By Carolina Frank

There is something undeniably calming about being around hopeful people. You feel it almost instantly. The room feels lighter, conversations feel gentler, and even difficult situations seem a little less intimidating. It is not because hopeful people live easier lives or pretend pain does not exist. Usually, it is quite the opposite. They have simply learnt that fear does not deserve to lead them.

Hope carries a certain atmosphere with it. It softens panic. It steadies emotions. It reminds you that not every storm is permanent. That is why people who genuinely trust God often feel so comforting to be around. Their peace is not manufactured; it comes from somewhere deeper. When Jesus said, “Do not worry about tomorrow” in The Gospel of Matthew 6:34, He was not offering a flimsy motivational quote or casual life advice. He was giving an instruction rooted in trust. A call to lean closer to Him instead of spiralling further into fear. Because worry and responsibility are not the same thing.

Worry Feels Active, But It Solves Very Little

Worry often disguises itself as care. It convinces you that if you think about something long enough, obsess over every possible outcome, or carry the burden constantly in your mind, then somehow you are protecting what matters to you.

But worry rarely produces peace or clarity. Most of the time, it simply drains you. Jesus knew this when He asked, “Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” in The Gospel of Matthew 6:27. There is a difference between taking responsibility and surrendering yourself to anxiety. Responsibility says, “I will do what I can.” Worry says, “It all depends on me.” And faith interrupts that lie. Faith reminds you that God is already present in tomorrow before you even arrive there.

Hopeful People Carry Peace Into Difficult Situations

One of the most attractive things about hopeful people is not that they are always joyful. It is that they remain anchored when life becomes uncertain. When challenging situations arise, they still feel disappointment, grief, stress, and frustration, but they are not consumed by it. Their steadiness comes from knowing they do not have to hold the entire world together themselves. That kind of surrender changes a person. It makes them softer instead of hardened. More patient. More reassuring to be around. Their presence begins to reflect the peace they continually return to.

You see this beautifully in The Epistle to the Philippians 4:6-7: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” And then comes the promise: “The peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Not peace because circumstances are perfect. Peace because God remains trustworthy within imperfect circumstances.

So How Do You Actually Stop Worrying?

The truth is, most of us do not stop worrying all at once. Trust is built daily, often quietly, through repeated surrender. Sometimes faith looks deeply spiritual. Other times it looks incredibly practical. It looks like opening your Bible when your thoughts are loud and reminding yourself what is true. It looks like listening to a sermon that recentres your mind on God instead of fear. It looks like church conversations, Bible studies, mentorships, or even a text from someone who reminds you to keep going.

Faith also grows through remembrance. That is why little reminders matter more than people think. A cross necklace. A verse stamped on a piece of jewellery. Even worship music in the car can pull your mind back towards Him in the middle of an anxious day. Not because the objects themselves hold power, but because they redirect your attention. And where your attention goes, your heart often follows.

Surrender Is Not Weakness

Many people resist surrender because they associate it with losing control. But biblical surrender is not passive resignation. It is trust. It is saying, “God, I will do my part, but I refuse to carry what only You were meant to hold.” That kind of faith does not always happen overnight. Often it is built in ordinary moments, through small daily decisions to return to Him again and again. The Book of Proverbs 3:5-6 says: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is simply stop trying to predict and control everything. Faith is a privilege, but it does require surrender. Not surrender to chaos, but surrender to the One who already sees the full picture. The One who knows what He is doing even when you do not.

 And perhaps that is why hopeful people feel so refreshing to be around. They remind you that peace is still possible. That fear is not the strongest force in the room. And that when your life is rooted in God, you do not have to carry tomorrow before it arrives.

by Robert Thompson

For generations, children born outside marriage were labelled with a single cruel word: bastard. The word appeared in law, in official documents, in school playgrounds, in churches, and in everyday speech. It carried shame. It marked people out as somehow less legitimate, less worthy, less respectable than others. The shame fell upon the child. It fell upon the mother. It almost never fell upon the institutions that created and enforced the stigma.

This week Archbishop Sarah Mullally apologised on behalf of the Church of England for its role in the mother-and-baby homes and adoption practices that caused profound suffering to women and children throughout the twentieth century. The apology was both necessary and welcome. Yet one phrase in particular caught my attention. She spoke of a culture that valued “secrecy and respectability” over compassion and care.

As someone who grew up in Ireland, I immediately recognised those words. Because secrecy and respectability were not accidental features of the system. They were the system. Women who became pregnant outside marriage were treated as problems to be hidden. Families were encouraged to keep silent. Children were separated from mothers. Records disappeared. Lives were permanently altered. All in the name of protecting reputations. Not the reputations of the women. Not the reputations of the children. The reputations of families, churches and institutions.

The children were called bastards. Yet looking back now, we are bound to ask a difficult question. Who was really responsible for the shame? The mothers did not create it. The children certainly did not create it. The shame was manufactured and enforced by institutions that claimed moral authority whilst denying compassion to some of the most vulnerable people in society. If there were moral failures in this story, they belonged not to the babies born outside marriage but to the systems that judged them, stigmatised them and separated them from those who loved them.

That is why Archbishop Mullally’s words carry significance far beyond the events of the past. When she speaks of secrecy and respectability, she is identifying a recurring institutional temptation: the temptation to protect reputation rather than people; to preserve authority rather than listen to those who have been harmed; to manage scandal rather than confront truth.

And that is why many survivors of contemporary safeguarding failures will read her words and experience an uncomfortable sense of recognition. The Church now condemns a culture that prioritised institutional reputation over vulnerable people. But that is precisely the criticism many survivors make of the Church today.

Time and again we hear concerns about delayed investigations, unpublished reports, defensive institutional cultures, failures of accountability and a reluctance to admit mistakes. Survivors speak of not being listened to, not being believed, or being treated as risks to institutional reputation rather than people deserving justice and compassion. Of course, there are many dedicated safeguarding professionals and church leaders working tirelessly to change this culture. Progress has been made and important reforms have taken place. Yet the underlying question remains. If secrecy and respectability were among the sins of the Church’s past, are we entirely certain they are not also among the sins of its present?

The tragedy of institutional failure is that it often becomes obvious only in retrospect. Today we ask how previous generations could have failed to see the suffering caused by mother-and-baby homes. How could they not have known? How could they not have listened? How could they have placed institutional reputation above human dignity? Yet future generations may one day ask exactly the same questions about us. What did the Church know about safeguarding failures? What did it do? Who was listened to? Who was ignored? Who was protected?

The Christian tradition has a word for the response required in such circumstances: repentance. But repentance is more than apology. When Zacchaeus encounters Christ, he does not simply say sorry. He restores what has been lost. Biblical repentance is practical. It seeks repair. It seeks restitution. It seeks justice.

That raises an important question following this week’s apology. What does redress look like?

Recent criticism from the Adult Adoptee Movement suggests that this question is not merely theoretical. Responding to the Archbishop’s apology, adoptee representatives argued that they had been excluded from shaping the process itself. Their criticism was simple but profound: “An apology about us, without us, is not accountability.”

More troubling still, some adoptees have suggested that they felt unable to participate in the Church’s engagement process because it did not feel safe. They point to meetings that included professionals and prospective adopters in circumstances where adoptees themselves felt unable to speak openly about their experiences. Whether or not one accepts every aspect of that critique, it points towards a central principle of genuine repentance. Those who have suffered harm cannot simply be the recipients of an apology. They must be participants in shaping the response. And if people affected by historic harms do not feel safe enough to participate, the Church must ask itself some difficult questions about the culture of its present-day processes as well as the failures of its past.

If the Church accepts responsibility for the harms experienced by women and children caught up in these systems, what practical acts of repair follow? Will there be assistance with tracing records and reconnecting families? Will there be counselling and therapeutic support? Will there be memorialisation and public recognition? Will there be financial compensation where harm can be demonstrated? Will survivors themselves help shape the response?

These are not easy questions. But they are necessary ones. The Church must be careful not to create the impression that apologies are for the institution’s benefit while justice remains the responsibility of survivors to pursue alone. Nor can the Church assume that an apology is survivor-centred simply because survivors are consulted; the deeper question is whether they share in shaping the response and whether they experience the process itself as safe, respectful and trustworthy.

The lesson of the mother-and-baby homes is not simply that terrible things happened in the past. The lesson is that institutions can become so concerned with secrecy and respectability that they lose sight of the people they exist to serve.

Archbishop Mullally’s apology was an important beginning. But the true test of repentance is not whether we can name the sins of yesterday. It is whether we can recognise the same temptations in ourselves today.

The children were never the bastards.

The real scandal was a culture that taught them they were.

by Stephen Parsons

Few people acquire all the knowledge or education that they would like.  Many of us who are ordained realise that our theological learning is at best incomplete. In many ways our knowledge resembles a certain brand of Swiss cheese that is full of holes which have never been filled.  In my own case I was privileged to spend much more time being a theological student before and after ordination than most others.  Still, my eight years of full-time study were unable to banish large areas of what I can now only describe as places of complete theological ignorance.  The system that was in operation in the sixties, when I went through the training process for clergy, required every student to pass a series of papers called the General Ordination Exam.  Each student had to pass in papers respectively covering Church History, Doctrine, Ethics, Worship and a number of papers on the Bible.  Those of us who had studied theology at university were deemed to have already qualified in biblical studies, but we still had to acquire a reasonable degree of competence in the other subjects.  Most people managed to pass but I wondered how taxing the standard for a pass was when the score that had to be achieved was only 40%.  My mark for the ethics paper, while a pass, was abysmally low, and I felt my knowledge of Church history was extremely fragmented.  While my university studies gave me reasonable exposure to scripture and the early creeds, my understanding and grasp of contemporary theological debates was thin in the extreme.  My post-graduate research studies filled me with information about Byzantine liturgy and liturgical theology, but this was no substitute for a thorough understanding of the history of the Book of Common Prayer and the debates within Anglican history which created the Thirty-Nine Articles.  Familiarity with the iconoclastic debate of the 8^th century also did not really make up for my failing to understand the contribution of Bonhoeffer and Barth to contemporary theology.

My Swiss cheese grasp of many areas of theology is probably not hugely different from many other members of the clergy today.  Ideally, as a solution to this, we needed also to be coaxed into a habit of study and reading over the entirety of our ministerial careers.  My own exposure to theological books of varied kinds did give me a taste for life-long study, though many of the books I have read reflect more my eclectic interests than material strictly relevant to the job of the parish priest.  One positive thing that arises from all this esoteric reading is that my varied interests within theology have kept me from ever attaching myself to a ‘political’ stance within the subject.  I have, in other words, never sought to align with individuals who write or speak as though they embody some position of ‘truth’.   I am not impressed with those who use the Bible to impose their views on, for example, the position of women in the Church or even try to argue that key points of doctrine or practice can be established by quoting a single verse or statement in Scripture.    Any statement which contains the words that ‘the Bible is clear’ is regarded by me with upmost suspicion because I have learnt over the years that the Bible is very often not at all clear.   I am not a ‘party’ man and certainly am never tempted to believe that there is somewhere a body of knowledge, single textbook or authoritative statement which has definitive answers to all matters of religious truth.  Partisanship, whether the evangelical and conservative brand, or that practised by those listen only to papal decrees, has little appeal.  I try to be a bit like Socrates, as recorded by Plato, who recognised that wisdom was to be found in understanding that he did not know things.  In short there is a wisdom in admitting one’s state of ignorance.  Listening to sermons today, often online, I seem often to encounter a belief in truth and certainty that does not know how to interrogate and question the wisdom of ‘orthodoxy’.  I far prefer the approach to truth which likens it to travelling on a journey where the traveller moves forward towards answers without losing a sense of the provisional nature of our understanding of truth.

Uncertainty and a questioning faith are two of the lenses that produce, as I see it, good Anglican teaching.  This moderate broad-church way of doing theology refuses to be tied into a single system of explanation and discourse.  Anglicanism, when it adopts this path of moderation and even uncertainty, seems better able to deal with and face paradox and find a way through the contradictory claims of the different schools of theological teaching. It is not fazed by these contradictory statements and still finds itself able to be of benefit to individuals trying to live a Christian life.  Recently I have come across a new book which puts into a single volume a perspective on Anglicanism which is able, in a quiet way, to make sense of many of the apparent untidy aspects of moderate Anglicanism.  The exploration is liberating and helpful and also it fills up many of the numerous holes that may exist in the theological education of many parish priests and bishops. .   The book is Good Faith: Why England Needs its Church by Angela Tilby.  In summary, this book explains to the reader, using especially the tools of history, that Anglicanism is a reasonable as well as a traditional exposition of the Christian faith that is attractive and convincing.  From conversations with my fellow clergy over the decades, I find that there are many who have lost the sense of balance that traditional Anglicanism offers.   In some cases, they have allowed themselves to be trapped by dogmatic systems of theology and a political line which seems to dictate everything they say or preach.  Tilby’s book is one that sets out the balance that belongs to the Anglican way, while simultaneously filling up some of the empty spaces of ignorance that afflict most clergy in the Church.   I know of no other book which, in a single volume and in an accessible way, successfully and succinctly traces the important strands of history, liturgy and theology that together have created the unique institution we call the Church of England.  The sympathy it reveals is a genuinely generous one.  The history of the Church of England is never the tale of a body of Christians taking the high road of correct values and choices on every occasion.  It is a story of flawed human beings trying to find the place of moderation and reason against the background of many Christians seeming to be overcome by fanaticism and intolerance.  I had always supposed that I knew my church history fairly well, but Tilby has uncovered numerous important sub-sections in this story which are simultaneously fascinating and important.

It is impossible to evaluate every section of the book, but I feel there is one section that deserves the special attention of the reader.  This is the section that deftly travels through the history of worship in the Church of England since the Reformation.  This section not only helps us to understand historical meaning of the changes which have appeared with each new version of the BCP but also to have a sense of what the reformers were trying to achieve in these key pillars of traditional styles of worship.  At a time when not only the BCP but also all respect for its use in the contemporary Church of England is on the wane, it is good to have an intelligent and informative appreciation of what worship has traditionally meant to Christians in this country.  I recently met a young clergyman, well into his first incumbency who had never, during his training or subsequently, taken part in a traditional BCP service of Evening Prayer.   One might imagine that the glories of medieval cathedral architecture which Tilby lovingly describes were also another part of the English religious tradition that demands to be understood and appreciated by all.  Instead, there are many who are locked out of any visual sensitivity to this part of the church’s tradition.   The language of beauty has become an unknown language.  English Christianity is in danger of losing its connection with the past.  The richness of the church culture, through music, words and buildings, needs to be rediscovered and understood.  Those who come to our churches should be encouraged to experience themselves as inheritors of an incredibly rich heritage.  Good Faith successfully connects us with the mighty breadth and depth of that tradition which we find in our own Church of England.

Good Faith is a book suitable for two categories of reader.  One group that need the book are traditional Anglicans who have allowed their grasp, knowledge and appreciation of the broad Anglican tradition to become atrophied because the climate of church life they encounter locally shows little of no appreciation for it.  Tilby’s book might well boost their knowledge but also it may help them to discover again a pride, even an enthusiasm, for Anglican order and style.  The notion that the Church of England stands for balance, as a mean between extremes, is an idea that still carries substance even if we may not want to identify completely with this idea,

The other group that may value this book, Good Faith, are those who find themselves in an authoritarian section of the Church, whether evangelical or catholic but suspect that there are other ways of being Anglican beyond what is on offer locally.  Dialogue with other people may be a way of discovering new nuances of truth which can enrich their faith and their appreciation of the culture of Anglicanism over the centuries.  One criticism of conservative, even fundamentalist, versions of Anglican life that I have, says nothing about its intellectual incoherence, though this may be present.  It is rather that there seems to be endless repetition in the diet of songs being sung on the stage up front.  In the effort to become new and ‘post liturgical’, the worship innovators of HTB have created something that will eventually be experienced as something extremely boring.  While I had cause to compliment the leaders at HTB for breaking through briefly to a true spontaneity, that moment passed very quickly and was buried in the cacophony of sound that formed the main ingredient of the worship.

Angela Tilby’s new book needs to be read by all those who welcome reason, reverence, respect for tradition and order in our national Church.  Were I to be a member of staff in an Anglican theological training scheme, I would insist that every student bought and read this book so that, even if the individual student had been formed within a sectarian part of our national Church, at least he/she would know how Anglicans have dealt with many of the issues of church life over the centuries.  Tilby makes it impossible to avoid recognising that the traditional Anglican, past and present, represents a unique yet liberating and tolerant version of the Christian way, which may well be of relevance to the spiritual needs of many in our society.

by Daniel Caerwyn (pseudonym)

Last August, Chris Brain was convicted at Inner London Crown Court of seventeen counts of indecent assault against nine women from his congregation. Readers of this blog know the story: the Nine O’Clock Service, the homebase team, the rota of young women required to put their leader to bed. The trial confirmed in law what Roland Howard documented thirty years ago in The Rise and Fall of the Nine O’Clock Service.

The trial judged a man. I want to write about the building, and the architecture that built it.

Within a single decade, St Thomas’ Church in Sheffield produced both the most notorious scandal in modern Church of England history and, by 2003, the largest congregation in the country. The Guardian covered the second story under the headline “The sleek shall inherit the Church”. We treat these as two stories. They are one.

Three books tell it. Robert Warren led St Thomas’ from 1971 to 1993 and wrote a memoir of those years, In the Crucible. He brought John Wimber’s teaching into the church in 1985, embedding prophecy, healing and spiritual warfare in its common life, and in 1986 he commissioned an experimental service for the unchurched young, led by Chris Brain. Howard’s book records what that service became. After Warren left, Mike Breen took over in 1994; Paddy Mallon’s memoir, Calling a City Back to God, narrates the growth that followed. Breen moved to the USA in 2004 to train leaders in his methods, and his organisation, 3DM, carried those methods across the Atlantic and back through books, courses and coaching networks.

Brain and Breen are easy to confuse by surname and impossible to confuse in person. Brain: avant-garde, artistic, an obvious rebel. Breen: a gifted preacher and a builder of institutions. Attend a NOS service and a Breen-era St Thomas’ service and you would find it absurd that they came from the same church. NOS looked like rave culture; Breen’s church looked like a standard charismatic evangelical “worship, word, ministry” service. But these labels tell you what happens in the room, not what happens to a person once they are inside. For that, you have to look at the architecture: how people were let in, how belonging worked, who shaped whom, what obedience came to mean and how authority was exercised. Read Warren, Howard and Mallon side by side and the same structure stands beneath both men’s churches.

Start at the door. NOS posted gatekeepers known as “sweepers”, members whose job was to take a newcomer’s measure and steer them, either toward the inner life of the community or quietly to its edge. St Thomas’ itself ran an eight-point checklist for assessing newcomers. Howard records that the right look, the right connections or money could carry a newcomer straight past conditions others laboured for months to satisfy. Two people could walk through the same door and meet two entirely different churches. Breen kept the gate and changed the label. His huddles, the invitation-only groups at the heart of his system, admit only those the leader selects, on terms the leader sets. His “Person of Peace” teaching directs leaders to invest in the receptive and the influential, and to pass over those who question. Invest is the operative word. His Five Capitals framework teaches leaders to appraise what a person carries in spiritual, relational, physical, intellectual and financial capital. The sweeper’s instinct becomes a balance sheet. Brain extracted usefulness as wealth and clout. Breen reframes the same calculation as stewardship.

Then the family. The trial heard how Brain’s homebase team absorbed members’ lives into his household, and how he cut followers off from family and friends outside the group. Breen needs nothing so crude. His book Family on Mission creates a conditional hierarchy where true “family” are exclusively “those who surrender completely, laying down their agenda fully”. Total surrender to the vision becomes the absolute price of entry for genuine belonging. In a book that commends the dissolving of ordinary pastoral boundaries and describes life lived within them as “utterly exhausting”.

Then the temperature. Howard records NOS members enduring an affection-and-withdrawal cycle they nicknamed “Chrisnapping”: intrusive confrontation framed as “loving aggressively”, followed by sudden warmth, on no schedule a member could predict. Breen codifies the same oscillation as “invitation and challenge” and calls it “constant calibration”: the leader perpetually alternating warmth, access and affirmation with pressure, correction and withdrawal. Strip the arbitrary cruelty from Brain’s version and you have Breen’s. The same cycle, made stable, kind-faced and publishable. Defenders of the system describe challenge as ordinary leadership development, the stretch any good coach provides. I have heard from many people who sat on the receiving end of it. None of them describes goal-setting.

Publishable is one word for it. Scalable is another. Max Weber distinguished authority that rests on law or office from authority that rests on the perceived extraordinary qualities of a person: charismatic authority, power grounded in a leader’s claimed access to God. The gift itself becomes the licence to command. Brain built that kind of power, and when he fell, it fell with him. Breen’s contribution was to make portable the one kind of power that normally evaporates with the man who holds it. He reduced charismatic authority to a method: shapes, stages, huddles, vows. An ordinary leader could install it, and Breen shipped the guidebook. The leaders pouring into Sheffield in 2003 to learn from the country’s largest church took the first deliveries. That same year he founded the Order of Mission, a dispersed order launched from St Thomas’ with episcopal blessing, whose members pledge themselves for life to “accountability, simplicity and purity”: a more palatable rendering of obedience, poverty and celibacy. The Anglican scholar Jack Shepherd traces the “resource church” concept, now central to Church of England strategy, directly to Breen’s 1997 writing about St Thomas’.

Breen liked to tell a story about Monty Roberts, the famous horse whisperer, who won horses over far more gently than his father, a man who broke them by force, and got better results. He offered it as a picture of discipleship. Submission remained the goal. I have often wondered who the father was in that analogy.

I should be clear: I am not saying Brain and Breen are the same. The court record makes plain that they are not. There are more parallels in the record than I have drawn here; with a retrial on the outstanding charges listed for September, prudence says they can wait. What I am saying is that the two men came from a shared ecosystem, with a common understanding of authority, leadership and discipleship, and both placed the leader at the centre of a follower’s life. Breen’s own record is this. In 2014, his methods caused a rift in a US megachurch, an online community formed to document harm in churches that had adopted them, and he stepped down as leader of the Order of Mission. In 2024, he resigned from Apex Church in Ohio after an independent investigation found he had engaged in sexual misconduct with a vulnerable member of the congregation, later confirmed to The Roys Report as Adult Clergy Sexual Abuse, alongside findings of bullying, intimidation and a reluctance to seek reconciliation. He was offered a right of reply to my earlier investigation; he expressed confidence in the integrity of his restoration process and disputed the bullying findings. He has since returned to Yorkshire and relaunched his publishing business. The Order of Mission has expelled him and is conducting a “learning process” into his years as its leader.

And the building? Readers of this blog will remember Richard Scorer’s account of the Matt Drapper settlement. In 2014, nineteen years after NOS was wound up, the church’s own internship and prayer ministry structures delivered a young gay man to an exorcism. The final prayer was pre-written on paper, suggesting prior use.

I have found no evidence of institutional curiosity into the suitability of Breen’s methods, and the risk of harm they might represent. This is what troubles me most. The trial judged one man. Barnardo’s adjudicated one incident, and its terms of reference excluded any investigation of the methodology as a system. The Order of Mission’s learning process is, its Secretary has confirmed to me, not a review of Breen’s published methods. No diocese has examined them. Yet those methods sit, often unattributed, in huddles, discipleship years and leadership networks across the Church of England and well beyond it, run in most cases by sincere leaders who have never heard this history.

So what is the family business? The refinement, packaging and distribution of charismatic authority: made possible by Warren, used to destructive effect by Brain, and exported by Breen. Mike Breen may be the most influential charismatic leader you have never heard of. I have published a longer investigation of his methods, and a toolkit naming the techniques one by one. The Sheffield story did not end in a courtroom last August.

By ANON (Views from the Pews)

“The House discussed the start of work on a review of the definition of safeguarding, to examine whether the Church’s structures and processes are established in a way that can best ensure everyone it comes into contact with is kept safe from harm.” (Minutes of the House of Bishops Meeting, York, 21 May 2026).

We have recently had another visit from the Archdeacon. Our parish is about to go into vacancy (the Vicar is leaving), so we have had the pep-talk about what an “opportunity” this time will be for our congregation and parish. We have no idea how long the vacancy will be, and the Archdeacon (helpfully?) said that the current gap between a clergyperson leaving and a new one arriving in the Diocese is about 18 months. Some vacancies take longer to fill, we were told.

We should be OK going forward. Our benefice comprises two parishes, with one Victorian church and one much older. Both have church halls. One of the parishes also has a mission church that was built on the new housing estate in the 1960s. So, we have five buildings to care for. The is also one JMI CofE school in the benefice. We do Messy Church too, and have a ministry to the residential and nursing homes in the parishes. Churchgoing numbers have been steadily declining over the past decades, and the pandemic (2020) hardly helped. But we have a nice Vicarage and also a house for the Curate in the other parish (formerly the Rectory), though, of course, no actual Curate these days, because far fewer people are offering for ordained ministry. So, like the rest of the Deanery, we rely on several retired clergy to help out. But they are getting older and not being replenished.

The Archdeacon told us that this “opportunity” we have before us – a long, 18-month vacancy in all probability – is a time when the laity can “discover their own ministry”.  At the PCC meeting, the Archdeacon reminded us that “every Christian has a vocation, and every baptised member of the church has a ministry”. We were told to renew our commitment to the Diocesan vision for “the ministry of the whole baptised people of God”. As we wait, pray and work for a new incumbent, we might be “surprised to discover how rich and fulfilling this ministry of the laity can be”.

Whilst I don’t necessarily baulk at such sentiments, I was left with an uneasy feeling about how things have been left. Sharing a vision for “the ministry of the whole baptised people of God” sounds OK (sort of), but I also know this is not a phrase found in the New Testament. I quietly wondered to myself if the Archdeacon knew that this overused soundbite wasn’t biblical?

Be that as it may, we will roll up our sleeves and get on with keeping the ship afloat, the show on the road, and the shop open for business. That, in essence, is what we are bound to do until sometime in 2028, when, God willing, the long siege of improvisation, burdens and duties is lifted, and we are finally relieved by a new Vicar.

Meanwhile, what most of us dread on the ground is the paperwork, administration, and responsibilities we will collectively be left with. Our benefice has two PCCs, both of which are independent charities. Our crumbling 1960s mission church has no PCC, but it does have several trustees as it is also a charity. We have to pay the quota to the Diocese too (there is no relief during a vacancy), and also handle the insurance, maintenance, and audits for the church hall kitchens, as well as contractors who handle health and safety.

We could probably manage all of this, though we only have one Church Warden for the Victorian church. Our other older church is about to lose one of its Church Wardens too, and we cannot find a replacement despite trying hard. There is one Treasurer for the benefice, but not one for the individual PCCs. We are not sure if this is legal, but the Archdeacon has been “taking advice” on this since last summer. Thus far, silence reigns on this query. So, we are just carrying on.

But it is safeguarding where the wheels look set to come off. Many denominations specify that any person with a recognised ministry should undergo DBS vetting and safeguarding training. On the assumption that anyone who has a role or responsibility that might relate regularly or frequently to a young person (i.e., under 18), vulnerable adult, or person who is ‘temporarily vulnerable’, we are struggling to make sense of how we are supposed to manage the next few years.

Frankly, we don’t know who should be covered by church safeguarding training, vetting, and DBS checks, and who should be included in the statistics and returns for the Diocese. To be honest, this wasn’t really any easier when we had a Vicar.

For example, when it comes to ministry with, to or from vulnerable adults, we accept that anyone involved in bereavement visiting, ministry and support should probably be listed. But quite a few people in our congregation offer this kindness and care just as good Christian neighbours might do, and it’s not clear to us that we can make people register with some Diocesan list and comply with their training just because they also happen to come to church. We think that laypeople who regularly help out at funerals or baptism visits, or anyone involved in supporting families, probably should be vetted.

We also have vulnerable adults (including people who are registered disabled) in our congregation who are actively engaged in various ministries (e.g., leading worship, music, intercessions, reading lessons, etc).  But we don’t know if they need vetting for any risk they might pose to others? Or, for any harm they might come to whilst they are ministering?  According to the Diocese, technically, it is the person who is offering the ministry who has to be risk-assessed.  But the ministers in this case are vulnerable adults, so what do we do?

We have similar quandaries with our young people. Some youngsters help out in Sunday School and support the crèche. Some of our youth group lead services with the worship band and even give short talks at the all-age services. Again, we don’t know if our young people need vetting for any risk they might pose to others? Or, do we vet the people they minister to for any harm the young people might come to whilst they are ministering?

More generally, with worship, we have lesson readers, welcomers, sidespersons, and folk leading intercessions. We assume that as these are all involved in regular ministry, they should all be vetted, trained in safeguarding, and subject to DBS checks. But that is a very large slice of our congregation. We do actually have a lot of lay participation in our worship, and wonder if everyone in the music group needs to go through the safeguarding vetting and training processes too? The guidelines from the Diocese stipulate that “anyone involved in ministry” should be, but that would be dozens and dozens of people. It might include most church members.

We also have some elderly retired clergy and lay readers sitting in the congregation, but they no longer have an official licence to minister, and so they don’t preach or take services. That’s fair enough. But people still look to them for pastoral care and occasional spiritual counsel. After all, they are experienced, kind, gifted and pastorally wise. We don’t know whether we are in breach of diocesan guidelines by allowing this to happen, though we don’t see how it could be prevented.

Finally, the issue that really perturbs us is hospitality. Our last Vicar was lovely, but their spouse was not a Christian and didn’t go to church. Despite that, the Vicarage was endlessly hospitable to the congregation and wider parish. Do we need to put all of the members of a clergy household through safeguarding training and vetting even if they are non-churchgoers? What about retired clergy holding an official licence and entertaining at home, but with lodgers in their house who are not vetted? Or what about vulnerable adults and under-18s who are part of a clergy household and involved in supporting events at official or casual church events, including hospitality in a Vicarage, but have not been safeguarding-trained or vetted? Are they at risk, do they pose a risk, or is it a case-by-case matter of resolving the queries?

We genuinely don’t know, and when we raised this with the Archdeacon, we were told that the Diocese would “take advice” and get back to us. That was last year, and nobody in the Diocesan safeguarding team seems to know the answers. As almost everyone in our churches has some responsibility, and we try to model a holistic vision for and approach to lay ministry, we think that everyone in the congregation should potentially complete safeguarding training and be vetted through DBS. But that would be silly, wouldn’t it? The Archdeacon has promised “to clarify the position of the Diocese”. Meanwhile, we are apparently meant to carry on as before.

These days, the Church of England talks a lot about “every member ministry”, but it doesn’t have any watertight definitions of ‘minister’ or ‘ministry’, or even precise legal demarcations. These terms can mean almost anything, and they vary from parish to parish. In our church, the team that serves the tea and coffee each week after worship and supervises the drinks and snacks for the children has a ministry (according to some definitions of safeguarding). Some say the team should all undergo DBS checks and safeguarding training. But it will be different at other churches in our deanery, where high numbers of laity involved in numerous ‘ministry teams’ won’t be vetted at all, and neither will the leaders of the home groups or Alpha Courses.

Meanwhile, our diocese has been busy collecting enormous amounts of personal data from laity across the parishes so everyone can be ‘processed’ for safeguarding vetting. Unfortunately, the diocesan IT systems were recently hacked, and a lot of personal data was stolen, so some churchgoers have had to apply for new IDs. So, it looks like our data is not safe in the hands of the diocese, which, quite frankly, comes as no great surprise. Yet the diocese still insists on collecting our personal data to allow us to have any kind of role or ministry (even if we are just talking about the team making the tea and the coffee).

I can foresee a day when anyone who does anything in church can expect to be vetted and trained. At that point, the only way to avoid such unwarranted personal intrusions and this overbearing scrutiny will be to promise that you will make no contribution whatsoever to “every member ministry”. Increasingly, that is the vocation beginning to stir in me.  If any readers can offer advice or share experiences on how we can manage this going forward, we’d be grateful.

This blog is a chapter from Bullies and Bystanders, edited by Janet Fife and Anne Lee, which is published this week by DLT. Rebecca Parnaby-Rooke is a trained music therapist who facilitates the online community The Ordinary Office.

Rebecca Parnaby-Rooke

“Silence is Golden”, as the Tremeloes famously sang. Jazz musician Miles Davis spoke of his craft belonging in the music he did not play; and quotes have been attributed to both Debussy and Mozart speaking of the power of silence in music. The notes you don’t play are often as important to a piece as the ones you do.

Think of that moment when a conductor holds the orchestra in position after the final note of a piece. Nobody plays a sound, nobody moves. The music is still being intentionally crafted, as represented by the musicians remaining poised. The art is still in motion. But for that moment, they are allowing the silence to ring out just as powerfully as the notes did moments before. Without that moment, what came before would be diminished.

It is an art, knowing how to craft silence. As music therapists, this forms an essential part of our training. In his excellent blog “What is Music without Silence”, Phil Evans succinctly explains the way we work with silence to support our clients. Specifically he explains. “Silence in music therapy, as in life, can take on many qualities. It can be oppressive or mutual, uncomfortable or soothing.” (Evans, 2013). It is this subversion of silence from the intentional and powerful to the forced and harmful which I seek to explore in this chapter.

Preserving the Positive Silence

In a music therapy session, if I heard a client play a soft instrument, such as an egg shaker, and responded with a hard strike on a bass drum, it would drown out their contribution, send the message my voice was more important, and discourage them from contributing again. I wouldn’t be doing my job. My role within the session is to facilitate the client in communication, musical interaction, and therapeutic development, not to make the musical sounds I like best. So, I may choose to hold my silence and look interested, hold a paused chord to invite more of their sound, or repeat their pattern to show I had heard it. I would acknowledge what they had done musically and give them encouragement to continue sharing what they had to offer.

How often is that the response to a survivor? We hear you, we are interested, please give us more?

Should my response be effective, and the client be in a position where they feel able, we may proceed on a musical journey together, exploring what they have to share. My role now is to facilitate, encourage, and most of all listen. To hold the space for any emotions or challenges we may encounter on the way.

How often is that the experience during a survivor journey? We are here for you, please know you are supported and we will tackle whatever arises together?

Once the moment has run its course, all has been expressed, and we come together in a moment of pause, there will be a silence. An opportune moment. This is the moment in which all that came before can be taken away as constructive, or can be ruined.

How often is it that the meetings survivors have which feel to have been beneficial are ended with platitudes, broken promises, or inaction?

I treasure that moment of silence, however brief. I invest in that moment of shared understanding, of coming together at the end of an intense journey. For it always is profound when someone chooses to share vulnerability with me. I have a responsibility in that moment to honour their choice, and take it forward with grace and respect. For me, that means recording what has happened in my clinical notes, sharing the event with family or staff teams (should that be appropriate) and ending every session with a “Thank you” song for the great privilege it has been to be with the client in music.

How often are survivors’ experiences respected and centred so? How often are records comprehensively kept, and information appropriately shared in line with GDPR and Caldicott principles? How often are survivors thanked for the great efforts they go to every time they relive their experiences, knowing the cost each time?

What is Retraumatising?

The cost of subverting silence is retraumatising survivors. This takes many forms, but first let us be clear with a definition of the term. Retraumatising is defined as “one’s reaction to a traumatic exposure that is colored, intensified, amplified, or shaped by one’s reactions and adaptational style to previous traumatic experiences(2)’. Essentially, an event which takes a person back to the state of trauma experienced at a prior time. This is not to be confused with the term ‘trigger’, which in comparison would be an event which increases a person’s emotional response in relation to a state of trauma experienced at a prior time. Put simply, a trigger reminds and therefore evokes. Retraumatising places the person back in the physical, emotional and spiritual state of trauma as a full-bodied response.

It may feel like a bold claim to suggest silence can impact a person to the extent they have a physical response – until we consider the myriad ways silencing can occur, especially in the context of bullying: repeated microaggressions which make a person afraid to speak out, in case their contribution is commented on, ridiculed, or contradicted. Being spoken over or shouted down. Left out of email chains or meetings. Finding out about key issues concerning their work through unofficial channels, removing any opportunity for discussion or feedback – with the refrain “Oh, I thought you already knew” echoing though the gossip. As if that would make it okay – the blow had already been delivered and further participation in sharing the news was a mere aftershock.

The earthquake analogy is a good one to use when it comes to trauma and retraumatising. When an earthquake hits you get the initial tremor, registered on the Richter scale and causing various levels of damage. It is a most unsettling thing to feel, an earthquake. During the Market Rasen earthquake in Lincolnshire on 27th February 2008, I was woken from my sleep feeling like I was being thrown around in a snow globe – while still laid on my bed.  I have never felt anything like it. But that isn’t necessarily the end of it.

Aftershocks can be just as devastating as the original seismic event. Some even register as high on the Richter scale as their original tremor. The aftershocks can keep on coming for days, even years; one series of aftershocks from New Madrid in North America have been active for 145 years – and counting! Not only do they cause damage in their own right, but they destabilise what has been shored up from the previous events. They make already damaged spaces worse. They trigger near collapses to become full destructive events. Just as retraumatising events do for abuse survivors.

Silence, Retraumatising & Spiritual Abuse

Judith Herman describes silent survivors as “carrying the weight of a burden that does not belong to them(3)”. When the #MeToo movement gained rapid traction on social media in 2017, it was almost as if sexual abuse survivors everywhere were breathing a collective sigh of relief. They could finally lay down the weight of their burdens and relate to people. Use their agency. Share parts of themselves which had never seen the light of day. No longer be silent.

For with silence comes shame.

I cannot talk about this, it must be hidden. I’ll be considered dirty, stupid, I brought it on myself.

With silence comes doubt.

Am I a victim, or actually, did I deserve this, were they right, am I wrong, bad, mad? Evil. Sinful.

With silence comes fear.

What if I accidentally talk about anything close to this, and cause trouble. I’d better not talk at all.

With silence comes introversion.

I can’t talk about this, so I won’t talk about anything. I’m better off on my own.

With silence comes frustration.

Can’t people SEE that something is wrong? That I’m hurting? That I’m not ok?

With silence comes anger.

WHY is nobody LISTENING to me? WHY won’t someone HELP ME?

When we are forced into positions of silence, all of this confusion, pain and negativity has only one place to go: inwards. We become ashamed of ourselves. Doubtful of our own identity. Fearful of our own judgement. Introvert, unless we use crutches to take us out of our misery for just a short while. Frustrated because we know, deep down, we were made for more than this.

And then comes the anger. Anger because all around us we see the pastors who abused us as children continuing to live out their days free from justice. Anger because we pursue our abusers through the courts, through jury trials where we, as witnesses, are the ones tried and found to be “not convincing enough” while our rapists walk free. Anger because we lose our health, honour and livelihoods to relentless bullies who use statutes and diktats to trap us in a world of legalism. While we sit, silent, typing messages and deleting them, because “it won’t help our case”.

I often wonder, actually, if it would help our case. If instead of adhering to the social norms of smiling politely and ignoring growing animosity, waiting two months for the next PCC to raise an issue, or subtweeting our grievances without ever making an actual complaint to the person involved, we would actually do better by grappling with the process outlined in Matthew 18:15-17. Speak up, individually, then with trauma-informed, trusted, and suitable supportive peers. Make it commonplace for siblings in Christ to be people who have difficult conversations. Because the harm which comes from fear of speaking up cannot be overemphasised.

In her courageous book A Spirituality of Survival(4), Methodist leader Barbara Glasson talks about the importance of finding a language of inclusion. We can only do that if we make space to listen and truly hear what each person has to say. What one person may see as liberating, another may see as oppressive. We can only begin to understand those dynamics if we name them first, without seeing them as confrontational or personal attacks, just spoken truths from the hearts of beloved siblings in Christ. When we speak into the silence, name our truths, we give each other the power of information. With that, the weight of the burden of silence is lifted. The shame, pain, and sin is placed back with the one to whom it belongs. Jesus can deal with it there. With us, the process of restoration and reconciliation can begin. Aftershocks can no longer impact the previously damaged infrastructure because instead of being shored up with wood, it is now being rebuilt from the ground up with iron.

We don’t know what burdens are carried by those we meet. Some of us may never be able to speak of them. Others may, in time, but not yet. Through my work I have been privileged to enable the breaking of silences which have been held for decades. As people of faith we are called to nurture spaces where all feel able to speak. Where silence is an invitation for glorious sound, not an oppressive, threatening blanket of pressure. Whether through speech, sign, augmentative communication tools, writing, singing, symbols, advocacy, or any other form of expression. We must be open, listening to and caring for what we receive in the space we hold. For what beauty could we be part of if we are?

(1) Evans, P, “What is Music without Silence.” At https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/phil-evans/music-therapy-silence_b_3390764.html  Accessed 14th October 2022.

(2) Danieli, Y,  “Fundamentals of working with (re)traumatized populations” in G. H. Brenner, D. H. Bush, & J. Moses (Eds.), Creating spiritual and psychological resilience: Integrating care in disaster relief work (pp. 195–210) (Abingdon: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2010).

(3) Herman, J ed., Trauma and Recovery (New York:  Basic Books, 2015), p. 200.

(4) Glasson, B, A Spirituality of Survival (London: Continuum, 2009).

Copies of Bullies and Bystanders are available from Anne Lee or Janet Fife at the discounted price of £10 + 2.50 P&P. Contact Anne Lee at

anne.lee@retired.ox.ac.uk or Janet Fife at jhfife@icloud.com

I am sure that most of my readers will have watched detective dramas on television where, during the investigation of a murder, a large chart is placed on the wall at the police station.  On this chart will be affixed pictures of all the possible suspects.  Without such a helpful visual aid, it is all too easy for the viewer to get the characters and their position within the fictional investigation hopelessly muddled up in the mind.   Most of us find such charts helpful in making sense of all the information that the fictional police and detectives are busily amassing in the drama. 

Another common convention, when drawing these fictional charts, is to create connecting lines between the suspects.  These lines show the way the suspects are linked in some way to each other and, sometimes, to the same businesses or institutions.  Every character has their own identifiable network.  Each works and lives within a context and this can be visually expressed through the use of these lines.  Quite often there is a moment in the drama where the chief detective is shown staring at the chart trying to see if there are any more connections that have been overlooked.  The detective will also be looking for such things as anomalies or patterns on the chart to enable him or her to crack open the case so that the guilty one can be revealed. 

This image of a chart, with pictures of suspects together with their connections, came to my mind as we heard the latest news about Jonathan Fletcher.  His story is well known and most of what we know about his malfeasance has been set out in Andrew Graystone’s excellent second edition account of the Iwerne saga, Bleeding for Jesus.  This blog assumes some knowledge of the story down to the very recent ‘examination of the facts’ hearing, at the Crown Court at Kingston upon Thames.  At this hearing Fletcher (JF) was found to have committed the sexual abuse and assault offences of which he was accused, even though he was judged as ‘not fit to plead’. The judge was obliged to ‘impose an absolute discharge’.

The important part of this JF story, I believe, is not to be found in these somewhat squalid episodes revealed inside a Surrey court, but in the way he was a key figure in the entire conservative evangelical world in the Church of England.  Although JF served most of his ministry at a single church, Emmanuel Wimbledon, he was probably more influential within this evangelical network than any other single individual.  He was the one who, for at least three decades, seems to have occupied a quasi-episcopal role within this powerful church network.  No one knew the individuals within that spider’s web better than him, and he appears also to have had enormous power within those circles to exercise a dominating patronage role.  Thus, he was able to place his own favoured candidates in the top jobs of the uber-wealthy parishes within the network.  Although that personal power, because of his old-age and pervading scandal, has now faded, most of the leading parishes within this wealthy network are still run by individuals who obtained their positions through knowing him and obtaining his approval.  These are the parishes that are able, because their immense wealth, to employ, in some cases, 15 or more curates and their loyalty to the wider church structures is, at best, luke-warm.  The whole conservative evangelical world in the Church of England was for decades substantially managed and controlled by JF.  No one could further their career within that world without JF’s personal approval.  In the light of all that has been revealed since 2019 when his past criminal behaviour was brought into the light of day, it is hard not to see him as a kind of mafia boss within this section of the Church.  In the current court case, JF is deemed to be suffering from dementia and unfit to answer charges of assault and sexual abuse.  Whatever further details of this story emerge, it is hard to see how the damage done by this individual will be allowed to dissipate for decades to come.  

In reflecting on the life and influence of JF and the way that he seems to have acted like a spider at the heart of the large interconnecting web, we need to think further about the lines that hold this structure together.  Going back to our imagined chart on the police station wall, it is these lines, these connections, that JF did so much to create and sustain, that help us to understand the dynamics of the con evo world.  These lines operated like a circulatory system within the human body with the flow of blood being coordinated and controlled to a large extent by JF.  The style of relationships that we observe in the con evo world, many reflecting unhealthy power and dependency dynamics, still exist.  To understand these processes, we need to go back one further stage, to the influence of Iwerne and the English public-school. We need to look at the part played by this powerful institution in English society on the Church.

Much information about the influence of the Iwerne camps on the con evo section of the C of E has been brought to light.  We now understand better how the culture and ethos of the English public-school find their expression in sectors of other institutions, not just the C of E. There is a lot of valuable material in Graystone’s book on this topic.  Some of these values derived from this source were undoubtedly good.  Boys were introduced to the idea of self-sacrifice and perseverance in the face of adversity, and this may have done much, in the past, to help build up the morale of a nation facing conflict, whether in the task of empire building or fighting world wars.  A single word comes into my mind to describe this self-sacrificial aspect of public-school formation and that word is ‘chap’.  In the vocabulary of 60+ years ago, and maybe now, a chap was someone who played hard and worked hard for the team.  He was reliable and honest, especially in the context of supporting others who were like him in background.   The word chap attracted to itself various adjectives.  ‘Good chap’ was an important accolade, or the word decent was frequently used. 

Some of the metaphorical blood that flowed into the character of Iwerne campers and protegees of JF could be seen to possess positive and commendable qualities.  But the public-school system bred other darker values which have been now recognised as toxic and harmful.  My observations here come from my own stint at a similar school, but it was not one to attract the attention of Nash’s Iwerne project.  We were however imbibing some of the same arguably toxic values that were found alongside the positive qualities in the public school system.  The first thing I should mention was a constant undercurrent of violence that existed.  I am not describing physical bullying, though this existed.  I am describing an environment which sometimes allowed for an unexpected crisis of violence or cruelty to erupt, so that one could never be totally relaxed in front of senior boys or masters.  Christian teaching did exist in the school, but it was not a type that encouraged individual spiritual flourishing or exploration.  Words like duty, loyalty and obedience seemed to typify what was taught about morality.   These were all corporate values and the loyalty that was demanded in the school was always to further corporate well-being, whether it was the values of the sports team, the house or the school itself.

Corporate morality is not of itself a bad thing.  What was unattractive and more serious was the effect of a fiercely hierarchical pattern of authority that existed within my school.   Boys fought tooth and nail to obtain the status of prefect or get chosen for the school (or house) teams.  Because there was so much in the way of competitive behaviour, there was also a lot of energy expended in striving to obtain status in some sphere.  The hierarchical environment also bred a particular kind of corrosive snobbery.  One did not associate with younger or less successful boys.  Friendships were often political. Who you were seen speaking to might enhance or undermine your status in the school.  It need hardly be said that values that might help build up the support of real community were not valued.  Any admission of vulnerability or indeed wanting to help the weak or disadvantaged also had little place within the system.

I realise as I write these words that they may only be the memories of a previous generation of public-school pupils and that things may today be quite different.  But I recognise that many of the current generation of clergy and bishops who have imbibed some of the values of public-schools and Iwerne may be unwittingly mediating these same values into the blood stream of parts of the church. JW is a product of this value system and a promoter.  He would have known well the competitiveness, ruthlessness and cruelty inherent in the public-school regime.  As one of the socially well-connected alumni who negotiated the system successfully, he would not have had any cause to criticise it.  So, in his long career of intense mentoring and influencing of younger clergy, he would been sharing these public-school values that seem to invert the values of the Magnificat.  Iwerne never seemed to be about exalting ’the humble and meek’ and there was never any talk of putting down ‘the mighty from their seat.’  

 Public schools in England traditionally stood for a distinctive elitist culture rooted in such things as fierce loyalties, entitlement and the worship of power as embodied in the successful sports hero.  The same values that emerge from these practices would spill over into the later lives of those who experienced them.  The professional networks they joined, including the CofE, continued to embody these values.    JF seems to have been a key player in creating and sustaining a group with the CofE strongly practising the toxic values of privilege and entitlement.  I am pleased to be able to say that not every conservative churchman aspired to these values and theology.  A group of churchmen of this theological persuasion represented by the late Melvin Tinker, seem to have stood apart from these elitist values that flow along the veins of what we might describe as the public-school mafia found among the heirs and successors of Jonathan Fletcher.  If the majority group among these conservatives is to have a future in the wider church, it may need to start by questioning and purging itself of the toxic legacy and poisonous contamination of some aspects of the public-school influence in the CofE.

By Carolina Frank

Jesus loved to teach through ordinary things. Seeds. Soil. Wheat. Weeds. Everyday images that people could recognise from their own lives. In Matthew 13, He speaks about a field where good seed is planted, yet over time other growth appears among it.

Anyone who has tended a garden knows this experience. You do not always notice unwanted growth at first. It arrives gradually, almost invisibly, and blends into what is healthy and good. Churches, like gardens, are made up of human; sincere, imperfect, hopeful people trying to follow God together. And wherever people gather, there will always be moments requiring wisdom, humility, and gentle correction.

Jesus reminds us that spiritual health is not about pretending problems do not exist. It is about tending carefully to what helps love, truth, and trust grow stronger.

“Whoever has ears, let them hear.” — Matthew 13:9

The Strength in Listening Well 

One of the great gifts any church can offer is the feeling of being truly heard. Most people know not to expect perfection from faith communities, but what they long for is honesty, kindness, and compassion when life becomes difficult. In conversations around safeguarding, listening matters deeply. Often the most healing words are simple phrases like: “Thank you for telling me,” or “I’m sorry you carried this alone.”

Jesus Himself spent much of His ministry listening to people others overlooked — the grieving, the isolated, the wounded, the ashamed. He created space for people to speak openly without fear.

“Carry each other’s burdens.” — Galatians 6:2

Healthy churches are not churches without challenges. They are churches willing to meet challenges with grace and courage instead of silence or discomfort.

When Small Things Are Left Untended

Most difficulties in life do not arrive all at once. More often, they begin almost imperceptibly. A misunderstanding that is never quite spoken about. A moment of hurt that is felt, but not fully named. A conversation that feels slightly too difficult to have, so it is gently set aside for another time that never really comes.

Over time, these small moments can begin to shape the emotional climate of a community. Not through intention, but through accumulation. A hesitation to speak openly here, a reluctance to ask a difficult question there. And slowly, without anyone consciously deciding it, trust can feel a little more fragile than it once was.

In the Parable of the Weeds, Jesus offers a simple but deeply human image of a field where different kinds of growth appear together. The point is not alarm, but awareness. Life, even in its best expressions, contains a mixture of what nourishes and what complicates flourishing.

In church life, these “weeds” are rarely obvious. More often, they are subtle patterns that develop over time. A preference for avoiding difficult conversations in order to keep things comfortable. A quiet instinct to soften or postpone uncomfortable truths. Or a sincere desire for harmony that, unintentionally, makes honesty feel slightly more costly than silence.

None of these arise from ill will. In fact, they often come from very understandable motivations, like a desire to protect relationships, preserve unity, or avoid unnecessary pain. Yet even good intentions, when left unexamined, can gradually narrow the space in which honest dialogue takes place.

Scripture, in its wisdom, encourages a different rhythm — one where truth and love are held together, not separated.

“Speak the truth in love.” — Ephesians 4:15

This is not a call to harshness, but to integrity. It suggests that real spiritual maturity is not found in avoiding difficult conversations, but in learning how to have them with patience, humility, and care for one another.

There is, at times, a quiet but important distinction to be made between protecting an institution’s reputation and tending to its deeper health. One is concerned with how things appear outwardly; the other is concerned with what is forming inwardly. The second is less visible, but ultimately more important, because it is what sustains trust over time.

And this is where humility becomes so central to the life of a church. Humility allows a community to say, in effect, “We are still learning.” It creates space not only for speaking, but for listening well. It makes room for reflection without defensiveness, and for growth without fear.

Seen in this light, growth is not a disruption to be managed, but a gift to be received. It is the ongoing work of becoming more truthful, more attentive, and more capable of holding both care and clarity together in the same heart.

Finding Faith Later in Life

One of the most beautiful surprises in modern church life is how many people discover faith later in life. We sometimes imagine spirituality belongs mostly to the young, but the opposite is often true. About 80% of adults over 50 say spiritual belief matters deeply to them. For many, faith arrives slowly and unexpectedly, like a letter appearing years after it was first sent.

Later life has a way of sharpening life’s deeper questions. People begin thinking more about meaning, forgiveness, family, legacy, and peace. Some who once felt distant from faith find themselves drawn toward prayer, Scripture, or the comfort of church community. Others return after many years away.

This is one reason gentle, trustworthy churches matter so much. Older (as well as younger) adults are looking for sincerity. They want communities where people can speak honestly, ask questions freely, and feel welcomed exactly as they are.

“Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he.” — Isaiah 46:4

Faith is not something we outgrow; it becomes more integrated into the texture of a life well lived.

The Enduring Value of the Good Seed

It is important to remember that Jesus’ parable is ultimately hopeful. The story is not about fear of weeds, but about confidence in the good seed. Most churches are filled with acts of kindness that rarely make headlines — volunteers making tea after services, people visiting the lonely, pastors comforting grieving families, congregations praying faithfully for one another. These things matter enormously. The presence of challenges does not erase the goodness that also exists. In fact, moments of honesty and reflection can strengthen communities and deepen trust. A healthy church is not one that claims to have all the answers, but the one willing to grow in wisdom, compassion, and care.

Tending the Garden Together

The parables of Matthew 13 remind us that faith is not static. Like a garden, it requires attention, patience, and care. Some things nourish growth; other things  hinder it. Wisdom lies in learning the difference.

Church safeguarding, at its heart, comes down to creating communities where people feel safe, valued, heard, and loved. And perhaps that is the deeper invitation within these parables: to become more attentive to what helps goodness grow. Because wherever truth, kindness, humility, and compassion are nurtured, good seed continues to flourish.

After reading this new book by Lucy Sixsmith on Soul Survivor (SS), the notorious and controversial movement formerly led by Mike Pilavachi, I had to ask myself what genre of writing was being employed.  The blurb on the back cover uses the word ‘memoir’ to describe the book.  It is, however, much more than a memoir.  I find it easier to describe it as a written conversation between various parties of which the reader is one.  The central character is, of course, the author Lucy who, in her mid-thirties is trying today to make sense of her past exposure to the enormously influential movement for Christian young people, which flourished in Watford for some thirty years.  As part of our initiation into the strange (for some) world of charismatic beliefs and practice, we are introduced to a younger Lucy.  The teenage Lucy is also a party to the conversation. As a young impressionable teenager confronting ideas and experiences that she cannot fully process, she initiates us into the religious worldview of a religiously inclined teenager from the noughties.  By the end of the book, the reader will have been introduced to a variety of ideas and notions that may be novel to many older Christians, but the effort will have been worth it for two main reasons.  In the first place, charismatic Christianity is becoming the dominant expression of the faith in Britain today and Lucy’s description of the ideas and assumptions in the movement, whether as a teenager or as someone speaking from early adulthood, is not a bad place to start.  The second set of insights being offered, especially to non-charismatic Church people in leadership, is an understanding of some of the dynamics that are around when churches allow obedience and surrender to a maverick leader.  Such practices can easily tip over into manipulation and exploitation of impressionable and vulnerable young lives.  SS was allowed to function for thirty plus years without anyone asking the penetrating questions that might have better protected the young people it purported to serve.   

I write this short review as a charismatic ‘sympathiser’, having been an observer of the scene for a number of decades.  My own ability to identify with the leaders of the movement ceased with the passing of an earlier generation such as John Richards and John Gunstone.  For a variety of reasons, the movement turned in a new direction in the 80s.  The baton of leadership was passed on to a group with a more sectarian outlook.  To use political terminology, the soft left charismatic style of the 70s became the hard left controlling leadership of the later 80s and 90s.  Having myself found a small niche in the charismatic world in the early 80s, so that I was even invited to speak at healing conferences about my interest in this ministry, I ceased to be regarded as ‘sound’ by the end of the decade.

The SS generation of the nineties and noughties to which Lucy belonged, alongside many of her Christian contemporaries, brought forth a manifestation of charismatic practice which was strongly identified with the conservative evangelical camp.  What Lucy describes of her home church and her experiences of SS camps breathes a Christian culture that I would have found unbelievably stifling and restrictive.  For those of us who had been warmed by the early pioneer days of the charismatic movement, it had been a cause of sadness that our ‘liberal’ opinions made us a cause of suspicion and threat to the generation that came after.  Lucy’s memories and descriptions of her Christian pilgrimage as a young person growing up in this later culture contains much material for reflection.  We have laid out for us the kind of teaching that was shared by Mike Pilavachi with the tens of thousands of young people who imbibed the Christian faith from this somewhat uncompromising conservative narrative.  The importance of the book is found in the way we are invited by the author to share in her struggles, her questions and doubts.  It is as though we are invited to participate, through the reflections of the book, in a journey of faith from the perspective of a very young, but highly intelligent mind. 

When the Music Fades is not in any way meant to be a hatchet job of the damaging ministry of Mike Pilavachi.  Lucy clearly understands the implications of all that has been revealed of the harm and trauma that has befallen a group of young men –  the massages and the dangers of inappropriate closeness to Mike.  This typically involved being at first favoured before being discarded.  There was much more going on and, as the title of the book suggests, Lucy recognises fully the part played by music in creating a distinctive style within the culture of SS, one which was highly attractive to young people.  The sections of the book discussing music, as far as this commentator is concerned, are the ones that are most difficult to engage with.  Perhaps music taste will always be an area of partial incomprehension between the generations.  But I still find myself asking the question whether the style and emotion revealed through the music of SS takes us into the presence of God or whether the same music is a tool of manipulation and control.  One of Lucy’s chapters is entitled Surrender.  Is this word a description of an emotion deliberately cultivated by leaders and musicians to create a power dynamic which was of benefit to the leaders, in terms of gaining kudos from the wider institution?  However much ‘surrender’ seemed to describe the spiritual place where the young participants thought they wanted to be, it is a word that has strong undertones of vulnerability and control.  Telling a large crowd of potentially vulnerable young people the importance of surrendering to an emotion-laden atmosphere is a situation of great potential danger.  Do teenagers have the necessary discernment and capacity for self-protection not to be sucked into something that may harm them at a deep level? 

As a university academic Lucy is alert to the need to respond to many of the searching questions that she recognises will be asked by her potential readership.  She includes helpful material from a variety of disciplines which help to give the context for the phenomenon we know as SS.   Her understanding and presentation of material connected with the history of evangelicalism leading up to SS is instructive and helpful.  She tells us about Charles Simeon, Henry Martyn and Moody and Sankey.  Little by little we find ourselves absorbing the message and significance of SS from these other perspectives, those of theology, history, psychology and direct experience. 

The value of the book is perhaps that it throws down a challenge to church leaders, asking them to state where the boundaries should be drawn between something that is orthodox, wholesome and life-giving and other cultures which may be exploitative and harmful.  The perennial issue about the place of music needs fresh scrutiny and attention, since we cannot simply assume that because something is popular it is necessarily spiritual and healthy.  Lucy makes a serious attempt as a newly minted adult to communicate the feelings and strong emotions aroused in these young people by the evangelistic youth culture of today.  My own level of incomprehension at the genre of musical style within this culture suggests to me that there may still be a considerable problem for the Church to overcome.  Mike Pilavachi was allowed to practise a risky, even dangerous style of Christian ministry for so long, partly because church leaders did not understand and therefore could not monitor intelligently and perceptively what he was doing.  The author, the grown-up well educated Lucy, offers a bridge enabling other Christians outside charismatic circles to understand what was being attempted in these camps. Many of the themes of an earlier charismatic culture: prophecy, tongues and healing were still present.  My own impression from the book’s descriptions is that these gifts were being practiced with a level of wackiness.  There is also a sense that gifts are being practised, sometimes without any proper idea of what was going on.  There is a vivid description of the author emerging from her tent one morning at camp to discover her friend prophesying to a group of younger boys.  These boys were in Lucy’s words ‘sceptical, but magnanimous’.  There was some level of acceptance in that they stayed to listen even though they seemed unconvinced.  Lucy’s own home independent charismatic church had been deeply impacted by the Toronto Blessing so she was wide open to wacky episodes in church, along with vivid displays of emotion.  The adult Lucy is offering us keys to understanding something of this culture.  That understanding will allow the rest of us to feed on its energy and vitality, even when we feel a necessary system of checks and balance is absent.

The adult Lucy Sixsmith provides us with something extremely precious: a direct personal penetration and insight into areas of church life that is strange to many of us.  We feel privileged to enter such an unfamiliar place, the Soul Survivor camps, but with Lucy as our guide, we are better able to understand and certainly not be harmed by the experience.

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Some readers may have seen the news about the legal case involving Jonathan Fletcher. Surviving Church wrote on the earlier stages of this case aboutwhich readers might like to remind themselves. https://survivingchurch.org/2020/12/22/bishops-safeguarding-and-jonathan-fletcher/

Many ordinary citizens in this country probably let out a sigh of relief when the news broke that the leader of Hungary, Victor Orban, had been defeated decisively in his country’s general election some days ago.  I cannot claim to be a close follower of the political story of Hungary, but the little I have gathered about the right-wing, even fascist, control of that society by Orban, meant that I was able to see that things could perhaps now change for the better in the whole of Europe.  All of us who passionately long for a just and peaceful outcome to the Ukrainian conflict, will pray that the European community will be able to increase their military and economic support for that beleaguered country.  This is perhaps easier now that Orban, a steadfast Putin ally, is no longer around to obstruct their efforts.

One of the features of contemporary politics is the way that right-wing, even fascist, regimes often seem to claim adherence to a faux set of Christian beliefs and values.  We find a colluding between members of our own home-grown ultra-right party, Reform, and Christian nationalist ideas.  Christian nationalism, with its strong attachment to flags and marches has become a significant political force in this country.  Most of us, who do not support a version of the Christian faith imbued with such crude nationalism, simplistic versions of history together with a fondness for ideologies of discrimination and hate, find this link deeply disturbing.   But such ultra-right ideas resonate with many people, Christian or not, because somehow, they satisfy a basic human instinct to feel powerful and important.  Those who join such right-wing groups see the opportunity to become part of something bigger than themselves.  Listening to slogans and simplistic notions of good and evil, the right-wing acolyte is attracted to a crowd energy which is new and exciting.  By becoming part of it, the follower is buoyed up to be a somebody; they are raised up above the humdrum sensation of being utterly insignificant and ordinary to become part of a new and successful elite.

The insights I may have about the attractiveness of right-wing fascist thinking were first formed by living in Greece for ten months in the Sixties, under the totalitarian rule of the Colonels’ regime.  Most people have now forgotten the horrors and cruelties of this group of middle-ranking soldiers who took over the running of their country for a full seven years.  The dimension that shocked and fascinated me at the same time, was the appeal to Christianity to boost the ultra-right ideology that these rulers imposed on their country.  They found a pliant group within Orthodoxy and persuaded them to support them.  Together, the government and this Christian group, known as Zoe, created a pseudo-religious Christian veneer to justify their political activity against the ‘communists’ who opposed them.  The word communist could then be stretched to describe anybody who did not follow the regime’s ideas.  The British government of the day, a Labour administration under Harold Wilson, was certainly to be characterised in this way, particularly as he was outspoken in the face of the physical torture being used on many political prisoners languishing in camps on islands. 

This blog is not intended to be an account of fascist right-wing regimes, but I want to remind my readers of the way that extreme politics, as seen in Hungary, Greece and large sections of the Republican party in the States, wants to use Christianity for their own political purposes.  There is a simple three-word slogan which describes both the ultra- right-wing politics and expression of the Christian faith found in these conservative settings.  The slogan declares quite simply that Might is Right.  This bald statement expresses an ideology, whether in a political or religious setting, that deals with certainties and an authoritative version of truth.  It is the task of the leaders, political or faith-based, to enforce that ‘truth’ with whatever means are available.  Backed up with the forces of might, the dominant proponents of truth seek to impose their ideology on an entire society, or the parts of it who have surrendered to the leadership of the group with the most power.  When only a single version of truth in any area of knowledge, religious, political or scientific, is tolerated, we find ourselves living in a society which is marked by sterility and a failure to thrive.  Conformity and passivity are rewarded, and independence of thought and questioning are severely punished.  I need not go back very far in history to be able to offer examples of sterility and cruelty contained in what we can describe as fascist thinking.  To assume that any individual, any party or ideology can be irrefutably correct all the time is the stuff of fantasy thinking.  Those of us who do not live in this ideological fantasy world know that truth is rarely attained in a pure form.  The best that can be achieved is a theory that works as long as it does until a better theory comes along and cause us to rethink our assumptions.  It is claimed that science works because those at the edge of research are constantly seeking to refine their theories by trying to prove them wrong.  Truth in every discipline is attained only by a constant questioning and putting current theories to the test.  This is somewhat different to an image of finding truth and then retreating behind castle walls to defend it from questioners and doubters.

There are two things that unite right-wing politics and conservative theologies.  One is the assumption that those in charge, and they alone, have the truth.  The second thing they share is the belief that their ownership of this truth gives them the right to forcefully act in opposition against those who take a different view.  The holders of ‘truth’ always have the duty to persecute the ‘heretic’, the one who does not agree or who thinks independently. Paradoxically, such a claim to own the truth in this way is found to be something attractive and appealing to many.  When the Christian leader/pastor makes such claims for his or her preaching the Word, in a way that nothing can be questioned or discussed, we enter an environment which is fascist in style.  We come to a question that asks whether we should ever expect our faith to have a resemblance to a totalitarian system that seeks to control and dominate in the pursuit of one version of truth.  This dominant truth is one beyond discussion or any kind of questioning.  All that I have written so far will indicate which side I take in such a debate.   I am a passionate believer in allowing truth to be discovered and explored in an attitude of tentative humility.  When someone appears who wants to articulate their truth in a somewhat different way, I would want to listen and understand what they are saying rather than assume that one of us is right and the other wrong.  Dialogue and discussion may open new dimensions of truth to both sides, if all are prepared to explore truth in this way.  The problem is that the fascist mentality does not allow this kind of approach.  It demands acquiescence in the diktat of the leader and so there is never room for exploring an approach to truth which wants to explore a quite different approach.

Authoritative answers, whether in religion or politics, are comforting in their claims.  At one sweep we are relieved of the pain of uncertainty and allowed to enjoy the reassurance of being ‘right’ because our side in the argument has the ‘might’.  There are churches who possess much in the way of institutional power and wealth and, because of this, they want to dominate and control other churches.  Such misuse of power among Christians may resonate with many people.  They believe it is somehow ‘biblical’ and it is preserving truth.  The reality, as we have tried to suggest in this blog is that the path to real truth is being shut down.   Truth is something towards which we travel while never fully possessing it in our human lifetime.  Our journeying and our hope that the destination we have glimpsed is the right one is what keeps us on the Christian path and in a state of permanent expectancy.  In the words of St Augustine, You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.