My blog posts have hinted at the fact that I am not, at the moment, as geared into the issues around Christian abuse as normal. This is because each day I am spending two or three hours at the local hospital doing what is described as ‘continuity care’ for the full-time chaplain during her holiday absence. Most of the patients I see are successfully responding to treatment while others are facing the end of their lives. It is this minority that demand patience and time. Some of these patients are unable to talk about the probable outcome of their illness while others are remarkably articulate on the subject of death. It is not easy talking to someone about their death as it would be all too easy to say something that causes distress. You are speaking to a person who is, until that moment, for you a total stranger. You are not only talking to them but you are trying to raise an area of conversation that is more personal and sensitive than anything else one can imagine.

This topic of what I, as a Christian minister, have to say to the dying does in fact touch on our overall theme. This is because I am trying to minister, not just to the practising Christians among the patients, but also to people who have no outward Christian faith. It is this latter group who present the greater challenge. The temptation for some Christians is tell the patient the ‘Gospel’ and then encourage them to accept Jesus into their heart and say the ‘sinner’s prayer’. The opposite temptation is simply to avoid saying anything of significance at all because all that they believe is wrapped up in words that they, the patients, would not understand. That does seem to be true of much Christian discourse. Words like salvation and gospel pour out of the mouth of the minister, even in the informal setting of a hospital bedside, and they probably confuse as well as alienate the listener. To leave a very sick patient with the idea, that because they are not individuals of faith, they are going to a place of eternal torment would be something highly harmful and distressing. Thankfully none of the accredited chaplaincy volunteers in our hospital would be allowed to speak in this way. But there are many Christians in Britain and elsewhere who belong to the ‘turn or burn’ group. Even if a Christian of this ilk did manage to curb his/her tongue over describing the fate of the unconverted, it is hard to see that they would have much of use to say. Because they would be, for reasons of tact and propriety, restrained in what they wanted to say, they would probably end up saying very little.

The challenge, and it is not an easy one, is to say something of value to a patient who may be close to death which uses no special language or any Christian jargon. It is this task which I have been thinking about and trying to put into practice over the months that I have been helping in the hospital. The first barrier that has to be crossed is to be allowed by the patient to talk about death in the first place. That requires a great deal of sensitivity and care. But once you have been allowed to enter into this space you have to declare what you believe is at the end of life. When I begin to speak on this topic, I might first of all mention, when it seems appropriate, the Near Death Experience (NDE) literature and ask if they have heard of it. I make the point that those who have been through such an experience seem nearly always to return with a heightened sense of wonder at what they have learnt. The experience has enthralled and overwhelmed them in its brightness and glory. There is a sense of having attended the ultimate homecoming, the greatest welcome that they could imagine. I then focus on one component of that experience, the encounter with beauty. The word beauty has many manifestations, whether through a transforming relationship, a memorable aesthetic experience or being raptured by nature’s wonders. Most people have something in their lives that they can identify with beauty and I encourage them to recall it in their imaginations. I then typically will point out that we encounter beauty by an opening up of ourselves. There is an act of longing and a reaching out involved to whatever we identify as beautiful. Beauty is always outside us. I suggest that the place that NDEs point to and the church’s tradition of heaven are roughly the same thing. Heaven, whatever else it is, is a place that totally absorbs our minds, our imaginations and our spirits. If we have ever been enthralled in an act of absorbing something beautiful, we should imagine that heaven is like that, only a million times more powerful. In that situation, time would cease to matter because the object of all our longing and our joy would be ours in a single eternal moment.

No doubt to the disapproval of many conventional Christians, I sum up the Christian faith as being the reaching out by us in faith, expectation and love to a God who also reaches out towards us. That is how I understand the words of Jesus in Mark chapter 1 when he declares that the ‘Kingdom of God is near’. ‘Turn around and receive the Good News’. In my conversations with people at the end of their lives I suggest that God is very close and we have to reach out to receive what he wants to give us, something that is hard to put into words. If appropriate I read part of Psalm 139 which declares that there is nowhere outside God’s presence.

These notes on making the Christian good news relevant to people in extremis who have no background in the Christian faith is sharing very personal material but it is relevant to the theme of our blog. This is because it is far from the Christianity that is coercive and controlling that we have had frequent cause to complain about. If such a message, summarised as ‘turn or burn’ is cruel and insensitive to ordinary people who struggle with normal life issues, it is a horrendous message to even hint at for the end of earthly existence. As a ‘liberal’ I believe that the Christian faith has good news contained within even for people who never come to church, never pray the ‘sinner’s prayer’ and never make any public declaration of faith. The more time I spend with the dying, the more I find that I want to proclaim the truth of John 14 that in my Father’s house are ‘many rooms’. Many rooms implies all kinds of conditions of people are catered by the divine economy and who are we to question how this works in practice? Perhaps I am technically a universalist, but that seems closer to the words and spirit of Jesus than anything I read in some types of Christian literature which is all about threat and control. The Jesus I follow is one that says to me, and especially to those close to death, the words ‘Come unto me all that are burdened and I will give you rest.’

Today (Thursday 6th) the papers are full of the sad demise of the charity, Kids Company. It might seem a strange thing for this blog even to mention it, but I detect in this story a fascinating and instructive juxtaposition of issues which we have often looked at in this blog. I have no means of knowing whether the story will show that a massive injustice has been done to the founder and director Camilla Batmanghelidjh. That will, no doubt, emerge in the coming days and weeks. What the paper (The Times) is also reporting this morning is the dynamic of the relationship that appears to have existed between David Cameron and Camilla B. Whatever else can be said about the founder of the charity, she appears to have had considerable ability to charm and cajole prominent people, from film stars to our leading politicians. The newspaper speaks of this as a ‘charisma’ which ‘enthralled’ and ‘mesmerised’ the Prime Minister so that he was ready to bypass his rationality and overrule the civil service accountants who are paid to guard the nation’s funds. They were concerned that financial discipline was not being exercised in the way the charity was being run.

Few people in this country are unaware of Ms Batmanghelidjh and her extravagant and colourful outfits. The ability to wear such clothing is indicative of a very confident personality. It is not hard to see how such an overwhelming outfit on an individual is suggestive of a powerful persuasive character. Describing her as ‘charismatic’ is one way of pointing to the fact that she seems to have had the power to fascinate and attract those she spoke to, among them the rich and famous. This celebrity status, no doubt, enabled her to have little difficulty in raising the considerable sums of money needed for her charity. But the problem for anyone achieving this kind of status and influence is that they may well start to believe that the fascination that they exert over other people is an infallible indication that they really are in some way special. Elsewhere we have called this inflated awareness of one’s importance, ‘Acquired Narcissistic Syndrome’. If Camilla B. indeed is revelling in this kind of charismatic/narcissistic power, she has something in common with the power exercised by celebrity preachers, especially those who adorn our religious broadcasting channels. This celebrity-type culture and its rampant narcissism is nevertheless frequently bad news for many people. It would not be particularly surprising if Ms Batmanghelidjh, the recipient of so-much attention and praise, has succumbed to some of the temptations that befall those in the category of celebrity. Her original undoubted gifts for caring for children might well have started to take second place to the enjoyment and the glamour of mixing with and influencing important people.

Charisma, as we have often described on this blog, is an important part of the dynamic of many churches. At its best, it gives a sense of life and vitality to worship and spiritual growth. But we have noted that charisma also has a dark side which can lead its practitioners into a malign exercise of power over followers. In describing these darker aspects of charisma in a religious setting, we have seen in other posts how followers are fascinated and enthralled by the signs of power that the charismatic leader is able to engender. There is a kind of mutual enhancement process. The followers are raised up by being close to the ‘man of God’ who reveals a vision of power and spiritual and economic plenty. The leader feeds off this adulation so he too is able to feel a psychological boost. To move from talking about charisma to describing what is, effectively, addictive behaviour, is not as far-fetched as it might seem. The music, the emotional intensity and the larger than life personality of the charismatic leader are all extremely stimulating to those followers present. When these things are absent then there is sense of let-down, a craving for the sensations that were part of a charismatic ‘high’. The wrong kind of charisma has, in short, created spiritual junkies both in the leader and his followers. The leader very easily becomes addicted to the high of being at the centre of an adoring fascinated crowd. He comes alive in this situation and when this emotional stimulus is not there, life seems flat and without flavour. When he finally leaves the scene, the ex-charismatic leader may well feel like an alcoholic who has lost the one thing that gave his life meaning.

One possible interpretation of the story of the Kids Company is that it has over the years acquired aspects of a religious cult, creating unhealthy dynamics for all those involved. If this is indeed the case, we must not allow ourselves to judge Camilla Batmanghelidjh too harshly. We may recognise that the people who lavished money and attention on the director were themselves needing to do this in the way that charismatic worshippers need to give and be close to their adored idols. The Prime Minister and Gordon Brown before him needed to feel that they were actively promoting the cause of helping deprived children and, by ‘worshipping’ Camilla, they allowed them to achieve something of this desired end. By using the terms ‘enthralled’ and ‘mesmerised’ to describe David Cameron’s relationship with Camilla, the reporter in today’s Times has well captured the quasi-religious dimension of the story. Camilla herself would need to be superhumanly earthed not to feel flattered and immensely exalted by having so much attention over such a long period of time. Somehow the whole unhappy episode is a sober reminder of what can go wrong when these quasi-religious dynamics are allowed to take root in politics and in the world of charity work. It goes without saying that they are already potentially dangerous in the context of religious organisations.

My analysing today’s story about the Kids Company in terms of the dynamics of charisma may seem impossibly far-fetched to some of my readers. But for me, this deconstruction of the story helps to make it more understandable as well as more human. If these insights about charisma that I have outlined were more widely understood, then perhaps the problems of this kind of episode might not be allowed to develop to such a sorry conclusion. My own take on the story would be to say that if you leave a charismatic personality (not in itself a bad thing) in a situation where he or she is not properly accountable, then you have the recipe for potential disaster. The problem will be compounded when the situation is not addressed for a number of years. When an individual in any walk of life, not least the church, is identified as possessing the gifts of charisma, then there should always be checks and balances to stop that individual becoming too powerful and controlling, no doubt ‘enthralling’ and ‘mesmerising’ many along the way. Charismatic power can be channelled into good ends, but that can only be done by people who have faced up to and understand its potentially dark and destructive side.

A short time ago I wrote a piece about the importance of recognising change in a positive sense as part of the human lot. What I did not discuss was the second part of the quotation from the hymn, Abide with Me, where it speaks not only of change but also of decay. This August, as last year, I am on chaplaincy cover at the local hospital. This means that I am talking to quite a few people sometimes at the very end of their lives. The hope is that some spiritual insight and counsel may ease their passing. That is the theory of a chaplain’s work. The actual practice is to listen to an elderly person, often in a state of sadness and confusion, and hope that the mere act of listening may help them feel connected a little, as they prepare to make the final journey from this life to the beyond.

The prevalence of actual dementia in so many of the elderly population is a fact of our time. Various initiatives are proposed, both social and pharmacological, but the sad fact is that quite a proportion of our elderly people die in a state of wondering who they are and barely recognising their relatives. This morning I spent time with one old lady who was convinced that her relatives had abandoned her and that they wanted her to die so that they could get their hands on her money. I had no means of knowing whether any of it was true or whether it was a fantasy created by her confused state. Either way it was a sad place for her to be. The same relatives will find themselves rejected when they get back from holiday and she will die, quite possibly, with a feeling of being completely abandoned.

The examples of mental and physical decay in the very old are familiar to all of us. It raises quite profound theological questions about our identity. Is our soul somehow contained in the sad confused state that many of us are destined to arrive at, or is there is a ‘core’ personality that exists beneath or above what we may become? Also when we use the language of ‘conversion’ to describe the Christian individual, is that state of being ‘saved’ something that can never be eradicated, whatever happens to that person in later life? It is not clear what the answer is to these questions, but it is important to ask them as we wrestle with the profound questions of human suffering as well as human identity. My own personal answer to the dilemma is to imagine that each of us do have a core personality which draws on aspects of what we are now and have been at every stage. Our ‘tree’ may have many layers or tree rings within but it is one tree with all the years of growth and change contained within it. The tree when it is fully grown still has those years of growth inside the trunk, even if only one layer of bark is visible to the human eye. I always think of God in looking at us, seeing, not only the people we have become but the totality of the all the stages of our journey on the way to the present moment. One gets the sense that the psalmist thought like this when he declared in Psalm 22.10: ‘upon thee was I cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me, thou hast been my God.’ God knows us from the beginning and that knowledge is one that carries us through to the end.

The seeming tragedy of old-age decay may not be the total evil that it appears at first sight. If we can retain an optimistic perspective, then we have good news for the elderly. God sees beyond and behind the outward decay to love and affirm the person right across the span of life. The practical issue is that the church is not good at sharing this message. In proclaiming ‘mission’ as being at the centre of its task, it very easily allows the extreme elderly to drop out of sight in favour of the young and virile who may yet become Christians. It goes without saying that the abandoning of a group of people, because of age or confusion, is an example of abuse through neglect. Old people need to be honoured and respected by both church and society. Somehow we have to find ways of expressing our respect and not regarding them as a nuisance because they no longer make a tangible contribution to their community. Above all, as Christians, we need to learn to see them as I believe God sees them, people with lives and loves behind and within them. We need to see them like trees containing the numerous rings of life and experience. That way the church could make an enormous contribution to the well-being of society. It could be said to be a place where people, all people, are honoured and valued from birth to death. This is what God does. He sees us and affirms us as wholes, as complete people.

My opportunity for visiting these very elderly people is confined to the periods when I am on duty at the local hospital covering for the chaplain’s holidays. For the rest of the time they are to me, as for most people, an invisible segment of society. It would of course be possible to pretend that because we seldom encounter the very old, that we can ignore the problem and hope it will somehow disappear. But even we were to think like this, there is one overriding reason to restrain us in such an approach. That is the fact that all of us need to think now about the way we will fare in a similar situation. For Christians we have to ask whether the church will support us in extreme old age. Will I be heard, have psalms read to me and be generally affirmed by members of the church or will I be abandoned as having nothing at that point to contribute to the Christian community? Perhaps that is a question that all my readers should ponder. If we do ask the question for ourselves, perhaps we can make a small difference now in ensuring that, in a very small way, the church moves out of its comfort zone to visit, support and minister to the elderly, the confused and the sick. They are, after all, again in the words of the Psalmist, ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’. By seeing that we are able to give them back some of the honour and dignity that age and infirmity has seemingly taken from them.

Words have a habit of subtly changing their meaning over relatively short periods of time. This may come about as fashions change, or an attitude in society moves in a particular direction. One of the words that has changed its meaning, causing sadness for many of us, is the word ‘Christian’. A few years ago the word meant a decent honest reliable person, someone anybody could do business with. Today the word, sadly, has become associated for many with a set of right wing attitudes, authoritarianism, homophobia and smug superiority. Worse, the word has, in some cases, come to be associated in some people’s minds with acts of betrayal towards others, like paedophilia and discrimination against women. For the time being, at any rate, the Church of England and other mainstream church communities still retains some of the good-will that it has built up over the centuries in society. It remains to be seen if this broadly benevolent attitude towards the C of E is continued as the parish system increasingly lurches towards being, not an institution serving the whole community, but a sect-like gathering for the religiously like-minded. Will the word ‘church’ come eventually to acquire negative connotations as seems to have happened to the word Christian?

I may have told the story about a pious family in my parish whose small son died as a baby. They were not members of my congregation but I still knew them quite well as members of the community. The mother took over the organising the funeral for the child but the whole process was delayed while she made frantic phone-calls to discover who was a ‘Christian’ undertaker. None of our local undertakers was considered Christian according to her sectarian definition, so eventually the ceremony was organised by a firm some fifty miles away. I was certainly unable to offer suggestions in this search. This idea that only some businesses are wholesome because they have people who are, not only members of churches, but also the right kind of churches, is quite widespread among some congregations. I have, from time to time, been told that I am not a proper Christian because a) I read the Bible in a different way from ‘true’ Christians and b) I do not ‘preach the gospel’ (not every sermon calls for repentance). This accusation has left me puzzled. Should I be upset that my beliefs and Christian priorities are considered beyond the pale, or should I be relieved that I am not expected to fit into the straight-jacket of increasingly sectarian expressions of the Christian faith? I cannot, in fact, be the only clergyman whose words and writings are scrutinised to see whether they conform to one or other of the Protestant articulations of the Christian faith. To say that this kind of scrutiny is not an irritant and indeed an undermining of morale, would be to downplay the situation. From the perspective of retirement I can see fairly clearly what was going on. I was observing a trend among individuals and congregations to understand the Christian faith in an increasingly polarised way. This is all part of the binary thinking we have discussed before. You are either in the fold or outside it. There is only black or white with no possibility of grey.

The more that ‘binary’ Christians see themselves as apart and distinct from others, whether Christian or not, the more that the bulk of society will become estranged from the word ‘Christian’ and move towards finding the word offensive. The good-will I spoke of above, which has been built up over centuries of hard-working service towards the poor and the sick, could be dissipated in a couple of generations. The ordinary member of the public when encountering the word ‘Christian’ will think not of selfless service of others but of bigotry and exclusion. Certain words from the Bible appear to support the desire of sectarian Christians to alienate and antagonise others, particularly the passage at the end of the Beatitudes: ‘Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account’. For some Christian groups, this appears to give them permission to irritate, upset and generally fall out with others outside their group whether Christian or secular. It is a mark of honour among many cultic groups to receive the disapproval of others. There is the psychological fact that groups under attack will draw closer together, but also the group convinces itself that truth and goodness will always be under threat of attack because that was the calling of Jesus.

The words in Matthew immediately after the quote made from chapter 5 give a somewhat different perspective on the Christian relationship to the world. Jesus tells his disciples that they are to be salt and light ‘of the world’. I draw attention to the preposition ‘of’, because it is significant that Jesus does not talk about the light and the salt being somehow separate and being introduced to it. Salt and light are already part of what the world consists of. Christians are to be those who reveal what is already there but may have been buried or hidden. I find the idea that Christians are helping to uncover what is already there in the world a far better description of mission, than the idea that the world is totally corrupt and ignorant. Our Christian ancestors in Britain have been working away at bringing light and understanding to many areas of society – hospitals, schools, care of the disabled, the poor and even into politics. I still find it a matter of comment that it is politicians that have seen the justice and rightness of extending marriage to the gay population in the teeth of opposition from many Christians. We are not far off from sending a clear message to society that a Christian is defined by his or her attitude to gay sex. So often we have heard earnest Christians in legal cases saying that their ‘faith’ forbids them acting generously towards a gay couple. How long will it be before this kind of attitude becomes fixed in people’s minds? Are we really to live in a world where the word ‘Christian’ means an intolerant bigot? Can the rest of us, who care for the values of tolerance and generosity to those who are minorities in thought or action, reclaim the word Christian? It will take a lot of work and effort for Christians once again to imply that we are followers of Jesus in his attitude to the poor, the weak, the oppressed and minorities. This blog is one small effort in holding up a flag to reclaim for the Christian faith the values of generosity and acceptance of others even when they are not like us.

Chris has been asking me for a number of weeks to set out what I think about the differences between conservatives and liberals within the church. Behind his request I sense that he believes, as do many other people, that I see them like two political parties that are in constant conflict or opposition. The one party is right wing, wanting to preserve the status quo, while the other, the liberal wing of the church, is a group that is more forward looking. The conservatives will hold on to old traditional beliefs while the liberal wing will entertain new ideas which make the traditionalists quite uncomfortable at times.

I want to suggest first of all that the political analogy to describe these two wings of the church does not really work. The so-called liberal wing of the church does not parade a set of beliefs and statements and then invite people to choose between it and the typical conservative set of statements. Typically conservative evangelical statements would include something about the sovereignty of God, the necessity of salvation through the atoning death of Christ, the trustworthiness of the bible as contained in the original manuscripts and something about the work of the Holy Spirit. Conservative congregations will be invited to subscribe to a version of these beliefs, even they will differ slightly from church to church. It will, in fact, be possible to find quite deep divisions within the Protestant family of churches on, for example, the details as how we are saved. This will happen even though these churches are all reading the same set of scriptures. As a non-conservative, I do not want to labour this point at present, except to note it in passing.

If the liberal position were to be like a political party, we would expect it to set out another set of principles and statements of belief to compare with the conservative creeds. My understanding of the liberal position is that it operates in a quite different way so that we cannot easily set it side by side with the conservative statements and do a ‘compare and contrast’. The liberal insight into the Christian faith will, like the conservatives, start from the existence of Scripture. But its use of Scripture will be quite different. The so-called liberals will often, and this is infuriating to those who dislike their approach, refuse to commit themselves to a single interpretation of a particular passage. They will also not want to disregard a conservative interpretation unless it can be seen to lead to harm for those who think in this particular way. The words of Scripture will be taken, not to prove a point of doctrine, but as a witness to a transforming event which took place in response to an encounter with the man Jesus. The same encounter and the same possibility of transformation can be sought today. The formal creeds will be taken seriously as a statement of the impact of that man Jesus on individuals and a whole society. The follower today is invited, not to declare an intellectual assent to statements about what is ‘true’, but to become part of a movement towards a reality we call God, as glimpsed and made real by Jesus. That journey has less to do with intellectual assent than with becoming part of an adventure of discovery as we grow towards God in the activities we call prayer, worship and the demands of love.

It would be true to say that liberal Christians are extremely vulnerable to the taunts of other Christians who, for their own purposes, have defined the Christian faith in propositional terms, i.e. as a series of statements about reality and truth. When Jesus spoke about the Spirit leading a follower into ‘all truth’, the liberal-leaning Christian will see this as a call to a never-ending adventure of experience of learning and praying, both on their own and also with others. The conservative will hear the word ‘truth’ as being the correct answers to questions of ultimate significance. The idea that there is an individual, personal even, element to the discovery of what truth might be, is alarming and even heretical to their way of thinking.

In trying to represent two sides of a divide within the Christian tradition, I have to repeat the point that we are not comparing opposing positions about truth. What we are comparing are two distinct ways of discovering truth. One is saying that truth is to be found by following certain paths which have been well trodden by others so that nothing new needs to be entertained or discovered. The liberal path is saying that the Christian path is an invitation to newness and discovery. There are maps available but each person who receives a map of Christian way is invited to fill in many of the details of the map for themselves. There will be many obstacles along the path to be faced. Sometimes the way will seemingly be blocked by tragedy, questions or plain uncertainty. The person travelling along these ‘liberal’ tracks may seem lost, vulnerable and may suffer pain. He may even suffer the pangs of doubt. Although he may hear the call of his conservative brother to come back to a place of certainty and safety, he will resist that call because he has glimpsed a vision that the path to God will never be easy and his vocation is to pursue truth and righteousness along a particular route which belongs in some sense to him alone. Jesus has spoken to him in the words ‘Behold I make all things new’. He has interpreted these words to mean that he has to pursue a path that is being walked for the very first time. It is fresh because he has never been along it before and he senses that God’s personal vocation to him to be a Christian is indeed a ‘new thing’. He also hears the word of Psalm 23 that there is one who walks beside him. ‘He leads me beside still waters…’

A few weeks ago I reflected on the Christian journey being like a pilgrimage and in many ways this reflection is a continuation of that theme. The important idea here and in that other reflection is the idea of constant movement and change. I would like to suggest that movement and change are an essential element in what it means to be a Christian. The words that cluster around ‘salvation’, safety and being saved, suggest arriving at a place so that there is no need to go any further. The idea that we can ever ‘arrive’ in any sense on this side of the grave is, for me, something deeply troubling. If anyone ever told me that I had ‘arrived’ spiritually and I need go no further because my salvation was assured, I would immediately feel trapped like a butterfly in a dark hall. No, for me the liberal is a Christian who, while he does not have all the answers, goes on moving, goes on travelling until his last breath. Maybe the life beyond death also requires us to journey and to travel so that we can adjust to the new realities that are there, the ’things that pass our understanding.’

My attention has been drawn to the Trinity Brentwood blog once again, as new information relevant to my concerns has been placed online. The information concerns two evangelistic organisations that are attached loosely to Trinity. These two, respectively known as Zeal Outreach Ministries and Tony Anthony International Evangelist, are dominated by the people in charge, Peter Ruck and Tony Anthony. Both of these men share much in common with the style and methods adopted by Michael Reid, the former leader of Peniel and frequently mentioned in this blog. In each case there is a story of conversion followed then by the development of an evangelistic ministry. No formal theological training of any kind is part of the narrative. Both organisations show the opportunities available to an articulate person who wants to be powerful and significant in this often murky world of do-it-yourself evangelistic empires. This last expression well describes Michael Reid’s Peniel enterprise until his ‘fall’ in 2008.

Before I tell the outline stories of these two individuals, I want to mention the question I raised on the other Trinity blog site. I asked, and myself answered in a generalised way, the question as to whether an independent evangelist needs theological training. I suggested that many, if not all, independent evangelists fail to obtain any theological qualifications. The core preaching technique for the majority of these evangelists in independent fellowships will be to tell their conversion story or testimony over and over again. The details will be sometimes changed and the conclusions altered but the core message will remain identical. This testimony style of preaching is not in itself wrong but when a particular preacher uses it over and over again, one has to wonder whether they have anything else to say. In some Christian cultures, every Christian is encouraged to stand and make a public testimony of how they became a Christian. This declaration of an individual’s Christian journey is an important milestone in their journey of faith. It may boost their confidence as a self-identified member of the group so that they may find then that they are ready to accept new responsibilities. The testimony on its own should not, however, be considered as the same thing as a teaching ministry. But this, sadly, will be as far as many untrained evangelists aspire. They may also, as I mentioned on the other blog, practise, under the guidance of a mentor, the devices of voice delivery, hand movements etc. so that their preaching style would be as polished as possible.

A further part of the ‘training’ of the evangelist might be a crash course in bible quotes. I rather irreverently suggested in my other blog contribution that the quotes learned would be mainly to do with ‘sin, sex and salvation.’ Whatever the quotes being used, they would be to prop up a particular theological emphasis favoured by the congregation concerned. It might be Calvinist, Neo-Calvinist or Pentecostal or some other flavour. Needless to say, from the perspective of the writer of this blog, quarrying the bible for texts to support a particular favoured belief system, is not a valid way to use the bible. The bible should always be allowed to speak for itself, not press-ganged into supporting a particular theology. But I have to leave that point to one side for the moment. The point of this short consideration of the training of many independent evangelists, including the two we want to discuss, is that any proper in-depth theological training is absent. The result of having no theological training or proper study of the bible is that you will be trapped within a small container of one narrow theological vision. If the preacher/evangelist is thus unable to break out of his pre-existing theological horizons, then the same fate is going to be reserved for all those who listen to him and believe that he is a man of God. Narrowness, shallowness of vision, blinkered perspectives and outright ignorance will be will be visited on all those who find themselves attached to evangelists whose grasp of the Christian faith is superficial. To be deprived of even a glimpse of the broader perspectives of Christian teaching because of the inadequacies of the preacher is a form of Christian abuse.

The two evangelists I want to consider who, it is claimed, have had no theological training of any kind are Peter Ruck and Tony Anthony. Peter Ruck was converted to Christianity through the ministry of Michael Reid at Peniel. Michael Reid did nothing to encourage Peter in any kind of ministry and it was only after the former was expelled from leadership that Peter moved towards discovering what he might do in evangelising. According to a well-informed source on Nigel Davies’ blog, Peter had himself appointed as a Youth Leader in the church before deciding that he had a vocation to be an evangelist. Peter is, to all accounts, not a bad man but it would appear from a perusal of his web-site that he is extremely naïve and thus liable to do damage to others. He is also in danger of being taken in by other more obviously ‘dodgy’ types within the unaccountable world of independent evangelists. Peter Ruck has annually organised a big festival, The Way, that took place at Trinity last week. No report has appeared on how many people came to this event but the people who are invited to speak at this event also belong to the tribe of self-appointed and self-authorised evangelists. As individuals they may be moral and well-meaning. One cannot, however, have any confidence that they will indeed help people to discover God or a deeper understanding of the Bible.

One person who was not invited to The Way by Peter Ruck was the evangelist Tony Anthony, even though, until recently, the two worked closely together. Tony is still in the process of planning a come-back into the world of independent evangelists, after his disgrace when his book, Chasing The Dragon was found, on detailed examination, to be a tissue of fantasy and exaggeration. I wrote about this book in a previous blog post. Once again, like Peter, Tony has had no training of any kind and his preaching seems to be a constant telling and retelling of his (fantasy) story about his past. The well-informed source from Peniel/Trinity suggests that the other Peter, Peter Linnecar, Trinity’s leader, is also guilty of making every sermon a personal testimony. Peter Ruck was, apparently, completely taken in by Tony Anthony’s ministry and such a failure of discernment is always going to be a hazard in the world of the untrained and unaccountable.

I am reaching the end of the allotted number of words I allow myself, and I want to finish with this final question. People like Peter Ruck and Tony Anthony set up mini-evangelistic empires and receive invitations from equally naïve Christian pastors and their congregations who hear their testimonies without a scintilla of doubt. Who are the victims here? It is the long-suffering members of congregations who long to be fed with wholesome Christian teaching but instead listen to the superficially attractive messages of people who behind them have no training, no theological depth and no accountability. Such a situation is bad for them, bad for the inflated narcissism of the evangelists and bad for the reputation of the wider church. How can anyone find their way to a mature appreciation of the depths of the Christian faith, listening to the ramblings of the ill-educated and the ill-informed? It is a bit like entrusting the care of a hospital accident and emergency unit to a bunch of boy scouts who have passed their proficiency badge for first aid. No malign forces are necessarily at work here, but the victims of such teaching still end up damaged and abused just the same.

One of the themes that emerged out of the Stockholm conference was the way in which cults often divide families. This also seems to be a theme that pertains to many high-demand Christian groups, from the JWs to independent fellowships like Trinity Brentwood. Recently Nigel Davies, the blogmaster who writes about the latter church, has been describing the way that his own daughter was alienated from the family by the machinations of the Trinity leadership. While the details of this are not given us, there is enough information to see the kind of traps and techniques that were employed. I will be returning to Nigel’s daughter later but I want to set out first the processes that I believe are involved when cult leaders wreak devastation on families, by splitting them apart and creating divisions and alienation.

Every cult or high demand religious group has one thing in common, a charismatic leader. This adjective ‘charismatic’ is a little slippery in its meaning, but here it refers to the fact of an (normally male) attractiveness to others. The quality of being attractive to would-be followers will have elements, not only of physical magnetism, but also the ability to entrance and fascinate through words and teaching. The relationship that will exist between this charisma and those that are drawn to it will have some of the qualities of ‘being in love’. In most cases the relationship will not have a sexual component but other aspects of being in love will be present. These include a sense that the charisma is ‘the’ answer to current questions and uncertainties. The leader will be able to persuade the follower to trust in his words in the same that the lover is completely prepared to trust the object of his love. The word ‘fascinate’ plays an important part in this process. In a book written about 100 years ago, Rudolf Otto described what he called the Idea of the Holy. This set out the notion that to be attracted to a holy object, idea or person was a key component in religious experience. This object was said to be a ‘tremendous mystery that fascinates’. I have often pondered Otto’s ideas since first reading them. They seem to apply to the experiential forms of religion that have appeared in the past 50 years. Both mainstream forms of religion and the cultic manifestations seem to tap into the need of people to be drawn to forms of new experience. They do not understand these but they are fascinated and enthralled by them.

The relationship with a religious leader and a follower is itself something to be pondered about in every type of religious group. Even the boring old C of E is not always free from unhealthy dynamics in this area. In cultic groups the leader will often get close to the followers and work his ‘magic’ on the followers, typically young, directly. Sometimes he is kept deliberately remote so that the follower has to make do only with occasional glimpses of him. These manifestations will be rationed so that the followers are kept to a high pitch of longing for the leader’s attention. However the dynamic of the religious group operates, there is clearly a very important bond between leader and led that is developed and cultivated in the group. The power of charisma is not to be underestimated as an important dynamic in every kind of church. Attractive people will always find it easier to persuade others and indeed get their own way. A readiness to ‘convert’ may come out of an intense desire to please.

When we enter the murky world of more obviously malign cults and extreme Christian groups, we see more clearly how charisma often becomes toxic. The experience of having perhaps dozens of followers being in love with you will easily turn the head of many leaders. He may or may not translate the adoration of disciples into the sexual conquest of female (or male) members, but he is highly likely to exploit them in other ways. We have looked at the issue of inflated salaries and financial perks in the last post and we can pass that over for now. The real temptation for toxic charismatic leaders is to have the undivided attention and adoration of individuals who will be loyal to them alone, untrammelled by family or other attachments. The splitting apart of families in cultic groups often seems to come about as the desire of a leaders to have the complete loyalty of one individual. Other loyalties must be put aside so that the relationship may be ‘pure’ and uncontaminated. You can imagine a leader whispering to a favoured follower about leaving all, including families and possessions, for the sake of the kingdom. The sense of fascination and enthrallment with the leader will allow the favoured one so honoured to commit the blasphemy of abandoning wives, husbands and children to follow the suggested path of utter devotion to the leader. The acolyte will believe that that they are doing it for God but in reality they have be seduced by the attraction of charismatic power.

The word ‘seduction’ with its overtones of sex and irrationality is a good one to use in the context of cultic groups. The combination of religion, power and heady experience is hard to resist for many people. The follower will feel intoxicated with all the attention that is lavished on him or her by the leader. But such intoxication will last only so long as they remain in the leader’s favour. The motivation for pushing out the follower’s spouse and children, which was to gain the undivided loyalty of the follower, was based on something fairly fickle. Very quickly the once favoured individual can find themselves passed over in favour of someone else. The devastation can be tremendous. It is a bit like leaving a husband or wife for another lover, only to find that the new lover has no intention of remaining loyal. The jilted follower is also left devastated in a similar quandary. They have been betrayed by a cult leader who has used his power abusively and without a trace of real concern for the well-being of the follower.

The fragments of Nigel Davis’ story in connection with Trinity Brentwood seem to fit in with this pattern. When Nigel left the church in 1997, the leaders appealed to the loyalty of his daughter to remain part of the church. This ‘seduction’ lasted only long enough to alienate her from the family and so, when she too left the church, she fell into the arms, not of her family, but of people who cared nothing for her well-being. Bereft of family support she has tragically acquired a drug problem which now threatens her life.

This blog post has tried to uncover the dynamic of the way that some religious and cultic groups use the ‘seduction’ of charisma firstly to attract and hold members, and then often discard them as the whim of the leader so decides. The effect on the well-being of people treated in this way and on their alienated families is nothing short of ruinous. Family relationships are extremely difficult to repair in these circumstances. That individuals in charge of these groups can behave with evident cruelty towards their followers is seemingly a mystery. But we have to leave an explanation as to how leaders possess such capacity for indifference towards their followers as a subject for another blog post.

I make no claim at originality in the title that I have included above as it has been lifted straight from a comment on the Brentwood blog. Behind the witticism there is a serious point being made about the nature of a cultic church. Indeed the question as to whether a minister or pastor is more interested in the financial aspects of his ministry (profit) than in the vocational aspect of his work (prophet) is something that could be asked of a wide range of Church leaders. In my own Anglican tradition there is probably little scope for inflating salaries for the clergy, but over my ministry I have noticed that some clergy were able to negotiate far more generous expenses than others. Financial struggle is, however, the normal lot of most clergy in the mainstream churches. Although the traditional picture of a clergyman in threadbare clothes, which Anthony Trollope described, may not exist anymore, there are some who really find it hard to make ends meet.

We have several times in the course of this blog talked about the ‘Health and Wealth’ teaching which is dominant among quite a number of churches, not least the so-called ‘black’ churches. There the idea of a threadbare minister would be considered, not a sign of humility and self-sacrifice for the work of God, but a sign of failure. The emphasis is on receiving the blessings of God and that includes driving the right kind of car and living with the right standard of living. The teaching that God wants to bless his people by providing all them with adequate wealth for a particular life-style will start with the minister but will spread beyond there to include many in the congregation. If this teaching has gained acceptance among the congregation, it will often have a pernicious effect in the way that the congregation will treat those who cannot aspire to a particular standard of living. Once the idea becomes entrenched that God is ‘blessing’ the wealthy and comfortably off, it is but a small step to despising those who do not have these trappings. Poverty will then become something that is blameworthy. In practice the poor will not hang around in a congregation where they are despised and looked down upon. The rest of the congregation will then settle down to be a group of people who aspire to the same set of values and similar comfortable standards of living. That in fact seems to be the pattern at Trinity Brentwood. The ‘problem’ of accommodating the poor will be one that has somehow vanished of its own accord.

The issue of congregations dealing with wide variations of wealth and class is not just one for so-called ‘Health and Wealth’ congregations. It actually affects many congregations without often being discussed openly. Wealth or the lack of it exists alongside another great taboo within churches which is the issue of class. Many Anglican churches do not have to deal with disparities of wealth or class because in the parish system people are gathered from particular areas which are similar socio-economically. Poor people tend to live in poorer areas while better-off people live in more expensive areas. Many urban parishes are thus socially and financially monochrome. It is only in the rural areas that rich and poor come together for worship, though sometimes one feels the system here works in a somewhat feudal way.

To return to our main theme of pastors and ministers who enrich themselves at the expense of their congregations. This behaviour, as evidenced by the leaders of Holy Trinity, Brentwood, is something that is an obscenity on more than one level. In the first place it is sending out a message that to be poor is somehow to be outside the blessings of God. This is a grotesque teaching which is worse than the idea of our Victorian forebears that poverty was morally blameworthy.

The second aspect of a wealthy leadership in certain churches is that it can create a barrier between the minister and those he serves. The idea of a servant ministry is very hard to sustain if you, the leader, drive a car that is bigger than that of your congregation and sustain a wealthy life-style. In the reports about Trinity, Brentwood, it is stated that the chief pastor has his own private entrance to the church so that he is not ‘contaminated’ from mixing with the ordinary members of the congregation. It is a small step from receiving a huge salary to believing that you are worthy of that salary. If you add to this to some of the teaching from the Health and Wealth gospel, you convince yourself that the money you receive and spend is a sign of God’s favour. The more you amass in the form of wealth, the more you believe that you are specially chosen and blessed by God. This at the very least is a form of fantasy religion.

Thinking of my own experience as an Anglican priest for 40 years, I can see that there was always a problem of having to live in a larger house than the average home in the parish. That is one thing, but any excess of wealth would have compounded the problem of being able to be alongside every parishioner, rich or poor. It would have been both embarrassing and counter-productive ever, in any way, to flaunt wealth or social position. Living in a tied house, even if it was larger than many others, was in many ways an advantage as it fell outside the norms of social climbing that obsess so many in society. Arriving at the age of retirement still solvent and with two children safely married and independent, we are indeed fortunate. The path of ministry has not been for us, nor ever should be, a path to wealth. Any suggestion to the contrary seems to be a kind of blasphemy. God does not, as the Health and Wealth preachers promise, provide riches to those who serve him.

Is love always benign? The answer to this simple question is no. People who declare that they love other individuals do not necessarily have the best interests of the other at heart. Love can sometimes be selfish so that the needs of the lover can take precedence over the one who is the object of affection. Also one person may love another because that is the only way that the lover can feel alive. They may fear the loss of the other because they know their self-esteem and their physical well-being would decline if the beloved departed from their life. This kind of love we describe as clingy and manipulative. It is hardly a gateway to fulfilment for either party. The grasping love of one party may also be a kind of self-medication, attempting to resolve one or other of a number of mental health issues, possibly depression or chronic loneliness. Clearly the recipient of such love, if they choose to hang around, is not receiving a life-enhancing affirmation of love from another person.

Selfish love can be described as toxic as it can lead to the recipient of such love being diminished or harmed. But there are distinctive forms of toxic love which emerge out of certain Christian settings. We have already seen something of this in our discussions on ostracism. A J. Witness mother refuses to speak to a daughter who wishes to leave the group. This mother will convince herself that she is acting out of love. She will know at one level that the reason for treating her daughter and her family as though they were dead is because the Church insists on it. But she will persuade herself that the harsh treatment is really an expression of love because, through it, she will be putting pressure on that daughter to return to the way of salvation, as interpreted by the Witnesses. The act of ‘disfellowshipping’ or shunning will be an extraordinary example of love that is no love.

Similar treatment will be meted by some Christians toward a member of the family who comes out as gay. So convinced are some Christians that the gay person is on the way to certain hell that they use every form of disapproval they can muster, including the silent treatment, verbal abuse or general harassment. All this done in the name of a kind of ‘tough love’. The idea is that such love will make the ‘sinner’ see the error of their ways. Perhaps they are following Paul’s instructions in I Corinthians over the expulsion of an immoral brother, in order to hand him over to Satan. It is hardly likely that such ‘love’ will be experienced as other than as toxic, and the recipient is going find it extremely hard ever to be reconciled to the dispenser of such ‘Christian’ love.

Sometimes the form of demonstrating love is not active, but consists of failing to offer any help or support for the one who has fallen into a difficult situation. They are allowed to ‘stew in their own juice’. Because they are the victims of their misfortune, they are allowed to suffer the consequences without any practical help or compassion being offered. Somehow, once again, such passive-aggressive behaviour on the part of Christians will be interpreted by some as love. Love here means leaving someone to flounder. The hope is that by abandoning them to their situation they may come to their senses. They are reaping the consequences of their behaviour and cannot expect any kind of help.

Another form of toxic love is found among those who preach hell-fire and brimstone teaching. I do not put myself in the line of those who preach this way, but from my memory of such sermons in the past, it was always hard to detect any trace of love in what was being said. And yet the preacher of such sermons has, I believe, genuinely convinced himself that his preaching is an act of compassion, reaching out to the damned and the unsaved. His ‘love’ is being declared because he believes he is reaching out from a place of blessing into another world of depravity and filth. His preaching may yet, he hopes, rescue a few from their ultimate punishment. From the perspective of the person who is the intended object of such rantings, the preaching comes over as an action of arrogant and bigoted hate. How dare the preacher make so many assumptions about the inner attitudes of the ‘unsaved’? How dare the preacher make assumptions about the attitude of Jesus himself towards the ‘unsaved’? If Jesus means anything at all to the non-saved, he stands for a love that enables one to grow as human beings. Jesus calls us all, not to some formulaic confession of faith, but to glimpsing and growing into a life of richness, beauty and creativity under God.

One thing we know about human love, as it touches us and our families, is that it enables growth. It is under a regime of the right kind of love that children grow up and flourish in happiness and joy. The same sort of love sustains us all throughout life. Christians believe that we grow and change and flourish under the beneficent care that God shines upon us. That divine love, one that sustains us even when we are down and encourages us to stand straight when life is hard, is a source of nourishment for our whole being, body and soul. At one level the Christian faith seen from this perspective is incredibly simple. Love one another in the same way that you are loved by God. Pondering the words of Jesus ‘just as I have loved you’, should successfully steer us away from any version of toxic love that is taught under the banner of the Christian faith.

There is within Christian belief an assumption, rarely brought to the surface, that believes that God does not and cannot change. This assumed changelessness of God allows Christians to expect that their world of belief also never needs to change. This understanding is expressed in the well-known hymn that God is one who ‘changes not’. He is compared with the ‘change and decay’ that is ‘in all around I see’. The hymn articulates an attitude towards God, both felt and believed in, together with a desire to reach out for and grasp on to realities which will never alter. This is felt to be particularly important for those who find the world unsettling because of the way that it is constantly changing and disturbing the people who want certainty and stability in their lives.

A longing for stability in the face of change is not peculiar to our age and culture. One of the distinctive beliefs of the Greeks of the early Christian period was the notion that God was a being above time and space. He was incapable of change. The understanding of perfection could not allow any idea of alteration in God. There was an instinctive understanding that change of any kind was a change away from perfection, a change for the worse. We might not want to argue with this understanding of the nature of the divine, but the effect on the spirituality that flowed from it was not always so helpful. In brief the mystical way was understood to be a journey from ‘change and decay’ to contemplate the eternal beauty and stability of God. Once again we can see that such a notion of prayer, which raises an individual to a place of transcendence, will have its supporters. There is however a problem when this is presented as the ideal for every Christian. Any quick reference back to the New Testament shows us that while prayer, worship and silence were important to Jesus, there was also the life of action and engagement to be undertaken. Surely for the vast majority of Christians a life of involvement with the world and a life of contemplation have to be kept in balance?

The longing to be in a safe place that never changes is not just an echo of classic spirituality. It is also recognisable as a longing with Freudian overtones. It has not gone unnoticed that the hymn ‘Rock of Ages’ seems to demand a return to the safe place similar to the one which was occupied by a child in the womb. ‘Let me hide myself in thee’ seems to pander to some fairly primal longings for safety. Whatever the truth or otherwise of this observation, we still seem to be in the arena of a Christianity which is being sold as a package that offers a diet of security to its followers. It is clear that the safety and security that many want is not in accord with the teaching of Jesus. His challenge to human kind is double-edged. While he invites us to come to him where he will give us ‘rest’, he is also the one who challenges us to take up our cross to follow him. The Christian life is thus a balance between contemplation and action and every reliable expression of the tradition over the centuries seems to recognise this.

The next thing we need to notice about ‘change’ is that it is a sign of life. Our understanding of biology and evolution allows us to see that change is the way that creation moves forward. Unless we are among the minority of Christians who reject evolution, it is clear to all of us that adaptation and change is what makes creation possible. There is a constant process in the way that life reaches out to embrace new complexity in the way that it is expressed. Human beings stand on the shoulders of 14 billion years of constant change and evolution. The detail of this evolution is of course beyond us here but change is an essential and inbuilt part of the process. We can summarise this process as saying that without change there is no life.

It would be then a truism to say that to embrace life is to embrace change. This is true as much for the following of the Christian path as it is true for life in general. An observation of the children in our families is where we see the process of embracing change and newness most clearly at work. They are allowed to make new discoveries every day, learn to use new words and we rejoice in this process. The Christian path cannot be immune to this same process of change. Obviously there is going to be the possibility of such a thing as negative change, change for the worse. But the danger of this should not blind us to the likelihood that we will be expected to be constantly learning, constantly growing and changing in our Christian pilgrimage. Above all we must not allow ourselves to be caught up in a church life which feeds off the fear of change. We should never give in to the doom mediators, the ones who sell ‘safe’ Christianity. That version will present a safe unchanging God, one whose will has been revealed for all time in a book. While it is true to say that the book, the Bible, is always going to be read in Christian circles and be appealed to as a guiding norm for the practice of the faith, it is not true to say that its meaning is unchanging. The bible is read and understood differently in each place it is taught. It will also reveal different messages at different moments in history. And it is not only the understanding of the bible that changes. The ‘book of life’ around us is constantly changing. Constant new insights are being discovered by the society around us. While some need to be challenged, others can welcomed as showing the creative change that a society in a state of evolution will throw up. Sometimes a society which reads the book of life correctly is able to develop love and compassion for persecuted minorities in a way that puts strict Christians to shame. Society, at least in part, has welcomed the end of racism and the cruelty meted out to gays and women ahead of many in the church. Sometimes we find ourselves holding hands with non-Christians who uphold the cause of justice and truth against the bigotry that is shown by some members of our own community. The blockage, at one level, is a fear of change. Christians of a conservative temperament have been persuaded by their leaders that changelessness is a feature of God and the teachings promoted by their group can also never change. That, as we have seen, can lead to cruelty and abusive behaviour.

Change, in short, is not a feature of a decaying church. It can be a feature of life and growth in the same way that the apparently dead twig on a tree gives way to an abundance of growth and beauty. While, of course, there are dangers implicit in the process of welcoming change, we still have to recognise that we need to embrace it in some form or other at every stage of our life. When we recognise the advent of some change as being correct, we need to be able to welcome it with enthusiasm and hope. Change is built into the fabric of the universe and we need to expect it especially in the events that we interpret as the action of God towards us.

STOP PRESS A video of my talk in Stockholm has been published on youtube. This is the reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpwyGHtFmXs