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/ ]