I have tried very hard on this blog to keep away from the subject of the coronavirus which is currently playing such a large part in our lives.  But try as I may, the topic seems to creep in everywhere.  We are even beginning to forget the routines we had before the COVID-19 first appeared.  All our plans for the summer are on hold.  In my case I am in the process of cancelling my plans to attend three conferences, a gathering with college friends and a trip to see family in Ireland.  Life has drastically changed.  But, compared to those who are actually sick, stranded on a cruise liner on the other side of the world, in a hostel in India with no money, I feel very fortunate.  I am safely at home with my wife, with other family not far away.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the world will never be the same after this pandemic of 2020.  The ways it will change will be fully charted by historians in the future.  Some of the changes will be social but there will be many consequences emerging from the appalling economic damage that is being inflicted on all the advanced societies of both East and West.  The economic effects of a possible full-blown slump on our society will reach into every aspect of our lives.  With falling stock-markets comes decreased wealth in society as a whole.  Lack of wealth involves less money being spent, less trade and higher unemployment.  All these point to greater poverty in the future.  With poverty comes the possibility of greater destitution and want among the least fortunate.

The Church will be caught up in the negative economic maelstrom like every other institution.  The gloomy part of this blog post foresees tremendous financial problems for the Church in the next ten to twenty years.  Since the beginning of the century, one has felt that the Church of England has been like a ‘zombie’ company.   The income/expenditure balance in the dioceses are very finely tuned.  When a serious economic shock comes along, the zombie company is the one that is revealed to have been trading insolvent for some time.  That is the situation we seem to have with the Church of England.  Many, if not most, of the dioceses have been in, or close to, a deficit situation. The central body managing the considerable resources of the Church Commissioners appears to be relatively healthy, even though its capital assets will have recently shrunk in value as for everyone else.  The Commissioners are however not responsible for paying for the day to day expenses of the dioceses and parishes.  Most of the Commissioners’ money is earmarked for national church bodies, clergy pensions, cathedrals and the bishops. The 44 dioceses raise most of their money from the quota paid by the parishes.  This money is then used to pay the clergy and their housing and pension costs.  In all, the yearly average ‘cost’ of each stipendiary clergyperson is £60 –£65,000.   The problem has been that some parishes around the country for some time have been unwilling/unable to pay the quota that has been requested of them to pay.  In some cases, they are under the impression that if they don’t pay, it will be made up for by central funds.  The best that the Commissioners have been able to do is sometimes to meet diocesan deficits with loans.  In certain cases, dioceses have been reduced to desperate measures like selling capital assets or keeping posts unfilled for long periods.  To summarise, the financial state of many English dioceses has been fragile for a number of years.  It is possible that, that because of the current financial crisis, the entire parish system may be about to fall apart.  The threat of insolvency hanging over many dioceses may be impossible to avert.  When there is no money to pay the clergy, the parish system breaks down completely.  This will not happen overnight, but it could become a reality over a ten to twenty year time frame.   

I have been painting a grim prognosis for the Church of England in view of the current economic shock to our country being caused by the pandemic.  When we move away from falling stock markets and rising unemployment to other aspect of the pandemic, I do see some signs of hope for the Church.  One of the most hopeful aspects of the current shut-down has been the flowering of good neighbourly behaviour in many communities.  Normal British reservation has given way to expressions of genuine neighbourly concern.   Church people have always been at the forefront of Good Neighbour schemes and now that this spirit is active and flourishing throughout society, it could be the future role of church people to keep that flame alive permanently.  It should not take a national crisis to alert people to the need to care for isolated neighbours.  We can however hope that, as a nation, this crisis has made us a little kinder and more considerate to others.

The second cause for hope is being found paradoxically in the midst of the fact that all our church buildings have been temporarily closed.  Social isolation has already created, in society generally, a new readiness to experiment with online communication with others. In my family we are starting to use Skype and Zoom and there is an Apple programme which enables my wife to play board games with our 4 year-old granddaughter in Belfast.   This technology seems to be catching on among Christians as they come to terms with their closed buildings.  A lot of our older church people will protest and say that this technology is not for them, but I can see that streaming church services into the home is something people will become more and more accustomed to and eventually accept. One really positive advantage is that it may have the effect of raising the quality of worship and teaching.  The online congregation have the option to switch off!   Also, there would be needed in a possible post-parish situation, something to supplement this domestic form of worship.  There could be large gatherings in a local town centre, perhaps the same place where people go for a supermarket shop.  I would envisage that this would provide the opportunity to sing together, to pray and to share food with fellow Christians, perhaps monthly.  I know that some people are frightened by large gatherings of Christians and they shrink from what they fear may become revivalist events.  I see no reason for this to be an obstacle.  Those who would be authorised to lead these large gatherings and area worship would need to be sensitive to the variety of spiritual needs that are represented among the people present.  Not everyone wants the culture of Holy Trinity Brompton, particularly in the more rural areas of the country.

In a phone call with a self-isolating clergyman, I learnt that in a multi-parish benefice in the Salisbury diocese, more people had tuned into a virtual service via Zoom than had ever appeared in the flesh for a similar event.  A lot of experimental work will have to be done.  But let us hope that the post-virus, possibly post-parish Church will never need to descend to doom and gloom.  The churches will change.  They may change radically, but somehow I am hopeful that people will find new ways to practise their faith in a way that is economically affordable and spiritually valuable.  This will enable Christians to play a full part and serve a society as it tries to recover from the current economic devastation that threatens all our lives. 

I must have written several times about bizarre events within American life under President Trump.  The most recent example of the current craziness washing over much of American society are the daily outpourings from the White House on the topic of the coronavirus. Trump himself tells the world about the progress of the ‘fight’ against the coronavirus and sometimes what he says appears to be based on fantasy and hope rather than reality. Alongside him, for these briefings, Trump has included an international expert on infectious diseases, Dr Anthony Fauci.  While wanting to have such scientific expertise around him, Trump has also been subtly undermining Fauci’s work by failing to stamp out some outrageous conspiracy theories directed against the doctor.   Fauci apparently once said, in an email, something favourable about Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State under Obama.  This, in the minds of the right-wing conspiracy theorists, who support Trump, renders him a stooge of the Democratic Party bent on destroying Trump politically.  In a single moment, all Dr Fauci’s expertise is devalued and trashed and his motivation for urging the American public to take the virus seriously is called into question.  One person could stop the dangerous onward march of these irrational conspiracy ideas.  That person is the President himself.  He, however, has no apparent desire to see the present coronavirus crisis as anything other than part of a war against his political opponents.  The claims of truth and scientific rationality can be sacrificed if that gives Trump political advantage.

The wild and unsubstantiated claims about the coronavirus that circulate currently in America are not just irritating; they are often profoundly dangerous.  Those who try to direct the country’s policy in helping victims, as well as leading the research to find vaccines and treatment, must be deeply frustrated by all the irrationality and incoherent management that is coming from the top.  The problem about any ideas that originate in irrationality is that they cannot ever be properly debated.    A person who thinks with his ‘gut’ as Trump does, is never going to be amenable to a calm consideration of scientific evidence and factual material.  Reason and unreason have very little to say to each other. 

Where does Trump’s dangerous irrationality come from?  It seems to come from two main sources.  The first source may be attributed to Trump’s own personality.  We have spoken before about the temperament of an individual like Trump who appears to suffer from full blown malignant narcissism.  When somebody suffers from such a pathology, they will have created a world inside their head that will automatically reject all ideas, people and thoughts that challenge their need to satisfy an overwhelming narcissistic hunger.  There is, inside the mind of such a sufferer, an insatiable appetite which demands to receive flattery, soothing and gratification at every opportunity.  So, to understand the lack of rational discourse that afflicts the Trump administration, we can in the first place point to his extraordinarily distorted and corrupted narcissistic thinking.

While an individual like Trump can exist in a delusional bubble completely of his own making, it is easier for him if his fantasy thinking is shared by others around him.  Trump of course has his political allies, especially those who see him as a means to enhance their wealth.  New laws and tax breaks can all be manipulated to favour the business interests of the very wealthy who are close to a compliant President.  Such individuals can always be relied upon to pander to gratify Trump’s narcissistic needs.  But there is a further larger group who remain steadfastly loyal to Trump, the American Christian Right.  Trump has always been able to count on this significant section of the population, white self-styled evangelical Christians.  They see his presidency as furthering their anti-abortion, anti-LGTB priorities.  These play an extraordinarily significant part in their deliberations and rhetoric.  To summarise these priorities, the conservative Christian right hanker after a more Christian ‘biblical’ society after Rushdoony.  They believe that Trump is, by promoting their interests, helping them to achieve this aim.  The way that traditional Christian conservative causes about abortion and LGTB form part of this agenda is not our concern here. These topics are well explored elsewhere.  What concerns us here is the way that irrationality has been allowed to flourish over the coronavirus struggle.  What happens in the States in this area matters to the whole world.  If the world economy and people’s lives are being undermined by crackpot Christian ideas, that matters a great deal.  Christian irrationality should not be allowed to creep into the mainstream of society and politics to threaten us all.

It is not too great a generalisation to say that a large segment of American Protestant Christianity has always had a problem with pure science and the technology that has grown out of it.  In Britain in the 19^th century, we too had fierce resisters to the implications of Darwin’s ideas concerning evolution.  Many Christians defended the strict notion that the world was created in six 24 hour days.  But by the end of the 19^th century most of these ultraconservatives in Britain had retreated to the margins of society and were not generally found in the denominational churches.  Among many American Christians, by contrast, the literal reading of Genesis is a widely held notion.  Typically, this is translated into antipathy and irrational hostility towards science and scientists.   When such hostility is projected on to doctors and scientists working to find a way forward with the coronavirus, such a belief system can be the cause for people dying unnecessarily.  The horror of our world collapsing into an economic depression, such as we witnessed in the 30s, is also too awful to contemplate

Religious irrationalism, whether in the States or elsewhere, has the power to further exacerbate the coronavirus epidemic.  Our first example from the States is to be found in the words of a megachurch leader, Guilermo Maldonaldo, based in Florida.  He called a meeting on March 15 and insisted that all his flock be there in person.  He asked the question.  ‘Do you think that God would bring his people to his house to be contagious (sic) with the virus?  Of course not.’  Guildremo, according to his website, is due to be present in London for a rally in June.  We expect it will be the virus that causes this visit to be postponed.  Even if there was no ban on such a mass gathering as he was planning to hold, we might hope that the Home Office might decide that allowing Guildremo to enter the country was not in the public interest.

A second evangelist Rodney Howard Browne, again based in Florida, has ridiculed members concerned about the virus by calling them ‘pansies’.  As an antidote he has handed out anointed handkerchiefs which he believes will protect them from the disease and the fear that may accompany it.

It is a matter of deep irony that one of the first people to die from coronavirus in Virginia was a Christian pastor, Landon Spradlin. He had described the pandemic as ‘mass hysteria’.  Spradlin had returned prematurely from a preaching trip to New Orleans after becoming ill.  In each of these three examples there is a dangerous juxtaposition between faith and irrationality.   The word dangerous needs to be emphasised again and again.  As long as the Trump government is infiltrated by this kind of irrational thinking promoted by ‘orthodox’ American Christian leaders, the world and its economies are in severe peril. 

Irrationality and faith are unhappy bedfellows.  I have pointed my readers to three examples among Christian Americans but there are many others.  When one believes that faith takes precedence over everything else, even rationality, we have a toxic, dangerous situation.  Like many conservative beliefs, the precedence of faith is a principle which does make some sense within a Christian worldview.  But it needs to be combined with wisdom, with nuance rather than as an all-conquering principle of a Christian attitude.  Above all, faith must never be the prelude to a dangerous irrationality which can swamp the minds of Christian believers as it appears to be doing in America.  No belief system can ever be allowed to endanger, even destroy, others simply because it never exercised the spirit of caution and care.

(Another non-virus story)

In the last blog post I explained how an encounter on a train, travelling across Europe in 1964, created significant changes in my life.  It led to doors opening and enabled study opportunities which went on with some energy until the mid-80s.  From around 1984 my focus for study shifted from my interests in the early Church’s art and liturgy to my current interest in healing and power and the way these dynamics are experienced within church communities.

I described in the previous blog how I received a travelling scholarship to study the Orthodox Church in Greece during the academic year 67/68.  In all, I was away for ten months and the time away included visits to Israel, Bulgaria and Romania.  It may sound like a long holiday but there were times of hardship and considerable stress.  Part of the problem was that Greece was going through a dark period politically with the arrival of the Colonels’ regime in April 1967.  The Orthodox Church was divided over whether or not it should support this ultra-right administration.  The more interesting churchmen and women could see that it was rooted in a bombastic crude nationalism.  The problem for the opposition was that jobs were on the line for those who spoke out.  More threatening than that was the prospect of imprisonment and torture.  Many people were afraid and this fear meant that meeting people was a lot harder for me than it should have been.

My main academic study was done in libraries in Salonika and Athens.  These were two places of large populations and thus the political oppression was all the stronger.  The arrival of spring in March 1968 allowed me the luxury of leaving the cities to travel in the provinces.  After a visit to the extreme north west to visit a small town called Kavalla near the Albanian border, blessed with many painted churches, I set off for Crete.  My expedition to Crete was the first time when I felt the political oppression a lot less keenly.  Crete had managed to keep the Colonels at a certain distance.  It was difficult for the central government to pretend that there was a potential communist conspiracy in Crete as they did in the mainland cities.  Communists had never gained a foothold on the island, even during the war.  Another great asset which helped me along in Crete was the memory of British involvement in the Second War.  Less than twenty-five years before my visit, British officers, supported by parachute drops and gold sovereigns, encouraged an effective resistance movement.  As an Englishman I could draw on the considerable goodwill which still then existed for all citizens of my country.  We were, in those days, not a common sight, especially out of season in the weeks leading up to Easter.

My normal pattern of operation was to call on a local bishop and ask for recommendations for whom I should visit.  I carried a formal letter of introduction from Archbishop Michael Ramsey. This worked well in Crete because no one seemed to be afraid of associating with me, a foreigner.  The bishop I called on in Heraklion recommended two parish priests and a monastery in Western Crete.  I consulted the map to decide on my exact route.  At the extreme west of the island there are two pointed pieces of land pointing north.  One promised to be a good walk so I travelled to the nearest village so that I could find somewhere to stay and attempt to walk north as far as I could along this strip of land.  At some point I visited the local café and chatted with the men there.  Among the locals drinking coffee there was a young man called Nikos Giannakakis, then aged 28.  We talked together and I discovered that his job was as a painter of churches and icons in the neo-Cretan Byzantine style.   After describing his work to me (in spite of his lack of English and my poor Greek) he promised to show me the current church he was working on in Chania. This meeting took place a few days later and I was an instant admirer of his work, both the portable icons and painted church walls.

When I got back to England, I kept up a correspondence with Nikos.  I publicised his work in the magazine Eastern Churches Review, but no one seemed to be interested in commissioning anything from him.  It took me five years before I was able to help him find work beyond the frontiers of Greece.  The background of how I came to find myself in Calabria (the ‘foot’ of Italy), among Greek Catholics of Albanian extraction, needs a word of explanation.

In 1969 the organisation Amnesty International wanted to organise a report on house arrest in Greece under the Colonels.  After some searching they found me.  My command of the language was still weak but after a crash exposure to Amnesty files at their then headquarters in Farringdon, I was sent off to do this piece of field work.  The whole enterprise was probably flawed from the start and I found at the airport that my name was on the card index of banned people.  I had flown in from Rome on a student charter flight and so I was sent back to the same place.*  At the age of 23, I possessed a considerable amount of social cheek, and so, armed with this, I set off to find the Greek College in Rome where I introduced myself (in Greek) to staff and students.  (Modern Greek was compulsory for all students then studying at the college) I am not sure what I expected to happen, but they invited me to stay for a celebration of St Peter (it was June 29^th).  Amnesty had invited me ‘not to hurry home’ and when one of the members of staff suggested I could profitably visit their Greek Catholic diocese in Calabria, I was keen to follow it up.  I visited these dioceses (there is one in Sicily) three times altogether and wrote a couple of articles to explain the peculiarities of Greek Catholicism in rural Italy. This tolerated married clergy, even in the early 70s.  It was one of these villages, Santa Sofia d’Epiro that, in 1973, was looking for an artist to paint their church in the Byzantine style. I knew just the person to recommend, my friend Nikos from Chania in Crete.

Nikos visited Calabria six times in the 70s as one village after another employed his services to decorate and beautify their churches.  He had, initially, considerable difficulty obtaining a passport but eventually the entire family made their home in the villages for the summer months.  Nikos’ two young boys picked up grammatical Italian with great ease, something that was to help them enormously later in their education.  Italian was the language that the local children used to communicate with outsiders and was learnt at school.  At home they would speak a dialect of Albanian.  Both Nikos’s sons ended up becoming medical doctors but trained in Italy.  One now teaches medicine to Italians. Their exposure to proper Italian as children though their father’s work, had equipped them to become part of a larger world than Crete.  I, unknowingly, had played a part in making this possible. 

It was Nikos himself, now 80, who posted the picture of Santa Sofia d’Epiro (above) on Facebook last Sunday and this picture sent a shock through the system.  It was through those two interconnected chance encounters, first with the Toynbee sisters and then with Nikos himself, that new realities were created. First we have two Italian trained doctors, a career opportunity for Nikos and a series of painted churches in Calabria.  It was a shock but a happy shock to be reminded how providence had put me in situations and places that had caused something new to happen both for me and for others.

*A local Italian branch of Amnesty was set up in Rome soon after my abortive visit to Greece. I take no personal credit for this initiative but the founding of the branch was directly connected in a complicated way to my brief time in Rome. Over the decades Amnesty volunteers from Italy have played a full part in helping to promote the cause of political prisoners around the world

At a time when the coronavirus is occupying our attentions, thoughts and prayers, it seems right to turn away completely from the topic.  As a regular blogger, I don’t want to run out of coherent things to say about the present crisis when it perhaps has barely begun.  Much more may need to be said later in the unfolding drama.  Today, for a complete change, I want to share with you a personal story, drawing from my own past. It is deliberately nothing whatever to do with the current crisis. It may, however, remind readers of their own experiences of encounters with strangers which have in some way been blessed.  My story is an interconnecting narrative with two parts.  Each section of the story has a common theme; the narrative depends on a random meeting with complete strangers. My story took place over fifty years ago.  Both of the encounters I describe turned out to have enormous, even life-changing significance in my life.  In the second meeting it was the life of the other person that was changed even more.

The story that I want to recount, begins with my looking at a picture posted on Facebook as recently as last Sunday.  It was a photograph of a church in a small village in a remote area of Southern Italy.  I cannot explain at this juncture why this picture of a church in the Greek Catholic tradition, painted internally by an artist from Crete, should have triggered a powerful reaction in me.  You will have to wait until the end of both my narratives to understand the significance of the picture and what it represents.

The first of my stories of chance encounters took place in May 1964 in the railway station at Calais port.   A boat train had brought me from Victoria station to Folkestone docks.  A boat then transported passengers to Calais to connect with various trains on their way to different European destinations.  I was to catch the train that would take me to Rome.  There I was to stay with a relative by marriage, married to an Italian.   This followed my leaving school three months earlier and after this I had filled some time working as a hospital porter.  My plans for Italy were vague but the aim was to fill up a chunk of time I had before going to Oxford in the October to begin my study of theology.  As I got into the carriage, I was greeted by two ladies in their late sixties.  Both were also travelling to Rome.  As the journey was to take the best part of thirty hours, we swapped life stories.  It turned out that my travelling companions were two very distinguished retired academics who were sisters and who lived in Oxford.   The elder of the two was Jocelyn Toynbee, a retired professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge.   Both the women were going to be staying at the British School of Archaeology in Rome.  They were going to be visiting a number of early Christian sites and I would be welcome to join them if I were able.  I knew then virtually nothing about early Christian archaeology, but with their guidance, it did not take long to become an enthusiast for ancient mosaics, churches and catacombs of which Rome has a wondrous abundance.  The highlight was the opportunity to descend under St Peter to view the simple tomb which encloses what are believed to be St Peter’s bones.  The Toynbee sisters returned home after three weeks but I was later invited to see them for tea at their home, having begun my course at Keble College.  At some point in my second year I discovered that, as part of my final exams, I could take a special paper in early Christian archaeology.  Jocelyn was, of course, there to act as my supervisor.  I sometimes found her style of teaching above me and more suitable for a graduate student. Once I had to protest once that a article in German she had recommended was completely incomprehensible to me.  But the mere fact of doing this somewhat esoteric course opened up doors for a lifetime interest as well as, for a time, the opportunity to travel.

In the first instance, my local education authority, Kent County Council, gave me a grant to make a trip to Italy to view the various ancient sites that were part of my undergraduate study.  I was living in the long-forgotten days when such beneficence still existed.  Thus in 1966 I was able to return to Rome as well as visit places like Ravenna and Grado in northern Italy.  Also, I was, in the following year, able to apply for and receive a scholarship administered by the Church’s Council for Foreign Relations to study and stay in Greece for up to a year.  This turned out to be a 10-month period abroad and I began it soon after my graduation.  The aim of the scholarship was to become familiar with the Greek Orthodox church and its monastic life.  My special focus was to be on Byzantine Christian art and its links with the liturgy.  The studies I undertook in Greece were eventually led to my studying for a second degree, a B. Litt., also at Oxford.   It was then that I was able to pull together my interest in liturgy and reflect on the way that early Christian art and architecture interconnects with the act of worship.  Traces of this interest remain and as recently as 2013 I was invited to give a talk in Crete to a group of contemporary icon painters.

The meeting with two women on a train journey in 1964 thus led to an amazing sequence of events which have greatly enriched my personal life and my ministry.  My interest has not profited the academic world in these areas, since, apart from a number of travel articles, I was only ever able to publish a single paper for an academic journal.  Nevertheless my passion for Orthodox iconography and the way that the entire early Christian and Byzantine art tradition has fed my soul is something that I am extremely grateful for.  In remembering that encounter long ago, I have to ask the question was it somehow meant?  Was there some kind of providence at work?  We cannot answer that question, but I am still moved to ask it.

In the next part of this reflection I shall continue with the explanation of how a small Church in Calabria came to be an important part of my personal story.  It is also part of the story of the artist who decorated it and how our lives intersected long ago in a small village in Crete.  There was a meeting; lives were changed for ever and there are physical monuments in Calabria to celebrate this chance, maybe providential, encounter.

To be continued……..

In every one of our lives there are salient events which we look back to and recognise as important transition points.  For some it was the first day at work, for others it was the day they got married.  There may be a whole series of such events, but the key ones are the moments which have a strong sense of before and after.   ‘Before I started work I never had any money but then …  Before I got married I visited the pub three times a week, but afterwards I stayed at home to be with my wife’.  These important events that mark transitions in our personal lives, extend to events we share with others.  We also have moments we share with the whole of society.  There used to be a time when an older generation was always talking about the time ‘before the war.’  I cannot remember whether the comparison was an expression of relief or regret.  If the truth were known, it was probably a bit of both.

The advent of the coronavirus is one of those societal life-changing episodes (like the war) which will be corporately remembered as a before/after event. We will, in all probability, refer back to the time before the virus with some shorthand expression because things then were different from whatever is to unfold in the future.  What the future brings is unknown to us.  But it is likely that there will be things that BC (before coronavirus) we used to take for granted but are no longer available to us.  We will think about them with nostalgia and longing.   The Church, like every other institution, will have its own set of BC memories.

If, to take the pessimistic view, the c-virus age is with us for a long time to come, the old norms of social interaction will change.  We may have to get used to the two metre rule for speaking to other people.  As far as the church is concerned, there are many congregations where the two metre convention has always applied.  These will probably also be the same congregations that resist the Peace with great passion.  One cannot imagine that the providers of box pews in the 18^th century designed them with the idea that individual members of the congregation would ever greet or touch each other.  The revival of box pews, with their ability to isolate family groups from each other, might well have a come-back in the post c-virus age.

On a more serious note, the advent of the rules which have closed church services right across the land, brings into focus the way that physical proximity and touching are, for some, very much part of normal worship activity.  While not every church encourages lengthy hugging and physical closeness, they are many that attract followers precisely because they do.  It is these churches whose members may find the enforced closure of services the most debilitating to their overall faith and practice.  Every Christian will be weakened spiritually by the enforced absences from worship services.  The greater damage may however be felt by those who faith is bound up with a strong corporate experience which encourages actual touch.  In short, some Christians seem to experience the divine only in a crowd situation, involving tactile experience and a strong leader to coordinate the event.  At such services the right music has to be played and the right emotional/spiritual buttons pressed by the person on the platform for worship to ‘work’.

At the heart of this reflection is a question.  Is our faith something between us and God which is assisted by coming together with others for mutual encouragement?  Is it, alternatively, an experience that is completely dependent on the other people present?  Are they, in other words, essential or merely helpful to us for the act of worship?  In previous blogs, I have spoken about styles of Christian worship which themselves can create patterns of dependence on a minister and a crowd environment rather than on God.   Along with these emotional ties to the minister, there is an attraction to a style of what I would call ‘Christian pop music’.   The music, the crowd experience and the attachment to a leader can become forms of addiction.  When a enforced separation from these ‘props’ takes place, this will result all too easily in withdrawal symptoms similar to bereavement.   No doubt God can be experienced through these things, but equally when they are withdrawn for whatever reason, there may be a serious void experienced in their absence.  The church going experience that involves any kind of addictive dimension will always be a fragile one, and this will become apparent when this experience is withheld.

My hope is that not every Christian will find the absence from church services such a difficult obstacle in their retaining a lively Christian faith and practice.  If churches are closed for three months or more, what will we find when we return?  If I have to make a prediction, I would expect to find greater spiritual resilience among those who have already learned to think, pray and reflect as individuals.  These will not be those caught up in a dependant party line rooted, say, in the debates of the 16^th century.  Rather these resilient Christians will be aware of many ways of being Christian, some of which have focused, not on any kind of crowd experience or rousing music, but on aloneness.  The Christian monastic tradition, alive to this day, is one example of this.  The word monastic means just this, being alone.  Jesus himself, spent much time on his own with his Father.  We have the account of the Gethsemane experience as well the time in the desert.  In my own personal Christian pilgrimage, I am much indebted to the tradition of the Desert Fathers.  They record their own struggles with faith and belief and much of this was undertaken in complete isolation from other human beings.  No one today is suggesting that all Christians should become hermits.  But, by acknowledging the existence of that tradition, we can begin to draw on some of the strengths of that way of discipleship to meet our present crisis.  A Christian with some sense of the power of the monastic or solitary Christian life, will, I believe, have the capacity to bounce back from the enforced Churchless period that stretches out before us.

This coming Sunday many churches will be physically open during the normal times of worship.  There will, I hope, be individuals there occupying the stillness and space to be alone and to begin to discover, if they have not already, a different way of being close to God.  This is the way of stillness, quiet and aloneness.  That is the way of prayer and devotion shown to us by many in the Christian tradition, the monks, the mystics and the solitaries through the centuries.  There is much that this distinctive tradition can teach us for our c-virus age and we need to embrace it more fully.

The almost universal availability of the Internet has made it possible for any persistent enquirer to have access to vast amounts of information.   In the past, only specialist researchers with permission to use university libraries could expect to find so much material.   While filing cabinets and confidential computer files do still bury secrets away from prying eyes in Bishops’ offices and elsewhere, the ordinary diligent searcher by the use of the net can still discover many truths that organisations, like the Church, might prefer to remain hidden.

In the past few days, I have had reason to pull out of my filing system, all the paperwork I have accumulated from the internet about the case of John Smyth.  It is quite a large pile of paper.  To remind readers, John Smyth QC was closely identified with the Iwerne camps run for public school boys by a group of conservative Christians.  These still operate today. Smyth was, at the time of his unmasking in 1982 chairman of the trustees body which ran these camps.  He was revealed to have been administering brutal sadistic beatings to some of the boys.  This was claimed to be for their spiritual benefit.  This behaviour was not reported to the police at the time and the story only came fully to light more generally in 2013.  The whole saga about Smyth and the lengthy suppression of information about his behaviour was made the topic of a Channel 4 documentary in 2017.  Smyth himself died in the summer of 2018.  An independent review of the events surrounding the story was announced in the middle of 2019.  This is being undertaken by Keith Makin and the original completion date was that it would report in May this year.

The complete story of John Smyth is an immensely complicated one and what I write here will only cover certain salient points and questions that have come out of my personal perusing of the internet material that I have collected.  Having re-read many of these documents over the past few days, I am moved to summarise all this massive amount of material with a single word – cover-up.

In many ways, the savage beatings that took place in Smyth’s shed in his garden in Winchester and at Iwerne (and later in Zimbabwe) are the least interesting part of the saga.  For the sufferers, of course, they were deeply traumatic and life changing.  We must never lose sight of that.  But, of far more interest to those of us trying to understand the story in its entirety, is the way numerous other people in Smyth’s network were caught up in the scandal.  The way that so many individuals were part of the story, not just as bystanders, but sometimes as active colluders, is striking.  Together they have, with varying degrees of culpability, conspired together to suppress the truth about a pernicious evil.

The word that I have used to describe the whole debacle, ‘cover-up’, is a word that suggests secrecy, lies and conspiracy to hide information.  It is sometimes possible for an individual with knowledge of immoral activity to believe that they have to remain silent for reasons of ‘confidentiality’.  The situation changes considerably when criminally evil actions are revealed.  These same witnesses are required ethically and legally to reveal what they know.  The claim of confidentiality is a poor defence in such a situation.  ‘Amnesia’ also seems like a suspiciously weak excuse for a witness to evil to make.  They seem to have chosen to become fairly active participants in a conspiracy to bury illegal and immoral behaviour.

Looking at the Smyth paperwork in my possession, there are at least three areas of questioning to be opened up by the reviewer.  In 1982 a written report about Smyth’s activities was made under the chairmanship of Mark Ruston, the Cambridge Vicar of the Round Church.  He was a key figure in Cambridge and was known by all in the conservative Christian orbit.  This report named the abuses by Smyth and also identified some of the victims using initials.  The authors accepted that evil had taken place but, for reasons of their own, nothing was done either to help the victims or to bring the incidents to the attention of the authorities in Church or State.  Many of the individuals identified as having received this report are dead but others are still alive.  We would expect that this early attempt to respond to Smyth’s behaviour should be investigated, as far as possible, by speaking to those who are still with us.

Winchester College, which most of the teenage victims attended, also knew about Smyth’s activities.  The headmaster at the time, John Thorn, wrote about the case in his autobiography.  There are also numerous other potential witnesses, chaplains of the school, parents of the victims and other masters.  One would hope that some are queuing up to give their accounts of what they remember of the traumatic episode. It is inconceivable that the headmaster, who extracted a signed agreement from Smyth, did not share some information with the housemasters at the school.  The head chaplain at the school who was there when the abuses were discovered, has claimed a complete failure of memory.  Is such selective amnesia to be compared with that afflicting Prince Andrew?  For most of us the expressions ‘I do not recall’ or ‘I have no memory of’ are either coded admissions of guilt or an attempt to shut down questions which have got too close to the truth.

Another cluster of questions concerns the charitable mission, the Zambesi Trust.  This provided Smyth with an opportunity for further abusive behaviour in Zimbabwe.  Setting up the charity involved trustees and the raising of considerable sums of money in this country.  Somebody had to provide written references for Smyth for him to be received by the church in Zimbabwe. Was that a carefully constructed piece of fiction, adding to the deceits already circulating around Smyth?  According to the independent Coltart report written to address concerns about Smyth’s work in Zimbabwe (of which I have a copy), some of the British trustees were extremely unhappy at some his activities.  In the end all but two resigned.  One would hope to hear from some of these disgruntled former trustees and also from the two that remained.  Sue Colman, married to one of these remaining trustees, and evidently involved in financially supporting Smyth, remains an Anglican clergy person in good standing.  Should not an apparent failure of safeguarding on her part (by failing to follow up abuse complaints) result in an automatic suspension of her PTO?  We have recently heard how the rules have been rigorously applied to the Dean of Lincoln.  Providing money, which enabled a known or suspected abuser to flee the country, is a serious matter.  It is everybody’s business that such collusion in evil should not be overlooked even if it happened over thirty years ago.

The overall suppression of information about Smyth (and Jonathan Fletcher) within the Iwerne/Titus/ReNew networks leaves us with a continuing sense of unease.  There were many high up in the network who knew what was going on.  The failure of a single one to come forward, suggests that the word conspiracy is an accurate one to describe this corporate behaviour.  A similar series of questions surround the events of 2012/2013.  All the personnel with responsibilities at Lambeth and Church House are alive and there should be no problem with obtaining a clear narrative about who did what and who told whom, particularly in the light of the disclosure of Smyth’s abuse by the survivor known as Graham.  Archbishop Welby admits to knowing about Smyth in 2013.  He suggested at an interview in February 2017 that there had been a rigorous enquiry and he had been kept in touch.  Victims have no evidence that this was the case.  Given that he was himself part of the same Iwerne network as many of those who knew Smyth well, there was a lot that he could have done.  Having heard about the scandal, it was possible for him, as a senior churchman, to have required members of that network (his friends) to come forward with what they knew.  His silence and apparent unwillingness to reach out to survivors suggests a deeper complicity on his part in the story.  We are at present left to speculate what the truth in this really is.

The success or failure of the Smyth review will very much depend on the readiness of individuals involved the events of the past to be willing to share freely what they know.  If they are Christian people, they should surely prioritise truth over tribal loyalties and the defence of a churchmanship brand?   If Keith Makin is unable to penetrate through the cover-up and suppression of truth that I believe has marked the whole episode for years, I sincerely hope that will be clearly stated in the report.  If the former supporters of Smyth and those loyal to his brand of conservative theology continue to obstruct through a failure to fully cooperate, that needs to be highlighted also.  Secrecy, lies and cover-up have no place in a review that is trying to make the Church a better place.  The eventual report is expected at the end of the year.   I shall be reading it carefully to see whether the Church can move on to be a better place of healing for the broken and a place of light and truth for those who live in a place of darkness.

by Janet Fife

I grew up in a clergy household, have attended church all my life – but I was 27 when I first attended a church that observed Lent.  For many years, I vaguely thought “Lent’ was something to do with lentils.

When I joined the Church of England in 1980 the pattern of the church year was one of the things that attracted me.  I saw that the structure it provides is a useful discipline. In some of the free churches I’d attended, the range of themes addressed in services was restricted to a few of the minister’s hobbyhorses. Following a lectionary compels us to cover a range of themes.

For the first few years I tried giving up something for Lent. One year I abstained from caffeine and had severe withdrawal symptoms for several days; when the same occurred the following year I gave up caffeine altogether. That stands out as one of the few spiritual benefits I’ve gained from Lenten discipline.

It was when I was ordained that my real problems with Lent began. This was partly because of the sheer grind of all the extra services and events during Lent, coinciding (as it often does) with a seasonal increase in the number of funerals. More significantly, my cathedral curacy was the first time I had encountered Lent being ‘done properly’. The cathedral was an unhappy place at the best of times, and the penitential seasons were misery. I felt I was being ground into the dust. ‘You are dust, and to dust you shall return’, in the words of the ashing ritual.

I have found Lent depressing ever since. I once discussed this with my spiritual director – a nun – who said I needn’t bother too much with Lent ‘because there’s enough Lent in your life already’.

Recently, I’ve asked people who find Lent difficult to tell me why. I’ve also asked people who observe Ash Wednesday and Lent what they gain from it. Predictably, one responded that Lent isn’t supposed to be about what we gain; it’s about practicing self-denial.  Fair enough.  But it seems to me that with any spiritual practice, we ought to be able to tell whether it helps us be more altruistic, gentle, serene, and more faithful to God and other people. I consider those qualities to be gains. I honestly haven’t found Lent observance does this for me; instead I have often been morose, self-pitying, and grumpy with God and the Church. When I was in active ministry this negative effect was no doubt largely due to the pressure of extra Lenten activities, preparations for Holy Week and Easter, and the added administrative burden of the APCM.

But not all of it. Reflecting on what others gain from Ash Wednesday and Lent has made that clear.  Of those who could explain what they find helpful (and I realise something may be genuinely beneficial without people being able to explain why), most gave reasons connected to Lenten themes:  humility, repentance, self-denial and reminders of mortality. Several quoted ‘You are dust, and to dust you shall return’.

I’ve never needed reminding that one day I will die. For many years my besetting sin was despair, and I can say with Keats that ‘many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death.’  For me, it’s a spiritual discipline to focus on life and what brings life. That’s why I know the importance of bringing hope to others.

Repentance and humility, if unconnected to any specific offence, too easily morph into a general sense of unworthiness and gloom. At least, that’s my experience – and clearly shared by a number of others.  Self-denial can increase the focus on self and lead to spiritual pride, or simply be meaningless. ‘Repentance in public without change of heart is very dispiriting. Real questions are never asked. Put it all on the faraway death of the Saviour Sacrifice; God is satisfied and all can go on as before, with no change.’ One correspondent pointed out that the elderly often have poor appetites, so have to make an effort to eat rather than giving up treats.

Another said he finds Lent ‘too structured, too prescriptive’; his most effective way of tuning in to God is to sit by the sea. A third finds the tradition ‘sanctimonious, rather than mindful and connected’. Others replied that they find the liturgy and ritual, the Lent reading and prayers, the ‘do this thing, pray this prayer, read this book’ approach ‘weird’, ‘alienating’, or ‘meaningless’. Signficantly, I think, many of those who felt negatively about Lent were women, or survivors, or both. In my chapter ‘The Gospel, Victims, and Common Worship’ in Letters to a Broken Church, I discuss at more length why women and survivors may find the Church’s stress on repentance unhelpful and even damaging. This may be why a number of people find Lent ‘miserable’,

The words, ‘You are dust, and to dust you will return’ (Gen. 3:19) are addressed by God specifically to Adam, not to Eve. Adam, made from dust according to the Gen. 2 account, is master of creation and needs to be kept humble – literally, to be grounded. Eve, created not from dust but from Adam’s rib, will be dominated and kept humble by him. And so it has proved.

Some value Lent because it’s an ancient tradition. The first record of Lent comes from a ruling of the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. The Council was convened, only 2 years after Christianity became the official religion of Rome, by the Emperor Constantine in order to impose order and uniformity on the Church. All 1,800 bishops within the Roman Empire were invited; contemporary reports of the number of prelates actually attending vary between 250-318. To me that seems a rather flimsy basis on which to establish a practice intended to be universal; but it had Constantine’s authority behind it and it stuck – and indeed has spread to churches then outside the Roman Empire.

If you are trying to keep an unruly empire in order, adopting religious practices encouraging people in humility and reflection on their sin and mortality, can only be helpful to you. We don’t know where they got the  idea of Lent observance came from, but it wasn’t the New Testament. Jesus kept a 40-day fast only once, to prepare for his ministry. and he went alone into the wilderness to do it. Matthew ch. 6 records Jesus instructing his disciples that when they pray, fast, or give to charity they are to show no outward sign of it, but to keep it secret: an instruction which might preclude wearing ash on your forehead or announcing what you’re giving up.  St. Paul, in Gal 4:10-11, rebukes the Galatians for ‘observing special days, and months, and seasons, and years’, seeing it as a sign of spiritual regression.

I haven’t written this to discourage those who find Lenten observance an aid to following Christ more truly. They have the approval of most churches and need only continue as they are doing, if it is genuinely helpful. I’ve written for those who find Lent adds further burdens to an already difficult life, or increases their self-loathing and misery.  Church leaders, too, need to be aware that Lent is not for everyone, and failing to keep it doesn’t betoken spiritual failure.

In the early 1990s a first attempt was made by the Church of England to draw up a formal safeguarding policy.  This was undertaken by the then Bishop of Bath and Wells, Jim Thompson.  According to Josephine Stein, in her essay in the book Letters to a Broken Church, this Bath and Wells document laid down the principle that the Church’s insurers should be immediately contacted whenever an accusation of abuse against a clergyman was made.  Stein also observes that, thirty years on, the Church still operates with the legacy of this legal confrontational approach.   When survivors of past abuse appear and seek help and support from the Church, what they often encounter is not compassion and understanding, but a wall of hostility and defensiveness, erected in part by the Church’s insurers and legal advisers.  The one seeking help becomes the enemy to be fought vigorously by any legal methods available.  This is something we explored when we looked at the story of Professor Julie McFarlane.  She described the process of seeking justice from the Church as a ‘brutal’ one. 

From the Church’s point of view, the policy of the past thirty years to rely heavily on legal processes in dealing with abuse complaints has mostly been a success from a financial perspective.  The task of making the Church accountable in any way for the abuse, has proved, for survivors, onerous and unpleasant.  Many would-be complainants have simply given up at an early stage.  Others have simply disappeared, and the Church has been able to wash its hands of them, legally and pastorally.  With this disappearance, potential financial burdens for the Church have also decreased. The few that have persisted in their complaining have had to cross numerous difficult hurdles to cross.  The consensus among the survivors that I know is that the legal process to be endured after an experience of abuse is far worse than the original event.  It is not surprising that there are relatively few survivors who are still visible in the public domain.  They are a small cohort.  Perhaps they can be seen as the heroic representatives of the much larger group of fellow abusees who have withdrawn from the field.

It would be good to say that the law of the land is an institution that is designed to bring justice to every citizen.  In practice, it is those who have deep pockets who gain the most advantage from the system of law as we have it.   It is here that institutions have tremendous advantage over individuals.  An institution will, when feeling under any kind of threat, always be able to outspend an individual.  Christ Church Oxford, an enormously wealthy college, has used some (well over £1 million) of its corporate resources in its attempts to remove the Dean, Martyn Percy.  He, by contrast, has no access to the largesse of the college to defend himself from these attacks.  He has had to find, according to the press, the eye-watering sum of £400,000 to pay for specialist lawyers.  Quite apart from the rights and wrongs of this case, this situation of financial imbalance is something grossly unfair.  A well-endowed institution can, through its wealth, have a legal clout which is difficult for any individual to compete with.  As a small side point, I am proud to have made a small contribution to a fund that has helped to pay some of Martyn Percy’s legal costs,

Over the past two or three years, when the stories of survivors have come more and more into the public domain, the legal shenanigans being played against these survivors have come into clearer view.  Among the methods being employed to maximise the advantage of the institution in legal cases, here the Church of England, I have noted the following.  In one case I heard of a bishop, questioned under caution by the police about a safeguarding failure, who was accompanied to the interview by a top London QC.  No doubt the bill for this QC was paid for by the central funds of the Church of England.  Another example of playing the system to lessen the liability claims of survivors, is to employ lawyers who know how to intimidate witnesses through aggressive questioning.   Also, the Church or its insurers, employ ‘expert witnesses’.  These may, unchallenged, declare their opinion that a survivor was mentally fragile before the abuse and thus the claim for compensation should be lowered.  In one case I know about, the ‘expert’ signed such an assessment of an abuse survivor without having met him.  It is always helpful to an insurance company (and the Church employing it) to produce experts who can testify to such preexisting mental fragility.    Were a full trial of an abuse case ever to occur as way of determining these liabilities, no doubt the sums involved would be huge.  When such church abuse cases are settled ‘out of court’, as they regularly are, the sums actually paid out are modest.  To receive £20-30,000 after a life-changing experience of abuse, having also endured a gruelling legal process during which your integrity may be attacked and your true motives for bringing the case challenged, is hardly worth it.  The reason that these survivors are prepared to go on risking their physical and mental health in order to pursue these claims, is seldom about money.  It is, as far as I can see, that they have a belief in justice, justice for themselves and for many others.  These others for reasons of their own have laid low to avoid the ‘brutal’ processes that the institution throws at them through an aggressive use of the law.

Treating survivors as legal problems to be solved will of course be a long way from a pastoral approach.  Most clergy, from bishops downwards, will have a built-in pastoral instinct in their response to episodes of abuse.  The culture of legal protectionism has, however, entered deep into the system so that nearly everyone in the Church involved with safeguarding, may be inhibited in the way they react.  Instead of using their instinct for offering pastoral care, they think legal liability, protocol and the possibility of someone, even themselves, being sued.  This situation of trying to deal with a pastoral situation of abuse from within a kind of legal mind-set will, of course, create strong dissonance.  Such dissonance will be combined with other emotions, fear, uncertainty and doubt.  What should be a straight-forward task of knowing the right way to react when disclosures are made, instead becomes fraught and hard to negotiate.  What I am effectively saying is that that the legacy of Jim Thompson’s early attempts at safeguarding protocol has cast a long shadow in the Church.  We now live in an institution that is more fearful, less spontaneous and more inclined to seek safety in the place of love.  I am not sure whether we can ever return to a Church which practises trust and spontaneity again.  Perhaps we will be able to, but first we will need to identify and hopefully, exorcise the spirit of fear in our dealings with one another in the area of safeguarding and relating generally.  We need to rediscover the spirit of generosity and care when we meet others, especially those who have come through the terrible ordeal of being the victims of some kind of abuse within the Church.

A short while ago, before we had heard of Jean Vanier, Peter Ball and church leaders who deliberately ignored and belittled abuse survivors, it was possible to believe in a simple version of the Church’s teaching about repentance and forgiveness.  The Church taught us all that if we truly repent, our sins are then washed away.  Some of us were also brought up on the hymn which contains the words: ‘the vilest offender who truly believes, that moment from Jesus a pardon receives.’  Suddenly we have now discovered that some good upright Christians who presumably have sought the same forgiveness as we have, have been continuously sinning with abusive crimes for decades.  The thought that such crimes are deemed always forgivable, when the evidence now points to a complete lack of remorse on the part of some perpetrators, is a repugnant one.  We feel the need of a new theology of forgiveness which will somehow face up to the reality that some Christians go on being ‘vile offenders’ even after they have uttered the correct words of confession.  The old promises that link the right words with receiving forgiveness from God does not seem to work anymore.  Whatever is true in this area needs to be re-expressed with a fresh nuance or qualification that it does not have at present. 

What the Church teaches about confession, repentance and forgiveness constantly needs to be revisited and restated.  The insights we need, will not just emerge from the re-examination of the theological traditions in these areas.  The Church also needs to be informed by experts in human psychology.   We can learn much from professionals who care deeply about the flourishing of human beings.  It was quite clear from the IICSA hearings on the Diocese of Chichester that what I shall refer to as ‘vilest offender theology’ was alive and well in certain Anglo-Catholic and Conservative Evangelical circles in that diocese.  It might almost be claimed to be one of the key elements to explain the way that this diocese, to its shame, had remained a hotbed of abusive activity for so long.   In different ways we listened to the argument that ‘the sin was confessed, forgiveness was received, let us now move on’.

Any theology that remains static and not subject to constant scrutiny is likely to become stale and not fit for purpose.  ‘Vilest offender theology’ in whatever churchmanship guise it is presented, has long passed its sell by date.  It is not that it is completely false.  More dangerously, it is at best half correct but those who sing the words do not appear to know or care which half is true.  Any future expressions of the Christian doctrine of forgiveness need to escape the bondage of such crude theology.  Teaching about such a vital topic as self-examination and forgiveness, needs to be able to resonate with modern understandings of human nature alongside the doctrine of God within the biblical and Christian tradition.

In this piece I cannot write a new Christian doctrine of forgiveness, but I can indicate a few pointers that I consider should be included.  One observation about human nature and sin that I have made in my contribution to the Letters to a Broken Church volume of essays, was to state that sin is nearly always about power abuse.  The reason for sinning, whether through theft, lying, sexual abuse or violence, is to obtain an apparent advantage or power over others.  Power is a commodity that all of us need to some extent so that we can feel alive.  A child needs acknowledgement from parents in order to flourish and establish a personal identity.  The psychological writers use the expression ‘mirroring’ to describe this process.  When toddlers pass key milestones in growing-up, they need the family audience to cheer them on and express admiration.  The small child sees the self in the mirror of parental approval and knows that he/she exists.  Any child who lacks that kind of affirmation from parental figures will sometimes learn, in later life, techniques of dominance to extract a substitute respect or feeding from weaker figures.  Such behaviour does not become less culpable because we have some insight into its origins, but at least it becomes more understandable. So, in summary, there is strong reason to suggest that a lot of evil perpetrated by individuals is an attempt to wrest back from the world the approval and significance that was denied to them as an infant or small child. 

The need to claim back a sense of power in whatever way possible, will often involve exploiting others without any thought of what they, the victims, may suffer as a result.  This deprivation model does not of course cover our attempt to understand more than a part of the evil we see in the world.  There was nothing deprived about the lives of Peter Ball or Jean Vanier.  Deprivation also does not account for the rapacious behaviour by many heads of governments around the world and the huge bank accounts off-shore that are amassed by Russian oligarchs.  Evil and greed is alive and well in places of wealth and privilege.

Every example of an evil action somewhere involves an individual (or an institution) shutting down the altruistic instinct that most of us try to cultivate as part of our Christian ethic.  Is it possible to be altruistic simultaneously with treating an individual badly or exploitatively?  How do we understand the good being enacted in the 150 L’Arche communities at the same time as the abusive behaviour towards at least six women seeking spiritual accompaniment from Vanier? I have no answer to this question, but I would always want to question carefully a situation where an individual is being honoured and praised for their work while there is little in the way of outside scrutiny.  The greatest evil in the Ball/Vanier scenario is that neither men appeared to have had any insight into the fact that what they were doing to their victims was also destructive to large numbers who looked up to them for guidance and leadership.  Some Roman emperors are said to have had in their processions a slave alongside them who carried a sign with the words ‘you too are human’.  This did not stop many of these emperors aspiring to divine status, requiring every citizen to give an incense offering as a sign of loyalty.  Self-inflation, Roman emperor style, seems to be common among the powerful.  It results in many people today dominating and controlling those around them, creating something truly evil at times.  There are theories in the literature on narcissism which explain how inflated behaviour in adults can begin early in life.  These may be caused by over-indulgent behaviour from a parent.  There is no time to explore that further here.

Studies of human nature today may give us far more sophisticated insights as to why otherwise good people fail and sometimes fail badly.  When theology on its own is unable to account for an appalling dissonance between belief and behaviour, we need to be aware of insights from other disciplines wherever they are found.  There will be no certainty in the answers we uncover in our search, but looking for some kind of Christian infallible truth in this area is a futile task.  When I think about my own failings this Lent, I like to believe that what I acknowledge somehow approximates to reality.  I would like to believe that the kinds of severe evil that harm others would be recognisable to me or those that know me.  My self-examination is never going to be perfect, but the Church should always be providing a context where it is impossible for true evil not to be visible and obvious.  In this post-Vanier/Ball era, we need new standards of self-examination and training in this for clergy and people.  This will allow them to live together in an environment that is wholesome, helping to keep out the evil of power abuse in favour of a spirit that is truly consonant with the love to which Jesus seems to be pointing us.

I recently received an email from someone I do not know about something he had read on this blog.  It concerned the name of an offender that appeared on the bottom of the Open Letter from a group of survivors and published here in the lead up to General Synod.  The name of the offender, known personally to my correspondent, is not important to share here.  The writer of the email had done his own research and he knew that the inclusion of this name on the Open Letter was not based on gossip but rooted in solid reliable testimony. 

Apart from expressing a sense of shock in the email, the writer had an interesting piece of information to share.  He revealed that in spite of all the allegations against this clergyman, which had also freely appeared on Twitter and other social media and among the organisations that look after the interests of survivors, it was completely unknown or discussed in his former congregation.  For whatever reason the congregation has chosen to be (been compelled to be?) kept completely in the dark.  We must assume that the current leadership of this still flourishing church made a decision to keep this information from the congregation.  Something similar seems to have been attempted within the REFORM/ReNew networks of congregations in their attempts to deal with the fall-out arising from the Jonathan Fletcher saga. What might be the explanation for these attempts to block information from a church?  Neither of the explanations offered here suggests especially honourable or honest motivations.  One line of reasoning on the part of leaders might be to consider that the failings of a leader are likely to undermine the faith of followers if they become public.  Another fear that such leaders might feel is to consider that any sort of criticism of an erring leader is in fact an attack on the theology represented by the accused former leader.  This sense of scandal, as having a ‘political’ dimension, will often enter into the calculations of those who control what congregations are allowed to think and know.  Conservative evangelical congregations where many of the current crop of scandals are found, are not known for the free and open transmission of information.  Holding on to power, money and influence seems to be more powerful than the sharing of truth, freedom and growth.   

As I began to think through this attempt to ‘protect’ individuals and congregations from facing up to scandal, I realised that there is something profoundly toxic, even evil, about this behaviour.  I imagined two parents of a pre-pubescent child who are offered access to a new drug.  This drug, they are told, will circumvent all the tantrums, pain and conflict which may arrive with the onset of the teen-age years.  They will have an ever-compliant child who will never be guilty of slamming doors and raising levels of stress and conflict in the home. Were the parent to buy into this wonder-drug, we know that it would raise many ethical issues, not to mention long-term potential psychological problems.  Passing through stages of conflict or adjustment are part of life.  They cannot be bypassed successfully without causing problems elsewhere.  In summary we would say that it is at best immoral, at worst evil, to behave as the church leaders are doing at one particular church, where details of past abusive conduct are being deliberately hidden.

In contrast, I want in this post to think about the positive aspects of openness in dealing with scandal.  Scandals of course will happen in churches of every tradition but there are ways of dealing with such events in a positive way rather than going down the road of denial and cover-up.  The positive way of dealing with negative events is perhaps illumined by the pattern set out by Elizabeth Kubler Ross in her description of the grief process.  Her pattern can be applied to any negative event faced by communities or individuals, such as a death or bereavement.  Everyone accepts that it is not a good idea to encourage anyone to be in denial when a death takes place.  The task of honest support for a bereaved person is what we can give them.  They need someone to be there as they adjust painfully and slowly to this new reality of their loss. Sometimes a priest is asked to collude with the bereaved person’s attempt to deny that the death has happened.  Both in the grieving process and in the honest confrontation with a terrible wrong-doing by a trusted leader, some of the other aspects of Kubler-Ross’ process may come to the fore.    Institutionally these reactions can be seen in no particular order.  We may well find the anger, the depression and the bargaining in various guises.  In whatever way these stages emerge, each of these emotions may be needed at some stage as a way of adjusting to and at the same time dealing with a shocking event.  The important thing is that the final stage of acceptance is eventually reached without any attempt to take short cuts. The whole process will require honesty, openness and candour on the part of a congregation faced with crisis.  Acceptance is also a stage on the way to facing the future.  A failure even to begin the process will freeze a congregation at the stage of denial.  This is because the leaders deem it too risky or too painful to move the congregation towards healing.

One of the issues that we touched on in the last blog post is the state of idealisation that can bind a charismatic leaders to their followers even after they have died.  Idealisation of another human being is likely to be in the long term an unhealthy bond.  The ‘worshipper’ will always have a tendency to ascribe qualities to their adored leader which probably don’t exist except in the imaginations of the follower.  Challenging idealisation of leaders in churches is always a healthy thing to do so that any situation of human frailty will be coped with far better.  Betrayal of trust by a revered leader will always be tragic and painful.  But it would easier to deal with if every leader had already constantly reminded the congregation that they shared the same humanity and fallibility with them, the congregation members.  It is the superhuman, god-like status of some leaders thrown up by the narcissistic process that is so damaging.  Having a ‘super-star’ for a leader may fill seats and increase church income, but it is a potentially a construction of fantasy which can easily collapse and fall.  Some leaders protect their god-like status by never being visible except on stage.  There they are surrounded by clever lighting effects which are impressive to followers.  When faith in God is damaged by the collapse into scandal of the celebrity preacher, one has to ask whether it was God or the preacher who had been at the centre of the action inside the followers’ heads.

Dependent passive relationships with fallible narcissistic leaders seem to be at the heart of many scandals and breakdowns in church life.  Such relationships will always exist because inside many of us is a wounded relationship with a parent.  By wounded I mean something incomplete rather than necessarily highly traumatic.  Whatever it is, it will render large numbers of us vulnerable to some extent to a leader who promises to re-parent us with offers to connect us to the ultimate parent, God himself.  That promise is also at the heart of the ‘cult’ contract.  It is helping to sort out these various layers of vulnerability and need that should be a major task of Christian leadership.  Sadly, we find that some of these leaders prefer to keep us in the place of dependency so that we can be exploited to suit their own needs and desire for gratification.  

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