by Andrew Graystone

In February 2019 the General Synod voted unanimously to urge its National Safeguarding Steering Group to “bring forward arrangements for redress for survivors.” An emotional debate was notable for the new Lead Bishop of Safeguarding saying that redress would require “serious money” from the church, and for Canon John Spence of the Archbishops’ Council responding that “This is not about affordability, it is about justice. . . The funds for redress will be found.”

For all the commitment implied by a unanimous vote, I’m not sure that most Synod members have fully understood what redress looks like, or indeed what the theological rationale for it might look like. There is further work to be done in understanding redress, and a great deal to be learned from other institutions have led the way.  In this blog I want to offer some early theological principles that might guide the church in deciding how to manage this very practical work over the next few years.  I will do so by looking at three stories from Luke’s gospel where some form of redress seems to be in play: Jesus’ parable of the Bad Priests and the Good Samaritan, his encounter with Zacchaeus the tax collector, and his brief meeting with the servant of the High Priest in the garden of Gethsemane.

The Bad Priests and the Good Samaritan  (Luke 10:25-37)

This is a parable that ought to make very painful reading for every church member, and especially for religious professionals. The priest and the Levite in Jesus’ story not only walked past the injured man; they actually crossed the road so as not to come too close to him. If this story were to be read in the context of church-based abuse, another layer of shame would apply. Imagine if the priest and Levite walked by, knowing that the victim’s injuries had been caused not by some random highwaymen, but by members of their own profession.

But I want to focus on the response of the Samaritan. First, he notices, and takes pity, and goes to the man to engage directly with him. Meeting victims at close hand is always a painful, challenging business, but this Samaritan is prepared to enter into the mess and get the victim’s blood on his own hands. This can’t have been pleasant, and it certainly wasn’t convenient. The Samaritan interrupted his own plans to look after the victim. Every human, including but not limited to Christians and their leaders, is mandated to interrupt their own plans to tend to the wounded person they meet in the street. Often we have seen church leaders resisting meeting with victims, or at best, meeting them on their own terms in their own places.

The Samaritan goes much further. He stops, goes to the victim, and takes the man with him to a place of safety. Then he takes personal care of him until it is clear that he is secure.  Then he entrusts the future care of the victim to an inn-keeper, providing generous funding. Then he arranges to revisit the man, and promises to pay the bill for his future care. “‘Look after him, and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.”

Jesus invites his listeners to commend the Samaritan for his approach; stopping, getting personally involved, staying with the victim, and paying for his long-term needs. He does all this for a stranger – indeed for a natural enemy. This is not simply justice, but something far bigger. The Samaritan is being commended for a deep and costly compassion that is centred solely on the needs of the victim. We can be sure that the victim, violently attacked and robbed by strangers, was not expecting such care. Probably the attack had robbed him of far more than his money. It had destroyed his sense of safety and self-worth, and his faith in human community. The actions of the Samaritan stranger went far beyond stopping the bleeding and patching up the man’s wounds. We can imagine that in the security provided by the Samaritan’s attentive care, the man began to take the first faltering steps to rebuild his faith in the possibility of goodness, or even just in his ability to walk down the street in safety.

A redress scheme in the name of the church will be intimate, detailed, and committed over the long term, like the Samaritan’s care of his new friend. It is not for contemporary leaders to distance themselves from the debts of those who went down the road before them. Instead, they need to discover the grace in the opportunity to serve the wounded they have met by chance at the side of the road.

Zacchaeus  (Luke 19:1-10)

The story of Zacchaeus the tax collector is well-known from Sunday School. The emphasis is often placed on Jesus’ willingness to restore even a cheating tax official to his band. Less is made of Zacchaeus’ personal redress scheme. In the story, Jesus doesn’t demand that Zacchaeus should make amends for his previous extortions. The initiative comes from Zacchaeus himself, as a response to Jesus’ unconditional welcome of him. “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”

There are two elements to Zacchaeus’ plan. The first is to divest himself of 50% of his income. Why does he do this? Presumably because he feels that the possession of so much wealth, and the power that went with it, was in itself part of the problem that had corrupted him. It doesn’t seem to matter where all this wealth goes, as long as it goes. He simply needs to be poorer in order to re-enter society as a follower of Christ.

The second element of Zacchaeus’ plan is specifically related to those he has abused. He’s not only going to pay them back; he’s going to pay them four times what he owes them. It is an act of reckless generosity. It is more than enough to restore what he stole from his victims. It goes further, restoring the relational damage between them, and then further, restoring the self-esteem of the victim, and further still– giving in excess, for the joy of giving and of receiving.

Any redress scheme in a church context that seeks to minimise reparations due, or to preserve the wealth of the offender, will be missing this vital element of excessive, joyful generosity. The church should approach the business of redress with joy and open-handed generosity. And if there are margins of error, they must fall to the benefit of the victim. 

The High Priest’s Servant  (Luke 22:47-51)

This tiny moment occurs at one of the high points of tension in the gospel narrative. It is so small that the other three evangelists miss it altogether. But it is a momentous act of real significance to those seeking to enact redress. Jesus is with his disciples in the garden of Gethsemane. The exhausted disciples are woken from sleep by the sudden arrival of soldiers to arrest Jesus. In the panic, Peter draws his sword and lashes out, catching the servant of the High Priest and cutting off his ear. It is a petty, ineffectual and desperate act – meaningless in defence of Jesus, but life-changing for the poor man who loses his ear. 

In the midst of the melee,  with his own life in imminent danger, Jesus stops everyone in their tracks. “Enough of this!” he says.  He goes to the young servant, touches his ear, and miraculously heals it. Jesus didn’t cause the problem, and Peter couldn’t fix it. There were a great many other things for Jesus and the disciples to be concerned with. Yet in the heat of the moment, Jesus stops everything, and takes time to heal a man that one of his disciples has wounded.

Church leaders have many things to worry about. They are concerned with declining influence, waning finances, poor reputation and all of the problems of an increasingly secular society. Providing adequate redress for victims of abuse from previous generations must seem sometimes like an irritant; a drain on time and resources with little positive benefit to the church.  And yet the ministry of healing, of which the delivery of redress is a core part, is not peripheral to the church’s mission, but the very heart of it. The church does not need to deliver redress in order that it can get on with its work of mission and ministry. Following the model of Jesus, it needs to see the delivery of redress to victims of abuse as an essential part of its ongoing mission.  

If there is one common factor in all three stories it is this: in each case the actors stop what they are doing to attend to the victims. In this, the church has so far fallen short. It has tried to manage the business of safeguarding failure whilst carrying on with business as usual. There has been no national act of contrition; no moment of drawing a line. Perhaps the first step for the church in considering how to make redress to victims of abuse in its midst is to stop everything; to look into the eyes of victims, and look into the mirror. The publication of the IICSA report seems the ideal opportunity to do this. Without stopping, it is hard to see how the church as a whole will be able to tend appropriately to those it has hurt, and in doing so, receive the grace of God.

I recently read somewhere online the statement that Bishop X is a narcissist. The identity of this bishop is not of importance for this reflection and, indeed, this claim does not need to be true to be pointing us towards something important. If such an accusation ever were to be true, if a person in charge of any organisation were indeed to be a narcissist, then we need to think about the way that this would impact on the institution.  In the case of a diocese it could create dysfunction, unhappiness and possibly even chaos in its wake.

I need, first of all, to define in approximate terms what I mean by narcissism. It is one of those slippery words which has become ubiquitous in this present century. I am aware of a Freudian use of the word, but it never reached the discourse of ordinary people until quite recently. I first became aware of the relevance of the word to my interests around 15 years ago. An Australian study of charismatic leadership by Len Oakes, drew my attention to the way that narcissistic categories were a useful way of understanding the motivation and style of some religious leaders.  There are certain words that undergird my understanding of narcissism.  Words like messianic grandiosity, insatiable need for approval and applause, as well as a sense of entitlement, seem to form some of the building blocks of the disorder of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).  In short, the definition of narcissism which I take from the standard Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is one that emphasises an overwhelming need, even addiction, for attention and applause of others.  Combined with this self-centred approach to life, there is a pathological absence of empathy or care for others.

The description of narcissistic personality disorder in the textbooks is, of course, a disability which touches almost everyone to a greater or lesser extent. Most people care about their self-esteem, but it is most often sub-clinical.  It is, in other words, seldom destructive of their ability to understand what other people are feeling or thinking. In recent years we have had the living example of narcissistic grandiosity coupled with complete disdain for other people in the person of President Trump. There have been frequent attempts to show how he fulfils every single one of the nine text-book criteria for NPD. I want to work with a focus with just two of these nine categories. The first is an insatiable hunger for approval and the second is a pathological inability to practise or feel empathy.

I have frequently come back to this phenomenon of narcissism in my interest in the issues around safeguarding and power abuse.  In the first place, a perpetrator of abuse is quite likely to be a NPD sufferer with a deadened conscience.  This enables him/her to harm a vulnerable individual without any apparent awareness of the damage that is being caused.  In the disordered pattern of thinking that may be present in the perpetrator, the only thing that comes to matter is a need to find gratification. Abuse of the weak is somehow feeding that narcissistic addiction for sensation and power.

 A major problem for many survivors is that the narcissism found in their abuser is also found in a different form in the institution they look to for protection.  If a bishop or responsible leader is afflicted by a degree of narcissism, they may well re-abuse the victim.  I am not suggesting that the bishop will want to treat the abused person as a target for further sexual exploitation.  Sadly though, this scenario did play out in one case study recorded by IICSA.  No, a more common danger is for the narcissistically inclined bishop to treat the victim/survivor as merely a problem to be managed.  Narcissism may well have blunted the needed empathy for the victim as well as imagination.  The response on the part of the leader will thus fail the survivor in various ways.  Because of a failure of empathy. the abuse is seen as a threat to reputation of the institution and not as a human tragedy involving acute betrayal and suffering.  In short, a bishop with strong narcissistic tendencies will behave like a committee man, managing, deflecting and avoiding the pain and the deepest needs of the survivor for the sake of the institution that he/she represents. 

In a paper I gave to the International Cultic Studies Association in 2019, I explored the idea that institutions themselves were a contributory factor in creating narcissism within individuals. The textbooks have put forward the idea that narcissistic individuals are those who are the victims of deficient forms of upbringing. I suggested that hierarchical structures, which offer status and power to leaders, create mental attitudes inside certain susceptible individuals. These can push them towards narcissism.  In other words, institutions themselves, with the tools of aggrandisement at their disposal, are able to create an institutional type of narcissism. Many of us are susceptible to the charms of such power and status.   But this narcissistic grandiosity seems to come at the cost of a depletion of our capacity for true empathy and care for the afflicted. These qualities are sometimes severely compromised in us, if not completely destroyed.

The statement that Bishop X is a narcissist suggests that there may be a serious threat to his/her proper functioning in the domain in which his/her oversight prevails. One part of narcissism, the appetite for glory and thrones, is possibly able to be restrained by the checks that most institutions possess. What is less manageable is a deficit in a capacity for empathy on the part of a bishop/leader. In short, if an abuse victim approaches the institution and finds there in its leader an implacable failure of empathy and care, he/she will be driven back into the hellhole that the original abuse had cast them into. This failure of empathy is not just something that affects the bishop’s one-to-one relationships within the diocese. It is likely to impinge on the whole gamut of relationships that exist across the board. A bishop who does not practise empathy may be extremely good at management.  The boards over which he/she has power may function well, but, at the same time, they may be soulless and cold organisations. Love and the warmth of the spirit have fled from the structures. Who would want to work in such a chill dark place where efficiency has usurped human love?

The opposite of narcissism within an institution will be a place demonstrating all the qualities of Christian love, empathy, openness and reconciliation. When there is secrecy, protectionism and institutional coldness, there is simply nothing to attract anyone from the outside. Somehow in these post –IICSA days, the church has to recover these non-narcissistic values to be able to show to those looking in that our church is a place of integrity, warmth and conducive to human and spiritual wholeness. I would hope that most clergy would want precisely these things and that they are doing all in their power to help to bring them about. This task will be made far harder when the institution for which they work and which they represent, is suddenly shown to be less than compassionate and caring for those outside its walls, and indeed some of those within.

– Anonymous

We are sorry

It is very hard

I do understand

It is all very difficult and we must do better

I was shocked by what I read

It was awful and I was saddened by it

We are ashamed of what has happened

We cannot go on like this

But some things have already improved

We are on a journey (please be patient)

We are full of regret

*

We are heading in the right direction

This will take time

We are listening and always have been

Bear with me I am on a steep learning curve

Obviously, I am concerned for you

We are taking steps (please be patient)

And we setting up proper processes

We are putting aside some money

I can’t say how much, or when, but hopefully soon

We need increased resources

I cannot answer that question now

I can’t say any more at this stage

*

We really are extremely sorry

I only have words

Yes, We know that words are not enough

That they do not compensate

But words are all we have at the moment -sorry

I understand your pain – I really do

So we will be putting new structures in place

It is hard to say exactly where responsibility lies

We know that this must be frustrating for you

Believe me – no-one is more frustrated than I am

Of course we care, which why I am talking now

I am committed to real change (please be patient)

We are sorry.  Believe me.

“The culture of the Church of England facilitated it becoming a place where abusers could hide.”  This sentence from the IICSA report was quoted many times in the past week and it raises the question in my mind about what precisely this word ‘culture’ means in this context.  My wanting to think about this is also prompted by the use of a phrase by Archbishop Justin when, in 2018, he spoke about the culture of deference in relation to the abuse crisis.  These two uses of the word ‘culture’ have stimulated me into thinking what might be the things about the Church that allow abuse of various kinds to happen.  Other church leaders have spoken of the need for a change of culture to help the Church move forward in the future.  Nobody, as far as I know, has spelt out what exactly these culture changes might involve.  To take a popular definition of culture as being ‘the way we do things round here’, we need to ask these two questions.  What is it about the way we do things in church that makes abuse possible?  I will not be able to exhaustively mention every aspect of the Church’s distinctive culture, but at least provoke some discussion about this important question.  Then we have to ask, how can we try to change the culture of the Church that will help its members protect the vulnerable from abuse?

I want to begin with the use by Archbishop Justin of the term, ‘culture of deference’.  But, rather than exploring what he might have meant by using that term, I want to put forward my own understanding of the expression.  For me, the best way of understanding this word deference is to notice, first of all, how most traditional churches have a well-defined traditional hierarchy within their structures. These hierarchies are marked by titles, special robes and an air of deferential respect for those individuals who have been chosen to be exalted above others. From the outside, a church hierarchy, and the deference that it attracts, appears to be slightly surreal.  It has a touch of the theatrical about it. For those inside the church bubble, it seems all perfectly normal and everyone adapts themselves to living with it.  The negative aspect of hierarchy, as we have discovered this past week, is that institutions with hierarchies will utilise the power possessed by them to protect themselves from attack of any kind.  An individual who harbours nefarious designs on the vulnerable, will have often been able to escape punishment or detection if he/she was sufficiently embedded in and valued by the church structure. 

Different church cultures have differing expressions of hierarchy.  For example, in high church circles bishops and clergy will be looked upon with a certain awe.  They are sometimes venerated with a slight bow by laypeople. When these exalted individuals come into conversation with those ‘below’ them, there can be a consequent social awkwardness which makes communication difficult. Such embarrassment and reticence on the part of many towards their ecclesiastical betters is something that will irritate many bishops and clergy.  Others, on the other hand, may enjoy this access to institutional/hierarchical power and the feeding of narcissistic hungers.  If this sense of superiority results in a lack of real concern for the flock, this will not help when it comes to doing the right thing for abuse survivors.

Within the conservative evangelical/charismatic world, we find similar deference towards leaders, albeit within a different cultural form. In some settings, this looking up to leaders is fostered by keeping the leaders at some distance from the ordinary people in the congregation. This helps to give them a certain mystique.  The public persona is only seen in a controlled and artificial context, such as preaching at a main service.  This may be laid on with the trappings of theatre, using special dramatic lighting effects and accompanied by professional singers. The leader of a mega-church will seldom speak one-to-one with the individuals under his nominal care. It will be one of the numerous staff members that actually deal with the individual when a problem arises. The sheer inaccessibility of many of the important leaders in the evangelical/charismatic world gives them a kind of mythical status. They become objects for projective fantasy. The very fact that they are not known personally to the majority gives them added power with congregation members. Cult leaders have always known the importance of not getting too close to the followers, since by doing so, they might expose their fallible humanity, and in the process destroy the mystique that has been created around them.

Having identified this problem of deference in the church, which is so ubiquitous, and which makes it difficult for many churches to operate as communities of care, we move on to another perennial problem, the culture of niceness. Christian people are routinely expected to be kind and considerate folk, especially to the fellow members of their congregation. The problem for many congregations is a failure to recognise that toxic behaviour can often coexist with a nice pleasant exterior. My interest in the church as a retired clergyman, has for a long time been in exploring the power dynamics which swirl just below the surface in so many congregations. Sometimes it is the clergyman who is exploiting his position of influence to gain personal power; on other occasions it may be a prominent layperson who is creating factions and cliques to gain advantage, materially or socially. Whatever the particular power scenario that may exist within a congregation, it is extraordinarily difficult to sort it out. There are two problems. One is that no one has the authority to come into a congregation and, as we say, knock heads together. The second problem is the way that Christian people are very bad at identifying and naming the toxicity of the power games that may occur within a congregation. They know how to be nice but not how to challenge a difficult individual who is on a personal power trip  This grasping for power may also sometimes involve grooming or sexual abuse. I expect that every reader of this short piece will be able to tell a story of an event where somebody exploited this culture of niceness to obtain for themselves the gratifications of power.

The third cultural factor which afflicts churches of all traditions is a culture of lay passivity. The traditional layout of the church which places the pulpit some 6 feet above the level of the pews is a kind of metaphor for the dynamic of much church life, both the Sunday services and beyond. One individual is set over the majority and the culture of the church has required that sermons be delivered with no response on the part of the people. This tradition is not without its value and I know that it would be extremely hard to change it. It does, however, seem extraordinary that every week an authoritative discourse is delivered without any opportunity for folk to comment or reply. At a time when, in a congregation, there are likely many better educated than their clergy, this tradition seems an anomaly.  Should it still be tolerated in this century?  I do not claim to have ever been in a church which has challenged this tradition.  From the outside it must look very strange. It seems to speak of an unequal access to power, church governance, knowledge and spiritual wisdom. Is this really what we want to convey to the outsider looking in? Come to our church.  You are welcome as long as you cooperate, obey and leave your questioning brain at the door.  Allow yourselves to receive the wisdom that the ordained minister alone can offer you.

Deference, niceness and passivity are cultural features of organisations like the Church that sometimes allow toxic behaviour, including child abuse, to flourish in its dark places. If people are afraid to question, challenge and pursue justice when things go wrong, then there will often be this possibility for dysfunction and power abuse to exist within the whole. If bishops are calling for a culture change to help prevent the abuse of vulnerable, they should help us by spelling out what it is they want us to change. Here I am suggesting three common cultural aspects of our church life which seem to enable toxically disordered behaviour sometimes to emerge.  From the outside they all appear anomalous in the present century.  Perhaps we should all become much more aware of how the Church is increasingly beginning to fail to resonate with the longings, needs and aspirations of ordinary people.  They look for community and find toxic power games.  They seek answers to deeply held questions.   All that they seem to receive is answers to questions they have not asked and no understanding of the meaning of their own questions.  The final failure of the Church is in the stark reality of what has been laid out by IICSA.  We have revealed before us a Church that for decades has failed to protect its most weak and vulnerable.  The last failure comes in the contexts of the others we have named.  There has been a massive failing of communication and connection between the deepest values of the Gospel culture and the people of Britain.  We have a long uphill battle to fight.   We desperately need leadership and prophetic vision to help us see the Christian faith beyond the narrow cultural expression of our Churches.

In many ways the report that came out today contained few surprises. Indeed, it was less radical in its criticisms, even to the point of appearing to provide the Church a much easier ride than they might have expected.   Much of the material was a description of the church structures that have come into being over the decades and even centuries.  The Church of England is extremely difficult to fathom so it was probably necessary to describe its workings in some detail for the reader.   It is impossible, for example, to liken the Church to the army or a large public company. Lines of responsibility do not work in a way that would be understood elsewhere. It is all too easy in such complicated and sometimes unaccountable structures for offenders to be hidden away and, at the same time, for abuse victims to be ignored and disempowered. The reader of the report learned, if he/she did not know already, how much power and influence a bishop possesses within his or her diocese. This has made the task of oversight for safeguarding officials sometimes almost impossible.   One of the main recommendations of the Report is that the role of Safeguarding Officer in each diocese should have independence from the Bishop.  This would enable them to make decisions and choose to pursue cases of abuse in a professional way. 

One issue which is close to my heart as a supporter of survivors, is the pursuit of justice for this group. Many things are destroyed by the experience of abuse, as we have seen in earlier blogs.  Among the things that are often destroyed is a healthy relationship with the Church and a confidence in its officers.  The report refers to several stories by survivors of conversations with Church senior people which were then ‘forgotten’.  The rule that disclosures of abuse must be recorded in writing by the one hearing such allegations has been a requirement for the Church since 1999.  When there has been this kind of neglect and a history of incompetent care for survivors, it becomes difficult to trust these same individuals as well as the institution they represent. They feel totally abandoned in many cases. The report sums up this dilemma when it inserts a passage from a third-party report. ‘The Church of England is yet to regain fully the trust of those who have been abused. It has been slow to find ways to engage effectively with victims and survivors or to learn from their experiences.’ For me, this failure to engage with and care for survivors is one of the most painful aspects of the whole safeguarding failure that has been witnessed over two or three decades. Whatever may be promised in the recent church initiatives for safeguarding, there is still a terrible legacy of a sense of betrayal alongside a feeling that the Church cannot be trusted.

This word mistrust is perhaps a good one to summarise this bitter legacy from the past.  It has done so much damage to the Church itself and to the continued well-being of the survivor population. Even if the IICSA report helps to create a new realism about safeguarding matters right across the board, this legacy issue of mistrust is one to be confronted and dealt with. It is not just the survivors who are looking out for a successful conclusion to the injustices of the past, the wider public has also felt betrayed by the Church’s failures to be a safe home for children and the vulnerable.   All realise how important it is to rebuild communication between the Church, those who have become its victims and those who look on.

This task of rebuilding trust with survivors and the watching public will be a very difficult one.  The situation that exists at present can be described fairly simply.  Institutional power wielded by bishops and others, aided by the services of expensive lawyers, communications experts and reputation managers has, for a long time, managed to keep victims and survivors largely invisible.  The emergence of some of this reality through the IICSA hearings has revealed all the ‘dirty tricks’ that have been played against this group of survivor/victims.  It has caused bitterness, frustration and a sense of continuing victimhood among many. Their situation was hidden from sight so that the Church was able to preserve intact its façade of decency and honesty.  Now that the IICSA report has cracked that façade, we have to set out how the building could be shored up and made a suitable structure for the future, where all may be welcomed and all may perhaps find healing.

The task of mediation has become a professional discipline, with its own principles and philosophy.  Individuals can be trained to be professional mediators.  In years gone by I attended several courses run by the Bridge Builders organisation and I know they still do important work in this whole area of reconciliation.  From the days I spent on the course some twenty years ago, I remember one particular principle.  The task of the mediator is, first of all, to enable proper communication between two parties.  In other words, each must listen to the other as a prerequisite of a possible reconciliation and restoration of trust.  If Bridge Builders were to be given a role in rebuilding the broken sense of trust between survivors and the hierarchy of the church, they would set up a meeting which banned lawyers and advisors on both sides, and allow the victims/survivors to speak and be heard by the senior representatives of the organisation that is felt to have betrayed them. In return the survivors would listen in silence to the words which reveal what bishops and other leaders had been feeling over the years.  Perhaps abuse issues were a triggering point in their own story.   Even bishops may have had to face up to power/abuse episodes in their lives.  Perhaps the institutional neglect of survivors had been exacerbated by personal experiences of the past.  None of that would resolve things on its own but at least the meeting would be between human beings in encounter.  This would be far from survivors and sufferers falling under an implacable institutional juggernaut.

Listening to and honouring survivors by the hierarchy would be the first step along a road towards the rebuilding of trust in the Church.  To repeat, it is not just the breakdown of trust between survivors and bishops that has taken place in this abuse crisis, it is a break-down of trust between the general public and the church in general that has occurred.  If the public witnesses something new taking place in the interaction between the leaders and the abused, then the same public will begin to understand the meaning of reconciliation. Surely this is a concept that is both Christian and relevant to society at large? If all Christians, especially leaders, can live out this reconciliation in the days, months and years ahead so that people can see it, surely this is a fantastic witness to the power of the good news to transform and make whole people’s lives and relationships.  Out of the darkness of abuse and brokenness, something good can come if we allow it to. 

by Gilo

By no means a comprehensive list. Just a brief visit across a number of things we may probably see further comment upon after the Inquiry makes its final Anglican report.

Mandatory Reporting

It’s possible that any expecting to see the much needed recommendation for Mandatory Reporting as part of the statutory framework – will be disappointed. It is long overdue. The argument is won. And this presents an ideal moment as the Church has come round to acceptance of MR after a rather circuitous route of yes we do, no we don’t. Many of us suspect the Inquiry want to hold on to this as a ‘big ticket’ recommendation for the final report at the end of 2021. Why wait until then? Current policies across many institutions in regulated activities have been called “bags of bits” by Mandate Now; labyrinthine policy jungles which would become largely redundant with MR. Culture change will happen in a single weekend with its eventual introduction. But I think we have to wait until the Inquiry gets the last train home.

Independence

The Archbishops Council statement was notably vague on this. That the Church is keen to put this theme out just before the final Anglican report suggests that the Inquiry will call serious question to the Church’s fitness for self-governance. There is an overwhelming need for the National Safeguarding Team to be given independent oversight, well away from the control of Archbishops’ Council secretariat. The current NST is almost an entirely new team, but part of the difficulty facing Melissa Caslake and her newbies is picking their way through the considerable wreckage of the previous era which has left many survivors deeply suspicious of the NST. Many disaster sites might have been avoided, or reached quicker resolution, if the NST hadn’t been shaped by the culture of Church House, its comms and lawyers and managers, and at times, the Church’s own dodgy reputation launderers. The Christ Church core group debacle would in all likelihood have been avoided. I am told the probable outcome of this independence will be the formation of a new NCI (National Church Institution) – called Safeguarding – with independent members alongside Church appointees in an oversight committee to beef up scrutiny. We will have to wait and see how and when this happens.

Archbishops and Bishops

Many of us expect to see Archbishop Justin Welby and former Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, criticised. Both their hearings were embarrassing. When each had an opportunity to apologise to a survivor sat directly behind them, they failed to do so despite being invited by the Inquiry. Those watching sensed that the Inquiry took a dim view. The wider existential crisis of the bishops – how many senior figures and their dioceses have responded, or failed to respond – is likely to come under heavy fire. The walls of silence to major questions that so many of us have experienced as a pattern across the bishops is something we hope the Inquiry will highlight. I know that Bishop Jonathan Gibbs is keen to see more vigorous accountability injected into the structure. At present it is at best variable, at worst: absent. Some bishops are thrown under the bus. Others get away with run-for-the-hills behaviour and hope the fallout from their denial and distancing will not follow them. The National Safeguarding Steering Group, the church’s current overarching board of governance, to many of us seems to resemble a shielding for senior figures who should be facing critical questions. It includes bishops who have managed to hide within the structure behind dysfunctional processes and a culture of protection.

Ecclesiastical Insurance

Many of us expect to see the church’s insurer take a substantial hit following the recall to IICSA when Ecclesiastical Insurance tried to pull the wool over a government inquiry. It’s worth pointing out that Carl Beech is serving 18 years in prison for perverting the course of justice and lying under oath to the police. But Ecclesiastical, a big corporate, have managed so far to get away with apparent dissembling in front of a government inquiry – under oath! It’s also notable that their lawyer, top QC Rory Phillips, had only one client at the Inquiry and a very small handful of statements to be across. What a mess he made. I don’t think anyone assumes he knew his client was being dishonest. But to be candid, he could have done an hour’s easy homework – and realised he was representing a client who was being considerably less than ‘sufficiently full and frank’ in their testimony. It took the Inquiry less than 45 mins to devastate their testimony on three significant counts. Now, much more is emerging about malevolent psychiatric reports used against survivors, ‘genetic predisposition’ defences, desk-topping, and other strategies deployed by EIG and their lawyer – much of this reflecting dubious ethics. But I doubt these will be visited in the report as some of these have only recently started to emerge, despite being brought to the attention of senior church figures over the years. But I would expect to see the Church criticised for its duplicity in some aspects of its relationship to the insurer. It has sought to protect a corrupted nexus, from whom it derives substantial income through the owner of the insurer, AllChurches Trust. It has been, as one cleric put it, “a very English form of corruption”.

Interim Support Scheme

This is not part of the Inquiry. But it’s definitely worth comment – as the Church announced this flagship scheme last week perhaps as an attempt to plea-bargain with the Inquiry, and certainly to address widespread concern at the lack of compassion towards survivors. My understanding is that this scheme will help up to ten people initially (to help create the structure) and then quickly scale up. Quickly being the operative word. If it fails to do this, or rows back on its promises, and becomes another smoke and mirror delaying tactic – then it will raise much more ire. The proof will be in the extent to which it is prepared to rescue economies of those left in wreckage as result of reporting and re-abuse. And not just the initial ten or so. But fifty, then a hundred, and so on. This is not the redress scheme and should not be confused with it. It is the interim support prior to redress. My understanding is that there is no figure attached to this scheme – instead the lead bishops have argued for an open credit line – which I think is the right approach. The final redress scheme will cost a great deal more. The figure that has been talked about in the longer term has been £200million. But many of us think this will not be sufficient.

What happens after?

Will the Church go back to sleep after the Inquiry? My sense is that the current lead bishops are keen to use this opportunity to bring about as much culture change as they can and I think they recognise that this is required across the top of their Church. My own view is that a Truth & Reconciliation initiative may be needed, in which bishops end the long procession of crafted apology statements, and apologise for real. But that has to go hand in hand with real justice and genuine repair of lives.

Last week the Church of England published two documents which, between them, revealed much of its current thinking over safeguarding.  I penned a rapid reaction to these documents over the weekend, trying very hard to be positive over the obvious efforts that are currently being made by senior officers in the Church to make things better.  Since writing those comments, I have had a chance to reflect further about the Archbishops’ Council statement and the job specification for a new senior post for a Development Manager (Redress Scheme).  These later reflections have picked up on the reactions by some of the online networks of survivors.   I do not share the outright cynicism of some, but I have become increasingly aware of some of the practicalities of the proposed changes.  The Church wants to show to its members and to the wider public a more generous open attitude, a stance of caring compassionate empathy towards survivors.  To say that this shift is going to be difficult is, to put it mildly, a massive understatement.

As I suggested in my last piece, there is a great deal to be discovered about current attitudes in Church House through a careful reading of the job description for the new senior post.  Everything that appears must have passed through the scrutiny of many readers. It thus represents the attitudes and opinions of many senior figures in the Church or at least has their blessing and approval.  We can, I believe, read this job description as a genuine statement of intent to create good practice in the future by the Church of England.

The response to survivors by providing financial relief, is currently provided from one of three sources.  The Church Commissioners, the insurers and the dioceses are all mentioned as potential sources of financial payments. In the case of the Commissioners, I read of one recent case where money was found to help a survivor going through a serious crisis.  The cases involving the Commissioners are probably exceptional. Most of the money that gets awarded to those who have suffered abuse, comes from the church insurers.  In practice we are speaking about Ecclesiastical Insurance Group (EIG).  For this insurance compensation to be paid out, there is in operation a legal process worked out and negotiated by lawyers on both sides. This avoids the expense of a full court hearing.   The dioceses seldom seem to have any money to provide for survivors and when money is paid out, the sums received have typically been paltry.  They rarely exceed £500 for counselling or some other immediate need.  Dioceses, as far as I know, do not ever appear to budget for the needs of survivors.  Even if one or two dioceses have given money to survivors, that again would be a highly exceptional event. 

The current scheme of financial redress via the EIG has been described vividly by Gilo and others.  To be fair to the insurers, they see themselves as doing a job and, as far as possible, they have an obligation to protect their financial interests by paying only what is legally required of them.  The payouts to victims accord with protocols which EIG and the rest of the insurance industry adhere to.  EIG will pay out in accordance with the terms of the policy held by the stakeholder, the parish or diocese.  Successful claims follow the production of incontrovertible evidence of abuse.  The abused will normally have provided this through pointing to a criminal conviction by a perpetrator, or linking a claim to an open confession in front of witnesses.  Even then, to judge from the experience of some, the actual sum of money handed over is still subject to reduction, if lawyers acting for the insurer can argue that the some of the mental damage caused by the abuse was already present.  It is here that poor ethical practice can enter into the dealings of insurance companies and lawyers.   If such a situation does arise, it should be recognized that the client, here the Church of England, should accept responsibility for ensuring that ethical practice is always upheld.  Julie Macfarlane described her experience of standing up against lawyers employed by the Church as ‘brutal’.  It felt to her as though the Church itself had withdrawn from the field and was letting someone else do what amounts to dirty work on its behalf.  Those among the survivor population who do make it to the other side and receive pay-outs from the insurers do not receive life-changing amounts of cash.  The Church does appear finally to recognise this.   The word ‘redress’ which they are now using is a stronger word than compensation or negotiated settlements.  Sums of £30,000 hardly compensate for ruined lives, the loss of profession, housing and the chance of a secure retirement.

Escaping from the insurance/lawyer led culture of financial compensation will not be easy for the Church.  Additionally the introduction, as the job description puts it, of ‘a form of solace designed to provide a degree of comfort to the victim for his or her injury and to make some attempt to put right the wrong that he or she has suffered’ will need a massive shift in culture.  It is not just the introduction of a new way of doing things that will tax the future manager of the Church’s redress scheme.  It is the sheer number of unknown victims that may emerge as the result of this new initiative.  Initially the idea is to have a pilot scheme, funded by the Commissioners, to provide support for a small number of known survivors.  There could then also be hundreds of individuals, as yet unidentified, out there who need to be helped.  When the scheme has bedded down, there is the potential pastoral care of these individuals.  Where are all these caring people going to come from?  Many are looking for precisely ‘a degree of comfort’ but have not so far found it in the Church.  Does the Church then look outside its boundaries to find people who can offer ‘comfort’?  These helpers, whether or not professional, will need a measure of skill to do this kind of work.  Also, there will need to be some sort of safeguarding process to weed out the wrong kind of ‘helper’.  The list of things to be done before a pilot scheme can be extended more generally to the wider public is likely to be extremely complicated.  A final point to be made is the way that any mention of money being handed out by the Church to sufferers could have a terrible corrupting effect on motives and behaviour.  The lawyers who assist survivors at present are among the most ethically principled I know.  What will happen if floodgates of financial redress are opened too wide?  Will we get phone calls from computer voices asking us if we have ever been abused by clergy or the church?  The Church may need to employ an army of new people to protect itself as well as administer this new compassionate approach.

Further ideas occur to me.  Each of the 42 Church of England dioceses have DSAs (Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser).   Some of these individuals are very good and their responses to survivors have been of the highest quality.  Others have been less successful according to the reports that reach me.  But good or less good, these DSAs would be more effective if they also could administer a modest budget for survivors so that words of sympathy could be backed up by instant help in the form of funds for specified purposes.  There is something crazy about a survivor having to curtail a course of therapy simply because they cannot afford it.  A initial £10,000 p.a discretionary fund for each DSA would make an enormous difference to many suffering individuals who are waiting for the full unrolling of a national redress scheme. 

My final concluding comments inject a note of pessimism to this Redress project.  The old pattern of controlling redress by making survivors pass through a very tight scrutiny process organised by lawyers and insurers had one advantage for the Church.  It cut down those who were eligible for redress to a bare minimum.  The fact that it was conducted, at times with a callous cruelty, meant that only a few came through the process to receive any money.  A new scheme which apparently looks to the Church Commissioners rather than the insurers to fund it, is going to be enormously expensive.  Taking away some of the scrutiny, to let many more through the process, is going to create a situation which makes it impossible to anticipate its eventual size.  The people who contact me through the blog with some story of abuse, are numerous.  Much of the behaviour they record is not technically criminal, but it still deserves apology from the institutional Church.  Is the Church going to be better at this aspect of redress?  Some of the highest officers of our national Church have found this part of the redress process harder than anything.  We only have to remember the excruciating scenes at the IICSA hearing when our Church leaders seemed unable to offer any kind of apology to Matt Ineson.  This single memory makes me ask whether the Church is indeed ready for this new initiative.  Perhaps after all the Church is still window dressing as a way of protecting itself from the scrutiny of IICSA.

https://www.churchofengland.org/safeguarding/overview/news-and-views/unanimous-support-archbishops-council-safeguarding-proposals

https://pathways.churchofengland.org/job/pathways/1989/development-manager-redress-scheme

This past week, two important documents have been published by the Church of England.  Both seem to suggest that decisive moves are now being made for the future of church safeguarding practice.  The first document is a press release at the conclusion of the Archbishops’ Council which met on Wednesday 23^rd September.  This appeared the day after.  The second is linked to the first; it is a job description for a senior post in Church House to help put the safeguarding proposals of the Council into effect.  The new post is to be responsible for creating and overseeing a new Redress Scheme for survivors which is now being proposed by the Church.   The Archbishops and their Council are, in short, actively seeking new ways of supporting and responding to abuse survivors.

The Friday press release contained an assurance by the Church of England to put right two issues from the past.  One was to make sure that new financial and practical support is made available to abuse survivors.  The second was to ensure that this task of providing survivor support and care would be independent and be free of the control of the central Church.   The document also recognised that, in the words of the Archbishops, the Church ‘has failed survivors’.  But now ‘decisions being made feel like a turning point ……..today our words of sorrow are matched by actions that we believe will lead to real change.’  What is now being proposed is a pilot scheme, working with survivors to see what are the best ways of helping them and finding out for the future what are the best of delivering redress.

These two documents have appeared at a critical moment in the history of the Church.   Looking back to February, we witnessed a great flurry of activity at General Synod with several members urging the Church to make a new start in the area of safeguarding.  A powerful speech was delivered by the new safeguarding bishop, Jonathan Gibbs.  This was backed up by important speeches from Julie Conalty and John Spence.  All the speeches on safeguarding indicated that there was unhappiness about the Church’s record in the past, and that there was a need for a shake-up at every level.  The speeches now have had the desired effect and the present documents are an indication that much work has been going on behind the scenes.  There is no appetite for going back to the old pattern of effectively ‘contracting out’ the care and overall response to survivors.   

The second event that looms over the Church is the awaited report by IICSA on the Church’s record on safeguarding.  This is due to be published on the 6^th October.  It is likely that the Church will receive substantial criticism from the Inquiry report.  Clearly the Church needed to show that it was now recognising this record of failure over safeguarding.   It needed to have in place some positive recommendations for future action in this whole area.

The scheme to which the Archbishops’ Council press release refers to, is called the ‘interim pilot support scheme’.  This recognises that the consequences of abuse on an individual can be severe, to the point where a survivor ‘is known to be in seriously distressed circumstances’.  The Church also ‘has a heightened responsibility because of the way the survivor was responded to following disclosure’.   This is, no doubt, referring to the stories of survivors being thrust into having to engage in a hostile litigation process to gain any kind of hearing by the Church.  That process is itself abusive with survivors having to endure intrusive lines of questioning by lawyers employed by the insurance companies who seek to minimise payment of liability.  In short, the Church finally gets the point that a survivor deserves something better than being thrust into the position of being a litigant.  The wounds caused by such a process are every bit as bad as the original experience of abuse.

The advertisement for a Development Manager (Redress Scheme) which, in fact, appeared the day before the Archbishops’ Council, shows that all the details of the new scheme had been worked out before Wednesday.  The advertisement gives us a sense of how seriously the National Safeguarding Team and the lead Bishops are taking this project.  This new initiative and the details of the post to put it into practice, have required many hours of discussion and work.  The level of pay, almost £70,000 pa., suggests that they are looking for a senior experienced person who understands management, redress schemes and hopefully the byzantine structures of the Church of England.  We learn along the way, from the advertisement, how the Church has operated hitherto in this area of redress.  The advertisement acknowledges that there has been ‘some provision for redress for survivors of Church abuse as part of the civil litigation process with such payments usually made by insurers, but in some circumstances the Church Commissioners.’ It is only in ‘some cases’ that there have been ‘other forms of compensatory response … funding for therapy, counselling and offers of apology’.  It is clear that the person who wrote the advertisement realised that the existing provision for survivors has been at best a post-code lottery.  Something better than legally negotiated settlements is needed by survivors of church abuse.  The sums involved will probably have to be fairly substantial.

The appointed person is to oversee the development and delivery of a national scheme of redress.  There would be a new structure to offer financial compensation which would be ‘a form of solace designed to provide some degree of comfort to the victim for his or her injury and to make an attempt to put right the wrong that he or she has suffered.’  There would thus not be a ‘one size fits all’.  A welcome clause that appears, declares the importance of ‘’involving victims and survivors of abuse in both the design and the ongoing governance of the redress scheme.’ 

This advertisement is to be welcomed, not only for the prospect of having a competent person responsible for redress issues in the NST, but also what it reveals about the writers of this advertisement who are currently in charge of safeguarding.  Everything about this advertisement proclaims loudly that the old days of secrecy and outsourcing of abuse cases to lawyers and insurers are over.  The outrageous practice of church lawyers/insurers asking a psychiatrist to write reports on a victim without ever meeting them, will not in future be tolerated.  The Church, we trust, is taking back control from secret unaccountable committees and entering a new age of transparency and justice. Everyone recognises that the implementation of a good redress scheme will take some time to deliver, but the old days of winter in Narnia seem to be over.  The thaw has come.  Under the leadership of Melissa Carslake, Jonathan Gibbs and the other safeguarding bishops, we can look forward to real changes that will help the entire Church of England become a healthier and more just institution.  Then it will be ready to face the world with a clear conscience to replace the shame heaped on it from all the abuse stories over the past twenty to thirty years.  There is much to be done, but the voices of survivors have been and are finally being heard and we rejoice in that new reality.

 

During the past few days, we have heard of the death, at the age of 92, of Robert Graetz.  Most of us (myself included) had never heard of Graetz until this notice of his death.  His obituary, as recorded in The Times is, however, an inspiration to many of us, especially those of us seeking fresh models of Christian ministry for today.   He followed a particularly courageous and costly path of discipleship.  Through his ministry, he also helped to change the course of history in the United States.  What he did and what he stood for stands out as a beacon of light.  It shines in a dark world of terrible racial division and hatred that is still a threat to societies everywhere, and is found even inside our churches.

Graetz was a young white Lutheran minister who was sent to serve a black congregation in deeply segregated Montgomery, Alabama in 1955.  The time and the place of this appointment suggest that Graetz was stepping into in a very difficult situation, especially for a first charge.  Unlike other white Protestant denominations, Lutheranism had never been wedded to the racist narrative of some other Christian groups in the southern United States. The history of American Christianity and the way that Protestants in the South provided ideological support for the Confederate cause during the American Civil War, is a complicated one.  Suffice it to say that some Christian denominations claimed to find scriptural justification for the institution of slavery.  It is an area on which I have no specialist knowledge, so I have to pass over the topic with some generalities.  As I understand it, some Christians in the 19^th century also colluded with a mythical narrative which saw the European white races as being a people chosen by God to inhabit the new promised land of America.  All the other races, native Americans, blacks and other non-whites were deemed to be second class, and some were fit only for slavery.  I leave it to others to unpack this complex history of the ideas that have spawned notions of white supremacy.  It does seem clear that part of this story has its roots in a distorted theological/biblical vision. The leaders of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, although they were not party to this white supremacy mythology, would still have preferred to send a black minister to Montgomery, but none was available.  So Graetz entered an arena, every bit as dangerous to life and limb as those faced by the early Christian martyrs on their way to execution. The main difference was the fact that those who were to oppose him in his work with Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and other early heroes of black resistance, were in many cases self-designated Christians.

In 1955 the separation of the races in the southern States of the USA was virtually total.  Restaurants, parks and transport were all segregated.   Graetz was a front line witness to the now widely commemorated act of defiance by Rosa Parks, a member of his congregation, who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger.  For this she was arrested, but the leaders of the black community began immediately to organise a boycott of the transport system.  This lasted 381 days until the Supreme Court stated that segregated transport was unlawful.  The boycott was organised by a new organisation, known as the Montgomery Improvement Association, run by another young minister, Martin Luther King.   Graetz was a fellow organiser and on King’s committee.  Graetz’s own car was put into extensive service, ferrying numerous black passengers as a taxi/bus service.   This boycott was the pivotal moment in the national civil rights movement for the whole country.

Three days after Rosa Parks was arrested, Graetz stood up in his church pulpit and urged his congregation to join in the protest.  As well as driving his neighbours around in his own car, he organised a car pool to help strengthen the protest.  He also wrote to all his fellow white Christian ministers, urging them to show ‘Christian love’ by supporting the protest.  None dared.

Being the only white person openly supporting the bus boycott, Graetz attracted attention.   He appeared in newspaper photos next to King.  White people who supported blacks were considered ‘worse than the black person’.  His ‘taxi service’ attracted the attention of the police and he was arrested on one occasion.  More serious still were rocks and bomb attacks against his house, not to mention numerous acts of vandalism against his property.  All these events were going on against the background of Ku Klux Klan activity.   Convictions for the Klan crimes were hard to achieve.  White juries were reluctant to find accused white people guilty, especially when they were accused of damage to black property.  On the same night that saw a serious bomb attack on Graetz’s home, the home of another prominent boycott leader, Ralph Abernathy and four black churches were also attacked.

The exact place of Robert Graetz in the overall story of civil rights in America is not one for me to write.  Indeed, my writing about this particular individual is purely as a way of inviting my reader to think about Christian ministry taking place in a setting of extreme physical danger.  One is forced to ask questions for which there are probably no answers.  Should one ever go through such things with your own family being put at risk?  The story of Martin Luther King is fairly well known and Graetz appears to have stood alongside him as a fellow minister.  No doubt their friendship was able to do something to strengthen King’s resolve for what he had to do and to endure.  But what comes over from Graetz’s story is the determination by a Christian minister to put the service of the people in his charge as a priority over every else, even his personal safety.  In the rhetoric of many Protestant ministers there is a constant repetition of the desire to present the Gospel to ‘lost’ and fallen individuals.  No greater need exists for humankind than to hear, to respond and be saved.  Graetz had a different vision of ministry.  He believed in the preaching of the gospel as a way to give new hope for this life both to individuals and entire communities.  The Church and the Good News were about a better life for his listeners.  They were being encouraged to work for this themselves in all their efforts to promote justice, equality and the overcoming of the abject poverty that in particular afflicted the black community.  That makes him a hero of Christian ministry in my eyes, even though I have only ‘met’ him in the last couple of days through his obituary.

The idea that the Gospel or ‘Good News’ is about allowing the teaching of Jesus to change people so that they become instruments of society transformation is not in any way a new idea.   In Matthew’s gospel this view of the meaning of the Good News is found in the judgement scene in chapter 25.  The judgement that is made is not whether we have believed the right things, but whether we have been inspired by the Good News to do the right things, feed the hungry, clothe the naked and visit the prisoners etc.  The version of the Good News that tacitly supports white supremacy ideas is one that preaches a sanctified self-care at the expense of any necessary awareness, let alone service, of others.  If the social activism of people like Robert Graetz is considered to be ‘liberal’ theology, then so be it.  I would prefer to identify and be inspired by such a ministry which faced up to physical danger, calumny and hatred, to allow justice and love to win through.   That is the legacy of Graetz.  He showed a Jesus-like integrity of service that cared nothing for self, for power or material advantage.  The love of God was a compelling reality in his life.  With it he was able to stand firm and, in spite of his fears, make a distinct contribution to civil rights in America.  He also serves as a model of integrity which Christian ministers can identify with everywhere.

 

On Sunday, the preacher at my village church started with a question.  ‘What makes you angry?’  She was seeing a link between two of the readings for the day, the story of a disgruntled angry Jonah and equally upset workmen in the vineyard story.  Those who ‘had borne the heat of the day’ were receiving the same pay as those who had only worked one hour.  The problem for me, when a preacher starts with a provocative question, is that it may set me off on a line of thought which stops me giving proper attention to the rest of the sermon.  This happened on Sunday.

What makes me angry?   One of the main things that upsets me is the injustice that I see when powerful people abuse their power to the detriment of others, especially the weak.  In the context of this blog site, I also realise that it is the anger I feel on behalf of the abused that fuels me with the energy to go on writing about this topic.  Anger of this kind has the power to do positive things, even bringing about change.  I hope the anger can be, in a small way compared to the anger felt by Jesus when he chased the money-changers out of the Temple.   He also showed real anger against the Scribes and Pharisees at various other points in the gospel narrative, especially Matthew 23.  So, Jesus seems to approve of anger that results in the furthering of the cause of justice, goodness and transparency.  The Psalmist said ‘Be angry but sin not’ and this reminds us that the motives for feeling anger must always be open to being questioned.  We have to ask, for example, whether the anger we may feel is an example of selfish petulance.  There will always be a need, in other words, to challenge our motives every time we feel anger being stirred up inside us.  Is this really righteous anger or possibly something selfish and dark?

The blog gives me opportunities to think out loud about the misuse of power in the Church, whether it is the power exercised by an individual or that of the wider organisation.  What is going on when an individual plays power games and abuses another person is somewhat different from the processes involved when an institution misbehaves.  Those in charge of an organisation can abuse, not only by direct activity but also through neglect.  If, for example, the institution does not follow up complaints against its own employees who are accused of abuse, it is itself contributing to an intensification of a victim’s experience of abuse.  Of course, there can be false accusations from which the institution needs protection.   More often, though, what we are witnessing is the natural tendency of an institution to act in a way that preserves its interests, whether reputational or financial.

The focus of this blog, when I began writing in 2013, was to stand up for individuals who were at the wrong end of power games played by the church, particularly cult-like charismatic groups.  I was combining a long-held interest in charismatic Christianity with observing how their behaviour could sometimes harm people. In 2010 I joined the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA ) and am a member to this day.  There are a huge variety of cults in our modern societies, not all of them obviously religious.  Perhaps the majority operate with some kind of spiritual agenda, whether New Age, Buddhist or Christian in origin.  Most of those who study them are ex-members themselves.  They know all the tricks that had been played on them to bring them, at one point in their lives, into a state of mental and emotional submission to a leader.  At the ICSA (cult studies) conferences I am meeting a variety of people who are in the process of escaping one or other of these groups.  While they were now no longer inside the culture that had caused them so much harm, there was still a continuing process to be gone through of escaping the mental tramlines that the cults had placed inside their heads.  Serious damage had been done and even when they were working, possibly as full-time psychotherapists, to help other cult survivors, they were still fighting their own internal battles.  The wrong kind of religion can, we can summarise, be bad for your happiness, your finances as well as your health.

My time in ICSA (cult studies), mainly by attending their conferences and preparing beforehand to give a paper, has helped me to become more and more sensitised to the possibility of the real damage that can be caused by religion.  I have to emphasise that it is seldom the doctrines or belief systems that cause the damage.  It is the use made of those beliefs by a controlling leader.  The long process of recovery from cultic bondage is one of relearning how to feel, how to think independently and generally escape all the destructive patterns of dependence that have been inculcated by a leader.  Most survivors of the cults preserve mental fragility years after their exit from a high-control group.  The tentacles that controlled them for so long were far more than deviant doctrines.  They were a whole nexus of social, psychological and theological strands woven together.  Those who have successfully helped individuals ‘escape’ from cultic bondage do not start with the theological/religious belief systems.   It is probably as futile to discuss such systems of belief with a exiting member, as having a conversation with someone whose only language is Finnish.  Mutual understanding is impossible.

Having said that beliefs on their own do not cause actual harm, I have to admit that this statement needs qualification.  When I wrote my piece for the volume of essays edited by Janet Fife and Gilo, Letters to a Broken Church, I looked at some biblical passages that bolstered clerical/leadership authority in potentially harmful ways.  People are harmed when Christian communities turn against them for no other ‘wrong’ than disagreeing with a pastor’s desire to use power inappropriately.  In administering such ostracism, a leader may be quoting scripture to back up his harmful consolidation of power.  His power is enhanced by his weaponization of the scriptural text.  Other examples are the use of scripture to foster fear of demons or hell and that will cause damage.  A theology or style of reading scripture that causes obvious harm to people, physically, emotionally or spiritually will always need to be challenged.  To repeat, it is not the actual texts that are being questioned, it is the way that they are being used to do damage to others that is under scrutiny. 

One of the extraordinary developments in the long unhappy saga of the institutional church and its neglect of survivors is in the way that simple morality and conscience has often seemed to be absent.  When bishops and church officials are found to be colluding with others to supress truth and transparency, that is of serious concern for the whole church.  The fact that institutions will have a natural tendency to protect themselves is a neutral observation.  It becomes a problem when the leaders of that organisation resort to underhand methods to promote that defensiveness.  It would seem that, in Gilo’s recent revelations, lawyers, medical experts and insurance personnel have conspired together to deploy highly questionable strategies in abuse cases – on the edge of what most people would consider ethical. This has been to the severe detriment of survivors’ well-being.  The effects have had serious and lasting consequences.  Julie Macfarlane’s book is soon to appear telling the story of tussle with the legal/insurance cabal employed by the Church which did so much in its attempt to destroy her and her case.  Fortunately for the abused, some survivors, Macfarlane, Gilo, Tony and Julian among them, have, at great cost to themselves, stood up to the bullying juggernaut represented by the insurance faction/legal teams/reputation managers arrayed against them.  There are signs at last that somewhere in the system individuals are beginning to show signs of shame that may lead, we hope, to real changes in the end.  Then we have the IICSA (sexual abuse inquiry) report, due at the beginning of October.  This may help to reinforce the message of needed new beginnings that is so sorely needed.

I began this reflection with the word anger.  I was talking about the anger I feel for the appalling things I have reported on in this blog.  A few are to do with individuals seeking gratification for sexual urges.  More shocking are parts of entire constituencies doing underhand things, whether they are called the Church of England, Lambeth Palace or the ReNew/Titus network.  Each, in different ways, is involved in ducking and diving to avoid owning up to massive failures of care, love and common decency in regard to abuse survivors.  Many of these have written to me to confirm that the institutional failures towards them are far more hurtful and harmful.  Their stories have made me angry and I hope that my reader can share some of that with me.