Visitors to this blog seem to be of two kinds. The first are the regulars (happily increasing) who come to read my comments and observations about some topical issue. Another group of people find the blog through a Google search. They want to know what I have said on some topic in the past. The most popular theme that is ‘googled’ is church shunning or ostracism. Many people seem to have had this experience at the hands of their Christian communities. The suffering experienced by some individuals seems to have been enormous. Such people are effectively cast out of a community which has been their spiritual home for a long time. In some cases, they are forbidden even to associate with family members who want to remain in the community. The pain experienced in this sort of situation is heart-rending.

The Christian leaders who exercise the sanction of ostracising certain congregational members will of course claim biblical authority for this action. They will refer to a passage such as Matthew 18.15-17. This appears to give a leader the authority for a leader to expel a ‘brother’ who has done something wrong. A similar power to root out a sinful member is implied in 1 Corinthians 5. ‘This man is to be consigned to Satan for the destruction of the body, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.’ The issue of discipline within any congregation is of course sometimes going to be an extremely difficult area to manage. In some congregations a lot of time has to be given to overseeing sexual abuse offenders who have spent time in prison. Marriage breakups within a congregation can also be very tricky areas to negotiate, particularly where both sides of a breakup are demanding support for their situation. It is not easy to avoid taking sides. Even more complicated is the situation is when two people become attracted to one another, when such a relationship would be adulterous. Not everyone feels the sense of shame which would here be appropriate. There is also the fact that most would acknowledge the relationship to be a cause of offence to others in the group. Applying Matthew’s instructions to these complex scenarios is no simple matter.

My reader will not be surprised when I point out that the Matthew 18 passage and others that give authority to church leaders to exclude people, can easily be inappropriately applied. Alongside the passages that demand obedience to a leader which we examined in an earlier post, these passages can also be used to maintain control. Sin is a difficult word to define. It is not difficult to imagine that some Christian leaders will include in their understanding of sin such things as disagreement, questioning and challenging decisions by the minister. It will also include sexual life-styles not approved of by the church. In short, texts from the Bible have come to be used sometimes to maintain strict control over members of the congregation to control their lives, their beliefs and behaviour. In a healthy congregation the possibility of disagreement is tolerated. There will be structures which allow debate and the opportunity to hear all sides to any question. In contrast, the authoritarian church will wish to close down all discussion on such matters. The ‘Spirit led’ decision of the leader is the one that prevails every time.

A power to exclude and ostracise an individual within a church is something of great moment. Even the thought that to argue against authority may be met with sanctions and exclusion will send a frisson of fear across a congregation. When the congregation colludes with this way of doing things, that fear may well be hidden. But when something occurs to upset the status quo, the raw power to shun and exclude becomes visible. It is that power that can quickly destroy the mental and spiritual well-being of the individual so affected.

One of the additional aspects of shutting out an individual member of a congregation is that everyone else is drawn into the process. They individually have to cut off all contact with the victim. Friendships and even family bonds are sundered in the effort by the leader to preserve a strong boundary between the ‘saved’ and those who have left the congregation. This rule would apply both to those who have been shut out and those who have excluded themselves. Of the latter group, Michael Reid, the leader of Peniel Brentwood used to quote 1 John 2.19. ‘They went out from our company but never really belonged to us’. The frequent quoting of this verse conditioned the congregation to believe that anyone who left Peniel for whatever reason was on their way to a state of damnation. Everyone had a duty to shun such people as well as collude with lies that are told about them. Children also caught up in these dynamics of exclusion. Old friendships were compulsorily broken. The pain on all sides was massive.

When we look dispassionately at the way shunning and exclusion are used in some churches, we can see that it is frequently to do with the maintenance of power by the leaders. It is felt to be necessary to have strong boundaries between those who are ‘saved’ and those who are not. This makes it easier for a church leader to exercise total control. Any softening of boundaries might undermine that control. It is a bit like the way that a government involved in a war has to demonise the enemy. Without that demonization, the necessary will to fight and kill the enemy will be weakened. President Trump is trying to bolster his own flagging authority in the States by creating new enemies – Mexicans, Muslims and most foreigners. The Brexit vote in this country seems to have fed off considerable antipathy towards foreigners, whether Europeans or people of a different colour. Demonization of those who are different is a popular gambit to play among leaders. It works in politics but sadly, to our shame, it also works among Christians.

When the Bible is used to shut out or exclude people it is being used as an instrument of harm. As with all abusive use of Bible texts, the interpreter needs to be challenged. While we know there are problems of preserving discipline within the church structure, we must always be aware of the way that certain texts can be manipulated to centralise power on an authoritarian leader. Those of us who do not belong to such congregations must be alert to the many victims of particular version of church power abuse. Gratifying the narcissistic power needs of a Christian leader can never be an excuse for cruel and vindictive behaviour towards Christian individuals. Once again it can be seen as simple bullying but with evil and sometimes tragic consequences. The ability of the bully to quote the Bible never excuses his behaviour.

One of the common expressions used by teenagers against adults is the word ‘patronise’. ‘Don’t patronise me’ is a common cry. What these young people are saying is do not use your knowledge and experience as a way of putting me down. I have opinions and even if they are not based on much life experience, I am still allowed to have them and express them.

Patronising someone is a way of exercising power over them. It may not be as serious or long lasting in its effects at other forms of power-abuse, but we still need to name it for what it is. Yesterday in the Church Times Angela Tilby identified the patronising which many of us have experienced in a church context. She speaks about a scenario where ‘people in distress are patronised by the saved and the certain’. I was struck by this turn of phrase. What Angela is describing is an attitude which we have met many times on this blog. People who hold that the Bible has a single level of truth -the literal- are going to insist on dogmatic answers to a variety of complex issues connected with belief and behaviour. ‘The Bible consistently teaches us that gay relationships are against the will of God; women must be subordinate to their husbands etc..’. The list is endless. Making statements like this is not the beginning of reasoned discussion. It is hitting people with unarguable tenets of dogmatism. The Word of God has been spoken and there can be no other way to proceed.

Angela Tilby has identified an increasingly powerful culture in our national church. This is the brand of evangelicalism which knows only a single way of speaking about truth. The Bible is held to speak clearly about what it means to be a Christian and how we should live our lives. There are however gaping problems for such an assumption. In the first place there many Christians, including self-identified evangelicals, who do not agree with simplistic answers to complex questions. Still less do these Christians, from a variety of backgrounds, agree that the Bible has a single answer to many of the difficult questions of morality whether personal or societal. Most of us who have studied Scripture to any depth recognise that the issue of gay marriage cannot be solved by an appeal to a couple of verses in Romans and some questionable references to gay behaviour in the book of Leviticus. The Bible simply does not allow itself to be mined in such a crude way for proof texts. The use of proof texts, either in preaching or teaching, is experienced as patronising and even abusive. All passages have to be read in their context, and the culture of the time of writing must be allowed to influence our understanding of what the text says to us now.

Christians do not now and probably never have agreed exactly how to interpret Scripture. To pretend that there is a universal consensus is simply dishonest. A still greater problem for Christians who interpret the Scripture and its message as though there are single meanings and interpretations is the huge gulf it creates with those outside the church. A non-Christian looking at the church will be quick to notice the amount of energy given to condemning a variety of sexual behaviours. It may be incorrect to suggest that Christians are universally 50 years behind the rest of society in attitudes about sex. But that is the impression that they give. Why would anyone ever wish to join a group that apparently seems to focus on sexual prohibitions above everything else? The more that we hear about the horror felt against gay sex among some Christian people, the greater the alienation that many people in our society will feel towards the church, even the Church of England.

Angela Tilby’s article recognises that there are deep spiritual needs which exist in many individuals within our society. Traditionally the church has been a place where people could come to explore what she calls ‘existential distress’. The training of clergy, I hope, still allows them to come alongside people experiencing such problems. Perhaps they can be helped to discover gently and gradually the language of spirituality with which to approach them and deal with them. Just as the loud music of a revivalist service is discordant and inappropriate to a person suffering from depression, so dogmatic and inflexible biblical teaching seems equally unhelpful to the actual needs of most people. Over the course of my ministry I have noticed in many places the way the church has withdrawn from trying to be at the heart of its community. It has been changed into a holy huddle concerned only for the spiritual well-being of those who attend. In the past the boundaries between church and community were fuzzy and indistinct. Who knew the precise motivation of parents who brought their children for baptism? Now that commitment is questioned to the point that the open but searching individual is made to feel that they have to remain outside.

Angela Tilby’s piece will be seen as (and already has been) an attack on evangelicals. It is not. It is far more to be read as a challenge to the kind of mind-set that has room for only one sort of Christian. ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions’. That should be a motto to describe the kind of church that many of us want to live in, a place where there is variety, choice and a complete absence of the kind of bullying that is implied by the word ‘patronise’. Long live a church which is free from the experience of being patronised by the ‘saved and the certain.’ That is the church I want to belong to.

The IICSA process has today (Wednesday) produced an interim report. I have not studied the whole document but one section has been reported many times in social media and the press. It concerns the way that many institutions, including presumably the church, put reputational considerations above the needs of victims and survivors. The extract is as follows:
The Inquiry considers that all too often institutions are prioritising the reputation of political leaders or the reputation of their staff, or avoiding legal liability, claims or insurance implications, over the welfare of children and tackling child sexual abuse. IICSA 25th April 2018

This statement, if applied to the church, is a devastating critique of the morality of our national church. It has led me to reflect on the way that institutions can behave in an immoral way. The church may have individual sinners as sexual abusers but the failings of the whole body that fails to deal with the problem in openness and honesty can be just as devastating to victims and survivors.

We are very good at thinking of sin as an individual act. It often is but all too frequently the moral decisions we make are not made in isolation. We all live in social contexts and while we have responsibility for our own actions it is often possible to observe social pressures affecting our decision making. Needless to say, a readiness to blame another person for our wrongdoing does not go down well in a legal context. Yet this tendency to blame another seems to have begun even in the Garden of Eden. ‘The woman you gave me for a companion, she gave me fruit from the tree …..’ Social pressures which come from family, parents or street gang do not constitute a defence in law. Each of us knows that however powerful such pressures are, every person needs to take responsibility for their actions.

If social setting, our family or a gang, create enormous pressure on us to do something wrong, imagine what it must be like where a complete society, such as Nazi Germany, has normalised evil behaviour. It has been shown through social psychological experiments that individuals, even those from stable backgrounds, quickly adapt to their surroundings and behave in whatever way is expected of them. There are two often quoted experiments which demonstrate this. Neither would be possible to repeat today for ethical reasons. One is the experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram. He showed that ordinary people were prepared to administer electric shocks (albeit fake) to strangers simply because someone in a white coat told them to do so. The subjects in the experiment believed that the situation of obeying someone with authority absolved them from having to worry about the high levels of pain they thought was being inflicted. The other famous experiment is the Stamford Prison experiment of 1972. A group of young men were invited to role-play either as prisoners or guards. Within very short time every one of the individuals had completely identified with their respective roles. On the one side, the ‘guards’ had become completely desensitised to the pain and humiliation being experienced by the ‘prisoners’. The prisoners also completely entered into the role and very rapidly developed passivity and inertia in their dealings with the guards. The social reality of the prison became an all-embracing fact affecting all of them and no one was able to step out of their respective roles. The experiment had to be terminated early when the girlfriend of Zimbardo could see the enormous damage that was being perpetrated in the trauma of the experiment.

In both the experiments it has been shown that a normal person in an institutional setting is susceptible to playing the role required of them, behaving in any way that authority may demand. In the Stanford experiment the weak became weaker but those in the powerful role became stronger as well as desensitised to the pain of those below them. Could that experiment be pointing to an interpretation of might be going on in some parts of our church? If playing a role in a fake situation (prison) could have such a dramatic effect on the participants, could not also role play in a real situation (church) have a malign effect on those who take part?

The accusation that is being made against some of the bishops of the Church of England is that they have failed to respond adequately to allegations of abuse. The IICSA Inquiry has called this a ‘prioritising the reputation of political leaders’. I am wondering whether we could see this failing as stemming from such a complete immersion in the institution they serve so that its protection is the highest value they know. Any church leader, whether a bishop or a curate is playing a role within it and thus is beholden to the institution in profound ways. Thus they can never be completely objective about its failings as those on the outside. Loyalty and love for the church as well as the roles they play within it are not going to lead to the most rational and clear understandings when things start to go wrong. Also, as certain clergy ascend the hierarchy their status within the institution becomes more embedded. If the institution is ever weakened, then status and reputation of those within it are diminished.

Zimbardo who set up the Stamford Prison experiment speaks of evil as being always linked with an abuse of power. The abuse of power by an institution is a rather more nuanced affair. When we note that the leaders of an institution will have identities completely defined in that grouping, the power they exercise will naturally have a tendency to be defensive and not always straightforward and transparent. Are we witnessing in the bizarre denials of bishops and other officials attempts to defend the institution that gives them much of their identity and self-importance? I have to say that reports of forgetfulness, documents lost in floods and other prevarications have left me struggling to understand what is now going on in the Church of England, particularly at the highest levels.

Zimbardo and Milgram both demonstrated to generations of social psychology students the power of the group to affect behaviour and personal morality. I leave my reader with the question. Are we witnessing an institution more concerned with its preservation and reputation than with the values it embodies? Is the church able to start witnessing to Christ more than it clutches on to its power and privilege?

I had intended to write a piece on the way the Bible is misused as a means of shutting out individuals a congregation does not approve of. That piece will have to wait for another day. Today I feel drawn to reflect on Gilo’s article and his observations. He claims that the Church of England at the highest levels seems to be guilty of ‘emotional delinquency’ with an attachment to ‘prestige, entitlement and deference.

What Gilo and the authors of the comments that follow his piece seem to pine for, is a new level of honesty and authenticity in our national Church, especially on the part of its bishops. They are of course mainly referring to the way that the church authorities have manifestly failed to respond adequately to survivors and others whose complaints threaten the comfortable status quo. Chris also adds to the discussion his sense of a strong disconnect in the way the church fails to engage properly with the needs of the poor and disenfranchised in our society. Returning to Gilo’s points, it seems fairly clear that there are major problems in the way that the Church is handling its legacy of sexual abuse. Those in charge of the institution responsible for the abuse seem unable to get a proper grip on the issue. Diversionary tactics and denials seem to be widespread in our church; at the same time media interest is growing rapidly. This uncovering of old secrets threatens the very future of our precious national institution.

In recent days we have been reminded (in the Church Times and elsewhere) of the 75th anniversary of the death of Sophie and Hans Scholl. This brother and sister were executed by the Gestapo in 1943 as members of a resistance organisation called the White Rose, based in Munich. This sought to awaken people to the evils of the Nazi corruption of thought and ideas. The group operated by peacefully writing and distributing tracts throughout Germany. The story of their resistance has been taught to generations of German school children and their portraits have appeared on German stamps.

The Church Times article makes something of the fact that the resistance of these young people (Sophie was just 21) followed a path that might have been set by church leaders. That is an interesting observation, but I want to refer to another part of the Scholl legacy. This was sketched out in an older 1970s essay on courage by Heinz Kohut, the American psychoanalyst. He used the accounts of Sophie and Hans to help illustrate his thinking about narcissistic disorders. The article where he discusses the Scholls focuses on their supreme courage in the face of death. It was not just that they were brave but Kohut perceives that both of them died in some way totally fulfilled as human beings. Their deaths, they knew, were destined to inspire in others resistance to the evil that they had identified at the heart of their society. The act of resistance gave their lives meaning which resonated with their core values. Kohut refers to this process as the ‘triumph of the nuclear self’. Without getting too much into the psychoanalytic language used by Kohut, it is clear that he wants us to see the Scholls as examples of how life is meant to be lived. It was said of Sophie that she ‘glowed’ in the face of death. In speaking about these young lives, Kohut implicitly contrasts them with the inauthentic parasitic existence of the many. Many people live out lives that are dependent on the opinions and flattery of others. The hero is the one who knows who and what he/she is – what is worth living for and sometimes what is worth dying for.

Kohut’s presentation of the White Rose group as examples of true authentic human living feeds into our discussion of what this blog is asking for from the Church – authenticity and total honesty. At the time of the Scholl’s deaths, the German general public had largely given up the struggle to find authentic meaning within themselves so they resorted to political solutions provided by the ruling party. They had forgotten, thanks to propaganda, how to know what they really were or thought. Notions of personal integrity were largely forgotten. In the Scholls there was, as it were, a moment of glory, as true human integrity shone through the miasma of conformity and self-serving instincts.

Whenever we encounter a gathering of people who only draw on the wisdom of a collective opinion, we can speak of a group mind. That is a situation where individual creativity and integrity finds it hard to flourish. Each person in different ways has surrendered to the collective. In some periods of history, the collective mind may conform to a political model. At other times the group ‘thinks’ along religious lines. What Gilo and other survivors seem to have been encountering are examples of thinking processes that look to a collective opinion to help them decide what to say. This process may well be caused by subtle institutional pressures placed on members to maintain a central power and control. You cannot have people thinking for themselves in the group. That would create untidiness in the collective at best; at worst you have the power of appointed leaders being undermined and challenged.

The witness of Sophie and Hans Scholl is a testimony to an authentic honest way of living that still inspires today. It represents the kind of honesty and truth that we would like to see in our churches and especially among its leaders. Where there is honesty and genuine human authenticity we can see a quasi-physical glow which many of us would describe as spiritual in nature. It is that kind of spirituality that we need and deserve to find in all our churches.

 
 

In response to Canon Simon Butler’s article After IICSA: Facing Up to Clericalism
on Via Media. https://viamedia.news/ (April 15th 2018). Gilo questions whether the new (post IICSA) gestures being made to challenge the old and arguably dysfunctional structures of the Church of England are sufficient. Old attitudes especially among the bishops seem deeply entrenched. It is helpful to read Simon’s article to appreciate this discussion. What happens in the future (fresh attitudes, new structures etc) matters not only for survivors but for the Church as a whole.

I (Gilo) recently met Simon Butler when survivors and allies protested at Synod and distributed a booklet(1) to all members. I instinctively felt him to be an ally for change. I think he can be summarised as saying: clergy need to become more lay-like, so that the laity can become more priest-like; but the twinned cultures of entitlement and deference prevent this alchemy from taking place.

But sadly the CofE continually commits itself to a path of self-diminishment. It has not faced the ‘crisis of its senior layer’. Denial, distancing, fog and blank, and an untethering from truth amongst current senior figures is too great, and reinforces entitlement. The crisis might have been faced a few years ago, and some redemption from the mess salvaged as a result. But there is an emotional delinquency in too many senior figures. I have seen it up close and personal in two mediations. One bishop recognised the need for contrition and made an adult apology, owning that his response had been disastrously advised. The bishop alongside him maintained a monochromatic response – a one answer fits all approach – clinging to petulant obtuseness. One realises with a jolt that some of the current hierarchy are depressingly quite low-calibre. Teflon coating covers over a lack of real theological guts.

I agree with Linda Woodhead’s recent article(2) calling for a new theology. But that is harder to achieve than a yard of new policy. There’s little theology of stature in the current Bishops. And any theology of contrition is centralised, expressed by Archbishop Welby, as we saw at IICSA hearings. This centralised contrition gives survivors almost nowhere to go. This is heightened by the stark contrast between the messages of both archbishops as highlighted in a recent Guardian editorial.(3) I suspect Welby doesn’t impact much on his hierarchy or strategariat. His is not a commanding enough voice to call change and shape theology in the response to survivors.

It’s a serious deficit in a structure that is taken up with management voodoo and collective omertà. This crisis cries out for a theology of justice rooted in profound honesty and commitment to reconciliation. The figures who get this are all marginals, regarded askance by the hierarchy as the survivors they stand alongside. The House of Bishops mouth change but too many regard our questions as treading on entitlement and the structures they want hidden. The deference upholding all this, both within diocesan structures and the NST, creates a culture many of us now call the Society for the Protection of Bishops. The cognitive dissonance in this culture has enabled many bishops to run to ground. The energy required to drag bishops out of foxholes is enormous – especially when it becomes obvious to the survivor that it is his/her task alone. The whole structure including the NST and civil service in Church House relies on the near impossibility for survivors of this task. Stories are numerous of survivors struggling to beat a path through intentional inertia, strategies of reputation managers, malevolence of the NST, and CofE corporate hand-wash. Something is very wrong with the theology of all this.

A new theology might enable the Church to grow from this crisis in surprising ways vital for the future. Only a theology of consensus, radical new consensus with survivors, can do this. Nothing less will redeem this broken structure if it is to recover integrity. The House of Bishops will need to make giant strides to make up for the inertia and spent promises of the past. It will need leaders of theological courage and compassionate wisdom. But prestige, entitlement and deference are not easily conquered in an institution so freighted down by these things. The Church is a heavily armoured vehicle with the engine of a lawnmower. Some of its current hierarchs need to retire before it sheds much of that armour. Realistically the Church is in for a long haul – 10 years at least of dealing with the aftermath of all this. I doubt the CofE will be any different from other churches which have spent decades fending off the impact of the abuse crisis.

(1) http://abuselaw.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Stones-not-Bread.pdf
(2) https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2018/6-april/comment/opinion/iicsa-forget-culture-new-theology-we-need
(3) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/22/the-guardian-view-of-abuse-in-the-church-a-truly-dreadful-story

A long time ago, when I acted as a Diocesan adviser to a Bishop on the paranormal, I sometimes met up with individuals who were convinced that they were oppressed by Satan or some demonic entity. The picture that unfolded, almost inevitably after some gentle probing, was that they had been part of a fundamentalist Christian group. There they were taught that they should always feel victorious and triumphant following their Christian conversion. The only interpretation that was being offered to them when they succumbed to a depressive episode was to suggest they were under demonic attack. This sort of attack was something all saved Christians might have to endure as a kind of test of their faith. I would tactfully suggest to them that their depression was nothing to do with evil or demons. In several of the psalms we see people feeling abandoned and depressed but never blaming evil entities. There is never a suggestion in the psalms that sadness, lament or a sense of defeat are somehow a sign of being attacked by supernatural evil forces.

In my writing about the musical culture of charismatic Christian worship, I have noted that there is in the worship songs a great deal about triumph, joy and victory that the Christian is supposed constantly to experience. The reality for any group of Christians is that there will always be a number who suffer from clinical depression. It may be that a depressed person finds his/her way to being in church precisely because they sense there may be there a promise of healing. For a few of these the constant cheerfulness and jollity of charismatic worship may help. I suspect that in fact for most depressed people in church, a sense of alienation from the dominant culture becomes acutely felt. There is little comfort in being told that you should be feeling one thing when you in fact feel the opposite. This may also be the message that is being delivered by so called ‘Christian Counselling.’

I have frequently spoken about the simple dualistic universe in which most conservative Christians live. On the one side there is God, angels, spiritual beings and the company of saved Christians that meet in their church and others like it. On the other side there are unsaved people, heretics and those who do not believe the doctrines of conservative Christianity. These are lumped together with demons and all the manifestations of evil in the world, alongside false beliefs and ideologies. The Christian who attends one of these ‘victorious’ churches knows which side of the divide he/she is on. They are on ‘the Lord’s side’ and this fact will eventually carry them through into the life of bliss of the world beyond. The depressed individuals will live in the same dualistic environment but there will be no certainty that victory belongs to them. Their sense of doubt about their salvation will be aggravated by a feeling that their lives have become a battleground between good and evil. This burden of uncertainty over their state of grace is one that will constantly prey on their minds. The thought is that because of their depression they are being oppressed by demonic forces. Because they are not sure which side is winning they fear for a loss of their salvation. This thought is one that can easily send a depressed Christian into a spiral of self-loathing and despair.

The text that seems to suggest that the world which Christians inhabit is a battleground between good and evil is Ephesians chapter 6.12. Here the Christian is to see his or her role as that of a soldier fighting a battle against ‘the rulers, the powers of this world and the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms’. This verse is quoted constantly as a means of presenting Christianity as involving a struggle against supernatural evil. This military metaphor of Ephesians 6 is of course an important one. However, if it is overemphasised, we end up with a lopsided expression of the faith, one that is authoritarian, intolerant and potentially violent. The whole passage, taken out of the context of the whole of New Testament, could easily be a proposal for a Christian Jihad. The ‘powers of this dark world’ might be said to refer to members of whichever political party that you oppose. In an American context this might justify a declaration of war against liberals and Democrats. Certainly, one feels that American society has become far more polarised than we are in the UK. It could be claimed that dualistic Christianity has contributed to the vast increase of intolerance and lack of civility in political life that we see in that society. However we interpret and understand Ephesians 6, it is clear that this text can be and often is misused by groups of Christians.

To return to our Christian individual who suffers from severe depression. She/he feels incapable of fulfilling the role of being part of a triumphant joyful army fighting for God. We need a better metaphor if we are to help him/her. In the first place it needs to be explained that the militaristic language of Ephesians is just a metaphor. If this language is unhelpful, it is because this dualism it depicts is, to say the least, an incomplete picture of the faith. I will admit that the language of Ephesians 6 was extremely useful when composing spontaneous prayers in my role of Diocesan adviser. It is a simple declaration that God is greater and more powerful than anything that is in the mysterious world of the unknown. It was important then to express a strong sense of the reality of God’s armour in the face of strange happenings. The metaphor of battle has its place in Christian discourse but it should never be made a dominant one.

Depression and grief of various kinds are never to be regarded as signs of demonic oppression. The depressed person, and there are many of these, needs to feel that the church never abandons them or makes them in some way unclean. The church for its part needs to rediscover the Psalms of Lament. We need liturgies that explore creatively how the psalmist sometimes felt the full agony of abandonment and betrayal and other mental states similar to the state of depression. For the psalmist these were never part of demonic activity. Rather they were simply human experiences which can coexist with belief in God. The depressed person is never meant to carry extra burdens of a teaching that says that their illness has created some openness to evil spirits. That is completely unbiblical and immensely cruel to a sufferer. When we read a Psalm such as 143 we can join in with the writer as the words are spoken: Answer me quickly, O Lord; my spirit fails. Do not hide your face from me or I will be like those who go down to the pit…. Show me the way that I should go, for to you I lift up my soul. Rescue me from my enemies, O Lord, for I hide myself in you.

This article is the first of a series of pieces which describe the way that the Bible can be used as an instrument of power abuse. Other topics that I hope to cover following this post is the issue of demonising opponents of a minister and the tactic of shunning. Both these strategies are used to by ministers across the board but the articles will focus on examples which are found at the conservative evangelical end of the church. The issue of inappropriate Bible quoting is an evil which infects many churches.

About twenty years ago I found myself in an embarrassing and unusual situation. I was taking a joint Carol Service with the local Baptist minister in the parish church. He decided bizarrely to preach about the responsibilities of ordained ministry. Instead of a reflection on St John’s gospel where Jesus talks about service and feet washing, the minister started talking to the congregation (with many children present!) about a verse in Hebrews, ch.13.17. ‘Obey your leaders and defer to them.’ Up to that point, even though I was aware of the verse, it had never crossed my mind that it applied to me or could ever define the relationship between Vicar and a congregation. After hearing him repeat several times that it was biblical for Christian leaders to expect obedience from their flock, I realised that he was occupying a different theological universe from mine in this matter. Since that day, I have discovered that there are a further cluster of ‘proof’ texts that seem to support the idea that a minister should always have control over what happens in his church. One of them is in Psalm 105: ‘Touch not the Lord’s anointed and do his prophets no harm. Another passage in I Samuel 24.6 shows David’s reluctance to kill Saul. This is because, since he was the Lord’s anointed, hostile action towards him would be a kind of blasphemy.

My Baptist colleague was on this occasion, in my estimation, using a Bible text in an aggressive, even coercive, manner. ‘This is what the Bible says and you have to follow me in the way I interpret it.’ There could be no discussion, no alternative interpretations to be entertained. On a psychological level I could see that the minister, by preaching in this way, was showing himself to be insecure. While he believed himself to be the leader of his church, he was not confident that he could exercise that authoritative leadership without reminding them of his special status from time to time. He was also working out of a very precarious world of ultra-conservative beliefs and understandings. It was precarious because he was sufficiently well educated to know that fundamentalist doctrines of scriptural inerrancy are not easy to defend. A modern inerrantist has to struggle with numerous problems of difficulties in the text, contradictions and plain discrepancies. One way round the problem is to cease to read the Bible as a connecting whole but rather to treat it as ‘mine’ of proof texts. Much of the Baptist minister’s preaching did in fact consist of leaping from one verse or section of a verse to another to illustrate the Calvinist theology that he espoused. In this way the passages that said something different could be quietly overlooked. There was never, for example, any apparent awareness of such things as the distinctiveness of each of the four gospels. The Bible was simply a large document out of which one extracted passages to support doctrine. These were then learnt by rote so that the Christian who was able to recite them correctly could be ‘saved’.

In practice I seldom preached on the nature of ordination as it applied to my own ministry. The Anglican liturgical calendar allows for a series of so-called Ember Days, and these are an opportunity for prayer and reflection on the nature of ordination. The Anglo-Catholic tradition in which I began my training has a ‘high’ view of priesthood but for most of my ministry, I have sat lightly on these ideas, preferring a fairly pragmatic approach to the nature and meaning of ordination. But it is my belief that there are also some toxic ideas of ministry around. These may be rooted in ‘proof’ texts from scripture as I have mentioned. Such ideas can have harmful even devastating consequences for those who follow them.

Let us suppose that a congregation agrees with the premises of the two quotations I have mentioned as being definitive on the way that priest/minister should relate to his congregation. Let us leave to one side the question of whether the verses mentioned have any legitimate application to a contemporary minister or priest. What has to follow is that the congregation members commit themselves both to obey and never challenge their minister. This subservience is felt to be necessary out of a respect to the word of God. It is then but a small step to regard obedience to a minister as being obedient to God himself.

Before we look further at the practical implications of obedience to a minister as being obedience to God, we should reflect on what this process may do to the minister himself. For any human being to identify with God is, by any account, an act of extreme hubris. It is one thing to have the authority to preach; it is quite another to assume this preaching will result in God-given infallible opinions. Even to entertain such an idea seems to imply that the one in charge is operating at a level of fantasy and delusion. Having expressed our doubt that any minister who seeks a high degree of control over a congregation is operating reasonably or in their best interests, we need to look further at other issues in this relationship.

Why would a humble Christian want to attach themselves to a minister who then demands their total loyalty, even worship? The answer is partly one we have already suggested. The minister is the one who reveals and preaches the word of God. To all intents and purposes, he is God. When the primary reason for churchgoing is to avoid the ‘wages of sin’ and obtain a place in heaven, then this obedience is a very serious matter indeed. To disobey is to risk hell. To disagree with the minister comes to be equally serious and potentially life changing.

From the perspective of this blog writer, the methods of interpreting scripture which apparently gives it infallibility and answers to scientific and historical questions do not stand up to scrutiny. When such infallibility is deemed to be also the exclusive possession of a church leader, the problem is magnified and becomes even more dangerous. And yet in many churches, some of them Anglican, up and down the country this is precisely what happens. The power dynamic between leader and led is not one of cooperation and mutual learning. Rather it is one of coercion and control by a leader or a small leadership team. Such a dynamic might seem strange in the world of European democratic traditions, but paradoxically this is in fact what ‘biblical’ values demand from a large segment of Christian opinion – to be subservient to the minister. The sections of the church that demand proper accountability and an informed approach to scripture from their clergy (this would apply to the majority of Church of England parishes) are probably unaware of the way others behave. Perhaps it is the task of this blog to remind each side something of what others believe, however different and even unpalatable it is.
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Today (Friday 6th) the Church Times has devoted two pages to the issue of safeguarding following the IICSA hearings. These were concluded as far as the Anglican section was concerned, on Friday 23rd March. The editorial, reviewing three contrasting approaches that are published, calls for a ‘more sophisticated and intelligent approach to safeguarding …’

It is the first of the articles, the one by Bishop Martin Warner, Bishop of Chichester that I want to examine. https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2018/6-april/comment/opinion/safeguarding-bishop-of-chichester-what-we-got-wrong-steps-we-are-taking-to-put-it-right I realise that most of the offences mentioned in the Inquiry were committed before his arrival in the diocese in 2015, but his article points to some areas of naivety on his part about the whole child abuse scandal. At the beginning of his article he refers to the case of Roy Cotton, one of the notorious paedophile priests. He accounts for the failure to stop Cotton’s offending behaviour by making a series of observations about the context of his ministry. The Bishop blames four things: academic and social snobbery, the manipulation of episcopal patronage and an over-lenient pity for him at the end of his life.

These explanatory observations as to Cotton’s ability to escape justice for decades are very unconvincing. Without going into the detail of Cotton’s ministry or the way he was able to escape accountability, I would suggest that Warner’s interpretations of what went wrong with Cotton could be expressed very differently and more robustly. This is my re-articulation of what Bishop Warner may be trying to describe. There was in the Chichester Diocese a rampant old-boy network at work. This grossly privileged male clergy of certain social and churchmanship backgrounds. Roy Cotton successfully exploited the culture of deference and dysfunctional exercise of power that had permeated the diocese for decades. This enabled him to remain in post for his entire ministry without challenge. The corrupt power structures that kept him in post involved others. Individuals, as yet unnamed, colluded with Cotton and protected him from the civil authorities. Whether these protectors were senior clergy or fellow incumbents, a miasma of guilt still remains in some areas of the Diocese. Evil flourishes when good men do nothing. In the case of child sexual abuse, I am not sure whether it is ever possible to be an innocent bystander. Unaddressed guilt within the Diocese still pervades the structures and needs to be exorcised.

Bishop Warner appears to ‘get it’ when he makes the statement ‘Survivors understandably describe this as conspiracy and cover-up …..many have testified that this was a damaging as the abuse itself.’ He then goes on to speak about the way Archbishop Rowan’s Visitation took place in 2011/2. This has led to new lay-led structures which, among other things, will bring survivors into touch with people trained ‘in the work of independent domestic and sexual violence advocacy’. This sounds to be helpful, but I still do not hear the profound sorrow for what has happened in the past. The statement ‘We are ashamed of the (the failures) and are profoundly sorry’ does not address this issue adequately. Bishop Warner goes on to say that he is not ashamed ‘of the people, lay and ordained, lay and ordained who have worked with determination and courage to change our culture and our practice ….’ Why do I not find this statement convincing? It is because Bishop Warner has not apparently understood the depth and extent of the suffering caused by the culture of his Diocese in the past. Dozens if not hundreds of individuals are still out there and we still have not heard of substantial resources being devoted to their support and healing. Until this help is visible and easy to access, protestations and offers of help will seem hollow and remote to the needs of survivors.

Let me summarise what was revealed by the hearings that were pertinent to the Diocese of Chichester. In the first place there were numerous examples of power being abused and we are not just talking about the sexual abuse. Abuses of power happened when there were failures to exercise authority responsibly and with care. When Bishop Kemp allowed the Diocese to be separated into autonomous episcopal fiefdoms, accountability among the bishops ceased to be exercised properly. That created the possibility of power being exercised locally and corruptly by area bishops. This culture of collusion then seems to have infected some of the clergy. They in some cases proceeded to protect and defend each other against outside scrutiny. All these power shenanigans which were revealed in the Inquiry were deeply harmful to those who were the victims. Complaints were deflected or unheard in many cases.

The second observation I have to make is to note that Bishop Warner has not grappled with the theological implications of safeguarding. Linda Woodhead, in the same edition of the Church Times, has written eloquently about the failures of ecclesiology and eschatology in the Diocese. I do not want to repeat her excellent points but theology’s absence in Bishop Warner’s piece is noteworthy. The abuse of power by clergy is and was a matter of theology. Anyone who allows an attitude of grandiose superiority to become internalised through adherence to a catholic teaching about holy orders needs to take care. An inherent superiority felt by clergy over lay people is a dangerous attitude. All too easily it can descend to abuse and other power games. As a clergyman I am also aware of the many biblical quotations that can be quoted to affirm my position of power in a congregation. I would in practice never use them because I believe text quoting for this purpose to be entirely inappropriate. Further teachings about forgiveness in Catholic and Calvinistic settings need also to be urgently re-visited and, in some cases, repented.

Bishop Warner’s article says many of the right things while leaving behind the impression that he still feels the show can continue as before. The challenge for the whole Church of England is to recognise that some things will never be able to go back to the old patterns of the past. However much the Church will resist this, accountability will be given to outside bodies when it comes to the protection of the young and vulnerable. The training of clergy will, in future, contain an element of ensuring that they fully understand the responsibility to understand and use power well. Supervision may enter the vocabulary of ministry right across the board from Archbishops to humble curates. The church needs to become an accountable body not only to its own members but to society as a whole. Only when it has taken the steps to understand the implications of accountability can it start to regain a rightful place in the estimation of the nation.

“A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence … anyone who wishes to produce an effect upon it needs no logical arguments; he must paint in forcible colours, must exaggerate, and he must repeat the same thing again and again. … (The group) wants to be ruled and impressed, and to fear its masters. … And, finally, groups have never thirst after truth. … They are almost as influenced by what is not true as by what is true. … A group is an obedient herd, which could never live without a master.”
—Sigmund Freud

In my attempt to educate myself in subjects beyond my original training, I have sometimes dipped into Freud’s writing. I find that my relationship with him goes in one of two directions. On the one hand I have never enjoyed his theories of the unconscious or found them especially congenial. On the other side his prose, even in translation, flows well and is normally comprehensible. This quotation came my way recently and I thought it resonated with many of our contemporary problems, both in and out of the church.

Absence of logic, exaggeration and failure to pursue the truth mark many of our current discourses today. But it is Freud’s mention of the group that I find especially interesting. I do not know exactly when Freud penned these words but, in the period up to the date of his death in 1939, it could be claimed that many thinking people allowed political groups, right or left, to do their thinking for them. The group-mind was arguably even more powerful then than it is today. If problems came up that were too difficult to resolve on one’s own, then the individual defaulted to a group of like-minded individuals. This group might be friends or ‘mates’ down at the pub. Independent thinking was too hard for most people even to attempt.

I could go on to speak about the influence of ‘opinion-forming’ newspapers like the Daily Mail on current political discourse in the UK. Clearly much of the Press in the UK and in the States has no interest in helping people to think for themselves. They offer instead instantly attractive opinions which pander to prejudice and deep unconscious bias. The chief technique of manipulation which has been used for hundreds of years is the identification of a common enemy. We can all feel smug and safe when we agree on the individual or group that we hate in common. I don’t need to enumerate all the enemies chosen by the right-wing press. Clearly foreigners of some description would form one of the categories of hate-object.

Having identified a few of the unhealthy dynamics of groups that Freud spoke about, it is painful to realise that many churches all too easily fall into the category of the mindless associations that he was describing. A contemporary worship service has a lot of ‘forcible colours’ in the form of loud, addictive and endlessly repeating music. As I have suggested many times before, repetitive music has the effect to drowning out coherent thought. Sadly, as with any addictive substance, that is precisely the point of engaging in it. People seem to long to go to a place where they can forget and where thinking and having coherent opinions is done for them by others. Possibly this is a regression to the place they occupied as a small child. Mother and father cared for them totally and they long to return to the place where they can enjoy the same dependence.

The second part of Freud’s description of the group or church is in the way that a relationship is sustained with a ‘master’. The church group often wants to be ‘ruled and impressed’. How often do we see this kind of link being established with a pastor whose word is equivalent to that of God himself? A failure to critique what is being said in church leads to a passivity about truth which Freud also identified. It has always been striking how many congregations only read the bible when selected passages are being preached about. It is never read independently by many in the congregation. This is perhaps because they fear what they might find there in the form of questions and insoluble problems that the text raises.

Group and mindless behaviour sadly seems to be endemic in our churches. Church shares with political parties the attractiveness of being a place where often opinions come ready-made. They are also spaces where individuals can feel strong as part of a group. This is what ‘we’ think about moral issues. Someone, not me, has decided what I think on the gay issue, abortion and countless other topical matters. If I were to think about them for myself that would be dangerous. I might find that I did not really agree with others. So, I will return to the mindless and safe state of being ‘credulous and open to influence’.

It is easy for church members to feel intimidated by their dependent role within a church congregation. Centuries of custom and practice has created an unhealthy deference to authority in all the churches. As part of the revolution being created at this very moment in the Church of England, that deference is beginning to be confronted and challenged. If the church is to survive and flourish it has to escape being an ‘obedient herd’. It needs to find a new role as a communion of thinking, inquiring and searching individuals. It needs to embrace the fact that in searching there may be differences of opinion. Those differences are no threat to our ‘salvation’ but are part of being human beings who are blessed with an infinite variety of personalities and ways of seeing

Amid all the talk of improvements to safeguarding within the Church of England, it is right to remember two past victims of its failure, Neil Todd and Guide Nyachuru. Both these names have been mentioned in one of the comments on a recent blog. Neil Todd was one of Peter Ball’s victims who committed suicide in 2012. The other was a young lad in Zimbabwe who died in mysterious circumstances at one of John Smyth’s camps in 1992. Smyth was accused of culpable homicide but the case was not proven. Several witnesses at his trial spoke of the abuse and savage beatings at the camps. This seemed to follow the pattern that Smyth had established with some boys who attended Winchester College and who were associated with the Iwerne camps at the end of the 70s and early 80s.

What do these two deaths have in common? In the first place neither of them would have happened if the Church had taken more seriously reports of abuse and violence in the first instance. A case against each of the men involved, Peter Ball and John Smyth, had been established to a high level of probability. While Peter Ball may not have gone on to abuse further victims after his police caution in 1992, the refusal of Church authorities to inhibit his ministry must have preyed heavily on his existing victims. Neil Todd himself seems to have reached out many times asking to be heard, only to be ignored and pushed back. Whatever the precise reasons for his death we might reasonably say that he died suffering from the trauma of sexual abuse which was severely aggravated by institutional neglect on the part of the Church.

The second disturbing link between the two stories is in the way that the two perpetrators avoided justice. Ball eventually was sent to prison but Smyth has not yet faced a proper trial. Both kept away from courts through exercising their considerable social power. Letters supporting Peter Ball were written by people of high social standing to the Director of Public Prosecutions. There were apparently two thousand of these letters. The writers of these letters probably had no knowledge of whether Ball was guilty or not. They simply felt that it was wrong to accuse an apparently charming, charismatic and holy man of such terrible actions. The Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, George Carey, also fell victim to the social charm exercised by Ball and allowed him to continue his ministry.

The facts as to how Peter Ball avoided justice for so long will be examined afresh in July at the IICSA hearings. Whether anything new remains to be revealed is another matter. A curious detail, yet to be explained, is why George Carey sent in a witness statement to IICSA claiming not to remember anything untoward about the Chichester Diocese during his tenure as Archbishop. I have no doubt that the question of the protection of Ball by many establishment figures will be commented on.

The Smyth affair is not due to have forensic examination by IICSA. Arguably though it is still a gaping wound in the church that has more to be revealed about it. There are simply too many unanswered questions. Some of the questions concern Archbishop Welby himself. He claims to have had no contact with the organisation that organised the Iwerne camps after he left for Paris in 1978. It is suggested that Welby returned on several occasions to give talks at these camps. According to Bishop Alan Wilson it is also inconceivable that Welby would not have known that Smyth had left Britain under a cloud. A report on Smyth’s behaviour was drawn up by Mark Ruston, an Anglican priest in 1982. Even though the accusations against Smyth were accepted by him as true, nothing was done to inform the authorities. Smyth was allowed to depart for Zimbabwe and later South Africa. Welby knew Ruston extremely well having had digs in his Cambridge Vicarage during his last year in Cambridge in 1978. The authorities at Winchester College were also fully aware of Smyth’s behaviour but again nothing was done to report this to the authorities. The whole secrecy surrounding the affair – something in which many must have colluded -has the aroma once again of an establishment cover-up. All the people involved from the boys themselves to the Trustees of the camps came from an elite group within British society. They also form a strong network within one powerful stratum of Anglican evangelicalism. Many of Iwerne’s ‘graduates’ occupy positions of high responsibility within Church and State and the whole affair has no doubt caused considerable embarrassment within these circles.

Two deaths of young men separated by twenty years. Both were preventable deaths if warnings of the evil behaviour on the part of two socially powerful individuals had been given earlier. One mourns these deaths, not in the sense of having known the individuals personally but because they represent and stand for the pain of many others who have been caught up in abuse cases before and after them. What are the common features in these stories?
First there was some toxic theology at work in both episodes. Toxic theology is like a fungus. It grows and flourishes in settings where groups of people collude together in unhealthy thinking. Ball’s theology was a distortion of an understanding of the monastic tradition. Smyth had a reading what true commitment to God involved and that included the ability and readiness to suffer pain.
Second. Both perpetrators were powerful individuals within the church. They were looked up to by many others and this afforded them protection from scrutiny both within the group and from the outside. Abuse was allowed to happen with ultimately tragic consequences.
Thirdly the stories show that evil selfish actions by individuals can result in tragedy of the worst kind. No one can ever pretend that sexual abuse or any other kind of abuse in the church has no consequences. It does and there is an obligation on all of us to fight abusive behaviour with every means available to us.

In this post we remember two individuals -victims of religiously inspired abuse. Their deaths lie at the door not only of their abusers. Those who kept secrets or covered up in any way for the abusers must share some of the blame for their deaths.

May Neil and Guide rest in peace and rise in glory.