There are a few books in one’s life that create an indelible impression, so that one never forgets the basic argument.  Among the books that for me fall into this category is one entitled The Discovery of the Individual 1050-1200 by Colin Morris. The principle insight of the book is to show how the roots of the Renaissance and the Reformation are to be found in intellectual developments in a number of centres of learning in early mediaeval Europe.  For me, the appeal of the book was in the way that it explained the cultural and philosophical meaning of ‘individual’ and how this idea needed to be discovered or re-discovered.  Before 1050, so the book claims, the intellectual traditions of Western Europe were unable to entertain any kind of novelty in their thinking.  Everything was derivative of what had gone before.  In order for the great explosion of revolutionary ideas that we call the Renaissance to emerge, there had to be, over a couple of centuries, a gradual building up of new intellectual traditions where scholars and thinkers could start to think for themselves.  In the modern parlance, there had to be an increasing tolerance for ‘thinking outside the box’. The new revolution in thought, which collectively is referred to as the Renaissance, burst into full view in the late 15^th century.  The world, especially in its art, literature and political thinking, has never been the same since.

These new traditions of thought and artistic achievement in so many arenas of human enterprise during the Renaissance were movements made possible by a relatively few brave pioneers being given permission in various centres to experiment and think new thoughts.  The Renaissance itself was given impetus and energy by the patronage of popes, kings and princes.  Many fell over themselves to be seen to celebrate this new movement in both learning and artistic discovery.  St Peter’s in Rome was built as much to symbolise the achievements of this new age of human endeavour and creativity as it was erected to celebrate the glory of God.  New thought being applied to art, literature and architecture was one thing.  Applying it to the religious traditions which had been handed down from the Middle Ages was a much more contentious process.  It was one thing for a pope to sponsor the music of Palestrina or the art of Michelangelo; it was quite another to listen to new religious ideas that might challenge the power complex of the medieval Papal establishment.  New thought could be tolerated, even encouraged, but not if it challenged religious privilege and power.

The personalities that created the Protestant Reformation can be seen to emerge from the same creative impulses that nurtured Da Vinci and Botticelli.  Of course, they, Luther, Calvin, Arminius etc., excelled in quite different spheres of human achievement and activity, but they had this one thing in common.  Each had given themselves permission to take forward the task of thinking new thoughts in ways that had never happened before.  Even fifty years before in Europe, any new thought in matters of Church discipline would have been met with harsh treatment from all sides, whether secular or religious.  Luther, in the 1520s, was able to find allies among the secular authorities to protect him. There was, providentially, a friendly German prince prepared to give him hospitality in a castle for a number of years, keeping him away from the many who would have preferred him to be arrested and killed.  The religious wars that followed the Protestant Reformation were long and bloody.  It was not until the middle of the 17^th century that continental Europe reverted to a semblance of an uneasy peace between the Catholic and Protestant nations. 

Many of us have read accounts of this period of history, 1530-1648.  On continental Europe it is sometimes summed up and described a time of religious wars.  The whole period does little to honour the cause of the Christian faith.  But one thing I take from the story of the Reformation is the way that each side in the dispute, Catholic and Protestant, embodied some part of the truth.  For the purpose of this blog post, I am going to ignore the theological disputes, such as biblical authority and the nature of salvation.   What comes out of my attempt to view the Reformation dispassionately (if that is possible!) and informed by the perspective of Morris’ book, is to note two distinct ways of being human and Christian. I risk a verbal battering from my historically informed readers when I liken the traditional Catholic style of practising the Christian faith as being in some sense ‘tribal’.  By this word I am referring to the fact that most people practised their faith as part of a community or nation of faith.  Catholicism was part of the fabric of the social order.  The Catholic faithful were not expected to look back to some conversion event in their lives.  It was part of what it meant to be alive and being part of their society.  Conforming to the authority of the priest was in many ways an extension of their submission to a feudal lord.  In return the Catholic faithful were offered the assurance that, provided they fulfilled the obligations of the Church, their place in heaven was secure.

The Protestant way of doing religion, again stripped of its doctrinal wordiness, honours the part of us that questions and argues our way to truth and faith.  When we use the word protest, it brings to mind an argumentative, forceful style.  We know also that, in practice, many protestant churches today are good at providing a non-demanding reassuring form of faith, but this was not true of the early pioneers.  They fought for their version of truth, using rhetoric, verbal and physical force to protest what they believed to be true about God and his relationship with humankind.  None of them seem to have been easy characters and they certainly did not seek for a comfortable life.   John Knox, for example, could be brutish and unpleasant by all accounts but, for good and ill, his version of Christianity remains influential in Scotland.  It is my thought that each of these two tendencies or ways of doing religion can exist in us simultaneously.  We swing between wanting a safe and predictable safe way of practising the faith and a more argumentative style.  Part of us is perhaps roused to a state of passion by the claims of Christianity.  We may sometimes even feel that we want to stand on a street corner challenging others to wake up from their complacency about spiritual matters.

My suggestion is that many of us have a Catholic sub-personality alongside a Protestant one.  This may seem to suggest that I think there is something wrong with us.  What I think I am saying is that we oscillate between different modes of functioning in our religious expression.   In other words, some of the time we need reassurance and comfort from our faith, but on other occasions, the faith we have leads to protest and strong affirmation. This is probably also true of our political thinking.  I sometimes say that I am, in my politics, intellectually left wing but temperamentally right wing.  The important thing is we can learn to be honest about what we think on religious topics and how, sometimes, two quite opposite thoughts can be felt by us to be true at the same time.  Those familiar with the novels of Anthony Trollope will remember the theological stance of Mr Arabin who became Dean of Barchester. 

The book, The Discovery of the Individual, helped me to become aware of the dual nature of my personality.  Two aspects of the same individual, the part that prefers the corporate safe way of doing Christianity and the forceful individualistic way, may live side by side.  I quickly add that this piece of spiritual self-awareness was probably nowhere in the author’s mind when he wrote his important work.   Nevertheless, I find it helpful to be reminded that I can swing between these two manifestations of religious personality.  I should not expect to live in one spiritual place all the time.  It also helps me to value another who chooses at any one moment to live in a different place along this continuum between the positions I have loosely called catholic and protestant.  That designation is not meant to be a scientific or psychological description of two types of personality but perhaps a convenient shorthand to describe two ways of practising the Christian faith.   Probably we need to recognise both styles, in ourselves but also in the wider Church.    I am not minded to emphasise either one as a way to exclude the other as both have a part to play in the wholeness that God is calling us to fulfil in our membership of his Church. 

A reflection for Holy Week

by Peter Reiss

Like many, I find the news from Ukraine ever harder to cope with – new and worse acts of brutality on innocent and helpless victims. I don’t want to be subjected to this news, but then how much worse to be subjected to the actual horror, or to witness it. I am also aware that this is not a new and strange outburst of brutality; it has been happening in too many parts of the world for so long; it is abuse on a massive scale, but each individual is a precious individual, not a statistic.

Faced with such brutality, I am struggling for words – whether to try and make some sense of it, or to pray. Words don’t cut it against knives and bullets and tanks. This blog asks us to wrestle with power-imbalance, abuse of power, the victims and the perpetrators.

A few weeks ago we heard of fresh-faced Russian soldiers captured in Ukraine and feeling lost; is it those same cohorts of soldiers who have become rapists, torturers and killers, or is there a different breed of soldier? How could a young conscript become so hard and hardened?

One answer may be that they were told the Ukrainians would welcome them not shoot back; when this did not happen, a new narrative was needed. Rather than consider themselves unwelcome invaders / the wrong-doers, they have relabelled the Ukrainians as a despicable enemy which does not respect Russia, which no longer has a right to live.

One answer may be that these soldiers have become used to seeing death, inured to it, scarred by it, brutalised, almost sub-human to survive. Another answer may be that they have become captured by the orders of more senior officers who have demanded these actions, until they have become customary. If I was a young soldier would I have the courage to say No?

These are only my attempts to make sense of what is happening; I suspect there is a blend of all three and more.

Three Scriptural links may be of a little help if we are trying to respond from a faith perspective.

In the masterfully written story of Cain and Abel (Gen 4: 1-16), the first violence between humans, the first mention of sin in the Bible, Cain is angry and his countenance fell – anger and jealousy are potent forces; The Lord speaks to him, and Cain has choices – “if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you but you must master it.” – he still has choices. Two things are noteworthy – first that Cain fails to master sin- the crouching sin grabs him and it is his brother who suffers – despite choice it is sort of inevitable, humans are not good at mastering a crouching sin. Secondly, the passage involves conversations between the Lord and Cain before and after the killing; the Lord is more concerned for the one who is about to sin, or has sinned than the victim; the Lord does not step in to protect Abel. Theologically this is unsatisfactory to us, but it speaks clearly of how the world is – God does not step in to protect the victims. Abel speaks only when dead when his blood cries out from the ground. I say this is a masterful composition because it speaks of God’s silence and absence as well as the failed dialogue with the aggressor. It is not the complete answer but it is an uncomfortable part of an answer; our faith requires us to live with this silent absence from the vulnerable, and the blood continuing to cry from the earth. Good Friday / Easter may offer hope. I find this passage helps me think theologically.

The second passage is one of the poems in Lamentations, or more particularly half of one verse, 1: 12 – “is it nothing to you, you who pass by? ..” How am I affected by the cries of the victims? Lamentations, like many of the psalms, is written from the horrors of war and violence, but their authenticity to their context means that others in other places may not frame their pain or their thoughts in this way. I cannot assume that their voice will be the same as the ancient voices from Jerusalem. I must listen to each voice not assume I know. The question from 1:12 catches me. Will I listen and be changed, or will I switch channel or scroll to find something easier to cope with? This passage demands a response – the wounded ask that of me.

The third very different passage I turn to, is the role of the crowds in Holy Week. The events of Holy Week do not take place in a church but outside – Roman soldiers and crowds buzzing with restless energies. The crowd on the way into Jerusalem on the Sunday are positive and excited. By the end of the week the dominant crowd are hostile and calling for one of their own people to be crucified. is this a crowd with a very different make-up from the Sunday crowd, and if so, where are the Sunday people? Is the second crowd stirred by agitators, so that the dominant voice is hostile to Jesus? I have been amazed at the courage of unarmed Ukrainians standing against Russian troops in the early days, a bit like a Palm Sunday procession in defiance of the Roman troops who presumably watched from ramparts but did not get involved. I am now numbed by the brutality of those Russian troops who have ransacked, tortured and executed in so many towns as well as shelled indiscriminately and defaced and defecated in shops, livelihoods and homes. If the story of Cain and Abel makes me ask if I can trust a God who does not protect, then this story makes me ask whether I would have remained supportive of Jesus by the end of the week or whether I would have been cowed into silence and submission by the louder voices. I don’t think that the same people who cried “Hosanna” on Sunday necessarily had shifted to “crucify” on Friday. I suspect many had gone silent in the face of opposition.

If jealousy and anger are potent forces for an individual, then mob-power, crowd-mentalities are even more potent in causing fear and silence. Jealousy, anger and hatred can hide the humanity of the other, so that they can be abused. The story of Cain and Abel holds individual choices and external forces in tension. The individual can lose their individual potency in a crowd, or in a mob, or even in an army, in a way that probably many of us cannot fully comprehend.

When faced with brutality, faceless brutality of a system or the heated brutality of an agressor, fuelled by seething emotions, it takes enormous courage to keep going. Holy Week for me this year will have a real edge – do I really see in the crucified Jesus the hope of the world, and if so, how might I say so in the context of such appalling suffering on such a scale.

But there are those who read this blog for whom abuse and suffering are firsthand, and I am always grateful for the courage of your comments. You have faced Cains, you have been ignored and passed by, drowned out by organised louder voices. I dare to believe that the blood of all victims cries out, and in God’s gracious economy is not lost but in Christ’s blood finds or will find resurrection life. But if I do believe that then I must find the courage not to be silenced, and the silence to listen to those who are crying.

A few weeks ago, we had one of those domestic crises which afflict all of us from time to time. Ours was a little unusual but needed to be dealt with quickly.  A jackdaw had somehow got into the chimney and fallen right down into the space behind our wood burner. Luckily the fire was not lit. There was no way that the bird could escape. What were we supposed to do? We rang up the local chimney sweep who services our wood burner and asked for his help. He happened to be 100 yards away in his van and so he immediately came round and dismantled the fire so the bird could escape. Both my wife and I felt that experience of relief when you can hand over a difficult task to somebody who has expertise and knows what to do.

This experience of handing over problems to other people with specialist knowledge is something we do frequently. We look to medical professionals, financial experts, car mechanics and the like with the expectation that they will apply their expertise on our behalf. In each case there is an internal sigh of relief as we feel released from the responsibility of sorting out the particular problem we are facing.  It is now their job to diagnose the illness, mend the strange noise in the car or whatever other problem we are facing.  Our relationship to these experts who sort out the myriad of problems that come into our lives is one of respect.  Their expertise is not one we can ever possess, however much we might like to be able to do more in the area of DIY.  Realistically we know our limitations in many practical tasks.  We defer to their expert decisions of what has to be done and try to sound as though we understand all that they are telling us. Allowing the expert to make decisions on our behalf is an act of trust and we do it willingly.  We feel very much that in this situation, they are in charge, and we owe them deference and respect.  Our part in the interaction is the ability and readiness to pay their bill promptly.  Prompt payment always seems one way we can use to express our admiration for people who use skills that the rest of us do not have.

The word deference is an interesting one and it describes a particular quality of relationship.   Deference implies an unequal partnership with another person.  We show it to a person who is our superior in age, skill, or has some kind of authority.  When we use the word in a Christian context, we are indicating that we are looking up to someone who may be placed over us in some way or is wiser spiritually and in learning.  As we know, there are a variety of formal hierarchies of authority in church life.  There are also many informal ones as well.  In all of these we may find relationships of deference at work. Some Christians have obtained defined roles as members of the clergy after training and formation.  Others have long experience or influence gained from years of Christian practice.  Deference is, in short, a word that articulates the fact that we sometimes find ourselves looking up to people because of their seniority to us in rank or knowledge.  They are also the people who seem to have something to give us in terms of encouragement and support.  For whatever reason, these are people we respect and honour.

When I was thinking about this word deference, I realised that the English language does not have a special word to describe the individual who is acting with deference towards another person.  Neither is there a word for the person who receives this attitude of respect and honour. We really need new words like ‘deferent’ and ‘deferee’ to express such a relationship. While this implied relationship often denotes something positive in the life of the church in terms of wholesome influence and teaching, we also encounter problems with the word in a church context. A year or two back, the Archbishop of Canterbury spoke about deference, and he appeared to bemoan that there is too much of it in the structures of the church. We may suppose that what he was talking about was the way that it is wearisome for him to be expected to have all the answers to difficult problems.  It must indeed be quite tough being at the top of a spiritual and theological hierarchy where everyone expects you to be an expert on many topics.  Then, in addition, as a member of the House of Lords and chief representative of the national Church, he is expected to have opinions on every political issue that is currently in the public agenda.  The place at the top of any hierarchy is a hard place to occupy.

These negative dynamics of deference are also in operation in an ordinary church congregation.  People look up to their leaders to provide teaching and guidance.  The clergyperson sometimes finds that he/she is expected to do the thinking and spiritual work on behalf of all.  The leader may indeed possess expertise to be shared with the congregation, but the expectation that he/she will always know what to do and say can be a heavy burden.  Many clergy want to encourage their congregation to think for themselves and so allow the learning and growth of each member to develop at an individual pace.  Many people, by contrast, much prefer to be told what to think. They are like the house group members in an Adrian Plass book, who turn to the group leader to find out what ‘we think’ on a particular topic. Church leaders, who place the burden on each member of making a personal pilgrimage and discovering an individual faith, are not always appreciated in a parish situation. ‘What do you think?’ is not a question that is welcomed in many congregations.  The dynamic of deference in some parishes is going to resemble a family dynamic where the children are still very young.  The stage of total dependence on parents to solve every problem is appropriate for this first part of their lives. Many churches and congregations routinely operate within such an atmosphere of immaturity and over-dependence in spite of the best efforts of the clergy. To use a Pauline image, the congregation remain permanently satisfied with a diet of milk rather than solid food.

There is another church dynamic where deference is also a problem, but for completely different reasons. The vicar or leader openly exploits the dynamic of deference, possibly to satisfy his/her own narcissistic need to be important.  Unlike the first scenario I described above, where the leader wants people to grow and mature, the people in this second congregation are deliberately kept in their infantile dependence.  The leader expects everyone to accept the teaching that is offered from the pulpit without question.  The training that this particular vicar received may have encouraged him/her to think that there is indeed only one version of the Christian faith.  This is the one he/she intends to share with the congregation.   Membership in many conservative evangelical congregations requires submission and deference to the dominant discourse and to the leader who teaches it.  Within this official teaching we will find, typically, statements about biblical inerrancy and substitutionary atonement.  We would not be exaggerating to speak of the ‘enforcement’ of these doctrines.  Quite often we find no room for discussion, difference of opinion or the honouring of other perspectives.  Clearly individuals, who do not wish to show deference to such teachings, have the option to move to a new congregation.  This is not always easy or straightforward.  I was hearing recently of a highly qualified reader who has been eased out of her teaching role in the parish by an incoming vicar.  The reader was, in comparison with the vicar, highly educated and, as far as I can work out, the vicar was afraid that her less thorough theological education might be shown up by the excellent thoughtful teaching provided by the reader.  These sermons were felt not to be showing sufficient deference to the vicar and her narrow range of theological ideas.

Deference can be an appropriate and valuable part of the way relationships are organised within a church congregation.  This short reflection has also indicated that an inappropriate expression of deference can in fact foster dysfunctional relationships within congregations.  A major part of the task of clergy leaders is to make sure that any tendency to over idealise the clergy or leaders is never allowed to create an environment of infantilism and immaturity.  Equally, the natural idealising tendencies oof congregations towards their leaders must never be allowed to create a platform for dominant, narcissistic styles of leadership.  These hold people back and even harm those who submit to their authority.  All clergy need to examine the place of deference within their congregation.  Is it to be used positively or is it to be allowed to hold people down in a permanent state of immaturity? 

Hillsong, the immensely powerful network of Christian megachurches, is in the midst of a new crisis.  Readers who want to know the details of the latest reported scandals can read a huge amount of material on the internet.  A new television documentary on Hillsong is currently being released and this will contain revelations of various kinds, with much of the speculation focussed on the leader and founder, Brian Houston.  Among other things, he has been reportedly found to have been with a woman in a hotel bedroom who was not his wife.  Houston has recently been required, not only to step back from his responsibilities, but to step down as leader.  His position as the founder/leader of Hillsong seems to have been made impossible. For many people there is little surprise in discovering that Christian leaders are involved in sexual scandal and I do not intend to focus on any of the detail of the reported misbehaviour.  Rather, what I want to do is to reflect on the wider issue of scandal in the Church and how it can damage the institution in ways that are not always obvious at the time.

When sexual scandals break in the Church, the first thing often to be mentioned is the fact of hypocrisy.  The standards of Christian morality are undermined when Christians, especially their leaders, engage in sexual behaviour which, while it may not break the law, certainly offends the ten commandments and/the New Testament injunctions to love our neighbour.  Some sexual behaviour is contested as to whether it is indeed immoral.  The churches are still debating whether same sex behaviour is ever justified or whether it can be regarded as a moral form of sexual self-expression.  I have to confess to a certain weariness with the arguments on same-sex behaviour. These have been rehearsed over and over again throughout my adult life.   The area of behaviour which is regarded as invariably ‘sinful’ is that behaviour which involves betrayal and deceit.  But it still needs to be repeated that sin, as understood by Christians, is so much larger a topic than sexual misdemeanours. 

In order to escape from the popular but misleading view that Christians are only concerned with sex when they speak about sin, we need to consider what are the worst failings among Christians that we can imagine.  Betrayal and harm of another person in the pursuit of personal gratification comes fairly high on the list of sinful actions.  There is one word in English that sums up what we need to be or to have to be less likely to engage in this kind of behaviour – the word is integrity.  Integrity is one of those words that defies easy definitions but is suggestive of character, honesty and reliability.  The absence of integrity suggests many things including the potential for selfish and abusive behaviour.  A person without integrity seems to lack a core or a solid centre.  The interesting thing about integrity is that one can claim to be a man or woman of integrity without pretending to be perfect or sinless. A person with integrity may still break commandments but we have the realistic expectation that they will have enough self-awareness to pick themselves up again.  They will know when they have fallen short in some way.  If they are Christians they will often submit to a mentor or spiritual director figure who can gently put them back on the right track when they stray.

Integrity is not just a feature of individuals; it also is a description which can be applied to institutions.  Institutions fail the integrity test when their members are found to be turning their back on the standards that the group is supposed to be upholding.  Talk of ‘institutional racism’ is describing an institution failing to preserve integrity at its heart.  We look to the police force not only to treat women and people of minority groups with respect and dignity, but to observe all the other values which are implied in the word integrity.  While perfection cannot be expected in any institution or individual, even those who have integrity, we do expect things to come out right in the medium term.  Institutions which lack integrity are extremely difficult to deal with.  Unlike individuals, institutions may have power and wealth in abundance.  Such an institution cannot easily be challenged.  Money gives access to legal defences and the threat of litigation.  All that those of us outside a powerful institution with integrity issues can do, is to challenge it through publicity.  Private Eye is the journal that challenges many institutions in British society.  Whether it always get things right in its presentations of the facts, I do not know.  What I do know is that it is extremely healthy for institutions and individuals to be forcibly tackled for their failures in upholding integrity and standards of morality.

To return to the topic of Hillsong.  What struck me as I waded through some of the predictable stories of financial and sexual excess was the sheer seediness of the culture that has grown up around parts of this church.  Whether it is the rave character of much of what passes for worship or the stories of credit cards handed out to members of staff with no credit limit, there is a lot that fails the ‘smell test’.  Institutional integrity expects there to be in a church, above all, a place which preserves the values of honesty, openness and justice.  Any institution will self-destruct or become enfeebled if it does not observe these protocols of integrity.  This applies to every institution including the Church.  There is no ‘get out of jail’ card available to a church because it claims to have God on its side.

My final remarks (being written on the train to London!) is that reputational damage is a serious problem for all churches today.  A failure to control the behaviour of leaders in their hedonistic lifestyles is a problem for some churches.  Another problem is the way that leaders, even in the the Church of England, are found to have failed the integrity test in areas which have nothing to do with personal morality.  When information is blocked, people are silenced and when lies are told by senior figures in the church in the cause of maintaining reputation and power, then we still have a problem every bit as damaging and corrosive to a church as what is now being revealed about Hillsong. These failures of integrity have to be considered over and above the failures that are apparent in individual bullying and abuses of power. The question that remains for all of us to ask is whether our church is an institution which still has integrity.  The answer is unlikely to be a simple yes/no one.  The fact that it even needs to be asked is an uncomfortable reality.  I leave it to my readers to answer the question for themselves.  I hope that for your spiritual and mental health that you have found places and people with the integrity to allow you to follow the Christian journey safely and well.

These days I do not have many face-to-face conversations about God.   In my local parish I keep very much in the background.  An application that I did make over a year ago for a PTO seems to have been lost in the bureaucratic in-tray of my diocese.  It did not help that the mission-community leader, then overseeing our parish and my application, left the area two weeks after signing my form.  This diocese seems to have ample supplies of retired clergy so that my potential contribution is not missed    The sermons that I don’t preach in a real pulpit have to appear from time to time on this blog.  

The short conversation that took place after church followed a sermon from our new Vicar which was a commentary on the first section of the Alpha Course.  This is being used during Lent.  I am not attending these sessions, but I gather that one question in the first session concerns the historical reality of Jesus.  There is a real effort made to convince the Alpha attendees that Jesus can be believed in because both the historical evidence for his existence and his claims to be the Son of God are strong.   There is the usual apologetic mention of Josephus and Suetonius which I believe are frequently appealed to in this context.  The argument seems to be that if Jesus existed and the evidence for believing the claims made about him are strong, we have solid grounds for following suit.  Everyone is faced with a choice – to believe or not to believe.  If we do believe, we have solid reliable historical evidence to back our choice.

My quiet conversation after the service was with a man who has, like us, only moved into the area in the past few years.  His wife is an enthusiastic Christian in a way that he is not.  He comes along apparently to support her.  His words to me were few but they communicated his difficulty in ‘believing’ what had been said in the sermon.  There was no opportunity to go into the detail of the Alpha reasoning or what I might describe as black-white theology.  I simply said there is a third way to approach the question of belief.   We can, in the words of a course that I used in my church some years ago, be ‘living the questions’.  I explained that the place of living inside a question was to allow that question to be alive and active inside us.  The alternative positions, total acceptance or total rejection both seemed problematic. Each of these options did not appear really to engage with the discussion. One side was walking away from even considering the question.  The other was claiming to have certainty over the question of belief without having necessarily engaged with it at depth.  To claim to have certainty in respect of a religious topic may not necessarily be a healthy position.   It implies that you feel you have arrived at a point beyond questions and doubt.  You cease to be a position to learn anything further. Your stance appears to be sterile and implies that you have reached the end of your journey. 

The conversation lasted only a minute or two and I did not develop it beyond the point of encouraging the man to think through the meaning of the phrase to live the questions.   But it got me thinking about how I would have, in the past, preached a sermon to encourage people who found difficulties with aspects of belief and faith. To offer people certainty in religious or political situations is seldom the best option. The current crisis in Ukraine reminds us that certainty can be a lethal and dangerous commodity.  Putin is an example of the way that one man’s certainty can lead others into a dark place where questioning and doubt are erased.  Such a place can have terrifying results.  Should not Christian believing always have an element of uncertainty about it?  There are, I believe, reasons for us to hold strongly to a position where ‘living the questions’ is the right and healthy reaction to both the way we learn, and the way we practise our Christian faith.

The first good reason for some provisionality, even uncertainty, to exist in our Christian faith is that it allows an individual always to be open to something new.  Scientific discovery, we are told, depends on a readiness to discard old theories when these cease to work.  Truth for the scientist represents something tentative and provisional.  If certainty were to be the goal of scientific enquiry, then scientists might believe that it was right to hope for a point where they no longer had to experiment or question their theories.  While I am no scientist, I note the huge adjustments that have had to be made when a scientist probes the sub-atomic world.  Common sense physics simply ceases to work at this level.  The scientist has to operate in the mysterious language of mathematical formulae which are a closed book to the majority of us.  Is it not reasonable to suppose that the Christian faith might be expressed in ways that transcend the limitations of our human languages?

 One of the things I am grateful for in my life is the privilege of having studied theology at university level for eight years.  The chief reward for this study is not some prestigious job in the Church but a wider sympathy for the infinite variety of ‘languages’ in which theology can be expressed.  I am not talking about the actual languages of Hebrew and Greek in which the Bible was first written, but the way Christianity has adapted itself to the variety of cultures that are found in the world.  Culture does involve languages, but it is also operates beyond words and concepts.  To say that we truly understand any culture fully, even our own, is probably a dangerous claim.  It is even more doubtful to lay claim to a culture that is not our own or expressed in languages which we have to work at studying.  My theological journey has taken me across a variety of cultural and linguistic boundaries.  18 months of the eight years studying were spent attached to institutions abroad where English was not a first language.  This privileged exposure has not provided me with superior knowledge of theology but has made me aware of the limitations of what I do know.  Wisdom comes from recognising how much my background of being a middle-class English male have shut off huge areas of wisdom that are given to those who think and speak using totally different words and ideas.  In short, my privileged theological education has allowed me to realise how much I do not know rather than what I do know.

Grasping that one does not know much in an area of knowledge, allows one to be extremely allergic to the language of certainty.  A lot of my theological opinions are a work in progress.  I shrink from settled opinions that are set in stone for fear of being suffocated by these opinions, when I want to take a new look at what I really mean in expressing them.  Many of my readers will be sympathetic to the analogy of the journey or pilgrimage as describing the Christian faith.  Because journeys involve movement there is always variety and newness built into what we can see.  We can never see the totality of the journey, but we can describe episodes that occur along the way.  The pilgrimage analogy is a good way of helping people, like the man in church, to realise that they can belong, even when they are uncertain about what they believe.   The same humility could be asked of the militant atheist.  How can anyone possessing the limitations of a single brain and living inside one culture feel able to pontificate what is ultimately real and true?  Humility is required of the atheist dogmatist as much as it is of the religious believer. 

The task of learning to be a Christian does not fit a textbook pattern.  We do not learn something as children and then cling to it for the rest of lives.  In practice all of us struggle with doubt, uncertainty and sometimes despair.  The alternative to struggle and untidiness would seem to be something far worse.  Coasting along, afloat on a raft of certainties and settled opinions, may sound all right, but it seems to offer a life devoid of texture, colour and meaning. 

Christianity suggests that one day we shall face our maker to face some process of judgement.  The idea of this judgement is often presented as a way of discovering whether we have lived good moral lives.  If that is true, I also believe that we will be questioned about whether we have been living lives involving adventure and courage.  Have we intellectually and physically pursued all our opportunities for learning and experience?  Have we, in other words, lived life to the full, exploring the options given to us and opening ourselves the infinite variety of life?  Have we, as well, pursued the many questions that life throws at us concerned with meaning and the nature of reality?

In the Church Times, dated the 18^th March, there is a photo of the Vicars’ Close at Wells Cathedral.  It is perhaps a symbol of a settled community dwelling within a place of exceptional beauty and peace.  The story line above the picture, however, tells of another reality.  It appears that according to a SCIE report (as yet unpublished) there is fear, anxiety and unhappiness stalking through the surroundings of the incomparable beauty of Wells Cathedral.   Many of the paid staff and volunteers are infected with a substantial degree of unhappiness.

Like most of my readers, the information I have on the report from Wells is based on a close reading of the story as reported in the Church Times.  What I extract from this account may be in part speculation, but it is also based on the surmise that such apparent tension and pain, as reported in the Close, does not arise unless there is a serious breakdown in relationships.  In this case we are given one key word – culture.  This culture at the heart of the fractured relationships is variously described as one that creates ‘fear’ and ‘feelings of heaviness’.  It is also reportedly linked to a ‘power imbalance’ and ‘misuse of power’.  In short, someone with power in the cathedral, identified as the Dean, is exercising it inappropriately and this gives rise to what most would describe as bullying behaviour.  The use of the word culture also indicates that the bullying is widespread right across the institution.  It is certainly something that seems to affect a considerable proportion of those employed or volunteering at Wells Cathedral.

The next question we have to ask is whether the report tells us the actual nature of the bullying.  We have over the years, in this blog, met many ways in which those with power, even in churches, bully others.  Bullying may be rooted in misogyny, homophobia, racism or any number of power games that people play.  Here the situation of bullying is found in a setting where ‘standards that appear unattainable’ are required of employees.  We can speculate about what these unattainable standards might involve.  What is suggested from the words used is that the bullying is the kind that is meted out by a perfectionist.   A child’s description might use the word fussy.  The fact that the Dean’s claimed perfectionism causes considerable distress right across the entire workplace hints at the fact that we are not dealing with something trivial.  From the outside we can suggest the possibility that the Dean may have some kind of obsessive disorder.  There is no hint in the words used that any of the staff are guilty of improper behaviour, such as theft or immorality.  Rather, the lapses they are accused of seem to be in the area of such things as tidiness and cleanliness.   If fussiness goes beyond a certain point, it becomes a neurosis and is potentially disruptive to everyone.  The words ‘walking on eggshells’ appear in the report and they confirm my impression that we are dealing with broken relationships caused by obsessive behaviour of some kind.   I have been trying to imagine any other ways that vergers or other cathedral employees might all fail in this area of ‘standards’.  There might possibly be one verger with slovenly attention to detail but it cannot be true of all. A verger ensures that the altar cloth is not spattered with candle wax and the purificators are properly starched.  If the Dean is indeed one of those people who is over-zealous and neurotic about everything being kept ordered, tidy and clean, we can see how a thoroughly difficult atmosphere could develop over time.  The tone of the SCIE report suggests that the victims of the Dean’s verbal lashings and the toxic environment around him are not being pursued for serious failings.  In other words, whatever the trigger points for verbal harassments by the Dean against cathedral staff, the report suggests that these attacks were not proportionate or fair. 

What I think that this SCIE report is describing, is a scenario where one party with institutional power is holding another group to account for their alleged failings.  The real reason for this kind of disproportionate bullying may be one of many.  The bully may be him/herself the sufferer of an underlying personality disorder.  There may be other unknown factors yet to become clear; the institution itself may have a history of conflict that goes back a long way in time.  One thing is really clear. Wells Cathedral needs to have an external intervention.  It sounds from the report as though the situation at the Cathedral has congealed into a state of immovable despair and unhappiness.  The state of play will not be solved through more authoritarian intervention from those currently in charge.  The environment needs to be thoroughly analysed and understood from all points of view and this needs to be done from the outside.  There are people around who can do this kind of work but there has to be an initial agreement to submit to, or at least be open to accept this outside advice.  The people with power, here the Dean, the Chapter and the administrator, will be required to listen and act on the advice of skilled and trained mediators.

The photo of the beautiful Vicars’ Close in Wells beneath the article brings out another aspect of this unhappy story.   One of the problems which causes much discontent among ordinary parish clergy at present is the way that they are required to live in tied accommodation.  This weakens their negotiating stance if ever they have a dispute with their Bishop.  The SCIE inspectors picked up this issue in the Wells situation.  Many of the cathedral’s employees are required to live in the cathedral accommodation provided.  Living in Vicars’ Close brings them close to their place of work and also protects them from the other expensive property options prevalent in a place like Wells.  As with clergy, living in tied accommodation carries with it an element of uncertainty, particularly if there is ever a power confrontation with an employer.  If an employee is bullied, then there is little possibility of the issue being dealt with fully, as the individual concerned is too scared of losing a home and a livelihood all at once.  Tied housing in other words is a mixed blessing when the power dynamics of the employing institution are unhealthy or autocratic.

This piece has been written without knowledge of the full facts.  I make no apology for my speculations as they do form a rational assessment and interpretation of the limited information that is given in the CT article.  The full SCIE report has not so far been published, so the material we have is incomplete.  The 70 employees and 400 volunteers who are affected by the state of tension and unhappiness, because of the bullying behaviour, are nowhere accused of improper or immoral behaviour.  If there is no actual wrongdoing apart from not meeting whatever is meant by ‘unattainable standards’, then we are left to conclude that this situation is ripe for successful professional mediation.   A mediator should be able to find out what is at the heart of the Dean’s somewhat overbearing behaviour towards the staff.  Is his perfectionism reasonable, or should it be tempered to fit in with normally fallible human beings?  These are all questions that a good mediator could be asked to tackle with the expectation that harmony, peace and a spirit of cooperation can be restored to Wells Cathedral.

My final comments link to the issue of power in cathedrals.   Over the years of writing this blog, I have reflected on dysfunction at various cathedral establishments in Britain.  Now that many visitations and reports about cathedrals are published online, we, the onlookers, are given much material to reflect on and interpret.  When the Bishop of Exeter wrote his visitation on Exeter Cathedral, I wrote my interpretation on what I thought was really going on.  I was pleased to be told that my observations were close to the actual reality by someone close to the action.  The power in institutions, whether secular or religious, seems to operate in predictable ways wherever you look.  Often, the only people who cannot see the blindingly obvious features of power dynamics are the people who form the cast list of the actors in a power drama.  Every institution is faced with failures caused by human frailty.  Human nature will often have a tendency to seek advantage and power when there is opportunity to do so.  The one institution that should be more resistant to power games of this kind is the Church.   We follow a master who said, ‘those who are supposed to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them … but it shall not be so among you’. Somehow this passage, which has Jesus commending to us the role of servant or slave, needs to be heard today as never before.  The power exercised by those senior in church circles needs to have such humility built into it.  Christians should be at the top of the list of those who recognise and reject tyranny and power abuse wherever it is found.

by Paul Skirrow

Definition of bullying: The abuse and mistreatment of someone vulnerable by someone stronger, more powerful, etc. It is prone to or characterized by overbearing mistreatment and domination of others.

The clergy of the Church of England, if asked directly, would probably be able to identify instances of personal bullying by the hierarchy, either of themselves or of others. Most however, would accept that this is not too common. However, it would seem that the identifiable mechanisms for direct one on one bullying have been embedded as part of the structures and systems of the Church. In that way they do not need to be personalised in any hierarchical figure as they become the normal practice of the management of the institution. Also, while resenting this ever encroaching managerialism, we find it hard to resist it, and to identify it in a way which reveals it for what is it. The hierarchy are engaged in bullying even without their activity being identified as such by them or others. Finally, when clergy suffer from bullying in this embedded form, it is difficult to pinpoint and identify a practice which is diffuse and permeates a whole system, and it is the nature of such a system that it is far from easy or safe for an individual to make a stand when isolated.

Below are some examples of the way bullying has become embedded, and is, in fragmented and generalised ways, experienced by most clergy.

• The removal of freehold. This paved the way for creating weaker and less protected clergy, making them easier targets. Employment rights were undercut severely through this process. The checks and balances built into the system were removed and a poor substitute, from the point of view of the clergy, was introduced: Common Tenure.

• The Clergy Discipline Measure is a fine example of what happens when the protection of freehold renders clergy vulnerable. Its destructive weaknesses have been identified but whether the Church has the will or the way to redeem the situation remains to be seen. The practice of being suspended and cut off from support and the exercise of one’s vocation, is a definition of being guilty until being proved innocent. The process feels like being bullied by clergy who have had to go through it, and it hangs, like Cicero’s sword of Damocles, over the heads of all priests going about their parish duties.

• The constant demand for responses to questionnaires from the “centre”, over and above what used to be the usual documents, seem like a deliberate checking up process to make sure the clergy are doing what they should. This is demeaning.

• The proliferation of initiatives cascading from the “centre” remind clergy that they are not really doing all they could to fulfil their vocation, and their practice of ministry needs remodelling. Belittling the vulnerable, persistently reminding them of their inadequacies, is an act of bullying.

• The devising of Diocesan strategies and plans into which parishes are expected to fit has the same effect, and reminds clergy that their traditional and faithful activities are inadequate. There’s a comic/tragic exercise watching clergy persuade their PCCs to produce a mission statement that fits in with the latest alliterative straplines from the Diocese and its elaborately illustrated and verbose Mission Plan. Again, the message is to do it the Diocesan way, not the way of your parish and people. This undermines those in weaker positions.

• The constant money pressure through Parish Share could be described whimsically as stealing the parishes’ dinner money, which is an old, traditional and established form of bullying. That aside, clergy are often made to feel as failures when they can’t up the giving to fund the extra staff, initiatives, and programmes of the Dioceses.

• The pressure to put bums on pews reflects a contempt for low numbers. Two or three gathered together represents a failure by the clergy. The message of failing is persistent and insidious. (See: Attitudes to, and funding for, rural parish ministry – Church Times Letters 11^th February 2022.) Numerical growth is the key to “success” and the only indicator of “success”. There are instances of Church House seizing on apparent growth from the statistics and asking to learn how the church managed it. Demographic changes such as immigration from predominantly Anglican countries, or two or three Christian families moving in do not count as “techniques”. Neither do proper pastoral care, or good funeral practices.

• The emphasis on the demography of the church is a criticism about the failure of clergy to fill the pews with younger people. However, when has the dominant age group been under 30, and for how many decades has the church been singing the same song about bringing in young people, without effect? That history doesn’t matter when it comes to bullying today’s clergy. Ironically, those who “failed” in the past are now in a position to criticise those who “fail” in the same ways now. Younger people have other things to do – visiting family, caring for elderly relatives, or taking the only opportunity for leisure together. Make sure they know we are there if they need us.

• The pressure to “reinvent” liturgy, to make it more “relevant”, “attractive”, or even inane, undermines clergy who are competent in doing what they have been doing well for years. Parish priests know as a rule what feeds their people and sustains them in Christian hope, if they listen attentively. Yet it would seem, according to the deluge of ideas from the “centre”, that they don’t.

• Persistent pastoral reorganisation, or the threat of it, disturbs, threatens and worries clergy who have no way to resist, especially those without Freehold. It creates and sustains anxiety, increasing vulnerability and the desire to comply with the demands of the bullies. Some rural Parishes seem to be reorganised in their groups almost annually or every time someone locally moves on. One rural churchwarden told me recently, “I’m not sure what there is to reorganise. We are down to one service monthly usually taken by a Lay Reader. There are 12 churches and one half-time priest.” The pressure to take on more is hard to resist because refuse and “even that which you have will be taken away”. (A standard line of one Northern Archdeacon.)

• The constant widening and increasing of responsibilities takes away the focus of clergy on the essentials of ministry. The administration, the returns, the courses, meetings, the three line whips to attend episcopally organised events. The essential Calling is reduced to the side-lines.

• Appraisals and Reviews often insult clergy in their approach to questioning their work, competence, and faithfulness. Done in the name of support they have been experienced as quite the opposite.

• There are increasingly rigid frameworks of safeguarding, health and safety, etc. which constrict initiative, have resulted in injustices to victims and alleged perpetrators, and create fear of sensitive practices and pastoral action.

• The recently stated aim to have lay-led churches is saying to priests, “Your calling is outdated and not needed. It doesn’t work.“ It completely misses the point that the vocations of the laity are in their families, communities and workplaces. The church’s role is to serve them and think with them theologically about that task. They are not to be co-opted as free labour to sustain an institution for the sake of its hierarchy.

All the above, in effect, outlines institutionalised bullying. It suggests that we have developed management practices designed to manipulate a weakened clergy in order to force them to do what the hierarchy wants through the structures the hierarchy controls. It is the practice of the powerful dominating weaker and more vulnerable people.

What is to be done? Many clergy quite rightly sit lightly to the above where they can, dismissing it out of frustration. This is still possible for those who have managed to hold on to their freehold. For others I would argue that a quiet resistance is required. A collective stance which allows such bullying to pass by or wither in the in-box. Alongside that, listen to our people and reassert the fact that those we serve have a different view and we are necessarily heeding their needs. Treat intrusive questions in questionnaires and assessments with quiet dignity, while indicating their irrelevance to your situation; a simple “N/A” works well. Use appraisals creatively to rediscover the excitement and hope of your vocation rather than follow a hierarchical agenda.

For the hierarchy, stop undermining your clergy in the name of “Ministerial Support”. Have a moratorium on initiatives. Visit and affirm small churches without judging; just enjoy them. There are some wonderful clergy and people out there. Do more theology (or even some theology) on ministry, priesthood and the place of ordinary lay people in the world. Meet one to one with the clergy and listen, don’t try and “lead”. Reconsider the size and financial burden of the large bureaucracies now deemed essential to manage the church.

Much is spoken of bullying and the Church of England has policies and training programmes about how to deal with it. The church knows there is a problem and seeks to prevent it from becoming a greater problem at one level. That is good. However, essential though the prevention of direct one on one bullying is, we need to see how we have integrated bullying into the culture and management of the church over the past two or more decades. If the analysis above has some basis in fact then we need to rethink. We seek to serve God and God’s people. We will never manage that with systems that allow the motives and practices of the powerful to dominate the servants. That’s the way of the world and not the way of God and the Kingdom.

Paul Skirrow is a priest in retirement with experience spanning Urban and Industrial Mission, Parishes, a Retreat Centre, and international networking.

In recent days, my attention has been drawn once again to a 2020 letter http://survivingchurch.org/2020/08/12/letter-to-charity-commissioners-over-concerns-about-church-of-england-safeguarding/  sent to the Charity Commission (CC) by a list of signatories about failures in the Church of England’s safeguarding systems.  It clearly set out a number of ways that the Church’s legal and administrative protocols for dealing with such things as clergy discipline and safeguarding practice are failing, sometimes lamentably.  It became known as the Micah letter because it is a plea to follow the principles set out in Micah 6.8 to follow a path of justice and mercy and walk humbly with God. The letter is dated the 11 August 2020.  As far as I can determine, the letter has disappeared into a black hole of the in-tray of the CC.  I do not make this comment as implying that the Commission is necessarily at fault.  If they did fail to respond to our 70 signatories, I can believe that there may have been some valid practical reasons.  The letter was raising a complex series of issues about poor safeguarding practice in the Church of England.  It is difficult to know how Baroness Stowell, then chair of the CC, could have responded.   A full response might have required the temporary shutting down of the entire safeguarding machinery of the Church while the complaints were investigated.

The prompt to me to look once again at this powerful written critique of CofE protocols and practice with regard to safeguarding came from the anonymous author who is standing up for ‘Kenneth’.  Were it not for her, I too would have completely forgotten the existence of this valuable document.  She observed that the document has proved to be an inspiration and support to anyone wanting to make sense of the sometimes tortuous legal processes that the CofE has put in place for safeguarding.  For most of us the existence of several apparently overlapping structures connected with safeguarding is very confusing.  How many really understand how the National Safeguarding Team relates to other structures like the National Safeguarding Steering Group and the National Safeguarding Panel?  No doubt each group can legitimately justify their existence on the grounds that they have distinct tasks.  But clarity for some does not translate into readily comprehensible structures for those outside the system.  What we have, according to the letter to the CC, are organisations bewildering and confusing and which, according to their critics, routinely fail to deliver good practice and safety in the arena of safeguarding.

The Micah letter identifies eight areas of structural dysfunction in the safeguarding institutions of the CofE with a request for the CC to help.  I do not propose to go through each one, but I want to comment on three issues which continue to be important.  It is hard to claim that, overall, things in the safeguarding world are much improved or changed in the two years since the letter was written.  Each of the three issues that I pick out from the letter for this blog have a direct bearing on the Kenneth case.  No doubt they can be applied to many other cases that are floating around in the Church’s legal system.  There are certainly many such cases. I note in passing that a lot of energy is being expended by ordinary Christians in being members of safeguarding core groups.  These have the power to make life-changing decisions which can damage or seriously affect the lives of others in the Church.

The first issue mentioned by the Micah letter is that the Church operates its own closed system of legal enforcement where there are often no practicable means of appeal.  The enforcement system often refers appeals back to the original core group or committee responsible for making a judgement.  In Kenneth’s case, there is no means to appeal to an independent ombudsman.  Anonymous took his case to the top of the system, the NST, when she saw that natural justice was being denied him.  All the NST could offer in return was to suggest that she took her concerns back to the Diocese which had made serious blunders in the first place.  To quote the Micah letter: ‘No matter how egregious the failures to abide by the Church’s own rules or basic principles of good practice may be, there is no remedy’.

The second area of concern that I wish to highlight from the letter is that there is a distinct failure in the way that the Church applies justice fairly and consistently.  When an accusation is made over a safeguarding complaint, the individual so accused is sometimes required to step aside from their duties immediately.  On other occasions the accused person is allowed to ignore the pending CDM as though it did not exist.  In one notorious case a senior bishop was permitted to move from one diocese to another even though a serious safeguarding case against him was still unresolved.  By contrast the public humiliation of Lord Carey, in full glare of press coverage, was concerned with a minor issue.  The instant removal of his PTO was done virtually without notice and it was, apparently, an evening phone call from a newspaper that alerted him to his ban.  The case was eventually resolved after it was decided that there was no case to answer.  I understand from Private Eye that a CDM has been lodged against a member of the Christ Church chapter without a suspension being required. I assume we shall hear about the judgement in due course.  As someone has pointed out, the application of this church system of justice seems to depend on whether you are important or easily expendable.  We would hope that the rules of ‘stepping back’ in the face of safeguarding situations could be made far more transparent than they are at present.  Meanwhile, Kenneth is prohibited from attending any church building in the country for worship unless he signs an agreement for a crime that he claims he did not commit and for which there is no means of appeal.

The third area of gross injustice that seems to riddle the Church’s attempts at running a functioning justice system, is when conflicts of interest are not addressed.  Kenneth finds himself at the mercy of a core group where at least one of the members is a facebook friend of the boy at the centre of the case and his mother. This core group member is also a member of a Fan Club Page for the boy.  No one here, or in the Percy case, seemed to question the appropriateness of having people in a quasi-judicial role whose ability to be objective was compromised by their pre-existing relationship with the accused/complainant.  The seriousness of the conflict of interest question is squarely addressed by Lord Carlile when he says: ‘Anyone with a conflict of interest must leave the deliberations and take no further part…Having people on a core group with a conflict of interest is simply not sustainable and is, on the face of it, unlawful.’  The aftermath of the Christ Church affair will no doubt bring into the light a shocking catalogue of collusions between lawyers and publicity merchants.  Between them they have been successful in one thing, claiming enormous fees for the privilege of manipulating the Church’s legal system.  This has been undertaken for the ethically dubious and unsuccessful attempt by the malcontent dons to harass and persecute the Dean.

The Micah letter to the CC contains one further layer of interest.  Appended to the letter are around 70 names including my own.  The list contains many individuals who follow and contribute to the comments on this blog.  Indeed, it is a bit like a who’s who of those who are concerned for the proper functioning of the structures of the safeguarding world.  Among the names are many that I have never met in the flesh but, because of the work they are doing for survivors, are fellow soldiers in the cause to which this blog is dedicated.  My impression is that there are many other individuals who support the cause for good protocol and just process in the C/E safeguarding world.  They nevertheless hold back because they fear that it may affect their professional lives.  Thus, their names do not appear.  But it is my belief that there are many silently supporting the work of safeguarding reform.  The Micah letter, though now nearly two years old, can act as an interim manifesto.  Even though no practical changes were achieved through it – publicly at any rate – it remains an important resource document.  Simultaneously it pleads for reform and sets out a fairer, clearer and generally better way of delivering safeguarding for the vulnerable within the structures of the Church of England.

by Nell Hardy

Thank you to Stephen for inviting me to contribute to this blog, as someone who has silently been following it over the last few months. I am an actor, writer, theatre facilitator and the founder of Response Ability Theatre, a socially conscious company that seeks to represent and support people whose lives have been derailed by trauma. I am also a survivor of spiritual (among other) abuse from a Church of England priest, who was also my father.

While working on R.A.T.’s first show – NoMad, my solo piece about my experiences of homelessness and mental health hospitalisation – I worked with experts in theatre outreach and mental health interventions to develop a two-stranded workshop programme. One workshop is for trauma survivors: it explores physical, metaphorical and symbolic ways of identifying and giving expression to one’s experience of trauma, empowering survivors to make sense in themselves of the hold their trauma has on them, and to explain their needs and perspectives to those around them.

The other is for social and mental health service providers: it identifies empathy as the most valuable tool in the kit of anyone working directly with trauma survivors, and teaches performance-based breath techniques and body language awareness to support workers to remain emotionally available, and so able to inform their problem-solving with instinctive compassion, without being dangerously vulnerable or inappropriate. This strand in particular brings something very new to the welfare sectors, and has been received with great enthusiasm by professionals I have encountered who are committing to person-centred, trauma-informed work.

I am now beginning development of my company’s second show, which will explore spiritual abuse, the role of spirituality in modern life, and the struggle to live with integrity under structures fuelled by narcissism, individualism and fundamentalism (in both its religious and secular forms). My aim is to raise awareness in an increasingly secular, anti-religious society, of how difficult it is psychologically to remove oneself from philosophies that have shaped how you see yourself and the world around you, and practically to extricate yourself from the communities around which your way of life has been built. To draw comparisons between the spiritual abuse that can come from religious affiliation, and the punishing ideologies and practices we all have to accept and absorb to survive in the ‘civilised’ world. To look at what happens when we lose our power and inclination to reflect on the values by which we live, and from there to ask what it really means to be a nurturing, accommodating and respectful citizen.

The creative realization of this project will bring with it the adaptation and offer of my workshop programme to survivors of spiritual abuse, and to spiritual leaders such as priests, imams, rabbis – who, as readers of this blog will undoubtedly know, are effectively social workers thanks to the overlap of spiritual pastoral duties and legal safeguarding requirements for any organisation in the modern world. I would like to explain further why I think such work is crucial for the well-being of survivors of spiritual abuse, including those whose experience came from the Church; for priests and other faith leaders who find themselves ministering under the same styles of bureaucracy that grip our welfare services; and for the integrity of organised spiritual practice going forward.

The big problem we have with trauma is that it is necessarily triggered by a social wrong that needs to be addressed for any mental health intervention to be effective – but the second our society sees someone in distress without a cause that is to them visible, various disempowering labels start being attached to the person. A flock of geese that flies away out of fear on hearing an unexpected loud noise is responding appropriately to perceived threat, but someone who breaks down when left under the power of a cruel manipulator has severe anxiety, neuroses, a personality disorder. To wider society, these labels lead to the assumption that the person is delusional, or a compulsive liar, or in some way not to be trusted and believed. In the person themselves, it creates deep-set confusion about whether wrong was actually done to them in the first place or whether it was “all in their mind”, and heightened fight or flight physical responses to everyday scenarios that can leave them feeling powerless to speak for themselves.

So where does the Church come in? Well, for a start, it is responsible for an awful lot of trauma survivors in our world today – and I would argue that spiritual abuse results in the most internalised trauma of all. If a child is mistreated by a parent, and builds their self-esteem around that experience, it takes a long time free from that influence and making new healthier connections with other people to get on to a new path. If someone is misrepresented by psychiatry and doubts their functionality, it requires a lot of risk-taking to prove themselves internally and to others. But how about when someone is told that God wants them to suffer? What risk can give you an alternative to God’s voice? What higher power can validate you than God? Where do you go for healing when God is harmful?

The Church in our time is also effectively a support service. Priests are social workers, and as a result often fall into the same traps of invalidating treatment towards their congregations, getting caught between various services when they do genuinely try to help, and hiding behind ‘safeguarding’ procedures to avoid taking responsibility for their actions, as others working at the mercy of highly bureaucratic systems do. But weirdly – in my experience, anyway – the fact of it being a faith body, with staff on atypical payment patterns and running with a high percentage of volunteers, seems to exempt it from a whole host of policy checks and accountabilities. The Head of Safeguarding for the Church of England when I was working my way through the complaints process described the Church’s safeguarding practice as the weirdest she had ever come across – without seeming to think she had any responsibility or power to change it.

As a result, that mentality of protecting each other instead of protecting the individual easily seeps into their professional mode – and once it’s there on the pastoral side, it can easily seep into ministry as well. Cue preaching styles that invalidate, traumatize and re-traumatize, that dictate rather than inviting questions and thought. Spiritual services are theatrical events, in which spectators are engaged on a heightened emotive level, told what to say and when to say it, and not invited to contribute directly to the conversation. Like theatre, they can be profoundly thought-provoking and inspiring in the right hands, or dull, prescriptive and frightening in the wrong hands. And of course, unfortunately, there are those priests who actively use their ministry to harm or take advantage of people. These, like most abusers, know very, very well how to make general society’s ignorance about mental health and trauma to their advantage.

The more spiritual abuse survivors are able to express themselves with confidence and empathetic force, the more success stories we will see, the fewer will be allowed to be brushed off the shoulders of people who don’t care. And the more people in wider society who see the vital insights of these survivors, and empathise on a bodily, instinctive level with their struggles, the more heed we will find being paid to the social lessons to be learned from our experiences. And our increasingly secular, decreasingly spiritually reflective society certainly could do with being reminded of their own spiritual vulnerabilities, how they leave them open to manipulation in and out of spiritual spheres, and brought in touch with how to support those emerging from spiritual abuse in safe communities in wider society.

I would love to hear from readers about if anyone else has used creativity as a kind of therapeutic intervention – and if so, if this was done in a Church or religion-conscious sphere? Neither Stephen nor I are aware of this offer existing anywhere. If something were to be started, do you think you would find it beneficial to your recovery?

And on the note of the public play I will eventually be putting on – what would you want wider secular society to understand about being a believer, or survivor of spiritual abuse, or reliant on a Church/spiritual community for acceptance and safety, in our times?

If I haven’t dizzied you with words already, I would like to welcome you to have a look at my website, www.responseabilitytheatre.com, for more information about my practice.

For those of us who appreciate traditional church music, Ash Wednesday is something of a highlight.  My wife and I ‘attended’ the broadcast Sung Eucharist from Durham Cathedral where, as part of the service, we listened to the glories of Tallis’ Lamentations and the Miserere by Allegri.  It is an extraordinary paradox that, at the moment in the Church’s year when we are remembering the depravity of human beings, we should also be hearing music that is at the pinnacle of human genius. 

‘Remember that you are but dust and unto dust you shall return.’   These words lie haunting over the entire Lenten liturgy for Ash Wednesday.  Somehow, we need to make sense of them.  The sublimity of the music may lead us away from considering ourselves like mere dust when fellow members of our kind can produce works of such quality. Will beauty like this ever die if there are human beings to sing it and listen to it?  But the Lenten emphasis on humankind burdened by sin and moving towards the dust of death must still be thought about.  We need to take these words and ideas seriously as part of our Lenten work as Christians.   Even though we might want to push such apparently gloomy notions away, the pervasive nature of evil in our lives, and in humankind generally, has to be something we look at calmly and fearlessly.

In previous posts I have often tried to grapple with the problem of evil.  Of course, discussion on this topic is never exhausted.  A particular challenge to our current understanding of good and evil, are the reports of the shelling of civilian areas in Ukraine and the insane firing of tank shells at a nuclear power station.  The Ukrainian war is in all our minds and is one example of how far human beings can sink in depravity, towards an evil that is beyond imagining. 

In my simple way, I have discovered one uncomplicated idea that I find helpful in trying to fathom the nature of evil.  Any evil action by a human being can nearly always be laid at the door of somebody’s craving for power and for the gratifications that seem to be promised through having it.  To have this single word, power, appearing in almost every example of human evil that we can think of, helps us to have a better handle on the phenomenon.  In summary we might claim that human evil nearly always involves the abuse of power of some kind.  Such an overarching idea also helps us to see how evil is so difficult to eliminate in one’s own life.  No one is ever completely clear of power abuse which is behind every example of human evil.  Thankfully, most of us avoid the severe manifestations of power abuse, like theft, rape, violence, selfish greed, and cruelty.  But many lesser kinds may well clutter up our lives.  These need to be dealt with in some sort of act of confession.  The important thing in making any such act of confession is the acknowledgement of how easily we can harm or neglect others.  It is so easy to hide this evil, even from ourselves. Being convinced of our rectitude, like the Pharisee in the Temple, is a form of hypocrisy that Jesus did not much care for.  Abuse of power, whether serious or minor is part of an endemic human disease in society.  Its toxicity is far more dangerous when it is not acknowledged.  There is also such a thing as ‘respectable’ evil.  By this term I refer to a way of undermining another person using the tools of an institution with which to do it.  A great deal of bullying and power abuse uses outwardly legitimate methods.  It is sometimes difficult, consequently, to spot what is really going on.  Even in the church, some evil situations can occur which are entirely hidden from sight.  The ‘innocence’ of the perpetrators is protected from coming into awareness because the ‘regulations are being followed’.  An illegitimate and immoral exercise of power towards an individual in an institutional context can still be evil even if, on paper, the correct procedures are in operation.  The person or people who have the potential to fully recognise the nature of the evil are the perpetrators.  All too often they are well-versed at the art of self-deceit.

If we are to do a good job at attempting to come to terms with our own personal temptation to do evil, a good starting place is to consider our personal relationship with power in the various contexts in which we live our lives.  Do we hanker after it?  Do we find that we resent not having it or, worse still, is there some pathological resentment from our pasts that makes us chase after it with an unusual and unhealthy determination?  There are two words in our vocabulary that look similar but help to describe perspectives on power and its possession.  One is humiliation and other humility.

 Many people in various ways have suffered humiliation in childhood or subsequently.  Some have overcome the effects of this traumatic experience in a healthy way and have gone on to discover self-esteem and live lives that do not beat others down.  Humiliation by parents and others, as we all know, can also have a variety of damaging and lasting effects on the way we approach life.  It can lead to a fiercely competitive approach when approaching other people.  Among the many defensive stances found in an individual who is haunted by memories of parental humiliation are the self-inflation techniques we associate with severe cases of narcissism.  In previous posts, we have noted how commonly this personality distortion is found among the clergy.  More serious a concern is the fact that clergy with high degrees of narcissism and with a longing and a need for power, are the ones that are often chosen to exercise it within the institution.  Within the Church we allow some individuals to take roles of power where they are no longer under any sort of challenge or supervision.  Such possession of unsupervised power, coupled with the disorder associated with narcissism, is an extreme danger to those under them and destructive to the wider Church.

The other word we identified, humility, can be translated by the words having your feet on the ground.  A bishop or leader with a hierarchical position, who also possesses humility, is one that consults, listens to counsel and above all has done the inner work of constantly challenging their personal relationship with power.  The humble prelate is one who listens.  Such people listen to the people who come to them; they listen to God in their quiet times of prayer.  Intellectually and spiritually, they are known for their flexibility.  This blog takes a strong stand against systems of theology or biblical interpretation that pronounce that one single version of truth or opinion is correct or sound with all others being in error.  We find such rigidity and failure of flexibility in the systems of management and teaching which, for example, we have come to associate with the Iwerne network and the ReNew cluster of churches.  These are examples of places where there is likely to be precious little in the way of challenging of personal or institutional power.  The statements that emerged from these conservative networks in response to the Living in Love and Faith material were totally lacking in humility or nuance.  President Putin, in the current war in Ukraine, is impossible to deal with because he has, like many conservative Christian leaders, only a single version of truth – his own truth.  Christian leaders who fail to have a measure of flexibility, humility, or the ability to see things from another’s point of view, will always be stumbling blocks for the churches. Christian individuals under their leadership will find that their guidance is not a path to Christian freedom but one to spiritual enslavement.  Such enslavement, linked with the lust for power among their leaders, is close to being a truly dark place.

In this reflection I have identified evil as being strongly linked to an inappropriate human lust for power.  Of course, this is an incomplete account of evil, but space and the patience of my readers puts a limit on what I can say further here.  I want to finish by suggesting how the quality of humility can change a desire for power over another into something humane and resembling what Christians mean by love.  English gives us three words which are the heart of humility and humble service, and they are impossible to have in any power game that might be being played.  The words are empower, empathise and encourage.  It is striking that each word has the prefix em or en.  Without doing a lexicon search on these words, I am going to assume that each verb has the prefix which is the Greek for ‘in’.  Each word is about giving something to another person, putting in power, courage or getting close to them by a readiness to feel their suffering.  The process of giving to another person, through one of the actions implied by these words, means automatically that no power is being wielded over them by us.  The words imply, in fact, that we are giving power away, and thus neutralising any evil that there might exist in the relationship.  To give power away is a strong indication that we are not trying to keep it for ourselves. 

As children, some of us were taught the moral teaching on how to talk to another.  ‘Is it true, is it kind, is it necessary?’  Perhaps another way of keeping ourselves from evil is to ask a similar question about our dealings with others in word or deed.   Does it empower, does it encourage, and does it show true empathy?   If what we do or say does one or more of these things, it is likely that we are avoiding the deadly trap of playing power games with others.  These are in different degrees and different intensities the source of much evil in the world.