As the reader of my blog posts will know, my concern for the problem of power in churches in Britain extends far beyond my own Anglican set-up. Many of the worst cases of clergy or ministerial abuse in fact take place in independent churches. These abuses, like those of Trinity, Brentwood, typically take place because of a complete lack of proper oversight. Such oversight would hopefully spot and call into question financial or emotional manipulation of members of congregations. The Anglican church does, however, have a particular issue connected with power of a somewhat different kind. The institution of bishops provides needed oversight but this management structure is counterbalanced by the extraordinarily power, rights and privileges invested in each clergyman who is appointed as an Incumbent. In the past every Incumbent possessed what is known as the freehold. This made him or her virtually unsackable. If the Church is determined to rid themselves of a particular clergyman for whatever reason, a legal process of immense complication and expense has to be followed. The institution of freehold has been weakened over recent years in favour of a system called Common Tenure. This sets out in details of what is expected of the clergy, their rights and privileges, including their access to support. It also importantly provides for a weakening of the freehold principle. The big draw-back to Common Tenure for the church as a whole is that it cannot be applied retrospectively to those who already possessed the freehold. As before they remain powerfully unsackable to all intents and purposes.

The anomaly of the continuing of the freehold for many thousands of Anglican clergy has emerged with a powerful topicality in recent weeks. I wrote about the trial of a priest in South London who was accused of conducting sham marriages over a long period of time. He and his co-accused were acquitted after the prosecution blundered in their presentation of the evidence. Technically the priest came out of the process innocent of the charges. There does not seem, however, to have been any argument that 400 weddings had taken place. As any priest knows, there is a proper process to be followed in accounting for the fees for these weddings. These all belong to the Diocese. In the case of the accused priest some £50,000 to £70,000 had gone missing. The trial which collapsed had focused on the illegal weddings so the issue of apparent theft was seemingly forgotten. The priest, now acquitted, was allowed to return to his Vicarage and the whole incident of missing money apparently ignored.

The question that occurs to me is this. Is there any institution in the world that would be unable to have a process for disciplining a member of its staff who had apparently failed to account for £50,000 + of the organisation’s money? It seems on the face of it that the freehold of the clergy is a more powerful legal force than the matter of large sums of missing money. Is the church going to have to take out a private prosecution to recover the money as, presumably, the police will no longer be interested in pursuing this man? The situation is full of anomalies and must be giving the legal advisers of the Diocese of Southwark a complete nightmare.

The power of the freehold is also emerging as an issue in my own Diocese of Carlisle. I speak in general terms as I don’t want to identify individuals. Briefly the situation is this. In the face of decline in both congregations and money, the Diocesan authorities have produced, with the leaders of both the Methodist and United Reformed Churches, a scheme for dividing up the diocese into 40 Mission areas. This was voted through at the last Diocesan Synod at the beginning of October 2014. The idea is that eventually each of these areas will have a paid ordained leader from one of the denominations, who will oversee a cluster of churches served by non-stipendiary local people. Some of these latter will be ordained and some not. The idea seems good in theory but in practice, it may never work, at least not for decades to come. The reason for this is simple. Several Anglican clergy with the freehold have been heard to say that they want no truck with the new system. Their legal quasi ‘ownership’ of the parochial areas under their charge is, as far they are concerned, not going to change for anyone. They also have no experience of working with other denominations and don’t want to start now. They know that no directive from the bishop or archdeacon will be able to force any change in the way they choose to do things, at least as long as they are around. Some freehold clergy are still in their 30s and thus it could be a very long time before future clergy, who do in fact buy into the Mission Areas idea, take over in every area of this diocese. The fact also that many of the clergy in this diocese are deeply conservative theologically, means that the practical difficulties of successful ecumenical co-operation are compounded still further. Supporters of groups like GAFCON are not good at conceding that people who are different from them theologically, or who come from another denomination, might have something important to say.

In these two cases it would appear that the clergy freehold is able to strangle both the proper administration of the institution and the ability to adapt and change to fit new circumstances. The task of the Bishops and other members of the hierarchy seems more and more problematic as they deal, first, with a laity who have increasingly the power of the purse-strings and, secondly, a clergy who can, when they wish, block change and the smooth running of the institution. The situation in South London is an organisational nightmare and the problems of unveiling and putting into practice an imaginative plan in Cumbria will become increasingly apparent over the coming months and years. Although I have set out the problem, I can see no obvious solutions. All that I would ask for is that someone in the institution would wake up and admit that there is a serious problem about both authority and power in the Church of England.

One of the topical issues in the church today is whether one group of Christians can stay in the same communion with other Christians who think in a different way from them. The particular example I have in mind is the fragmented state of the Anglican Church over the situation of gay sex and the ordination of practising gay people. In the past Christians separated over differences of doctrine, especially, in the first five centuries, when there were different views on the nature of Christ and his relationship to God. In 1054 the Eastern Church formally separated from the West over the question of whether the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father or from the Father and the Son. Obviously there were other cultural and political factors at play, but there were some serious theological issues to be resolved. Maybe they would have been but for the enormous issue of the fact that hardly anyone in 11th century Rome was familiar with the Greek language. It was never going to be easy to discuss erudite the theological points that were outstanding between the churches, when the language of one was so little known by the other.

The differences that exist today between Anglicans in different parts of the world is, arguably, quite a different kind of separation. A large group of Anglicans stretching from Sydney in Australia to sub-Saharan Africa with supporters in Britain and America have chosen to withdraw from association with other Anglicans on the grounds that some Anglican churches are turning their back on centuries of Anglican tradition by tolerating a gay life-style and ordained gay clergy. Although formal separation has not yet taken place, the rhetoric put out by GAFCON, the conservative Anglican grouping, in 2008 and 2013 makes it unlikely that a full gathering of Anglicans will ever take place again. This is tragic but we need to understand that unlike schisms in the past, the differences are not matters of theology. They should be seen as divisions that involve visceral dislike, even disgust, on the part of one group of Christians for the acceptances of another.

The Christians represented by GAFCON affirm that they are minded to separate from the wider Anglican body because they find it impossible to receive communion, or share it with someone in a gay lifestyle. This extends, not just to gay ministers themselves, but to entire church bodies which are tolerant on the gay issue. Although the expression is used ‘unfaithful to Scripture’ to justify this stance, one suspects that here, in this area, theological issues are not in fact high on the GAFCON agenda. In the past Christians did argue and separate on theological questions and some of us have had to revisit the finer points of Arianism or Monophysitism as part of our theological training. But I am suggesting that in this case Christians are separating because of an intense dislike of the lifestyle of others. The separation is wrapped up in theological language but psychological issues seem to be pre-eminent in this case.

If we have to find a theological/historical precedent for the present schism, we need to go back the heresy of Donatus in 4th century North Africa. The issue was about the acceptability of certain bishops who had handed over their books to the persecuting emperor Diocletian as a way of warding off martyrdom. As far as Donatus and his followers were concerned, this bishop had for ever cut himself off from the Christian body, and thus would never again be able to administer valid sacraments. This presumption that valid sacrament could only be offered by sinless clergy was clearly unacceptable to the wider church. St Augustine, a century later, in particular stood out against this puritan rigorist idea. It made the institutional integrity of the wider church impossible to sustain if a group of Christians could declare a sacrament invalid because they did not like the lifestyle of a particular bishop or clergyman. The validity of the sacraments had to depend on the action of Christ, not the moral rectitude of the individual priest.

Thanks to Augustine in particular, Donatism was defeated decisively even though it lingered right up to the time of the Arab invasions of North Africa in the 7th century. We do however seem to be having a re-emergence of the Donatist heresy in the actions of GAFCON today. They disapprove of the life-style of certain bishops and clergy and for them that is a reason for splitting and schism. It is not possible for Anglicans beyond GAFCON to allow one group to decide what is and what is not acceptable behaviour on the part of clergy. If such decisions are to be made, it must be with the mind, wisdom and understanding of the whole church. Anglicanism along with most of the rest of Christendom has firmly rejected Donatism. The present splitting is at heart not theological but, as I have said, ultimately to be understood through psychology, history and culture. If there were real theological issues but genuine goodwill on both sides, then the theological issues could be unpacked and, hopefully, resolved. Psychology and visceral hatred however are not so easily resolved. The issue is further complicated by the way that conservatives appeal to a unworkable pattern of reading Scripture. This sometimes claims that a single text, even taken out of context, can be made the foundation for a complete theological system. That problem goes on raising its head every time we try to understand and respond to conservative Christianity which, according to this blog, uses and abuses Scripture in a flagrant and unhelpful way.

In following the Brentwood saga as reported in the last blog post, I found myself making a comment about the nature of cult-like churches on the other blog. I mentioned that cultic leaders create rigid boundaries. These have two purposes. One is to stop people finding out information about what goes on inside the group. The other is to stop people inside finding out about the way that the rest of the world lives and thinks. These boundaries afflict those in leadership as well as the ordinary members.

What are the boundaries that are built around authoritarian churches and groups? Obviously they are not physical, but they might just as well be for the way they function. The way into an authoritarian set-up is relatively easy, but the way out is extraordinarily hard. The first part of the boundary is created by the paranoia of the leader, which is then passed on to his followers. He will teach those in the group that the world outside is incredibly dangerous. Michael Reid found a good way to terrify young parents who came to his church. He told them that local schools were hotbeds of loose morals and Satanic activity. The only safe place for their children was to attend his Peniel school. Once the children had entered the school both children and parents came under his dramatically volatile exercise of power. Reports indicate that some of the parents who displeased Reid were then controlled by unfavourable treatment being meted out on their children. The paranoia was also a constant part of the preaching. In common with many similar churches, the preaching emphasised how all other churches failed to provide access to God. The fate of those who did not had proper access to God, was, needless to say, a place in eternal damnation. The only safe place was to be a member of Peniel. Whether this humiliating, coercive style of preaching still exists, it certainly was still around at the time when Gail attended the Bible School at the church.

The second part of creating boundaries in a church is the personality of the leader. A leader who uses charisma in its secular sense, sets up a vulnerability in those who are initially attracted to the larger than life personality. Many people lack a full dose of self-esteem, so that when they meet a large powerful personality who takes an interest in them, they are attracted to them. Charisma is quite simply the ability to attract others to oneself, whether because of a magnetic quality or because they put forward a vision that seems both to make sense and provides a direction for life. The interaction between charismatic leader and led is of course not an equal one. However exciting the initial contact had been, it quickly develops into a relationship of dependence. The ‘big’ personality needs the fawning adoration of the acolytes while the dependent ones hanker after the scraps of attention from the leader. It is unhealthy in both directions.

In looking at the history of Peniel as revealed through the blog and recalling my one visit to the church, it would seem that the present dynamic is vastly different from the old. The current leader, Peter Linnecar, does not seem to exercise power in the same way as his former mentor, Michael Reid. MR exercised a lot of power through the exercise of charisma, of which much was self-serving and malign. PL, on the other hand, exercises his power by appearing to cultivate a mystique around himself. He appears to do very little in the way of pastoral activity and, apparently, never answers emails or phone calls. But, by being inaccessible to the ordinary members of the congregation, he is able to suggest that he is a man of depth who is too important to bother himself with the day to day issues of the church. By concentrating his appearances to Sunday mornings, Peter maybe is exercising a charisma of remoteness which is in the last resort is just as powerful as the former regime. In the present regime, there is still in the congregation a hunger to be dependent on a charismatic personality who can solve the problems of not feeling sufficient self-esteem. MR did this by the exercise of charismatic power which involved shouting and humiliating alongside occasional words of encouragement. PL exercises a form of charisma which does not use force but the power of an inaccessible mystique.

How does the exercise of charismatic power create boundaries? The best way to think of this dynamic is to think of iron filings. Anyone who submits to charismatic authority is like one of the charged pieces of metal that are drawn to a magnet. In looking at the pattern that is set up, the observer can note other pieces of metal that have not been charged in this way. The boundary lies clearly between the two types of metal. Many people look on churches and cults where the strong charismatic figure at the centre holds so much power. How is this possible they think, why do people get caught up in this? It is possible because this seems to be the way that groups operate. People will always follow the strong personality who will help to make up for their own feelings of not being complete. They are drawn to the magnet and after a time they become dependent on its energising qualities. They cannot imagine ever living beyond the orbit of that energy again.

The situation at Brentwood is still unresolved. No resignations have taken place and PL has challenged the congregation to come out and say if they want him to go. As at least 50% of the congregation is related to him by blood or through marriage, such a vote is unlikely to go against him. He has also created, as I have tried to describe, a charisma of mystique which operates in a gentler way than before, but may be equally powerful. The situation is finely poised. Gail’s testimony may indeed have opened a flood-gate. But we will see.

Back in March I did a blog post about the church in Brentwood which suffered under the cultic regime of Michael Reid. MR, as I shall call him, was removed from post after details of an illicit ‘affair’ with the choir mistress came into the public domain in 2008. In fact there were numerous skeletons which tumbled out of the cupboard and these included the use of arbitrary power and manipulation as well as highly questionable financial dealings to benefit MR and others among the charmed circle of leaders. Following massive legal expense for the church, MR was removed from office. It still took a further five years to get a court order to evict him from the church premises that he occupied.

With the removal of MR, it might have been thought that the church could have a new start. But unfortunately for the church, the trustees appointed MR’s number two, Peter Linnecar, as pastor. Paying him an inflated salary of £80,000 pa, they believed that he could take them to a new future. The trustees had not calculated how much remained to be done to remove the old patterns of cultic church life that remained and in which Peter Linnecar had been deeply involved. A blog was begun by one Nigel Davies asking that a full account of the abuses of the past be acknowledged and proper apologies made. Many people had left the church with the departure of MR and the majority of them had suffered severely at his hand. These people wanted the church to come clean about the appalling events that the church had allowed to happen over 30 + years. From my point of view the church had exhibited all the typical signs of a cult so this blog, which I followed avidly, was of great interest, particularly as it revealed attitudes of both current and ex-members. From time to time I had cause to comment based on my studies of church dynamics or arising out of reflections on a visit to the church in 1998 in preparation for my book.

About five weeks ago, our blog came to interact with the Brentwood story. I had a chance email from one Gail (a pseudonym) who had visited this blog and liked the tone taken here on the theme of abusive religious groups. She had been part of Peniel, as Trinity church was then called, some thirty years ago. As a young woman from America she had been sent here to study in the so-called Bible school at Brentwood. In practice that meant the church had a group of young females to do chores around the premises of the church. Eight of them slept in a room with one toilet between them. In addition they were subject to relentless and aggressive bible indoctrination when they were humiliated and generally made to feel worthless. Gail also hinted to me of a darker aspect of her time in Britain.

I responded two or three times to Gail expressing my appreciation of the fact that she had chosen to trust me with this personal information which I promised not to pass on. I was also pleased that she had found helpful some of the material on the blog. The situation changed dramatically a week ago when Gail asked Nigel to publish on his blog a full account of her traumatic time in Brentwood at the so-called Bible school. The account is well written and is devastating in its effect on the reader. For those who do not want to read the account in full (connection to post given at end), Gail’s story is a description of cult life where total control was exercised. This extended to clothing, social contacts and even diet. Passports were taken away and money that had been sent by parents was intercepted and doled out in arbitrary small amounts. The dark secret, which Gail had hinted at in communicating to me, was rape at the hands of a church member. In spite of the devastation caused, Gail has emphasised in a subsequent contribution to Nigel’s blog that even more painful were the months of endless humiliation and mistreatment that preceded the sexual violence. Her words are as follows: ‘The emotional damage done by that night is terrible but, in all actuality, it pales in comparison to the damage done in the weeks and months leading up to that night. ‘

In the week since the publication of the account, the publicity machine at the church has gone into overdrive. There is a hint of panic in their public utterances. In a statement published some four days ago, the statement spoke of their intention to ‘investigate formally an allegation of impropriety’. A further statement spoke of the leaders desire to ‘apologise unreservedly for the hurt and distress caused’ and they expressed shame for ‘negative attitudes shown by the leaders towards various people at the time’. The statements represent a massive shift by Trinity Church even though genuine remorse for the events has yet to be shown. But the statements are possibly preparing us for a change of regime at Trinity and the removal of the chief pastor Peter Linnecar. Why do I think this? The language being used has for the first time used the language of apologies, something they have hitherto been unwilling to do. Previous statements by the church have spoken of regret that some people felt they had suffered. It has always been said that Trinity could not apologise because it would open them up to court cases. Now that they have been pushed into a corner by this allegation of a crime committed on their patch, they see perhaps that the fastest way out of the problem is to ditch their leader who was deeply implicated in everything that Reid was up to in the Bible College days.

I am of course speculating as to what will happen next, but the path to truth and justice for hundreds of people abused by the narcissism of Christian leaders is always difficult and tortuous. As I have pointed out before, the narcissistic fantasy for a many leaders like MR and Peter Linnecar is to believe that their utterances are beyond argument and infallible. This position of course goes hand in hand with a belief in the infallibility of the bible text. Gradually the authorised expounder of the infallible text becomes infallible themselves and it becomes almost impossible for them ever to admit being wrong. Gail’s testimony (and Nigel’s blog) is a powerful weapon against such pretentiousness and pomposity. Events are moving fast and things may change as soon as tomorrow. Meanwhile we believe in a God who scatters ‘the proud in the imagination of their hearts’. More to come.
Here is ref. to the student’s testimony
http://victimsofbishopmichaelreid.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/a-cautionary-tale-from-survivor.html?showComment=1414146863353#c4239206485157513377

There is a word that resonates across Christian history which means ‘destruction of images’ which is iconoclasm. There were two times in history when Christian leaders attempted to destroy every vestiges of picture or representation of religious themes, whether carved or painted. The two main periods of this iconoclasm were the eighth and ninth centuries in the Christian East and the sixteenth century in the protestant West, particularly in Northern Europe In many ways Eastern Iconoclasm is the more interesting, especially in the way that iconography was first rejected and then reinstated in the churches of the Byzantine Empire after 843 AD. This episode, although it is something I personally resonate to, is less relevant to our overall theme than the massive destruction of art and imagery in this country, among others, at the time of Edward VI right up to the English Civil War. Only this morning I walked past empty plinths on Carlisle Cathedral which would once have had statues on them. These were then prised from their place by puritan zealots in the name of a reformed faith in the mid 1500s.

In both East and West the reason given for removing images and statuary was that it was essential to destroy idolatry and the worship of ‘graven images’. The argument as to whether images on church walls could be said to constitute real objects of worship, needless to say, was debated extensively in both parts of Christendom. Clearly there were also deeper issues at stake. In the East the Byzantine Emperors were influenced by the iconoclastic behaviour of the Arab invaders. They had their own cultural reasons for rejecting imagery but to say here more than this would be to lengthen my post too far. As far as protestant Western Europe was concerned, the old medieval symbolisms of Catholic theology seemed to be a distraction from the new protestant emphasis on the Word as the means of approaching God. The ordinary faithful member of congregation had been cut off from the Bible text because of illiteracy and the refusal of the church authorities to tolerate translations of any part of the Bible. One the main spurs of the Reformation was the availability of affordable printed Scriptures in the vulgar tongue. This could now be studied free from the control of the priests and other church authorities. All the pictorial imagery of the churches which had been the ‘Bible of the Poor’, now seemed to be a drastic filtering and censoring of the plain message of the Bible. Art which had communicated the Christian faith to the illiterate church members now came to be seen as the enemy of the protestant faith sweeping across Northern Europe.

The destruction of countless statues, paintings and illuminated manuscripts in the name of the ‘new’ religion represents the greatest acts of cultural vandalism the world has ever seem. But however much we may decry this period of our history, we may be grateful that most of the cathedrals and parish churches of England were spared, a fate not afforded to the equivalent buildings in Scotland. If anyone has ever been to the city of St Andrews in Scotland it is possible to see the fate that might have befallen all our cathedrals. We have to ask the question as to why there was so much hatred of art and sculpture. We have hinted at the way that the written word was a dominating idea in the understanding of what faith. If you had the written text, so the thinking went, you had direct access to the mind and laws of God himself.

The English parish church never plumbed the depths of artistic austerity that we find in protestant Northern Europe. There the pulpit was placed right at the centre and raised up high. This communicated clearly the idea that the preaching of the Word was the most important thing that happened in the church building. Preaching of necessity involved actual words, so this currency of the word became the chief method of communication. Images, symbols and pictures became redundant to the supremacy of verbal communication of saving truth.

There are of course many Christians who agree with the iconoclasts of the past and can say nothing good about imagery and symbolism. The idea that truth can be shared through a picture or image simply means nothing to them Such Christians probably also reject beauty and architecture as relevant to the task of worship. Once again I find in this discussion an awareness of a parting of the ways in what one might call Christian imagination. For me and for many others, both past and present, both external and internal pictures enable a participation in mystery and the aspect of the divine which can never be reduced to words and concepts. To take away such images, of whatever kind, is to impoverish my grasp of religion enormously. Iconoclasm is not just a destruction of images, it is a destruction of faith.

I am one of those people who rejoices in the aesthetic, the symbolic sides of religious faith. I rejoice that the human spirit can use to its enrichment the art of every culture and age to penetrate and to understand better the mysteries of faith which so often transcend words. We all need words (as for this blog post) but let us never be trapped and strangled by them. Artistic images and symbols, mental images, all form part of the means whereby human beings can ascend to the knowledge and contemplation of God himself.

I have just been reading a blog post by the Secretary of the organisation called Modern Church on the topic of the parochial system in the Church of England. The reason that I refer to this blog post by Jonathan Clatworthy is because it has got me thinking about the question of the future of the parochial system in the Church of England. My original comment can be read on the link that I shall give at the end, but my present blog post is an extension of my reply to Jonathan.

Among the many problems of the Church of England is the question of finance. The most expensive part of financing the church is the provision of clergy and paying for them and their housing and pensions. One existing solution to the expense of stipendiary clergy is to employ ‘self-supporting’ clergy who earn a living elsewhere and provide support for churches at week-ends. This system is in part a response to a need, and we can say that it is thanks to these non-stipendiary clergy that the parish has just managed to limp along and survive. But there is one great draw-back to any dependency on not paying an increasing percentage of the clergy in the Church of England. The draw-back is that it will never be possible to reproduce the educational standard that was required of clergy in the past and to provide it for this army of part-time unpaid clergy. In my generation the State paid for my undergraduate theological studies and my two years in residential training. They even agreed to pay for a four month sojourn studying in Switzerland. Such largesse is no longer to be found and the fact that ordinands are to be found in an older age group, means that few of them would, in any case, have the time to take the training that those of us in our twenties could once enjoy.

For a whole number of reasons the ordinands of today, particularly the non-stipendiary ones, have to enter ordination with less time for study under their belt. This does not make them second-class clergy but it does mean that many of them will find the teaching and preaching role something hard to sustain. Jonathan Clatworthy’s solution is to face this situation head-on and suggest that teaching and preaching should be a specialised ministry, undertaken by a few specially trained people. This would mean that the parish churches would be places where people gathered for worship and prayer. The teaching role would a parallel but less frequent occurrence, either taking place in particular centres or as an itinerant ministry. I mentioned in my response to Jonathan’s post the existence of preaching crosses in many villages, which is where people gather to listen to a passing Dominican friar in the mediaeval period.

I don’t want this blog post to be too critical of the sermons I have heard since retirement, but some have been dire. My criticism of many of the sermons I have heard is two-fold. Some have been poor because of a simple lack of understanding at any depth of the Bible or Christian theology. Others have been below standard because the preacher is operating out of a theological perspective that is narrow and deeply partisan. There is an evangelical-type sermon that has a few endlessly repeated motifs and too many clergy are repeating this litany of appeals over and over again. For me, and this is a controversial criticism of the evangelical conservative position, there is a type of preaching that finds its appeal only because it is simplistic, banal and without subtlety. For anyone who likes to be taught something in the experience of listening to sermons, these appeals are irritating at best. They potentially destroy any sense of adventure or growth in the activity of going to church.

What might church be like if the attempts at preaching were removed? For a start the services would be shorter. Instead of sermons there could be times of reflection when the leader invited the congregation members to offer their own take on scriptural passages. There could also be times of silence and an attempt to experience what it is like when words stop. There could be a dynamic closer to a social meeting but interspersed with prayer and reflection. The church building might not necessarily be the best place for this kind of gathering. However it takes place, it would not require an expensively trained clergyman to lead it. To make up for the lack of sermons at these gathering there would be a monthly occasion when there would offer a first-rate professional teaching event at a near-by town. This would be led by someone who understood communication and teaching. Alternatively/additionally the same teacher/preacher would come, say, once a quarter to each church to deliver a memorable address which could be chewed over in the following weeks.

Moving preaching from being an ordeal to something exciting and worth waiting and travelling for, could inject a new energy into the Church of England. The small often demoralised churches in the countryside could be places of gathering and prayer, led by local people, while the teaching and challenging aspect of church life would be done by those who knew what they were doing. From my personal position, there would be an escape from the bondage of an ever-increasing dominance of conservative dogmatic preaching. If the Anglican Church stands for breadth, it would never hand the task of teaching only to those who advocate a partisan and narrow point of view. The level of theological learning required of these diocesan teachers and preachers means that that the vast majority anyway would come from a liberal perspective. In this case liberal is not about a party line but about taking a perspective that is grounded of an in-depth broad non-partisan view of theology. All that would of course have to worked out in detail by the powers that be in the future, But meanwhile it is an idea that possibly may represent the future, a future where there is genuine hope for the Church in England.
See: http://clatworthy.org/wordpress/2014/10/does-the-church-still-need-parishes/

There is a story that is coming out of the area of South London where a long time ago I used to work as a clergyman. It concerns a clergyman, originally from Uganda, who was until 2011 the Vicar of the parish next door to where I had been in the 1970s. His alleged misdemeanour is a strange one. It was to officiate at the marriages of people who had no right to be in this country and thus provide them with the right of residency. The numbers of couples involved came to almost 400 over a three year period. The story, as recorded in the newspapers, described couples queuing up to be married, sometimes changing for the service in the church loos and normally having no witnesses or guests.

Having been a clergyman for many years, there is one part of the story I can identify with. There is the moment when by handing a green certificate to a happy couple, you are party to a fundamental change in their life story. Because of something you have helped to set up, you have become part of a life-changing moment in the couples’ lives. You are a bit like a midwife to a new birth.

Obviously the clergyman concerned may have been motivated by money and there was a missing £50,000 sent off to his homeland of Uganda that had not been declared to the diocese. But the crime seems an extraordinary one to commit for money as it is extremely hard to hide evidence of this particular crime. Also as the South London Vicar knew, you cannot conduct bogus weddings without the cooperation of others. So in court with the Vicar is a verger and a PCC secretary. They presumably were complicit with all the fake paper work that had to be sent off the Registrar at the end of every quarter. While filling up registers is not hard, it does take an eye for detail. It is no fun having a query from an eagle-eyed registrar in Basingstoke who spots some discrepancy or actual mistake. I am also puzzled by the fact that the same registrar, that sometimes queried my marriage returns, did not apparently wonder why the numbers of weddings in the parish in South London had shot up from 6 a year to 200. Do registrars not communicate with Archdeacons when something deeply suspicious takes place?

There are various aspects of the story that do not add up and I shall never know the answers. But I want to add my commentary on the story by noting that it may not have been primarily a matter of greed that sent this particular clergyman apparently down the path of illegality and crime. I would suggest that at the heart of the crime, there is also the possibility that it may have all began when the Vicar found for himself enjoying the power of taking marriages. Possibly he learnt to enjoy this exercise of power in people’s lives so much that the whole thing went to his head. Power is something is addictive and insofar as a Vicar exercises real power in acting as a registrar for the state, this enjoyment of power may eventually come to be a motive for crime.

It is hard and probably wrong to speculate about the motives of another person’s actions. But it is, I believe, instructive to think about the way that the love of power is at the heart of most wrong-doing and crime. Gaining money is of course one particular manifestation of human power games but Christian ministry in fact offers multiple ways of enjoying power. One can almost say that for the wrong kind of personality, the ‘vocation’ to ministry might be a calling to the enjoyment of privilege and power. Most enjoyment of power in ministry can be achieved honourably without illegality, but when power is through the naked pursuit of money or sex, the minister at some point will be tripped up. In the case of the Vicar who is alleged to have made money taking illegal weddings, it may have been a case of two sorts of power games colliding in one person. As the chances of getting away with a crime on such a scale are fairly slight, one might claim to see an addictive, almost self-destructive aspect to the Vicar’s actions. Whether the Vicar was addicted to power of money or the power of having control and influence over people’s lives, there was a kind of recklessness about his behaviour which suggests he was strongly driven in a self-destructive way. But there is an important difference between the moment of satisfaction in handing over a certificate to a happy couple to the desperate murky manipulation of the system which is alleged in this case. One was, hopefully, a legitimate satisfaction as part of the role, the other a grubby grabbing attempt to bolster up deep inadequacies. But once again we enter the realm of speculation and hypothesis.

Every church leader is given the responsibility of exercise of power. Some do it honourably and well while others find themselves propping up character weaknesses by using the same power in a self-directed way. When power is used badly by those in charge in any institution, then someone gets hurt. Abuse of individuals in the church is always through the abuse of power. That is why we keep coming to this subject and reflecting on its manifestations from one of its many angles.

I have already, in an earlier post, mentioned the preference of the Christian Right in America for Old Testament law rather than the mercy-laden commands of Jesus. Much of the current rhetoric aimed at homosexuals, is indebted to passages from the Book of Leviticus. Previous hate-targets of decades gone by include those involved in abortion, feminism and secular humanism and all these ‘evils’are attacked with similar quotes from the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. The question might arise as to why there is this obsessional attachment to books of Jewish law, while apparently ignoring the commands of Jesus to love enemies, serve others and practice mercy and forgiveness. The reason for this Old Testament approach to society and its ordering can, to a degree, be laid at the door of one R.J. Rushdoony, an American of Armenian extraction. He wrote a huge three volume work in 1960s, known as the Institutes of Biblical Law. This was modelled on Calvin’s Institutes of Christian Religion. In this work, Rushdoony proposed that Old Testament law should be applied to modern society. We have met the word ‘theocratic’ to describe the thinking of the Witnesses. The word to describe Rushdoony’s thinking was a similar one ‘theonomy’, which means the application of the law of God. He argued for a Christian theonomy to be applied to society. Thus, in accordance with Mosaic law, the death sentence would be administered for homosexuality, adultery, incest, lying about one’s virginity, bestiality, witchcraft, idolatry or apostasy, public blasphemy, false prophesying, kidnapping, rape and bearing false witness in a capital case. I cheerfully copied this list from a web-site, wondering if Rushdoony had left anything off. Apparently there is one death deserving crime omitted and that is drunkardness. Also, Sabbath breaking is also quietly left off the list, even though the Old Testament thought it worthy of the death sentence.

Behind this nutty version of Biblical interpretation is a visceral hatred of democracy. ‘Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies’, Rushdoony is reported to have said. ‘Christianity is completely and radically anti-democratic; it is committed to spiritual aristocracy.’ Such sentiments of course fit neatly into a right-wing paternalistic version of politics, and it is not surprising that his ideas have been embraced by another version of politics known as Dominionism. This is a right wing political vision that embraces the death penalty for all the categories mentioned above and proposes a Christian dominated system for American government. This combines a laissez-faire attitude towards economics and the violent oppression of all thinking and actions that are not approved of.

It was probably obvious to Rushdoony and his followers that his political vision was intemperate and totally impracticable. But the very existence of his massive tome and its apparent closeness to Calvin provided it with great influence both on Calvinist Christianity as well as other right wing forces at work in America. The idea that society can be run according to the Laws of the Old Testament sounds very grand until you start to think it through in practice. Quite apart from whether we wish to stone a public blasphemer or a Sabbath breaker, there is the unpalatable picture of group of unelected men gathering together to administer God’s law in his name. When they are no checks and balances in a system, the consequences for any society are potentially catastrophic. There is nothing to stop such a system becoming similar to that which prevailed in Nazi Germany during the 30s and 40s. The one who takes the power is the one with the guns and the largest ego. Even if such a scenario is hard to imagine even in the States, where guns and survivalist ideas are widespread, such ideas can still become influential in the thinking of mainstream parties. That is where Rushdoony and his ideas have become important as well as dangerous. They are not an actual political blueprint but they act as a kind of evil political virus, working on the imaginations and thinking of those who think they want to bring ‘Christian’ ideas into society.

Why do I bring up the rantings of Rushdoony on this blog? The reason for this is that much of the right-wing rhetoric that spills out against the rights of women and gays has already been rehearsed in the pages of Rushdoony and his followers for decades. Ranting against ‘public blasphemers and false prophesying’ may have been quietly suppressed but pressure can still be placed on the wicked, in the form of those who practice gay sex. Today in the Anglican Church, we who suffer from the poison of Christian homophobic vitriol, do so partly because of the dangerous rabid ideas of a fundamentalist preacher of 60 years ago. I need to repeat, once more, the simple observation that Jesus did not come to reinstate the harsh tenets of Old Testament law. He came to fulfil them, which in practice meant that he came to neutralise the poison, the bile and the hatred that flows through some of these texts. We cannot allow our thinking, political or religious, in any way to be influenced by an atrocious piece of writing which owes more to the murky depths of Fascist rhetoric of the 1930s than to anything emerging out of modern political or religious thought. Even when the origins of these primitive and bestial ideas have been long forgotten, we still need to be reminded how easily Christian thinkers have been prepared to drink at the cess-pit of extremist thought. We must not be among them!

It is a source of pride in many churches to have pew bibles for the use of every congregational member. I, for one, question why these Bibles are needed since each member of the congregation will have a Bible of their own at home. If having the complete text in front of them at every service is really important, then the Church leader could encourage them to bring their own copy.

What do I think is really being said when Bibles are provided for everyone in the pews? I offer my interpretation as it might apply to some more conservative churches. Followers of this blog will expect me to come up with a somewhat perverse interpretation of such an apparently innocent act, and they will not be disappointed. By giving my opinionated interpretation for this action, I hope, at least, to get us thinking about the use of the bible in church. While thinking about what pew bibles signify, we may also reflect on another related topic. This is the fact that among the churches, where Scripture is most outwardly honoured and respected through preaching and mission statements, there is also an apparent laziness among members when it comes to their knowing what the text actually says.

The placing of a Bible in front of each person is done in many places so that when the preacher refers to a particular text, the person in the pew can look it up. This will assume a facility for this kind of switching from book to book or from text to text and this ability is taken for granted in most Bible believing churches. There will be also the implication that the argument of the preacher has added weight and authority because it is supported by particular texts. The preaching is then perceived to be authoritative and this in turn will boost the status of the preacher. In other words the provision of pew bibles seems to link in with a particular somewhat ponderous style of preaching in that church. If I wanted to be critical of this style of preaching, I would describe it as tending towards being heavy and dogmatic. While taking its authority from scripture, the preaching will probably sit lightly on other sources of inspiration, for example, the images derived from nature or the wider culture. The style of preaching that I and many others would prefer, is one that can reflect on a passage, draw insights from everyday life and also seek to encourage an understanding of the mind of Jesus to deal with the business of living in the world.

The second reason for my not being enamoured of the pew bible idea concerns the way the bibles, that are used in this way, come to be thought of. I would suggest that the practice of focusing on single verses or even single phrases, gives the Bible a bitty quality. In other words, people get used to the idea that the best way to read it, is as a series of quotes or proof texts to support preaching. What is tacitly discouraged is the idea that the Bible should be read as a continuous narrative. From a cynical perspective, if anyone actually does read the Bible in this way, they might find out that certain strands of teaching are not precisely as they have been taught. Woman in one version of the Genesis text was created simultaneously with man (not after), seven pairs of some animals went into the Ark (not two) and you must not speculate where Cain’s wife (Genesis 4.17) came from! If you sit faithfully in the pew and only consult the verses the preacher tells you, then your little brain will never have to bother itself with these sorts of imponderable questions.

In the third place the choice of edition is important. There are some versions that are, on the basis of a few verses translated conservatively, considered ‘sound’ translations. The versions that are generally recognised to take a more scholarly approach to disputed passages are discouraged. In the New International Version, much favoured by conservatives, Isaiah 7.14 is translated as ‘virgin’ to reflect the conservative theology of the translators and their convictions about prophecy. The other versions, which are faithful to the actual Hebrew words, have the translation ‘young woman’ . The Revised Standard Version which first appeared around 1950 was publically burned in the streets in America for containing such a heretical translation of the Hebrew word ‘almah’. While overall the number of these disagreements across the versions are few and relatively minor, no conservative church would tolerate the current New Revised Standard Version. From a scholarly point of view it is considered the best translation, but this NRSV version is never found or read from in conservative churches.

For me, the provision of pew bibles contains the implied message that ordinary Christians should not read their Bibles except under supervision of a preacher. It is easier to go along with the preacher’s pronouncements about the bible as a ‘God-breathed’ text, if you are in fact ‘protected’ from reading it for yourself. For anyone who does in fact read the text properly, the claims of inerrancy for the narrative may very quickly become fantastic and unsustainable. The faithful and loyal members of the ‘bible-believing’ church will thus often desist from the attempt to study it for themselves, precisely because they want to avoid feelings of dissonance that the reading of the actual text may stir up in them. For that reason the Bible continues to remain a virtually unknown text for countless thousands who nevertheless will express great admiration and respect for it. What remains in their memories are up to a hundred verses committed to memory because they are frequently mentioned from the pulpit. Psalm 23 can be recited virtually from memory and most people will know 1 Corinthians 13 and John 3.16. But these will be like choice pearl nuggets mined from the vast but unknown depths of the biblical text. The bible in conservative churches remains the world’s bestselling book which is the least likely to be actually read. Sadly, for perhaps different reasons, most Christians share with conservatives an indifference and ignorance about the content and meaning of Scripture. How many times in Bible study groups have I had to give page numbers? The members do not know which Testament a particular book is in, let alone whereabouts in the Bible it is to be found!

Several decades ago, the distinguished sociologist Max Weber made some important observations about the nature of charisma. I hope my readers will not mind if I record his ideas in a less than precise way, but the gist of what he noted was as follows. Charisma is a kind of effervescence that attaches itself to an individual in the realm of politics or religion. The charismatic leader will infect the followers with a sense of the beyond, new possibilities and new horizons. This community of followers will have an energy about it, and for a time the energy of this original vision will be sustained. I do not remember what Weber said about the way the charismatic energy was renewed, but the important thing that follows is what Weber calls routinisation. This process involves a collapse of the original energy. This takes place when the founder has died, moved on or simply lost the early vision.

Since Weber’s day, no one has seriously questioned his observations that enthusiasm gives way to routine and flatness. Obviously there are countless other things to be said about charisma in a religious setting but the basic claim of Weber about what happens to charisma has not been challenged. Take any group of Christian set on fire by ‘enthusiasm’ and thirty years down the line the nature of that enthusiasm will been transformed into dull old rules and regulations.

I mention Weber’s observations in connection with the work of Trevor Dearing among villages in Essex that Chris raises in a comment. Without knowing about these original missions I would expect that little remains of the ‘fire’ that spread across these villages in 1970s. If ‘revival’ actually hit a parish church, the next generation of ‘routinising’ Christians will have elbowed out the remaining enthusiasts. Some few might have joined an independent church and tried, probably in vain, to keep alive the original excitement. The churches that they belong to now are subject to the same social forces that Weber described and probably if any of us who strayed into one of them, we would not detect any of their early history. The churches that buck this Weberian trend the longest, are those that are found in towns, i.e. with congregations well above 50. A different dynamic again is found in the largest churches with congregations of 200+.

Chris is right to suggest that there are places that have congregations which are strongly fundamentalist in tone which were once touched by charismatic enthusiasm. But I would maintain that the fundamentalism style is often all that remains to them from the original package. They have a loyalty to ‘inerrancy’ doctrines, not because they are convinced by them, but because the original ‘prophet’ thought in this way. A loyalty to his vision is expressed by a loyalty to his theology. Now that much of the charismatic excitement has vanished, the prophet’s doctrine is all that remains to them. This is in fact a feature of many of our churches. There is a memory of something from the past, which is kept half-alive by the singing of tired ancient chorusses. The preaching may be about enthusiasm but there is normally little sign of it in practice, especially when the congregation numbers around 15 -20.

The reality that Weber pointed to is that vision and charisma are things that quickly fade unless they is renewed from within. Many of the people within the so-called ‘Charismatic-movement’ have realised this, and so we have the new ‘outpourings of the Spirit’ from places like Toronto, Penascola or Brownsville. To use a cooking analogy, these outpourings seem to be the old dishes which have been re-heated. Only a few will get to taste this food that has, with great difficulty, been kept warm. The normal way that this enthusiasm is mediated to ordinary Christians is by attending large gatherings like Spring Harvest, but most find it hard to take the excitement of the large group back into their local gatherings.

As someone who lived through the 70s and who followed the early days of the Charismatic movement with some interest, I was at the time deeply disappointed with the way things turned out. At the very start of the movement before it had been strangled by fundamentalist theology, there was a vision for a different future. Christian charisma, without its theological trappings, is in essence a spirituality. It is also a spirituality that allows Christianity to look with sympathy at other spiritual traditions across the world. As a spirituality of openness to the unseen, it can be compared to shamanic traditions, traditional African religions and the religions of the East which focus on spirituality before dogma. The charismatic contribution to the existence of a Christian tradition of healing is massive. I doubt very much whether the tradition of laying on of hands would exist at all without the charismatic impulse. At the same time this spirituality aspect of charisma receives absolutely nothing from the crude Protestant straightjacket which normally imprisons it in the West.

In this post I have appeared to say two contradictory things. One is to support Weber in his claim that ‘charisma’ invariably becomes routinised over time. The freshness of charismatic excitement cannot be sustained for very long within our Christian institutions. And yet I have hinted at another direction. I have suggested that were charisma to be released from the dogmatic straightjacket that Christians have placed it in, then it could be set free to sustain itself in a new way. It could be seen to be an impulse that exists within all spiritual traditions, including our own, which speaks of freedom, enthusiasm and newness. My own vision for the potential of charisma is at present a work in progress. All I can say at this moment is that my vision for it grows as I read and expose myself to spiritual traditions other than my own. This ‘work in progress’ may form part of my blog posts in future months.