Tucked away in the thirtyone:eight Review on Jonathan Fletcher was one fascinating but revealing detail.  One witness, giving evidence to the Reviewers, was speaking about his experience of Emmanuel Church Wimbledon.  At a meeting for the leadership team, JF made a comment about his understanding of the Church.  He said, ‘the Church was training camp rather than a hospital.’  That short, possibly throw-away, remark has lodged itself in my mind and I have been thinking through its implications.   Perhaps the comment gives us an important key, not only to Fletcher’s own thinking about the Church, but to what was taught within the conservative constituency in general.  We need to tease out the nuances of what is being said here.  As far as I am concerned, this description raises alarm bells.  My post is an attempt to explore some aspects of why I feel uncomfortable at the training camp metaphor.

Let us reflect on these two metaphors, training camp and hospital. The first type of institution is one for the cultivation of physical prowess.  For the sake of brevity, I will mention two examples.   In the first place, a training camp is a place where sportsmen of various kinds go to improve their skills.  The young Andy Murray was, I believe, trained at a specialist tennis camp in Spain as a teenager.  The same opportunity is given to many promising athletes and footballers.  It takes months and years of hard work and training to reach the top ranks of sporting skill.  The words, training camp, are also associated with the military. During the First World War, recruits were given a six-week basic training before being sent to the Front.  In that time, they had to learn to march, to obey orders without question, as well as the brutal skills of killing the enemy before they themselves were killed. Both these examples of a training camp are united by at least one common factor.  The people who went into them had already been vetted for their physical condition.  In one case the candidates were already highly competent sportsmen and women.  In the case of soldiers being recruited for the First War, they had all met the minimum standards of height (five feet tall) and were free from any obvious illness or disability.   In short, the training camp is a place only for the physically active.   No one could enter such an institution who was either disabled or weak. To be at any training camp implied that you were somewhere on the scale between minimally fit and physically excellent.

There are quite a number of scriptural passages that would appear to liken the Christian life to that of the athlete or the soldier. Paul uses the idea that the Christian life is like a competitive race.  The best runner is awarded a crown. For Christians the imperishable crown, the reward of eternal life, is what focuses attention and effort.  We also find military imagery in the Epistles.  In Ephesians (not necessarily Pauline), we have a vivid description of a Christian clad in the armour of God in chapter 6.  This armour evidently provides for the spiritual purposes of both attack and defence. Such metaphors of the Christian life, as the athlete or the soldier, are going to be of obvious appeal to anyone, but most especially to those brought up in the traditions of muscular elitist Christianity. The traditions of the Iwerne camps seem to have extolled such values, giving prominence and adulation for godly leaders, as well as prizing the values of obedience and public-school manliness.  However precisely these values are defined and understood, they seem to fit in well with JF’s promotion of the training camp model, whether having a military or athletic focus.  We might note once again that the vision of ‘Bash’ was for a Iwerne-trained godly elite ruling Britain.  This seems to have drawn something from the prevailing political fashions of the 1930s, especially fascism.  The emphasis on ‘top’ public schools, as providing the clientele for these camps, chimes in with an abiding undercurrent of elitism that is also distinctive of JF’s understanding of Christianity.  He and others in this tradition also never look at the shadow side of this model.  With the focus on the task of training future church leaders, the group running the camps had little time for those outside their charmed constituency.  There was a tendency to look down on or despise those who were on the outside.  Whether the Iwerne alumni recovered from the social elitism that they absorbed at the camps is not a question I can answer.  Some certainly did not.

The ‘hospital’ model of the church is one that we can claim to read out of the Gospels and the teaching of Jesus.  To take but one prominent example of the teaching of Jesus – the Beatitudes, we might ask the question.  How much do they reflect the manly elitist culture of the English public school?  Have those whom Jesus called blessed been to a training camp to learn the qualities valued by the Beatitudes?  No, these qualities at the beginning of Matthew 5 imply the very opposite.  It is almost as if Jesus, entering an elite school, walked past the successful leaders and the winners of sports cups to seek out those with ‘two left feet’ and thoroughly inept at any kind of team game.  The unsporty or academically lacking are not necessarily more virtuous than the rest.  They do however have one positive advantage over the leaders and the otherwise successful within the system.  They do not have to be constantly worried about keeping up appearances or a reputation for success.  The humble, the vulnerable and the low in status, though they have little power, also have no position to defend.  Because they are, in this way, among the vulnerable, even sometimes persecuted, Jesus regards them, paradoxically, as closer to God.  It is that which can make them blessed or happy.

What has this vulnerability got to do with hospitals?  One of the things I learnt in the retirement role of Bank Chaplain at Carlisle hospital some years ago, was the importance of helping people come to terms with their experience of vulnerability.  Whether they were seriously ill or just out of circulation for a couple of weeks, a patient in hospital has to come to terms with a new status.  All the things that defined them outside the hospital are stripped away.  They no longer have the role that defined them outside, as a managing director or a boss.  They are patients, to be treated by the staff in the same way as everyone else.  The old status that they had built for themselves as sometimes important members of society, had to give way to the new unsettling status of being a vulnerable human being, dependent on others.  The status of the patient has an uncanny parallel to the status of the ordinary human being coming before God or encountering Christ.  I am a strong advocate of the Orthodox Jesus Prayer which goes as follows.  ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’.  This short prayer is special, because it reminds us of our universal vulnerable status before God.  At the same time, it allows us to feel affirmed and accepted by him.   The hospital is an excellent analogy for the Church because it helps us see this double reality of our humble status before God and his gracious acceptance of us.  If we are ever guilty of pride and self-importance, the Church (as hospital) should remind us of our true status.  In pre-Covid days, we always had the powerful symbolism of all kneeling side by side at the altar, status left at the church door.   In our experience of dependency, penitence and powerlessness, we were learning to see ourselves as God sees us. 

The contrast between training-camp and hospital metaphors is ultimately a political-type distinction in the way we understand Church.  One seems to extol human achievement, status and thus pride.  The other calls attention to the importance of vulnerability, self-knowledge and powerlessness.  In writing this, the Gospel story of the pharisee and the publican comes to mind.  The first paraded his power and achievements before God while the other confessed failure and sin.  The latter left the Temple justified.  That brief picture perhaps shows above all what the military/athletic analogies of the Church lack, the ability to see ourselves as God sees us.  God seems to be in the business of looking after the vulnerable and valuing the qualities that vulnerability can bring.   He is the one who ‘hath exalted the humble and meek’ and ‘filled the hungry with good things’.

I was never an attendee at the Bash camps or in any way under the influence of Christian Union type theology.  I hope if I had been, my knowledge of the gospels and the reported sayings of Jesus about humility and powerlessness would have alerted me to the need to affirm and protect the values of the powerless and the vulnerable.  I hope I would never have been tempted to embody any of the elitist thinking that seems to have infected many Christian institutions and congregations.  The con-evo world does seem, in many places, to have distorted ideas about power.  My reading of the gospel narrative suggests that God in Christ reaches out to us, but not when we are parading our importance, strength and competence.  He comes to us most especially when we recognise our need of him and are prepared to engage in what Jesus calls metanoia.  It is this realisation that God finds it easier to reach us when we are open and vulnerable that makes the hospital metaphor of the Church far, far more realistic.  The other picture, the training camp metaphor, while not without some merit, should never be left unchallenged and uncritiqued.  It should always be balanced with the Gospel emphasis that Jesus comes to us at our point of need.

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By Janet Fife

I was unprepared for the impact the John Smyth and Jonathan Fletcher review reports, issued recently, had on me. I’m not one of those directly affected:  I didn’t know either of the men and if we had met they wouldn’t have thought me worth their notice. I do know some victims of both men, some who were part of their circle, and some of those people mentioned in the reports. I was prepared for the implications of that and the inevitable emotional impact and stirring of compassion for the victims and survivors.

What I didn’t expect was that the reviews would force me to reflect on my own family history. The world described by the reviewers was both familiar and utterly strange to me; it was those contrasts which struck me so forcibly. I grew up among conservative evangelicals, mostly in the USA, and retained that allegiance when we returned to England in 1974. I was a member of Church Society until they passed a resolution against ordination for women while I was training at Wycliffe Hall.

Reading about the privilege that comes with going to the right public school, I understood afresh why my father and his three brothers all emigrated in the post-war years. Cockneys from the slums around the Old Kent Road, their intelligence, talents, and acquired middle class accents would not have got them far had they stayed in England. Percy, a Scotland Yard detective, found he wasn’t going to get promotion within the force, so he moved to Tasmania. There he reached a senior level in the Australian police while writing radio plays and studying law in his free time. He eventually became a barrister, specialising in defence – as a change from his former career prosecuting. Reg went to the USA where he became business manager of the Christian Literature Crusade. Harold, a Baptist minister in England, took a large church in Toronto before working for the Far Eastern Gospel Crusade, spending half of each year in Japan. He wrote several books.

My father, Eric S. Fife, was much the youngest. He was only two when his father died, leaving the family to subsist on a widow’s pension. At 16 Dad had to leave school to help support his mother and himself. After serving in the RAF during WW2 he took a correspondence course with the London Bible College and was ordained as an FIEC (Federation of Independent Evangelical Churches) pastor in Winchester. During the war he had been stationed in North Africa for a considerable time, which sparked an interest in foreign missions, so he joined the board of the North Africa Mission. In 1955 he was sent to the USA to found a branch of the NAM over there, and so we emigrated. He must have been quite effective, because in a few years’ time he was appointed Missionary Director of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (now known in the UK as UCCF). There he became involved in the Neo-evangelical reaction against Christian fundamentalism – a kind of conservative evangelicalism broader, and with more intellectual credibility, than the Iwerne version.  In his role with IVCF he held his own among university students, professors, and world Christian leaders such as Billy Graham, John Stott, Festo Kivengere, and P.T. Chandapilla.  Many of them visited our home. Dad’s books, especially those on missions, are still available (second hand) in several languages. He was a powerful preacher, too, and in demand across the USA, Canada, and much of the world – except in his home country. Many, many people owed their faith or their missionary vocation to him.

He was a remarkable man, to achieve so much with little education and no advantages except his own talents. What might he have accomplished with the benefit of a public school education, university, and good social networks? And how many other men and women might have exercised a very fruitful ministry in the UK, but for the lack of the ‘right’ class background?

In his youth in England, Dad had been a disciple of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the celebrated Reformed expositor and president of the British wing of Inter-Varsity. Before ordination Lloyd-Jones had had a distinguished career in medicine, becoming assistant to the King’s own physician. John Stott, who had himself been a disciple of E.J.H. Nash, the founder of the Iwerne camps, once observed to my father that ‘Martyn Lloyd-Jones had an inferiority complex because he didn’t go to public school’.  The language and world view of conservative evangelicalism is very familiar to me, but between the social world of Fletcher and Smyth (and their followers) and my own there is ‘a great gulf fixed’ – just as there was between Nash and my father, or Stott and Lloyd-Jones, all those years ago.

The class differences were huge and prevented my father from ever being much recognised over here. In other ways, though, he had rather a lot in common with Smyth and Fletcher. He had a charismatic personality and a natural air of authority which meant that wherever he was, he was generally assumed to be in charge. He was very intelligent, widely read, articulate, sensitive, perceptive, thoughtful, and could be charming. He inspired great devotion in his followers.  But he was also narcissistic, manipulative, violent – and a paedophile. We will probably never know whether he kept that in the family, or whether he sometimes preyed on the children of families he stayed with on his travels. I hope he didn’t.

One of the themes identiifed by the thirtyone:eight review into Jonathan Fletcher is that of ‘homogeneity’:

‘The Review illustrated that one of the biggest difficulties in identifying and disclosing the behaviours was the myth of homogeneity. The Review evidenced that a person who possesses positive characteristics and is widely highly-regarded could nonetheless display entirely inappropriate, abusive and harmful behaviours which render them “unfit for their office”.

Furthermore, those who wish to disclose abuse or harmful behaviours can be caused to question their experience and reality where the predominant narrative outlines the positive traits of an individual. When this is combined with a narrative of protecting the gospel above all else then this becomes a powerful barrier to disclosing abuse or harmful behaviour.’

That aptly describes one of the major issues of my life. I don’t think ‘homogeneity’ is quite the right word, though. It’s probably apt when a charming, intelligent, and kind person is revealed as a malignant narcissist and an abuser. The contrasts between the different aspects of their personality are confusing and damaging to their victims, especially where there is a myth that people are either good or evil, rather than a mixture of both. When an effective spiritual leader, through whom God is seen to work, is found out to have done cruel and evil things over many years, profound questions are raised about the nature of Christian ministry and the work of the Holy Spirit. Why would God choose to use such a bad person? Were their gifts really God-given? If some of what they said and did was false or had evil motivations, was any of it true and real? I have never managed to answer these questions to my own satisfaction, and probably never will.

Astute regular readers of Surviving Church may have realised by now why I often express concern not just for survivors, but also for the family, friends, and followers of those revealed to be abusers, and those who have failed in safeguarding. I know how heavy a burden they carry, and the anguish that they may be feeling.

In the last few days we have seen some very good survivor-centred responses from leaders in the ReNew constituency.  We have also seen a few abysmal ones which amply illustrate the malign culture described in the reviews. Many in that network, both leaders and followers, will still be reeling from shock. It may take them years to come to terms with it all. But I have a word of encouragement for them:  if you can find the courage to break ranks and tell what you know, to admit that you too were taken in, you will find that between survivors and anti-abuse campaigners class barriers break down. We support each other support in a fellowship of suffering, passion for justice, and righteous anger which I believe truly does come from God. It’s at least the equal of the fellowship found in good churches and one of the best things in my life.  It gives meaning to my history, my suffering, and my future.

Many victims of abusers like Smyth and Fletcher have, understandably, lost their faith. I don’t blame them for that and I’m sure God doesn’t either. 

In this Holy Week I remember that Jesus raged against the exploitation of vulnerable people. He was subjected to physical brutality and public sexual humiliation; he identifies with our sufferings. And no one who beats, torments, or humiliates other people does so in his name.

by Anonymous

The bloody history of shambles might help us process the God-awful mess of
the Church of England, the National Safeguarding Team, injustice and
incompetence, and the brutality of bishops and church officers “just following
their process…”.

Annibale Carracci, The Butcher’s Shop, oil on canvas, circa 1583, 185cm x 266cm.

Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford.

 Annibale Carracci, The Butcher’s Shop, oil on canvas, circa 1580

59cm x 71cm, Kimbell Art Gallery, Fort Worth.

You are looking at two pictures by Annibale Carracci, painted in the early 1580s.  It is one of two slightly different paintings called ‘The Butcher’s Shop’. One hangs in the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. The other hangs in the Christ Church Picture Gallery, and is one of the paintings bequeathed in legacy by Charles 1.  It may have originally been commissioned by a Butcher’s Guild.  It is big picture of a busy butcher’s shop – much like you get in any market.  Meat hangs up; there are game birds.  Several staff chopping and prepping. Sharp knives, a saw, and some butcher’s blocks – all stained with blood.

But it is of course a religious picture, refracted into the everyday.  Here, in the picture, we see the foreground, almost at knee height, so you have to bend down to see it: a lamb about to be slain.  Passive, motionless and without blemish.  The picture gives us other clues as to its intentions.  Meat – like the soul in judgement – is weighed by one person in a balance. 

An armed guard gazes into some middle distance – a seemingly pointless detail in a butcher’s shop.  And there are on-lookers too, as though watching butcher’s at work was a good way to spend your free time.  This is a scene of ordinary slaughter. An ordinary day at a butcher’s shop is like an ordinary day in Palestine, two thousand years ago.  Death is routine.  Actually, there seem to be a lot of bystanders in the two paintings – people doing nothing whilst the slaughter just carries on.  Process.

In C.D. Dickerson’ intriguing Raw Painting (Kimbell Masterpiece Series, Yale University Press, 2010), he explains how the paintings portray the butcher’s trade in sixteenth and seventeenth century Bologna.  Dickerson puts Carracci’s painting into context by comparing it with a contemporary butcher’s shop painting by Bartolomeo Passarotti (1577-80) and Dutch-Flemish paintings by Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beukelaer.

The paintings by Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beukelaer (below) may appear, on the surface, to be mere representations of the produce available in a Dutch or Flemish market.  But on closer inspection, one can clearly detect a sacred scene painted in the background of Aertsen’s work.  Why did Carracci and others paint like this?  I think one clue is the link between the soldier and the passive lamb in the Oxford painting.  For here the imagery is pregnant with meaning.  This is no ordinary butcher’s shop. The man kneeling in the foreground with a cleaver in his left hand is about to ‘sacrifice’ the docile lamb in front of him.

The butcher standing left of him is holding a set of scales reminiscent of a Last Judgment. But what is that Swiss Guard with the ridiculous protruding codpiece even doing in a lowly butcher’s shop? The Swiss Guard were, and still are, the elite police force of the Vatican. A respectable Swiss Guard would have servants to do his bidding. Could he be representing one of the soldiers at the scene of the Crucifixion? Maybe. Yet the Swiss Guard represents something much more sinister: a symbol of the Church uncaring, just observing a slaughter.

Most readers of this site will know what an utter shambles the Church of England is, that safeguarding (and the work of the NST) and the implementation of CDM’s on clergy is form of process-torture and brutal butchery. Research from Sheldon found that 40% of clergy who were on the wrong end of a CDM contemplated suicide.  The rest merely feel crucified – butchered by an inhumane system of justice that follows a process that is numb and dumb to compassion. 

Our bishops admirably perform the role of Pilate, washing their hands to claim their innocence.  The NST and the Dioceses are little better than shuttling the victim between the court-trials of Pilate, Caiaphas and Herod.  If you are unlucky enough to be the Dean of Christ Church, you can be delivered up to all three tribunals in a matter of weeks.  No-one takes responsibility.  They will each blame the other.  It is a shameful shambles for an institution that is supposed to specialise in care-taking, receiving care and in care-giving.  It is incomprehensible that people who are supposed to be good and kind can tolerate such indolent brutality and butchery visited upon others.  What is going on, I wonder?

Our word ‘shambles’ commonly means “a scene or state of great disorder and confusion”, but it historically referred to a slaughterhouse.  The word (in a singular form) originally meant “a stool” and “a money changer’s table”. Later it acquired the additional meaning of “a table for the exhibition of meat for sale”, which in turn gave rise in the early 15th century to a use of the plural form with the meaning “a meat market”. A further extension of meaning in the 16th century produced the sense “a slaughterhouse”.

That meaning quickly led to the more figurative use of ‘shambles’ to refer to a place of terrible slaughter or bloodshed. A few centuries passed with the word being mostly used with the literal “slaughterhouse” and figurative “place of mass slaughter or bloodshed”. A bloody mess, literally. By the early 20th century, another extension of meaning took place. ‘Shambles’ acquired the sense of “a scene or state of great destruction” and “a scene or state of great disorder and confusion,” or a “great confusion; a total mess”.

The money-changer’s tables? A bloody mess? A slaughterhouse? Good Friday? You might ask why safeguarding in the Church of England is such a bloody mess – an utter, total shambles?  The answer from Good Friday is that Church has to do something with its crippling guilt over its past crimes and cover-ups.  So it matters not who is tortured and dies for all of these sins: someone has to.  A scape-goat is needed. Preferably a ready supply of them.

This is why the Swiss Guard in Carracci’s painting looks on, impassively. His pose is one of indifference.  But I also think it is one of pointless pietistic prayer and passivity.  Bishops will tell you they are praying for you as you are butchered and hung out to dry by the NST, before whatever remains of you is passed through the mincer of a CDM.   Carracci painted the church observing the victim die, for what in fact the church does.  The lamb-meat is to order.  So I think this is an image of atonement for the sins the Swiss Guard must represent.  As soldiers, they had a fearsome reputation for being tough, brutal mercenaries; they were butchers for hire, and commanded high fees for their work.

Perhaps like me, you have found yourself butchered and hung out to dry by the Church?  Perhaps you found that the bloody slaughter that is visited upon victims of abuse, clergy facing false accusations and ruin, and being condemned by courts, trials and processes that deny everyone their basic human rights, transparency and agency, is just too gruesome to watch anymore?  I agree. Sometimes, the only thing to do with a bloody ‘shambles’ is look away. 

Or perhaps leave it altogether?  Leave the butcher’s shop, I mean.  Assuming you don’t mind the analogical imagination at work here, if the vehicle for your means of journey and pilgrimage – be it boat, plane, car or train – is not roadworthy, seaworthy or able to fly safely, it is usually a mistake to presume the voyage ahead will not include some terror or likely misfortune.

If the car or bus has no MOT, and looks like it is clearly a shambles, my counsel is you’d be unwise to climb aboard and take a seat. It may already be too late for me to give you this advice, and you may well find you are already (s)trapped in.  If so, I am sorry.  But please, try and leave when you can.  You may have to wait for the next stop at a junction or at a port. But when it comes, this is your chance to hop out, and hop off.  Escape. Seize the moment.

The quality of the driver, a cheerful conductor or smiling flight attendant won’t help.  The recent (promised) dubious health and safety audits won’t be worth the paper they are written on. Leave now. Because once inside this shambolic vehicle, your life is actually in far more danger.  It is better not to risk the ride.

Leaving the butcher’s block was not an option for Jesus on Good Friday. Or for the two thieves. Or for Spartacus and his friends. Such carceral crucifixions were common: there to intimidate the masses, suppress dissent and bypass true justice. But you do not need to be crucified for the sake of the church, looking on, with pitiful piety and pastoral pity.  This is their shambles, not yours. You do not need to be another vicarious victim in their butcher’s shop.

A lamb being slaughtered is not a very promising symbol for a new religious movement.  Yet from the first Easter, Christians proclaimed that “the Lamb who was slain takes away the sins of the world”.  The gospels converted the shepherd of the sheep into one of the flock.  Jesus becomes a victim; one statistic among the numberless who were butchered by an autocratic State. 

Jesus is simply a routine execution – a regrettable process to be started and finished as quickly as possible. And then we can all go home.  I find it interesting the Jesus is condemned to die before the jury can deliberate; his trials are afterthoughts, and only there to rubber-stamp the sentence.

I think I may know what you are thinking now.  So please let me say, try not to worry too much about Jesus struggling and gasping for each breath on the cross.  Or protesting about the injustice of three consecutive kangaroo courts.  Because Jesus is not alone, you see.  He has the constant presence of episcopal company in his suffering, and I promise you, is sincerely offered “prayer and pastoral support during this difficult time”. You should remember that the thieves don’t get that, so Jesus is actually quite fortunate.

Seriously, Jesus is “well supported”. If it were not for that cross keeping him upright, he’d be a crumpled, tangled heap of bloody mess, bruises and broken bones on the ground, where no-one could see him. Such is the brutality of our CDM’s and the faceless unaccountable processes of the NST. I, you, we: are led like lambs to the slaughter. 

So much for Good Friday, then.  Yet I do not think you have to be another notch on the NST and CDM roll-call of victims.  That is why I wrote this.  Good Friday is not meant for you.  The Swiss Guard may still look on, but there is life outside the butcher’s shop. It is not your prison, or your butcher’s block, and you do not need to be some tangled mass of discarded offal in an ecclesial meat display. You are actually worth much more than the sparrows. Jesus told us.

So at Easter, what might you try to remember? That death has no more dominion over you. As C. S. Lewis once said, part of the Deep Magic of Good Friday lies in surrendering to something else that the Church neither owns or knows; namely the wisdom of God.  You can let fear do it’s worse, but it cannot kill you, so do not be afraid. 

Try to keep your faith, knowing this is foolishness and weakness to the world; but to God, it is wisdom and strength. A resurrection strength that will actually save us from this butchery. 

That Swiss Guard has it all coming to him.  Much like the soldiers who stood guard by the tomb of Jesus.  The cracks appear; the light breaks in. The guards can’t cope without a corpse.  Their dead prisoner has left; they have nothing to watch over any more.  The light floods out of the tomb. 

Resurrection is coming, and for those indolent passive soldiers – instruments of unjust butchery going through their motions of process a few days before – the resurrection is going to be, quite simply, terrifying. Revolutionary.  The tomb-guards and soldiers then have nothing to process, and nobody left as the object of their grim vigil.

New life comes, and the old order is swept away. The guards, sore afraid, must scatter. We will now witness to something else: new life, new hope and radiant resurrection light piercing the darkness, and exorcising the indifference of our church leaders and the banality of their butchery back into the shadows, where such evil belong. 

Lent and Good Friday are but a season. Resurrections are forever.

Pieter Aertsen, The Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms, oil on panel, 1551

115cm x 165cm, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.

Joachim Beukelaer, Fish Market, oil on panel, ca. 1568

56cm x 213cm, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples.

One of the telling observations in the recent thirtyone:eight report into Jonathan Fletcher is the way he was allowed to take a key, even dominant, role in the structures of conservative evangelicalism in Britain.  Some have described Fletcher as the ‘Pope of Evangelical Conservatives’.  We have had cause to refer, on many occasions, to the tightly knit but closed world of powerful and often wealthy parishes that belong to this network, now known as the ReNew constituency.   With their wealth and their authoritarian approach to theology, these churches have ended up in many cases as semi-independent of CofE structures.  In many cases, these parishes can be understood as forming a church within a church.   Typically, they have little to do with the other local CofE parishes.  The central Church has provided them with a ‘flying bishops’, ostensibly to protect their clergy from the taint of women as priests or bishops.  It still, however, suits these churches to be thought of as part of the Church of England.  In practical terms, such as receiving or giving anything to the central body, these parishes might just as well be joined to a completely separate denomination.

About two and half years ago, the Bishop of Oxford issued an Ad Clerum to his diocese.  It contained mild support for same sex relationships.  It was hardly a radical statement on the topic of inclusivity, but it still succeeded in uniting all the con-evo forces in the Oxford diocese to band together with others and sign a letter of protest to their bishop.   Around 105 individuals signed the letter.  Surviving Church took the time to examine all those who had signed the letter and were identifying with this conservative protest.  The 70- 80 clergy on the list proved, on close examination, not to represent the same number of parishes.  A good segment were found to be working for foreign-funded parachurch institutions centred in and around the city of Oxford.   There are, of course also large ordained teams at the main con-evo parishes in the Diocese.   Like the big conservative parishes in London, a church like St Ebbes will attract young hopefuls among the newly ordained who desperately want to work there..  But I noticed another interesting fact.  There are a cluster of parishes in the Oxford diocese in the most attractive surroundings with youngish con-evo vicars.  They all appear to have the qualities that Fletcher was reputed to favour.  Such ‘golden boys’ needed to be young, Iwerne alumni, and also the product of the ‘right’ school, university and theological college.  Two of these parishes in the Oxford diocese, now with strongly con-evo vicars, were known personally to me in the 80s and 90s, at a time when they were firmly middle of the road in terms of churchmanship. Their tradition was closer to BCP with a penchant for Mattins at 11 am.  Then sometime after 1998, both these parishes had appointed young men, who had each served their title in one of the major con-evo London churches.   Were these appointments organised by the networking of powerful evangelicals under the oversight of Fletcher?  The appointment process is shrouded in mystery so we cannot know for certain. Very quickly, after a year of St Helen’s type ministry, the old original congregations had mostly departed and a new younger group had moved in.  Because the old congregation were no longer there to complain about the suddenness of the changes, the church authorities at the centre heard nothing and saw nothing.  The same thing happened to a parish near mine in the Cotswolds, this time in the Gloucester diocese.  This was the village of Bibury.  I had known two former Vicars, who presided over a conservative and traditional congregation.   The village and the Vicarage in it are perhaps the most delightful in the whole of England.   The church, now part of a Team Ministry, has also received a con-evo incumbent, the former head of Scripture Union, Tim Hastie-Smith.  This Vicar is mentioned in the current Scripture Union report about John Smyth.  I believe the report refers to his self-criticism that he was extraordinarily lacking in curiosity over the behaviour of Smyth and his subsequent ‘exile’.

For parishes to change churchmanship and tradition so abruptly is unusual and needs some explanation.  Because the three vicars concerned have precisely the right background to be part of Jonathan Fletcher’s circle of followers, I think, after reading the thirtyone:eight Review, to surmise that it is highly likely that Fletcher himself used his social contacts and charm to manipulate other patrons to allow him to put his own man in.  All these candidates, and indeed all proteges of Fletcher, are eminently socially suited to run wealthy riverside country parishes.  This is true of the Oxford parishes. Like Fletcher himself, these clergy from his circle know how to charm and manipulate in equal measure to get their way.  These qualities, as the report describes. allowed Fletcher to get his own way whenever ‘difficult’ people challenged him and had the temerity to ask questions. 

In my original scrutiny in this blog of the individual clergy who signed the letter of protest against the Bishop of Oxford in 2018, I discovered a number of other parishes which may have experienced similar changes.  They also were in extremely pleasant areas and showed possible evidence of what I shall call ‘patronage tampering’.  I shall not name these parishes as the evidence that Fletcher nobbled powerful people to override their power of patronage, is circumstantial.  But Fletcher’s place in Debretts, his membership of Nobody’s Friends Dining Club and his extensive contacts right across the Church of England suggests that he was able to exercise a great deal of what I refer to as patronage power over a long period.  What was in it for him and the con-evo block in the Church of England? 

The extension of the cluster of ‘plum’ parishes across Britain which can now claim to be con-evo, enables the ReNew body to grow in strength.  More importantly they now control the future patronage of pleasant parishes to accommodate the large numbers of ordinands that this tradition is producing year by year.  Many clergy never leave the London evangelical circuit around All Souls and St Helen’s.  We note that the recently appointed Vicar of All Soul’s has never worked outside London.  Indeed, his only curacy is the one he has served in St Helen’s.  In a similar way the new Vicar of St Aldate’s Oxford (a separate evangelical network in no way like ReNew or operating in a similar way) has only served a single curacy – at Holy Trinity Brompton.   The candidates for the top jobs in the evangelical/charismatic world may have had to wait a long time as junior members of staff for their great promotion.  But their experience is narrow.   It is also unlikely they will ever move again since their limited experience of the wider church does not make good bishop material for the rest of us. 

Jonathan Fletcher’s legacy is probably long lasting.  His personality and ministry style is likely to have affected deeply most of the large numbers of clergy he has mentored.   While the report calls for the dismantling of the con-evo leadership structures, it is unlikely to happen.  Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac and the con-evo constituency has become addicted to enjoying this power.  Fletcher certainly revelled in the way that his power enabled him to do what he wished in ways that we can see as deeply manipulative.  The Fletcher legacy will also be felt in parishes across the country where there has been a con-evo ‘takeover’.   I would love to see someone do research in these churches to discover the true history of what happens when in the name of biblical truth you destroy a congregation in order to create a new one.  The ‘destroyed’ are power abuse victims every bit as much as sex abuse victims.  The only problem is that they are the forgotten victims of a Church that thinks about the institution more than it thinks about those who are part of it, but have effectively been expelled as part of a con-evo Fletcher inspired take-over..

The Independent Lessons Learned Review for Jonathan Fletcher (JF) and Emmanuel Church Wimbledon (ECW) was set up in December 2019.  This Review was commissioned by the church itself to be undertaken by the safeguarding organisation thirtyone:eight.  This was after concerns had been raised about the behaviour of JF the former Vicar of the Church.  He had retired in 2012 after thirty years in charge.  Allegations of sexual abuse and other harmful behaviours had been made by various people over a number of years.   The Review was commissioned by ECW partly as a way of facing up to its own past, but it also needed to respond to possible criminal activity by their former Vicar.  The Review was not easy to undertake.  Among various complications was the fact that ECW has a nuanced relationship with the Church of England.  It preserves a degree of independence by being what is known as a Proprietary Chapel.  Although still part of the national Church, it possesses a degree of independence through its founding deeds and this is not always well understood.  It was also firmly rooted in the theological tradition known as Conservative Evangelical.  This was a strongly traditional form of belief.  One feature of this strong self-identity and independence was that the Vicar, if he chose, could exercise an authoritarian style of leadership.  The second complication for the Review was an apparent moral blindness on the part of JF when accused of unbecoming and immoral behaviour.   While apologising for some of his behaviours, JF also attempted to downplay his actions, by claiming that ‘anything that happened was totally consensual and non-sexual’.  On other occasions, according to the Daily Telegraph, he maintained that he was ‘deeply, deeply sorry for the people I’ve harmed.’  While it is difficult to gauge exactly how far these comments go in expressing remorse, we should note that he refused to take any part in the thirtyone:eight Review and resisted all attempts to hear his side of the story.

The incidents of actual sexual abuse are, for me, the least compelling part of the narrative. The Review does conclude that various forms of sexual misbehaviour did occur, and the large number of testimonies place the accusations beyond all reasonable doubt.  But for me it is the cultural and theological setting in which these crimes took place that is the most interesting.   In my past attempts to cover the JF story, this wider setting has always been my focus for discussion.  The beliefs and assumptions that existed among those he served and, in some cases, harmed, is a subject worthy of study.   The lessons that need to be learnt are the ones that emerge out of this murky and hard to disentangle world of faith, power and vice.  One word in the Review, which has also been drawn out for emphasis by members of the independent advisory group, is the word fear.  JF exercised considerable power over his congregation which caused fear in those who wanted to challenge it.  The Review speaks of ‘relational power’ to describe how JF exercised ‘psychological domination’ over others.  Some likened this treatment of others, causing humiliation and fear, as being like that of a public-school headmaster.  It was noted how the fear induced by JF was an issue, not only with members of his own congregation, but he also practised it among others he encountered within the network of con-evo parishes known now as the ReNew constituency.  The Review found it necessary to give some participants anonymity because they still felt fear over ‘repercussions’.  These could affect ‘future careers, personal relationships and standing’.  This accusation, that there is in the network of conservative evangelicals a miasma of fear, is a very serious one.  The charge is that JF, through his personality and charisma, kept some individuals under his personal control.  The implication of the Review was that this culture of personal control was being handed down another generation.  There is a quote from the Review that speaks of ‘fear of others still in positions of authority in the wider con-evo constituency’.  In short, the whole network is affected by a continuing culture of tight control.  The techniques of JF to coerce and control others for his narcissistic purposes, have been handed down to a new generation of leaders such as the incumbents of St Helen’s, St Ebbes and other major ReNew parishes. 

The 4 page supplementary Report by the advisory group is hard hitting on this issue of fear and spiritual bullying.  It develops the idea that such bullying is and has been a feature of many of the churches in the ReNew network operating within this con-evo culture.  Raw fear has made it difficult for ECW members to come forward to share what they know.  This fact might explain why the JF scandal took so long to break.  People in the network have been conditioned not to speak out.  They were made to believe that such speaking up would be a betrayal of the Church and of God himself.

JF’s misbehaviour did not of course begin in 1982 when he took up the incumbency of the Church.  The Review however says nothing of this earlier history.  To complete the profile, we would need to understand far better his Christian formation as a young man, as well as his growing influence over many in the conservative Christian world when still a curate.  The period that particularly needs further examination is the time when he was first ordained. This was the period he spent in Cambridge, his participation in the Iwerne camps and his widespread influence over a generation of Cambridge students who went on to be ordained.  These included Nicky Gumbel and Justin Welby.  The silence from this generation of clergy who, early on, came into the JF orbit is a serious gap.  Elsewhere in the con-evo world, there is a debate going on about the influence of Ravi Zacharias and how his fall has affected the faith and integrity of those who came under his influence.  Every single one of the top leaders in the ReNew network either knew or was prepared for leadership by JF.  He has now shown to be a charlatan.  The question immediately arises for his disciples as to how they deal with this fact.   Is there to be an appraisal of some kind, or will those same followers retreat into silence and secrecy?  The intellect cries out to understand better when things go very wrong.   We need enlightenment to make sense of this confused picture of power mixed up with the dynamics of abuse..

The JF Review raises a number of challenges to both JF’s former congregation and to the whole con-evo network.  Among the very strong early recommendations of the Review is one that demands ‘the unhealthy culture of the congregation and network of the CE constituency …be addressed fully by those having played a key role in the establishment of that culture ….   no longer (should they) enjoy the influence…’   In short, the Review is calling for a wholesale clear-out of the old guard of leaders.  At the very least there should an entirely fresh look at the culture of a fear-laden autocracy, backed up by public-school attitudes from the past.  I have frequently talked about patronage to describe the way things are done in the con-evo world.  Parishes and favoured positions of influence are handed on to members of an ‘inner-ring’, the small group favoured by the leadership.   Even now, power to chose who is appointed to key posts is in the gift of an elite band of leaders who dominate this con-evo world.

Jonathan Fletcher has been the product of an elitist church culture which is a throw back to the 1930s.  It was then that ‘Bash’ thought up his idea for taking over the church with carefully groomed cadre of men from the top public schools.  JF was a perfect example of a Bash type.  He used his dominant social and educational privilege to run things exactly as he wished.  Sexual abuse was one part of the way he expressed his sense of entitlement.  The same was true for Ravi Zacharias.   Hopefully the days of making up the rules of safeguarding as we go and the unsupervised use of male power are over.  The popular mood also no longer tolerates male hegemony.  At ECW, since JF’s departure, women’s ministry on a small scale has been allowed to appear.  At that Church and elsewhere we hope to see a church released from the ideology as well abusive behaviour of a church leader such as Jonathan Fletcher.    

In September 2018, the Church of England, as part of its ongoing safeguarding efforts, published a very comprehensive fact sheet on different types of abuse.  It is an attempt to encourage a reader to become used to recognising the great variety of abusive practices that can occur in the Church and elsewhere.  In 2015, English law codified the idea that domestic abuse is much more than just physical violence.  It may include a range of behaviours that come under the broad category of coercion and control.   Even without evidence of physical violence, a man or woman can now be convicted of a criminal offence for abuse.   Educating people to have a broader understanding of abuse in a religious context was also needed.  I have a personal interest in this topic.  When I wrote my book Ungodly Fear over twenty years ago, I was trying to explore this idea that the misuse of power in a church context was a widespread reality and the cause of much suffering.  Abusing power is a far bigger topic than just the sexual exploitation of a vulnerable person.

This morning, on a sister blog Archbishop Cranmer, we heard new details about the Dean Percy affair.  I do not propose to repeat the points made in that disturbing article, but to use some of Cranmer’s material to indicate that Percy has become the victim of many of the types of abuse mentioned in the 2018 document.  Apart from naming a wide range of abusive practices, the 2018 CofE document also provides suggestions of the way that the Church can respond to the victims and survivors.  Percy, because he has been labelled as a perpetrator, has not been offered much help, pastoral, financial or practical.  Help is supposed to be offered in such cases, according to the Church’s safeguarding protocols but only the tiniest amount has been forthcoming.  Somehow the level of vitriol in the College is such that a regime of extreme isolation has been imposed.  The help and support that Percy has been able to gather is that which has come from family and friends.  He has also seen the complete depletion of the family finances. 

The 2018 document first of all discusses emotional or psychological abuse.  I would see these two forms of abuse as sometimes distinct categories and, at other times, overlapping.   Over the past three years there have been many examples of psychological threats and abuse towards Percy.  Phone calls/emails late at night are part of the stock-in-trade for those who want to harass and put someone permanently on edge.  Also within a community like a college, it is not difficult to create an unfriendly environment for an individual.  Shunning and ostracism, when they are practised, are especially cruel.  This is a topic to which I often return in this blog as it is one of the most evil practices that can be enacted.  The 2018 document mentions this behaviour when it describes ‘causing or forcing isolation/withdrawal from family/friends and support networks’.  The extraordinary lengths to which the Censors and members of the Chapter has gone to prevent members of the clergy/colleagues even visiting Percy are described as practices that the Church should be fighting against.  Can unproven allegations of sexual harassment ever justify the rolling out of such viciously cruel behaviour?

Abuse can also be financial.  The 2018 document has in mind such things as the forcing of an elderly person to change a will or hand over property.  In Percy’s case, the financial abuse has been by forcing him virtually to bankrupt himself in employing lawyers to defend him in the first legal challenge by the College to oust him in 2018.  He was declared innocent of all the 27 original charges brought by the Censors.  Percy’s accusers were also shown up to have produced manipulated documents.  In short, the accusers engaged in lying to make their case.  Retired Judge Andrew Smith saw the lies and commented on them in his report.  In the latest attacks by College and National Safeguarding Team, overseen by the Bishop of Birmingham, Percy has been unable to instruct legal representation.  This is partly for financial reasons and partly for reasons of his health.

The CofE document mentions discriminatory abuse.  This is taking advantage of someone who is in a weaker position because of poverty, disability or some other handicap.  Discriminatory abuse is to be found all over the recent treatment that Percy has received.  The Sub-Dean, Richard Peers, has taken it upon himself to prevent even the fellow members of Chapter from making contact with Percy.   Such isolating of a sick man, socially, spiritually and psychologically is desperately underhand behaviour. 

Institutional abuse is described.  This is the kind of situation that might occur in a Home where one patient is treated badly because they are deemed to be difficult in some way.  When an institution, like a Home, turns against an individual, it is hard to see how anyone can resist such enormous pressure.  It is clearly going on at Christ Church. The financial bullying of Percy, backed by the enormous financial resources of the College, was another example of institutional abuse.   The Censors must be hoping that the Dean’s ability to fight back financially will eventually be defeated by the sheer fire power available to the College because of their endowments. 

Abuse by neglect and acts of omission are other examples of behaviour suffered by Percy.  The utter failure of the College or Canons to reach out to a sick man to offer help and support of any kind is an inexplicable failure of any institution, let alone one founded on Christian principles.  The 2018 document is not a particularly Christian document.  It is rather an adaptation of the Care Act of 2015 which wanted to show how we need to take a much broader understanding of abuse than society has done hitherto.  As with the Charity Commission, the values being articulated are human values.  If Christian individuals and institutions find these hard to hold on to, what can we expect of the rest of society?  Are we not able to hope that Christians take morality and goodness seriously?

The final category of abuse mentioned in the document is complex abuse.  This is a name given to a situation when an institution or an individual is using a variety of abuse methods against one person.  We have already indicated that Dean Percy is the target of a many-sided form of abuse.  Complex abuse might be considered to be an convenient shorthand for what is going on here.  But there is one great irony about the document Types of Abuse.  This was put together by experts in the Safeguarding world to help Christians identify those in need of help.  Here we are discovering that in fact it is, in this case, the Church itself committing acts of abuse against an individual.  If I am right in identifying six of the categories of abuse in this church document being set in motion by church officials, then someone needs to blow a whistle on this event.  We often speak about survivors on this blog, but here we have to describe Percy as a victim.  Six forms of abuse coming from two distinct institutions, operating with an extraordinary level of malice, is enough to put anyone into a breakdown.  No one going through such an experience is easily able to fight back.  Humanly, the force being used is barely survivable.  The only human strength that can operate here is that provided by supporters, family and friends.

Two things need to happen if the Church is to emerge from this disaster with any integrity.  One is that all the clergy who have been guilty of dirty tricks and abuse against Percy should be named in a new Clergy Discipline Measure process.  There have been so many procedural dishonesties in this episode.  One mentioned by Archbishop Cranmer, is what I call the dirty dossier.  This is a fraudulent risk assessment document submitted with the CDM documents to the Bishop of Oxford.  The College have admitted that they were wrong to back this document but the damage has done in creating the over-the-top risk assessment which has now been put in place around the College.  The second thing that could save the day and rescue the Church’s integrity from a mire of self- destruction, is for someone of stature to come forward.  They would then ask for all the destructive church processes to be halted for a while.  The one person that could do this is the Archbishop of York.  The Archbishop of Canterbury is likely to be entangled with the same legal firms as have been advising the Diocese of Oxford and Christ Church College, as well as the various bodies that work out of Church House.  Stephen Cottrell, hopefully, can recognise what a disaster these events are for the whole Church of England.  I believe that the paths of Dean Percy and Cottrell have crossed in the past.  If that is true, he will know that Percy is not a sex-crazed lunatic, which is how his enemies at Christ Church have been trying to portray him for their own political ends.  If the Archbishop pf York could put in place a moratorium on the church processes for three months, this might help to calm things down and stop the current madness infecting and afflicting the church in Oxford and elsewhere.   There is a crisis; we need something dramatic to happen to resolve things.  Stephen Cottrell, you are our last hope!

Almost every institution these days seems to have a mission statement.  Local parish churches are no exception.  When a congregation registers as a charity with the Charity Commission (CC), they are obliged to produce a statement of aims and purpose.  This is then attached to the Annual Report along with the audited accounts.  Mission statements do serve one valuable purpose, in that they compel self-scrutiny within an organisation like church congregations.   The one big weakness that the mission statements produced by churches have, is that they often get wrapped up in churchy language.  Instead of addressing issues like justice, power, bullying and inclusivity, these statements often paint an idealised picture of church life, which may be remote from the reality.   The use of ‘holy’ language to describe the work of the church often does much to obscure the real vision of the church organisation.  References to God seem fine but all too often they give us no clear picture of what the church is actually doing.

When we want models of good mission statements for churches, local or national, it is always worth looking outside the Church to see clearly stated what good practice in this area looks like.  As I indicated in an earlier blog post the Church exists on at least two levels.  It has an ‘ideal’ manifestation which reveals it as a theological concept or idea.  It also has its local manifestations, complete with human sin and weakness.   Most of us realise that just because the word church appears somewhere in describing an individual or a group, no automatic assumption can be made that high ethical standards are in operation.  Churches behave well or shabbily like other organisations.  We see all too often examples of the Church behaving worse than their secular counterparts.  This has been proved especially true in the area of safeguarding.  We find examples of bullying, lying and power abuse involved in the original abuse.  It also happens when attempts have been made by victims to report their trauma to church authorities.   The shoddiness of treatment towards victims by leaders is perhaps because these leaders believe that their moral status and the status of the Church institution will result in not having to face scrutiny.

While church congregations have mission statements which often lack precision and depth, the same formulaic prose is also provided for the national bodies which form part of the Church of England.  One would like to see every constituent body of the Church being required, not only to define their role, but also indicate their values and the ethical principles to which they are committed. The House of Bishops, the Archbishop’s Council, the National Safeguarding Team (NST) and other national entities of the Church should each have their own binding mission statements which go further than mere aspiration.  The purpose of such a mission statement would be to allow those of us outside to understand why these entities exist and also have some means of seeing how ethical standards in each are being audited.  In recent weeks, we have been exposed to apparent chaos in the NST and its management of the Clergy Discipline Measure.  It would be helpful if there were a proper NST statement of values which gave detail to how they were being held accountable for their failings when things go wrong.  For a body to have so much power without an apparent system of accountability is going to be a cause of unhappiness and confusion for many in the Church.

In recent days I have stumbled across a mission statement from a well-respected national body.  The organisation producing it is the Charity Commission.  We have already, in an earlier blog, set out the seven principles by the CC expected of every charitable body.  Here we have the expectations of the CC for itself.  It is a remarkable short document.  It is possibly a model for the kind of mission statement that would be appropriate for the national Church, as well as all its constituent bodies.  Clearly it does not draw on religious principles, but it draws on universally held ethical standards.  I am proud to be living in a country where the aspiration for such high ethical norms is expressed by a public body.  Even if the CC does not succeed in completely stamping out unethical behaviour in English charities, it engages with the task with a highly principled and moral perspective.  This list of fundamental principles under which the CC is taken from their website.

Independent: we(the CC) will maintain independence in our decision making, acting without fear or favour, in the public interest.

Accountable: we will be proactive in accounting to all our stakeholders, which will include involving others on a continuous and appropriate basis and taking responsibility for our decisions.

Proportionate:  our actions, procedures and culture will be proportionate to the burden of regulation on charities, of different sizes, to the degree of risk involved and to the potential impact, within the resources available to us.

Impartial: we will exercise our powers and discretion in a way which is non-partisan and even-handed.

Transparent: we will communicate with and listen to our stakeholders and will be clear about our actions, intentions and expectations.

Consistent: we will act consistently in our decision making.

This list feels like a breath of fresh air, potentially blowing over many institutions.  It offers a benchmark for good practice that we could see profitably applied to most charitable organisations, including the churches.  It certainly provides a place for such organisations to start from.  It would be wonderful if every charitable body in England were compelled to sign up to this or a similar document to obtain charitable status and the tax benefits that go with it.  The tragedy of reading this list is the bitter realisation that in the realm of safeguarding and its implementation, the Church fails in most, if not all, of these principles.

The first word that I pick up from this statement is the final word consistent.  On Tuesday this coming week, the thirtyone:eight report on Jonathan Fletcher is to be published.  From what we already know, it is likely that abusive behaviour over a period of thirty years is going to be revealed.  The public scandal only broke in June 2019, but my sources tell me that Fletcher’s behaviour was widely known about for a long time before that.  Given the fact that the Daily Telegraph has made the Fletcher story front page headlines, a consistent church would long ago have started their own ‘lesson-learning’ enquiry into this massively reputation damaging scandal.  But no, it is understood that the NST does not even now have a file for Fletcher, let alone a core-group or any plan to look at the likely fall-out from this report.  Meanwhile, two core-groups have been convened to examine the case of Dean Percy.  The allegations against him, even if true, score very low down on the damage chart.  If the NST was required to sign a statement of values which mentioned consistency, one wonders how much interest they would have had in the case.

We may take another word from the list which seems topical at present –  impartial.  The disasters that have befallen the Clergy Discipline Measure over recent years, also indicate that impartiality has been a frequent casualty in church disciplinary processes.  Complaints against some bishops have been made in the full glare of publicity and press coverage, and we mention George Carey and Christopher Lowson.  In other cases, where there have been equally serious complaints against bishops, the process has been quietly shunted off to the shadows.  I am thinking of the recorded safeguarding failures of the Bishops of Birmingham, Oxford, Beverley and Doncaster to name a few.  No suspensions, even temporary, took place and nothing else seems to have happened.  The current farce of allowing two diocesan bishops, with serious safeguarding issues in their pasts, to handle the Percy CDM case, is the ultimate absurdity.  It offends two of the CC ethical guidelines, impartiality and independence.    Overall, the Christ Church affair seems to fail every one of the Charity Commission’s standards for ethical behaviour.

The Church of England and all its constituent bodies should be asked each to produce and agree to a statement of their purpose and the ethical values to which they are committed.  These would hopefully reflect the same qualities and standards as the one produced by the Charity Commission for itself.  If such a document were in place, standards of behaviour would have to rise instantly in the Church.  If the Church were able to produce a documents like this and live them out, that might help to restore some of the integrity that it has lost over recent years.  People understand integrity, honesty, consistency and transparency.  If they can see some of this restored to the national church, there is a chance that many new people might actually want to become part of it.   

One of the most devastating discoveries that a person can make is that the company or firm they work for is corrupt in some way.  They then have to make a choice.   Do they resign forthwith and attempt whistleblowing as they leave the company?  Do they supress the knowledge of the dishonest practices or, worse still, collude with them in some way?  I am sure there are other options that my readers can come up with as a response to ethical failures in an institution.  The fact remains that many workplaces, and this can include churches and educational establishments, have stepped over to the dark side.  It need not be financial corruption, but there may be a culture of rampant racism, misogyny or homophobia.  Another problem could be endemic institutional bullying or sexual harassment.  How does one cope with the fact that a boss or overseers are tolerating or even condoning misconduct?  I wonder how the workers in France who worked in the manufacture of cladding for buildings felt when they realised that their factory and their bosses had been complicit in the terrible Grenfell fire.

Organisations, companies and religious groups are all places where terrible things can happen.  It is right for official enquiries to be set up to examine when things go badly wrong and how appalling events happen because of institutional failure.  Only the major scandals of abuse and dishonesty are exposed in this way.  Minor injustices continue, causing untold misery for the victims of such behaviour.  As I ponder these sobering thoughts about work organisations I ask myself the question:  can we locate corruption in an institution?  Does it get grafted into an organisation so that it becomes somehow endemic in that institution?  Alternatively, is it only to be found in the attitudes and actions of those who are responsible for the corrupting behaviour?

The answer to the question is that organisations are never totally corrupted.  New leaders arrive and, as if by a miracle, the old atmosphere that tolerated evil can be quickly swept away.  It seldom happens overnight because people who have worked in toxic or claustrophobic environments need time to get used to a new broom.   As I have already mentioned, congregations can also be corrupted when the wrong people are in charge. Every institution will be open to the same dangers.  The people who lead are normally in the position to bring about the changes that are needed to make the institution flourish. Bullying, misogyny and homophobia, to take three examples, can be banished from the workplace, the college or the congregation.  Every institution can overcome systemic evil if it puts its mind to it.

Returning to the example of the Church, as an institution with which most readers of this blog are familiar, we can suggest that it exists at two levels.  One is the Platonic ‘ideal’ of the Church.  It is the place where Christians learn to worship God, follow their master Christ and receive the power of the Spirit to live their transformed lives.  Such a one sentence description of the Church is bound to fail as a full description, but we can allow it for the moment, as we contemplate the messy reality that we, in fact, encounter week by week.  Christians are very good at pretending that the ideal is the reality they deal with most of the time.  By doing this they make themselves unable to see the more human realities in front of them.  The fantasy perfect church and infallible leaders are what they pine after, and so they create that reality in their minds, even if it does not in fact exist.    

When we think about the Church having this double reality, divine and human, we also recognise that it shares one thing with every other organisation.  Organisations, like human beings, have an inbuilt instinct for survival.  Churches will use all means available to help them continue to exist.  Some methods, as we have indicated, may be  rooted in human selfishness while others will look to what we call transcendent realities. This double rootedness, in human selfishness and divine inspiration, creates its own problems.  If we try to pretend that the Church is normally in accord with God’s will, we are in danger of giving bad behaviour a ‘get out of jail free’ card as we fail to look carefully at the motivation and behaviour of leaders.  We also are sucked into believing that anyone with a position of authority is automatically to be trusted.  The Conservative Evangelical world is working through the problems of having trusted Ravi Zacharias and Jonathan Fletcher for decades.   Each man was placed, not in a potentially fallible human category, but in a ‘divinely inspired and uniquely blessed by God’ group.  To trust someone who turns out to be an abuser is a major cause of stumbling and loss of faith.  The only antidote for this shattering and disillusionment of Christian followers is that all leaders avoid what we call the celebrity culture.  Creating Christian celebrities is a high-risk strategy.  All of them will turn out to be human and fallible like the rest of us.  That is not to say that they are all guilty of deceiving followers, but that we should always avoid treating any such leaders as super-human.

The record of the Church of England leadership, with its management of safeguarding events over the past twenty years, is extremely patchy.  Most church members would love to believe that their leaders always know what they are doing.  They are supposed to be helping the flock to be as close as possible to the ‘ideal’ of church life, the one revealed to us by Scripture.  But what we find in reality is that the guardians of church life are far more wrapped up in management issues and ensuring that the church institution survives.  In some ways this instinct is natural and to be expected.  But it is the way this survival priority has been put into effect that causes us alarm.  Looking back a number of years to the Ball scandal, we watched how the Church protected itself by hiding information.  Important letters sent to Lambeth Palace about Ball’s behaviour were never shared with the police.  The other institutional tactic that has been used, is to bully and intimidate those who bring complaints to the Church about their past abuse.  The ‘myth’ of appropriate concern for survivors is often merely an idea inside the minds of bishops and others in authority.  The reality is sometimes bullying behaviour, and this has been subcontracted to lawyers who are employed by the church leadership.  A gay clergyman can hear, as happened recently, his behaviour described as being like bestiality.  Because the remark was made by a lawyer instructed by the Church, the church authorities avoided taking blame for the remark.  The Julie Macfarlane case was described as being a ‘brutal’ struggle just to be heard by the Church.  Once again it was not the bishops and the church leaders that were doing the persecution directly; it was the lawyers working on their behalf.  The Church, in pursuing such tactics, has survived as an institution with its money and structure mostly intact.  But the cost of ensuring this survival has been extremely high.  The Church can still believe in and proclaim its ideal manifestation, the worship of God etc., but fewer and fewer people will see that vision.  Somehow the ideal has become increasingly obscured by murky behaviour on the part of those who lead it.

The Christ Church affair rumbles on.  We have long given up expecting to see compassion, fairness, even-handedness and transparency in this affair.  As with other cases, we see a lawyer-coordinated campaign of persecution being waged against one individual.  The official acts of aggressive behaviour against the Dean may have been planned and put into effect by lawyers, but they are assisted by others who pile in, for reasons of their own, to enhance the cruelty.  There are many bystanders who share guilt.  Whatever guilty acts may have been committed by an individual, nobody deserves to be so thoroughly undermined by a campaign of such deliberate and targeted brutality.  Where is the pastoral care for the Dean?  Where is the concern for his welfare? This should apply to him, as any other person who is suffering breakdown because of persecution.   As an outsider I am particularly shocked by the way that the Church authorities in London and Oxford see fit to conduct a simultaneous campaign of persecution.  If the Bishop of Oxford believes that his Dean has done something terrible, is there not still enough imaginative care around in Oxford to stand back and let the other College process work its way through?  No, the Dean has to face persecution from two directions at once, the Church and the College.  All this is being done when he is off sick with serious mental trauma, caused by three years of attack.  He should not now be having to marshal his defence against any such attacks.  The story of vicious mental cruelty against the Dean is worthy of a third world country, to be reported by Amnesty International in one of their reports.  I am wondering whether the Church has stopped to think how it is conniving in something truly sickening and barbaric. This cruelty by the Church (and College) is what will be remembered long after the rest of the dispute is forgotten.

Over the centuries the Church was able to justify its actions, however arbitrary, because it believed it was doing the will of God.  The safeguarding failures and the treatment of survivors by official bodies have recently been so appalling that even the Church has stopped trying to pretend that God is anywhere to be found in its actions.  They are, to quote Archbishop Sentamu, sometimes ‘shabby and shambolic’. In all these episodes, the Church and its reputation is a heavy loser.  The Ball case showed a system that did not want to stick up for victims but instead sought the approval of the great and the good supporting one of their own.  The Elliot review showed a Church once again that could not take action to do anything to care for an abuse victim.  Rather it hid behind insurance company lawyers as a way of fending off challenges to its institutional complacency.  The Macfarlane case showed again how far the Church was prepared to defend itself, using lawyers to fight tooth and nail to avoid admitting manifest failures.  The ongoing Christ Church saga has involved two bishops of the Church, each with a record of safeguarding failures.  It may be a coincidence that the attacks on a sick man arrived virtually on the same day.  This may have something to do with the fact the same lawyer is involved in both cases.  Winckworth Sherwood, her employer, have a vested interest in keeping the case going as long as possible.  Charitable funds from both College and Church have been poured out like water to fund this devilish project.  Christ Church, the diocese of Oxford and the Church of England all come out of this very badly.  Yet we believe there is much more information to come out.   We trust that it will soon see the light of day.

by Fiona Gardner

Stephen suggested that further analytic thought might contribute more to the discussion on Christ Church and dysfunctional group dynamics. Here are a few thoughts – taken from my book shelf.

It was the psychologist Carl Jung who said that if you want to lose your identity – join a group. He also wrote that the group experience takes place at a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. Communal singing can work like this – the choir or congregation feels as if one, uplifted together, even if singing words that might not ring true or make sense to each individual member. In a group we escape from ourselves when our sense of security is increased and the sense of responsibility is decreased – it becomes what Jung calls a mass mentality which of course can be benign or malign (there are plenty of examples that come to mind), or a healthy mixture. And for each person in the group there is a heightened suggestibility and what Jung calls a suggestive group spirit (he refers at one point to the example of the confessions of the Oxford Movement) where the favourable social effects are experienced at the expense of the moral and mental independence of the individual. In the group our discriminative capacity is decreased: ‘one becomes braver, more presumptuous, more cocky, more insolent, more reckless; but the self is diminished and … individual judgement.’ This levelling down can be compensated by one person who emerges as ‘The Leader’ of the group spirit. This means that prestige and power conflicts keep arising: ‘social egocentricity increases in proportion to the numerical strength of the group’.

Regular readers of this blog are well up to speed with the various attempts to apparently ‘oust’ Martyn Percy from his position as Dean of Christ Church, Oxford from 2018 up to the present. In a letter circulated to members of General Synod of the Church of England in June 2020, the authors, lawyers Martin Sewell and David Lamming wrote how whilst the process was not transparent – ‘the only transparency is the motivation’. Whilst the motivation may be clear, there are murky and obscure processes going on in terms of group dynamics. David Lamming commenting on the Independent Review published on 11^th March sees conflict of interests and loyalty as part of this. The Governing Body is a large group – over 60 (it looks like 41 involved in recent actions – so to return to Jung’s phrase ‘social egocentricity’ is pretty high which may help to explain the reluctance to reflect on what the group is doing. Jung put it like this: ‘When a hundred intelligent heads are united in a group the result is one big fathead’.

This is where Wilfred Bion might also offer clarity. Stephen referred the surviving church readership to Bion’s work on groups, and although Bion died in 1979 both his work on what happens in groups, and his work with individual patients are still held in high regard. His theory is based on what he discovered in his work managing a rehabilitation unit for psychiatric patients in the British Army during World War II, and later with small groups at the Tavistock Clinic. As Stephen and follow up commentators have stated the central idea in Bion’s theory is that in every group, two groups exist: the ‘work group’ and the ‘basic assumption group’. Bion was not referring to factions or subgroups within the group, but rather to two dimensions of behaviour within the group.

The work group is that element of group functioning that is concerned with the primary task or work of the group: which in this case would be governing Christ Church to the best of the group’s ability. The mature work group is aware of its purpose and can define its task. Its members work cooperatively as separate and discrete members who willingly choose to belong to the group because they identify with interests of the group. This group tests its conclusions, seeks knowledge, and learns from its experience. Bion notes that this level of maturity in the work group is very rare.

One of the defining characteristics of the emotional life of the Christ Church Governing Body would appear to be its inability to learn from previous experience. So, why would the Governing Body employ ineffective and self-contradicting behaviour that lessens the effectiveness of the work group? Why would it compulsively repeat this?  Bion suggests that this is because in addition to the work group, the basic assumption group is strongly at play. The basic assumption group can be thought of as the ‘as if’ group, meaning that the group behaves ‘as if” certain tacit assumptions were held by the members. These assumptions are hidden in the group subconscious, outside the awareness of group members. The type of basic assumption group that fits best with the reported behaviour at Christ Church is the fight-flight group which assumes that it must preserve itself at all costs, and that this can be done only by fighting or fleeing from someone or something. The group has no tolerance for weakness and expects casualties since salvation of the group is more important than the needs of individual members. The fight-flight leader must inspire great courage and self-sacrifice, and lead the group against a common enemy. If none exists, an enemy will be created. A leader who fails to afford the group the opportunity for retreat or attack will be considered ineffective and ultimately ignored. When scapegoating (such as might be considered against Martyn Percy) occurs within a group dynamic, it is possible that the fight-flight assumption is largely at play. Members bond together to fight a common foe, the scapegoat, resulting in the majority of the group sharing a sense of purpose and ‘groupness’ often for the first time. One interesting aspect is the power of group mentality and the uneasiness experienced by individual members unless they are conforming to this underlying basic assumption.

 When the rational group process is corrupted – as in this situation – then it means that there are powerful emotional states pushing judgement into second place. In other words, things are not seen clearly and there is no chance of learning from experience. Might it be possible that the arrival of and suggested policies changes made by Martyn Percy have created a feeling of being under threat – a somewhat paranoid basic assumption group where the fear is of change and the survival of the institution. Bion found that the basic assumption group offers a feeling of increased vitality; it also rejects that there are any difficulties – especially psychological difficulties or it offers a means of avoiding difficulties by focusing instead on the enemy. So, there is an excitement engendered by the basic assumption group, an excitement far removed from the usual dull meetings with agenda, procedures and points of order. Bion wrote of ‘This longed for alternative to the group procedure’. It’s exciting because it is fuelled by heightened emotions such as anxiety, fear, hatred and love – all contributing to the basic assumption. Under threat the basic assumption group might turn to the group history, using tradition and how things have been to protect the group in its struggle against the threat of having to accept an idea which might require individual progress and discomfort.

Each group member has to try and identify with either the basic assumption or the rational structure. It seems that a majority of the Governing Body are identifying with the basic assumption group and then would feel persecuted by what seems to them to be the arid intellectualism of the work group. Where basic assumptions become dangerous is when they are translated into action and again this is the pattern at Christ Church.

So, what might a group consultant suggest? If it was Bion he might use his idea of working on containment within a contained space where the powerful emotions could be held, processed and then communicated without everyone becoming overwhelmed by them. There then might be a restoration of the capacity to think sufficiently in each individual member of the body to refocus on the work group ethic. Or he might just see that the group has got stuck on the collective regressed level and see that any change at this point is a forlorn hope. Bion recognised that the fight-flight group has no concern for the welfare of the individual – as long as the group continues, and so will feel that any method of dealing with the group neurosis is opposed to the good of the group and will be rejected.

In recent weeks, the work of the Charity Commission (CC) and its involvement with the Christ Church Oxford saga has been explored on this blog.  I do not propose to go back over what I have said in earlier posts.  Nevertheless, I want to repeat one point that I made on the 28^thJanuary.  When a dispute arises between the CC and a registered charity under its supervision in the UK, the CC and its decisions have considerable legal force.   Recently the CC has published an account of their involvement with a Sikh charity in London. This clearly sets out how the CC works to intervene when a religious charity is unable or unwilling to conduct its affairs in a way that satisfies charity law.   The religious charity involved is the Central Gurdwara, the most prominent Sikh temple in London.  The process of intervention by the CCs has lasted several years but it has finally been resolved by some decisive actions by the CC.  This has brought to an end a number of failures of governance which involved money and other administrative lapses.  The story of the CC’s involvement with this charity is an instructive one, since it shows a dogged determination by the CC to put things right and insist that charity law is observed and enforced.  Charity law in Britain is not like a voluntary code.  It is part of English law backed up and enforced by the civil authorities of our nation. 

The charitable aims and objects of the Central Gurdwara are the maintenance of the building and the advancement of education for members of the Sikh community.   The problems that were raised and brought the charity to the attention of the CC in 2012 centred round some disputes among the trustees.  These made it difficult for the smooth operation and management of the institution.    The CC seem to have  a well-established process for these eventualities and these protocols have been in operation from December 2012 right up to the present report in March 2021. The CC obviously are using their own terminology to describe these stages in putting things in order, and, even though it is not absolutely clear to a layman what each part of the process involves, we get the sense of a well-oiled and efficient scheme at work.  The first stage was the ‘opening of an operational compliance case’ in 2012.  The next stage was the issuing of an action plan in February 2014.  In July 2014, the CC opened a ‘monitoring case’ to find out whether the trustees were implementing the action plan.  The monitoring case had determined by July 2015 that a statutory inquiry under section 46 of the Charity Act was required.  This was to examine the compliance with the action plan, the financial regulation of the charity and whether there had been misconduct by the trustees.  By March 2016 the CC had determined that there were serious problems.  The trustees were issued with a Direction to provide evidence and copies of documents which could be examined to see whether promised improvements of the Charity were in hand.  One sticking point at this stage proved to be an issue over defining membership.  Members of the Temple alone had the power to elect trustees and because there was some vagueness and uncertainty in this area, the process of finding legal trustees was made impossible.

In January 2017, the CC decided that it was necessary to intervene and appoint an Interim Manager (IM).  He would have the legal authority to determine on the difficult task of membership so that valid elections would be able to take place.   The main problem encountered by the IM was the continuing disruptive behaviour by existing trustees.  It was determined that the appointment of 15 brand new trustees was the only way that future governance could be set in place and respected by all parties.  This process of electing the new trustees was overseen by an independent specialist company for managing ballots and elections.  These took place in March 2020.  The three candidates who had received the highest votes were appointed President, Vice President and General Secretary respectively.

The conclusions of the CC inquiry have considerable interest to those of us who look to the CC to provide stability to the charity sector and in our case, religious charities.  One statement that caught my attention was one that stated ‘the former trustees failed to resolve their differences and implement the guidance.  This amounted to misconduct…’  A further statement gave the new trustees the option to ‘recover any money lost due to breach of trust/duty by the former trustees.  The IM had clearly had a difficult task.  The report recorded that he had met personally expenses of £33,791 which had not been charged to the charity.

The final section of this Report about the affair reminds the reader of the responsibilities of charity trustees.  One would like to see these printed and given to every single individual who takes on this role, PCC members and college governing bodies alike.  It is worth reproducing seven principles that are recognised by the courts when reviewing the conduct and decisions of charity trustees.  These principles are as follows.  Trustees must

• act within their powers
• act in good faith and only in the interests of the charity
• make sure they are sufficiently informed
• take account of all relevant factors
• ignore any irrelevant factors
• manage any conflicts of interest
• make decisions that are within the range of decisions that a reasonable trustee body could make

Of these seven principles one would like to be able to say that they are always listened to by charitable bodies we know.  Acting in the interest of the charity will always require that other issues, like personal vendettas, be put to one side.  Conflicts of interest are again common in some areas of church life we have been looking at over the past weeks and months.  It is indeed helpful to have these reminders of good practice for charity trustees of all kinds of charity.  It is also good to have a reminder that good practice is not only recommended; it has the full force of the English legal system to back it up and enforce it.  The Church of England has managed to avoid some of the requirements of law by being able to claim special exemptions.  Thus, it has been allowed to avoid some of the stipulations of the Equality Act 2010.  It can, in some situations, discriminate against women and sexual minorities.  How much longer these exemptions will be tolerated by society is an open question.  One can imagine that eventually the laws of the land will be the same for every institution, including the Church, and the laws which tolerate deliberate acts of exclusion will be swept away.

One institution that is currently attracting the attention the CC is of course Christ Church Oxford.  Even at a distance it is possible to discern that there exist breaches of several of the seven principles of good charity trusteeship.  I hardly need to repeat all the ways that personal animosities seem to have started to interfere with the trustees’ work.  Animosity and the process of governance have become entangled.  Another of the principles of good governance is that trustees should be well informed.  The censors at the heart of the dispute with the Dean have done little to assist this process when they forbade the Andrew Smith report being distributed among their fellow trustees.  The lack of openness in this action does not fill one with confidence that whoever is chosen to ratify the Governors’ actions will find the Christ Church trustees acting in acting in ‘good faith and only in the interests of the charity’.

My final comment is this.  If I, as a non-lawyer, can spot several obvious flaws in the way matters have been handled at the College, it is surely clear that a legally trained person, well versed in charity law will also see these same failures of good practice.   The College is going to be judged by the protocols of charity law which does not make any exemptions or concessions.  The Central Gurdwara in London was not able to argue against the right of the British State to demand just and fair practice as is laid down by the laws of the land which operate to oversee charities.  Christ Church College may be able to employ the best (and most expensive) lawyers in the land.  Even with this power, it will not be able to stand against the power of the courts and its judges if it is found to have betrayed its charitable aims.  At present it is hard to claim that the trustees of Christ Church are fulfilling and acting in accordance with the terms of their trust.