
On Friday 3 April the Titus Trust has released a statement following a settlement with three survivors of John Smyth. The blog has frequently written about the case of John Smyth and his abusive behaviour and this is the subject of a new review by Keith Makin.
I do not propose to go back over all the material about John Smyth as the interested reader can find all the details of the case in earlier blogs on this site and elsewhere. What I wish to write about is the distorted manner in which the Trustees have presented their perspective on the case. The full text of their statement and Andrew Graystone’s response can be found on Thinking Anglicans website. https://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/titus-trust-john-smyth-and-jonathan-fletcher/#comments
After a platitudinous expression of regret, the Trustees go on to speak of the ‘emergence of details’ about the abuse by John Smyth and Jonathan Fletcher. To speak in this generalised way without any date affixed is a misleading fudge. Some of the Trustees conceivably may not have known about the scandal before 2012 when the first survivor made a formal complaint. It is absolutely certain that others in the group would have known of Smyth’s activities for decades before that. The Trustees have always been chosen from a fairly small network of churchmen and women clustered around St Helen’s Bishopsgate, St Ebbe’s Oxford, the Round Church in Cambridge and All Souls Langham Place. As far as those of us outside this group, now called ReNew Constituency, can tell, information would have flowed freely within this network, particularly among the more senior members. The original report written about Smyth and published confidentially in 1982, did, we know, circulate among many of the prominent members. The initials of senior figures in the network who led the enquiry were named within the document. Although we do not now know exactly who knew what and when, large sums of money were raised and spent to keep Smyth in Africa for the 35+ years before his death. It is hard to see how tens of thousands of pounds were spent without some information being shared among the leaders of what was then the closely entwined Church Society and REFORM. I am thus forced to conclude that this absence of a date may well be a ploy that is meant to confuse the reader. It allows him/her to believe that information about John Smyth’s crimes was unknown when in fact for some this was old information that had been circulating around among the leaders of these groups for a very long time.
The second apparent attempt to manipulate the truth is a reference to work done by the Titus Trustees and thirtyone:eight, the independent child protection organisation. This group has a good reputation for understanding the issues around abuse. No doubt the training given was valuable to the Trustees. But what are we to make of the sentence including the words ‘receiving training in pastoral care and supporting survivors of abuse’? The natural implication of the sentence is that the Titus Trustees went out to search for Smyth victims and offer them support and pastoral care. My contacts with one or two of these survivors tells me that there is no evidence that this was done. If pastoral care was not shown to any of these victims, to whom was the pastoral care to be shown? The recently concluded financial settlement was not undertaken with any pastoral dimension in evidence. Indeed, the three survivors mentioned in the statement have had to fight over several years. Titus has ended up spending a fortune on lawyers, far exceeding anything paid to survivors. The evidence for huge expenditure on legal fees is found in their published accounts as a registered charity.
A third area of concern over the Titus statement concerns the reference to an ‘internal cultural review’. It then impressively refers to a future ‘independent Cultural Review’. The traditional secrecy of the Titus Trustees over the years, and, before them, the Iwerne Trustees, does not bode well for such a cultural examination. Are they going to speak to the abused survivors to find what they think of the culture, past and present? Are they going to subject to examination the highly contentious theology used by John Smyth to justify pain and violence as being part of Christian discipleship? I have read some of the source documents used by Smyth and frankly they are toxic, especially when used by a sociopathic Christian leader. A proper ‘cultural review’ would be one that was prepared to challenge this theology used by Smyth. What is to stop the poison of Smyth’s ideas appearing again unless they are properly understood? Every part of the network of interconnected groups, churches and individuals that interact and are linked to the Titus Trustees need also to be part of such a process. The convenient myth that each part of the ReNew constituency is independent of the other parts, works well when wishing to avoid responsibility for dreadful cover-ups over the decades. The name of Jonathan Fletcher was mentioned in the statement, but his abusive story is being relegated to a quite separate enquiry. As far as I can determine all the parts of the ReNew network adhere to the same harsh Calvinistic fundamentalism. Each part has to retain its place in the network by espousing the same ‘sound’ theology that calls itself orthodox Anglicanism.
The statement of the Titus Trustees ends by inviting those who have been part of their camps to comment and contribute to the forthcoming Cultural Review. What planet are they living on? Having fought an aggressive legal battle against three Smyth survivors to lessen financial liability, do Titus really expect others to come forward to be part of a safeguarding process run by them? Everything about this statement, including its timing in the middle of the pandemic, reeks of bad faith. The interested reader should read the comments by Andrew Graystone which are also to be found on the Thinking Anglicans website. We looked for clarity and honesty, the prelude to a new beginning. Instead we find dishonesty, fudge and manipulation of the truth. With Andrew, I call for the ‘Titus Trust to cease it activities immediately, and to disband.’ This statement is a disgrace and takes us no closer to a position of truth and justice.
This information has been sent to me by an anonymous but trusted source. It reveals further how truth was suppressed and distorted within this network. It points to a further link which I have not made in my piece -the link between Emmanuel Wimbledon, Jonathan Fletcher’s base and the Iwerne network.
For decades the files detailing Smyth’s abuse were stored in Giles Rawlinson’s attic. Giles was a senior lay leader at Emmanuel – effectively Jonathan Fletcher’s right hand man for decades. The man who refused to hand documents over to police until forced to remained a trustee of Titus Trust and was able to influence decisions for years after Iwerne rebranded itself as Titus Trust. His leadership of Cross Links also gave him a wide influence. It is striking that the safe space for hiding evidence about Smyth was felt to be an Emmanuel church attic