In my last piece I spoke about conflicts of interest (COIs) occurring in the situation of Core Groups.  Somebody very helpfully pinned up on Thinking Anglicans a government definition of what a conflict of interest involves in the world of business.  It is worth quoting in full. 

A conflict of interest occurs when a board member has multiple interests which may influence the way in which they act or vote on  a board. The specific risk inherent in conflicts of interest is that the professional judgement or actions of a board member in relation to the company they represent are influenced by a secondary interest, such as a personal financial interest, the financial interests of family and friends, or the desire for personal advancement. As with all risks, there are ways of mitigating the risk. 

In the messy world of church politics, where the motives for actions on a committee may be more to do with advancing a personal or ‘party’ interest than with money, we need to think about these ‘secondary interests’ and what they might consist of.   What are the things in church life that people value highly which might make them act or vote in such a way to further secondary interests? 

Almost every example I can think of which involves a hidden motive for such behaviour involves a manifestation of power of some kind.  Let us look at a number of potential examples.  They vary in levels of seriousness. 

• An advocate of a theological position is rejected because one or more members of the committee want to see a favoured party position strengthened.  Affirming the power of being in the winning ‘party’ or tribe.  
• A member of a committee votes for the candidate who attended the same college as they did.  An example of favouritism and indirectly promoting your own brand of training. 
• A committee member will allow personal and historic animosities to affect their assessment of an individual for a post.  Exercising power over a disliked individual 
• The bias caused by a preference for PLU (people like us).  Closet racism or misogyny 

• One party in the group has professional links or obligations to another party not in the room.  As an example, a member of a law firm or reputation management company may continue to want to curry favour with an existing client like the Church of England, regardless of the topic under discussion.   
• Fear that something shameful from the past may be revealed if particular course of action is taken. 
• Decisions taken help to supress secrets that are kept for reputational or financial reasons. 

If you gather a committee or group of church people together for any decision-making process, there will almost invariably be somewhere a link or personal connections that join them together.  You need in this situation to import outsiders to question the process from a truly independent standpoint.  I very seldom meet a Church of England clergyperson who does not know at least one person that I have known or worked with.  Total independence in terms of knowing nothing about an individual prior to a meeting to make a judgement about them is probably impossible.  Some conflicts of interest or secondary interests need not be a problem if they are out in the open and not hidden away.  How do we avoid this issue becoming a real problem especially when we are dealing with decisions which potentially affect a person’s life, health and well-being? 

The first thing that needs to happen is that the Chair of an interview committee, Core Group or a similar body possesses a clear understanding of all the issues around COIs.  There is a professional judgement to be made about the point at which a past link or personal contact becomes a COI which would require an individual to withdraw from membership.  In practice, in a properly run process, this should seldom be necessary.  What does not inspire confidence is when, as with the Percy case, there appeared to be no awareness of several obvious conflicts right at the beginning of the process.  Any naivety over such COIs does not encourage confidence that any part of the process is going to be sound or even legal.  Recusal or removal, when required, should normally happen long before the main process gets under way.   The grey areas of slight acquaintance or interest should be declared at the beginning so that all the other members are aware of them.  One would like to think that the Church, of all places, was cultivating a culture of openness.   It is a serious matter when undisclosed or hitherto ignored information subsequently becomes available.  Having to remove members from a group suggests, at the very least, some incompetence on the part of the conveners.  Deciding when such conflicts amount to sufficient procedural irregularity as to invalidate decisions requires honesty, courage and integrity.  If in doubt, start again.  This would seem the safest approach to most people. 

I believe it was the Bishop of London who recently referred to the definition of culture as ‘the way we do things round here’.  The current culture of the Church of England apparently does not seem to appreciate the importance of insisting on uncovering COIs in its efforts to promote fairness and justice.  Whenever COIs exist within an institution unacknowledged, then the institution can quickly become corrupt and untrustworthy.   The recent removal of two complainant dons from the Dean Percy Core Group may sound like a minor adjustment in the enactment of the Church’s disciplinary process.  In fact, it is telling us far more than this.  It is declaring that every single individual involved in initiating the Core Group process – the NST and the officials in Church House – were apparently blind to a simple requirement that fairness in such a group was essential to their proper (and legal) functioning.   The inability to recognise one COI allows me to suggest that the conveners were also blind to a second more fateful COI.   Here we are following the insights of Martin Sewell who has laid out the case for seeing the Core Group attack on Dean Percy as a struggle by a Church establishment faction to destroy a challenger to their power.    Dean Percy, in short, represents a threat to vested interests at the heart of the Church of England.  I leave my readers to consult the article for themselves. https://archbishopcranmer.com/martyn-percy-cultural-mindset-establishment-privilege/    While I cannot summarise the complex issues to which Martin draws attention, I can say that any just struggle against unaccountable factions of power has my attention.  When the forces of oppression and power are exercised by Church leaders in the name of church discipline, that becomes a matter of the gravest concern. 

Conflicts of Interest are an inevitable part of any functioning institution.  To repeat the point, it is not their existence that is the problem.  It is their deliberate suppression in the hope that people will not notice, so that decisions of integrity are prevented.  The Martyn Percy case has become a test case for the Church.  Will it continue down the path of dishonest dealing by using the power of undeclared interests, lawyers and money to enforce its will?   Safeguarding protocols and confusions over their proper enforcement may be the issue being looked at currently.  If there are serious doubts and questions about the ability of the Church to get things right in this area, what about other areas of its life that we know nothing of?    The Church powers that be have not earned our trust for fair dealing in this area.    Without earning the trust of their members on this matter, how can they expect to be given the benefit of the doubt in other areas of the Church’s life?  

In an earlier blog I spoke about the loss of memory that can befall an organisation where there is a rapid turnover of staff.  Traditions and important memories of the past could be wiped out for all practical purposes if the new people were coming into post knew nothing of what used to go on.  The ability to be ‘in the know’ about the past used to be a position of considerable power.  Today, however, the internet makes it far less easy to bury old information.  The power of knowing much of what was said or written is given to anyone who has determination to seek it out.  Reviews, lessons learned reports and old committee meeting minutes can be scrutinised by anyone with the determination and the time. 

We have, on this blog, recently given a great deal of space to a discussion of Church Core Groups.  Some may be weary of this topic.  Nevertheless, this blog is primarily about the way power is exercised in the Church.  These Core Groups are vivid expressions of this Church power.  The coercion and pressure that may be felt by those who are the target of such a group is considerable.  Also, a Core Group can, when mismanaged or bungled, do extensive damage to the reputation of the Church at large.   Current interest in Church Core Groups has been caused by the wide publicity given to the one investigating Dean Percy at Christ Church.  Quite a lot has already been said about the conduct of this Group, but I need to revisit it once again since it interacts with another once widely reported Core Group, the one dealing with the case of Bishop George Bell.  This was convened six years ago in 2014, but its findings and procedures were critiqued extensively in an independent Review by Lord Alex Carlile. 

This Carlile Review was published in December 2017 and made several recommendations for the future conduct of such Groups.  On Friday 17^th July we read that there appears to have been an effort, according to the Church Times, belatedly to apply one of the stipulations of Carlile’s recommendations. This was to outlaw conflicts of interest in such a Group.  On this occasion the NST has addressed one glaring example of such a conflict in the Percy Core Group and decreed a change in the composition of the members.  Two of the Group members, who are publicly identified as complainants against the Dean, have ‘been removed’.  With them present, it must have been impossible for the Group to act in an unbiased fashion.   It was as though two members of the prosecution team were also serving on the jury.

Many of those serving the current Oxford Core Group are probably unaware of what was said by Carlile, but there are those still working for the Church at a senior level, who cannot be ignorant of what was in the 2017 Review.  Alongside his extensive criticisms of the Bell Core Group, Carlile had a clear vision for such groups in the future and the way they should be managed.    The criticisms made by his Review were harsh.  The Review stated that the Church of England had established a ‘Core Group which failed to follow a process which was fair and equitable to both sides’.  The muddles and confusions that marked the Bell Core Group process had led to a serious situation.  It raised (and raises) questions about the competence of the Church of England’s structures and their capacity for integrity and fair dealing.  The current Percy Core Group threatens to be another serious disaster for the Church even with the recent changes.  Would a more detailed appreciation of Carlile’s suggestions have helped to avoid another crisis and even an utter discrediting of the entire Core Group process?  

Looking at the 74 pages of the Carlile Review, we find that, at its heart, there is a story of a woman given the name of ‘Carol’.  She claimed to have been sexually abused, when she was a child in the early 50s, by the internationally known Bishop of Chichester, George Bell.  This had been disclosed to a subsequent Bishop, Eric Kemp in 1995.  Nothing came of the complaint and in 2012, Carol, by now a pensioner, wrote again to Lambeth Palace about the matter.  She no doubt believed that her story might receive more attention after the Jimmy Savile scandal broke.  After a series of consultations, a Core Group to look at the complaint was convened in 2014.  This would review Carol’s claim and make some recommendations about possible compensation. 

Carlile’s critical Review was especially exercised by the fact that the Group appeared very ready to assume Carol’s testimony as factual.  There seemed no appetite for subjecting it to any proper scrutiny or query.  Even accepting the fact that Carol may have been sexually abused by someone, there were other possible interpretations, such as mistaken identity of the abuser or memory lapses.  This led to the main criticism of the process by Carlile that even handedness had been absent in what was a quasi-legal process.  Carlile repeated this point several times in the review in different ways.  In his words: ‘I have concluded that the Church of England failed to institute or follow a procedure which respected the rights of both sides.’  In effect the Group treated the reputation of Bishop Bell as of no real importance.  Although Bell died 62 years ago, there are remaining relatives and many others who remember him. 

 In a small way I have a personal interest in Bishop Bell. The last six months of his life were spent in Canterbury and I, as a twelve-year-old have some personal memories of him.  There will also still be others who were teenagers in the Diocese of Chichester and were confirmed by him.  His good name does matter to many people.  The issue of Bell’s possible guilt is discussed in the Review, but it was not in Carlile’s brief to decide on the matter.  But we can read into the text a certain sympathy for Bell’s cause when Carlile speaks of a ‘rush to judgement’ on the part of the Core Group members.  He also discussed the way that, once the belief in Carol and her claim that her abuser was Bishop Bell became fixed in the minds of the Core Group members, no attempt was made to seek out corroborative evidence to back up or challenge Carol’s recollections.  Bell had a living biographer, Andrew Chandler and there was also alive in his 90s a former chaplain of Bell’s who had been resident in Bell’s Palace at the relevant time.  No attempt to speak to either man was made.  Carlile was himself able to speak to the 92-year-old chaplain, Canon Carey, about his recollections of the period as well as the buildings where the abuses were supposed to have taken place.   

The Carlile review of 2017 is, in summary, a telling critique of the Church of England and a guide telling us how not to run a Core Group.  Carlile described the Bell Group as a ‘confused and unstructured process’.  Clearly there was a lot of work needing to be done if the Church was planning to continue to serve the cause of justice and historical transparency, using this process.    

At one point in the report, Carlile uses a small word which I find significant.  The word is ‘oversteered’.  Perhaps that was what had distorted the whole 2014/5 Bell Core Group process.  In a vehicle, a small oversteer can cause a fatal crash.  In the case of Bell’s Core Group, oversteer in the process of interpreting evidence caused irreparable harm to the reputation of a past hero of the Church.  Why did such oversteer happen?  We need to recall that 2015 while the group was doing its work, the newspapers were full of the Bishop Ball affair.  Is it too fanciful to suggest that image advisers employed by the Church were anxious to write a narrative about the Church, showing it to be considerate for the interests of an elderly lady who had been abused and was seeking justice? 

Can we detect in any way that the Core Group was being ‘managed’ to satisfy the needs of the Church communications department and its desire for good PR?  Were the Archbishop and Bishop of Chichester making statements suggested to them by their highly remunerated reputation managers?  If Carlile’s critical Review is pointing us in this direction, then it follows that similar pressures will also be at work in the 2020 Percy Group.  Are Core Groups, in other words, subject to being managed to suit the purposes of the reputation launderers working for the Church? In the comments I made about Bishop Jonathan’s responses to questions at the recent Synod, I suggested that the management of safeguarding issues was being handed over to a team of lawyers.  Such lawyers would be the ones seeking to defend the Church and protect its good name.  Now, after reading the Carlile report again, I am left wondering whether it is in fact the power of reputation managers and communication departments that we see operating behind the scenes and making the decisions for our Church.  If that is the case, then our Church will not be taking too seriously the cause of transparency, justice and truth.  These and other Christian values like honesty and right dealing may only ever be paraded in public when they can serve the purposes of good PR!  

This rereading of the Carlile report and the way that it revealed rampant ‘unconscious bias’, to quote from Martin Sewell’s question at last Synod, allows us to point once again to our ongoing concerns over the Percy Core Group. Conflicts of interest still abound there. Quite apart from the inappropriate placing of two complainants in the Group, there are the collusions we have pointed to before between firms of lawyers, reputation managers and those at Christ Church who have manipulated the Church and the NST to operate in their interests. If the incompetence of the Bell Core Group was a scandal, the sheer apparent malevolence at work in this present Percy Group is one which is driving out all pretensions to ethical behaviour and Christian values. We seem to be witnessing evil and corruption on a grand scale. Will the Church at the national level be able to rescue this situation and allow it to come through this appalling crisis?

By Janet Fife

Prof. Ralph Hanna once entered a Caifornia classroom, dumped his rucksack on the desk, and, eyeing his students, said in a rich Texas drawl:  ‘Latin ees not daid. They jest changed its name to perteck its reputation.’ I’m tempted to say the same of medieval exorcism rituals:  they haven’t died out,  they’ve just changed their name to deliverance ministry.

That would not be fair, however. Deliverance ministry is more subtle and, in my view, perhaps even more dangerous than exorcism. Proponents of exorcism hold that a person can be possessed and controlled by one or more demons. Usually this would be seen as a fairly rare, though serious, occurrence. Many practitioners of deliverance ministry, on the other hand, inhabit a world infested with demons. They believe that even devout and faithful Christians are routinely troubled by these malign spirits. Everything from paisley pattern to Body Shop products has been described as ‘demonic’, with advice that Christians should avoid them.  People may become ‘demonised’ by being the victim of an assault, touching a dead body, or having ancestors who were Freemasons, alcoholics, or went to seances.

This is a world view dominated by fear.  ‘The Enemy’ (as they call Satan) and his minions are everywhere, they are powerful, and if we are not constantly on the alert they will get us.

         Mommy told me something a little kid should know,

         It’s all about the devil and I’ve learned to hate him so.

         She said he causes trouble when you let him in the room,

         He will never ever leave you if your heart is full of gloom….

                            (‘Let the Sunshine In,’ by Stuart Hamlen)

I heard one woman lament that her church’s round-the-clock prayer scheme had no one to cover the 3-4 pm slot, so that children coming out of school would be ‘unprotected’. It’s exhausting to have to foresee every danger in order to be able to pray about it. And it stems ultimately from a failure to trust God.

Full disclosure:  in my charismatic days I both participated in and was the subject of deliverance ministry (not always willingly, I may add). I stayed at Ellel Grange twice soon after it opened in the late 1980s; Ellel has since become notorious for its focus on the demonic. During my second curacy, in a large charismatic church, I was trained in John Wimber’s methods of power healing and deliverance. And I have had encounters with various leaders practicing this ministry, including Michael and Rosemary Green.

The demonologies taught by some feature hierarchies of evil spirits with different realms of responsibility. The demon or demons to be confronted are identified by the symptoms and history of the patient.  As just one example, Ellel identify ‘how the spirit of Jezebel operates through ungodly control’.  There may be talk of ‘generational spirits’ or curses. Repeated or chronic illnesses are commonly identified as the work of a ‘spirit of infirmity’.  In one such case I knew, a young woman with ailments moving round her body was thought to be possessed by a spirit of infirmity and prayed for accordingly, without effect. but was eventually diagnosed with an auto immune disease.

Advocates of deliverance ministry can rightly claim that it is ‘biblical’, and Jesus is recorded as carrying out several exorcisms. There is no biblical justification, however, for many of the theories about ranks and classes of demons. Such a study is inherently unhealthy. The gospels and Acts do not show exorcism to be more than an occasional feature of the ministry of Jesus and the apostles, but Ellel and others assume deliverance to be a part of the Christian life.  If it were expected to be a normal part of the ongoing ministry of the Church we would expect to find instructions to that effect in the epistles. We do not.

To some all this will be foreign and bizarre:  how can people living in the 21st century not only believe this stuff, but act on it? To others, including intelligent and educated people, the world of angels and demons is not only scriptural, but it makes sense of the world as they experience it. It may be a straw to clutch for the desperate, or offer an illusion of hope to those whose problems seem to have no solution.

It was my disillusionment with these approaches to healing ministry, and concern at some of the things I had taken part in and witnessed, which led me to research an MPhil on ‘Charismatic Healing Ministries and the Sexual Abuse Survivor’. I concluded that to a survivor, inner healing and deliverance ministries pose a serious risk of causing further damage.

This blog doesn’t offer scope for discussing all my reasons for that conclusion, but one of my most serious concerns is the use and abuse of power.  There is inherent power imbalance in this kind of ministry. The person to be prayed for will be outnumbered, and usually those doing the praying will be ‘taking authority’ over whatever conditions or spirits they feel are afflicting the candidate. It’s very seldom that the pray-ers will have even the most basic knowledge of psychology and serious mistakes can be made.  And it’s extremely difficult for those being prayed for to challenge the ‘diagnosis’ of those ministering, if they feel misjudged or concerned about the course the ministry session is taking.

Moreover, deliverance ministry attracts those who already have an unhealthy attitude to power.  Here is an opportunity to ask questions about intimate aspects of people’s lives; to make pronouncements over them; to ‘exercise authority over’ demonic realms. It can be a real ego trip. At the last session of an Ellel course on deliverance, the leader commanded all the evil spirits in the room to ‘manifest themselves’ (a term frequently used). I will never forget the utter bedlam that ensued, as 60 or 70 people moaned, howled, and wailed. Instead of quieting things down, the leader walked among the crowd praying with people individually while the rest continued in their noisy distress. After some minutes I caught a glimpse of his face – he was enjoying it. I never went back.

(Apologies to Alan Bennett)

An offering to Surviving Church from an anonymous contributor who speaks of the Kafkaesque experience of being at the wrong end of a Church of England Core Group

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

‘First They Came’ is the oft-quoted and adapted poetic form of the post-war confession in 1946, from the German Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller. His confession was about the cowardice of intellectuals, Christians and most clergy for saying nothing in the face of injustice, even when it was right in front of them, in plain sight.  They all chose to look away. This included, and by his own admission, Niemöller himself.  Niemöller’s prose raises two questions for us today. First, who are they? Second, who are we? In what I describe below I seek to address that question.  I write anonymously, but I do so autobiographically, with some details changed.

——————————————————————————————————-

They wrote to tell me that they had formed a Core Group. It was all about me, apparently, and my ‘practices’. Not now, of course.  But something done or not done in the past.  The person writing told me that they couldn’t say anymore at this stage. They had decided I would have to be investigated. They couldn’t tell me what it was about in detail. I would understand that they had to maintain their confidentiality.

They told me to step back from a number of duties, voluntarily.  Or I would be punished with some suspension. They told me this was non-negotiable, but they were just asking. Nicely. But that if I didn’t comply, there would be trouble.

They told me they would allocate me some support. They had selected someone for me. I was in too much shock to take notice. This person, they said, would help me. With what, I asked? At this stage, they said, they could not say anything further. But they had allocated me some support. Did they know anything, I asked? No, they said.  The support person was picked for me, but remains outside the ‘process’.

Then they sent a letter. There would be a statement on the website and an agreed announcement about the process I ‘had agreed to enter into’. But I protested, I hadn’t ‘agreed’ to anything. I’d been given no choice: forced. They replied I did have a choice. Comply, or lose your job, they said. I asked who wrote the statement?  They said the Core Group had ‘agreed it’, and that there was nothing I could do about it. 

The letter, they said, would be helpful. It wasn’t. It outlined some specimen ‘accusations’ against me, and told me this meant I would be categorised as a ‘risk’ for the time being. But I was not to worry. Being suspended was a purely ‘neutral act’ – it did not imply any guilt on my part. This was merely a ‘routine’ process, so I should not be concerned about my reputation. They told me I could not talk to anyone about what was happening. That I had to keep this confidential. That I was not allowed to say anything about this to anyone.

I asked if I could have an advocate – some legal advice, perhaps?  They said that would not be necessary. They said I was not ‘on trial’ in this process. Although, they did add that if the ‘investigation’ concluded that I was a ‘risk’, then I could lose my role, home and livelihood. I asked if I would have input into that decision?  They said that would be a matter for the Core Group. They added that I could take my own legal advice – if I wanted.  But at my expense, of course.

I asked, who was on the Core Group? They could not say at this stage: it was confidential. I asked how the Core Group was formed? They could not say, as it was confidential to the Core Group. I asked if it was free from conflicts of interest, bias, or people using it for vindictive purposes, or making vexatious and ruinous allegations? They said the Core Group managed these things, and there was a process. I asked if I could see a transcript or details of what I was accused of? They said that was confidential to the Core Group.  I asked if there was a process of appeal, or perhaps a complaint process? They told me they would think about that.

I asked what would happen if they got things wrong? They seemed puzzled by this question.  The process was agreed. The Core Group had met. Accusations and allegations had been made. There would have to be an investigation. Surely, they said, I could see they had to continue with their process until it was completed?

I told them that some people committed suicide when faced with the shaming of such allegations and accusations. Many people who did not take their own lives became depressed instead, and signed off sick.  Or just resigned. Or both.  It could take years to recover from the trauma of being falsely accused.  Reputations might never be restored.  They said nothing. So I asked again. They still did not answer. I asked again. They reminded me that they had allocated me a support person. If I did not want the one they allocated, I could choose my own.  That was it, they said.

I told them that this could be financially ruinous for me. They said, ‘the process must come first. We cannot run this around concerns for you, your wellbeing, welfare reputation or your family. Victims must come first!’. I said that there weren’t any victims. No-one had complained. That this was all made up, and just malicious. 

They just said that everybody had to be treated the same, and there could be no special pleading.  I had to be investigated in the same way as anyone else who ‘potentially posed a risk’.  Could I not see that this was ‘fair’?

I protested. Fair on who, or what, I asked?  Do I have to prove my innocence, lest I be presumed guilty?  Are we not all ‘potential risks’?  I could not see any fairness in their process. I could see no transparency, accountability or truthfulness.  I could not see any evidence of concern for me, due process, or for the interests of the victims or survivors of abuse. They said that the church had to ‘look like it was doing the right thing’. It can’t be seen to be letting some people off lightly.

So I gave them a list of people who they had already let off lightly. Or in some cases, had decided to not investigate at all. These people were all known abusers. They had caused untold damage to dozens, even hundreds of people. Over many decades.  People had known about their abuse for years. But nothing had been done to them, or to the people who knew about it. So I asked, why was I being singled out?

They did not answer. They said that each Core Group came to its own conclusions. That they could not comment on individual cases. That if no investigation of a known abuser had taken place, there must have been good reasons in the process for this to have been decided at the time. The fact that these people were eventually found to be abusers, and had now been named was, of course, ‘regrettable’.

I asked if there was ever any apology for the victims in these cases? They said that if they had decided not to investigate such people then, they could not possibly be held responsible for the actions of abusers now, or for what they had done to their victims. They said that was ‘obvious’.

I asked them why they put out a media statement about me, but not about others who were being ‘investigated’?  That was a Core Group decision, they told me. So I asked who made decisions about who was to be named and shamed, and who was to be shielded from any exposure to the media? There was no answer.

I asked again. They told me these decisions were made on a case-by-case basis. They ‘reassured’ me that there was no hidden ‘agenda’ against me. Everything that was done, is being done, and will be done to you, is done for the sake of the victims and survivors, who ‘must come first’, they said.

I said, ‘it looks like you are just protecting your own reputation here…I mean, you throw a few people to the wolves to make it look like you have got robust structures, but you just operate secretly and with no sense of accountability or justice…’. Again, they did not answer me.

So I went to the bible, and I read them these words from Nicodemus in the Gospel of John (7: 51): “Does our law seriously judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out the facts, and discover what they are doing?”  I said that word “seriously” like John McEnroe did – a kind of shouted, sarcastic, sulky squeal.

They didn’t like this. I knew that, because by now I had figured out that anything they didn’t like, or any question they didn’t want to answer, meant that they just kept silent.  They did not need to speak to me, or answer me. They are not answerable to anyone. They are unaccountable.

They could do what they liked with me and to me. The process allowed them to suspend me; to recommend my removal; to name and shame me; to draw on evidence against me, but refuse to hear evidence or testimony for me. They could go after anyone they liked. No-one was above them.

I asked, ‘seriously…how is any justice served by this?’.  They just told me that they operated with their own processes. They were not like healthcare, government, social care or other bodies. So, they did not need to follow the good practices of other organisations and institutions, because they were not like them. They did not need to operate justly or fairly, because they self-audited, judged themselves, and worked with their own standards and protocols. This all worked well for them, they said.

I asked them about all the illness and trauma they were causing me. I mentioned the sleepless nights, the stress to my family, the medication, the financial costs and the reputational damage they were inflicting. They said ‘we can see that this must be a difficult time for you’. But they said nothing more. And they did nothing more. They carried on with their process.

I no longer know what they are doing. I know nothing about the new Core Group they set up to investigate me. I don’t know who they are.  I don’t know if they are doing this to me deliberately to cause me harm, or because they are incompetent, and too proud to admit their failings.  But I do know that I no longer trust them. I do know that I no longer believe them. I do know that none of their statements can be taken at face value anymore. I do know that they are bungling – but also dangerous.  I do know that when your church hierarchy can’t be trusted any longer, something deeply corrupt has taken root in that body. 

As I reflect, I wonder how we ever arrived at this sorry state of affairs. When you can’t believe and trust your bishops and other high-ranking officials in the church, because they cannot demonstrate truthfulness, transparency and fairness, what is left for us?  Just questions, I think. And a group of people – I have only referred to them as ‘they’ – who don’t answer to anyone, or think they need to answer anything. 

That question comes round again: “Does our law seriously judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out the facts, and discover what they are doing?”  Poor Nicodemus.  He never got an answer from the Pharisees and Sadducees. Nor would Nicodemus get one from our church today.  Authorities know how to keep silences – that is their main mode of violence.

They had pursued others before me; but I said nothing. I assumed the authorities knew what they were doing then; that they must be right. In getting rid of these others, it showed they must have done something wrong to deserve such treatment.  But then they came for me.

They may come for you too. Who are they? Who are we?  I am not longer very sure.  But please remember this: I have warned you.

Back in February I was paying close attention to the speeches at General Synod  which were given on the topic of safeguarding.  In particular, I was listening to the speech given by Bishop Jonathan Gibbs of Huddersfield, the new lead bishop for safeguarding in the Church of England.  In what I wrote on this blog, I said that his influence was ‘crucial for the future of safeguarding and the welfare and interests of survivors’. I expressed a great deal of hope for this influence as he was expressing, in his speech, the firm expectation that, in the future, the perspective of survivors would be allowed to affect the way we ‘reshape our shared life in the church.’  He went on, ‘too many of us don’t get it.’  This speech with its references to redress, apology, action and change, seemed to be the mark of someone ready to speak the language of survivors.  How would we want to describe this language that survivors want to hear?  We would suggest that what survivors want to hear is language informed by pastoral instinct, care and compassion.   They do not want to hear the language of an institution in defensive mode where the protection of reputation and assets is placed on a pedestal above everything else.

We now fast forward to the General Synod that is taking place tomorrow.  Like all other assemblies the coronavirus has made it into a virtual event.  I have not read all the papers but I am naturally interested to see if there is follow-up to the positive approach to safeguarding that came from Church officials in the February session.  How is it being handled at this Synod?   There are 13 questions on safeguarding matters which have been published, and the responses to these and numerous others questions have put out in advance on the internet.  The responses to these questions is a major point of interest for Synod members.  The answers which respond to safeguarding enquiries are all presented as coming from the lead Bishop, Jonathan Gibbs. 

Before I go on to examine one of the questions in more detail, I should make a general observation about all these safeguarding responses.  In February we heard from a fired-up Bishop Jonathan, who appeared passionate about his new responsibility for safeguarding.  In July this same man puts his name to 13 responses to questions on the topic.  It has to be said these answers to these questions sound like extracts from a dry legal text-book.  Of course, some of the required answers did touch on questions of legal protocol and definition, but not all.  The style of all of these responses is such that I would be very surprised if any of these answers were actually put together by Bishop Jonathan himself.  Every single one appears to have been composed by an anonymous lawyer and Bishop Jonathan is simply the spokesman who delivers these ‘official’ answers.  The human being that spoke with such passion back in February has somehow disappeared.  In his place is a legal functionary who is anonymous and speaks in the way that will best preserve and defend  the Church of England. 

As I have suggested, many of the 13 questions from Synod members did require a legal-type answer.  Safeguarding is, after all, often a matter of putting into practice the correct procedures, particularly as laid down by the House of Bishops in their 2017 guidelines.  But amid the more formal questions of protocol. I detected a googly.  Martin Sewell, a lay member from Rochester, asked a question which was bound to catch my attention as it related to the Martyn Percy affair, something the Church of England may regret becoming involved in.  Sewell’s question, no 27 is as follows.  ‘The Church has embraced the concept of “unconscious bias”.  Will the Secretary General and the NSSP urgently review the composition of the Martyn Percy Core Group and confirm to General Synod members within a month, that having considered the importance of fair and proper process, they can assure us that the Core Group was free from unconscious bias, and the Core Group decisions were untainted by it?’  The questioner knew that the placing of any group of individuals, well known to each other, with others who have been actively  working to remove the Christi Church Dean for over two years , was operating with a built-in bias right from the start. Someone has likened this action as being like allowing members of the prosecution team to join the jury.  Bias within the group was far from ‘unconscious’.  It has made any objective pursuit of justice for Dean Percy by this group virtually impossible.   Bishop Jonathan or the lawyer speaking through him, chose to ignore the evident gross anomalies of the situation, and declared the following in smooth lawyer-speak.  ‘We are not able to respond to specific ongoing cases but as a general rule we would accept that as far as is reasonably possible in the circumstances of each case , a core group’s work should be free from bias ………’

The answer ascribed to Bishop Jonathan is almost certainly not the answer of the man who had spoken so passionately about safeguarding in February.  The question was one about reflection regarding the issue of unconscious bias, one that is much talked about in this epoch of ‘black lives matter’.  The question was not an easy one to answer and it demanded the exercise of the imagination by whoever tried to respond to it.  The Secretary General and the National Safeguarding Steering Panel were being asked to reflect on what they thought might have been going on within the Core Group for Dean Percy.   The answer that came back had not even allowed the question to be fielded on to William Nye and the NSSP.  It was batted away by a legal functionary working in Church House without apparently any serious attempt to engage with the deeper issues implied in the question.

What are the issues implied by this question?  Surviving Church has also asked the same question in a different way.  How can a Church core group function properly when it contains openly hostile individuals to Dean Percy?  Bishop Jonathan must be completely aware of all the ambiguities of process and law that still bedevil the Percy Core Group and its proper functioning.  The formal answer that is published as a response to Martin Sewell’s question shows no  trace of uncertainty or ambiguity.  The answer neither answers the question nor does it hint at the struggling humanity of the bishop who spoke to Synod so movingly and passionately about the issue of safeguarding in February   Rather we seem, in this answer, to have the words of a legally trained functionary with no pastoral awareness of the issues at stake.  That does not reflect the reality of Bishop Jonathan.  This formal answer seems neither to engage properly with the question nor offer an answer that could be said to be of any obvious value.

I have no means of knowing exactly how questions at Synod are dealt with and responded to.  If my speculation is even partly right, that a Bishop’s reply has been drafted by a lawyer and we are witnessing a terrifying vision.  The Church of England is led, not by bishops or archbishops but civil servants and lawyers who are hidden away in Church House.  The task of General Synod is surely to demand to see the ‘real’ Bishop Jonathan, not the one who is not permitted to answer for himself questions put to him by members of Synod.  In the case of Martin Sewell’s question, the individuals addressed were not reached.  Bishop Jonathan/anonymous Church lawyer deflected the question before it reached its destination.  Is that really how we want the Church to be organised?   Is there an English word to denote an organisation run by lawyers?  Perhaps that is indeed what we now have in England!

Trying to make sense of what is going on

A casual reader could be forgiven for being totally confused and beginning to lose the plot over Christ Church Oxford and the travails of its Dean.  What started as a falling-out between a group of disgruntled dons and the head of their Oxford college, has grown into something far more substantial.  This blog piece is an attempt by an outsider to look at the substantial amount of new available information and try to make some sense of the facts that we are being given.  It may also help my readers to have this more recent material presented in a summarised, bite-sized version.  Some of the material is complex so setting out succinctly and, I hope, accurately, some of what is now in the public domain, may be helpful to a reader.   As we shall see, the complete story has yet to be told.

Back in 2018 a group of Christ Church dons made a complaint against Martyn Percy, their Dean and Head of College, accusing him of immoral conduct.  This complaint was made following the procedures available to them by the College statutes.  After a massively expensive enquiry, a retired judge, Sir Andrew Smith, threw out all twenty-seven charges and the Dean was re-instated.  The college appears to have spent over £2 million of their charitable funds in bringing their complaints forward and Dean Percy was forced also to employ legal support costing him £400,000.

Earlier this year the same group of complainants approached the Church of England’s National Safeguarding Team to bring a further complaint against the Dean connected with safeguarding issues.  This complaint procedure is on-going.  Once again Dean Percy is forced to employ legal help as the NST have, in response, set up a quasi-legal Core Group to investigate the complaint.  This is where the situation becomes complex and the subject of procedural and legal arguments. 

• A major issue yet to be resolved in the case is this.  Dean Percy wears two hats in his unusual double role.  On the one hand, he is a Dean of a Cathedral where Church safeguarding rules could come into operation if required.  On the other side he is the head of a college at a university which has its own set of protocols and guidelines.  A similar situation would exist for a school, prison or hospital chaplain.  While they are working in their respective work environments, chaplains have to work according to rules set by the institution that employs them.  In cases of safeguarding, Church and State have differing standards and regulations.  The Church has rules which talk about ‘vulnerable adults’.  All other non-church organisations, including universities, adhere to regulations which speak of a category referred to as ‘adults at risk’.  The precise definitions of these two expressions do not concern us at this point, but suffice to say, they are not the same.  It is hard to see how Dean Percy could be expected to operate according to two distinct sets of guidelines simultaneously.  It is clear anyway that all the safeguarding complaints are to do with episodes of college life, i.e. in areas of his responsibility where the Church has no obvious role or access.

• The case seems to be full of potential conflicts of interest which make it almost impossible for the Core Group to work with an adequate level of independence.  There are just too many personal ties that exist between the Dean’s accusers and the publicity companies and legal firms who have now become involved in the case.  We obviously do not have all the facts of who knows whom, but there is a miasma of suspicion about the process which makes it hard to see how there will ever be a calm dispassionate examination of the facts. The two non-church organisations prominent in the case each have a lot of history and involvement with both Christ Church and the Church of England central structures.   One is the public relations firm, Luther Pendragon.  They have already been working for the complainant dons in their earlier case against their Dean in 2018.  They also do work for the Church of England and several of the dioceses.  Alongside Luther Pendragon is Winckworth Sherwood, a firm of top end London lawyers.  They are extensively involved with church work at the national level and also with the Provincial Registrar and the diocese of Oxford.   WS, as we shall now call them, used to be run by the Rev John Rees, who now works for the national Church at a senior level.  The letter sent to Martyn telling him that he faced investigation by the NST was written in the name of Melissa Caslake, the director, but it appears to have been drafted by another senior lawyer with connections with WS, Alex McGregor.  He is a priest lawyer who used to be chancellor for the Diocese of Oxford.  The WS Oxford office was also drawn in to issue the letter from the Bishop of Oxford to George Carey, removing his PTO. 

• Given the close personal and professional ties that can be seen to bind all the individuals within these firms with the national church and with members of Christ Church, we would have expected to see a number of recusals from the Core Group. It is surely impossible for members of such a small network to regard themselves as independent in regard to this investigation.  In actual fact, 13 out 14 members of the Percy Core Group are believed to have personal or professional links with WS.  Two of Dean Percy’s accusers sit on the group while no one represents the interests of the Dean himself.  Further, Alex McGregor, the member of the Church’s legal team and who reputedly drafted the letter to Martyn, is an alumnus of Christ Church.  He can be expected to have continuing social and other contact with some of the dons involved in the case. 

• The minutes of the Christ Church Core Group, which met on March 13th 2020, have not yet been released.  The various conflicts of interest that would appear to be in operation, in bringing together such a group, need to be fully explored.  The group that is claiming to seek justice for the Dean needs to explain how they feel able to do this with any degree of integrity while these apparent conflicts of interest are neither acknowledged nor examined.  There is also something less than healthy when committee proceedings are apparently wrapped up in secrecy.  The Carlile report, which scrutinised the processes in the case around Bishop Bell, called for all such Church core groups to carry representation of the interests of the complainants and the accused.  That, clearly, is not happening in this case.  The impression is being given that the whole process is an expensive and dishonourable exercise in trying to wear down the Dean by litigious-type activities.  To their shame, the Church of England has allowed itself to become party to a what appears to be a thoroughly shameful process.  The NST has been manipulated to become part of something so toxic that it may itself be destroyed by this involvement.

• The reputations of two organisations are being severely damaged by this episode.  Christ Church dons have already seen twenty-seven accusations against the Dean rejected by a retired judge.  The repeat of the attacks on the Dean with a completely new set of accusations, while using another legal structure, seems foolish and even reckless.  The reputation of the Christ Church college has been muddied and brought low by this case.  At the same time the status of the Church of England is taking an equally heavy battering.   The Church, with the connivance of its top legal officers has allowed a church legal process to be used in a dispute within a wealthy Oxford college.  It is surprising that the advice of the Church’s own publicity machine and its reputation managers was not there to check this appalling waste of human and financial resources.  At a time of financial anxiety for the parishes and cathedrals of England, congregations are witnessing the expenditure of tens (even hundreds) of thousands of pounds of church money on this case.  This is money that properly belongs to the Church.  Quite apart from the evident flakiness of the case, the Church of England has allowed one of its structures to be used, abused and, arguably, totally discredited in pursuing a case which appears ultimately to be beyond its remit.  Let us hope that General Synod at its meeting in two weeks time will be able to do something to reverse this terrible train crash.

The present outbreak of covid-19 has been an unremitting tragedy for many families across the world.  But there has been, indirectly, one tiny glimmer of new light for an existing group of sick patients -those suffering with chronic fatigue syndrome or ME.  What has happened is that a significant number of those recovering from the covid virus have fallen prey to symptoms identical to ME sufferers.  This emergence of ME symptoms among this highly studied group of ex-covid patients has helped finally to extinguish the old notion that ME is a psychological complaint, amenable to cognitive therapy.   It is beyond doubt a physical post-viral condition.  It needs, and is now receiving, the attention of serious researchers every bit as much as for any other physical illness.  ME sufferers can no longer be treated as malingerers.  This was sometimes their cruel fate until recently.   The psychological treatments formerly on offer for ME must have felt wildly inappropriate to patients lying exhausted in bed sometimes in extreme pain and with debilitating muscle weakness.

Covid-19 has had this indirect effect of finally establishing beyond doubt that ME is a genuine physical illness and not something conjured up by the mind.  Something similar has also happened in the legal world.  Until recently, violence against women (sometimes men) in the home was recognised to exist and offenders were sent to prison because of it.  But to prove the offence, the violence had to be physical.  There was no understanding in law of other forms of psychological violence behind closed doors.  Bullying, gaslighting, harassment, financial control and humiliation did not constitute offences that could be challenged and punished with the weight of the law.  In short, nothing could be done unless there were broken bones or black eyes.  Once again it was a case of ‘if we can’t see it or define it, it does not exist’.  Finally, in 2015 there was introduced into the law of the land the notion of ‘coercion and control’ to describe cases of psychological violence against a partner in the home.  Suddenly police and lawyers were permitted to punish a behaviour that had always been there, but not hitherto properly named or recognised. 

 For the Church there is a similar reticence over the concept of ‘spiritual abuse’.  Definitions of this idea are being offered by a variety of writers and researchers, but the Church is still reluctant to commit itself to outlawing any of the range of behaviours that would come into this broad category of description.  Physical violence in the church is rare.  The case against John Smyth in England and Zimbabwe was exceptional and extraordinary.  It goes without saying that his behaviour and that of sexual abusers is clearly against the law of the land and will meet the sanctions of imprisonment when proven.  Spiritual abuse is, however, difficult to define.   Also, some Christians find the expression offensive since it might suggest that certain practices extracted from Scripture could be harmful.  But before we get into the question of objections to the idea, we need to look at some up-to-date Church documents where the reticence for the term is revealed.

A recent attempt by the Church of England to describe the range of abuses which it wants to outlaw, is found in a document published in June 2019.  This is the one that provides the guidelines for the Past Cases Review (PCR2) process at present under way.  PCR2 is a massively expensive process which hopes to uncover, by examining all church records, a full picture of the abuses which took place in the past but were never dealt with.  In the Protocol and Practice guidance, the document states These behaviours may include physical, sexual or emotional abuse, neglect, discrimination, theft, fraud and financial exploitation. There is no separate mention of spiritual abuse.  This would lead one to conclude that Church of England is not yet ready to commit itself to any definition of such an idea.  It is thus all too easy for the Church to proceed on the basis that if we have not identified it or named it, then perhaps it does not exist.

It hardly needs saying that if spiritual abuse as a category is left out of the PCR process, one massive area of pain and suffering among victims is going to be ignored.  The scrutineers trawling through hundreds of documents in diocesan and central offices are effectively going to be closing their eyes to a dimension of suffering that, for many, is more significant than the physical or the sexual. 

What is this spiritual abuse which survivors speak about?  There is one recent book by Lisa Oakley and Justin Humphreys which sets out the case for this category of abuse being a reality.  They see it as a genuine and acute cause of suffering even if some involved in professional safeguarding, together with many church leaders, would prefer to proceed as though there were no such thing.   What is this spiritual abuse which the Church of England authorities are reluctant to accept?   Oakley and Humphreys realise that there are problems that make it difficult to offer a watertight definition.  The broad description speaks of an abuse event where manipulation, coercion or control take place within a church/spiritual setting.  In the book by Alan Wilson and Rosie Harper, there is one memorable turn of phrase which captures the way that human and spiritual facets are sometimes combined.  The authors speak of an abusive episode ‘outsourced to God’.  An individual is maybe forced to endure a punishment like enduring ostracism from an entire congregation.  Perhaps a Christian is forced to do something against their will.  Those in charge manage to dress up the unpleasant experience as being an obligation due to God or to the words of Scripture.  What are in fact taking place are, in reality, human power games which have become cloaked with the supposed authority of the divine.  These obtain their capacity to wound and harm individuals precisely because they appeal to deep seated spiritual beliefs and loyalties held by the victim.

A failure to have any secure or even working definition of this area of harm we call spiritual abuse, weakens the PCR process.  The Church has access to a great deal of expertise in this area and this surely is sufficient to produce an interim definition suitable for the ongoing process.  It is perhaps fear of theological conflict with those on the powerful conservative fringes of the Church that has created this reticence.  Many have become accustomed to exercising ‘spiritual authority’ in ways that easily slide over into abusive practice.  These practices would include the physical (biblically ordained!) chastisement of children, dramatic and terrifying exorcisms and so-called conversion therapies practised on members of the gay community.   The wide-spread use of fear techniques in ‘biblical’ preaching to encourage conversion and financial giving is also ethically questionable.   When a Christian meets such ‘coercion and control’ techniques within a church setting, they should question whether they are encountering spiritual abuse rather than the Christian good news.  The use of fear-laden language within church life can quite often be an exercise in bullying abusive power under the guise of bible teaching. 

In a letter to a survivor, which I have been shown, a senior safeguarding official promised that a definition of spiritual abuse was under active consideration at the national level.   Can I suggest that as long as there is no working statement about spiritual abuse and a determination to stamp it out, it  will leave the PCR process half-done.  It will also allow the Church of England to keep their eyes averted from the huge range of suffering individuals who have met spiritual abuse in one of its varied expressions.  A failure to identify an evil when it comes before you is a serious matter.  The medical profession was blind to the pain of ME for decades; the legal profession/courts for a long time refused to acknowledge women emotionally battered by their partners who used the tools of psychological torture.  Is the Church going to join in this tradition of wilful blindness by refusing to see the incidence and severity of what we are describing as spiritual abuse? 

Establishment is one of those words that we often use loosely without necessarily thinking much about what it exactly means.  It is a word that occurs in many different contexts of society.  It may be a word describing something about politics, the business world, the legal profession or the Church.  Some of the time the speaker will use the word with a tone of disapproval.  It is normally possible to gauge what the user thinks of the concept by the way the word is spoken.  A lighter tone can suggest approval or, at any rate, acquiescence in all that the word involves.  In a political context establishment values make us think of people whose thinking is on the right in the political spectrum.  In most contexts the word is used to denote a group who stand for precedent and they will value the task of preserving tradition and order.  The analogy of left and right is offered as a useful shorthand for what we are trying to describe in interpreting establishment.   Leftish thinking, in whatever context, will seek to challenge establishment ideas.  From that perspective, establishment values will be thought to be those blocking the way to change and movement within an institution.  Centrist-thinking people (like me!) will see both sides of the argument.  There are times when challenge is needed but other occasions when we should value the order and stability of the past which establishment values represent and preserve.

Notions of left and right, in describing the way institutions operate, are only very rough approximations of the dynamics of organised groups.   But anything that enables us to navigate a path of understanding as to the way an institution like the Church works may be helpful.  Establishment conservatives in the Church will have, in common with other members of institutions, this reverence and respect for tradition and the status-quo.  While it is true that there are many individual members of the Church who fall into this category of wanting at all costs to protect and preserve its values and traditions, there is also a sense in which the institution itself preserves these values.  It is no exaggeration to suggest that any organisation will behave like a living being with a built-in instinct for its self-preservation.   Also as a general rule, we find that the greater responsibility an individual has accepted within an organisation, the more establishment in thinking they become.  They have invested their identities within the institution so that this identity is likely to reflect the values of the whole.  As prominent servants of the Church, bishops and other leaders become, with few exceptions, the guardians of its establishment values and traditions.

To continue our analogy of left and right, we see how the left wing in the Church constitute those who challenge the status-quo whether for practical or theological reasons.  We have no space here to examine those who challenge the Church with radical theological ideas or those who raise the topic of welcoming minorities into the worshipping life of the Church.  Our concern here is the way that the body we call survivors challenges establishment values within the institution.  The nature of the challenge has various elements.  Survivors have some important points to make against those who occupy positions of power or leadership.  The accusations against powerful individuals in the structure disturbs the smooth narrative, or should we call it mythology, which says that only individuals of the highest moral calibre become bishops and priests.  If even a few individual bishops and priests fail in this way, the ‘left-wing’ challengers, here represented by the survivors, want to ask uncomfortable questions of the institution.   Is there something about the culture of the Church that encourages the dysfunctional behaviour among some of it servants?  Why does the Church engage in bullying and lying in order to supress the evidence of evil behaviour?  We saw such things revealed in the IICSA hearings in the Peter Ball section.  No establishment will find such questioning comfortable. It profoundly undermines the sense of what their institution is and how people will come to regard it both in the present and in the future. 

 To make life complicated there is in the Church of England more than one establishment grouping.  Two at least come under the challenge and scrutiny of survivors.   The first establishment finds its centre in the power structures and networks associated with St Helen’s Bishopsgate.  We would claim that this network provided cover for the abuses of John Smyth and Jonathan Fletcher. A second establishment power block, not defined by theology, operates out of Church House Westminster and interlocks with the House of Bishops.  Exactly how that network works, with its links with lawyers, publicity machines with access to huge financial assets, is shrouded in mystery.  For decades no one has queried the work of the Church at the centre operating in secrecy and without apparent scrutiny.  The reason for this tolerance of an undemocratic process at the heart of the Church was because it seemed to work smoothly.   Appointments to high office were made without any scandal or suspicion of simony.  The financial decisions that guard the assets of the Church Commissioners seem to operate highly efficiently.  But there should always be room for challenge when it comes to any establishment, especially when they exercise their powers secretly.  We have the expression ‘speaking truth to power’.   Here we are talking about holding power, especially that of establishments, accountable.  Yesterday (Monday) we had the extraordinary news of Bishop Stephen Cottrell openly admitting a serious safeguarding failure of ten years ago.  This new openness is remarkable, especially in view of the history of cover-ups which traditionally exists at the heart of the Church.   We need to see this disclosure followed up by other safeguarding concerns being addressed promptly.  There are a cluster of other pending complaints to be dealt with against other serving bishops on safeguarding issues.  We can hope that this new openness is the start of a new contract between the secretive establishments of the Church and their radical questioners and would-be reformers.    

A further observation about establishment behaviour within the Church needs to be drawn out.  Thinking of the clergy, I would not be wrong to suppose that many young clergy begin their careers inspired with a sense of the radical demands of the Christian faith.  In our left-right analogy, they are firmly identified with the left.  Their vocation is an invitation to live a life of service of the Kingdom.   Priorities like evangelism, teaching and the service of one’s fellows after the example of Jesus, are a priority.    As time goes on, the demands of the institution become more pressing, whether their local church or the denomination.  The drag of that institution to make them its creatures becomes irresistible.  They become more and more aware of their role as being subordinate to the institution.  They come to recognise their dependency on it for their livelihood, their status and future.  They become, in other words, more and more like company reps.  They then start to adopt the habits, the mannerisms and the styles of what they think a clergyperson should be.  Another way of saying it is to suggest that the Establishment is rather like a large magnetic force which tries to draw all into its orbit.  After thirty or forty years caught up in its force field, few have that independence of thought and action that may have been there at the beginning. 

It is important to point out that my own personal experience of supporting survivors over quite a number of years has made me firmly, in church political terms, left-wing.  I might easily otherwise have acquiesced in the quiet life of trusting all the decisions of my leaders and ecclesiastical betters, thinking that I can rely on them to uphold and protect the Church’s reputation.  But in the face of lies and cover-ups that are so often part of the experience of abuse survivors, one’s attitude is changed.  Acquiescence and trust has made way for me to want to challenge and confront some of these establishment forces in the Church.  Although my influence is small, the voice I possess is given a little power by the internet, support of vocal survivors and the power of Twitter etc.  Small pebbles thrown into the pond of church politics can sometimes make real ripples and influence opinion.  Many people of influence and power are decent people and if enough can be persuaded to see more clearly the principles and values of decency, fairness and justice, then the conservative power of sometimes dishonest structures can be broken.  Am I wrong to see the honourable open behaviour of Stephen Cottrell as the possible harbinger of a new approach to the past?  Five years ago all seemed to be secrecy and cover-up.  Are we at a springtime of decency, openness and new beginnings, while shaking off some of the power of the establishments?  There is much to do but there seems at present to be an inexorable movement in the right direction. 

It is nearly twenty years since I left my last English parish in Gloucestershire.  I am aware that since I ceased to be an English vicar, many things have changed in the typical parish.  In the 80s and 90s the ‘secular’ wedding and funeral had barely been invented; the consequence was that I officiated at most of such events in my community.  My experience of parish work then was that there were always people to visit in their homes, whether bereavement follow-ups, shut-ins, the sick or baptism families.  My visiting was constantly increasing the numbers of people that I knew well within the community.  After 16 years in the same place, I had heard the personal life histories of hundreds of individuals and families.  At that time, a vicar was expected to know everyone, as well as be seen out and about on foot or on a bicycle within the area.  Trying to fulfil the expectation of extensive visiting and visibility was something I carried over from the training in my curacy days back in the early 70s. 

The one thing that I could not leave behind when I moved on to pastures new in Scotland was all this detailed information about individuals and families in the parish.  It went with me.  Having been able to reflect back to a funeral congregation some real personal memory of the deceased, had been an important part of helping a family in their grief.  These personal memories could not be transferred to a filing cabinet. No longer could a wedding couple have the added reassurance of one of them having known the vicar since being prepared for confirmation eight years previously.  My successors had inevitably to start from scratch.  My personal memory bank was not available to my successors.  It was particularly sad when an individual descended into dementia or disability and the one in charge of their funeral had never known them as people of vigour and selflessness.   It is certainly placing no blame on my successors to say this.  It is just the way it was.  People and their deeds get forgotten very quickly and that may happen to any of us.  A long-serving vicar may be the only person around who knew quite how much Mr so-and-so or Miss Blank achieved in their time, even more sometimes than the families.  The vicar often carries in him/herself much of the corporate memory of what that person represented to the community.

This word memory is an important one to think about.  We have this expression ‘corporate memory’ to describe how some important memories, good and bad, about individuals or events are sometimes preserved within institutions.  When a good corporate memory is preserved, it can provide some kind of lasting memorial to a person.  More often such memories are lost.   Sometimes there is a change of personnel in an organisation or there may be deliberate policy of repressing the memory because what he/she represented is no longer in fashion.  But these corporate memories are important because, even when they become weakened, they contain part of what has created the present.  Honouring the people of the past, even in a generalised way, should always be part of the self-understanding of a community or church congregation even when the actual memories have grown dim.   

In today’s Church we have one area where memories are still very important, the world of safeguarding.  One group carries all the memories of past abuses in the Church going back as far as 60 or 70 years.  These are the individuals called survivors/victims.  Their memories are detailed, reliable and, unfortunately for them, sometimes vivid to the point of being traumatic.  On the other side are the professionals dealing with the safeguarding issue.  They might be expected to engage readily with those who carry all this information from the past, because this information is in danger of being forgotten or lost.  But the institution they work for, the Church, expects the professionals to regard safeguarding as an issue to be sorted.  There is thus this institutional fix-it approach.   The professionals use the benefit of their educational background, whether legal, social work or reputational management, as providing skills to solve the ‘problem’.  The material they have before them are reviews, reports and legal arguments about liability.  The one glaring omission is that, in their heads, these professionals have no direct access to the detailed and vivid memories of the survivors.  All too often, they seem to have little interest in acquiring any of that memory by simply listening to the survivors.

A couple of years ago a woman survivor spoke to me about a phone call she had made to a central Church safeguarding point of contact.  The complaint this survivor made to me, was that there was first a profound lack of listening skills or understanding of the needs of abused individuals on the part of the person taking the call.  This failure was combined with another kind of failure, a complete ignorance of any of the then recently published reports, those connected with Peter Ball and the Elliot report.   Here was a representative of the Church paid to speak to survivors who had not been brought up to speed with any of the material which survivors and their supporters thought of as basic background information.  Was the fact of this palpable ignorance the result of a rapid turnover of staff, or suggestive of a broader loss of corporate memory that we spoke of above?  This failure of corporate memory which seems to affect many of the professionals involved with safeguarding is a serious one.  Time and time again in the IICSA process, qualified individuals were shown to be ignorant of factual and historical material or lacking areas of basic understanding of the way things are supposed to work in legal or social work contexts.  The latest corporate memory failure is the failure to implement the Carlile recommendations made over the formation of Core Groups.  Had the professionals simply forgotten what Lord Carlile had said only three years before?  How could the NST not once, but twice, fail to ensure that the survivor/alleged perpetrator was represented in the Group?  The second issue is the extraordinary harmful legal advice, given by the Church’s top legal adviser in 2007 and circulating for ten years, that pastoral contact should be shut off from survivors if they made a legal claim.  This was a year after the Compensation Act (2006) specifically stated that such expressions of support would not be deemed to affect compensation claims.  How much suffering was caused to survivors by this profoundly incompetent piece of legal advice?

At present there exists a ravine between two sides where one seems to be frightened of the wisdom, the experience and the memory of the other.  On one side there are those who have the memory (individual and corporate) of events, evil actions and decades of suffering.  These are the body of articulate but still traumatised survivors.  On the other side are the professionals who are trying on behalf of the Church to resolve the massive problems caused by the Church and the outcome of years of incompetent management in this area. The professionals, we would claim, lack proper understanding of the deeper issues of abuse as experienced by the survivors.   They also operate with an unhealthy obsession to see their role as being primarily a defensive one.  As long as the whole safeguarding industry adopts this defensive posture, the communication, the bridges across the ravine will never be properly built.  The Church, as a whole, needs this issue to be solved.  Otherwise, it will continue to be a profound wound in the heart of the institution, damaging and weakening us all.

  

Commentators on religious affairs are giving a lot of thought as to the ways that churches will be having to change after covid-19.  Here is not the place to rehearse all these potential disruptions but to bring to attention another major historical shift, one that is soon likely to affect many Christians groups in the USA.   In January 2021, after what is expected to be a massive defeat of Donald Trump in the November elections, a new US President is due to take over at the White House.  Assuming that the prediction of a Democratic landslide defeat is correct (by no means certain), the subsequent political upheavals will change the whole atmosphere of American life in numerous positive ways.  We trust that there will be a collective sigh of relief as people welcome back a period of honesty, truth telling and an end to the criminal self-serving behaviour in the White House. The task of being the new 2021 leader of the free world in a post-covid, economically battered country, will be indeed an enormous responsibility.  The task that is laid on this new American president’s shoulders will be every bit as demanding as that given to Franklin D Roosevelt when he came to power in 1933.  He had to sort out the appalling aftermath of the stock market bloodbath of 1929 and the depression that followed it.  The decisions of a new president of the United States will be of importance to all of us as economics and the effects of the virus are international in their scope.  

The one social entity in the States that has supported President Trump fairly consistently over the four years of his presidency, are the group described as ‘white evangelicals’.   This expression does not really correspond to any group that we have in the UK.  The commentators in the States who try and convey the significance of the term, sometimes describe them as people whose self-definition is contained as knowing who they are not.  White evangelicals will typically be working class and have cultural and political assumptions about the superiority of the white race over Latinos and blacks.  Those of them who attend churches will naturally gravitate towards congregations that are, by UK standards, extremely conservative/fundamentalist in style.  The word ‘fundamentalist’ does not have the same negative connotation in the States as it does here.  There are many Americans who regard themselves as ‘belonging’ to such churches, even if they do not physically attend them.  Extremely conservative religious beliefs, with shades of racist and ultra-right political assumptions, are those that are paraded when these ‘religious’ Trump supporting Americans need an identifying label to give themselves a secure sense of who they are. 

According to a recent video on Youtube, the white evangelical ‘tribe’ is one that has given its soul to the cause of President Trump. The minister speaking on this video to make this comment, described this relationship between Trump and this large tribe of white evangelicals, as a kind of Faustian pact.  On the one side the group have given, through their leaders, a kind of sanctification or blessing on the reign of Donald Trump.  In return he has promised to give them access to the White House and some influence in shaping some of the priorities of government.  The most important goal for these evangelical leaders and their followers is the chance to see favoured candidates nominated for the Supreme Court. These appointments have a long-term effect on the whole of society, since the appointees serve for the whole of their lives.  In the Supreme Court some of the most significant struggles for the soul of America are being fought.  Much is said about culture wars in the States and the battles over abortion and the status of same-sex relationships.  These battles are of vital importance to conservative Christians in the struggles against ‘liberal-humanism’.   So far President Trump has successfully placed two new conservative judges in the Court.   In theory this should have quickly led to the repeal of laws not favoured by the conservative religious Right.  This expected outcome has yet to materialise as the appointed judges have not voted entirely as expected.  This part of the story must be put to one side for another time. 

So far, the exchange of favours negotiated between Trump and his white evangelical supporters has worked mainly in Trump’s favour.  They remain a solid block of voting support which does not shift, whatever examples of incompetence or scandal are revealed.  But many of the more aware of the Christian leaders among the white evangelical tribe have started to notice the considerable cost involved.  It is an assault on their Christian value systems to support a thrice married racist who shows little loyalty, even to those who support him.  There is also a recognition that the unwritten agreement that exists currently could be overturned at a moment’s notice, once the individual or group no longer serves Trump’s purposes.  The lying and hypocrisy that emerge from the White House have also not impressed the young people within the tribe, and there has been a noticeable collapse of support for conservative churches from this cohort.      

The commentator on the Youtube video gave me two particularly fresh insights into the culture of white evangelicals in the States.  The first insight concerned the drifting apart that is taking place between some leaders and their flocks.  Leaders of evangelical congregations, like himself, were starting to have active doubts about the wisdom of supporting Trump.  He said that the problem was that their congregations would never support them if they tried to suggest that Trump was in any way flawed.  So, it was fear that kept leaders on board within the Trump camp.  The alternative was to be voted out of their posts.  Power in many independent congregations does not belong to the nominated leader.   

A second point that was mentioned in the video also related to fear.  The interviewee commentator mentioned attending conferences where they were taught to ‘encourage’ generous giving.  The professional trainers in this area had a simple message.  This was to tell the ministers that the more the congregations were frightened and angry, the more money they would donate to the church.  To summarise, the message was ‘give us more fear and more anger’.   

It is hard to know exactly how the cohort of white evangelicals in the States will respond if their ‘hero’ is defeated in November.  There is something very volatile about this group and one can see that some members of this Christian tribe could easily be provoked to violence if their leaders were to suggest such an action.  But whatever else is true, a culture of fear, potential violence, anger and extremist thinking is never going to be a healthy mix.  As we have already suggested, it is not a version of Christianity likely to go down well with the more liberal young.  It will also have even less pulling power, if the figurehead of the movement is thoroughly defeated in November and required publicly to face up to his numerous crimes. 

How will evangelicals in this country fare in this potential cataclysm to the brand name that may happen in the States in the autumn?  As we have already suggested, there are significant differences in the meaning of the term in the two countries.  But for all the differences, the two groups still share a descriptive name.  For that reason alone, evangelicals here should be concerned about the events taking place in the States.  The damage on American society caused by Trump and his supporters is so massive that there may be a huge political and theological backlash against those groups who have supported him.  The term evangelical may become a toxic description for decades to come across the world.  If evangelicals here or anywhere in the world want to avoid that guilt by association that is inevitably on its way, they need to start to plan now.  They have to examine the word and allow it to be defined in ways that have not been corrupted and made unclean by association with the criminal reign of Donald J Trump.