A few months ago, I covered the story of Rachael Denhollander who had been the victim of sexual abuse in the States. She along with many other victims was given the opportunity to speak at the trial of Larry Nassar, her abuser, about her experiences. Nassar had been found guilty of over a hundred attacks on the athletes he had trained. Rachael’s statement was especially powerful. She spoke of justice and forgiveness in the context of her strong Christian faith. The additional fact in her story was that her own church had attacked her on the grounds that she had begun speaking about the problem of abuse in a group of evangelical churches in association with her own. She mentioned that this advocacy had forced her to leave her church because they could not tolerate criticism of other churches with whom they enjoyed cordial relationships.

Rachael’s church was never publicly identified but it has now named itself. It has also declared to the world that Rachael’s stand has resulted in a period of soul-searching and transformation for the whole congregation. The church is Immanuel Baptist Church in Louisville, KY. What they have produced is, arguably, a template for any church which finds itself on the wrong side of history in respect of abuse cases. Immanuel realised, after its time of looking at itself that it did indeed have ‘a sin to confess’. They had failed to support Rachel adequately in the lead up to the trial of Nassar and when she questioned the invitations to Sovereign Grace Ministries to preach in Immanuel. She had pointed out that there were serious concerns about abuse and safeguarding at SGM and that it was inappropriate to carry on as though nothing was going on. As the result of the apology, Immanuel Baptist Church and the Denhollanders are now reconciled.

I want to reproduce the final paragraph in the Statement for my readers as it would appear to be a model for any church which is seeking to make a new start from a position of denial, cover-up and the avoidance of truth. The paragraph is entitled The Gift of Reproof.

During a long, hard pastors’ meeting in which we were beginning to see some of our faults, one of our pastors said, “We have been given a gift.” After months of reflection, we believe this statement more than ever. Being made to see our blind spots has been a gift to us. In the last few months, God has increased our sensitivity to the concerns of the abused. He has called us to look at our own shortcomings as pastors. He has allowed us to seek and receive forgiveness from those we have failed. He has motivated us to ensure that Immanuel Baptist Church is a place where the abused are cared for and abusers are vigilantly protected against. He has renewed our sense of the importance of being held accountable to one another, to our congregation, and to the watching world. We pray that God would continue to write these lessons deeply on our hearts so that the gospel can continue to be clearly proclaimed in and through our lives.

There are several striking sections in this statement. First, we have the insight that reproof can in fact be a gift. Someone outside the closed circle which had created a pattern of groupthink, enabled them to see ‘blind spots’. The blind spot here was an inability to understand the needs and perspectives of the abused. The ability to identify and overcome these ‘blind spots’ is regarded as a gift. Because of overcoming them the congregation can see that the church can and should be ‘a place where the abused are cared for and the abusers are vigilantly protected against.’ There is also a new awareness that the church has task of being accountable both to the congregation and to the ‘watching world’.

The leaders of Immanuel Baptist Church have, in a single paragraph, come up with a set of insights about abuse which could yet provide a pattern for churches all over the world. Those who tell of abuse from the past are not the enemy. There may be speaking on behalf of God, reproving the church for its blindness, insensitivity and above all its instinct to protect the institution at all costs. The struggle that is going on in the Church of England over safeguarding issues seems very much like a battle which is being fought on these grounds. On the one side there are those who are offering the ‘gift of reproof’, the survivors and those who support them. They have been supported by the writers of numerous reports on the inadequacy of past responses. On the other side are those who have a professional concern to defend the institution and its reputation at all costs. Which side will win? We have no means of knowing. The church in Washington surrendered after five months of intense agonising and self-examination. The Church of England can delay for a long time the realisation that it has lost its way in this matter of dealing with past abuse cases. Alternatively, it can make peace with those who ‘reprove’ it. Financially that path of transparency might be expensive, but it would be the only path of true integrity and honour. The ‘watching world’ understands this clearly.

In the post of today I referred to a recent review put out by the Truro Diocese referring to a convicted paedophile who has been convicted and sent to prison. Gilo has kindly submitted further information on the background to this case which fills out the information in the last paragraph of my blog post. Some of the points that Gilo raises are quite detailed but the reader will be able to discern the point that I have made in my piece that the powers that be do not oversee safeguarding with a degree of professionalism which would help us trust their competence in this area. Gilo writes:

There are many holes in this review from Truro Diocese. I will pick out a few.

Omission of any mention of the CofE 2007-09 Past Case Review (PCR) is notable. And it’s worth having a little background on that for your readers. The PCR looked at 40,747 files dating back more than 30 years. It’s scope lasted two years and the concluding 2010 report identified only 13 cases needing formal action. Bishop Anthony Priddis, chair of the Church’s Central Safeguarding and Liaison Group which effectively led the PCR across all dioceses confidently said at the time “As a result of this Review, we are now able to say that nobody representing the Church in a formal capacity has allegations on file that have not been thoroughly re-examined in the light of current best practice, and any appropriate action taken”

The Dowling Review in fact mentions the PCR without even realising it – when it cites Bishop Bill Ind’s recollection that an audit of files had taken place in 2008 by Martin Follett, Diocesan Registrar at the time. But the reviewer, Dr Andy Thompson, seems unaware of the PCR. It’s odd that the “fat file” wasn’t unearthed, but took another 4 years to come to light. I’m told by a reliable source that the “unusual place” the file was found, was no more unusual than the back of a filing cabinet in the Bishop’s residence/office.

Why has Dr Andy Thompson left out any mention of Truro diocesan failure to carry out the PCR properly? Probably because he has no awareness of the history, little understanding of context, and has been given a carefully restricted remit.

Incidentally, when the PCR report came out in 2010, members of MACSAS approached the Church and asked whether the 13 outstanding cases included 22+ they were aware of in one diocese alone! The PCR was an expensive paper-clip hunt, and MACSAS told the Church that information on file was scant as much history and disclosure of abuse was simply never filed – or when it was – was often later destroyed. But it’s strange that Truro did not find such a significant paper-clip. Perhaps the Diocesan Communications Officer and Bishop’s Research Officer at the time made sure it was ignored. That was Dowling himself.

But there is another much more glaring omission. There is no mention of any survivors. They are invisible. Presumably they experienced the cover-ups and failure of appropriate response. Some may have tried to raise awareness as they watched Dowling rise up the diocesan ladder. But their experience and any insights on how the diocese responded to them – is totally absent. This omission is disturbing. It suggests a remit very purposefully constructed to withhold information whilst giving out carefully selected information. I imagine Dr Thompson cannot be blamed. But perhaps he should have asked Nigel Druce of the Diocesan Safeguarding Panel why such a wafer-thin remit. Why are the primary voices, the voices of survivors, not being invited to offer any insights to this diocese? Dr Andy Thompson is a leading lay figure in the diocese and on the Bishop’s Council in the diocese. I can’t help thinking a more independent and experienced reviewer would have spotted this obvious hole immediately.

The previous bishop of the diocese, Tim Thornton now Bishop at Lambeth, gets a mention in the telephone interviews, but any further involvement ends. Incidentally his chaplain cited in the review, was one of the diocesan figures I spoke with about my case. His response was priceless. A very sarcastic and mocking: “What did you expect me to do – go bang on the door of Lambeth Palace for you!” before putting the phone down. He was on the Safeguarding Advisory Panel at the time. That should indicate the culture of delinquency, deference and dysfunctionality present within some of these diocesan structures. It should also indicate the need for an independent structure – which we heard again and again expressed by many voices during the IICSA hearings.

Returning to this review, in short the remit seems entirely self-referential from a diocese that looks as if it’s protecting more than is revealed. The former Bishop of Truro and the acting Bishop of Truro (Bishops Tim Thornton and Chris Goldsmith) ought to be asking serious questions of the way this process was initiated and led. And I hope General Synod will be asking critical questions of the hierarchy and the broken culture it has so often engendered in July’s meeting in York.

Gilo

The question, ‘what is safeguarding within the Church?’ should involve a relatively simple response. After all, safeguarding for a variety of institutions has been going on for a considerable period. To find our answer we can examine the delivery of safeguarding which has now been honed by increasing levels of expertise over 20+ years. Then there is the word itself. It implies the task of keeping others safe. The hazard that was identified in the Church and elsewhere was the sexual exploitation of the vulnerable. Children and vulnerable adults needed protecting from sexual predation by others, especially those in positions of authority. Thus, everyone in the church needed to be sensitised to the possibility of such a crime taking place. ‘Together’, the slogan might run, ‘we can make sexual abuse in the Church disappear’.

So far, I have said nothing controversial. Problems begin to appear when we examine the actual minutiae of safeguarding practice. The question arises. Who are the people to make the vulnerable safe? Up till now the background discipline of most professional safeguarding officers (SOs) seems to be Social Work. That would involve a training well equipped to look at complex situations and offer judgments about what is going on. Assessing character and making assessments of risk has always been part of a social worker’s daily routine. Such a background covers many of the required skills for safeguarding including the training of others. But there are additional issues. People at risk may need legal protection and so SOs require some legal knowledge comparable to police officers. The assistant SO in my own diocese has a background in police work.

The potential skills that might be needed for SOs go further. Safeguarding work operates within the context of institutions. Do the SOs need some expertise in social psychology? Are they able to analyse the convoluted power structures that seem to lie behind many examples of abusive behaviour in church communities? Perpetrators also may have complex personality disorders. Do the SOs need to understand these and, more important, identify them before abuse actually happens? Then there are all the reports that have been written since the turn of the century cataloguing failures and weakness in safeguarding practice. Has the SO taken the trouble to read all of these to note the recommendations for the future? What about the needs of those who have been already abused? Are these needs part of the responsibility of the SOs? Should they be concerned whether such identified survivors are being cared adequately by the institution that abused them? Does their job description and the resources provided for the post allow them to hand on such victims/survivors to others for care? When the needs are not psychological but practical – housing, finance etc., are there accessible bodies to assist and deal with this side of things?

The questions I have asked would seem to suggest that safeguarding is now a huge and complex issue. In trying to answer my series of hypothetical questions about the skills required for SOs, the reader can see that it is not practicable to expect any individual, even at a national level, to be trained in so many disciplines. This is not a criticism of the individual integrity and ability of SOs. No one can operate to fulfil all the potentials demands of this job as it has evolved over the past twenty years. SOs did not exist until the 90s and they were then created to respond to a crisis within the church. It might be claimed that at the beginning of safeguarding, it was a job that involved few specialist skills beyond keeping a good filing system. Now the profession has become almost impossible to do unless, as sometimes happens, the job is tightly defined. The inability or unwillingness of SOs to offer support to survivors of abuse in many dioceses may simply be because they have neither the skills, time or practical resources to do it. If the SOs and the bishops who employ them try to keep all safeguarding activity within the diocesan structures, it is likely that some potential aspects of safeguarding will simply not happen.

One solution to the massive complexity and multi-disciplinary nature of safeguarding is simply to recognise that it cannot be delivered in all its aspects unless parts of it are outsourced to other organisations. Such an idea has been resisted and the Anglican House of Bishops seem unwilling to let go of any of their control over the process. This desire to keep everything ‘in-house’ was seen in the proceedings of the IICSA hearings. Bishops and other church authorities were clearly and painfully out of their depth in the way they had failed to manage safeguarding even over the past twenty years. When files go missing (or get flooded/burnt!), important information is not shared and unprofessional rivalries are allowed to interfere with the process of safeguarding, it is clear that something needs to change. No doubt the Independent Inquiry will have their thoughts on precisely what these changes should be. Clearly the present structures are not fit for purpose.

In July in York there is to be a debate on safeguarding in the Church of England. A major change that is needed is a clear recognition that the task of safeguarding overall is arguably too big for existing church structures to deal with. Some parts of it have been going well – the delivery of training to ordinary church members to be aware of the issue and how some members are vulnerable to abuse. Other parts of the safeguarding package are simply not working. SOs seem to be unable in most cases, mainly because they lack the resources, to help the victims of past abuse. To remind the reader of an earlier blog piece, the task of caring for past survivors should be made into an entirely separate effort – the ESTA initiative. The other main area that should be hived off from the bishops is their control of what happens to allegations of abuse. It is no longer appropriate to even pretend that Church possesses the necessary expertise to determine guilt or innocence in the case of abuse allegations.

As a footnote I have read through quickly the recent review concerning the convicted paedophile, Jeremy Dowling, in the Diocese of Truro. This was commissioned by the Diocese. Two things struck me forcibly. First the questioning of bishops seems to have been very selective and partial. Not only were some former bishops not questioned about what they knew, but the answers that were obtained from others suggested that the questioner was very deferential in speaking to them. A forensic inquiry would have pressed questions much harder than was apparently done. Also, all potential witnesses should have been pursued. The second point concerned a ‘fat file’ about Dowling which various bishops claim never to have examined. Why was the file not found by the investigators who supposedly did the Case Study Review of past cases in 2010? The Church spent millions in an effort to unearth such material. Both these questions suggest organisational unprofessionalism at the very least. A lack of episcopal curiosity also seems to have been prevalent in the Diocese of Truro.

When I was a small child, there was a recognition that, as part of growing up, we had to catch certain illnesses to become immune to them. I am of course speaking about chickenpox, measles and mumps among others. There was another illness, not uncommon among children, which had a terrifying reputation. This was far more serious; it was polio. Even as a young child I heard about children in hospitals encased in an iron lung to assist their breathing. Their lungs had ceased to work because of paralysis. Eventually the Salk vaccine for polio came in and children all over the country were given it on a lump of sugar. To organise such an immunisation process for every child in the country must have taken a lot of effort. It was apparently successful as, after around 1957, few further cases of polio were reported in the UK.

I begin with this anecdote as a way of drawing out a contrast that I see in the world of church safeguarding. The highly organised structure of trained people who make it their business to defend children and vulnerable people from potential dangers within the Church is like the Ministry of Health organising an immunisation programme. Everyone, from the Archbishops down to a member of a church council, has been required to attend a safeguarding event as well as undergo a criminal record check. This process, like the polio vaccination effort of the 50s, has required a massive amount of organisation and time. It would be good to say that these safeguarding efforts by the church will be as effective as the campaign against polio. It would be marvellous if reported cases of sexual abuse reduced to zero. The word safeguarding is one that implies protection and vigilance against possible dangers. It requires everyone to be on their guard against inappropriate behaviour, especially around relationships with children.

The IICSA hearing about the diocese of Chichester revealed that the process of safeguarding has become almost a mini-industry. I have not studied the official guidelines for good practice, but I understand that they run to several hundred pages. To add to the complexity, each diocese is responsible for the details of its own safeguarding policy. Although Church House employs 13 f/t members of staff in this area, the National Safeguarding Team does not seem to have authority over the protocol of each diocese. We might hope that out of the IICSA process some centralisation of practice as well as simplification might result.

My anecdote about polio and the task of immunisation also carried a reference to those who were tragically afflicted by the disease. They were not all placed in an iron lung but some ‘escaped’ only with a degree of paralysis to the limbs. The extreme cases died or were rendered cripples for life. These breathing machines saved lives, but an experience of being inside one for even a week must have traumatised the patients severely. By the end of the 50s no one was talking about children in hospital inside iron lungs. For whatever reason they simply were not around anymore and thus not needing to be spoken about.

If we compare the process of safeguarding with the polio immunisation programme, we need also to ask how the abuse survivors fare. From the evidence of IICSA and other communication I have had from victims via the blog, it seems to be true that many victims feel like the children inside machines designed to help them breathe. They have been shut away and ignored. All the money and the magnificent organisational abilities of the church have gone to protect as-yet uninfected (unabused) children. The survivor community often feels like the children hidden away in hospitals. They are ignored so that they can be forgotten. Safeguarding officials in trying to stamp out the virus of sexual abuse in the church, are not interested or even able to help them. The focus is on the ‘well’, not the victims of abuse.

In this blog I want to distinguish between the activity of safeguarding, the setting up of structures to protect and defend vulnerable people, and the task of caring for survivors. The church for all its detailed attention to safeguarding structures for the protection of the vulnerable, does not seem to care or give much attention in responding to victims and survivors in an effective way. This apparent indifference that survivors have encountered from safeguarding officers, nationally and locally, is said to be so hurtful that it is experienced as a kind of secondary abuse.

If we identify the safeguarding process as being like setting up a huge immunisation programme which is distinct from the task of nursing the existing victims of polio, we may be able to suggest what is missing in the church’s current response. The unfortunate victims of polio needed care in the same way as the abuse survivors need care. I have struggled to find a single word to describe the nature of the care needed by abuse survivors. Two words have been suggested to me -thriving and flourishing again. Taking the first of these words I have made it part of an acronym ESTA- Enabling Survivors to Thrive Again. I understand that this acronym is also a word in Spanish – you are. ESTA is what is needed for survivors, in the same way as unmolested children and vulnerable adults need protection through safeguarding. Let us abandon the pretence that caring for the abused plays any part in the safeguarding role. No one, nationally or locally, seems to have achieved this double role within the safeguarding community. Care of survivors should be put into the hands of a completely new body. Just as we did not expect civil servants to care for children in iron lungs, so we should not expect safeguarding experts to have much to offer the needs of abuse victims.

In this blog I am calling for ESTA groups which should be commissioned to work independently of existing safeguarding teams. They would support abuse victims who request their help. The advantage of my acronym is it indicates that survivors would not be passive consumers of help. The word ‘enable’ points to the way that the relationship of the helper to the survivor is one of cooperation and support. Survivors need many things. But it is not the task of the helper to tell them what they need. Many things should be on offer -therapy, residential care, legal support and emotional backing. Above all the survivor needs to feel heard by the institution which has abused him or her. We are not just talking about the original abuse but also the subsequent institutional abuse which has been so often reported by survivors. Unanswered letters, blanking by senior officials and a sense of being ignored by the system have been deeply traumatising to those experiencing them. By removing responsibility for helping survivors from safeguarding teams, we would hope to restore the human touch which has somewhere been lost in the process. What I have written remains an aspiration rather than a detailed proposal. But it might help someone reading it to wake to the realisation that the present structures of safeguarding are sometimes deeply damaging to those who in vain look to them for help and support.

But as I began to seek answers as to what exactly happened and why, nothing could have prepared me for the years of dishonesty, obfuscation and, at times, outright hostility that followed.
Critical records went missing, statements from staff were dishonest, investigations were superficial, the organisations that should have been taking action to ensure the Safeguarding services were safe instead acted to reassure each other that everything was OK.

This extract was taken from a witness statement by someone who lost a child through incompetent midwifery services in Barrow in Furness, Cumbria. By changing a single word, as I have done, it could easily be mistaken for a plea from a church survivor of sexual abuse. Both in Cumbria and across the country individuals have faced obstruction and hostility as they question the institutions that caused them or their loved ones real harm.

After my recent blog post when I spoke about bishops as managers who somehow then lost much of their pastoral skill, I realised that I needed to restate my claim in a more nuanced way. Bishops and other senior clergy do not in fact necessarily lose their pastoral skills with individuals; the problem is what may happen to these skills when they encounter an individual who has been damaged by the institution that they as bishops oversee. The capacity to show empathy for a woman who has been abused by a partner in a domestic situation may still function well. A problem arises when abuse is perpetrated, not by a violent husband but by a clergyman or even a fellow bishop. In this situation the shutters seem often to come down as we heard from the contributors to the previous blog post on this site.

The doctors, nurses and administrators at Barrow Hospital to whom complaints were made, were no doubt individually decent and caring people. There is nothing to suggest that as a group they neglected their children or their elderly parents. But something changed in them in the situation of having their colleagues or institution criticised. This was the beginning of the lies, dishonesty and hostility that were handed out to grieving parents and other vulnerable people. There is no doubt that this behaviour was internally justified. Sentiments like ‘we must stick together’ or ‘the hospital needs absolute loyalty from us’. All such justifications no doubt fudged the issue as to whether their actions were moral, compassionate or indeed served the long-term interests of the institution of which they were part. Of course, from the outside it can be clearly seen that such behaviour was far more damaging to the hospital than if a clean breast had been made at the start. But the dishonest culture of collusion and cover-up does not make this kind of calculation. It merely serves the immediate perceived needs of the institution. Cover-up at all costs rules, regardless of long-term damage to reputation and climate of trust. Every individual who participated in this kind of cover-up lost something of their inner soul. The institution also stole from them something important, their decency and their honour.

There are many gaps in our knowledge about what is happening in the church as the result of decades of cover-up and obstruction in sexual abuse cases. The IICSA hearings and the comments following the previous post suggest that the problems are still extensive. I would ask my readers who wish to experience the frustration of those at the wrong end of the complaint system within the church to read the comments from Andrew Graystone and Gilo. They will get a flavour of how frustrating it is to try and tackle an institution which closes ranks to make complaining almost impossible. The individuals who hide behind institutional walls are probably thoroughly good people like the Barrow hospital staff. But the institution has corrupted some of them. It is not their individual morality that has been taken away, but the institution itself may have done something to their sense of honour and their integrity.

Looking at the institutional structures of the Church of England from the outside, we can often see tremendous defensiveness at work. Those in charge of the church no doubt feel it needs to be defended because there are massive dangers if legal liability for past abuses is accepted. The diocese of Tasmania in Australia has had to sell of half its buildings in order to meet the financial liabilities for past abuse settlements. Here the cost of meeting possible claims against the Church of England is potentially huge. Even if the Church does have large liabilities to meet in the future, it is hard to see that a path of obfuscation is a viable way forward for the Church. At best it could delay the day of reckoning but this delay would only be achieved at the cost of integrity and openness. Many of us want to see the dark shadow of abuse being faced up to rather than buried by delaying tactics. Honesty and integrity are surely better weapons with which to face the future than half-truths and cover-ups.

As a final comment this blog applauds the appointment of Vivien Faull as the new Bishop of Bristol. Vivien showed her leadership mettle in the messy business with the bell ringers at York. In this blog at the time we supported her stance as there was clearly a festering problem which needed to be confronted. This decisiveness is an important addition to the House of Bishops. Let us hope that her appointment will help to create a new atmosphere not only in Bristol but across the whole Church of England.

I heard the news of the death of Tessa Jowell on the radio on Saturday. Obviously, the event was not unexpected but there is always a sense of loss when a much-respected person in the public eye dies. Among the tributes, I heard one which especially struck me. This was an appreciation to make anyone’s family proud. Tessa Jowell, someone said, was a person who sought out the powerless in society and tried to help them. She also sought out the powerful and encouraged them to help the powerless.

I have been reflecting on these words and asking myself how this might relate to what happens or does not happen in a church context. It might be hoped that anyone who gets caught up in the Christian ‘spirit’ would inevitably develop a sensitivity for the needs of those who are poor or disadvantaged. Those of us who have worked in any way with people in need know that it is seldom straightforward. People do not queue up, as in a soup kitchen, grateful for any scraps of help or attention that are on offer. The idea of what constitutes help will often differ dramatically between the would-be donor and the recipient. Untidy political questions about the distribution of resources in society are never far away. Many individuals in the so-called caring professions must go home each day wondering whether the help that they offered was indeed the best or the most suitable that could be provided. What a client thinks they need is not necessarily in their best long-term interest.

The perennial uncertainty of not knowing precisely how to respond to situations of need will be wearing on the professional (or amateur) helper. Many of the problems of deprivation seem intractable and never go away. What do you do as a teacher if half your class in a primary school turns up in unwashed clothes having eaten nothing for breakfast? How far can you help if a tenant is being exploited by a landlord when there are threats of violence in the air? A clergyman who choses to live in a ‘difficult’ area will know about countless examples of the effects of bad housing, social deprivation and poverty. Presumably the same kinds of problems faced politicians such as Tessa Jowell. She appears to have been one of the politicians who persevered with her efforts to help in situations of individual need. In her case she also used her connections with powerful social figures to bring about political changes which went wider than her local constituents.

The temptation for any carer in a difficult environment is at some point simply to remove oneself from the challenges of poverty and need. One way of doing this is to go off to work in a geographically more congenial environment. The other option open to some is to seek a post in management. In any profession, to be in management implies that one is no longer at the ‘coal-face’. One is now directing others to do the work. In a church context that means ‘preferment’, taking on the role of an Archdeacon, Bishop or an Archbishop. The day-today problems of dealing with the intractable needs of ordinary people are thus magically pushed away. They all become someone else’s immediate responsibility.

If I am right, managers in any organisation are always going to feel a sense of relief at being ‘above’ the old issues that they used to deal with. I would suggest that, as time goes on, their emotional engagement with the actual day to day difficulties of people’s lives becomes weaker. After say, three years, most managers within a professional institution will have successfully cast off the old stressful role of gritty engagement with people’s lives. They have started to live out the new persona; they have become the successful (well-paid) manager. Stresses do not go away but they change in their nature. As far as bishops are concerned, there will be the acquisition of management skills as well as staff to deal with difficult issues. At the same time close contact with ordinary human distress has decreased. Sometimes also the old skills of empathy and Christian love begin to atrophy. No one forgets what it means to be a victim of poverty or abuse, but somehow the full emotional ‘knowing’ is no longer there.

I make these comments as a possible explanation as to why it is that there seems to be such a chasm between the statements* of bishops and archbishops towards survivors of church sexual abuse and the reality on the ground – almost total inertia. Promises of putting the victims at the centre of concern in practice have turned out to be highly expensive consultations which produce almost no change in the way victims are cared for. Compared with the complexities of poverty, the healing of most abuse survivors, while challenging, does follow some fairly well recognised protocols of professional care. Rather than follow these protocols, the actions in fact taken do seem far more to serve the needs and perspective of the management class – the bishops. These actions, such as they are, make little or no sense to those who are the victims of what is, arguably, a severely defective culture.

I am one of those people in the church who unashamedly sees the problem of sexual abuse in the church from the point of view of victims/survivors. These survivors have had their lives damaged or even destroyed by systems of abusive power which had incubated a sense of entitlement among abusing clergy over decades. It is never just about sexual deviance on the part of individuals. Sexual abuse emerges out of attitudes of privilege, elitism, patronage and power-seeking. While we can expect to find institutional power games in every area of society, somehow, we might have hoped that they would be absent from the place where the teachings of Jesus are supposedly honoured.

To return to Tessa Jowell. She seems to have been a woman who moved in places of privilege but never lost touch with her readiness to serve and identify with human beings in need. Our bishops also move in places of privilege but, unlike Tessa, in many cases they appear to have lost touch with individuals in distress. Here of course we are speaking of the survivors of abuse. This apparent failure of episcopal empathy may well prove to do more damage to the health of the Church of England than any other single lapse in its recent history.

*Statements and responses from bishops followed (among others) the Elliot Report, the Butler Schloss enquiry, the Sally Cahill enquiry and Moira Gibb’s report on Peter Ball. No doubt similar expressions of good intentions will follow IICSA in due course.

Last Sunday I was singing the hymn which contains the familiar words: ‘when I tread the verge of Jordan, bid my anxious fears subside’. I could equally have been singing about the reality of God as my shepherd. Alternatively, there might have been a hymn which likened the Christian life to a pilgrimage through hostile territory. Even when, as in one case, the original reference is to an historic event, each one of these hymns is being used as a metaphor for some aspect of the Christian journey. As metaphors they allow the Christian to create inside their head a visual picture of some aspect of what Christians believe. No one was suggesting that I should take these images as a literal description of truth. To do so would have been to miss the point of the way language was being used in this context. Each image has a power as a metaphor to move a Christian and in different ways evoke the reality of their faith.

The Bible we use and the hymns we sing encourage us to do a lot of visualising and imagining reality that is at the heart of belief. Often these acts of imagination that go on inside us have no point of reference to an actual historic event. Sometimes the stories of Old and New Testaments that inspire our imagination tell of actual events; on other occasions the things that evoke an imaginative response inside us are simply well-told stories or metaphors. The reality of God or the issues around discipleship do not become any the less real inside our heads, because the story that evokes them is not historically ‘true’. Also, when I sing about ‘the verge of Jordan’ as a metaphor for the human experience of death, I am not in any way misusing it by refusing to concern myself with whether it is historically accurate. The hymn uses the story as a way of contemplating a profound human reality. The human imagination needs this and other metaphors for coping with the fact of death and the implication this has for conducting the rest of our lives.

How do our minds in fact engage with story and metaphor as a way of experiencing and making sense of spiritual reality? I suppose that the simplest answer is to say that metaphor, if it is to be used successfully, demands a developed imagination. If I think of God as my shepherd I need to provide my mind with an image culled from my capacity to imagine. It is the use of this same imagination that allows me to reach out in the activity we call prayer or worship. Reason, of course, has some part in the process but it is impossible to imagine a religious life of prayer being viable without the full participation of the human imagination. Another traditional word for the human imagination within prayer is the heart. The imagination/heart is what creates and makes use of the vivid picture language which is another word for biblical metaphors. It is also through the imagination that we can resonate inside to the language of the spiritual classics. Without metaphor and picture language in these writings, they would be very short indeed.

In summary, singing about the journey to the River Jordan involves the activation of our imaginations. This blog post has the simple aim which is to celebrate the role of the heart, the imagination which links us to spiritual realities, whether in Scripture or other types of devotional literature. When we celebrate the imagination in this way, it reminds us that there is also another approach to the Christian faith. This is one that demands that we emphasise the literal meaning of the language of the Bible whenever possible. We are expected to prioritise ‘fact’ above all other types of language. The need to find scientific statements in the poetic reflections of the author Genesis seems to kill the spirituality of the book stone dead. It is hard to celebrate or contemplate the wonder of creation when you are being forced to argue about how long the six ‘days’ of creation lasted. Like modern progressive interpreters such as myself, the early Church Fathers were deeply conscious of the way that the literal meaning of biblical passages did not necessarily reveal their most important aspect. Although we might not agree with the way that they went about their treatment of the biblical text, we can applaud the way that many of them wanted to suggest the possibility of some passages having different levels of meaning to offer. I seem to remember from my studies that key figures such as Origen were very anxious to apply the idea of allegory to the text, particularly when there are contradictions and anomalies to be overcome.

Since the 18th-century, there has been an increasing emphasis within human knowledge on the scientific, the provable and the mathematically precise disciplines. This holding up of measurable fact as superior to all other forms of knowing has had the effect of downgrading other forms of truth. This discovery of science as a tool of explanation for the natural world comes to us through the movement we call the Enlightenment. It has provided us with a great deal in terms of technology and we cannot imagine the modern Western world without it. But there have been losses to human flourishing as a result. It is, however, ironic that the Christians who claim to be most faithful to the biblical text, the conservatives, have been the ones who have been most affected by modern Enlightenment values. Arguing about the numbers and species of animals in the Ark could only ever matter to a culture (such as our own) that expects precision in measurement. Many of us who study scripture know that this kind of accuracy is unlikely to have been of special importance to the Biblical authors. Expecting ‘God’s truth’ to be like a modern scientific textbook is an extremely unhelpful and distorting approach to the text of Scripture. But this is precisely what many conservative evangelicals do with the Bible. They look for precise statements of scientific fact and historical truth in the text. In doing so they miss the variety, the nuance and the depth of the symbolism and the metaphors that are everywhere to be found. There will of course be some disagreements and debates to be had as to how to identify metaphor, fact and history. As a general point I would like to think that the authors of Scripture were far more in tune with an approach which emphasises the use of the imagination/heart as I have outlined. We are creatures that want to approach truth not only with our minds but above all with our imaginations. God is far more to be known and understood with the help of picture and metaphor. We need, of course, our minds, but we also need in knowing God to develop and foster the parts of our being that respond to divine beauty and mystery. The author of the Cloud of Unknowing, a mediaeval mystical treatise, stated it very simply when he said of God: By love he (God) can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held.

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.