by Anon

Damon is an apprentice devil tasked with learning to undermine and weaken the Church of England and wider Anglicanism. Lucius is a senior devil mentoring apprentices overseeing the work on all denominations. Lucius refers to the Church of England as the ‘English Patient’. Lucius is particularly keen to encourage the Church of England’s peculiar ecclesionomics, bloated ecclesiocracy and unaccountable episcocrats. Lucius draws on C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, published in 1942. These letters are published by Lucius for the benefit of new apprentices. – Lucius.

One Swallow Does Not Make a Summer

Dear Lucius

I am getting very concerned about statistics. Or rather, what Anglicans seem to be reading into them.  There was some recent research appearing to show a resurgence – even a resurrection, it alarms me to say – in younger people coming to church. Apparently the trend is most notable amongst young men. 

I know I shouldn’t panic, because if the figures are to be believed (which is debatable), the upturn in numbers is only slight, and anyway confined to Pentecostalism, Catholicism and some fashionable Ultra-Reformed churches. These churches are not my responsibility. But I do worry that the talk of growth is stimulating Anglican morale, which concerns me.

Could you give me some sort of guidance on how to tackle this?  I’d like to nip it in the bud before it gets out of hand, and I think I need some strategic advice on what tactics to deploy if we are to undermine any apparent recovery.

Your Servant, Damon

Dear Damon,

You need not worry. One swallow does not make a summer, and these new numbers are, as you say, barely relevant to the primary focus of your work, which is the Church of England – the one we call the ‘English Patient’. If anything, the best thing to do now is to encourage English Anglicans in their belief that things are getting better.  The mirage will soon vaporise, leading to an even deeper decline in trust and confidence.

Sometimes it is helpful to see figures and statistics in a broader context.  I think you are aware that, recently, over 700 clergy wrote a letter to complain about their appalling pensions.  The English Patient’s finances are in a dreadful state. Most dioceses run massive annual deficits. Many cathedrals cannot break even. However, the episcopacy taxes the parishes even more, despite fewer people paying the quota.  It leads to an ever-deepening crisis of resentment and mistrust, which your predecessor did so much to cultivate. A few extra young people, if indeed there are any, won’t turn that tide.

You may recall that overall, the bloated ecclesiocracy and unaccountable episcocrats are just not trusted by the faithful.  Your English Patient is actually very poorly, but thankfully for us, in total denial about how unwell, what the sickness is, and how to restore their health.

Happily, they are clueless. More modish marketing and communications, evangelism, youth initiatives, vocation drives and stewardship schemes are all being pushed hard.  This is good news for us, because it deepens the alienation and despair, and also means the English Patient loses trust and confidence in all the remedies the leadership keeps on promoting.

It is also important to remember the scale of your problem.  We only need one apprentice to work with your patient, English Anglicanism, because it is so very small. But it continues to believe it is a Very Important And Big Long-term Enterprise (VIABLE). Helpfully for us, your English Patient imagines itself to be eternal, so the gaps between fantasy and reality keep causing your patient to have even more doubts.

You might like to look at the Roman Catholic Cycle of Prayer and compare it to the Anglican Cycle of Prayer for comfort and context. We have a very large team working on Roman Catholicism.

The Catholics have 3200 dioceses and 650 archdioceses, 225,000 parishes, over 400,000 priests, 50,000 permanent deacons, 650,000 monks and nuns, and nearly 3,000,000 catechists for their 1.3 billion followers. But it manages to get by with only 5,340 bishops. Believers who use the Roman Catholic Cycle of Prayer will pray for nine dioceses, daily.

The Anglicans have around 55 million followers (they’ll claim 80 million to big up their size, but that includes 25 million in England, where attendance is down to just over 0.5 million, and two-thirds of the laity are retired people). Your English Patient has too many dioceses and bishops for too few believers.

Global Anglicanism has 855 dioceses, which means believers pray for around two of them each day when using the Anglican Cycle of Prayer. Yes, Anglicans are small potatoes.  Globally, Roman Catholics outnumber Anglicans by over 25:1. In percentages, Anglicans constitute about 3.5% of what Roman Catholicism represents. Anglicanism is 96.5% smaller.

However, your VIABLE Anglican Communion has amassed almost 900 bishops, despite its small size. There is one bishop for every 0.25 million Roman Catholics. Yet there is one Anglican bishop for every 60,000 from your denomination. Not for nothing is your English Patient known as ‘Episcopalian’ outside England.  It seems that when it comes to bishops, they just cannot get enough of them.

These numbers should comfort you.   The global population of Roman Catholicism is rising. Global Anglicanism is declining. This is largely due to birth rates, but your denomination continues to invest in recruitment drives hoping to attract newcomers to the Anglican family.

It is helpful to our cause that your English Patient believes it is in recovery, and can reverse decline.  And they won’t take any lessons from other declining denominations, because they think they are a special case. Your English Patient lives in two parallel conflicting universes. One knows it is declining. The other has to believe it isn’t, and the recession is only some blip.

Even more helpfully, your English Patient thinks it is on some par with Roman Catholicism. This fantasy should be strongly encouraged, because eventually reality will dawn, leading to deeper collapses in morale, trust and confidence.

But best of all, Anglicans fight amongst themselves about why, who or what is responsible for their decline. They will fight even more about who, what, how and when is the best way to recover.

As we’ve discussed before, Damon, your best bet here is to encourage the church leaders who claim to have all the answers.  We are blessed that your English Patient has many such people within its leadership, with the ecclesiocracy and episcocrats constantly trying to apply the Midas Touch to their truly dire ecclesionomics.

Above all, it is vital that we do all we can to support the English Patient in their belief that they have the best-equipped persons to make their own diagnoses and prognoses, promoting and manufacturing their remedies and therapies.

The English Patient thinks it does not need a doctor, and if it is unwell, it will eventually shake off the aches, fevers and other symptoms and soon be on the mend.

You must do all you can to encourage the English Patient in their belief that they are exceptional and unique, and don’t need any outside interference or help from real experts.  That way, tens of millions of pounds can be spent on safeguarding, for example, or on other initiatives that are bound to be a waste of time, effort and money, since your English Patient always thinks it knows best. Just let them carry on.

One swallow does not make a summer, and all this talk of growth and resurgence is like a single spring day in the midst of a long, hard winter that shows no sign of ending.

As the population of England grows, vocations continue to decrease – because clergy have few rights, too much responsibility, little support, and pitiful stipends and pensions to look forward to. Volunteers for roles in parishes are also declining.

The ecclesiocracy and episcocrats have created a church where the bosses are secure, unaccountable, unregulated, and generally well-paid. But the clergy and volunteers are over-regulated, accountable for virtually everything, and have never felt more undervalued and vulnerable.

Even if a few more young people were hanging out with your English Patient, all the interminable fudging on sexuality and gender means they won’t stay long and throw their weight behind the institution. Swallows come and go.

So, Damon, there’s no need to worry. The best thing to do with the English Patient is to keep an eye out for any significant changes. But otherwise leave the leaders to their own devices and desires. They will inflict more damage on their church than we could ever engineer.  Keep affirming their egos that they are VIABLE and the best-placed people to resolve crises of their own making. They believe and act as though they are a law unto themselves. The longer this continues, the faster they will decline.

Your Mentor, Lucius.

By Anon

The Easter Season once again brings no good news for the victims of abuse at the hands of the Church of England, and for those who have been harmed by its continuing betrayals, failures and dishonesty over safeguarding. In his Easter message for The Times (Credo, April 19), the Archbishop of York wrote of Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, and the despair of its victims.  He was unable to see that the horrors, injustices and abuses abroad in the wider world happen in the Church of England too. Yet he offered no Easter hope for those caught up in never-ending cycles of abuse and cover-ups inside his own institution. The Archbishop’s Easter message was addressed to the world, ignoring all those still captive to the abuses perpetrated within his church. So we have rewritten his Credo homily (barely changing a word), but merely altering the subject.

“As John tells it in his Gospel, Jesus’s resurrection was met first with darkness and weeping. In times of uncertainty and upheaval, this detail frees us to see that lament and hope are not, after all, mutually exclusive.

When Easter arrives in John’s Gospel, it arrives amid darkness. Jesus’s body is gone from the grave. The moment is quiet, utterly unprecedented, and completely bewildering. And it brings the first witness to tears.

These tears are those of Jesus’s friend Mary Magdalene, shed as she desperately seeks him. Finding the tomb empty, she comes to the only reasonable conclusion: someone has stolen his body. Mary sobs. And yet soon she will come to recognise a seeming stranger to be Jesus himself.

That recognition dawns with Jesus’s soft speaking of her name, “Mary”. This gentle and intimate moment distils the wonder of Easter: tears first shed in sorrow are transformed to tears of joy before they’ve even finished trickling down the contours of Mary’s face. The same tears, transformed from sorrow to joy, are offered for the same Jesus, risen from death to life.

Mary’s tears, shed in anxiety and desolation, mourning, perhaps even in shame or regret, are familiar to many victims of injustice, betrayal, abuse and evil. But she shows us that those who shed tears of lament can do so while persevering in hope, even when tears of joy seem impossibly far off.

By the usual standards, Mary should have given up on Jesus as a catastrophically lost cause: he had been rejected, humiliated, executed, and placed in a tomb. Yet still she turns up in darkness, laments — and finally, wonderfully, finds stubborn hope fulfilled beyond her imagining.

Here, many victims of abuse can identify with both the tortured dead, Jesus, and the mourner who has had all hope and trust removed by a regime hell-bent on easy expediency and perpetrating injustice.

John’s account also emphasises that the risen Christ does not first reveal himself to people of power: not to the Roman governor, nor the chief priest, not even to the senior disciples, but rather to this weeping Mary. She is a victim, as Jesus was.

Jesus stands before her, not robed in finery, but wearing the scars of his torture and death on the Cross. The risen Jesus is greeted by no fanfare, no flourish, no powerful VIP visitors. Instead, he is greeted by Mary Magdalene sobbing amid darkness.

In the battle zones of the Church of England’s safeguarding debacles, and in the barren fields of moral famine we find in episcopacy, the rubble of lives left by the Church of England’s abuses and cover-ups (they never end), tears and darkness are among the very few things not in short supply. The suffering for the victims is beyond comprehension, and yet many people there will greet the dawn of Easter Day with Mary Magdalene’s mixture of lament for their situation and stubborn hope.

Increasingly, however, it seems that those of us who look on the Church of England from afar do so without hope. The temptation is to view these situations as simply intractable, unfixable. Easter dawn reminds us to both lament and hope stubbornly amid this great darkness.

I know that we must not abandon attempts to seek justice in the Church of England. Nor “move on” from our concern for the gross failures in our safeguarding policies and practices. We ought not to tolerate the destruction of victims of abuse as an uncomfortable side-effect of our ministry. Nor should we give up on striving to honour truth in our political and public conversation. But perhaps we should start such conversations inside the Church of England first? Because it’s getting difficult to talk about all the evil in the world when we won’t clean up our own backyard.

The unimaginable triumph of Easter dawned while it was still dark, and it was met with weeping. By lamenting and remaining stubbornly hopeful, Mary Magdalene refused to abandon the cause of good and right even amid confusion and darkness.

Whether or not you celebrate Easter, Mary’s example can help us address the uncertainties and darkness that we face with some stubborn hope. But please remember I am only talking about the wider world here, and not about the Church of England. We prefer to change the subject and look away from our sins and failings inside the church, maintain silence, and keep our deeds covered in the darkness.

At Easter, the last thing we want is the tombs disturbed with piercing truth and light, and the disruption of new life. You’ll have to look elsewhere for that. We like to keep our failures, abuses and sins buried where the public can’t see them.

Commenting later for The Times, Andrew Graystone, an advocate for abuse survivors, said that “trauma doesn’t take holidays”, noting that Easter could be a painful time for those who have been abused and ignored in the church. “The message of Easter is that the route to new life runs through betrayal, pain and death,” he said. “A church that tries to skirt around the harm it has done, or put it aside for a few days to focus on something else, will miss what the Easter story is about. Easter is an opportunity for the church to look evil in the eye, including its own evil.”

The current stand-off in a clash between President Trump and Harvard University is part of a much bigger story than many people realise.  Looking at the dispute in a wider context relates it to the so-called culture wars under way in America. The opposing sides in these wars, representing two ways of understanding the world, can clearly be identified in this Harvard/Trump confrontation.  The defiant stand being taken by Harvard against the Trump administration that seeks to control it, may be seen as a skirmishing before a major, if not historic, battle in that war.

The so-called culture wars which appear in different guises all over the world, refer to the passionate and intense convictions that people have about the way the world is, or should be, changing.  Speaking very generally, one side will look mainly to the past as the key to understanding the present.  Sometimes the past that is evoked is entirely mythical.   American politicians sometimes nostalgically look back to the 50s as time where ‘family values’ were practised.  Much of this nostalgia is romantic and false.  The levels of domestic violence, though hidden, were then tragically high in many countries including the United States.  The Church has its own versions of a gold-tinted past, with memories of packed churches and a place where leaders enjoyed respect and honour from society.  Meanwhile the Church was also presiding over abuse and dark institutions like mother and baby homes, where cruelties were being practised routinely.  Much of the struggle of the culture wars seems to centre around how we deal with the past.  Is it a model for the present or should we always be seeking ways to grow up and beyond our past?  Do we identify, in short, mainly with the forces of conservatism or those of progressivism?  In a political setting we identify this struggle as one between right and left.

The attempt by Donald Trump to undermine all the main institutions of America is a struggle to overwhelm and batter into submission all opposition to his personal vision and his desire to dominate the whole of American society.  I do not want to go down the rabbit hole of discussing motivations for his attempting this massive task, but I observe that this political experiment will take a long time to unravel by a future government.  Trump is, in essence, fighting on behalf of ultra-conservatives to bring back a mythical past when America was great and dominant in the world, both economically and militarily.   It will also enable the massive enrichment of a small band of his cronies, including his family. The fantasy of being omnipotent is also one that many people entertain inside.  It is also the ultimate desire which the narcissist possesses.  To want such control and domination means that one has had to discard all attempts at empathy for others along the way.  Individuals are used and then discarded with no attempt to reward them over a period.  Promises are made and quickly broken when the other individual has served their purpose.   Ultimately Trump is every bit as dangerous as his critics have made out.  He is proving willing to use the entire American nation in his project to fulfil his megalomaniacal aims for complete control.

Where does Harvard come into this?  Harvard University represents a natural ideological centre of opposition to the megalomaniacal ideas of a man like Trump.  It represents an older wiser America, firmly rooted in the real world of history, education, law and science for the past 250 years of its existence.  It was founded in the early 17^th century and was fully exposed to the later Enlightenment tradition that was sweeping over American universities as it was in Europe.  The Enlightenment may not have been the means to discover certainty in every discipline, but it taught the people of Western Europe new intellectual values – the importance of debate and the constant need to challenge presuppositions.  One maxim came to typify this new approach to knowledge and consists of three words.  The saying which sums up so much of this Western intellectual movement of the 18^th century was simply ‘dare to doubt’.   The ability to doubt the received wisdom of the past was for some a deeply unsettling approach to human knowledge.  Most areas of knowledge in the 18^th century were rooted in the tenets handed down from the ancient world.  Even medicine owed as much to reading texts of classical authors and their presuppositions than to current observations of the workings of the human body.  In making these very generalised comments about the Enlightenment, I am aware of straying into areas of study where I have no specialised knowledge.   But one statement which I want to make, which I believe to be broadly true, is that Harvard University can be said to be rooted and nurtured in many of the best principles of Enlightenment thinking.  The same readiness to question and scrutinise ‘authority’ in different forms of knowledge in a critical but open way would be among the values of all universities the world over.  Universities are temples of knowledge but the knowledge they share with their students is one that has been by honed through a constant process of questioning and experiment.  Truth, according to the best minds belonging to our Western universities, among which Harvard has a distinguished place, has truth always to be regarded as a work in progress, not a completed product.

Harvard can act as a shorthand for the methods of seeking truth according to the highest standards of scrutiny that we have in our Western culture.  Within the approaches to truth as practised by the academic word, there will be disagreements and debate, but such disagreement is part of the process.  Gracious disagreement is not to be deplored, but honoured.  There are many who believe that knowledge is to be found using quite different methods of discovery.  Speaking very generally, there are many who will believe that truth is only to be discovered by a fresh scrutiny of the past, as the Renaissance writers and thinkers did.  The achievements of those who rediscovered the classical authors and their views on the world were considerable.  The Renaissance was, however, an incomplete project.  It needed the Enlightenment impulse, with its advances in science, philosophy, law and psychology, to name a few disciplines, to enable our modern Western civilisation to be formed.  This role of universities with their crucial support of Enlightenment values cannot be downplayed.  A challenge to Harvard, and the attempt to destroy the Enlightenment values preserved in its teaching and research right across the board, is an attack on all our values whether or not we have been privileged to have a university education.  I am constantly in awe of the knowledge of people with skills which make modern life possible: engineers, architects and economists.  Any attempt to destroy the credibility of the Enlightenment project threatens and weakens every discipline taught at university level.  Trump’s DOGE project has already halted some vital medical research.   No doubt, the idea of well-educated researchers working in clean laboratories every day offends some who regard education of any kind as elitist.  Book learning does not seem to be widespread among Trump’s followers and enforcers.  Indeed, the demands and attacks on Harvard threaten the entire Enlightenment value system and may remove from America much of what has been achieved in so many areas of life over the past two hundred and fifty years.

Most of the readers of this blog would identify themselves with the Christian label.  Every reader will be aware of ways of identifying with the name Christian which go against any concession to Enlightenment values. For many, the name Christian can only be claimed by those who believe, for example, that the world was created in a week of seven days and that women have no place in ministry. Those who hold to such strict ideas about truth will have little time for the idea that it is possible to change one’s mind about anything in one’s belief system. This position is maintained, even though God himself is recorded several times to have changed his plans, according to the Old Testament.   We call such rigidity of thinking ‘conservative’, especially when there is no room for newness or progression in this way of understanding faith and truth.  It is not difficult to suggest that Trump/Harvard confrontation is rooted in a similar kind tension that we see existing between conservative and progressive Christians.  Speaking for myself, I see a place for conservative views, but I also believe that Scripture and faith allows me to ask questions about the tradition and not be alarmed if some aspects develop and change over time.  The true liberal is anyone who allows this development to take place.  A constant newness is a feature of every culture and set of ideas.  Liberals rejoice in the changing/evolving nature of truth.  It is this liberal value that is embodied by Harvard and the entire Enlightenment project.  The Trump confrontation with Harvard and all the values it represents is an important one.  We follow it with interest and concern.  The clash threatens the whole liberal project of the West and the human values that are contained in the Enlightenment.  The movement may not be perfect from a Christian point of view, as Lesslie Newbigin showed us in the 80s.  But, the complete or partial destruction of Enlightenment values, as Trump is attempting, would be a far greater tragedy.

Most of us have heard of YWAM (Youth with a Mission) and know it to be a large youth centred international organisation devoted to mission and evangelism.  My knowledge of this group did not encourage me to want to look further into its story when I first heard about it a decade ago.  Rumours of mistreatment of volunteer staff members were then circulating.  One particular account did burrow into my memory.  This was the story of a young idealistic volunteer who was working in India, but who became disillusioned with the treatment he was receiving at the hands of YWAM leaders.  The response of the organisation was simply to abandon the volunteer.  He had no money or other means of returning to his home,  which I believe was in Australia.

I would normally hesitate before recounting a story heard a decade ago about an organisation which may be a hostile piece of gossip. I take the risk because although the story I heard may be just that, a rumour, it pales into triviality when set alongside the many other allegations against the group collected by Shanti Das in the Observer last weekend.   The Observer story is in many ways a familiar one, especially for those of us who are familiar with safeguarding stories connected with control in some religious groups.  These seem inevitably to focus on abuse, whether emotional, spiritual or sexual.  The YWAM story appears, from the Observer account, to indicate what we can only describe as cultic exploitation.  The abusers in YWAM, if such they are, seem to be concerned with establishing complete control over their victims.  This enables them to obtain access to a gratification that such control provides.  This pattern is common to the behaviour of cult leaders the world over. 

I retell some of this Observer story of spiritual abuse to show how an ostensibly Christian organisation can put itself in the situation of using cult dynamics, while believing that it is doing God’s work.   There are various danger signs in the Observer description of YWAM that together allow us to refer to it as cultic.  When these danger signs are found in any Christian group, we must be on the alert and aware that we are entering potentially dangerous territory.

The first danger sign is the age issue.  There is nothing intrinsically wrong in recruiting young people from the 18-30 age group to practise Christian evangelism and ministry.   Young people in this age group have not yet settled into family life or careers and so are free to be recruited into a ‘gap-year’ experience as provided by YWAM.   They also possess a great deal of idealism and capacity for self-sacrifice at this stage of their lives.  Youthful health and vitality are also generally more tolerant of the less-than-ideal living conditions that are experienced in poorer parts of the world.   But there is a shadow side to this boundless capacity for self-sacrifice and idealism.  These same qualities, however honourable, make the individual potentially open to abuse and exploitation if there is any rottenness or corruption in the organisation.  In short, where there is human sin there will be a potential for some of those in positions of power to take toxic advantage of those in their charge.  A perennial issue for YWAM, as for any organisation with responsibility for groups of young people being prepared for ministry, is to be alert for this potential for abuse among the trainers.  No amount of high-sounding Christian rhetoric can remove this possible evil, even in organisations dedicated to the highest of values.  Only safeguarding vigilance and a realistic understanding of human nature will make such organisations consistently safe and free from the toxic effects of controlling abuse.

There are two salient factors that have allowed toxic abuse to find a home in YWAM’s method of operation.  One is a practical issue brought about by geography.  If you remove a group of young people to a centre in an alien unfamiliar culture and many miles from home, you inevitably increase a sense of vulnerability and dependency in these individuals.  The greater the vulnerability, the more the dislocated youngster is likely to develop a potentially unhealthy dependence on leaders.  A second method for creating a dependency on an organisation is by insisting on an adherence to an authoritarian understanding of scripture.  In the case of YWAM and numerous similar organisations, the teaching will include a reactionary stance on all things to do with sexuality.  There seems to be an unhealthy focus on compelling YWAM members in group ‘confession’ sessions to open up and admit any deviance from the conservative understanding of sexuality within their personal lives.  It does not take much imagination to see such compulsory ‘confession’ as a weapon of control.  Quite apart from what any of us think about the LGBTQ issue, it cannot be right to use the sexual preferences of an individual as a means of controlling them through the imposition of shame and guilt.  This is what appears to have been a regular pattern in the YWAM group meetings.

The YWAM culture of coercion and control that the Observer article describes is very similar to the dynamics of a cult.  It is one thing to teach and believe a set of attitudes about human sexuality.  It is quite another to impose those beliefs on others using the tools of social shame and the threat of ostracism.  This kind of compulsory groupthink is typical of cults. Whether or not my anecdote about the Australian young man abandoned in India by YWAM is literally true, it represents a sense of dread that a young person might feel when tempted to question those in authority.  To describe YWAM as a cult is simply to indicate that within this group non-conformity is impossible.  Such suppression of identity is, most of us would claim, a denial of an essential human freedom.  The freedom to be a dissident is a fundamental human right.   Maturity is gained through questioning and exploration, not through the surrender of one’s intellect to the dictates of an authoritarian conservative mind-set.

The Observer article is, for a change, not a narrative about sexual abuse and exploitation.  It does, however, lay bare the vulnerability of idealistic young people to harm.  These, in the name of Christian ideals, sacrifice an important stage in their lives to a cultic group.  At best they can extract some positive learning out of their experience, and this may include some insight about the power of groups to take over control of young lives.  At worst, there may be a completely messed up set of values in the head, which puts a permanent block on the ability to understand sexuality and healthy human relationships.  If even half the claims of control in the Observer are true, it represents the imposition of an enormous burden on a substantial cohort of young people at a vulnerable stage in their lives.  If such damage is routinely happening at YWAM, we might ask which other branches of the church are treating young people with the same recklessness and potential damage to their lives.  Abuse is not just about sex and finance.  It is often about damage to trust and the ability to make healthy meaningful relationships with God and with others.  To damage that ability is to create real and lasting harm.

Message for blog post:

Do you have a personal connection to Iwerne camps or have material related to it? I’ve been contacted by someone conducting research in this area and they would be very interested to hear from you. Please get in touch with me directly on parsvic2@gmail.com to learn more.

by Martyn Percy

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/369115/marriages-in-england-and-wales-by-type-of-ceremony/

We, as a nation, have now passed the fifth anniversary of Covid-19. Stay at home. Avoid meeting others. Churches locked. Bishops conducting online services from their kitchens, ritually sanitising their hands (even though nobody was communicated). Dominic Cummings driving to Barnard Castle for some reason or other. Funerals restricted to a handful of mourners. People dying in care homes, with loved ones only able to  press their noses against the window in those final hours. The Prime Minister being admitted to hospital and coming close to death. The daily ritual of banging pots and pans for the NHS, arguably the national secular-sacred faith of the realm.

We all have memories of Covid-19 and the two periods of lockdown, punctuated by “eat out to help out”. But as a recent op-ed in The Economist noted,

“Coronavirus in Britain is a story of individual grief and collective amnesia. The fifth-anniversary commemorations on March 9th, which had been designated a “Day of Reflection” by the government, were dignified but modest. In London relatives of the deceased threw carnations into the Thames, as a piper played a lament. Around them, joggers plodded, tourists gawped and drinkers toasted the first pint of the day in glorious spring sunshine. This is a sentimental country, where Armistice commemorations seem to grow bigger each year and new statues are erected to local heroes. But mention the pandemic, the biggest calamity in living memory, and you will be met by a wince and a change of subject. The memory is less of the neighbourliness and Zoom yoga, more of bitterness and boredom…”

A BBC Survey published on 25 March 2025 estimates that as many as 1:10 may have Long-Covid. That’s around 5.5 million in England alone (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93ker0kevpo). Long-Covid is a new condition which is still being studied. The most common symptoms of Long-Covid include  fatigue, difficulty breathing, problems with concentration and memory, aches and pains.  Other symptoms include disruption to senses (i.e., such as smell, hearing, taste, etc.), chest pains, difficulty sleeping (insomnia), depression and anxiety, feeling sick, loss of appetite and persistent headaches.

Of course, the CofE does not have an illness like this. Not in reality. Here we are speaking only analogically, and in so doing, I draw on David Tracy and his prescient The Analogical Imagination (1981).  Analogically, the CofE is a corporate body with severe malaise, and is experiencing symptoms it cannot make sense of. But what are the underlying causes?

A number of senior clergy have opined that a lot of the struggles the CofE is currently wrestling with have been pinned on to Covid-19. Other senior clergy have expressed scepticism on this, and suspect that Covid-19 has become a distraction for not thinking about the deeper latent problems that were bound to pose issues to the CofE, and eventually become manifest.

I think they are both right. But to understand why the CofE can’t cope with its (corporate, analogical) Long-Covid, one has to look further back.

In their remarkable book Secular Cycles (Princeton UP, 2009) Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov show how societies in Europe evolve and adapt to the bigger underlying cultural, political, demographic templates that shape life, hope, expectations and outcomes. They show, amongst other things, how birth rates, food prices and inflation shape population size. How inflation and stagflation (i.e., the combination of high inflation, stagnant economic growth, and elevated unemployment) impact wages, employment and work. And disease, plague, wars, revolts and natural disasters must also be factored in.

Many historical processes exhibit recurrent patterns of change. Century-long periods of population expansion come before long periods of stagnation and decline; the dynamics of prices mirror population oscillations; and states go through strong expansionist phases followed by periods of state failure, endemic sociopolitical instability, and territorial loss. Turchin and Nefedov explore the dynamics and causal connections between such demographic, economic, and political variables in agrarian societies and offer detailed explanations for these long-term oscillations–what the authors call secular cycles.

Secular Cycles elaborates and expands upon the demographic-structural theory first advanced by Jack Goldstone, which provides an explanation of long-term oscillations. Turchin and Nefedov test that theory’s specific and quantitative predictions by tracing the dynamics of population numbers, prices and real wages, elite numbers and incomes, state finances, and sociopolitical instability. Incorporating theoretical and quantitative history, the book studies societies in Europe during the medieval and early modern periods, and even looks back at the Roman Republic and Empire.

Turchin and Nefedov don’t have much to say about Christianity directly, but it is clear that when one analyses the big social-secular-material cycles, churches are compelled to adapt. As they do so, they incur the consequential symptoms that the larger secular cycles produce. In this regard, Turchin and Nefedov follow earlier work by John R. Moorman, Jack Goldstone and Lawrence Stone

For example, Medieval England had around 10,000 parishes serving three million people. The late medieval parish priest was a semi-literate rural worker. In pre-Tudor England hardly any parish had a resident curate, or even necessarily a parish church. But 1540-1560 saw huge declines in ordinations.

Given the turbulence and violence of the Reformation this is hardly a surprise. In Canterbury diocese in 1560, of 270 livings, 107 had no clergy. In Oxford archdeaconry the numbers of clergy fell – from 371 in 1526 to 270 by 1586.

After 1600 the numbers of clergy in the CofE increased rapidly, and by 1640 there were more clergy than livings (so unemployment). By 1688 there were 10,000 clergy. But the rise and fall in numbers does not tell the whole the story. By the end of the Caroline period, a minister had a university degree, strong religious convictions, a comfortable house, and income on a par with doctors or lawyers, often able to afford domestic help. Ordination was for elites.

This trend continued, albeit in slow decline, during the 19^th century, and to some extent the first half of the 20^th century. But the post-war years have seen a much, much steeper decline in the public status and professional identity of clergy. Teachers and nurses will be better-paid, and enjoy stronger employment rights.

Today there are 12,500 parishes in the CofE serving a population of 57 million. Under 700,000 attend its services, amounting to just over 1% of the population. With 36% of attendees over the age of 70, the cliff edge looks very steep, with 200,000 set to be lost to the CofE in the next 15 years. They will not be replaced.

With around 50% currently aged between 18 and 69, and only 18% being 17 or younger, the CofE has largely lost its transmission rights. When empires or societies collapse, there is loss or disruption in transmission. What was previously assumed is forgotten. What was once known is no longer learned.

Between 2009 and 2019 the average weekly church attendance for the Church of England fell by approximately 218,000. Church attendance figures fell even more during 2020 and 2021, although this was due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Check the collection plate, in the meantime.

In 2022, approximately 207,004 marriages took place via a civil ceremony in England and Wales, compared with 41,915 religious ceremonies. Since 1992, there have been more civil ceremonies in every year than religious ones. Naturally, there were far fewer ceremonies taking place in 2020 due to Covid.  Yet there is no national or diocesan mission strategy, nor even a bishop, getting to grips with any of this. By 2030, the average weekly church attendance for the CofE will have collapsed to around 0.5 million – simply not a sustainable economic position.

That the CofE sits on social and cultural templates it cannot control is hardly news. But there are no national or diocesan mission strategies that show any inklings for engaging with the bigger picture. The CofE thinks it is running out of young people (true). So it pours huge amounts of money, resources and anxiety into reversing this, without ever pausing to consider declining birth rates (there are fewer young people), and that as a population the English are getting older and older, with fewer taxpayers and people at work to pay for the long-term care of the elderly. Young people are extremely anxious about this, and the toll on their mental health and morale is enormous.

The CofE is habitually between 25-50 years behind the times on management, communications, leadership, HR and the like. Initiatives on mission, youth, the elderly, reorganisation, finances, governance, employment and engagement are wincingly out of date, even pre-publication. On safeguarding and sexuality the CofE occupies top spot as a national scandal (and were it not, it would be a national joke). Little of the operational and managerial infrastructure is fit for purpose. The CofE is run by (proverbial) generals fighting the wars and opponents of bygone eras, if not centuries.

On pensions, the recent letter from 700 CofE clergy flagging existential anxiety and poverty has been met with indifference by the hierarchy. As indices of trust are measured across professions, the CofE and its leadership have logged the lowest score on record. People outside the CofE do not believe what bishops say. Inside the CofE, it is hardly any better. Its managers and leaders are out of their depth, yet regard themselves as indispensable, despite being clueless. Locally, for parishes, the annual warmth of seasonal spiritual nostalgia has become a threadbare comfort blanket now so fragile it can barely be touched before being carefully stowed away until the next Christmas or Easter comes.

Meanwhile, theological analysis – which could have been be critical, nourishing and prescient in such a crisis – has been stripped out and marginalised, or ostracised by the CofE’s leadership. Whilst insights from secular social sciences were never really engaged with by the CofE leadership. Corporately, the CofE is like the proverbial frog in boiling water. It has no idea how it got into the kettle, let alone why the water is getting warmer. Alpha Courses, Fresh Expressions, mission statements and another diocesan reorganisation have been, predictably, about as effective as a nosegay in the face of a major plague epidemic.

England was hit hard by Covid as was the CofE. There were 120 days of lockdown in the nation – far more than other countries. Yet our mortality rates were amongst the highest in Europe. It is estimated that the backlog for NHS treatment is still running north of 7 million.

Pupil absence rates in schools remain high, and the bill for the bail-out given to employers and employees (one of the most generous, globally) will sit on the national debt for generations to come. The furlough scheme cost the nation £70bn, which is 2.9% of GDP.

On the ground, locally, rates of stress and anxiety amongst clergy continue to climb, and major issues on morale, mental health, expectations on work, finances (personal and ecclesial), public trust, employment rights and pensions remain unaddressed. Such factors are dogged by other persistent scandals in the church. The nation continues to practice slow-but-ever-increasing social-distancing from the CofE, save for a few festive occasions each year.  Nationally, there is no sign of anyone in the CofE leadership grasping these nettles.

As I have recently argued(The Exiled Church: Reckoning with Secular Culture, Canterbury Press), the huge and calamitous adjustments made by the Church of Scotland to its demographic and financial crises could serve as a warning to other denominations on the perils of not thinking ahead. Five years on, Covid has irreversibly transformed the English nation. Which makes it all the more remarkable is that in the CofE, it seems to barely changed or adjusted at all.

So, what about the CofE suffering from a case of corporate Long-Covid? It seems to fit with our collective sense of symptoms. That said, and as Turchin and Nefedov suggest, issues that the English nation (and thus its national church) are wrestling with lie well beyond its control.  It remains to be seen if the CofE leadership can read the signs of the times and interpret them, let alone think creatively about the survival and shape of the church over the next few decades.

If there is to be any hope, there must first of all be some realism about the present and future. But the leadership cannot talk their way out the collective crises afflicting the CofE. So we need a lot more show and a lot less tell. We need the leadership to show visible, serious signs of real change that are intelligent, wise and considered. On that, we continue to hold our breath. I fear we’ll be waiting for some time. 

by Anthony Bash

Forgiveness

Justin Welby was asked in Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on 30 March 2025, ‘Do you forgive John Smyth?’ Welby answered,

‘Yes. I think if he were alive, and I saw him – but it’s not me he abused. He’s abused the victims and survivors. So, whether I forgive or not is, to a large extent, irrelevant.’

Welby is not a victim of the physical abuse perpetrated by John Smyth. Smyth did not beat him when he was a minor with hundreds of strokes and left him scarred and bleeding. In this regard, Welby has nothing to forgive. He is a third party, an outsider, a critic of what happened, but not the subject of Smyth’s brutality.

A church which perpetrates the view that it is possible for people to forgive those who do not wrong them holds an absurd view of forgiveness. What has forgiveness got to do with anyone except those who have been wronged?

In answering ‘Yes’ and then qualifying what he meant by ‘Yes’ and acknowledging his forgiveness was, to a large extent, ‘irrelevant’, Welby discloses the muddle that lies at the heart of his approach to forgiveness – an approach that mirrors the approach of the Church of England generally.

On the one hand, forgiveness is seen as an overarching good, to be offered at all times, in all circumstances, whether sought or not. People think it promotes reconciliation and wellbeing, and that it avoids conflict and division. Without it, so it is said, there can be no peace.

On the other hand, Welby recognises – despite having said he forgave Smyth – that his is not the place to forgive, as he is not a victim of Smyth’s brutality. We go further: it’s not that Welby’s forgiveness is ‘to a large extent, irrelevant’: it is irrelevant.

Welby’s answer wants things both ways. Welby offers something to everyone and thereby satisfies no one. In fact, his answer could offend everyone – either for forgiving when some say he shouldn’t or for saying forgiving is irrelevant when others say it is not. This approach is an example of the besetting Anglican sin of keeping everyone on board and offending no one. The victims of abuse know this ‘have-your-cake-and-eat-it’ approach doesn’t work – as gays and women in the church will also testify.

This is the reply I suggest Welby could have given Laura Kuenssberg in response to her question, ‘Do you forgive John Smyth?’

No, Laura, I do not. Smyth did not abuse me. If Smyth were still alive and I saw him, I would confront him about what he had done, and tell him he needed to surrender to the police to make a full confession. I would also urge him to contact his victims and to put right with them, as best he could, what he had done. He would need to make some sort of reparation in demonstration of a change of heart. Without something like this, he will not have forgiveness from the victims, and there can be no place for him in the life of the church of Christ.

What is lacking in what Welby said is what lies at the heart of forgiveness – remorse, repentance, reparation. Remorse and repentance are the result of a change of moral perspective and precede forgiveness. They demonstrate a commitment both to act differently and to be different in the future. The result is more than words of regret but appropriate reparative action.

The church’s overarching commitment should therefore not be to forgiveness as an end in itself. Rather, it should be to truth, integrity, and honesty. It should be to do right, to call out what is wrong, to seek justice, and to expose lies, deceit, and cover up. Forgiveness may then result, but not necessarily. The church’s focus is mistakenly on the goal, not on the means.

Personal Responsibility

In the interview, Welby spoke of feeling ‘overwhelmed’ by the number of allegations of abuse the church had received in 2013. He is ‘utterly sorry’ and said he felt ‘a deep sense of personal failure’. Though not said, this failure includes not initiating cultural and structural changes to the church between 2013 and 2024: additional safeguarding officers and a welcome change in culture for preventive safeguarding are not the only answer. Welby’s bland ‘corporate-speak’ reason for resigning – ‘personal responsibility for shortcomings’ – obscures the fact that he failed to provide leadership about an issue that has engulfed the church in shame.

Apart from asking for pity because he had felt so overwhelmed, saying (as if an excuse) ‘I had a difficult upbringing’ (it was Eton College, and then Trinity College, Cambridge), and eventually giving up by resigning, what did Welby personally do to put right his errors when he became aware of them? What model of the gospel did Welby demonstrate by his actions?

What has not happened under Welby’s watch is compensation for victims of historic abuse. There have also not been independent investigations of mishandled cases of historic abuse and cover up. Neither have there been independent investigations of cases where safeguarding has been weaponised to cause harm. Rather, the church remains detached from mechanisms of public accountability and independent scrutiny. The church’s perspective has been to look forward, and not to acknowledge and face past mistakes and their consequences. So, the extent of the unaddressed problems has not been acknowledged, and victims of abuse still have no remedy, reparation, justice, or closure. We asked above, ‘What did Welby personally do to put right his errors when he became aware of them?’ The answer is: Not much.

The example of Graham, one of those abused by Smyth, illustrates the church’s failure to properly address the past. In Kuenssberg’s broadcast, Graham said he had had ‘the most extraordinary, traumatic journey trying to get answers, trying to get any kind of support’ from the church and that his experience of historic abuse by Smyth ‘paled into insignificance’ in comparison with what the church had put him through. Even if there is a degree of hyperbole about what Graham says (and I am not suggesting there is), his statement is an extraordinary indictment of what he says is the greater abuse he experienced perpetrated in the name of the church.

When asked whether he accepts that (in Welby’s words) Welby ‘really is sorry’, Graham said that Welby has not contacted him personally or apologised. He regards Welby as having ‘blanked’ him and the other survivors of Smyth’s abuse, and as refusing to tell the truth. Graham concluded, ‘We’re the victims and we deserve to know what happened. We don’t yet.’

Institutional Responsibility

Without going into much detail in the interview, Welby also said that he accepted ‘institutional responsibility for long-term revelations of cover up and failure over a long period.’ The cover up and failure have many causes. A future Archbishop of Canterbury will need to identify the causes and address them. The causes include the following. There is no legal requirement to report allegations of abuse (‘mandatory reporting’). There is lack of resource to deal adequately with reports of abuse. Investigations into alleged abuse are conducted ‘in house’, by people who may wish to avoid public shame and scandal for the church. The church is not subject to the Nolan Principles setting out professional standards of conduct in public life; neither is it subject to the same statutory framework of regulation and accountability as secular institutions. In short, there is lack of statutory regulation, lack of resource – and perhaps even of resolution – as well as a culture of amateurism at the heart of the church and its institutions. The church is not adequately fitted to safely and responsibly carry out its role in public life. Reform therefore needs to be both statutory and in-house – and urgently.

By walking away, ‘overwhelmed’ by the scale of the problem and having done little to address it when in office, Welby has bequeathed to his successors besetting, unaddressed systemic and structural failure in the church. A new Archbishop will need skill and experience to remedy the failure. A new archbishop will also need conviction that the gospel insists on repentance for sin in the context of truth and justice.

Triple Wounds

The culture of forgiveness that pervades the church, the church’s own failure to respond appropriately to safeguarding allegations, and the church’s lack of moral vigour in its approach to forgiveness are triple wounds for the abused. The abused will, first, carry the wounds of their historic abuse. Second, they will carry wounds from a church that has failed to hear them and to act on what the church has heard. Last, there will be wounds from the church – sometimes even from its national leaders – who forgive abusers when they have no business to do so and do not see the absurdity of what they are doing. The result is that the abused will have to learn to survive the historical abuse they have suffered, the neglect of the church, and the wounds of (perhaps well-meaning but) theologically naïve forgivers.

Anthony Bash is author with Martyn Percy of Forgiveness, Remorse, Reparation: Reckoning with Truthful Apology (Ethics Press,2025).

A few weeks back I wrote about the experience of job interviews in the Church.  This experience, which many of my readers have endured, is not far from our minds as we contemplate the enormously critical interview due to take place for the post of Archbishop of Canterbury, sometime in the summer months.  Two things make this interview stand out.  It takes place against a background of political division and intransigence that did not exist to the same extent when Justin Welby was scrutinised back in 2012.  Another thing is that the new incumbent will be aware that he/she is taking over a role that has demoralised and enfeebled the immediate predecessor.  A further point to be made is that, currently, the financial and spiritual health of the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion could be said to be in a more fragile state than at any time in the past two hundred years.  The conclusion of many people is that the post of Archbishop of Canterbury has now become a thoroughly poisoned chalice in 2025.

In job advertisements for posts in many walks of life, recruiters have often included two useful lists to help a potential candidate decide whether to apply.  In one column there is a list of ‘essential’ qualities needed for the post.  In another list there are qualities mentioned which are ‘desirable’ for the applicant to have, and these go beyond the bare minimum.  The expectation is that, in a situation where two candidates of equal merit present themselves, the applicant with a greater number of desirable qualifications will be preferred.  Whether or not such columns exist for the next occupant of the chair of St Augustine, this does not stop interested parties (that includes some readers of SC!) creating fantasy lists as a way of thinking out loud about the qualities we would like to see in a new archbishop.  This speculation about the essential and desirable qualities for would-be candidates has been encouraged by the open invitation to every member of the Church of England. All are being asked to express their opinions and even suggest names of potential candidates.  It remains to be seen whether such attempts to open up the field to outsider contenders will make any difference to the process which begins in earnest in May of this year.

To return to our essential/desirable fantasy lists, we can start by recognising that there will never really be any widespread consensus as to what should be mentioned in the desirable list.  The thoughts in my mind and in that of somebody else on what is desirable, will, undoubtably, reveal something about the compiler and their own ideas/priorities for the Church.  Such desirable lists would, anyway, contain an impossibly large number of expectations.   The Church, as we all recognise, has so many opinions, manifestations and expressions within it that it would be difficult to find a leader capable of meeting even a small number of these expectations.  If we find it difficult to agree what should be on the desirable list because of the wide-ranging nature of peoples’ hopes, the same should not be true for the contents of an essential list.  If the next Archbishop of Canterbury is in any way to be successful in the role, it will be because he/she has in some way grasped the nettle of what is the essential direction of travel for the Church over the coming century.  What follows is in no way a complete essential list but an invitation to think out loud and share ideas about what is truly important for the future leader in our Church of England.

The rest of this piece will set out my ideas about some of the essential qualities that I believe might be required of an Archbishop of Canterbury today.  Some of them will be similar to the qualities we ask of our parochial clergy, but I do recognise that constant public exposure by a church leader to the press and the public requires a particular, even superhuman, resilience and stamina.  This is similar to that required of our politicians.  Apart from this need to have a enormous capacity for work and the gift of imperviousness to substantial pressures, I centre my remarks on three qualities beginning with the letter ‘I’.   They are integrity, inspirational and indwelling.  Every one of my readers will probably have further essential qualities to add to this list, but I allow myself the excuse that I only have 1500 words for these musings.  On such a big topic it is inevitable that important things will get left out.

I start my essential list with my old favourite – integrity.  The next Archbishop of C needs to be for the church’s sake, and that of society, a WYSIWYG – what you see is what you get – kind of person.  In this epoch of safeguarding anxiety, we also cannot afford to have a candidate with any involvement with past scandal or even having knowledge of such behaviour.   The more general meanings of integrity, involving openness and complete honesty together with a requisite and appropriate response to any wrongdoing, whether by an individual or group, has to be built in and assumed.  But the problem is that there has been so much bad behaviour or tolerance of such things as bullying, secrecy and cover-up, that there can only be a few bishops left of whom it can be said that there are no rumours around their actions and decisions in the past.  We are not here speaking about such things as mood swings or lapses into irritability but of endemic character flaws that would cause a negative response in anyone hearing about them for the first time.  Past attempts to bury scandal, using the tools of secrecy and institutional power, do not compare well with the kind of openness that genuine WYSIWYG integrity implies.  Even in our house of bishops, this genuine openness is not as common as we would like in an institution that claims to embody the wholeness and holiness of its founder.

The word inspiration has a special meaning in a Christian context.  It refers to the possession of the Spirit, ‘the Lord, the giver of life’.  To ask for an inspiring archbishop is to ask for a man or woman who can inspire as they themselves are inspired.  To mediate inspiration, the archbishop should be able to teach and preach in a way that makes a mark on the hearer.  There should be sound theology as well as memorable inspiring imagery.  Something of the excitement of good news should inhabit every public utterance and the impact of the archbishop’s spoken word, whether in a sermon or in the House of Lords, should have the quality of making people want to listen.

The final I word, ‘indwelling’, is not one that immediately releases its meaning without some word of explanation.  I want an archbishop to have some of the quality of relating to others which make all their encounters with people special, so that something important is given and shared.  This is a gift that I realise few people possess with any degree of completeness, so we can think of this as an aspirational quality to be aimed at, though seldom realised. I have yet to come up with another English word which captures what I mean by indwelling.  Such a word would need to encompass elements of true altruistic love, empathy and human sharing.  We all recognise this special empathetic quality of relating, when someone of complete integrity looks at us in the eye and gives/shares something of themselves.  It is not an act of dominance or control but simply a momentary indwelling and this is experienced as a kind of blessing.  An archbishop will meet thousands of individuals in the course of his/her work without the slightest chance of remembering names or anything else about them.  But a lot can be given and received in the five second handshake; relationships can begin, and human barriers can start to dissolve, whether those of race, language or culture.  The capacity of an archbishop to indwell another person will allow him/her to perform the vital task of building up the institution and helping the entire Anglican structure to find its way back to being the ‘Body of Christ’ in the true biblical sense.

The final question remains.  Does a qualified person with these three ‘essential’ qualities exist?  Part of me is gloomy in offering an answer to this.  But, if there can be found an individual who possesses these three ‘I’ qualities, then there is hope.  If on the other hand, serious compromises have to be made over the integrity, inspiration and indwelling/empathy of an otherwise promising candidate, then the further decline of our national church may be rapid.

The Episcopal Review of Winchester Cathedral was completed recently and a summary published on-line.  The presenting crisis was the departure last year of Andy Lumsden, the Director of Music, after more than 20 years in post.  The Review tells us very little about the events, disagreements and failures in communication that led up to the event, but clearly there has been, and, no doubt, still is, a great deal of unhappiness among staff and stakeholders in the management and running of Winchester Cathedral.   The Bishop, Philip Mountstephen, identifies ‘declining performance, unsatisfactory relationships and failings in leadership and management’ at the Cathedral, justifying both the current Review and the recommendations that flow out of it.    

The published summary of the Episcopal Review is only ten pages long and the reader is given little detail which would account, for example, for the Dean bringing forward her announced retirement from May 2025 to this month.  It is not profitable to speculate on these matters, and I have no access to any source of inside information.  What is hinted at in the Review, as the central concern, is the issue of music and the part that it plays in 21^st century cathedral worship.  While there are bound to be precise details about the management failings as well as the behaviour of individuals within the Cathedral community, the summary Review does not name names or apportion blame to anyone.  We are left to speculate on what might be the broad issues prompting the Review.  My own assumption is, from the evidence of the summary, that the context of the Review is a number of serious disagreements about the place of music among those involved in its provision.  A telling sentence appears on page 7, suggesting serious non-communication and diverging understandings of the role of music in the life of the Cathedral.  ‘It was felt that Chapter simply did not understand the musical side of the Cathedral’.  Such non-communication and misunderstanding are probably found in other centres of musical excellence in Britain today.  How do these centres best fit in with the rapidly changing face (and decline) of church life in this country?  The cathedral music tradition is for many still a compelling reason for attaching themselves to churches which maintain an active choral tradition, but which is so radically different from what is commonly termed ‘Christian music’.

Seventy years ago, I was a member of the cathedral choir in Canterbury.  The experience opened me up to appreciate a particular style of church music which has since become familiar to quite large numbers of people. At that time, the 50s, cathedral-type music was known only to those who attended cathedrals or one of a limited number of Oxford/Cambridge chapels and other foundations where choral traditions had been maintained.  Little of this genre of music was filtering through to the general public in Britain. The BBC radio programme with a reputation for the high brow, the Third Programme, seemed to show little interest in this rich vein of sacred choral music, whether in 16^th /17^th century polyphonic manifestations or later styles.  Two further reasons for the non-circulation of cathedral music were current.  The first was that LP records were extremely expensive.  If there were recordings of church music, they would have been priced at 35 shillings each, a sum equivalent to over £30 today.  The second fact was that there was simply no exposure to this style of music except among the vanishingly small number of active church musicians.  The only church music familiar to the general public were hymns and the yearly broadcast of the King’s Cambridge carols.  One piece of church music did penetrate into popular consciousness when the boy chorister, Ernest Lough, sung Mendelsohn’s ‘O for the wings of a dove’ in the mid-30s and the record was widely acclaimed.  The arrival of Radio 3 in around 1964 had the welcome effect that more music of every kind, including church music, was aired, no doubt creating a new ‘fan-base’ for what had been an extremely niche cultural taste.

Today we can note two major changes in the church music scene. One is that the music found formerly only in cathedrals and a cluster of Oxbridge chapels has spread out widely from this narrow base.  Both in terms of the number of musicians performing such music and those hearing it, there has been enormous growth and appreciation of this particular style.  Secondly there has been growth in the music available to be sung.  Some of this is as the result of new compositions by young composers who are fascinated by the ancient tradition that binds music and worship together.  There has also been a large amount of serious academic scholarship, bringing to light forgotten or neglected masterpieces of the past, particularly from the age of Elizabeth I when English music of all kinds excelled.

The rise in popularity in church music which I have witnessed in my lifetime has not been without its problems.  Winchester is one of the top cathedral choirs in the country.  Such a description comes with its own challenges.  What makes a choir good?  Is it that the style and quality of music inspires a quality of worship that is special and could act as an incentive to other churches aspiring to high standards, but lacking the endowments to meet the costs involved?  Having a ‘good’ choir could be a judgement based purely on technical and aesthetic factors.  It need have nothing to do with God or the reality of worship.  Finding out where is the meaning of excellence in terms of the choir achievements, is likely to be a constant cause of tension between clergy and the musicians who work for the institution.

A second point of tension, that will apply to every choral foundation in the country, is the rise of ‘popular’ Christian music.  For the majority of Christians, Christian music is found in what is known as worship songs.  Without expressing a value judgement on this style of Christian music, one has to say that such music emerges from a very different culture from the one in which cathedral musicians operate.  Church leaders working in cathedrals are acutely aware of the incompatible demands of the aficionados of choral mattins and those who prefer Graham Kendrick and Hillsong.  In a small way, I faced this tension in my parish and resolved it by allowing, as far as possible, both styles or cultures to co-exist.  The church choir and the music group appeared at different services and a kind of peace prevailed.  Whether the current tensions at Winchester have anything to do with these divergent styles or cultures of church music I have no inside knowledge, but the existence of such contrasting styles remains a very large elephant in the room called Christian worship.  It cannot be expelled easily.   In a centre like Winchester Cathedral where traditional cathedral music has reigned for literally centuries, it is hard to imagine that worship songs ever get an easy welcome, if at all.  But, if this is the only genre of Christian music known by a segment of the congregation, then it will be hard for the leaders to ignore it without causing upset and unhappiness.

In this piece I am suggesting that church music of all kinds is likely to draw into itself many of the other divisions and unspoken conflicts that already exist in the church.  Deep irreconcilable differences exist over the LGBT issue, climate change as well as theological attitudes to Scripture.  It is possible to distinguish a ‘liberal’ approach from a ‘conservative’ one, and, maybe, the two sides can have a discussion with a measure of civility.  When it comes to divisions over what church music is the preferred option, there are sometimes even deeper underlying issues, matters of taste, culture and social class.  These are difficult to address without sounding elitist.  I am well aware that my wanting to listen to Tallis’ Lamentations as part of my observance of Holy Week will not be understood by many sincere Christian people.  A greater number might fill a cathedral nave to listen to the Matthew Passion in Holy Week, but we are still facing the fact of widely divergent tastes in music among Christian people.  Somewhere in the unhappiness that has arisen in Winchester are, I believe, these cultural and aesthetic issues that arise when two incompatible musical styles are brought in close juxtaposition and found to be totally alien to each other.  Resolution of such cultural divergences will require a wisdom far greater than anything I see on offer in the Church today.

In writing this piece I am prepared to accept that the issues addressed by the Review and the resignation of the musical Director may have absolutely nothing to do with the clash of discordant musical cultures that we see in the wider church.  If I am wrong, this does not render all my comments of no value.  The tension between popular and classical church music is a live issue in many places and, sometimes, it can be said to exist as open warfare.   It is one of the ironies of today that one area of growth in church life at present is in an appreciation for the meditative, even contemplative style of BCP choral evensong.  It is for others to explain the appeal of the Psalms sung to Anglican chant, which also allows a renewed appreciation of the English language as spoken five centuries ago.  In a century’s time, it will become obvious which style has stood the test of time.  I suspect we all have our preferred guess.

The recent announcement that ten members of the clergy in the C/E are facing a disciplinary process, arising out of the Keith Makin report, was not an unexpected item of news.   The Makin report had named dozens of clergy said to have known of Smyth’s criminal activities, but these ten ‘represent those whose actions have been deemed to meet the threshold for instituting disciplinary proceedings’.  In other words, these ten clergypersons are to be subject to the scrutiny of the NST and under the terms of the CDM accept whatever penalties that the CDM process decides.

Back in 2020, I took an interest in the case of George Carey and the way that Makin chose to publicise, mid-enquiry, some apparent misdemeanour on his part.  This was followed by an immediate withdrawal of Carey’s PTO by the Bishop of Oxford.  Many people were puzzled that Carey’s apparent failing was seen to be so serious that, of all the failures being uncovered by Makin, this one alone required immediate action.  The removal of Carey’s PTO was reversed some months later, but much damage had been done to Carey’s peace of mind and reputation.  My blog piece, that I wrote at the time, focussed on whether Smyth’s brief and tenuous attachment to Trinity College Bristol, where Carey was principal, might have been so transitory that his presence was barely noticed.  An exploitation of Trinity’s name to help Smyth in his plan to flee Britain for Africa, where no scandal had yet attached to his name, might offer a plausible interpretation of the facts as we then knew them.  According to this interpretation, Smyth had registered as a student, but he was just exploiting a non-residential status at the college as a way of enhancing his CV.  Even a fleeting attachment to Trinity College might impress theological institutions abroad, especially in places where the British system was not well understood.  A non-residential student in a British college might be regarded as having a status that was not merited. No special reason exists for Carey to have heard of this very part-time student before his arrival.  Carey simply did not move in the prestigious evangelical circles occupied by Smyth and his former admirers that had worshipped him summer after summer at Iwerne.  The Bash ‘project’ and its focus on evangelising the public-school elite was not something that had any interest for Carey.  He would have found the focus on evangelising the privileged classes as something alien, even objectionable.  If this very part-time student, Smyth, was, as we suspect, keeping his attendance down to the absolute minimum, there is no reason for Carey to have got to know him or have had reason to consult the files about him. The politics of the evangelical world at the time seem to have been well outside Carey’s concerns.

This month I have had passed on to me Carey’s own autobiographical account of the background to the disciplinary process being currently undertaken against him by the NST.  This also sets out material from the work of the earlier 2020 core group.  Reading this narrative with the permission of the author, I am, I believe, able to see more of the dynamics of the 2020 core group and the way it became convinced of the guilt of an individual based on what appear to be hunches rather than actual evidence.  Stripped down to the bare bones, Carey was deemed guilty of having seen the original 1982 Ruston report on Smyth and having done nothing with the information.  The surmise that he had seen the report was based on two passing references in letters sent by David McInnes to David Fletcher. In the second of these two letters, David MacInnes was wanting to trace a number of ‘memos’ describing Smyth’s crimes.  He mentioned that a minister called David Jackman had a copy ‘and so had George Carey’.  It is this single unsubstantiated and uncorroborated claim that Carey had the document, and he had not reacted by going straight to the police, that is, both then and now, at the heart of the CDM accusation.

Carey’s account of his own self-examination about whether he might have had a lapse of memory, after seeing such an explosive document as the Ruston report, is at the centre of this new autobiographical fragment.  Carey rejects the idea that he could have read it, and then immediately put it out of his mind.  Such a notion, he concludes, is impossible.  Quoting Andrew Graystone, who knows more about the Smyth story than anyone else alive, he explains that the memo ‘is so shocking that I can assure that if you had been presented with Mark Ruston’s 1982 report you would remember it for the rest of your life.’ 

When my blog piece about Carey and his possible guilt over Smyth came out in 2020, a contributor to the comments section, called David Pennant, came up with a further valuable piece of information.  He wrote: I was a full-time ordinand at Trinity College Bristol from 1981 to 1984, and then stayed on researching there from 84 – 86. I went into the college only once a week in the latter period, but in the early period I was there five days a week. We lived a mile away in our own home. This blog is the first time that I have discovered that John Smyth had any connection with the college. Had I known at the time, I would have searched him out and welcomed him, remembering him from Iwerne days. So, I am certain that I never heard anything about his presence. I also only discovered the allegations against him from this blog in recent years. 

Reflecting on David’s testimony, we can make one or two observations.  If a Iwerne alumnus had been present at Trinity, it is inconceivable that John Smyth would have managed to be so utterly invisible unless he had arranged to make his attendance deliberately so.  Also, the evidence and testimony of the one member of staff who would have dealt with an external student, as Smyth must have been, Peter Wiliams, was never followed up by the core group.  This might have shown Carey was never party to any information about Smyth and his fleeting attachment to Trinity Bristol in those far-off days.  Here the Church of England core group system shows itself unwilling to pursue facts as far as they lead.  Certainly, there is plenty of ‘reasonable doubt’ to query the group-think conclusion held by the core group.  They decided that George Carey knew all about John Smyth and his crimes but chose to supress this knowledge in order to have a quiet life.

I do not know George Carey personally, though we met at a Hereford diocesan conference in around 1991 when he was Bishop of Bath and Wells.  The story that I have discerned now and in 2020 when trying, on this blog, to make sense of his narrative, is capable of more interpretations than just those given by the NST and the original core group.  Once again, we seem to be encountering a clear interest in the rights and privileges of institutions and how these take precedence over a concern for justice for the individual.  Having been permitted to glimpse the ‘evidence’ brought forward as a way of pinning guilt on Carey, I have very little confidence that church justice is or was being served.  We can say that whenever there is evidence that facts are not pursued in a thorough professional manner, any accusations made against an individual lack integrity and even credibility.  Common-sense questions also arise about the possible reasons for only one example of malfeasance, Carey’s, being acted upon prior to the excruciatingly delayed publication of the Makin report.  What made Carey’s ‘misdeeds’ so much worse than those of others? One word used by both Carey and Julie McFarlane to describe the operation of church justice, whether in the role of the accused or the accusing, is ‘brutal’.  There is a brutality about a process which seeks to attack and sometimes destroy those it disapproves of.  One thing I can hope for is that the exoneration of George Carey will eventually be complete.  Based on the evidence that I have seen, I hope that his friends in the legal world will be able to show up clearly the pettiness, vindictiveness and injustice which the Church of England has allowed to become part of its life.  That may lead to the eventual complete dismantling and rebuilding of the structures around safeguarding so that justice, honesty and harmony may be restored to this area of church life.

There is an advantage in having absolutely no inside information with regard to a puzzling church news story that has appeared over the past couple of weeks.  My ignorance allows me to think out loud as to what might be going on behind the curtain of secrecy in the appointment process for the next Bishop of Durham.  We have been told that the nominee for this prestigious post has withdrawn his/her name from the appointment process.   Speculation immediately arises, not only about the name of the individual concerned, but the possible reasons for any reasonably qualified individual not allowing him/herself to be suggested for the fourth most senior post in the Church of England.  Having no sources of information, I can join my readers in speculating that this piece of news may possibly denote a situation of crisis at the top, and it may have considerable implications for the future of the Church of England.  

Why is the withdrawal of one possible contender for the see of Durham a matter of potentially upmost seriousness?  Before we can attempt to answer that question, we should note that the task of finding someone to head up an organisation in any walk of life is seldom a straightforward task.  A selection committee may have to work extremely hard, only to find that none of the possible candidates are suitable for the post.  How many appointment committees end up appointing the least objectionable candidate rather than the best candidate, simply because they know an appointment has to be made?  In the case of parish appointments, there are some posts where no applications are being received.  Interregna stretch on over the years and the only thing that changes is that the band of retired clergy ‘helping out’ get older and frailer.  The House for Duty option is becoming increasingly less attractive as the costs of heating a rural vicarage become unaffordable on a pension.  When an appointment is eventually made, problems do not necessarily go away.  The appointment committee may have to witness how the lack of experience they had noted in a candidate at the interview stage, turns into a parochial nightmare which nothing except a future retirement will be able to resolve.

The candidates for posts of bishop do not arrive for selection without their own personal histories.  These may have attracted a share of controversy and challenge.  The episcopal candidates may well be men and women of real ability and skill, but the situations they potentially face are still highly stressful.  One contemporary challenge is summed up in the two words ‘social media’.  This pair of words sums up a whole host of hazards for a bishop in the Church of England.  The uncomfortable reality of occupying a prominent role in an organisation, under constant media scrutiny, include being discussed and criticised on Facebook or X without having a realistic opportunity to reply.  Even if the discussion about you is relatively friendly, the sheer fact of constant exposure to the public must be a constant strain.  

Two suggestions to explain why the nominee for the Bishop of Durham is withdrawing from the process have been made.   One is somewhat mischievous and needs no further discussion.  The candidate is thought to be angling for the other current vacancy, that of the throne of Canterbury.  The more likely explanation is that the role of Diocesan bishop has become increasingly unattractive over the years and that qualified candidates simply do not want the sheer stress of occupying the role.  At any one time, there are only a finite number of candidates capable of filling the post of a diocesan bishop.  Is the person that might be qualified free to be considered?  The window of time that exists for such a major move to be made may be fairly narrow.   Also, as with parishes, dioceses come with plusses and minuses, many to do with finance.   A number of the 42 English dioceses are believed to have financial black holes which could make a vacant diocese an uncomfortable post to preside over.  To have to worry about parishes in your diocese being unable or unwilling to pay the parish share is a considerable burden.    The fact of a serious deficit is only part of the problem.  It is the fact that the necessary response to deficits, closing or amalgamating parishes, potentially makes the incoming bishop part of a ‘them’ trying to ‘destroy’ the parish system.  The situation in Truro and Leicester, where creation of massive teams and groupings of parishes is well under way, is not thought to be a happy one.

The role of a bishop seems sometimes like that of an unpopular manager closing down local branches of a national company.  Closing anything down is never popular and it will, perhaps inevitably, create considerable personal stress for the would-be office holder.  A recent, but even greater, source of stress has been laid on the entire episcopal body through the advent of safeguarding.  If there is a diocese which has an exemplary record in this area, we will probably never hear about it.   If bishops and safeguarding officers are playing their part in preventing harm happening to vulnerable individuals, that is as it should be.  Sadly, we only hear about failures and neglect.  No kudos or congratulations is given to a bishop who gives a great deal of energy and effort to getting safeguarding right. It is a tails you lose and heads no one will ever know.  Safeguarding is an arena of deep unhappiness for victims and survivors but often also for those who oversee its implementation.  The Church of England had an opportunity to let go of this area of enormous stress in the February Synod.  But, by retaining final control of safeguarding in-house, the C/E has built into the role of its officeholders, everyone from bishops to churchwardens, a responsibility which can be thoroughly toxic.  By its nature it seldom seems to be able to promote joy or creative change in those who administer it.

In 2025 we contemplate an institution, the Church of England, which, for many, has become a place of stress and unhappiness.   In the past it was easy to glimpse a certain glamour in the prestige and power of those who presided over this venerable organisation as bishops.  Some of those who exercised that power in British society are remembered for fulfilling a role as the moral conscience of the nation.  It is hard for bishops today to achieve such a profile when the discussions that are heard by the public, seem to be self-absorbed and even trivial.   

In asking the question again as to why a nominee for a prestigious bishopric should withdraw his or her candidacy, we might answer with one word – morale.  The individual so nominated may simply see in front of him/her endless insoluble issues of finance, management and personnel.  The would-be bishop does not feel capable of dealing with them all without ending up as a severe casualty of depression and stress.  At the heart of a bishop’s calling is the pastoral support and care of the clergy in his diocese.  These other essential priorities – management, finance and safeguarding – get in the way of this vital task.  If he/she is prevented from caring for the clergy, then the heart of the episcopal task is being laid to one side.  It is small wonder that more clergy are more likely to seek the opposite to preferment, preferring a post which allows them to do the ordinary priestly tasks of teaching, pastoral care and providing first class inspiring worship.  The old-fashioned activity of parish and hospital visiting was right at the top of the ‘things-to-do-list’ during my training years in the 70s.  I accept that parish priorities have had to change with the times over the past 30 years, but I cannot see that a regime which seems to attract to itself endless form filling and team meetings, allows the human vocational aspect of priesthood to flourish.

The simple question why the nominee to the bishopric of Durham withdrew, may have a simple answer.  The person so nominated recognised that the job was now one that has developed and turned into a monster that is impossible to control.    Questions abound over the mental health of archbishops and bishops alike are already being asked elsewhere.  Parish priests have their own sets of problems which challenge mental and physical stamina.  We cannot discuss that issue of parishes today, but it seems clear that the lot of the parish priest is more difficult to manage than in the past.  If I am right, then the claim will be reflected in the declining number offering themselves for full time ministry.  When these numbers recover that may be an indicator that morale is returning to the Church of England.