by Gilo

Having written a piece about the use of ‘core groups’ and the Clergy Discipline Measure, to be discussed by the House of Bishops this month, Surviving Church has received a further contribution on the topic from Gilo. Gilo’s current piece focuses on the Martyn Percy saga at Christ Church Oxford and explores the way that Church of England official safeguarding procedures have somehow become entangled in the affair. The process has become messy and it is hard to see a good outcome when good practice and the pursuit of fairness appear to have been bypassed along the way. It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that the entire structure of Church of England safeguarding is on trial in this one case. And yet the situation presents to survivors a new opportunity to bring legitimate complaints about many serving bishops. In the past, complaints have been routinely dismissed, but now we would expect to see core groups and action. Ed.

The National Safeguarding Team has instigated a ‘core group’ to investigate complaints against Professor Martyn Percy by disaffected members of Christ Church alleging safeguarding failures. This follows the comprehensive dismissal by Sir Andrew Smith (a retired High Court judge) of the original case brought against Percy by members of the Governing Body seeking his removal from office. To many who have followed the media stories on this saga, this latest development resembles a kangaroo court with the deployment of weaponised safeguarding in a desperate attempt to oust the Dean. It was reported by the Church Times (29 May) that Percy has no representation on this core group but must adhere to its diktat. It seems likely that this action by the NST will add considerably to the reputational damage already done Percy by the group of college dons.

As has been previously written on this blog and elsewhere – NST core groups are already a deeply contentious issue. There’s a striking parallel here with they way they’ve been used in survivors’ cases as little more than a PR management exercise. In my case, the NST had the lawyer present who led the settlement for Ecclesiastical Insurance – but I had no representation and didn’t know a core group had taken place for 18 months. The appropriation of the NST in Percy’s situation is likely to rebound heavily on an already mistrusted and discredited Church of England national safeguarding.

It has been reported that two of the dons pitched against Percy sit on this core group. If either of them sent or received proposals to “poison” the Dean and fish his “wrinkly withered little body” out of the river, then the NST has entered the realm of Ortonesque farce. In most organisations emails at this level of delinquency about a colleague, and circulated widely amongst a professional body, would result in disciplinary action. Survivors have frequently written angry letters to and about bishops – I openly include myself in their number but have never expressed a wish to see particular Bishops fished out of the Thames from Lambeth Bridge! The media reported that the Senior Censor tried hurriedly to get the College Council to self-delete the full report in what appeared to be an attempt to bury these juvenile emails. The Senior Censor apparently sits on this core group. You couldn’t make it up!

But more disturbingly, I have heard on good authority and am aware that others have also heard, that at a recent Governing Board of the college, one of the senior college figures boasted to the Trustees “the wily Censors have made sure they complained to the right part of the National Safeguarding Team”. If true, both ends of that statement are extraordinary. I don’t know if the NST are aware of this. I don’t imagine so. There would be an outcry across the Church if the NST had been complicit in their own ugly appropriation. It would raise questions about who is controlling different bits of this structure, and in particular who is pulling the strings of the “right part” of the National Safeguarding Team. I suspect Synod members would throw their hands up in horror and ask: how the hell does one rescue a Church’s national safeguarding so far down a road of ethical dysfunctionality?

But this core group sets an interesting precedent. Quite a few Church of England Bishops have been accused of safeguarding failings, cover up, poor response or no response towards survivors, gaslighting, blanking and fogging, dishonesty – yet how many have had core groups convened about them by the National Safeguarding Team? It would now seem that a complaint from a single source against a senior church officer is no longer time-limited, but will result in the formation of a core group on which the complainant can be personally represented. The person under investigation will presumably be asked to step aside from safeguarding responsibilities during the investigation. Although the circumstances in which this has come about are ugly and point to church officialdom targeting a well-known critic – the situation has unexpected potential for survivors. There are a significant number of survivors who have credible and legitimate claims that serving bishops have mishandled disclosures of abuse or have been dishonest in their response. We might welcome the opportunity to have core groups established, and to have complaints acted upon at last. I suspect the number of bishops who could feasibly be asked to stand down through such action might be surprising.

There are bishops on the National Safeguarding Steering Group (NSSG) who in mine and others view shouldn’t be on that group until retraining, moral reorientation and proper apologies render them fit to respond to survivors with honesty, decency, compassion and a sense of urgency to situations. The same could be said for other bishops. Matt Ineson could justifiably bring legitimate complaints against four bishops and one retiring archbishop. If the NST were to follow the same route as they have done with the Dean of Christ Church – all five would be required to abide to the conditions imposed by the core group while those investigations take place. And Matt Ineson would have representation on each of the core groups, or one combined core group, and could be present himself presumably if he so wished. And that is only one such situation. There are plenty of others. Incidentally the CDM complaint against the Bishop of Lincoln is also proceeding out of time, which again raises questions in relation to CDM complaints made against other bishops – all of which were ruled out of time. It would seem sensible to find out from the Director of Safeguarding what the formal route now is for complaints to be made, so that several bishops can be asked to stand aside without further delay while core groups are set up. The NST can hardly ignore any such request. Survivors might speculate as to which part of the NST is the “right part” to complain to for action. If, for example, you send an email to safeguarding@churchofengland.org, does that go to the right part, or the wrong part?

Returning to Martyn Percy who I know a little, he wrote a chapter for Letters to a Broken Church and has been an unwavering ally for survivors. My personal view is that he has more integrity and courage than many current bishops whose response to the abuse crisis (with a few notable exceptions) has shown them to be a run-for-hills culture … insipid at best, downright dishonest at worst. I end with a quote from his chapter in our book:

Like many loyal servants of the Church of England, I have watched IICSA over the past three weeks with a growing, troubling, deep sense of shame. This is a hard thing to admit. To know that you belong to a body where you can no longer believe of trust the account of the polity or practice that is being offered in defence of its behaviours by its own leaders. To know that the real victims in this tragic farce who are still waiting for basic, fundamental rights that should be givens for the church – recognition, remorse, repentance – are abused twice over.

In the first instance, it is by their actual abuser. The second time, and far worse, is the subsequent abuse perpetrated by the Church. For this is a church that is deaf, dumb and blind – and seemingly wilfully indifferent to the suffering undergone by those abused – and then addresses this with little more than an incompetent veneer of safeguarding practice, which only further compounds the original act of abuse.

The Church Times’ 22^nd May issue contained a notice that the Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM) would be discussed at the House of Bishops’ meeting in June.  This debate is a hopefully a precursor to a replacement or a radical amendment to this piece of church legislation.  Since the CDM came into effect in 2006, it has been controversial.  Some who have suffered its outworking have experienced it as extremely stressful, painful and traumatic.  Indeed, the legislation is regarded by many as the most appalling piece of church self-regulation that has ever been conceived.  Left intact or with only minor tweaks, the CDM has been thought to have the power to cause lasting damage to the Church. 

When the Church of England brought in CDM, it was to replace the extremely cumbersome regulations that existed in church law to tackle the problem of clergy malfeasance.  Before 2006, the Church could do nothing to discipline an erring cleric unless he/she broke the laws of the country.  The CDM was an attempt to make it possible to take action when the church authorities deemed behaviour by a member of the clergy to be unbecoming or the cause of scandal.   

One of the main changes was that anyone, Archdeacon or ordinary parishioner, could make a complaint about a clergyperson.  Whether the complaint was trivial or weighty, it had to be examined and taken seriously.  Over the years since 2006, numerous issues have arisen over the implementation of the measure.  Some have pointed to the expense while others have complained about the inordinate amount of time involved.  Survivors are asked to provide written evidence to back up their complaint, and may spend many months compiling a dossier that is never read; yet the one-off submission of written evidence is the only evidence that is allowed.  After the conclusion of the CDM, there may be a review – but in one case the views of the survivors were redacted from the version that was posted online.  

During April, an article on the CDM and church safeguarding, by Josephine Stein, was published in the journal Modern Believing.  The article is a powerful critique of the way the CDM has been implemented and deserves to be read by the bishops and anyone concerned about the way that the CDM has failed abuse survivors. It extends points on this topic made in Stein’s essay in Letters to a Broken Church, and explains why reform or rejection of the  CDM is urgently needed for the sake of the health of the whole Church. 

Stein’s article explains why the CDM has been an unsuitable tool for dealing with cases of clergy sexual abuse and other safeguarding issues. Each suspected case of abuse will involve at least one survivor/victim as well as an alleged perpetrator.  Any legal process will do little or nothing for an abused person or victim.  The CDM seeks evidence that can be verified independently, which is nearly impossible as abuse is normally conducted in private and often uses insinuation and/or non-verbal threats.  The abuser typically uses grooming and spinning a web of secrecy around the events, especially in a case involving children, to further conceal his actions

Only through a psychologically informed process of interviewing an alleged victim, is there likely to be uncovered what Stein calls ‘dyadic dynamics’ between the perpetrator and his target (most perpetrators are male).  This expression captures well the nuance of a manipulative process whereby a powerful individual exploits one who is weaker.  A process based only upon written evidence is hardly the best way to uncover the truth about abusive behaviour.  Finding out what really happened will be better accomplished by informed  questioning by a psychologist, who could also very quickly spot false accusations.  

An abused person who has suffered at the hands of an abusive leader needs always to be at the heart of any process after the event.  The CDM process, by being focussed on establishing blame and punishment, allows the victim of abuse to be put to one side.  Practical outcomes, like suitable counselling, psychotherapy and/or spiritual direction for a victim and steps to prevent a perpetrator continuing the pattern of abuse, need to be put in place as part of the overall process.  If these important issues are not dealt with, the harm to the victim as well as the reputation of the Church will be massive and long-lasting. 

Stein considers the role of core groups which sometimes form part of the Church’s response to allegations of abuse.  The setting up of such a group might, on the face of it, be seen to be a good way of informally resolving and obviating  a full CDM process.  In practice, as we saw in an earlier blog post, these core groups have not always been well managed.  Furthermore, core groups ignore confidentiality by ‘sharing’ information widely, which may enable the perpetrator and his allies to take retaliatory action against the ‘accuser’.  This is deeply unsafe.  The focus according to Stein has been on ‘managing’ the problem rather than seeking the best outcome for all concerned.  When core groups work in a way that excludes a survivor, they can become a gross attack on his/her privacy and well-being and will tend to obstruct justice.

To mention one recent example, the core group set up by the Church to examine the case of Martyn Percy at Christ Church Oxford seems to have been ‘weaponised’ against him.  It is unclear who authorised this process, but it has led to a situation where allegations against Martyn are discussed in a forum where he is not represented.  Private Eye has examined this case in detail.  Because of all the publicity over this case, we are likely to see the eventual discrediting of core groups as currently constituted as a suitable response to safeguarding allegations. 

Stein’s article makes some very important points about the needs of survivors which the CDM process does not address.  Survivors of abuse, she claims, do not usually have money at the top of the list of their needs.  However, her comments on psychological, spiritual, legal and financial support for survivors need to be taken to heart. 

Negotiating settlements with insurance companies and their lawyers is also experienced as damaging and re-traumatising.  There is also the issue of legal fees for survivors.  Legal fees and internal costs to the insurers can end up more than double the amount ultimately received as a settlement, which by any objective standard would be considered incommensurate with the costs borne by the survivor related to the abuse.  Stein refers to a quote from an essay by Andrew Graystone published in Letters to a Broken Church.   Graystone’s question for church leaders in their approach towards survivors is this: ‘not .. how little can I pay them, but how much can I love them.’

The other major issue that Stein brings to our attention is the ‘one size fits all’ approach to clergy under accusation by the CDM.  Clearly there are different levels of misbehaviour.  Once again, having an independent assessor trained in a relevant discipline can uncover such things as immaturity or a personality profile that includes habitual dishonesty that may lie at the heart of a case of misbehaviour.  Such assessment may sometimes be able to ‘rescue’ an offending individual from being lost to the profession permanently if some sort of rehabilitation is appropriate.  In some cases, something similar to Circles of Accountability and Support may be the right way forward. 

In her final comments, Stein expresses her sense of urgency that the conflict laden/legalistic approach to clergy discipline must be superseded.  We may hope with her that the Church of England through the action of the House of Bishops will discover a much broader range of responses both to perpetrators and victims of abuse.  Failures in this important area not only make the Church an unsafe place, but they undermine the Church’s standing with the wider community.  That collapse of trust is a serious matter.      

by Janet Fife

‘You’re in a man’s world now. You’ll have to fit in.’ So said one of my colleagues soon after I was ordained deacon in 1987. That put a damper on my newly ordained enthusiasm. I’d thought I was serving God, and found I was only working in a gentlemen’s club. Not a member but a menial. Some years later, in a different diocese, that feeling was reinforced when a senior cleric told me, ‘The real reason we don’t have women on the bishop’s senior staff is that, if we did, we couldn’t tell the same kind of jokes in our meetings.’

The Church of England is infested with men’s clubs, both literal and metaphorical. It has long been clear that they do not serve the interests of women, BAME people, and what used to be called the working classes – anyone, in fact, who is not a ‘gentleman’. More recently it’s become obvious how destructive they are to the interests of survivors of abuse.

The House of Bishops excluded women until recently, and still has too few to change the culture. Since its deliberations are secret, and neither agendas nor minutes are ever published, we know little about what goes on there. We do know, however, that very few bishops against whom safeguarding complaints are made face a penalty. The most notorious case is that of Matt Ineson, who reported his rape by a priest to an archdeacon (now a bishop), two bishops and the Archbishop of York. None acted on Matt’s disclosure; CDM complaints against them were ruled out of time. Bishops protect each other.

Forward in Faith and the Society, defending the seal of the confessional, oppose mandatory reporting of abuse. Experts have expressed concern that some abusers exploit confession to free them of guilt so they can abuse again.

At the other end of the churchmanship spectrum is ReNew, the conservative evangelical constituency.  ReNew is linked to Reform, AMIE, Church Society, and Titus Trust. Many ReNew leaders are products of the boys-only Iwerne (now Titus Trust) camps, as is the Archbishop of Canterbury. Titus Trust and ReNew leaders strongly resist sharing information about John Smyth, Jonathan Fletcher, and other alleged abusers associated with the Iwerne camps. Titus Trust, with income nearing £2 million p.a., fought claims for compensation from Smyth and Fletcher survivors. So far they have settled with only three of over 100 victims; sums paid to them are far exceeded by the sums paid to Titus’ expensive lawyers and PR firms.

Nobody’s Friends, the elite private dining club centred on Lambeth Palace, was largely unknown until it featured in evidence given to IICSA (the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse) last summer. Lord Lloyd of Berwick, a former Law Lord, wrote to Archbishop Carey on Peter Ball’s behalf in January 1993, saying, ‘”May I presume on a brief acquaintanceship at dinners of Nobody’s Friends?”’ Lord Lloyd continued to lobby Lambeth Palace on Ball’s behalf well into 1994. Nobody’s, which first met in 1800, consists of half clergy and half laypeople:  Tory grandees, judges, public school headmasters, and the like. Historically all male (women were first admitted in 2004), Nobody’s has been a place for men to exercise influence and angle for preferment. It currently has over 150 members. In Lord Lloyd’s evidence we saw how such a club may serve the interests of abusers over those of their victims.

Freemasonry is one of the oldest and largest male clubs, and like the others has a reputation for secrecy. The extent of its influence within the Church of England is hard to discover, but undoubtedly exists. In 1984 a retired Sussex priest told me of his membership in a Chichester vicars’ Lodge; this was while Eric Kemp was diocesan bishop and Peter Ball bishop of Lewes. Years later the social responsibility adviser of another diocese expressed his concern that all three archdeacons, the heads of every major diocesan committee, and the diocesan secretary’s husband were Masons and that diocesan financial decisions reflected Masonic priorities.

 What all these men’s societies have in common is that they have close links with the Establishment and exercise influence within the Church in secretive ways. They operate on behalf of vested interests and for the benefit of their own members, and hate transparency. Stephen Parsons and Gilo, writing on the blog SurvivingChurch, are doing much to expose the ways in which these and other groups exercise patronage and work against the interests of survivors of abuse.  

The Shemmings Report into abuse in Chichester Diocese has a valuable section on networks and how they function. It notes:

“at different times, sexual offenders were operating in the organisation which, due to the particular type of inter-connectedness of the ‘network’ just described, means that they were influencing others in the network, sometimes deliberately but often unknowingly.”

This applies also to those who fail to take action against offenders. When an archbishop gives inaccurate information about Iwerne abusers, is that an honest mistake or is he motivated by loyalty to his ‘club’? When a bishop who frequents Masonic functions does not act on a priest’s confession of abuse, we wonder whether the Masonic connection has any relevance. But whatever the influences at play here, we know it is not the interests of the victims or children which rank first with these prelates.

Safeguarding cannot be effective in a Church where the interests and loyalties of clubs and networks predominate over values of justice and truth. The shepherds cannot protect the sheep while occupied by feasting.

And so I pray, in the words of the anonymous canticle ‘As one who travels in the heat’:

…you have blessed me with emptiness, O God;

You have spared me to remain unsatisfied.

And now I yearn for justice;

Like an infant that cries for the breast,

And cannot be pacified,

I hunger and thirst for oppression to be removed,

And to see the right prevail.

Amen.

I have had in mind to write an idiot’s guide to the byzantine complexities of the Church of England’s safeguarding institutions. I recently received this anonymous letter from the future explaining with great clarity the way that the Church in 2025 proposes to deal with bishops and clergy who go astray in some way. The consequence of entering into the processes of church discipline will have the result of driving everyone involved into a state of complete bewilderment and despair. We can hope that decisions made in 2020 will prevent this Kafkaesque future coming to pass. We still have five years to get things right! Surviving Church identifies with the sentiments of this letter but it was written by a contributor, not the Editor.

The National Safeguarding Team

Lambeth Palace, London SE1 7JU

April 1^st 2025

Dear Bishop,

As you will be aware, the role of the National Safeguarding Team (NST) has broadened over the last year, following amendments made to the Clergy Discipline Measure of 2003. Our remit now covers all areas of safeguarding, including any sensitive spheres relating to the conduct of clergy, if it is alleged that they might pose a risk to the health, safety, security and wellbeing of any member of the public who might feel endangered.

We are writing to let you know that we have received a number of complaints about your driving from one of your neighbours, and who also represents your Neighbourhood Watch.  You have been seen driving erratically on several separate occasions.  A couple of times on your own, early in the morning. Twice at night, late, returning home.  And on at least two occasions, driving near children who were on their way to school.  Your neighbour has strong reasons to believe that you are driving whilst under the influence of alcohol, and that you might pose a danger to the public, and may inadvertently cause injury to someone.  Or worse, be responsible for a fatality.

Obviously you will understand that the Church of England cannot afford to be seen condoning senior clerics who might be intoxicated whilst driving.  We are all aware of what a serious public concern drink-driving constitutes.  We have therefore convened a Core Group to investigate this matter. We have taken seriously the representations of your neighbours. We have also looked into your drinking habits (e.g., dinners, events, receptions, etc.). We have also checked with the police and the relevant local traffic monitoring bodies to see if you had been caught speeding recently, or driving dangerously.  No offences have been reported to the police, to date. Your Neighbourhood Watch has not reported you to the police either, pending the outcome of our enquiries.

However, on the basis of your neighbour’s reported concerns, you will understand we are obliged to investigate such matters.  We therefore ask you to refrain from driving anywhere for the moment – either by yourself, or in carrying any passengers, especially children.  If you need to get anywhere by car, someone else must drive.  You cannot be in a car on your own, and must always be accompanied in a vehicle.  For the time being, you should not attend any event at which alcohol might be served, or to place yourself in any situation in which alcohol might be offered to you.  We also ask you to surrender your driving licence for the time being, until our investigations are completed.  Please do not attempt to contact any of your neighbours, your Neighbourhood Watch group, or anyone who has been a previous neighbour of yours.  Should any of them contact you, please refer them directly to us. 

The person to manage the investigation has already been appointed, and begun their work.  We hope that this process can be completed as soon as possible.  We have allocated you a support person to help with any pastoral needs you may have during this time.  You may also nominate an advocate on the Core Group for when it next convenes, but there is no date for that yet.  Unfortunately, we were unable to find an advocate when we originally met and set our terms of reference for the process.  Sometimes when convening a Core Group, the person under investigation would not initially be offered an advocate, or even told they might need one (because they may not) until the nature of the accusations are clarified.  This protects complainants, NST and the confidentiality of the process.  Our investigation strives to be fair and balanced, so you can be reassured that you will not be placed at any disadvantage by this. You may nominate a suitable friend or a colleague for the Core Group; but not a lawyer, as that is against our Guidelines.

Under the terms of reference for the investigation, we will begin to interview your neighbours, people you drink with when at formal and informal events connected with your duties and role, and also socially.  We will interview people you have driven, or have seen you drive.  We will want to pull together a balanced picture of how your drinking and driving might be connected.  In this, please be assured, there is no suggestion that you have a specific problem with alcohol, or are an alcoholic.  We will obviously consult with the police and the highways authorities to check on driving movements after you have attended official and social events that have involved the serving of alcohol.  We may need to have access to your medical records.

We cannot release the minutes, findings and conclusions of the first Core Group meeting.  They are confidential to the Core Group, whose membership we cannot disclose.  However, we believe that the concerns of your neighbours have met the threshold for implementing our investigation.  You are therefore asked to agree to this joint media statement:

“A complaint against the Bishop has been raised by individuals and an organisation in respect of allegations of drink-driving.  The matter will need to be formally investigated by the NST, and until the investigation is complete, the Bishop will not be driving, or attending any event or gathering at which alcohol may be served.  The Bishop has agreed to cooperate fully with the NST and its enquiries, and no further media statement will be made by either party until the investigation is completed”.

At the conclusion of this investigation there are a range of possible outcomes. In some cases, the findings can lead to you losing your licence and being banned from driving for life, or for a shorter period of five years. You could be asked to re-take your driving test, or attend some mandatory driving course, after which you will be further risk-assessed.  There might be penalties and/or restrictions attached to your driving licence, which, subject to continued compliance with the conclusions of the NST investigation, might be removed at a later date, yet to be determined. If alcohol abuse does emerge as an issue, we may require you to undertake counselling or some remedial medical treatment to address the cause and effect of excessive alcohol consumption.

Failure to comply with the NST’s investigation and the normative conditions attached to it, and as spelt out in this letter, will result in an automatic CDM being issued.  If the investigation discloses offences and misconduct that are serious, a CDM process will also be implemented.  In some cases, offences can lead to a prison sentence (which triggers an automatic CDM), though in this instance, your neighbour did not indicate that you had committed any criminal act.  However, I you will be relieved to learn that the investigation, just to be sure, will also cover this ground.

If you have any questions, we will try to deal with these as best we can. But please note, we do not enter into correspondence or negotiation with any individual who is under investigation, once the Core Group has met, and the terms of reference have been set. These, as you know, were agreed last week, and that is why we are writing to you, in order to inform you of these. 

The Lead Investigator will be in touch soon. As this is a confidential matter, we do not permit you to discuss this with any other person, and you may only refer to the agreed statement between us in the event of any media or any other enquiries.  Please be assured that your voluntary withdrawal from driving, social events at which alcohol is served, and other gatherings, is an entirely neutral act, and implies no guilt on your part.

Yours sincerely, The NST.

Appendix

We are aware that some people receiving a letter from the NST without any warning may initially find the contents disturbing.  Your allocated pastoral support person has been provided to help with any concerns you may have.  We have also produced this brief list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), and we anticipate that the answers to these FAQs will help to allay any misgivings you might have about the process you have now begun.

• Who will pay my legal fees? 

This is not a legal process, so there should be no legal expenditure that you need to meet. We cannot be held responsible for any legal fees you may decide to incur.

• Should I get some legal representation, just in case I need support?

There is no need, as the NST, Core Groups and Investigators do not usually consult with lawyers during an investigative process and when making determinations.

• Am I on some kind of a Trial?

No.  The NST, Core Group and our Lead Investigators do not have a role in establishing your guilt or innocence. Our role is to find out what has happened, and what or who may be at fault.  Once the investigation is concluded, it may be that the recommended decision of the Core Group is loss of licence to minister, suspension, barring from ministry, or completely cleared.  But this is not a trial, which is why you do not need legal support.

• What if the Investigation was or is being mishandled? 

It won’t be. You should refer any concerns you may have to the NST. However, the NST cannot engage with individuals under investigation until a Core Group process is complete.

• What if I disagree with the decision or verdict you reach?

Our investigations are thorough, and we strive to be balanced and fair.

• Is there an Independent Chair I can appeal to?

The Independent Chair is only able to look at the processes, guidelines and their general implementation, and cannot comment or adjudicate on any individual cases. You can refer any of your concerns to the NST.

• Is there a right of appeal to any decision?

You can refer any concerns you have back to the NST, or refer the matter on to your Bishop or Archdeacon, unless they were involved in the original claim against you.  If they were, then you may want to consider alternative avenues.  We have provided you with an allocated pastoral support-person as a resource, who might be able to advise further.

The current row over the rights and wrongs of Dominic Cumming’s trip to Durham may seem a long way from the concerns of this blog.  Indeed, it is, and I do not propose to spend time here analysing the ethical issues involved.  I happen to agree with those who feel that Cummings and Johnson have destroyed their right to impose their moral authority over the citizens of this country.  Few will want to take Johnson’s leadership seriously ever again.  What now interests me now is the way that many Anglican bishops and clergy have come out to protest openly over the lawlessness of our Prime Minister’s closest adviser.  When bishops seem to agree on an ethical principle in society, it is right for us to stop and take note as to what might really be going on.  Gilo has written a passionate twitter post on the topic, but he questions the bishops’ moral stance when it is viewed in the context of the Church’s dealing with survivors. The bishops are, in Gilo’s mind, guilty of gross hypocrisy.  I give a link to his post.  https://twitter.com/seaofcomplicity/status/1264916304244375553/photo/1     To put the question another way, are the bishops engaged in some kind of displacement activity?  Are they jumping on a bandwagon of moral outrage when there are issues within their own backyard that should be faced and owned up to?

I have argued for a long while that the bishops of the Church of England exercise oversight over an institution, at times severely compromised.  Our Church seems to operate on two levels, and it needs leadership for both these aspects.   The first is the theological or ideal aspect.  This attempts to embody and articulate the spirit and the ethos of its founder.  Thus, the Church would be expected to enrich us all by being a place of reconciliation, healing, forgiveness and joy.  The other aspect of the Church is the physical reality of its institutional embodiment.  This involves buildings, money and power.  It is extremely hard for this second dimension of the Church’s existence to remain anywhere approaching moral perfection.   Whenever power and money come into any situation, there will almost inevitably be conflict of some kind.  In the Church’s institutional life, as we constantly remind our readers, power games are often played, selfishness is common, and people are often exploited and treated badly.  You expect such behaviour in institutions in general, but somehow you always hope that the Church will operate according to a different set of rules and values.  Sadly this does not seem to be the case.

A newly ordained clergyman entering the Church to serve it, might hang on to an idealised picture of its life for many years.  Even though, as time goes by, examples of greed, narcissistic power games and hypocrisy enter his/her awareness, the hope clings on. Bad behaviour is believed to be in no way typical.  We can, thankfully, always find exceptions to patterns of selfish behaviour and self-serving among the Church’s leaders.  We need such examples to retain our faith in human nature and in the integrity of the Christian belief system.  But perhaps we also have the uncomfortable feeling that were we to know more, the total picture would be far more depressing than we know. 

A bishop who takes on the oversight of a whole diocese is the one person in the Church in the area who has access to knowledge about many of the things that may be wrong inside the structure.  That knowledge is a heavy burden.  Every example of incompetence, laziness or immoral behaviour among the clergy will be causing harm to the people of God.  How does the bishop deal with this information?  Episcopal power is not exercised in the way that the world understands.  Clergy cannot be hired and fired on a whim.  A bishop has often to sit by and let things take their course until death or retirement intervenes.  The Church has chosen to be an institution which protects its employees, but this comes at a cost that is high.  The one who knows how much this costs the church in terms of harm and lost opportunities for mission in a diocese is the one who bear this burden inside his/her head at all times.  If there is any sensitivity, possessing this knowledge will cause pain.  The role in protecting the institution, its reputation and good name means that all this knowledge remains the bishop’s alone.

  The bishop is also the figure that is nominally responsible for all those who live and work in the diocese.  He/she is also responsible or those who have lived and maybe suffered under a previous generation of clergy or leaders.  The bishop will often alone have access to the filing cabinets that contain that past.  Will he/she metaphorically dare to look inside these cabinets, or will there be a preference to leave them firmly shut in the hope that the secrets contain there will not emerge to further disturb his/her equilibrium?  The various examples of survivors finding bishops with ‘amnesia’ or less than sympathetic to their appeals for justice and support may perhaps be partly explained by this fact.  Some bishops have already had their sympathy and compassion shut down by what they already know.  Perhaps they are in some cases victims of what might be known as a form of compassion or justice fatigue?  Compassion fatigue may be another way of describing the way that sensitivity and a working for justice have been crushed out of an individual by too much exposure to the realities of human failure.  Learning about abuse takes its toll, even for someone on the edge of things like myself.  I am sure I could not manage to process as much information as bishops may have in their purview.  As T.S Elliot said: ‘Mankind cannot bear much reality’.

To return to the Cummings affair.  I am suggesting that the enthusiasm by the bishops to take a moral stance on this matter may perhaps be explained by the fact that most of the time the moral issues they face are fuzzy around the edges.   Here is a clear issue on which to take a stand and reclaim some kind of moral leadership.  The role of bishops in the church and society has been blunted in the fact that their own institution has been compromised, as Gilo points out, by failures over safeguarding in the past.  In some cases, their personal histories may have involved them in past, morally dubious, episodes in the church.  The scandals of Ball, Smyth and Fletcher to name but three, involved many other parties, including some currently serving bishops and clergy.  Some were guilty through silence, others by collusion in evil activities, and for every clergyman sent to prison, there must have been many who knew something but did nothing.   The IICSA hearings helped us to see a little what was going on behind the curtain in Lambeth Palace and in various Bishop’s palaces.  The preoccupation of those in authority in the Church seems always to have been to protect the institution and its employees, even if ordinary survivors were left out in the cold.   In contrast to Gilo, I am going to suggest that there needs perhaps to be a greater, more compassionate, understanding for the position many of the bishops find themselves in.  Their response to survivors has been poor to the point of being cruelly negligent.  Perhaps, were they able to speak to us as human beings, rather than as our spiritual superiors, we might glimpse a suffering and pain as well as a genuine concern for the needs of others.  Hitherto that has been hidden beneath the need to preserve the institutional shell.   

Readers of this blog cannot fail to have noticed the controversy which has centred around the name Iwerne and latterly, the Titus Trust.  Iwerne is the name of a village in Dorset.  Here, for many years, a school complex, empty during the summer holidays, provided accommodation for summer camps for boys under the leadership of E.J. H. Nash (known as Bash).  In later years, these camps have proliferated and now take place at a variety of centres across the country.   Some of these camps still focus on male pupils from privileged private schools while others are more open and include young people from day schools.  To attend one of the camps in the past, one had to go to one of only about 15 of the most elite boarding schools in England.  Amid the changes that have been overseen by Iwerne/Titus trustees, one thing seems not to have changed.  That is the continuation of a narrow form of Christian teaching, of the kind taught by Bash in the 1930s and continued by his successors.  It is difficult to describe Bash’s theology and the theology of Iwerne in a few words.  It combines conservative Biblical ideas with notions of male elitism.  It could also be said to be anti-intellectual.  Bash himself was said to have based all his teaching on a single 19^th century book by R.A. Torrey, What the Bible Teaches.  This book attempted to place every item of classic Protestant teaching into a series of Bible texts.  Thus, the Iwerne approach never ventured beyond the text of the Bible, even while it was emphasising a version of Christian doctrine that would have been understood better in the 16^th century than in the world of the New Testament.

Ideas have consequences.  Conservative protestant theology has always held many of its followers in a straitjacket of discipline, sometimes even of fear. Notions of hell, handed down to the Protestant reformers from the Catholic middle ages, still had the power to grip the imagination.   Contemplation of Christ’s suffering on the cross also has the power to arouse, in his followers, strong emotions of pity and devotion.  But any emphasis on suffering can, in extreme cases, have malign results.  The Christian adherent might come to believe that deliberately seeking to share the suffering of Christ was part of his vocation.  John Smyth, for a decade the chair of the Iwerne Trust and present at many camps, seems to have followed a reading of Scripture which believed it was spiritually beneficial to suffer and inflict pain.  Christ suffered for our salvation, so it is right that we seek to share his pain and encourage others to do so.  The exact reasoning that Smyth followed, and the way that it fitted into his disordered psychological profile, will never now be known to us.  We may, however, suggest that the closed incestuous world of Iwerne theology made it possible for such distortions of teaching to emerge.  The other con-evo organisations that currently intersect with Iwerne/Titus are also not open to a wider theological vision that could challenge such ideas.  The notion of being ‘sound’, when uttered in this context, seems to be extraordinarily narrow for those of us who look in from the outside.  The theological horizons of the 16^th century are extraordinarily suffocating to many of us reared in broader theological traditions.

In recent days the Titus Trust has put out a statement.  It is reorganising the work of the Trust.  The emphasis is now on organising the camps into regional structures.  But there is one major new change.  The Iwerne name, so long associated with these camps, is to disappear.  Why is this so significant?  It has recently come into the public domain that the Titus trustees, in their attempts to fight legal claims for the historic behaviour of John Smyth, have employed the service of Alder UK.  This, according to Julian Mann who writes for Anglicans Ink, is a very expensive PR firm.  This firm has, in all likelihood, been involved in suggesting that the word ‘Iwerne’ is now toxic.  It is toxic for its association with John Smyth, Jonathan Fletcher and others under police investigation for abuses against boys.  Andrew Graystone helpfully wrote about these wider enquiries in the Church of England newspaper and they are quoted in the recent article by Julian Mann in Anglican Ink. http://anglican.ink/2020/05/06/alleged-iwerne-abuser-now-under-police-investigation/    With at least two reports expected in the next twelve months looking at the careers of two individuals, closely associated with Iwerne, the time has clearly come to jump ship and cast away the Iwerne name.

The wise (probably very expensive) advice handed to the Titus Trustees is understandable.  But there is a problem in this strategy, as Andrew Graystone has pointed out in a statement to Premier Radio.  While it is possible to shed a name, the really important part of reform is to examine the culture of the past and the corrupt theologies that have and continue to have harmful effects on individuals.  When I think about Smyth, I do not just think about the pain he and others inflicted on so many to satisfy perverse appetites.  I think about the way that a theology was allowed to fester within a whole organisation, making it possible for the young men to believe that this treatment was somehow part of Christian discipleship.   Smyth and those like him could only have acted out their nefarious schemes within an organisation that had already, theologically speaking, ‘softened up’ victims to become vulnerable to them.  Iwerne/Titus is responsible for an overall theology that allowed such things to happen.  Whether it was an over-emphasis of the passages from Proverbs about a father disciplining his son or some morbid preoccupation with pain, the background and culture of Smyth’s activities needs to be better understood and then renounced.  It was incubated within Iwerne/Bash’s theology and will continue remain there as long as it is not firmly understood and repented of.  Changing a name will not remove the poison of the past, both in the harm it did and its continuing ideology.

It would be unrealistic to expect Keith Makin and his study of John Smyth to get to grips with the theology of the Winchester and Iwerne beatings.  The only people capable of doing this are members of that network themselves.  I may be cynical but somehow, I doubt that this will ever happen.  The conservative theological tradition within which Titus supporters operate, is not one that seems ever to engage in self-criticism or re-examination.  Whatever else is wrong with liberal theology, it cannot be accused of staleness since it recognises the need to revisit its presuppositions constantly in the light of a changing world.  Theology is always a work in progress for a theologian working in the liberal tradition.  When necessary, thought patterns from the past can be discarded.  With the conservative traditions we have associated with the ReNew constituency which intersects with Titus, there seems to be an atmosphere of permanent defensive thinking.  One of the comments on a previous blog indicated the way that conservative theology seems to be preoccupied in naming other group,s seeming to be in opposition, as enemies.  However much has been spent on the removal of ‘Iwerne’ from the description of the camps that follow in the Bash tradition, those of us who follow the work of Titus will still be reminding readers of the direct links, historically and theologically, to the appalling behaviour of several leaders, including a former chairman of the Trustees.  Titus has the power to break that link but it will need to do more than just order a mere change of name.

On December 27^th last year the Daily Telegraph published, on the front-page, information about the former Vicar of Emmanuel Wimbledon, Jonathan Fletcher and accusations made against him for abusive behaviour.  The previous June, the same newspaper had published a story on the topic, revealing that Fletcher had had his Permission to Officiate withdrawn by the Diocese of Southwark at the beginning of 2017.  There were few details in the June 2019 report about the nature of the offences leading to this ban, so we were left wondering exactly why this action had been taken against a clergyman of such standing and possessing considerable influence within the world of conservative evangelical Anglicanism.  There was obviously a story to be told but the details were not being given at that point.  The December Telegraph account by Gabriella Swerling introduced new material, since she had interviewed five victims of Fletcher’s abusive behaviour.  Without going into the details, she was told of massages, cold baths and other behaviours which, while not technically criminal, were questionable as being part of any recognisable pattern of pastoral care.  Reading through the Telegraph account once again, there is a clear pattern of young impressionable men who were in awe of Fletcher’s power as a guru, father-figure and man of God.  They were thus ripe for abuse at his hands.  Whether it is to be described as sexual abuse or spiritual abuse is probably not important.  Clearly those interviewed had been severely traumatised at the hands of Jonathan Fletcher.

The original Telegraph story of June 2019 had resulted in various responses from a variety of sources.   The ReNew constituency leaders published a statement of regret through an organisation known as the Evangelical Ministry Assembly and some of the speeches relating to the event were broadcast on Youtube.  https://vimeo.com/344888648 I found myself commenting on three occasions as an outside observer.  I was puzzled by various aspects of the case, including the way that the entire Internet had been swept clean of all references to Fletcher.  His online sermons had disappeared and even documents that had contained references to him were ‘edited’ so that his name no longer appeared.  That work must have taken a lot of effort.  For individuals studying the story like me, it just provoked a greater interest in what information there was to be had.  Although the information I presented on this blog contained nothing from the inside, I could not help but notice that the articles I had written were being consulted for months afterwards.  Most blog pieces I write have a circulation lasting at most a week, but interest in Fletcher has been extensive and literally thousands of people have consulted these particular posts. http://survivingchurch.org/2019/06/27/joining-up-the-dots-the-jonathan-fletcher-story/  https://survivingchurch.org/2019/07/01/further-reflections-on-the-jonathan-fletcher-story/

The second aspect of the story that demands comment is the way that, apart from the five anonymous individuals interviewed by the Telegraph, there has been little evidence of new people coming forward to say what they know.   That may have changed in the past few months as there is an enquiry being conducted by Thirty One Eight, the independent safeguarding charity.  They have been commissioned to make this enquiry by Emmanuel Church, Fletcher’s former congregation in Wimbledon.  They were to have delivered the report by this month, but the virus, and larger than expected amounts of information being gathered, have created a delay.  We have absolutely no reason to suppose that they will not accomplish a thorough job and we hope they can help heal some of Fletcher’s victims who have suffered so grievously over the past thirty to forty years.

As my readers who have read earlier blogs will know, the Fletcher affair is deeply intertwined with the Iwerne/Titus story.  Fletcher’s own brother David was the leader/organiser of these camps for many years and for decades also Jonathan was a regular feature there as a speaker.  On one occasion at least he shared a platform with John Smyth.   All this information is available freely on the net and I do not propose to spend any more time recounting it.  What is of importance is what is happening in the present and this may help us to understand new twists and complications in the way the Fletcher saga is to play out over the next year or so.

The first thing I have to report is that there has been an interesting change of personnel among the safeguarding professionals who are involved in the process.  Sarah Hall, who can be viewed on the YouTube video I mentioned above, was the local Emmanuel safeguarding officer for the parish in June 2019.   She now no longer fulfils that role.  She had combined a full-time post as women’s worker with the parish safeguarding officer.  From the video it would appear that Sarah was the front person for local safeguarding concerns at the church.  She is also given as the contact person for the website set up to help Emmanuel survivors, Walking On.  The two people mentioned now as having safeguarding responsibilities are Gilly Briant and John Adams.  I cannot work out when the changeover took place but it is worth noting that John Adams is a member of the ordained staff and thus would not obviously fulfil the independent role normally expected of safeguarding officers.  The second change of role is in the Diocese of Southwark safeguarding team.  Kate Singleton, the Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser, gave up the task around a month ago.  No replacement has yet been appointed.

Changes in personnel do not normally matter but with a case as sensitive as the Fletcher affair, one would want to see continuity being preserved both in the Diocese and in the parish.  When new appointments are made, much background knowledge can often be lost.  In the case of Fletcher, there is an enormous amount of background information to be mastered.  It will be all too easy to blame lost files, the coronavirus and miscommunication for massive errors in the way information is in future gathered and processed.  I add this change of personnel to another piece of information which is also somewhat ominous.  I have been told on good authority that, at the national level of safeguarding, in the offices at Church House, there is no file kept or indeed any interest in the Fletcher case.  Given the enormous exposure of the affair on the front page of a national newspaper, this is a strange position to take.  It was apparently said that the affair should be dealt with purely at the diocesan level.  The changes of staff at local diocesan and parish level together with the indifference of the National Safeguarding Team are, when taken together, evidence of a worrying indifference to the whole case by the central church authorities.  There is clearly no appetite by anyone at the centre to see stones turned over and the past opened up to scrutiny.

What we have left is the independent enquiry by 31-8 which we may see published this autumn.   Let us hope and pray for the sake of victims that this enquiry will be allowed to do its work without interference or impediment of any kind.  From past experience, we have seen other enquiries interfered with or suppressed in some way, when the truths revealed are of embarrassment to the centre.  From the little we already know the truth about Jonathan’s Fletcher’s stewardship of Emmanuel is ugly.  The Church of England as a whole and its inner integrity will not be served if that truth is in any way hidden and lost in ‘the land where all things are forgotten’.

by Gilo

One of the manifestations of power in the Church is what Surviving Church has referred to as ‘social power’.  For some time, Gilo been making a study of this complex world of social elites in British society and the way that they relate to institutions in Britain like the Church of England.  The account that Gilo presents to us here is a detailed glimpse of some of the workings of the Establishment.  It may help us to understand a little better the dynamics of the influences at work which were able to protect Establishment members, like Peter Ball, for so long. Ed.

(Gilo has provided me with the detailed references to back up every statement in this piece.)

The latest addition to the board of Ecclesiastical Insurance as Independent Non-Executive Director is Sir Stephen Lamport. He joins The Very Revd Christine Wilson who  (somewhat questionably) remained a director during the year in which she stood down as Dean of Lincoln owing to a safeguarding complaint brought by Melissa Caslake, the Church’s safeguarding director. Ecclesiastical is the Church of England’s insurer and has come under increasing spotlight for its unethical strategies in relation to the treatment of survivors.

It would seem possible that Lamport has been brought in to redeem the sticky reputation Ecclesiastical has acquired. A reputation courageously and fearlessly referenced by a senior church figure at February’s Synod when she said, “Surely we have the capacity to question our insurers about their practices and indeed our lawyers. It occurred to me that actually we can change insurers if we don’t think their methods are ethical. I change my electricity supplier. I am hoping that when I go back to my diocese some of my colleagues, and I’m sure they will, will be asking me some very difficult questions in diocesan synod.”

Lamport might be the right man for corporate reputational salvage. As former Receiver General of Westminster Abbey and one of the founders of the Westminster Abbey Institute, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for Ethics in Public Policy and Corporate Governance he has a highly developed understanding of issues of ethical behaviour. The Westminster Abbey Institute was founded in 2013 to work “with the public service institutions around Parliament Square to revitalise moral and spiritual values in public life.” Its prestigious Council includes such establishment luminaries as Baroness Butler-Sloss ….. who told an abuse survivor that she did not want to include Bishop Peter Ball in a report in Chichester diocese because she “cared for the Church” and “the press would love a bishop”. The Council also includes Mr William Nye (current Secretary General of Synod), Lord Saatchi and many other eminent figures. Lamport spoke at the Institute in March 2018 on the theme of Truth Sustained “The importance of truth cannot be underestimated. It is at the heart of those things which sustain a civilised society: trustworthiness, dependability, wise decision making and solid relationships.”

Lamport also brings serious credentials as a senior advisor in Sanctuary Counsel, which describes itself as a “boutique advisory firm, providing strategic communications and reputation advice..” I associate ‘boutique’ as an ascription with small expensive hotels. This is a reputation firm which breathes ‘establishment’ and if you’ve never heard of it then you probably couldn’t afford its services nor walk in the circles that needs them. It is so impossibly discreet and ‘boutique’ that its website has a mere two pages which both feel leather-lined.

Sanctuary’s offices by the entrance to Dean’s Yard and Church House are convenient for when Lamport needs to renew his membership of Nobody’s Friends. The Treasurer of Nobody’s is based a few doors down in The Faculty Office of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Nobody’s Friends is a shadowy and elite dining club that meets in Lambeth Palace. A “crust” club filled with bishops, senior lawyers, Tory grandees, and public school headmasters. I’ve previously written about it on this blog, and about the links of three of its past members to Westminster cover-ups of Kincora abuse in Belfast. Lamport is to be commended for being one of very few members who openly lists Nobody’s Friends in his Who’s Who listing. Most prefer to keep it hidden.

Lamport brings to Ecclesiastical Insurance further establishment ties – impressive enough to add serious cachet to any board of directors. Previously a Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales, Lamport reportedly still oversees the group of grandees called Operation Golden Orb. This group is responsible for planning Charles’ coronation, and has worked with Lambeth Palace over a long time on such deliberations as the one-throne-or-two conundrum (Queen Camilla, or Camilla the Princess Consort with no throne of her own).

Whilst working for the prince, Lamport was involved in the management of a case of a valet who made a claim of rape by a more senior household servant. According to the Peat report, Lamport wrote to Ms Shackleton (the prince’s divorce lawyer who was also involved in handling the matter) asking if an agreement could be reached with the man in order to “avoid an investigation”. The agreement included payment of £38,000. Ms Shackleton was so disquieted by her experience that she later told Lady Sarah McCorquodale, Princess Diana’s sister: “I was asked to make it go away. It was one of the lowest points in my professional career.” The valet had gone to the police over his rape allegations, but decided not to continue with the complaint after the settlement with the Royal Household. When he died tragically young, his constituency MP Paul Flynn said publicly, “He was very badly treated and they got some of their best public relations people to bad mouth him at the time. They really turned the heat on him. I thought it was pretty disgraceful and he disappeared from the scene because of it. It’s a sad life and a tragic case.” A reading of the Sir Michael Peat report, online in full, into the handling of the matter shows that Lamport was keen to close the thing down with no investigation on the premise that he did not believe the allegation. Protection of the Royal Household and the prince was perhaps more important than proper investigation into a possible crime.

So it is disconcerting that Lamport now advises the board of Ecclesiastical Insurance which deals with survivors cases. It’s also troubling that he’s also a trustee on the board of AllChurches Trust, the charity which owns the insurer. We’ve seen this dual membership before with Sir Philip Mawer, a former Chair of AllChurches who was also a senior independent director of Ecclesiastical while he was a former Secretary General of Synod. It was soon after Mawer’s tenure of power in the Church, and while he was a director of Ecclesiastical, that the insurer started having a ringside seat at the Church’s central safeguarding committee! That sentence merits its exclamation mark. This fact emerged in his first statement at IICSA by Michael Angell, an executive from Ecclesiastical. It seems extraordinary that the insurer was able to observe the church’s safeguarding discussions from mid 1990s through to 2015. Especially when one considers the culture of secrecy, denial and safeguarding failure during this period. The strategic and operational advantage afforded the insurer through observation at close quarters of the Church’s response cannot be underestimated. We can only guess the subtle influences the insurer was able to exert during those decades. And the influences travelling in the other direction. Incidentally, Sir Philip is believed to be still the President of Nobody’s Friends – a position he held in 2015. It’s not who you know – but who you dine with that matters!

One might hope that the Church of England will recognise and address this set of incestuous links. Links already to some extent highlighted in Letters to a Broken Church which has been bought for their dioceses by a number of bishops. 50 copies were also bought by Archbishop’s Council for Synod members. The final IICSA report on the Anglican hearings comes out in August and is likely to be critical of Ecclesiastical’s performance at the Inquiry where it was publicly lambasted. Some of us are aware of further things emerging about Ecclesiastical tactics and its relationship to the Church which are likely to bring further acute embarrassment to their client, the Church. The insurer does not yet seem to have learnt that the only real thing of value they have is their reputation. With all that has so far been brought into daylight – they seem to imagine it can still be business as usual.

Presumably both church and insurer hope Lamport will ride to the rescue. Perhaps he’s being lined up to replace William Nye as next Secretary General of Synod and Secretary of Archbishop’s Council? They tend to like maintaining close links with the insurer. He seems a fit. Or perhaps it’s time they ended these nested ties? And recognise that it’s no longer acceptable to operate a nexus that looks so incestuous in its intertwining as to be in the words of one cleric “a form of quiet English corruption”.

If you ever see a group of nine-year-old children, especially boys, arguing with one another, you can take a good guess at what the argument is about.  The argument will probably be linked to their inbuilt competitiveness.  Each child will be laying a claim to some achievement or having the best of something.  He has the best trainers/mobile phone/ family car or is the tallest/strongest/best at football in the group.  One child in the group may, however, recognise that he has nothing in his life that would count as being the biggest or best, so that when these arguments take place, he holds back.  But then one day he comes into the group with his eyes shining.  For a moment he is the centre of attention.  What has he acquired that makes him suddenly important?  He has obtained a piece of secret information.  It may be a bit of gossip about a teacher or news that a holiday is going to be announced.   For the short moment, while the boy has the secret which no one else possesses, he has the illusion of power.  I want in this post to think further about the power of some information.  Secret information can be a means of either liberation or alternatively the cause of toxic domination over others.   The plot in Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest centred around a single piece of information becoming known.  The information itself had power to release happiness into the present.  It would not be an exaggeration to think of the hidden information about the abandoned baby as being a kind of extra character in the plot, waiting to reveal itself at the right moment.

Information can be said, on occasion, to possess real power and the bearer of that information can also be seen to exercise this power.  We have of course observed on this blog numerous other ways of exercising power, and many of them have been described.  Today I want to focus on thinking about this way that information, especially when it is secret or restricted, can be a powerful tool of domination, whether in an individual relationship or within an institution.  Secrecy is just one more way that human beings can learn to use and control others.  While the exercise of legitimate power methods is a necessary part of institutional life, we need, however, to be aware of how any manifestation of power, including secrecy, can become a tool of evil when in the wrong hands.

The power that can accrue to someone having secret information is potentially a power that can cause widespread harm.  Secrets often remain hidden for long periods of time but that does not prevent them sometimes wreaking havoc in people’s lives, even while they are still hidden.  In my own thinking about secrets in the church, I have come to see that there are two particular ways in which secrets cause damage to individual people.  Let us examine each in turn.

The first example of a secret is the knowledge of a hidden shameful event from the past.  This knowledge may exist only inside someone’s memory or perhaps is known by another party and is used in some way to control the person involved.  The shame experienced may or may not be linked to something that has been done but the victim of the shame still wants the event to be hidden.  It may be a family scandal or an experience of abuse.  The sufferer dreads it being brought into the open.  This control may not rise to the level of actual blackmail but there will be the ever-present thought that this detrimental information might be revealed at any time.  That can be a constant blight to a person’s life. 

The second kind of secret also concerns a past deed known to a third party.  Here the interest is not in harming the person in any way.  Rather the opposite.  The one with knowledge wants to protect the one who carries guilt from their past activity.  Now the effort is to make sure that the event remains hidden so that also it cannot harm the organisation to which the perpetrator and his co-conspirator both belong.  Secrets are being kept in order to preserve reputations.  No consideration is given either to the demands of morality or keeping people safe.  The preservation of the secret has then the unfortunate consequence that the evil can fester and spread.  Evil flourishes not only because good men do nothing, but these men actually encourage the evil by tacitly tolerating it and refusing to act against it.

The power of the secret, as we can call it, is not only an action which can be the cause of evil among individuals.  It can also permeate the entire culture of an organisation.   We know that there is such a thing as confidentiality in the medical world and most people do not want every fact about their lives spread far and wide.  But some organisations take the principle of confidentiality and use to become a tool of coercive power.   When an organisation chooses to supress information by weeding the files of past embarrassing behaviour by its servants, that is a kind of information holocaust.  Of all the images that came out of the first stage of the IICSA hearing, it was the one describing a former dean returning after his retirement to burn files in the Deanery garden, that was most vivid and telling.  The Chichester cathedral close had been rife with scandal and safeguarding failures.  The power of the secret as a permeating evil spirit could be said to have been haunting the entire cathedral complex. 

Secrecy as a form of power still stalks the institutions and bodies of the Church of England.  The story of safeguarding is a story of cover-ups, information suppression and an apparent unwillingness by many in authority to show metanoia about all the secrets that have been kept by those in authority in the church.  Just to mention the names of Fletcher, Smyth and Ball conjures up images of filing cabinets with hidden secrets and files stuffed with information that should have been handed over decades ago.  In one comment to a recent SC blog, it was mentioned that one Giles Rawlinson had kept out of sight in his attic numerous files connected to the Smyth case.  At least the police eventually obtained sight of them, unlike the files that were burnt in the Chichester deanery garden.  If there is one word to describe the misuse of power by the ReNew constituency, it is this continuing use of secrecy.  Unlike other forms of evil, secrecy does not involve action or deliberate choice.  It just requires that an institution sits back and does nothing, smug in the complacency of its power.  It is that smugness and passivity that is now being challenged and will continue to be challenged.  Apart from fending off the questions being asked by survivors, official Inquiries, the police and the general public, the church and the constituent bodies within it now have to negotiate the new threat, the pandemic and its aftermath.  If there is one good thing that may come out of the present crisis it is the thought that secrecy and suppressing of information may be less tolerated within our church life as it negotiates its place within the post-pandemic society.   Secrecy, as a tool of power, has played a toxic role in the Church of England for too long. It is time for its expulsion from the life of the institution.

A fantasy examination question for an A level student fifty years from now, might read as follows.  ‘Competent leadership on the part of generals and politicians was a crucial element in enabling the Allied nations to obtain victory over Fascism in WW2.  Conversely, poor political leadership helped to exacerbate the International Pandemic of the 2020s.  Discuss.’   I realise that I have been thinking a lot about the failures and successes of leadership over recent weeks.  We now have the commemorations of the Second World War to remind us how another world-wide crisis was dealt with by our political leaders in the past.   I realised that it might be helpful to set out more what I believe this mysterious quality of leadership to consist of.  I am sure that somewhere among the 600 blog posts there are to be found some other reflections on the topic, but a discussion on leadership at this moment in history is going to be different from anything that has been offered before. 

 As I begin my random thoughts on leadership, I am comforted by the fact that, although there is a vast literature on the topic, there is much disagreement among the experts as to precisely what leadership is.   This allows someone like me, possessing no specialist expertise, to reflect on the topic, basing my remarks purely on life experience.   We all have had to cope with leaders and others with authority over us.  Maybe we have been in a situation where other people have looked to us to provide leadership.  What will be true is that everyone will have encountered the phenomenon of leadership and either benefited from it or suffered pain because it was exercised with ineptitude. 

This post will try to focus on the positive aspects of leadership.  Examples of bad practice no doubt will emerge as we explore the leadership that can be inspiring, helpful and transformative.  We routinely think of leadership as a corporate matter, with a leader having authority over groups of people.  We need, I believe, to start in a different place.  Leadership begins in the human family.  In a traditional family where there are two parents, one parent will typically take on the main nurturing protective role of a child.  This will normally be the mother in a heterosexual partnership. But there is a further parenting and leadership role to be performed.  That is the task of gradually introducing the child to the wider world, teaching him/her social skills and the ability to care for and protect him/herself and generally function within what will be the adult sphere.  Child rearing will have both these aspects, nurture and challenge.  Typically, a father will shoulder a significant part of this second area of responsibility.  Teaching/leading a child to operate outside the safety of the home is a gradual process lasting a considerable number of years.   Later on in life, many of us will seek out other individuals who will continue certain aspects of this parenting role.  Their role in our lives is often described as being a mentor.   Such a individual helps us by, for example, reflecting with us on difficult situations we face.  He/she may offer assessments of future challenges that we are considering.  A typical scenario would be a job application.  The mentor may well help us clarify the positives and the negatives of a post and whether we are suitable to take up the challenges involved in it. 

The parent/mentor model embodies several of the qualities of a good church or political leader.   Such a figure will want to be a guide, an encourager and one who can see the way ahead with a degree of clarity.    Above all, a leader is going to be a person who only wants good for those in his/her charge.  Obviously, when someone has large numbers of people to care for, they cannot know everyone personally.  They can, however, be expected to ‘have their ear to the ground’ to pick up the dominant feelings and aspirations of their group.  Thus, when decisions are made by a leader which affect every member of a group or a nation, the individuals within it may reasonably expect to feel included somewhere in that decision.  When, on the other hand, leaders make decisions that benefit either only themselves or their small band of cronies, the typical person among the followers will be able to spot that self-serving action.  If, on the other hand, there has been a genuine attempt to do the very best for the majority that also will be picked up.  The key to leadership is good communication.  When men and women of power work in secret, that will always create distrust, resentment and resistance among the followers. 

One of the best descriptions of leadership I have read, links a leader to a vision for his or her group.  The leader has this vision and, through the skills of rhetoric and persuasion, draws in his followers to join him/her in sharing it.   It may or may not be a message of new prosperity and plenty.  A leader, like Churchill, was inviting followers to a tough period of ‘tears and sweat’.  The leader is the one that can successfully articulate and communicate what needs to be said in a given situation and invite the followers to prepare for it.  The important skill for any leader is the correct interpretation of the times and the ability to know what will be acceptable to the followers in effectively responding to it.  That, of course, will demand gifts of a high order. I am unsure whether there is currently anyone on the political front or in church leadership who can, in fact, perform this role?  At the risk of repeating what I said in the last blog post, the future of the nation and the churches looks bleak at present.  From our political leaders we will need help to face up to the possibilities of shortages, increased unemployment and severe social pain.  While setting out these grim realities, it will also be important to rally people around the possibility that such pain can be borne and be the harbinger of a new sort of society and church life.  Froghole has helpfully listed several of the steps that might be taken to allow the ordinary members of society not to feel forgotten.  I noted one suggestion which involved the closing down of financial boltholes in British Overseas Territories.  If the covid-19 age has the consequence that society ends up with even greater inequality, that will be a stain on this country’s history which will never be erased.  If we are to have greater economic hardship, then everyone must accept their share.  I am not suggesting some fantasy equality for all, as this, historically, has proved unworkable as an aspiration.  Political leadership in this situation is explaining to people what is required of every member of society.   We need from our political masters some clear facts, even if they are initially extremely unpalatable.   

The leadership of the Church has, to all appearances, been paralysed by the virus.  As I articulated in the last post, there is something slight awry when church leaders gather to discuss how the church is going to pass through the present crisis but keep their deliberations secret.  When the committees of Church House and the House of Bishops play this game of secrecy, they imply that they own the church in a way that is not true of the rest of us.  If dramatic contingency plans are being made, we need to know.  If there is a hope that the show goes on as before, we also need to be told.   Leadership, good leadership should be telling us the prognosis for the future, good or bad.  Will the church not be healthier for facing up to reality and beginning to adapt to coping with its implications?