The events in Syria over the past few weeks remind us of the terrible destructive power of ideologies. A civil war is clearly far worse than a conventional war in the way that it creates hatreds and divisions which last for decades even after the fighting has stopped. Soldiers in a war between nations have been taught to hate an enemy who is largely unknown and mostly unseen. In a civil war ordinary people have been taught to hate people who have been hitherto been neighbours, even friends. They may have lived alongside them for years and now they have to think of them as a terrible enemy. That enmity is then worked upon by leaders so that violence towards even women and children is perpetrated in its name.

It is said that in order to kill another person one has to overcome various deeply held taboos within the personality. It is by no means easy apparently and we would like to think that these taboos make the kind of behaviour of the type that we see in Syria extremely unlikely in our own country. Is it possible to imagine people killing each other in this country for the simple reason that they are different either in their religious outlook or their political point of view? This is not a question we often ask ourselves but the events of civil war in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and now in Syria force us to contemplate this ghastly possibility. The people of Bosnia as well as the ordinary citizens of Syria were not human time-bombs waiting to explode when they were given permission to kill members of another group. And yet large numbers of people have been forced to take part in the terrible atrocities in both countries. If President Assad’s soldiers have been guilty of dropping barrel bombs on their own side, then one has to ask what is going on in their minds. Those soldiers who have complied with the orders to do terrible things to people of the own country have evidently bought into the narrative that their victims of their ghastly actions are beneath any human consideration on account of their different political or religious affiliation. In short the inbuilt humanity of the individual soldier has been overwhelmed by a political and religious imperative.

When we consider this terrifying fact, we are being told that in some situations religion and politics are more powerful than ordinary human kindness and compassion. Ideology and religious belief can in some circumstances overwhelm human love. This fact, while it may or may not be true of us individually, should terrify us. It should make us aware of the way that religion and politics can be corrupted to serve base ends in the hands of unscrupulous leaders. While we would like to think that there is nothing which could override our own basic moral attitude towards life and its preservation at all costs, the evidence suggests that it could potentially be otherwise. Political and religious leaders do seem to have the power to corrupt the moral sensitivity of their followers in alarming ways. Even though we are not members of President Assad’s army being urged to kill fellow citizens, we should still recognise the mechanisms of indoctrination that make these actions possible.

The destruction of human sensitivity by political and religious leaders is a crime which need to be named and deplored. We have seen in this blog other lesser crimes being committed by religious groups which are a denial of human compassion, notably ostracism and shunning. Although following a leader’s command to shut out an ex-member of a religious group does not constitute actual murder, there is nevertheless a wish that the shunned person should somehow disappear. Shutting someone out is not far from a desire to see them dead. In a recent correspondence with someone, I have learned of an individual who committed suicide as a direct result of being shunned from their Christian fellowship. One has to ask the question whether this result was one that the shunners were secretly hoping for. When followers are told by a leader, religious or political, to have nothing to do with someone because they have committed some infringement, these leaders are consciously undermining the normal tendency in human beings to care for and to nurture others. When parents or children are deliberately ignored and given the silent treatment because the group leader tells you to do so, a form of soul murder is taking place. The command is obeyed because the followers need to belong to the group. This need is so powerful that it can be manipulated so that the group ideology takes precedence over the human call to love. There is a kind of blasphemy at work whenever Christians who want to follow Jesus’s command to love others are persuaded to shut out others in the name of purity or some higher purpose. We may find it hard to love everyone but there is nothing in Jesus’s words which gives any encouragement to the idea that we should try to destroy someone by deliberately cutting them out of our lives or the life of the group. When a political or religious leader tells us to do this, we should know that it is time to escape from this group. Needless to say, many people in such a situation find it impossible to move away from the group, because they have become hopelessly entangled emotionally, socially and financially within it. The group has, in other words, made them its slave. When this is the situation, their freedom to choose has been destroyed. We are right in this situation to call that group cultic.

This blog post has been an attempt to help us recognise how religions and political ideologies are sometimes guilty of destroying the humanity and capacity to love which exists within each one of us. That is indeed a terrifying indictment of their power and influence in our world. This blog has not addressed the way that this process happens within a political context. Rather it has taken a brief look at the way that some religious authority takes away the ability of an ordinary Christian disciple to flourish and to grow. Where we see Christian flourishing being destroyed by a demand for authoritarian obedience, we need to protest and protest loudly. There is no room within New Testament Christianity for such enslavement and tyranny; it is a denial of our humanity and thus all that Christ preached and stood for.

Recent news stories in the UK have brought to our attention the issue of tribalism in politics. By ‘tribalism’ I am referring to the age old tendency for one group to define itself by its hostility and differentiation from another group. Defining a ‘them’ does wonders for creating a sense of solidarity among the members of the ‘in’ crowd. In the current UK political example we are seeing a revival of anti-Israeli, even anti-semitic, sentiments among the hard-left sections of the Labour party. That it should have raised its head now is of no surprise as these hard left groups have been welcomed back into the party since the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader. I do not propose to do a political or historical analysis of this situation, but merely to point out that there will always be groups in politics who attract members because they all share identical hatreds for the same people.

The majority of my readers will not belong to extreme political groups where defining, naming and vilifying another group is the raison d’etre of existence. But all of us will have at some point been on a march or taken part in a demonstration where we are expressing hostility to a group or another government. I can remember taking part in a demonstration outside the Spanish embassy in London at the end of the 60s. I cannot remember what the cause was but it was memorable for me as I had a chance encounter with Bishop Trevor Huddleston, the well-known anti-apartheid campaigner. I also tasted some political activity as a supporter of Amnesty International, a cause which I support to this day. The exposure to any kind of political activity will have the result that we will recognise something of the pull that tribal politics, being against something, will have for people, especially the young. When you protest about something you despise or deplore, you have a strong sense of self-definition. You become one of the ‘good’ people who loathes fascism, tyranny or whatever is the evil movement of the moment.

Political activism is of course not just taking place within political parties. One can be politically active in any organisation and this of course includes churches. In some sense this blog is a political act. It is a small protest in the face of an institution which finds it difficult to recognise that power abuse is a problem. Protest in the old fashioned meaning of the word does not suggest that there Is necessarily an evil ‘other’. The protest is about trying to get an institution to face up to a largely ignored problem. As long there are victims of the abuse of power within the church, then someone should be thinking about the issue. When an institution appears to be blind to what is going on within its borders, then protest is a legitimate and necessary course of action.

To say that this blog is speaking out against power abuse in the church in a general sense is not of course the complete truth. As my readers will know, there is a strand of Christian practice which I identify as having a particular problem with handling power successfully. By no means is it the only one but the strand, which for shorthand I describe as conservative Charismatic, seems often to place the spiritual and emotional needs of its people in second place to the amassing of power, financial and emotional for the gratification of its leaders. Thus I spend time analysing the power dynamics of these kinds of church using both theoretical and actual examples. Reports, like the Langlois report into the affairs of Peniel church in Brentwood, allow the theoretical side of the blog to be tested against the harsh reality of what takes place ‘in the pews’ on some occasions.

The writing of such analyses about the behaviour of other people is not without its dangers. As with any politician seeking to name the evils of opponents, it is all too easy to create a ‘them’ in my imagination. I hope that I am aware of this danger and it is here that my readers have an important part to play. It is for them to spot signs if I am ever in danger of lapsing into caricature and demonising others in through an attack of intellectual laziness. If I want to interpret what I see going on among many of the political thinkers that are being scrutinised by the media at present, I identify a strong attack of mental sloth. Thinking through a fresh political stance (or theological one for that matter) takes effort. It is easier to sloganise than to think through a new position for the present. The rewards of also having a band of ‘comrades’ to join you in proclaiming these old hackneyed slogans is not without its rewards..

Being ‘political’ whether in politics or the church requires constant vigilance. The vigilance being required is never to lapse into cheap jibes, exaggeration and caricature of those one does not agree with. There are some apparent rewards that come with joining with others in belittling one’s opponents. To be joined with others in ‘hating’ an out-group gives one a sense of importance and power. These feelings are however fairly superficial and short lived. A boost to self-esteem that comes as the result of being part of a large ‘successful’ group will be normally be followed by a descent back into the ordinary experience of being alone. The importance one feels from being part of a tribe that makes its name by being against others is seen to be an empty sterile place in the long-term.

Recent comments by Justin Welby about his discovery that his mother’s husband was not in fact his biological father are helpful in this context. On learning that he was not genetically a Welby, he remarked that he obtained his identity from his God-given identity in Jesus Christ. Whatever we understand to be the meaning of these words, we have a witness to a Christian reality that puts our tribalisms, based on blood or nationhood, firmly in their place.

After a full two years the Hillsborough inquest is finally over. For the sake of my non-UK readers, I should mention that Hillsborough was a terrible sports disaster when 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death at Sheffield in 1989. There are many aspects of this legal process which attract our interest but I find myself drawn to pointing out the way that the integrity of the ordinary Liverpool supporters has been upheld. For 27 years this integrity was tainted by what we now know to be unsupported rumours and slander. It was always being suggested that the cause of the catastrophe was partly to be attributed to the unruly behaviour of the Liverpool fans. The police were thus using their considerable social power to maintain that this was an accident which they could not have prevented. It now appears that appalling, even criminal, decisions were made by some of the police that day leading to the terrible events.

My own life and the Hillsborough disaster intersected one another through the fact that one victim, Derek Godwin, was a young man who lived in my then parish. I spent a lot of time trying to care for the family, conducting the funeral and generally hearing all about the events of that terrible day. I must confess that none of the claims against the police were being articulated by Derek’s parents. Because his character was such a gentle one, no one ever suggested that he was involved in provoking or aggravating the disaster. His parents, while devastated by the tragedy, were not holding any grudges against other people.

I want to return to the part of the Hillsborough story which highlights the power of truth and justice against the power of institutions wielding considerable social power. The event demonstrated clearly how those in charge, the police and their supporters, thought that they could control the story and write the official history of the event. Something similar seems to be being attempted at Trinity Church Brentwood. A devastating report, criticising the appalling behaviour of leaders trustees and other hangers on over 30 or more years, has been set out in the report by John Langlois. The church, using what power still remains to it, is trying to airbrush the report out of existence. Its method is to spread rumours about the integrity of the author and thus discredit the whole report. This reminds us strongly of the behaviour of the police in their attempts to suggest that hooliganism was at the root of the Hillsborough disaster. In the case of Peniel/Trinity, the latest rumour and innuendo being made against John Langlois was not expressed until several months after his dismissal by the trustees. The original dissolving of the Commission in July 2015 was on the grounds that his report contained bias which made it of no value. Now the current rumour is that he had incorporated some material from another report into his own. No details of precisely what this means are available. John has also not been afforded the right to reply against either accusation. It is strange also that the reasons for his dismissal and the complete ignoring of his report has subtly changed over the months. At least at Hillsborough, the police defence of themselves against accusations of gross incompetence and criminal behaviour was apparently consistent. Even now with the wide publicity given to the inquest results, there are still police who deny the results in favour of the old versions of events.

We do not know whether there will be any further independent report on the behaviour of leaders at Peniel/Trinity church. One thing seems to be true at present, is that there is no agreed version of how to move forward on the part of those in authority at the church. It seems that behind the scenes there is a civil war going on between those who know they must face up to the past and those who want to suppress it at all costs. The fact that Nigel Davies has not given up his protests outside the church is giving the leadership an enormous headache. I have no idea how much his blog is being read by the rank-and-file members of the church, but I would imagine that many, who are not totally locked into the church’s controlled thinking, might be tempted to read an independent voice. I, for my part, remain a fairly active contributor to Nigel’s blog. This story, as it unfolds, is an ongoing saga which constantly lends itself to interpretation and comment.

What do I think will happen at Peniel/Trinity? If the rumours of deep division within the leadership are true, then the church will, in all probability fall apart in the next couple of years. One thing that would hasten its demise is a credible lawsuit brought about by one or more ex-members. Such a law-suit would no doubt draw on the devastating Langlois report. This, I feel, must have some weight among those who are legally trained. The obsession of many of those who wish to suppress all discussion of the past would appear to be to enable the preservation of the church’s assets. The property holdings amassed by the church under its former leaders are considerable. In themselves these assets give to some in the church a sense of a dominance and importance among the local Christian communities. Such a sense of importance is now arguably no longer deserved. Eventually the mismatch between the church’s financial wealth and its corrupt history will finally be seen as a gross obscenity. For the church ever to regain any integrity in the eyes of the outside world, it would be better for it to shed all or most of the physical plant which was acquired in the dark years of spiritual tyranny and abuse.

The Hillsborough inquest, to repeat myself, is a victory of truth and justice over massive institutional power. We must applaud this outcome. It is a victory that comes alongside our increasing awareness of the way that many institutions, including our churches, seek to use their power to suppress, humiliate or exploit the weak in our society. Each and every victory by the weak helps victims in other institutions to rediscover their dignity and their power. Institutions have their place in societies, but it must always be possible to challenge and question the power that they exert in each society.

I was recently having a theological discussion with another clergyman. The exact topic that was being discussed is not here of any importance. But the exchange we had started me off on a reflection on how communication is possible between two people when they try to share ideas beyond a merely factual exchange of information. Every discipline has its own vocabulary or, some would say, its own jargon. To talk theology or converse about any other discipline there has to be a common language which both sides tacitly accept. Enormous confusion comes about when we find ourselves using words in a different way from the person we are speaking to. The potential problem of miscommunication is not just a matter of what words we use but also the possible differing philosophical or cultural assumptions which may be held by either side. Put simply the words we use may not mean what we think they mean to another person. Problems are compounded when a native of one country tries to explain something to a person who has been brought up using a different language. Any of us who have studied foreign languages know that there is more to meanings of words that what is contained in the dictionary definitions.

As the conversation proceeded I realised that Christians have a distinctive set of words and meanings in their communication which they use with one another. In this blog we have frequently referred to those conservative Christians who maintain that the Bible must be always be factual when it appears to be making statements of a factual nature. Their ability to welcome poetry or metaphor as a part of Scripture is severely curtailed in this pursuit of propositional truth. We end up with the absurdities of the story of Jonah being set out as historical fact and the scientifically implausible theories of a ‘young earth’ . This latter theory is celebrated at the Creation Museum in the States where dinosaurs and early man walk side by side. The people who make these claims seem to think that factual propositions are the chief if not the only valid form of discourse that can be used to communicate ‘Biblical truth’.. Something is true or not true; there are no other ways of speaking about the world we live in. The communication that I was having the other day was not rooted in this particular assumption. Far from it. There was in fact a quite different issue being revealed. The clergyman I was speaking to was a believer in the supreme power of intellect and rational thought. In short she appeared to believe that all issues could be solved by the rigorous application of science or rational thought. There was no place for any kind of irrationality within the Christian faith and it was necessary to pursue truth using all the methods that are provided by science and philosophy.

The conversation did not develop very far and perhaps I did not want it to. But as I reflected on the conversation I became aware of the way that I try to communicate with other people. I realized that I am not indebted to the stifling methods of fundamentalist reasoning which can so often ignores nuance, poetry and symbolic ways of understanding truth. Equally I am not locked into a strong rationalistic framework for speaking about the Christian faith. In contrast to these two ways of speaking I would in fact claim to be biblical in an important sense. This is because I try to follow the Bible in the way that truth is given to us in a whole variety of ways. Sometimes the Bible writer presents his truth using history but his historical account is seldom a simple parade of facts. It is history strongly interlaced with interpretation. On other occasions a biblical writer will speak the language of poetry. Through such poetry he will examine both the sorrows and joys of human experience. On another occasion truth will be presented in the language of drama and story. There will be the dilemma of a fictional character like Job. This story will be examined and will become the source of moral teaching and wise counsel. I could of course go on to say much more about all the different strands of truth and spiritual communication in the Bible. But as I was having this conversation with a strongly rationalist clergyman, I realised how much I need to preserve all these biblical varieties of communication and understandings of truth in my own ministry. Sometimes, for example, it is important to communicate truth through the use of story. The telling of a story, fictional or true, is a powerful method of encouragement for someone who needs to hear a new insight which will help them carry on in the face of adversity or pain. On other occasions, it is not the power of story that helps people, but simply the sharing of a powerful visual image to stir their imagination. Such a picture can evoke a powerful response and a longing for truth.

Christian communication takes place at many levels. Were it ever to remain simply at the level of factual propositions, it would be an extremely dull affair. I wonder whether ‘facts’ ever have the power to attract an individual who like me responds better to colour, beauty, the texture of story, poetry or visual imagery. Of course Christianity is based on certain truth claims – the birth the teaching and the resurrection of Jesus, but equally it achieves its power through the way that it is able to touch people at a very deep instinctual level and move them to feel after and to find the spiritual reality of God. The significant conversations that I have had with individuals, particularly in a hospital setting, have required me to be sensitive to the language and forms of communication that the other person can manage to understand. I would like to think that I can be adaptable to any kind of understandings and thinking that the other person normally feels comfortable with. The person who thinks visually, I hope to be able to use visual language. The person who responds to intellectual discussion will find in me also a readiness to respond that kind of discussion. In short Christian communication is about discovering the language through which two people can communicate.

I have not spoken much about the problems of language in Christian conservative (fundamentalist) discourse, except in passing. But if I were to criticise it, I would want to say that an obsession with truth in a scientific way is an incredible impoverishment of truth and language. We are given so many other ways of communicating the deeper things of life. Discovering and sharing these deeper things is what gives life its zest and vitality. On the day after the celebration of Shakespeare’s death, I would remind my reader of the famous saying of that brilliant man which perhaps sums up what I have been trying to say in this post, There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

I have been reading recently some interesting material on the subject of counselling people who have been through a traumatic experience. It picks up the ideas of Judith Herman who wrote a classic book in 1992, Trauma and Recovery. This sets out the principles on helping people to recover from trauma. The word ‘trauma’ would apply to any damaging experience from seeing terrible events in war to having your self-determination completely stripped away through membership of a extreme religious group. The first thing that a traumatised person needs is to find in the counsellor a place of safety where they can tell their story. It needs to be a place where the client can be assured that they are being offered real understanding and empathy. This kind of attunement with a sufferer is something that will require considerable experience as well as training on the part of the therapist. The sort of thing that can go wrong for any inexperienced listener is that he or she would be unable to listen to the events of the past without himself becoming themselves emotionally over-aroused. Emotion in itself is not inappropriate but it must never, on the side of the therapist, be so strong that it upsets his ability to calm the client down. The technical jargon puts it this way, that the therapist must regulate their own affect. The therapist must hear the story and be able respond to it with empathy but also with a level of detachment. Otherwise the client may easily go back into the shell of their undigested pain.

The ability to hear the extremely painful memories of another person without rejecting, disbelieving or in some way switching off, takes skill and training. This will require, on the part of the therapist, that the thinking part of their brain is working properly in tandem with the feeling, experiencing side of the brain. In short they need to have good left brain/right brain integration. Without such integration on the part of the therapist, the client may feel, either an over-intellectualised approach to their problem or the opposite, an over-emotional sympathy that does not allow them to have new insight into the issues of the past. Either way they still remain trapped and isolated in their pain and the terror of their memories. Proper connection with another human being, in this case the therapist, is the first stage of the journey through which the traumatised individual is brought back into connection with the wider human race. A gradual facing up to the past, experiencing it in a safe environment, is an essential stage of the journey towards healing and integration. One of the terrible things about trauma is that the one who experienced it may not at first be able to give it any kind of verbal expression. The part of the brain that has been traumatised does not have words and concepts. Part of the task of the therapist is to help the client to find symbols and later actual words to describe his or her experience. In this way they can relate to it in a new way, using the tools of intellect and reasoning rather than simply experiencing it as a traumatic event. The article I was reading picked up on the way that psychotherapy has as its aim the reintegration of parts of the brain that may have ceased to synchronise. These may have been sundered apart, either by one traumatic event or through years of subtle undermining of the personality by some cultic exposure. There is a lot more to be said about this and we have to leave it as a topic for another time. I would however just mention here the way that many cults undermine the parent-child relationship so that the instinctive need to protect children by parents is undermined has been undermined by cult teaching. The cult leader has constantly taught that the only true ‘father’ is himself

I give this summary of what is generally regarded as good practice in psychotherapy. It is offered in the context of helping clients get through the trauma of a terrible event like violence, rape or seeing something that causes flashbacks and nightmares. In contrast I want to quote some words from a ‘Christian therapist’ which was offered as a comment on Nigel’s Peniel blog. The Langlois report clearly indicated that many of the ‘victims’ from Peniel were suffering from a degree of post-traumatic stress which has resulted in a need for years of counselling.

She/he writes ‘It seems to me that unless this is sorted out in prayer then any one can jump on the band wagon and say they suffered at the hands of MR…..I have worked in the area of abuse, sexual, physical and emotional, but NEVER have I came across a group of victims who want to be reminded constantly about their abuse, and NEVER have I spoken to any who would take money as compensation…..This should all be `put to bed` so the abused can start to heal with the love and mercy of God….Leave Trinity/Peniel to sort out their own problems and find a decent Church to attend on a Sunday….that’s just my opinion based on years of experience both as a counsellor and Christian….

These words are possibly typical of the dangerous attitudes of some so-called Christian counsellors. They show how there is a serious mismatch between responsible therapy and what seems like ignorant nonsense. Christian forgiveness and prayer seem to be the only tools of therapy on offer in some forms of Christian-inspired training. It is not surprising that the majority of survivors at Peniel are steering clear of the therapy being offered to them by the church when they are faced with this kind of dangerous nonsense. This therapist who has worked, as she/he puts it, for years with the victims of trauma seems to have completely avoided good therapeutic practice by refusing to allow a victim or survivor to face up to the trauma of the past within an empathetic setting. Instead of the listening skills and empathy that are required for this kind of work, this particular therapist seems to have offered what she considers to be the Christian response, forgive the past and get on with your life. The secular model which Christian counselling so often turns its back on suggests the complete opposite – a slow painful facing up to the past with the support of an empathic therapist. According to the responsible mainstream literature, the part of the brain that experiences trauma, the limbic system, has trapped certain events so that they continue to trouble and plague the sufferer. These events need to be released and brought to the surface. That is the task of responsible therapy. ‘Putting to bed’ the events of the past is a far more complicated affair than this counsellor seems capable of imagining.

There are many other issues I have with so-called Christian counselling and some of these have been discussed before in this blog. In summary I object to the comment of the Christian counsellor above because he or she responds to the hard work of listening and empathising with clients by offering them mere platitudes and ‘holy’ language. The love and mercy of God will have a far better chance of working when a counsellor himself is freed from bringing unhelpful dogmatic beliefs into the counselling room. Forgiveness does not in fact solve everything. Christian love surely recognizes that much more is involved in the recovery from trauma. For myself I would entrust myself only to secular counsellors – never to people think that dogma and Bible quoting somehow sorts out every problem. The survivors of Peniel and indeed survivors of any traumatic experience deserve the best. Sadly what they are being offered is something that will probably totally fail them and they may end up far worse than before.

I was having a conversation with a mainstream evangelical church leader the other day who knows of my concern about the abuse that takes place within this culture. He found it very difficult to understand why I should focus on the evangelical world when there is so much material about abuse emerging from Roman Catholic sources and indeed all strands of the church. In many ways he had a valid point to make. I found it initially difficult to marshal my thoughts in responding to the concern of an honourable evangelical. In this particular case he is one concerned for social justice as well as the traditional task of bringing people into a relationship with God. The problem that I was trying to articulate and which he was unable to grasp, was that however many honest evangelicals exist in the world, there are many others who are not so honourable. They use the same turns of phrase and the same traditional theological ideas but somehow they create something which is often grotesque and unworthy of the name of Christian. A respect and love for the Bible can indeed be something which is life changing and may allow an individual to make a new beginning in discovering what his life is for. Equally the same apparent respect for the Bible in the hands of a manipulative person can drag an individual, especially a woman, into a life where they end up in effective bondage to a powerful and corrupt charismatic leader. The promise that Christianity is a way to a full life has delivered a form of slavery. This blog has given many examples of the corrupt version of the evangelical message. A love of power and money seems to motivate far too many Christian leaders who preach from the orthodox evangelical hymn book. It is this corruption of evangelicalism that is a the heart of this blog’s concern, not the word itself.

In this blog post I want to summarise the areas where the mainstream evangelical message sometimes becomes corrupted and distorted through the selfish and power seeking activities of certain types of Christian leader. I repeat once more that I am not making a condemnation of one particular tradition within the Christian church, even if I do in fact have queries about the theology that is being preached. It is one thing to disagree with the theological position of another person. That is almost inevitable when we live in a world of a variety of thinking, different historical backgrounds and the sheer variety in people’s psychological make up. What I do object to is when I see human exploitation of the vulnerable and weak by people who use the Christian message with which to do it. If I have any criticism of mainstream respectable evangelical church people it is in their blindness to all the things that are done by people who claim to belong to the evangelical camp. Superficially these latter preach the same message as the mainstream but in fact are verging on the evil in the devastation that the actions sometimes cause.

One particular area of activity in which evangelicals of all kinds seem to excel is in the conduct of worship and music. At its best this worship helps people to have a lively sense of God’s presence. At its worst, as I have written in past blog posts, the style of music offered is a form of seduction to draw people into the building, particularly the young, and encourage them to have a good time. It could be claimed that the style of music on offer at some churches is a bit like a night club or a party. No doubt people enjoy themselves in this carnival atmosphere and there is a release of inhibition and a flow of goodwill engendered through the loud music on offer. The party atmosphere is particularly striking in many black led churches. Here the women are encouraged to dance and, in their wild gyrations, there seems to be an element of sexual exhibitionism present. The dominant part that deafening music plays in the worship of many free and independent churches means that these congregations are not encouraged towards reflective contemplation of spiritual things. Such music, if I can be bold, also completely destroys the possibility of any kind of intelligent appreciation of what is going on in other areas of worship. There is thus a considerable gap to be found between these ‘noisy’ churches and others, evangelical or otherwise, where there is an emphasis on good preaching and intelligent understanding of the Bible and the Christian message. In one church there is a mind blowing cacophony of sound. In the other there is stillness, reflection and silence. It is not hard to imagine a considerable gap of understanding and communication between the two.

The next area of behaviour which separates out what I want to call the parasitic evangelical churches is in the area of money and financial wealth. It would not be an exaggeration to say that many independent church leaders seem to be obsessed with wealth and high status. The first sign of this is the importance given to acquisition of wealth and prosperity for the minister personally. This is justified as a sign and an exemplar of God’s blessing on him. ‘Health and wealth’ teaching will require an aggressive teaching of those passages in the Bible which refer to tithing. A congregation of 200 people all giving 10% of their pre-tax income will produce considerable sums of money. This will allow, as in the case of Peniel Church Brentwood, the ministers to be paid obscene amounts of money. A second related part of the corrupting effect of wealth is to purchase or build magnificent church plant. This will involve sometimes the raising of millions of pounds. When a church spends large sums of money on itself, one has to ask whether there is comparable concern for the social needs of the area around them. From time to time I look at the websites of independent churches to see what activities they are involved in. It is quite clear that many ministers value their ministry by the magnificence of the buildings which they occupy. These buildings thus often seem to become monuments to human hubris. They are massively expensive to heat and maintain. It is also not easy to justify their existence when the space within them is not being used to its full extent or shared with the wider community.

I am sure that there are many good evangelical churches who do not corrupt their people by the excessive noise of mind-numbing music and sound or demanding huge sums of money from those who attend. But to these uncorrupted churches I would ask one thing. Do they not know how quickly and easily a similar message to the one that is being preached in their building has been allowed to become something tawdry, cheap and corrupt in a church down the road? The same message of eternal salvation has been subtly twisted and polluted by another minister who, superficially at any rate, is saying all the right things. At the same time he is clearly concerned not with the glory of God but with his own gratification, his power and his material advantage. Both the good church and the bad church share the title ‘evangelical’. I call upon the good evangelical church to name and perhaps shame the institution that brings the word ‘evangelical’ into ill repute among those of us who do not identify with this description of their religious identity. Perhaps I can go further and say that the word ‘Christian’ is also being brought into ill repute by those who exploit others and enrich themselves with the tools of preaching and church leadership.

I want to finish by repeating the point made above. It is not the word evangelical that is the cause of a problem. It is the use of the word and its style and culture by certain maverick ministers and congregations that create a huge problem. If mainstream respectable evangelicals want to use the word and hold onto it as a word of dignity and integrity, then they must be prepared to own up to and critique what is done in the backyards of their culture.

‘Why are people so critical of other people when things go wrong?’ This was the first sentence in a recent blog contribution. I thought about my response before deciding to make a blog post out of my reflections on what is my answer to this question. The simple answer is that sometimes when things ‘go wrong’, a large number of people may be affected by what has been done. The ‘wrong’ action has perhaps become an instrument of abusive suffering for maybe many people. It is important that the perpetrator of the action becomes aware of this fact. There is a particular issue when a person of power or influence misuses their power as all the people under their influence may well be affected. A different way of judging what is going on comes into play in such a situation.

Thinking about this further I have come to see that we need to think about wrong actions as existing on a continuum. The degree of seriousness which we ascribe to them will depend on the extent to which they have affected other people. A supremely wicked act might be one which initiates tens of thousands of people being slaughtered because of their colour or race. Being critical of another people’s wrong actions is obviously an extremely important task. That is why we have laws to express society’s disapproval towards evil actions that harm others. At the other end of the continuum of wrong actions we have an immoral act which only affects and harms the person doing it. The watching of pornography or the taking of drugs will no doubt be seriously harming the individuals involved and their relationships. Such things are no doubt wrong, but some of the time they are not illegal or deemed to be matters of public interest. It is probably not helpful that other people outside the situation (the press?) take the high moral ground by publicising these misdeeds and naming them.

In the case of the leaders of God TV, the mentioning of the issue of Rory Alec’s adultery is not in fact the same as taking a moral stand on the rights and wrongs of committing adultery. We may of course have strong feelings in the matter but in most cases we have to accept that this transgression is a private matter and not for us to probe into. We may of course privately speculate on the way that any act of sexual betrayal will normally be cataclysmic for the people close to the situation. But adultery or any non-criminal sexual affair takes on a different dimension when it is perpetrated by people in positions of trust. The situation is of course compounded when the activity is criminal in addition to being immoral. The Bishop Peter affair was far more serious than just a misdemeanour against young men. These young men were the immediate victims but many more people felt betrayed and the trust in the integrity of the church as a whole was undermined by the Bishop’s activities. In the case of Rory Alec and God TV, tens of thousands of listeners had believed that they were listening to the authentic word of God through the presenters, Wendy and Rory. For one of them to betray high moral standards would be potentially deeply disturbing to the listeners. However we understand the relationship between broadcasters and their audience in this situation, something important was going on in this relationship which gave meaning to the lives of those who follow God TV. Many had given considerable sums of money; they had followed these Christian leaders with enthusiasm and now they were being let down. Of course the adultery itself is important but here it only becomes of greater concern because massive issues of trust and betrayal were also involved.

It is interesting that there is much current discussion in the churches about what I would call private morality. The Anglican bishops for example are giving the impression that the most important moral issue today is that of homosexuality and the possibility of ‘gay marriage’. Whatever one’s moral stance towards this particular issue, it could be claimed that it is a clear example of a private moral matter which affects very few people beyond the relationship. It would be hard to claim that there is any abuse going on affecting those outside the relationship. In contrast, the historic betrayal and failure to protect children in many religious institutions and the imposing of religiously inspired ideologies harmful to women damages millions. This blog and its editor is concerned with these evils that are tragically endemic in many church institutions. These have the effect of damaging enormous numbers of people in the context of God and the Christian faith. Of course it is and always will be important to name and be critical of such behaviour. Here in this blog we explore the psychologically deviant among Christian leaders, corrupt and self-serving interpretations of the Bible along with bullying and other examples of abuse of power in the church. All these things have and continue to do enormous damage to the integrity of the church and that is why they must be explored. The naming of evil actions towards the vulnerable is the first stage towards preventing them happening in the future. Rory Alec’s failure was, to repeat, not simply or even mainly about sex. It was the fact that his action had the effect of betraying large numbers of people who looked up to him. It was in short a massive case of hypocrisy. That is serious, far more serious than simply going off with another woman while already married.

In writing this blog I have had to look at my own behaviour and identify the times when my actions have affected not just myself but other people, sometimes more than one. To betray or harm other people through selfish acts is far more serious on a moral scale than doing something that is stupid and foolish but only harmful to oneself. Many immoral acts against oneself involve some form of self-harm but these quite often can be corrected when the consequences, great or small, become apparent to us. A typical example would be the reforming drinker or viewer of pornography. When harm is done to others through our actions, the consequences do not always appear quite so readily. It may be that some people are around who still carry the burden of something abusive we said or did years later. It will be impossible in this lifetime to undo the damage of all our selfish actions towards other people, but at least we should be aware that such damage exists and, if it is possible, we have to do what we can to put these situations right. Identifying the difference between the harm we do to other people and the harm we do to ourselves may help to make us more careful in the future. In identifying the actions done by us which create the most harm to others, we can be morally more sensitive and less judgmental towards others, particularly in cases where the harm done affects nobody beyond the perpetrator.

It is sometime since I wrote about the events at Trinity Church Brentwood. Part of the problem is that other events, illness and house move, took me away from following the ongoing saga, but also I have had problems in accessing Nigel Davies’ blog. There is some bug in the system which means that I only occasionally manage to get into the discussion. But I can report that the main news at Trinity church in the post Peter Linnecar era is that the massive and devastating report by John Langlois continues officially to be ignored by the trustees. It is apparently evident that even while it does not officially exist, many people, including the trustees have read it. These same trustees have formally decided to respond to the other report from David Shearman and Phil Hills. Their response has been to set up a Reconciliation and Reparation Panel and this came into effect during March. The panel is under the chairmanship of one Peter Jordan, a minister of a local church known as Sawyers. Sawyers is one of the members of BADEF, the Brentwood and district Evangelical Fellowship. Nigel Davies has rightly been constantly critical of this group for failing ever to speak out against the abuses at Peniel/Trinity church, even though all the congregations that are part of this group were receiving a steady stream of refugees from Peniel/Trinity over the years. The stories that these refugees would have shared would have alerted any pastorally minded minister to the excesses of Reid’s ministry. Nigel points out that in fact the BADEF churches were always far too much in awe of the wealth and power of Peniel/Trinity Church ever to make any effective protest or attempt to criticise Reid’s appalling regime or the legacy he left behind him.

The individuals which has been given the task of making up the panel to attempt to reach out to the numerous victims of Peniel/Trinity church have, apart from the chairman, Peter Jordan, been left anonymous. Their qualifications have been set out but they do not inspire confidence, either in terms of their professional achievement or their potential ability to offer a true independent voice. One is a lawyer, one a consultant, and the other two apart from the chairman are a ‘psychotherapist’ and an accountant. Nigel has pointed out that an anonymous group is not one to inspire confidence from the perspective of a vulnerable victim. He is also incensed by the fact that Peter Jordan, the chairman of the panel and a local minister, is due to preach at Trinity on April 10. This acceptance of an invitation to preach hardly implies a detached independent relationship with the church. Jordan has also been active in BADEF for a number of years and is their current Chair. He is thus tainted along with all the other ministers of this organization of a wilful blindness and indifference towards the excesses of Trinity Church under its two former leaders.

As part of the exercise of reparation and reconciliation ex-members of Peniel and Trinity have been sent forms to fill in. The forms suggest that a sum of money may be made available for those who have suffered to enable them to receive some form of counselling. Meanwhile the third member of the panel who is named as a qualified psychotherapist and counsellor inspires absolutely zero confidence with regard to her professional competence and qualifications. I wrote a contribution (set out below) to Nigel’s blog to point out that many qualifications held by so-called Christian counsellors are not recognised by any professional accredited body in the UK. Nigel’s most recent blog links this member of the panel to an organisation called Deep Release.org and another known as Barnabas training. I have not yet had the opportunity to check out these two groups, but I would certainly not want to entrust myself to any ‘Christian’ group if I had been abused at the hands of Michael Reid or Peter Linnecar. My feelings about Christian counselling bodies have been severely jaundiced by some bad experiences over the years. I here insert the comment I made on Nigel’s blog.
I was somewhat alarmed to read the ‘qualifications’ of the panel member no 3 mentioned in the previous blog post. Most of us who have ever had anything to do with ‘Christian counselling’ (eg nouthetic counselling) are very cautious of the qualifications and actual content of these courses for ‘Christian training’. The only professionally accredited people are those who have done courses recognized and overseen by the British Association for Counselling and Therapists (BACP). Others who write or study courses (online etc) may be able to call themselves therapists but their standards of expertise range from the ignorant to the appallingly dangerous.
I once wrote a reference for a woman who was the least qualified person to start counselling that I had ever met. I tried tactfully to say to the Christian course organisers that the candidate totally lacked listening skills, thrust opinionated views on everyone around and was generally in my opinion unfit for the course. She was accepted and qualified!
If I go to a therapist, I want to know that they have achieved a proper professional qualification. Nothing about panel member no 3 suggests anything but a home-grown in-house type training. It reminds me of the way that MR and PL never submitted their preaching and pastoral skills to outside scrutiny. Look at the havoc they were able to achieve!

The suggestion is being made that the total amount being allocated for each survivor is around £300. Whether or not this is an ex gratia payment or a contribution towards meeting the cost of a limited number of counselling sessions is not clear. But, as someone pointed out on Nigel’s blog, this is a very small amount of money when set against the £7000 a month that was being paid to Peter Linnecar over the last eight years.
Nigel is thus extremely angry at at what he perceives as extremely half-hearted efforts to put right the wrongs of the past. His complaint in summary is as follows:
• The reconciliation panel shows no signs of true independence. This cosy relationship between the chairman of the panel and the church is symbolised by an invitation from the church to preach at their morning service on April 10th.
• An anonymous group of people will not inspire confidence from the victims of past spiritual abuse. The breakthrough of John Langlois was that, for the first time, Peniel/Trinity victims were able to see that somebody who was totally independent and without any bias was available to hear their story.
• The reparation that is being offered to past victims is derisory and half-hearted. Once again Nigel sees that the main efforts on behalf of Trinity is to preserve their assets while going through the motions of a limited gestures towards the victims of past abuse.

For all these reasons Nigel is to continue his courageous protests outside the church. This will incur the hostility of current church members who feel that their church is somehow doing the right thing for the victims of past evil. Even from the perspective of someone like myself living in the remote north of England, it would seem that Nigel is doing the right. This so-called panel inspires no confidence either for practical competence or its solutions being offered to past victims of the church.

As a final comment I am surprised that anybody would want to associate themselves with such a manifestly feeble attempt to put right such monstrous past evils. In view of the fierce outspokenness of the Langlois report we should be surprised that anybody, even a small group of ordinary church people, would want to have anything to do with this weak attempt to whitewash and try to bury the awful past of Peniel/Trinity church. It will be interesting to see if anyone in fact is prepared to fill up the reparation forms and meet a bunch of doubtfully competent people, all for the sake of a totally inadequate £300 worth of counselling. The victims of the Peniel church, as identified by the Langlois report, deserve better and we must be grateful to Nigel Davies for continuing the struggle to secure a more adequate justice for those who have been so cruelly and devastatingly abused by Christian ministry.

Some weeks I made reference to the fact that I was an incumbent in the diocese of Gloucester when Peter Ball accepted a police caution for illicit activities towards young men in earlier years. This caution resulted in his resignation as bishop of the diocese. This all happened in 1992 and I cannot have been the only person who was left wondering about the actual facts of the bishop’s alleged behaviour. Nobody said anything at the time as to whether or not Bishop Peter was actually guilty of a crime. Words like misunderstanding and mistake floated around to confuse the straightforward question, was he guilty for not? The press and the Church reported part of the truth, the police caution and the resignation, but the public was left to speculate what was in fact behind this dramatic and sudden departure.

Last week in the Church Times there was a fascinating new piece of new information on the affair. It came from an individual who had known a lawyer present when Peter Ball was being interviewed by the police in the original 1992 investigation. This lawyer had reported that Peter Ball ‘sang like a canary’ – in other words he had made a full confession of the various misdeeds for which he was later sent to prison in 2015. At this point I want us to think, not about Bishop Peter’s crimes, but the way that other people were reacting to what was being revealed back in 1992. It is hard to imagine that senior members of the church, including the then Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, did not have an accurate understanding of what had been revealed in the investigations and interviews of the time. No doubt more facts will emerge as a result of the Goddard enquiry . More formal censure no doubt may well be handed out to the church leaders of the time for their actions and inactions in dealing with the affair. But it was clearly an unprecedented crisis for the Church of England. So far we have heard in response stories about failures of memory and claims of ignorance. These will no doubt be challenged as not representing what really went on behind the scenes at the top of the Church of England.

In thinking about the bluster and denials so far heard from those church leaders who were around at the time, I want here to suggest a more generous interpretation of the facts as we have them so far. Senior members of the church, here the then Archbishop of Canterbury and his senior staff were faced with a totally impossible and unprecedented situation. A bishop had failed in his calling. The failure was a serious one and it had the power to severely undermine the institution in which this bishop had responsibility. Because there was no real precedent for this event, one can imagine that there would be a kind of numbing of thought as the powers that be looked for ways to deal with it. The first response would be to defend as best they could the institution which had been betrayed by Bishop Peter’s behaviour. To help them in making a defensive response to protect the church, they seemed to have had on their side at the time a media and a public opinion which also saw the church as a bastion of stability in society as a whole. Persuading the police and prosecutors to go no further than issuing a caution was a way of allowing the church to continue in its stabilizing role in society with the least possible damage. From the perspective of 2016 we can see that this attempt to protect the institution was short term and ultimately doomed to fail. Eventually chickens would come home to roost. At the time however the success in damage limitation was impressive. It seemed to allow the good ship, the Church of England, to continue to sail along without visible damage above the waterline.

Alongside the defensive measures to protect the Church of England was another psychological process which I would speculate was at work among those who knew the facts about Bishop Peter’s crimes. There was a need not only to defend the institution for which they had responsibility, but also they had to defend their own sense of personal integrity. I see in operation what I would call the PLU (people like us) phenomenon. Bishop Peter is and was a cultured, educated and socially at ease individual. He was well-connected with royalty, politicians and the social elite of Britain. From the perspective of the Establishment he was definitely ‘one of us’. ‘People like us’ do not commit crimes of this kind and when they do they create a sense of vulnerability and unease among the people that have connections with them . The social elite of Britain, and indeed ordinary people, are very good at projecting criminal behaviour on to other groups which they can mentally refer to as a ‘them’. Criminals are the people who are not like us, they have no moral sense, they are the riffraff of society. The moment that someone ‘like us’ commits a crime, we suddenly find ourselves able to imagine ourselves as a criminal. That is a thoroughly uncomfortable and unwelcome feeling. We realise that we have a shared humanity with a criminal because they are ‘like us’. We have already allowed an identification with them to take place and their criminality in some way contaminates us as well.

Another way of talking about this tendency to mentally separate ourselves from the evil-doing of others is to think of ourselves a living in a variety of tribes. The way we have allowed ourselves to think is to see the evil of the world in the tribes other than our own. It is always the ‘them’, the member of enemy tribes, that are guilty of horrible anti-social actions. People like us, people in our tribe never, we believe, behave in this way. From the Archbishop of Canterbury down, nobody in the church at that time could embrace the reality that a man of the highest social credentials and who had served the institution of the church for 30+ years was capable of criminal behaviour. The effect of this realisation was to threaten the sense of who we, the fellow members of the tribe, are. We are brought close to a recognition that everyone, even members of our own tribe, is capable of evil action. If members of our tribe, people like us, can fail, then we have to face up to the possibility of evil, even criminal behaviour being somewhere inside us waiting to erupt. However much the Bible speaks to us of original sin, most of us want to believe that we are fundamentally decent honourable people and that such evil is a long way away. It is much more comfortable thinking this way.

In 2016 we are entering a period when we can no longer protest our innocence because we are a particular kind of person, a person with the right kind of education and social background. There is no longer a boundary between respectable innocent people and the rest. Criminal antisocial behaviour has come randomly to affect people of any kind or background. Society as a whole is weaker through this realization. Because evil can exist anywhere, even within our own tribes, among ‘people like us’, we sadly have to be a little more suspicious and a little more cynical in our interactions with others. Regretfully the days of automatic trust of the stranger are being taken away from us. Each and every betrayal of others, whether in the church or beyond, weakens the bonds of trust and goodwill that has hitherto bound the church and society together.

During the weeks of disruption owing to intermittent flu and my house move, I have not been properly able to engage with the seasons of the Church’s year. I am of course aware that today is Good Friday but somehow the events of today have not moved me to write on the theme of the season as they should. Suffering comes in so many forms and the physical pain of Christ on the cross is one incomprehensible extreme of pain. While recognizing this, we need always to remember how many other forms of pain that humanity can experience (and cause). It is futile to say that because one pain is terrible it is somehow ‘worse’ or ‘better’ than another. Every pain is awful in its own way and it is an honourable task for anyone to resist pain and to fight it on behalf of others. This may involve standing up to the powerful who seek to exploit the weak and cause them pain.

The pain of the abused may or may not be physical but it is often life changing and life denying. The Church, especially the Church of England at the moment, is being woken up forcibly to the experience of individuals who have been abused in the past having their lives sometimes ruined in the process. The particular story which stuck out for me in the past seven days was the story of a woman, Dr McFarlane, who was sexually abused at the age of 16 some 40 years ago by clergyman in the Chichester diocese. The part of the account that stood out was the fact that she had had to spend £40,000 of her own money on lawyers to prompt the church to act. This would require a grit and determination that many victims would simply not have. During the process which led to these expenses being recovered together with a further £40,000 damages, Dr McFarlane had to endure two hours of hostile questioning by a psychiatrist who was trying to undermine her story on behalf of the insurance company. It was later admitted afterwards that the approach of the company and its lawyers allowed ‘limited scope for personal and sensitive engagement’. During the questioning, according to The Times, it was suggested to her that she, was at the age of 16, somehow a complicit consenting partner to the parish priest who abused her. Two things come from the story which give us grounds for hope. The first thing is that the Church of England may realise that it cannot ever again be a party to such appalling abuse that took place through the aggressive questioning by the lawyers of a church insurance company. The second hopeful part of the story is that Dr McFarlane has not had to sign in any confidentiality clause. Rather she has persuaded the church that there needs to be a ‘protocol review meeting’. This will potentially change completely the way that sexual abuse issues are handled in the future. If claims for damages against a body within the Church of England are made, there will be a fresh approach which does not resemble the ordeal faced by Dr McFarlane and no doubt many others in the past.

It is also clear this past week that the case of Bishop Peter Ball will not go away. I have further thoughts about the dynamic in the church at the time which made his abuse possible but I will keep that for a separate blog posting. Both Ball’s case and the McFarlane case create considerable upheaval in the church as to the way the church has to deal with skeletons in the cupboard. Each case that emerges from the past is another blow to its reputation but also its financial stability. With many parishes up and down the country unable to pay their quota, it would be a disaster if, for example, all individual parishes had to pay additional premiums to cover themselves from legal claims for past abuse. The insurance companies, as we have seen above, can no longer protect themselves from claims by aggressive cynical lawyers. If they adopt the approach of pastoral sensitive understanding of these claims, they will have to set aside far more money to meet future claims.

The Church of England at last appears to ‘get it’ over the area of sexual abuse by its officers and clergy, past and present. It can no longer pretend by obstruction, intimidation or denial that these things are not happening. This owning up will be extremely expensive, both financially and in terms of its reputation. The next stage may well be when the church begins to recognise that people, especially the vulnerable, may have been abused in a whole variety of other ways within a church context. This blog has identified many other ways that power is and has been abused in church settings which has nothing to do with sex. Were the potential tsunami of claims against the church for historic sexual abuse to begin to include all the other forms of abuse which this blog identifies, the Church as an institution might not be able even to survive. Will the people in the pew be willing to pay for many new legal claims against the church for the sins of the past?

This blog post does point to a somewhat gloomy future for the Church of England if even a small amount of the pain and suffering inflicted by its leaders in the past were to be deemed worthy of legal redress. There is however hope that this wave of claims of abuse could be neutralized. This would involve a fresh understanding of the way that power abuse takes place within all institutions. I for one detect an incredible naivete among bishops, clergy and laity about the likely effect when unsupervised leaders work in an institution which lacks accountability. My own expertise, such as it is, would not pretend to be able to diagnose every part of the processes that lead some clergy to abuse, bully or misuse their power in some way. I just know that it happens frequently and that there are models within the psychiatric literature which offer some explanations of what is going on. Some of these I understand and I continue to struggle with new theories all the time.

Next time I want to reflect a further on why a culture existed that protected so many miscreants in the church from challenge and arrest. I also want report on the latest developments at Trinity Brentwood. Meanwhile it is good to be back and I hope my readers enjoy a peaceful and joyful Easter.