silence is not the same as ignorance.  Silence may indicate complicity at the least.   It is hard to imagine that a one-time chairman of the Iwerne Trust was allowed to disappear without any discussion or comment. One would like to know more about the relationship between Jonathan Fletcher and John Smyth.  Fletcher’s silence about his own alleged misconduct is perhaps typical of the culture of the con evo world.  If that is not in fact a repeated pattern right across the network, then we need to hear more from the current leaders.  They need to speak frankly and openly about what they knew.  If they do not, then their reputations and their place in the history books will be much diminished.  The public will assume complicity in a massive event where because of silence, abuse and sadistic cruelty were permitted to flourish.

In naming some of the institutions which have some corporate responsibility for the scandals of John Smyth, I realise that, in the secular world, a scandal of this dimension would require resignations and real accountability to be shown. So far, as others have commented, not a single church person has lost a job or been officially reprimanded for the appalling failures for which the Archbishop is now apologising. What seems to be happening now, as before, is that in the face of scandals and past misdeeds of church members, nothing is ever done to make a difference, apart from a wringing of hands and expressions of regret. Individuals have failed, but I feel the greater crime has been the corporate one. I do not know what it is like to be a part of one of the named institutions which has manifestly covered up immorality and crime.  It must, in fact, be appalling to be guilty of knowing dark secrets and having done nothing to bring them to light.  The names of the wealthy trustees of the mission charity supporting Smyth in Africa are well known, but they have never come forward, as far as I know, to reveal their part in the drama or express regret for it.

I wish that it were possible for the NST to do this gargantuan task. It cannot and will not.  Perhaps the promise to do something impossible is a ploy aimed at calming, temporarily, the anger of all those who have suffered at the hands of John Smyth.  I end my somewhat angry rant about the Archbishop’s statement without any clear suggestions for what can be done to resolve the promise of something which is impossible to do.  Perhaps on his return from sabbatical, the Archbishop should help the situation by setting up a response to the Smyth scandal which is possible to accomplish in such a way that would help survivors.

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.