The discussion in the previous post about teenage Christianity has caused me to reflect on the experiences I went through at school and later.  My boarding school took Christianity and chapel life seriously but there were no institutions like a Christian Union with links to summer camps.   There was a small group called the Vivian Redlich society, named after an old boy who had died in Papua at the hands of the Japanese while serving as a missionary in WW2.  This group did Bible studies and listened to talks.   It did not meet frequently enough to encourage any form of over-excited enthusiasm in the participants.  The school, nevertheless, allowed a steady respect for Christianity which was sufficient for me to leave to read theology at university without any expressions of surprise from masters or other boys.  You could describe my school in the early 60s as an institution which provided a stable setting for emerging priestly vocations in several of its boys.  It was not trying too hard to create that vocation through any form of hard sell Christianity.

My lack of any kind of hot-house Christian experiences as a teenager, was, in fact, something that served me well in later years.   I arrived at university with a freedom and a keenness to explore what the faith was all about.  I had at that point no strong preference for any expression of the faith which could claim my undivided loyalty.  In spite of pressure from Christian Union types in my college to attend their meetings, I had enough understanding of the wider setting of Christianity to realise that Christian Unions were, in one way, just one expression of the faith among many.  I wanted to experience many of these other manifestations of the faith.  In this I was like a hungry person entering a room with a huge variety of foods available to sample.  There were meetings of Quakers to visit, Orthodox liturgies to attend and glorious music to be heard across the city in various college chapels including my own.  Those sucked immediately into the Christian Union vortex were being invited into one small room with only a single dish on offer. Though I attended such meetings a few times, I realised that to be in thrall to the notion that the meetings of the Christian Union presented the sole expression of Christian truth was not where I wanted to be. It would have been severely limiting to my early awareness of the huge cultural and theological diversity existing within Christianity.  What my other discoveries of the faith were telling me was that the journey to find faith and truth was going to be complex and never totally complete.  The beginning of adult life was certainly not the time to close any options down.  There would always be this personal adventure of discovery, with perspectives to be explored, which would reveal the enormous variety implied in the word truth.  Intellectually and aesthetically, the task of learning to be a Christian, as well as teaching others to share in it, is a life-long undertaking with many twists along the way.

Surviving Church began as a blog for individuals who, at an early age, had been ‘converted’ into a conservative form of Christianity. Subsequently they may have found it limiting for their ability to flourish as full human beings.  I wrote short pieces which had a single underlying message.  It was to say that the version of Christianity you follow (and this applies to me) can always be broadened and extended beyond what you have so far learnt and experienced.  If any Christian leader tries to tie you to a single version of truth, theology or music style, you can be fairly certain that the narrowness they proclaim is their narrowness, not that of Christianity itself.  I personally find it deeply disturbing to hear words like ‘the Bible teaches’, ‘infallible’ or the authority of the Word of God.  Every time such words or expressions are used, we are witnessing a power manoeuvre.  An attempt is being made to suck the hearer into the vortex I mentioned earlier.  It is a place where there is no discussion or disagreement tolerated.  It is a place that I dread the most – the position of being under the control of someone who is living in a place representing a sole version of truth.  If he has deficits in his understanding (and that is is true of all of us), these same limits will be shared by all those under his control.   Of course, authoritative statements will sometimes be uttered with the preacher’s learning and insight to back them up.  Nevertheless, it will always be dangerous to root one’s entire Christian understanding on the fallible and incomplete grasp of truth held by a single individual.  For me, Christianity is found, not in boldly proclaimed statements of doctrine; it is found along the journey of faith which is subtly different for each pilgrim.   It does not allow any of us to say we have arrived this side of the grave.  The best that a preacher can do is to explore and interpret the written truth of Scripture and share how these words have guided and inspired him/her along the path. 

At the very beginning of Mark’s gospel, the text speaks of the good news, the euaggelion.  What is the good news?  It is not a new idea, a system of beliefs or a political system.  It is the announcement of the Kingdom of God drawing close.   Even Jesus was pointing his hearers beyond himself to the activity of God in the world.  While he himself was the means of God drawing close, the invitation at that moment was not to believe something but to become part of something, a new reality breaking through.  Over the centuries the Church has forgotten to see that the task of teaching and preaching is never about the preacher him/herself.  It is about what is being revealed through the words used.  The picture that comes to mind is the showman who stands up and pulls back a curtain to show some visual wonder.  The thing seen is to be the centre of attention, not the puller of the curtain.  The existence and creation of so-called celebrity preachers to me is a kind of blasphemous take on the task of preaching.  It focusses on the person doing the preaching and not on the message being shared.  The Idea of celebrity in a pulpit is also likely to cause the kind of dependency culture that is so unhealthy for the growth to maturity that each Christian should be engaged in.  Although I no longer practise the ministry or preach, the question I used to have for each of my flock was not: are you sound? But are you growing in understanding and depth? Are you becoming more and more the people you are capable of being?  In looking at the dynamics of a sermon, the focus should be on the relationship between the message and the would-be recipient, not between the preacher and his/her audience.

At the risk of repeating myself I want to reiterate my point about the dangers of focussing on a preacher, when the emphasis should normally be on the task of the healthy growing of Christians.  Even dead preachers, like Billy Graham, John Wimber or David Watson can sometimes trap individuals in an endless cycle of dependency so that they, because of their attachment, can never grow beyond a certain point.  If the people who introduce us to the ‘glorious liberty of the sons of God’ do their job properly, they leave the scene quickly after pulling back the curtain.  What is then remembered is not the preacher but what was shared on a crucial life-changing occasion.  I am also fortunate that in spite of the limitations of my school Christian education, I was never trapped by a system of belief and thinking which wanted me to accept or reject a system of thinking and belief in one great indigestible lump.   Rather, I was allowed to take on examining the claims of the Christian faith over a lifetime.  The faith has many facets, and it needs copious amounts of time to examine them.    It cannot be done in one brief emotional moment by a vulnerable, possibly manipulated, teenager trying to identify his or her adult Christian identity.

Today’s blog is somewhat personal, but I sense that at least some of my readers are also ready to revisit their experiences, good and bad in their Christian pasts.  I regard myself as fortunate to have had many experiences of exploring the Christian faith through travel and one-time links to universities in Switzerland and Greece.   My good fortune was not just the things I learnt and places I visited but the in the fact that, even at an early age, my education had not closed me down to being able to learn and experience new things within the sheer variety of Christian culture and witness.  The influence of places like Iwerne camps and the many centres of ‘sound’ conservative Christian teaching may represent where many Christians wish to be, but I sense that some may come to regret that they believed it possible to limit their experience of God to one cultural manifestation.  God seems to be found in so many places and we should rejoice in that.

by Edmund Weiner

Most of the recent interest in the Iwerne camps has focussed on the period from the late 70s onwards when John Smyth and the Fletcher brothers were prominent in the camps and their organisation. It is easy to forget that there was an earlier, perhaps more innocent, period in the history of the camps.  Here is a personal account by Edmund Weiner who remembers the founder, E J H Nash (Bash) and the impact he still had over the boy campers in that period. From this time, the early 70s, we have some intriguing memories of both Fletcher brothers, particularly Jonathan. Jonathan was then emerging into a leadership role.  This piece helps to give us some feel for the personalities of both brothers when they were themselves young(ish) men.

In the summer term of 1969 I was in my first year at Christ Church, Oxford. I had just been ‘converted’ to evangelical Christianity through the college Christian Union group, which was very vigorous and contained several associates of VPS (Varsity Public Schools), then the proper name for what was informally called ‘Iwerne Minster’ or ‘Iwerne’ (though the actual venue was the nearby Clayesmore School). I presume that my public school background had been noted, since I received a visit from David Fletcher, the ‘Commandant’ of the Iwerne Minster camp.

DF invited me to come for a week to Iwerne Minster in the vacation, as a ‘Senior Camper’, which I duly did, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Senior Campers worked extremely hard doing various daily chores. One of mine was making up dozens of bottles of orange and lemon squash for outings. Another, a group activity, was making hundreds of sandwiches for packed lunches. We laid tables and did a certain amount of cleaning. We rushed from our chores to prayer meetings and bible studies with the officers that were held in addition to the talks laid on for the junior campers. We also paid a fee for the privilege of being there!

At that time, ‘Bash’, the Revd E. J. H. Nash, was still active. He wasn’t seen much during the early part of the programme, which consisted of a series of talks from officers, gradually building up to the evening when campers were challenged to make a commitment to Christ. The key talk on that evening was given by Bash. I think I only met him once and wasn’t especially impressed, whereas there were other officers, such as DF, whom I liked very much. I also remember being in a meeting where John Smyth was present, possibly only for a short visit, but I don’t know if I actually met him.

I loved the camaraderie and eagerly absorbed the teaching. I attended (I think) two more camps during my undergraduate years. I was also invited to a largeish gathering of officers and senior campers in Eastbourne, where there were again bible studies and prayer meetings. I can remember little about it, apart from walking along the Seven Sisters.

I was told that I was one of the few participants they had ever had from Westminster School, which I think they regarded as a future mission field, as it had no Christian Union. Possibly it was hoped that I would be able to assist with outreach there. The background to this, if I am not mistaken, is that a boy’s participation in a camp was by invitation, and that depended on there being a VPS staff member teaching at their school and running a Christian group which they attended.

After attending these camps, I was invited to join a few handpicked VPS men for several days at a kind of retreat (I’m sure that wasn’t what they called it!) in Cumbria. I think this must have been the summer of 1970. Jonathan Fletcher kindly drove me and C (later to become a bishop) from near our homes on the outskirts of London to this event. I had met JF before; in fact I think he may have visited me in college in his brother’s company. But I got the impression that he was very much the junior player while DF was the big noise: I think he was not long out of theological college.

The ‘retreat’ took place in a guest house in the country, I think in Broughton, near Barrow in Furness. We met each day in a chintzy parlour containing a harmonium, which accompanied our singing of the good old CSSM choruses familiar from Iwerne. The leader of the gathering was David Fletcher. I suppose JF assisted. I think the purpose was to train us to become officers — leaders at Iwerne or the associated camps. We were about half a dozen, all undergraduates. Apart from C and myself, there were at least three Oxford men, who later became evangelical clergy, and a single Cambridge man whose name I’ve forgotten. Three of those present were from my college.

I can remember very little of the programme, except that towards the end we each had to write and present a short evangelistic talk of the typical VPS kind. I walked round the garden in a somewhat desperate state trying to manufacture something suitable to put in my little filofax-style book, which was standard equipment. I think I knew in my heart that I was not VPS officer material, and didn’t particularly want to be. I am still a lay Christian (now very much not evangelical), and thankful for it.

What I remember much better were the leisure activities, several of which had slightly disturbing aspects. On one afternoon we had a hill climbing expedition. We parked in a field and proceeded up into the fells. The walk was fine until we reached Striding Edge. No one had prepared those of us who were not familiar with the Lake District for this. It is a path where fatalities are not infrequent. Of course, there was no compulsion to tackle Striding Edge, but some on the walk did so. The rest of us descended via an extremely precipitous scree. My apprehensions about this were assuaged by the calm support of C, who was an experienced hill walker. As far as I can remember there was no mention of special equipment or safety precautions at all. When we met up at the cars, we were faced by an irate farmer: the vehicles were illicitly parked in his field. An unedifying confrontation was in progress. It disturbed me that Christians who were apparently familiar with the area should show such disregard for private property.

On another day we drove into Barrow and had a look around. I was in JF’s car. On the way JF indulged in a little prank. This consisted of pulling up near a person walking along the road, winding down the window as if to ask for directions, calling out ‘Straight on?’ in a questioning tone, and then driving off. On our way home through the suburbs, JF instigated another prank. P, the smallest member of the party, was dropped off to join the tail of a long bus queue. We then drove round the block and back to the bus queue, where we screeched to a sudden halt. Two big members of the party leapt out of the car, seized P, and bundled him, pretending to protest, into the car, which then roared away, leaving the bus queue wondering if they had witnessed a kidnapping. Neither prank seemed at all funny, and even if they had been, they have always struck me as inconsistent with Christian behaviour.

In 1971, at the end of my last term as an undergraduate, I was again offered the chance to attend a VPS camp during the summer vacation. I cannot now remember if this went with a change of status up to officer, but I have a vague memory that the camp might have been the Lymington one rather than Iwerne. As it happened, my parents had planned for us to spend the whole summer with my sister in Cyprus, and as this clashed with the VPS camp, I declined the offer. And that was the end of any invitations to be involved with VPS.

An important point to make is that I never witnessed improper behaviour or improper suggestions of any sort. But I do think that the conduct of the ‘retreat’ points to a certain recklessness and a cavalier attitude to the concerns and rights of other people, which can be encountered quite widely among conservative evangelicals with a public school background.

While I hold no brief for Smyth, the VPS, or the evangelical wing of the C of E, I would like to point out that the Guardian review of Andrew Graystone’s book strikes me as over-sensationalized. The VPS camps were not ‘military style’. It’s true that the Revd Nash introduced some absurd military labels for the staff, but they didn’t mean anything. There were absolutely no military style activities, only lots of sports, games, and expeditions, plus the services at which the evangelical version of the Christian faith was presented. Nor was there, to my knowledge, any undue pressure to be converted: I’m quite sure that a 16 year old presented with an ideology is mature enough to make a choice (or was in the 1960s — I first chose to become a Christian on my own at 15).

Talk about ‘recruits’ is also silly. Commitment to Christ was, obviously, a qualification for being on the staff (many of them were clergy or ordinands), but the public school boys who attended were just children attending a camp. I’m not aware that there was an emphasis on, or indeed any teaching about, ‘purity’ (if that refers to sexual behaviour). By far the most important thing about a VPS man was that he should be both ‘keen’ (i.e. dedicated to ‘witnessing’) and ‘sound’.

It’s also really silly to describe the VPS as a ‘cult’. A cult is a church-like movement which takes over both individuals and families, brainwashes them, and controls their lives. The boys did not become cult members — they went back to their rather privileged homes and schools and carried on just as before, except that some of them began to practise Christianity. As regards the staff, clearly they were and are part of an organized pressure group within the church that requires strict adherence to conservative evangelicalism, but membership is entirely voluntary.

This is not to say that the VPS wasn’t or isn’t sinister, in the same way that all the para-church groups operating behind the scenes in the C of E are sinister. The VPS network operated in a semi-secret way. It heavily influenced the University Christian Unions (at least at Oxbridge) without openly declaring itself. Back in the 1970s, my fiance and I dropped in on C at Wycliffe Hall for a cup of tea; C suddenly became sheepish and apologized for having to rush away to a hush-hush prayer meeting (a VPS one).

The other unpleasant aspect of VPS, correctly identified in the Guardian, was its concentration on privileged young people, aiming with great success at getting public schoolboys to become the future leaders of the C of E. In this it resembles the now moribund Moral Rearmament movement, which targeted ‘key men’ who might be expected to become political leaders. Frank Buchmann, MRA’s founder, of course, was greatly influenced by the Keswick movement, which also underlies the evangelicalism of the VPS.

I hope what I’ve written corrects some false emphases in the presentation of ‘Iwerne’. Its badness is a little more subtle than the picture painted by sensationalistic journalism.

.

With the imminent publication of Andrew Graystone’s new book on the Smyth saga, Bleeding for Jesus, we have renewed interest in the story from many, including the Press.  The Titus Trust have recently published a timeline of their version of the events in the narrative around responses to Smyth, covering the years 2012 -present.  The main feature of their timeline is to show that, even according to their contested account, the trustees of the Titus Trust and others involved with the Iwerne camps were extraordinarily tardy in dealing with the information that was gradually trickling out from 2012 onwards.  The fact is that there was, for most of this period after 2012, a dangerous abuser at large, albeit in another part of the world.  This fact did not really seem to inspire any sense of real seriousness among those who had the power to do something about it.  The Titus Trustees seemed to be anxious above all to establish legal distance from the previous Iwerne charity that ran the camps until 1997.  As with the wider Church of England, there was little evidence of urgency to show care and consideration for the victims who were known about.  It would appear that, by 2017, at least 22 victims had been identified, but the welfare of these individuals does not appear to have been high on the agenda of the Titus trustees.

This blog piece is unlikely to contain any fresh information, but rather raises some questions that must have occurred to others as they examine this extensive batch of material which is newly revealed in the Titus timeline.  In passing, I would suggest that there is up to week’s work just to become familiar with all the Smyth material that has already entered the public domain since the Channel 4 programme in 2017.  This is even before the Makin report has been released or Graystone’s book published.  Both documents will be required reading for those of us who have tried to follow the story so far.

My role in looking at all this new Smyth material and the role of the organisations involved with him is not to attempt to summarise all the paperwork.  Any contribution I can make is to draw to the reader’s attention certain anomalies and questions that stand out in my reading of this material.  The first point that needs to be made is that the Titus timeline only covers the period from 2012 to the present.  I want to ask questions about the previous period from 1982 to 2012.  1982 was the year when a group of senior evangelical leaders associated with the Iwerne camps were alerted to the violent behaviour of John Smyth against some of those young campers.  It was the year when the so-called Ruston Report was compiled, and this established beyond doubt that criminal acts by Smyth had indeed taken place.  Various reasons have been offered to explain why the police were not immediately involved.  These include the desire of parents to protect their offspring and also the reputation fears of the authorities of Winchester College.   The recipients of the Ruston report numbered, I believe, eight people, all of whom were identified by their initials.  Some have now died but there were some in active positions of authority within the Iwerne movement well after 1982.  They knew what had gone on and later they were to hand on that information to the current generation of trustees responsible for the camps.

The period from 1982 – 2012 is the period that interests me most.  Officially in the Iwerne/Titus hierarchy no one needed to admit to knowing anything as no victims had yet come forward to challenge the long thirty year period of silence.  The Iwerne/Titus Trust officials could sleep peacefully in their beds.  There was no interest in Smyth from safeguarding authorities, and there were no police or lawyers acting on behalf of the victims/survivors.  By focussing only on the period after 2012, the Titus timeline is creating a narrative that there was absolutely nothing for anyone to do until victims/survivors began to appear. The argument could also be made that it was precisely this suffocating silence sustained by Titus leaders that aggravated the long-term trauma of Smyth victims.  One hopes that Keith Makin will have something to say about this culture of secrecy maintained by Iwerne leaders for so long.  The culture of silence has, arguably, had a devastating legacy.  Another issue from this period, about which we would like to learn more, is the rationale for transferring all the assets and liabilities from the old Iwerne trustees to the Titus Trust.     Nothing I have read suggests that this ‘takeover’ in 1997 was anything other than an attempt to escape the moral and legal obligations of the other older charity.

The  next question that I want to consider is to ask who in the years before 2012 knew about the Smyth scandal and could have changed things?  There are three groups to consider.  One is the group referred to by Anne Atkins in the 2012 Mail piece. This referred to the Smyth affair being shared as a gossip topic at dinner parties.   Probably these recipients and purveyors of the gossip could have done very little to change the history of the affair.  The telling and retelling of any story countless times, as this one was, probably has the effect of making the actual facts less and less precise.  In short, people heard the rumours and the gossip, but they had no solid reliable facts to go on, even if they had had wanted to take it further.

The second group were those who did know the facts.  Some of these were officials in the Iwerne network and some had been part of the group who received the Ruston report back in 1982.  These included David Fletcher and others involved with Scripture Union.  There was in 2000 a handing over of an envelope containing details of the whole affair by Tim Sterry of the SU to a member of Titus trustees.  This envelope, which included among its contents a copy of the Ruston Report, would not be opened and read for another 13 years.  Outside the Iwerne/SU network, there were a number of prominent wealthy evangelical backers who facilitated the financial aspects of Smyth’s ‘banishment’ to Africa.  The enabling of Smyth’s ‘escape’ to Africa was an expensive affair since it required the setting up and financing of a new organisation, Zambesi Ministries. The details of the part of the story is not completely clear and again, one hopes for further clarification from Graystone’s book and the Makin report.  The most likely explanation for the official silence about Smyth by senior Iwerne connected officials before 2012, seems to have been a combination of wilful ignorance and a readiness to blank out of consciousness (forget?) inconvenient information. 

The period before 2012 also had a further distinct group who knew about Smyth’s criminal activities.  These are the victims themselves.  I am not about to indulge in any kind of victim blaming as I know enough about the effect of trauma on individuals to understand the extreme reticence of victims in many cases.  Trauma often creates repression of memory; the conscious mind may shut it away from recall for decades.  But there are questions to be asked of at least two individuals who entered the Anglican ministry and achieved prominence within the organisation.  I have in mind two people, both Smyth victims, who later received significant positions of influence in the Church of England. One became Bishop of Guilford and the other Rector of St Helen’s Bishopsgate.  The latter post is perhaps the most prestigious post in the Anglican con-evo world.  Both these individuals appear on the surface to have found a way through whatever trauma they may have suffered as young men at the hands of Smyth.  Their periods of prominence within the CofE certainly began before 2012 (2008 and 1998 respectively) and both were then in a position to do something on behalf of other victims during the silent period.  I leave it to my reader to answer this question.  If you are an important part of the leadership structure of a large organisation and you know of horrors committed against innocents within it, do you not have a moral obligation to share this information with appropriate people?  Is not sharing information with others who can put a stop to such depravity a moral obligation for a Christian leader? William Taylor in particular was in close working relationship with everyone of influence within the con-evo Anglican world before and after his appointment to the top job at St Helen’s.  The Bishop of Guilford from the time he was appointed as a suffragan bishop, would have had privileged access to safeguarding professionals locally and nationally. They could have advised him on what to do in facing up to safeguarding events from his personal past.

The answer to my question that I ask of these two Smyth survivors may well be answered by the phenomenon we have met many times before – misplaced loyalty to the systems and the institutions that reared you.  We end up in a place we have been on numerous occasions.  We are in the place of conflicting loyalties.  We do not know which loyalty has the greater claim on our conscience.    The sphere of Church leadership seems to place individuals far too often in this impossible place.  It is not surprising that many Church leaders wish fervently to lay down the burdens of their leadership responsibilities in exchange for the peace and tranquillity of retirement

The take-over of Afghanistan by the Taliban has left us with a whole variety of emotions. We fear for an entire nation thrust into a state of chronic uncertainty.  A group of lawless men, who have been indoctrinated in the most extreme tenets of Islam, have been let loose in a large country to do whatever they wish.  These fighters are the ‘graduates’ of thousands of madrassas, religious schools where the only things taught are the tenets of the Koran.  This enables them to regard anyone who has participated in any aspect of modern culture or systems of government as enemies of their faith.  Potentially, men and boys can be summarily punished or even executed if they may have been contaminated with unislamic ideologies.  The legal system will now be handed over to mullahs and judges who believe that it is their task to purify society according to a fantasy model of Islam which never actually existed. In some way, they believe it is still possible to create an idealised Islamic state which will overtake and replace the westernised mores of the urbanised elite.

The pain that most of us feel is for the half of the Afghan population who are female.  Prospects of secondary education are probably removed at a stroke for a generation of young girls.  Young women will be forced into marriages with Taliban fighters without any choice in the matter.  The word marriage, in many cases, will not describe what is happening.  It is the forcible abduction and rape of the innocent.   There is a swathe of women who have been educated over the past twenty years since the last Taliban period of rule.  They have become competent professionals in a variety of roles, and they now face an uncertain future.  Will they be forced back into the home and rendered invisible and powerless?  Things may not turn out to be as awful as they were under the so-called Islamic state in Iraq, but there will still be a massive amount of suffering.  This will extend to anyone who has an aspiration for human flourishing of a kind that is linked to the ideals of our modern age.

Religiously motivated abuse of women has been common in many cultures across the world.  There is, of course, an extensive literature to help us to understand why women fare badly in some religious settings and the political systems inspired by them.  I make no claim to have mastered this genre of writing and what I say here will be what I have observed over the years in the UK in the way women have been treated by church and society.  Like many people of my generation, I absorbed the idea early on that most women would expect to spend a lot of time in the kitchen, preparing meals and making a home spotless for the male provider of the household.  Some women in the 50s did go out to work of course, but the disparity of wages and opportunities was such that the man’s job always took precedence over the woman’s. 

During my time at university, women were present there but in relatively small numbers.  There was still a generation of women alive who had been successfully entered for degrees in the 1920s but who had been unable to graduate according to the rules that had applied at the time.   The other thing I was well aware of was the way that the Anglican priesthood seemed to be a breeding ground of what we might describe as low-level misogyny.  Some clergy seemed to relish the masculinity of the priesthood in ways that I felt to be unhealthy.  The absence of women in the sanctuary often also gave rise a certain amount of what can only be described as homoerotic gossip.  Although my preferred church background is liberal catholic, the ‘dressing-up’ side of things did not always make me feel comfortable.   It was part of the way of things, but looking back, there was much that probably needed to be challenged as it, directly or indirectly, helped to feed a culture that was certain to humiliate or belittle women.

There is a great deal more to be said about the respective roles of men and women in a religious setting.  My broad take on the issue is that it is all primarily about power.  Culturally and psychologically men have, over the centuries, expected to dominate women, whether in the family, the workplace or the locale of religious activity.   Rationally this desire for control might appear to reflect some aspect of male sexuality.   There is, I believe, a deeper reason for this male struggle for control. Men are subconsciously in fear of women.   They are not frightened of them physically.   Rather the fear is of women’s ability to operate with what we call emotional intelligence.  Women create bonds and friendships with other women with relative ease.  They manage situations of emotional complexity with a deft instinct for finding the right words.  They seem to find it easy to create bonds with children and the young.  In a church pastoral setting they are often likely to have the empathy required to help another individual through a crisis.  In summary, some women manage many of the tasks of priesthood with a skill which not all male priests find easy to show.  That female adaptability to some of the tasks of priesthood does not endear them to male clergy, especially the insecure personalities and those whose sense of masculinity is bound up with the identity of priesthood.

The insecurity of some male clergy in the face of women, whether ordained or lay, reflects the same insecurities that also make some men wife-beaters and misogynists.  Male insecurity is, I believe, at the heart of the issue with the Taliban and the difficulty that every Muslim society has with giving women their proper place.  While there is probably little we can do to change the culture and belief tenets of Muslims, there is one thing we can do in our own settings.  We can challenge misogyny within the structures of the church however it is manifest.   Someone, in response to one of my posts, spoke about the disempowerment in the church felt by female laity.  They were referring to the double impediment of being both a lay person and a woman.  This meant that in relation to church clerical male decision making, they were almost invisible.

I want to finish this post by celebrating a number of women whose voices have played a crucial part in the way the character of this blog has taken shape.  Each of them is active somewhere in the church, trying to change the culture of Christian male dominance.   Among the bravest is the work of Kate Andreyev who has taken on the entire leadership cohort of the Church Society/ReNew complex.  Whatever her precise arguments are with this group, it is worth noting the fact that the power bloc she has taken on, is one that is still openly committed to preserve male privilege for the conservative wing of the Church.  It seems extraordinary in the 21^st century that the Church of England should be tolerating such institutional bias against women’s voices.   Here, however, is one brave articulate woman trying to make her case heard over against this immensely powerful block which does so much to exclude the influence of women.  Is this so different from the work of the Taliban in their cultural subjugation of women? Another woman making waves has been Rachel White.  Her voice, protesting about the protocols to choose those recommended as ordinands, had to be removed, but it continues to be available as a published archived article in the Church Times.  We also have the powerful witness of Fiona Gardner. Her book records meticulous research about the abuse of both sexes, but also reveals the way that, as a lay woman, she was treated almost contemptuously by powerful men in the Church. Then there are the voices of survivor women who have made themselves known to the blog.  Some are anonymous, like Mary, Trish or English Athena.  Others have allowed their names and experiences to be fully visible, like Jane Chevous and Janet Fife.  Janet has contributed by writing posts, which sometimes draw on her experience as a survivor.  Each of these individuals, and many others, has enriched the blog, not least by bringing the women’s perspective on power issues within the Church.

We need to return to the original event that set me off on this reflection -the Taliban threatening the voices and power of women in Afghanistan and elsewhere.  Our response to this horror of female suppression must be a readiness to re-examine our own collusion in religiously inspired misogyny.  We have hinted at the fact the Church of England still allows institutional subjection of women whether in large evangelical networks or Anglo-Catholic conclaves.  While these religious impediments will not be removed quickly from Anglicanism, it behoves the rest of us to challenge these assumptions in whatever way we can.  If we long for the Muslim faith to tolerate the full flourishing of women within their societies, we must, at the same time, put effort into our challenging what many of us see as the residue of religiously inspired misogyny within our own church.   

About 10 years ago, a schoolgirl, Martha Payne from Argyll, caused a sensation by taking pictures of her school meals, and then publishing the photos on the internet. She wanted to show visually how she and friends were being made to eat unappetising food on a daily basis.  When her school tried to stop this attempt to expose the inadequacy of the food, support from the internet exploded, with the press and public opinion very firmly on the girl’s side.  The net result was that the school was forced to improve the quality of the food.

This story, in itself, is not of earth-shattering significance, but it does help to make the point that voices of ordinary, even obscure people, can often be heard in this digital age.  Above all information can be shared across the world extremely quickly. In some ways, this blog Surviving Church is another example of the way that other unimportant voices, both the writers and the commenters, can be shared in the Church, especially the Church of England.  Nobody is obliged to read SC, but it seems that some people in the Church do.  A topical post (often written at breakneck speed!) can reach 2000 individuals.  There is also a solid phalanx of regular readers numbering around 400.  I feel that my readers welcome the information and opinion carried by SC, even though little of it is original or first-hand.  Any added value to the basic facts of a story may be in the fact that I sometimes have a feel for the background context.  Also, I sometimes notice detail in a story that others may have missed.  In any event, support for this writing and commentary work has given me, over the years, an increasing confidence that I have some useful things to say.

Looking beyond SC, we can say that the exchange and sharing of church-based information on the internet may be changing the whole Church in unforeseen ways.  Of course, not every example of comment on Twitter or Facebook is helpful or even wholesome.  But even the existence of trolls and malicious comment has not yet made the internet a place that is so unreliable and dangerous that it should be avoided altogether.  Real information is shared; opinion is expressed and no longer do we have to rely solely on official pronouncements written by those trained in reputation management.  The Winchester affair was instructive in this way.  When the ‘stepping back’ of the bishop was first announced, those of us outside the Diocese had no real means of know what was really going on.  The reputation experts (working for Luther Pendragon?) did their best to downplay the seriousness of the situation.  There were, however, enough individuals writing on blogs such as this one to give the outsider a fairly clear idea of what was in fact going on.  One wonders whether the presence of the internet meant that story played out in a quite different way than if there had been no online circulation of information.  A question to be asked in a Church history exam twenty years hence might be this.  Discuss the impact of the internet on the governance of the Church of England in the first three decades of the twenty first century.

The Christ Church affair has been, all on its own, something of an internet event.  The information recorded on blogs and by press stories of various kinds is now so extensive that a special website has been created to accommodate it all in an accessible way.  The anonymous blogger/compiler calls himself Turbulent Priest https: //www.turbulentpriest.net/ .  The broad impact on the case through the sharing of online information and discussion seems to have been broadly positive for Percy’s cause.  It still remains to be seen which side in the dispute will eventually prevail.  One side, the College hierarchy still has many aces in terms of solid institutional power and vast wealth.  The other side, the cause of the embattled Dean, has had to rely on the support of many individuals without such institutional power.  Many of them have been recruited to his side by all the open and frank discussion of his case through the internet.

A more recent case of publicity helping in a case connected with safeguarding protocol, is that involving the Rev Stephen Kuhrt. On 22 June, Kuhrt was suspended by his diocesan bishop from his job as Vicar of Christ Church Malden.  There was an allegation that he had not followed protocols in a safeguarding event/episode going back to 2007. In this case the PCC came to their Vicar’s defence in a very public way.  They made full use of the internet to publicise the details of his suspension, openly sharing with interested parties a lot of detail about the case.   They suggested that the CDM against their Vicar was a form of retaliation against him.  He had, while raising the issues in the same case, caused embarrassment to the local and the National Safeguarding teams for their own failures. The individual in the case, a member of Kuhrt’s congregation, was prosecuted and convicted for the abuse offence.  The case overall showed Kuhrt’s courage in pursuing the cause of justice and, in spite of his own failures of protocol when dealing with the case, he could be seen to be an impartial champion of safeguarding.  Thanks to the internet, many people came to hear of the details of Kuhrt’s suspension and many rallied round from all over the country to express their support.  The PCC were evidently inviting this support.  The CDM seemed to be dealt with greater speed than usual.  Kuhrt was exonerated on one charge within the CDM. For the less serious aspect of the charge involving a failure to remove names in a written document, he received a formal rebuke.   It seems reasonable to suggest that the popular opinion that has been activated in this case has helped to produce this quick resolution.  Kuhrt has been allowed to return to his post since the end of July and the case against him is now closed.

A third case which has benefited from the extensive publicity given to it, from the point of view of a complainant, is the Matt Ineson review.  I have discussed this case at different times over the years.  There is now, apparently, an impasse over the holding of a review of the case.  As most of us know it involved an abusive priest, Trevor Devamanikkam.  He committed suicide in 2015 just before coming to trial.  The internet and the press have taken up Matt’s case and allowed it to be heard.  The hierarchy of the Church have not been shown up well in their dealings with the whole affair.  Both Archbishops appearing at the IICSA hearings were invited by the questioning barrister to speak to Matt who was present.  Both declined to do so.  These were poignant but also excruciating moments in the hearings.  It may be these two failures of compassion that will be remembered long after the main IICSA recommendations to the Church have faded from our corporate memory.

I suspect that the reader will by now have gathered that I am to conclude that the internet has been a decisive positive factor in the overall cause of safeguarding in the Church.  It has allowed the free flow of both information and comment uncensored by official authority using the power of information control through the power of secrecy.  Unofficial information can of course be tainted with factional thinking or downright falsehood.  It is here that the work of reliable and trusted commentators becomes important.  They are the ones able to cast an informed opinion over the veracity of possibly embarrassing information that reaches the public domain.  We have such writers like Gilo, Andrew Graystone and ‘Archbishop Cranmer’.  Each has earned a reputation for honest comment, even when their words make some in authority suffer with embarrassment and even shame.  Institutions and those leading them are weakened when guilty secrets are exposed to view.  It is, however, hard to suggest that censorship and secrecy are in any way healthier ways forward.  Every time that a scandal is revealed that shows up leaders in a bad light, it can be regarded in one of two ways.  In the first place it can be seen as a threat to the flourishing of the institution and thus to be resisted at all costs.  From the other perspective, the allowing of light to be shed in a hitherto dark place can only be regarded positively.  Antiseptic balm may sting for a while but ultimately it will be seen as part of the process of healing. 

Over the period of time when I have been doing my own commentary work, I have detected a subtle shift in attitudes among those who have authority in the Church.  Comments from bishops hint that the tectonic plates are moving. In some places, this seems to lead towards a greater welcome for those of us who prefer the healing power of truth to the weasel words of reputation management.  The battle to bring consistent justice, light and clarity to the dark places of power abuse and bullying has not yet been achieved, but perhaps we can, with the help of many people of goodwill, see the dawn appearing over the horizon.  This dawn has, I believe, been made possible by the internet and the new reality of large numbers of church people communicating information and opinion freely with one another.  This has given the movement towards openness enormous power, power that would be inconceivable in a pre-internet era.  As the words of Morning Prayer say, ‘the night has passed, and the day lies open before us’.

by Mark Bennet

There is a psychological phenomenon which occurs when a person is under extreme stress – a survival strategy called “splitting” – by which the bad bits of life are separated from the self so they don’t have to be experienced or dealt with. The world also tends to be seen in black and white, without nuance or complexity (I simplify grossly). Thinking about the Church of England as an organisation under stress, there seem to be so many examples of distancing from the bad bits (I will suggest some below), that the organisational defences seem to be set at a high level. One aspect of splitting is that it can occur unconsciously – and I want to suggest that the Church of England has not been wholly conscious of its institutional behaviour. Such situations involving God’s people occur in the Bible, of course, and it is the prophets who both diagnose the true situation and get badly treated for their pains – the black-and white evaluation and distancing strategies apply with some force. In this piece, I am looking at a range of issues through a particular lens, conscious that each example has a great deal more complexity than I am able to discuss. I am also aware that I am skating in general terms over issues which have profound personal consequences for some people.

My first observation of distancing was as a member of the WATCH national committee – so often women were talked of in public as if they were in a different category from other Christians, particularly the so-called “militant women”. I was proud to be a rather modestly militant man, conscious that my existence challenged the categories which dominated the narrative of the debate.

Another place where stress has been great has been in the handling of human sexuality. Here, I look at the collective behaviour of the bishops, who have affirmed what is called “traditional teaching” and yet enacted practices contrary to this – in ordaining gay (and later lesbian clergy) over at least the whole of my adult lifetime. And it is worth noting too that in ordaining lesbian and gay clergy, bishops have made implicit promises to those clergy, which they have often been unable to keep. Our Bishops collectively have neither moved to change their collective practice in line with their teaching, nor taken steps to defend their practice and change their teaching. When we look at the means used to engage with the issues, we find that the conversations have been outsourced to people and groups who have no agency to change the practice, and that debates which might have influenced the teaching have been deferred or controlled.

Particularly egregious has been the treatment of the victims and survivors of the various abuse scandals in the church – here we see black and white evaluation and distancing writ large. Those who have been abused are treated as an unwelcome distraction from core business. Examine, for example, how much resource has been found for the recruitment of safeguarding teams and the roll-out of training on an industrial scale – expensive and complex tasks requiring will and determination to carry through. Compare this with the task of compensating victims and survivors and their families – also a complex and expensive task, where the progress has been distinctly limited.

Then there is the commissioning of “lessons learned” reviews. In liturgy, I often suggest to my colleagues that we don’t just “say” or “read” our liturgical texts – if our liturgy means anything, we are saying or reading the texts for a reason, whether it be praise or confession or prayer or thanksgiving, and we ought to be using active words which signal personal engagement in the purpose of the text. (“Let us confess … “, rather than “let us say … “, for example). When Church bodies commission a lessons learned review, they can very easily subcontract both the review and the learning to the author. In the announcement of a review,  there is often no language which signals personal commitment or engagement. The same is true, of course of the typical legal/PR “non apology” texts which have become too prevalent in recent times. A review, once written, can be put on the shelf with all the other reviews – just like the reports on minority ethnic concerns, whose recommendations, even when accepted, were never followed through. It might not be much, but changing the name of the reports to “Lessons to be learned” reviews, and saying “we are committed to learning the lessons” rather than “we have commissioned a report” would at least signal a greater intention. One reviewer, Ian Elliott, has tried to insist that the lessons are learned, and has experienced the same kind of distancing as others (and as the prophets before him).

The same distancing is seen with abusers too – the tone can change and they can be treated as if they were “never one of us”. The treatment of John Smyth and Jonathan Fletcher has this aspect, both within their close community, and also in the wider church, which so easily treats them as a mainly irrelevant part of a marginal group. The adulation given to Peter Ball before his fall, or Chris Brain, is an example of the “white” side of the black/white thinking of an organisation under stress – criticism is unwelcome, discounted, not allowed. “Success” is too necessary for survival for “failure” even to be contemplated.

And this black/white behaviour of the organisation is also seen around the operation of the Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM) – the use of suspension and secrecy has often led those facing investigation under the CDM to feel as if they have been deemed outsiders overnight – and of course, this is the behaviour we might expect from an organisation under the kind of existential threat which seems to be hanging over the Church of England. The feeling of threat, of course, is not new. When I was made Deacon, twenty years ago now, in Ripon Cathedral, the preacher predicted the demise of the CofE within five years and certainly within ten. I am not, in this piece, interested in the particular facts of individual cases, but more in what the collective experience might tell us about the organisation. The sense of threat seems to be driving adaptive behaviours which are contrary to our gospel narrative. The fiction, for example, that suspension is a neutral act, does not bear examination in relation to the lived experience of those who have been suspended, and conveniently ignores the fact that suspension is a public act in the lives of those exercising a public ministry. This fiction distances the decision-makers from the consequence of their decisions.

A very recent example of this kind of behaviour goes under the name “Myriad” – church without the difficult bits – bits like dealing with historic abuse, and allocating resource to victims. Not dealing with “limiting factors” and “passengers”. Without expensive training in the lessons learned in all those reviews. Not wondering how, if success looks so much like Peter Ball or Jonathan Fletcher of Chris Brain, we might avoid the catastrophic failures of those apparent successes – those lessons really do need to be learned. Don’t get me wrong, mission is important to me, and lay led groups and clergy led initiatives are part of our DNA in the parish where I serve (and variously evident in our collective life). But we take our responsibilities as part of a wider church seriously, and often feel them weighing heavily on us – that doesn’t change if we outsource the new initiatives: someone has to discharge the collective responsibility.

The new tagline for the Church of England seems to be “Simpler, humbler, bolder”. There is a danger in that word “Simpler”: given the scope of the challenge we face, it could be an invitation to sideline the complexities – and invitation to further or more aggressive distancing. I hope it refers rather to straightening out the bewildering complexities which contribute to the distancing/splitting behaviours we see so much of – complexities which so very often keep such people as victims, complainants and those complained of at arms length. These behaviours are adopted because they are easier, and apparently more effective than the alternative, which is evidently difficult and expensive and for which there is limited resource. The Jesus I read about in the Bible touched lepers and socialised with sinners in spite of the ritual impurity, stigma and criticism he faced.

“Church without the difficult bits” is an easy prospectus in a complex and challenging world – but that is not what we have been promised. The cross is not a symbol we can split off and ignore: Jesus puts it as a key waymark on the journey to redemption and resurrection, and invites us to live a faith in which the difficult bits are fully integrated. The way we are invited to travel is not straight and wide, but narrow and difficult. We are not invited to split off, ignore and deny the difficult bits, but to confess them and seek forgiveness. We have, and we enact, powerful symbolic language, which presupposes the work of the Holy Spirit, and which we could be using to resist the tendencies I have illustrated. Part of our problem is that, along with other kinds of splitting, it is so easy to separate these institutional and organisational issues from the theological, liturgical, spiritual and symbolic resources which would enable us to address them so much better. As St Paul might have written – and now I will show you a more excellent way …

Mark Bennet is Team Rector of Thatcham in the Diocese of Oxford

A couple or more years ago I was discussing, on this blog, the professional background of those who made up the original National Safeguarding Team (NST) of the Church of England.  This team was put together by the Church in 2015 at some considerable expense and consisted of thirteen and half full-time posts.  The names of everyone working on that team was recorded on the Church’s website.  It was thus possible to see which professional skills were most highly valued by those creating this new church initiative.  I noted when writing my piece that many of those then working for the NST seemed to have a social work background or links with the police.  The professions notably not represented were the legal profession and those connected with one of the disciplines around mental care and therapy.  No doubt, legal opinion could be brought in when required, but the absence of anyone with an awareness of the needs of victims and survivors of trauma was a serious omission.  I commented that this appeared to suggest that, in the minds of those creating this new NST body, management and the protection of the institution seemed to take a higher priority than the care of those damaged by abuse.  In short, the NST appeared to be a body for ‘managing’ the problem of abuse, rather than having proper regard for the victims of such behaviour.  The NST has indeed obtained a reputation among survivors for its clunky and sometimes cruel protocols administered on behalf of the Church.  Abuse had to be rooted out, it was true, but there has often not been any real empathetic engagement with the needs of those who had been damaged along the way.  The frequent cry often heard seemed to be that the protocols operated by the Church were harder to endure than the original abuses suffered.

Since 2015 the old NST has been entirely rebuilt.  Some of this ‘renewal’ of personnel was apparently to do with failures revealed at the hearings of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).  But for whatever reason, the original members of the team under the leadership of Graham Tilby are no longer in post.  A new broom in the person of Melissa Caslake was brought in.  Survivors looked to her with hope since she brought into the Church a new and independent professional perspective which might have been able to cut through some of the old, fusty protocols.  Above all, she was not caught up in a church culture addicted to reputation management and the demands of its communications department.  Melissa was able, in the short time she spent in post, to build up new team almost from scratch. Although she was able to win the confidence of a number of survivors I am in touch with, there were clearly other pressures she had to face that we can only speculate about.  She lasted in post a bare 15 months, before taking up a senior child protection appointment in the state sector.  It is not unreasonable for us to pause a moment to speculate why she was able to give so little time to the role.  It would seem that any vision she may have had for the NST could not be driven forward.  The needs of the church institution, seen through the eyes of William Nye and other senior officials at Church House, perhaps came into conflict with the priorities of an outside professional concerned with the welfare and right-dealing for survivors.  Something had to give and so the new head of the NST felt obliged to move into a new role.  What I say here is speculation as we have no means of knowing exactly what went on behind the scenes

For the rest of this post, I want us to think about the idea of team and what it might imply in the context of the Church pursuing its safeguarding task.  When we talk about teams in ordinary conversation, we are describing a group of people working together.  Between them they possess all the complementary skills needed to complete a particular task.  No single member of the team has all the required skills to do the project alone.  One person, the team leader, may be expected to have an appreciation for all the skills represented in his/her team.  He/she is responsible for deploying the team to work together so that the process of completing the joint task may be smooth and efficient.  The leader will be a particular kind of professional person, the one that can appreciate the skills of others and see how each interlock with others.  My complaint over the apparent failures of the NST so far, in its public performance, is that it has not brought together all the skills necessary to do the complete safeguarding job properly.  In earlier posts, I have discussed the extraordinary absence of anyone from the therapeutic world to feed into team discussions the likely impact on individuals either experiencing accusation or a lifetime of trauma following abuse.  Anyone following the stories of Matt Ineson, Martyn Percy or more recently Alan Griffin, must have asked themselves the simple but obvious question.  Why was no one in the local/national team working with these cases able to anticipate the appalling impact on individuals caught up in them?  When the NST was brought in in March 2020 to look at a spurious accusation over Percy’s alleged failure to act appropriately in a safeguarding matter (a case that was dismissed), no one was on hand to look at the potential impact on the accused.   Did no one in the senior ranks of the London diocese reflect on the appalling stress placed on Fr Griffin by leaving serious accusations on the table without any urgency to resolve the veracity of these accusations?  A single individual, without necessarily high levels of therapeutic training, could have asked the simple question each time, have you thought through what these as-yet unproven accusations are doing to these individuals caught up this process?  No one asked that question in these and many other cases.  The consequence was serious pain and, in one case, tragedy.

There is one further category of professional insight that is needed in many safeguarding cases.  As a background comment before we consider this, we might note that the Church of England has seriously undermined its reputation in the eyes of the wider public over the past few years.   The reader of the Daily Mail will probably be aware of two things about the Church.  One is that there are numerous survivors of sexual and other forms of church abuse who are still searching for justice.  A second point is that there is an awareness that the Church has seemed to place its reputation and financial assets above the need for care and justice.  Over the past twelve to eighteen months, with the talk by central Church authorities of compensatory schemes (which Gilo has so ably unpacked for us a week ago), the powers that be at the heart of the Church are finally showing signs of understanding the crisis of reputation. They are now responding to this widespread antipathy towards the institution.  Something is moving at the centre, but we are still left with the cumbersome, in some cases, the heartless and cruel structures of the Clergy Disciplinary Measure.  What can the Church do further to reclaim its reputation and claw back a little of the goodwill that has vanished over past months and years in Britain and elsewhere in the world?

The answer that I am sketching here is not a DIY for reputation recovery.  It is simply a plea for a new uncovering of areas of expertise and insight which are desperately needed in the NST and indeed, in the whole Church.  The expertise I am talking about comes somewhere in what we can broadly call institutional dynamics or organisational psychology.  It is an area of discourse that crosses various disciplinary boundaries.  It takes in social psychology, psychoanalytical theory and sociology.   It can perhaps answer questions like the ones which puzzle many of us.  Why do individuals change when they join institutions like the Church?  What happens to individual conscience, capacity for empathy and integrity when people become part of large groups?  Why do organisations sometimes seem to sit so lightly on old-fashioned morality, even when they claim the Christian label?   We are describing serious institutional failures that befall large organisations and the Church is no exception to these processes.  Many people accept these manifestations of institutional behaviour without realising that, as with most things, there are those who study these things.  Institutional dynamics, the negative kind, are severely damaging the Church at present.   We need in Church House, the NST and the House of Bishops people who really understand these processes and the dynamics of what is happening.  These same forces are undermining the Church and its institutional reputation.  If the Church of England were a public company with profit margins to maintain, it would have done the necessary tasks of analysis a long time ago.  Poor ethical behaviour, such as we often see in church institutions, needs to be tackled head-on.  Such behaviour threatens the purpose and the future of the whole organisation.

So, in conclusion, the Church needs these three things in facing the cataclysmic safeguarding crisis that is threatening to destroy the residual influence that it still has in the UK.  It needs first to understand how to set up structures that provide justice and meaningful levels of restorative compensation.  This it is beginning to do.  In the second place there needs to be grafted both into the committee structure and widely available afterwards, people who understand the deep needs of the emotionally abused and traumatised.  Thirdly, and this is not something I can do more than sketch out, it needs to have experts who can help the Church see the way that institutions often seem to function harmfully and have a corrupting power over many of their leading members.  The Church so often, in pursuit of its corporate and institutional goals, seems to retreat from its ideals of love, compassion and kingdom values.  No one will want to join a Church if it is perceived only to be protecting the power and privilege of its leaders.   Hypocrisy, in the shape of bishops and clergy who may smile but are compliant with acts of cruelty, is a very poor look.

Thirty or forty years ago there was a question posed for church congregations trying to take their evangelistic responsibilities seriously.  It was: Is your Church worth joining?  The topical question for Christians in these abuse aware days, from archbishops downwards is this:  Is your Church a safe place to join?

by Dr Rachel White

Following representations from an Anglican bishop, I have decided to withdraw the article about lessons learned. I may well return to a consideration of the issues posed by this account, because clearly there are lessons to be learned by me in this case about the issue of power in the church. While I have no reason to doubt the the story revealed by this blog post, Surviving Church cannot withstand legal challenges. I am leaving intact the comments posted for this post as they help to convey the flavour of the original article. Stephen Parsons Editor

There are some words in the English language which do not have definite defined meanings. We normally tend to assume that when we use a word it will have the same meaning for everyone else who uses it. In many cases this is not true. People use words and give them nuances of meaning which may vary to fit in with their own life experiences.  The only words that are consistently interpreted in the same way are those that operate within the discourse of logic or in scientific and technical descriptions.

One word that we use frequently, but needs constantly to be defined according to its context, is the word morale.  It is a word that can be used to convey the mood, positive or negative, in an organisation.  To say that there is low morale in an army unit, a firm or a church congregation is to hint at any number of a cluster of negative factors that can befall an organisation and affect its functioning.  Anyone in charge of such a group will need to take quick action.  Otherwise, the work of this organisation can become increasingly enfeebled. A general going into battle knows that it is important for his men to have good morale and feel positively about the support network that they depend on.  They also need to understand the cause for which they are fighting.  Small things in an army will make an enormous difference.  A plentiful supply of hot sweet tea was essential to the fighting spirit of the troops in WWII.  This and an occasional glimpse of their commanders and generals.  It allowed the soldiers to realise that senior officers and generals were not just names and remote figures away from the action.  Tea and rousing pep-talks were the sort of things that made a big difference to the general feeling we describe as morale.  Good morale is an essential part of organisational effectiveness and will be a priority of any good leadership.

It is not just in the fighting forces that we need to find good morale so that difficult tasks can be done well.  Rather, good morale is something we need to find in a factory, a school and in the various structures of the Church.  It is hard to describe precisely what we are talking about in each of these settings.  It is probably easier to describe morale by noticing what happens when it is absent.  We know from experience the lassitude and the low energy levels that are felt when morale is missing in a congregation, a diocese or a school.  We can clearly see this is opposite to good morale.  It is all that is summed up in the word, demoralisation.  When morale is high, people’s body language clearly demonstrates the sense of hope, excitement and a feeling of direction that has flooded into their institution.  People are being led somewhere and they have a renewed sense of energy and purpose.  We need to think further and ask ourselves what good or, alternatively, absent morale in a church might feel like.

Morale, or the lack of it, is both a corporate and individual experience.  In the Church many clergy suffer individually from a problem of low morale. One cause of low morale may arise from the sheer difficulty of doing a particular job well. The parish may be too large, with occasional offices taking up 80% of the priest’s time. It may be that you have inherited a historic division within the parish between individuals and families, stretching back decades.  A common problem today is also the lack of volunteers to allow the structural aspects of the parish to function well. These are the kinds of problems that are difficult to resolve, whether by an incumbent, or anyone else who might come in from outside in an attempt to help. A bishop or an archdeacon might have little help to offer in mediating in ancient disputes or finding someone to act as church treasurer.

Although outside support may have little to offer in resolving some local problems within a parish, the support of senior staff in the diocese can do a great deal to help raise morale among the parish clergy. In the past, when I was parish priest, I normally only saw the bishop when he came to do a confirmation.  The words of the Institution service which speak of the sharing of ministry between bishop and incumbent had little practical meaning.    There was little sign of episcopal interest in anything that I got up to. In later years, from around 1995, there was an annual appraisal with a member of the diocesan senior staff, but I only remember two or three such meetings. Would a detailed knowledge of my parish have made any difference? It is hard to answer that question as it was never on offer. I can see that if there had been any serious problems, it would have been useful to have had a pastorally sensitive figure with experience who knew overall what was going on.  The real problem was one I raised in my last blog post -the fear of having a negative issue being recorded in the clergy ‘blue file’.  A pastor, not an assessor was what might have been required at various stages in my ministry. Because it was never on offer, I cannot ever have been said to have missed it.  I believe it would have done something to lift the spirits if there had really been someone of experience, compassion, and concern, potentially interested in the detail of my parochial successes and failures.

The morale of the parish clergy, I believe, would be boosted if there were effective oversight which did not come with any threat of disciplinary action built in. In my 40 years of parish ministry, I only remember one meeting with a bishop which had solely pastoral content. The occasion was when I was planning to move on from my second curacy to return to university to do two years theological research. It was an important moment for me to see that the bishop fully understood my reasons for pursuing this idea. I needed to know that the system would not reject me in the future for having the temerity to become a full-time student again.

I mention my own personal experience (or lack thereof) of encounter with bishops as a way of suggesting that it is important for working clergy to feel that someone knows something of what is going on in their lives. It does not have to be any detailed knowledge. This pastoral oversight might be hoped for by everyone working in parishes, but it is especially true for the stipendiary staff who may have no other source of professional backing.  It may of course exist in the current Church, but such help was not available twenty+ years ago. If and when things go wrong in a parish, it is of enormous help if the person you speak to knows something of the context of each ministry. It matters to feel that the ministry of each parish is something that the bishop shares with the parish priest.  I forget the exact words that occur in the Institution service, but they go something along the lines of ‘take this ministry which is mine and yours’. If that sharing of ministry is slightly a reality, then each parish priest will have a solid sense of being supported.  That will be the cause of a real boost to his or her morale.

The current events within the London diocese, relating to the Griffin affair, must be doing a great deal to undermine the morale of the diocesan clergy.  From the fragments of information that have been revealed, it is evident that when senior staff met, they did not always take care to ensure that only factual information about the clergy was shared.  Gossip and rumours about clergy were apparently given space at some of these meetings.  Even if nothing was done with such information, allowing gossip ever to enter written records is hardly indicative of a caring, supportive relationship between senior staff and parish clergy.  Clearly there are bound to be unique stresses and strains within the London diocese, not least because of the polarity of the church traditions represented there.  The contrasting theological perspectives in one fairly compact diocese must create its own set of problems. Institutional morale must be hard to maintain in these circumstances.  The coroner’s report by Mary Hassall was pointing to serious problems in the provision of pastoral care for the clergy.  Any such deficit of care and sloppiness in the keeping of records will severely dent morale and will take time and effort to repair.  Trust has been damaged and this needs to be a major issue of concern for the senior staff in the diocese of London and beyond.

The analogy of making sure that an army going into battle have good morale, is a good one to describe what is needed for all ‘front-line’ clergy working in the parishes.   Feeling known as well as actively supported by their officers and generals is of vital importance both for soldiers and clergy to enable them to function well.  In addition, they need to feel that the actual situations they face daily are really understood.  Also, when statements from on high are uttered which do not connect to experience, that will likely undermine the sense of belonging to the institution.  Trust, listening, active support and proper communication are all part of the process that is needed to bind clergy and bishops to one another and to the institution they serve.  When these are in evidence, morale will be high and the task of extending the Kingdom will be furthered and enhanced.

By Fiona Gardner

There is a new and fascinating biography out about Bishop Stephen Neill (1900-1984). ‘A Worldly Christian’ is a meticulously researched and referenced book by Dyron B. Daughrity, Professor of Religion at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, published this year by Lutterworth Press.

Daughrity describes Neill’s life as ‘a tumultuous one’; both his parents were missionaries and following his father’s ordination the large family moved frequently. Despite an unstable and nomadic childhood – the children were looked after ‘by a series of nannies and governesses’– Neill’s upbringing was ‘thoroughly evangelical: family prayers, Bible memorisation and recitation, unwavering faithfulness in attending church services.’ Eventually settled in Dean Close, an evangelical boarding school in Cheltenham, Neill found this ‘a consistent place to call home’ noting in his own autobiography his approval of the use of the cane which ‘certainly did me no harm’, a practice that Neill later adopted in his adult ministry. Clearly academically brilliant both at boarding school and then at Cambridge where he won numerous academic awards, Neill studied and ‘may have taken early refuge in a kind of lonely stoicism. Religion, as well as nature and circumstance, may have conspired to mold him this way … Perhaps a less austere religion would have given the church a servant less deeply damaged.’

For despite all the academic success Neill was troubled by long periods of mental and physical ill health – with insomnia, depression and temper outbursts plus exhaustion – he himself acknowledged: ‘My fierce temper, the outward expression of so many inward frustrations’. The issue of his repressed sexuality is discussed in the autobiography. Neill had a negative attitude towards women involved professionally in Christian work, and was fond of being with young men, but wrote that both homosexuality and masturbation ‘falls below the level of genuinely human activity’. His biographer comments, ‘the possibility that he was a closeted gay man should not be ruled out.’

Leaving an academic career Neill became a missionary in South India and spent over twenty years there eventually becoming Bishop of the Tinnevelly diocese in 1939. He moved into ecumenism in Geneva working for the World Council of Churches, later taking on a professorship in Hamburg, and then working in Nairobi. His last years were spent in Oxford. He wrote 65 books and numerous articles many of which are still enthusiastically read and cited, and he achieved international fame and esteem lecturing and evangelising around the world; and the book details all these successes.

Previous biographies have either chosen to not know about, ignored, or glossed over Neill’s destructive side, and it is to Daughrity’s credit that this is openly acknowledged and discussed. Neill was unable to be candid about certain chapters in his life; even when confronted with his abusive behaviour he interpreted the situation differently –placing the blame on events and refusing to accept any wrongdoing.

From his earliest years in India, Neill used the cane and later a knotted rope as a form of discipline: ‘he utilised it throughout his life when he thought someone needed to be corrected.’ He was seen as both devoted to ‘the betterment of the diocese’ and as ‘overly autocratic’. One priest ordained by Neill showed deep ambivalence, commenting on Neill’s generosity and concern with the poor, yet, ‘He was very strict in many ways. He was a disciplinarian, an autocrat, imperialistic. Highly intelligent, he used to think very little of other people’. At a time of the movement for Indian Nationalism, and the struggle for independence the known incidents that led to Neill’s resignation carry the added horror of the weight of colonial rule. Neill was later described as ‘a famous colonial missionary’, but in Africa in the early 1970s was judged as displaying ‘racism and arrogance’, with ‘a bullyish etiquette’ insensitive to the African way of doing things and ‘exploitative to the people around him.’

His modus operandi remained the same in all the documented and known incidents of abuse included in the biography, where young men would be asked to report their good and bad actions. Neill would ask if they were prepared for punishment, and once they agreed would take them into a room and beat them on their bare buttocks.

‘When they cried, Neill stopped. Neill did this all throughout his ministry, even as Bishop. Advice was given to him by his supervisors and friends, but he continued to do it. Neill would often beat young people, mainly teenagers. Normally he would beat people aged 10-25 years. Older ones who were close to him were also beaten… Many advised him to stop, but he could just not stop’.

The situation that forced Neill to resign the bishopric involved a local school teacher whose village then complained to the diocese with a number of influential figures supporting the movement to get rid of Neill. Charges of violent assault would have been brought against Neill in the Episcopal Court ‘citing a number of instances of violent assault of clergy, laymen and teachers’, so he was forced to resign despite a powerful campaign to keep him as Bishop.

Neill returned to England and in his own autobiography did not give the real reason for leaving India. He worked for a short time in the faculty of divinity in Cambridge. While researching the biography, Daughrity was contacted by the painter Patrick Hamilton who recounted Neill’s punishment for his personal failings. Hamilton wrote, ‘Certain things [Neill] did have affected my whole life and now, at the age of 83, I still find him lurking in the dark places of my mind. I believe I am the one who reported what was happening and was probably responsible for his immediate removal from Trinity in about 1947.’ A further incident was fully documented dating from Neill’s time in Nairobi in the early 1970s and finally reported to Anglican Church authorities in July 2020. The account includes the victim’s suspicion that although remaining fully clothed, Neill found the experience arousing. Importantly this victim was able to confront Neill some years later when he threatened to repeat the beating, and able to tell Neill, ‘how inappropriate it was to spank a grown man. Neill was flummoxed.’ Neill regularly visited and stayed at Yale University in the US. In 1979 an eyewitness account reported the spanking of two or three young men following a small group discussion of the Christian tradition of ‘beating the body’ as a spiritual discipline. The witness to the scene reported: ‘he combined a biblical teaching with a practice that gave him pleasure.’ One of the men reported the incident, and Neill was told not to have private meetings with students. Another documented abusive incident took place shortly before Neill died whilst a senior scholar at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. The victim was helping Neill preparing a book for publication when Neill asked the person to sit on his lap, and then discussed the need for punishment and began slapping them on the buttocks. Needless to say, this person avoided Neill as much as possible after the incident.  

Whilst Neill did consult a psychiatrist about depression, he was unable to seek treatment for his beating fetish or what his niece referred to as his ‘sado-masochism’; nor were these incidents seen as criminal – so he was never prosecuted. His status and reputation were such that whilst many senior church authorities knew about his actions including Archbishop Donald Coggan, Neill was never held to account. Indeed, when Richard Holloway disclosed the abuse in a book review of an earlier biography in 1991, Holloway was castigated by many for not focusing on Neill’s ‘fruitful life and ministry’ and ‘the brilliance of the man’. Inevitably though more victims of his perverse behaviour came forward in the 1990s as a result of the publicity. The account from the victim who disclosed in 2020 suggests that currently there is ‘a growing file on Stephen Neill’.

So, what to make of yet another sad account of abusive practices in high places? Canon Eric James who in his role as Chaplain of Trinity College, Cambridge, ‘came to know the tragic truth’ of Neill’s compulsive abusive behaviour called in 1991 for ‘psychosexual understanding’ and for members of the Church to ‘examine the psychosexual basis of much that passes for theological conviction.’ Thirty years later as the abusive so-called ‘spiritual practices’ of Peter Ball, John Smyth and Jonathan Fletcher are reluctantly dragged into the light we might wish for the same thing. It’s not just about understanding though, it is also about confronting and properly bringing to account all abuse, and offering realistic support and help to victims. There is a need for understanding how emotional deprivation and illiteracy may re-emerge in abusive behaviour and linked to these, why senior clerics find it hard to face up to the need for professional psychiatric or psychotherapeutic help. Why is mental health and sexual well-being never taken as seriously as reputation and status?