In September 2018, the Church of England, as part of its ongoing safeguarding efforts, published a very comprehensive fact sheet on different types of abuse.  It is an attempt to encourage a reader to become used to recognising the great variety of abusive practices that can occur in the Church and elsewhere.  In 2015, English law codified the idea that domestic abuse is much more than just physical violence.  It may include a range of behaviours that come under the broad category of coercion and control.   Even without evidence of physical violence, a man or woman can now be convicted of a criminal offence for abuse.   Educating people to have a broader understanding of abuse in a religious context was also needed.  I have a personal interest in this topic.  When I wrote my book Ungodly Fear over twenty years ago, I was trying to explore this idea that the misuse of power in a church context was a widespread reality and the cause of much suffering.  Abusing power is a far bigger topic than just the sexual exploitation of a vulnerable person.

This morning, on a sister blog Archbishop Cranmer, we heard new details about the Dean Percy affair.  I do not propose to repeat the points made in that disturbing article, but to use some of Cranmer’s material to indicate that Percy has become the victim of many of the types of abuse mentioned in the 2018 document.  Apart from naming a wide range of abusive practices, the 2018 CofE document also provides suggestions of the way that the Church can respond to the victims and survivors.  Percy, because he has been labelled as a perpetrator, has not been offered much help, pastoral, financial or practical.  Help is supposed to be offered in such cases, according to the Church’s safeguarding protocols but only the tiniest amount has been forthcoming.  Somehow the level of vitriol in the College is such that a regime of extreme isolation has been imposed.  The help and support that Percy has been able to gather is that which has come from family and friends.  He has also seen the complete depletion of the family finances. 

The 2018 document first of all discusses emotional or psychological abuse.  I would see these two forms of abuse as sometimes distinct categories and, at other times, overlapping.   Over the past three years there have been many examples of psychological threats and abuse towards Percy.  Phone calls/emails late at night are part of the stock-in-trade for those who want to harass and put someone permanently on edge.  Also within a community like a college, it is not difficult to create an unfriendly environment for an individual.  Shunning and ostracism, when they are practised, are especially cruel.  This is a topic to which I often return in this blog as it is one of the most evil practices that can be enacted.  The 2018 document mentions this behaviour when it describes ‘causing or forcing isolation/withdrawal from family/friends and support networks’.  The extraordinary lengths to which the Censors and members of the Chapter has gone to prevent members of the clergy/colleagues even visiting Percy are described as practices that the Church should be fighting against.  Can unproven allegations of sexual harassment ever justify the rolling out of such viciously cruel behaviour?

Abuse can also be financial.  The 2018 document has in mind such things as the forcing of an elderly person to change a will or hand over property.  In Percy’s case, the financial abuse has been by forcing him virtually to bankrupt himself in employing lawyers to defend him in the first legal challenge by the College to oust him in 2018.  He was declared innocent of all the 27 original charges brought by the Censors.  Percy’s accusers were also shown up to have produced manipulated documents.  In short, the accusers engaged in lying to make their case.  Retired Judge Andrew Smith saw the lies and commented on them in his report.  In the latest attacks by College and National Safeguarding Team, overseen by the Bishop of Birmingham, Percy has been unable to instruct legal representation.  This is partly for financial reasons and partly for reasons of his health.

The CofE document mentions discriminatory abuse.  This is taking advantage of someone who is in a weaker position because of poverty, disability or some other handicap.  Discriminatory abuse is to be found all over the recent treatment that Percy has received.  The Sub-Dean, Richard Peers, has taken it upon himself to prevent even the fellow members of Chapter from making contact with Percy.   Such isolating of a sick man, socially, spiritually and psychologically is desperately underhand behaviour. 

Institutional abuse is described.  This is the kind of situation that might occur in a Home where one patient is treated badly because they are deemed to be difficult in some way.  When an institution, like a Home, turns against an individual, it is hard to see how anyone can resist such enormous pressure.  It is clearly going on at Christ Church. The financial bullying of Percy, backed by the enormous financial resources of the College, was another example of institutional abuse.   The Censors must be hoping that the Dean’s ability to fight back financially will eventually be defeated by the sheer fire power available to the College because of their endowments. 

Abuse by neglect and acts of omission are other examples of behaviour suffered by Percy.  The utter failure of the College or Canons to reach out to a sick man to offer help and support of any kind is an inexplicable failure of any institution, let alone one founded on Christian principles.  The 2018 document is not a particularly Christian document.  It is rather an adaptation of the Care Act of 2015 which wanted to show how we need to take a much broader understanding of abuse than society has done hitherto.  As with the Charity Commission, the values being articulated are human values.  If Christian individuals and institutions find these hard to hold on to, what can we expect of the rest of society?  Are we not able to hope that Christians take morality and goodness seriously?

The final category of abuse mentioned in the document is complex abuse.  This is a name given to a situation when an institution or an individual is using a variety of abuse methods against one person.  We have already indicated that Dean Percy is the target of a many-sided form of abuse.  Complex abuse might be considered to be an convenient shorthand for what is going on here.  But there is one great irony about the document Types of Abuse.  This was put together by experts in the Safeguarding world to help Christians identify those in need of help.  Here we are discovering that in fact it is, in this case, the Church itself committing acts of abuse against an individual.  If I am right in identifying six of the categories of abuse in this church document being set in motion by church officials, then someone needs to blow a whistle on this event.  We often speak about survivors on this blog, but here we have to describe Percy as a victim.  Six forms of abuse coming from two distinct institutions, operating with an extraordinary level of malice, is enough to put anyone into a breakdown.  No one going through such an experience is easily able to fight back.  Humanly, the force being used is barely survivable.  The only human strength that can operate here is that provided by supporters, family and friends.

Two things need to happen if the Church is to emerge from this disaster with any integrity.  One is that all the clergy who have been guilty of dirty tricks and abuse against Percy should be named in a new Clergy Discipline Measure process.  There have been so many procedural dishonesties in this episode.  One mentioned by Archbishop Cranmer, is what I call the dirty dossier.  This is a fraudulent risk assessment document submitted with the CDM documents to the Bishop of Oxford.  The College have admitted that they were wrong to back this document but the damage has done in creating the over-the-top risk assessment which has now been put in place around the College.  The second thing that could save the day and rescue the Church’s integrity from a mire of self- destruction, is for someone of stature to come forward.  They would then ask for all the destructive church processes to be halted for a while.  The one person that could do this is the Archbishop of York.  The Archbishop of Canterbury is likely to be entangled with the same legal firms as have been advising the Diocese of Oxford and Christ Church College, as well as the various bodies that work out of Church House.  Stephen Cottrell, hopefully, can recognise what a disaster these events are for the whole Church of England.  I believe that the paths of Dean Percy and Cottrell have crossed in the past.  If that is true, he will know that Percy is not a sex-crazed lunatic, which is how his enemies at Christ Church have been trying to portray him for their own political ends.  If the Archbishop pf York could put in place a moratorium on the church processes for three months, this might help to calm things down and stop the current madness infecting and afflicting the church in Oxford and elsewhere.   There is a crisis; we need something dramatic to happen to resolve things.  Stephen Cottrell, you are our last hope!

Almost every institution these days seems to have a mission statement.  Local parish churches are no exception.  When a congregation registers as a charity with the Charity Commission (CC), they are obliged to produce a statement of aims and purpose.  This is then attached to the Annual Report along with the audited accounts.  Mission statements do serve one valuable purpose, in that they compel self-scrutiny within an organisation like church congregations.   The one big weakness that the mission statements produced by churches have, is that they often get wrapped up in churchy language.  Instead of addressing issues like justice, power, bullying and inclusivity, these statements often paint an idealised picture of church life, which may be remote from the reality.   The use of ‘holy’ language to describe the work of the church often does much to obscure the real vision of the church organisation.  References to God seem fine but all too often they give us no clear picture of what the church is actually doing.

When we want models of good mission statements for churches, local or national, it is always worth looking outside the Church to see clearly stated what good practice in this area looks like.  As I indicated in an earlier blog post the Church exists on at least two levels.  It has an ‘ideal’ manifestation which reveals it as a theological concept or idea.  It also has its local manifestations, complete with human sin and weakness.   Most of us realise that just because the word church appears somewhere in describing an individual or a group, no automatic assumption can be made that high ethical standards are in operation.  Churches behave well or shabbily like other organisations.  We see all too often examples of the Church behaving worse than their secular counterparts.  This has been proved especially true in the area of safeguarding.  We find examples of bullying, lying and power abuse involved in the original abuse.  It also happens when attempts have been made by victims to report their trauma to church authorities.   The shoddiness of treatment towards victims by leaders is perhaps because these leaders believe that their moral status and the status of the Church institution will result in not having to face scrutiny.

While church congregations have mission statements which often lack precision and depth, the same formulaic prose is also provided for the national bodies which form part of the Church of England.  One would like to see every constituent body of the Church being required, not only to define their role, but also indicate their values and the ethical principles to which they are committed. The House of Bishops, the Archbishop’s Council, the National Safeguarding Team (NST) and other national entities of the Church should each have their own binding mission statements which go further than mere aspiration.  The purpose of such a mission statement would be to allow those of us outside to understand why these entities exist and also have some means of seeing how ethical standards in each are being audited.  In recent weeks, we have been exposed to apparent chaos in the NST and its management of the Clergy Discipline Measure.  It would be helpful if there were a proper NST statement of values which gave detail to how they were being held accountable for their failings when things go wrong.  For a body to have so much power without an apparent system of accountability is going to be a cause of unhappiness and confusion for many in the Church.

In recent days I have stumbled across a mission statement from a well-respected national body.  The organisation producing it is the Charity Commission.  We have already, in an earlier blog, set out the seven principles by the CC expected of every charitable body.  Here we have the expectations of the CC for itself.  It is a remarkable short document.  It is possibly a model for the kind of mission statement that would be appropriate for the national Church, as well as all its constituent bodies.  Clearly it does not draw on religious principles, but it draws on universally held ethical standards.  I am proud to be living in a country where the aspiration for such high ethical norms is expressed by a public body.  Even if the CC does not succeed in completely stamping out unethical behaviour in English charities, it engages with the task with a highly principled and moral perspective.  This list of fundamental principles under which the CC is taken from their website.

Independent: we(the CC) will maintain independence in our decision making, acting without fear or favour, in the public interest.

Accountable: we will be proactive in accounting to all our stakeholders, which will include involving others on a continuous and appropriate basis and taking responsibility for our decisions.

Proportionate:  our actions, procedures and culture will be proportionate to the burden of regulation on charities, of different sizes, to the degree of risk involved and to the potential impact, within the resources available to us.

Impartial: we will exercise our powers and discretion in a way which is non-partisan and even-handed.

Transparent: we will communicate with and listen to our stakeholders and will be clear about our actions, intentions and expectations.

Consistent: we will act consistently in our decision making.

This list feels like a breath of fresh air, potentially blowing over many institutions.  It offers a benchmark for good practice that we could see profitably applied to most charitable organisations, including the churches.  It certainly provides a place for such organisations to start from.  It would be wonderful if every charitable body in England were compelled to sign up to this or a similar document to obtain charitable status and the tax benefits that go with it.  The tragedy of reading this list is the bitter realisation that in the realm of safeguarding and its implementation, the Church fails in most, if not all, of these principles.

The first word that I pick up from this statement is the final word consistent.  On Tuesday this coming week, the thirtyone:eight report on Jonathan Fletcher is to be published.  From what we already know, it is likely that abusive behaviour over a period of thirty years is going to be revealed.  The public scandal only broke in June 2019, but my sources tell me that Fletcher’s behaviour was widely known about for a long time before that.  Given the fact that the Daily Telegraph has made the Fletcher story front page headlines, a consistent church would long ago have started their own ‘lesson-learning’ enquiry into this massively reputation damaging scandal.  But no, it is understood that the NST does not even now have a file for Fletcher, let alone a core-group or any plan to look at the likely fall-out from this report.  Meanwhile, two core-groups have been convened to examine the case of Dean Percy.  The allegations against him, even if true, score very low down on the damage chart.  If the NST was required to sign a statement of values which mentioned consistency, one wonders how much interest they would have had in the case.

We may take another word from the list which seems topical at present –  impartial.  The disasters that have befallen the Clergy Discipline Measure over recent years, also indicate that impartiality has been a frequent casualty in church disciplinary processes.  Complaints against some bishops have been made in the full glare of publicity and press coverage, and we mention George Carey and Christopher Lowson.  In other cases, where there have been equally serious complaints against bishops, the process has been quietly shunted off to the shadows.  I am thinking of the recorded safeguarding failures of the Bishops of Birmingham, Oxford, Beverley and Doncaster to name a few.  No suspensions, even temporary, took place and nothing else seems to have happened.  The current farce of allowing two diocesan bishops, with serious safeguarding issues in their pasts, to handle the Percy CDM case, is the ultimate absurdity.  It offends two of the CC ethical guidelines, impartiality and independence.    Overall, the Christ Church affair seems to fail every one of the Charity Commission’s standards for ethical behaviour.

The Church of England and all its constituent bodies should be asked each to produce and agree to a statement of their purpose and the ethical values to which they are committed.  These would hopefully reflect the same qualities and standards as the one produced by the Charity Commission for itself.  If such a document were in place, standards of behaviour would have to rise instantly in the Church.  If the Church were able to produce a documents like this and live them out, that might help to restore some of the integrity that it has lost over recent years.  People understand integrity, honesty, consistency and transparency.  If they can see some of this restored to the national church, there is a chance that many new people might actually want to become part of it.   

One of the most devastating discoveries that a person can make is that the company or firm they work for is corrupt in some way.  They then have to make a choice.   Do they resign forthwith and attempt whistleblowing as they leave the company?  Do they supress the knowledge of the dishonest practices or, worse still, collude with them in some way?  I am sure there are other options that my readers can come up with as a response to ethical failures in an institution.  The fact remains that many workplaces, and this can include churches and educational establishments, have stepped over to the dark side.  It need not be financial corruption, but there may be a culture of rampant racism, misogyny or homophobia.  Another problem could be endemic institutional bullying or sexual harassment.  How does one cope with the fact that a boss or overseers are tolerating or even condoning misconduct?  I wonder how the workers in France who worked in the manufacture of cladding for buildings felt when they realised that their factory and their bosses had been complicit in the terrible Grenfell fire.

Organisations, companies and religious groups are all places where terrible things can happen.  It is right for official enquiries to be set up to examine when things go badly wrong and how appalling events happen because of institutional failure.  Only the major scandals of abuse and dishonesty are exposed in this way.  Minor injustices continue, causing untold misery for the victims of such behaviour.  As I ponder these sobering thoughts about work organisations I ask myself the question:  can we locate corruption in an institution?  Does it get grafted into an organisation so that it becomes somehow endemic in that institution?  Alternatively, is it only to be found in the attitudes and actions of those who are responsible for the corrupting behaviour?

The answer to the question is that organisations are never totally corrupted.  New leaders arrive and, as if by a miracle, the old atmosphere that tolerated evil can be quickly swept away.  It seldom happens overnight because people who have worked in toxic or claustrophobic environments need time to get used to a new broom.   As I have already mentioned, congregations can also be corrupted when the wrong people are in charge. Every institution will be open to the same dangers.  The people who lead are normally in the position to bring about the changes that are needed to make the institution flourish. Bullying, misogyny and homophobia, to take three examples, can be banished from the workplace, the college or the congregation.  Every institution can overcome systemic evil if it puts its mind to it.

Returning to the example of the Church, as an institution with which most readers of this blog are familiar, we can suggest that it exists at two levels.  One is the Platonic ‘ideal’ of the Church.  It is the place where Christians learn to worship God, follow their master Christ and receive the power of the Spirit to live their transformed lives.  Such a one sentence description of the Church is bound to fail as a full description, but we can allow it for the moment, as we contemplate the messy reality that we, in fact, encounter week by week.  Christians are very good at pretending that the ideal is the reality they deal with most of the time.  By doing this they make themselves unable to see the more human realities in front of them.  The fantasy perfect church and infallible leaders are what they pine after, and so they create that reality in their minds, even if it does not in fact exist.    

When we think about the Church having this double reality, divine and human, we also recognise that it shares one thing with every other organisation.  Organisations, like human beings, have an inbuilt instinct for survival.  Churches will use all means available to help them continue to exist.  Some methods, as we have indicated, may be  rooted in human selfishness while others will look to what we call transcendent realities. This double rootedness, in human selfishness and divine inspiration, creates its own problems.  If we try to pretend that the Church is normally in accord with God’s will, we are in danger of giving bad behaviour a ‘get out of jail free’ card as we fail to look carefully at the motivation and behaviour of leaders.  We also are sucked into believing that anyone with a position of authority is automatically to be trusted.  The Conservative Evangelical world is working through the problems of having trusted Ravi Zacharias and Jonathan Fletcher for decades.   Each man was placed, not in a potentially fallible human category, but in a ‘divinely inspired and uniquely blessed by God’ group.  To trust someone who turns out to be an abuser is a major cause of stumbling and loss of faith.  The only antidote for this shattering and disillusionment of Christian followers is that all leaders avoid what we call the celebrity culture.  Creating Christian celebrities is a high-risk strategy.  All of them will turn out to be human and fallible like the rest of us.  That is not to say that they are all guilty of deceiving followers, but that we should always avoid treating any such leaders as super-human.

The record of the Church of England leadership, with its management of safeguarding events over the past twenty years, is extremely patchy.  Most church members would love to believe that their leaders always know what they are doing.  They are supposed to be helping the flock to be as close as possible to the ‘ideal’ of church life, the one revealed to us by Scripture.  But what we find in reality is that the guardians of church life are far more wrapped up in management issues and ensuring that the church institution survives.  In some ways this instinct is natural and to be expected.  But it is the way this survival priority has been put into effect that causes us alarm.  Looking back a number of years to the Ball scandal, we watched how the Church protected itself by hiding information.  Important letters sent to Lambeth Palace about Ball’s behaviour were never shared with the police.  The other institutional tactic that has been used, is to bully and intimidate those who bring complaints to the Church about their past abuse.  The ‘myth’ of appropriate concern for survivors is often merely an idea inside the minds of bishops and others in authority.  The reality is sometimes bullying behaviour, and this has been subcontracted to lawyers who are employed by the church leadership.  A gay clergyman can hear, as happened recently, his behaviour described as being like bestiality.  Because the remark was made by a lawyer instructed by the Church, the church authorities avoided taking blame for the remark.  The Julie Macfarlane case was described as being a ‘brutal’ struggle just to be heard by the Church.  Once again it was not the bishops and the church leaders that were doing the persecution directly; it was the lawyers working on their behalf.  The Church, in pursuing such tactics, has survived as an institution with its money and structure mostly intact.  But the cost of ensuring this survival has been extremely high.  The Church can still believe in and proclaim its ideal manifestation, the worship of God etc., but fewer and fewer people will see that vision.  Somehow the ideal has become increasingly obscured by murky behaviour on the part of those who lead it.

The Christ Church affair rumbles on.  We have long given up expecting to see compassion, fairness, even-handedness and transparency in this affair.  As with other cases, we see a lawyer-coordinated campaign of persecution being waged against one individual.  The official acts of aggressive behaviour against the Dean may have been planned and put into effect by lawyers, but they are assisted by others who pile in, for reasons of their own, to enhance the cruelty.  There are many bystanders who share guilt.  Whatever guilty acts may have been committed by an individual, nobody deserves to be so thoroughly undermined by a campaign of such deliberate and targeted brutality.  Where is the pastoral care for the Dean?  Where is the concern for his welfare? This should apply to him, as any other person who is suffering breakdown because of persecution.   As an outsider I am particularly shocked by the way that the Church authorities in London and Oxford see fit to conduct a simultaneous campaign of persecution.  If the Bishop of Oxford believes that his Dean has done something terrible, is there not still enough imaginative care around in Oxford to stand back and let the other College process work its way through?  No, the Dean has to face persecution from two directions at once, the Church and the College.  All this is being done when he is off sick with serious mental trauma, caused by three years of attack.  He should not now be having to marshal his defence against any such attacks.  The story of vicious mental cruelty against the Dean is worthy of a third world country, to be reported by Amnesty International in one of their reports.  I am wondering whether the Church has stopped to think how it is conniving in something truly sickening and barbaric. This cruelty by the Church (and College) is what will be remembered long after the rest of the dispute is forgotten.

Over the centuries the Church was able to justify its actions, however arbitrary, because it believed it was doing the will of God.  The safeguarding failures and the treatment of survivors by official bodies have recently been so appalling that even the Church has stopped trying to pretend that God is anywhere to be found in its actions.  They are, to quote Archbishop Sentamu, sometimes ‘shabby and shambolic’. In all these episodes, the Church and its reputation is a heavy loser.  The Ball case showed a system that did not want to stick up for victims but instead sought the approval of the great and the good supporting one of their own.  The Elliot review showed a Church once again that could not take action to do anything to care for an abuse victim.  Rather it hid behind insurance company lawyers as a way of fending off challenges to its institutional complacency.  The Macfarlane case showed again how far the Church was prepared to defend itself, using lawyers to fight tooth and nail to avoid admitting manifest failures.  The ongoing Christ Church saga has involved two bishops of the Church, each with a record of safeguarding failures.  It may be a coincidence that the attacks on a sick man arrived virtually on the same day.  This may have something to do with the fact the same lawyer is involved in both cases.  Winckworth Sherwood, her employer, have a vested interest in keeping the case going as long as possible.  Charitable funds from both College and Church have been poured out like water to fund this devilish project.  Christ Church, the diocese of Oxford and the Church of England all come out of this very badly.  Yet we believe there is much more information to come out.   We trust that it will soon see the light of day.

by Fiona Gardner

Stephen suggested that further analytic thought might contribute more to the discussion on Christ Church and dysfunctional group dynamics. Here are a few thoughts – taken from my book shelf.

It was the psychologist Carl Jung who said that if you want to lose your identity – join a group. He also wrote that the group experience takes place at a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. Communal singing can work like this – the choir or congregation feels as if one, uplifted together, even if singing words that might not ring true or make sense to each individual member. In a group we escape from ourselves when our sense of security is increased and the sense of responsibility is decreased – it becomes what Jung calls a mass mentality which of course can be benign or malign (there are plenty of examples that come to mind), or a healthy mixture. And for each person in the group there is a heightened suggestibility and what Jung calls a suggestive group spirit (he refers at one point to the example of the confessions of the Oxford Movement) where the favourable social effects are experienced at the expense of the moral and mental independence of the individual. In the group our discriminative capacity is decreased: ‘one becomes braver, more presumptuous, more cocky, more insolent, more reckless; but the self is diminished and … individual judgement.’ This levelling down can be compensated by one person who emerges as ‘The Leader’ of the group spirit. This means that prestige and power conflicts keep arising: ‘social egocentricity increases in proportion to the numerical strength of the group’.

Regular readers of this blog are well up to speed with the various attempts to apparently ‘oust’ Martyn Percy from his position as Dean of Christ Church, Oxford from 2018 up to the present. In a letter circulated to members of General Synod of the Church of England in June 2020, the authors, lawyers Martin Sewell and David Lamming wrote how whilst the process was not transparent – ‘the only transparency is the motivation’. Whilst the motivation may be clear, there are murky and obscure processes going on in terms of group dynamics. David Lamming commenting on the Independent Review published on 11^th March sees conflict of interests and loyalty as part of this. The Governing Body is a large group – over 60 (it looks like 41 involved in recent actions – so to return to Jung’s phrase ‘social egocentricity’ is pretty high which may help to explain the reluctance to reflect on what the group is doing. Jung put it like this: ‘When a hundred intelligent heads are united in a group the result is one big fathead’.

This is where Wilfred Bion might also offer clarity. Stephen referred the surviving church readership to Bion’s work on groups, and although Bion died in 1979 both his work on what happens in groups, and his work with individual patients are still held in high regard. His theory is based on what he discovered in his work managing a rehabilitation unit for psychiatric patients in the British Army during World War II, and later with small groups at the Tavistock Clinic. As Stephen and follow up commentators have stated the central idea in Bion’s theory is that in every group, two groups exist: the ‘work group’ and the ‘basic assumption group’. Bion was not referring to factions or subgroups within the group, but rather to two dimensions of behaviour within the group.

The work group is that element of group functioning that is concerned with the primary task or work of the group: which in this case would be governing Christ Church to the best of the group’s ability. The mature work group is aware of its purpose and can define its task. Its members work cooperatively as separate and discrete members who willingly choose to belong to the group because they identify with interests of the group. This group tests its conclusions, seeks knowledge, and learns from its experience. Bion notes that this level of maturity in the work group is very rare.

One of the defining characteristics of the emotional life of the Christ Church Governing Body would appear to be its inability to learn from previous experience. So, why would the Governing Body employ ineffective and self-contradicting behaviour that lessens the effectiveness of the work group? Why would it compulsively repeat this?  Bion suggests that this is because in addition to the work group, the basic assumption group is strongly at play. The basic assumption group can be thought of as the ‘as if’ group, meaning that the group behaves ‘as if” certain tacit assumptions were held by the members. These assumptions are hidden in the group subconscious, outside the awareness of group members. The type of basic assumption group that fits best with the reported behaviour at Christ Church is the fight-flight group which assumes that it must preserve itself at all costs, and that this can be done only by fighting or fleeing from someone or something. The group has no tolerance for weakness and expects casualties since salvation of the group is more important than the needs of individual members. The fight-flight leader must inspire great courage and self-sacrifice, and lead the group against a common enemy. If none exists, an enemy will be created. A leader who fails to afford the group the opportunity for retreat or attack will be considered ineffective and ultimately ignored. When scapegoating (such as might be considered against Martyn Percy) occurs within a group dynamic, it is possible that the fight-flight assumption is largely at play. Members bond together to fight a common foe, the scapegoat, resulting in the majority of the group sharing a sense of purpose and ‘groupness’ often for the first time. One interesting aspect is the power of group mentality and the uneasiness experienced by individual members unless they are conforming to this underlying basic assumption.

 When the rational group process is corrupted – as in this situation – then it means that there are powerful emotional states pushing judgement into second place. In other words, things are not seen clearly and there is no chance of learning from experience. Might it be possible that the arrival of and suggested policies changes made by Martyn Percy have created a feeling of being under threat – a somewhat paranoid basic assumption group where the fear is of change and the survival of the institution. Bion found that the basic assumption group offers a feeling of increased vitality; it also rejects that there are any difficulties – especially psychological difficulties or it offers a means of avoiding difficulties by focusing instead on the enemy. So, there is an excitement engendered by the basic assumption group, an excitement far removed from the usual dull meetings with agenda, procedures and points of order. Bion wrote of ‘This longed for alternative to the group procedure’. It’s exciting because it is fuelled by heightened emotions such as anxiety, fear, hatred and love – all contributing to the basic assumption. Under threat the basic assumption group might turn to the group history, using tradition and how things have been to protect the group in its struggle against the threat of having to accept an idea which might require individual progress and discomfort.

Each group member has to try and identify with either the basic assumption or the rational structure. It seems that a majority of the Governing Body are identifying with the basic assumption group and then would feel persecuted by what seems to them to be the arid intellectualism of the work group. Where basic assumptions become dangerous is when they are translated into action and again this is the pattern at Christ Church.

So, what might a group consultant suggest? If it was Bion he might use his idea of working on containment within a contained space where the powerful emotions could be held, processed and then communicated without everyone becoming overwhelmed by them. There then might be a restoration of the capacity to think sufficiently in each individual member of the body to refocus on the work group ethic. Or he might just see that the group has got stuck on the collective regressed level and see that any change at this point is a forlorn hope. Bion recognised that the fight-flight group has no concern for the welfare of the individual – as long as the group continues, and so will feel that any method of dealing with the group neurosis is opposed to the good of the group and will be rejected.

In recent weeks, the work of the Charity Commission (CC) and its involvement with the Christ Church Oxford saga has been explored on this blog.  I do not propose to go back over what I have said in earlier posts.  Nevertheless, I want to repeat one point that I made on the 28^thJanuary.  When a dispute arises between the CC and a registered charity under its supervision in the UK, the CC and its decisions have considerable legal force.   Recently the CC has published an account of their involvement with a Sikh charity in London. This clearly sets out how the CC works to intervene when a religious charity is unable or unwilling to conduct its affairs in a way that satisfies charity law.   The religious charity involved is the Central Gurdwara, the most prominent Sikh temple in London.  The process of intervention by the CCs has lasted several years but it has finally been resolved by some decisive actions by the CC.  This has brought to an end a number of failures of governance which involved money and other administrative lapses.  The story of the CC’s involvement with this charity is an instructive one, since it shows a dogged determination by the CC to put things right and insist that charity law is observed and enforced.  Charity law in Britain is not like a voluntary code.  It is part of English law backed up and enforced by the civil authorities of our nation. 

The charitable aims and objects of the Central Gurdwara are the maintenance of the building and the advancement of education for members of the Sikh community.   The problems that were raised and brought the charity to the attention of the CC in 2012 centred round some disputes among the trustees.  These made it difficult for the smooth operation and management of the institution.    The CC seem to have  a well-established process for these eventualities and these protocols have been in operation from December 2012 right up to the present report in March 2021. The CC obviously are using their own terminology to describe these stages in putting things in order, and, even though it is not absolutely clear to a layman what each part of the process involves, we get the sense of a well-oiled and efficient scheme at work.  The first stage was the ‘opening of an operational compliance case’ in 2012.  The next stage was the issuing of an action plan in February 2014.  In July 2014, the CC opened a ‘monitoring case’ to find out whether the trustees were implementing the action plan.  The monitoring case had determined by July 2015 that a statutory inquiry under section 46 of the Charity Act was required.  This was to examine the compliance with the action plan, the financial regulation of the charity and whether there had been misconduct by the trustees.  By March 2016 the CC had determined that there were serious problems.  The trustees were issued with a Direction to provide evidence and copies of documents which could be examined to see whether promised improvements of the Charity were in hand.  One sticking point at this stage proved to be an issue over defining membership.  Members of the Temple alone had the power to elect trustees and because there was some vagueness and uncertainty in this area, the process of finding legal trustees was made impossible.

In January 2017, the CC decided that it was necessary to intervene and appoint an Interim Manager (IM).  He would have the legal authority to determine on the difficult task of membership so that valid elections would be able to take place.   The main problem encountered by the IM was the continuing disruptive behaviour by existing trustees.  It was determined that the appointment of 15 brand new trustees was the only way that future governance could be set in place and respected by all parties.  This process of electing the new trustees was overseen by an independent specialist company for managing ballots and elections.  These took place in March 2020.  The three candidates who had received the highest votes were appointed President, Vice President and General Secretary respectively.

The conclusions of the CC inquiry have considerable interest to those of us who look to the CC to provide stability to the charity sector and in our case, religious charities.  One statement that caught my attention was one that stated ‘the former trustees failed to resolve their differences and implement the guidance.  This amounted to misconduct…’  A further statement gave the new trustees the option to ‘recover any money lost due to breach of trust/duty by the former trustees.  The IM had clearly had a difficult task.  The report recorded that he had met personally expenses of £33,791 which had not been charged to the charity.

The final section of this Report about the affair reminds the reader of the responsibilities of charity trustees.  One would like to see these printed and given to every single individual who takes on this role, PCC members and college governing bodies alike.  It is worth reproducing seven principles that are recognised by the courts when reviewing the conduct and decisions of charity trustees.  These principles are as follows.  Trustees must

• act within their powers
• act in good faith and only in the interests of the charity
• make sure they are sufficiently informed
• take account of all relevant factors
• ignore any irrelevant factors
• manage any conflicts of interest
• make decisions that are within the range of decisions that a reasonable trustee body could make

Of these seven principles one would like to be able to say that they are always listened to by charitable bodies we know.  Acting in the interest of the charity will always require that other issues, like personal vendettas, be put to one side.  Conflicts of interest are again common in some areas of church life we have been looking at over the past weeks and months.  It is indeed helpful to have these reminders of good practice for charity trustees of all kinds of charity.  It is also good to have a reminder that good practice is not only recommended; it has the full force of the English legal system to back it up and enforce it.  The Church of England has managed to avoid some of the requirements of law by being able to claim special exemptions.  Thus, it has been allowed to avoid some of the stipulations of the Equality Act 2010.  It can, in some situations, discriminate against women and sexual minorities.  How much longer these exemptions will be tolerated by society is an open question.  One can imagine that eventually the laws of the land will be the same for every institution, including the Church, and the laws which tolerate deliberate acts of exclusion will be swept away.

One institution that is currently attracting the attention the CC is of course Christ Church Oxford.  Even at a distance it is possible to discern that there exist breaches of several of the seven principles of good charity trusteeship.  I hardly need to repeat all the ways that personal animosities seem to have started to interfere with the trustees’ work.  Animosity and the process of governance have become entangled.  Another of the principles of good governance is that trustees should be well informed.  The censors at the heart of the dispute with the Dean have done little to assist this process when they forbade the Andrew Smith report being distributed among their fellow trustees.  The lack of openness in this action does not fill one with confidence that whoever is chosen to ratify the Governors’ actions will find the Christ Church trustees acting in acting in ‘good faith and only in the interests of the charity’.

My final comment is this.  If I, as a non-lawyer, can spot several obvious flaws in the way matters have been handled at the College, it is surely clear that a legally trained person, well versed in charity law will also see these same failures of good practice.   The College is going to be judged by the protocols of charity law which does not make any exemptions or concessions.  The Central Gurdwara in London was not able to argue against the right of the British State to demand just and fair practice as is laid down by the laws of the land which operate to oversee charities.  Christ Church College may be able to employ the best (and most expensive) lawyers in the land.  Even with this power, it will not be able to stand against the power of the courts and its judges if it is found to have betrayed its charitable aims.  At present it is hard to claim that the trustees of Christ Church are fulfilling and acting in accordance with the terms of their trust. 

There is an apocryphal tale – which happens to be true as well – that tells of a BBC reporter in Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles in the late 1980s.  He was trying to explain, live on air, to the news anchor in London, the intricacies of the politics, religion, violence and tribalism, with the law, police and paramilitaries all thrown in for good measure.  It was a tragic-yet-hopeful complex spaghetti of issues and events, and hard to explain in one report.  So here is how he summed it all up: “Anyone who thinks they understand what is going on around here clearly hasn’t grasped the situation”.  Quite.  If you thought you understood what was happening, you would really need to think again. 

Any clergyperson who has acted as the chair of a Parochial Church Council will know the experience of trying to find common ground amid a cacophony of opinions. On contentious matters, it is seldom possible to arrive at the point where we can say that this is the undisputed unanimous position of the whole group. In spite of Paul pleading for Christians to be of ‘one heart and one mind’, this seldom is the reality we find in practice. Many decisions, which go to a vote, have a substantial minority grumbling that what has been decided is wrong.

The academic study of group behaviour is not one that is familiar to most people. Some of the insights which can be discerned from these studies are nevertheless fascinating and useful for the Church.  We sometimes want to forget the untidiness and even unpleasant dynamics that can exist even in ordinary committee work. As long-term readers of this blog will know, I have always been interested in the way groups function.  What happens in a committee or a congregation is sometimes in complete contrast to what individuals say they want.  When we recently looked at the writing of Le Bon and his 19^th century studies of the crowd, we discovered that the normal consciousness of individuals is sometimes compromised or changed when they become part of a large group.  Freud picked up this theme, noticing the way that primal unconscious processes could erupt into the conscious mind of members of a crowd. He theorised that a group like the church or the army would have a corporate super ego.  This would, in a group setting, replace the one used by the individual.  The army operated smoothly because a Commander in Chief was making the decisions about what were the important tasks for that army to perform. In Freud’s understanding, the person of Christ was the guiding principle, or super-ego, operating within the Christian.  This created a stability of belief and practice. Freud’s observations are interesting regardless of whether we agree with them.  They show him taking seriously the corporate aspect of human awareness as well as that of the individual.  His speculations about the unconscious dynamics that operate within a crowd/mob, sometimes involving violence, helped his successors to an understanding of the phenomenon of fascism in the 30s.

 Another pioneer of group studies, Wilfred Bion, deserves our attention. He was working with groups of officers invalided home during the Second World War. These had been incapacitated by some kind of mental trauma.  Bion’s task was to rehabilitate them so that they could function once again and continue to make their contribution to the war effort.   He decided on an experiment.   This was to put the men into groups so that they could learn to work together and accomplish simple tasks which would involve cooperation.   These Bion work groups were initially thwarted by resistance from the members of the group.  Bion went on to analyse what was really going on, and how it was stopping the men working together.  He called these processes of resistance, which were impeding the work tasks, basic assumptions. These basic assumptions were a kind of group mental attitude which they all shared.  Put another way, the group members were acting out of a group mind, resisting doing the tasks which the group were being given. Two of these basic assumptions can be mentioned here. One is a tendency of a group always to look around to find someone to be their leader.  This is, in itself, an avoidance tactic.  It makes one person responsible for what goes on so the others can sit back.  The second basic assumption is what Bion called fight or flight. This is a tendency for all members to use the group to look for and struggle against perceived enemies. This hostility towards another group (real or imagined) is irrational but it is a successful way of relieving primal anxieties about identity of the group.  It certainly succeeded in the temporary undermining of the group tasks which were the whole point of Bion’s groups.

The study of basic assumptions and the way that these unconscious processes erupt into the work of groups, large or small, is something which was closely studied in the 70s and 80s. The Tavistock Clinic invested a great deal of energy and manpower into studying and experimenting with such groups. Sadly, from the point of my own interest, this area of study seems to have become far less fashionable over the last 20 years. It may account for the way that fewer people are on the look-out to notice the way that unconscious processes are at work in many group situations. People do not want to see how often group dynamics are rife in institutions and workplaces, including the churches.  The former Dean of Westminster, Wesley Carr, was interested in this material but, since his death, I am not aware of anyone in the churches who is interested in this important class of research and study. When we, of an older generation who were aware of these interests, observe dysfunction in church groups and institutions, we are reminded of the relevance of this theoretical material to church conflicts.

One group in the news at the moment is the Governing Body of Christ Church at Oxford.  Obviously, we only know what they choose to tell us about the conduct of their meetings, but it is hard not to speculate about the dynamic of these meetings.   We would expect that they behave in a way similar to any other group with 60+ members.  Some will be happy to sit back and listen to the activist core which is driving the agenda without expressing any opinion.  They will let decisions be made on their behalf, as long as it does not touch or affect them too much outside the meetings. The second basic assumption of fight or flight will provide the group energy which is needed to pursue the vendetta against the Dean. Probably only a tiny number will personally have any deep irrational dislike of the Dean, one which has created so much malevolence.  Nevertheless, some of that hatred may have spilled beyond the core.  Even the most intelligent members of a large group may find something attractive in being sucked into doing what many groups enjoy most, hating a scapegoat.  What I write here is, of course, speculation, but I understand that a toxic environment has indeed spread over parts of the college.  Unconscious negative forces, the kind described by Le Bon, Freud and Bion are alive and well in twenty-first century Oxford.

Among the press releases put out by Christ Church for the consumption of the public is one that I am still puzzling to make sense of.  However, we believe that an external, independent review will provide further reassurance about the decisions that were taken, and a way forward for all involved.”  This statement contains two ideas that are mutually incompatible. The first of these is the word ‘independent’ and then it is closely followed by the words ‘will provide further reassurance about the decisions’. How can any group suggest what an independent review should provide?  Although the statement is slightly qualified by the words ‘we believe’, there should be here a stronger commitment to this independence.  Independence has to guarantee that any conclusion will be in accordance with the facts and the judgement of the one doing the review. Was this statement written by a fairly junior and inexperienced member of a reputation management company? It certainly does not suggest any detailed care for the reputation of the institution issuing it.

Declining academic interest in group dynamics over the past 20 to 30 years has meant that most people are now blind to the possibility for organisations like colleges and the churches to act irrationally. Bion, sixty years ago, wanted us to see how these unconscious, irrational and destructive forces can take hold in group functioning.  When we talk about independence in evaluating groups and their behaviour, we mean rising above and beyond the hatreds and behaviours indulged in and fostered within much institutional life. When such irrationality becomes dominant in an institution, as it seems to be doing in Christ Church at present, calm analytical minds need to be brought in to show the difference between passionate feeling and factual material.  Such judgement and stability must come from the outside.

Looking at the College from the outside, gleaning material provided by the Press and by Private Eye, we see an institution apparently bent on self-destructive behaviour.   These, we believe, are driven by the unconscious processes identified by Bion and will, over a period of time, do enormous damage to the College.   It may be said of Christ Church Oxford in a history written about the College many years hence.  2018 to 2022 was a period of corporate institutional insanity.  No one seemed to understand what was going on and the College took some time to recover.  One thing we certainly hope not to read is that the dysfunctions of the time swept away the Dean of the College. 

“Words strain.. crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.”  T.S.Elliot

A somewhat unedifying dispute has broken out between conservative Anglicans in Nigeria and their ACNA fellow travellers in the States. The Anglican Church of North America is one of a number of break-away groupings, formed after a large conference in Jerusalem in 2008 for conservative Anglicans from all over the world.  This conference was one of the latest in a long line of efforts to present conservatives as the heirs of orthodox historic Anglicanism.  They are the ones who are biblically faithful and live in accordance with the true gospel of Jesus.  Two documents are appealed to as expressing the mind of that Jerusalem conference.  Adherence to them is also seen as marking out someone having membership of this true Anglicanism.  The first is the document produced by the conference itself, the so-called Jerusalem Declaration.  The second is part of a statement or report from the Lambeth Conference in 1998.    Addressing the topic of sexuality, the segment is referred to as Lambeth 1:10..  This statement had quite a bit of material addressing the pastoral care of homosexuals but the sentence focused on by conservatives is the one which declared that ‘homosexuality was incompatible with Scripture’.  Conservative bishops were able to read from this sentence a total vindication of their position.  To this day, little by way of new thinking has taken place among conservative Anglicans and this was vividly attested to by the reactionary video put out recently by the organisation, the Church of England Evangelical Council.  This was published in response to the nuanced document, Living in Love and Faith, which represented the range of viewpoints in the Anglican Church as a whole.  It is clear that the issues of welcoming and engaging with the gay community is of no interest to many within the broad family of conservative Anglicans across the world.

The current dispute has been triggered by an open letter written by some members of ACNA in the States, addressed to their fellow Anglicans who are troubled by the way that gay Christians are treated in many conservative Anglican settings.  It is not a radical document by any means, but it is stating things which would appear obvious to outsiders. Demanding that gay people attain abstinence and celibacy means that they have to meet standards not expected of straight people. Also, even when gay Christians achieve celibacy, they are still being treated as invisible.  Congregations do nothing to affirm them in any way.   The authors call for ‘compassionate and effective pastoral care’ for this group.  What this means in practice is not spelt out, but clearly the letter has rattled cages right across ACNA and its allies around the world.

The conservative Anglican Church in Nigeria, under its Archbishop Henry Ndukuba, has been the first to see this open letter and ACNA’s response to it as the beginning of a capitulation to western decadence, and thus a betrayal of strict traditional Christian values.  Homosexuality must continue to be treated as a virus or a yeast that ‘should be urgently and radically expunged lest it affect the whole dough.’  Further the Archbishop goes on, ‘the events ..(are) most unfortunate and dangerous to the cause of Mission…. The Church in USA which should lead the fight against this evil in ACNA; and if it fails, it would have disappointed God.’  In response to this furious letter, ACNA have answered, expressing the fact that absolutely nothing has changed in their approach to the issue of homosexuality and that they remain faithful to the foundation documents who hold together the GAFCON family across the world.

The blog is not intending to be a discussion about who is right between Archbishop Ndukuba, ACNA’s Archbishop Foley Beach and the writers of the ‘dear Gay Anglicans’ letter.  Conservative Anglicans dwell within a universe of binary realities which Surviving Church does not share.  Reality in the binary world is either true or false.  It cannot occupy a place somewhere in the middle.  As the quote from T.S.Elliot at the beginning indicated, the reality is that words are imperfect tools, they crack and decay with imprecision.  If we want to understand what is really going on between conservative Anglicans in the States and Nigeria, we must go behind the words about homosexuality and ask questions in a quite different way.

What is going on when Christians struggle with one another and sometimes kill each other over the precise meaning and definition of words.  To me, and many other liberally educated Christians, it is an enormous relief not to be tied to a single interpretation of a word.  Even the advantage of having studied Greek and a little Hebrew, does not bring me any closer to a perfect understanding of Scripture.  The ability to penetrate a word, by understanding its context and its history, may take me further away from any claim to understand it completely.  The more we study words and ideas, the less we seem to make claims about having complete insight into their meaning.  I prefer to live in a world of paradox and ambiguity where meaning and truth are only discovered after long painful questioning and scrutiny.

The spat that is going on in the conservative world of Anglicans is not, and never has been, one merely about truth.   It is mainly about our old friend, institutional and personal power.  The Bible and one way of reading it and interpreting it, has been weaponised to offer a victor, if successful, enormous rewards and access to power across the Anglican Church.  Christians of all shades and opinions have been lured to seek power in Trump’s America.  There has always been an extraordinary myth about the duty/call of Christians to rule over society having claimed power in God’s name.  The idea of a Christian theocracy was first articulated by Rushdoony in the early 70s.  Such ideas have little appeal in Britain, but it is an idea popular in the American evangelical world.  A Christian leader in Africa, already subsidised by generous amounts of American cash, will have a good idea of the way that much power could fall into his lap if he backs the right person in the bitter culture wars being fought out among Christians in the States.

Among my books is one entitled American Culture Warriors in Africa.  It is an account of the way that the anti-LGBT protagonists are exporting their struggles to Africa.  There, with plentiful cash and human resources, these ‘warriors’ are seducing whole churches and denominations to the anti-LGBT cause.   Individuals such as the Sekulows (father and son) and Scott Lively spread anti-gay poison throughout Africa, contributing to the strong legal inhibitions about gays that are current in Uganda and elsewhere. With the background of all this well documented ideological interference in Africa by right wing Americans, we are right to query when an Anglican prelate makes statements which have a strongly political flavour.  Can this be understood as a bid for influence and power?  Is there some behind the scenes manipulation going on which would align the Church in Nigeria with some even more extreme Anglican factions in the States? There are certainly many who would love to see denominational Christianity destroyed so local congregations could operate without accountability. Battles for influence and control, using scriptural arguments about homosexuality as a kind of excuse for aggressive belligerence, are unedifying.   The email correspondence flying back and forth between Africa and the States reflects the same battle that is being fought from many pulpits.  All are trying to impress hearts and minds, falsely I believe, that the gay issue is a defining Christian principle.  Most, if not all, of these efforts seem to be an attempt by Christians to obtain for themselves power and influence over others.  Whether these bitter culture wars will settle down in time for Lambeth 2022 remains to be seen.  Perhaps it would help if a new dose of honesty entered the discussions.  Power, we would claim, is at the root of many of these fractious debates.  The idea that Christians are always fighting valiantly for truth seems to be a delusion.   If that dishonesty is not challenged, the whole Anglican structure could shatter into pieces.  The dishonesty of trying to pretend that the current stance of ACNA and GAFCON should somehow be normative for all Anglicans everywhere is palpable.  Do we really expect, as ACNA (and the members of fundamentalist groups in Britain) does, that words uttered at any period of history can remain unaltered free from interpretation and new understandings?  The Church of Nigeria’s position and ACNA are both wrong.  Words, insights and ideas are necessarily and constantly in a state of flux and change.  If they stay the same, they become brittle and crack and ‘will not stay in place’.  Ideas and experiences are always moving. ‘To be perfect is to change often’.  

See https://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/church-of-nigeria-criticises-acna/ for sight of documents mentioned in the post.

I sometimes find it helpful to ponder on ideas in a simple way.  I try, if possible, to reduce a theological idea down to a single word. Such a word will, no doubt, have nuances or shades of meaning which then have to be teased out. But having only one word to think about at a time helps me to preserve simplicity and clarity in my thinking.  A word which this blog is constantly wanting to return to is the word ‘power’. This is a word which, of course, is used in many different contexts.  For a start, it is a word with both positive and negative connotations.  This fact that it has no inherent goodness or evil built into it makes it a valuable word in discussion.  Everyone using it is forced to define what they are talking about and that is a good start for any dialogue.  When I mention power in the context of the church or the Christian life, no one is going to know at the outset whether I am describing something good or something negative.

.The word power in a Christian context has many positive manifestations.  If we were playing a word association game, many would come up with other positive words like Spirit, love or inspiration.  There is one particular cluster of positive words which all relate to power in the hymn, Praise my Soul the King of Heaven.  The writer refers to the experience in the Christian life of being ‘ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’.  These words each describe an experience of being empowered in a significant way.  Christianity is offering us release, newness and a sense of God’s power in our lives.  How wonderful it would be if the only experience of power that a Christian had were these positive ones.  Would that it were true that every experience of church life led to the build up of the right kind of self-esteem and self- love.  From this experience of God’s power and protection, the Christian could move seamlessly into a life of service and love for his/her fellows.  God’s power of compassion and love translated into human compassion is not a bad short description of the Kingdom of God as described by Jesus.

I expect the reader will anticipate that I have to move from the positive forms of power in the Church and the way that these are often eclipsed by negative experiences. Readers of this blog will be familiar with all the negative encounters with power that church members sometimes are compelled to endure. There will be the power games, the acts of hostility and the bullying.  In the most severe cases there will be extreme abuse, sexual or physical. Attendance at church, participation in the Christian life which promises to empower and enrich the Christian life, can become instead a savage experience of disempowerment.

There is, sadly, another misuse of power which we sometimes find in churches. This happens when the leadership of a church promises to the congregation power and prosperity or ‘health and wealth’.   God will bless them and give them his power as long as they give adequately and are obedient to all the commands of the leadership.  It does not take us long to see that this promise, by compelling subservience and dependence, is an act of taking power away from people.  We have talked about this dynamic in church many times.  It is effectively a ploy by the leadership to disempower the congregation at a stroke so that the leadership can have more power. The dynamic of the church becomes a top-down control by the leadership. What a long way is such a use of power is from the liberating freedom implied by the hymn?

Like most of my readers, I have a strong sense of the way that the Christian faith is a pathway to empowerment and the ‘glorious liberty of the children of God.’  When faith, by contrast, is presented as formulaic, legalistic and controlling, overlaid with the power of authority and threat, it is very off-putting.   It is not surprising that many people feel suffocated and oppressed by this kind of language. We find this contrast in Paul.  Sometimes he uses heavy legalistic language to speak about the faith; on other occasions he seems to rejoice in the freedom of lyrical language to describe what he knows and what he has experienced. Both are necessary, but when the liberating language of love, peace and justice is absent, what remains is not recognisably Christian.

In the last day or two I have been wrestling with a document put out by the Church of England on the setting up of an independent safeguarding structure.  This will oversee the work of the National Safeguarding Team and other national bodies in the safeguarding realm.  Such structures are, no doubt, necessary.  Nevertheless, the document is written in such a way that one feels that the only people who will engage with the process will be people who are already familiar with the heavily formulaic patterns of church-speak.  Somehow the whole safeguarding world seems to reflect the world of lawyers, managers and bureaucrats.   I already have to use Janet Fife’s useful glossary of acronyms to remember the different groups doing work in this area.  One more will confuse me, and no doubt others, who are trying to negotiate the labyrinthine world of national church organisations.  I ask myself the question.  Is this document another attempt by the Church to cling on to power to manage itself free of secular scrutiny?  How much independence is being proposed?  Is it writing documents that will exclude most ordinary Christians who should be there to respond to survivors?  What the survivors have to offer is the passion for justice, the longing for reconciliation, the prophetic challenge and the transparency of truth.   Survivors have been doing this work for years and church organisations have seldom been able to keep up.   The Church trundles along, producing more of the same and now it proposes another level of bureaucracy to face this enormous challenge of putting right past evils.  Of course, survivors are being welcomed into this new structure, but it is not one they have set up.   Will the survivors have the necessary stamina to sit with church appointed officials and argue their case in such a way that the church will respond fairly and openly.  My problem is that after reading the 20 pages of church management speak, I am really none the wiser as to how this is going to make any difference to what goes on in the Church.  It will give Janet Fife one new acronym for her glossary.  Meanwhile, where is the Church realistically going to find a survivor or two able to give this time and stamina?    We do need more of the passion that survivors can bring to the table, but is this the right way to tap into it?

Tomorrow (Saturday) General Synod has an online session to discuss this document among other pieces of business.  I am not sure what I hope will come from that discussion.  I just know that I would like to see some of the passion for the Kingdom of God come into the exchanges.  In the Church of England we need the longing for peace, truth, righteousness and justice to be injected somehow into the process of safeguarding.   The right way forward is not moving the Titanic chairs around, but the waiting on and acting with the power from on high.   That power can indeed ‘ransom, heal, restore and forgive’ the Church and allow it to find new ways of moving forward in the realm of safeguarding.   The Church must find the way of empowering survivors and victims, having for so long disempowered them in an attempt to protect its power.

Anonymous

One of the little known facts about the rise of early Nazism relates to the professions that were most represented in the rank and file of the party and movement.  By several furlongs, the answer is: academics at German universities and colleges. You may think that is shocking enough.  But be prepared for the after-shock: many academics were also members of the clergy. 

Why and how, you may ask, could this be so? After all, the Nuremberg trials revealed horrific war crimes on a scale not witnessed before or since.  Surely to God, intelligent academics and kind clergy could not have been party to this?  But think again.

The conditions for Nazism were economic, social, ethnic and political. The psychological conditions are arguably harder to name: shame, guilt and terror at the humiliations of the Great War and its aftermath. And then the social-self-preservation kicking in, which invested in old myths to justify the flexing of new moral righteousness.  We forget that most card-carrying Nazis were on a moral crusade.  And like all crusaders before them, there were demons to slay, enemies of God to slaughter, and huge investments in scapegoating. The Turks, Infidels, Armenians, Jews, Gays and others – all can testify.

How was such certitude about the Jewish pogrom expressed at Nuremberg, 75 years ago? It depended on who was on the stand. Some were certain that they were right, and happy to meet their fate and suffer the consequences.  Others sought salvation through that oft-repeated trope: “I was only obeying orders”. What Nuremberg showed the world was what Hannah Arendt was later to describe, memorably, as “the banality of evil”.

More on banality in a moment. But before then, try and recall the numerous scenes in the final episodes of The World at War. Or the recent footage that has come to light, of the allied forces liberating the death camps.  The allies often found the camps deserted by the guards, with piles of unburied corpses, ashes, ovens and emaciated people starving to death. How did the allies respond to the sights and traumas that they were witnessing, and that would haunt them for the rest of their lives?

In many cases, they rounded up the local populations near the death camps, and made them walk through, and look at what their compatriots had done.  Where there were no neighbouring death camps, the population were herded into cinemas and made to watch newsreels evidencing the atrocities. Only after sitting through a screening were viewers given their ration tokens, stamped, for bread. If you did not see the death camps, it was hard to come by food.

Most people might assume that faced with the shock, trauma and reality of the death camps, they might, in Old Testament terminology, “rend their hearts and garments”. Some did. But if you watch grainy old film footage of townspeople walking through their local neighbourhood death camp, marshalled by allied troops, you see other reactions too. Some hold their heads high, and look away – a proud, almost haughty posture, as though somehow they have been confronted with “fake news” and odious allied propaganda. Others, stand and stare, and weep in disbelief.

Others walk past slowly, as at a funeral. Some run, fleeing from the very sight (and site). A small few remonstrate with the allied troops at the showcasing of such a grim spectacle.  It was nothing to do with them, after all. The reactions in the German cinemas were the same. Some fled in terror. Some scoffed. Others sat in utter, total shock.  Some went home and took their own lives.  For many years after, the suicide rate amongst German women was the highest in Europe.  There is only so much a witness can take.

The classic study of cognitive dissonance and religion – for that is what we are dealing with here – is Leon Festinger’s 1956 epic, When Prophecy Fails.  Less well-known is Festinger’s distinctive articulation of ‘social comparison theory’.  Namely, the premise that people have an innate drive to accurately evaluate their opinions and abilities, so seek to evaluate their opinions and abilities by comparing them with those of others.

This is important in the church – and always has been – as Christian groups like to say what they are most like (comparison), but equally, that they are special, so un-like anything else. This will produce distinctive grammars and cultures.  So, in terms of safeguarding, the Church of England has ‘Core Groups’ – but not like anything else you can find on any other planet. Clergy have ‘annual appraisals’ too; but again, not like anything else you can find on any other planet.  The church runs all kinds of systems that sound as they will be comparable to their secular counterparts. They never are.

Festinger had a distinctive take on cognitive dissonance too, and at its most basic, his hypotheses went something like this.  The existence of dissonance (or inconsistency), being psychologically uncomfortable, will always motivate a person to try to reduce their dissonance and achieve consonance (or consistency).  When dissonance is present, in addition to trying to reduce it, the person will actively avoid situations and information which would likely increase the dissonance.

On this basis, flat-earth-fanatics, QAnon followers and believers in the immortality of Elvis will always be with us. Nothing you can say will contradict a truly devoted believer.  Festinger and his colleagues noted that every time you provided reasons to disbelieve, this led to an increased conviction in beliefs.  Such beliefs were always held with deep conviction.  These beliefs produced actions or validated realities that were impossible to undo.  (So, if the Bible suggests the world is 6,000 years old, well, it is: and science, geology and palaeontology can’t undo that ‘fact’, because – and don’t forget – this new-fangled empiricism and knowledge is younger).  All attempts to refute beliefs will only intensify and confirm those beliefs. 

This also explains how, when people were escaping from the inferno of David Koresh’s compound outside Waco in Texas, they didn’t thank their rescuers who were paramedics, police and other emergency services pulling them out of the burning fires. No. Those being rescued quoted scriptures, especially Revelation. Those rescued were already interpreting their furnace and the deaths as a scriptural fulfilment. Their time was at hand.

But let us return to our German audiences in 1945.  By making populations and communities see and be forced to bear witness to what had been done in their name, what did the allies hope to achieve? Cynics may say, it was vengeful: passing on the trauma the liberating soldiers had endured to the people who had been sitting with this right under their noses for several years. I am not sure, however, that this is fair.  Nuremberg was, after all, about education. It was an extended enterprise in accountability, responsibility and justice.  It was a way of holding a mirror to the world, and to all of us, and saying: look.

The banality of evil is commonplace.  ‘Banal’ means ‘common’, ‘ordinary’ and ‘shared’. Arendt’s phrase gets right under the skin of what communities, societies, groups and churches find to be so utterly normal they cannot see its actual evil.  Racism, sexism, abuse of all kinds: these are part of the ecology of churches. We have just got so used to this stuff. We no longer notice it.

But it shocks others. And when they see it, they are furious. Their anger can be uncontrollable. You can understand perhaps, just a little, why allied soldiers, when they found camp guards hiding amongst the concentration camps, mercy was in short supply. The murderous rage that the liberators felt might be in all of us, somewhere.

This is where I struggle with the Church of England, NST and safeguarding. I see only captives and the oppressed. I see no sign of any liberators.  I cannot name a Diocesan Bishop who has, so far, acted with moral courage, or acted with any moral agency to call out the abuses.  I see only process: just our numbed mitred-ones, “only obeying orders”.  The banality of evil is contagious. And compulsory.

The Catholic theologian Clemens Sedmak says that one of the primary tasks of theology is to see it as an invitation: to wake up – to be mindful and attentive.  Black Lives Matter has a slogan: “if you are not angry, you are not paying attention”. Quite.  This is what the allies did with cinemas and walkabouts in 1945.  It was a powerful poke: wake up – just look at what has happened! Yet some still could not see, and would refuse to learn.

If I am right about the moral purpose of the allies in 1945, and Black Lives Matters now, then the obvious thing to say about the primary task of theological education is that it is not – and never was – first and foremost about pumping out information and dogma. No. It is about arousing curiosity.  If the theologian cannot ask ‘why is it like this?’, or ‘does it have to be that?’ and ‘could it not be better?’, then Jesus was wasting his time with parables and miracles.

Curiosity leads us to searching; to self-search; to probe; to wrestle; to change; to repent; to risk; to love; to sacrifice; to empower others; to be responsible; to see, judge and act; to be accountable to one another; to become like Jesus.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t see any of this in the Church of England’s approach to safeguarding. Ever.

Instead, I see and hear leaders saying: “this is just the way it is at the moment”; “we are on a learning curve”; “we are on a journey”; “we are doing our best” and “we’ve come a long way”. But the best the NST does is not good enough. In fact, their best is harmful.  I say this is after reading the recent 20-page page paper ‘Independent Safeguarding Structures for the Church of England’.  A careful scan of the proposals from the NST for an Independent Safeguarding Board left me weary and demoralised. But also deeply disturbed.

Why? Well, the rhetoric is lame, and the entire document seems to contort itself around process, but one which lacks any real bite.  Let me explain.  Herewith the Missing Words Round – a pub quiz interlude in this short essay.  Which of these words is missing from the report? Could it be justice, pain, betrayal, anger, injustice, resolution, compensation, closure, healing, repentance, atonement, sacrifice, forgiveness (yours, mine, anyone else’s), pastoral, care, kindness, suffering and compassion? Or could it be shame, stigma and guilt? Or perhaps God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit? Yes, they are all missing words. All of them. Not one mention for any of them in 20 pages.

Amazing. Yet someone has written a theology of safeguarding for this report, but managed to miss out all of these (key?) words. How is this done? By whom? For whom? Imposing comprehensive solutions stems from superiority. It will not realize the need for collective learning via intended authentic social intercourse and deep listening. This must be rooted in ecologies of equality, with attendant humility, compassion and empathetic bridging.

Those in power must begin by setting aside their power, and repent of seeking control in the lives of others. We can only be moral by working together in a spirit of genuine reciprocity. An over-confidence in the ability of one group to initiate good for another always carries risk. Namely, to deny that other capacity – the one that causes unintended harm.

It reflects a dangerous assumption on the part of those in power: that only their injection of goodness and morality can reform society and liberate others. Countless impositions of initiatives on racism and sexism suffer from this. And now safeguarding. Lies are more common in silences than words, says Adrienne Rich. Authentic listening has to be the starting point for the NST and the Church of England. But you can be sure they will not want to hear what we have to say.

In decades to come, just as people have studied the cognitive dissonance of those on trial at Nuremberg (remember, “I was only obeying orders”), I think, anthropologists will study this small tribal cult that revolves around process, but strangely has none. The god of the NST is process, and its high priests control its’ meaning. Alas, this is only a local tribal deity, and in terms of Festinger’s notion of social comparison, it bears no relation to any other ideas of process in rest of the known world. Contact the relevant tribal elders for more information: the silent ones in the pointy hats, holding the magic staffs. They will explain why process is their god.  But it is all a mystery you see; the unseen and ultimately unknowable – such is process god.

Pope Francis has a nice line on the purpose of the church. He says it is a ‘field hospital’, not a custom house or some bureaucratic tax-revenue centre.  What does he mean by this?  That the church is here to mend and heal.  Not take and tax. The church is for reconciliation, compassion and empathy.  The church is an ITU – yes, an Intensive Care Union.  We are here to bind up the broken-hearted, to set captives free, and to deliver people from the powers of darkness, their afflictions and the stigmas and demonization, and all that oppresses them.

I have spent years now listening to those abused: the sexually abused, and the falsely accused.  And yet as I read ‘Independent Safeguarding Structures for the Church of England’, and what do I find? No heart or soul. The language of dull, dead process. It is a form of anaesthetic for the pain that the abused still bear.  You will recall Marx’s aphorism: religion is an opiate for the people.  It relieves their pain, but does nothing to alleviate the causes of their suffering and misery.

The trouble is, there is no other care or cure for the victim or patient of abuse from the NST. Now, “a patient of abuse” works pretty well as a term for our purposes here. We wait in hope. But in vain. The NST is, meanwhile, the weirdest field hospital. It bears no social comparison to any other healing institution. 

All that ever happens is this. On the ward rounds you are assessed, and promised prompt treatment.  But nothing else happens.  Your pain increases, and your anxiety too.  You feel forgotten.  So, you scream loudly, for a very long time.  Oddly, this makes the medics run away.  Eventually, they promise to operate.  But only if you calm down.  Nothing happens when you do.  So you keep screaming, and eventually the noise for everyone is so unbearable, they take you for surgery.

But then it is strange, for they ever do is gas you: they sedate you. You wake up, and they ask if you are feeling better? You say you do not. So they say they might need to repeat this procedure several times. It never works. So they discharge you, and explain your pain is all in your head. This is now your fault.

You are referred to Out-Patients in future, which alas is only open on alternate rainy days in any month beginning with an ‘R’. In the meantime, new patients arrive at the field hospital. The sedatives are in plentiful supply. Or you can just read the latest policy documents. They have the same effect.  The opiate of religion is a way of avoiding the causes of pain and disease. It ignores the poverty and social causes of the disorders and inequalities in society.

Seventy-five years ago, some people were traumatised by what the allies showed them. Some looked, and turned away. Those on trial were just running a process, and had the right moral reasons for doing so – or so they thought.  The banality of the evil was that no-one running the processes or obeying the orders exercised any moral courage or leadership.  And so the pogrom continued.  Because the cognitive dissonance was always in place.

Theology is an invitation to wake up. Abused lives matter too.  If you are not angry, indeed boiling with righteous rage and faithful fury with the proposals in the latest ‘Independent Safeguarding Structures for the Church of England’ document, then you are clearly not paying attention.  Actually, you are not awake. What would it take, I wonder, to get our church leaders to sit up, take notice, and begin a journey of real com-passion with us?  Those not just abused or falsely accused; but also those abused each and every day by the devoted disciples who belong to the tribal cult that worships this little god of process? 

The banality of evil is not waking up to the pain of your neighbour, and not being able to hear the cries and screams of the victims.  That was the education project we now refer to as Nuremberg. I long for the day when we can lead our bishops past the heaps and piles of atrocities that they have ignored for so many long, long years. 

But I know already what will happen. Some will stand and weep with shame. Some will look away, and claim no responsibility. Others will say they never knew anything about this. A few will flee with in the face of the trauma of what they have just seen and witnessed. Yet none, not one, will take responsibility. Because, as you know, the mitred-ones were just following a process; just taking orders; just a cog in the machine.  Such is the banality of evil.

The recent ‘fall’ of the noted apologist and evangelist Ravi Zacharias raises some disturbing questions.  There are the obvious ones, about how his organisation, RZIM, allowed itself to be hoodwinked for such a long period of time by this man who turned out to be a serial abuser.  For me, the deeper questions are not the obvious ones about his abuse.  They are the ones that want to scrutinise what Ravi may have thought about his vocation as an influential man of God.  At what point in his life did Ravi surrender himself to the gratifications of his abusive behaviour?  Did he not know, while he was behaving in this way, that this was a betrayal of his call to serve and share a vision of God?  Ravi is no longer with us to answer such questions, but they still need to be asked.  I am not so cynical as to believe that he began his career as a preacher as a way of obtaining opportunities to abuse.   Obtaining power to abuse and exploit women was not, we trust, in the conscious mind of the young Ravi as he began his ministry many decades ago.

The recent history of the Church is littered with terrible stories of male (mostly) Christian leaders betraying their vocation to prey on the weak.  Something beautiful, a life of love, vision and service is exchanged for something cheap and trashy.  What is going on?  Can short term sexual gratification ever be worth the catastrophic betrayals that are taking place?  The key to answering this question is to be found somewhere in the nature of power.  Power is something we all need so that we can stand up for ourselves and not be crushed under the bullying tricks of the dominant in society.   Bullying is an experience that many suffer right back to the time of infancy.  In Western male culture the human child is taught to stand up for himself.  The self-assertive one is applauded.  But the struggle in the male child (I hesitate to speculate what generalisations are appropriate for girls) to avoid humiliation or subjugation at the hands of others never really gets resolved.  Even the boys at the top of the food chain still carry a fear of losing their position.    When and if you reach the top, you become vulnerable to someone else using physical strength to push you down.  Right through these artificial hierarchies in which many, if not most, male children live, there are two dominating realities.  The first is fear of domination by others.  The second is the longed-for antidote to this fear, the possession and exercise of power over others.

If fear and power exist widely within the preoccupations of boys in their early years, there will be, as they grow into adulthood, a variety of changes in the way typical power games are played out.   Power for adults (men and women) is maintained in a variety of ways way beyond brute physical strength.  Things like manipulation, coercion and subtle threat are examples of the way that power over others is asserted.  There is also a genre of behaviour we describe as narcissism.  This is a behaviour which successfully manipulates others so that they look up to you and feed your desire for power.  Narcissists have developed a whole range of techniques and skills to occupy this place of control.   They are, for example, good at intuiting the weaknesses of others for their own advantage.  They know just how much pressure to apply to get their own way.  They understand how to use another person’s desire to belong, how it can be turned around so that the individual can be dominated and thus under the control of the narcissist.

Where does Christian leadership come into this discussion on power?  Christianity would perhaps want to claim to be the ultimate antidote to the debilitating power games that are so found frequently in society.  Christianity glorifies a saviour who was brought to glory without the brute exercise of human power.  All the normal expressions of power and ambition were rejected in the desert of temptation.  The power to rule, to be worshipped and to court popularity were all pushed away as being unworthy of what God desired.  Thus, as Christians, we follow a man without power, one who has rejected all forms of earthly domination involving violence and control.  Paradoxically we still have a Church which seems riddled with narcissism, power games and hierarchies.  All these lead to the same bullying, control and coercion that we might expect to find in places which have no awareness or loyalty to the Man on the Cross.

Christianity and the institution that has grown up around it, the Church, has acquired possession of much power.  There is the power that exists simply by having an institution with leaders and a hierarchy.  Any organisation with systems of management has to operate within recognised power structures.  But there is an additional source of power that Christians can claim belongs to them.  This is the power of having leaders who claim to act as representatives of God himself.  Within and beyond the formal structures of Christian denominations, this power of God to control and guide is frequently invoked.  A vivid example of this ‘freelance’ divine power are the so-called prophets in the States who foretold Trump’s victory.  Their power is not greatly diminished by the failures of this prophecies.  Then there is the power of the elegant speaker, the one who controls and seduces a crowd with attractive sounding promises.   Sometimes those promises relate to material prosperity.  With us you will find health and wealth.  Give to this ministry and God will reward you many times.  Also, you will find yourself on the winning side.  Our Church/ministry/teaching is going to be the dominant one in the next round of elections or in the world to come.  If you come on board with us, you will have the satisfaction of being on the winning side and looking down on losers who have chosen differently.

The offering of power to Christian followers is a key part of what many Christian leaders have to offer.  And yet this teaching seems to have little to do with the one who resisted the Devil’s offer of power while in the desert.  The real motivation for presenting Christianity as a religion of power is that it automatically rebounds back to the leaders.  The peddler of power to the crowd will have power and wealth for him/herself.  The narcissistic needs, the cravings for significance by some Christian leaders, have to be fed and in the process the true nature of Jesus’ power is eclipsed and lost. 

How does this all link with Ravi Zacharias and his failure of vocation?  Ravi, we believe, was called to preach the gospel but somewhere along the line he found himself choosing what was, for him, a gratifying experience of power rather than the path of service.   The call of God became corrupted inside him.  Instead of service he gave himself up to the urge to misuse power and seek sexual control.  The reasons for him to succumb to this temptation will never be known.  Possibly the young Ravi had experienced humiliation in boyhood because of his racial or social background.  Speculation is probably futile, but something in his life opened him up to what appears to be an addictive attraction to sex along with the narcissist’s lusting after personal power.   If God could ever be said to have called him, that power given to him at some point became twisted to be an instrument of human greed and personal gratification.

The conclusion of this short piece around the topic of the ministry of Ravi is to ask questions about vocation.  Many of us claim to have experienced it.  The question we need to ask ourselves in the context of Ravi’s fall is this.  When we hear God’s call, are we listening to a call to service in his name?  Alternatively, are we seeing, unconsciously maybe, that a link with God may boost our power?  This access to his power may be in part to be used for our own ends, so that our depleted self-esteem may receive a boost.  Is our relationship with God in any way serving narcissistic needs?  The question has to remain a question, but it is still one worth asking.  When asking it, we raise a serious challenge to the whole issue of power as it is exercised in the Church.  Do the pomposities, the hierarchical posturing and the power games linked to ambition in the Church, really reflect the man of sorrows?  Are we really remembering that we are following a leader who turns his back on all human power to follow the way of suffering and service?