https://d3hgrlq6yacptf.cloudfront.net/61f2fd86f0ee5/content/pages/documents/26-07-final-report-for-publication.pdf

It has not been easy writing this blog piece as new information keeps appearing.  Thus, the drafts I put together earlier in the week have had to rewritten more than once to keep the piece more or less up to date.  The main focus for this blog is a document published on the Church of England official website,122 pages long, entitled Independent Review of Case TT commissioned by the Interim Commissioner for Independent Case Reviews.  I hope that this short summary of its contents in this post will encourage many of the Surviving Church followers to read it in full.  In summary it contains a frank and detailed critique of the poor treatment of an abuse survivor by individuals and groups acting for the Church of England over several decades. When the document first appeared on July 15^th 2026, the survivor’s name was anonymised but, since publication, other published references to the case have revealed her name.  I understand that this survivor, Jane Chevous, is happy for her name to be used rather than the TT in the Review.  This is in spite of the fact that the Review refers to some quite sensitive information connected with her personal life. 

In urging my readers to persevere with a detailed study of the 31.8. Review of Jane’s struggles to be heard by the Church authorities over several decades, I am hoping that, like me, they will feel themselves also much better informed about the traumatic experience involved in being a survivor.  They will also become more familiar with the protocols and processes employed by members of the National Safeguarding Team and other professionals doing this work. The detail in the Review helps us to understand how complicated is the task that professionals face in delivering safeguarding. From this current Review we gain a level of familiarity with the processes used by these NST officers, caseworkers and core groups. Attempting to deliver safety protocols to the church institution when there are competing interests and priorities in operation at the same time, can result in confusion. Even if the Review does not answer all the safeguarding queries that many of us continue to hold, this is a document full of good sense and clarity. Asking the right questions of safeguarding experts may eventually produce a system which is easy to understand and does not add to the pain of those who are victims/survivors of a dysfunctional institution. The current 31:8 published Review on the story of Jane’s experiences as a victim of both abuse and insensitive management is an important staging post on the way to a renewed system of safeguarding which will promote justice and healing.

In pursuit of a clear understanding of all that has happened to Jane over the last 40+ years, the Reviewer has consulted numerous document and conducted many interviews. From the documents, from emails to SAR requests, we get remarkable insight into the way that safeguarding is done.   No doubt, as the result of this critical glimpse of the operation of core group meetings set up to examine Jane’s story, there will be a call to make changes in safeguarding processes all over the country.  

Jane’s story can be told in a few broad strokes.  Back in 1979 she was working in church youth work and she was involved with two ordained youth leaders who abused her sexually and spiritually over a number of years.  As with many sexual victims, the behaviour of the abusers was not immediately recognised as abusive by the victim.  It was only in 2001 that she made a formal approach to the Diocese of Southwark to report the abuse.  This was resisted and she herself was subject to victim blaming.   She later discovered that her claims of being subject to rape were dismissed in the belief she was a ‘gold-digger’ and also ‘hysterical’.  The two bishops in the diocese and the archdeacon involved with her case seemed to have no interest in establishing the facts, all their sympathy and support being extended to the perpetrators.  Jane, unsurprisingly, was seriously dismayed by this response and she abandoned her membership of the Church and her roles within it.  Her mental health was severely affected, and she made attempts on her life.

The next stage of the narrative begins in 2019 after Jane had heard about the work of IICSA and the setting up of the NST in 2015.  From the beginning, her approach to the NST was affected by a serious misunderstanding about what they were able to provide for her.  In her words, ‘I entered full of hope and optimism in a place of relative healing and left distressed, broken and with no justice, accountability or healing’.  As the 31:8 reviewer has pointed out, the NST had a protocol which was always focussed on the need to manage risk.  If an accusation was made, the priority was not to establish responsibility or accountability, but to take steps to remove the potential risk of future abuses or harm.  The reviewer gives quite a bit of space to this early misunderstanding that arose because of this protocol embedded in the NST that their task was to manage future threats.  It certainty did not meet Jane’s felt need to be believed and to receive some kind of apology for what she had suffered.  For the outside observer trying to understand other cases with similar misunderstandings, it is useful to see this discussed in the Review from both perspectives, that of the survivor and that of the church institution.

The following three years of work by the NST with Jane reveal a number of obstacles identified by the 31:8 reviewer which militated against smooth functioning at the NST.  Jane herself was spending time abroad and the Covid epidemic was raging.  There were also problems and serious mistakes at a practical level with some poor record- keeping.  This was compounded by a number of changes of staff which made continuity hard to maintain.  Long delays in communication with Jane because of these bureaucratic delays made her often feel disconnected from the NST process.        

The misunderstandings that bedevilled the safeguarding process for Jane throughout her interaction with the NST from 2019-2022 should, we might feel, not have been unexpected when they occurred.  The reviewer expresses some surprise that a leaflet to explain the meaning of ‘managing risk’ was not made available.  My own observation is to express surprise that the leaders of the NST had not met a similar situation before like Jane’s.  Her complaint, which any intelligent individual might make, was to question whether it was appropriate to use the word ‘safeguarding’ to describe a process that seemed to have as its main purpose the protection of an institution. This seemed to take precedence over caring for a wronged individual.  If we examine the use of the word ‘risk’ in this NST context, we find that the most important thing being protected is the Church itself.  Legal advice being given to the NST in its early days seemed to have suggested that any admittance of responsibility might involve the Church in huge financial liabilities.  This prevented the NST providing the one thing that might have brought healing and closure for a victim – an apology and some accountability.  That legal advice turned out to be completely wrong and, in an earlier blog, I have quoted the relevant legal evidence to refute the liability argument.  This was provided by a legally trained relative.

The 31:8 Review consists of 122 tightly typed pages and the fact of its appearance at the beginning of the summer holidays and after a meeting of General Synod might seem to be an attempt to condemn it to a quiet burial. Were this very important Review to be forgotten, it would avoid some frankly embarrassing criticism of the Church’s leadership alongside some challenges to the official protocols for safeguarding practice.  I am hoping that many who read this summary will take the trouble to read the full Review.  They will learn a lot about the inner workings of the CofE and the way that it sometimes strays from its claimed high standards.   The Review is extremely critical of the church leaders in the Southwark diocese who, in 2001, received Jane’s complaint and then treated her with such cruelty and disrespect.  The Review records the later efforts by the NST to challenge the earlier behaviour of these church leaders in the 2001/2 period when Jane’s case had been brought to their attention.  The leaders concerned, two bishops and an archdeacon are not named, but are clearly identifiable from the information that is revealed about them.  The negotiations with these leaders were not concluded satisfactorily even though a great deal of effort and time was expended on meetings and contact with them.  Ideally the breakdown in relationships that had occurred in 2001/2002 should have been worked through and somehow resolved.  That never seems to have happened and the 31:8 reviewer accepts that this was the case.  The DSA in Southwark did however accept, after the conclusion of the NFT process and its 8 (!) core group meetings, how deeply traumatising the original abuse had been for Jane and how the processes would have been far less disruptive for Jane if she had been allowed to tell her story on tape to avoid seemingly endless re-questioning and cross-examination.  A further bright spot for Jane came as the result of the current Bishop of Southwark writing to her supportively after the end of the NFT inquiry.  He was able to apologise and express his regret at what she had to endure, both in the early days and after she brought the incidents to the attention of the church authorities.  Above all the Bishop of Southwark expressed his belief in her account.  Seemingly he was unafraid of Jane initiating some massive lawsuit against the Church of England.  The Bishops of Oxford and Dorchester also listened to Jane’s story and apologised for the abuse she had suffered. Both dioceses followed this up by agreeing to make financial provision towards the cost of her counselling.   

There is much else in the Review in terms of good and bad practice to be mulled over, but I have to say that having reached the end with its descriptions of bullying and power abuse throughout the narrative, I am left feeling myself somewhat traumatised.  The assumption that someone making a complaint is automatically a mischief maker and should be frightened off by a solicitor’s letter does not create a trusting mutually supportive Body of Christ in an area.  The lack of any pastoral response or insight among church leaders when Jane’s original complaint was made, meant that the suffering that Jane endured continued for decades.  Jane’s story and the failures in response are important and the Church of England will become a better place if even some of the lessons are learned from her story.

by Stephen Parsons

One of the things that is constantly changing in the world of safeguarding and abuse is the vocabulary used to describe it.  New categories or expressions that are used to describe all the different forms of abuse appear all the time.  The studies and reports of today are resourced by the results of research in varied disciplines and the language they use.  Two examples of this refined language come immediately to mind.  One is the expression ‘coercion and control.’  Whatever the precise history of this expression, it gave to lawmakers in Britain, in 2015, the ability to describe and sanction non-violent forms of control in a domestic situation which was criminal.  It has now become a common expression to describe other examples of pressurised control and is used in contexts beyond the domestic sphere.  The addition of ‘trauma-informed’ into the discourse also allowed all of us who were concerned for the victims of abusive behaviour to understand the ongoing and lasting consequences of spiritual abuse.  Even the word safeguarding itself is of relatively recent origin.  When writing about power and its abuse in the Church during the 90s, I never had cause to use the word. 

With the arrival last year of a new book by Tom Wilson, Safer Faiths, Safer Followers, I am once again reminded how thoroughly out of date my own research has become.  This new book deserves to be widely read by those who want to understand more on the safeguarding theme, not only in Christian contexts, but right across the religious map of Britain.  This post I am writing here is not intended to be a review of Wilson’s book, which I have enjoyed for its many insights.  I am, however, unashamedly wanting to mine a single word from his book which I find to be enormously useful in my understanding of the dynamics of church power abuse.  Power abuse in a religious setting, as we need to remind ourselves, manifests itself in many forms. The single word introduced into Wilson’s discussion, which I find helpful for my own thinking, is ‘agency’.  For Wilson, agency is what is taken from an individual when subject to spiritual or any other kind of abuse.   Losing one’s agency sums up the post-abuse sense of humiliation and demoralisation that typically overcomes the victim of a degrading episode.  That loss of confidence in one’s decision making and one’s ability to be in control of one’s own life is often, as readers of this blog will know, the lasting legacy of abuse of whatever kind.  We see the most obvious, as well as most extreme, example of loss of agency in the experience of enslavement.  Slavery is a situation of total disempowerment where one person is forced to submit to the will of another.  It is not only defined by physical shackles.  The individual becomes a slave psychologically when they learn to accept a situation of their total subjugation to another.  There are many forms of bullying and dominance which try to crush an individual.  Torture, rape and threatening behaviour also, in their different ways, deprive the abused individual of their freedom and their agency.  They have become in effects slaves of another or, maybe, of an abusive institution.

 We have explored very briefly how losing agency is a good description of the situation that many abused individuals find themselves in after an abusive episode has taken place.  Such abuse or coercion that leads to a long-term loss of agency does not have to be violent or sexual.  Wilson’s book explores the case of a teenage boy who came under the influence of an Anglican parish priest, Timothy Davis.  The intensive spiritual mentoring that Davis offered was clearly unhealthy and harmful.  While, in this case, no physical or sexual activity was involved, the relationship was such that the 15-year-old was clearly in complete thrall to the older man.  The language of agency loss was not in fact used to describe this case, but it fits the situation well.  Peter Ball, Mike Pilavachi, John Smyth and Jonathan Fletcher could all be said to have held their chosen mentees in a similar state of slave-like dependency.  It is clear that, whatever else may have been going on within these relationships, the victims were all having their self-determination attacked to gratify the psychological needs of their abuser.  The Davis case reached a conclusion in 2018 when he was found to have abused ‘spiritual power’ and authority over the boy and was removed from ministry. 

One thing that is helpful about Wilson’s analysis is the way that, by using the language of ‘agency’, the observer can see clearly how the actual moment of abuse is not necessarily the worst part of the narrative.  At the heart of Wilson’s understanding is the idea of the long-term diminishment that is the likely result of any abuse committed by one individual against another.  The important question that now should be asked in every abuse episode is not just the detail of an act of abuse, but whether it has created trauma and the long-term undermining of the victim’s agency.  Obviously, this notion of impaired or weakened agency will have a whole variety of manifestations and meanings, according to the precise nature of the abuse that has been perpetrated.  For example, the experience of ‘gaslighting’ may well undermine the ability to know one’s mind or make decisions.  This type of behaviour is likely also to have devastating destructive effects on the ability to feel safe.  It will take a careful sensitive approach to reveal this damage to the agency of the individual who has been abused.   Whoever is given the task of uncovering the truth of an abuse event will need wisdom and sensitivity of a high order, together with a questioning that understands the ways that a victim may have had the core of their being undermined.  Damage that leads to a loss of agency is always serious. Having read Wilson’s sensitive exposition of what it means to lose agency through an experience of an abusive event, one longs for this level of awareness to be present in every core-group or safeguarding body so that they are always alert to this experience of loss that is encountered by many victims of power dominance or abuse.  The old Latin tag directed at medical doctors, Primum, non nocere (first, do no harm) should always be applied to those meeting and responding to survivors.   A failure to be alert to loss of agency among abuse survivors puts such survivors at risk of additional suffering.   The evidence points to many occasions where the process of investigation proves to be a additional source of suffering, sometimes far greater than the original wrong.

Our brief discussion about ‘agency’ and the way that it can be damaged or removed by an act of abuse of some kind, leads into another reflection.  Briefly stated, it is this.  If a negative abusive event care can result in loss of agency, how does the Church try to ensure that proper care is in place which will seek to build up the agency that has been lost in the abusive episode and its aftermath.  My response to this is first to look back on my own ministry over many decades and look at what I believe were my aims as a parish priest/pastor.  I would want it to be true that all my pastoral relationships were about supporting and enabling, in Wilson’s language, the agency of everyone for whom I had a pastoral responsibility.  The parish priest has a commission to build up the sick and encourage the broken and the bereaved.  All this, involving frequent visits to the homes of parishioners, could all be described as ‘agency work’ and we must not forget how it is also found in the teaching role of the clergy.  Reaching an ‘aha’ moment with adult confirmation candidates (less easy with teenagers!) was one of the highlight moments of parish ministry.    Helping the bereaved, the sick and the demoralised to recover their hope was always a crucial part of the daily visiting tasks.  By modern standards the strong emphasis on home visits, that was drummed into us curates in the early 70s, might be frowned on in today’s safeguarding culture.   I cannot imagine being a parish priest where visiting was not the core activity.  After retirement I was privileged to act as a ‘bank’ chaplain at a local hospital.  It was good to return, briefly, to role of encouragement and the task of helping patients to recover hope in the face of serious fears and vulnerabilities. 

I am grateful to Tom Wilson for introducing me to the notion of ‘agency’ in the middle of his discussion of the contrasting and often destructive and damaging forms of ministry conducted by Jonathan Fletcher, Peter Ball and others.  I have in this post attempted to turn around the word to look at its meaning when used in a positive perspective. By thinking of parish ministry as the task of recovering and restoring agency in every member, we find that we are thinking of ministry in a quite distinct way.  This is a style of ministry that actively promotes agency, hope and spiritual growth without any of the shadows of authoritarianism and control so often found in churches today.  Many of us are deeply uncomfortable at the adulation given to the larger-than-life charismatic personalities on the stage who are, for logistical reasons, unable to get to know their ‘sheep’.  This kind of ministry is strong on entertainment but sits lightly on the importance of increased agency and spiritual maturity.  The question for ministry now becomes: ‘Is the congregation individually and corporately able to increase its agency?’   Answering this question successfully will require us to have a fuller understanding of what it might mean to have agency in the Christian life.  Wilson’s book tackles the important question of how agency is taken away by various examples of manipulation, bullying and other forms of spiritual abuse.  So far the full description of what it means to have full agency and be supported in obtaining it has not been mapped out.  Perhaps this short piece may help us to start thinking afresh, not about abusive ministry, but about supporting parishioners to live out the Christian life with greater abundance and agency.

by Anon

If you follow football, you’ll know that when a team fails to perform, they often dismiss the manager. In the 21^st century, Watford has changed its managers 24 times. Other clubs with significant managerial turnover include Chelsea and Nottingham Forest. Leeds United, Sunderland, and Crystal Palace have all experienced 20 or more permanent managerial changes since 2000. In contrast, Arsenal and Manchester City have had the fewest managerial changes.

Of course, leading a denomination is nothing like managing a football club. Yet there are some striking parallels. Supporters have expectations. Season ticket holders – or the regulars and frequent attendees – will know that the fanbase is wider than those just turning up every week in the cold for a couple of hours. Football, like religion, is an all-consuming affair. There is morale to consider. And performance on and off the field. The parallels are plain to see.

At its most basic level, psychologically, supporting an underperforming team can be a miserable and frustrating experience. Everyone on the terraces – or in the pews, for that matter – will have an opinion on who to select and play, tactics, and management. They can all do a better job than the manager.

Of course, denominations tend not to sack their managers (or “let them go”) unless they have no choice. Welby went. In Wales, Archbishop Andrew John (Anglican) and the national team parted company. In Scotland, Archbishop Keith O’Brien (Roman Catholic) also resigned. Performances and perceptions do matter.

Sarah Mullally has been managing the Church of England side for several months. So, it’s still early in her tenure. There are the coaching grounds in Canterbury, but the main stadium is at Lambeth Palace. This is a national team with a respected global pedigree and international following. Appointed in October 2025, Mullally took up the reins in March 2026. She’s the first female appointee to take the role. Like all new managers, many were ready to believe that this time it would be different (even if they could remember thinking that last time).

After all, it would be fair to say that the last half-century has been a ropey affair for managing the Church of England team. When the England football team won the World Cup in 1966, Michael Ramsey was Archbishop of Canterbury. Coggan and Runcie followed. In the run-up to the millennium, it was the turn of Carey, who was replaced by Williams, before being succeeded by Welby. And now Mullally. Modern Archbishops tend to average a ten-year stint.

Like her immediate predecessors, Mullally’s brief will have been to turn around the fortunes of a national denomination that is haemorrhaging support, experiencing a marked decline in prestige, unable to recover its international marque, and struggling with morale, results and overall performance. The terraces (or the proverbial pews) have levels of expectation and hope. They always do.

But the modern era for this game is tempered with realism, and the statistics are brutal. Only one in five of the population opted for a Church of England funeral in 2024; 80% chose an alternative. The figure for weddings is rapidly collapsing to one in ten of the population, with 90% choosing not to involve the Church of England.  In 2024, infant baptisms conducted by the Church of England accounted for 5% of newborns. National figures for confirmations were 22,000 in 2010, but by 2024, that figure had halved to 11,000. By any yardstick, those numbers are grim.

As a supporter or pundit following a football team, you can see how the team and the manager are performing from the statistics. The numbers don’t lie. They tell a story. Points accrued, goals scored, possession percentages, and the like all point to results. You can tell the fans as much as you like that your team played a great match and deserved something from the game, but were just unlucky this week. Or that things will be turned around next season. So, you must have the time to rebuild the squad, and the fans will just need to be patient.

The trouble is, for the Church of England, the fans have had this message from the Board of Directors for the best part of half a century. New managers come and go. Players, likewise. But the team continues to slide in national standing, and the decline internationally is even more marked and alarming. Here, parallels between the national church and the governance of England as a nation are striking. There have been seven Prime Ministers in the last ten years (Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer and Burnham). Perhaps running the country might be compared to the difficulty of managing Chelsea, Watford, or Nottingham Forest? Yet with expectations running way too high (and some might say unrealistic given the global context), mediocrity and mere survival are not tolerated.

According to one recent commentator (Claire Berlinski, ‘Changing the Undertaker Won’t Halt the Decline’, The Cosmopolitan Globalist, June 24, 2026), “Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer – each in a different way was consumed by the same unresolved event…the country keeps changing the undertaker and wondering why the corpse remains dead.” The same could certainly be said of Scotland’s football efforts at the 2026 World Cup campaign. But a change of managers won’t help, as Tom English noted (c.f., ‘Scotland’s ill-fated World Cup story finally at a sorry end’, 28 June 2006: https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/c5yzdwz890go). There were multiple layers to Scotland’s failure. As might be said of Church of England bishops too, Scotland’s team was “a squad full of endeavour…but the collective is decidedly average at best”.

And it’s hard to argue with those numbers. In the FIFA world rankings, Scotland sit at 42, so it would be a stretch to suddenly break into the top 30 at the group stages of the World Cup. England sit in fourth place in the FIFA world rankings, which suggests a spot in the semi-finals but not beyond. That is where it ended for England. They did great, for sure, finishing third, and the nation can be proud. They really can. But what is it about the hubris of a nation that presumes it deserves to do better?  The fans may well be full of passion and optimism. But that doesn’t increase the chances of outperforming the ranking. Many views from the pews would concur. Likewise, from the voters. The football team, the country and its national church are stories of struggle (or perhaps slow decline?). We need to engage with and accept that reality, not keep denying it, pretending we can somehow cheat it.

A selection of the more memorable books from the 20^th and 21^st centuries, all suggest a catalogue of collapse – an English empire descending into decay:  Decline and Fall (Evelyn Waugh, 1928), The Strange Death of Liberal England (George Dangerfield, 1935), The Collapse of British Power (Correlli Barnett, 1972), Farewell the Trumpets (Jan Morris 1980), Britain in Decline (Andrew Gamble, 1994), The Abolition of Britain (Peter Hitchens, 1999), The Strange Death of English Conservatism (Sam Tanenhaus 2005), The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (Piers Brendon, 2008), English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Martin Wiener, 2011), and Can We (Britain) Be Great Again? (Jeremy Hunt, 2025). These are mere samples. But no country produces a Library of Lament such as this unless despair afflicts the national psyche.

Why is England in decline? While this situation partly stems from the loss of its empire, the deeper issue lies in the nation’s inability to develop a suitable post-imperial governing identity. The country has clung to the habits, symbols, and structures of a former world power, even as its economy shrinks and industrial regions decay. This has led to a political landscape that confuses sovereignty with productivity and values nostalgia over strategic vision.

But the decline began even before the empire began to fade. England, as the first industrial nation, initially benefited from advantages that later became rigidities, such as outdated factories, management practices, class structures, educational biases, financial habits, and a political elite focused more on imperial administration than on industrial modernisation.

In the 1960s and 1970s, political theorist Tom Nairn and historian Perry Anderson formulated their theory of English decline. They argued that early English capitalist success allowed outdated institutions and class structures to endure, in contrast to continental European countries such as Germany, which modernised through efficient administrative tiers and effective education systems. For England, the triumphs of the past become the blight of the present. The grip of nostalgia on the psyche of its national church is also part of this problematic ecology.

The English are still chewing on the thick curdled whey of Empire Glory Days. That makes realities hard to stomach, and sober realism is an even harder sell. The Church of England’s national demise, to say nothing of the global Anglican Communion’s rapid dissolution and increasingly fractious divisions, is fully part of this story too. It is also hard to manage a team that doesn’t really want to be managed.

As with politics and football, so with the Church of England? In which case, Mullally is a symptom of our times, and no cause of malaise. There was a time when new leadership in the Church of England represented genuine change. So mere managerial competence will not be enough, and besides, the Church of England is already weary – some may even say cynical and suspicious – of bold new visions.

The 21^st century has seen far too much promised (mostly about growth), and far too little delivered. As with the country, the national church needs the leadership to provide a cohesive spiritual, theological, emotional, and moral account of the institution that is honest and truthful too. That is simply lacking. So, there is no credible visualisation for better days ahead.

As politicians will confirm, technocratic improvements often falter when public frustration is high. Church of England clergy and laity are disenchanted and demoralised by the clear signs of decline in the quality of episcopal oversight and support they currently receive.  Anger over the deterioration in the standard of spiritual and pastoral care at the hands of senior staff they encounter is further fuelled by bloated diocesan staffing levels and burdensome, intrusive bureaucratic processes. Clergy and laity feel that their hard work no longer matters and that their endeavours don’t even guarantee that their future ministry will be valued. They suspect, with good reason, that their leaders lack a credible plan for recovery, or possibly even for survival.

The clergy and laity need a leadership that can hear, articulate and understand their concerns and unhappiness. But instead of articulating their discontent, the Church of England’s hierarchy merely seems content to manage it.

The Church of England will not be saved by more strategies. Or worse, glossing over the ingrained depression and disenchantment with more PR. For Mullally, presenting herself as a competent Archbishop could be dangerously misleading, as it suggests that effective administration can resolve much deeper structural problems. When it doesn’t, one risks being seen as disingenuous.

Church leaders need to educate the clergy, laity, and the wider public about what truly matters in mission and ministry. But Mullally is not a teacher, so that aspect of leadership (the need to inspire through rich public theology and spiritual wisdom) is essentially out of range. Mullally may say many of the right things. But whether she can or will deliver is questionable.

For example, she recently called for clergy to be treated with more care and respect, mindful of the overwhelming evidence we have for the stress and mental health issues that clergy regularly report in surveys. Mullally seems to be (wilfully?) indifferent to the notion that the primary cause of the harm clergy experience is the diocesan hierarchy and structures of the very institution she represents. Yet Mullally addresses the abuse and harm clergy are reporting as though it were perpetrated by some vague third party. But the Memo from the employees and volunteers to HQ could hardly be plainer: “you are the problem”.

As the recent report from Veronica Hope Hailey confirms, there is ‘pervasive distrust’ in the Church of England’s leadership which can only be restored through accountability. That must begin from the top, with the Church of England’s leadership becoming accountable and transparent for their actions. Without this, they will not be trusted by clergy and laity, and nor will they deserve to be. (https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2024-06/gs-2354-trust-and-trustworthiness-within-the-church-of-england-a-preliminary-report.pdf) 

There are no quick fixes for these troubles. History teaches that we must live through long social and cultural cycles that we can neither control nor evade. Part of the cost and vocation of leadership is to make the burden of such times more bearable for everyone else, if we can. Changing Prime Ministers, Archbishops, or football team managers is unlikely to transform the ultimate destiny of a country, church, or soccer squad, magically turning them into winners overnight.

Football-wise, these decades have been tough to endure. Disenchantment still reigns. As for overseeing the Church of England, scaling back ever-increasing layers of managerialism will now be very welcome. If trust is to return, clergy and laity want leadership that is pastoral, compassionate, honest, accountable, humble, transparent, spiritually wise, and theologically rich. History will be the ultimate judge of how the Church of England was managed in our time.

by Kieran Fitzsimons

Editorial Introduction Over the past twenty years or so we have become increasingly aware of the part played by human sexuality in our understanding of the dynamics of church life. In this piece by Kieran we are invited to think about music within the life of the Church and the way it too affects all of us at a primal level. Recognising this power of music in church settings is the key to understanding and, when necessary, neutralising some of the destructive passions aroused by differing musical styles (and different styles of singing and playing). In this way music can be released to play its part in enriching the act of worship and bringing us closer to the divine.

1. I’m a retired school music teacher and cathedral musician.  For 20 years I’ve been using recent study and research into how music affects people – such work has profound implications for music in education and in the Church.  I’ve also been struck by what Stephen Parsons and Fiona Gardner (among others) have written recently about issues of power and control in the Church, manifest in horrible sexual deviancy.

2. I believe that there are connections here, because unhealthy appetites for power and control are seen in music too – I’ll outline two real examples.  Also there’s the same tendency towards institutional ‘cover-up’ and what I call ‘polishing the outside of the vessel’ (Matt 23) when wrong is done in either context – Safeguarding or music.

3. I’ve known many churches where clergy (‘high’ and ‘low’ alike) wanted to control music and musicians in what Fiona calls ‘asymmetrical’ relationships.  One ‘high’ vicar got through six organists in ten years and tried to ‘micro-manage’ a professional musician by very detailed instructions on how to use the organ.  She complained to the bishop, who supported her and told the vicar to stop it.  He didn’t.  Other organists got the same detailed instructions but now marked ‘confidential’.

4. Another vicar, very ‘low’ (his ‘Con Evo’ church was growing in numbers, especially attracting students), also got through organists – I was ‘organist 3 of 4’ in six years.  He turned against each one, and his curate (who did appreciate music) said on record that he’d had to ‘intercede’ for each – there was false accusation.  We might say ‘faults on both sides’, but remarkably the young man before me was both a good musician and a sincere ‘Con Evo’ – pew bible open during readings in the service, and so on.  Even that didn’t satisfy the vicar.  He used the pejorative term ‘emotional’ about anyone whose views didn’t suit him but always sang very loudly – the way people do at football matches.  I felt sure that this showed an emotional need, but I didn’t know what it was.

5. We need to ask how and why such things happen, irrespective of ‘high’, ‘low’, or any other Church identity.  Music (like sex) has primal influence.  Our understanding of this, and of people’s musical development, is transformed by new methods for detecting the response to music of very young babies.  An unborn baby’s hearing is fully developed by about half-way through gestation, so when Mum plays her choice of music, the baby hears it too.  Newborn babies respond more to that music than to other sounds.  Such insights are not new; wise people (especially mothers) have known them intuitively for perhaps thousands of years.  Now science backs them up.

6. Babies are more sensitive to melodic patterns than to pitch itself.  If a familiar ‘tune’ is played, moved up or down by a few semitones, the baby is comfortable; but if the set of intervals itself is changed there can be a strong reaction.  Composers handling their melodic material know many techniques (e.g. repetition, sequence, and development) which help to make a piece of music effective; now we can start to see how and why.

7. Some non-Western cultures or societies show much more awareness than ours of ordinary people’s musical potential.  In the early 1950s, American researchers (John Messenger et al.) spent time with the Anang Ibibo tribe in Nigeria and were amazed.  All the tribespeople, including small children, knew a huge range of traditional songs and dance routines.  The researchers couldn’t discuss ‘non-musical’ (or ‘tone-deaf’) people, because the Anang language had no equivalent concept – I hope it still hasn’t.

8. That American research was published in 1958, but I only read about it 50 years later in a new book, Psychology for Musicians (Lehmann, Sloboda, and Woody, 2007).  Perhaps it was neglected because at first there wasn’t ‘hard science’ to back it up – now there is.  I’ve seen it cited in other places since.  It may be worth mentioning that John Sloboda is an emeritus professor at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and was previously Professor of Psychology at Keele University – an unusual ‘trajectory’.  He has contributed to ‘the literature’ on Church music.

9. Rev. John L Bell, of the Iona Community, writes about ‘vocal disenfranchisement’ (The Singing Thing, 2 volumes, 2000 and 2007).  I believe him that this is a largely European – and especially British – problem.  As many as one in four British adults believe that they can’t sing, always because they were told this early in life by someone whose opinion they trusted. 

10. All of the above strongly suggests that if our development (emotional, sexual, or musical) hasn’t been healthy in early life, seemingly irrational adult behaviour may result – in the examples I’ve given, a ‘high’ vicar defying his own bishop, and a ‘low’ one turning against a sincere Evangelical musician.  The second, as I found out later (too late), had been brought up in a strict religious sect, in whose services women had to sit apart from men.  Perhaps not surprisingly, both vicars (‘high’ and ‘low’) had a restrictive view of what females could do in the Church.

11. These examples may show resentment – what Stephen calls envy leading to ‘festering jealousy’.  It might become disguised, even hidden beneath consciousness.  Of course, such insight is from recent study, and may be news to many church officials – especially the older and more influential ones.  It wasn’t in their own study or training.

12. I’m keen to try and spread more modern awareness, and to contribute to better understanding of how Church music affects us all – in whatever kind of church.  That would also mean challenging the false conflation of good music with ‘privilege’ – and the myth of ‘non-musical’ people.  I don’t think that such a challenge would be ‘dumbing down’.  I respect capable, sincere cathedral music colleagues, but my experience in schools is that ordinary children can be drawn up to high expectations.  This is also possible with adults – though in a way ‘the younger the better’.

13. If readers are interested, I can present some ‘Case Studies’ more fully.  During a bit of university research in late 2001 I consulted Robin Rees, whose 1991 PhD and 1993 book Weary And Ill at Ease had included three such studies of churches with problems and conflict about music.  Robin concluded each ‘case’ with questions which an individual reader, or a group, might consider and discuss – something which we could potentially do via the ‘blog’, helped by the scientifically-informed understanding now available to us.  Knowing the ‘how and why’ of unwelcome past issues may help us to improve on them.

Kieran Fitzsimons

by Anon

“He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.  His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”  (Luke 3:16, 17)

As it happens, I am writing this reflection on the feast day of John the Baptist. In the northern hemisphere, this is also the longest day of the year – after which, the days grow shorter. So, it seems appropriate to write about one of John the Baptist’s most memorable phrases (above), also repeated in Matthew (3:12).

Readers will doubtless know that winnowing is the process of separating chaff from grain and removing pests from stored cereal, usually following threshing. This involves throwing the mixture into the air, allowing the wind to blow away the lighter chaff while the heavier grains fall back down to the ground, where they are gathered. Techniques for winnowing can include using a fan, fork, basket, or shovel on harvested grain. The chaff scatters to the wind.

True, John the Baptist would not have known about the modern usage of the word chaff, but he would have easily understood it. Chaff is material used in military operations as an active decoy. Chaff, originally known as Düppel, is a radar countermeasure that disperses thin strips of aluminium or plastic to create metallic clouds. These clouds confuse radar systems by appearing as separate targets. Modern military forces use chaff to mislead active radar-homing missiles. Aircraft and warships are equipped with chaff-dispensing systems for self-defence.

Government PR regularly uses chaff (i.e., releasing a critical report on a ‘bad news day’ where it will hopefully get buried by other, more grave headlines). Likewise, the Church of England (CofE) frequently deploys chaff in its safeguarding efforts. The sheer scale of CofE safeguarding disinformation and puffery points to very deliberate PR strategies that pump chaff out into the public sphere at every opportunity.  It is there to confuse, distract and evade any detection of the real problems. The CofE’s safeguarding work is mostly chaff, not wheat.

What does the CofE’s safeguarding work hope to evade by these endless clouds of chaff? In a word, exposure. The fear is of being targeted by any authority that might threaten independent external scrutiny. Accountability must be avoided at all costs. So, chaff clouds are the order of the day. As many as possible. God forbid that Parliament or the Charity Commission might shine a spotlight on the incompetence, vested interests and corruption that drives CofE safeguarding. Preserve us, Lord, from the secular courts finally taking up a case from a survivor or victim that investigates CofE processes. For we know, Lord, that we have no processes that are fit for purpose. Not one.

So, concealing chaff clouds are the answer. Decoys and distractions can mask the dithering and facile pretence of running systems that could never otherwise be trusted or command confidence. Chaff helps the CofE to evade detection. General Synod should be the Threshing Floor for seeing through all this, sifting, discerning, weighing, and judging. But if you take a look at the Agenda for York’s General Synod in July, you’ll see that chaff is everywhere. You can’t move for the stuff.

Yet members of the General Synod are benumbed and utterly somnolent. The powers-that-be running the agenda from the podium learned long ago how to euthanise Synod members and meetings. It’s all status theatre, replete with wigs, gowns, and the pretence of debate and democracy led from the front. Anyone with an ounce of common sense, a prophetic cell in their body, or a conscience knows Synod is a waste of time. There’s no accountability and zero transparency. Watch, and you’ll see consecutive days comprising choking clouds of chaff.

But these days, CofE safeguarding has evolved into a publication: Chaff Weekly. This is no surprise, as one must remember that the Archbishop of York inadvertently let the cat out of the bag at a General Synod gathering only a few years ago, when he told the assembly that the purpose of all their effort and expenditure was “to safeguard the church”. A slip of the tongue, for sure, but a truism if ever there was one. The CofE’s leadership in safeguarding is engaged in a reputational endeavour. All other statements and claims made by CofE safeguarding – “we are listening to survivors; victims are at the front and centre of our concerns; we’re improving our processes; there will be a lessons learned review; blah, blah, blah, etc” – are subordinate to the Archbishops’ very telling, inadvertent admission.

The goal of CofE safeguarding is the preservation of its reputation and the avoidance of ceding accountability and transparency to any independent external body. That ‘safeguarding journey’ needs a lot of chaff, as the major task is to avoid embarrassing detections. This requires clouds of chaff to be released on a regular basis.

Just take a look at some recent chaff. In May, “the House [of Bishops] 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). So, another review is in the offing, which can presumably review the previous reviews, and probably suggest another working party to look into the next steps…which can then be subject to another review.

On June 11^th, 2026 (Saint Barnabas Day is celebrated – ironically, Patron Saint of Encouragement), the NST launched another consultation on safeguarding. How many consultations does the CofE need? There is no finite number. Lord, may the heavens rain with downpours of endless chaff upon your church. (see: https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2026/12-june/news/uk/church-of-england-s-definition-of-safeguarding-could-be-broadened)

Much of this chaff is proactive and designed to conceal the deeper problems. During the John Smyth (Makin Report), David Tudor, Mike Pilavachi, Jonathan and David Fletcher debacles, and with the reprise of the Chris Brain scandal, CofE safeguarding chaff clouds have had to thicken and rain much more frequently. Otherwise, scrutiny might detect the difficult things hiding in plain sight (I Cor. 4:5).

So, rooting through recent copies of the CofE’s safeguarding Chaff Weekly we can see that the CofE appointed Sir Stuart Carlton as the new Chair of the Redress Scheme Steering Board (27 February 2026). Sounds good? Yet the Redress Scheme is meant to be completely independent of the CofE. But no matter. Anyway, we’ve not heard a pipsqueak from Sir Stuart since this announcement.

Likewise, Nazir Afzal, appointed as the new CofE chair of the National Safeguarding Panel (11 September 2024). Sounds good? But nothing is really known of Mr. Afzal’s role, his current whereabouts, or how this appointment fits into another one of the CofE’s Safeguarding Reviews of Reviews (a free monthly supplement with Chaff Weekly).

On 30 September 2025, Chaff Weekly reported that “Dame Christine Ryan [has been] appointed Executive Chair of Safeguarding Structures Programme Board” (whatever that is). Sounds good? But nine months on, the silence is deafening. It remains the case that there is still no body – independent, professional, internal or external – overseeing the CofE where you could complain about their poor or unjust safeguarding procedures and hold bishops and officers accountable for their actions or inaction. The CofE leadership wants to keep it that way.

My older back copies of Chaff Weekly report that Lesley Ann Ryder has been appointed as the independent co-chair for the Safeguarding Response Group (April 2024). Sounds good? But don’t be doing too much digging. The CofE’s chatty chaff press release trills that Ms. Ryder is “an experienced CEO who has worked in national and local government and the health and charity sectors…[and] has been appointed the independent co-chair of the Response Group looking at two important reports on independence and safeguarding in the Church of England.”

But a quick check of her 16 appointments at Companies House doesn’t readily align with the claims in her LinkedIn profile. Apart from the two family-owned companies (Anume and C2S Management), Ryder’s average tenure for any directorship was 12.3 months. Around 50% of her business experience was in the lottery and gambling industry, and in commercial trading to raise money for hospices. (NB: Barbara Kahan was listed as the other Director for Ryder’s Anume. Born in 1931, Kahan was listed by Companies House as holding 2,277 other directorships and credited with having started more than 25,000 businesses. So, sounds good?). Ryder holds no qualifications in safeguarding, social work or social policy, nor does she cite any relevant safeguarding expertise.

Ryder lists Cambridge University as her alma mater, but has no degree from there, though she did attend a course in learning to speak French at the Department of Continuing Education (2008), and claimed to be “invited onto a postgraduate certificate course”, but no indication that she did so.  But we’ve heard nothing from her since the April 2024 Chaff Weekly fanfare.

The press releases on the NSP, RSSB, SSPB, SRG – so many new chaff-like bodies and debris have been commissioned – feature lovely, fetching photos of the appointees. Any nervous church and Synod members from the Home Counties are bound to feel comforted by the press releases and the people posing for their pictures. After all, these folk all look so, well, reassuring.

By now, you should have twigged that Chaff Weekly is one of the country’s leading newspapers for making new announcements, in order to conceal the fact that nothing is actually happening. Nor is it going to happen. That is the point. Chaff Weekly publishes chaff. And chaff, by definition, is expendable rubbish designed to fake movements and camouflage any real intentions.

Anyway, you can make your own chaff. How about designating 2027 as the Safeguarding Investigations into Lessons Learned Year – SILLY 2027, for short? What about a new consultation looking into Renewing Integral Safeguarding Knowledge – RISK, for short? There is bound to be somebody willing to chair this work, and the press release and flattering portrait will be a cinch for the chaff merchants. Everything can be put on hold until the group reports back to Synod (later). The trick is to look busy, whilst doing nothing.

The use of the CofE’s “favourite go-to-survivors” is also part of the chaff cloud (or smokescreen?). Despite this very, very small select group not enjoying the trust or confidence of the very much bigger and broader range of victims and survivors, the CofE likes to keep things tight and “in the family”.

One of the ‘chosen’ claims to have fronted participation and lived experience in a 40+ year career in education, social care, and children’s rights across the voluntary, statutory, and faith sectors. But a quick check of their profile shows this 40+-year career somehow began whilst they were still in school. It just doesn’t stack up. Nor does the claim to have got a distinction in a three-year taught university degree course in under two years. But never mind. This individual – a CofE favourite appointee – just sits on every safeguarding panel going.

Then there are our regular columnists for Chaff Weekly. There is the Robert and Joanne column – taking it in turns to be the ‘Lead Safeguarding Bishop’. Again, this sounds good? Until you realise neither possesses any qualification in social work nor is a member of any relevant recognised professional body.

Another columnist is Alexander Kubeyinje, National Director of Safeguarding. Chaff Weekly sometimes interviews him too. In the Strategic Review of Safeguarding (2025) – again, sounds good? – he tells us how great everything is and how well it is all going. Thank goodness for such high standards of independent reporting. The CofE’s safeguarding chaff must always sound professional. Chaff Weekly will deliver that message in spades. The lack of accountability and transparency is imperative.

When John the Baptist spoke of wheat and chaff, his listeners would have instantly understood that the chaff symbolised oppressive systems that must be discarded. That, to separate the wheat from the chaff, was a call to dismantle unjust structures and empower the oppressed. Seeing the chaff for what it represents presses the church to prophetically identify and eliminate its own harmful and abusive practices. And that if there is to be any radical hope, separating the chaff from the grain will be transformative, and permit a just and truthful church to emerge from the ashes of the old, flawed systems.

The CofE safeguarding leadership wants no such thing. They merely seek more subscribers to Chaff Weekly. Perhaps you might be tempted? But as the Gospel of Matthew (3:12) reminds us, “His (Jesus’) winnowing fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly clean out his threshing floor, and gather the wheat into the barn; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire”. We already know how this will end. Sounds good to me.

I was speaking to a fellow retired clergyman some time ago about the safeguarding culture that appears everywhere in church life today.  He responded by telling me about an offer made to him by an insurance company over safeguarding.  This company offered to provide access to legal protection if ever he was subject to an accusation of abuse from the past.  Because the amount required for this cover was a modest sum, he decided to sign up, even though he knew that there were no genuine stories about him to be told.  The possibility of a false accusation remained a real, but thankfully improbable, threat.

False accusations of abuse sadly are not unknown, even in the church.  We can remind ourselves of the unsubstantiated rumours and gossip that attached themselves to Father Griffin, which lead to him taking his own life.  The accusations against Bishop Perham did an enormous amount of damage to him personally, his family and the whole of his diocese.  His untimely death from cancer following his exoneration may or may not be an indicator of the nature of the stress he had been under.  Chronic illness does often seem to go hand in hand with the trauma experienced through abuse.  So, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether the same illness inducing factors are at work from the stress of being accused falsely. Such an accusation places one in a no-man’s land of forced inactivity for months and years.  How do bishops and clergy required to step back from their duties spend their time?  They are required effectively to disappear, but this is quite hard to do when you have been used to a degree of public exposure through your relationships, writing and preaching.

Those who have studied the issue of false accusations against clergy and Christian leaders mention the statistic that around 5% of these accusations are false.  I do not know how this figure was arrived at, but this percentage is sufficient to make it important for those charged with examining abuse cases always to face the possibility that with accusations of abuse, there may sometimes be falsity and malice present in the accusation.  The case against John Brassington seemed to achieve its apparent credibility, not from a careful examination of all available evidence, but from a number of prejudices and assumptions that reportedly existed in the minds of members of a core group gathered to deal with the case.  Now that most of those originally in this group have moved on in their careers, John will probably never see justice or vindication.   Although the substance of the story remains in the voluminous paperwork collected by John’s friends and supporters, it will probably be of interest only to a historian who, in the future, wants to understand how the Church did its work of operating its own version of a justice system.

In this blog I want us to set out some of possible reasons for someone to bring a false accusation against a Christian leader, to accuse them of assault or bullying.  While I have the Brassington and Griffin cases at the back of my mind, my observations here are also based on a number of other episodes beyond these two cases alone.   If future core groups are to handle these kinds of accusations against individuals, they need to have some insight into the dynamics of a false accusation., even though they are rare events.  I am going to suggest that there are, in most cases of false accusation, some common themes.  It is to these that we now turn our attention.  My aim here is not to go further in discussing actual historical cases, but to indicate some of the distinct dynamics potentially present in the false accusation cases that I have encountered.

Why would anyone seek to accuse another person falsely of a serious offence, thereby breaking one of the Ten Commandments about bearing false witness?  Most people have encountered this ‘false witness’ offence at some point during their lives.  In the process of administering justice, courts take very seriously the possibility of perjury and lies.  For the proper administration of justice, a court expects to hear ‘nothing but the truth’ in the testimonies given in evidence.  False accusation and false testimony are also taken very seriously by Scripture.  If an individual chooses to break this commandment we need to reflect on possible reasons. 

In the Litany of the Book of Common Prayer, God is asked to deliver us from numerous evils that may assault us at the hands of others. The quartet of ‘envy, hatred, and malice and all uncharitableness’ is included.   My spell-check does not like the final word, but I think we can read the word as a synonym for the other sentiments mentioned, malice and hatred.  Before we come back to the idea of false accusation being an outworking of malice and hatred, I want us to think about ‘envy’.  The word envy is often replaced by the idea of jealousy and this is a distinct form of malevolence.  Such a feeling is going to be common in any environment, particularly one which tolerates or encourages competition.  To be jealous of another person is to resent the fact that they have achieved a skill or power that the jealous person thinks desirable.  Any institution (think Church or public school) that is organised by a system of promotion and reward will likely be place of festering jealousy.  Some will benefit in a race for promotion and status while others languish at the bottom of the pile.  This distinct version of hatred and malice felt by one party against another may in some cases lead to violence.  If jealousy or envy can provoke violence, how much more can we expect to see on occasion false accusation used as a weapon against the individual who is seen to have achieved success in one of life’s races?  The race that has been won, whether for money, power or status, may have cost a great deal in terms of expended energy, but the culture of competing to win always makes such a struggle appear worthwhile.  The atmosphere of permanent and intense competition creates, on occasion, a situation of passionate jealousy, and this is something we have all witnessed. False accusations may well appear in this kind of setting, drawing on the considerable energy evoked by the feelings of passionate jealousy.  The question in a core-group setting should always consider whether envy and jealousy might possibly be a factor in an accusation.  Ever since the struggle between Cain and Abel it has been a factor that infects relationships, even those of the closest.

Jealousy and malice may exist in a situation where there is a history of competition between individuals and needs always to be considered.  There is also a further type of false accusation which needs to be assessed. We have all been part of human families as children and we can remember well how we and our siblings sometimes sought to be the centre of attention in the family group. The announcement that ‘my brother hit me’ is one way for a younger child to seek the help of adults and be the focus of attention for a few minutes.  Such a situation normally resolves itself, but the complaining child has learnt that such a complaint or accusation provides them with a momentary access to real power.  In schools the world over teachers are today wary of the child in a class making accusations against other children.  More serious are the accusations made against a teacher.  Procedures are instantly activated and there may have to be an immediate ‘stepping back’ by the teacher concerned.   Most of us hear only part of the story but it seems clear in many of the stories I have heard, that becoming important and listened to, may be a motivation for a young person to make an accusation against an adult.   Such a potential motivation has to be (or should be) examined to assess whether the accusation is real or stems from a desire to be right at the centre of a serious drama.

The possibility of false assumptions, rumour-mongering or simple malice will always be scenarios that have to be considered when cases of alleged abuse are being considered.  Careers and relationships can be destroyed on the basis of an accusation made.  Those who have to make decisions on these matters for the Church need always to have a clear understanding of the dynamics of prejudice, malice or scapegoating that may exist in schools, churches and other similar organisations.  The procedures to avoid such possibilities may normally be robust but, if ever the system gets it wrong and listens to the false accusation, the knock-on effect can last for decades.  Institutions are seriously weakened by even a single mistake and the assumption that truth and justice are always a priority can be destroyed in the minds of a watching public.  We know that malefactors can be accepted for decades without challenge in some parts of the church.  It seems that the same system that failed to spot them to protect their victims is sometimes unable to discern the innocent who are accused of the most appalling crimes.  The great loser in all this is the Church itself.  Confidence in its integrity remains as a vital part of its ability to survive and serve another generation.

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.