I cannot be the only person trying to puzzle a way through the divisions that exist in the Anglican Communion at present.  As I have said several times before, the main topic of the debate, issues around sexuality, is a deeply contentious one, one that I draw back from involvement in.  This is partly because I do not believe that I have anything to add to the passion and complexity of the issues in this debate.  The other more important reason is that I see the fundamental issue as going far deeper than our opinions and beliefs about human sexuality.  In simple terms I see the current divisions within Anglicanism as being closely bound up with the culture wars being fought and paid for by enormously powerful and wealthy conservative forces in the States.  These right-wing interests hope to take control of society on behalf of a religiously infused nationalism in America and across the world.  Liberal thinking in politics or religion is a threat to that bid for power.   

Our Anglican debates are probably a mere side-show within this larger picture, but these lobby groups have stirred up enormous passion in these discussions about sexuality.  Thirty years ago, the LGBT debate was a non-issue.   It certainly was nowhere thought to be a defining measure of who was or who was not a Christian.  One reading of Anglican history suggests that the deliberate ramping up of this issue was orchestrated by a group of well-funded conservative Anglicans.  They met in Kuala Lumpur in February 1997.   They seem to have made a deliberate decision to put the same sex issue to the fore and ensure that it was a key item for discussion at Lambeth 1998.  A hitherto minor point of disagreement was thus weaponised and turned into a means of uniting Anglican conservatives together in their bid to become the dominant faction in the Communion. 

The current thinking by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York seems to be a wish that the different factions in the Anglican Communion and the Church of England might move towards a situation of gracious stalemate.  They seem to be currently saying, ‘we cannot agree on this matter.  At least let us agree to disagree and get on with other more important things like helping the world to avoid destroying itself and enable people to find God, especially the young’.  Most of us would agree with such a sentiment and wonder why, instead of the costly and debilitating effort involved in fighting this culture war, the contenders cannot agree to a truce.  But, as we know, there seems little sign that the successors of those who plotted at Kuala Lumpur are ready to pull back.  The war does not seem destined to stop without one side surrendering and allowing the other to obtain power over the whole.  If the debate is ultimately about power rather than sex, then we cannot expect it to be easily resolved.

As I indicated at the beginning, I do not propose to weigh up the arguments on either side of the divide.  I have clear sympathy for those who wish the Anglican Communion not to be taken over and controlled by the same right-wing ideologies that have been on show in America under Trump.  My concern in this blog is to try to unearth the causes as to why the two sides debating seem to be unable at times even to share a common discourse.   For this we need to go back a stage in terms of human psychology.  Before anyone is able to argue for truth, reality and freedom in a debate, they have a unique personal history and development.  Reason is built on pre-reason.  Before reason and proper functioning rationality emerged in each of us, there were a cluster of child-centred passions, desires, frustrations and the hope for instant gratification.  Out of this chaos of an unformed personality, there eventually appeared the rational person with thought-out convictions. The connection between the rational adult and the irrational feelings of the child may, however, be closer that we might want to admit. 

Every time we utter an opinion which we believe to be a rationally thought out and coherent point of view, we need to ask ourself.  To what extent are we ever truly independent in our ideas?   How far do the things we say and think reflect the jumble of emotions and feelings we have had as well as the people to whom we have been exposed over the decades right back to infancy?

I want to continue our reflection on the way we come to support a well thought-out and rational opinion on difficult issues, like the gay question, by looking at the work of Abraham Maslow.  Maslow explained in an illuminating way how human beings are motivated to behave in certain ways because of a ‘hierarchy of needs’.   These range from the physiological (food, warmth and rest) to social needs and others reflecting the human capacity for self-transcendence.  I want to suggest that strongly held beliefs and opinions reflect and are intertwined with these various needs that inevitably influence day to day human functioning.  Let me explain.

At the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid are some needs that have to be met for our physical survival.  If our parents had not provided for these basic needs, we would have died.  There is then another cluster of needs that provide for our social development.  A child left without interaction, touch and mental stimulus may survive in a physical sense, but, like many Romanian orphans, he/she will be stunted and handicapped, mentally and emotionally.  Beyond touch and proper stimulus is the need for attachment and sense of safety.  Depriving any child of these things will probably create, then and into adulthood, compensatory behaviours.  These represent a desperate need to receive what is their birth-right.  Feeling safe and properly attached to others are among the experiences that everyone needs and deserves, enabling him/her to grow up as a balanced human being.

The need to feel safe is one of the basic requirements for all human beings. Maslow’s theory predicts that every child and every adult will reach out to seek safety when they sense its absence.  When very young we looked to parents to provide for our safety but as we got older, we had increasingly to take responsibility for our own safety needs.  Wise parents are constantly reassuring their offspring that they are safe.  There are rituals for doing this, like night-time ‘tucking children up’.  This can be enormously helpful in learning to deal with childhood fears, like that of darkness. When fears are overcome the child will possess a secure platform from which to explore the world.  As adults, we also find that there is an instinctive mechanism inside us which sets up a certain tension and anxiety whenever we feel unsafe.  We then strain with our whole being to remove that uncertainty and fear.  Prayers and rituals of protection can play a large in the religious observance of many.  

Among other Maslow needs identified in the hierarchy, is belonging.  As with safety, this word points to a major element in religious language and practice.  To belong, to be part of something bigger than ourselves, is what makes the religious quest attractive.  It also resonates with and runs alongside our need to be safe.  People in church environments are taught to seek and receive ‘salvation’.  This is the promise of God-given safety which will carry us through this life and into the stage beyond death.  Identifying the way that the beliefs and convictions that we hold resonate with the needs identified by Maslow is a useful thing to do. Having identified primal and pre-rational facets in our religious observance, it becomes easier to understand how religious arguments do not normally reflect pure logic and reason.  Belonging and being safe are among the primal needs which belong to both our religious and social identities.  They exist long before we articulate religious beliefs or argue doctrinal positions with others

One idea that has come to the fore once again, particularly in view of the impasse between the various factions on the LGBT issue, is the Indaba idea from Africa.  This requires all parties in a disagreement to sit with each other to explore, at a deep level, what is really going on in a debate or conflict.  I am no expert in the Indaba process, but it seems that it could be done in a way that draws on this Maslow insight about primal needs. I have suggested that it is an interweaving of rational and pre-rational processes that together has created our strongly held convictions.  Getting in touch with the primal needs that Maslow identifies in every human being, clearly takes time. We might in the process learn to understand ourselves and others better. Common sense tells us that neglect of social needs in a small child might lead to a fascination with hell, salvation and eternal punishment.  Also, we suspect that an expressed need to dominate and control, which is so pervasive in some areas of church life, may come from a failure to have had other social needs met in an individual’s past.  Clearly the exploration of these layers of need in each of us would require huge amounts of time, combined with trust and a readiness to explore our deeper vulnerabilities.  That would be Indaba++.  But we desperately need new initiatives to replace the non-comprehending failures of communication exemplified in the recent videos from Christian Concern and CEEC.   The Church of England is on a trajectory to fragmentation and even destruction because human beings have hidden behind contradictory and irreconcilable propositions.  There is a crisis, and we need to do something urgently to resolve it.  This will include examining our vulnerabilities and seeing how unmet needs may have created serious blockages in our ability to understand and embrace the reality of another human being and their opinions.    

Many of us in the Church of England have acquired labels, self-designated or otherwise, to describe what is known as our churchmanship.  The labels that are given us, or we give ourselves, are a bit like a foreign language to those not in the know.  Evangelicals especially have many varieties – open, post, conservative and moderate to name but a few.  High Church Anglicans also have an equally bewildering cluster of labels which normally centre around the word catholic.    The best way to penetrate the confusion of these labels is, in most cases, to find out who is the leader or mentor that a particular individual identifies with.  This is a particularly useful method when we try and understand the tribal complexities of the world of Anglican evangelicalism.  These identified leaders of the various evangelical groups will each have a distinct nuanced take on a variety of topics within the parameters of evangelical thinking.  They will have an opinion on the topics of the day, women’s ministry, speaking in tongues, same sex marriage, critical views on the Bible and the question of who outside the group can be associated with.  But the nature of human groups also means that, even when we have identified leaders and those who identify with them, we will find nothing permanent about them.   Loyalties and allegiances will be in a constant state of flux.   Officially all evangelicals are bound by a central statement of faith.  That statement of faith should make them a united and an unchallengeably powerful group in the Church of England.  But the reality is different.  To take one example.   When GAFCON was formed in 2008 to protest the liberal tendencies in the Anglican Communion, many English evangelicals rallied round the so-called Jerusalem Declaration.  The current support for this group has weakened somewhat over the past twelve years.  At present GAFCON UK struggles to pay for a full-time administrator.  The strength of this organisation exists elsewhere – Australia, Africa and the States but not in England.   In the same way we learn from contributors to this blog about the varying fortunes of the Evangelical Group on General Synod (EGGS) group.  Once again, accepting the testimony of our contributors, we learn that this group has lost some of its power by insisting on adhering to a politically hard-line statement of evangelical belief.   

In summary what we are claiming is that the ‘Momentum’ faction among Church of England evangelicals seems less powerful today.  My last blog was on the power of the CEEC to represent and speak for Anglican evangelicals.  It seems that the video The Beautiful Story has exposed several new fissures in the evangelical monolith in Britain.   Not every evangelical wants to have their belief system articulated by others or to be told what they think about every detail of personal sexual morality.  The nuances of personal history and belief are seldom articulated satisfactorily by others.   Not everyone finds it helpful to hang their personal belief statement on a list of propositions prepared by a committee in perhaps another country.    Tribal/party positioning and systems of belief may be becoming less important for the same reasons that churchmanship labels have declined in importance. 

There is one further generalisation about the Church of England connected with churchmanship, which it is important to examine.  It is reported that most Church of England bishops in post are evangelicals.  The truth of this statement could be determined by an examination of each of their personal histories in the Crockford Directory.  I have not done that piece of research, but I make these comments on the assumption that this statement is likely to be true.  Simultaneously we note that the evangelical label seems not to make any but a tiny minority of this group card-carrying activists in the style of Labour’s Momentum.   Few appear to identify with or follow the narrow tribalism of the big ReNew parishes in London and elsewhere.  Few have openly supported the CEEC makers of the video The Beautiful Story.   At best, we can describe this cohort of evangelical bishops in the House of Bishops as being cultural evangelicals.  The evangelical tradition is somewhere in their Christian stories.   Pragmatically, it does not represent everything they are now.  For example, this group of bishops seem to realise that whatever their beliefs are, it is not prudent or helpful to engage in theological controversy with those who do not agree with them.  We are all relieved that it is impossible to take out a CDM simply because one member of the church does not agree with the theology of another member.  If bishops and others were political in this sense, arguing constantly about theological issues, that would be a seriously disruptive and unsettling situation.  In one diocese a bishop, now retired, made a point of appointing only conservative evangelicals of the same tribe as himself.  That left a legacy which is hard to undo and this diocese will be marked (and weakened) by this political intervention for a generation. 

I began by mentioning that churchmanship labels are often self-designated.  I thought it might be useful to take the example of one individual and explain how churchmanship loyalties can start but also change.  This example involves my own story and goes back to the autumn of 1964 when I first arrived as an undergraduate in Oxford.  From the point of view of ecclesiastical choices, Oxford was like a fabulous restaurant offering a myriad of dishes.  It was hard to choose.  On the very first Sunday (after attending college chapel) I had a choice of attending St Aldates, the lively evangelical church in the centre of the city or the cathedral right opposite.  Why was I considering St Aldates?  The reason was that a teacher at the school I had attended in Eastbourne eleven years before (aged 7) was the sister of the Rector, Keith de Berry.  I felt some distant loyalty to an evangelical past which I had met at her school.  But there was another churchmanship loyalty which I also needed to honour.  This was my formation in a cathedral choir school from the age of eight.  This had inculcated a love of polyphonic music to be heard barely two hundred yards away on the other side of the road at Christ Church Cathedral.  A busy road separated these two ecclesiastical worlds.  The story does not resolve itself in a tidy way.  After a few weeks alternating between the two, I found myself at Pusey House, a very high church institution.  I eventually graduated to the role of thurifer.  This allowed me to perfect the skill of generating enormous clouds of incense at High Mass.  I wonder if health and safety rules would now allow so much smoke in church!   

The lesson I took from Oxford was that worship (and churchmanship) cultures come with many different forms.  Although the differences can be described in cultural terms, the important thing is that different groups of people become accustomed to the variety of practices we describe as worship.  Experiencing everything from Christian Union meetings to Orthodox liturgies meant one important thing for me personally.  No one would ever be able to convince me that a single form of worship should take precedence over all others.  Later I spent two years studying for a higher degree in the theology of the Orthodox liturgy.  Although I cannot write about my findings here, I can share a couple of sentences.  The Eastern Orthodox experience of worship is quite distinctive in the way that, unlike the west, it honours imagery and visual experience.  The worshipper ‘sees’ divine reality in the liturgy far more than he/she hears and interprets spoken words, understanding them in a cerebral way.   

  The conclusion I want to offer my reader is that churchmanship is always going to vary across the church-going population.  It is never a question of establishing right and wrong in this area.  Differing theological ideas may be often far closer to each other than the rules of logic might suggest.  Worship, whether through silence, raucous singing or the still perfection of a Palestrina mass, will communicate God to different people.  It will also be wrong to suggest to another Christian that his/her experience of worship is wrong in some way.  It is also wrong automatically ever to assume that what someone else believes is wrong.   There may be times when I need to question this idea, but I have a sense, honed by my rich exposure to the variety of religious expression in Oxford all those years ago, that our approach to another person’s experience of God must normally be one of humble awe.   

When we talk about church politics, we are aware that there are many differences between what happens in our national parliament and in the Church of England General Synod.  But there are nevertheless some similarities to be noted.  It is possible to identify some who debate from a recognisably left-wing position as well as some who argue from what we would describe as the right.   While many, if not the majority, of Synod members may have no sense of owning political allegiances in what they have to bring to debates, there are a significant number who do.  Speaking very generally and, most likely, inaccurately, those on the left stand for a libertarian approach to Church affairs.  They are likely to be focussing on issues such climate change, social justice and a more liberal attitude to sexual matters.  By contrast, the right-wing group in Synod will have a more authoritarian approach to such things as doctrine together with an emphasis on personal morality, especially in the area of sexual ethics.  A further distinct feature of the right wing in a church context is something that it shares with authoritarian movements right across the spectrum.  It has the belief that it owns the truth.  As the possessor of the final truth, based on its ‘sound’ interpretation of Scripture, it convinces itself that it should be allowed to be the leader of the whole institution.  To do this it is not beyond using various dominating methods, involving the use of fear tactics.

The issue of the moment for the whole Church of England is the publication of the lengthy document Living in Love and Faith (LLF) The document only appeared a few days ago and the hope is that it will enable the whole Church of England to begin to understand better the issues around marriage and same sex relationships.  In this way they will find a way to grow together in learning to live with others who have quite different views on this topic.  My interest here is not in the topic of the debate or indeed the content of the 480-page document.  My concern is for the way that representatives of one politically right-wing group in the Church, known as the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC), have rapidly responded to LLF.  Their response takes the form of a professionally produced video entitled The Beautiful Story.  The images in the video show that it was shot in high summer.  In other words, the video can be understood to be a pre-prepared political statement, presenting the views held by those on the right on the issues raised by LLF.

What are we to conclude about the release of this video in terms of political process?  Let us imagine a parallel in the political life of the country.  Suppose a Labour government is in charge and they have poured massive resources into preparing a bill that will transform the welfare state and make life easier for the unemployed.  After three years work, with consultations across many other institutions including universities and welfare groups of all kinds, the Bill is published for discussion.  Within a week, the Conservative opposition publish their response.  Their document has no point of contact with the Labour one because, at best, it has worked on the principle that it could guess what was going to be in the Labour Bill.  The parliamentary debate that follows would be like two men shouting at each other in a dark room.  There is no possibility of discussion, debate or even communication.  How can the CEEC pre-prepared video engage with a major document like LLF when it was written and filmed so long before its publication?  Was there any possibility or even desire to communicate or debate the issue properly?

The arrival of the video, The Beautiful Story, even putting to one side whether we identify with its content, is a clear undermining of the quasi-parliamentary system of working for the Church.  The Church of England believes in listening, debating and considering an issue prayerfully before choices and decisions are made.  The tone of the video could be summarised as saying this.  We (the CEEC) are the only group to read the Bible correctly and we already know the mind of Christ on the topics concerned with sexuality.  All further discussion is thus futile.   The rest of you must surrender to our interpretation. Otherwise, we may take away our support for the Church.   Politically speaking, this mindset is close to a dictatorship complete with the use of fear and threat.  Among the comments made in the video, some were distinctly patronising and even offensive.  How can a leading evangelical scholar presume to declare what liberal scholars believe about Christ’s attitude to the gay question?  We heard more than once that the Bible is ‘abundantly clear’ on the topic.  No, the Bible is not abundantly clear on this or any number of other issues to do with personal morality.  Jesus spoke far more decisively on the divorce question than he ever did about other matters to do with sex. Conservative Anglicans have been very tight-lipped about enforcing discipline in this area.

If we look at The Beautiful Story through the eyes of a secular political process, it feels like a piece of propaganda from an extreme faction on the right which would like to have total domination over the whole institution.  The video smacks of hubris by its implied assumption that the whole LLF process is a waste of time.   Those of us who study the power dynamics of the way that this conservative group within the C of E works, have some insight about who in fact makes the political choices in CEEC.  It appears not to be either of the two bishops who have speaking parts in the video.

All in all, the power of this conservative faction is being weakened by this expensive piece of propaganda.  It probably represents a serious political miscalculation for the CEEC.  In the past the teachings of this group did not really impinge on the rest of the Church.  Their opinions on the gay issue were known but not widely discussed.  The only group who could be relied upon to make the case for the reactionary right-wing point of view, were people in the media.  They would wheel on a conservative spokesperson who would give the party line with a predictable soundbite.  People outside conservative circles did not seem to take these views very seriously.  But now, by publishing this video which clearly identifies a range of individuals alongside their attitudes and assumptions, they are likely to create a far stronger political push-back on the part of those who do not think as they do.  Did a diocesan bishop really threaten to leave the Church of England if he and his CEEC group fail to get their own way.  Many people, who do not at present see the Church in political categories, may come to have a new insight on the way that power is being deployed.  Because of the language of threat and contempt for the bulk of their fellow church members that is revealed in the video, ordinary church people may realise that they need to be better defended from these anti-democratic ideologies represented by the Church’s own right wing.

There is little in the video that convinces me that it is about truth and integrity.  What I see is a lot about politics and power.  The conclusion I draw from the new video is that the Church’s right-wing faction have become so confident of their power to dominate that they no longer care if they alienate others in the Church.  That is a political miscalculation that they may come to regret.

By Gilo

Berrymans Lace Mawer (BLM) is a major law firm with tentacles in all corners of the defence of institutions in abuse cases. They are currently positioning themselves through a series of webinars to bid for widespread legal management of redress schemes. One of their partners is already involved in the Irish Redress Scheme.

I am the sole solicitor to the Irish Redress Board where to date, I have overseen the completion of 16,650 applications and redress of £953million being paid out.   https://www.blmlaw.com/people/sharon-moohan

Although the fee structure for such a contract will be commercially sensitive and closely guarded secret, a simple guesstimate might still be done. A conservative £2000 fee for processing each application would give BLM over £33m. A perhaps more realistic £4000 per application would give BLM £66.6m. Does BLM receive a reverse percentage, or perhaps a bonus for maintenance of sufficient numbers below agreed bands of redress? We don’t know. And probably never will. But these contracts will be very substantial. And BLM is already familiar to many institutions who have relied upon them for aggressive defence against claims. They are well placed to mop up this business in coming years.

Just to be blunt about what’s happening here – this would be the Church’s lawyers, who have cost many survivors our repair and caused much re-abuse with unethical tactics, now positioning themselves to pick up the very lucrative business of redress management. Nice work if you can get it. But perhaps BLM should not be surprised to know that survivors are urging the Church to go elsewhere for legal advice. Too many survivors have bitter experience of the ruthless opportunism and cruelty of Paula Jefferson’s strategies to watch in silence as BLM benefits from the management of the Church’s redress scheme.

The Church needs to signal a clear shift away from the cosy affiliations with lawyers and insurers who have done massive harm, both to survivors and to the reputation of the Church. A sea change is required. As a senior Church figure at the February Synod said:

…Because surely within our dioceses we have the capacity to go further than a ‘full and final settlement’. Surely we have the capacity to do justly, to act mercifully, and even to be generous. Surely we have the capacity to question our insurers about their practices and indeed our lawyers. It occurred to me that actually we can change insurers if we don’t think their methods are ethical. I change my electricity supplier. I am hoping that when I go back to my diocese some of my colleagues, and I’m sure they will, will be asking me some very difficult questions in diocesan synod.

BLM are playing both ends of a circus in a compelling story of hypocrisy. The company has more brass than a colliery band to place itself at the forefront of discussion on redress considering the practices it hoped no-one would notice. Genetic predisposition arguments, use of desk-topping, consent arguments, ugly references to a survivor as ‘hassle value and some risk around publicity’ are just some of the things survivors have managed to bring into daylight so far. Their webinar series represents a bid to claw back credibility in the face of the extensive reputational damage that BLM has brought to a major client. This client must presumably wish that BLM had acted with much greater decency and integrity. The deployment of unethical strategies may end up costing the Church on the way to half a £billion!

An email was recently sent out to participants indicating that the webinars have now been postponed to the New Year. The message also seemed to indicate that BLM might be poised to mop up the Scottish Redress Scheme. Or might have already landed this. How many other schemes will they seek to run? Those of us who have alerted the Church to the unethical situation – are keen that survivors elsewhere realise what is going on. This law firm are the same people who harmed many of us through derisory and harshly contested settlements. If you’re in doubt here are a few articles in which BLM have worked closely in tandem with Ecclesiastical Insurance (there is barely an operational rizla paper between them).

https://www.postonline.co.uk/claims/4602976/ecclesiastical-faces-fresh-allegations-of-unethical-treatment-as-case-of-suicide-watch-claimant-comes-to-light

https://www.postonline.co.uk/claims/7652861/briefing-ecclesiasticals-child-abuse-claims-shame-ceo-hews-admission-too-little-too-late

https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2020/9-october/features/features/the-moment-my-heart-stopped-fainting

https://www.postonline.co.uk/claims/7681106/former-broadmoor-psychiatrist-faces-investigation-for-role-in-ecclesiastical-abuse-claims

BLM have done enough lasting harm and cannot be trusted. They, and the agents they choose to help them (one of whom is currently being investigated by the General Medical Council) have no real concern for the life-long impact of abuse, no understanding of the limp through life that so many survivors have endured. Nor have they sought to gain understanding. Paula Jefferson the head of their abuse department, who has led many settlements, has ignored complaints or batted them away like unwanted flies. We gather that the Archbishop of Canterbury has ‘fumed’ when he has heard about some of the responses from Paula Jefferson and her senior partners to survivors. To be fair though, the Archbishop has known for a long time and pretended that their unethical strategies weren’t his concern or that he could do little about it. But he seems to have woken up on these things recently.

Redress Schemes should be survivor-centric, involving the participation and experience of survivor groups, and not as lip-service PR but in very real ways with survivors on redress panels. Crucially, these schemes should signal a clear move away from the toxic and cynical processes of the past which were rife with  dishonesty, callousness, and ‘horse trade’ games. For these reasons, survivors from the Church of England context have already expressed to the Lead Bishops that any involvement of Paula Jefferson or her partners in BLM in the CofE redress scheme would be highly inappropriate and unethical.  

The best way for Berrymans Lace Mawer and Ecclesiastical Insurance to pay their substantial moral debt would be to contribute significantly into the Church of England’s redress fund. And issue statements of apology for the re-abusive harm they have caused so many. Survivors are calling for these corporate agents of the Church to be brought to considerably greater moral account by their client, than the Church has been prepared to do so far. The Church is picking up a colossal bill in lieu of BLM’s inability to read the signs over a long period of time. The Church has a moral responsibility to all survivors to ensue that the responses of institutions begin to be patterned in a new way – one that leads to healing and putting right the institutional evils of the past. It should lead the way in addressing BLM’s practices as clearly unacceptable.

We hope survivors from other institutions will read this, recognise the chicanery that has been pitted against them, and take questions up with the institutions they are calling upon for justice. Please share this widely.

Anyone who has read any of the church documents about safeguarding, will know the expression ‘vulnerable adult’. This term has been defined on various occasions.  There is a long list of statements which interpret this expression.  In summary it applies to any adult who is open to exploitation by another individual because of some impediment in their social, emotional or physical functioning.  The term has been rightly critiqued, not because such vulnerability does not exist, but because some of what is meant by the word could be said to apply to every human being on the planet.   Everybody is vulnerable at some point in their lives and it is also a mistake to believe, as the expression implies, that vulnerability is a good word to describe a permanent handicap of some kind.   Many of us move in and out of situations of vulnerability.  It is for this reason, no doubt, that the secular use of this expression has given way to a more accurate expression, ‘adults at risk’.  The Care Act of 2014 successfully describes the need to protect at risk adults in society without ever using the word vulnerable.  Indeed, it is pity that the Church has not yet caught up with this wording in the Care Act by also abandoning the expression altogether.  The word fails in several important respects and it is these failures that I want to explore in this post.    

In the first place the word vulnerable means literally capable of being wounded. Whatever other definitions we then choose to add on to the word, vulnerability is a category potentially applying to every human being.  Everyone is vulnerable in the same way, just as everyone must eventually face up to his/her own death.  We all experience aggressive, coercive or bullying behaviour by others from time to time. We could also add numerous other experiences which we would describe as involving other people attempting to take advantage of us. While we may not be vulnerable in the ‘at risk’ sense, we are certainly vulnerable in our capacity to be hurt and damaged by the malevolence of other people. 

There are good reasons, good Christian reasons, for seeking to rescue this word from the negative connotations that that it has acquired in safeguarding documents and the pre-2014 social work uses of the word.  One of the defining features of our humanity is our capacity to feel.  You cannot stop feeling things, good and bad, unless you close all the senses and become a kind of robot.  Robots do not feel nor are they exposed to sensations of malevolence directed at them from outside.  Feelings of any kind will involve accepting our vulnerability. Such feelings are not always the highway to fulfilment and contentment. Sometimes this capacity to experience feeling involves negative sensations such as shame, grief, fear or disappointment. All these feelings are unpleasant, but we would never want to deny our capacity to feel them and thus avoid experiencing any kind of emotional pain.  The negative feelings we have are balanced by our ability to feel joy, creativity, satisfaction at a job well done and delight at the presence and company of other human beings. Our ability to experience the negative is for the most part more than balanced up by our ability to feel what is good and glorious about life. 

The experience, that, for most of us, anchors our individual lives, is the experience of love/commitment to another person. But, even within the most successful relationships there are times of misunderstandings and hurt. Nevertheless, few people who have been with a partner or spouse for a long period of time would want to declare that the memories of togetherness and mutual joy are in any way negated by the times of hurt that may have occurred.  Both the joys and the hurts are born out of our human capacity to be vulnerable to another.  In short, we need to celebrate the fact that we are vulnerable beings who are open both to joy and pain. This word vulnerable could also be translated as openness.  Such openness to another is a key facet of our humanity.  Surely, we are right to reclaim the word vulnerable to help us describe this possibility of reaching the fulfilment commended by both Scripture and human tradition – the experience of human partnership in marriage. 

This blog post is then all about reclaiming the word vulnerable and seeing it as something glorious and distinctly human. Vulnerability, in short, is the capacity to share one’s humanity in acts of generosity and love, even while knowing that such openness makes it possible to be open to the possibility of hurt.  When we use the expression vulnerable adult in an association with weakness, incompetence or failure of some kind, it will be unable to serve its more elevated purpose of pointing to our highest potentialities as human beings.  It is important to challenge that old, I would say obsolete, use whenever we can. 

In the New Testament the word vulnerable is never used.  Nevertheless, there is one point when Jesus appears to be talking about something very similar to our notion of vulnerability – in the Beatitudes.  There are a variety of possibilities of meaning for these eight declarations by Jesus and in many ways the measure of uncertainty about exactly what Jesus meant adds to their interest and value.  Here I shall restrict myself to commenting on the first two, both of which seem to have something to say about vulnerability.   In the first beatitude Jesus speaks about the poor in spirit.  Preachers often declare that the explanation they offer is close to the original meaning.  I would rather say that none of us can know definitively what Jesus really meant by this term.   I for one have always found the paraphrase in the New English Bible helpful. ‘Blessed are they who know their need of God’.  This communicates the idea of openness and vulnerability towards God so that we can come to him with right attitude for receiving what he has to give us. To accept that we are needy in a spiritual sense is one step along the road towards finding mercy, peace and forgiveness.   The poor in spirit could well be translated or paraphrased as Blessed are the vulnerable, if we take the NEB translation seriously.    

The second beatitude is also one where Jesus appears to be commending a group who are often thought to be weak or vulnerable, those who are in a state of grief.  The natural meaning of those who ‘mourn’ is to point to those who have lost a loved one.  Christian spirituality, however, knows other forms of grieving, including the mourning over evil and the pain of the world.  Grief could also be a reaction to the existence of sin, our own or that of others.   However we chose to interpret these first two beatitudes, we find ourselves exploring a range of spiritual/psychological states which belong to our topic of vulnerability.  The lack of one single interpretation for either of these two beatitudes allows us to range over a consideration of many different ideas.  Also, we find at different moments in our lives a meaning which fits more closely to our situation.  For example, the older we get, and encounter loss of loved ones, we need to hear this beatitude as a word of comfort for that grief.  When we are younger our grieving tears might be more appropriately shed for the appalling suffering revealed in the world’s continuing story of pain and poverty.  Grieving is appropriate as a response to pain of a variety of kinds.  I used to sum up my teaching on this beatitude by saying that Jesus commends in us a capacity for tears.  ‘Heaviness may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning’ as the Psalmist said.   Mourning and joy are commended by Jesus to be the two balancing aspects of Christian experience.  Vulnerability and joy are also to be balanced in the normal Christian life.  In short, while no one wants to be in the place of vulnerability and mourning all the time, they do belong to the Christian life and indeed are part of the journey of joy and grief that is set before us in our journey of Christian discipleship from birth to the grave 

Today, two documents have appeared in connection with the formal complaint made about the Archbishop of Canterbury by the complainant known as Graham. One is a press release from Lambeth Palace giving notice of the dismissal of the complaint https://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/news/update-safeguarding-complaint-against-archbishop-canterbury and the other is a press release from the complainant. https://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/pressrelease.pdf The background to this complaint was described in my last blog post connected with John Smyth. I mentioned the way that the Archbishop of Canterbury had become aware of serious accusations made against the former chairman of the Titus Trustees in 2013. This was a year after one of his victims, Graham, had made a disclosure to a senior clergyman in Cambridge involved with the Titus Trust. We have already made reference to the fact that Archbishop Welby knew John Smyth personally.  He has admitted visiting his house on one occasion. It has never been claimed that they were close friends, but Welby’s own conversion and background within the Christian faith owed much to the evangelical Christian networks in Cambridge in the 1970s.  Here Smyth also had many links. The network that is now known as ReNew was very strong in Cambridge. Mark Ruston and Jonathan Fletcher both exercised an influential ministry among undergraduates in that city through the Round Church. Many of the officers who worked at the Iwerne camps were undergraduates in Cambridge at that time, including the young Justin Welby and Nicky Gumbel. Networking is something that the REFORM/ReNew network have always done very successfully. The conservative evangelical world which originally nurtured Welby always strongly sustained a sense of camaraderie.  Archbishop Welby, although later broadening out in his churchmanship sympathies, did not appear to lose these connections and friendships with those in the world of conservative Anglicanism.

The 2013 complaint about John Smyth should have been a alarm call for Archbishop Welby. As I indicated in a previous blog on this topic, he certainly knew many people in Smyth’s network to ring up and ask what the story  was all about. I mentioned before an extraordinary lack of curiosity on Welby’s part. Do we perhaps detect an attitude of fear and the desire not to know what was being revealed?  Anyone who lived, as Welby did, on the periphery of the world of Jonathan Fletcher and John Smyth must have had some inkling that they were personalities which were at the very least controversial and possibly dangerous. While we can take Welby’s claim that he did not know John Smyth well, we would have expected that, as a newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, he would have wanted to investigate how far the scandal might go.  One of the principles of safeguarding, and well established as good practice by 2013, is to establish whether an individual poses any kind of risk. Although Smyth was a long way away in South Africa, he was still a potential risk in safeguarding terms. What did Welby do? He asked the Bishop of Ely to look into the matter.  A letter was written in 2013 by the Bishop of Ely to the Bishop of Table Bay outlining the risks posed by Smyth.    No reply was ever received. No follow-up was made, either by Welby or the Bishop of Ely. Neither was there another letter written, as far as we know. On a television programme in 2019, Welby claimed to have sent another letter at the same time to the Archbishop of Cape Town. In spite of enquiries, no copy of this later letter has ever been produced to confirm this claim. Smyth was active in legal circles in South Africa to within months of his death in 2018, and there was no attempt by him to hide from either the Church or the civil authorities in South Africa.

The complainant, Graham, has two major issues with the core group who examined his complaint against Archbishop Welby. In the first place he, as the complainant, was never formally interviewed to establish the facts from his perspective.  Both as a survivor and a safeguarding complainant he felt that he should have been properly heard.  It was as though the core group had no interest in establishing facts. In the second place it was stated today in the Lambeth statement that the complaint was simply about safeguarding practice.  From Graham’s perspective, the complaint was much wider than this. Archbishop Welby was in a position to stop John Smyth from having access to young people at any point between first hearing the about his misbehaviour in 2013 right down to the moment when the whole story came fully into the public domain in February 2017. Graham was also critical of the way that the chief of staff at Lambeth Palace, David Porter, approached him directly in an apparent attempt to interfere with the complaint process. This approach appeared to have the authority of the chairman of the Welby Core Group., Zena Marshall.  She is also the Deputy Director of the National Safeguarding Team. Graham has made this effort to subvert the process the topic of a further complaint.

As an outsider, I write my commentary based on the written documents before me.  I do not have the face to face interviews with the parties concerned.   With the evidence before me, I confess feeling considerable unease about what I see. Even when stripping out all the details of who knew what and when they knew it, something deeply dysfunctional is being revealed in these two documents. In 2013 (or possibly a year earlier) a huge destructive scandal came to the attention of the most senior leaders of the Church of England. This was not just about a vicar at the other end of the country committing some criminal offence. This was a complaint about an individual who was (or had been) influential and widely known to considerable numbers of clergy in the Church of England. Worse than Smyth’s original offences, which have never been contested, was the fact that these crimes were covered up for 30 years. A young man in Zimbabwe died at one of Smyth’s camps and there were some attempted suicides as well as many ruined lives.  It is hard to understand how a person with enormous influence in the Church, as Welby had, did not see this as a matter of extreme priority and deal with it decisively. For a core group later to say that there had been no safeguarding concerns about his actions in 2013 and later seems rather feeble. This weak lack of response suggests that there may have been, as with recent scandals in the Catholic Church, a desire to bury wrongdoing in the hope that it would just go away. I, for one, am deeply disappointed in the way that these documents reveal a lack of transparency, candour and honesty in facing up to the appalling abuse legacies of the past. There are, I believe, at least 22 victims of John Smyth who will all be re-abused by reading these documents and the institutional failures they will see in them.   Graham’s complaint against the processes set up by the NST has not been to all appearances properly answered. For all of these survivors this day, 12 November 2020, will be a day which they will remember forever as a moment when the Church of England has failed them once again.  It did this by not providing anything in the way of justice or a proper path to healing.

Long-term readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that I have, with many others, had some anxious moments fretting over the recent American election. When I woke up last Wednesday morning, it seemed that the fears of a re-election of President Trump might come to pass. Even after Joe Biden’s convincing win and his four million majority in the popular vote, there are still anomalies to be faced.  One glaring fact puts a dampener on the temptation to celebrate too extravagantly.  President Trump was the recipient of 70 million votes from his fellow countrymen.  This statistic is remarkable, and it requires an explanation, or at least some degree of inquiry.  For four years Trump has been exhibiting a combination of petulance, prejudice, gross lack of empathy, dishonesty and lying, coupled with rank incompetence in many of the tasks of government.  In spite of all this, huge numbers of people wanted him to continue to be the president of their country. The other great conundrum, which is closer to home, is the fact that hordes of self-proclaimed Christian people also decided that he was able to represent them and be their leader.   What can we say is going on when a man, totally absorbed with himself alone, appeals to so many people?

One of my friends in the cult world, Steven Hassan, has written a fascinating book with the title The Cult of Trump and this appeared at the end of 2019.   He is able to account for Trump’s appeal to large numbers of people at a very visceral level.  For example, Trump has been an arch-manipulator through the use of fear and hate speech.  He tells people that hordes of Mexicans are waiting at the border, wanting to rob honest Americans of their property, endanger their wives and take their jobs.   Such rhetoric can by-pass the normal critical thinking parts of the brain.   When such language is constantly reinforced by broadcasters, such as Fox News, you have the recipe for keeping many people on tenterhooks.  Fear-based thinking makes the individual open to consume the most extraordinary conspiracy theories and irrational thinking. Once a large swathe of the population begins to think in this way, they begin to become dependent on the source of this way of thinking.  Trump is the provider of this information, but also he offers himself as a potential rescuer from all these terrible threats.  This is a dynamic that also works well in a cultic context.   Somehow Trump has managed to infect a large section of the American population with this fearful mentality.

The most interesting part of Hassan’s book are his accounts of several of the ultra-right/Christian groups that have helped to fire up Trump’s obsessions and distortions.    The first of these organisations, we have time to look at, is called The Family. The history of this organisation goes back to 1935. A Norwegian, Abraham Vereide, had a vision when God spoke to him. ‘Christianity’, he was told, ‘has got it wrong for 2000 years in its focussing on the poor and the weak’.’ But’, the vision went on, ’it is only the big man who is capable of mending the world. But who would help the big man?’  In summary the Family was a kind of Christian fascism.  By 1953 Vereide had organised the first National Prayer Breakfast, a meeting that attracted many of the wealthy and powerful Washington elite. The Family had a vision that was strongly militaristic and fiercely anti-Communist. It envisaged a ruling class of Christ-committed men (shades of Iwerne camps?!).  These would be bound in a fellowship of anointed key men.  In short, Vereide and the Family were looking for a kind of theocratic dictatorship. So the Family’s strategy is to recruit people with money, power and special skills and invite them to these National Prayer Breakfasts. The ideology of the Breakfasts is not exclusively Christian or even Republican, but it remains firmly right-wing and authoritarian.  Christ’s message, as far as this group are concerned, was never really about love, mercy, justice or forgiveness. It was about power.  Evidently the Family approved of Trump, even though the exact relationship with him is unclear.  While Trump’s earlier relationship with the Family is not open for scrutiny, his vice-president Mike Pence has for some time been a key member.  With Pence at the right hand of the President, the Family came very close to fulfilling their dream of a group of religiously inclined supermen at the heart of government. Nine individuals with strong evangelical credentials were appointed to Trump’s cabinet. When Jeff Sessions, linked to the Family, left the Cabinet and was replaced by William Barr, there were, through him, links with another secretive Christian organisation, Opus Dei.

Another religious network which has been discussed here in a blog post a couple of years ago is the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR).  This network peddles ideas within the evangelical/Pentecostal world similar to The Family. The recently disgraced leader of Hillsong New York, Carl Lentz, is deeply involved in this organisation.  The key task of NAR is that of influencing and if possible, taking over every aspect of American culture (politics, business, education etc) with a well worked out Christian theocratic agenda. Trump has proved to be a useful tool in furthering some of these aims.  One significant inroad into American institutions has been made by the appointment of 200 conservative federal judges in different part of the country. From NAR’s perspective, there is an ongoing struggle to restore God’s rule in a society which has become increasingly secular and anti-Christian. It remains to be seen how deep the damage to American society has been through the making of these judicial appointments as well as other concessions to the Christian Right.

A further group, not especially religious in its inspiration, is found in the so-called libertarian movement. This network is inspired by the writings of the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. This writer, in a book called Atlas Shrugged, promoted a rugged individualistic ideology. Government, taxes and support of the poor are all unnecessary. Naturally Rand’s philosophy has special appeal for the tiny section of the population who are extremely rich.  Massive tax cuts for the rich seem to have come about, in part, through this influence of Rand on many Republican politicians.   From the perspective of this wealthy privileged group, democracy and socialism are both negative words.   They indicate a threat to wealthy privilege because the majority in society are being encouraged to gang up on the rich to carry out legalised theft. A great deal of energy has been expended by the Trump administration in trying to remove the medical insurance scheme of his predecessor, known as Obamacare.  We in the UK find it hard to understand the way the argument is made against ‘socialist medicine’.  Having a government in any way concerned with the needs of poor people, seems to be low on the agenda of many wealthy Trump supporters.  They have been quietly seduced by the assumptions of these extraordinary right-wing/Christian elitist ideologies.

Donald Trump seems to be a phenomenon which has been created by a combination of extreme right-wing ideas, a corruption of Christian ideology and other ideas that serve the interests of the very rich. Paradoxically and unexpectedly, this phenomenon of Trumpism has also been made into a commodity to appeal to many of the poorest elements in American society. There is a striking parallel between the messages of prosperity preachers, aimed at the poor, and the appeal of Trump to the same group.   Look at my wealth, my success and all the possessions that I enjoy.  You too can enjoy all of it by proxy through identification with me.  Trump’s self-presentation as a constant ‘winner’ is believed somehow to rub off on to all his followers.  The reality is, of course, is that things don’t work like that.   It is the same for followers of prosperity preachers. Both sets of promises are completely empty.  As we now know, the successful businessman trope is also a complete myth as far as Trump is concerned.  We suspect that it will all come tumbling down very quickly when the banks and other lenders realise that the Trump brand has been thoroughly trashed by all the reports of criminal behaviour. But, up to now, it has been possible for many to believe in and project on to this extraordinary larger-than-life figure.  Like a worshipped and feared father figure, Trump has drawn the adoration of millions.  We may not feel any of that attraction ourselves, but we need to feel some of its power as a way of understanding what is going on in this fascinating drama of American political life.  For us, as people concerned with the intersection between religious ideology and the rest of life, it is particularly interesting..  Too many of the same political and religious currents swirl around our own country for us ever to be complacent about what could happen to our own society.  

By David Brown

David Brown invites us to consider the dysfunctionality of a culture of conformity and cold authority that we frequently find in our churches.  He likens this to ‘Pharisee’ leaven which can infect the institution with a cold lovelessness.   By contrast, the leaven that Jesus offers to the Church is one that eschews power, control and attachment to status.  It is a Kingdom leaven, an inner transforming loving power which the Church desperately needs. Ed

I started work in 1992 for Keith Sutton, the godly Bishop of Lichfield, as his Lay Assistant, after 34 years in the Navy.  Feeling drained on retiring again in 2004, I wanted no further involvement with Anglican bureaucracy with its unjust treatment of some clergy, and unchallenged elements of dysfunctionality. These continued to trouble me; then new thinking shifted my understanding. 

Case 1.  I was invited back to investigate three separate parish crises, as Bishop’s Commissary.  I did so by taking eye-witness evidence of specific events.  In each case the Bishop’s Chaplain told me the Staff felt the Vicar was the problem, yet in each parish troubles stemmed from a skilled provocative bully—a long-standing treasurer, a long-standing warden, and a rebellious curate.  In the first two cases I visited the clergy couple first to hear their stories—they wept, for no-one from the diocese had ever listened to their stories.  In the first case, the Rural Dean and Assistant Rural Dean clearly despised the priest for his churchmanship—he being very high church

Case 2.  Other things had astonished me in my time in post.  One senior incumbent—revered I think by the Bishop’s Staff—was in the spotlight.  His archdeacon told my bishop of two reports he had received of fraudulent use of funds.  The Accounts Department had discovered false mileage claims for a four-parish benefice for ten years when he only had charge of three, perhaps amounting to £20,000.  The archdeacon also received a parishioner’s complaint that the vicar had hiked up the fees, irregularly, for her marriage-blessing service.  The archdeacon started negotiating.  If the incumbent, six-months’ short of retirement, handed in a signed retirement form with a £20,000 cheque for the DBF, he would call it a day.  This was beyond the archdeacon’s remit.  I suggested to my bishop this had to go to the police:  it was a crime against members of the public, and the diocese had no capability in criminal investigation.  So, it happened.  The police forensic accountants got to work and reported evidence of fraud to the level of £160,000.  The incumbent went to court, receiving a nine-month custodial sentence. Yet, this was not the end of the revelation.  I worked closely with the Diocesan Secretary.  Across the next three of so years, four different clergy who had been that priest’s curate, learned of the case through the media, and unbeknown to each other came to report their four stories—two to the Diocesan Secretary and two to me.  Each had, in their curacies, reported courageously to their area bishop or archdeacon—across several years—their incumbent ‘trousering’ money from the offering plate, I think habitually.  No action was taken against the incumbent.

Only the fourth curate heard anything further.  Years later, he asked to see me after I had retired, seeking any guidance I could give—he had been offered the Bishop’s Chaplain post in another diocese.  Ordained at about 40, he had been finance-director of a substantial company, exporting world-wide.  He told me his story.  After reporting the ‘trousering’ incidents, the archdeacon called him back.  “Robert”, he said, “you need to learn you’re no longer finance director of XXX, but a curate in the C of E.  To help you grasp the difference, I’m moving you to another parish.”  It was over 17 miles away.  His wife had to find a new job and their three children enter new schools.

Case 3.  The priest was from an overseas diocese with an extremist government. His bishop got wind that he was on the state-police hit list and needed to get out of the country. With alacrity, Lambeth and our Government departments got him and his family out.  Our diocese gave him a stipendiary post and accommodation.  He struggled with the culture change and seems not to have done too well.  Several years went by, during which time his wife got into uncontrollable debt that the diocese helped resolve.  Sadly, the marriage broke up acrimoniously, so he lost wife and children.  There was no sign that anyone was assigned to stand by him.  He was scorned by his area bishop and archdeacon, two in each case—his reputation going before him.  Eventually one of his two parishes was irregularly taken from him. Next, he was attacked with a machete.  Whilst in hospital, he was coerced into resigning.  After a while he was forced to leave his vicarage—his health in a parlous condition.  All his worldly possessions, documents and family photographs, remained in the garage and, after being given a month to remove them (which he could not do, having no place to put them) they were placed in a skip.  Once ousted, he spent some time sofa-surfing, but this came to an end.  His health failing, he was on the brink of living on the streets when the diocesan bishop heard some details of the case.  The priest, with a parishioner friend, was invited to Bishop’s House to tell his story—twice, for about three hours.  It all poured out.  +Keith Sutton was moved deeply, saying ‘I’m sorry’ repeatedly through each meeting.  He was given a parish appointment in a different episcopal area, his two-year pension gap filled, and his life stabilised over two or three years until he moved to another diocese.

My growing perspective.  I could tell many stories.  They are not about blame.  I have my own share of getting things wrong, and if immersed for years in the same culture as the figures mentioned, I doubt I would have acted much differently.  Yet, my past 15 years have been dominated by wondering how such practices—a pervasive dysfunctionality—can exist, unchallenged, in God’s Church. The Foundation for Church Leadership published my booklet “Releasing Bishops for Relationship” in 2008. I suggested how a bishop’s desk duties and unending meeting commitments might be lessened.  Although well-received by some, I doubt anything much changed.  Yet thoughts still came. 

I started to see that ‘culture’ rather than ‘system’, offered the right understanding—the line Jesus took.  He never suggested better ways of leading or organising his Jewish faith community.  Though sometimes training his disciples forcefully, the gospels astonishingly never tell of him blaming any individual, not even during his bogus trial.  I saw how this defined his ministry.  We read how, ‘‘when the crowd gathered by the thousands, so they trampled on one another, Jesus began to speak first to his disciples, “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, that is, their hypocrisy”. He used the ‘leaven word’ to contrast the two cultures ‘on the counter’.  By purveying Kingdom leaven, he equipped his disciples to do the same. It was his core message for all within earshot.  In parallel, he excoriated the Leaven of Herod, the scribes and Pharisees—in straight teaching, parable, and confronting its advocates corporately. The gospels are full of it. For me, ‘Leaven’ translates directly as ‘Culture’:  that is, how our associations and communities silently press us to conform.  It is a whole-community lifestyle thing. Jesus’s ministry may be described in leaven-terms:  he proclaimed and evinced the one, and declaimed against the other.  One carried God’s love, and the other a chilling lovelessness.  Lovelessness is the true opposite of love; hatred being only one part.  When Kingdom leaven shapes a community of believers, God’s power is released.

Inherited cultures work unnoticed.  We tend to see our own world through a non-cultural lens, noticing words and deeds yet not the power of over-arching culture.  Meanwhile we unconsciously put our ill-examined, inherited Church culture on constant display to the world outside.  This is surprising for followers of Christ.  First-century Judaism believed in God, yet scarcely his power—described sometimes as ‘religious atheism’.  Corporately, they swerved away, with power and status appetites, ignoring the needy.  The pattern seemingly lingers still.

Rank has just one purpose:  to define the responsibility level appropriate to a person’s giftedness.  It is not a mark of superiority.

In LEAVEN, I name four strands of worldly culture that have soiled God’s people across the centuries:

• use of controlling power,
• enchantment with historic customs,
• individualism, and
• dogmatism. 

Kingdom culture offers a better way.  Perhaps, even our Church’s well-intentioned Renewal and Reform project risks leaving the governing spiritual /cultural issues unaddressed.  Meanwhile, the lovelessness pandemic presses for a world where love―invariably of God―fades to illegibility, its presence removed, and memory wiped.

Recently, on the 26^th October, a 94 page document was published by the safeguarding charity, Thirtyone:eight, on the group of churches known as The Crowded House (TCH).  It is a document well worth studying because, among other things, it allows those of us who have never been part of a house-church environment to understand better how churches within this model operate.  I have chosen to focus on two aspects of this report which, between them, take us to the heart of the issues encountered by many independent churches led by single individuals.  One is  the leadership style.  The other is the question of whether the congregational members receive appropriate pastoral care for their individual needs.

TCH was originally a mission plant with indirect links to an Anglican parish, Christ Church Fulwood in Sheffield.  It was set up at the end of the 90s largely through the initiative of its founder/leader Steve Timmis.  He and another leader wrote a book exploring his vision for the congregation, called Total Church.  This appeared in 2007. I have not seen the book, although I understand that it explores the ideas of radical commitment both to God and to the church community. The small cluster of congregations that came under the umbrella of TCH in the Yorkshire/Sheffield area remained independent but developed an association with Acts 29, an American church network which strongly emphasises mission and evangelism.  Steven Timmis was later employed by the Acts 29 network to be an international director of the group.

The request, by Trustees for an independent learning review from Thirtyone:eight in February 2020, followed a critical article in the magazine Christianity Today appearing in that same month.   The article recorded the unhappiness of 15 members with the leadership style of Stephen Timmis.  They claimed that there was a pattern of spiritual abuse, bullying and intimidation.  It is impossible to attempt to summarise what the review revealed in this area, so I am taking a more global look as to why church members may sometimes find leadership oppressive.  There seems to be a tendency in churches which are initially attractive to young people and which provide exciting new experiences of church life, to go down such a path.  The main clientele of TCH when it was first set up was certainly fairly young.

It goes without saying that churches attractive to large groups of the young will feel quite different from established traditional congregations.  The main distinctiveness about such congregations is that there is great deal of youthful idealism and energy, with a readiness to be committed to a variety of programs involving, perhaps, evangelism or working in deprived areas.   Many young people will pass through large student congregations and enjoy the buzz of lively worship and preaching for the time they are students.  Because of the large numbers involved in these congregations, many will be happy to be attenders and observers rather than becoming deeply caught up in the inner life of the congregation.  Even those deeply involved have to move on for work and family reasons. They can look back and see the church of their university years as a stage in their pilgrimage.  It was never meant to be a place of permanent Christian residence.  Whatever new church they end up in, it is unlikely to demand the same things that were expected from them when they were young, free and full of energy.

TCH seems to have operated with a different model from the typical university student congregation. Although it appealed to the idealism and energy of young people when it was founded, it was also trying to create a pattern of church life for the long term. What seems to have been happening is that Timmis was expecting as much from older (30+) more mature congregants as he was from the youngest cohort.  When these older members resisted, they were told that they had ‘lost the vision’ or were no longer committed to God in the way that he, the leader, believed to be required of them.  The other issue was that some older members were expecting to grow into positions of responsibility and decision making.  Timmis had other ideas.  He wanted to preserve the same pattern of dependency that he had established when the church was first founded.  Whatever his gifts of preaching, evangelism and teaching, Timmis apparently lacked the gifts of empathy and discernment.  These would have enabled him to see that he needed to adapt to the congregation pastorally and in other ways.  His congregation was changing in terms of what they needed, and he was failing to respond to this fact.

In an interesting interview on The Pastor’s Heart, an Australian website, an Australian church leader, Stephen McAlpine, who had spent time with TCH in 2007, spoke of the tension that can occur when a highly committed group of young followers starts to grow up. Members initially come to a church excited by its offer of a vision and wanting to make their contribution to that vision.  But once they arrive, their own needs gradually come to the fore.  In short, they need to receive something back in terms of pastoral care as well as to give of themselves to the church’s vision..   The move from being idealising, energetic young believers to people facing ordinary life challenges is something that churches are not always ready for.   It is up to the leadership in any church to cope with these inevitable changes in the needs of its members.

In offering my personal take on this report, I am suggesting above all that the leader of TCH, Steve Timmis, was failing lamentably to respond appropriately to the needs of some individuals in his congregation.  This was becoming particularly apparent as these adherents of his church were growing and changing over time.  At the beginning of the journey, Timmis, as their leader, had understood well how to draw in a group of impressionable young people to share his gospel vision.  His sermons were universally appreciated.  He also found it easier to manage people when they were still in this state of dependency as they had been in the beginning.  Many of the problems uncovered by Thirtyone:eight were problems of a Timmis’ failure of flexibility to deal with individuals who were 15 -20 years older than when they had joined. He was a leader who needed to be in control, and this had the result that a part of the congregation was living in a state of suppressed frustration. Eventually this dissatisfaction exploded into a revolt and the article in the magazine Christianity Today.  A few days later Stephen Timms resigned, and the congregation asked to have a review commissioned by the safeguarding charity.  Their report is this document that we have today.

Most of the reports published about dysfunctional congregations and abuse situations in the Church of England over the past few years have involved sexual misconduct. Refreshingly there is no hint of this in the conduct of the leadership at TCH. We meet instead spiritual abuse alongside harmful examples of control, coercion and simple love of power.  The report deals helpfully and usefully with these concepts, ensuring that reader is up with the latest scholarly opinion on these topics. The Thirtyone:eight report is thus a model of informed commentary on all this material.  It can be read as a mini-textbook of applied theology and psychology which is completely up to date. 

The one thing that is missing from the TCH account is any speculation as to why Timmis should choose, consciously or not, to abuse his power.  As readers of this blog will know I have often discussed the potential issue of narcissism in religious leadership.  There are plenty of clues to suggest that Timmis, in his inability to delegate or share responsibility for the leadership of the church, was afflicted by narcissistic tendencies. In short, his identity had become so bound up with his position of controlling leader, that he could not let go of any of it without this threatening his sense of self-esteem.

Among those who suffered as the result of this narcissistic ministry were those who simply walked away.  Timmis discouraged any attempt to reach out to these leavers and they were normally ostracised as being people who had lost the vision or chosen the world in preference to radical discipleship.  According to my interpretation, these were people who had grown up and now needed something that they were not being offered, a way of living a life of discipleship compatible with family responsibilities and the demands of a career.  The remaining congregation got used to the simplistic explanations to explain these departures.  These rationales were both untrue and deeply unjust. It was also deeply damaging to declare, as TCH did, that any thought or action not coinciding with the will of the leader was sinful. Binary thinking like this always needs to be challenged. In TCH, as the report indicates, there was little in terms of challenging the leader.  A need for subservience was what was required.

The failure of TCH was a failure to allow balance and compassion to reign in the congregations.  Instead of allowing the Christian faith to enhance and enrich life, Timmis demanded from his followers a harsh and inflexible adherence to a vision that could never change.  I become very concerned when any Christian teacher suggests that Christianity is an inflexible body of truth.  Two words that are at the heart of the Christian message, compassion and forgiveness, reveal constant new insights as we ponder them and make them our own.  If these two words mean anything, they imply that God is reaching out to us where we are at that moment.  He never lays upon us impossible burdens that we cannot carry, but travels with us along life’s journey.

For the full text of the Report please click on the link

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/597b10f9ff7c509fce4c4729/t/5f9a7a535f044f0fdc82d3c8/1603959383931/Final+Report+-+The+Crowded+House+Learning+Review+-+October+2020.pdf

One of the permanent psychological legacies that many survivors of abuse have to carry is the possibility of being ‘triggered’ at any moment.  This is a kind of mental explosion which takes place when a past abusive event is reactivated by something seen or heard.  The mental shock involved in such a triggering can, in some cases, produce tears, shaking or other physical signs of distress and despair.  Most therapists who seek to help survivors are familiar with these symptoms. It does not make them easy to deal with.  They are never trivial or routine.  Triggering is a source of real pain and anguish for sufferers and it is possibly life-long for those who are afflicted by it

Recently on Youtube, a section of film, potentially triggering for survivors, appeared, which featured John Smyth, the notorious abuser.  He was speaking from South Africa about a notorious legal case there, the trial of the Paralympic athlete, Oscar Pistorius.  I watched it with a grim fascination so that I could get some feel for the man, his body language and the tone of his voice.   Hitherto I had only seen the muttered comments he had made in the fleeting Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman in February 2017.  The date of this other interview, 2014, was at a time when Smyth was apparently able to make frequent trips to the UK from South Africa.  His evident confident carefree pose also could have contributed to a potential triggering effect for any of his victims.  The significance of the date when it was made will become apparent as we go further into reviewing some other episodes in the more recent story of Smyth.

The outline of Smyth’s story is well known to readers of this blog.  His crimes of religiously inspired acts of violence against a group of boys and young men go back to the late 70s and early 80s.  These were linked to his position as Chair of the Iwerne Trust, a charity now called Titus Trust.  The Trust changed its name in an apparent attempt to distance itself from any involvement with Smyth and his crimes.  Both charities were/are under the influence, if not the control, of the REFORM/Church Society network and their leaders.  They were set up to inculcate a cadre of privileged public-school boys with the culture and beliefs of the strand of conservative evangelicalism favoured by the network.  In general terms, what is now called the ReNew constituency upholds a style of evangelicalism which stands apart from the more widespread variant favoured in charismatic circles.  It has favoured a patriarchal style of leadership which avoids granting women positions of real responsibility.  Although the ReNew strand of teaching and practice in the Church of England is not widespread, it does have considerable influence and access to wealth and power. When the crimes of Smyth first became known to the leaders of this network in the early 80s, there were powerful individuals on hand with the necessary financial clout to ship Smyth out of the country to Africa and support him financially until his death in 2018.

The recent story of John Smyth begins in 2012.  In that year two things happened.  The first was a newspaper column written by Anne Atkins in the Mail on Sunday, when she described the bare outlines of the Smyth story without giving his name.  Anne referred to this column when she appeared on Cathy Newman’s ground-breaking Channel 4 report in February 2017.  First she admitted that the unnamed Christian leader who was guilty of beating boys was indeed John Smyth.  What was more interesting was the way that Anne recalled the consequences of revealing this information to the Mail on Sunday readers.  To quote her words in the 2017 interview, she told us that ‘the flak I received after the article was horrible actually ……(it came) from people who were senior to me.  Why are you stirring all this up?’  These few words are fairly revelatory.  It implies that Anne was got at by people who knew all about the Smyth story, but they were also senior to her. By implication, these were the leaders in the Titus/REFORM network at that time.  The words she used tell us that the attacks were plural.  Some emanated from leaders; others possibly from rank and file members of the network like herself.  All who attacked her seemed to know the full Smyth story and were upset that the dam of secrecy and concealment was being breached. 

The Mail on Sunday article in 2012 was the first crack in the great Smyth cover-up.  The second event was the beginning of a correspondence between a Smyth survivor and a senior member of the Iwerne/REFORM network.  The survivor, who calls himself Graham has kindly shared with me the chronology of his own personal attempt to bring the events in a Winchester garden shed to the attention of the Trustees of the Iwerne camps and also the wider church.  The correspondence that Graham initiated in March 2012 was seeking, in the first place, access to psychiatric help   It. continued over 2012 and the first half of 2013.  In July 2013 Graham is finally passed on to the safeguarding team of the Ely diocese.  In Graham’s words, he hoped some well-oiled process would swing into action and the end result would be an offer to find and  pay for psychiatric or counselling support. 

The details of the correspondence by Graham with Ely reveal his heightening of frustration and anger.  One issue that caused Graham considerable grief was finding that his name had been shared by the Ely DSA with the Titus Trustees, ignoring his desire not to be named.  Much of the correspondence is about finding suitable therapy and support.  The money that was found came from private sources via the Titus Trustees, but it ran out in April 2015, having lasted for barely a year.

The other preoccupation of Graham was his attempt to alert the Church authorities to the continuing threat of Smyth himself, even though he was no longer living in Britain.  The Bishop of Ely wrote to the Archbishop of Cape Town to tell him, in some detail, the issues around Smyth.  The letter I have seen made it easy to find him by enclosing his current South African address. The idea that Smyth was uncontactable was patently absurd since he was an active figure in South African legal circles, working for the Justice Alliance of South Africa.   The Bishop of Ely received no replies and in May 2015 the DSA wrote to Graham to say that he ‘had no power to compel agencies in South Africa to respond to my concerns.’  This somewhat feeble response was the best that Ely could come up with in spite of seven letters from Graham between May 2014 and August 2015 to get the Church to take the whole issue seriously. The Titus Trust, although they knew that Smyth was entering Britain regularly on visits, refused to accept that they had any moral or legal obligations over his behaviour.  From that point until the Channel 4 programme in Feb 2017, the story was like a ‘pass the parcel’ game.  Nobody wanted to accept responsibility for enquiring too deeply into the abusive legacy of this man or the danger that he potentially posed for the church in the future.  Smyth, as is well known, died in Africa in mid-2018.

The story ends with no satisfactory conclusion.  But we have to ask what might have been done to help Graham and the other victims and to bring Smyth to some form of justice.  The key person who seems missing in action is of course Justin Welby.  No one claims that Welby knew anything prior to 1982 and what he knew after that was merely that Smyth had been uncovered for unspecified misbehaviour and banished.  But he certainly did know him personally and many in the network of people that Anne Atkins refers to in the Channel 4 interview.  Welby definitely heard about the Smyth affair in the autumn of 2013, possibly a year earlier.  This was around the same time as a group of ‘senior’ church people in the REFORM network were giving Atkins ‘flak’.  If Welby knew nothing before autumn 2013, he certainly knew lots of the people who could have brought him quickly up to speed over the Smyth affair.  All the evidence (anecdotally supported by Atkins) points to the detailed story having been shared among many individuals in the REFORM network.  This had been the crucible and setting for Welby’s own Christian conversion while at Cambridge in the 70s.  Was Welby not even curious to find out the full story, when the name Smyth was first mentioned in 2013 in a safeguarding context?  If Welby had leapt to and written formally to the Archbishop of Capetown in consultation with the Bishop of Ely, that dreadful ‘triggering’ interview might never have been able to take place.  The civil authorities in both South Africa and Britain might have been alerted to do their work much earlier.  What-if scenarios are seldom profitable speculations, but there seems to have been a failure to act with energy and alacrity and allow a safeguarding catastrophe which is still reverberating within the Church.  The Makin report is unlikely to resolve all the issues over the Smyth affair.  Indeed, it will once again reveal ‘shoddy and shambolic’ practice at the heart of the Church of England.