Few of us have lived through a moment in history that could truly be described as revolutionary.  The historians among us can point to certain pivotal episodes that powerfully changed for ever the experience of whole countries and the individuals within them.  Three political upheavals come to mind which have a clear claim to be called true revolutions.  In each case the populations are still experiencing the effect of what then took place.  These revolutions that come high on the seismic scale are, respectively, the American (1776), the French (1789) and the Russian (1917).  There have of course been numerous other lesser revolutions in Britain and elsewhere, but none come close to these three I have named. In each of them there was radical change – change that happened almost overnight.   

What are the features of a revolutionary event that make it significant and history-changing?  The word implies a turning upside down of the old order.  The old has passed away for ever, never to return. An entire population may be forced to accept a new reality about the way they are governed.  Resources of property and power may be reordered.  Sometimes the rich and powerful are deliberately persecuted, and an entire new class of people is created to manage the new system.  The only time in my life that I have witnessed, at first-hand, events which were thought at the time to be a revolution, are the political upheavals in Greece in 1967-8.  I watched the way that the traditional intelligentsia was shoved into the shadows (or prison) and a new bullying class of bureaucrats elevated to run the government and the police.  In short, officialdom became harsh and coercive.  Fear of strangers became the norm. The person you were speaking to might be an informer reporting to the State.  What I am briefly describing has been the norm for many unfortunate nations, and, tragically, is once again being reasserted in the occupied areas of Ukraine.  The deep irony of so many of these oppressive regimes is that they believe themselves to be pursuing commendable revolutionary aims.  In the case of Russia and the political oppression of parts of Ukraine today, the political justifications (removing Nazis) have turned out to be totally spurious. 

The word revolution is one that can also be applied to an event in any institution where dramatic irreversible changes take place.  Looking back over the past ten years in the CofE I detect three events that are revolutionary in the sense that they were unprecedented and at the same time irreversible.  To describe any event as revolutionary is of course a subjective assessment, but I would suggest that as the result of these three moments something really important has taken place.  The first pivotal moment for the CofE, and indeed for the whole of British society, was the revelation of the horrendous behaviour of Jimmy Savile in 2012.  I do not intend to dwell on this evil individual and his nefarious behaviour, but rather comment briefly on the seismic shift in attitudes which we witnessed throughout every institution.   After Savile, many abused individuals were able to come forward to disclose their stories and know that they would now likely be believed.  Many British institutions have had to face up to the presence of sexually abusive individuals within them.  The way that football, athletics, schools, and prisons were found to be infested with many abuse cases is an issue that we are still dealing with. The CofE, along with many other institutions, has been compelled to allocate considerable sums of money to provide training and expertise for both its employees and its members to deal with this massive problem.  Safeguarding for the vulnerable, however much we may critique its implementation, is something that is here to stay.  From a historical perspective, I see a direct link between Savile’s dreadful behaviour and the setting up of our NST in 2015.

Locating a second revolutionary moment in the CofE takes us away from the world of safeguarding to another theme often considered by this blog, the exercise of power in the Church by bishops.  It could be claimed that in our CofE, the power of the bishop to teach, admonish and discipline has been traditionally unchallenged.  In recent decades we have seen the growing influence of synods, but these have not claimed ownership of all manifestations of traditional episcopal power.  The power available to diocesan bishops remains considerable.  If a bishop decides to use his power arbitrarily, even tyrannically, there is nothing readily available in the system which has the right to challenge it. Only criminal activity or breaches of safeguarding rules are subject to sanctions exercised by other authorities.  Traditionally, the system has worked through the expedient of extremely careful vetting and formation for senior posts in the Church.

 The second revolution in the CofE took place in the Winchester Diocese in 2021 when a group of senior clergy expressed their intention to propose a vote of no confidence in their diocesan, Tim Dakin, at the Synod.  +Tim was not being accused of safeguarding or criminal offences but rather of presiding over a regime of bullying, fear and the destruction of morale in the diocese.  As far as I can tell, such a challenge against a bishop has never before been recorded in the CofE.  The fact that this threat ultimately led to the retirement of +Tim indicates that a powerful precedent has been set.  It is now possible for Synods to challenge the power of bishops when they are believed to be abusing this power.  Diocesan Synods would only ever rarely seek to propose such a vote, but the way that bishops exercise their power in the future must surely subtly change to take account of this event in 2021.  Another such challenge may well resurface at some future point in another diocese.  The genie is out of the bottle and cannot be put back.

The third revolution that has taken place in recent weeks is the extraordinary sight of a bishop seeking to control criticism of his actions by resorting to legal processes and the threat of a defamation suit.  Such an action has never, as far as I can gather, happened before in the Church.  I am course referring to the recent story of a CofE bishop publicly trying to shut down critical comments made on the Archbishop Cranmer blog.  The basic issue here is not who is right in the interpretation of the events under dispute.  The question that has to be faced is whether a bishop or, indeed, the wider CofE, stands to gain anything from an extraordinary and clunky demonstration of episcopal power.  Threatening anyone with legal action, before other methods of conciliation have been explored fully, does not make good publicity for the Church. Indeed, even the threat of such action may change the way that bishops are regarded in the future.  The public will be aware that such legal action costs money and institutions which spend money in this way rapidly undermine a willingness to provide voluntary donations in the future.  The law is a clumsy way of settling disputes at the best of times.  When legal processes are used by an organisation which purports to believe in reconciliation, love and goodwill, something looks out of kilter.  A bishop is known as the chief pastor in his/her diocese and any recourse to legal threats seems to be a denial of all the values implicit in a pastoral relationship.   My instinct tells me that this precedent of invoking the law to intimidate someone who is raising their voice to challenge power will not end well.  It will have a variety of unforeseen and possibly damaging consequences both locally and nationally.  I doubt if the bishop, using the sledgehammer of legal methods, has thought all these through. The political climate of the Anglican Church is already fractious over matters of sexuality and doctrine.   Opening fresh ‘fronts’ with critics in new areas is wasteful of energy and much needed resources.  The Diocesan Synod in this case will be concerned to see any of their charitable funds expended in this way.  There will, rightly, be calls for mediation and dialogue rather than the use of the blunt methods of a legal process.  The story, whatever its outcome, will be long remembered and the reputation of all bishops diminished in the eyes of many people.  The ordinary churchgoing population of the diocese will also have less incentive to attend, let alone give generously to their local churches. 

Three events or episodes- each may be seen as revolutionary in their implications for the life and functioning of the CofE.   Each episode was an unprecedented moment which has perhaps changed the history of the CofE for all time.   First, we are all living in a post-Savile world.  That horrendous episode forced everyone including members of churches to take the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable more seriously than before.  The enforced retirement of the Bishop of Winchester has changed the idea that bishops in the CofE are beyond criticism or accountability.  In the same way the use of legal threats against an individual for exploring what happened in a notorious episode of power abuse within the church, suggests that the role of bishop currently needs re-examination and re-discovery if the idea of episcopal oversight is to remain a viable and helpful one for the Church of the future.

Writing a recent blog, I found myself reflecting how we sometimes make decisions and take actions based on firm convictions that exist inside us. On other occasions we find ourselves thinking and behaving in ways that more reflect the values and attitudes of the people around us.  We could categorise these two modes as, respectively, individual and tribal behaviour.  At my boarding school in my teens, we were all required to join the Combined Cadet Force (CCF).  Most of us accepted this as part of the price of living in a post-war world where there was a vague possibility of a foreign army invading Britain.  Only one boy argued his way out of this obligation on the grounds of a convinced pacifism.  I was impressed with the fact that he argued his case in front of the headmaster and successfully convinced him of his personal convictions.  The idea of having a conviction which went right against the assumption of the crowd was then something new to me.  It was and is so much easier to go along with whatever everyone else is thinking or doing.  The voice of the crowd, or the tribe, is a powerful force and few of us will resist it unless there are exceptional circumstances.  The crowd mind is also a place of apparent strength.   To embrace it in religion or politics is also to feel safe and protected from the isolation and the sense of weakness that can come as the result of going it alone.

The ability to preserve a unique personality and individuality in the face of the tribal forces around is a huge challenge, especially for the young.  We are constantly being pulled in several directions simultaneously.  A lot of the energy we feel is coming from the groups around us, urging us to fit in.  In addition, another part of us is fully aware that we are unique.  We do have our own convictions as well as a functioning conscience.  Thus, we have an individual contribution to make either to the family or to the wider society.  Nevertheless, the constant pull towards conformity and practising other forms of group behaviour persists.  It is a balancing act and probably few of us get it right much of the time. Perhaps the most important task is for us to recognise that there is a struggle to be had in working out who we are individually and the temptation to go along with the easier option of tribal behaviour. Having some awareness of this struggle will perhaps prevent us ever going too far down the path of mindless conformity.  The place of balance is one which is worth searching for even if we do not always find it.

We often, in talking about balance between extremes, refer to the idea of a continuum.  This word evokes the picture of a measuring rod with people choosing which place to occupy along its length.  Some will cluster at one end, others in the middle, while others will find themselves at the far end.  Two examples of continuums will be familiar to all my readers.  The first is to be found in politics, where the language of left, right and centre is firmly embedded into our discourse.  We are also aware of the way that a quasi-political language exists to describe church practices.  We speak about extremes of conservative evangelical belief or high church practice as though people occupy a place somewhere on this scale.  Most politically active adults find themselves remaining fairly securely identified at one point on the political continuum and this may not change over a lifetime.  Others consciously move up or down this scale, reflecting changing convictions or different life experiences.  In a church context we might say of an individual who moves from a conservative stance to an open evangelical position that he/she has moved towards the centre.

Returning to the contrast we began with, the distinction between tribal and individual conscience-driven behaviour, I have come to see that both ways of functioning exist along continuums.  It is never a case that one sort of behaviour is right and the other wrong, it is always a question of balance.  To take the, person who acts out of his/her conviction or sense of independence, there is the distinct possibility that their individuality has been taken to an extreme.  We have a word to describe the extreme of individuality, and the word is narcissism.  When somebody acts out a personalised agenda with absolutely no sense of what others are thinking, that is not likely to result in acceptable behaviour.  The descriptions of narcissism, which include the ideas of entitlement, grandiosity and failure of empathy, all point to a crass insensitive individuality which is not acceptable.  In other words, the fact that an individual is not looking to the tribe for cues on how to behave does not make them an example of heroic and commendable independence.   Their behaviour can be harmful and destructive to others. 

If narcissistic individuality is at one end an extreme of poor behaviour, we can imagine that we might find at the other end an isolated sad individual who has withdrawn into a place of complete non-engagement with others.   This place of non-engagement is not to be judged on moral grounds, as the cause of such a stance may have much more to do with upbringing and poor nurture.   We mention it because, describing in brief these two ends of the individual continuum, we can be more aware of a central balanced point which is the optimum place to be.  I leave it to my readers to imagine what the ‘mean between extremes’, as Aristotle might have put it, looks like.  If we know we have to avoid the crass exploitative manipulations of the narcissist and the sad place occupied by the isolated individual, most of us will have some sense what the optimum place of individual functioning will look like.

The second continuum, where we need to find a place of balance, is the one where we recognise that our human functioning requires us to fit in with the tribe or crowd.  We recognise how this external force is exerting pressure on us.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  What is bad potentially is when we cannot ever see that this force is working on us.   At that moment we are a part of a tribe.  We need, for example, to have some understanding that the socialist ideas that we expound are linked to the social circles we move in.  To claim that our political convictions are uniquely worked out by our intellect and individual conscience is probably dishonest.  This is not wicked in any way, but it marks a failure of insight which may make us less empathetic to the position of others.  It would be unrealistic to suggest that what other people think or say has no bearing on our actions and thoughts.  Again, it is a question of balance.  The continuum for this crowd behaviour will have, as one extreme, the place where the individual is completely dominated by the group – the ‘we think’ brigade.  Nothing original is permitted inside our heads and every stance we take has to be in accordance with what the leader or group have decreed.  We see this type of behaviour in cults but also, sadly, in churches.  Some churches are quite good at destroying the individuality of their members to create a uniformity which is destructive of a balanced humanity.  I am not clear what the opposite extreme of this continuum looks like, but it might belong to the person who believes that they can live without community but in a proud self-sufficiency.  However we describe the two ends of the community/tribal spectrum, we know that there is a place of balance in the continuum where such things as mutuality, love and interdependence can flourish.  We need other people and other people need us.   Getting that particular balance right takes skill and experiment.  To use another word that has cropped up recently in these blogs, we need to be oscillating along the spectrum to find the right place to allow both our individual thinking and our social existence to flourish.

This reflection has attempted to explore something of the dilemmas of being human.  The word that we keep coming back to is the word balance.  Being human and Christian, we need to find a balance in our lives.  We need to avoid the extremes of self-inflation/narcissism and over exposure to the dehumanising of crowd/tribal behaviour.  Those who lead us will accomplish their responsibilities so much better if they are aware of these dynamics which seek to trap us in human conceit and self-inflation or, alternatively, destructive self-deprecation. 

My thoughts on balance within our lives, finding altruistic love for others rather than selfish exploitative behaviour, are naturally inspired by Christian ideals.  Fitting together these ideas about the place of balance and seeing how they are exemplified in the teaching of Jesus is still a work in progress.  Meanwhile I sense that we can see Jesus as one who well understood the competing pressures of individuality and belonging to groups. Sometimes that tension which he faced led to family fallings-out.  What was going on in Jesus’ mind when he uttered those memorable words in front of his mother and family?  ‘Who is my mother and who are my brothers?’ This same Jesus showed an acute sense of family when he uttered the words from the cross ‘Behold thy mother’ to the beloved disciple.  Jesus lived the same tension of living out a unique vocation with balancing a human need to belong.  All of us have in different ways to resolve this tension of individuality and belonging.  It is something that comes with fact of being human.  Awareness of the problem is a first step in finding a way forward that does justice to our well-being and flourishing as Christian men and women,

Up till now I have avoided writing anything about the Scottish Episcopal Church (SEC) in this blog.  I still have personal contacts with that Church having worked as a Rector in a congregation (charge) on the edge of Edinburgh for 7½ years.   In many ways these were the happiest years of my ministry. Having returned to England in retirement, I have wanted to retain the fantasy that things such as bullying and safeguarding problems did not happen in Scotland.  When a problem arose last year in the diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney, linked to possible power abuse, I hoped in vain that the issue would quickly go away.  I was keen to believe that the saga could be resolved in a way that would not disturb my idealised memories of the SEC.

On Saturday last, the 11th of June, the Scottish edition of The Times carried a story which brought up-to-date news of the ongoing saga of Bishop Anne Dyer, the SEC Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney. In summary, the diocese of Aberdeen has been troubled for some time by stories of alleged bullying and abuses of power by the bishop. Bishop Dyer, who had been Warden of Cranmer Hall Durham, was appointed Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney in 2018. The appointment had been complicated by the fact that the normal protocols for choosing a bishop by election had failed to produce an agreed candidate.  In such a situation the choice is left to the College of seven Scottish bishops. Up to this point no woman had ever been selected for the office of Bishop in the SEC and there were among the clergy of the diocese a number who objected to such an appointment. The problems that have arisen subsequently are apparently nothing to do with the gender of the bishop but with her management style. Scottish Episcopal dioceses are, by English standards, extremely small (Aberdeen has 48 churches and around 25 clergy).  Clergy and bishops meet up far more often would be the case in England. If there are any personal difficulties or clashes, they will become disruptive very quickly.

The immediate cause of a dysfunction in the diocese related to the state of disrepair at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Aberdeen. Without going into overmuch detail, the bishop decided that she would nominate another church in Aberdeen to be a pro-Cathedral, pending some long-term resolution of what should happen to the cathedral building. The whole question of how to merge clergy and congregations seems to have been poorly handled.  Great resentment was generated among various stakeholders, including the musicians at both churches. Bishop Dyer’s people skills seem not to have been of the highest and the whole confrontation became serious and very public.  One respected senior clergyman in the diocese had his licence removed by the bishop. When this crisis spilled over into the wider church, the College of Bishops asked Professor Iain Torrance to conduct an enquiry and make recommendations as to what should be done. Iain Torrance is a highly respected figure in church and Scottish circles and has acted as Moderator of the Church of Scotland.  The report, published in a digest form, seems thorough and professional. One comparison we might make with similar reports in England is that the whole exercise was completed in a few months and the SEC received Torrance’s services without charge.  In summary, Torrance concluded that the evidence pointed to the conclusion that Bishop Dyer should be urged to stand down because her position as bishop was ‘irrecoverable’. 

The College of Bishops now found itself in a dilemma. Should they accept this report and encourage Bishop Dyer to retire or should they ignore the report and seek some other way forward?   It seems that the bishops have placed the Torrance report into a pending file.  Earlier this year, the College asked a group of three mediators to try and solve the breakdown of communication between Bishop Dyer and some members of her diocese. Meanwhile the Bishop seems to be working, but the Torrance report hanging over her must lessen her authority.  The College of Bishops are in a difficult situation. If the mediation effort that they have set up fails, what other options of resolving this problem are left to them?  As in England, bishops are authorities to themselves and there is no other legal authority able to force Bishop Dyer to retire.  We need also to remember that it was difficult to find a suitable candidate for bishop last time.  Next time, after these ‘local difficulties’, it will be still harder to find an acceptable candidate. The College of Bishops relate to one another as equals.  No individual possesses the authority to tell one of their number what to do. Bishop Mark Strange of Moray, Ross and Caithness is the current Primus. His status is that of first among equals, primus inter pares. He does not have the role or authority of an Archbishop

The new information published by the Saturday Times adds another dimension to the story and puts further pressure on Bishop Dyer, and indeed on the College of Bishops. The reported story relates how a lawyer called Peter Murray working in a legal firm called Ledingham Chalmers, took on work for the bishop and the diocese.  The story reminds us of the way that sometimes bishops in England, under some sort of pressure or challenges to their authority resort to expensive legal options. The diocese of Aberdeen is, of course, tiny by English standards. Also with each charge responsible for paying and housing its clergy, the sums for which the diocese is responsible are probably small.  Without having any figures in front of me, I am guessing that the annual total budget for a diocese in Scotland would seldom exceed £250k.  In the years before Bishop Dyer’s appointment in 2018 in, the diocese typically spent £3k a year in legal fees. The Times story centres around the fact that, since Bishop Dyer’s appointment, the diocese of Aberdeen has spent £120k on lawyers at Ledingham Chalmers. Peter Murray, the lawyer named as receiving this largesse, is also a trustee of the diocese and a personal friend and supporter of Bishop.  It would appear reasonable to suppose that the vast increase of expenditure was directly connected to the litigious environment that Bishop Dyer’s management style has created.  There seem to have been no checks and balances to challenge the way that this money was being expended.  Readers of this blog will be familiar with the theme of charitable money being spent to preserve and protect the personal/professional interests of individual bishops and their circle.

In retelling this story about the SEC and the way that, once again, charitable money ends up in the pockets of well to do lawyers protecting institutional interests and reputations, one has a sense of sadness. Lawyers do have a part to play in church management and administration, but one weeps for any situation where churches or dioceses are paying out large sums to legal personnel who fail to observe the highest standards of ethical behaviour.  The problems in Aberdeen have now been compounded to a point where it is hard to see how this particular story will have a happy ending.  The College of Bishops have placed their trust in a mediation process which will now be more difficult to resolve in the light of these new revelations of financial mismanagement. The Scottish equivalent of the Charity Commission will no doubt be involved, and an investigation ordered.  Once again, we will have the unedifying spectacle of a report which will show how the charitable contributions of the faithful have been allowed to pass into the hands of lawyers without any obvious benefit for the public good.

I write this blog post with a sense of sadness and disappointment. Whenever a scandal, sexual or financial, breaks there is always a weakening of trust in the institution involved.  The Church of England has seen a steady loosening of trust towards its leaders over recent years. When trust is weakened in this way, the strength and integrity of the whole institution is lessened.  I wish I could see a positive outcome for the present SEC crisis. What we really require is some strong inspirational and  decisive leadership. This is also required for the Church of England.  It is currently hard to see where this will come from. It certainly is not much in evidence at the present time.

One of the features of the Christ Church Saga is that there is now far too much information for anyone but the most assiduous individual to process. There are literally thousands of online pages of facts, speculation, claim and counterclaim. Most people will end up with only a subjective impression of what has been going on in the College and Cathedral over the past four years. Even if they arrive at a conclusion about what they believe to be the truth, few would be able to marshal all the necessary facts that would allow them to argue confidently either for or against the Dean.    Ordering all the information in a way that will convince a third party of the stance we are taking is probably not possible for most of us.   Having said all that, I am and always have been a supporter of Dean Percy. This is a position I arrived at based on a knowledge of his character over some thirty years, but also backed up through my, no doubt incomplete, study of the available online information.  I know that by saying that I have to be extremely careful in how I present my supporting material.  First, I know that writing on the topic can bring threats of legal action by the teams of lawyers actively protecting the College and the Diocese of Oxford.  Secondly there is the question that I have already alluded to.  I recognise that a supportive position requires a fluency in all the facts surrounding the case and this I cannot claim to have.  Out of my study of all the massive amounts of material available, I find myself left with three outstanding questions.  If I were to be able to find the full answer to these questions, I believe I would be a long way towards having an insight into what is, for me, the most interesting part of the Percy saga – the motives and feelings of those who persecuted him over four years. Reducing the whole Percygate saga into a reflection on the motives of certain individuals caught up in a nightmarish event, is not meant to be an accusatory rant.  The story, however, lends itself to such speculation and questions.  Perhaps the best we can do is to arrive at a place of puzzlement over the behaviour of otherwise highly intelligent human beings.  I hope that, by pondering the questions I pose, my reader can perhaps be helped to have a new, more manageable, grasp of important parts of the story.  Asking pertinent questions, even when we cannot provide complete answers, is surely a valid way to penetrate deeper into the truth of what has been going on in Oxford over the past few years.

My concern in asking questions about Percygate is not to uncover new facts but to understand a little better the dynamics of the affair and how it was set in motion.  There are episodes within the saga that cry out for explanations at a number of levels.  Much of the time we do not have answers to these questions.  We have only our surmise and speculation. The asking of questions is still a useful thing to do as it helps us to understand better.  This first question I have centres around the original confrontation between the Dean and members of his Governing Body (GB) when a group led by the Christ Church Censors sought to remove him from his post for “immoral, scandalous or disgraceful conduct”.  In 2019, in the course of this dispute, the accusation was taken to a formal Tribunal.  Here a retired judge, Sir Andrew Smith, presided and heard 27 charges. . The hearing took place over 11 days in June and July 2019.  When the judgment was given in August, it resulted in a near total vindication of the Dean.  All the charges against him were overturned. My first question concerns the circulation of this Smith report.  All the members of the GB were technically party to the prosecution of the Dean, but the group of Censors and ex-Censors, overseeing this prosecution, decided that the report should not be read in its entirety by all the members.  The redacted version that they were allowed to read omitted mention of the misbehaviour of certain individuals and also left out an appendix 5.  Here Sir Andrew had spelt out the details of unpleasant, even vitriolic, e-mail exchanges between certain members of the GB about the Dean.  Members of the GB were explicitly forbidden to read the full unredacted version later forwarded to them by Jonathan Aitken.  They were instructed to return their copies unopened and unread. My first question is simply this. What were the grounds which led the committee of Censors and ex-Censors to believe that it was right or just to make this demand of the GB? In issuing such a prohibition, the Censors seemed to be treating the wider GB as children, children who could not be entrusted with sensitive information. Whatever the detailed answer to my question might be, it is clear that the Censors and ex-Censors, the dominant clique in the GB, wanted to ensure that they were in control of the flow of information within the College. This single episode in the whole saga reveals an aspect within the story that puts these Censors in an unfavourable light. Whenever important information is denied to those who have a legal right to see it, we are likely to suggest that there is here little regard for justice, transparency and proper process.  Evidently power games are being played out rather than the neutral pursuit of justice.

The next question I have to ask comes from a later stage in the whole process. It is at the point after the accusation of improper behaviour has been made against the Dean in October 2020 over what is commonly summarised as ‘Hairgate’.  The allegation against the Dean was responded to by both the Church and the College authorities. Because of the accusation, the Dean was required immediately again to cease his duties in the cathedral and College.  The Church process required the taking out of a CDM against the Dean.  As part of the procedure, an independent reviewer, Kate Wood, was brought in to make a factual report and also recommendations to the Bishop and the NST.  My second question does not focus on any of the interviews with the complainant or the Dean but on one particular aspect of the CDM process. A CDM requires that a risk assessment be drawn up.   This will set out the conditions under which an accused person should be managed, pending some kind of hearing.  Somebody – it has never been established who – produced a most extraordinary document which was meant to set out the risks posed by the Dean. The document has the hall marks of being an inhouse piece of work.  In this risk assessment, the writer appeared to believe that the Dean was a danger, even a potential sex predator, to every individual working in in the College. Overnight he was prevented from having any contact with a single person in the College on the grounds that he was a danger to them. My second question is not about the authorship of this extraordinary document. My question is simply this.  Who within Christ Church, the diocese of Oxford, the Bishop’s staff and the safeguarding team actually believed in the contents of this document and that it in any way reflected reality? It appears that this risk assessment was ‘approved’ by the entire diocesan staff, in spite of its murky origins.  It is hard to see how anyone close to Christ Church or the Diocese had any reason to suppose from the available information that the Dean was a danger to anyone. It has been pointed out that the Bishop had the authority to seek help in drawing up a risk assessment which would be uncontaminated by either the politics of the Cathedral or Christ Church.   Instead, the Bishop stood by this homemade document of doubtful provenance.   I am told that there are ten qualified people in the Oxford area able to do this work of risk assessment. As we all know, the subsequent judgment by Dame Sarah Asplin declared that the alleged offence, if it took place, was not overtly sexual and did not merit a Tribunal process.  Dean Percy had never had other accusations made against him of sexual misbehaviour. We are left unable to explain how a group of Church officials suddenly became caught up in an extraordinary group fantasy.  This postulated that there was among them a sexual predator of such rapacity that everyone in the College and Cathedral needed protection from him. The results of this calumny have been seriously harmful and far-reaching to the morale of the Cathedral and the whole diocese.

The final question is about the future. When, at some time in the future, the full story of the Great Persecution is told and the details of the motivations and the skulduggery uncovered, we might hope for the wounds to begin to heal.  In the meantime, we await the arrival of the forces of reason and justice, perhaps mediated by the Charity Commission.  Their verdict would do much to tidy up the terrible legacy of this affair.  One thing is certain is that the reputation of individuals in Christ Church and the Church of England has been badly damaged.  It is also apparent that some individuals have allegedly behaved in a truly wicked fashion, leading to a major scandal which will take decades to heal. My final question is this.   Is the Church of England prepared to use its considerable powers under the Clergy Disciplinary Measure to sanction and discipline its clerical members if they are shown to have been involved in gross misbehaviour towards the Dean?  Spite, malevolence, and jealousy all seem to play a part in the saga, alongside a kind of group insanity.  The Church has a duty, if it finds this kind of irrational bullying, to show its displeasure and demand sanctions from those found to be guilty. Some are also calling for an Archepiscopal Visitation to the whole Diocese of Oxford, like the one carried out for Chichester in 2011. The nature of the alleged misbehaviours may be different, but their effect, in terms of weakening the reputation of the entire Church of England, is comparable. If the Church at the highest level ignores what has happened in Oxford, that will be one more nail in the coffin for the reputation of the Church in the wider society.

For further fresh insights into the affair, please consult the Nineveh Website. https://nineveh.live/?page_id=75

        by Janet Fife

I arrived at my office in the church to find a cartoon taped to my door. It depicted a smoking church, with shaken and singed members of the congregation departing. One of them says to the minister on his way out, ‘Nice to hear a good old-fashioned sermon again, Rev.’  Someone had pencilled in underneath, ‘We’ll have the fire extinguishers ready!’ I can’t remember what text I’d been assigned to preach on that Sunday – I was still a curate – but clearly I’d gained a reputation for preaching some pretty judgmental sermons.

That was part of the tradition I’d grown up in, where preachers ‘dangled sinners over hell’, like the 18th C preacher Jonathan Edwards, or ‘challenged’ their hearers ‘to within an inch of their lives’. It was all done in love, of course:  people had to be ‘convicted of their sin’ before they would turn to God. So in all earnestness I would declare that ‘God is not impressed’ by this or that aspect of human behaviour.  I knew very definitely what was right and would please God, and what was wrong and would make God angry. Certainty is so reassuring.

It was at some point after that cartoon was left on my door that I sat in that same office preparing a sermon.  And an inner voice said to me, very clearly, ‘It isn’t your job to convince people that they’re sinners. That’s the job of the Holy Spirit.’ (See John 16:8.) I saw then that my role was not to convince (‘convict’, in evangelical parlance) people that they were sinners, but to attend to those who were already worried about their sin.  To those people I might minister forgiveness, healing, restoration. Or, as often happened, I might reassure them that they had done nothing wrong. I recall one woman, who came to see me who was tormented by guilt and could find no peace. Her offence? On her first ever visit to church she had taken communion, not knowing she ought to have been confirmed before taking part.

Many of us will, at one time or another, have taken part in a social media conversation among Christians where some of the participants refuse to accept that there is more than one valid point of view on a contentious topic. Not content with merely stating their own views, they imply that anyone holding a different opinion is wilfully disobedient to God. ‘The Bible clearly says, x, y, or z, and everyone who wants to obey God agrees with me.’ There is no recognition that faithful Christians might differ as to the interpretation of the Bible or the will of God; no nuance. If others in the discussion quote Bible verses that appear to contradict their stance, they ignore them or explain them away. If opposing arguments are backed up by citing Bible scholars, those authorities are dismissed as unsound or second rate. Nothing can shake their apparently impenetrable assurance that there is only one version of the truth, and it is theirs.

This is not a new phenomenon. St. Paul, writing to the Romans, said: ‘Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarrelling over disputable matters. One person’s faith allows them to eat anything, but another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. The one who eats everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does, for God has accepted them.  Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.’ (Rom. 14:1-4 NIV).

The question of whether or not to eat meat may not sound too serious to us, but to first-century Christians living in Gentile cities it posed a serious dilemma. Much of the meat sold in the market came from animals which had been sacrificed in a pagan temple. Therefore, the meat on a Christian’s plate might well have been sacrificed to an idol. To some, knowing the idols had no real existence, this didn’t pose much of an issue. Others felt strongly that it was a risk no Christian should take.  This might be that they believed the idols had demonic power, or because the believers had converted from the other religion and were afraid of being lured into slipping back, or for some other reason. For whatever reason, they contended that true Christians ought to make their devotion to Christ alone clear by abstaining from meat. Real Christians were veggies.

I was born in 1953, and in my lifetime the defining issues of ‘soundness’ for evangelicals have included the following:  not wearing make-up (for women); not having long hair or beards (for men); not dancing, drinking, smoking, playing cards, listening to rock music, or seeing films; the right beliefs about the Second Coming of Christ, the Tribulation, Rapture, and Millennium; predestination vs. free will; the authority and infallibility of Scripture; eschewing vestments, candles and incense in church; wearing a cross rather than a crucifix; opposing the ordination of women; and believing homosexuality to be sinful.

Some of these are still contentious issues, but the heat went out of others long ago. And while British evangelicals have never been much exercised over dispensationalism and the details of the Rapture, their American equivalents never had a problem with cosmetics. My mother, speaking to a church ladies’ group in the Chicago suburbs in the 1960s, recounted how shocked British evangelicals had been when the Billy Graham team arrived in England in 1956, and the wives were wearing make-up. Unfortunately, it turned out there were several of those same wives in her audience, and they were affronted. That was the last time my mother ever spoke in public.

Anglo-Catholics will have their own shibboleths, as will traditionalists. Observing Ascension Day on a Sunday; the position a priest takes when celebrating; whether ‘virtual’ Communion is valid: almost anything can be loaded with immense and eternal significance. I have known charismatics maintain that everything from paisley fabrics to Body Shop products are demonic and must be eschewed by truly devoted Christians.

Which all reminds me of the therapists’ axiom:  ‘The presenting problem is never the real problem.’ The real issue is not eating meat, the infallibility of Scripture, or LGBT people. The real issue is a deep, unspoken fear that God cannot possibly love us enough to accept us despite all our sins and mistakes. It’s a dread of what happens when we die. It’s a (probably unacknowledged) rage that has to find an  acceptable outlet when Christians are expected to instantly forgive and forget even the most terrible wrongs committed against them. Or it’s the preacher’s own guilt projected onto others, as with my abusive father or my colleague Geoff, who was outed by the News of the World as ‘the dirty dean of Salford’ after advertising ‘Happily married man seeks sex with no strings attached’.

It took me years, even after I stopped preaching judgment on people, to realise that the eagerness to do so sprang from my buried anger at my father and other abusers. I had grown up among evangelicals who believed that the ‘abundant life’ Christ brought meant we should always be smiling and full of joy. And two vicars had counselled me that I must forgive my father for the abuse; one even told me that if I was still angry after a single session of prayer I must be ‘demonised’. So what acceptable outlet could I find for my rage, other than to condemn those who could safely be regarded as sinners? One of my greatest regrets, looking back over my life, is the people I damaged by doing so.

I wonder if Paul had similar regrets. At any rate he, the ‘Pharisee of the ‘Pharisees’, the absolute stickler for the letter of the Jewish law, writes to the Romans that it is the punctilious Christians who have the weaker faith. This is of course the opposite  of what I was brought up to believe. It seems also to be the reverse of what many contemporary conservative evangelicals still believe.  The CEEC (Church of England Evangelical Council) has this week issued a video which includes the following statements:

‘If you and I disagree about what the Bible says is good, and what can receive the affirmation of God…we have a fundamental problem.’

‘We can’t agree to disagree on these foundational issues of sexuality and Christian living because Jesus says they’re issues of eternal significance.’

‘This particular issue goes to the heart of what we believe, not particularly because of what people do in their bedrooms, but because of what it says about God.’

The video is, as you will have guessed, about whether the Church of England should be accepting of same sex relationships: but over the years and the centuries the same things might have been said about many another issue which is now not an issue. The speakers will all have been absolutely sincere in their belief that LGBT+ is the most important and defining topic for the Church of our day, but it’s not clear to many of us that they are right. If Jesus said anything at all about homosexuality the gospel writers didn’t record it; and how can affirming gay Christians say anything bad about God?

However, I don’t intend to get into a discussion here about homosexuality; my theme is our tendency to judge each other about decisions which are really between the individual believer and God. We rightly condemn those activities which harm others:  slavery, theft, adultery, violence, sexual abuse, slander, and so on. We are right, too, to be truthful about corruption and injustice where we find it. But I now believe that we should be very slow to call sinful those activities that don’t harm anyone else. We don’t know what God is doing in someone else’s life, but we do know that it’s the Holy Spirit’s job to nudge them if what they are doing is displeasing to God. I end by parapharasing Paul’s wise advice to the Romans:

‘The one who is liberal must not treat with contempt the one who is conservative, and the one who is conservative must not judge the liberal, for God has accepted them.  Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.’

The forthcoming Jubilee has allowed the older ones among us to dredge our memories to recall where we were when the news of the death of King George was announced to the nation.  I was in my two-form rural primary school in Kent.  One of the children from the class above came into our form room to announce the news. The broadcast of Music with Movement for schools had been interrupted to share the news with the public. I do not remember any strong signs of emotion being displayed.  More shocking was the announcement of the assassination of President Kennedy eleven years later.  The violent death of prominent people was not something that we were used to at the time or expected. 

Reading accounts of past events that we were part of, in some sense, is a fascinating exercise.  One thing that is of interest to me is to reflect and discover how long it took for any sense of party politics to enter my thinking and my imagination.  As a student in the mid-60s there was a great deal of political activity going on around me, but I did little to get involved.   Everything seemed to be pointing the way to a political revolution that many believed to be imminent.  The Vietnam war was polarising the young people of my age in the States. The short but bloody 1968 confrontation between the Russian tanks and the crowds of Prague was heroic, inspiring and tragic all at the same time.  The student uprising of the same year in Paris galvanised many young people into political awareness and activism.  I was one of those who, until the end of my time as an undergraduate, was a complete political innocent.  It took a prolonged stay in Greece under the Colonels to awaken any political fire inside me.  My exposure there to a cruel fascism introduced me to the emotion of political passion.  For the first time I began to be able to imagine something of the zealotry of young people around the world, who at that time were prepared to risk their lives to change a political system.  

Politics is not only about a dominant group which makes the rules that govern a country.   Alongside the ideology of a ruling party in government we have other levels of political activity, as, for example, the belief systems of institutions.  In the late sixties, speaking in a very generalised way, it could be said that the universities and churches were predominately in a left-wing mode.  For me, a participation in this ideological social movement was experienced by my attendance at a huge student conference in Manchester in 1969.  This conference was entitled Third World First.   The very definite left-wing bias of some of the speakers was apparent in their use of incomprehensible Marxist jargon.  These were hard to listen to or understand. There was enough, however, to latch on to elsewhere to make it worthwhile.  We had the inspiring words of Archbishop Helder Camara of Recife in Brazil.  He helped to convince his audience that the future that beckoned us had a distinctively socialist feel.

Beyond the world of politics and universities there was yet another ‘lefty’ revolution going on, this time in the theology of the churches.   In a revealing chapter in her recent book with Nicholas Peter Harvey, Unknowing God, Linda Woodhead speaks of the communitarian strand of modern philosophy and theology.  This was flourishing in the sixties and, according to Woodhead, was typically expounded by the influential philosopher John MacMurray. This writer had a great influence on my own thinking from the time I read one of his books in 1964. The theme of much of MacMurray’s writing is a simple one. He articulates the idea that each of us only finds ourselves in our relationships with other people. In other words, community is the primary reality, and it takes precedence over our individuality. In this mode of thinking we find several other theologies which emphasise the communal and which were very popular and influential in this period.  Among them we have feminist theology and liberation theology.  Both are examples of Christians attempting to explore theology as it touches groups.  At the time, like many others, I found such ideas enormously attractive.  They also fitted with another strand of theology which I was learning from my study of Orthodoxy.  The theme that I was noting is summed up in the word Sobornost. This is one of those words that is best not translated.  It is a Russian word which is itself a translation of the Greek word koinonia.  That word has the idea of human community and participation in the divine.  At theological college I was attracted to the ideas of John Zizoulas who wrote a work on the eucharist. He claimed that the church finds its true identity as it gathers to celebrate this rite of communion with God which also binds together its members.

Looking back, I can see how thoroughly immersed I was in the communitarian ideas that were current in the sixties.  Woodhead’s short essay has allowed me to recognise how much I was feeding on the prevailing fashions of the time. There is nothing shameful about this attraction, but the dangers of going too far down this path can be faced afresh as we look back.  Woodhead’s writing is able to point out, from a contemporary perspective, the drawbacks of taking on too much of this mode of thought.  One of the interesting expressions of this thinking was the wide embrace across the Western world of a belief in communes.  Many, if not most of these experiments, ended in tears as the idealism which started them could not overcome the many practical issues that this kind of community living involves.  I have also listened to endless accounts of the ‘cults’ where idealism was betrayed so that a community became a focus of pure exploitative power. One student at my theological college went off to live in a commune immediately after ordination. This was supposed to be a great new idea in politics and in the church. Too much idealism does not solve problems like responsibility for cleaning and washing up. The Christian commune at Blackheath survived only a couple of years.

Woodhead’s article is of great value as it sets out the danger of a church life and a theology that draws deeply from this communal vision.  She also recognises that the opposite to it, what she calls atomised existence, is conducive to loneliness and isolation.  Any excess of community is often going to be claustrophobic and dangerous.  Community of the wrong kind can involve the loosening of barriers that mark out where we end and another begins.   This can be exhilarating but we all need appropriate boundaries to defend and protect us from exploitation, bullying and abuse of various kinds. Finding the right balance between atomised existence and an over-intimate association with others is difficult. The article dramatically points to the way that sexual abuse is a forcible wrecking of the needed boundaries that should exist between us and others.  We desperately need them for our psychological and emotional well-being.

We all face the problem of finding out who we truly are. Over the 10 years when I have been involved in cult survivor circles, I have seen how easily people can become sucked into extremes of community living. They give so much of themselves to the cult, its leader and the ideals of the group, that it is extremely hard later to escape and find their true self once more. I wonder sometimes whether church groups understand the dangers of what appear to be cult-like practices in their communities. We recently mentioned the dynamics of the John Smyth ‘cult’.  He completely undermined the self-determination and identity of his young victims. For many of them the task of reconstructing the self is still proceeding some 40 years later. Peter Ball did something similar to his victims.  It took exceptional courage for survivors in both cases to step forward and make a complaint. Simultaneously we need to remember that not by any stretch of the imagination is everything about religious community bad.  The danger here is when such communities allow their members to step over a line into a form of undifferentiated merging with others.  We need to spend more time addressing this tension in church life and how we need to preserve a healthy place which balances our need both for community and individuality. The same balance is needed in our political life.  Fortunately, we have the resources of Scripture to help us to find who we truly are in Christ.  We never need to be enslaved in the ideology and control of another person.

Over my lifetime I have seen in politics and religion the oscillations between promoting strong independent individualism and the insistence on new forms of tight community. On this blog we have noted the tension between placing ourselves under a strong charismatic leader or seeking to go it alone.  It is indeed hard to find exactly the right place to be along this spectrum.  The place of true balance in our religious and our political life is, nevertheless, worth searching for.   The two extremes of total independence and a merged personality have to be wrong, both from the theological and the psychological perspective. The important thing for a Christian is to understand the seductive nature of both these positions so that they can avoid embracing either of them. We are not meant either to be a strong superman/woman, owing nothing to anyone or, on the other hand, a porous personality able to be swayed and manipulated by everyone in sight. I believe that the resources of Scripture combined with an intelligent reading of the psychological literature can help us to know what is, for each of us, healthy territory to occupy. My short reflection here on this post has perhaps made us aware of a map that needs to be drawn by each of us.  That map may help us to live in the right place, a place that is simultaneously open to God, to other people and to our true selves.

  

One of the things we learn very early on in life is that if you are going to have an argument with someone, it is a good idea to agree on what you mean by the words you use.  Numerous discussions over the years have proved to be a waste of time when you discover that your starting point or the words you were using were being defined in quite different ways by the person you were talking to.

In recent safeguarding news stories in the press and elsewhere we have also been encountering situations when two sides use words which have quite different meanings from one another.   Martyn Percy has been reminding us, in his recent article on the Modern Church site, how words are indeed slippery things.  In the novel, 1984, published in 1949, one of the themes is the way that language becomes a tool of oppression by the ruling clique.  Hitherto wholesome words, like freedom and truth, have their meanings totally subverted so that no one quite knows what they really mean anymore.  All that can be said with certainty is that in a 1984 context, words are defined to fit in with what those in authority have decreed.

One word that has been giving problems in recent years, particularly in a safeguarding context, is the word independent.  I spent time trying to define in an earlier blog what this word might actually mean.  In a church/safeguarding setting there does seem to be a particular problem in knowing how we should understand the word.  The Church of England authorities appear to believe, for example, that the word can legitimately apply to a group of people working at Church House and paid for with central church funds.  To believe that any group working with such constraints can be properly independent in a meaningful sense, is to enter a 1984, Alice in Wonderland fantasy.   Here words mean anything that the speaker decides they mean. The word independent has now been so overused that perhaps it needs to be avoided as much as possible.

Is there another word that might replace independent, now that it has had its meaning undermined?  The last time the word was used appropriately was when the Government set up the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).  Since then, there have been so many times where the word has not been used accurately and credibly that the very mention of the word sets off alarm bells. Independent, in other words, has lost much of its meaning and needs replacing.

In the middle of wondering how the Church could recover the idea of independence in the way that it allows others to scrutinise its work, I encountered the 300-page report written for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in the States.  According to the New York Times on May 22^nd the report, compiled by Guidepost Solutions, recorded how nearly 400 individuals employed within the SBC have been convicted of sex crimes since 1998.  This scandal broke first of all in 2019 through the diligence of two newspapers, the San Antonio Express and the Houston Chronicle.  A major theme in the revelations was the criminal inertia of those at the top of the denomination.  The official line taken by the denominational leaders was that their power to intervene was severely restricted by the fact that Southern Baptist congregations were separate entities.  They were thus independent of the denominational structures.  According to this latest report, this did not stop the denomination holding 700 records of the malfeasance among its clergy members, while doing nothing to warn congregations of the dangers posed by these individuals. Offenders could thus flit from church to church and be free to offend again.  Meanwhile, congregations who were tolerant of women’s ministry or gay marriage were disciplined or even disfellowshipped from the SBC.

Even after the newspaper revelations of 2019, it has proved extraordinarily difficult to get the SBC leadership to come clean about its failings, both locally and nationally.   Typical responses have been that the revelations are the work of the devil trying to destroy God’s work.  One particular prominent campaigner, Beth Moore, who went public with her outspoken comment on the SBC leaders’ failings, saw them as being in the context of ‘the sexism and misogyny that is rampant in segments of the denomination.  She also attacked the opposition towards the group responsible for the current report.  ‘If you still refuse to believe facts stacked Himalayan high before your eyes and insist the independent group hired to conduct the investigation is part of a (liberal!) human conspiracy or demonic attack, you’re not just deceived.  You are part of the deception.’

The SBC has been profoundly affected by the report and its findings.  Readers can access the material for themselves and read whatever other follow-ups appear after the publication of this report.  The telling point I take from this report is that it was undertaken by a group that was truly independent.  As such, the report was not afraid to challenge the institution to the point where it was accused of severely wounding the entire denomination.   One piece in Christianity Today calls the report ‘the Southern Baptist Apocalypse’.  The other turn of phrase that most struck me in the same article in CT is the expression ‘third party’ referring to the way that the report was written by an outside group.  This set me to wondering whether we could challenge the Church of England to say, when they wish to use the word independent, whether they really mean ‘third-party’.  By using this latter expression, they would be making it absolutely clear that the individuals making a report or assessing material were working from a position of impartiality and objectivity   The expression ‘third-party’ is far less capable of being manipulated than the word independent.  I am going to avoid using the word again unless the person I am communicating with is using it as a synonym of ‘third-party’.

In-house reports or internal investigations within the Church can never be independent in the strict meaning of the word.  The issue I want to present here to members of the Church of England is not to go on arguing about the meaning of independent.  That is probably a futile discussion.  They have allowed the word to appear in the context of the Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB).  Quite clearly that entity is not qualified to use the adjective as a self-description.  I do however want to see third-party investigations take place in many sectors of the Church where safeguarding failures have been identified. This is a job for the outsider, the third-party investigator.  The one obvious institution that still has the power to investigate the Church’s safeguarding failings with third-party objectivity is the Charity Commission.  They possess the objectivity and the power to challenge the extraordinary way that, even when the Church produces a self-critical report, no one in its ranks ever receives sanctioning or suspension.

In a recent tweet, Andrew Graystone reveals that six Church of England bishops, currently serving, knew about the Smyth scandal before it became public knowledge.  An independent review, evaluating this claim, might conclude that there was no case to answer as the knowledge of these activities took place a long time ago.  A third-party review might take, in all probability, a much harder line over such a revelation.  It might suggest that any institution that tolerated such laxity over matters of truth is in serious danger of moral collapse through its own lack of integrity.  To combat this, there needs to be a public display of brokenness, transparency and contrition.  Looking at the problem as objectively as possible, we might want to take the independent line or the third-party line.  I know which position I would favour. The harder line is, I believe, the way forward, not just for the flourishing, but even for the survival of the Church of England.  

The war in Ukraine has reminded us all of the vital importance of such things as morale and effective leadership. If there are factors that are causing severe damage to the military ambitions of the Russian army (and navy) in Ukraine, it is partly as the result of extraordinary failures in these two areas. We are all witnesses to the incompetence and disastrously low morale among the Russian forces. They are often demoralised, disorientated and increasingly ineffective against a Ukrainian army buoyed up by international support and a keen sense of the rightness of their cause. As we ponder the reported drunkenness and brutish behaviour of ordinary Russian troops in Ukraine, we are also aware of the serious deficiencies of their political and military leadership right across the board. All institutions suffer if those in charge have such a deluded and distorted grasp on reality. Here the situation has been made worse by the high numbers of deaths among the officer class in the Russian army. We are told that one legacy from Soviet days is the way that junior officers are not permitted to make decisions or use personal initiative on the battlefield. A flexible response to a new situation cannot easily be put into effect without a confirmatory order from a senior officer. He may be absent a long way from the front line. This makes for a fighting force burdened by delays and slow reaction-times.

I begin my reflection on leadership in the Church by looking at how this one institution, the Russian army, is being failed by an inflexible and inadequate style of leadership. What would good military leadership look like? Beyond noting the extraordinary lack of preparation for war by the Russian political leadership, I have nothing particularly useful to offer to answer this question. I would merely note that if you allow endemic corruption to exist within any institution, you destroy the possibility that the ordinary people in the organisation will have confidence in what they are called on to do. Decades of corruption, grift and political interference have crippled the Russian fighting efficiency and capacity to wage war. One hopes that similar handicaps are not allowed to interrupt the fighting potential of the armies in democratic nations. In armies and other organisations, we depend on trained professionals to lead and guide members to run things smoothly and efficiently. Leadership skills are necessary wherever groups of people are being organised to work together to achieve a common purpose. Good leadership contributes to material and human productivity while bad leadership results, as in the Ukrainian conflict, in human misery and institutional failure.

Before I make some comments about leadership in the Church, I want to sketch out some of the things that we look for in all leaders, whether for businesses, political institutions, or religious bodies. The first thing that comes to mind, as I consider the task of a leader, is that every leader should embody the values of the institution. A leader in a manufacturing company will not spend a lot of time on the shop floor with the workers, but the relationship between leader and led will be enhanced if the leader has made it his/her business to understand as much as possible of the technical details of the institution’s output. This familiarity with technical detail is not simply good for public relations. It also helps when the leader must make some decision which affects all the workers or subordinates. Good relationships with the workforce have a moral aspect. By this I am indicating the importance of there being trust on the part of the shopfloor in the absolute integrity of the person making decisions affecting their lives.

Leadership, I would maintain, demands morality to be built into the desired relationship with those who are led. If any sense of the leaders behaving without scruple is felt, the morale of those led is affected. The other aspects of leadership, efficient administration, productivity, and charisma are all vitally important, but the need for moral behaviour by a leader stands supreme. It has been instructive to note the rapid decline in the fortunes of Hillsong Church around the world. What failed were not changes of doctrine or the quality of the worship, but the upholding of moral integrity by the leaders. When Hillsong was attracting famous pop stars and celebrities to its numbers, it must have felt very ‘happening’ and on trend. Once the stories of misbehaviour began to leak out, the things that appeared to be glamorous overnight become seedy and repellent. I make no predictions about the future of Hillsong, but it is hard to see the ‘brand’ surviving for the long term.

The Church of England, and the groups linked with it, are currently facing their own problems with leadership. We look to such church leaders to provide guidance both to individuals and to our national political institutions. For the Church to speak truth to its followers or those who hold positions of power in society, it needs to be confident that its own moral integrity is unblemished. There are a variety of current problems in the Church at present which raise serious issues of trust. From time to time promises are made by those in authority to the wider church. Then after a couple of years, someone reminds everyone that the promise has somehow been lost to sight. Two examples of as-yet unfulfilled promises in the safeguarding arena come to mind. The first is the promise made by Archbishop Welby a year ago to survivors of the evil activities of John Smyth, that every member of the clergy who knew about Smyth’s activities would be ‘investigated’ by the NST. There are about 30 individuals who knew the events beforehand but nothing has emerged to indicate that this promise to investigate has been activated. Another promise, that was put forward at a General Synod over a year ago by John Spence, a member of Archbishop’s Council, was a promise that ‘funds would be found’ for redress as required. This was a matter of justice. Last week, to considerable fanfare, increased allocations of money for the next Triennium (up to 2025) were announced in a press conference by the two archbishops. Support of parishes and parish clergy were announced but no provision appears to have been made for the redress scheme. Has it been quietly forgotten, like so many other promises connected with safeguarding?

In the past, before the days of the internet, statements could be made by those in authority which then might become quickly forgotten. Today the same thing is no longer true. The records of Twitter, newspapers and even blogs like this one are lodged for ever on the net and can be recovered by any diligent researcher. If promises are made and then apparently forgotten, there are those who are ready to point this out. In short, the days of making promises to church members, and then ‘forgetting’ that the promises were ever made, are over. Senior church leaders also make promises of the timelines of reports and enquiries. Every time these reports are delayed, and deadlines fail to be met, the sense of confidence in the quality of leadership in the church is chipped away. Followers of this blog and of the history in the Church of England will be keenly aware of when feelings of disappointment and disillusionment are felt by ordinary church members over failed promises.

I am conscious of numerous other ways that the integrity of those in senior levels of the Church of England and among the senior members of semi-independent groups has been questioned. It serves little purpose to raise further more shameful examples here. But what we have in the Church is a generalised sense of unease and an increasing decline of confidence that everything is being done in the best way for the future. The overall accusation is that church leaders and leaders of Church factional interest groups are acting, not in the interests of integrity and truth, but in a way that preserves power, privilege, and the interests of this institution or group. Often the challenge for an organisation like the Church is not just to correct misapprehensions on the part of a watching public, but also take active steps to anticipate the impression of bad faith that is being circulated in the public domain. This is not a job that that can be handed over to communications experts. Indeed, the publicity firms that the Church employs have sometimes made a situation of moral failure seem even worse than it in fact is. What is needed is active contrition on the part of leaders. Such contrition must seem to be genuine and heart-felt. It needs to reflect the highest values and beliefs of the organisation. So far we have not seen examples of this quality of penitence in the world of safeguarding. The path towards resolving all the issues left over from the abuse crisis in the Church of England will require, not just financial redress, but active and sincere expressions of sorrow from the institution as well as the individuals that perpetrated and collaborated in such terrible evil. This will be, for the time being, one of the most pressing challenges to be faced by leaders of our national Church.

If you were ever to examine the contents of a formal library in an English stately home, you might find that a high proportion of the volumes are leather-bound collections of sermons by Anglican clergy.  Many of these published works were what we would now call vanity projects.  The cost of printing and publishing was extraordinarily high, and it is hard to imagine that the reading public had an appetite for the 45-minute reflections by learned clerics.  The people who were interested in reading these volumes were perhaps the authors themselves and those in their circle.  I may be wrong in my surmise.  Certainly, few people today have the patience or the stamina to read volumes of sermons of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  

Since retirement I have become a ‘consumer’ of other people’s sermons.  This experience has made me become a critic of my own offerings in the past.  Discovering the things that you like and dislike in other people’s preaching helps one to become retrospectively much more aware of personal failures in the past.  I want to start with naming two things that I find irritating in the sermons I hear today.  The first is the attempt by a preacher to be clever.  One particular trick that is sometimes played by preachers are the lengthy quotes.  A sermon of ten to twelve minutes can take one or possibly two quotations from a non-biblical source, but when there are seven or eight quotations from learned books or poems, the thread (if there is one!) is destroyed.   All that is left is a preacher trying to be wise, and a congregation which is left confused by the way the argument of the sermon went over their heads.

The second great source of angst for me, at any rate, is the repeated use of biblical words or phrases without saying anything fresh about their meaning.  Sometimes a single word with a strong biblical provenance like love, faith or salvation is repeated over and over again.  Just because certain words are common in Scripture, it does not mean that they have a clear meaning that is current today.   A preacher should pay close attention to the likelihood (even probability) that members of a congregation are carrying a degree of misunderstanding in their interpretation of biblical words and ideas.  Biblical words or phrases have a variety of potential meanings.  A preacher is permitted to suggest that our living in the 21^st century affects the way we use words and it is important to realise that there are indeed areas of potential confusion in the way we use words now which does not help us understand scripture.

After listening to a sermon, I sometimes emerge from listening with one of these two complaints.  The first is that I lost the plot somewhere about a third of the way through because I was trying to see the connection of the quotations mentioned and failing in the effort.  The second complaint is that the preacher has been battering the congregation with his/favourite biblical words and phrases without giving a single new insight as to their meaning.  To be told, for example, that the Christian command to love is central, is hardly edifying.  The nuance of meaning in the word itself is enormous.  In addition to using the word love, we need to engage with all the ways of understanding it in contemporary thought.  What is the status of love in race relations for example? -or immigration? -or same sex partnerships?  Every single biblical word which has currency in ordinary parlance needs to be used with extraordinary care.  The potential for a congregation to lapse into their existing tramlines of thought, when presented with certain words, needs to be constantly challenged.  A listener to our sermon about love, for example, must not be allowed to think only in terms of a Mills and Boon romance.  Words like forgiveness and reconciliation all need to come over in a sermon context as words containing a challenge.  We need to feel that sense of challenge, particularly if the word had that character when they were first used within Scripture or when coming from the mouth of Jesus himself.

In my final Lent as a parish priest in Scotland, I led a group on the meaning of certain common Bible words which were either easily misunderstood or allowed to have meanings that did not do justice to the ones in the Bible itself.  On one evening I spent 35-40 minutes exploring in both testaments the word ‘Word’.   On another evening I gave the same treatment to the word ‘memorial’.  Without getting into the detail of these Lenten sessions, it has to be said that I allowed my commentary study and my linguistic understanding gained from both Hebrew and Greek, to come into play.  Even if my small group might not remember all the detail, the main message was to say ‘never assume that because a word in the Bible sounds like one we use in day-to-day speech, that its meaning is exhausted by  the common use today.  Expect a deeper, even unexpected, meaning in these words’.  Bible study will always go deeper than knowing the surface words of a modern translation.  Perhaps one should also add: ‘Be very wary of a preacher who presumes to understand completely any text in Scripture.  There is always more to be said!’

In writing the above I am not suggesting that deep linguistic analysis should be part of a sermon.  Such exploration may need to be part of organised study groups or even through formal study.  I would, however, want a listener to any of my sermons to have a sense that whatever I say is never the last word.  There is always more to be discovered.  If the presentation can be made sufficiently interesting that that the listener wants to hear more, then so much the better.  Whatever is said in a sermon, I would always aim to ensure that there was always something to be taken away and remembered.  It probably does not matter if the main thread of an argument is forgotten. It is more important if the preacher leaves behind a word, a picture or a story.  The carefully placed anecdote/picture raises a sermon from an easily forgotten sequence of words to something to be mulled over and remembered.  My own preference is for a vividly described visual image.  I probably tend towards the picture or image as this is my preferred way of dealing with abstract ideas.   If, by dwelling on an idea, it presents itself to me in a pictorial form, then I will share that image with a congregation.  If the image is told well, it is likely to be remembered long after the rest of the sermon is forgotten.  Better still, we may find that the remembered image links back to the main topic of the sermon.

The spiritual tradition of Ignatius of Loyola has given to Christian practice a legacy of image making.  The encouragement, in that tradition, to create vivid representations of gospel events within the mind is a style of spirituality that used to be much spoken about.  Having never been on an Ignatian retreat, I am not aware of whether this practice is much in evidence today.  Nevertheless, I am instinctively drawn to this method as it makes the truth of the gospel encounter with Jesus an exercise of the imagination as much as of the mind.  My exposure to the Orthodox traditions of visual encounters with pictures and icons also makes me want to explore the idea of ‘seeing’ the truth rather than understanding it.  In the talk on icons that I used to offer to church groups, I would make great play of the idea in Orthodox spirituality that it is the job of the Christian to contemplate through seeing the mystery of God.  It takes some adjustment to grasp this idea but once it is understood, people are grateful to have this special insight into another Christian culture.  Perhaps in another blog I will say more on this topic.

In our final summary we have moved from the intellectualised habits of understanding to a simpler method which uses the capacity to see or visualise and to enjoy stories as a method of connecting with truth.  If I am in any way correct that this method comes naturally to most human beings, then that should alter the way we engage with and present truth.  It also perhaps indicates that our styles of sermon giving should adjust.  Although I do not preach any more, I would always in theory want to enlist such tools for understanding in every sermon I preached.  Perhaps I am hinting that this method is one worth following for others who exercise this sacred task of preaching.  Everyone can see, or at least visualise in the mind, and everyone can follow a story.  If truth is potentially found in such pictures or stories, then perhaps we should be offering far more of such preaching fare. Congregations may also be learning in this process to receive better something which is edifying, inspiring and life-changing.

A farewell sermon preached in Oxford on May 14th 2022 by

The Very Revd. Professor Martyn Percy, Dean of Christ Church (2014-2022)

Readings: Psalm 80; 1 Samuel 16: 1-13; Matthew 7: 19-27

Personal Note: Today we begin with an enormous thank you to all those who have, over the past four plus-years have been so kind, caring and supportive towards Emma and me.  We want to thank everyone for coming and being here today, and to thank those who wanted to be amongst us, yet could not be.  In the course of this lengthy ordeal – which at times has felt gruelling – I can only say that we have felt sustained by prayer and love like never before. This care has also been material. We have received several thousand messages, cards and letters of kind support from all over the world, representing not just friendships, but also deep connections with the wider world, universities at home and abroad, and people and places near and far.  There have been phone calls, flowers, meals, many cakes, and reassuring hugs. ‘Thank you’ does not even begin to express our gratitude. It never can.

I want to especially thank – on behalf of us all – our staff at the Deanery: Kim, Tina, Jess, Rachel and Maggie – who will have welcomed you and thousands of others over the past eight years to Christ Church for suppers, receptions, teas, coffees, more coffees, mulled wine…other events, and more coffee. Between them, they have notched up over 65 years of combined service, and we owe them an enormous debt of gratitude for all of their unfailingly professional, cheerful, diligent, resilient and caring service. Thank you.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank some others too.  This could be a long list, but let me just thank the Rector of Exeter for his kindness and care in lending in using the Chapel today, and to Andrew the Chaplain, the Choir, and all who have made this possible.  I also want to especially thank Deborah, Alan, Paul, Matt, Karen, Iain, Erica, Tom, Henry, Jonathan, Linda, Suzanne, Martin, Angela, Robin, Elizabeth, Andrew, Catherine, Sarah, Sean, Rosie, Peter, Corinne, Colin, Frances, David, Nigel and many others, who for various reasons, preferred not to be named.  I also especially want to express gratitude for those here today representing an extraordinary network of survivors and victims of abuse within the church, who are exemplars of such care, courage and compassion in the face of their own sufferings and trauma, and yet have continued to model the most extraordinary resilience and hope to so many in their ongoing campaigns for justice and truth to reform a broken church in a needy world.

Last, but not least, the nucleus of the sustaining beloved community has been Emma and our sons, who have had to bear all things, and hope for better.  That they have done this with such fierce, determined and persistent love and care is part of the lightness of being that is sometimes hard to even hold, let alone comprehend. Such care and support bears testimony to some of the deep truths that we hold dear in common: that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome. That love, hope, faith and charity are hard to extinguish, and persist. And in all this, I have been mindful – as has Emma – of our enduring bonds of affection and gratitude with the congregations of the cathedral, colleagues, hundreds of staff and volunteers, students and alumni. You will always be in our prayers, and remembered with abiding gratefulness.

Sermon: Sometimes we choose the readings for a sermon, and sometimes they choose us. St. Matthias is the Apostle who replaced Judas, and was chosen by means of lottery to take the number of disciples back up to twelve.  But before we talk about Matthias, we need a word about the two deaths we remember from Holy Week. Noting that on Good Friday and after the death of Jesus, all the disciples dispersed and ran away, one modern poet, Norma Farber (‘Compassion’) asks where we might find Mary, the mother of Jesus on that day? 

In Mary’s house the mourners gather.

Sorrow pierces them like a nail.

Where’s Mary herself meanwhile?

Gone to comfort Judas’s mother.

As the mystics say, you cannot find Jesus in Heaven on Good Friday because he’s gone looking for Judas in Hell. Jesus won’t go home without him.  So Judas is the permanent-resident elephant in the room for St. Matthias’ Day.  Judas casts a shadow over these readings, and so we cannot ignore him.

Judas is a betrayer. In Dante’s Inferno, Judas occupies a podium finish with Brutus and Cassius in the inner, ninth ring of hell.  These arch-betrayers of classical antiquity represent treachery.  Judas remains a relevant figure today. Everyone will have some taste of treachery; of being the victim of others bearing false witness; of being snared; of being badly let down by someone you had trusted. You have had that experience. You’ve known others who have had that experience. I too have had that experience.

When you think about it, there is quite a bit of gambling going on in the bible.  Pilate offers the crowd baying for blood a 50-50 choice – do you want Jesus, or Barabbas?  Even though it is a 50-50 ‘ask the audience’ eliminator, the odds, we sense, are already firmly stacked against Jesus.  Before he is crucified, Jesus is blindfolded and invited to guess who struck him.  It is a kind of cruel wager, in which all odds are stacked against the victim.  We all know what it is like to see the person who might strike you, but we are left befuddled when it is a shadowy group, committee or process.  At the end of the gospels, the soldiers draw lots for Jesus’ clothes.  So at the foot of the cross, the executioners and guards play dice before God.

But there are other odds too.  What are the odds of a small Jewish sect becoming the world’s largest faith?  No-one took a punt at Ladbrokes on that one in AD33.  What were the odds that a key member of the disciple’s team, and the treasurer no less, would lose his place to an unknown man named Matthias – the disciple chosen to replace Judas, and chosen by lottery.  Two names put before the panel to consider, but only one is chosen emerges as the preferred candidate…

Let’s talk about Matthias. I like the story of Matthias, because it shows, for starters, that the first Christians were actually quite Anglican.  That is to say, they knew the value of being pragmatic, and could put it before principle when needed.  I suppose the better thing to do with Judas’ successor was to go into a lock-down conclave, and emerge only when ready.  But time is short; there is a mission to get on with.  They need a twelfth apostle – preferably before supper and sunset – and so they draw lots.  It’s a gamble.  Yet it seems to pay off.

But there is a deeper theme at work in the manner of Matthias’s selection that is reflected in both the Old and the New Testament readings, and it is this: we are all dispensable. Matthias is Patron Saint of ‘It Doesn’t All Depend on You’.  Judas is airbrushed out of history, and now an unknown runner called Matthias reminds us that God is not lacking on the supply-side for people to work with, provided they are committed to joy, gratitude and true service.  Be that person.

Because God does know a thing or two about the odds of his purpose being worked out.  And I would not bet against the outcome.  God does not ask us to gamble. Merely to remember that there are no reliable odds on how your future will turn out.  But the God of the present – and of the future – will not let you down.  So we do not need to live as others might, because the “citizenship of heaven”, as Paul calls it, will see that we are in the end, held and cherished by a God who will not let us fall. 

I think Matthias might have agreed with Woody Allen: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your future plans”.  Most people know the so-called ‘Serenity Prayer’ – or at least the first part of it.  Very few, however, know that the original was written by Reinhold Niebuhr in the darkest days of the Second World War.  The prayer goes like this: “God, grant me grace to accept with serenity, the things that cannot be changed; courage to change the things which should be changed; and the wisdom to know the difference…” 

But the prayer then continues: “…living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; and taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is.  Not as I would have it, but trusting that you will make all things right, if I but surrender to your will.  So that I may be reasonably happy in this life; and supremely happy with you forever, in the next…”.  Many soldiers were given this prayer as they left America for Europe; or England for Normandy on D-Day. They were clutching it as the gates of their boats opened and they poured onto the beaches. There was nothing more they do about what happened next.

Nothing, except remember that God hears the prayer from the trenches; he hears the prayer of the ones rooting for a successor to Judas.  But God knows life can be fickle, and ever-changing.  Because God has already become one of us.  He has loved us enough to live for us, as one of us, and amongst us.  He has known what it is to have the odds stacked against him.  He has risked that enough to die as one of us – and yet be raised up. 

Jesus Christ is, quite simply, no stranger to our lives.  He was and is with us – this is what ‘Emmanuel’ means.  He loves us where we are, and walks with us every step of the way.  In one of the darker moments over these last few years, and when all had seemed very bleak to me, Emma wrote this poem called ‘Another Economy’, and it rejoices in the good that might be found through and with others in the midst of all the crap (for want of a better turn of phrase).

I have found that there is a different economy

Whose currency is

Love and kindness

Faithfulness and prayer

Generosity and integrity.

When these virtues are practiced

Deposits are made and investments accrued.

So, when the world turns harsh

And desolation beckons, 

I find I am rich.

And I can draw on this wealth

Providing me with

Friendship and kindness

Prayers and blessings

Fortitude and strength.

Anyway, perhaps I should say something about our readings by way of closing.  Our Psalm is unequivocal: God will save and restore, and even though our detractors may scorn us and laugh at us, God will never turn away from you. Never.  I managed a wry smile when 1 Samuel came up – and I didn’t chose the readings today, as I say, they’ve chosen us. We’ve ended with a reading about a small man, and a gospel reading that appeared at our wedding.

But 1 Samuel 16 reminds us that God often begins with the runt of the litter – the littlest and the lesser is where God begins.  It is what Jesus starts his ministry with, time and time again.  God is always looking for the outsider to confound the insider; the least to be the greatest; the gentle to show the strong how to be; the foolish to convert the wise. 

David is picked because he’s no Goliath.  He is a minor character put out to tend flocks and amuses himself by making up the songs and tunes we know as psalms.  God likes to do extraordinary things with the neglected and the rejected.  God chooses the weak and the foolish things of the world to confound the wise and strong.  God grows the fruit of his Spirit within our yielding flesh, hearts and minds.  Growing fruit is slow work.  Cheap, false piety that mimics authentic growth will always be available in plentiful quantities. But discerning disciples are seldom fooled by such offerings. Quality takes time to bud and flower.

Likewise, you can build almost anything, instantly, on sand. But without deep, solid foundations, what is knocked up in the morning is swept away by the evening. Building a solid structure on unforgiving rock, with all the boring into the ground required to establish the foundations, is hard and laborious. But persevere. Slow Church is where we find God slogging away, working with grace, love, goodness, charity, kindness, mercy and endless patience over the decades and centuries.  It takes a long, long time to bring the gospel to any community; or to a country. Only fools think this can be fast.

My vocation to serve Christ and the world as priest, pastor and professor will continue.  But my season for doing so within the Church of England must now end, so that truth can be spoken to power, and prophetic insight not diminished by the gravitational pressure of institutional loyalty.  

In this, I take my cue from Jonah. Do not look back in anger. Look forward only in love, and by education and example, live for others as Christ does, whether you are an insider or an outsider. As that other famous Dean – James Dean – once said ‘only the gentle are truly strong’.

We face many challenges in our world today: wars, famine, disease and injustice.  Hold fast to God and to one another. Be good. Be humble. God, who is faithful, will not let you fall.  “Do not be afraid” and “do not fear” are phrases most often repeated by Jesus in the gospels – more than seventy times.  Our calling does not seek safety, security or any other benefits.  Our vocation is not to cling to church; but rather to step out in the love revealed in the person of Jesus. 

For me, and you, that is the path that now lies ahead. May God grant us all grace and peace, as we walk with him who is ever-beside and before us. Amen.

The Readings

Psalm 80

¹ Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock!
    You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth
²   before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh.

    Stir up your might, and come to save us!

³ Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

⁴ O Lord God of hosts,
    how long will you be angry with your people’s prayers?
⁵ You have fed them with the bread of tears,
    and given them tears to drink in full measure.
⁶ You make us the scorn of our neighbours;
    our enemies laugh among themselves.

⁷ Restore us, O God of hosts;
    let your face shine, that we may be saved.

⁸ You brought a vine out of Egypt;
    you drove out the nations and planted it.
⁹ You cleared the ground for it;
    it took deep root and filled the land.
¹⁰ The mountains were covered with its shade,
    the mighty cedars with its branches;
¹¹ it sent out its branches to the sea,
    and its shoots to the River.
¹² Why then have you broken down its walls,
    so that all who pass along the way pluck its fruit?
¹³ The boar from the forest ravages it,
    and all that move in the field feed on it.

¹⁴ Turn again, O God of hosts;
    look down from heaven, and see; have regard for this vine,
¹⁵  the stock that your right hand planted.
¹⁶ They have burned it with fire, they have cut it down;
    may they perish at the rebuke of your countenance.
¹⁷ But let your hand be upon the one at your right hand,
    the one whom you made strong for yourself.
¹⁸ Then we will never turn back from you;
    give us life, and we will call on your name.

¹⁹ Restore us, O Lord God of hosts;
    let your face shine, that we may be saved.

1 Samuel 16:1-16

16 The Lord said to Samuel, ‘How long will you grieve over Saul? I have rejected him from being king over Israel. Fill your horn with oil and set out; I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons.’ ² Samuel said, ‘How can I go? If Saul hears of it, he will kill me.’ And the Lord said, ‘Take a heifer with you, and say, “I have come to sacrifice to the Lord.” ³ Invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show you what you shall do; and you shall anoint for me the one whom I name to you.’ ⁴ Samuel did what the Lord commanded, and came to Bethlehem. The elders of the city came to meet him trembling, and said, ‘Do you come peaceably?’ ⁵ He said, ‘Peaceably; I have come to sacrifice to the Lord; sanctify yourselves and come with me to the sacrifice.’ And he sanctified Jesse and his sons and invited them to the sacrifice.

⁶ When they came, he looked on Eliab and thought, ‘Surely the Lord’s anointed is now before the Lord.’⁷ But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.’ ⁸ Then Jesse called Abinadab, and made him pass before Samuel. He said, ‘Neither has the Lord chosen this one.’ ⁹ Then Jesse made Shammah pass by. And he said, ‘Neither has the Lord chosen this one.’ ¹⁰ Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel, and Samuel said to Jesse, ‘The Lord has not chosen any of these.’ ¹¹ Samuel said to Jesse, ‘Are all your sons here?’ And he said, ‘There remains yet the youngest, but he is keeping the sheep.’ And Samuel said to Jesse, ‘Send and bring him; for we will not sit down until he comes here.’ ¹² He sent and brought him in. Now he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome. The Lord said, ‘Rise and anoint him; for this is the one.’ ¹³ Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the presence of his brothers; and the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward. Samuel then set out and went to Ramah.

Matthew 7:19-27

¹⁹ Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. ²⁰ Thus you will recognize them by their fruits. ²¹ “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. ²² On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ ²³ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ ²⁴ “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. ²⁵ And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. ²⁶ And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. ²⁷ And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”