If you ever see a group of nine-year-old children, especially boys, arguing with one another, you can take a good guess at what the argument is about.  The argument will probably be linked to their inbuilt competitiveness.  Each child will be laying a claim to some achievement or having the best of something.  He has the best trainers/mobile phone/ family car or is the tallest/strongest/best at football in the group.  One child in the group may, however, recognise that he has nothing in his life that would count as being the biggest or best, so that when these arguments take place, he holds back.  But then one day he comes into the group with his eyes shining.  For a moment he is the centre of attention.  What has he acquired that makes him suddenly important?  He has obtained a piece of secret information.  It may be a bit of gossip about a teacher or news that a holiday is going to be announced.   For the short moment, while the boy has the secret which no one else possesses, he has the illusion of power.  I want in this post to think further about the power of some information.  Secret information can be a means of either liberation or alternatively the cause of toxic domination over others.   The plot in Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest centred around a single piece of information becoming known.  The information itself had power to release happiness into the present.  It would not be an exaggeration to think of the hidden information about the abandoned baby as being a kind of extra character in the plot, waiting to reveal itself at the right moment.

Information can be said, on occasion, to possess real power and the bearer of that information can also be seen to exercise this power.  We have of course observed on this blog numerous other ways of exercising power, and many of them have been described.  Today I want to focus on thinking about this way that information, especially when it is secret or restricted, can be a powerful tool of domination, whether in an individual relationship or within an institution.  Secrecy is just one more way that human beings can learn to use and control others.  While the exercise of legitimate power methods is a necessary part of institutional life, we need, however, to be aware of how any manifestation of power, including secrecy, can become a tool of evil when in the wrong hands.

The power that can accrue to someone having secret information is potentially a power that can cause widespread harm.  Secrets often remain hidden for long periods of time but that does not prevent them sometimes wreaking havoc in people’s lives, even while they are still hidden.  In my own thinking about secrets in the church, I have come to see that there are two particular ways in which secrets cause damage to individual people.  Let us examine each in turn.

The first example of a secret is the knowledge of a hidden shameful event from the past.  This knowledge may exist only inside someone’s memory or perhaps is known by another party and is used in some way to control the person involved.  The shame experienced may or may not be linked to something that has been done but the victim of the shame still wants the event to be hidden.  It may be a family scandal or an experience of abuse.  The sufferer dreads it being brought into the open.  This control may not rise to the level of actual blackmail but there will be the ever-present thought that this detrimental information might be revealed at any time.  That can be a constant blight to a person’s life. 

The second kind of secret also concerns a past deed known to a third party.  Here the interest is not in harming the person in any way.  Rather the opposite.  The one with knowledge wants to protect the one who carries guilt from their past activity.  Now the effort is to make sure that the event remains hidden so that also it cannot harm the organisation to which the perpetrator and his co-conspirator both belong.  Secrets are being kept in order to preserve reputations.  No consideration is given either to the demands of morality or keeping people safe.  The preservation of the secret has then the unfortunate consequence that the evil can fester and spread.  Evil flourishes not only because good men do nothing, but these men actually encourage the evil by tacitly tolerating it and refusing to act against it.

The power of the secret, as we can call it, is not only an action which can be the cause of evil among individuals.  It can also permeate the entire culture of an organisation.   We know that there is such a thing as confidentiality in the medical world and most people do not want every fact about their lives spread far and wide.  But some organisations take the principle of confidentiality and use to become a tool of coercive power.   When an organisation chooses to supress information by weeding the files of past embarrassing behaviour by its servants, that is a kind of information holocaust.  Of all the images that came out of the first stage of the IICSA hearing, it was the one describing a former dean returning after his retirement to burn files in the Deanery garden, that was most vivid and telling.  The Chichester cathedral close had been rife with scandal and safeguarding failures.  The power of the secret as a permeating evil spirit could be said to have been haunting the entire cathedral complex. 

Secrecy as a form of power still stalks the institutions and bodies of the Church of England.  The story of safeguarding is a story of cover-ups, information suppression and an apparent unwillingness by many in authority to show metanoia about all the secrets that have been kept by those in authority in the church.  Just to mention the names of Fletcher, Smyth and Ball conjures up images of filing cabinets with hidden secrets and files stuffed with information that should have been handed over decades ago.  In one comment to a recent SC blog, it was mentioned that one Giles Rawlinson had kept out of sight in his attic numerous files connected to the Smyth case.  At least the police eventually obtained sight of them, unlike the files that were burnt in the Chichester deanery garden.  If there is one word to describe the misuse of power by the ReNew constituency, it is this continuing use of secrecy.  Unlike other forms of evil, secrecy does not involve action or deliberate choice.  It just requires that an institution sits back and does nothing, smug in the complacency of its power.  It is that smugness and passivity that is now being challenged and will continue to be challenged.  Apart from fending off the questions being asked by survivors, official Inquiries, the police and the general public, the church and the constituent bodies within it now have to negotiate the new threat, the pandemic and its aftermath.  If there is one good thing that may come out of the present crisis it is the thought that secrecy and suppressing of information may be less tolerated within our church life as it negotiates its place within the post-pandemic society.   Secrecy, as a tool of power, has played a toxic role in the Church of England for too long. It is time for its expulsion from the life of the institution.

A fantasy examination question for an A level student fifty years from now, might read as follows.  ‘Competent leadership on the part of generals and politicians was a crucial element in enabling the Allied nations to obtain victory over Fascism in WW2.  Conversely, poor political leadership helped to exacerbate the International Pandemic of the 2020s.  Discuss.’   I realise that I have been thinking a lot about the failures and successes of leadership over recent weeks.  We now have the commemorations of the Second World War to remind us how another world-wide crisis was dealt with by our political leaders in the past.   I realised that it might be helpful to set out more what I believe this mysterious quality of leadership to consist of.  I am sure that somewhere among the 600 blog posts there are to be found some other reflections on the topic, but a discussion on leadership at this moment in history is going to be different from anything that has been offered before. 

 As I begin my random thoughts on leadership, I am comforted by the fact that, although there is a vast literature on the topic, there is much disagreement among the experts as to precisely what leadership is.   This allows someone like me, possessing no specialist expertise, to reflect on the topic, basing my remarks purely on life experience.   We all have had to cope with leaders and others with authority over us.  Maybe we have been in a situation where other people have looked to us to provide leadership.  What will be true is that everyone will have encountered the phenomenon of leadership and either benefited from it or suffered pain because it was exercised with ineptitude. 

This post will try to focus on the positive aspects of leadership.  Examples of bad practice no doubt will emerge as we explore the leadership that can be inspiring, helpful and transformative.  We routinely think of leadership as a corporate matter, with a leader having authority over groups of people.  We need, I believe, to start in a different place.  Leadership begins in the human family.  In a traditional family where there are two parents, one parent will typically take on the main nurturing protective role of a child.  This will normally be the mother in a heterosexual partnership. But there is a further parenting and leadership role to be performed.  That is the task of gradually introducing the child to the wider world, teaching him/her social skills and the ability to care for and protect him/herself and generally function within what will be the adult sphere.  Child rearing will have both these aspects, nurture and challenge.  Typically, a father will shoulder a significant part of this second area of responsibility.  Teaching/leading a child to operate outside the safety of the home is a gradual process lasting a considerable number of years.   Later on in life, many of us will seek out other individuals who will continue certain aspects of this parenting role.  Their role in our lives is often described as being a mentor.   Such a individual helps us by, for example, reflecting with us on difficult situations we face.  He/she may offer assessments of future challenges that we are considering.  A typical scenario would be a job application.  The mentor may well help us clarify the positives and the negatives of a post and whether we are suitable to take up the challenges involved in it. 

The parent/mentor model embodies several of the qualities of a good church or political leader.   Such a figure will want to be a guide, an encourager and one who can see the way ahead with a degree of clarity.    Above all, a leader is going to be a person who only wants good for those in his/her charge.  Obviously, when someone has large numbers of people to care for, they cannot know everyone personally.  They can, however, be expected to ‘have their ear to the ground’ to pick up the dominant feelings and aspirations of their group.  Thus, when decisions are made by a leader which affect every member of a group or a nation, the individuals within it may reasonably expect to feel included somewhere in that decision.  When, on the other hand, leaders make decisions that benefit either only themselves or their small band of cronies, the typical person among the followers will be able to spot that self-serving action.  If, on the other hand, there has been a genuine attempt to do the very best for the majority that also will be picked up.  The key to leadership is good communication.  When men and women of power work in secret, that will always create distrust, resentment and resistance among the followers. 

One of the best descriptions of leadership I have read, links a leader to a vision for his or her group.  The leader has this vision and, through the skills of rhetoric and persuasion, draws in his followers to join him/her in sharing it.   It may or may not be a message of new prosperity and plenty.  A leader, like Churchill, was inviting followers to a tough period of ‘tears and sweat’.  The leader is the one that can successfully articulate and communicate what needs to be said in a given situation and invite the followers to prepare for it.  The important skill for any leader is the correct interpretation of the times and the ability to know what will be acceptable to the followers in effectively responding to it.  That, of course, will demand gifts of a high order. I am unsure whether there is currently anyone on the political front or in church leadership who can, in fact, perform this role?  At the risk of repeating what I said in the last blog post, the future of the nation and the churches looks bleak at present.  From our political leaders we will need help to face up to the possibilities of shortages, increased unemployment and severe social pain.  While setting out these grim realities, it will also be important to rally people around the possibility that such pain can be borne and be the harbinger of a new sort of society and church life.  Froghole has helpfully listed several of the steps that might be taken to allow the ordinary members of society not to feel forgotten.  I noted one suggestion which involved the closing down of financial boltholes in British Overseas Territories.  If the covid-19 age has the consequence that society ends up with even greater inequality, that will be a stain on this country’s history which will never be erased.  If we are to have greater economic hardship, then everyone must accept their share.  I am not suggesting some fantasy equality for all, as this, historically, has proved unworkable as an aspiration.  Political leadership in this situation is explaining to people what is required of every member of society.   We need from our political masters some clear facts, even if they are initially extremely unpalatable.   

The leadership of the Church has, to all appearances, been paralysed by the virus.  As I articulated in the last post, there is something slight awry when church leaders gather to discuss how the church is going to pass through the present crisis but keep their deliberations secret.  When the committees of Church House and the House of Bishops play this game of secrecy, they imply that they own the church in a way that is not true of the rest of us.  If dramatic contingency plans are being made, we need to know.  If there is a hope that the show goes on as before, we also need to be told.   Leadership, good leadership should be telling us the prognosis for the future, good or bad.  Will the church not be healthier for facing up to reality and beginning to adapt to coping with its implications?   

Many people in this country have watched the television mini-series Chernobyl, even though it has not been transmitted by the main terrestrial channels.  It is a powerful drama/documentary and helps us to understand the moral bankruptcy of the Soviet system some five years before its final collapse.  The judgement of Mikhail Gorbachev, no less, was that the explosion at the plant was the ‘turning point’ that ‘opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the system as we knew it could no longer continue’. 

Viewed from this perspective, the drama and the event that was portrayed in it was less about a nuclear event and more about a once mighty institution being tested by a crisis and failing, lamentably, to respond adequately.  The most telling parts of the drama are the exchanges about truth and its control during the course of the drama.  To stop the outside world knowing what had happened, phone lines were cut and Moscow rejected an immediate evacuation of the neighbouring town, Pripyat, and the surrounding area.   ‘Panic is even worse than radiation’ Boris Shcherbina, a vice-chairman of the Council of Ministers supervising the management of the crisis, declared.  As a good party functionary Shcherbina was giving voice to the paranoid communist aversion to ‘alarmism’. This was a crime in the Soviet Union and it could see its perpetrator sent to a labour camp.  It was not as though ‘truth’ did not exist within the system, but that the ruling communist system was the arbiter of which truth was allowed to prevail.  In one memorable scene, to rapturous applause, Zharkov, a veteran communist and member of the Pripyat governing council, makes a statement espousing rudimentary communist morality to local officials.  ‘No one leaves [Pripyat]. And cut the phone lines. Contain the spread of misinformation. That is how we keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labour.’

The priority of the ‘system’ over truth and the preservation of human life has an eery parallel to the events in America today.  It has been apparent for some time that, for Donald Trump, ‘truth’ is what furthers his political future.  It has very little to do with reality or the good of the people for whom he has responsibility as President.  Lies and false claims of success help to make him feel good about himself, feeding his toxically narcissistic personality.  His desire and need to retain power is also obsessive.  He enjoys being at the pinnacle of influence, but his enjoyment of such a position is also connected to a fear that, were he to lose it, an avalanche of lawsuits for financial skullduggery and other crimes will descend on him the moment he leaves office.  For supporters, Trump’s power and confidence becomes their power.  As with cult membership they identify with their leader and share in his ‘achievements’.  They have allowed themselves to become merged in some real sense with his personality so they cannot stand apart and see anything wrong in what he says or does.  His ‘truth’ has become their truth and they cannot see the high price that they are paying to live in a distorted universe of Trump’s making.

The social situations we have described refer to very different historical settings.  But Soviet Russia and Trump’s America have something in common.  Both have provided, for some sections of the population, a system or institution that can be relied on and believed in.  In both cases what was believed in was rooted in deceit and lies but that did not matter as what was gained appeared to outdo that.  Having an institution to lean on, whether Soviet communism or Trumpian triumphalism, removes anxiety and self-doubt – for a time.  But each of them provides a reason for not thinking or taking a critical look at what is going on around.  In such a situation anxiety is banished, internal calm is restored.  It does not matter that the telephone to the world beyond is severed, as long as peace and tranquillity is preserved within the mind of the blind follower.

Trusting that an institution or a person is totally reliable so that you do not have to think things out for yourself is what small children and totalitarian followers do.   It is almost as though the ability to think through complex ideas and to have an opinion of one’s own is too hard for many people.  It is the situation that allows the instant ready to serve opinions of the Daily Mail and Fox News to flourish.   Sadly, the desire to go into a ‘not-think’ state applies to many church people.   This blog post often refers to the anti-intellectualism of right-wing fundamentalists in the States, but we are not referring to them at this point.  What we are talking about is the failure of many people to challenge institutional thinking or any voice that appears to have authority.  We may not think of ourselves as being subject to the decrees of institutions, but intellectual laziness is sadly extremely common.  When there is such mental laziness around, those who have power can get away with misusing it.  Most of the time it is not appropriate to use the word ‘abuse’ to describe what is going on.   Rather we should perhaps speak of acquiescing in an unhealthy power dynamic which is subtly undermining an individual and their capacity for individual agency.

The ‘not-think’ state that exists in churches, as individuals lean on leaders and the institution itself, is part of the reason that makes it difficult for survivors to be heard and the cause of justice generally to prevail. I am well aware that justice for abuse survivors is not the only issue that church people should be fighting for. The fact that there are other rampant injustices towards minorities of all kinds in the church is well known. Each of these deserves to have vigorous spokespeople demanding our attention.  The supporters of all these causes will probably have the same complaint. Their fellow Christians are often beset, not by wickedness, but everywhere there is a prevailing apathy, laziness and the pursuit of comfort which distracts them from a proper engagement with the issues.  These same forces of apathy, which disengage mind and feeling, allowed the Soviet system to exist for a long time.  They also allow Donald Trump to bewitch a large minority of the American people, in spite of the inanity and shallowness of his words and thoughts.  The call to lift people out of inert thinking to active engagement with the causes of our time is not meant to be biased towards a particular political party view.  It is asking people not to lean on institutions, but to engage individually with the matters of the day using their thinking, their feeling and their consciences.

On a final note we may suggest that both in the State and in the churches we are suffering from a paralysis of leadership.  Leadership in these contexts is not telling people what to do or what to think.  It is getting people to fully engage with what is going on and use all these abilities of feeling and intellect to grapple with and respond to events.  I have yet to hear clear words of leadership from the Prime Minister or our religious leaders.  I would like to see some imaginative prophetic thinking going on to suggest how the path to the future should unfold.  Things are going to be different for our nation and for the world in general.  As things stand, there will be massive costs to be paid for by future generations.   Rather than penalise only our children and grandchildren, we should be talking about the costs to our generation, those that need to be met now.  From the State I would expect to hear something about increased taxes and from the Church some straight talking about what the institution can realistically afford in the future.  Even ‘back of the envelope’ calculations suggest that there is going to be an earthquake ahead in what the church can afford to sustain in terms of its activities  The sooner that planning starts in earnest to adjust to this future, the better.  Leadership in the Church of England needs to be open.  The calamities and failures of safeguarding have been partly as the result of the church, at the leadership level, attempting to hide its crises in secret committees.  If the transition to the future, whatever that may involve, is to be a smooth one, we need to hear far more of what goes on behind closed doors.  Institutional self-protectionism is no longer appropriate.  The  institutionally dictated attitudes that have failed us in many safeguarding events need to be overcome.  We need to feel that the church authorities are truly on our side.

Three weeks back, I wrote about the financial settlement, announced by the Titus Trustees, with three Smyth survivors.  My comments about the accompanying statement, issued at the same time by Titus, were that it was less than satisfactory.  There was no real engagement with the pain of the survivors caused by Smyth either in Britain or in Zimbabwe.  If the Titus Trustees believed that the announcement was going to give them a good press, they were mistaken.  Among the observations made here on this blog, and elsewhere, was the fact that far more charitable money has been spent fending off the complainants and protecting Titus assets, than used on the actual settlements.  In short, the charity trustees seem to have been most focused on preserving their wealth.  The question about how they might most generously and charitably help victims and survivors of Smyth’s brutal activities, does not appear to have been asked.

In the last few days we have learnt of a further development in the story.  The Rev Simon Austen, the Vicar of an active conservative Anglican parish in Exeter and Chair of the Trustees running the Iwerne camps, has relinquished the post of Chair and Trustee.  This second piece of news is worthy of comment.  Of course, the explanation for this resignation may be completely mundane.  The demands of a busy parish may indeed mean that he does not have the time to give to the trustee work.   But the history of Iwerne/Titus is such that it is hard not to speculate that an event like this has a deeper significance. The original Titus announcement about the survivor settlements was issued by press release on a Friday evening in Passion Week.  We might wonder whether there was a hope that it would be overlooked.  This second piece of information about Simon’s resignation was not the subject of any press announcement at all.  His name as a Trustee simply disappeared from the website and on the record in Companies House it was stated that the this resignation had taken place on the 9^th April, the day before Good Friday.  Once again there seems to be an attempt to keep this news under the radar.  A spokesman for St Leonard’s Church, Exeter stated that Simon had come to the end of an agreed period of office.

The Titus Trust are entering a very difficult period in their history.  Apart from the announcement of the financial settlement a week previously, the Trustees are now apparently cooperating more freely with Keith Makin’s inquiry into the Smyth affair.  Indeed, it is hard for them to refuse to do so now, since their excuse has always been the existence of a law suit now concluded.  We still, however, have yet to witness any real expressions of enthusiasm for sharing information from this quarter.  The one thing that the ReNew/REFORM/Iwerne constituency have proved to be excellent at is the keeping of secrets.

Why did Simon Austen really resign?  We have no definite means of knowing anything beyond the official reason given.  It cannot be a popular decision for him to have taken as far the Trust is concerned.  It is hard to see who else is going to want to willingly occupy the position of chair of an organisation, now so much under scrutiny.  Apart from Keith Makin’s enquiry, there is also a promised cultural review to be conducted by the trustees themselves.  Unless the trustees have already determined what conclusions are going to be revealed ahead of time, these enquiries are likely to be less than comfortable for all concerned.  The networks that intersect with Titus and Iwerne Trust before it, are crammed full of secrets and no one in that group will have any interest in revealing them.  The story of Smyth’s activities and his downfall have been shown to implicate others who knew but did nothing.

The Smyth affair has never been just about one person’s evil proclivities.  As I have claimed several times it is a story of institutional secrets, conspiracy to cover-up, tribal loyalties and corrupt behaviour by a range of people.  Simon’s resignation may be one person attempting to distance himself from a leaky wooden boat which is rat-infested and taking on water.  But from what I can gather, Simon, like all the members of the network, must know murky things about the past.  This means that he cannot so easily walk away from the secret-infested culture of Iwerne/Titus of the past thirty years. 

In my interest in power dynamics and my observations of the ReNew network, I have noticed that everyone taking a position of responsibility within the network has been promoted through a system of patronage.  Like an old-fashioned mediaeval kingdom, the positions of power and influence are handed out to those who have been ‘approved’ by the ReNew leadership.   This finds its centre in the main conservative parishes like St Helen’s in London.  Past and present (and future?) chairs of Titus have all apparently received the stamp of approval from this leadership core within this powerful conservative wing of the Church of England.  The power they possess consists of three strands.  They have massive wealth which allows them to be financially independent of the Church authorities at the centre.  At the same time the parishes in the constituency can threaten to withhold money from dioceses.  They know that if that threat were ever carried out, it could cripple the work of an entire diocese.  Secondly, they have the power of patronage, as has been discussed.  Thirdly they have the power of being able to control information through strong tribal loyalties.  Smyth’s and Fletcher’s misbehaviours were supressed for over thirty years.  Even now, with all the information being revealed to the press and outside enquiries, the typical member of the ReNew network remains unwilling to share information even if he/she may have been a victim.  Inquiries and investigations have still to reveal more about what happened in the past.  Those who were the victims of Smyth’s and Fletcher’s behaviour continue to suffer because the full truth has never been properly told.  The power of omerta is at work in this network and that power creates its own special flavour of evil.   Do those with knowledge of evil actions in the past, as actors, witnesses or sufferers, not realise that their silence acts as collusion for something deeply toxic?

The resignation of Simon Austen and the lack of information about the true reasons may indeed be a matter of little importance.  But, to judge by the way that the ReNew group behaves and keeps secrets which damage people, they have no right to expect to be believed by outsiders when they offer innocent explanations for the events that take place.  Withholding information, as Iwerne/ReNew have consistently done over so long a period can be seen as an act of hostile and aggressive behaviour towards the innocent.  When we finally see clear evidence of metanoia and open sharing of truth on the part of leadership of this ReNew constituency, then we will begin to believe that they are being honest with us.  Until then, we will hold on to the thought that the only thing that seems really to interest them is their influence over others and their maintenance of their power within the church.   The incubation of evils like that of Smyth and Fletcher has had the long-term effect of making the whole network appear toxic to the rest of the church.  Can we really be blamed for that attitude, even if it is not completely fair?

Over the past few days, I have found myself reflecting further on the mechanics of safeguarding as practised by the Church of England.  I noted that so-called core groups possess a potential conflict of purpose.  What are they really supposed to accomplish?   How do they operate within what we have suggested is a somewhat dysfunctional safeguarding industry within the church?

When we try to find out what is the official scope and function of these groups, we may look at an official statement set out in a House of Bishops document from 2017.  This is entitled Practice Guidance: Responding to, assessing and managing safeguarding concerns or allegations against church officers.  Some key words from this document are as follows.  ‘The purpose of the core group is to oversee and manage the response to a safeguarding concern or allegation …….ensuring that the rights of the victim/survivor and the respondent to a fair and thorough investigation can be preserved.’  The task of responsibility towards a victim is also expressed in the words: ‘Ensuring how the victim/survivor and/or their family can best be supported by advising the DSA’.  This understanding of the working of core groups is very close to the model adopted in social work practice.  In that context, as it relates to the care of a child or vulnerable adult, a team of individuals, each with a professional interest in the case, would come together to discuss it.  In many cases, when appropriate, the parent of the child or even the child him/herself would be invited to take part in the process.  This incorporation of a practice from the world of social care is to be expected as most of the first generation of safeguarding officers on the national team in 2015 seem to have shared this professional background.

Some serious flaws in the functioning of the core groups within the church seem to have begun early on.  A first problem was the fact that these groups were convened and met in secret.  Gilo has told me that, although there was a church core group convened to discuss his particular case, he was told nothing about it for 18 months.  Even when he heard about it, he was not informed of the identity of the members.  I am also told by a John Smyth/Iwerne survivor that the NST (National Safeguarding Team) informed him that the John Smyth core group was disbanded on his death. In addition, the survivor was never allowed to know who had been in that core group. This again shows a complete lack of interest in the well-being and support of the Smyth survivors. It is almost as if a corporate sigh of relief was uttered now that the perpetrator was off the scene. One of the issues about the Smyth scandal is the way the episode implicates senior churchmen within the Anglican establishment. Any excuse to shut down investigations and discussion would no doubt have been welcome by those who had been close to Smyth in the past. The speed of closure illustrates clearly the core group’s preoccupation with perpetrators and the damage they could have caused to the wider church. Support of survivors does not seem to appear anywhere on their agenda.

One professional outsider who was allowed to attend a core group meeting was Ian Elliott, the author of the Elliott report.  His reflections on what he observed were shared with the IICSA hearing last July.  His testimony focused on the way that the core meeting model that he was familiar with in his professional life, sharply diverged with the way the meeting was conducted in the church setting.  He testified:  ‘I was initially expecting that the core group meeting would be similar to a case conference model, which I would be familiar with, but essentially would be a meeting whereby all those who were providing care and support would come together… I did not think that that was happening at that meeting.  I felt that it was very much a business meeting that it didn’t have a focus specifically on the case and the welfare of A4.  I was quite shocked by that.  A4 was not in attendance; no one was there as such representing him…… I spent some time talking at length to members of NST to establish exactly what was the purpose of a core group meeting, as such.‘

Ian was then asked by a member of the IICSA panel for the answer that he had received from this questioning.  Ian’s answer was telling and chimes in with the impression given to survivors who have asked the same questions of others involved in safeguarding work.  ‘It was essentially a business meeting, but the focus, I think, was more to do with the protection of the institution, the protection of the church as opposed to the care and welfare of A4.‘

These words in many ways sum up what seems to have happened everywhere with core groups since the Church of England first adopted them as part of its practice.  Instead of psychologists, psychotherapists and others on the group who would be anxious to promote the pastoral needs of victims, we find the safeguarding professionals supported by lawyers, communications experts and representatives of insurance companies.  The cynic in me would ask: Is it any surprise that core groups have been conducted in an atmosphere of secrecy and concealment, when there is so much that needs to be hidden from sight?  Ian commented further in a interview on the Radio 4 Sunday programme.   ‘In my experience, affording the subject of the meeting, the survivor, the opportunity to contribute to it, makes for much better outcomes.  … (The meeting) is rooted in attitudes to survivors which are totally misguided, misplaced and unacceptable.‘ Phil Johnson, the chair of MACSAS, the survivors’ group and also interviewed on the same programme, added his assessment:  ‘These core groups demonstrate the extent to which the church is more interested in financial considerations  than the well-being and care for victims.‘

After reading Ian Elliot’s professional assessment of what was going on at the core group he attended, we find ourselves understanding the House of Bishops’ guidance in a different way.  They spoke about ‘managing the response to a safeguarding concern or allegation’.  It would appear that ‘management’ in this context is in fact about settlements, protecting the church’s reputation and generally avoiding bad publicity as far as possible.  The second part of the management process, ‘ensuring how the victim/survivor and/or their family can best be supported’ seems to be absent.  Although we would expect the church to have a system for protecting its reputation, it is bizarre that anyone should conceive of doing such protection while at the same time pretending to be caring about the interests of survivors.   These two aims, as I and others have pointed out before, are extremely hard to fulfil at the same time.   In the end, to judge by the individuals chosen to be members of the core groups that we know about, the church has decided to lean firmly in the direction of ‘managing’ the interests of the institution rather the care of survivors.   Secrecy and indeed confusion about what are the true purposes of safeguarding generally are still a feature of much of what goes on in this world.  Sometimes we hear the expression ‘lessons learned’ in connection with safeguarding reviews that are conducted from time to time.  I cannot be the only individual who wonders whether the church is really learning lessons.  Recently a Dean of a major cathedral was suspended and then re-instated over a safeguarding issue.  The details of the case have never been published or shared with the wider public.  How can anyone learn anything if important safeguarding information is not shared?

This brief look at the issue of core groups in the church has a final footnote which leaves us feeling that things are not going to change soon.  Back in 2012/13 the publicity machine of the Church of England received a shake-up when the full horror of past abuse cases in the church was beginning to become apparent.  Around that time, a new appointee to the post of Director of Communications for the Archbishop’s Council was a former communications officer/priest/lawyer, one Arun Arora.  Although the appointment attracted some negative publicity, there was one positive thing to give us hope.  Those looking for a new culture of openness in the C/E noted that Arora had stated, in an article, his support for the principle of institutions/professions not being allowed to ‘mark their homework’.  He had written: ‘the rights of any profession to both represent and regulate its members are outmoded, outdated and outweighed by the need for consumer protection and confidence’.  And yet, disappointingly, during Arora’s time working for the church, nothing of a new way of dealing with past murkiness appeared.  The culture of secrecy, suppression of scandal and injustices towards survivors has continued.  In this process, in spite of the affirmations of the House of Bishops, the core groups, that have come into being, have become part of the problem.  Affirming justice and revealing truth about the past are honourable aims but the church is slow and unwilling to make these its priorities.  The critique by Ian Elliott and others over the work of core groups has never been answered.  The C/E has to be more open in its dealings with survivors as well as its own past.  The core groups, which have been evolving since around 2015, have, apparently, become a method to contain scandal rather than one for promoting the cause of truth and justice.  Do the rest of us have to regard them as weapons of defence for the church rather than instruments of justice and compassion for those who have suffered?  

By Janet Fife

The summer of 1972 stands out in my memory.  I’d finished my first year of college, during which my family moved from Florida to California where my father pastored a church. That summer I volunteered as work crew at a Christian wilderness camp on Catalina Island, nearly 30 miles off the southern California coast. The island is mountainous desert with feral goats, pigs, and bison; Campus by the Sea was sited in a private cove accessible only by boat. There was no electricity and very little running water. The main dining and lecture hall had open sides, and most of the cabins had only partial walls. We spent the whole halcyon summer out of doors or in the sea.

My job for the summer was to run the laundry. I had an ancient twin-tub machine powered by a lawnmower engine bolted to a frame. I had to make the most of the limited water supply, cope with the lawnmower engine, and train a series of short-term helpers to keep their fingers out of the wringer. It was hard work but I enjoyed it. Time off was spent hiking, swimming, snorkelling or, on rare occasions a trip into Avalon (the only real town) by boat when my day off coincided with a trip for supplies.

But perhaps the most special feature of that summer was that most of the work crew were in our teens or early twenties; and many of us had been swept up in the Jesus Movement, a genuine religious revival among young people. It’s impossible to recapture or to describe what it’s like to be part of such a revival. “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven.” In the worship part of our daily team meetings we almost seemed to be touching heaven at times.

There was something missing, though, and as the summer wore on we felt its lack more and more keenly:  we had no access to Holy Communion. None of the groups visiting the camp brought a minister with them and we couldn’t get to church in Avalon. Summer was near its end when, finally, a group arrived at camp with their pastor. By then I’d been without Communion for 3 months, and most of the others had too.  There was anticipation when we learned that this group planned to hold a Communion service on their last evening with us. We asked if we could join them – and were refused. It was a hurt and disconsolate group who gathered for our team meeting.

I don’t remember the details of our discussion, but I do remember the outcome. We decided to hold our own Communion service that evening, led by Rob ‘Otto’ Kroeger (son of theologian Catherine Clark Kroeger) and myself. We gathered in a crew cabin, huddled on bunk beds. One of the cooks brought bread and cooking wine from the kitchen. We read the Bible, prayed together, and aired some of the tensions which inevitably arise when a group of people live and work in close quarters (‘Bill thinks Christians should have all things in common, except his wetsuit and his 12-string guitar’…). We forgave each other. And then Otto and I celebrated Holy Communion, as I had seen my father do it.

It was one of the most moving and deeply meaningful Communion services I have ever experienced. When it had finished we didn’t want to separate, so we adjourned to an empty cabin with a small kitchen and had a love feast of abalone rolls.

Strangely, God didn’t seem to mind that neither Otto nor I was ordained; that I was a girl; or that I hadn’t yet even been baptized (my baptism was scheduled for the autumn). God’s presence was palpable, despite all these drawbacks. And it made a difference to the way we related to each other for the rest of the summer.

I have recalled this episode when reading some contributions to the ongoing debate about ‘virtual’ Holy Communion. Some tell us that if we take bread and wine while watching a live streamed Eucharist, we are not really taking Communion. Others would discourage us from taking bread and wine at all. This baffles me. The Communion brought to me at home, where I have not taken part in the service with others, and not heard or seen the consecrating prayer, is held to be the real thing. So when I have joined an online service, sung the hymns, prayed with others, followed the eucharistic prayer  – why would that not be a valid communion? Do we believe that the God who created multiple solar systems is limited by space and time?

I have felt the same bafflement when hearing people say that they are ‘not in communion with’ certain other Christians. A Roman Catholic nun colleague once said to me that, ‘When we take Holy Communion we’re in communion with the Pope and all the saints, and when you take communion you aren’t.’ There are Anglicans who don’t recognise the Communion services of other denominations as valid. Within the Church of England there are diocesan clergy conferences and Maundy Thursday Eucharists where there are separate celebrations for those who recognise female priests and those who don’t. But if I am in communion with Christ, and you are in communion with Christ, how can we not be in communion with each other? ‘Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread.’ The bread is not the priest’s wafer but Christ, the bread of life. Every Christian is part of that body, even if their church has no eucharist at all. They share in Christ in other ways.

Each Christian denomination has the right to order itself in the ways it thinks best, and those who belong to it should submit to that discipline. That is right and proper, for ‘all things should be done decently and in order’. In exceptional circumstances, however, the usual order may need to be changed. And we should at all times recognise that the Holy Spirit is not bound by the rules of our particular Church.

The Bible gives us little reason to think that celebrations of the Eucharist ought to be limited to a priestly caste; the Passover is observed in Jewish homes. It’s likely that many of the restrictions which have long hedged round Anglican and Roman Catholic Eucharists arose from the Roman Empire’s need to control its people once Christianity became the empire’s recognised religion. In Yorkshire we have an expression that a particularly loving and generous person ‘has a heart as big as a dinner plate’. God’s heart is so big the whole cosmos cannot contain it. In these difficult times, the Eternal Love will not leave his people unfed and uncomforted.

 In the last piece, I wrote about the way our capacity for independent thinking is often compromised by external influences.  We may experience these at any moment of our lives.  This was an idea that I lifted from my reading some twenty years ago of a book, Influence, Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini.  The book was first published in 1984 and has proved to be a classic of social psychology.  It has been very influential among religious students and sales experts alike.  Those who study cults of various kinds also quote it frequently.  The ideas contained within it have stood the test of time well.  Cialdini’s basic idea can be stated very simply.  To persuade or influence another person, you need to apply one or more of six principles of social influence.  These are, using merely the headings, reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity.  I do not have the space to explore what each of these principles involves, but to give a flavour of how they work, I can take one topical example.  People, in a pandemic like the current one, are easily persuaded by the rumour that there is a scarcity of loo rolls in the shops.  This rumour then creates its own momentum and the shelves are quickly stripped bare of this commodity.   The sight of empty shelves brings into operation a second principle of influence, social proof.  Everyone else is doing it, so we continue to be convinced that we need to go on hoarding.   In spite of there never having been a real shortage, these two examples of social influence at work have resulted in irrational behaviour (and a shortage of a commodity!) by large numbers of people.

Cialdini’s ideas on influence can be applied in many different situations and contexts.  People want to be liked, to be consistent etc., but we can easily imagine situations where fitting in with others in accordance with one or other of Cialdini’s principles will be competing with ordinary rational judgement.  I have noticed that such a strong attack on our individual decision making may happen when we join a committee.  Most of the time committee consensus-making is a thoroughly normal and healthy process.  We need individuals within the group to shift their opinions so that joint decisions can be made, and agreed action taken.  There is nothing wrong with compromise most of the time and the world cannot go forward without this give and take in people’s opinions.  But the situation can arise when the majority on a committee is in fact wrong.  What happens when a person on a committee, with expert knowledge or access to correct information, is overruled by a majority?  Some of Cialdini’s principles of influence operate extremely powerfully in a committee situation.  The expert, the person who knows what he/she is talking about, can easily be crushed by the weight of contrary opinion, even when it is applied with a smile and the tools of charm.  He/she may continue to fight against the odds.  More likely the outnumbered ‘expert’ will quietly give up on opposition on the grounds that it is uncomfortable, even painful, to be a minority of one.  Social influence principles will normally ensure that the tough dogged independent and feisty person will in the end become the pliant subservient committee member who agrees with the majority view, even when it is wrong.

Cialdini, writing in the 1980s, does not appear to give a lot of attention to the social psychology of group committee work.  He seemed much more interested in the effect of these influences on individuals as consumers or workers.  I intend to suggest what I have noted of his ideas so far applies to some current safeguarding issues within the Church of England.  Speaking about this ‘industry’ in very general terms, I have noted and commented before on the fact that there seems at present to be a deep conflict at the heart of all church safeguarding work.  This is in the fact that the needs and interests of survivors of abuse are pulling in one direction and this is completely at odds with the desire for the Church to preserve material assets and reputation. Ian Elliot wrote about this tension back in 2016 when he said in his report: Emphasis should be placed on ensuring that financial considerations are not given a priority that conflicts with the pastoral aims of the Church when engaging with survivors of abuse.   If someone new with a firm grasp of the psychological needs of survivors and the importance of justice does join a safeguarding committee, what happens?  It is hard to see how they can survive with their original idealism and concern for survivors intact in the face of the group influence which is pulling the opposite direction.  Several of Cialdini’s principles of social influence will be brought to bear on the minority voice.  They then have the choice either to leave or to submit to the overpowering influence of the majority. 

In my conversations with Gilo, he has, on occasion, referred to this process going on.  Hitherto independent individuals have joined the safeguarding establishment of the Church of England.   They then become ‘hoovered up’ (Gilo’s expression) by the committee system at work in this process.  After a period, they reappear as compliant creatures of the established pro-institution perspective.   ‘Big Brother’, however we define that, has made them into his own.  Among the ‘victims’ of this ‘influence’ process are some high-ranking church men and women whom I hesitate to name.  The better informed of my readers can make good guesses at to their identity.  The problem, at its heart, is that safeguarding has not established firm boundaries as to what its priorities are.  Is it about the need of victims or the preservation of the assets and reputation of the established Church?  As long as this fundamental question is not answered, there will always be unresolved and unresolvable conflict within the committees in Church House and among Safeguarding committees throughout the country.  A particular problem arises for the so-called core groups which I understand are set up to deal with individual cases of abuse.  According to my information, these are set up without any representation for the survivors themselves or their representatives.  How they believe that they can resolve these cases justly without listening to the survivors’ voice is beyond me.  All too often the individuals’/survivors’ interests are in this way going to be crushed under the weight of the grinding wheel of institutional interests because that is the easier option for those with the power.

Cialdini’s work demonstrated that all individuals are susceptible to influence of different kinds, making it sometimes impossible to resist.  In the Church we have noted that the desire to preserve and protect power will sometimes be working against justice and compassion for individuals.  Typically these stronger forces seem to prevail.  My understanding of the way social pressure operates, makes me sympathetic towards those who find themselves defeated in committee work.  Their former ideals cannot resist the power of the group that is too strong for them.  What I do find puzzling is that there does not yet seem to be any conversation about ethical issues within the Church’s safeguarding enterprise.  Are there really so few of us who are suggesting that the work of the past five years of safeguarding has been severely compromised in its failure to defend survivors better?  How much longer do we have to wait before somebody at the top of the Church of England realises how self-defeating it is to try to do such incompatible things at the the same time. Until the Church is really clear about its priorities and what it really wants to do in the area of safeguarding, there will always be frustration and failure. We have, sadly, seen a great deal of these over the past five years.

The law of the land wants to believe that everyone over the age of 18 is an adult and thus capable of making rational responsible decisions.  This assumption that all of us are completely rational and able, at all times, to discern and act in our own best interests is of course a dangerous myth.  It is not that we are permanently irrational in our thinking.  The problem is rather that each one of us is potentially, at any one moment, subject to any one of a whole variety of influences, pressures and even threats. For Christians we even find that the precious faculty we call our conscience is capable of being blown off course by external or even internal forces.

As an example of what I am talking about I want to imagine a hypothetical situation in an old peoples’ home. In charge is a power-obsessed woman who is anxious to run the home for as little money as possible.  This will get her into the good books of the owners whose only interest in the residents is that they all pay their fees on time. The power of the manager over her under-appreciated workers who do the day to day caring is total. The atmosphere is tense. The carers are daily aware of the short cuts that are forced on them to enable the extra profits to be made. There is strict control on how much time can be spent with each resident and how much food can be served up at mealtimes. Most of these carers are from overseas and so their immigration status is insecure.  The manager knows that her power over them is such that, if they are sacked by her for any reason, not only will they find it difficult to get another job without references, but their ability to remain in Britain is compromised. Needless to say the carers often have no savings as any excess money has been sent to their home countries.

In such a situation of fear, continuous threat and power abuse, how far can we say that the care worker has the capacity to make decisions or operate in accordance with their conscience?  The carer wants to make sure that the distressed elderly person has the attention they need or the alternative food to replace an indigestible meal.  We would say that such an act was from conscience or internal goodness. But, in performing this act of kindness, they face the wrath of the manager, if they are found out.  This tension between conscience and fear is at the root of real stress and may eventually be the cause of physical or mental breakdown.

It is not just in care-homes that such a scenario is possible.  It could happen in any work situation including an Anglican parish.  Many curates in their first posts live in a permanent state of stress for fear of upsetting their ‘training’ incumbent.  I place the word training in inverted commas, because from what I hear from my limited knowledge of the life of deacons, the period of training for curates is often regarded as a matter of sheer survival. 

In any work situation where managers, vicars or bosses are given the power to fire or wreck the careers of those under them, it should be possible for someone from outside  to come in as an external referee.  What needs to be identified are the dynamics of power in that situation.  Are employees already living and working in an environment of threat, fear or coercion?  If any of these dynamics are identifiable, then safeguards or check and balances should be put in place.  Why should anyone come under a situation of effective tyranny in the workplace?

One of the things available to us today is a far better understanding of the dynamics of power within institutions and even domestic situations.  We can now describe better with the language of various disciplines, including social psychology, what is taking place in a situation of conflict or dispute.  Two words added to a piece of 2015 legislation in the UK have empowered many women trapped in abusive relationships.   Those words, coercion and control, have allowed the law and the powers of the State to have a say when one party in a domestic relationship uses psychological controlling techniques on another.  In the past the only interventions by the legal system that could be made were where when actual physical violence was used against one party.  The new understanding of power in such relationship now extends to the use of psychological violence.  It is not just the sticks and stones that hurt; it is also words, threats and exercise of coercive power that do serious damage.  The law of the land now finally gets it.

This blog often discusses the existence of narcissistic dynamics within the Church and it is gratifying to find that, over the past ten years, the discourse using this terminology has grown enormously.   The value of having toxic narcissism discussed in so many new contexts is that people are faster in their understanding what might be going on when powerful leaders (or mini-tyrants) start to become intoxicated with their power.  The clear description of the process of narcissistic dynamics helps us to get a quick handle on many situations that perhaps baffled us in the past.  Understanding nearly always helps one party to demystify the situation they are faced with and regain some control over it.  Interestingly, one of the tasks that I can usefully do in my retirement, through the medium of this blog, is to talk through with an individual a power situation being described to me.  Then my task is to reframe it with  a fresh set of categories, which may include the language of narcissism.  The threatening Archdeacon can sometimes be interpreted in a way that his exercise of power can be seen to be closer to a childish tantrum than a dispassionate exercise of justice.  I refrain from giving examples here, but the simple act of reframing a situation with a new language can be enormously liberating for the victim.

When any of us encounter power dynamics in the Church, it is all too easy to surrender to that power and allow ourselves to be dis-empowered in the process.  A more subversive approach is to challenge that power, not by facing it head-on, but simply by understanding it better.  The dynamics may seem complex and hard to disentangle but sometimes this process is not as difficult as we think.   To tease out these deeper meanings within actual exercises of power within the Church is one of the things I am learning to do in my retirement.  Light can be shed on the abuses of power.  Understanding them, when they take place in the public arena or in the Church, is what I shall continue to do as long as they occur.  

One of the myths that is being peddled during the present Covid-19 crisis is that we are all in it together.  It is true that every section of UK society has been inconvenienced or worse.  The virus makes no distinction between rich and poor or even, it seems, between young and old.  And yet there is a sense in which the adage ‘we are all in it together’ is a falsehood.  Behind this slogan is a reality too uncomfortable for most of us to face.  What seems to be happening is that some are surviving far better than others.   Large numbers of people without secure housing or income are losing their safety nets of survival and are being threatened with their families by something close to destitution.

In my piece about the post Covid-19 Church, I made the point that it will be the new economic realities that will cause the greatest earthquakes on the life of the church in this country.  While I am no economist, I do read the financial pages of the newspaper with a reasonable amount of attention.  The anticipated falls in industrial output in this and every country make for sombre reading.  The effect on employment may be catastrophic.  It does not take a mathematical genius to see that if you take out, even for a short space of time, a quarter of a nation’s industrial output you destroy massive amounts of personal wealth as well as the tax revenues available to a government.  Much of this revenue in Britain is at present spent on the welfare state (including pensions).  Even if the country gets back to normal in six months, the effect of all that lost output will take a long time to repair.   At present the energy of the country is focused on the need to defeat the virus.  Everything else is on hold, including the planning of how we start to recover economically.  How does a country recover its economy and make it possible for ordinary citizens to continue to feed themselves and pay their bills and mortgages?  Meeting that expense in peace time will put a huge dent in the nation’s future prosperity.  Even if Universal Credit is quickly available for all who need it, will this cover all the necessary outgoings that most families have to meet each month?  Even if landlords are generous to tenants during the crisis period we are in at the moment, who is going to be responsible for those sums in the longer term?  The same question has to be asked about utility bills.  Will the companies be required to write off all debts of customers who cannot pay? 

There are many economic questions to be answered over the next months and years.  But, however those questions are answered, it is clear that many of Teresa May’s JAMs (just about managing) will tip over into real poverty.  I don’t remember the percentage of people who have absolutely no savings, but it is uncomfortably high.  Living from hand to mouth has always been the way of living which has been the only available method for large numbers of people.  They simply cannot afford the catastrophe of widespread unemployment that our country faces as the result of the virus.

If I can indulge in a bit of long distant memory on the topic of poverty, I could claim that when a child my family was poor by the standards of today.  We were poor in the sense that we never bought ‘stuff’ and most things we had were hand-me-downs or second-hand.  In society as a whole there was then in the 50s little in the way of credit to buy luxury items.    Although the expression ‘overdraft’ did enter my consciousness from quite an early age, there was none of the culture of leasing a brand-new car and all the other schemes calculated to keep many families today in the stranglehold of debt.

I have sometimes wondered what would happen if even a small percentage of the leased cars on the road were to be repossessed and returned to the lenders?  Even a ten per cent default will create a massive earthquake in the price of second-hand cars.  The availability of these leasing schemes would decline as the companies offering these schemes find they are losing money.  This would in turn seriously affect the new car market.  The same thing could happen to housing.  Mortgage companies can only afford to give a small holiday before they have to start to repossess homes.  Once again, homes will begin to flood the market and prices will start to drop.  Massive financial dislocation will again follow as some of the wealth accumulated over decades for secure retirements begins to evaporate, even for the wealthier in society.  The economic activity of this country is in some areas built on the precarious and risky roundabout of debt and leverage.  If the roundabout stops then everyone will realise that much of their wealth is based on fantasy. 

This blog piece is a thinking out-loud exercise.  We are facing a severe economic dislocation in society which may plunge many in our society in a terrible place of economic distress.  Some, a few, will have taken measures to protect themselves.  Some may even stand to make huge profits as they bet on the downward march of markets and currencies.  The majority, the vast majority, will be poorer.  Those already poor may know levels of need that will require huge levels of government intervention to enable even bare survival. 

One would like to think that the leadership of our country would help people to understand what could be around the corner for everyone.   I would like to think that those in government are already working out the huge rises in tax that will become necessary to stop the group we call JAMs from experiencing want and actual hunger.  It will require true leadership for a Prime Minister to tell people that, to keep this country going, there will have to be real sacrifice on behalf of all to deal with the future economic shocks that we will be experiencing, as the economic realities of the virus become clearer by the month. 

Where do Christians fit into all this?  I would suggest that we need to hear from the leaders of churches and faiths to help us all face some of the hard truths about the future which I am trying to explore.  The way forward is help all of us  to see that we there has to be a new mood of community awareness.  We all need to pull in the same direction to bring the whole country through the crisis.  During the war, every citizen was required to lend to the government, through the tax system, extra money.  This was to be returned in the form of post-war credits.  Money was eventually returned, but the recipient received only a fraction of the value of what had been lent.  Inflation had destroyed much of its purchasing power in the meantime.  It would be difficult for any government to force wealthier citizens to hand over assets for a national crisis as they did in the 1940s.  But some huge sacrificial effort is going to be needed if we are to overcome the crisis facing so many people in our society.  Things like conspicuous consumption will need to be regarded as anti-social and against the common good.  Sharing, recycling our ‘stuff’ and community activity will again be the new norm.  Acts that show awareness of all those living around us should be encouraged, just as they have begun to appear during the lock-down.  A more caring, more aware society could emerge from the present crisis and be carried into the future.  This future will be one full of economic challenges of the highest order.  We need dynamic and excellent leadership both from Church as well as State to make the radical shifts of attitude that I believe are going to be necessary.  The old Churchillian sentiments about ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ may have to be wheeled out once more.  Perhaps the whole country, in meeting the cost of sacrifice being asked of all, may become just a little bit more like the Kingdom that Jesus came to tell us about. 

It has been a difficult task, this Holy Week, holding together all the realities of the present moment.  In the background is the all-pervading reality of COVID-19 which continues to sweep its way through the homes and institutions of this country and around the world.   Then there are the victims of this pandemic, both those who suffer and those who die as its victims   These deaths often take place in sterile, lonely settings, with loved ones out of reach and human touch.   Somewhere, amid all this pain, we are also remembering Jesus in his suffering.  Although Jesus drew a certain level of comfort when members of his family gathered at the foot of the cross, for most of the time he faced his pain utterly alone.  Can we bring his story into our story?  Can we see something in the Passion story that gives hope and possible new understanding of the pandemic in the light of the Passion of Jesus?

This current blog may turn out to be a somewhat tortuous reflection as the two strands, the Passion of Jesus and the pandemic, whirl together in my mind.  To start this reflection, I should mention two news items which caught my attention over the past week with reference to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In the first report there is an account of a Christian University in the States, called Liberty University, calling back students to campus in the middle of the lock-down period.  The precise details of this story are subject to different versions.  Two reporters who were involved in researching this story have been issued with private arrest warrants by a much enraged Jerry Falwell, the University President.   The original story in the New York Times also suggested that there was an outbreak of the virus on the campus.  This is again disputed.  What is clear is that Falwell is a devoted supporter of Donald Trump.  Thus his public pronouncements on the pandemic have eerily echoed the message that was coming from the White House.  By recalling the students back to campus, Falwell seems to have been making a gesture of open support for Trump’s tendency, until recently, to downplay the effect of the virus as much as possible.

The second narrative in the news media involves certain orthodox Jewish communities of New York (and Israel) and the way that their isolation has made such groups hot spots for the virus.  Many ultra-orthodox Jewish communities give a high priority to preserving their separateness from the rest of the world.  Notions of purity and cleanness are very important to them.  Their self-definition will be found in the degree of success they achieve in creating a pure way of living by following the holy Torah as the pure will of God.  Part of the problem has been that the communities like this simply pay no attention to public announcements over lock downs or social distancing.  The newspapers they don’t read represent the outside world, from which they are trying to escape.  Every piece of information that reaches these groups has been filtered through their trusted rabbis and teachers. 

When we look for parallels between the ultra- Orthodox Jews and the staff and students at Liberty University, we can find a common theme in that both, in different ways, practise the idea of separation and purity.   The way that Christian fundamentalists are constantly opposing modernity and its fruits; liberalism, secularism and sexual plurality, is not so different from the closed Jewish groups who are determined to preserve their Torah purity in the face of secular America.  Many of us would want to argue with the relentless pursuits of purity as being the wrong answer to a very complex issue.  But when we go into the present dilemma faced by both Liberty University and the ultraorthodox Jewish communities in facing COVID-19, we find that it is not purity theology itself that is the problem.  What has created the dangerous situation that both groups (and those like them) find themselves in, are the structures of power and control that have been built up over tens, even hundreds of years.   

The word control describes in outline how any group successfully puts limits on the way its members are allowed to behave.  Any conservative group, whether political or religious, is in danger of being absorbed by the other groups around them.  Because of this threat to their identity, controls and strong prohibitions have to put in place to prevent this happening.  In my own mind I make a clear distinction between the mechanics of control, which are broadly similar across the groups, and the individual ideologies which are being protected.  Cults, religious groups of all kinds and extremist political parties will use very similar techniques to keep members on board.  Such control methods involve the use of power, soft or hard, to preserve the orthodoxy set out by the leadership.  ‘Soft’ power is a shorthand for the techniques of bribery and gentle mental persuasion, while ‘hard’ power may involve threats and even violence.  Leaders, religious or political, learn over time to maintain their power and control through a combination of techniques, both hard and soft.  The ideology that is preserved through this use of power is what is most visible to the outside.  What is really important, to my belief, is the subtle levers of power by which it is done.

A central theme of this blog is that of power and its abuse.  People are sometimes abused by the exercise of power.  In our two examples, I am not attacking the ideology of purity that is found in each of the groups, even though I strongly disagree with it.   What does need to be challenged are the way that religious leaders who, in the name of an ideology, even conclude that they are entitled to place other people in danger.   A shorthand way of describing what is going on at present is to say that some people are being bullied to death.  To bully is probably best defined as the exercise of power where a perpetrator stands to gain something and the victim nothing.  The perpetrator may achieve a momentary sense of importance.  Any need to feel such importance may well be linked to some deprivation in childhood.  Whatever the reason for bullies emerging in religious or political groups, they are sadly extremely common, even if the consequences are rarely fatal.  Power and control is offered to leaders as part of the ‘reward’ for the new responsibility and some use it to indulge a craving for importance as well as nurturing delusions of grandiosity and significance. That is dangerous.

It is against this background of leaders sometimes misusing power that we finally return to Jesus and his Passion.  While we often fail to spot toxic uses of power with our religious structures, we really have excuse for not understanding what Jesus thought about power.     It is not just he said about it – and there is quite a lot – but what he did about power.  The Passion story is a narrative from beginning to end which reveals how Jesus confronted power and bullies of all kinds.  His words to Pilate about power are significant.  ‘You would have no power over me unless it had been granted to you from above.’  Jesus accepts the power structures of Rome because they exist, not because they exemplified any virtue.  Pilate was a creature of the system.  If Pilate had been a free man, rather than one totally defined by his place within the tyrannical hierarchy of Rome, he might have been able to see a deeper power in Jesus, the power of God’s love.  The power of coercion and control was being pitted against this power of divine love.  At one level the bullying coercive power wins.  But the message of Jesus’ story is that there is in his powerlessness a greater unconquerable power.  The Easter message invites all of us to identify, not with the bullying powers that so often seem to win, but with this other power, the one that bursts out of the tomb on Easter Day. 

Jesus lived and died without ever using coercion with any individual.  His power, most clearly seen on the Cross, was one of example, invitation and encouragement.  In responding to that kind of call to discipleship, we should be not only the Easter People but also those who practise his powerlessness, the refusal to compromise with anything that seeks to dominate and control.