One summer Sunday afternoon in 1988, I was in the provost’s vestry of Bradford Cathedral, assisting the Bishop of Bradford to robe. I often did this, since as the junior member of clergy I was the bishop’s chaplain when he visited the cathedral. What was out of the ordinary that day was the group of people gathered there. Along with the bishop, Roy Williamson, and the Provost, Brandon Jackson, were David Penman, Archbishop of Melbourne (Australia); and Desmond Tutu, Archbishop of Cape Town (South Africa). The latter two were in England for the Lambeth Conference. Archbishop Tutu was scheduled to preach at the cathedral evensong before we all went on to a mass rally at Valley Parade football ground, where Archbishop Tutu would be speaking again.

This group of powerful men began discussing the vexed question of women’s ordination.  South Africa and Australia had ordained their first women deacons in 1985; England in 1987. None yet ordained women as priests. The great men were discussing if and when women should be admitted to the priesthood.  I listened meekly until Desmond Tutu concluded, ‘There’s no hurry.’  I spoke on impulse:  ’Time passes slowly when you’re being oppressed, doesn’t it, Archbishop?’ There was a short silence. Without replying, the men turned to other topics.

The Anglican Church of Southern Africa eventually ordained women as priests in 1992, as did the Anglican Church of Australia. The Church of England followed in 1994.

I have recounted that incident in the provost’s vestry to very few people. To tell the truth, I was embarrassed at the part I had played in it; I felt that I had been impertinent to speak out as I did. After all I was a very junior member of clergy and these men were all very senior.

A few months ago, however, I did relate it to Christina Rees CBE, a founding member of the Archbishops’ Council and formerly Chair of WATCH (Women and the Church) and a member of the General Synod for 25 years. Christina had a very different take on it. It was extraordinary, she pointed out, that a group of men should discuss women’s ordination while totally ignoring the ordained (and robed) woman who was with them. Even Desmond Tutu, a noted civil rights activist, had not thought to recognise my presence or ask for my views. I was not acknowledged even when I spoke.

The idea of deference to rank was so deeply ingrained in the Church that even a good man Like Tutu could discuss women’s ordination in front of an ordained woman while completely ignoring her. They certainly did not think they had anything to gain by hearing my perspective on the matter. The arrogance of this ought to be breathtaking, yet it betrays something of the culture of the Church.

In my first year of training at Wycliffe there were only 5 of us women, and 95 men. My fellow trainee Lynda Rose recounted an incident which occurred during a mission she was on in the spring of 1985. One of the local people enquired of the tutor leading the group whether the Wycliffe women then training to be deacons had aspirations to the priesthood. No, he replied immediately, they hadn’t. Lynda promptly responded that actually all 5 of us felt we were called to be priests. When the incident was discussed later the tutor’s reaction was, ‘Don’t discuss women’s ordination, it’s a minefield!’ None of the teaching staff had asked the women students regarding our vocations; they simply assumed that we didn’t want to be priests. And the lesson the tutor had taken from this was not, ‘I shouldn’t assume I know what people think before I’ve asked them,’ or even, ‘Next time I’m asked for someone’s views, I’ll let them speak for themselves.’ Instead he had labelled the whole topic as dangerous and to be avoided. Women are tricky, let’s not discuss them!

In my files I have an order paper from a long-ago General Synod, which was due to discuss the report ‘Making Women Visible’. The debate was listed instead as ‘Making Women Invisible’ – a typo which was perhaps a more honest reflection of the Church of England’s intentions.

My recent reflections have not concerned merely the behaviour of the prelates in the provost’s vestry, however. In 1988 I was already a feminist and I later became an activist, but for more than 30 years I had never questioned my feeling that I should not have spoken out. In fact, my shame at having done so had kept me silent all that time. I have come to see that that too is extraordinary. I come from a nonconformist and independent-minded background and had had none of the awe  of the hierarchy with which many Anglicans are brought up; yet in barely a year I had internalised the view that women and junior clergy should be invisible and inaudible. No doubt my critics will say I was never very good at being silent, but the fact remains that for the whole of my ministry I felt uneasy and even guilty whenever I spoke out. And I was all too aware of the disapproval of my seniors when I did so.

IICSA identified deference as one of the reasons why abuse could so tragically flourish in our Church. It is so much a part our Church’s culture – and that of the Anglican Communion as a whole – that usually we don’t even think to question it. But it corrodes our sense of common humanity and impedes justice; what in biblical terms is called ‘righteousness’.

Deference to Peter Ball’s rank as bishop, his class and social standing, along with his immense personal magnetism, hindered many from discerning his narcissism or believing the allegations against him. Ball was a bishop and a bishop would not do such evil things. Deference means that college tutors don’t have to value their ordinands’ experience outside the Church. Deference means that bishops can pronounce on all sorts of matters of which they have no real experience, while ignoring the perspective of those who do. Deference prevents Church leaders from accepting what survivors of Church abuse have to offer.

Let’s put an end to deference. It’s destructive.

The BBC programmes on Peter Ball have naturally provoked a fair degree of comment, alongside expressions of regret and sorrow.  Because Ball is no longer with us, it is possible to attempt to understand something of the whole.  On Thinking Anglicans one commentator has provided additional intriguing information about Ball’s early years, his encounter with the clergy selection process and his sponsorship for ordination by none other than George Bell, then Bishop of Chichester.  With his help, Ball negotiated the initial blocks put up by CACTM, the selection body, and obtained his first curacy in Bell’s diocese.  Having become a ‘blue-eyed boy’ in Bell’s eyes, Ball was allowed to move on very quickly along his chosen path to an involvement with a school and later, in 1960, to found his own religious community.   The early details are intriguing and are evidence of the considerable charm and powers of persuasion (manipulation?) that Ball was able to exercise over others right back at the beginning.

The crimes which finally sent Ball to prison and public disgrace are well-known.  The overall theme of this blog has never wanted to spend time on dwelling on the details of the sexual deviations Ball was guilty of.  It is however worth noting the fact that he appears to have been, for much of his life, fixated on abusing adolescent boys and young men.  The only thing resembling a comment that I will insert here is one relating to a discipline beyond my expertise.  I would surmise that such behaviour is possibly indicative of a disrupted maturing process.  Part of his personality, in other words, seems never to have developed beyond his own adolescence.  History would have been far more tolerant if he had had a secret liaison with a mature male partner in a genuine relationship of mutuality.  What actually happened, the coercing and control of young vulnerable men, was evil and deeply harmful to his victims. 

From my point of view, the deeply interesting part of Ball’s story is not this sexual behaviour but the way throughout his life he succeeded in covering up his crimes by the use of the techniques of persuasion and charm.  The first victim of Ball’s charm was George Bell back in the 1950s.  Bell wrote about him, when promoting his candidature for ordination.  “Junior Squash champion for the South of England and Sussex, and is regarded as a possible Blue at Cambridge. He represented Lancing at soccer, athletics and tennis, besides being head prefect, and managing the school remarkably well, though undoubtedly a reserved boy. Surely this says something for character?”  Although these are not the only remarks about Ball that were made, it is clear that the public-school persona and excellence at sport impressed Bell.  To use my language, Ball was a ‘chap’, a secure member of the English social elite and much to be valued among the clergy at the time.  This was apparently the dominant reality about his personality that overrode any other considerations in the eyes of his bishop.

This social confidence which attendance at Lancing had given Ball in those early years were finely honed at later stages of his life.  Cambridge University in those days was attended by disproportionate numbers of boys from public schools.   Later still Ball mixed easily with aristocrats, princes of the realm and senior politicians, such as Margaret Thatcher.    Being part of the social elite and wearing all the confidence that goes with it, will always make it easier to hide whatever damaged aspects of the personality may exist.  I am not in a position to speculate on the exact nature of the woundedness that enabled Ball to hurt and damage so many of his fellow human beings.  These actions do suggest that he was indeed himself seriously flawed.  The social power he possessed helped him to be in a place where he could put into effect his nefarious plans.  Later on, he used the same social power to defend himself against the attacks of those who were to challenge his behaviour.

Alongside the social power that Ball obtained simply by being part of the public-school/Cambridge nexus of the early 50s, Ball possessed another form of power – charismatic power.   It is difficult to define precisely what we are talking about when we use the expression charismatic power as it has social and religious meanings.  But to summarise, it is the ability to inspire others, to point them to a place beyond the here and now.  It suggests that the one with this ability is able to excite others with some vision for the future.  Peter Ball was by all accounts an impressive speaker and preacher.  As one of his clergy, for the short period while he was Bishop of Gloucester, I could see the way he operated.  I did not have the insights of character analysis that I possess now, but I could see that Ball had ways of persuading people of his holiness and integrity which were compelling.  It was hard to believe at the time that he was capable of cruel exploitative behaviour of young men.   Large numbers of people were caught up in the myth of Ball’s holiness and very few were able to glimpse the reality of his narcissistic cruelty

One person who forms a crucial part of the Ball story, but whose role has not been closely examined is Margaret Thatcher.  The first(?) meeting of Ball and Thatcher seems to have occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Brighton bombing of 1984.   Ball was the local bishop (Lewes) and helped to provide a calm unflappable pastoral presence in the midst of the carnage.  Thatcher, having noticed and befriended him sought to use her prime minister’s influence to push his name forward for a diocesan post.  She was unable to achieve this during her tenure of office but the influence of Robin Catford, her ecclesiastical appointments secretary, seems to have prevailed under John Major who followed her.  (For further information on this, see Colin Buchanan’s letter in the Church Times 24^th Jan.)  Thatcher’s active interest in ecclesiastical appointments is well-known.  She helped to propel George Carey to Canterbury and Brandon Jackson to the Deanery at Lincoln.   We cannot now disentangle the chemistry that linked Ball and Thatcher but we can speculate that she was, like many others, susceptible to his charismatic charm combined with finely honed social polish.  It was this combination of skills that later served Ball well, even after he had been cautioned by the police in 1992.  With it he distorted the judgement of both the Prince of Wales and the Archbishop of Canterbury.  Both were drawn in to become Ball’s supporters even when there was demonstrable evidence of criminal behaviour.   Somehow the sheer power that Ball possessed, charismatic and social, overwhelmed the capacity of both men to make rational coherent judgements about one of their fellow men.

A longer version of this paper, were it to be written, would want to explore further, from the clues that we are given, other dimensions of the life of Peter Ball.  My own amateur assessment of his psychological profile suggests that he was the victim of a full-blown narcissistic personality disorder.  This would account for a number of features in the story which are otherwise puzzling.  How are we account for the evident convincing charm combined with an almost total absence of conscience?  The ultimate ambition of Ball seems to have been the exercising of power to gratify his outsize ego.  The sexual exploitation of adolescents was only one part of his wider insatiable desire to be admired and honoured.  He especially looked to be noticed by the great and the good of society.  Narcissism, charisma and charm all often work together and when in operation they are able to fool and confuse the rest of us.  If we are to learn from this life of an extraordinary but deeply flawed individual, I believe we should understand Peter Ball primarily as a man who abused others through the misuse of his power.  Beyond the dozens he sexually abused there are the thousands he fooled through his deadly manifestation of charm and faux holiness.  That is the great devastating legacy of this man and, as I write this, I realise that I am among the many who during his life time were fooled in this way.

William Crawley interviewed Professor Julie Macfarlane on Radio 4 on the Sunday Programme last week-end.   The interview (transcribed below) follows the extradition, trial and conviction of her abuser, the Rev Meirion Griffiths.  The interview makes vividly clear the mismatch, on the part of the Church, between protestations of ‘deep sorrow and remorse’ and the litigious games sometimes played against survivors who seek to bring their complaints of abuse against the Church. 

William Crawley When reporting on child sexual cases as we often do on this programme, we try to hear from victims and survivors to understand their treatment and their experience both from the church and the legal system.  What though if an abuse survivor is also a professor of law?  What unique insights could they bring of being a complainant in our legal system and about the role of the Church in those very challenging circumstances.

This week a retired priest of the Church of England, the Revd. Meirion Griffiths who is now 81 was convicted of sexually assaulting a teenager and another woman in the 1970s and 1980s while he was Rector of St Pancras and St John in Chichester.  One of those women was Dr Julie Macfarlane who is now Professor of Law in the University of Windsor in Canada.

Julie Macfarlane It would have been devastating not to have convicted somebody who I have known for almost my whole life, did some terrible things to me and I also know to many other people. So, that moment when I heard he was convicted was an enormous sense of relief.  It was not validation for a survivor to hear that there is a conviction because we know it is true but it is a huge relief to know that the process is finally over. 

WC  Can you tell me a little bit about how the abuse you experienced affected you throughout your life?

JM I spent the first twenty years afterwards really trying to just ignore it and get on with my life.  I was ambitious – I was developing a career – I started to have a family and I really stuffed it down.  But I knew that at some point I would have to do something about it because I knew that it was going to be a predatory pattern that I had witnessed and that there were other people out there and I felt a moral responsibility to stop it.  It will always be part of my life – this abuse.  It is impossible for a survivor to imagine what it would be like without having experienced that trauma and I do have chronic PTSD and I have learned over the years to manage that as well as possible.  But it is an experience that stays with you for ever and affects your reactions to life and your feelings about things that happened to you for ever.

WC    And many victims and survivors, as you know, have over the years spoken about burying their story and their fears about the re-traumatisation that they might experience going through the criminal justice system.  Were you re-traumatised?

JM  Oh, absolutely.  The cross-examination process, even for somebody like myself who, you would say, William, understands the process – I have been training lawyers for forty years – is absolutely brutal.  And it’s brutal because we continue to have at the centre of this process an idea of relevance and credibility that we associate with the evidence of victims which completely misunderstands the impact of trauma and what this is really like.   So, I was asked repeatedly to relive a situation which was incredibly painful for me.  Every single minute difference of description was seized upon.  So we have this idea that any possible inconsistency, however minute, is relevant and that the witness should be taken to task.  I sometimes compare this to asking somebody who ran out of a burning house 30 years ago what colour socks they were wearing.  And, if they get the colour wrong then it is: ‘Aha you see, you are not credible!’  These are not issues that affect people’s credibility and truthfulness, but it has become an accepted part of the process that there should be a tearing down of a victim – what we sometimes call ‘witness whacking’.  And I was asked over and over again during my cross-examination both times, ‘you’re lying aren’t you Professor Macfarlane’.  Indeed, the degree of public humiliation and excoriation that victims have to go through in order to testify is absolutely insane.  And, you know, I have some real advantages and privileges here and it was incredibly traumatising for me.  I cannot imagine how we can expect people to do this. 

WC     Julie.  What about your experience of the Church’s role, how things worked out, how things played out in the court.

JM.  They were completely at arms’ length at the criminal trial.  I think that that is wrong.  I think that in a case like this where there has been a previous investigation followed by his resignation, then a criminal suit which was successfully settled.  Where everybody knows that these things happened, I think that the Church should have been proactive in making a supportive statement towards the two complainants – myself and the other complainant.  My experience over the years of talking to the Church about this issue is that they talk out of both sides of their mouths.  In public they talk about their deep sorrow and remorse.  In reality, in civil cases they are playing the most aggressive litigation game imaginable.  I know this because I study and write about litigation games and they are not following through with what they say is their commitment to understand the truth of what happened.  In fact, they are vigorously resisting the truth of what happened.  If the Church really meant what it says about being sorrowful about the thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands worldwide victims of clerical abuse, they would be finding a way to encourage people to come forward.  They would not be resisting it. They would not be putting road-blocks in people’s way both in a civil case and in a criminal case, by simply allowing somebody to be torn to pieces as I and the other complainant had to be in order to convince a jury of the truth of what we were saying.  And I don’t want to sugar-coat this.  It is a horrifying experience.  But here is the important thing.  Unless we step forward, unless we talk about this, unless people are able to do this, nothing is ever going to change in this culture.  This affects everybody from law professors across the board.  And we need people to step forward and say that this happened.  And you know, at the moment you do have to be very tough to go through this process.

WC Professor Julie Macfarlane

Mark Bennet reflects on the way the Osborne report of 1989 indicates a quite distinct set of mores over sex current in the Church at that time. The culture of the Church protecting its own and failing survivors seems to have been also endemic in the previous generation.

The screening of the documentary “The Church’s Dark Secret” this week was salutary for me, even though I had been following the stories of safeguarding failings in the Church for some years. It threw a spotlight on attitudes and behaviours which we find shocking today, and on uses and abuses of power in the Church to protect those in privileged positions.

One issue the documentary did not address was how typical the response to Neil Todd and Peter Ball was. Did Peter Ball hold such a significant position in the minds of church authorities that his treatment was essentially unique, or were there aspects here which were more typical of the time? The emerging material around the activities of Jonathan Fletcher demonstrates some common themes, but the aspect of positional privilege is present also in that story.  It is easy to see the two as examples of the abuse of particular power and privilege separate from the more normal life of ordinary people.

As a matter of course institutions rarely record how they bury their shameful secrets.  In this case, as it happens, there is some documentary material which records the “sorts of strategies” which were apparently being “widely followed” as late as the late 1980s and presumably still into the 1990s.  This makes it roughly contemporaneous with the shocking stories of abuse which are now coming to light. The document revealing these attitudes and strategies is the Osborne Report of 1989, titled “REPORT TO THE HOUSE OF BISHOPS ON HOMOSEXUALITY”. Though the existence of the report was widely known at the time, its content was suppressed.  It was eventually published by the Church Times in January 2012. The full text is available at http://thinkinganglicans.org.uk/uploads/osborne_report.pdf.

Most of the text, which runs to 144 pages is a careful analysis of the attitudes within the Church to the issues of homosexuality. There is no sense in which abuse or safeguarding is a principal or a main consideration.  There is, however, a short section which touches on the response to pastoral problems and failings around sexual misbehaviour.  The most significant extract is copied in full below. Being essentially an aside in a longer report, there is no detailed analysis of the attitudes and practices involved.  When I read it, it shocked me to the core.  Here practices which allowed significant abusers to hide and to continue in ministry are recorded with minimal critical comment. Here, the response to “breaking the law” does not involve reporting to the police or statutory authorities. Here, the pastoral care of the victims and survivors of broken pastoral situations gets a bare passing mention, whilst the maintenance in ministry of clergy and ordinands seems to be a priority.

For me this raises two key issues. First, we can criticise leaders in the past for maintaining the culture they inherited, rather than challenging it.  That would be wrong.  The failings involved in the widely reported cases of abuse are not only the failings of a few individuals in places of power.  The Church as a whole was failing.  The problem was not only “them” but “us”. Second, until this truth is owned by the Church as a whole, the attempts to change the culture and practice will likely prove ineffective.  The extent of denial is too great.

The dynamics around the disclosure of abuse by a victim frequently involve, I would suggest, a sense of shame and failure evoked in the person who receives the disclosure. The discovery of a widespread practice which would horrify us today may do the same. I have certainly felt it, and have made all kinds of excuses to myself not to give this material particular prominence once I discovered it. But. unless the Church is able to own its shameful history both institutionally (in response to culture and practice) and personally (in response to individual disclosures) I fear that “safeguarding” will remain distorted. It will be the “safe” parts of the safeguarding agenda – like training and DBS checks – which will get the priority and the money.  The shameful parts will continue to be pushed to the margins together with the victims and survivors who bring our shame and failure to light.

I hope that new attention to this material will help the Church of England to reach a more honest appraisal of its past.  More significantly I hope that it will help the Church towards a better response to the victims and survivors of abuse.

EXTRACT FROM THE OSBORNE REPORT (1989 and published 2012)

294. All strategies for pastoral care need to give careful thought to their likely outcome. In many cases the future well-being and reputation of the persons involved may well depend on a clear understanding of where different choices lead. ACCM, college principals, directors of ordinands, and bishops need to bear this in mind when dealing with sensitive situations involving care and discipline of ordinands and clergy. These become particularly sensitive where matters of personal conduct are under question. Such situations are, of course, not just concerned with homosexuality.

295. As far as we are able to determine the following sorts of strategies are widely followed.

a) When an ordinand or one of the clergy discloses their sexual temptations, support and encouragement is offered and more thorough counselling advised if appropriate.

b) When an ordinand or candidate for ordination discloses a homosexual orientation, s/he is advised that if s/he chooses to promote the homosexual cause or to live openly in a sexual partnership s/he will seriously impair their range of ministry and that s/he might better seek some other form of vocation. If the person declares their intention to remain very discreet in their sexual activities, those in authority have to judge whether this seems a likely option and to assess whether a clandestine sexual life will be detrimental to their moral and spiritual life and ministry. Likewise if s/he declares an intention of celibacy those in pastoral charge need to consider the sort of support necessary to sustain this vocation.

c) Where there is a case where sexual behaviour has been unprofessional, say with a consenting adult in their pastoral care, discretion and discipline work together. The priority is to search for the best way forward for all concerned. Penitence and purpose of amendment and the acceptance of care and counselling to help the process of change are essential. If such are not forthcoming, resignation may be required.

e) When the sexual behaviour of clergy causes scandal, they are asked to explain themselves. If this behaviour or talk is thought to be essential or unavoidable by the person involved, the bishop might ask whether it is reasonable to expect his congregation or parishioners to go along with such behaviour if it offends their conscience and judgment. Other work might be considered if things reach an impasse, otherwise a resignation with no alternative Churchwork might have to be required.

f) When such behaviour involves breaking the law, eg by sexual involvement with a minor (especially one in his personal care)and there is no reason to suspect that the case is known to any but the two of them, the person concerned is warned of the great danger that they and their ministry are in, be moved to penitence, and be advised to terminate the relationship gently but swiftly and to go on leave of absence prior to moving parishes. The provision of pastoral care for the minor is discussed. Immediate resignation may be required of such clergy.

STRENGTHS OF THIS APPROACH

296.  The present way of handling such pastoral measures:

a) upholds the principle of the sinfulness of homosexual genital acts, but is compassionate towards lapses, especially when there is evidence of penitence, faith and the desire to amend.

b) recognises that sin cannot be abolished, but that it has to be left behind, and that an individual may need help in growing past his sins.

c) keeps sexual sins in the private area as far as possible.

DETRIMENTAL CONSEQUENCES

297. The present methods may be perceived to lack clarity. From one side it may be suggested that there is not enough toughness in opposing homosexual conduct. On the other hand it may be seen as discriminating against homosexual persons.

298. It runs the risk of inhibiting clergy and ordinands from being open to the bishop. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that homosexuals are very cautious about how much they feel able to share with their bishop. All of this can lead to deception, hypocrisy and concealment which are detrimental to spiritual growth and healthy adult relationships.

The BBC 2 programme on the 14th and 15th January on the appalling behaviour of Peter Ball and the cover-up of the crimes has drawn attention once again to the sufferings of Neil Todd. Neil committed suicide rather than going through the ordeal of facing his abuser in a trial. Although there are many victims of Ball it seems right to honour the memory of Neil who paid the price of his life because of the failure of the Church to listen to him. As the programme made it clear, the Church tried to discredit him and refused to take his testimony seriously. I am republishing the story from a March 2018 blog alongside the account of Guide Nyachuru. We are hoping that the review of John Smyth by Keith Makin will give back to his memory the dignity that Guide deserves. May they both rest in peace.

AS WRITTEN IN MARCH 2018 Amid all the talk of improvements to safeguarding within the Church of England, it is right to remember two past victims of its failure, Neil Todd and Guide Nyachuru. Both these names have been mentioned in one of the comments on a recent blog. Neil Todd was one of Peter Ball’s victims who committed suicide in 2012. The other was a young lad in Zimbabwe who died in mysterious circumstances at one of John Smyth’s camps in 1992. Smyth was accused of culpable homicide but the case was not proven. Several witnesses at his trial spoke of the abuse and savage beatings at the camps. This seemed to follow the pattern that Smyth had established with some boys who attended Winchester College and who were associated with the Iwerne camps at the end of the 70s and early 80s.

What do these two deaths have in common? In the first place neither of them would have happened if the Church had taken more seriously reports of abuse and violence in the first instance. A case against each of the men involved, Peter Ball and John Smyth, had been established to a high level of probability. While Peter Ball may not have gone on to abuse further victims after his police caution in 1992, the refusal of Church authorities to inhibit his ministry must have preyed heavily on his existing victims. Neil Todd himself seems to have reached out many times asking to be heard, only to be ignored and pushed back. Whatever the precise reasons for his death we might reasonably say that he died suffering from the trauma of sexual abuse which was severely aggravated by institutional neglect on the part of the Church.

The second disturbing link between the two stories is in the way that the two perpetrators avoided justice. Ball eventually was sent to prison but Smyth has not yet faced a proper trial. Both kept away from courts through exercising their considerable social power. Letters supporting Peter Ball were written by people of high social standing to the Director of Public Prosecutions. There were apparently two thousand of these letters. The writers of these letters probably had no knowledge of whether Ball was guilty or not. They simply felt that it was wrong to accuse an apparently charming, charismatic and holy man of such terrible actions. The Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, George Carey, also fell victim to the social charm exercised by Ball and allowed him to continue his ministry.

The facts as to how Peter Ball avoided justice for so long will be examined afresh in July at the IICSA hearings. Whether anything new remains to be revealed is another matter. A curious detail, yet to be explained, is why George Carey sent in a witness statement to IICSA claiming not to remember anything untoward about the Chichester Diocese during his tenure as Archbishop. I have no doubt that the question of the protection of Ball by many establishment figures will be commented on.

The Smyth affair is not due to have forensic examination by IICSA. Arguably though it is still a gaping wound in the church that has more to be revealed about it. There are simply too many unanswered questions. Some of the questions concern Archbishop Welby himself. He claims to have had no contact with the organisation that organised the Iwerne camps after he left for Paris in 1978. It is suggested that Welby returned on several occasions to give talks at these camps. A report on Smyth’s behaviour was drawn up by Mark Ruston, an Anglican priest in 1982. Even though the accusations against Smyth were accepted by him as true, nothing was done to inform the authorities. Smyth was allowed to depart for Zimbabwe and later South Africa. Welby knew Ruston extremely well having had digs in his Cambridge Vicarage during his last year in Cambridge in 1978. The authorities at Winchester College were also fully aware of Smyth’s behaviour but again nothing was done to report this to the authorities. The whole secrecy surrounding the affair – something in which many must have colluded -has the aroma once again of an establishment cover-up. All the people involved from the boys themselves to the Trustees of the camps came from an elite group within British society. They also form a strong network within one powerful stratum of Anglican evangelicalism. Many of Iwerne’s ‘graduates’ occupy positions of high responsibility within Church and State and the whole affair has no doubt caused considerable embarrassment within these circles.

Two deaths of young men separated by twenty years. Both were preventable deaths if warnings of the evil behaviour on the part of two socially powerful individuals had been given earlier. One mourns these deaths, not in the sense of having known the individuals personally but because they represent and stand for the pain of many others who have been caught up in abuse cases before and after them. What are the common features in these stories?
First there was some toxic theology at work in both episodes. Toxic theology is like a fungus. It grows and flourishes in settings where groups of people collude together in unhealthy thinking. Ball’s theology was a distortion of an understanding of the monastic tradition. Smyth had a reading what true commitment to God involved and that included the ability and readiness to suffer pain.
Second. Both perpetrators were powerful individuals within the church. They were looked up to by many others and this afforded them protection from scrutiny both within the group and from the outside. Abuse was allowed to happen with ultimately tragic consequences.
Thirdly the stories show that evil selfish actions by individuals can result in tragedy of the worst kind. No one can ever pretend that sexual abuse or any other kind of abuse in the church has no consequences. It does and there is an obligation on all of us to fight abusive behaviour with every means available to us.

In this post we remember two individuals -victims of religiously inspired abuse. Their deaths lie at the door not only of their abusers. Those who kept secrets or covered up in any way for the abusers must share some of the blame for their deaths.

May Neil and Guide rest in peace and rise in glory.

A thought occurred to me as I was reflecting on the first part of the Peter Ball programme broadcast on Monday night on BBC2.  I was thinking how children learn the difference between right and wrong.  It occurred to me that my generation learnt a great deal about the victory of good over evil by watching endless performances of cowboy films.  In the 50s before televisions were generally available, crowds of children would pour down to their local cinema on Saturday mornings to watch a special programme for them at the price of sixpence.  There would nearly always be at least one Western and so the children would follow some well-worn story line involving ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ on horseback shooting it out at the climax.  I came to realise how important this oft-repeated story line was for a rudimentary moral education for the children of that period.  Knowing that good was going to prevail in every case was a kind of secular ethical conditioning.   Each individual was taught to believe in the ultimate victory of goodness.  That is not a bad moral principle to live by, even if it does not always work out this way.  Britain in the 50s was an optimistic place and it was still possible to believe in such an idea.  Schools, churches and fictional cowboys on horseback all backed up the idea that good guys always win in the end.

When I was watching the Peter Ball programme, I had a horrible sense of turn-around in this old comforting moral universe that I had grown up with.  Suddenly the roles of good and bad were reversed.  The ‘good’ church types, the ones that I had known, in some cases personally, in the Diocese of Gloucester, suddenly appeared weak, deceitful or actually wicked.  By contrast those who opposed them, the police, ruthlessly searching for truth, were the good and upright ones.  My professional and personal instinctive loyalties lay with the Archbishop and other bishops who were defending a villain.  But, by defending and protecting Ball, these same leaders were betraying truth as well as my trust and loyalty towards them.  My old moral universe was being undermined.  The ‘goodies’ and the ‘baddies’ had somehow swapped sides.  My past loyalty to the system was putting me on the wrong side next to the villains.

A large number of people are, like me, going to feel betrayed in watching the programme.  Speaking as a retired parish priest I can attest to a traditional fund of goodwill towards the church which has existed in the wider British society until very recently.  Clergy, of which I am one, were invited into people’s homes and the other institutions of the parish by people of all faiths or none.  We were thought, for the most part, to represent a wholesome influence and could be trusted to have total integrity in every area of life.  I belong to perhaps the last generation of parish clergy who genuinely believed in the value of door to door visiting.  The practical outcomes for that approach were numerous.  An important ‘dividend’, if I can call it such, was the privilege of taking the funerals of many non-church people and helping to make their passings a community event as well as a family occasion.  Much has happened in the past twenty years to render this approach to parish work obsolete and unworkable.  Safeguarding and health and safety issues have put many blocks to this way of functioning.  Chief among these blocks is the greater suspicion that exists in the wider society.  I have no direct knowledge of the protocols that exist today in parishes.  My impression is that visiting parishioners in their homes has, in many places, become extinct.

The programme about Ball will have increased, for many, the sense that churches and church people are no longer safe or worthy of trust.  In the language of Western movies, the church authorities, from Archbishops downwards, are among the ‘baddies’.   Even when an individual clergyperson earns the respect of a community or a diocese over a period of time, he/she will still be working for an institution that has lost face and trust at an institutional level.  I get the impression that many clergy are feeling the negative results of this institutional suspicion, something that constantly slows or impedes their access to parts of society they want to enter.  Instead of being assumed to be automatically trustworthy, clergy have to earn trust and this takes several years to obtain. 

Over the past months my blog posts have become increasingly gloomy.  The reason for this gloom is that the safeguarding scandals have fundamentally undermined the traditional contract of trust between Church and British society.  Something similar is happening in the States.  When Trump finally leaves office and the rampant criminality of his administration becomes clear, the uneasy agreement between president and his evangelical base will be seen as enormously damaging to their cause.  Evangelicals have ‘married’ corruption and dishonesty in a way that has never happened before in history.  Can they ever recover their integrity and respect in the eyes of American society?  The Church of England has also sold its integrity to the need to defend itself and its officers when they become corrupted or corrupting.  Not only have lies been told, but relevant to this blog, innocent people have been maligned and reputations attacked for the sake of defending the institution.  When is the same institution going to begin to act on behalf of the values that it is commissioned to defend?  I don’t need here to spell out what those gospel values are.  But among them, there are the values of truth, openness, honesty and humility.  The path back to integrity is a path that will include honouring and respecting those who have been wronged by a Church that has shown itself more concerned for its reputation than for its integrity.

Tonight (Tuesday) the sad Ball saga is to continue on BBC2.  Once again, we will be witnessing a battle between power and integrity.  As most of the drama has been rehearsed elsewhere before, we already know the broad plot outlines.  Again and again the Church will be seen to chose its power and privilege over its integrity, leaving its reputation damaged and the suffering of the abuse victims rendered more acute.  If the Church is ever to find its way back to its gospel origins, it is going to have to engage in metanoia.  That will require honesty and realism and such qualities are only found as the consequence of good leadership.  Is that leadership to be found?  That remains to be seen.  At the moment it is not visible. 

The saga of Harvey Weinstein in the States has been an ongoing story in the Press for over two years now.  It has reached some sort of climax with a trial beginning this week and Weinstein facing an indictment of five counts of sexual abuse against two women.  The original accusations against Weinstein in his capacity as a well-known film director marked the beginning of what came to be called the ‘me-too’ movement.   In many walks of life, including the Church, women have at last felt able to step forward and attest how they have been abused sexually by powerful men.  These sexual predators typically seemed to believe that their status and wealth can make any accusations disappear.   Scandals were hidden through a combination of threats, shaming and financial inducements.  In many cases these methods seemed to work.  The problem of sexual harassment in institutions of all kinds has remained a hidden one.  When money was handed out, the lawyers backing the powerful abusers forced the women to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).  In Weinstein’s case, 80 women had come forward originally alleging their stories of being sexually abused by this one individual.   Most of Weinstein’s alleged victims were would-be actors.   Some undoubtedly had believed that if they put up with the abuse at his hands, they would able to progress in the film world.

The criminal trial that has just begun is based on the evidence of just two victims.  The other seventy-eight women in various ways have either withdrawn from their original complaints or have seen them disqualified.  Some have been bought off with cash settlements and NDAs.  Others have been persuaded that the task of going through the court process is too injurious to their mental and physical well-being.  Many have been harassed by private investigators or reporters and their lives have been threatened with ruin by having a connection to such a notorious case.   Two only are left and it indicates that in a case like this, it costs a great deal to be able to stand up for what is right. What we are witnessing is the ability of money and power to make accusations evaporate for the most part.  That there are still two witnesses of Weinstein’s alleged misconduct is remarkable when you take in the methods available to the powerful to intimidate and terrify accusers.

One of the Weinstein accusers was speaking on a New York Times podcast this morning.  Apart from describing the lengthy and confusing process of the case coming to court, there was one particular moment where the moral dilemma facing her was encapsulated in a single recollection.  The victim had prepared a sheet of paper with two columns.  On one side she wrote the words.  Reasons for withdrawal from the case.  She found no difficulty in filling up this column.  There were many good reasons for withdrawal from the struggle.  There was the effect on her career, her family and her physical and mental well-being.  The case, she knew, whatever the outcome, could destroy her life.  She would never be able to escape the attention of the powerful supporters of the film mogul.  Already the original abuse had taken its toll on her health.  She was struggling with post-traumatic stress and all the physical and mental afflictions flowing from that.  Would it not be easier just to accept a financial settlement from her abuser to make everything go away? 

The witness then turned to the second column.  The heading at the top said ‘reasons for carrying on’.  Under this heading she wrote the words – ‘this is the right thing to do’.  Try as she could there was nothing else to add.  She stood to gain nothing financially or in terms of her health and well-being by continuing the fight.  But, although she did not use these words, she could hold on to a precious commodity inside herself, her integrity.

Many of my readers will perhaps have already worked out where this particular blog post is going.  In some ways it is a continuation my last one where I spoke on the courage of survivors.  Like the Weinstein witnesses, Church abuse survivors have very little to gain by fighting the establishment.  The Church of England which selected, trained and employed many of the perpetrators of sexual predation is enormously powerful.  Like Harvey Weinstein it can use the resources of money and legal expertise to batter down the protests of those who have been grievously wronged.  Next week we will, no doubt, hear again how the power of the Church attempted to manipulate even the legal system itself.  Peter Ball escaped justice for twenty years because the powerful in the church ensured that victims of his sexual violence, like Neil Todd, could not be heard.  As I have claimed in an earlier post, both Neil and Guide Nyachuru were literally sacrificed because powerful people refused to stop protecting the evil, using their resources of their influence and power.  On another blog, Thinking Anglicans, the question has been raised once again about the moral guilt of those who financially supported John Smyth in Zimbabwe. This lead directly to the drowning of Guide at a camp run by Smyth.

The church survivor/victims, both the visible and the invisible, are all suffering all the things that the Weinstein survivor wrote on her sheet of paper.  Health, wealth and relationships have all been compromised and blighted and these issues don’t get any easier for them as they get older.  I am privileged to know several of these brave and courageous survivors.  It is because of their persistence that many of the church-wide safeguarding initiatives have come to exist.  As one of them put it to me; ‘the survivors are making the running’.  It is hard to see that anything much would have been done to pursue justice in this area without the clamorous and courageous voices of survivors.   In the same way it took just two victims of Weinstein’s alleged behaviour to enable the court case to happen and put a check on abusive and exploitative behaviour in the American film industry.  Because of the ‘nuisance’ survivors like Gilo, Matt and Graham, the Church of England has in fact become a safer place for children and other vulnerable people.  When the history of the Church is written, the narrator will, no doubt, be puzzled that the authorities of the Church from our generation, from Archbishops downward, have failed to celebrate and honour these heroic survivors and what they have indirectly achieved at enormous personal cost.  As a direct consequence of their suffering, the Church, in another generation, may perhaps be allowed slowly to regain a measure of its integrity.  Because we do not yet celebrate these survivors, we cannot at the present time claim any of their virtue for ourselves.  Tragically too many members of the Church are content to stand aside and watch as the powers that be try to undermine their heroic witness to justice, integrity and truth.   

Writing a blog post fairly regularly means that I get an opportunity to clarify my thinking about the future of the Church.  As a retired member of the clergy, I probably should be doing the opposite – standing well back, stopping my subscription to the Church Times and letting the Church sort itself out without any comment from me.  What, after all, can one person do to influence an institution that I have not been a working part of for almost 20 years?

Surviving Church is a project that has evolved over the six and a half years it has been functioning.  It began by supporting a handful of survivors who had been through negative church experiences as a part of charismatic Christian groups.  The blog set out the material that I was discovering in preparing papers for an organisation I am part of, the International Cultic Studies Association. (ICSA).   Chris Pitt’s story, which we looked in the early days, was not vastly different from the accounts of those who had spent a long time in a cult.  As time went on, I found myself encountering new varieties of survivor, especially sexual and spiritual abuse victims.  Survivors were beginning to find me and my blog posts had then to try to reflect their issues and concerns.  Just as the nature of abuse being looked at was changing, so were the settings in which these abuses were taking place.  I began to understand better the way that some schools, universities and summer camps were facilitating abuses.  Abuse was not just about one person misbehaving but about networks sometimes colluding to misuse power and harm and damage individuals at the behest or control of a leader.  I started to see that abuse in its various forms was like a cancer, which could threaten and undermine the integrity and health of large swathes of the Church.

Since around 2015, at a time when a variety of public institutions began to face up to the issue of abuse, the evident lack of expertise in the Church to deal with the abuse problems has become clear.  The scale of historical incompetence and bungling among Church of England leaders was especially evident at the IICSA hearings in 2018-2019.   Back in 2015 a large 300,000-word report was published about a non-Anglican church in Brentwood, detailing ghastly forms of bullying and abuse against church members.  Using the theoretical resources and insights of the cult study network, ICSA, I offered through this blog extensive commentary on this report.   I even considered making the material the subject for a book.  Somehow that moment passed, particularly as there were other abuse reports clamouring to be read and commented on.  We had the Elliott report and the Gibb report and there were various other indications that the Church of England was beginning to take seriously the need to respond to historic abuse against individuals.  Bishops were constantly heard to say that survivors were at the centre of their concern. The post- Savile era and the way that this scandal had alerted wider public opinion to the dangers of sexual abuse of children, was also putting pressure on senior church leaders in every denomination to listen carefully to what was being told them by their members about sexual abuse.

In the past two or three weeks this blog has seen a crescendo of activity as once again the Fletcher story, first publicised last June, has burst into public awareness.  An additional level of public interest in the overall topic will be sustained over the next week with two hours of television coverage of the Ball episode.    These constant proddings of public attention will not do the Church of England any favours.    What more should we saying about this situation that the entire Church of England faces at the beginning of 2020?  In trying to offer a personal response to this question, I accept the fact that over the time span of the blog’s history,  I have become not just a reporter but an active supporter of the victims of the misuse of power.

The Challenges of 2020

• There still exist a large and unknown number of ‘survivors’, victims of abuse within the churches.  Even if there were only one such person, church authorities have a moral obligation to do all in their power to help them.
• Many of these survivors are invisible.  They have effectively been banished from sight because they cannot live with the shame of their abuse in public view.  Many of them are afflicted by financial hardship because of the abuse in addition to ongoing mental or physical illnesses.  Relationships have often been blighted.  The compassionate reaching out to these individuals is an on-going and probably never-ending task.
• Among the survivors are some brave individuals who have openly challenged the structures of the Church in their search for some recognition of their stories.  This emerging from the shadows to challenge and question the Church does not relieve their pain in any way.  It makes it more acute.  Some, like Matt Ineson and Gilo, have achieved visibility and are known to the media.  From the perspective of the bishops and other officials these survivors are probably regarded as nuisances and time wasters.  From the perspective of the as-yet silent survivors, they are heroes and they speak for many who are unknown.

Why do I take the side of the survivors, both the ‘nuisance’ ones and the silent ones?  One answer to this question, beyond the desire for justice, is that I see that the Church of England (and the other churches no doubt) has a problem with power and its management.  The cases of abuse, as exemplified by the stories of Peter Ball and Jonathan Fletcher, are not merely, or even mainly, about sex, but the outworking of long-term dysfunctions of power-structures.  These have privileged certain groups at the expense of others.    Sorting out the crisis of past abuse cases is also about sorting out historically embedded biases against women, the poor, children and other people from different minority backgrounds.  I do not presume to be able to suggest easy answers to any of these problems.  What I do know is that there is an immediate issue which is to do right by survivors.  Every day the Church expends its energy in fighting or ignoring survivors and denying them a proper voice, it depletes itself in the eyes of British society and a fair-minded public.  The Church of England, in other words, is rapidly losing its credibility over this one issue.  Am I only one who feels a severe mismatch between New Year messages about communication from our Church leaders and serious deficits of communication between the Church and the suffering survivors?  We need action.  We need a new attempt and a new energy to ‘act justly… and walk humbly before your God’.  Words and promises are no longer sufficient.

The healing of the needs of abuse survivors will only happen when the Church takes a completely fresh look at its understanding of power.  It needs to hear again what Jesus himself had to say about power.  Those passages that speak about service, the disowning of privilege and elitism are freely accessible to the reader.  Both those on the outside and those within might value the sight of the Church going into the desert with Jesus and relearning the true nature of power for our new decade.

In writing my reaction to the Daily Telegraph story on December 27th, there was one point where I got things completely wrong.  I speculated that communications experts at the top of the Church of England and the ReNew network would be working hard over the week-end after Christmas to respond to the reporting of Gabriella Swerling and her team.   Nothing has, in fact, appeared, as far as I can determine, from either source.  Instead of the great publicity crisis there has been a Great Silence.  No one in the Church of England has said a thing, either through an official statement or through one of the safeguarding organisations that look after this side of the Church’s life.  Jonathan Fletcher’s former church, Emmanuel Church Wimbledon (ECW), no doubt feel that their backs are covered by the earlier announcement of a Review under the leadership of Justin Humphreys and his organisation 31.8.

The absence of comment to the vivid Telegraph reporting cries out for some interpretation.   What is going on when a major national newspaper describes a scandal in the Church of England but this story is met with blanket silence?  Do they really think that the general public is going to ignore the account and move on?  It is here that I, as an independent commentator, can make a confident prediction.  The general public are not about to move on.  Those who know about it are appalled at the story and they are expecting decisive action from the leadership of the Church of England.  They want the Church to indicate that past behaviour, such as the Telegraph reported, can never happen again.  Without such statements and a determination to take action, the public is going to believe that the Church is losing (has lost?) the will to remove the appalling blight of bullying, sexual harassment and power games from within its midst.  In other words, the person in the street will conclude that the Church has become institutionally abusive.  Because of that it will be a place to be avoided at all costs.

These are strong words and I cannot, in this short piece, attempt to suggest all that the things that should be done to drag the Church back from becoming irredeemably tainted with this label of being institutionally abusive.  In any secular organisation, if a scandal of this size broke, there would be sackings and resignations.  Responsibility for failure would have to be apportioned and acknowledged.  It is only when this kind of cathartic cleansing has taken place, that the public can allow that organisation another chance to show itself as redeemable.  Such resignations do not happen in the Church, but there is still the need for the outside observer to have grounds for believing that there are changes, real changes, in the pipeline.

How has the Church arrived at a place when it cannot say or do anything significant to respond to a scandal of this size?  One could make the argument that the Church publicity machine was taking a break after Christmas and that key personnel were scattered to various parts of the world on holiday.  That may be in part a reason for the silence, but another reason may be that the Church authorities that operate out of Lambeth Palace and Church House are completely cut off from knowing anything about what goes on in Emmanuel Wimbledon and the other ReNew congregations.  Jonathan Fletcher, in other words, is a maverick clergyman over whom the Church has had no control or oversight for nearly 40 years.

Back last year, Justin Welby made the extraordinary claim in a television interview that John Smyth, the notorious figure involved with Iwerne camps and harsh physical beatings of young men, was not Anglican.  Whether or not he believed this statement, which was patently untrue, is probably beside the point.  What Welby’s statement said to me was that the official Anglican publicity machine was seeking to limit the impact of the Smyth scandal by seeking to separate the Church from any association with him or the Iwerne camps.  In one sense the publicity machine was correct.  Iwerne camps (later called Titus) had been held for 60 or 70 years completely outside Anglican episcopal control.  They operated like an independent franchise and were answerable only to their own trustees.  When the scandal of Smyth’s misbehaviour did break in 1982 and a report was prepared, there was no attempt to circulate that report beyond a small powerful clique within the organisation.  No bishop or archdeacon was ever given sight of it.  In this way, Iwerne trustees linked to REFORM and the Church Society were acting as totally independent of the central Church of England structures.  At some point the Church has tacitly surrendered overseeing of part of its structure to the group of leaders and congregations we now know as the ReNew constituency.  These were being given the right to behave exactly as they wished, free from episcopal control.

The Emmanuel Wimbledon scandal has revealed something l which dwarfs  the misbehaviour of a single individual.  It has shown up how an episcopally ordered Church has allowed the relinquishment of oversight of a sizeable part of its own structure.  This in turn has allowed corrupt individuals to exercise power without any checks on their behaviour.  In my judgement the Great Silence is taking place because the central church authorities have no understanding (or interest) in this part of the Church.  How can the central part of the Church promise to do anything to stop future scandals if hitherto it has had no input of any kind?   The only response, one we are seeing, is startled impotent silence.  The structural independence and power of ECW and the ReNew group has come to be revealed with startling clarity.  Whatever Justin Welby’s past relationship with many of the leaders inside the Fletcher circle, and we suspect they are extensive, his role as Archbishop gives him absolutely no power to wrest back any of the control these groups have acquired.  Looking back over the past twenty years, I suspect that a battle to assert control over the Con-Evo (now ReNew) group was fought and lost the time of the Jeffery John debacle in 2004.  Archbishop Rowan tried and failed to appoint Jeffery John as Bishop of Reading.  One suspects that the negotiations which went on behind the scenes may have resulted in even more power flowing to the Con-Evo group in which Fletcher was prominent.  The situation of the dying days of 2019 has revealed clearly that the authority of the Church does not operate in every part of its structure.  In a scandal involving the effectively independent branch represented by ReNew, the central body has nothing to say.  They have been banished from any involvement with ReNew and its power and money for nearly twenty years and probably much longer.     

The Great Silence, as far as the central Church of England communications department is concerned,  is because they have had no input into that part of the church for a long time.  The Great Silence from the ReNew/Con Evo constituency can be explained because that is how they always operate.  The Smyth scandal and now the Fletcher scandal are both notable for the way that they have involved long term secrecy.  Individuals, including many survivors, have been threatened, cajoled or shamed into silence so that the secret scandals would not come out.  Thanks to the Telegraph, those days are over.  The Church both at the centre and at its ReNew fringes have now to deal with the new realities.  The challenge for everyone is to discover ways to convince the fair-minded outsider that our national Church is not institutionally abusive.  That is a hard task but we must make a start now.

It is very hard for a non-Christian to know what Christians really believe.   The problem for anyone outside the Church is to know where to listen.    The ones that shout the loudest tend to be from conservative groups.  It is there that you may hear anti-gay rhetoric, support for a variety of Right wing causes and sometimes the most extraordinary rejection of many of the achievements of two hundred years of scientific research.  There are, in fact, many other Christians who do not think at all like this.  Such Christians do not go in for loud protestations.  They are probably far more numerous than the conservatives who have the loudest voices but these latter will always appeal to journalists who want quick sound-bites.  Because this voice is prominent, the Christian witness to society is thought to be politically and socially far from main-stream.

It is no secret that Surviving Church comes from a Christian stable that is liberal, inclusive and open to the findings of scientific research.  The word ‘open’ is important in this context because, unlike conservative Christian opinion, there are many issues on which my opinions are in the process of formation.  I also find myself on the side of the ‘situational ethicists’, those who believe that we work from individual situations rather than inflexible principles garnered from a particular reading of Scripture.  My understanding of the Bible is also a work in progress.  I keep finding new insights as I read it.  Even if the Bible has not changed, I, as the reader and the world I live in, most definitely have done.  Without all the changes that are going on, my study of Scripture might become, over the decades. rather dull.  It is these changes and our attempts to apply the Bible to them that keeps bible study fresh and exciting.  If there really was only one way, for example, to explain the death of Christ, might not people have become bored in hearing it explained to them over and over again?

My area of strong disagreement with conservatives is not that they preach and teach a set of ideas that I don’t agree with.  The problem for me is that they insist that their ideas are mandatory and exclusive.  The preacher is telling his flock in so many words ‘unless you believe this particular formulation of Christian doctrine, you cannot belong to this church or expect to receive salvation when you die’.  Liberals, like myself, find the element of threat in this style of preaching quite alarming.  It allows absolutely no scope for disagreement or doubt.  The doctrines are presented in a take it or leave it way.  The liberal approach to doctrine is not to say that this doctrine is what we teach and you must follow it to belong to our tribe.  No, we explore the words of Scripture as well as the insights of literature and the imagination as all being tools through which to explore the reality of God.  Our formulae and our words will always have the air of provisionality about them.  The attempt to find Christian truth is always going to be described as a ‘work in progress’.

The idea that even the words of Scripture do not give us certainties is very threatening to many conservative Christians.  They believe that their membership of the Church entitles them to be confident and certain in their formulae of truth.  The response to this dilemma can be framed through a question.  Does your understanding of being a Christian give scope for growth, change and transformation right through life?  Was it, alternatively, something that was handed out complete and final on the day of your conversion?  The idea that everything is given to us in terms of ‘salvation truth’ all at once leaves me with a sense of claustrophobia.  I am condemned to go through the rest of my life repeating the same formulae connected with my salvation without any ‘deviation or hesitation’. The possibility or expectation that I might have a personal insight to add to the way that Christian truth is articulated, is taken away at a stroke.  The only authorities are the precise words of Scripture and a few venerated teachers honoured by the particular tribe that I belong to.

To me, conservative Christianity fails one major test.  It does not fail on the grounds that it teaches conservative doctrine, even though in this doctrine there are ideas that that I personally find uncongenial.  Doctrine and differing interpretations of Scripture will always be areas for disagreement among Christians.  There is no Church that has got everything perfect in this area.  The problem for me is that to be a member of a conservative group seems often to close down the possibility for an individual to flourish as a full human being.  Common-sense and basic psychology tells me that, as a Christian leader, I should never require that an individual close down in any area of potential growth.  Rigorous, inflexible and fear-laden teachings about God can often stymie and blunt people, both in their spirituality and creativity.  Creativity involves the ability to take risks and learn from mistakes.  Spirituality, as it has been practised by every tradition of Christianity for 2000 years, has plunged deep into the resources of human culture, art and music.  When these infinite possibilities for growth and change are in any way fenced off or restricted, something human dies.  As a parent and a grand-parent I rejoice to see a child grow in every area of life and in every sense of the word.  Sometimes they make wrong turns in the growing process but the child learns through those mistakes.   In time they come to find a unique identity that God has prepared for each one. 

I had in this blog wanted to share with my reader details of some fascinating new brain research, drawn to my attention, which explores how conservative Christians (and Trump supporters!) can become hard-wired to accept uncritically whatever teaching or information is shared with them, even when it is implausible.  Education is supposed to create a healthy scepticism and questioning.  Particular kinds of religious/political conditioning from early childhood -the promotion of ‘facts’ over creativity and mystery – makes a brain to have little resistance to various kinds of indoctrinating processes.  It is, it is true, much easier for a majority to believe uncritically whatever is being taught them.  Challenging teachers or propaganda is hard work.  But without the ability to question and scrutinise, the potential for life as a full human being and as a Christian threatens to be extremely flat and one dimensional.   The only people who gain from this situation are the ‘leaders’.  They achieve power, status and sometimes wealth from shepherding large numbers of compliant obedient followers.

The question that has to be asked of me as a Christian is not what do you believe?  The more important question is this.  Does what you believe enrich your life, enable you to flourish as a human being and bring you into touch with a God who gives you hope, love and joy?   That is the question and I suspect that the answer is not provided by words but by whether something radiates from one’s expression and demeanour.  To use Christian language, is there ‘Christ in you, the hope of a glory to come?’