From time to time I have had cause to return to the case of Jonathan Fletcher. It represents one of the most significant pieces of unfinished safeguarding business within the Church of England. At the time of writing we are waiting for the report which is being compiled by the safeguarding organisation, thirtyone:eight. There was some discussion, a couple of weeks ago, about whether the report was ready and about how much in advance it was being shared privately with Fletcher’s old church Emmanuel Wimbledon. No one, as far as I can see, gave final answers to these questions.  We will have to wait and see, but I believe the report to be imminent.

Emmanuel Church Wimbledon, where Fletcher was Vicar for thirty years between 1982 and 2012, realises that there is a great deal of public interest in the reported activities of their former Vicar.  This would be true both of his erstwhile parishioners as well as the wider public.  In many ways, through the reporting of Gabriella Swerling in the Daily Telegraph, there is a segment of the public that has had more exposure to the story than many senior members of the Church of England. I have also got the impression that senior safeguarding officials in the Church and those in the National Safeguarding Team are showing little interest in the upcoming report.  It is perhaps a case of ‘if we ignore this matter, even if the newspapers are reporting it, it will soon go away’.  There is also an apparent perception that because Fletcher’s former church operates in a semi-detached relationship with the Church of England, it can be shrugged off as not being of concern to the rest of the Church.  Emmanuel is what is known as a Proprietary Chapel and thus, legally speaking, is not fully under the authority of the local Bishop of Southwark. The Bishop still maintains a level of oversight over the parish and has the power, which he has exercised, of granting and withholding licences and PTOs for the parish.  Also, the power to ordain Emmanuel clergy still falls to the Diocesan.  Two of Fletcher’s ordinands, Rod Thomas and Andy Lines have become Anglican bishops.  In the latter case, the consecration was, in the eyes of the C of E, somewhat irregular.

The report that we are waiting for from thirtyone:eight is of significant importance in several ways.  The Church of England’s leaders cannot afford to ignore its revelations.  One issue is that of Jonathan Fletcher’s past (and continuing?) influence over quite large swathes of church life in England.  Considerable numbers of clergy and parishes are in debt to this influence and his exercise of power whether through patronage or in other ways. As the Vicar of Emmanuel and as a leading member of the Church Society/REFORM network within the Church of England, Fletcher had a great deal of influence in that network. Any association with him, a key person in the network, but dogged by accusations of exploitative behaviour, will be remembered and perhaps regretted.  Every church where he preached, every conference which he led or spoke at, every vocation he fostered will be impacted by what we expect to be revealed in the report.   A sense of shock and even shame will doubtless reach right across the conservative evangelical world over which, for a long time, Fletcher presided like an uncrowned king.

The thirtyone:eight report that is being commissioned by his old Church will no doubt focus on the thirty year period while he was Vicar of Emmanuel.  Fletcher’s influence and his story in fact go back much further. As a curate of the Round Church in Cambridge from 72-76, he was a major influence on many Christian young people at Cambridge University and through his attending the Iwerne camps right up to 2016.  It is hard to conceive how anyone who mixed in those circles would not have known him. If the thirtyone:eight report concludes that his influence, when at Emmanuel, was at times unhealthy or even toxic, the same risk would have applied to this earlier period.  Those who knew Fletcher at Cambridge were, we would suggest, in the same danger as his parishioners in Wimbledon.  Among those that came under this influence during the 70s were such names as the young Nicky Gumbel and Justin Welby. Nicky acknowledges the debt he owed to Fletcher for his Christian formation.  He said in a forward to a book of Fletcher’s writings published in 2013: ‘He (Fletcher) met me three hours a week for a year. And regularly thereafter until I left university….. He has carried on helping hundreds of people like me find faith….his passionate faith combined with …..natural charm have been used by God’.  Such words of enthusiasm for Fletcher might well explain why there is so little interest in his case among our current Church leaders.  However the complete career of Fletcher is judged by future historians, it is clear that there are still many in the Church who feel they owe him an enormous amount and are perhaps dreading the thirtyone:eight insights.  Meanwhile I have it on good authority that there are no files or any paperwork kept on Fletcher by the NST in Church House.  Martyn Percy, by contrast, has suffered the attention of two NST sanctioned core groups. No doubt each core group generated enormous quantities of paper.

While we are waiting for the Fletcher report, we are also awaiting Keith Makin’s conclusions about the behaviour of John Smyth and who may have known about his activities. Smyth and Fletcher operated in different locations, but their stories intersect at significant points. The main common denominator was the Iwerne camps.  Both men also shared the ability to avoid the attention of the police and the Church authorities, even though there had been questions about their behaviour for a considerable time.  Each of them was successful at charming and manipulating  those around them.  In Smyth’s case his support network resulted in tens of thousands of pounds being collected to allow him to live abroad until his death. Whatever precisely was the appeal of these two men to keep the Con-Evo constituency silent and compliant, it has certainly been effective until now.  When I first started asking questions about Fletcher, I discovered that one or several of his acolytes had systematically gone through the entire Internet removing all mentions of his sermons, talks and other activities.  It was as though someone believed that they could make him disappear.  Unfortunately for them, written programmes were less easily destroyed, and I gave space on this blog to the notice of a conference on preaching, called and presided over by Fletcher himself, in the early part of 2017.  This had attracted over 30 male clergy including 4 bishops.  The fact that Fletcher could attract so many to listen to him was remarkable. Especially important was the fact that this meeting took place after Fletcher’s PTO had been removed.  Smyth and Fletcher both inspired considerable devotion from their disciples, receiving both loyalty and silence even in the midst of their abusive behaviour.  It was a story of strong influence and domination over the young impressionable Christians who looked up to them.  One reading of the Smyth/Fletcher story, is that each operated as a father surrogate.  They were able to offer emotional support to vulnerable young men who spent so much time at boarding school away from their real fathers.  The Public School had deprived them of normal family life.  It was also training them in a quasi-cultic culture of silence, domination and unquestioning obedience.  Tragically and cruelly the vulnerabilities of these young men were exploited and used to gratify the power needs of these two Christian leaders.

The thirtyone:eight report that we await is one that has been commissioned by Fletcher’s parish and not by the Church of England. We have already had some glimpse of what will be revealed in this report, thanks to the Daily Telegraph attempts to research the story.  There is, however, much more detail to be revealed. Whatever the report tells us, it will not be a good outcome either for the Wimbledon parish or the wider Church of England.  Up till now Fletcher has had protection from senior members of the Church who belong to the Iwerne network.  That protection, reinforced by Fletcher’s membership of the Nobody’s Friends dining club, will not be tolerated by a press who is alert to this story.  I can imagine that there may be two separate stories.  One will be the retelling of the old stories of abuse, nakedness and ‘forfeits’.  The other will be the story of a Church which has known about a serious case of power abuse but has consistently over decades turned away its gaze.  Several con-evo institutions, such as Oak Hill theological college and St Ebbe’s Church in Oxford have been happy to benefit from the Fletcher private trust, even after the scandal of his behaviour became public knowledge.  The sin of avoiding inconvenient and thoroughly toxic facts is something that has to be laid at the door of both the central Church of England and the Con-Evo network.  Perhaps the greater blame attaches to the cluster of leaders and congregations that belong to the so-called ReNew constituency.  In any event, both groups, the central Church and the ReNew network, should urgently prepare themselves for the outcry that is likely to be heard with the publication of the thirtyone:eight report.  The loudest accusation may well be the cry of hypocrisy.  The readers of the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph seem to loath hypocrisy more than almost anything else.

The behaviour of this one man, Jonathan Fletcher, may yet wreak as much damage on the Church of England as the behaviour of Peter Ball.  Once again it is not the actual individual abusive activities that cause the greatest disgust; it is the apparent inability of the Church to operate with transparency.  Secrets, cover-ups and actual lying all undermine integrity within an institution.  It is this repeated failure of integrity that seems to represent the great failure of the Church.  Without integrity there is a threat to its ability even to survive to serve another generation.

The Statues Gasped: A testimony of being healed from childhood sexual abuse alongside the experience of facilitating healing.  Sarah Chapman and Anna. 2020  Privately published but available from Amazon. 

I sometimes wonder if my blog readers are curious about my background in the Church which has led to my concern for power and abuse issues.  Those who have followed this blog a long time will know that I write, not as an abuse survivor but as someone who wants to help such individuals to explore ways to find healing in one or other of its many manifestations.  In this I can draw on my personal experience of clerical ministry over a long period.  In particular, I write as one formerly quite actively involved in the Church’s healing ministry.   Having been exposed to this ministry, I am fully aware that it sometimes has a shadow side.  The Church can, while offering wholeness, be a place of harm.  Much of what is written in this blog is, to a certain extent, an exploration of this terrifying paradox.  The highest and the best, the Christian good news, can sometimes be quickly twisted to become the occasion of evil, deep pain and horrifying suffering.

My background experience within the Church’s ministry of healing and deliverance has given me some sensitivity to the needs of the abused.  One of the issues that constantly come up in the pages of this blog is the way that survivors can be re-abused through the wrong kinds of intervention and support.  An abuse event is not just a one-off experience of pain, it can have terrible life-long consequences which affect relationships as well as emotional and physical health.  Few survivors receive the highly skilled interventions from professional therapists or gifted spiritual counsellors that they need.  Alongside the difficult journey to health, which may be offered by psychotherapy, survivors are also struggling to find some kind of justice.  Having to meet the demands of these two strivings, the search for therapeutic healing and justice, it is hardly surprising that many victims of abuse fall by the wayside and become invisible.  Public survivors, the ones representing the invisible victims, have to be courageous and strong.  The journey they have to endure is hard and exhausting.

Just recently I was sent a copy of a book, The Statues Gasped, which deals with the topic of healing for abuse survivors.  It takes the form of a narrative about the help offered to an abuse survivor by a Christian priest/therapist, Sarah Chapman.   In the narrative, the survivor, called Anna, slowly and painfully finds her way to wholeness aided by the resources of skilful counselling and the Christian faith.  Anna is in the process of recovery from the life-changing effect of sexual abuse perpetrated on her as a small child and teenager by her own father.  The help that Sarah Chapman is able to offer her is both spiritual and therapeutic. The insights that are shared in the book by both therapist and survivor help us to have a fuller insight into the process of healing from abuse.  It is costly work both for the survivor and her therapist.

Anna’s abuse experience at the hands of her father was an act of gross betrayal by both her parents.  Neither seemed to understand the need for the growing child to feel safe and protected.  As the result of the massive psychological traumas which went on throughout her childhood, Anna developed Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).  DID is one of those complex disorders encountered in the text-books.  Here, through Sarah’s description, it become possible to understand something of how it operates.  At the same time we realise that it may probably be commoner that we had thought.  For the purpose of our understanding here, DID is a disorder that can occur as the result of the mind trying to deal with a highly stressful event.  This might be something like a sexual assault.  Because the trauma cannot be acknowledged or processed by the conscious mind, particularly when it lacks maturity, the memory of it, for the sake of survival, is sealed off.  It remains buried where it does not have to impinge on day to day awareness.  The problem for the abused person is that these fragmented parts of the personality, each containing traumatic memories, can suddenly be activated or triggered into conscious awareness without warning.  In Anna’s case there was, among others, a six-year-old dissociated personality.  This fragmented part of her personality would sometimes appear, complete with the understanding and sense of terror that had become frozen by Anna at that age.  Sarah quotes from the leading writer on Trauma, Van der Kolk: ‘experiences cause people to become hopelessly stuck in the past.’   Friends and would-be helpers had to be prepared for these sudden personality shifts.  Anna was carrying several of these unintegrated personality fragments from her past, from an infant self up to a teenager.    Each one of the parts or fragments of her personality had a frozen memory of abuse.  The healing task, to put it at its simplest, was for the therapist patiently to connect with each one of these split-off personalities.  Then they each had to be loved and nurtured back into the core adult personality.  Sarah, in short, was offering appropriate therapy to every one of the dissociated fragments of Anna’s personality.  The toddler in Anna needed security, the six year old reassurance and the teenager answers to the questions around growing up.  This required a great deal of time as well as a great deal of skill.  The healing love that was brought into Anna’s situation was not just what Sarah, as her therapist, could offer her, but there was a sharing with every part of her with the love of Jesus himself.  In this way the healing process was a spiritual as well as a psychotherapeutic process.

The book is helpful to readers because it goes into considerable but non-technical detail about this process of trauma and the way that dissociated states can arise.  After reading the account I realised that perhaps I too had encountered this disorder without having realised what it was.  Sudden uncontrollable bursts of emotion in a stressful situation may perhaps indicate a moment of regression to a dissociated part of the personality.   There is so much to be understood about the aftermath of abuse and trauma in general.  Whatever the extent of DID in society, it is important for any of those involved in the care of the abused at least to be aware of its existence.  The importance of the book is then not only to make us aware of a distressing outcome of abuse but also to realise that there are possible grounds for hope.  Christian healing and psychotherapeutic intervention can offer a path back to healing.

This book is, I believe. the very first written by a Christian professional that relates DID to childhood sexual abuse.  As we would expect, the book explores one important theological theme that occurs in every abuse scenario.  How does one forgive?  The exploration of this theme is dealt with wisely and realistically.  There is no ‘forgive and forget’ playbook.  There is rather a psychotherapeutically informed recognition of the costs involved in making this possible.  For Christians, the reality of forgiveness will reach right across the boundaries between faith and good psychotherapy.  Sarah handles this theme with care and sensitivity.

One of the remarkable aspects of the book is the way that Anna and Sarah seem genuine partners in the path to healing.  It is written as a journey of mutual discovery and one feels that their common faith allows them to occupy a place which we may call spiritual intimacy.  This is an expression that I coined for myself some thirty years ago when I was engaged in an active parish healing ministry with my wife.  The role of prayer brings the ‘healer’ and the one seeking help into a distinctive partnership.  Sarah is alongside Anna as a spiritual companion.  She also has the wisdom to show how Anna herself has to do much of the hard work of prayerful meditation and reflection.  Much of this is done, we discover, as an anonymous member of a cathedral congregation.  Anna’s own written account allows us to share this side of the story.  Quiet private reflection on the words of worship and prayer feed the soul and become a powerful tool in the journey towards healing. 

In this powerful testimony of Christian healing, there are no miracles or short cuts.  Rather this is a story that fully acknowledges the pain, the catastrophe and destructiveness of sexual abuse.  Nevertheless, it points us to a realistic path to healing.  In describing this path we are taught several things.  In the first place through the description of DID we are shown what needs to be done for some survivors.  Like Anna, they are, maybe, carrying life-long trauma, resulting in a fragmentation of the personality and massive inner disturbance.  The inner child, or shut off fragments of neglected personality, need to be reached and integrated into the core adult personality by the loving skilled intervention of the therapist, Christian or otherwise. 

Having now read this book, I have a new appreciation of the potential needs of survivors who may suffer in this way.  While the book I have been commending does not qualify any of us to be therapists ourselves, it does raise our horizons of understanding of the task that may need to be followed.  Everyone who has any dealings with survivors should read this beautiful book.  It describes the hard work of healing but it also indicates that there is hope.  That hope does in part lie within the resources offered to us in the Christian faith.

In recent days we have heard about the removal of the suspension which has been hanging over the Bishop of Lincoln, Christopher Lowson, for some 20 months.  The story has, from the beginning, attracted much comment.  This was the first time that the Archbishop’s power of suspension had been exercised against a serving bishop pursuant to amendments made in 2016 to the Clergy Discipline Measure 2003.  This blog will not attempt to cover all the detail of the case, but the Lincoln story raises a number of issues that are worthy of our attention.

I begin my comments with an assurance to the reader that I have absolutely no inside information about the Lincoln case.  All I know is from the public domain.  But some new information about the Bishop’s suspension in May 2019 has begun to trickle out.    Some of the details will probably always remain hidden.  What we have learnt over the past few days is that there was a safeguarding offence to do with the Bishop’s mishandling of a case involving one of his clergy.  For this failure he has now received a formal penalty.  This is a rebuke and, following it, Bishop Lowson is free to return to his duties.  Needless to say, there was a much more severe punishment that the Bishop had to endure.  He had to live under a cloud for twenty months, unable to work or connect with his diocese.  That was a far more serious and painful matter than any rebuke.  The whole episode brings us back to a consideration of the way that the Church operates its own legal system, here the CDM and the use of core groups.  They seem once again not fit for purpose.  We need, however, to remind ourselves at this point that the 20 months of purgatory endured by the Bishop is a relatively light sentence compared with the ‘sentences’ which abuse trauma and C of E structures have condemned many survivors to put up with.  They have to live with not only the effect of their original abuse, but with a legal structure and an institution that so often seems neither to understand their pain nor show any willingness to help them find healing and justice. 

We need here to pause to revisit the original announcement of the suspension of Bishop Lowson in May 2019.  An allegation against the Bishop had attracted the attention of the police and thus the church authorities in the person of the Archbishop of Canterbury.  From the little we now know about the matter, it is not easy to work out why there was a basis for police involvement.  The police did, in fact, drop their interest in the affair in January 2020 with a statement to the effect that, from the evidence they had examined, no offence had been committed .  The Archbishop’s statement in May 2019 declared ‘if these matters are found to be proven I consider that the bishop would present a significant risk of harm by not adequately safeguarding children and vulnerable people.’  The police in Lincoln added, in their own statement, a suggestion that there was some connection with a wider investigation into safeguarding management decisions within the Diocese.  The statement from the Archbishop emphasised that ‘there has been no allegation that Bishop Christopher has committed abuse of a child or vulnerable adult’. 

According to those who have made a close study of the current Clergy Discipline Measure  the Archbishop was applying the section that states (section 37(1)(e)): ‘Where …the archbishop of the province … is satisfied on the basis of information supplied by a local authority or the police …that the bishop … presents a significant risk of harm, the archbishop may… suspend him from exercising any right or duty of or incidental to his office’.  It is interesting to note that the power to suspend only arises when harm to others is considered to be a real possibility.  The words of the Measure suggest that there has to be evidence of a threat of actual harm to a child or vulnerable adult.  But the Archbishop’s statement had ruled out any such harm.

What were the real grounds for suspension if this risk was not in evidence?  The simple answer may be that the section I have quoted, 37(1)(e), is not fit to cover the type of eventuality that we find in the Bishop of Lincoln’s case.   The CDM legislation does not fit the facts of Bishop Lowson’s situation and so we find the text of the Measure is being put through a process of contortion in an attempt to make it work.  In short, we appear to be witnessing a flawed process.  Something similar has occurred in Christ Church Oxford where the Church has declared the Dean a ‘risk’ (against all the evidence), and he is unable to meet with his own adult son without a chaperone.

In both places, there is a subservience to some highly destructive and harmful legal protocols which the Church itself has invented.  We note, also in passing, that the application of these rules is highly selective and that notorious individuals accused of serious abuse are somehow ignored by the Church and appear not to attract the attention of senior church officials in the NST.   Our present concern is the fact that real people get harmed when Church legal processes get things wrong.  This is what can happen when the actual situations the Church faces are not allowed for in its own rules.  As long as the Church has the power to produce laws and regulations that sometimes fail the test of justice and fairness, its reputation will be harmed and undermined in the eyes of society.  Its power to affect change and create a wholesome influence on society will be weakened.  Getting the Church’s legislation right is important, perhaps too important to be left to lawyers alone.

In the original statement from the Archbishop there was another point made which also seems to contradict what is contained in the CDM provisions.  Apart from insisting that the Bishop Lowson was not suspected of being an offender against children and vulnerable people, the Archbishop also described his suspension from his duties as “a neutral act”.  The Archbishop may have wanted to effect the principle of ‘innocent until proved guilty,’ but the actual CDM provisions that were being applied were far from neutral.   The Church, in other words, has once again found itself tied to a process that is not suitable for purpose.  The natural meaning of ‘risk’ is that the Bishop of Lincoln, unless inhibited by law, was potentially liable to harm others.  In other words, CDM rules, by having this word ‘risk’ injected into every process at a very early stage, force those dealing with a case to decide on guilt or innocence before any evidence has been heard.  In the case of Bishop Lowson, the accused found himself forced to live in two parallel universes.  In one he was held to be innocent until proved guilty.  In the other parallel reality, and according to the CDM, he ‘presented a significant risk of harm’.  Neither universe fitted the actual situation at all well.  But once again we see the Church of England locked into legal processes that do not appear fit for purpose.  Survivors of abuse find it hard to discover justice because of the way the ‘system’ works against them, privileging the institutions who can pay the most.  In the same way, potential safeguarding offenders also fail to find justice because of flawed processes.  The pain of exile that this Lincoln victim has had to endure should be openly acknowledged.   Whatever he may or may not have done, Bishop Lowson has been forced to live in a state of limbo for 20 months.  Will that time and the stress he has endured ever be recompensed?

Bishop Lowson appears to be a victim of poorly designed Church legal processes in the same way as Dean Percy and George Carey.  Each of them may have some faults in their pasts, but the way the church processes have operated in each case has been shameful if not scandalous.

But flawed structures of justice do not operate on their own.  They need willing servants to put them into effect.  There are of course senior church functionaries who could, if they chose, blow a whistle to stop these core group/CDM processes when they are operated cruelly and destructively.  The fact that the suffering of each of these three men has been allowed to continue so long is an indictment of some of those in charge in the Church.  They choose to leave bad protocols in place even though they know they cause harm to those who are felt to be less important.  We are told that the whole CDM process is under review.  Will we see alongside this review a sense of shame and penitence on the part of those who have allowed the Measure to operate unjustly and, in some cases, malevolently? 

by David Brown

David Brown writes about a frequently missing ingredient in Church life, especially within its disciplinary processes

45 years ago, I served an Admiral within his staff of about 30. He was commanding a group of warships deploying round the globe, exercising with eleven foreign navies as we went.  I learned something important from watching him at close quarters which may surprise you: his unconscious demonstration of the power of love.  One-to-one, he treated subordinates as friends, regardless of rank – getting to know them, listening to what they had to say and sharing in their humour.  In no sense was he a popularity-seeker; this was surely an outcome, but never an aim. 

Unsurprisingly, we all loved working for him.  We ‘worked our socks off’ for him.  He never raised his voice, and when some rebuke was needed, a raised eyebrow was generally enough.  Under his kindly rule, we found an unusual satisfaction in working with our colleagues and subordinates.  Long-term friendships formed, and I still relish biennial reunions.   I sense he was a man of faith.

This helps me understand the immense power of love we find in Jesus – a power to draw together, opening the gateway of faith.  Delving into the nature of God’s character is instructive, for the love God draws us into is nothing less than radical.

For love is not a technique or method, it is at the heart of God’s revelation.  It opens our eyes to who God is, His nature, how He views His world, the shape of His intentions and how He works.  Yet love is meaningless in a vacuum.  God offers love to every person and can reveal it to anyone – even the antagonistic – we simply need to receive it.  It is contagious. God’s mission to make the loveless lovely is described beautifully.  His love-flow is directed into those who have never experienced His love, to make them lovely.  A miracle.

All these things have come to mind as I ponder the Church’s attempts to replace the Clergy Discipline Measure.  The church seems to be drawn more and more into a sterile burdensome bureaucracy — at the expense of relational pastoral care.  Whilst the New Testament is mercifully free of emphasis on procedures and process, the subsequent millennia have seen a gradual replacement of Grace by Law.  And now, bishops risk being stripped incrementally of their Ordinal role to embrace discipline, not discipleship, as a component of “pastoral care.”

Delegation of effective pastoral care to others may work for lesser issues, but a process that may strip priests of their ministry, livelihood, and future, self-evidently requires the closest episcopal understanding and involvement.  If bishops cannot deal redemptively with such tasks, they should not be bishops.  Our ‘front-line’ clergy, for whom the episcopacy is there to serve and enable, become the victims if discipline is irregular and inadequately overseen.  Effective parish ministry should be the primary goal in a bishop’s oversight.  It is, after all, a shared “cure of souls.”  They should spend much time in this direction.  If they cannot deliver oversight here, they have no significant function, and the Church will drift and wither.

In current practice, it seems the apostolic model has shifted in many places from enabler of effective relationally based pastoral care to initiator of clergy discipline by which is now meant punishment, with severe consequences.

The ‘elephant in the room’ is surely that relational shortfall in which the Church now finds itself: the loss of genuine caring episcopal contact with parish clergy, which should enable and encourage parochial ministry.  This has resulted in a lack of trust in senior clergy.  Indeed, I hear it said that some, if faced with parish trouble, would never approach senior clergy because of the risk of it being turned against them. 

In the 10 years that I chaired the PCC of our small parish there were five visits from an area bishop or archdeacon.  Each occasion felt a little like an Ofsted inspection.  There was scant benefit, except maybe for the ‘inspectors’.  A managerial culture – inherited, unnoticed and unchallenged – has replaced episcopal pastoral care.  I suggest some church-life traits that have caused this and act to hinder relational development across the Church:

• Lack of real pastoral contact with clergy – senior clergy seldom seem to prioritise this.
• Mission Action Plans.  The idea of planning is surprisingly absent from New Testament accounts. There was no sign at all of the apostles planning missions. Earlier, it was the Pharisee Gamaliel who spoke truth on the matter to Jerusalem power: “If this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. (Acts 5.38,39)”
• Measures of Church growth.  Do church leaders ever ponder the reason behind God’s Old Testament strictures against census-taking? Should we rather be looking for faith development and growth in discipleship not numbers?  It is Kingdom Growth that matters.
• Notions of effective ministry as being harmonious.  Would Paul’s ministry be regarded as successful today, based on peace being established in communities? Jesus did not promise peace but a sword. The measure of effective ministry is transformed lives and communities not necessarily comfortable existence.
• ‘Religious atheism’ – those who present themselves as godly but are not (as described in 2 Tim 3:2-5), such people infect churches and local ministry but often successfully ingratiate themselves with senior clergy.  
• Clericalisation – which disables the laity.  We seem to have a long history of expecting God’s wisdom and initiatives to be channelled solely through human hierarchies.
• Diocesan and national ‘honours and awards’.  God alone knows the hearts of men and women; whose rewards are in heaven.  The Church seems to reward those who uphold the status quo rather than those who comfort the comfortless and disturb the comfortable.

Lastly, referring to so-called Clergy Discipline issues, I suggest the following are key points to be at the heart of the renewal of this matter, recognising that nurturing pastoral relationships are at the heart of effective witness and service of a loving redemptive God:

• Any lack of trust between leaders and led is a significant underlying problem.
• Law does not change people, relationships do.
• Procedures and processes have no power to bless.

The power of strong mutual relationship offers the route to durable solutions.  This enables a dependence on God who reveals His loving purposes and opens doors to redemptive transformation.

On Wednesday (27 January) the trustees of Christ Church Oxford received a letter from the Director of Regulatory Services of the Charity Commissioners (CC).  This letter questions the decision to set up a second tribunal against the Dean.  In particular, the CC are:

“seeking further information and assurances from the members of the Governing Body about why establishing a Tribunal is:
• in the best interests of the charity and its beneficiaries.
• a responsible use of the charity’s resources.
We will also examine how, when reaching this decision, the members of the Governing Body:
• took account of our published guidance and previous regulatory advice; and
• identified and managed any conflicts of interest and / or loyalty.” The letter adds: “This is not an exhaustive list. Full details of the information and assurances we require will be set out in a separate letter to the charity’s registered main contact.”

All that I have quoted so far is taken from a comment published yesterday on this blog by David Lamming, a retired lawyer, and a member of the Church of England’s General Synod.  He is among those who have been working for such an intervention by the CC in the Christ Church affair.  He could see, as I have done, that whatever the rights and wrongs in the present round of the struggle between Dean and members of the College, the affair has involved a series of profound failures of process which relate to events back two years or more. 

What is the Commission saying with this letter?  They seem to have a detailed understanding of the way that Christ Church governors have been responsible for expending eye-watering amounts of charitable money on the campaign of seeking to remove the Dean.  Such a campaign hardly counts as charitable activity.   Christ Church College, along with every other charitable institution will have had to prepare for the CC a list of the charitable purposes for which the charity exists.  These would then have to be approved by the CC and published annually with the public accounts.  No doubt among these charitable purposes would be found some mention of education of the young and the maintenance of the buildings and inherited property.  The sustained persecution of a Dean, by the use of legal harassment, will not be included among these objects.  The letter is brutally clear in saying that the CC “have concerns about the prudent application of charitable funds and the proper process of decision making within the charity as the dispute involving the Dean continues.”  As the report of the letter in today’s The Times is headed, “Oxford college warned over dean’s tribunal.”  And it is significant that this warning has been sent to all the members of the Governing Body, alerting them to their individual fiduciary duties as charity trustees.

This letter represents an important milestone in the Percy saga.  I have never hidden from this blog my support for Dean Percy.   I salute him as a fellow supporter of the Church abused, whether by institutions or individuals.   My chief concern has been always for him to have fair process when accused by others.  His evidence has to be heard in an environment that is properly independent.   When independence was allowed into the Christ Church persecution process at an earlier stage, with the hearing by Sir Andrew Smith (a retired High Court judge), all the charges against the Dean were dismissed.  The Smith tribunal decision, which has not been released but which I have been allowed to read, is far from being entertaining.  Nevertheless, two salient points stand out from the written decision.  One is that Smith spotted a degree of malevolence among the accusers of the Dean and he included examples of their manifest hostility in an appendix.  The second point is a negative one.  None of the accusations of serious misconduct referred to the Dean’s personal morality.  All the arguments were about the difficulty of agreeing levels of pay for the teaching staff, including the Dean himself.  It was only much later that accusations about safeguarding were brought into the dispute.  The Church of England’s National Safeguarding Team (NST) became involved because in March 2020 there was a suggestion that the Dean had mishandled four safeguarding concerns arising from reports made to him by fully competent adults at the college.  This complaint was escalated by the Church of England to a formal enquiry and a core croup was established to investigate.  This core group had to be reconstituted when it was pointed out that it included the very members of the Governing Body who had made the complaint to the NST. The conflict of interest was glaring and obvious and they had to go.  Finally, in September, the core group announced its findings.  The Dean was cleared of the alleged safeguarding failures, with Dr Jonathan Gibbs (Bishop of Huddersfield and the lead bishop on safeguarding) stating publicly that the investigation “had concluded that the Dean had acted entirely appropriately in each case,” (see the Church Times, 11 September 2020.)

The saga has received extensive coverage in the media, but those who have stumbled across the Percy case as it has been played out recently might think that the whole thing hinges on an allegation of a sexual misdemeanour.  For those of us who have been following the saga over three years, the disputed events in the Cathedral vestry on 4 October 2020 are just one small part of the longstanding campaign of vilification against the Dean, spanning over three years.  The CC will be fully aware of the history of the campaign and the way that the Governing Body of the College have been behaving in ways that fail the smell test of equity, independent inquiry, and justice.   I would go further and describe the behaviour of the Dean’s enemies as having the hallmarks of a persecuting mob.   A mob, as we saw in an earlier blog, does not reason.  It only feels.  The feelings of this particular mob of highly intellectual Christ Church academics are aimed to bring about the destruction of the Dean.  The reasons for this enmity can be discussed elsewhere.  One thing is clear is that the feelings of an irrationally-aroused group do not make for fairness or justice.  The mob cannot think; it can only feel and act destructively, as we see it doing in the hallowed walls of Christ Church (and as we saw it doing on Capitol Hill in Washington on 6 January 2021.)

Christ Church put out a statement yesterday, clearly in response to the CC letter, though this would not have been apparent to those not in the know.  We expect that the publicity firm working for the College wrote it and received payment for writing it.   The other firm that has played such a prominent part in the process of persecution against the Dean is the legal firm of Winckworth Sherwood (WSLaw).  There may now be an understandable reticence by the Governing Body to commit further to using this firm in view of their high fees and the way that such expenditure will need to be accounted for by the College by the accountants of the CC.  The CC is the one body in British society that can stand up to the powerful College lawyers.  WSLaw know, as does the College, that the potential legal power of the CC stretches a long way.  In the last resort the CC can operate the ultimate sanction of taking away the College’s charitable status.  It is unlikely to press this nuclear button, but the mere existence of this threat gives the CC real power. 

Throughout the process of the persecution of the Dean by senior members of the College and the NST, we have seen several examples of the questionable use of power.  So now, the intervention of a truly neutral body, the CC, with its readiness to question such things as excessive legal bills, biases, and conflicts of interest, makes a real difference to the way the Dean’s persecution proceeds in the future.  If a favoured firm of lawyers can no longer be used as a ‘fixer’ to enact the malevolent intentions of the Dean’s enemies against him, this will surely change the atmosphere at the meetings of the Christ Church Governors.  Each Governor is also having to take his/her trustee responsibilities individually.  This should focus the minds of Governors considerably.  I wonder how many of the Governors of Christ Church have really paused to think about their individual responsibility for the public trashing, not of the Dean, but of the resources and reputation of their venerable and hitherto respected institution within the University of Oxford.  If they have not, the CC letter will certainly bring each of them up short and force them to consider it.  Indeed, they would each be well advised to seek independent legal advice.

The intervention by the Charity Commission in the Christ Church affair is made in the context of a whole history of toxic relationships within the college.    How these are resolved is open for discussion by cool heads.  Perhaps what the CC intervention is saying to us is that there must be better ways of resolving disputes than by the weaponization of church legal structures and the endless use of legal processes which threaten to destroy individuals and completely undermine the organisation which has chosen to go down a path of vindictive persecution.

by Janet Fife

I’m not sure how it’s happened, but after 40 years in the Church of England I still believe it’s appropriate to declare an interest when commenting (let alone acting) on a matter of which one has some personal knowledge.

I’ll therefore say here that I’ve met George and Eileen Carey in both professional and social contexts a number of times over the years – beginning with an interview at Trinity College, Bristol, in late 1983 – and regard them as friends. It follows that I cannot claim to be an impartial observer in the safeguarding cases involving George.

I think that knowing the impact on a conscientious person of having failed badly in one high profile safeguarding case, and being accused of failings in another, has given me a more balanced perspective in the ongoing campaign against Church of England abuse than I would otherwise have had.  This has its own value.

On 17 June 2020 Oxford Diocese released a statement that during the course of Keith Makin’s review into the John Smyth case, ‘new information has come to light regarding Lord Carey, which has been passed to the National Safeguarding Team for immediate attention as per the agreed Terms of Reference for the review. A Core Group was formed, according to House of Bishops Guidance, and it advised the Rt Revd Dr Steven Croft, Bishop of Oxford, to withdraw Lord Carey’s Permission to Officiate (PTO) while the matter is investigated. Lord Carey’s PTO was revoked by the Bishop of Oxford on Wednesday 17 June. Lord Carey is currently unauthorised to undertake any form of ministry in the Diocese until further notice.’

George himself had been notified only hours before.  He was given little time to absorb the news, or to inform family and friends and cancel any preaching engagements before people heard via the media. Twelve days later it was announced that Bishop Stephen Cottrell, whose appointment as Archbishop of York had been announced, had been under investigation for an alleged safeguarding failure for some months past, and had been found to be at fault.  He issued an apology, no penalty was imposed, and no announcement was made until the case was concluded. There was comment at the time about the disparity between George’s treatment and Stephen’s; we were left to infer that the lapse George was accused of was more serious than Stephen’s. George has been under this cloud of suspicion for more than six months.

The retired barrister and General Synod member David Lamming wrote to the Church Times, in a letter published 3 July 2020, arguing that ‘the recent revocation of Lord Carey’s PTO…cannot conceivably be justified on any safeguarding basis…Frankly, the Church’s action is both irrational and cruel, and the PTO should be restored forthwith.’ It wasn’t, of course.

Suspension from office or removal of PTO is a sensible option when allowing someone to preach or conduct services poses an actual danger. This might be if there was evidence that the priest or Reader had abused someone physically, sexually, psychologically, or spiritually; if they were preaching heresy; or operating a cult. In those circumstances it needs to be made clear that the alleged offender does not have the Church’s approval and authority. It’s necessary because people tend to trust clergy.

Making faulty decisions about safeguarding comes into a different category, especially for those who are retired and no longer in a position to make such decisions. Such ministers pose no actual risk to others. And when someone’s PTO is withdrawn there are so many others who suffer: the overworked clergy they are helping, family and old friends for whom their participation in funerals and weddings means a lot; all those who would have received their ministry. Why should these people suffer if the minister poses no danger?

The problem is that the Church of England has very few disciplinary tools at its disposal. ‘Rebuke’ is one of the penalties available under the Clergy Discipline Measure 2003 (see section 24(1)(f)), but only after a finding of misconduct has been made in proceedings under the Measure. By contrast, the granting or withdrawal of PTO is entirely at the discretion of the diocesan bishop. There is no due process, no right of appeal, and no mechanism for appeal. This is clearly unsatisfactory. A bishop is able, if s/he  wishes, to withhold PTO until a minister admits guilt and apologises for something they have not done.

There is an important point, too, regarding historical safeguarding lapses. Those of us who have been working since the 1980s to get the Church to take abuse seriously will know how much the general level of awareness has changed since then. There is still a long way to go, especially as regards good process and treatment of survivors, but it is at least accepted that safeguarding is a serious issue.

To put this in historical perspective: the UK’s Children Act was not enacted until 1989; the Church of England introduced its first child protection policy in 1995. As late as 1998 the then Vice Principal of Cranmer Hall strongly resisted my suggestion that pastoralia training for ordinands ought to include information on abuse and the pastoral care of survivors. That Vice Principal is now the Bishop of Oxford, who removed George Carey’s PTO for a supposed safeguarding lapse in 1983/84.

I have seen the evidence that Keith Makin sent to the NST. It consists of two letters from Canon David MacInnes, then Birmingham’s Diocesan Missioner, to the Rev. David Fletcher of the Iwerne Trust. The first is dated 15 June 1983; the second 7 June 1984. Both are strikingly vague. There is no subject heading, no reference to previous correspondence; everyone except George Carey (then Principal of Trinity College, Bristol) and Free Church minister David Jackman is referred to by their initials. The1983 letter has ‘dictated by David MacInnes and signed’ under the signature of a woman who was presumably his secretary. The 1984 letter is signed ‘David’ but also appears to be professionally typed. As a former secretary myself, it looks to me as though Canon MacInnes did not want her to know what he was writing about in those letters. It follows that it isn’t clear to us either – unless, of course, we are prepared to read a lot into them.

The June 1984 letter suggests that George Carey had been sent a copy of ‘Mark’s memo’. The NST’s Statement of Safeguarding Concern in this case, which is undated, assumes that ‘Mark’s memo’ is the Ruston Report of 1982. They have offered no evidence to support this assumption; nor is there any record that George received and read ‘Mark’s memo’, whatever that was.  (It is known that a brief and much vaguer memo was circulated to a wider group than received the Ruston Report.) George has no recollection of it – nor, indeed, of John Smyth. Smyth was a sabbatical student at Trinity for a single term beginning April 1983, and does not seem to have been in college much. David Pennant, who knew Smyth well and was a student at Trinity at the time, says that he never saw him there. Canon Williams, who was Course Leader at Trinity then, is in fact the only member of staff who remembers Smyth at all. He says, ‘The [Iwerne] Trustees had no reason… to say more than that they supported John’s wish to take a sabbatical and do some theological study.  I saw him, I recall, as a wealthy successful lawyer able to take time-out to pursue his passion.’

Canon Williams’ supporting evidence that the Ruston Report was not known among staff at the college, and that George would certainly have told senior staff if he had been aware of serious allegations made against Smyth, was discounted by the core group chaired by Bishop Tim Thornton – even though, privately, he told Lord Alex Carlile QC (who wrote the 2017 Review into the Bishop Bell case) that he was impressed by that evidence.

The NST’s whole case against George Carey rests on the unsupported assumption that George had received, and read, the Ruston Report with its detailed account of Smyth’s offences. Barrister David Lamming, who has seen the MacInnes letters, comments:

‘it’s only a matter of inference that the ‘Mark’s memo’ referred to in the 7 June 1984 letter is the 1982 Ruston Report… by no sensible train of reasoning could it be said that the letters provide evidence that George was a safeguarding risk 36 years later such as to justify/require his PTO to be revoked as an 84-year-old retired priest.’

Bishop Tim Thornton and the NST regarded these two letters as a smoking gun – in fact they’re just a fag end in the gutter.

Astute readers will be scratching their heads, wondering why David Fletcher, David MacInnes, and the other surviving men on the circulation list of the Ruston Report have not been subject to similar measures as those taken against George Carey.  Bishop Thornton and the NST seized on George, who at worst had only been a very peripheral figure in the Smyth case, and have taken no action against any of the central figures. All of those men who are ordained and still alive have been left with their reputations intact and the continued freedom to minister if they wished to do so.

Only George, after a lifetime’s faithful service, and his family have been left unsupported, undefended, and badly bruised by this experience.

I will leave the last word to Lord Carlile, who has acted for George in this case: ‘The process used against George lacked independence and objectivity. They provided inadequate opportunities for George’s case to be heard, and no opportunity to challenge their witnesses such as they were. There should be root and branch reform, to provide a proper investigative and disciplinary process comparable with that for doctors and other professional groups.’

The Church of England has been rife with safeguarding crises recently.  Those of us who watch these sagas as they unfold on the internet or in the Press have a hunger for one thing.   We long to see the power to engage in independent scrutiny being entrusted to people of high professional expertise.  They will then proceed to analyse the people and institutions affected by these events, before delivering a calm clear verdict as to what has been really going on.  This forensic examination will then perhaps point to the way that the affected institution, the Church, can deal with the past safeguarding event.  It will involve successfully learning what needs to be learnt and providing healing to those wounded by the past.  In this way the institution and its safeguarding victims can be helped to move into the future. 

Examples of safeguarding excellence do exist. I offer three examples as a gold standard which the Church of England frequently fails to reach.  The examples of safeguarding excellence I mention share in common the fact those who provided it were writing from positions of complete professional independence.  Attempts by the Church to achieve the same level of independent scrutiny seem often doomed to fail, as ‘marking your own homework’ is not a good basis for providing independent and just outcomes.   In summary, the three I bring forward are the IICSA reports, the Elliot Review on the case of the Church’s treatment of one survivor and the work of Thirtyone:eight, exemplified by the recent report on the Crowded House.

Each of these reports was marked by high levels of professional independence, coupled with a real understanding of all the issues involved.  I have often referred to the fact that expertise in safeguarding is spread out over many disciplines.  It needs some understanding of law, psychology and the social sciences.  Abuse taking place in a church context also requires a working knowledge of theology and church life.  Few people have all these skills.  In an ideal world the so-called ‘expert’ would need to consult widely to ensure that any knowledge and skill deficits are made up when necessary.  A readiness by an expert to consult other professionals will take a certain degree of humility on the part of an examiner.  Such humility is not what we seem to find among the in-house professional people the Church employs.  They appear always to assume that their previous professional skills, such as those gained in police work or social work, are quite adequate to do the complex task of examining safeguarding events that take place in the Church.

With these qualities of independence and expertise in our minds, we may turn to two ongoing safeguarding incidents in the Church on the go at present.   One is the reporting of a incident about abuse, stretching back thirty years, involving John Smyth and the Iwerne camps.  The disclosure by a survivor was made in 2012.   This story is one that involves our own Archbishop of Canterbury and one of his senior advisers, Canon David Porter (a layman).  The story is set out in The Spectator last Thursday 21^st January.  A point that the author, Ysenda Maxtone Graham, makes very powerfully in the article is that the Archbishop is deeply beholden to this adviser for many of his public utterances on matters of contemporary concern.   It is not, however, these statements on a range of public issues that concern us here.  It is the way that the Archbishop seems to be cocooned and protected by Porter from engaging properly with safeguarding scandals that have hit the Church throughout his primacy.  One particular safeguarding issue that Canon Porter seems to be shielding the Archbishop from is that involving John Smyth.  This disturbing failure by the Archbishop to engage properly with this story is made worse by the fact that the abuser was personally known to him in his younger days.  Although the relationship between the two is not thought to have been close, there is another fact which often gets overlooked.  The Smyth scandal is particularly shocking in the way that it has been buried in the minds and memories of a large group of alumni of the Iwerne camps over a long period.  Among this privileged group of ex-public school boys who attended the camps, many personally known to Welby, are effectively in some cases witnesses to past criminal activity.  Most have remained silent to this day.  The Augean stables of Smyth’s behaviour in England and Africa need to be cleansed.  The Archbishop and many of his old camper friends need to begin telling us all that they remember.  Instead of that, as the Spectator article suggests, David Porter has advised the Archbishop to do absolutely nothing.    His passivity and silence are causing the victims a great deal of additional anguish.  In a Channel 4 interview, the Archbishop promised to meet with John Smyth survivors.  So far, he has failed to do so.  We are left to suspect that he understands too much about their suffering and is unable to face them.  Whatever the reasons for this non-engagement with Smyth survivors, it also does not inspire confidence in the Archbishop’s personal readiness to offer a lead in the total arena of Church safeguarding.  The two things that the Smyth affair needs are those we have already indicated.   One is a clear knowledge of all the facts,  Then we need to gather all the needed resources to help and plot the path forward for the future.  Expressions of regret uttered at General Synod are no substitute for the kind of energetic engagement that is required.  We need to see the light of honesty, truth and justice being shed on these shameful areas in the Church’s past.  So far we do not appear to see real concern on the part of a leader to help the Church forward out of this tragic and damaging episode in the history of the Church of England.

Personal reputations and possibly raw fear are being aroused when the whole Smyth story, and this festers away at the heart of the Church.  A block on further scrutiny of the episode seems to be what is recommended by lawyers and advisers.  Another way of putting it is to say that up till now the people who could throw further light on the story have been impeded from doing so lest vested interests and inconvenient truths be exposed.  Clearly there is a need here for independent scrutiny.  We will see whether Keith Makin is able to deliver a report that measures up to what IICSA, Thirtyone:eight or Ian Elliot might have provided. 

When we look the other ongoing saga in the Church which cries out for independent scrutiny, the Christ Church affair, once again we encounter blocks on expertise and independent justice.  There are simply too many unanswered questions and apparent failures of process in the CDM report that I have been allowed to read.  This utilises the College investigation, written by Kate Wood, as the basis for a separate Church CDM process.   I have already pointed out that there are bound to be serious concerns if people with known enmity to Martyn Percy are allowed to take a prominent part in his legalised persecution.  There are above all, real problems in allowing one of the original College complainants, Canon Ward, anywhere near the Church’s CDM process. Did not the Bishop of Oxford see immediately that Ward’s role as a CDM instigator in this case should not be allowed?    I do not propose to repeat all the queries that I have already had about the independent status of the College investigator. Since writing my earlier comments, I have discovered that Ms Wood worked for the Diocese of Chichester in a safeguarding role.  This was in addition to her working relationship with the NST over the Whitsey report.  Even if she was indeed in ignorance of the Percy affair and knew nothing of his active support for the memory of George Bell, her closeness to others who would have known, gives a strong appearance of a conflict of interest.

Other queries from a reading of the Wood report are, as yet, unanswered.  Witness A, when talking about the episode in the vestry, is recorded by Ms Wood to have exclaimed:  ‘I knew it was a massive deal. People wanted the final blow. I was thinking is this important enough for that to happen?  Could this be the killer blow? ‘ These were the actual words of the witness when she/he first heard of the allegation against the Dean from the ‘victim’.  Ms Wood showed absolutely no curiosity about what these words were implying.  Her accuracy in recording interviews seems impeccable but the absence of any comment or follow-up question is surprising.   An ordinary person hearing these words in the context in which they were uttered, would conclude that the witness might already be biased and possibly tempted to ‘big up’ the incident.  Speaking of witnesses, there is a further potential witness to the episode who was mentioned in the report but not questioned.  A further cause for disquiet is that there is also no explanation over the truncated time frame of both processes.  The appointment of the investigator, the conduct of the enquiry and writing up of the report all took place in a matter of a few days.  Did the investigator need no time for a preliminary background enquiry over the case before accepting, or was she already well known to one of the accusers among the Christ Church censors or lawyers?    It is also suggested that the Oxfordshire police who took the trouble to visit the college, the Cathedral and the site of the alleged harassment did a far more thorough job.  The police dismissed the accusation.  Ms Wood seems to have done most of her investigation remotely. 

Independence and detailed scrutiny of all the facts are possible when writing reports about past safeguarding incidents.  We have the expertise of IICSA lawyers working collaboratively with other experts, the team of examiners at Thirtyone:eight and the vast experience of Ian Elliot to show us the way things can be done.  Sadly, as the Spectator article and the Percy CDM papers demonstrate, the Church is content to allow itself to use flawed processes.  As long as this continues, enormous damage will be done both to individuals and institutions.  Safeguarding will always involve the telling of truth and that process will involve the pain of metanoia.

One of the insights given to those of us approaching old age is the recognition that the wisdom you have now obtained was not there thirty or forty years before.  As a retired parish priest, I see clearly how some decisions made in the past were not always the best ones.  I am not thinking about things that could have harmed people, but judgements made that may have affected the general progress of a parish.  Back a few decades (I shall not be more specific), I was faced with the arrival of a clergyman (we will call him Peter) in my parish who had taken early retirement on health grounds.  My 2021 self would now ask some very penetrating questions about the nature of the ‘health grounds’.  I should at the very least have made a phone call to an archdeacon to find out a little more.  Probably in this case, I would have picked up the message that there was something to be cautious about.  On the face of it Peter had had a lively ministry, albeit of a charismatic flavour.  This was, however, the only style he seemed to understand, and it was not where any of my then congregation were.  The sermons that Peter preached were volatile and unpredictable.  Displays of emotion in the pulpit about relatives who were not ‘saved’ did not edify but rather embarrass.  The liturgy was also subject to random editing which did not stand up to any kind of theological consistency.  As time went on, he began to show signs of mania which are not the product of a healthy charismatic spirituality.  I have always been tolerant of charismatic styles of prayer and it was probably this tolerance in my younger self that allowed a difficult situation to continue longer than it should have done.  It did eventually resolve itself as Peter found a much more congenial audience for his style of preaching among the network of independent congregations around.  They welcomed a new voice to their services.

My exposure to charismatic forms of preaching/ministry did not start from the experiences I had with Peter.  My pre-Peter experiences had been reasonably extensive, and I certainly feel that I had been able to grasp the importance and appreciation of these styles of spirituality to a ministry of healing.  Healing and the support of healing ministries took up a significant part of my ministry and I served some years as a Bishop’s Adviser.  This role involved me with becoming sensitised to a variety of theological styles when practising this ministry.

It was tempting right back in the 70s when I first encountered charismatic phenomenon and preaching, to think of it in entirely theological terms.  To introduce any kind of psychological insight in assessing it seemed somehow blasphemous.  The Holy Spirit was, to all appearances, operating directly in the lives of Christian individuals and transforming lives and making them holy.  This direct unmediated access to the Holy Spirit was similar to other claims that conservative Christians were making about the text of Scripture.  Anything as pure as the ‘unmediated Word of God’ had to be beyond any kind of human criticism. This uncritical approach to the manifestations of the Spirit was quite simply another form of fundamentalism.  Both the Bible and the Spirit quickly could however, become tools of oppressive power in the wrong hands.  We can see that the entire charismatic movement has been damaged by such claims for the ‘infallibility’ of the Spirit.  Statements like ‘God is speaking to me and revealing his will’ enter into the discourse of the leaders. This kind of grasping of power by Christian leaders, using the tool of text-quoting and appeal to spiritual phenomena, is unlikely to be healthy.  Just because followers long for certainties in the Christian journey does not mean that Christian leaders should spoon feed them  As readers of this blog will know, I have never allowed the mere quotation of a biblical text to resolve a theological issue.  Finding ‘truth’ in the miasma of text-quoting and the multiplicity of theological traditions that we have, is endlessly complex.  Christians may long to possess certainties but there are many reasons to suggest that this is not easily delivered.  The Bible is not, and never has been, an oracle full of proof texts.  Culture and the rules of meaning within language will throw up ambiguity and nuance at every turn.  It is what makes the Bible and the theology it contains an endlessly fascinating study but, for some, this does not provide the certainties for which they crave.

Pentecostal/charismatic-style preaching with its double appeal to unmediated pure reality of God through scripture and experience will have tremendous drawing power because it meets a craving for certainty.  Being entranced by this link to certainty will also mean a strong attachment to the one teaching and preaching in the church.  In what I, and many other Christians, would consider to be a kind of blasphemy, there is a process which transforms an ordinary fallible human being into a super-human oracle of God.  By demonstrating the power of the Spirit and being the only legitimate interpreter of the Word of God, the minister/pastor claims all power to himself.  Someone who believes that he indeed has such extraordinary power may also be on the way to a manic breakdown.  This is what appears to have happened to Peter before his early retirement and his arrival in my parish.

Why do people flock to such congregations where the preacher may sometimes exhibit mania and other disturbing facets of the narcissistic personality that we have talked about on other occasions?  Something I have recently read about the charismatic leader in all walks of life explains this conundrum very elegantly.  One prominent feature of many groups and that includes many charismatic/Pentecostal congregations is the strong sense of us/them.  Belonging to a group that  that many such groups carry as part of their identity.  Part of the church’s corporate memory will then consist of the way that there was once this traumatic separation from another group.  This may have involved a parting of ways from another denomination.  There will thus be a major ‘them’ from the past as well as a number of other thems in the present.  We have contending against us the unsaved, the mockers of the faith and the liberal intellectuals.  It will take a relatively modest level of rhetorical skill for the preacher to incubate successfully that sense of separateness and estrangement felt by a congregation.  People enjoys this feeling of being specially chosen when compared with the ‘other’.  Separateness make them aware of themselves as distinct from their Christian and other neighbours.  It is not hard, as we have seen before, to back up from Scripture this strand of teaching.  By emphasising this line of exposition, the congregation can be persuaded to give up their thinking selves as a way of suppressing any dissonance that they may feel.  That will allow them to fall in with the dominant opinion, that of the leader or preacher.   

The book I am reading explains how the preacher/charismatic leader is subtly encouraging one part of the brain to become dominant.  It is well-known, even in motivation/leadership courses, that people working for a corporation are seldom motivated merely by appealing to the rational part of the brain.  It is the emotional brain, the amygdala, the more instinctive part of the brain, that needs to be activated for real changes in behaviour to take place.  It is this part that is activated when the body senses some danger or something causing fear.  In a congregational setting the ‘enemies’ of faith are named as threats and this will get the amygdala activated.  This will successfully override the pre-frontal cortex, the part of the brain that uses reason for decision making.  Such group thinking is also common in a political context.  The leader, having roused an audience to fear the other, whether an idea, a group or an individual, can then keep them in a state of expectation and longing to have provided for them the ‘answer’ that will remove the demons out of sight.

My appreciation of charismatic preaching and practice has to be qualified by my dislike, even loathing, of methods of manipulation that involve the subtle use of threats and fearmongering.  The path to a holistic appreciation of the Christian good news should surely involve the reason, the thinking part of the human person.  Can we ever afford to hand over ‘faith’ to the irrational and the primitive functioning of the human brain?  There is a time for the emotions and the feelings to take a prominent place in our religious life.  Supressing reason and discernment is not the way to do this in a healthy way.

Observing how power flows within organisations is a fascinating task.  Traditionally power flows from the top of an institution down to its base.  Those in charge are supposed to administer their power so that the authority and expertise of those in leadership flows smoothly from the top to the bottom.  But the truth is, of course, that power within institutions seldom works like this.  There are countless permutations in the way power operates.  Sometimes those at the bottom of the structure find that they have the greatest power.  The ‘Chiefs’ become the bullied or oppressed at the hands of the ‘Indians’.  In some cases, it is a group in the middle that seize the power to make life uncomfortable for those above and below.  All that can be said as a generalisation, is that the outsider, the independent assessor, must never come with assumptions on the question ‘Who has the power in this organisation?’  Power can be found in the most unexpected places and take a variety of forms.

The classic cases of church abuse that have been examined on this blog have typically involved survivor/victims suffering at the hands of predatory (normally) male clergy.  The power system at work in a church congregation is usually a traditional one, with power flowing down from a single leader to those who accept his/her authority.  For abuse to take place there may be a variety of different powers in evidence.  Sometimes power flows down from an individual to groom not only an individual victim, but, to quote Susie Leafe at General Synod, ‘they groom entire congregations’. This grooming is added to other manifestations of power, that of silencing or the assertion of rank and status over a minor.   The child or vulnerable adult is typically told, in a variety of ways, that their testimony will never be believed over the man of power.  In most cases when the complainant has tried to tell their story, this has been shown to be true.  Up till about ten years ago, a child or adult complaining about abuse in the Church has had relatively little chance of being heard or taken seriously.  In the past the victim of church abuse seemed to stand more chance of justice by going to the police than telling someone in the church.  But, even there, however well the police do their job, the experience of abused individuals within the adversarial system of the courts has often been brutal.  Why would anyone, already fragile, want to go through such an ordeal?

The record of the past thirty years of Church safeguarding has been at best mediocre and at worst poor.  Today we at least accept the possibility/likelihood that the testimony of someone recalling abuse, even from years before, will probably be conveying the truth.  Just because a Church leader protests innocence, complaints against him always need to be heard and properly investigated.  A typical case will involve a victim who has experienced a stronger person imposing their power against them in a variety of ways.  If we were to draw the dynamics of power in a visual form, we would see a victim at the centre, with various arrows of power coming down on him/her.  One would be described as sexual abuse, another bullying and yet another grooming or silencing.  Combined together, these arrows would have the effect of silencing and totally disempowering the one at the centre.  Not all the arrows originate with the abuser.  Some of them can be traced back to, say, an unsympathetic archdeacon, a lawyer employed by the insurance company or simply a bystander whose instinct is always to take the part of the abuser as a man of the cloth.  However we draw the chart to describe the power flows, the traditional pattern of abuse shows power to flow in one direction, downwards.  This ensures that the victim is thoroughly demoralised.  The combined weight of tradition, status, money and prestige enjoyed by the church and those who worked for it, would win in most situations.

When the vast majority of the abused, in and by the church, remained largely hidden from view, it was right to use the word ‘victim’ as a description.  Anyone who experiences power abuse without being able to access protection or justice of some kind, is not in a good place to heal.  A ‘survivor’ by contrast is among a new generation of those hurt by the Church.  Today the abused are sometimes able, not only to be heard, but also have their pleas for justice and support responded to.  These individuals, some of whom I am privileged to know, are extremely brave and courageous people.  They have succeeded in transforming the diagram which I mentioned in the last paragraph.  The survivor is one who has some hope of finding healing.  He/she has begun to reverse the direction of the arrows that tried to make them silent victims.  By turning the arrows round, the survivor has started to assert power, to challenge and point, not only to their abusers, but also to those whose status and institutional roles worked against the survivor.  Bishops who ‘forget’ disclosures or fail to make any record of meetings with the abused are part of the deeply shocking history of Church abuse and the way that institutional power tried to bury truth.   Survivors have credible stories and because of them, they have power to change the Church.  The old mental diagrams that we created for ourselves to think about the way victims are supposed to behave, no longer work.

So far, I have postulated two mental images expressed as diagrams.  One is the diagram of abuse that creates ‘victims’.  The other is a diagram where these so-called victims are fighting back.  They are telling their story so that the power dynamics are beginning to go into reverse.   The structures and bystanders that enabled the abuse are themselves put under scrutiny and challenged.  The arrows all point upwards in a flow of power that refuses to tolerate the institutional power games being utilised against them.  They are not always successful.  The Church has invested a great deal in preserving its reputation and status within society.  The battle that survivors are having to fight is ongoing.  Nevertheless, the diagram of power flow in the Church will never be the same as it was thirty years ago when the word of Church authorities could not be challenged. 

There are of course other new power dynamics in the Church which run in parallel with the new credence being offered to survivors.  Many clergy today seem to be in a permanent state of tension, thanks to the outworking of the  Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM).  This measure effectively gives any disgruntled or upset parishioner the right to make a complaint against the Vicar or priest.  So far, the Church has not tolerated complaints based on ‘political’ or theological grounds.  Nevertheless, situations of real tension, even hatred can arise when a group of parishioners decide that their priest is not ‘sound’.  The ‘unsound’ Vicar can be pestered to the point of a nervous breakdown by factions using the CDM tool.  I am not suggesting that CDMs are being used to adjudicate in these kinds of disputes.  Bishops are not (yet?) requiring Vicars to move on as the result of parishioners complaining about their ideology/preaching.  But it has become clear that some clergy, who are embroiled in some kind of political spat, are having to be constantly on alert lest some mishap can be inflated and made the centre of a CDM complaint.  The CDM does not have to succeed to keep the clergyperson in a constant state of tension.  They are afraid to upset parishioners, particularly the articulate ones.  These know how to play the system and are not intimidated by the CDM forms they have to fill in.  These can threaten the sleep and general well-being of their clergy. 

In the past the arrows indicating the flow of power in the Church all flowed downwards.  Clerical/episcopal power was unchallenged and few complaints about the misuse of power were ever heard.  Now that the possibility of clerical malfeasance is an acknowledged issue, clergy everywhere have to watch every word, every gesture in case it is misunderstood or misinterpreted.  There are, however, still some parishes and congregations where challenging authority is all but impossible.  These are those, which because of ‘biblical’ principles, the hierarchy do not allow themselves to be challenged.  Such leaders are effectively appointed by God.  Their judgement and opinions share the same infallibility that are afforded to the words of Scripture.

The situation of Martyn Percy at Christ Church presents us with an extremely complicated power diagram.  Although there is an alleged ‘victim’ somewhere on an imagined chart, it is hard to see that she has become in any way at the real centre of this complex power struggle.  What seems to be true is that powerful individuals in the College have been waiting for something to happen which allows them to deploy their expensive team of lawyers to drive him from office.  Martyn is like one of many clergy in the Church of England whose situation has become vulnerable to the activities of ‘enemies’ who want to remove him. The College uses its protocols in their attempt to remove him but they are also marshalling the weapons of the Church of England, the CDM, to help them in their task.  The CDM here, as elsewhere, has become weaponised and thoroughly toxic.  How can it be just for a complainant Canon with a track record of malevolence against the Dean to be allowed to head up a CDM process?  Is the Bishop of Oxford himself unable to see the clear power dynamics of the present situation?  For justice to be done, we need to find for both College and Diocese, people who are truly independent and are prepared to view dispassionately the total dynamic and history of the Percy affair.  The mob violence of a Trump crowd seems to be what we are observing at present.  Calmer heads are needed to prevent massive damage to both personal and institutional reputations.  History will not be kind to either the Diocese of Oxford or Christ Church College if they continue to hurtle down a path of self-destructive harm.

The recent ‘insurrection’ in Washington DC, by supporters of outgoing President Trump, reminded many of us of other events in history involving crowds, like the Storming of the Bastille.  The blog post that follows is on the topic of crowds, but it is not about history.  Rather it attempts to think about the psychological processes that are on display in crowd settings.  Some crowds are better described as mobs when demagogues like Trump seek to incite his followers to commit violent acts in the name of a political cause.

A mob/crowd becomes a coherent entity whenever a large group gathers for some common purpose.  Random collections of people who happen to be together do not constitute a crowd in the sense that I am trying to describe.  The crowd which has some sense of common purpose will also have some rudimentary structure to accomplish its purposes.  It may come into being as the result of a dramatic political event like a revolution.  Alternatively, it may be formed to support a football team, playing a crucial match.  Some crowds are deliberately created by the activities of a demagogic leader like Trump or Mussolini.  In a political setting, a crowd/mob can turn into something really powerful and even frightening.  Governments and people in authority have known over the centuries to fear the mob.  It is not just the fact that a thousand people armed with the simplest of weapons can do a lot of damage to their surroundings; it is also the fact that the sheer energy of a crowd that comes into being, when roused by a leader, can unsettle peaceful cooperation within communities for years.  Thousands of people united into a crowd by a common purpose do and have changed history.  America will never be the same after the events in Washington on the 6^th January 2021.

The study of crowd psychology has always fascinated me.  This is in spite of the fact that nearly all of the dedicated literature on the topic originated abroad and even today I am not aware of a single scholar in the UK who is currently writing on the subject. I may of course simply be out of date but that is what I found when I tried some years ago to do some serious reading on the subject.

What is crowd psychology?  A better place to start is to ask the simple question.  What was my experience the last time I was part of a crowd?  It might have been as an onlooker at a football match.  It might have been as a theatre goer or as an attender at a large Christian charismatic gathering.  It may have been when attending a political gathering of some kind.  Some of us avoid crowds precisely because we dislike what we feel they do to us.  As a broad generalisation we can suggest that in a crowd we feel depersonalised; our being in a crowd changes the nature of our consciousness.  Whatever kind of crowd (or group) we are in, there will be some level of change in the way we experience the outside world.   In many crowd situations, people are aware of a powerful pressure to merge, partly or completely, with the thinking and feeling of the other people in the group.  This would be especially true of a political gathering. (There have also been many studies of the pressures felt by members of juries to conform)  When Trump spoke to crowds of his supporters, he knew exactly when to introduce the uniting chant of ‘lock her up’ or ‘stop the steal’.  It takes quite a determined act of will by individuals in the crowd not to join in such chanting.  How much easier it is to go with the flow and shout with the rest?

The first popular book on the topic of crowd psychology was by a Frenchman, Gustave Le Bon.  He was writing in the 1890s, so his reflections were available to the 20^th century political orators, especially Benito Mussolini and Hitler.  Le Bon’s observations resonated with the time.  Governments everywhere were aware of the raw power of revolutionary movements involving mobs, such as the French Revolution or the other revolutions that disrupted many European countries in 1848.  There was an appetite to understand and thus perhaps control or channel this raw energy which could be such a threat to the established order.

Le Bon was, according to his critics, not an original thinker but a populariser.   We in Britain can forgive him this, since, in translation, his book, The Crowd, was the very first attempt to get the English reader to think about the topic of crowds, using the available tools of psychology.  He began with the basic observation that a crowd is, psychologically, a different reality from an accidentally gathered group of people.  A crowd in this understanding can always be said to have a common purpose.  It is this common purpose which has brought it to occupy the same physical space at the same time.  The one who participates in the collective mind or common passion/cause of a crowd will very quickly discover that the dominant thought of the group is one that quickly and easily comes to fill the individual’s consciousness.  In this way the crowd makes the group into a single being or subject.  In Le Bon’s words, we discover ‘the law of the mental unity of crowds’.

From these observations we can repeat the idea that individual thinking, feeling and acting work differently according to whether we are in a crowd or alone.  When we are in a crowd, our experiencing and feeling seem to draw on a primal, even primitive level of functioning.  This is one that all human beings share in common.  The more individual creative and intelligent parts of human functioning, those that we each build up over a lifetime, seem to drop away.  Instead of intelligent processing of information, Le Bon noticed the way that the individual in the crowd operates out of the more primitive and instinctive parts of the psyche.  There is a failure to consult intellect or reason and this results in the crowd/mob’s tendency to embrace extremes of political/religious thinking. Such extremes are articulated in the political ideologies on the ultra-right or left. Religious extremism can also be rooted in the same primitive and sub-rational roots.  The crowd is not the context for weighing up and considering dispassionately competing views and opinions. It will prefer members to use the simplified slogans and propaganda ideas given to it by the leaders. Among the many changes that can take place in a crowd is the ability for the individual to feel enormously powerful.  There is a sense of being able to tap into the power of the group so that some feel invincible and thus indestructible.  There is also a susceptibility to what Le Bon calls contagion.  In other words, a idea suggested by the leader through the tools of propaganda can come very quickly to occupy and even take over the awareness of every single member of the crowd.  This capacity for identical feelings and sensations to spread rapidly across crowds, helps us to have an appreciation for the dynamics of crowds in other contexts.  Some of us have experienced some similar dynamics in Christian charismatic settings.

In short, the immersion of the individual in a crowd/mob can have the effect that he/she is persuaded to behave in a way that may be quite contrary to their non-crowd behaviour.  Usually individual behaviour is something which is rooted in reason and personal morality.  In the crowd there is a kind of hypnotic fusion with others in the group and this may result in behaviour quite out of character and contrary to the normal system of personal values.  This hypnotic and primal group way of thinking or not thinking can sometimes result in impulsive risk taking and a failure to look after one’s best interests.  Sometimes this impulsive risk taking is interpreted as human courage.   But simultaneously a capacity for sacrificial self-giving is sometimes accompanied by a new potential for ferocity, hatred and violence.  This is never seen in the person’s normal life.  Another way of putting it is to suggest that in a crowd, the individual slips down the ladder of civilisation.  Acts of apparent heroism appear alongside those of hatred and brutality. 

The dying days of Trump’s presidency, especially the events of January 2021, have given us some insight into the primal and toxic behaviour of crowds.  Ironically, many who are part of the Trump mass cult see themselves as Christian, being normally moral and selfless human beings working for a higher cause.  The reality for them in a crowd seems quite different.  Thanks to crowd studies initiated by Le Bon over a hundred years ago, we can see taking place an eruption of primitive impulses into American society.  Some of these have been activated in a physical crowd setting while the same primitive passions may have been caused by the virtual crowd settings created through the internet.  Many of these will take a generation or more to heal.  The ability of politicians (and churchmen) to understand better these dynamics, will perhaps protect all of us from the malign effects of crowd/mob thinking and behaviour in the years to come.  Sadly, I do not detect that there is much understanding in our national or church life for these insights or even a desire to make this exploration.   Failing to understand crowds and crowd behaviour will make us potentially far more vulnerable to their disastrous and damaging impact.