by Martyn Percy

Part 2 of Martyn’s assessment of Alpha

Alpha courses appear to be a phenomenal success.  My copy of Church Times seems to take on the proportions of the Sunday Times whenever there is an Alpha News insert.  Their own publicity suggests that hundreds of thousands of people have taken part in a course in this country, the Commonwealth and beyond.  Alpha News is full of good reports and self-publicity, smattered with quotes from ‘academics’, Bishops, and the like.  The Alpha Course itself has now become a business operation, with its own staff, teaching materials, sweat shirts, videos and books.  Of its type, it is one of the slickest commodifications of the gospel.

I ought to state now that I have not attended an Alpha Course; but I have seen much of the Alpha material.  To my mind, it has a number of features that are commendable.  First, it is a course, not a ‘hit and run’ exercise in evangelism.  A number of evenings, a weekend away and a final supper can facilitate the building up of community relationships.  Second, because it is designed to be locally-based, and from the church, it avoids the pitfalls of some itinerant evangelists who might not relate easily to local contexts and churches.  Third, there is a wealth of supportive literature to aid enquirers.  It is well-marketed, and written and presented in a ‘light’ apologetic style, formed from an evangelical-charismatic basis.  A sort of David Watson Jesus Then and Now for the 90’s, but with much more emphasis on the individual, the therapeutic, and a very personable Holy Spirit.

People who attend an Alpha Course seem to enjoy the fellowship and find their faith refreshed.  Amongst most, if not all charismatic-evangelical churches, the Alpha Course has now become obligatory; a logo that makes a statement about being in the vanguard of fashionable evangelistic techniques.  Yet I do have quite serious reservations about the style, content, approach and results of Alpha.  How though, can something apparently so successful be flawed?  Three reasons immediately come to mind.

First, there is very little attempt to present the Church as the body of Christ which is the initial repository for the Gospel.  The assumption Alpha appears to make – common to a good deal of evangelical apologetics – is that people become Christians first, then think about joining a church.  The disassociation is highly problematic.  Whilst individual evangelists and various agencies target the millions beyond church structures, the majority of conversions often fail to be properly inculcated in to the church.  This is, in part, because these same people are embarrassed by the church, and offer a Gospel that barely mentions it, if at all.  Evangelicals tend to have little theology of place, or an appreciation of directional plurality, regarding the church as a collection of people who are in agreement with one another.  A focus on the church and sacraments would deepen the course, and ensure the material was more firmly rooted as an arm from within the church, rather than an external agent being used as a go-between.  Some Roman Catholic and liberal Anglican churches have ‘tailored’ the course in this way, although the authors forbid this.

Second, the genius of Christianity lies in its contestability.  In the relentless appeal to ‘basics’, the course obviates the implicit and explicit paradoxes in the Gospel, as well as its breadth.  It offers Christianity as a simple, uncontextual, boundless project that is ‘learned’ through a course offering certain types of knowledge and experience.  Any group that offers a course on ‘Basic Christianity’ needs to address who chose the basics, and why certain ‘basics’ were selected and not others.  In Alpha, the basics turn out to be an appeal to a largely innerrant Bible, attenuation of a homely and powerful Holy Spirit, and expression of an Evangelical atonement theory.  They are not, interestingly, the Trinity, baptism, communion or community, which might be more appropriate for other groups.  Moreover, the authors apparently do not like the course being adapted or enculturated.  This suggests that a ‘package’ of truth is being sold.  Yet Christianity is arguably not something we ‘possess’; like God, it possesses us, but is beyond us too.

Third, the focus on the Holy Spirit is one of over- emphasis.  The Spirit on offer obviously arises from a personable, therapeutic, home-counties context that is concerned with the individual.  The dynamics of the Spirit’s work in creation, justice, peace, reconciliation and the wider church receive scant attention.  This is because the authors of the course reflect an elite, upper-middle class outlook (Eton, Cambridge, Brompton), which, quite naturally, has also enculturated the Gospel.  In introducing the Gospel from here, there is inevitably no real social mandate, no prophetic witness and no serious appreciation of theology or ecclesiological breadth and depth. 

It is true that the Gospel is free to all.  But it does not follow that it should be sold and marketed as a cheap package deal – a bargain-break weekend for two in eternity.  Alpha offers a highly successful ‘trial pack’ (a ‘nice’ version of Christianity), yet one that does not actually relate to what is ultimately on offer, namely the complexity of salvation from within the church.  As a locally-based evangelism programme, it is seriously flawed.  True, it does recognise that ‘lasting conversions’ are made through local church connections and friendships, with less coming from hyped-up rallies or events that are outside the church.  But the weaknesses lie in its theological foundations.  It sets its own ‘questions’, and then offers the ‘answers’ to them: a classic technique in apologetics – caricaturing ‘objections’ to faith, then demolishing them.  There is little space for people to actually reflect on and vent their own serious social, personal, moral or theological concerns.  The appeal to ‘basics’ seems to assume that all Christians are more or less the same underneath, and that their ecclesial expressions are merely cosmetic.  They are not: for many they are matters of theological and aesthetic substance. 

As a course, it is therefore somewhat prescriptive, a package rather than a pilgrimage.  Participants are locked into a hermetically-sealed hermeneutical circle, that keeps more issues out than it actually addresses.  It is a confident but narrow expression of Christianity.  It stresses the personal experience of the Spirit over the Spirit in the whole church, in all its plurality and depth.  It attempts to transform course members in to converts, and then again into church members.  Ironically, the skeleton of the course does provide a good template that parishes could adapt and deepen according to need and context.  A number of parishes I know have adapted the middle-class presuppositions of the course for their own situations where ‘supper parties’ are not easy formats in which to discuss life and faith.  It is odd then, that the authors of the course are against this.  Presumably, this is because there is a real bias in the material that is not to be ignored, and is to be protected from dilution.  So here we have a technique with fundaments, Patent Pending.

My hunch is that Alpha ultimately does to churches what any revival does.  Mostly, it excites and galvanises existing believers, and encourages them to ponder (briefly) the world outside the church.  Then to engage with it more openly than they might otherwise, albeit temporarily.  However, although this form of apologetics is to be preferred to some itinerant evangelism or mass rallies, insofar as it is locally-based, it has still done little to address the theological vacuity of its parent missiological models.  It is still more monologue than dialogue.  People are still mostly ‘sold’ a Gospel that is independent of the church – and then the course organisers wonder why the attendees don’t translate into members.  It also offers a version of the Gospel that is weak on sin, suffering, atonement, sacraments and sacrifice.  True, people have to start somewhere with the claims of the Gospel: milk precedes meat, and you learn to walk before you run.  But does the presentation have to be so sugar-coated, crude and narrow?  People’s previous experience of the church is deemed to be peripheral, and the selected ‘basics’ presented as central.  For example, one cannot imagine receiving any reasonable answer to a question like this: ‘What did God do for me when I was baptised as child?’  Such issues are omitted from the agenda.  They are just too complex to form the basis for a discussion about divine action and the graciousness of God.

The danger of a therapeutically-tuned version of the Gospel that is intentionally socially relevant is that it will itself become a fashion-victim.  The course comes from the same church – Holy Trinity, Brompton – that introduced John Wimber’s ‘Signs and Wonders’ (miracles are the best form of evangelism: 1984-86), the ‘Kansas City Six’ (1988-90: a group of strange American ‘prophets’, now widely discredited) and the ‘Toronto Blessing’ (RIP, 1994-1996).  In their own way, all these phenomena were rather ordinary within the econtext of revivalism and enthusiastic religion, yet they were marketed and sold well, particularly by Holy Trinity, Brompton.  They have a shelf-life of between 18-24 months, and in spite of some of the same Bishops and ‘academics’ who promote Alpha (one is placed in this category by virtue of being a Principal of an Anglican Theological College) giving each of these movements their full impramatur, they fizzled out.  So what they actually point to, ironically, is the lack of a deeply-formed ecclesial identity and enduring spirituality in these faith-expressions.  Without something new to sing about, punters in the pew eventually become bored.  ‘Success’ is therefore about being at the forefront of spiritual fashion, riding along on the crest of the latest wave or craze. 

A key to this is the singling out of the spiritual as an ‘event’ which can be transformed into a commodity.  This means that Miracles and Blessings suddenly acquire an identity that makes them stand out from the crowd, like a designer label on a handbag or a pair of trainers.  An ordinary blessing won’t do anymore: it must be the ‘Toronto Blessing’.  Prayer for healing is old hat: ‘Signs and Wonders’ is where the action is, and God is deemed to be.  Prophecy is interesting, but have you heard the Kansas City Six perform?  So it is with Alpha.  An ordinary catechetical course will no longer suffice – evangelical-charismatic consumers are buying a name and an identity.  And the Alpha authors will not tolerate imitations or adaptations of their Gospel: it is salvation by copyright.

It will be interesting to see how many attending the courses, then ‘making a decision’, or having a numinous experience, are actually members of their local church in two years time.  My guess is that for all the hype, triumphalism and talk, this course is mainly about ‘refreshing’ charismatic-evangelical identity.  It does not address the world in all its pain, ambiguity and profusion – so it won’t actually change it, in spite of the claims.

Revd Dr Martyn Percy,

by Martyn Percy

Part one of a two part examination of the Alpha Course

By any yardstick, Alpha Enterprises – courses, books, conferences and other programmes – is one of the more impressive missional developments to have emerged in the last 50 years.

The original course began in 1977 under Charles Marnham, a curate at Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB). John Irvine, Marnham’s successor, developed it further, before Nicky Lee and eventually Nick Gumbel completed the evolution under Sandy Millar, the Vicar. The course is now available in over 100 languages, half the countries of the world, and its is estimated the total number attending the course exceeds 25 million in its near 50 year history.

I wrote a reasonably prescient critique of Alpha in 1997 for Reviews in Religion and Theology.  This was at the high-point of Alpha, when 10,500 courses were running in the UK. Stuck for a title for the tongue-in-cheek review article, the publishers rang and asked me for a view.

I plucked ‘Join-the-Dots Christianity’ out of thin air, and the label has stuck ever since. It is faith given the painting by numbers treatment.  Alpha is to mission what a Lego version of what Michaelangelo’s Statute of David might do for fine art. Once you have this in your head, you cannot unthink it.

Of course, Alpha is not Christianity. And Christianity is not Alpha.  Alpha is a form of packaging that has been attractively branded, and so it should be treated as any wrapper might be. The goodies are inside. The envelope is not the point of gift, any more than the accent of a preacher is integral to the gospel.

That said, the more one might laud the wrapping, the lesser the stress on the contents become. Here, I suspect that one of the reasons Alpha resonates is that the leadership culture of the Church of England has decomposed into one where appearance matters more than reality. How the church wraps its news, sometimes to try and manipulate the media, and tries to bury uncomfortable truths is a resonant feature of its communications and public relations.

The underlying culture that gives credence to this resonance has been cooking for a very long time.  For example, consider this conundrum.  Are sermons and talks for training and equipping (i.e., skills, techniques, etc.) congregations?  Or, are they, following Paulo Freire, for education and liberation (i.e., critical questions of belief and praxis, and the fostering of wisdom, etc)?

I instinctively recoil from the idea that sermons, talks or even church itself is a training-centred institution. But I accept that in times of duress and distress – and the churches are surely living in such contexts – a training-based focus is almost bound to emerge. Education and wisdom ceases, and its replaced by instruction and coaching.

But Alpha is, as I say, packaging. It is not the gospel, and it does not claim to be.  Yet the underlying culture of Alpha does carry some assumptions about faith, God and Christian life that make it a particular type of pedagogy that the majority of Christians find uncomfortable (i.e., the number left globally when you subtract 25 million, which is around 2.5 billion), but cannot quite put the finger on why. 

First, Alpha gives a free pass to pragmatism.  If it looks like it works, it must be good. If we can’t see results quickly, it will almost certainly be time-consuming and expensive. This is not a helpful fundament to adhere to for valuing theology, which is a slow, slow discipline that takes decades for the seed to gestate into good fruit.

Second, Alpha is inherently mechanistic. The Bible itself is treated as a kind of instruction manual or guide book – there to fix matters when things go wrong, and to make sure other things work better. A vision for pedagogy founded on such assumptions will provide training and apprenticeships, but be suspicious of education and questions that the manual doesn’t address. Being on an Alpha Programme is a bit like being walked through a Haynes Car Manual over the course of ten weeks. I’ve nothing against Haynes Car manuals, by the way. I just don’t think I’d enjoy these being preached from the pulpit. Like the vast majority of Christians, I don’t go to church to be trained and equipped.

Third, if the goal of Alpha Programmes is training and equipping for greater growth and effectiveness, then of course, education – a pedagogy schooling students in the art of constructive dissent – will be largely unwelcome, as conformity to a blueprint is bound to be preferred to critical thinking. Sermons in training-based ecologies school congregations in compliance.

Fourth, sermons that flow from a revolutionary pedagogical model or dissenting educational ecology will challenge and disturb listeners. But hearers will learn to think, and engage in the tradition critically.  The mechanistic training model won’t do that; it would be like trying to argue with the instruction manual for a broken gas boiler. My advice? Don’t.

Fifth, salvation is packaged as an individualistic, quasi-Pelagian faith. I am with the present Pope, however, who in paraphrasing Saint Francis of Assisi has often remarked that “no one is saved alone; we can only be saved together.” (cf. Fratelli Tutti, 32). We cannot be judged alone, and we cannot be saved alone.

I’ll concede the difference between training and education is a characterisation. That said, the training model will deliver mechanistic instructions and techniques, based on its assumptions of revelation and the relationship between divine and human agency. The educational model will see revelation as complex, requiring critical interrogation, imagination and interpretation.

At present, the vast majority of Church of England bishops are locked into supporting the mechanistic training model. The long-term consequences for such short-termism are yet to be seen, but are likely to result in a thinner grasp of the richness of faith amongst congregations, and a sense amongst the laity that they are only being “equipped” with “tools and techniques” to achieve certain ends, which are nominated by bishops in strategies, plans and visions.

Whilst teaching that offers techniques that are orientated in mechanistic, pragmatic, restorative, overhauling and expansive aspirations for the faith, an enormous range of teaching is excluded by such prioritisation. Perhaps this is inevitable given the pragmatics. After all, many clergy are now ordained after studying for two years, which in fact turns out to be around twenty months.

I might add they work very, very hard, and at considerable cost to them and their families/partners/supporters and friends. But this is hardly akin to the seven years of education and formation required of Jesuits. The Christian life, rather like Christmas or Easter, is not something you can learn from a Haynes Manual (see illustration below – a humorous book, obviously). The Christian life needs to be lived. We are always becoming Christian. Conversion is present and future tense, not one date to be marked up in the past tense.

The graduates of Alpha Programmes are now emerging. The courses that began almost fifty years ago have produced clergy, not all of whom have stuck with the blueprint. Some have recognised that their Alpha-Mater left them with holes in their Christian knowledge. The exclusions that will sometimes crop up in sermons and teachings are the fruit of mechanistic-pragmatic training models would cover, but not be confined to, critical thinking, imagination, wisdom, desert spirituality, analogy and poetry, deeper journeys into contemplative prayer, loyal dissent and authentic revolutionary theologies. These seek to resist oppression, confront oppressors, and transform the church with liberationist thinking. The job advertisements in the Church Times are instructive here. For the most part they focus on equipping and growth – the twin concerns of mechanistic-pragmatic paradigms in training ecologies.

Alpha hasn’t caused any of this, by the way.  There is no blame being apportioned here. The success of Alpha Programmes is merely a symptom of where the Church of England has got to and where some other denominations have arrived at in the 21^st century. But if the church is to survive, it might need to ask what pedagogical assumptions programmes like Alpha carry. And whether this packaging is, in fact, at some risk of veiling the revolutionary power and gift of the gospel.

Revd. Prof. Martyn Percy

The word Anglican is one of those words in the English language which has to be combined with another one, to allow us to know what group within the wide range of manifestations of Anglicanism a speaker is referring to.  It is used by a range of disparate and contrasting Christian groups which do not routinely agree with one another.  The reason for using the word descriptively may have more to do with the group’s history than with its current theological position.  The bodies which together make up such networks as ACNA (Anglican Church of N America) or GAFCON (Global Anglican Futures Conference) are groupings which may have members with little or no engagement with the classic expressions of the Anglican spirit.  Many come together to express a fierce biblical fundamentalism and an almost obsessive preoccupation with sexual ethics.  The two examples I have mentioned bring together Christian bodies that use the Anglican designation while simultaneously attacking other more mainstream Anglican groups for their believed ‘apostasy’ and deviation from a very conservative brand of ‘biblical orthodoxy’.

  Not long ago, the badge of being Anglican was invariably a claim to something which involved membership of a cross-cultural international Christian body reaching across the world.  That vision does, of course, still exist and is given some sort of expression at the Lambeth Conferences held in England every ten years.  Sadly, this inclusive vision of what it means to be an Anglican Christian has become less dominant over the past decades.  The fierce struggles to allow a conservative understanding of Christian marriage to define ‘true’ Anglicanism have weakened the wider Anglican vision which seeks to hold together a variety of Christian beliefs within a single body.  That struggle continues, but the casualty of this struggle has been a serious weakening of the wider church.  It is hard to share a Christian message of peace, healing and reconciliation when the main energy for your existence comes from a bitter, even obsessive, objection to the way that one minority group in society wishes to express and live out their understanding of marriage.

Among the many Anglican groups which exist in an impaired or broken relationship with the main body of Anglicans, which look to Canterbury for leadership, is a body called the Free Church of England (FCE).  This group maintains links with many other Anglican networks through its membership of the GAFCON organisation. The origins of the FCE in the 1840s do not concern us here, but it is sufficient to say that the debates among Anglicans about authority were then every bit as passionate as today.   My current interest in the FCE is sparked by news of serious power struggles within this tiny church which has only a few hundred members in the whole of Britain. The bishop Primus, John Fenwick, is facing some serious challenges to his leadership and there has been talk of financial/property irregularities as well as doctrinal disputes. 

Like other people taking a current interest in the FCE, my curiosity has also been piqued by the succession of unhappy members of the C/E who have found, for a time, a spiritual home in the FCE having made well publicised exits from the national Church.  Recently three well-known dissident Anglicans, Brett Murphy, Calvin Robinson and Matthew Firth have all received a welcome in the FCE after loudly protesting their failure to agree with their bishops and the discipline of the C/E.  The task of overseeing the ministries of these men cannot be easy, since each of them arrives at the door of a new church with a powerful, somewhat overwhelming, sense of their ability to know the will of God both for themselves and for their new church.  Calvin and Brett are also highly skilled and accomplished communicators.  Watching the YouTube of Calvin debate at the Oxford Union about marriage is to be impressed at his fluency and intellect.  Even though his politics and theology, coming from an ultra-right wing stable, are to be resisted, few would win arguments in the face of such eloquence.  All three possess gifts of conviction and rhetoric.  The problem is when those same gifts of rhetoric are used against authority.   A bishop in any church will find it hard to assert episcopal authority in the case of such powerful individuals.  Two of the three have, in fact, already parted ways with the FCE.  Calvin has moved on to the Nordic Catholic Church where he functions as a priest.    He had received Deacon’s orders at the hands of Bishop Paul Hunt of the FCE in 2022.  Something similar seems to have happened to the highly gifted Peter Sanlon who, for a short period, had taken his congregation in Tunbridge Wells into the FCA in 2019.  Sanlon’s congregation are now, since 2021, part of the Presbyterian denomination.  Brett’s sacking from the FCE and his position at Morecombe is a very recent development.  It is not clear whether this suspension will hold as the congregation, not the FCE, apparently owns the church plant and can, in theory, seek episcopal oversight wherever they wish.  Whatever the precise reason for this parting of the ways, I suspect that Brett’s influence through his social media presence will always prove a threat to any who claim canonical jurisdiction over him.  Whatever the reason, it does not bode well if the FCE cannot harness the abilities of such talented individuals to the plough of making the FCE whatever it is meant to become for the future of the Church.  Meanwhile, the last surviving member of the trio of recent recruits, Matthew Firth, has been put in charge of the work of planting churches in the north of Britain. The city of York has been mentioned as a possible centre for his future work.

My direct knowledge of the FCE is based on current internet discussions but I also have had some past acquaintance of both the men who are the current bishops in this Church.  In the case of John Fenwick, the FCE Primus and Bishop of the northern Province, we knew each other as students.   Both he and I had tapped the same source of scholarship funding to study the Orthodox Church.  His interest and later doctoral studies on the liturgy of St John Chrysostom were, at the time, somewhat novel for an evangelical (late 70s).   His continued interest in the Fathers of the Church still pervades his theology, as a YouTube of one of his sermons makes clear.  His exposure to Orthodoxy will undoubtedly have left its mark on his theological outlook.  Conservative and authoritarian forms of Orthodox theology of course exist, and these may have been imbibed by the young Fenwick.  They would not, in my judgement, find it straight-forward to co-exist easily with the conservatism of an evangelical Anglican like Brett Murphy or the distinctive Anglo-Catholic conservatism of Calvin Robinson.   The falling out with Brett may be a clash of theological outlook or more simply, an attempt by the individual with institutional power (John) to regain control over the one (Brett) who has considerable articulate and charismatic power.

 Para removed as I have got Bishop Paul H confused with another of the same name

It is clear from discussions on X (Twitter) that the FCE is going through some challenging times at present.  It remains to be seen if John (and Paul) can hold things together for the distinct and unusual brand of Anglicanism that he oversees and seeks to promote.  The culture wars at present raging among conservative churches must, anyway, be exhausting for leaders and weaken the ability of their congregations to flourish. Both FCE bishops are now in their 70s and one wonders what thoughts have been given to succession planning.  They both joined the FCE as fully trained C/E clergy.  Unless other clergy with gifts of episcopacy appear, the church may shrink back into being yet another cluster of local congregations lacking direction or sense of purpose.  Vision and potential for growth can only exist when there is imagination combined with strong leadership skills among those in charge. 

by Susan Hunt

Editor writes: The legal system in Britain has many strands; in particular there are two tasks it tries to perform well in delivering justice for our society.  The first thing is to apprehend and punish malefactors, those who break the law and cause harm to individuals and institutions in our society.  A second fundamental task is to determine when an accused person is in fact innocent. If anyone is declared ‘not guilty’, he/she can continue their life acquitted and free from the accusation made against them.  Justice systems are course not infallible and get things wrong on occasion.  Individuals may spend years in prison accused and sentenced for crimes they have not committed.  The police, courts and officials who work for the cause of justice, however conscientious, sometimes allow things to go awry.  Fortunately, we have in this country a further institution which may, on occasion, protest the guilt or innocence of individuals even after legal processes have apparently been exhausted. Despite its foibles and failures, the free British Press does sometimes act positively to promote the role of delivering justice.  Many miscarriages of justice, like the Post Office accusations, have been exposed because a journalist has been prepared to burrow away to uncover evidence that the professionals, the police, lawyers and judges, have somehow missed.

The administration of justice in Britain is an expensive enterprise.  Courts and prisons represent a huge investment of resources and personnel to provide a system that provides justice most of the time to serve the people of our society. It comes as surprise to many people to discover that the Church of England operates its own justice system. It does not operate prisons, but it has procedures and can make decisions which have force and authority, being backed up by the State. I hesitate in claiming to understand exactly how secular law and church law intersect but we have seen over the past week an illustration of the way that the alleged behaviour of one ordained individual, Canon Andrew Hindley of Blackburn Cathedral, interacted with the legal processes of both church and state.

The damage to the entire Church of England, and especially the cathedral and diocese at Blackburn, because of this Hindley affair has been considerable.  For reasons that are shrouded in mystery the prosecuting authorities of the state refused to involve itself with the case, despite numerous police investigations into Hindley’s behaviour. The church’s internal legal processes have faced an uphill task in taking action. In the end, the departure of Canon Hindley was only secured through the payment to him of a considerable sum of money. It is enormously expensive to force a high-profile church employee to resign and the saga of the former Bishop of Winchester comes to mind. The pay-off for Canon Hindley will also have been prohibitively high.  One questions as to whether these costs of possessing such an in-house legal structure are justified.  A further problem is that, at the local level at least, the skills and expertise to determine the guilt and innocence of accused employees/volunteers are frequently absent.  Would it not be cheaper, as Professor Jay suggested, to hand over the entire safeguarding process to be overseen by a secular body with the skills and authority to deliver reliable justice?  This would be in accordance with the norms and protocols developed for employment law.

While the application of church law is problematic at the national level, it also, not surprisingly, encounters issues of professional competence at the local/ diocesan level.  Surviving Church has for some years championed the cause of ‘Kenneth’, accused of sexual abuse by a church Core-Group appointed by a C/E diocese.  No proper examination of the facts of the case has ever been undertaken and the unqualified opinions of the group have declared him guilty.  The group has refused even to consider the possibility of his innocence. When justice is determined without legally competent methods being applied, the potential damage to an institution is considerable, quite apart from the pain suffered by the accused person.

 Susan Hunt takes up this story of highly damaging and legally incompetent behaviour.

Let us remind ourselves about the treatment of ‘Kenneth’ whose advocate,  I, Susan Hunt, have been, in relentlessly supporting his case for more than four years. This is a saga which is well documented, using objective information including Subject Access Request (SAR) documents.

Kenneth, an elderly ailing man of 79 years, was accused in March 2020 of sexually touching a chorister, an accusation he vehemently denies. He was refused not only an investigation but also the consideration of five pieces of significant evidence and a further one from the cathedral’s own records which might have exonerated him.

Kenneth’s case, is still, four and a half years later, without investigation or any scrutiny of evidence.  Such a serious accusation has led to the gravest of injustices.

For the details see: https://survivingchurch.org/2023/11/02/searching-for-truth-how-kenneth-has-been-failed-by-the-justice-system-of-the-church-of-england/

THE PROBLEM INCLUDES MANY OTHER PEOPLE

One case which bears similarities to that of Kenneth is that of the London priest, Father Alan Griffin.  He committed suicide because of the way he had been treated in a safeguarding case. Of him his close friend, the Revd Peter Mullen, spoke of “the nonchalant cruelty of the officials who destroyed his life.” In Kenneth’s case there are nine parallels to the case of Father Alan Griffin. The  Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser (DSA) in Kenneth’s case did not even bother to acknowledge the chart I made of the similarities; surely another case of ‘nonchalant cruelty’.

Martin Sewell wrote an open letter to the Chair of the Charity Commission, Mr. Orlando Fraser KC: 13 Dec 2022 signed by 51 others. A relevant paragraph reads:

‘We are all witnesses to a highly dysfunctional church culture – one lacking in care, wisdom and responsibility – uniformly poor in responses to allegations of abuse, and subsequent complaints about corrupted, cruel and inhumane processes. These have led to despair, suicides, travesties of justice, all perpetrating much longer term pastoral and personal damage on a colossal scale. Yet nobody in the Church of England takes any responsibility for this. We have no functional leadership in safeguarding.’

THE DIOCESAN SAFEGUARDING ADVISER

The blame for the bungling fiasco of Kenneth’s case seem to lie with the DSA.  Although she claimed she was following procedures in the House of Bishops Guidance, she failed to follow fifteen procedures relating to respondents in that document. Neither would she ever give a reference to any of the claims she stated even though asked many times. These were:

1.“Our role is to believe the complainant whatever he says and any evidence to the contrary is inadmissible”:

2. “Our role is to weigh the balance of probabilities. This essentially means that we are weighing up whether, ‘more likely than not’ there is a risk based on the allegation that has been made”:

3.“Our role is not to seek the truth”:

4.“Our role is not to investigate the allegation”:

5.”Our role is not to assign guilt but to manage risk for the safety of the church  and in so doing it is victim/survivor led”. 

There are many contradictions in the above statements, as the DSA seems to have pursued her own version of the truth. This ‘Alice in Wonderland’ situation of ‘verdict first, judgement afterwards” that has been arrived at after four years cannot easily be resolved. Neither can the mantra ‘the child must be believed’ . The Diocesan Safeguarding Core Group (DSCG) members were persuaded that they could trust the DSA on this and they have now found themselves in a corner from which there is no obvious way out.  In the same way that they trusted her judgement formed on a false assessment that Kenneth is High Risk. Now in that too there is no way back – the result of amateurs making professional decisions.

A piece of evidence from the choral registers which might well have exonerated Kenneth has been deliberately suppressed by the DSA. Although she knew it was legal to give Kenneth the information we learn that her most recent excuse for not giving it was that she said she looks at the case “through a safeguarding lens” (from SAR).  It is strongly suspected that not giving it for more than four years  is a cover-up to avoid divulging information which might exonerate Kenneth and incriminate one of their own.

The DSCG boast they instigated an ‘Independent Review’. Independent it was not: the reviewer had already worked alongside the DSA and he was only allowed to work within parameters laid down by the DSCG, which did not include any independent investigation of the allegation. Even so he strongly criticised the approach of the DSCG to the case.

Lord Carlile said of Safeguarding DSCGs that they are ‘undertaking legal work for which they are not trained’. Leaving the administration of justice to a group of legally unqualified amateurs taking the law into their own hands needs to be countered by a system of proper challenge and appeal. Professor Jay also found this a weakness in the system.

An example of illegal practice by amateurs is Kenneth’s Risk Assessment when he had been designated ‘High Risk’. This had been based on incomplete and false information including the DSA admitting they had confused Kenneth’s information with that of another person; even so it was still included in his assessment. The result was that he was ‘HIGH RISK’ – the same level as a convicted paedophile.

On July 22nd 2024 I asked the Diocesan Secretary ‘Could you tell me please what professional body, if any, regulates the Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser?’ There has been no answer to this simple yes/no question. So presumably she is not accountable to anyone. Even three bishops and a dean claim they ‘cannot intervene in the processes of a DSCG’.

INFORMATION FROM SAR

From SAR there is strong evidence that the conversations in DSCG were inappropriate and unprofessional. They made cruel and disparaging remarks about Kenneth personally, his life, friends and interests. They speculated about important issues regarding Kenneth which they should have known as part of the case. The speculation often led to downright lies which Kenneth could not challenge or dispute because he did not know they were being said.

From SAR In the privacy of their meetings they even try to blame Kenneth for the impasse for ‘not engaging with the process‘. By this, they mean he would not sign a document admitting his guilt. Although Kenneth insists he wants me and my husband to be present at meetings, that was refused because I am frequently criticised for my ‘interference’ which has ‘obstructed process’. We even find advice given to the Dean to hold meetings with Kenneth in his office as that is his territory with him in control of the space. Thus he can refuse us the right to be present to support Kenneth. In an attempt to resolve this problem from their point of view there have been DSCG discussions as to what to tell Kenneth so he refuses further help from me.

In an email found in SAR to an outside person written by the Dean, he claims that the DSCG had ‘made considerable efforts at justice, honesty and compassion for the victim’.  In the context in which it was written, ‘victim’ refers to Kenneth. So, it would seem that the Dean now realises that it is Kenneth who is the victim, but he can do nothing about it without the DSA’s agreement.

PROBLEMS FOR THE CATHEDRAL

The frustration for the cathedral in Kenneth’s case is that he has never signed any agreement plan admitting guilt. Without that final jigsaw piece, the case can never arrive at any complete resolution. So, although he can now attend the cathedral under certain conditions, he has been treated as though he accepts the DSCG’s judgement. Kenneth, however, does not believe that there is any intention to move towards his full and final rehabilitation.

I continue the task of supporting Kenneth with the encouragement of those who have followed this saga on Surviving Church.  Recently, Stephen and his wife watched an online service from St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh where there was a public adult baptism.  This included a promise by the candidate to ‘work for justice and peace, honouring God in all creation’.  This promise is stated more strongly than in the words of Common Worship where the baptismal pledge is to ‘seek peace and justice’.  For me, working for justice and peace through my efforts to obtain the complete rehabilitation of Kenneth, is part of my attempt to live out my Christian identity and vocation.

This story of Kenneth casts a shadow over the safeguarding processes, not just of one diocese, but through it, the entire C/E. By resisting the official institutional version of the truth, I, as an independent advocate, am challenging the competence and professionalism of many important church people,  They come to be seen as unsafe.  The only conclusion I can draw is that currently worshippers need to be warned that the C/E is a basically an unsafe organisation.  It is unsafe because because its much-vaunted safeguarding procedures are not themselves safe.

In Friday’s Church Times we read the story of the ‘commissioning’ of seven men to positions of leadership in conservative evangelical congregations opposed to the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) process.   This commissioning is one that authorises an individual, congregationally trained, to preside over a quasi-sacramental breaking of bread and perform other tasks associated with priesthood.  It took place at St Helen’s Bishopsgate and it clearly defies the canons of the Church of England. My own take on the events at St Helen’s Bishopsgate (and All Soul’s Langham Place) is not to repeat what others have said about the schismatic nature of these actions.  Rather I want to think about the young men, the Bishopsgate Seven as I shall call them, who are occupying a position of ecclesiological ambiguity for the present.  Their position within the structure of the C/E may eventually be regularised, but meanwhile their situation and status are outside the structures, legal and theological, that define our church.  How this conundrum is resolved, whether by a formal split or some other formula, is not for me to determine.  Only time will tell how this issue is to be played out.

Returning to the Bishopsgate Seven who occupy centre stage in the current drama, it is natural for us to observe how much they are all being placed in a situation of vulnerability as the result of this commissioning.   Although, currently, they have the institutional blanket of All Souls and St Helen’s to protect them from challenge, the fact remains that their situation is irregular and outside the statutes and legal structures that govern the Church of England.  They have allowed themselves to be clearly identified with an illegal action.  Their status as commissioned quasi-ordained church leaders is not, at present, recognised by church (or state) law.  The authority awarded them through the act of commissioning is entirely dependent on a protecting group of church leaders who are linked to the St Helen’s network.   These churches and their leaders appear to believe that their position of being extremely wealthy and ‘orthodox’ gives them the right to usurp the lawful authority that exists in the Church.   If this authorising group is challenged and the status quo of episcopal order restored, the Seven will lose whatever authority they had been granted by the commissioning event.  It is not surprising that, so far, the Bishopsgate Seven have not been named.  Congregations in the future may think twice about employing or appointing individuals who have been so clearly identified with an act of canonical defiance.  Anonymity serves as a necessary protection for the moment, but, realistically, it can only be a matter of time before the names of the Seven leak out into the public domain.

Allowing oneself to be party to an historic act of canonical defiance carries with it risk.  If you are a retired bishop, like Rod Thomas, or the Rector of a wealthy prestigious church like William Taylor at St Helen’s Bishopsgate, the risks are clearly less.  You have substantial institutional power, having arrived in a position where few would dare challenge your authority, even if you are seen to be acting to undermine the integrity of the Church of England by defying its structural and canonical norms.  The risks to the group of anonymous commissioned leaders, the Bishopsgate Seven, are, by contrast, substantial.   If their names become associated with this canonical act of defiance, one that may be declared invalid by both church and state, these young leaders will be seen to have made, right at the start of their ministry, a poor decision and one that may blight their entire careers.

I want to think here about the motivations of the Bishopsgate Seven which allow them to accept an irregular form of commissioning at the start of their ministerial careers.  Their association with St Helen’s or one of its satellites during training is likely to have given each of these men a unique sense of spiritual privilege.  There was inevitably for them a considerable buzz and energy from being part of one of the most important conservative parishes in the world.  They have been trained in a church which hosted the ministry of such preaching luminaries as Dick Lucas.   The current Rector is also widely known and clearly possesses considerable institutional influence within many C/E conservative networks.  The Seven may each hope that this being close to such heroes, past and present, will somehow rub off on their own ministries.  The presence of this kind of hero worship as a dynamic of church life appears to be a significant factor in conservative evangelical circles.  Conspicuously, the now discredited Jonathan Fletcher does seem to have excelled at the art of captivating and impressing large numbers of followers (groupies?), young and middle-aged, right up to the end of his authorised ministry in 2017.   With his ability to exercise charisma alongside considerable patronage power right across the structures of the con-evo world, Fletcher possessed a powerful influence, one not granted even to Diocesan bishops.  This institutional power was also enhanced because the theological system he operated within was always prioritising the need for inerrant truth.  Theological systems which promote infallibility and leaders who claim to promote such ‘truth’ are, for their followers, very powerful indeed.  Those who attach themselves to the holder of such power believe they share it in some way and are thus protected from external challenge.

The Bishopsgate Seven have each attached themselves to an institution (St Helen’s) and the leaders in the network who exercise the power that is possessed by the group.  We can name two.   The first is the Rector, William Taylor, and the second is the commissioning Bishop, Rod Thomas.  Each of these leaders has openly identified with this act of institutional and theological defiance.  Their actions will be challenged but nothing will happen to either of them in terms of their current status.  Each of the Seven, on the other hand, have allowed themselves to be party to this act of defiance, confident in the power of their admired leaders to protect them.  Is this trust in the leaders justified?  There is something to suggest that, while both leaders named do still have considerable institutional and patronage power, their current reputation and status as respected leaders in and out of the network is being subjected to challenge.  Back in June 2019, when the Jonathan Fletcher scandal erupted into public consciousness via the Daily Telegraph, there was enormous consternation in the circles where Fletcher had been such a dominant figure.  Taylor, as Rector of the most prominent church in the con-evo network had little to say about the scandal of power abuse and homo-erotic behaviour at Emmanuel Wimbledon.  His subsequent silence on the matter lasted over a year. He claimed at the time that he had himself heard of Fletcher’s activities only in February 2019.  Rumours of improper behaviour had been flying around since 2017 and Fletcher’s PTO from the Diocese of Southwark had been withdrawn the same year.  Another salient fact which challenges Taylor’s account of events, was the removal of Fletcher from the Iwerne camp in the summer of 2017.  We are asked to believe that neither fragment of news had reached Taylor in 2017, even though he was actively involved with Fletcher through their common trusteeship of a charity known as St Peter’s Canary Wharf Trust (known as St Peter’s Barge).  If we do accept Taylor’s testimony that, as the unofficial leader of the entire con-evo network in England, he had heard nothing of the rumours, we are led to conclude that his leadership fell short.  His style of leadership evidently did not include keeping his ear to the ground and making sure, as good leaders do, that he knew what was going on in the constituency over which he had considerable control and oversight.

The part played by Rod Thomas also does not inspire us with confidence.  He had entered the charmed circles of con-evo ‘royalty’ via a different route from the majority of ex-public-school Iwerne men who are prominent in these circles.  He had been a member of Fletcher’s congregation in Wimbledon from the time before Fletcher arrived in 1982.  He was thus able to be mentored by Fletcher as a teenager, student and ordinand right up to his appointment as bishop.  We are asked to believe that Thomas saw and heard nothing untoward about the behaviour of the older man all through this long association.  It is unclear whether Thomas was acting as an innocent/dupe. Whatever explanation is brought forward for his inability to see what was going at Emmanuel Wimbledon during Fletcher’s 30 year ministry there, we are not given confidence to believe that Bishop Thomas is a good observer or judge of character.   Complete failure of curiosity is the most generous interpretation of the facts we can give to justify the leadership lapses shown by these two men.  Other interpretations could be offered.  Has the long-term identification with the St Helen’s brand, as represented by these individuals, really been a rational choice on the part of the Bishopsgate Seven?

My focus in this blog has not been about the canonical issues involved in the Bishopsgate commissioning.  It is about the apparent public weaknesses in two leading men involved in the irregular commissioning that puts at risk the welfare of seven individuals. An illegal event has taken place to further a political agenda.  There is a long-term struggle to make the Church of England conform to an agenda of ‘biblical orthodoxy’ which flies in the face of Anglican history and tradition.  Seven idealistic young men appear have allowed themselves to be identified with this struggle.  They cling to an institution and to its leaders even though there is evidence of serious past failings in this leadership.   When we learned in 2020 that Taylor, as a young adult, was himself a victim of John Smyth in the notorious garden shed in Winchester, there were immediate questions as to whether Taylor could have used his direct knowledge of these events to help prevent subsequent victims in England and Africa suffering harm.  Is this yet another example of the institution prevailing over the interests of individuals?  Important abusive leaders, like Smyth and Fletcher, both remained unchallenged for a long period because in the conservative culture the cause of institutional power took precedence over the pain of individuals.  The recent events in a London church may be a manifestation of a further example of this indifference to the true needs of ordinary people like the Bishopsgate Seven.  The real goal seems to be the ambitious plan to take over the Church of England in the name of ‘biblical orthodoxy.’   The needs and welfare of individuals perhaps will always take second place to such a grand scheme and the political demands of powerful organisations.

by Vivienne Tuffnell

The news that there’s a move afoot to remove the term spiritual abuse from the categories of abuse in the church has left me dismayed. It shows the total lack of awareness of both what spiritual abuse IS and its long term effects on a person. Currently listed as a form of emotional and psychological abuse (which is fair), it’s my belief that spiritual abuse is a gateway for other forms of abuse that include sexual and physical abuse. Just as sexuality is considered an integral part of a human being’s make up, so too is spirituality, even in those who would consider themselves non-religious.

I have been a victim of a variety of abuse but I believe that the spiritual abuse may well have been instrumental in laying me open to the others. I grew up in a non-religious home where church-going was not a thing; previously both my parents had practised a Christian faith but by the time of my first memories, this had fallen by the wayside. As a small child I was fascinated by the numinous and aged 6 I made a shrine in my bedside cabinet using the nativity from an old Christmas card as an icon, surrounding it with whatever beautiful things I could find. I performed rituals for pet funerals, incorporating the concept of holy water. At the start of secondary school we were all given a Gideon bible, the New International translation rather than the much less accessible King James bible. I immediately began reading it daily, and began attending a local free church where I made a profession of faith aged 12. Ironically, it was my mother’s distrust of this church (she thought I was joining a cult!) that sent me to the local Anglican church, which is where steadily I became laid open for abuse. I’ve always been an oddball: unusual, intellectual and often felt alienated from my peer group at school. A few years ago, in my early fifties, I was diagnosed as autistic. Anecdotally, autistic people are often perceived as different, and are marginalised and often persecuted; I desperately wanted to be included in something beyond my immediate family and to have friends. In my later teens a youth fellowship group began, led by a pair of young couples. I have some fond memories of this group and some uneasy ones. We went away as a group for a week at Easter when I was 17, where the first identifiable instance of spiritual abuse took place. As an introvert I realise now I had become uncomfortable with the communal living and had become withdrawn and angry, needing my own space desperately, to recalibrate. One of the leaders took me aside to the retreat leader, an Anglican clergyman of the charismatic persuasion, who prayed over me, laid hands on me, to dispel or cast out the perceived “oppression” by spirits. This event played on my mind ever after.

Fast forward a year to my first term at university when the Anglican Chaplaincy ran a weekend retreat to Kinmel Hall in North Wales. These retreats were intense hot-houses of all sorts of experiences, and the rising tide of signs-and-wonders experiences, with charismatic worship, had been bursting out in the student chaplaincy for some time before this weekend. During the course of it, I again experienced the discomfort of communal living and that was made worse by noise at night stopping me sleeping. By the Sunday morning, I was angry and withdrawn and wanted to get out. I absented myself from the Communion service and went and hid on my bunk. I was crying and distressed. Someone from my fellowship group had spotted me crying, and had fetched the student leader of that group, and another former student who was an Anglican ordinand. These two people then proceeded to perform an exorcism on me, refusing to allow me to leave and forcing me to submit. At the time, I believed in such things and was terrified, of them and of what they implied was afflicting me. Afterwards they told me I must tell no-one, and left me to mop up. They offered me no support or guidance or any sort of debriefing of what had happened. I internalised the experience, ending up believing I was weak, a vessel for evil, and at risk of further possession.

The rest of my first year at university went downhill rapidly, with nightmares and anxiety leaving me exhausted and scared, and desperate for support that was not forthcoming. I had already been struggling with eating, but I stopped eating, became anorexic and eventually my body completely rebelled. After a tumultuous year I came down with mumps and viral meningitis a week or so before my exams and was very poorly indeed. At least one other person from my fellowship group experienced something very similar at the hands of the same student leader and had a total breakdown and left university completely. I have often wondered what happened to her. By the end of the summer holidays (which I spent in my digs) I was so mentally unwell I made a suicide attempt. It was a turning point. I didn’t get any help but somehow, a corner had been turned. I had realised I had been losing myself. The belief that I am somehow evil, weak, stupid and so on, still resurfaces, especially when I am tired and unwell. Knowing myself now, I can see that at no point was there anything spiritually wrong with me; yet everyone was constantly talking about evil spirits infiltrating society, oppressing people or worse. The idea of spiritual warfare was a topic for almost every conversation and bible study. I discovered in my mid forties that I have a connective tissue disorder; along with being very bendy, suffering pain and dislocations, it comes with anxiety and depression (with this condition you are 20x more likely to suffer from anxiety and panic disorders). In those days, among the people I moved with, depression and anxiety were seen as lack of faith or worse, a sign that you are being targeted by demonic forces.

In the years since then, I have found it impossible to be a true part of a faith community. Even the Quakers, who I consider to be my closest match for a spiritual home, I cannot commit to fully. My husband is a vicar; when I attend church (which I do sometimes) I have to sit near an exit. I can only tolerate services with either no music or very traditional music; chorus or modern worship music sets my hackles off. Both my trips to Taizé in France were marred by the unease the chants engendered in me. I will not now attend any smaller groups, and have startled people who have offered to pray with me by refusing vociferously. Certain words, phrases and attitudes make me recoil. A tiny, barely-surfaced vocation to priesthood has been strangled and buried almost before birth. I exist on the margins of faith, passionately interested and equally passionately repelled. As I get older, cPTSD affects me more and more, with multiple triggers and factors.

A secular response to the abuse I experienced (this is just a sample of some of it) would be to tell me to just leave it all alone, have nothing further to do with churches or faith groups. Yet this is something I cannot do. Spirituality is a thread running through me from earliest childhood; to cut and remove that thread is to cut the warp on which my being is strung. Just as sexuality is at the core of a person, so too is spirituality. Like other abuse spiritual abuse is about power and control, often masquerading as concern for the well-being and soul of another person. It was watching the documentary on Bishop Ball that made me realise that what had happened to me was abusive; I had internalised much of it, unconsciously seeing it as being my own fault. I spoke at length to the safeguarding officer but at this point, too much time has elapsed. Continuing further would potentially destroy my mental health, such as it is. Many of us are left in this position of knowing there can be no justice, no reparations, no changes.

Such things still go on. There is a resurgence of those patterns of behaviour and beliefs. Though it’s sometimes couched in slightly different language, it’s the same animal. The prevalence of it is still unknown, but if an outsider like me recognises it’s going on, then it’s on the brink of becoming a scandalous problem. It’s my feeling that unless the issue of spiritual abuse is taken seriously, there can be no progress in terms of growth. Nor should a church that has hidden, dismissed, concealed, condoned and even encouraged so many forms of abuse have any right to growth. The fact that it is considering withdrawing the term spiritual abuse is a red flag, because it strongly suggests that it does not consider it a real thing at all.

In my account I have deliberately avoided using emotive language or dramatic prose in describing what happened to me, but nonetheless I must assure readers of the horror of what I experienced and its lasting effects on me. I hope that it helps someone, somewhere, understand better the consequences of such experiences.

by Hatty Calbus

           Something common to the recent abuse scandals in the Church of England has been a connection with HTB. The latest is with Mike Pilavachi and Soul Survivor, whose evangelising success and closeness used to be hymned by Nicky Gumbel. https://x.com/god_loves_women/status/1658531348347342848?s=61&t=Ao5_W_2mTy-7Nu6qyWc4Mw Much of this is well known, but drawing out connections needs the background. The network is so dense I’m likely to have missed links. (And it might be better represented diagrammatically, if anyone would like to have a go.)

            The Iwerne Evangelical summer camps were founded for boys and youths from the best public schools by EJ Nash (‘Bash’ – 1898-1982, Trinity College, Cambridge, curate at Emmanuel Church, Wimbledon). Nash was succeeded by Revd David Fletcher (1932), whose brother Jonathan Fletcher (1942, curate at St Sepulchre’s/the Round Church, Cambridge 1972-76), like Pilavachi, was granted a longterm abuser’s fiefdom, in his case at Emmanuel Church. Jonathan Fletcher attended Iwerne from 1955-2017 (many facts here come from Andrew Graystone’s book Bleeding for Jesus). John Smyth (1941, Jesus College, Cambridge, lawyer) was chairman of the Iwerne Trust from 1974-81. He and Jonathan Fletcher both felt entitled to indulge a taste for homoerotic sadism, exploiting many youths in their spiritual care, who were manipulated into massages and/or naked beatings.

            Within that elite world, the existence of both groups of prey was an open secret for decades. But Smyth died in 2018 saved by other best-public-school-Christians from the justice system. An inquiry has, to say the least, lacked urgency. Fletcher was only finally investigated when victims resorted to the press.  A hushed up investigation into Smyth in 1982 (by coincidence, the year Fletcher arrived in Wimbledon), was carried out by Mark Ruston (1916, Jesus College, Cambridge, vicar at St Sepulchre’s/the Round Church, Cambridge). Justin Welby (1956, Eton, Trinity College, Cambridge) was a Iwerne ‘officer’ (it was all very military and manly) who gave talks. He lodged with Ruston in Cambridge and was mentored by him. Ruston also mentored Jonathan Fletcher. Fletcher in turn mentored both Welby and Nicky Gumbel (1955, Eton, Trinity College, Cambridge, ex-lawyer).

          A pronounced Iwerne and HTB senior-clergy duplication is joined by the overlap of both with Eton and Cambridge, especially Trinity College (“filthy rich,” says The Tab), which occurs so often I’ll now abbreviate it to TCC. There are HTB’s three vicars up to 2017: John Collins (1925-2022, Clare College, Cambridge), Sandy Millar (1939, Eton, TCC, ex-lawyer), who put Welby forward for ordination, Nicky Gumbel (1955, Eton, TCC, ex-lawyer) and Gumbel’s close friend from school Nicky Lee (1954, Eton, TCC) who was associate vicar. There’s also former curate John Irvine (1949, ex-lawyer), involved in the early Alpha course who led HTB’s first ‘plant’. And Welby, having been brought to faith at TCC by Lee, was a lay leader at HTB, mentored by Collins and put forward for ordination by Millar.

           Revd John Stott (1921-2011, TCC), an adjutant and camp secretary at Iwerne, was not at HTB, but is much cited by Gumbel. Millar was not at Iwerne, but was a lawyer contemporary of Smyth’s at Cambridge. Bishop Richard Chartres (1947, TCC) was not at Iwerne, but attended HTB’s Focus holiday every year, and like Millar, Welby, Gumbel and Lee was at TCC. Welby, Gumbel and Lee were Eton and TCC contemporaries and friends.

           And then there are the Colmans. Sue Colman (1959) was a curate at HTB. She and her husband Jamie (1958, Eton, lawyer) donated Malsanger Park, which HTB described as its “home in the country.” Jamie Colman was at Eton with Welby, Gumbel and Lee, preceded by Millar. He was mentored by Smyth. Irvine, Millar and Gumbel were lawyers before they were HTB clergy, Jamie Colman was a lawyer married to HTB clergy. And Smyth was also a lawyer, the professional and Church connection with Jamie Colman leading him and his wife having to admit to giving Smyth hundreds of thousands of pounds over nearly thirty years till 2017, “despite knowing that the barrister had admitted beating boys and showering naked with them.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/10/colmans-mustard-heir-admits-charity-funded-child-abuse-barrister/ Gumbel appointed Sue Colman safeguarding minister at HTB. Smyth and his wife stayed in the flat of another lawyer – fellow barrister, HTB lay leader and friend of Gumbel, Jane Auld, in 2016.

          I wrote previously about Timothy Storey’s abuse. He is in prison for abusing girls as young as thirteen. The vicar at his hunting ground, St Michael’s, Belgravia, was Charles Marnham (1951, Jesus College, Cambridge). Marnham was previously the HTB curate who devised the Alpha Course. I have not been able to discover if he is another Iwerne alumnus. St Michael’s is a small church, but Marnham apparently not only noticed nothing amiss with his youth worker’s behaviour with girls, but made him responsible for safeguarding training. After Storey’s convictions, he made no statement and still saw no need to put any safeguarding information on the church’s website.

          One victim told the church authorities of her abuse and Storey was withdrawn from ordination training but was employed as administrative assistant in a London parish. When one of the victims reported her rape, she had received the response that the Church must consider Storey’s “welfare and needs.”  https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2016/26-february/news/uk/diocese-admits-safeguarding-failure-over-rapist-ordinand A further senior clergyman to put Storey before his victims, Hugh Valentine (1956) was the diocesan safeguarding adviser. https://www.iicsa.org.uk/reports-recommendations/publications/investigation/anglican-church/pen-portraits.html There was a curate at HTB, John Valentine (1963), who prior to that was at St Michael’s with Marnham. He was only at HTB two years and may be  completely blameless, and unrelated to Hugh Valentine, but given how it works, relationship looks likely.

          And there is one final, significant lawyer: Jonathan Coad. Like Marnham and Ruston, he is a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, former bass player in the band at HTB, bass player at an HTB plant. Described by Private Eye as a “legal bruiser,” he advertises his services as “protecting top brand and corporate reputations” and is currently helping Soul Survivor, whose “brand” has been rather damaged by Pilavachi. “A grateful Justin Welby” – in Coad’s words – has been another client. Private Eye reported that Welby “likes to point out that the church’s central safeguarding budget has grown exponentially under his leadership” – without mentioning that the criteria for giving compensation to survivors have been tightened and ten times less money has been spent on them than lawyers.

          The density of the connections might distract from the wider question of why HTB has links to all four recent Anglican abuse scandals. Within the network, there are those who might be called ‘abuse adjacent’ and there is the question of complicity and collusion. Some will protest, “Guilt by association!” – but their world is tightly tribal, which has worked mostly to their advantage. Apart from the institutional bonds, there is the supper party circuit. A common feature of abuse is those nearby not knowing. But there are always people denying, avoiding, minimising, deflecting, rationalising, seeing without seeing, hearing without hearing. https://www.premierchristianity.com/features/soul-survivors-the-inside-story-of-how-mike-pilavachis-abuse-was-uncovered/17824.article And, to state the obvious, particular responsibility lies with those in positions of responsibility. There’s a sharp comment in the Meghan Markle drama Suits. When a director pleads he didn’t know about some fraud, one of the hotshot Harvard lawyers retorts, “It was his goddam job to know.”

          It might be said that those who don’t see abusers as abusers won’t see their victims as victims – and recognise their devastation. This can become all too clear when the abuse finally gets exposed. The senior leader in this network is obviously Welby. Gumbel has no hierarchical role but certainly a very elevated unofficial position and, with his leadership conferences, leadership courses and leadership podcast, could surely have something expected from him. He wrote of Fletcher in 2012, “My admiration for Jonathan knows no bounds.” Graystone says Smyth and Welby exchanged Christmas cards till the mid-nineties and Private Eye has reportedthatWelby also sent Smyth money. https://x.com/frstevenhilton/status/1813710323410706754?s=61&t=Ao5_W_2mTy-7Nu6qyWc4Mw Both Gumbel and Welby were then clergy. When everything came out, Welby did speak belatedly, and, victims said, inadequately, about Smyth. His eventual comments to Premier Radio about Pilavachi seemed oddly inarticulate and again inadequate (“Here was a youth work that was remarkable on the appearance, but was abusive, deeply abusive, internally … there was abuse. We need to be honest about that. We need to be transparent. I, from all that I hear and are going on asking questions. The work on transparency is being well done.”) There seems to be no record of any comment of his about Fletcher and Storey’s protracted abuses, which also continued far into the era of safeguarding procedures.

          Gumbel has made no comment about Pilavachi, despite victims being part of HTB’s ‘family’. https://x.com/drstevelewis/status/1778074172406595726?s=61&t=Ao5_W_2mTy-7Nu6qyWc4Mw Nor, despite his Iwerne involvement, did he make a statement showing concern for Smyth or Fletcher’s victims. And there is his close connection with the Colmans, who were so invested in Smyth. When a woman was raped at HTB’s Focus holiday in 2018, the police said she was receiving support from specialist officers. The church issued a cold little statement saying it was a police matter. As a former lawyer, Gumbel would have known he could express pastoral care without prejudicing the case. After the revelations comes absence.

          Welby comes from HTB and has made it central to the future of the Church – despite the money and megachurch influence I previously tried to show are safeguarding red flags, despite Revitalise patron Chartres with his terrible safeguarding record and despite links to the four recent Anglican abuse scandals. The problem is not Welby and Gumbel’s vulnerability when they were very young to Iwerne, but their apparent fear, as powerful adults, of facing what abuse is and does. The robbed, beaten victim bleeds in the road while the priest looks the other way and keeps walking. 

Attending conferences abroad has become an increasingly difficult undertaking for me as I get older.  I have doubts that I will want to face the challenges of Manchester airport during the holiday period in the future.  However, this year the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) chose the vibrant and attractive city of Barcelona in which to hold their annual three-day event.  I attended and presented a paper on the issue of exorcism and the way it is sometimes used inappropriately as a way of ‘caring’ for members of the LGBTQ+ community.  This theme has become topical through some recent events in the Diocese of Sheffield.

The blog is not going to be a rehash of my words at the conference as most of this material has been shared with my blog readers over the years. I want, rather, to try and share a few of the main insights of some key contributors.  These are those whose professional life has been dedicated to supporting and rebuilding those whose lives have been devastated through their membership of malign and controlling political or religious groups.

One topical idea circulating in the conversations and papers was the notion that a large sector of the population in the States is being recruited to join a massive societal cult under its leader, Donald Trump.  The mechanisms that bind so many people to such a human leader, so eminently unsuitable for this leadership role, are not easy to explain.  It seems we have to explore the ideas that come from attachment theory.  All human beings, as children, pass through the stage of making strong attachments before they eventually become secure independent adults who know who they are and what they stand for.  Another way of expressing this idea is to say that we aim to develop a strong core personality.  This normal process may be disturbed in one of two ways.  Some individuals never grow up in the sense that they continue to need their early attachment relationships for psychological survival.  Others have made it through to the adult stage but then some serious experience of stress pushes them back to a childhood stage of vulnerability and an immature dependence on others.  This vulnerability of immature dependence is found in many people.  A failed marriage or the loss of a job may place the individual in a place where he or she is now ripe for recruitment to a cause or a person at the heart of a cultic group.   Instead of having a strong mature personality at the centre, the vulnerable dependent person reaches out to find a strength in attaching him/herself to another.  This may be a person or an idea/movement.  From this attachment comes a ready-made instant cluster of ideas and opinions.  No longer does one have to think or make decisions; the cult/ideology/cause/strong man does it for you.  The individual personality, as far as it can be said to exist, has become largely an extension of the movement and of the leader at its head.  The MAGA types in America have allowed Trumpism to be their mode of awareness.   This way of thinking has the immediate advantage of relieving any stress involved in thought and reflection.   To be able to say ‘this is what we think’ also gives the individual a reliable and gratifying sense of personal power and agency, a power mediated by the membership of the movement or the cult.

In the academic circles where the issue of cults is studied, the notion of ‘brainwashing’ has largely gone out of fashion.  Rather than having something removed from the mind, the cult member has had something added on.  The cult member is thought to have acquired a cult personality which may have successfully overlaid the true or core personality. This core is never in fact destroyed and it is the task of the therapist to excavate the buried core personality, a complex task.  The fact is that there are precious few therapists in the UK who understand the dynamics of cultic groups.  It requires a particular kind of insight to help extract this core personality which needs bringing to the surface and allowed once again to be the salient expression of who I or you are.

This model of thinking that presents the personality as possessing several layers is quite a challenging one to all our thinking about ourselves.  How much of our presented personality is an extra defensive screen to keep others from knowing us too well?  No one is likely to arrive at the perfect balance between living out the core self and the opposite extreme of hiding behind a variety of masks or defensive personae.  Somewhere we try to achieve a ‘good-enough’ position which allows us to give and receive love in a way that nourishes us and at same time transforms and supports the people around us. 

The conference in Barcelona was largely using the discourse of secular therapy in its efforts to provide support for cult victims.  These victims had suffered because of the toxic and harmful ideas emanating from extreme political or religious groups. What was not brought up was, of course, any theological or biblical teaching that would help stop us falling into this trap of putting on a personality that betrayed or buried our true core identities.  One of my favourite passages from Paul is the one where he expresses his joy at the thought that one day he ‘shall know even as I also am known’.  This suggests to me that the Christian task is to have a great deal of concern for finding out our true identity and cutting through self-deceit.  Such acquired fake personalities are at the heart of the cult problem.  The Church of course also has a problem in this area.  For example, how many of us have been to services where we feel caught up in an imposed but inappropriate jollity which is completely out of sync with the actual mood of the congregation.  It is also vitally important for pastors dealing with individuals to discern what their clients are really feeling as opposed to coming to the ‘correct’ solution to their problem. Joy and sorrow are both part of human experience and thus being alongside another person may involve sharing their happiness or sitting with them in their pain.  Once again, we have a passage that shows how Paul is able to reach and affirm the full reality of another human when he says, ‘rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep’.  The capacity in this way to give of ourselves to others in need is one of the greatest gifts we have to offer.

The ICSA conference has left me with insight as to the way human beings are all somewhere on a journey towards authenticity or what we describe as wholeness or integrity.  My Christian faith, together with my understanding of cult exploitation, has given me insight into the many ways this process can be disrupted when someone with an narcissistic appetite for power and gratification is allowed to corrupt and interfere with another person’s journey.   The ways that we can hurt or be damaged by others, not least by being made to become something we are not in ways to benefit them, are examples of the power of evil at work.  Somewhere in the middle of all the horror of human exploitation and abuse, whether in the cults or churches, there are biblical images that show what true relationships look like.  Although some Christians seem very adept at extracting from scripture those texts and passages that assist them in nefarious activities of abuse, we can also find models that show us decisively how to love in a way that does what it is meant to do.  It should ideally be all that strives to build up, transform and help others to find life in all its fullness.  Although the world of relationships is seemingly hard to engage with, without ever causing any harm to another, we do have the possibility of evaluating our motives. This allows us to enable true transformative goodness to flow through us.   Sometimes the apparent good and generous act turns out not to be so, but merely to bring benefit to the doer.  Christian discernment and the traditions of ethical goodness should help us to know fairly accurately when things are genuinely altruistic and Christ-like.    Christians cannot always be counted on to provide shining examples of human goodness but, at the very least, we should expect Christians to recognise goodness when they see it. Sadly, the safeguarding catastrophes of the past two or three decades have borne witness to a blunted and impoverished awareness of the nature of goodness, even among those who should be our esteemed leaders. 

       by Hatty Calbus  

In my pieces about the influence of HTB, I looked at its charity, the Revitalise Trust, and the questionability of some of its trustees, then at the safeguarding danger of following the megachurch model. The two issues come together in another member of the leadership body, its Patron Richard Chartres, Bishop of London from 1995 to 2017, who used to attend HTB’s Focus annual summer holiday, with his loud shirts a humorous tradition. For teenagers and vulnerable adults, Chartres’ approach to safeguarding could be much less amusing.

        Just before he retired from the biggest diocese in the country in 2017, he complained about the frustrations Church bureaucracy had caused him.  https://www.premier.org.uk/News/UK/Bishop-of-London-speaks-of-career-frustrations-ahead-of-retirement This dislike of bureaucracy may partly explain his lack of oversight of Martin Sargeant, whom he appointed as Head of Operations, and who in December 2022 was jailed for five years for defrauding the diocese of £5.2 million over a decade. It was unclear how much of that money had been donated by parishioners. An investigation in 2023 found that Sargeant was seen by other staff to be acting “with the authority of the Bishop.”

          Chartres’ dislike of bureaucracy definitely extended to safeguarding procedures for vulnerable adults. For several years the diocesan website included his opinion that the law protecting adults judged to be at risk was “the elaboration of defensive bureaucracy based on a culture of suspicion” and he put “vulnerable adults” in political-correctness-gone-mad quotation marks [I have a printout of the webpage.]. This critique was there at least as late as October 2012. There had been a legal requirement since the 2006 Vulnerable Groups Act to have a policy and procedures for vulnerable adults as well as children. London was the last diocese in the country, Anglican or Catholic, to comply, and by some time, not meeting the requirement till the end of 2012. In 2011, he claimed it was up to individual churches if they wanted to apply the safeguards required by law [in a letter]. https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2013/27-september/comment/opinion/the-hidden-scandal-of-adult-abuse

           The lack of oversight of Martin Sargeant and dismissal of the need for care to be taken with vulnerable adults came together terribly when a suicide attempt by Fr Alan Griffin was ignored and Sargeant also decided he had used underage rent boys. Fr Griffin converted to Roman Catholicism and these allegations were passed on to the Diocese of Westminster. He killed himself. The coroner, Mary Hassell, reported that the allegations were “supported by no complainant, no witness and no accuser.” She commented on “the breadth of the systemic and individual failings.”  https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2021/23-july/news/uk/church-s-safeguarding-blunders-could-cause-more-deaths-coroner-warns A review in 2022 noted,“It is abundantly clear that [Sargeant] was allowed to function with little accountability or supervision during the tenure of the former Bishop.”  It also suggested that he “chose to leave his post when the new Bishop came into post, partly because of her insistence on greater accountability.” According to the Church Times, “The report found that there was insufficient understanding of appropriate practice when it came to handling safeguarding allegations.”          

          The case of church youth worker and ordinand Timothy Storey in 2016 showed Chartres’ attitude to safeguarding children and teenagers was no better. This was a shocking case, all the more so because rather than historical abuse, it involved a recent predator operating for years when strict child safeguarding should have been assumed, but where there was, in Judge Philip Katz’s words, “wholesale failure.”

          Storey was convicted in 2014 of grooming hundreds of children on Facebook, sexual assault, inciting children to engage in sexual activity and making indecent images of children, and jailed for three years. In 2016 he was convicted on three counts of rape and jailed for fifteen years. From 2002-2008, he had not only been able to work as a youth pastor at St Michael’s, Belgravia, but trained other youth pastors in child safeguarding and was put forward for ordination. Complaints only seem to have been recorded in 2008 and 2009, despite how prolific his abuse was in the youth group and at church camps.

         When two of Storey’s teenage victims reported their rapes to Chartres, Storey was withdrawn from ordination training. No help was given to the victims, though Chartres told one of them who had written to him that he would pray for her “at the end of the week.” https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3160116/Bishop-London-s-apology-joke-says-alleged-rape-victim-Oxford-youth-pastor.html But then Storey had been personally sponsored in his application for ordination by Chartres. Judge Katz said his protestations of innocence reeked of “false religiosity,” yet this false religiosity was apparently invisible to one of the most senior churchmen in the country. And the Diocese of London was actually ‘slated’ (the Church Times’ word) by Katz for lying. https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2016/22-april/news/uk/judge-slates-london-diocese-over-storey-case  Katz accused the diocese of a “shameful misrepresentation of the truth” when at the end of the trial, a spokesman claimed they had acted appropriately at all times, and implied the police were at fault for not properly pursuing the matter earlier. Katz said the police had “investigated diligently and sensitively — something the diocese had been incapable of.” https://www.premier.org.uk/News/UK/Judge-s-fury-at-Diocese-of-London-after-rape-sentencing

  https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2016/26-february/news/uk/diocese-admits-safeguarding-failure-over-rapist-ordinand The 2020 IICSA report says Storey was permitted to continue working with children, as he expressed remorse. He was assessed to be “basically a good man who could be an effective priest.”

          After the trial, the diocese claimed safeguarding had been much better since 2010, yet, to repeat, Chartres’ criticism of safeguarding procedures was still on the website late in 2012 and there was no policy and procedure for vulnerable adults till the end of 2012, so the law was still being broken. And St Michael’s continued to have nothing on its website about safeguarding: no policy, no contact details. When I questioned this, the woman I spoke to there was “shocked and horrified” and was going to pass it straight on. Eighteen months later there was still nothing. It took a couple more years.          

          None of this puts Justin Welby in a good light either. Large question marks have been placed by John Smyth’s victims and Channel 4 over how much he knew about his abuse, but there should be none over what he knew about Chartres, as Storey’s trials were reported in the press. Yet Welby said nothing. When he told the IICSA  inquiry in 2018 that clergy were given training that made it “quite clear” that if a safeguarding issue were not reported it was a disciplinary matter, he omitted to say how recently this had failed to happen in London. Three months after Storey’s second sentencing, Chartres was on the stage at HTB’s 2016 summer holiday being extravagantly feted. Welby, there on the stage with him, described him as “quite simply one of the best, if not the best, bishop that we’ve had in the Church of England since the Reformation.” https://m.youtube.com/watch?sns=em&v=pA9j17re5CE (2 mins 42). This is supposed to square with a Church of England spokesperson’s statement after Smyth’s death in 2018 that “Safeguarding has always been an absolute priority of [Welby’s] ministry.” And then his reported choice to succeed Chartres, fitting his businessification of the Church, was Paula Vennells, whose leadership of the Post Office, similarly to Chartres with Martin Sargeant, featured suicides.

          Rather than resigning in disgrace, Richard Chartres retired in 2017 accepting outpourings of praise and the grandeur of a peerage, becoming the Right Reverend and Right Honourable the Lord Chartres GCVO – Baron Chartres, of Wilton in the County of Wiltshire. And none of the above was deemed serious enough to disqualify him from being appointed Patron of Revitalise, the charity to a significant degree determining the Church’s direction. To give him such a prominent role shows a continuing disregard for victims. For all the periodic bouts of handwringing and pious statements, how is anyone to believe that those with most power in the Church of England really care if lives are destroyed by abuse?

by Martin Sewell

Just when you thought the CofE ( aka “ the Post Office at Prayer ) could not make things worse on the Safeguarding front, along comes Synod Paper GS2364 in which the Church’s Jay Review Response Group delivers only one clear message –

“ Hold my beer!”

Be under no illusion; this paper is an attack on the Jay review, its clarity, its independence, its call for urgency and above all its promise to put the victims and survivors first. The General Synod is not being asked  to debate what is right about the Jay and the Wilkinson critiques, but rather to focus on how disturbing establishment group-think regards such incisive challenges.

If Jay and Wilkinson opened the Safeguarding can of worms which remains episcopally led and synodicaly governed, the good folks behind GS2364 are urging Synod to kick that can further down the road once again. With this Response Paper- which Synod will probably pass- we will not discuss it again until February 2025 and probably not conclude matters until 2026 by which time an entirely new Synod will be elected many of whom will lack historic memory.Of course many of those responsible for the abuse debacle will by then be dead or retired. It is the perfect “Sir Humphrey solution” to the embarrassments of the past.

Except it is not “the past”; talking to survivor supporters last week I learnt that new scandals are emerging with the same problems being encountered, and why would that not be the case? The same people who let victims down two years ago are still in post unchallenged and unaccountable, and there are still no conflicts of interest policies in place, or other improved safeguards for due process. Jay identifies that our Safeguarding falls well below the secular world and is inconsistent between Dioceses. That is not being addressed and will not be anytime soon.

Worse; the Archbishops have previously assured us that they deprecate the silencing of victims by the use of Non Disclosure Agreements. I already knew that these have been re-badged as “confidentiality clauses” or “non disparagement clauses” but I have now learnt that the Church has begun sending “cease and desist” letters to troublesome folk allegedly “ harassing” the institution by refusing to be fobbed off. Coming from lawyers charging £500 per hour, the threat of costs orders is plainly intended to intimidate critics into silence. Perhaps we can shame the Church into addressing legitimate grievances rather than bullying the already damaged and vulnerable in this way. Frustrated people became irritated and angry; solve the problem – not the predictable response. Think of your worst experience with a call centre then magnify it by a thousand.

If the Church’s response to its safeguarding crisis  have got worse “on the ground”, it has turned equally sour institutionally. After spending £1m on two professional and timely produced Reviews from Dr Wilkinson and Professor Jay and her team, the Church had clear narratives of how incompetently and inconsistently the Church has been led. Nobody knows where “the buck stops”, everybody denies personal effectiveness and responsibility- but all was not lost.

First Dr Wilkinson identified that after it had been arraigned before IICSA and given one last chance to put its house in order, the Church Establishment bulldozed the creation of an “ Independent” Safeguarding Board ignoring pleas from the floor of Synod to build into the process some key performance indicators.

Her report was brilliant, comprehensive, incisive and produced at pace. It stunned the Archbishops Council. It has never been comprehensively examined and debated by Synod. We learned that there was a fundamental failure to establish from the outset what “independent” was supposed to mean.The ISB members came from secular backgrounds where there is a commonly understood culture of independence, yet as former ISB member Steve Reeves, identified, what the Church actually means by ‘independent’ is “semi detached”.

This is no mere aphorism. The Church operates as a chumocracy, with a number of “good chaps” ( usually chaps ) who can be relied upon to “do the right thing” without formal limits in place. Thus it is bad form to expect the inconvenience of “conflicts of interest policies” or clear role definitions. Managerialism has been criticised for permeating the leadership culture but basic good management practice continues to evade us. Define the problem carefully before you try and fix it.

Dr Wilkinson further identified a failure to properly resource the ISB to meet its challenges; under resourced ab initio, it was further debilitated over the prolonged period during the suspension of the Chair who was thus unable to exercise her allocated role to advance the 12 critical Reviews into the acute and chronic needs ofvulnerable survivors.

It is now over a year since the ISB was peremptorily terminated without what Dr Wilkinson identified as  ‘trauma awareness’.   Those cut adrift were confirmed to have suffered ‘significant harm’ by Prof David Glasgow, a consultant Clinical Psychologist, who had had been recruited (but never deployed) by the Church to advise on such matters. Nobody within the Church has resigned or suffered any consequence for such failure, but worse has ensued.

One of the ‘ISB 12’ chose to walk away from the outstanding Review process but the remaining ‘ISB 11’ continue to agitate for justice. Some have spoken of  suicidal ideation – our victims were already people acknowledged as  hurt and vulnerable.

Without consultation (a continuing grievance in this and other cases) a reviewer was appointed. Pastoral support continued to be provided to the ISB 11 by Steve Reeves and Jasvinder Sanghera on a voluntary basis because of their conscientious acceptance of ongoing professional responsibility.  Ms Sanghera became Dame Jasvinder Sanghera because of such commitment to supporting the abused.

One year later, not one of the urgent reviews has even been commenced let alone concluded. 

Let’s do that again…

One year later, not one of the urgent reviews has even been commenced let alone concluded.

The blame lies once again with the project management rather than the individual reviewer who, I am given to understand, is deeply frustrated; there is evidently not even a required data sharing protocol in place; the ISB had similar data management issues 12 months ago;  nothing has changed

The costs however continue to mount. Questions will be asked at General Synod as to the costs of the Reviewer and support staff to date.  Mr Crompton was engaged on a two day per week consultancy contract, with support from a Business Manager specifically recruited for the task. The costs to date of achieving no progress is unlikely to be much shy of £100k based upon known comparable payments. Added to the £700k costs of the Jay report, the £350k costs of the Wilkinson Report and an unknown portion of the £300k budgeted for the ‘Response Group’ and we have a lot of expenditure for not a lot of tangible outcome to date.

Our victims continue to be sidelined and to suffer.

The Response Group has recently delivered its first report. They have collated and presented views on ‘the way forward’ together with research that confirms that the closer you are to responsibility for the way things have been badly done, the more resistant you are likely to be towards the proposals of Prof Jay. The one thing it is clear about is this: notwithstanding the suffering of the ISB11 and importantly – new survivors coming forward to join the ranks of neglected victims of injustice – the Response Group lacks any sense of urgency.

Worse, it has failed to address the fundamental question which anyone examining the shambles need to ask.

‘Given that a key failure of the ISB arose from a mismatched understanding of the word ‘independence’ between secular world safeguarding experts and the Church Establishment (Archbishops’ Council, Secretariat, House of Bishops, DSA’s etc) why has the Response Group made not the slightest effort to grasp that nettle and articulate what it thinks independence means? Is it yet again a case of  ‘Not my job, squire’?

The Response Group employs the terms ‘independent’ and ‘independence’ 175 times in its report. This implies a degree of importance to be attached to it. Unless and until we have a clear benchmark meaning of the term, all discussion is mere ‘blah, blah, blah’.

The Church has dispensed a great deal of time money and cruelty yet its Response Group has failed to even see the wood for the trees.

Professor Jay has delivered a simple and effective model of how to deliver independence in accordance with commonplace secular modelling. Diocesan Safeguarding Advisors/Officers would continue to do the work in situ as at present according to the duties set out in Diocesan Safeguarding Advisors  Regulations 2016; a few housekeeping adjustments would need to be undertaken to align those duties with the new structure but the outcome would be minimal on the ground but with one primary vital change.

There would be no confusion as to where the safeguarding buck stopped.

 It would be the duty of one charity to deliver independent Safeguarding without conflict of interest and it would be the duty of a second charity to oversee the performance of the first. Both would have independent Trustees with expertise and be required to focus on one issue only – delivering Safeguarding properly.

All DSAs would work to a common standard and be independently regulated; they would equally be resourced externally to a consistent level. If the two charities were not well run by their respective Boards of Trustees, they could be suspended and  replaced without complications; now apply that test to Diocesan Bishops.

Whether General Synod members have the time, motivation expertise, and desire to examine the deficiencies of the Response Group, we shall soon discover.

If this is how we put survivor interests first one might have wondered what a low priority looks like, however we do have one useful piece of evidence of what CofE ‘business as usual’ looks like.

The Makin Report into the crimes of John Smyth, first reported to Lambeth Palace in 2013, is now 1500 days late; the copies were due to have been sent out to named persons in the report for the process known as Maxwellisation on the 13th May. They were  sent out last week to some organisations, some of whom might be significantly ‘lawyered up’.

How long it will take to assess their representations is anybody’s guess. Prof Jay delivered a clear functional structure for reform with a plea to act urgently and not to tinker; the Church knew better.

The Church always ‘knows better’ and therein lies the root of the Safeguarding shambles we are in.

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