Martyn Percy

Aidan Moesby’s live art installation, ‘Sagacity’, first appeared in 2015. At first sight, it looks like a periodic table of elements from a school science class. But Moesby’s subsequent print of the live installation is called ‘A Periodic Table of Emotions’.

Moesby’s installation and print replaced hydrogen (H) with happy (Hy). The art goes further: (Bl) is for bleak, (Fu) for fury and so forth. Colours are used to differentiate between the emotions. One group of ‘emotional elements’ is made up of the seven deadly sins. The largest family of emotions is concerned with different kinds of depressive states. These are coloured in blue (naturally), and include sorrowful, dejected, subdued, empty, demoralized, sombre, suicidal, awful, dreadful, unhappy, morose.  This is a veritable lexicon of woe. But what of the table above being applied to an institution, organisation, community or nation?

I recall a previous Archbishop of Canterbury describing the national mood of the Church of England and wider Anglicanism as one of ‘low grade depression’. That might have been true then, and for sure, ‘gloomy’ would be a good term to describe how many see the prospects for the national church and wider Communion. True, much time can be spent on blaming others for our moods and emotions. But what might some emotional-ecclesial intelligence offer at this point?

First, there is no real terminology in scripture for the category of ‘emotion’ or ‘mood’. When we do encounter anger, grief and joy, we meet them without reference to our wider framework of emotional wellbeing, which we take for granted today. This might be progress for some, but for others, it turns emotions into pathologies that must be managed, and that is the surest way to intensify those emotions.

Second, as the medieval mystics opined, melancholy was hard to shift, as it was settled state of grief and anguish. I suspect that it is this type of ‘emotion’ that is now gripping the Church of England and wider Communion. The recent announcement of a ‘wellbeing package’ for clergy in the Church of England will only compound that sense of depression.

Third, the collective “pursuit of happiness” (as the 1776 American Declaration of Independence has it) is not a reference to some transitory feeling. But rather to a solid state of liberty where individuals and communities could truly flourish. It follows that if a group or individual cannot pursue this kind of ‘happiness’, anger and resentment quickly surface, with associated emotions of rage and fury.

Emotions, when institutions seek to manage and mute them, quickly witness a downward spiral of emotions for all concerned.  That is why Christians have long invested in the notion of caritas – not an emotion, per se, but rather an ‘emotional ethic’. Caritas is a self-regulating spiritual exercise of the will, heart, and mind – to foster and offer compassion, empathy, alms and abundant love and care beyond the usual bounded constraints of personal desire.

Caritas is what we expect from our parents, hope from our partners, and will be grateful to receive from our children. Caritas is what those with less hope, pray and yearn for. It is what those who have more must engage with in their ‘soul work’. The irony of caritas is that when we learn to give and receive it, which is a duty, we quickly encounter joy.[*]

This is perhaps the most acute problem for today’s English Anglican leadership. It appears to have lost its emotional intelligence; sorely divorced from and devoid of caritas.  Announcing a new ‘well-being package’ for clergy addresses some material concerns that have impacted ministers, as the Church of England recently did.[†] But it does almost nothing to assuage the sense that this is an organisation that responds to serious emotional need, depression and trauma with a ‘wellbeing package’, as was the case recently. The choice of language and the initiative are more likely to compound the sense of alienation many now feel.

Furthermore, clergy themselves feel processed, managed, and muted, as they have never done before. For example, clergy seeking to conduct marriages or take funerals outside their diocese, or from another province, will frequently encounter elephantine processes that treat the clergyperson as a potential risk to be managed, the event as a potential hazard that also needs vetting and risk management, and probably additional training, forms to be filled in and more besides. This robs clergy of their agency and role. It trespasses on the broad and deep range of emotions a minister might try to manage at a wedding, blessing of a couple, burial or cremation.

To add insult to injury, the persons presuming to undertake the vetting process and risk management on behalf of a diocese or bishop have no external accountability to any independent professional body, and there will be no appeal against decisions taken, or how any request is dealt with. There is nowhere and nobody to complain to (other than internally). This anti-caritas compact feeds distrust and fosters the range of depressive emotions cited above.

The only way out of this is for the leadership of the Church of England to recover its heart and soul, and rediscover caritas for leaders who preside over ministry. Political compromises on divisive moral debates will not resolve the raw underlying feelings of shame, anger, melancholy, grief and fathomless sadness that the concerns prompt, simply by appearing as an item on some agenda as an ‘issue’. Nor will more managerialism – packages, visions, strategies, initiatives and the like – compensate for the sense many have on the ground in parishes.

That sense is this. They might not matter that much; they represent a cost to an institution that it can no longer afford; they must be treated as a potential risk and accordingly managed; they are an agenda item, and so are their issues; and they might just be one more problem or issue that can hopefully wait, or solved with minimal intervention (i.e., contactless – though there might be an email or letter). The sense that the clergy have is that they are just units to be ‘processed’ in a system, and that their grief over their wellbeing can be assuaged by some new ‘package’. The ‘package’ will be announced with much fanfare and enthusiasm. It will be met with ennui.

Without caritas, the church is as doomed as a family without love. The Church of England leadership now stands at a testing existential crossroads. Shepherds or Managers? Pastors or CEOs? How the church treats its own will be replicated in how wider communities and parishes feel the church is treating them. The current ecclesial crisis is an emotional-existential matter, requiring solemn reflection and sober, sincere, serious repentance.

If we look forward, the emotional terrain looks set to get tougher. The views of Charles III’s son and heir, William, are thought to be somewhat tepid on the matter of the Church of England.  The future William V could signal to the government that the reigning monarch, acting as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, might have been a valuable arrangement for national interests in 1534. But it is very hard to make the case for this in 2034. The sense of dislocation is thick in the air but denied by the leadership. It is as though the bishops think Jesus himself said, “keep calm and carry on” – no matter what the reality is.

England is hardly beholden to its national church anymore, and a litany of safeguarding scandals, cover-ups, managerial failures and general indolence has left the broader population disenchanted with the current leadership. The likelihood of that being reversed seems slight, and the Church of England seems set to become an increasingly marginal element in the day-to-day lives of its citizens, if baptism, confirmation, wedding and funeral statistics are anything to go by. To say nothing of the bleak news on usual Sunday attendance (uSa).

Meanwhile, across global Anglicanism, our churches worldwide can now barely relate to one another, given that the divisions on issues of sexuality, polity, order and the like are so deep, bitter and profound. Most other Protestant denominations have entered into bespoke semi-detached modes of separation. Still technically married and bearing the same family name, but not living together and leading separate lives, is perhaps the best analogy? Or, same grand house, shared hallway, but otherwise divided into flats with separate entrances. Some neighbours talk to each other. Others do not.

That might work for a while, but there comes a point when money, property, assets and savings need to be shared out, and the running costs divided up equitably.  Lawyers tend to get involved at this point. This is why emotional-ecclesial intelligence needs to be recovered. What can Anglicanism do, going forward? There are three possible options.

First, there is the carry-on-disagreeing option, though this has had its day, and too much ink (and maybe blood) will be spilt with hoping against hope that schism can be avoided. All the signs in this option point to implosion and weary resignation. The price of this option – full Communion – is one that few will invest in, and many have already turned their back on it.

Then there is the second option that suggests you divide from those you no longer agree with, and/or expel the heretics. Some conservative proponents champion this course, but it’s unlikely to gain much ground because, while hot on specific moral issues, conservatives can be a bit slack on canon law, and do not mind, for example, lay people celebrating holy communion. If moral deviancy is to be punished, what about liturgical or canonical defiance?

Then, there is a third way. It must be accepted that the worldwide Anglican Communion is really a construction of the British Empire, though it has eventually evolved into a more equitable commonwealth – or better still, a worked-out federation. Anglicanism is undoubtedly global but is now too diverse to be centrally or collegially governed in a manner that guarantees unequivocal unity. Its future lies in adopting federalism, and not trying to copy ‘Communion’ catholic-speak.

Option one is poisonous, and option two would be a lawyer’s dream ticket.  But option three can be worked out through love and caritas. In the meantime, call nobody ‘Raca’ (Matthew 5: 22). For that matter, be careful about lazy labels like ‘liberal, ‘conservative’, ‘traditionalist’, ‘progressive’ and the like. Such labels rarely work well. Just look at the nomenclature of ‘Anglicanism’.

In God’s eyes, we are all fools and blind to the spirit of the age. Instead, settling our differences in a spirit of love, equality and justice might be wise and prudent. Anglicanism need not be afraid of divorce or separation because, if done well, it can bring peace and sponsor new kinds of love and respect.  However, this requires a level of emotionally intelligent leadership and ecclesiology, which is currently lacking in Anglican polity. Grief is the price we pay for love; we must all let go eventually. And let go, we will. In the meantime, treat others as you would want to be treated. God will judge us all with piercing truth and justice. God has contempt for no one. Only love.

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[*] Amongst the best writers on the history of emotions is Katie Barclay. See her The History of Emotions: A Student Guide to Methods and Sources, London: Bloomsbury/Red Globe Press, 2020. See also Thomas Dixon, The History of Emotions: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: OUP, 2023 and Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears, Oxford: OUP, 2015.

[†] https://www.churchofengland.org/resources/clergy-resources/clergy-wellbeing-package

by Stephen Parsons

Among all the stories of terrible abuse that have occurred within a church setting, there are a few which follow a different narrative, that of a false accusation.  All abuse accusations need to be responded to professionally and well.  But, when, as in some accounts, a false accusation has been made, the one accused turns out to be the actual victim. The implications for the health and well-being of the accused are life-long.  Some of these stories, like that of Bishop Michael Perham, are in the public domain, while others, unknown, blight the lives of those accused while continuing to protest their innocence. 

Any individual burdened with the accusation of committing a sexually abusive act is in a very difficult and sometimes impossible position.  Sexual activity, abusive or not, is done in private and if an accused individual is unable to prove that he (normally he) was elsewhere when the attack was made, his protestations of innocence may be unheard.  If a child is involved, many people assume that a child is incapable of telling a lie about such matters.  Even though an allegation from a child should be taken extremely seriously and never trivialised, this does not take away the need for detailed and careful questioning.  Assumptions of guilt should never be untested and unchallenged.  Anyone who is accused of a crime should always have the opportunity to be properly heard and recover their reputation, if innocent

Any accusation that gets through an initial inquiry, one that may sometimes be based on amateur guesswork or homespun psychology, can still be the cause of enormous damage.  Also, requiring a teacher, a priest or a bishop to ‘step-back’ for months, even years, while enquiries are made can be a time of extreme mental torture for the accused.  I knew of a case of a head teacher at a special school who was accused by pupils of some kind of abuse.  He had to go on paid leave while the accusation was assessed and rejected.  The experience broke him, and he died from a sudden heart attack in his late fifties.  Equally tragic was the story mentioned above, that of Bishop Perham.  I knew him fairly well in his curate days near Croydon.  This was before he started to move from one important job in the Church to another, ending up as Bishop of Gloucester.  As a liturgist, Perham had a huge part in the creation of Common Worship and it was in the early 80s that we met at conferences for the study of liturgy.  The accusations that surfaced during his time at Gloucester emerged from his time in Croydon.  I have no doubt that protocols were correctly followed but there is something wrong with a process that takes many months to deliver a verdict. The accusations were withdrawn, and Perham was then allowed to return to Gloucester to receive proper farewells before retirement.  These had been denied him while the accusations were being examined.  Sadly, he was soon to develop terminal cancer, and he never lived to enjoy a long well-earned and productive retirement.

Having brought up two accounts of false accusation and the devastating damage they can cause, I want to raise the question of why anyone might choose to make such an accusation.  The points that I bring up are not based on a single case, but long-term readers will recognise that some of the questions I ask could be appropriate to the ‘Kenneth’ case.  My assessment of why his case has proved so difficult to resolve is first to point to the institutional refusal by the Church of England to allow any kind of independent appeal process which might challenge the amateur assumptions of a Core Group.  Possibly his case might have been dealt with differently if he was a cleric, but the Kenneth’s lay status seems to have worked against him.  Declaring him guilty by placing him in the ‘high-risk’ category has created damaging effects for him and the cathedral concerned. In addition, confidence in the safeguarding protocols has been undermined in his diocese, as I understand.  There still seems to be no resolution in sight.

Having thought for some time about accusations of bullying and abuse and the motives for making them, I find myself in company with the vast majority in believing the bulk of such accusations to be true.  But there will be exceptions, and a group has always to be open to the possibility of a false accusation being made.   A child may normally be truthful, but the same child may be attention seeking.  Many children know that one way to get attention is to say something outrageous.  In the village where I served my first incumbency, the Headteacher routinely asked at assembly if there were any birthdays to be celebrated.  One small boy from a poor family would raise his hand on every occasion so that he could be the centre of attention for a moment.  It was sad to behold.  Was a response every time to this cry for importance the right way forward or would it have been better to ignore his hand shooting up?  Being the centre of attention is strong motive for behaviour, and what is true for children is also true for some adults. 

In our attempt to make decisions about who is likely guilty and who innocent, people at the top of an organisation can call upon the expertise of people we refer to as professionals.  A professional is someone who has received a relevant training in such things as law, psychology and sociology.  Such book knowledge is backed up by proven experience and expertise.  One of the problems about church safeguarding has always been the lack of a generally accepted path to professional accreditation.  Who should occupy this space, able to lay claim to safeguarding professional expertise? My own reading into the subject suggests that anyone who claims to be expert in this area without continuous professional development over 5-10 years is probably engaged in an act of self-deception.  Merely listing some of the disciplines that contribute to a proper understanding of safeguarding – law, criminology, psychoanalytic theory and practice together with sociological insights. – makes one aware of that there will be probably serious, even dangerous, gaps in the so-called professionalism on offer from a typical Diocesan safeguarding ‘expert’.    A multi-discipline team might overcome some of these skill problems in cases like that of Kenneth, but we will quickly hear the cry that such expertise is expensive.  Allowing contested cases to reach no conclusion is also expensive, both financially and in terms of reputation.  Who knows how much damage is sustained by a cathedral, even the wider church, when such cases come into the public domain?  The lack of competent professionalism operating, as in Kenneth’s case, results in reputation damaging consequences for institutions and leaders alike.

In writing about professionalism and the way that is sometimes absent in safeguarding cases, I am minded to suggest a few ideas about how we might begin to change the situation.  Being ‘unprofessional’ implies one of a number of possible lapses in judgement and behaviour.  It is clearly unprofessional to indulge in such things as bias, favouritism and partiality.  Such things are routinely found in the school playground. All of us have memories of our own childhoods where we had to negotiate our way through fickle and unreliable relationships. The constant shifting of moods among children means that a child’s best friend one day can sometimes become overnight the worst enemy.  One of the gifts of adulthood is the ability to enjoy relationships that have stability and are not subject to constant changes of mood.  The adult human does not cease to be capable of some serious lapses of judgment, involving possible regression to childish responses to others. There is also the danger of groupthink and unacknowledged prejudices can still pervade the way we think.  There are, we find, many ways that we can get caught up in primitive ways of thinking about other people.  Primal feelings of dislike often seem to be fed by memories of childhood rivalries; we may also be guilty of lapsing into child-like attention-seeking behaviour.  In this way a non-professional group (PCC?) will also often be full of primitive dynamics.  A chairperson of a committee or Core Group may need to be constantly reminding the individual members not to get swayed by such things as the memory of a school bully who resembles candidate B at the interview.  Rising above subjectivity is something to ask of everyone in a quasi-judicial role, whether deciding on a candidate for class teacher at one’s local school or forming an opinion of someone accused of a sexual offence.

When the Church judicial processes get things wrong, the follow-on damage is appalling.  When a Bishop can survive the credible claim that he told, without evidence, a female abuse survivor that she was victim of a false memory, many of us feel deep shame for even being associated with an organisation that can incubate such distorted thinking.  The persecution of Fr Griffin is still recent enough to be a malignant wound in the Church of England.  Where was the professional competence able to get the bottom of the rumours and leave an elderly priest in peace? 

Safeguarding in the Church will continue to focus on the protection of the vulnerable.  At the same time, the Church must learn to offer protection to the small number of individuals who fall into the category of falsely accused.  When such accusations are made, we must not allow untrained individuals to have the final word.  These beliefs may be mere prejudice, based on encounters many years before.  If we do decide on the guilt of another, there must be the opportunity for an independent third party to review the case.   Millions have been spent on safeguarding in the Church of England.  The case for spending a small proportion of this money on the protection of the falsely accused would seem in order.  They are victims too.

Damon is an apprentice devil tasked with learning to undermine and weaken the Church of England and wider Anglicanism. Lucius is a senior devil mentoring apprentices overseeing the work on all denominations. Lucius refers to the Church of England as the ‘English Patient’. Lucius is particularly keen to encourage the Church of England’s peculiar ecclesionomics, bloated ecclesiocracy and unaccountable episcocrats. Lucius draws on C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, published in 1942. These letters are published by Lucius for the benefit of new apprentices. – Lucius.

Living in Love and Faith

Dear Lucius

I am a bit fretful about the Church of England’s handling of same-sex blessings, equal marriage and human sexuality.  My predecessors seem to have been much more successful in causing major car crashes at Lambeth Conferences and General Synods, engineering lengthy bitter rows over gay bishops, winding up right-wing clergy to say that AIDS-HIV was God’s wrath, and generally creating a climate for moral debate that was about as civil and constructive as Game of Thrones meets Warhammer.

Those were the days! The Conservative Evangelicals took no prisoners, and the Traditionalist Catholics had their don’t-ask-don’t-tell strategy which was very carefully managed with lashings of gin and lots of lace. And everyone could blame the liberals because they were the only ones talking about sexuality.

I am getting a little bit worried now, because it turns out that quite a lot of Conservative Evangelicals who were purportedly promoting orthodox views about sexuality were actually a different prospect in practice. And some of the Traditionalist Catholics seemed to have the same problem, namely saying one thing but doing another. The liberals still got the blame, however, which is of course a great result for us. The last thing we want is an honest, progressive church.  God save us from that. Well, not God, obviously. I mean The One whose Name Must Not Be Spoken.

Anyway, I worry that the Church of England might be making progress. I am not sleeping too well at the moment, because I think there might be some kind of uneasy truce brewing. Can you put my mind at ease?

Your Servant, Damon

Dear Damon,

Yes. I can put your mind at ease. There might be an uneasy truce in the air, but it will cause more harm than good, and only deepen the divisions in the church. Your English Patient lacks the capacity to make a moral decision unless it secures 100% of the vote, so it is constantly hunting around for concessions and compromise.  This VIABLE Church – a Very Important And Big Long-term Enterprise – is hell-bent (sadly, not literally!) on pleasing everybody, so ends up pleasing nobody. You honestly don’t need to worry.

Whilst the Glory Days of huge public rows at General Synod and Lambeth Conferences over sexuality are gone, you must remember that this was back in the day when the public and the press were a lot more engaged in the goings on of the Church of England.  I look back with great pride at the attempt of a visiting overseas bishop to exorcise the demon on sexuality from an LGCM campaigner during a Lambeth Conference. That was a huge coup for us.

But it is important to see that the long-term impact of these earlier PR triumphs is that the press would not bother to report this kind of thing now. The pubic knows that on sexuality and gender, and quite a lot else, the Church of England is a basket case.  The indifference of the press and the public is our victory. Nobody expects your English Patient to talk any sense on these matters or give any kind of moral lead to the nation. It is not even interesting to watch Conservative Evangelicals posturing to the tiny remnant remaining in the Church, trying to persuade listeners that if biblically conservative views on sexuality were restored, people would soon be queuing to get into worship services to hear more sermons selling Old Fashioned Certainty by the pint.

Personally, I think you should be encouraged by how the Church of England leadership is handling the debates on sexuality.  It is laced with delays, anti-democratic, indecisive, and deliberatively diabolical. We could hardly do better. The bishops are showing us their best side – vacillating, mercurial, political, lacking any moral courage and compass, and also secretive and totally unaccountable. And we haven’t bribed one of them – honest! We don’t have an Insider or Double Agent fermenting this self-destructive behaviour.

We are truly blessed here – through obviously not ‘blessed’ in the way that the Other Side means! But it is amazing to think that after all the nasty rows and fireworks in sexuality debates over many decades, the Church of England’s leadership just decides to internalise its disagreements.

So, don’t worry about the lack of noisy bitter infighting on sexuality spilling across the pages of the press. The media are bored by the church, and very v jaded by its fearfulness and indecision. The good news for us is that your English Patient has really ceased to be news. It has become an irrelevance. To be honest, you’d need a very slow press day to carry a report on some wacko conservative Christian prattling on about biblical family values (minus the concubines, polygamy and slaves, obviously), trying to convince the general population there are only a few positions on sex that God really favours, and all the others merit a proper good stoning.

The really good thing about sex and your English Patient is that they just can’t bear to talk about it, at least in public. It is not a good look for a body preening and positioning itself to be so VIABLE: a Very Important And Big Long-term Enterprise in the public eye.

So, they’ve decided to take the subject behind closed doors and talk in private for an unspecified period.  Those inside the locked room imagine that everyone else outside is waiting for some sight of the proverbial White Smoke. But in fact, everyone has either fallen into a coma, decided to snooze and catch up on a boxset of Death In Paradise (series 1-3), or just quietly gone home, despairing of the moral vacuum. By the time the bishops have anything to say, there will be nobody left for them to talk too.

Leave them to it, Lucius. The leadership are their own worst enemy.

 Your Mentor, Lucius.

The diagnosis of Parkinson’s problems at the end of last year has woken me up to the need to get my life tidy.  One of the areas of untidiness is in my books.  Like many people who develop short term enthusiasms, I have sometimes bought books which remain unread.  It is now time to lighten the load, both literally and metaphorically.  As I handle the books on my shelves, I am reminded of the various stages of my intellectual and theological adventures from undergraduate days to the present.  Having purged my books several times in the past, the ones that remain speak to me of relatively recent enthusiasms I have been indulging in, especially since retirement.   My undergraduate self would never have guessed that I would find myself in the world of cults, crowd dynamics and safeguarding issues.  Theologically and intellectually, I have been on a fascinating journey with various twists and turns.  It might have been tidier if I had stuck to one continuing speciality or interest.  That might have built up an expertise in a single area of enquiry, perhaps publishing the definitive study on the topic.  Whether it was because of an inbuilt intellectual fickleness or impatience, my efforts at study have wandered fairly widely, so that all my efforts are those of an amateur enthusiast rather than any sort of expert.

When I began my undergraduate studies, in the far-off days of 1964 at Oxford, I was not a strong student.  The essays I wrote, and the lectures attended were seldom edifying for me or my tutors.  By the beginning of my last year, the winter of 66/67, I felt set to fail completely.  There was just so much material to master and my brain felt overwhelmed by it all.  The way that I overcame this mental paralysis, in time to make an unexpectedly good showing in my final exams, was to take a bold step.  I abandoned all the notes I had taken from half-understood lectures that I had written down and instead started all over again in my learning.  Out went the books full of overspecialised material and in came the books written at a level I could thoroughly master.  I remember the delight with which I devoured John Robinson’s book on the Body and how it demystified Paul’s theology.  The lectures on Paul I had attended had made his thinking totally incomprehensible.  John Robinson opened up Paul and his thinking and made him coherent and understandable.

I do not have the space to mention which Old Testament studies injected some much-needed illumination into my learning, but the same method of focussing on books that were written at my level was applied right across the board.   Reading accessible books rather than relying on badly taken lecture notes introduced structure and order into my learning.  I also began to see that all the biblical material I was reading had always to be understood in a wider context.  There was no point, for example, in knowing what Exodus had to say about the Passover, unless you also knew or were aware of how this festival developed different emphases over history.   Everything I was learning about the Bible had to be placed in the context and setting of other historical and theological insights.  In short, I was learning to understand holistically, to ask at every point how pieces of knowledge connected with other areas of information and fact.  Always searching for and often finding these connections gave me a sense of the whole, as well as enormous respect for what Scripture was about.  This may seem to be an insight hardly worth pointing out, but academic methods of detailed scrutiny often destroyed any sense of integration and wholeness in the text.  To go back to the Passover example, I found myself having a far clearer understanding of the eucharist because I had become imaginatively involved in the Passover theme from the earliest days.  My knowledge of the Bible was not created by ‘clobber texts’ but through an empathetic immersion into the themes of biblical teaching. With this appreciation for the central insights of Old and New Testaments, I had an anchor which made my last-minute revision effective and to the point.

1967 was the first year when the Faculty of Theology in Oxford first required every candidate to offer a special subject.  I offered Christian archaeology and, although my showing in that paper was lower than my other marks, it was to lead me down a rabbit warren of fascinating, but ultimately over specialised study.  Nevertheless, this was to provide me with an opportunity for extended theological study normally only offered to  a student with an aspiration for a professional academic position. The financial demands today for this kind of extended study shut out all but a very small number.  I was successful in finding funding for a year’s travel and later two further years residential theological research, leading to a B. Litt degree in 1978.   After this I tried to remain connected to the academic world for a time, but the absence of easy library access made the effort hopeless.   I managed to give two presentations to the Oxford Patristic Conferences in the early 80s, but the amount of effort required to put together two twelve-minute papers made me realise that my explorations into Byzantine liturgical theology had no future.  Any attempts at academic scholarship, especially when attempted outside the orbit of a university and libraries, had to be abandoned.

The 42 years since I consciously abandoned the attempt to keep up with formal theological scholarship, in favour of more practically based learning, have not been wasted.  I have produced three (non-scholarly) books on healing themes and the abuse of power.  My own struggles to find something to say in a world of professional academics had taught me to realise that being acceptable in the world of academe is not the same as being useful to the Church and possibly the world.  I have always believed that clarity of expression must always take precedence over the formal rules of academic discourse.  My own theological journey or pilgrimage has taken me to occupy a place on both sides of the aisle, as it were.   I have been immensely privileged to have been able to make such a journey and it is hard to imagine a freelance student ever in the future being given the same freedom and resources to range over so many areas of theological interest.  In my case my studies, mostly undertaken in the context of parish ministry, have covered topics ranging from psychoanalytic themes to cultic behaviour and fundamentalist ideas.  My audience for all this amateur enquiry that my books and blogs have evoked in others have been the dozens of individuals who have written to me, especially over the past eleven years.  They are those who have allowed themselves to feel safe entrusting me with their secrets and experiences.   Some of them have felt confident enough to share their experiences in a blog.  I never meet them in the flesh but supporting them has been a great privilege.  They are encouraged by being heard and I am encouraged to know that someone finds my reflections helpful.

Do I have any regrets?  There is one dream that I had when I began my blog and before that never seems to have been fulfilled.    Retired clergy, such as I, given that many have had extensive theological formation, should be enabled to share in a structured way something of the richness of their learning. This could involve some kind of mentor relationship with those setting out on their clerical career.  Like me they often have libraries of useful books which they would willingly share and discuss to provide a glimpse of a richer and more expansive theological vision that is easier to engender when money and time are not in desperately short supply,  Those of us who call ourselves progressive or liberal want to declare forcefully that theology is not a single understanding of truth but is a vision of reality that potentially permeates through many other disciplines.  This then may be seen by the one with the eyes to see it.  No one being ordained today should ever be allowed to stop reading and learning.  Plato said something along the lines of the more I learn, the more I realise how much I do not know.  We older clergy, who were trained in an age which was more generous with time, know this truth.  That kind of training encouraged insight into what we see as wisdom.  It is a journey, involving a way of understanding that many, clergy and laity, still wish to follow today.

by Anon

The Lucius Letters: Chapter Two

Damon is an apprentice devil tasked with learning to undermine and weaken the Church of England and wider Anglicanism. Lucius is a senior devil mentoring apprentices overseeing the work on all denominations. Lucius refers to the Church of England as the ‘English Patient’. Lucius is particularly keen to encourage the Church of England’s peculiar ecclesionomics, bloated ecclesiocracy and unaccountable episcocrats. Lucius draws on C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, published in 1942. These letters are published by Lucius for the benefit of new apprentices. – Lucius.

Mutual Flourishing

Dear Lucius

I am getting very concerned about some of the press releases I keep seeing from a handful of Church of England dioceses.  These seem to indicate that women clergy work quite well with male clergy who don’t actually think women can be proper clergy.  But in some pictures from these dioceses, the women clergy look ever so happy, and say things like how lovely and nice their bishop is, even though that same bishop clearly doesn’t think women can be proper clergy. I’m worried that the overt discrimination is getting camouflaged by a veneer of politeness and a heavy cloak of niceness. We should be able to expose the Church of England for discrimination, but they seem to be getting away with by smiling a lot and talking about ‘mutual flourishing’.  How can we expose this duplicity?

Your Servant, Damon

Dear Damon,

You honestly don’t need to worry. The sacramental efficacy of women priests and bishops is clearly doubted by these proponents of ‘traditionalist’ views, and in no uncertain terms. A recent Church of England report said this:

“The basis of…objection to women’s ordination is the authority and unity of the Church.  The Church of England is part of the one holy catholic Church of God and that imposes limits on what it can and can’t decide unilaterally. Extending the historic threefold order to women constitutes a major doctrinal change and thus, whilst it may be the way the Spirit is calling the Church, it is an action that the Church of England does not have the unilateral authority to undertake”.

It is hilarious to cite ordination as the factor in the “authority and unity” of the One Holy Catholic Church. The official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church on the sanctity of life – conception, contraception and so forth – and the proper ordering of family life are major tenets of Catholicism.  The Church of England departed from such positions decades ago – “decide(ing) unilaterally” – that managing the size of a family through artificial means (i.e., contraception) was not wrong or sinful.  Roman Catholic orthodoxy disagrees. 

Traditionalist Anglicans are just liberals pimped up in liturgical bling.  They choose to ignore many major Roman Catholic doctrines, yet they accept others. They are fully signed up to Pick-and-Mix Anglicanism. They just don’t like to admit it.

The bishops are like some modern-day King Solomon rabbit caught in the headlights. Faced with a moral dilemma, such as what to do with two women arguing over one baby and who is the real mother, the bishops fudge it. They’ll recommend joint custody or try and broker some coparenting arrangement. They’d call that ‘mutual flourishing’ too. Why make a hard moral choice when you can fudge the issues and delay a difficult decision? 

Trying to impose ‘mutual flourishing’ makes no moral sense. It would be like forcing somebody to sign up for a peace treaty that they objected to and then telling them that they then had to sign another document saying they were happy with the terms of the imposed truce, even though they had resisted the treaty. And if they weren’t happy, they’d be told they’d end up with even less…so please pose for the camera next to the grinning man who doesn’t think you should be in the picture wearing a dog collar, and smile nicely!

The important thing to remember, Damon, is that the public don’t buy this for a second.  That’s why the congregations who are against women clergy are so careful not to mention this on their websites or on their notice boards.  The phrase ‘mutual flourishing’ is only meant to stop people inside the Church of England arguing more, and somebody actually making a clear moral decision. 

This is a huge fillip to us – and to the One whose Name Must Not Be Spoken. The Church of England has compromised on every important moral matter in recent times. On sexuality, gender, equal marriage and even the remarriage of divorcees, the Church of England won’t ever give a clear moral lead. They then just dress this up in silly phrases like ‘mutual flourishing’ which are imposed without consent.

Frankly, the Church of England does such a great job of undermining itself, and slowly losing the trust and confidence of its people and the wider population, you need do nothing other than sit back and watch them destroy themselves.

So, Damon, there’s no need to worry. The best thing to do with the English Patient is let them carry on releasing glib press releases with smiling women clergy next to grinning male clergy who don’t really believe the clergywomen should be in the picture at all. Just leave the church leaders to their vain PR and comms strategies. 

Keep stroking their egos. The church leaders think they are running a VIABLE Church – a Very Important And Big Long-term Enterprise. But in truth, your English Patient is just suffering from long-term cognitive impairment. So the gaps between fantasy and reality keep growing and will cause your patient to gradually unravel. Trust me. You just need to be patient.

Your Mentor, Lucius.

by Anon

My experience of abuse by a member of clergy is ongoing. Like many in my position, I was not fully aware of the severity until a critical point was reached: a single point in time, which denotated explosive chain reactions, revelations, and confrontations. In the immediate aftermath—dazed, air still shimmering with fallout—I considered why the word victim didn’t resonate with me, but the word survivor did.

Was my discomfort due to the fact that victim can imply a lack of agency? Or because the word maintains a link to the abuser? No, I decided. It’s the inert state that troubles me: the sense that a victim is the result of a finite series of actions. The implication that this status is permanent and cannot be altered further. The premise that the identification of a victim and a perpetrator means justice has been served. The assumption that a victim continues to live without any expenditure of effort or energy, floating like wreckage upon the waves: that there are no aching muscles or gasping breaths, no frantic treading of water. The active and continuing nature of the word survivor seemed preferable to any of this.

Survival is work. It is work without any tea breaks or days off. Abuse doesn’t magically stop once a report is made; it often intensifies after the survivor attempts to sever contact with the abuser. The entire process by which one reports abuse is inherently traumatic. Physical, psychological, spiritual, and financial effects are not resolved by filing a safeguarding report. When people talk about survivors, often they are speaking about people who must actively choose to survive every single day, hour, minute. Struggling with the effects of trauma is often perceived as weakness. I have heard clergy speak with discomfort about the safeguarding training they had to undergo, as if they were above contemplating non-abstract crimes and abuse. They don’t want to think about such concrete things, about the wickedness human beings are capable of committing. Neither do survivors, but survivors have no choice in the matter.

Abuse reverberates; it ripples, sending shockwaves backwards and forwards in time. It rips through past, present, and future. The damage is irrevocable and irreparable. Memories become tainted by new information. The present is an unbearable landscape of bureaucracy and sadness, an endless battle stretching into the distance. Hope is stripped from the future. When the Church delays the outcome of a case, when it deliberately lets a case stagnate, when it blocks paths to justice and resolution, there is no discernible future.   

How do you measure a life in limbo? How do you quantify time irretrievable? The loss of opportunities, the stagnation of career or education? The isolation, the exhaustion, the shame, the fear? The absence of smiles, of joy, of dreams, of the desire to dream? The insomniac nights, or the ones filled with nightmares – which weigh heavier on the scales of torment? Is it worse to dream, unwillingly, of my abuser, or to lie awake, unwillingly, yearning for justice from a Church whose accountability to survivors is lacking? From a Church that would prefer I didn’t exist?

The act of reporting abuse by a clergy member represents a deed of tremendous faith in the Church—and, by extension, in the safeguarding policies and machinery in place (ostensibly) to protect parishioners. Once a report is made, a special relationship exists between the Church and the survivor. In some sense, a fiduciary duty is created. Reporting abuse entails a great deal of risk, especially when one lives with one’s abuser or is otherwise vulnerable. A survivor may be putting their life on the line to file a safeguarding report. This amount of trust and risk must be met with the highest standards of care and respect.

What should that standard of care look like? At the very least, it must include adhering to Anglican safeguarding policies as they are written.

As I agonised over reporting my abuser, I read every scrap of information on the safeguarding website for the Church of England. I read every policy, procedure, and guideline applicable to my situation, and many that were not. (This is part of the immense unpaid work a survivor must do.) My decision to file a safeguarding allegation was predicated on this information. I noted how a survivor was required to be supported throughout the process, and what other avenues were open to me for counselling and help. I educated myself about safeguarding agreements, clergy disciplinary measures, and the roles various individuals were meant to play in relation to the complainant and the recipient.

I trusted with my whole heart that this process would be followed.

What happened (and is happening) instead continues to shock me. Relying on written safeguarding policies was a grave mistake, as these have not been followed. I have learned that even a case of recent abuse with copious evidence can be handled horrifically by the Church. After writing a detailed account of the abuse I suffered at the hands of a clergy member, I now must continually document the neglect, delay, and abuse committed by those involved with the safeguarding case—people I trusted to protect me and others. Every failure to act, every delay, every obstacle feels like a beating. This is nothing less than institutional violence. And, perhaps more importantly, it entails work. Exhausting, emotionally draining, unpaid work. This, too, is the work of surviving.

It is hard to think of a single example in all of history when perpetrators of oppression successfully carried out a reformation of their own behaviour—or even tried. Discussions of institutional accountability often include the question, “Who watches the watchmen?” The gist is that those who police are fallible and must themselves be policed. Accordingly, the February 2025 general synod of the Church of England rejected an independent safeguarding structure. So, who is watching the watchmen? Survivors. Survivors are the ones keeping the Church accountable. The very people who have been doubted and ostracised are the ones testing the rickety scaffolding of Anglican safeguarding policies and exposing the faults. But survivors do this at their own risk. Such risk is not only psychological. John 3.20 states, “For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.” Do not underestimate what a person will do to avoid exposure. There are survivors who have good reasons to fear for their lives.

In examining the Bible for passages about honesty and truth, I ran into problems. I am neither a pastor nor a theologian, but it became painfully obvious that one must be very cautious in interpreting the word “truth” in the New Testament. Most if not all references pertain to Christ, or to the specific truth of the Gospel. Of course, Scripture condemns deceit and preaches honesty, but misappropriating these references to truth would bring no comfort; it is hard to fool oneself when one knows better.

I did realise two things while considering Scripture and the voices of survivors. First, survivors of clergy abuse carry within themselves a great truth—a truth much greater than blood and bone. They bear the trauma of betrayal by a Church they (may) love, by clergy they trusted, by a system they believed, and seemingly by God. They carry this burden inside of them and continue to bear witness to truth—if not through words, then through their continued existence in the face of adversity. Second, remaining silent is torture for a survivor who feels compelled to speak. For those who feel the prick of obligation, what they have endured and continue to endure must see the light of day. The survivors who report and who speak represent innumerable survivors who cannot. Voices for the voiceless. 

The delays and failures of the Church in handling safeguarding reports and in providing support for survivors are shameful enough. On top of this, survivors are often ordered to remain silent, while issuing no such directive to the (alleged) perpetrator. Furthermore, there is no reward for good behaviour; survivors are given no additional respect for complying with gag orders. There is merely more neglect, delay, and covering-up. I am now convinced that there is no “perfect victim” of clergy abuse. There exists no model for a mythical survivor who is instantly believed and supported by the Church of England. The notion of a “perfect victim” is damaging regardless, but its complete absence here is noteworthy. It is more appropriate to view survivors of clergy abuse as whistleblowers. It was only within this framework that I could begin to comprehend why the Church treats survivors as cruelly as it does and why the Church would seek to silence survivors’ voices.

There are days, and nights, when I feel the truth in every heartbeat; its sheer power threatens daily to undo every joint and sinew in my body. I do not speak for all survivors, but I know that this great and horrifying reality cannot dwell quietly within me for the rest of my days. We cannot be friends, or even bitter roommates, in this temple. Truth be told, and quickly.

It is a sorry situation when church leadership in three parts of the United Kingdom is being challenged and called into question at precisely the same moment.  To misquote Oscar Wilde ‘it is one thing to have church leadership challenged in one province, but to have three put under scrutiny at the same time is careless’.   The critical calling out of the Archbishop of Wales, the Archbishop of York and the Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church at the same moment must be an unprecedented event.  It is also traumatising to the other members of those bodies under their oversight, especially those in positions of leadership themselves.

Readers of my blog will be familiar with the background to the current turmoil in Scotland, Wales and England involving church leadership.  The precise reasons for unhappiness need not be rehearsed here, as there are other places, e.g. Thinking Anglicans, where the facts, such as we have, are explored.   There is also nothing to be gained by joining in a blame game.  Insofar as this is necessary, it has already been done by others with a greater grasp of all the facts than I have.  What I do wish to consider here is to try and imagine what it must be like to be one of the church leaders under fire and having, not only their decision-making questioned, but also their integrity.

Exposure to criticism is one of the costs of occupying a position of high office in any walk of life.  The job of CEO of a business leads one open to massive scrutiny, but the rewards in terms of salary and pension rights can be eye-wateringly huge.  One of the ways that pressure and stress are managed in high-flying secular jobs is through the fact that executive positions seem relatively secure.  Even if the company you are in charge of loses money and your resignation from this company is demanded, it seldom seems to prevent you, the leader, from successfully moving to head up another company.  A senior member of the clergy is in a much more fragile situation.  The ‘tied cottage’ method of employment means that the threat of losing or leaving a post represents a greater threat to well-being and welfare.  A clergy person, forced for whatever a reason to depart from a post, will typically have no property, no savings and no immediate prospect of obtaining new employment.  New opportunities for retraining get increasingly challenging and difficult, especially after the age of 50.   It is also not easy getting on the short lists for an incumbency position after the age of 58/59.  In short, it is highly risky treading the path of a clerical maverick.  The possibility of ending up homeless, impoverished and alone is just too great.

Taking risks in one’s style for practising leadership in today’s church is thus not to be recommended.   Making the wrong decision can seriously rebound and the harms that can descend on the clergy leaders and their families are possibly catastrophic.  Recycling senior clergy, even with decades of practical experience behind them, is not easy either.  Some senior clergy successfully move ‘down’ from cathedral canon or dean to incumbent status and seem to thrive.  This option is not given to very senior clergy who have reached the status of bishop.  Such clergy have reached a point in the trajectory of promotion where ‘demotion’ does not seem to happen.  Some defensive cord is wrapped around them, and the only viable option for a bishop who fails badly in the complex task of leadership is retirement.  One such episcopal departure covered by Surviving Church was enormously complex and cost the Church a great deal of money to resolve.

This consideration of even the possibility of career collapse among the clergy is a prelude to the thought that the clerical profession carries with it considerable pressure and stress.  My thoughts about the three leaders of the branches of the Anglican Church that we have mentioned as being currently under pressure, is to consider the stress they have been and are under.  Calls for them to resign, whether deserved on not, must be hard to bear.  Whatever their failings, they are human beings having to deal with opprobrium, and this must directly attack their quality of life.  No one becomes ordained with the expectation of having to face levels of stress that could cause Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  For leaders to know that there are people who want to attack and put pressure on them, is a hard burden to carry.  Having to face the hostility of individuals who hate your position on the LGBT issue, or the ministry of women is also very debilitating, spiritually and physically.  There cannot be many clergy who have not felt something in the way of political or personal opposition which has been the cause of unhappiness and stress.  Such episodes, especially for bishops, must have the tendency to spill over into family life.  The question that immediately comes into one’s mind is this:  Why would anyone accept the perceived gratification of high office in the church in return for PTSD levels of stress? Another way of asking the same question is to wonder whether we are reaching the point where candidates of ability routinely turn down senior posts for fear that their mental health might be compromised, if not destroyed. 

In last week’s Church Times there appeared a half page advertisement for the post of Dean of Bangor Cathedral.  The number of suitable candidates is first restricted by the requirement to speak and write Welsh.  The numbers who can cross this first hurdle and then feel able to offer themselves for consideration to be a church leader in this part of Wales will be tiny.   It will shrink further, possibly to zero, when the candidates acquaint themselves with the current crises at Bangor.  Candidates have to be prepared to negotiate an extremely tense and volatile set of issues related to finance, safeguarding and personal relationships.  Does the Archbishop of Wales really expect to find someone who is prepared to handle all the issues when so much has yet to be resolved in the Cathedral and Diocese? It requires super-human qualities that surely would be already manifest in one of the Welsh speaking clergy of the province, if such abilities in one person existed.

The gloomy point I am arriving at is to suggest that senior posts in the Church are becoming so complex and stressful that there may soon be insufficient people with the skills, calibre and mental stamina able to do them well enough to allow the Church to function well.   Looking at the impossible list of requirements for the next Archbishop of Canterbury, one wonders if a person with the right qualities and abilities actually exists.  One suspects that some who might be qualified to do major sections of the A/C’s tasks may have already withdrawn their names in a desire to escape the crushing responsibilities of the post.   We are still processing the news of a candidate for the Bishopric of Durham pulling out of the race at quite a late stage.  Perhaps the word race suggests a completely inappropriate image.    You can only have a race if there are several runners or riders ready to compete.  At Durham, Canterbury and in Wales those who operate behind the scenes collecting competitors, seem to be having a hard task getting the candidates to enter starters orders.

 A recent article on the net about the lot of clergy, addressed the issue of burnout.  Certainly, something has to happen if this problem of stress and burnout trauma is not to destroy the energy and vitality of those who lead and work for the Church.  One or both of two things must happen.  Either a great deal of thought and planning must be given to making the clerical task doable, by offering much more in terms of support, training and proper R & R.  The second thing is that the senior clergy should never be put in the position of having to manage a situation where they do not have relevant skills and competence.  The failures in church safeguarding have come about partly as the result of an institutional hubris which seemed to be saying that anyone can do the work with minimal skills and training.  Being out of one’s depth should never be a cause of shame, but a sign of the right kind of humility.   ‘I cannot do this, please help me’ should indicate a Church where giving and receiving are part of the routine fabric of its life.  Such a Church is one worth belonging to – a place where hardships and struggle are alleviated by sharing, as well as glimpses of joy in service.                                                                                                                                                                                   

Mr. Martin Sewell, 8 Appleshaw Close, Gravesend, Kent, DA11 7PB

To:     Marsha De Cordova MP, Second Estates Commission, House of Commons.

           Dr. Helen Earner, Senior Director, Charity Commission, London.

           Richard Moriarty, Financial Reporting Council, London.

cc:      Archbishops’  Council (AC), General Synod Members (GSM), National Safeguarding Team (NST) of the Church of England (CofE), London.

22^nd May 2025

Dear Marsha, Helen and Richard,

I write as a member of the General Synod of the Church of England who has taken a special interest in the injustices of victims of abuse at the hands of the Church of England (CofE). I have been a primary advocate for their grievances, and I believe I enjoy a significant degree of trust in articulating their concerns to which I have listened with care and respect.

In this letter I raise matters of widespread disquiet not only of victims but also of a

significant number of Synod members in relation to the financing and functioning of CofE safeguarding operations. Ordinarily such a letter would be directed to the trustees (Archbishops’ Council – AC) of the national structures as the responsible body. However, all trust and confidence in the governance of the CofE – whether General Synod (GS), the NST or AC – is broken. We have seen that when serious issues of probity and legal process are raised, together with fiscal accountability and proper transparency, the issues are sidestepped or covered up.  

There is now cogent evidence to believe that examples of legal and fiscal malpractice have occurred and have not been properly addressed. So, on behalf of seriously concerned parties I now ask that, as a matter of urgency, you formally initiate investigation of these concerns.  In summary, the primary concerns are as follows

1. Payouts for interim support allegedly made by the CofE to abuse victims, and featured in their public audited accounts, do not accord with the monies which victims claim that they have actually received. The evidence for these alleged discrepancies has been made available for analysis by the victims. Whether the issue is one of unclear presentation, faulty process, technical error or worse, victims receiving payments must be entitled to a clear explanation to address their concerns. 

I am authorized to send you prima facie evidence on condition that I secure your agreement to investigate the matters, consult with the victims and provide them with your findings on these alleged disparities in the audited accounts. 

• A public letter and Press release have been issued by the Church’s victims of abuse. (See: https://survivingchurch.org/2025/05/15/press–release–from–isbsurvivors–group/). It speaks in terms of misconduct in public office and mendacity by that Church’s leadership, including the General Synod of which I am a member. Like the Post Office sub-postmasters such accusations need to be properly investigated, and I ask that you do so. Whether or not these are fair accusations, they are heartfelt, and truth must be must at the very least be independently evaluated. The pain and distrust expressed in the letter are plain, the language unattractive, at times but the allegations must not be dismissed on that basis alone.

• Various attempts have been made to bring the Secretary General (and CEO) of the CofE to account for his actions on matters of safeguarding. These have been repeatedly suppressed by the AC, through reference to a secret process described as “private”, within which the form of inquiry itself and the reasoning supporting the “no further action” outcome, remain secret. The Church has repeatedly and publicly asserted that it has repented past cover-ups and that it now embraces and upholds the principles of ‘transparency and accountability’. Yet this is patently untrue in the case of its Chief Executive. An independent report by a professional psychologist complementing the findings of the Wilkinson Review confirmed that the Secretary General had caused “significant harm” to victims. This was submitted to the AC – who effectively chose to ignore the findings.

Another well documented case relates to the Secretary General misleading an abuse survivor and securing the dismissal of a complaint against himself under the same secret process (see: https://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/safeguardingbishop–admits–that–survivor–was–misled/). This unaccountability in the principal officer is not a trivial matter and cannot but undermine public confidence in the national institution. Both cases, and the processes by which they were dismissed need to be urgently and independently investigated, not least in respect of why the Audit Committee of the AC has not accorded such matters serious consideration and reported to Synod.  The membership of that committee currently lacks any external member exercising oversight and that fact is itself the subject of victim disquiet and lack of trust.

• Recent work by the late Clive Billenness, a forensic auditor, General Synod member and elected member of the Audit Committee of the AC, showed that potentially falsified and forged evidence presented within the Church’s legal disciplinary process required proper independent investigation. (On this see: https://survivingchurch.org/2024/12/16/the–weaponization–of–safeguarding/). The case represents a prime example of ‘the weaponization of safeguarding’ referenced in the Jay Report. Similar accusation has been identified in other cases relating to innocent CofE clergy, notably the late Revd. Alan Griffin who had committed suicide in consequence (c.f. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk–englandlondon–58326903).  Such weaponization resulted in no disciplinary action in either case being taken against the alleged perpetrators. The prima facie findings of Clive Billenness must be independently tested.

The letter of the ISB Survivors Group – to whom the CofE promised swift justice more than two years ago – demonstrates that all statements on CofE safeguarding made by its Lead Safeguarding Bishop, the Archbishops or trustees (AC) are now viewed with distrust and disdain. All attempts to secure accountability transparency and justice have failed.  No part of the institution functions properly honourably and consistently for its victims. No resolution is currently in sight.

I formally request that the recipients of this letter, as the only relevant external regulators, initiate the urgent investigations now required. There can be no confidence restored in the operation of the charity (i.e., the Archbishops’ Council) until the regulators initiate proper action.

This is an Open Letter, in order that parishes, congregations and churches, and those engaged in any other related charitable work and its governance, can be reassured that when extremely serious matters of fiscal probity and conduct in governance are raised, the public

can see that the statutory regulating bodies will act. I have copied the letter to the Archbishops’ Council and to the members of General Synod.

Yours sincerely,  

Martin Sewell

by Martyn Percy

In a famous scene from The Matrix movie, there is moment which offers a tantalizing insight into drugs that have the power to awaken any pill-popper to three quite different hidden realities. A red pill inducts the consumer into a world of secret right-wing truths. A white pill will persuade the user that the situation of the wider world is rather better than you had imagined. A black pill, once digested, tells you know just how doomed we really are.

It is hardly a hidden reality that the story of the Church of England in the 21^st century has been largely shaped by a cocktail of black and white pills. In just 25 years there have been countless prophecies of doom, with alarm bells ringing to announce the next imminent crisis (i.e., pensions, vocations, ageing-dwindling congregations, soaring costs, abuse scandals, etc) that are of the black pill variety.  And there have been legions of initiatives that are white-pilled, and purport to reverse every negative trend.  The result is a church addicted to prescriptions and remedies in ever-higher dosage that boasts every shade of grey.

At the same time, there are a handful of commentators who only see red pills, as though the Church of England was being taken over by a small handful of right-wing ideologies. Personally, I doubt this very much. The Church of England and the wider global Anglican church is simply being consumed by process. Executive managerialism has become the parasite of eating the organism from the inside. What the church once consumed is now consuming it from within. This is a church being hollowed out by processes it neither comprehends – nor can expel.

The last time the Papal office and the Archbishop of Canterbury role were both vacant simultaneously was 334 years ago. Canterbury was vacated after the then-Archbishop was refused to swear allegiance to William and Mary and the office vacant between February 1690 and May 1691. The Papacy was also vacant following the death of Pope Alexander VIII in February 1691, with a new Pope not elected until 161 days later.

Modern conclaves tend to be rather quicker.  Cardinals will hear about the death of a Pontiff within moments of his passing.  The cardinals can gather fast, and the demands of a media age probably means they get down to business quickly.  Even with over 130 voting members of the conclave, the selection of Pope Leo XIV took just four rounds of voting over two days to emerge as the chosen candidate. The white smoke is an emoji to signal the new era.

The process for choosing the next Archbishop of Canterbury could hardly be more different. Having agreed to resign in November 2024, the process for selecting a successor to Justin Welby has quickly lurched from tragedy to farce. There is a dispute over the nominated electors from Canterbury Diocese, and a further dispute over the rules to elect the electors. The likelihood of a name emerging by the autumn seems slim, even though there are only 17 people on the committee to make this decision.  The committee is another aspect of the Church of England’s Grey-sphere.

If a picture is worth around a thousand words, then the images of all the cardinals gathered in identical kit for the funeral of Pope Francis and then for the conclave to elect Pope Leo XIV are telling.  And certainly, when compared to the last Lambeth Conference for Anglican bishops gathered from across the world.

The conclave and its attendant public liturgies presented an impressive regiment of imperial uniform (red robes eerily resonant of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale). Unity and uniformity are dress coded. The Anglican gathering, in contrast, looks more like a liturgical garage sale and charity shop rummage. Little matches. Disunity and diversity are dress coded too. Bishops wear what they want.  Some bishops – notably Sydney Archdiocese – decline to wear liturgical attire at all, if it can be avoided.

In contrast, the pictures of the funeral for Pope Francis could have been lifted from a well-choreographed scene in the Star Wars movies. The zoned marshalling in St. Peter’s Square represents an expression of imperial ordering. Yet at the same time, framed by ordinary mourners expressing their gratitude for their Pope and Father in God.

At the Conclave in Rome

The Lambeth Conference

The contrast between a conclave (the term means, literally, ‘a locked room’) to elect a Pope and the committee set up to choose a new Archbishop of Canterbury are as night and day. The former is rooted in two millennia of prayer-soaked practice. The latter is a secular process with an added spiritual gloss. Yet the committee will be just as secret.

The body charged with choosing the next Archbishop of Canterbury represents a hangover from an English colonial civil service culture where key decisions and appointments are made behind closed doors in some private smoke-filled room of a London club. Take away the smoke and the club for 21^st century sensibilities, and you’re essentially left with the same process. True, there is a nod to democracy (though the nominees given the task of electing are currently the subject of dispute). Yet as a committee, there is more opacity than one might encounter at a conclave.

What can’t be addressed by the next incumbent of Lambeth Palace is the unresolved nature of the Church of England’s identity. Since 1834 many Anglicans have bought into the myth that it has two pedigrees. On the one hand it is Protestant Reformed. On the other hand, it is Catholic. Some Anglicans go further, and entertain fantasies of reunion with Rome, forgetting that the core theology of the Church of England is Reformed Protestantism, and that the Head of the Church is the reigning English monarch, not the occupant of the Vatican.

This confusion of identity cuts no ice at the proverbial Church-Crufts Show. Anglicanism is a hybrid; a mongrel denomination that is sartorially and liturgically Catholic (sometimes), but theologically and organisationally Protestant (sometimes). Anglican Bishops dressed in purple are left stranded in the middle, trying to hold together two slowly bifurcating tectonic plates. Today, most English Anglican Bishops enjoy unchecked executive power, but with almost no pedigree of theological nous. Their real authority lies in pastoral praxis, but few have the energy to inhabit that aspect of their role. Bishops are often found to be desk-bound bureaucrats, firing off emails and issuing shiny-white-pill policy documents with fanciful vision statements, warding off the panic attack side-effects of corporate black-pill addiction.

The next incumbent of Lambeth Palace could do worse and take an honest and serious look at the identity issues that have lain unaddressed since the Church of England divorced itself from Rome in 1534.  Anglicanism is essentially a branch of Protestantism.  True, and unlike other Reformed churches, Anglicans kept their bishops and some of its clergy and churches continue to adapt their liturgies and clerical dress codes from Rome. Others do not, and opt for a more ‘happy-clappy’ style of worship. There is no central power or authority in Anglican polity to counter the exercise of such freedoms and unable to police its diversity.

There is no liturgical uniformity.  There is no central system of canon law. Many Anglican Provinces do not require affirmation of the thirty-nine articles of faith. Some Provinces have outlawed liturgical practices and clerical attire that became fashionable through Victorian ritualism. Theologically and organisationally, Anglicanism is essentially a Protestant expression of Christianity. Some Anglican churches will avoid using the prayer of confession in liturgy. Others have liturgies of baptism that feel more like a service of exorcism.

What the Church of England needs is serious authentic clarity. It is time to stop pretending that global Anglicanism is like Roman Catholicism, and in the same global orbit. It isn’t. This current process to choose a new Archbishop of Canterbury cannot possibly inspire confidence or attract affection, trust or faith. The committee is a crystallisation of the confused mindset that reflects the state that the Church of England finds itself in. Like the black-white pill cocktail, a committee-led process is bound to produce yet another shade of grey.

The next Archbishop cannot come from a conclave. Nor, alas, can she or he emerge from the kinds of democratic, open and transparent election processes that some other parts of global Anglicanism have adopted for electing bishops.  An elitist English Anglican establishment will always shy away from egalitarian ecclesiology. But if the Church of England were to own its Protestant identity more explicitly, it might find that a genuinely democratic synod would attract far more public support than some secretive committee ever could.

PRESS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DATE: 14^th May 2025

Survivors of Church Abuse Demand Action from the Archbishop of York

The ISB Survivors Group has today issued the attached open letter to the Archbishop of York.

We are survivors of abuse within the Church of England. We are the very individuals who were promised independent reviews by the Church, following the Independent Inquiry into child sexual abuse (IICSA). Many of us had already begun our reviews through the Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB) — until the Archbishops’ Council abruptly dismissed the ISB Board Members, halting the process and denying us the justice we were due.

Our group includes IICSA core participants, survivors of Bishop Peter Ball, and victims of John Smyth, amongst others. Some of us have been battling for our complaints — including those against senior bishops and Archbishops’ Council members — to be heard for over 30 Years.

It has now been almost two years since the dismissal of the ISB Board. No meaningful or credible alternatives for resuming our reviews have been proposed. While the Archbishop of York has agreed to meet with us, he continues to refuse discussion of the very issues we need to address.

For 23 months, we have been left without any independent support. The Church’s proposed

“independent” support included individuals closely connected to the National Safeguarding Team (NST) — a blatant conflict of interest. The “independent” advocate assigned to survivors worked directly for the Church of England. One other complication is that the Archbishop of York’s own behaviour would be subject to scrutiny in the very reviews that he is effectively preventing from progressing.

We are exhausted by the Church’s failure to act and by what we perceive as manipulative stalling from both the Archbishop of York and the deeply discredited National Safeguarding Team. The re-abuse and cruelty needs to stop.

Our lives have already been shattered by horrific, sadistic, and systemic abuse. We will not tolerate continued mistreatment from an institution that professes to follow Christ.

Media Contact:

Name: Marie-Louise Flanagan – independent press spokesperson

Email: marie-louise@step2mediation.com

Phone: 07498 847665

An Open letter to The Archbishop of York and Archbishops Council

Dear Archbishop Cottrell,

STRICTLY WITHOUT PREJUDICE

We are in receipt of your communication sent to Dame Jasvinder Sanghera in early February and after much consideration individually, as well having met as a group, are now ready to reply. All of us agreed that the best word to describe your letter was “abusive” and that consequently need to say that we find that it impossible to see Jesus in you.

Your abusive letter has made us realize that if we were to engage any further with you, even with the assistance of others, or to engage with your fellow members of the Archbishops’ Council, their agents (let alone your utterly discredited and menacing national safeguarding staff), that there is a substantial risk that it might be seen by others as a sign that it was perhaps safe for them to engage with you in any way. However, it is very clear to us, having read and deliberated upon the contents of your letter, that there is a very high risk that you potentially expose us to experiencing substantially worse further trauma that would cause us (already victims of sexual and spiritual abuse from your organization) irreparable and in some cases even mortal harm.

Archbishop Cottrell, we see you as a diabolical monster bent on causing us further harm and after receiving your letter we shall not communicate with you, your colleagues or agents any further: quite simply we do not believe it would be safe for us to do so. Consequently, we strongly advise any other vulnerable man, woman or child also to keep away from you and your discredited organization – one that seems to delight in its core business of causing everincreasing violence against those who are vulnerable.

You use the word “robust” to describe safeguarding in your church, however your often repeated use of this word merely means to us an escalation in the abuse that we continue to receive from you and your business organization. For many of us, we see in you an individual worse than Bishop Peter Ball or John Smyth –  indeed some of us wonder whether your desire to harm us is based in a similar perversion of Jesus and His love.

Christians are supposed to show the Light of Christ but in you, Archbishop Cottrell, we see merely darkness – no doubt your insistence to meet with Dame Jasvinder Sanghera and Mr Reeves “on a private and confidential basis” would also be held by you in the dark – a refuge to which you are perhaps unseemingly more inclined than the Light of Jesus.

Finally, as for your “apologies to all survivors for the trauma they have experienced” and that you wish to “seek to find a way forward to minimize any further trauma to the group” (failing to mention seeking to address the substantial harm you, your colleagues and business agents have already caused), from our own experience we simply do not believe a word of it and never will – nor arguably should anyone else. 

We suggest that you appoint a TRULY Independent Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) to move things forward URGENTLY. 

Yours sincerely,

The ISB SURVIVORS GROUP