Whilst the debates over sexuality gathered most of the headlines during last week’s General Synod, useful information has nevertheless been  forthcoming for those of us concerned about Safeguarding; “Let those who have ears to hear, hear” is a good text for the attentive, so here are my principle takeaways.

• The Archbishops and Church House did not dare to have an open debate about why the project known as the “ Independent Safeguarding Board” is in such deep trouble. 

• Bishop Pete Broadbent was absolutely right when he warned that 

“The platform tactic (from those leading debates and carrying forward the business of Synod) has been to attempt to keep questions about the Church’s safeguarding practice, past and present, off the floor of Synod. Attempts to inquisite the shortcomings of the National Safeguarding Team, the past failures of Bishops and the various ‘lessons learned reviews’ (from which we never seem to learn very much) have been seen off and resisted, leaving victims, survivors and those campaigning on their behalf with the sense that justice will never be done or seen to be done.” 

•   The ISB has itself identified to Archbishops’ Council serious problems concerning its creation and functionality, which include the following direct quotes from its website

• Church inaction in one area  “severely hampers the ISB’s ability to provide oversight and scrutiny …”

• “the Church of England has co-created a delivery vehicle that frustrates the ISB’s ability to assure a critical safeguarding service.

​​• The current position of the ISB in the Church’s infrastructure is     unsustainable” 

• The ISB does not consider that it is sufficiently independent from those it is responsible for scrutinising

• Half the membership of the Audit Committee of the Archbishops’ Council has raised concerns about the creation and functionality of the ISB, yet those concerns have been rebuffed.

• Nobody knows the composition of the delegation which spoke to the Charity Commission on behalf of Archbishops’ Council after governance failures were reported by a wide range of interested parties. 

• The New Director of Safeguarding needs all the support he can get.

The implications of these observations are important and profound; they go to the very heart of good governance of the Church of England and the continuing problems must once again be reported to the Charity Commission. This is not just about safeguarding it is about proper governance.

The ISB was the principal response of the CofE to IICSA and already it has failed in its present incarnation. That statement is not even controversial if you talk to members of Archbishops’ Council, or of the ISB. It needs reformation and everyone- not least the Church victims – knows this to be true. The $64 question is “when and by whom”.

Church House obstructed the attempts to place this in the agenda last week; we simply wanted to note the concerns of the Survivors and the ISB, place the matter on the agenda for July and ask the Audit Committee to look into why things went wrong.

Be very very clear, it was the latter proposition that spooked the Establishment at Church House and Lambeth Palace.

For all its rhetoric about transparency and accountability the CofE leadership resists the application of the Nolan principles for good conduct in public life at a visceral level. It will accept any amount of public embarrassment rather than submit to proper scrutiny into how it manages matters such as Safeguarding. 

The reason is simple; to undertake Safeguarding to the well established standards of the secular world,  you have to confront the unaccountable discretionary powers of the 42 Bishops each of whom acts with the autonomy of a medieval Prince Bishop. You simply cannot reconcile good Human Rights compliant safeguarding, with a structure still significantly operating within a 12th century mindset.

Synod has just voted through the necessary legislation to make Safeguarding “Advisers” in Dioceses into “Officers” who are independent of their Bishops. But they now report not to an independent oversight body, like perhaps the Independent Safeguarding Board, but instead to the Archbishops’ creation – the National Safeguarding Team. In the 1971 words of The Who, is this a case of “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” ?

When I began challenging Church thinking on Safeguarding in 2015 I made clear that the mantra “ Trust me -I’m a bishop” will not wash in the modern world. I was taken aside by a senior Bishop who patiently explained that I was trying to make them conform to the standards of the secular Safeguarding world, whereas “ We are building a system suitable for the Church of England”.

That turned out well didn’t it? 

During the Monday evening Question and Answer session a low key drama played out, the implications of which will have been missed by many members. You have to know how to “read the game” here.

A member asked if the Audit Committee had been asked to audit the creation of the Independent Safeguarding Board. This in itself should have caused a ripple of excitement. Every year, Synod nods through the routine report of the Audit Committee but it never contains anything headline-grabbing. Not that is, until now.

Now, it is being asked – and is also itself asking – to become involved in one of the major issues for the Church. Perhaps this is not so unusual given the millions of pounds being spent on inquiries and paid out to victims of wrongdoing by the Church as well as the reputational harm the constant scandals are doing to it. Safeguarding is an important matter. If the ISB is in crisis so soon, why is this? What went wrong? Who should we trust to put it right? 

The Audit Committee is a watchdog for Synod and has a supervisory role in anticipating and troubleshooting problems. In a different agenda item, one member of the Audit Committee described auditors as “always being able to find the cloud behind the silver lining”.

The question was answered by Maureen Cole who is not only the Chair of the Audit Committee but sits on the Archbishops’ Council. Curiously, neither the written answers provided nor she personally identified herself as having this dual role. She was put up to answer and repeated the mantra that the ISB is independent and not the Audit Committee business – but wait…. Why was she answering for the Archbishop’s Council if she is the Chair of the watchdog? “ A wo/man cannot serve two masters”. If Hogwarts had taught Harry Potter auditing skills alongside potions, advocating for the people you are supposed to be auditing would be one of the Unforgivable Curses.

She was then challenged by members of her owncommittee and was obliged to acknowledge that half of the committee had asked to look into the ISB creation and that the Archbishops’ Council – on whose behalf she was answering – had rejected such an inquiry.  And so we are back to a common theme in these matters – that of conflict of interest and lack of proper independence.

Further, as indicated from the quotations above, the independence of the ISB from the Archbishops’ Council was called into question by the ISB members themselves. It is a mess and needs looking into but there is reluctance to do so  by “ the powers that be”. It is a different problem to that identified by Bp Pete Broadbent but closely related.

Why does this matter?

Put simply, if the design of the ISB Constitution is flawed we need to understand why; nobody would ask that a replacement Grenfell Tower be designed and built by the same architects and construction company unless there had been a proper – and timely – inquiry into why the design failed in the first place.And the original architects and builders would not be trusted to report on what went wrong. The same applies to the ISB. I do not blame its members for the problems they report. Indeed, I praise them for acknowledging the weaknesses they have identifiedand clearly want to address.

I go further; I ask was the failure to give proper independence a matter of incompetence or symptomatic of a fundamental reluctance in Church House to relinquish power?

In another debate the Revd Andrew Dotchin spoke of the need to be trusting if projects are to take off under their own steam. “ If you give” he advised “ let go”.

That is a well formulated proposition and one I borrow in this context. Did the ISB fail because Lambeth Palace and Church House feared to surrender control over Safeguarding to a fully independent, autonomous body?

I suspect that this is the answer, but a proper investigation by the Audit Committee would help clarify this. Unfortunately the Archbishops’ obstruction means that the matter cannot be debated properly until July, and if Synod wants to review and oversee the new iteration of the ISB, that simply cannot happen until February 2024 . I suspect that by then another “ Bishops’ fix” will have been implemented and proper oversight circumvented again.  This is not just poor governance, it is flawed governance.

I wonder what IICSA, the Charity Commission and possibly even Parliament, who are now taking a close interest in the Church’s affairs because of LLF, will have to say about this.

When after more than two centuries as a leading merchant bank, Barings Bank collapsed in 1995, it was due to the misconduct of a single employee. The subsequent inquiry concluded that Barings was bankrupted due to an absence of effective controls and inadequate auditing. The ISB must not become the next Barings, and all praise to the three members of the Audit Committee who are apparently trying to prevent this. One hopes that the other two, independent members of the Audit Committee will join them to form a united front against the stone wall of the Archbishops Council.

There is however, some good news. The new NST Director Alex Kubeyinje began his first speech to Synod with an apology for the furore that had greeted his references to NST staff being threatened. If the giving of that early sincere apology heralds a change of culture at Church House then it is is to be doubly welcomed. He appears to be a quiet thoughtful man, not given to rhetorical flourishes. That too is to be welcomed. But most welcome of all is the fact that coming from the secular Safeguarding world I knew, I am confident that he knows how to do things properly. 

Whether he will be able to successfully challenge the existing Establishment mindset and culture remains to be seen. He will need all the help he can get including that of Survivors, whose contribution to the debate the Archbishops sadly preferred Synod not to hear about.

by Simon Richiardi

Editorial Comment.

Last week the Church gave to the world the impression that there is only one subject of interest for them to think about and debate – sex and marriage. Surviving Church has taken the view that this topic has received more discussion than it probably deserves. Those who oppose the proposal that same-sex couples should be allowed to receive the Church’s blessing belong to many conservative churches both within and outside the Anglican family of churches. Chief among the arguments opposing these same-sex blessings is the notion that there is a clear ‘biblical’ idea of marriage between one man and one woman. That claim seems doubtful, particularly if we study the Old Testament with its apparent acceptance of concubinage and polygamy. The following contribution from Simon Richiardi helps us to understand the culture of some conservative Christians and the way they view marriage. There is much in the narrative about control. There is a strong adherence to the idea that anything that deviates from a strictly controlled conservative perspective must be resisted. It is also a case study of how carefully selected biblical passages about marriage, to put it mildly, do not always smoothly translate into good practice. Indeed, ‘biblical teaching’ in the hands of an authoritarian pastor may turn out to be the cause of toxic harm. There is much worthy of comment in this piece but I will leave it to my readers to draw from the text what thy feel is salient to the current debates in the wider Church. The account, no doubt, would read very differently if written from the perspective of a woman.

We were the marriage church.  Not the church to get married in; it was much better than that.  We were the church that did marriage.  And although no-one ever said it, the word “properly” floated ghost-like in the air over conversations about marriage.  We did marriage properly. 

           The teaching was this, essentially: Christians shouldn’t date; they should marry.  No dating.  Just seek God’s will and he will give you a verse or two indicating who your intended is and  – boom – instant …. What?  Holiness?  Being better than other churches?

To give some context, I was a studying at a university in the UK about 20 years ago, and in the Christian Union and attached churches I first came to know Reformed Theology and practice.  Phrases like “sound doctrine”, “the flesh” and the debate between Arminianism and Calvinism became part of my mental world. I heard it said that studying liberal theology leaves a scar on the psyche of a Christian; these days I feel the same about Reformed Theology.

           I was suffering from mental health problems but being part of an Evangelical world then did not encourage me to seek help outside of that, if, indeed, it was even granted that mental illness existed at all.  And if it was conceded that something like these existed, then the answer was, of course, found in Christian books and teachings and not the suspicious philosophies and practices of psychology or counselling.  SO, naturally I looked for answers in house as it were.

           I came under the influence of an American Pastor (and he was a pastor with a big ‘P’) who led a small, independent Baptist church.  He was a charismatic figure, and his life story was dramatic, full of drugs and drama before he became a Christian.  As someone who was very unsure of himself,  I was drawn to his loud, dramatic style of preaching, alongside the sense of self-assuredness and certainty in his belief in God.  Eventually, we became friends and I would say that he “led me to the Lord”, as the saying goes.

           But during my second or third year, a particular teaching slowly sneaked its way onto the agenda.  Softened up by exposure to American books like I Kissed Dating Goodbye, the church became obsessed – and I think obsessed is an accurate word – with the notion of how Christians get married.  Dating was portrayed as not quite trusting God for your future spouse.  The real people of faith prayed, and when God told the man to ask for a woman’s hand in marriage then they could do so.  Or they could ask the pastor to approach the woman for them.

           As a very anxious and shy individual, I was anxious about approaching a woman for a date.  Well, this just took all that away!  Just get God to do it for you and forego all the relational learning and maturing one gets from just being with people.  A cliché I often hear in church at the moment is about “the messiness of life”, and it’s a cliché I agree with.  Life is messy, and what we were being taught was an attempt to deny this.

           But marriage was spoken about all the time.  When would you get married?  Is marriage on your mind?  Sitting under all this was the slightly icky – messy – fact of sexual desire.  The word “marriage” was if not a synonym for “sex”, then inextricably bound up with it.  For some reason, we needed to police this aspect of humanity quite stringently.

           What happened was very simple: over the next couple of years, people got married. They got on the conveyor belt and  – bam! – instant conjugal happiness.  But this wasn’t enough, just for us to enjoy the people getting married in our church.  Other Christians needed to know about this.  They needed to know about it even if they didn’t want to.   They didn’t know what they needed.  The teaching needed to “get out there”.

           A booklet was written detailing the stories of three couples who got married via this teaching.  It was called, in the most passive-aggressive misquoting of Scripture ever, “A more Excellent Way.”  One of the men involved was even trying to expand it into a book.  When the pastor was invited to speak somewhere, he took the booklet with him.  We had a product and it had to be exported.

           And it’s about here that my personal story intersects with all of this.  I had stayed on at university to study an MA in Creative Writing.   During my MA I think I fell in love with a woman at the church – or was very attracted to her.  Of course, I did nothing other than pray.  And I feel the emphasis on marriage was a problem to someone who was struggling to find their way in life.  Despite the MA – which I struggled through, I felt very directionless in life and my confidence was very low.  To then dwell on a romance sanctioned by God was to some degree a way of escaping the pressure of life decisions I felt unequal to the task of making.  I didn’t talk about it with anyone because I felt they wouldn’t understand my lack of confidence; I felt ashamed.  I needed proper psychotherapeutic help of some sort, but this tended to be viewed under the sniffy term “fleshly”. 

           I want to be clear: I wasn’t pointed to this person by anyone; I was drawn to her.  Perhaps under different circumstances we could have tried to build a life together.  But what circumstance we were in!  Take the following as an example:

 Always an aggressive speaker (I remember him banging the glass of drinking water he had on the table at the front of the church in frustration at people not changing the way he expected them to), it took a new turn.  At least twice in the sermon he said this to the church: “People think I shout too much, that I’m too intense.  But I was in my car before church one evening, and I was praying.  I said, ‘God, they don’t want me.  They think I shout too much.’  And God said, ‘Well, you tell ‘em from me’.”

           At the time I was troubled by this; it felt dangerous, but I brushed aside my intuitions because “He knew what he was doing; he was the Pastor.”  Now I can see it for what it is, even though my stomach still clenches in anxiety that it might just be God speaking, and that is using the position of power afforded him to intimidate the congregation into compliance.  It is an example of coercive control rather than, as I believed then, God communicating himself to us.

           That is the most brutal example, the only one when a part of me began to question the Pastor’s example.  But what it shows had always been there, was always in the water, had already been working its effect on me.

           Despite the fact that there was a great deal of talk of God’s grace, the power games which were being played out told a different story about who God is and how to relate to him.  He was a God to be feared, to be intimidated by. 

           But this is the sort of event which I look back at now and wonder how I could have been taken in.  I still, 20 years later, think “how did I allow myself to be so manipulated?”

           It was in this environment that I asked a woman to marry me.  I was unsure about doing this, and I made the mistake of confiding in a friend at the church.  His advice was, “If it’s wrong, then God will providentially stop it from happening.”  I was manipulated into getting engaged when I was very unsure about doing it.

           I won’t dwell on the story as it is too painful, but I experienced a loss of control, a loss of authority in my life which is almost too unbearable to recount.  I spoke to my parents who recognised symptoms of anxiety and depression.  They in their turn contact the Pastor in the hope that he would convince me to see a doctor.  They didn’t realise that he would do no such thing. 

           The church believed in Victory!  Bright, shining, grandiose, heavily booted Victory, which trounced all opposition.  I was fed the theology of my Triumphant Identity in Christ, but it is very hard to accept that when one’s autonomy has been so compromised.  And now it seems that the Pastor was not interested in my well-being or well-being of my fiancée; what they wanted was a result!  Me healed via his ministry and then married.  Victory.

           Victory or Control?  There was no patience, no interaction with anyone which did not end with “well, are you going to obey God?”  This was a church where the Pastor had once preached “ When God says, ’Jump’, we say, ‘How High?’”  That’s how obedience was taught to us.  And Pressure was the great teacher.  When the world pressured us, then God grew us.  When my depression didn’t get better, when I didn’t want to marry this woman, then I was disobedient.  I was in rebellion.  I “made Jesus, the Messiah, a liar.”

           The last time I was in that church I had broken off the engagement.  I also took communion, and the Pastor intimated to me, in front of other people, that I shouldn’t have taken communion because I was walking in known disobedience to God.  There was a hint of a warning there.

           I left the church after that night and returned to live with my parents, something which leaves me with a feeling of failure.  It has taken me nearly 20 years to process this experience, years to begin to see it as a period when I was emotionally abused and manipulated in an atmosphere very similar to a cult.  Sadly, much of the processing has taken place in secular environments because churches, no matter how well-intentioned, give very little space for someone to talk about these experiences. 

At the beginning of this week, we looked forward to seeing some challenges at General Synod to the protocols around the Church of England’s safeguarding work.  Any such challenge was effectively blocked by a refusal to allow a following motion from Synod member, Martin Sewell. The details of this were ably set out by David Lamming in the previous blog.  This, among other things, questioned the absence of any mention of the Independent Safeguarding Board in the Synod papers.   Today, the hour given over at Synod to a consideration of safeguarding was a low-key affair.  The departing bishop with special responsibility for safeguarding, Jonathan Gibbs, said all the right things but there was little spark in what was said by him or in the presentation by the Director of the NST, Alexander Kubeyinje.  The challenge to the authority of Synod caused by the side-lining of an independent oversight body, the ISB, might well have raised the temperature of the debate.  In the event the Synod seemed exhausted from the earlier discussions on Living with Love and Faith.  Although the ISB was airbrushed out of the debate, the importance of a third-party independent scrutiny of the Church’s work in the area of safeguarding remains as vital as ever.  What follows are some thoughts on this theme. These were written by me last weekend before the debate.  The Church authorities may have marginalised the ISB for the time being, but the issue of independent oversight remains important.  If there are problems (as identified below) with the ISB as presently constituted, the way forward is to engage with the issues rather than airbrush them out of existence, as the Church seems intent on doing.

 The Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB) came into being just over 12 months ago.  It was an initiative of the Archbishops’ Council (AC) of the Church of England, and it was conceived as a new body able to provide independent scrutiny of the various safeguarding bodies in the Church.   Since its founding the group has lurched from crisis to crisis.  It is hard to see that, in its present configuration, it will be able to survive and serve the Church in the future.  In this piece I cannot attempt to address all the issues that have emerged about the ISB in recent days and weeks.    Somewhat provocatively, any mention of the ISB has been expunged from the official safeguarding papers being distributed to Synod members.  What follows here may be regarded as some background information for anyone trying to follow the recent complicated politics of safeguarding.  Interest in the topic is widespread and we owe it to the overall subject to express our concern and interest for the issue.

This blog, for the sake of simplicity, is going only to discuss three points which pertain to the current ISB saga.  The storyline related to this organisation has become convoluted. Something of this complexity is reflected in the fact that the Church Times in its current edition (February 3^rd), gives space for three separate stories about the ISB.  I do not propose to go into each of these threads.  My method for presenting something of this continuing ISB saga, as well as presenting a personal slant on what is going on, is through asking questions.   In this attempt to ask questions, I hope I can give a fair-minded approach to some of the current problems facing the ISB and its relationship with the wider Church.

The first basic question which is fundamental to any understanding of the difficulties at Synod and the reports in the Church Times is this.  What is the ISB for?    A part of the answer is that the ISB was set up by the AC to provide ‘professional supervision to (but not line management of) the Director of the National Safeguarding Team (NST)’. This supervision is combined with the task of ‘receiving and responding to complaints about the NST’s handling of cases.’  There are another 14 items in the ISB’s terms of reference which appeared when the group first came into being.  One might expect that an effective response, even merely for the delivery of the two tasks mentioned, would involve the gathering of quite a substantial team of professional individuals.  Although there are plans for expansion, the ISB currently consists of, up till now, 3 part time employees with secretarial support.  As most people are aware, one of the three, the Chair Maggie Atkinson, has been required to ‘step back’ over a data breach allegation.  A complaint about this has been upheld by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).  So far no one has found a way of making a decision as to whether the suspension is permanent or not.  The other two members of the ISB bravely soldier on.  

This question, what is the ISB for, carries with it a second subsidiary question.  Does the group, (even with a promised input of new staff), realistically stand a chance of fulfilling these 16 terms of reference?  There are some basic problems.  Nothing I say here is any personal criticism of the actual individuals who work for the ISB.  They have been recruited from a pool of highly experienced individuals who presumably understand, among other things, management theory and the inner workings of organisations.  All three have also been chosen from outside church circles.  This is to enable them to achieve the necessary level of independence of church politics. There is of course one key problem in appointing people who have no background knowledge of the structure they are being asked to support.  They naturally find it extremely hard to understand the mind-set of those they are overseeing.  In this blog we have had cause to question the background knowledge of those who work for the NST.  It is never just a matter of absorbing new information; there needs to be an immersion into a new professional culture which may be initially alien to the newcomer.  The ISB member, Jasvinda Sanghera, who comes with significant background in the needs of survivors, has gleaned her expertise, I understand, from working with victims of domestic violence.  There may well be overlaps with survivors of spiritual and sexual abuse in a Christian context, but there are also massive differences.  Those of us who have been involved in the discussion about safeguarding for a moderate length of time, are constantly concerned at the way professionals in safeguarding roles have huge gaps in what we refer to as the ‘corporate memory’ around the topic.   When it was suggested recently that the remaining two members of the ISB undertake the writing of a report on the Martyn Percy saga, those of us who have seen even a little of the enormous quantity of material that pertains to this case, immediately wondered how many man-hours would be required just to arrive the starting block to undertake such an enquiry.  Apart from the mass of factual material to be mastered, there is the cultural background of church and college to be comprehended.  It seemed wise for the Archbishop’s Council to withdraw the ISB from this massive undertaking, even though the ISB itself has expressed its displeasure at this decision.  It will continue to be a challenge for the AC to find the expertise and the understanding of university/church protocol to undertake this task.  One fears that such an enquiry may find itself in the same position as the Makin enquiry – over-time and overstretched.

The third question we have to ask of the ISB is the one concerning its own internal relationships.  There has been in the publicly shared publications by the ISB a suggestion of internal friction within the membership.  One has the gospel passage about Beelzebub in mind, where Jesus said ‘Can a kingdom divided against itself stand?’.  It is hard, if not impossible, for a small part time group to involve itself in overseeing a large institution like the NST and its dozens of employees when it has the distraction of division in its ranks and run-ins with the ICO.  Such institutional malfunctions are serious and cannot be glided over without questions being asked.  The third question for the ISB is simply this.  Given the fact that there are reported divisions in the ISB, and your chair has been found to have failed to keep data safe, is it realistic to expect survivors and the public at large to have, in the near future, confidence in your ability to get important work done?

The ISB has been functioning for a year and it has been noted by Martin Sewell and others that, in the papers about safeguarding for this week’s Synod, even a mere mention of the ISB is nowhere to be found.  This is possibly an attempt by the AC to bury an expensive project under the carpet with the hope that no one will notice.  We might have some understanding for those who thought up the birthing of the ISB as a way of regaining the respect of society after the severe mauling of the CofE by the officers of the Independent Inquiry over Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).  Somewhere along the line, this project of the AC has failed to deliver what was hoped for.  The need for a completely independent body to oversee safeguarding in the CofE is still required, but the ISB has, arguably, not turned out to be the correct tool.  It is not the competence of the individual members of the ISB that I am raising here.  The fault seems to lie further back.  It falls on those who had an idea of what was needed, but set it up prematurely.   The IICSA challenge to the CofE to provide independent oversight of its own protocols for safeguarding remains.  Can the Church show itself able to administer a system of safeguarding without outside supervision?   The muddles and missteps that may be revealed at Synod this coming week perhaps indicate that the Church is indeed unable to manage in this area of creating a safe environment which enables those who have been damaged by its own employees to find a way to move forward and maybe even to flourish and grow.

By David Lamming (General Synod member 2015-2021)

A few days ago on this blog, Synod member Martin Sewell posed the question, “General Synod and Safeguarding Issues: Will the problems be faced? (24 January 2023).  One of the major problems concerns the rôle and functioning of the Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB).  Related to this is the fact that the Board’s chair, Professor Maggie Atkinson, remains ‘stepped aside’ following the upholding by the ICO of complaints of data protection breaches.  Recently, also, the ISB has been told by the Archbishops’ Council that it is no longer to carry out a ‘lessons learned’ review into aspects of the long-running saga at Christ Church, Oxford.

On its website the ISB state: “We exist to ensure the Church of England delivers its safeguarding responsibilities  We also provide independent oversight of the National Safeguarding Team (NST).”  This function of the ISB was recognised in a paper, GS 2263, presented to Synod at York in July 2022, which stated (at paragraph 19): “The ISB liaises with, and oversees the quality of the work of the NST.” Especially given the ISB’s difficulties, not least of which is that of its supposed independence, one might have expected that the ‘Safeguarding’ item on Synod’s agenda on Thursday would include a report from the ISB.

Only seven months ago in York, Synod passed a motion, in terms proposed by the lead bishop on safeguarding, Dr Jonathan Gibbs, that included a request by Synod for “regular updates on progress at each group of sessions, especially concerning the strengthening of independent accountability and oversight of the Church’s safeguarding work at all levels.” (Emphasis added.)  However, there is not even a mention of the ISB in either of the two published briefing papers for Synod, GS 2293 (‘Update from the National Safeguarding Team’ and GS Misc 1335 (‘Update from the National Director of Safeguarding’), both referred to in Martin’s blog.  Moreover, the two active members of the ISB, Jasvinder Sanghera and Steve Reeves, in a statement posted on the ISB website on 2 February, revealed that they had wished to be able to update Synod but were rebuffed: “Despite attempts to secure an opportunity to update Synod in person, no time was made available.” https://independent-safeguarding.org/general-synod-2023/ They added, “We do not believe that the importance of ISB work is consistent with a ‘fringe’ activity“—which suggests that a fringe meeting had been offered to them as an alternative.

Jasvinder and Steve go on in their report to identify a number of issues regarding the ISB’s rôle and work, in particular the vexed question of its supposed independence – one of the issues mentioned in Martin’s ‘further motion’ referred to below.  They say:

“The current position of the ISB in the Church’s infrastructure is unsustainable. The Archbishop’s Council trustees provide the funding for the Board’s operations and acts as the employer of its staff, subject to task management by the ISB itself… In its first year, the ISB has experienced multiple instances in which its independence and freedom to operate has been hampered. The ISB does not consider that it is sufficiently independent from those it is responsible for scrutinising. The independent minds of board members need to be supported by an independent body, the operation of which cannot be frustrated by the Church.”

The safeguarding item on the Synod agenda comprises a presentation, with Q&A, followed by a motion (to be proposed by Dr Gibbs) to ‘take note’ of the NST report GS 2293.  Under Synod standing orders, such a motion cannot be amended but, if it is first carried, a ‘further motion’ can be moved under SO 105(6).  This provides, so far as material:

“… any member of the Synod may, after giving due notice, move a further motion arising out of the report which— (a) expresses approval or disapproval of the report in whole or part, or (b) is otherwise relevant to and within the scope of its subject matter.”

In the absence of a specific report or agenda item and as reported in the Church Times last Friday, Martin Sewell tabled such a motion. (“Motion will question ISB’s absence from Synod agenda” Church Times, 3 February 2023, page 6. The full terms of the motion were set out in a comment that I posted on Martin’s blog.)  However, after the paper went to press last Wednesday, Martin was informed by the Acting Clerk to the Synod that his motion (which had been duly seconded) had been ruled out of order by the ‘Chair of the debate’ after receiving legal advice, on the basis that the report to which it is a following motion is a report of the NST and the ISB is a creature of the Archbishops’ Council, not the NST.  The full reasoning, after, citing the terms of SO 105(6) was:

“A motion which says, “The report should have covered subject X”, when subject X is outside the scope of the report, cannot qualify for this purpose; to hold otherwise would be to negate requirement (b).  And [the Chair] does not consider that the matters you wish to raise with regard to the ISB are “relevant to and within the scope of its subject matter”.  The scope and subject matter of the report are to “provide updates to the General Synod of the following workstreams of the National Safeguarding Team”.  The workstreams are then listed.  The ISB is not a workstream for which the NST is responsible.  It is the responsibility of the Archbishops’ Council, with the ISB accounting directly to the Council for its performance, rather than through the NST.  The proposed following motion, being concerned with the ISB, is therefore not a further motion within SO 105(6).”

One might have thought that an item of business headed in the Synod agenda as simply ‘Safeguarding’ (see GS 2283, page 13) would enable a motion to be tabled concerning the very body set up to oversee the safeguarding functions of the NST.  But no, it is clear that those running the Synod do not wish to see the problems of the ISB aired in Synod and subject to debate by Synod members, notwithstanding the motion agreed in July 2022. A revised motion, quoting Synod’s resolution last July and thereby seeking to overcome the objection, was tabled by Martin but also rejected on Friday on the same grounds.

The effect of the Chair’s ruling is that neither Martin’s original motion nor his revised motion will appear on a Notice Paper for the information of Synod members when they arrive in Church House on Monday, as he requested.  But it is questionable whether this is lawful and whether the Chair—at this stage, simply the member of the panel of chairs designated to chair the safeguarding items of business on 9 February—has the power before Synod meets to make such a ruling. Martin raised this issue with the Acting Clerk to the Synod in an e-mail on Friday as follows:

“I note that you refer me to SO 15(2) concerning the powers and duties of the Chair.  However, that SO is one of a group of standing orders headed ‘General Procedures at a Group of Sessions’ (emphasis added) and I cannot see in it or elsewhere in the SOs any provision enabling someone who has merely been designated to be the Chair of a particular session to make a ruling in advance of the session.  By contrast, in respect of rulings on questions, there is provision, but when the Synod is not in session, the person to make the ruling is the Chair of the Business Committee: see SO 113(5).

It seems to me, therefore, that the ruling Andrew Nunn has made, apparently on legal advice, is ultra vires and void. If I am wrong about this, please let me know and direct me to the provision in the SOs relied upon.”

As I write this on Sunday evening, an answer is awaited.

What next?  Synod members may well share the view that the issues surrounding the ISB are both urgent and important.   SO 4(3) of the Synod’s standing orders empowers the Joint Presidents of the Synod (i.e. Archbishops Justin and Stephen) to “direct the addition to the agenda at any time of such urgent or other specially important business… as seems to them desirable.”  This power was exercised in 2016 to add to the Synod agenda a motion enabling a debate about the outcome of the Brexit referendum, and again in 2017, following the General Election of that year—neither of which matters, unlike the supervision of C of E safeguarding, directly concerned the Synod.

Recently, in an article published in the January 2023 issue of the Ecclesiastical Law Journal, Bishop Pete Broadbent, a member of the Synod for some 36 years prior to his retirement as Bishop of Willesden in 2021, wrote this:

“The platform tactic (from those leading debates and carrying forward the business of Synod) has been to attempt to keep questions about the Church’s safeguarding practice, past and present, off the floor of Synod. Attempts to inquisite [sic] the shortcomings of the National Safeguarding Team, the past failures of Bishops and the various ‘lessons learned reviews’ (from which we never seem to learn very much) have been seen off and resisted, leaving victims, survivors and those campaigning on their behalf with the sense that justice will never be done or seen to be done.” (Pete Broadbent: Reflections on the Workings of General Synod, (2023) 25 Ecc LJ 19-31 at page 25.)

Is it too much to hope that our two archbishops will heed these words and use their power under SO4(3) to ensure that Synod is enabled this week to discuss the very issue it requested to be updated about just seven months ago?

 

From time to time we hear about people working in various institutions, like the police or the Civil Service, who call out some murky or corrupt behaviour within their organisation. We call this action whistleblowing.  It may be that someone brings to light financial irregularities or an intolerable level of oppressive hatred towards minorities.  Such behaviour may involve misogyny or homophobia and this behaviour has become impossible for the bystander to tolerate.  The whistle-blower is the one who speaks out. In most cases we hear about, we discover that the costs to the individual speaking out in this way have been considerable.  Whether it is the blowback from colleagues, whose bad behaviour is exposed, or a heavy institutional response from the top of the organisation, the whistle-blower usually has to pay a heavy price and put up with the stress that comes as the result of his/her whistleblowing activity.  In summary we would suggest that whistleblowing is a hazardous, even heroic, undertaking.

When we take a look at organisations in general, I think it would be true to state that whistleblowing is rare.  The reasons for this are worth thinking about.  It is far from clear that fear of persecution from colleagues is the main factor in repressing whistleblowing.  A more straightforward explanation that inhibits the normal member of an institution ‘spilling the beans’, is simple loyalty to the group.  This would be the normal dominating thought of most people in, say, a firm or factory.  The rule of not ratting on your workmates or colleagues is normally going to create a far stronger inhibition than ideas of morality or a loyalty to a higher good.

The bonds that tie individuals to an organisation are, of course, not just considerations of simple loyalty to the group.  We can imagine a variety of scenarios where circumstances or events create an unquestioned bond to a group which is hard to challenge.  As an extreme example, we have all watched films where the gang leader ties the gang member into the group by forcing him or her to commit a crime.  Once the new gang member has robbed a bank or shot someone, it is hard for them to have any way back from their new status as gang member.  A blackmail situation has been activated.  No one says it out loud, but the threat is always there.  If we get arrested and go to prison, then so do you.   It is hard to see any obvious way out of this conundrum.

From the extremes of a blackmail scenario in a criminal gang, one can imagine many other lesser ways that tie the individual to the group so that whistleblowing becomes unthinkable.  The idea of loyalty sounds like an honourable value, but in many situations, it simply means that the individual has become acculturated to a particular way of doing things.  We recognise that such group acculturation often does not have honourable outcomes.  A group of men might bond together with a common interest in macho activity.  This might include the domination of, or even cruelty, to the women in their lives.  Other movements or groups may indulge in wild conspiracy theories or normalise phobic behaviour towards minorities.  I find it hard to understand how groups of Christians can sometimes act with so much hatred towards those they do not like, such as gays or liberals, unless there are social benefits attaching them to this kind of group loyalty.  Feeling good because your group hates the despised ‘other’ seems a remarkable inversion of Christian values.  But it seems to exist in church settings just the same, seemingly impossible to challenge.

Before we return to a consideration of the whistleblowing phenomenon, it is important to linger for a moment on the account of group behaviour in a church context told by Yvonne and David Shemmings in their reflection on the child-abuse saga in the Diocese of Chichester. https://houseofsurvivors.org/shared-files/1186/?Shemmings_Report_ib4lHC8.pdf  One suggestion that the Shemmings investigated was whether the abuse was organised.  The evidence that was uncovered did not lead them to suggest a conspiracy of abuse.  Rather they found such abuse was to some extent normalised in certain clergy networks so that offending clergy knew others who were, if not active abusers, able to look the other way if any evidence of such behaviour came their way.  In this we are naming another group phenomenon which militates against whistleblowing, the almost sacred devotion to the preservation of secrets.  Supressing information by insisting that others keep secrets is a very powerful dynamic within groups.  Having a secret, knowing something that others do not know, allows an individual to feel endowed with a sense of power and privilege.  One surmises that the popularity of Masonic groups is partly to do with the promise of secrets that will only be divulged to a privileged few.  Cultic groups like Scientology also peddle in secrets about the origin of the universe.  The power of Scientology has lessened considerably since much of this ‘secret’ hidden knowledge has been leaked out to all and sundry.  More powerful than the meaning of masonic symbols and myths and theories about the beginning of the universe, are the human secrets that actually exist in groups like churches.  Sometimes these secrets include hidden episodes of shame which relate to important leaders.  Such leaders are controlled by the fact that, at any moment, documents or oral testimonies could be released which would destroy their reputation and authority.  Where does real institutional power lie in such a complicated situation? The real power in the group probably belongs to the one who possesses the shameful secret, as long as no one has any past secret to reveal about them.  Organisations which alternatively reveal and hide such secrets for political reasons are toxic environments to work in but they are found within the Church as in other organisations. One would prefer the attempt to blow fresh air into an institution through whistleblowing to the rancid air of power games and nervous stress that permeate so many organisations, including our own.

When we return to our consideration of whistleblowing, we might want to express our surprise that it ever happens.  The whistle-blower has not only to face social ostracism and even violence from those guilty of bad behaviour.  He/she has also to overcome the extensive social inhibitors that operate when we are part of any group.  Nobody wants to ‘shop mates’.  We have to conclude that,. when whistleblowing does happen, there need to be some highly principled and brave individuals at the heart of it.  As a general rule we might want to suggest that such people are more likely to be worthy of our admiration than the opposite.  Of course, there may be unworthy reasons for whistleblowing, but I also want to suggest that the person who breaks through all the social inhibitors to stand up and declare the truth is a brave unusual person. 

In our survey of discussing why whistleblowing is a rare phenomenon in society and its organisations, we have noted that the reasons for this rarity have much to do with the nature of groups and organisations and the way they normalise and control our behaviour.  Some of this institutional control is honourable but much is not.  The dynamics of groups can make for a sense of stability but often that stability is very fragile because of the misdeeds and secrecy that can often be hidden within these groups.  Currently the Church itself is going through a number of crises, as its ability to be open and honest with its members is being challenged.  When an institution shows itself unable to be open and honest and selective over the information it shares, an atmosphere of mistrust is created.  Those who challenge the narrative that the Church is ‘on a journey’ to deliver the highest standards of safeguarding to survivors, find that they, along with whistle-blowers everywhere, suffer the sanctions I have described. The Church has considerable institutional power to hit out at such critics which include those who are already victims of church-based trauma.  The sight of a religious-based organisation playing dirty tricks, involving the heavy use of institutional and legal power, is not very edifying.  As I have suggested before, the reverberations of these battles can never achieve what is desired, the protection of the power and assets of the organisation.   What they do achieve is an atmosphere of unease, and a weakening of loyalty on the part of ordinary members towards the leadership. 

The next meeting of General Synod is likely to show up the cracks that exist between the official narrative of unity and competence in the church and the real situation of muddle and intrigue that seems to exist at the centre.  I have nothing useful to add to the gay marriage debate, but feel that an equal amount of time should been given to looking at the present state of safeguarding.  There is, it can be confidently asserted, a great deal of unhappiness in the Church over safeguarding.  The problems do not seem to relate to the training that is being widely shared across the Church but in the reluctance of the Church authorities to speak frankly of what has gone wrong in the past. Coverups, silence and persecution of whistle-blowers creates a toxic environment in which few can flourish or grow.  Whistleblowing is a messy inefficient way of sharing truth, but it is an improvement on all the secrecy that seems to exist at the heart of our national Church. The hints that we are given suggest that maintaining the status-quo in the CofE safeguarding narrative is not only almost impossible for those in charge, but a cause of unbearable stress.  Stress creates burn-out and we have seen a suggestion of this in the rapid turnover of those heading up the NST since its start in 2015.  The forthcoming Synod safeguarding debate on February 9^th will be instructive.  Will the message be ‘business as usual’ or will there be a hint of changes, the kind that whistle-blowers seek to introduce to their organisations everywhere.

by Martin Sewell

When the General Synod of the Church of England meets next week in London, all the attention will be on the well publicised issue of same sex marriage. This is not unreasonable, but it also means that another of the major issues undermining the Church in the eyes of the public, has been pushed way down the agenda. The continuing  issue of the Church’s poor response to survivors and victims is important and it deserves no less publicity.

Unlike so much that goes on at Synod, this is a scandal which is entirely self made and capable of ready resolution, if only there was the desire, drive, commitment, and competence to do so.

Importantly there is significant grass roots unity on these matters across all the traditions; there is no theology in favour of abuse and bullying, and there are people of principle across the traditions who set aside other differences and keep banging their heads against the institutional brick wall whilst the leadership chant their mantra “ we are on a journey”.

Synod members cannot fix climate change, they are gridlocked over gay marriage and most of the general public are not paying attention anyway; the public does know however, that the Church has a well documented history of letting survivors down very badly – often for decades. A bold initiative in this area would demonstrate that we “practise what we preach”. We are still waiting for it.

In February 2023,  Safeguarding has been relegated to the “ graveyard slot” on Thursday afternoon when some folks will be getting ready to catch trains to Truro or Carlisle. It is hardly worth staying for. All members will be offered is a “ presentation with questions” – one question permitted each. That is no basis upon which to hold power to account and that is entirely why General Synod has found itself managed into impotence by the House of Bishops and Church House.

This time however, a group of survivors have prepared their own briefing which is being offered to the Synod members – 60% of whom are new and vulnerable to the kind of blandishments which have stonewalled survivors for years.

This briefing can be read here at https://houseofsurvivors.org/shared-files/1822/?SYNOD-SAFEGUARDING-BRIEFING-FINAL.pdf

Its clarity and focus contrasts significantly with the official report to Synod GS2293 https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-01/GS%202293%20Safeguarding.pdf which is reeks of management-speak and is almost unreadable which cynics might think is not accidental.

There is a  clearer second report GS1335 https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-01/GS%20Misc%201335%20NST%20update.pdf one passage of which  does deserve particular attention. In it, the newly appointed Director of the National Safeguarding Team Alexander Kubeyinje raises the important issue of the abuse that his team members are occasionally subjected to.

I have met Alex on one occasion. I found him a good attentive listener and I wish him well in his role. It helps enormously that he has been recruited from the same secular safeguarding culture in which I practiced as a lawyer and so we are very much “on the same page in terms of how things are best done. We can get down to business without  the preliminary of “comparing notes”.

I am therefore very happy to highlight and endorse his plea for his staff to be respectfully treated and to unequivocally to condemn any improper behaviour. He writes

3.1.  I have been taken aback with the amount of abuse, bullying and harassment that colleagues receive and threat to life on occasions. This has predominately been from a small number of survivors , advocates and others who have concerns with regards to safeguarding across the wider church community . The NST are at the forefront of this abuse which has a detrimental impact on them and their families. I have not witnessed or been informed of any bullying or harassment within the NCI’s .

3.2.  All of them come to work to do a good job, but this is often received with abuse and harassment. However, there is not always a sense of how staff can be protected from such horrific abuse and bullying.

3.3.  As a Church we do have a duty of care to them. There are both legal and moral obligations to protect staff from this. As a result of this, staff will often shut down and not want to engage with the people who are abusing staff which in turn has a detrimental effect on all involved. It must be noted this behaviour is across the NCI’s and is directed from the wider church community to every level of the organisation.

Nobody and nothing should detract from that message, but I think it is proper to make a simple reference to the 1987 Cleveland Report which is one of the foundational documents of the secular safeguarding culture from which both Alex and I come.

Chapter 13.18 of that report addressed a similar issue in respect of parents whose children were at risk of removal by social workers – sometimes a necessary but always an acutely stressful time for all involved. Baroness Elizabeth Butler Sloss wrote

“Families who are in crisis have a heightened emotional response. Anger aggressive destructive behaviour and the possibility of violent impulsive reactions may need to be faced.  The social worker needs to maintain an open structured relationship with the family whatever the social workers personal feelings, it is important to avoid a judgemental or accusatory attitude towards a parent who is a possible perpetrator; the risk of suicide amongst perpetrators who are able to acknowledge their abusive behaviour to themselves or others must be recognised….. Social workers must develop the skill of respecting and supporting the persons without endorsing or colluding with their acknowledged or suspected patterns of behaviour”.

That which is true of stressed perpetrators is no less true of the Church’s innocent victims who routinely find their lives in tatters, in chronic and acute need and running up against  what they perceive to be an unsympathetic bureaucratic structure. When you have walked a few paces in their shoes, being passed from pillar to post around a variety of Church layers at Diocesan and National level with everyone passing the buck and nobody holding ultimate responsibility,  you may not condone –  but you understand why people end up raging against the machine.

Alex is right in bringing this to our attention, but how quickly we are able to solve this particular problem will surely depend on how quickly and effectively we grasp the handful of nettles which make up so many aspects of the Church’s current safeguarding dysfunctionality.

We know we have to put proper structures in place  for the benefit of our victims: we know that doing so can only be for the benefit of the Church’s reputation. Alex, inadvertently but entirely properly and relevantly,  offers a third reason to make our structures and systems as smooth  accessible transparent and effective as possible  – we owe it to our staff who bear the brunt of the frustration caused by the ineffectuality of the current Church  leadership

The Church of England is to have yet another Lead Bishop for Safeguarding.  The Bishop of Stepney, Joanne Grenfell is to take up this difficult but important task at the end of March.  She takes over from Jonathan Gibbs, the Bishop of Rochester.

Any bishop who is unfortunate to have this safeguarding role laid upon them, would seem to deserve our sympathies.  It is a task almost impossible to do satisfactorily.  Why do I say this?  Regardless of experience, qualifications and background knowledge, any bishop who takes on this role is almost bound to fail to win approval from all the stakeholders.  A safeguarding lead bishop from day 1 is going to be pulled in two strongly opposing directions.  These are probably impossible to reconcile.  On the one side there is the army of survivors and victims who believe that a senior Church of England figure will have the power to resolve their complaints against the system, either as someone falsely accused, or as a survivor.  The lead bishop may have enormous compassion for these individuals caught up in the safeguarding meat grinder.  In practice he/she has neither the time nor authority to do anything significant to change the situation for them.  On the opposite side there are the people of power in Church House or Lambeth Palace who ultimately make the decisions about the mechanisms of safeguarding.  For them, the Lead Bishop is an important bulwark of defence against the torrent of complaints that regularly come from members of the church to the central bodies.  The Lead Bishop has to be discouraged by these men of power from making any promises – financial or pastoral – that cannot be met.  Everything in the church’s protocol must be done in an orderly fashion.  In practice, this involves delay and spinning out cases so that the minimum resources have to be used up in dealing with the endless safeguarding torrent.  How any individual could survive having these two contradictory roles at the same time – listening to the pain of victims and defending the institution – is beyond me.

One detail about the lead safeguarding role announcement now being handed on to +Joanne, and which comes to her rescue, is the fact that appointment is only to be held for three years.  There are two ways of looking at this time limit.  One is to note that three years are by no means long enough to get to grips with all the multiplicities of knowledge that are potentially required of anyone doing this job.  I have, on this blog, set out some of the skills that I believe are required from an individual seeking to be considered a safeguarding expert.  They are clearly likely to be beyond the capability of any single individual.  An understanding of law, psychodynamic theory, organization theory, history, theology and trauma studies should ideally be expected of anyone claiming even a modicum of expertise.  This list could be lengthened further.  Safeguarding is not a set of skills that can be acquired overnight. 

The brevity of the term of office for the safeguarding lead can be understood to have another purpose.   Alongside the difficulty of fulfilling the expectations that I mentioned above, there is another way that a brief period of office can serve a valuable purpose.  It allows those with power, but hidden behind the scenes in the Church, to retain their control of the whole process.   No one who serves only three years in any role within an organisation, is ever to be fully on top of the skills that they need.  By default, those who appoint them (and control them) will always have the power to set the agenda over the way the job is done.  Scope for independent initiative in this area is extremely limited.  The same constraints seem to apply to anyone holding senior office in the CofE. From the Archbishop downwards, senior clergy all appear to be speaking from a single agreed script.  This has all the appearance of being thought up and curated by invisible teams of advisers and public relations personnel.

When we take a closer look at the situation of the current Bishop of Stepney, we find additional factors in the appointment that are a cause for concern.  These may seriously compromise her ability to do the job.  +Joanne is said to be experienced on safeguarding matters, and this interest would certainly have given her detailed knowledge of what has been happening in her area of London.  She will know all the background detail of two major safeguarding episodes. Many would refer to them as scandals.  She will be aware, in the first place, of all the anxiety raised among many of her clergy in her area over the ‘information dump’ made by Martin Sargeant at the end of his time working for the diocese.  There are many threads to this story, but the one that must have touched +Joanne (and given her sleepless nights) was the anxiety experienced by many of her clergy who lived with the thought that some uncorroborated safeguarding accusation was going to be made against them. No one has accepted any responsibility for Father Griffin’s suicide.  No doubt more information will emerge but, until it does, there is, I understand, a state of acute mistrust among many clergy over the behaviour of senior staff in the Diocese.  They must have serious questions as to whether the senior clergy are capable of bringing the sequence of events that were set off by the Griffin suicide to some satisfactory conclusion.

Another safeguarding episode that continues to haunt the part of London over which Joanne has episcopal oversight, is the case of Survivor N.  The details of this story have appeared the Church of England Newspaper and elsewhere.  It will certainly be familiar to +Joanne, even though she was not Bishop of Stepney as the time of the alleged offences. It is unnecessary for me to name the individuals mentioned in the saga.  In summary, it is a highly credible story of homosexual abuse with a CDM taken out against a well-connected clergyman who holds a post in Joanne’s area. Because of the power/status of the alleged offender, Survivor N was subject to some unpleasant harassment, including legal threats from the diocesan lawyers.  The failures in this case seem to have been chronic on the part of the Diocesan authorities.  Even though the whole episode started before +Joanne’s time, and her personal leadership is not a issue in the case, she is still part of a senior team responsible for bringing justice and closure to the events. Survivor N was let down very badly and was driven to attempt suicide. The current failure is in the fact that the case has still not, to my knowledge, reached a conclusion.  The pattern that seems to prevail is that, when  CDMs are taken out against senior clergy, the eventual judgements are not given any publicity.  In this case the complaint and the victim’s pain received an international notoriety.  This was to do with coverage in the press, and partly because a song about the case was composed and performed by a well-known Irish folk group.  We hope that the CDM complaints will not be allowed to fade away.  I also hope my readers will listen to this song from last August 2022 and feel some of the passionate anger expressed by the musicians on behalf of the victim/survivor.  https://survivingchurch.org/2022/08/29/a-song-from-ireland-in-support-of-survivors-of-church-abuse/  The survivor himself was much helped by the thought that an internationally acclaimed music group had taken up his cause in standing up to the power of the London Diocese.

One of the features of the lyrics of the song, Collusion, is the naming of a firm, employed by the London diocese for crisis management, that took a full part in the persecution of Survivor N. This crisis management company, Luther Pendragon, is also used by the Church of England centrally as well as at least three dioceses, including Winchester and Oxford.  The reputation of this firm with other survivors is, to say the least, extremely low.

+Joanne thus now finds herself in a diocese plagued with some serious unresolved safeguarding episodes.  There may well be others not in the public domain.  Regardless of the personal and professional skills that +Joanne can bring to the post, one cannot help but question whether a diocese with such serious outstanding safeguarding crises is the right platform from which to advise the national Church.  Is it not difficult to promote good practice right across the Church of England dioceses when the situation in the home diocese is, to say the least, messy and confused?  The job of being lead bishop on safeguarding is a tough and unglamorous undertaking.  Can we realistically expect excellent service from a junior bishop who seems already to have a plate-full of safeguarding issues to deal with in her own local area?

I end with the final lines of the lyrics about Survivor N’s story.  It raises a question for my readers and all who have responsibility for bringing justice and compassion to the Church.

I sing of gentle people daring to complain

I do not sing for vengeance, I do not sing for gain

I sing that Christianity be Christian once again

It was announced in another blog that Michael Reid, the former head of Peniel Church in Brentwood, died on Friday 13^th January 2023.  Those who have followed this blog for a long time will be familiar with the name.  My interest in this larger-than-life charismatic leader formed an important focus for this blog over a period in around 2015. 

Why was writing about Michael Reid and Peniel important to me in the early days of Surviving Church?  The simple answer is that Reid became, for me, a classic embodiment of many of the outrageous examples of spiritual power abuse that I was uncovering when I started my study of the topic 20 -30 years ago.   In the mainstream churches, by contrast, such things were being better concealed in the 90s.  My documented case studies, as readers of Ungodly Fear will know, came mainly from free churches on the fundamentalist/charismatic end of the spectrum.  Back in 1998 when I was writing the book, I was aware of Reid’s church, Peniel Brentwood, which was an independent charismatic congregation.  My wife and I visited the church and attended a service around that time, but loud alarm bells did not ring immediately.  It was only a little later, after my book had been published, that I realised that Peniel and its leader, Reid, was a vivid example of a church that contained many examples of the toxic abusive behaviour that I had been describing in my book.  I started to correspond with one Nigel Davies, a blogger whose family had been seriously damaged through membership of this congregation.  He has, right up till today, used the power of protest to demonstrate in person outside the church, now known as Trinity Brentwood.  Over the years his protests have been extended to include other congregations within the Elim network.  This is the denominational grouping that Peniel (now called Trinity Brentwood) chose to identify itself with after Reid was forcibly removed as leader in 2008.

For those of my readers who have the time/interest to look it up, there is a great deal of information on this blog from around 2015 about the appalling events in this congregation under Reid. After the forced resignation in 2008, there was a brief ‘Prague Spring’, but it soon reverted to its old controlling and abusive ways under a new leadership.  Peniel/Trinity cannot be the only church that finds it hard to face up to the legacy of a past abusive history.   Reid had been sacked for sexual misdemeanours (consensual? adultery), but the appalling trail of cultic intimidation and financial skulduggery was, arguably, even more serious.  Eventually the church agreed to investigate its own past after a credible complaint of rape was made against one of its own members.  The report that appeared in the autumn of 2015 and to which I attach a link at the end, is a very important document even seven years later. This report, written by an eminent evangelical lawyer called John Langlois, runs to some 200,000 words.  It was, and remains in my belief, the best and most vivid and detailed account of a British church committing abuse against its own membership.   At the time that it was released, I frequently referred to this Langlois report on this blog as a way of illustrating how the narcissistic behaviour of one man could create so much havoc and pain for so many.

The removal of Reid was not easily achieved.  Court cases had to be fought as Reid regarded the church buildings and plant as belonging to him personally. By 2008 the church had, through the dint of congregational financial sacrifice, acquired a considerable portfolio of property, including a large premises for a school.  This building later sold for £6m.  One part of the battle that Nigel Davies has been valiantly fighting for, is that some of this money, accumulated by the bullying techniques of Reid and his henchmen and women, should be used to compensate some of those who had lost everything in terms of education, mental health and financial stability because of their involvement in the church.  Although Reid’s name is now probably no longer discussed or remembered by the current congregation, Davies claims that much of the wealth of the church belongs morally to a past generation who were ruthlessly exploited and abused while members of Peniel.

When recording the death of an individual, it is customary to add the letters RIP to the name.  In this case I hesitate to do this.  This is because of the way that so many individuals, young and old at Peniel, lost their peace by having it taken from them.  My blogging work brought me into direct touch with several Peniel survivors, including an American girl who had come to Brentwood in the 90s to study at the so-called Peniel Bible School.  Instead of learning, this cadre of girls were exploited as cheap labourers for the Church.  Those who administered the scheme made sure that they could not escape by confiscating their passports on arrival and intercepting their letters from home.  Exploitation of vulnerable foreign girls sometimes extended to a situation of sexual abuse.   It was, in fact, in response to one specific complaint of such abuse, that the church was forced to set up Langlois’ investigation.  Also, the entire congregation had experienced forced labour, by having to turn out regularly to work on the estate and the grounds.  This was expected of the youngest children as well. All this is described in great detail in Langlois’ report.

When I was writing my commentaries in 2015 on Reid’s behaviour as revealed by Langlois, I was always hoping that such behaviour would never be found in the Church of England.  While it is true that the cult-like atmosphere of Reid’s congregation would be difficult to find in an ordinary CofE parish, there are still many, some uncomfortably close, parallels in common church leadership styles.  Langlois described many of the classic power games and techniques at work in Reid’s leadership style.  We find the typical methods of coercion and control, including shaming and ostracism.  Reid also seems to have enjoyed playing off one family against another, retaining to himself the power of supreme authority.  It is first from reading about Reid that I learned some of the classic biblical texts used by abusive leaders against those seeking accountability.  ‘Touch not the Lord’s Anointed’ and ‘Obey your leaders and defer to them’.  These were the passages quoted endlessly by Reid in the ruthless manipulation of the people in his congregation.  Obeying Reid meant, for example, cruelly turning the back on those who decided to leave, after daring to question Reid’s leadership.

Peniel/Trinity Brentwood concerns have disappeared for seven years from the discussion in this blog.  I could be said to have moved on from considering the horrors of Peniel in Brentwood.  Reid’s death, however, has had the effect of triggering a memory of his abuse horrors. I am reminded of my own reflections and attempts to understand the wickedness of Reid and the way he acted with such appalling cruelty against the people he was supposed to care for spiritually.  The Langlois report continues to remind us that spiritual/power/sexual abuse is alive and well in the Church and those of us who see this must do all we can to expel it from Christian circles.

Some concluding reflections on church power abuse, triggered by the death of Michael Reid

1 Any church leader, who works in a pre-existing or created hierarchy, will experience the temptation to obtain gratification by ‘lording it over the flock’.  A church leader needs to have a strong system of self-awareness and accountability that makes it difficult to succumb to this temptation.   Just because a candidate for ministry may begin training strongly imbued with a desire to serve, it does not mean that this sense of humility will stay the course, without the need for constant monitoring.

2 A temptation to exercise power inappropriately in a church is normally found in one or more of three areas, power/status, sex and money.  Male pastors seem to be more readily attracted by power abuses than the female.  Female power gratification does, of course, exist.   I do not need to spell out the appalling damage that sexual power abuse can wreak in a congregation whether directed against adults or children.  Financial dishonesty, or even a preoccupation with financial power can also create serious damage to a church.  It does not have to be illegal to be corrupting. It is a temptation for some to see financial success as spiritual success when it may be no such thing.  Tithing is not biblical, whatever ‘prosperity’ teachers may declare.  There is nothing in Scripture to suggest that all our charitable generosity should be directed at and through our local church and its leaders.  Indeed, handing over so much financial power to church leaders may create the conditions for abusive power that are spiritually and morally dangerous.

3.  Michael Reid’s legacy of causing pain, humiliation and lasting damage to many of his flock at Brentwood is a learned lesson to be heeded by every congregation.  A full 14 years since his forced retirement, means that only a few will now remember his life and career. The fact that there exists an extensive and detailed report of all the failings of his congregational oversight and the sheer suffering he inflicted on young and old, means that something is left, albeit negative, of his ministry.  The events and pain inflicted on so many at Brentwood between 1980 and 2008 are episodes that should never be allowed to be buried in the mists of history.

The Langlois report on Peniel Church Brentwood 2015

https://www.dropbox.com/s/e3578t7pt87jvci/Langlois%20report.pdf?dl=0

In the last couple of days an important decision from the Solicitors Regulation Authority concerning the CofE has appeared in the public domain.  It is not a story recounting outrageous immorality on the part of a church leader, though the report does have a link with the late Bishop Peter Ball and his crimes.  It recounts the unprofessional behaviour of a single individual who used to work as Registrar or chief legal officer for the Anglican Diocese of Gloucester.  The officer concerned, Christopher Peak, has now seen his registration as a solicitor removed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.  This story has some importance in the wider relationships between the Church and the legal institutions of this country.  Every member of the Church is, in a slight way, affected by the special legally enforceable rules that operate in the work of the national Church.  There are certainly hundreds of professionals who are employed to oversee legal matters in the dioceses and at a national level.  It is to be hoped that these qualified professionals will always give good service for the substantial sums of money that they earn to manage this aspect of church life.

At the heart of this legal story is not a decision or a court case.  It is the account of a total absence, over a twenty-year period, of any challenge or legal questioning over a legal saga.  The context of the case is the arrest and subsequent Caution of the then Bishop of Gloucester, Peter Ball for offences against young men.  This part of the story is well-known. Having voluntarily agreed to vacate his see in 1992, Ball went on to an active retirement ministry for some twenty years.  Eventually the case was re-examined, and Ball served a fifteen-month sentence in prison for his offences.   The part of the story that is less well known is the fact that the Gloucester Diocesan Registrar, Christopher Peak, acted as a personal solicitor to Ball when the case first came into public view in 1992.   In short, Peak agreed to negotiate with the police and the legal authorities in the task of mitigating the crimes of Ball.  In this he seems to have enjoyed a measure of success, as Ball, despite his Caution, went on to enjoy many more years of retirement ministry.  Somehow, Peak failed to recognise that it was totally inappropriate for him, as a chief diocesan legal officer, to act at the same time on behalf of his bishop under criminal investigation.  In non-legal jargon, can it ever be right to represent the interests of the diocese and an accused bishop simultaneously?  Is this not a case of a lawyer tolerating a clear conflict of interest?

The twenty-year gap that I have referred to above represents the period (1992- 2012) where Peak, the chief legal officer of a diocese, having legal responsibilities for promoting the welfare of that body, had chosen to identify with one party in a criminal case. One does not criticise Peak for taking on the role of a defence solicitor, thus presenting the best possible case for an accused party.  Peak was entitled to defend Ball, but he was not entitled to have the role of representing the interests of the diocese as its Registrar at the same time.  This conflict of interest should have been obvious to Peak as its head legal official.  It should also have been obvious to others working in a legal capacity around him.  For twenty years this situation of obvious conflict of interest was tolerated without any awareness of dissonance. Because Peak would not have been able to represent the diocese ‘without fear or favour’ in a legal case involving the former bishop and his diocese, he was compromising his ability to protect the diocese.  No doubt, there were those within the church legal system nationally, who might have spotted something wrong with the situation.  Somehow we suspect that the power of vested interests were wanting to keep a firm lid on any examination of what had gone wrong.  In the end, it was not church lawyers that blew the whistle of what had been going on; it was the work of some lawyers following the case from the National Secular Society.  It was they who, thirty years after the event, obtained this current ruling from the Solicitors Regulatory Authority.  This deemed Peak’s behaviour as worthy of official censure and sanction.

Why is this story important?   It is important for at least two reasons.  The first is that legal offences by those working for the church, when they occur, have been, historically speaking, rarely challenged.  The conflict of interest involved in having the Diocesan Registrar acting as a personal solicitor for the bishop should have been fairly obvious to anyone working in a legal capacity in Gloucester at the time.  One suspects that deference to Peak by lawyers and church dignitaries alike supressed any such challenge.  As Registrar and probably the most highly paid servant of the diocese, it was probably not difficult to overawe any potential opposition to his legal activity as personal solicitor in defending Ball.  Initially, at any rate, the diocesan clergy unanimously supported Ball and it was only later that the possibility of guilt gradually dawned on them.  The second factor is linked to the high financial rewards payable to lawyers who work for the Church. Just as Peak used his skill and power to successfully manage things legally for Ball, so we have witnessed the raw power of well-paid lawyers working openly to intimidate their victims in the case of the Christ Church/Percy case. We have discussed in earlier blogs the way that conflicts of interest were clearly apparent in that long-running saga. At Gloucester, the power of a Registrar acting as a defence lawyer must have been considerable.  We know from the Charity Commission statement that the fees charged by the church lawyers working for Christ Church and Diocese of Oxford were massive and one suspects that considerable sums of charitable money were also spent defending Ball.  We should always be able to expect the highest standards of ethical behaviour from lawyers working for the church.   Somehow the events of recent years when specialist church lawyers have been involved have meant that our confidence in the church’s legal system is not as secure as we would like it to be.

The Peak affair is something that could easily be buried under the ecclesiastical legal carpet.  It is however, I believe, saying something challenging to a future generation of church lawyers.  After failures and evidence of legal malfeasance over recent years, the wider Church will always be watching your behaviour with greater scrutiny.    In return for the millions we spend, and have spent, on legal services, we expect one thing above all.  We expect the very highest standards of morality and ethics. These are already laid down by the legal profession itself as it seeks to serve the public in a variety of contexts. Breaches of trust, conflicts of interest, protecting reputations and institutional bullying should never be found coming among church legal officers.  Also, protecting such behaviour, when practised by church dignitaries, is not part of your job.  We need the service of good lawyers to help the Church of England in its work, but we need to be able to assume that you fully share our highest ethical values, even if not necessarily our beliefs.  These values indeed already belong to your ethical and professional training.  They include respect for all, justice, equality under the law and high levels of personal integrity.  Recent failures by church lawyers in preserving such values have put many of us in a state of high alert.  We want to see that the church legal system is being used to promote the cause of justice and goodness and not a means to bolster reputation management and indulge in unjust power games which damage so many.

Having struggled through the New Year season with Covid, I make no apologies for delays in writing a few words for my readers.  For me and my wife, the virus has manifested itself as a streaming cold, a hacking cough and a high temperature and I realise that I have had little energy for writing over the past couple of weeks.  What I offer here is shorter than usual, but I trust my readers will be understanding as I try to get back to normal.

The word that sums up this season is simply the word ‘new’. I realised as I was thinking about this word that it is not one describing an objective reality. Something may be new to one person but not to another. The individual who has not yet seen an object or had a particular life experience is entitled to describe them as new on the first occasion when they are encountered.  While there are some things that are universally new to everyone, most ‘new’ experiences are only special to the individuals concerned.  This quality of newness, such as one marking an age milestone, is nevertheless very important to those involved.  The newness of marriage, parenthood, adulthood is something we commemorate and often share with others.  We recognise how important these new milestone events are in people’s lives.  By our joining in such celebrations, we help to emphasise how delighted we are to share an experience of newness in another person’s life.

Newness is not just about marking and celebrating these life milestones, whether those of other people or our own.  It also describes about a quality of living that sees the way that everything around us is constantly in a state of flux and change.  The world of nature allows us to live in a world of beauty and growth where we see constant change.  It is perhaps much easier not to notice what is is going on around us, how, for example, each day in the year has its own special quality.  The light of the sun in winter is of a different quality to that of summer.  Each season also has its own glory.  The changes and constant newness all around us are a constant source of delight and joy.  The one thing that is required to enter this world of delight is our readiness to pay attention.   It takes effort to notice the new.  Humankind has a regrettable preference for what is predictable and repeatable.  We thus find it easier to shut out anything not needed for the immediate task in hand.

The capacity to embrace newness in the world of nature by people is an attractive quality.  It makes us want to try harder to cultivate this appreciation or sense of wonder in ourselves as a way of honouring God as the creator.  There is a wonderful passage in Psalm 8 when the psalmist speaks of the ‘work of thy (God’s) fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained’.  If appreciating God’s beauty is to become an honoured part of our spiritual make-up, then we should probably take more trouble over it.  We would like to think that our recognition of the newness of everything around us, is indeed part of our Christian faith.  This may be the case, but it cannot be allowed to stand on its own.   To serve God merely by recognising his beauty in nature would be an in incomplete, even lopsided, form of faith. 

There is one further way that we are called to engage with newness.  Christianity sometimes involves deliberate activity.  We may see something that ought to be done and we determine in our minds to take the necessary actions to bring it to pass.  Knowing that the people around us have similar needs to our own allows us to make an effort to serve those needs when we can.  Every decision to speak a word of encouragement or support to another person takes courage on our part.  When we do it, it is a deliberate action and it is new in the sense that it has never happened before.  Our potential actions towards other people all have the possibility for good.   In this potentiality there is enormous hope for change, newness and even transformation.  Perhaps we make less effort for the people around us because we have started to get too used to them and take them for granted. Just as the view from our own front window becomes so familiar that we stop noticing it and take it for granted, so we so easily do the same with people.  To say that other people, even those closest to us, have so much more to be engaged with, is probably an understatement.  As with the seasons, the growth in nature and the beauty of light interacting with plants and animals, so the people around us, the ones we take for granted, have so much to appreciate about them.  It does, however, require some kind of deliberate attention or application to reveal what we should want to find in that that over-familiar, maybe even stale, relationships.  But if we believe that everything is capable of being made new, then we should give our full attention to areas of staleness in our personal lives.  To see what is new in everything and everyone around us is perhaps a truly Christian resolution for the New Year.

In Revelation 21, in a passage often read at funerals, the one seated on the Throne says, ‘Behold I make all things new’.  Exactly what is being made new in this passage needs discussion and interpretation and there is room for different opinions on this. Nevertheless the ideal of newness being a divine gift to replace brokenness, death and loss has a powerful resonance. In whatever situation we find ourselves in we are always in the need of newness.  The interesting thing is that such newness is always available if we truly look for it.  It is available in the world of beauty and nature, and this is a gift for all, regardless of any religious background.  But newness is also promised in our relationships.  As Christians we are expected to explore the possibility of new relationships.  Here we find the discourse of reconciliation, forgiveness and restoration.   These are words about newness that very much belong to the Christian narrative.  There is a great deal of hope to be found here.

The idea of New Year has a powerful resonance whether we are talking about a Christian audience or an ordinary secular one.  Both can respond to that idea that newness involves hope and possibilities for the future.  Christians have their own account about the content of their hope, but every human being can be drawn into a narrative of good things that are possible if we are prepared to make the adjustment to listen more carefully and pay attention to what is around us.   Newness in the world, in other people and breaking out of staleness and routine is part of the way that the world becomes changed.  When we see a changed world both in the world of nature or in relationships, things start to shift.  We become part of and begin to create a new and better world.   Somehow, we have begun to put into practice our participation in the changing of the world that God is still creating, the world where all things are made new.