Among the variety of unhelpful things that children of my generation were told by well-meaning adults was one very harmful rhyme: ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me’.  There is of course a certain level of truth in this rhyme but equally, the downplaying of the power of words to hurt and harm was undoubtedly crass and insensitive to say the least.  Many children have come to believe that there is something wrong with them when they experience acute pain because of words directed maliciously against them.  Some of this shame and pain is carried into their adult experience.  I do not need to spell all the different permutations of bullying and slander that can do so much to make life a misery for anyone so targeted.

Most of us recognise that words have the ability to be extremely powerful things.  The right word can do an enormous amount to cheer a depressed spirit just as the thoughtless word can put someone down.  All of us look back to our failures to use words as well as we could.  Perhaps our early efforts to use words better might have been helped by not having had to encounter at an early age the dreadful rhyme I mentioned above. 

If we want support for the idea that words should be treated with extreme care and respect, we need go no further than considering how words are understood in Scripture.  One year in Lent, while still in my parish, I gave a whole evening presentation about the word ‘word’ as it is used in the Bible.  I began my piece by pointing out that the Hebrew word ‘dabar’ contains far more than the act of speaking as we understand it.  To understand this Hebrew word we have to add to the idea of speech the notion of ‘creative power’.   Although the Genesis account describes creation as the result of speech, it only when we get to the Psalms that we begin to get a real feel for what the Hebrew writers think about the power of words.   This is of course especially true when referring to what proceeds from the mouth of God.  ‘By the word (dabar) of the Lord were the heavens made’.  ‘The Lord spake and it was done, he commanded and they were created.’  Another very vivid picture is given us as we read the following passage from Isaiah 55.11.   ‘The word will not return to me empty until it has accomplished all that I have commanded it to do.’  It is easy to miss the full impact of such passages until we have absorbed the Hebrew perspective on words and their potential.  Words are in this setting are instruments of real and lasting power.  When God speaks things happen.   Sometimes human individuals, like prophets, are given God’s words to speak.  Once again there will be an understanding of how much there is active power in operation.  Even when mere human beings like ourselves use words, this Hebrew understanding of their potential to exercise real power is never far away.  

It is against this background of understanding a little of Old Testament assumptions about the meaning of ‘word’ that we can understand better the first verses of St John’s gospel which are always read at Christmas.   The reader at the Nine Lessons and Carols often introduces this reading with the words ‘St John reveals the mystery of the Incarnation’.   I am not sure how many people in fact get the point of the reading with its evocation of the creation story and its distinctive understanding of the meaning of ‘word’.  To talk about the primordial reality as a word seems an odd thing to say on the face of it.  But little by little we come to understand that what is being shared is the breath-taking claim that an eternal God is communicating with and reaching out to his creation through his word.  Word is not speech in a human sense; rather it is an extraordinary moving out from the divine mystery to touch and communicate with the world through the life, speech and actions of Jesus.   The word, the self-expression of the inner being of God, became flesh and dwelt among us.

In this reflection, I am hoping to encourage a reader to learn to use and respect words better.  They are potentially, as we have said, agents of real power.  They can hurt but they can also build up and encourage.  When we use words flippantly, as we often do, we tell ourselves that we are speaking in jest.  This jesting may be, if we are self-critical, an attempt to trivialise words and treat them as cheap.  I would like to think that Christians never think of words as having little value.  So much can be achieved or possibly undermined by the way we use words. We have a biblical duty to think of them as infinitely precious, to be used as far as possible for good.  I am always convicted by the passage of the Epistle of James about the importance of ‘bridling the tongue’.  While I stand accused at a being a failure in this area, I find I can be helped by making a connection with all that the Old Testament says about the Word of God.  If God creates, communicates and reaches out with his Word, does he not call us to do the same?  Our words do not of course function like the Divine Word but they do potentially have some things in common.  The words we utter are capable of becoming a focus of transforming power.  When used properly they can create, encourage and build up others.  When they succeed in doing this, they distantly evoke the divine action of creation itself.  What greater challenge or calling could we have than this? 

Most of us why try to practise the Christian faith are aware of forces within us that pull in opposite directions.  We could liken our Christian experience to being a bit like the ‘push me pull you’ animal in the Dr Doolittle stories.  One such pressure is a strong attraction to the past while simultaneously knowing that we have to engage with the present and the future.  Some traditions and denominations make it a mark of their identity to refuse to engage with the present.  Examples come to mind of the strong supporters of the Latin Mass or the preacher who insists on tackling themes and debates that have not made a lot of sense since the 16^th century.  The present/past tension is played out weekly in the mundane job of choosing hymns.   Everyone who is responsible for this task knows the problem of keeping a balance between old and the new.   The normal compromise, which is to choose music from every style, may cover up the cracks of this tension, but it does not really solve the dilemma of a church, one that is required to look simultaneously to the present, past and future.

Another ‘push me pull you’ factor for the conscientious Christian is the tension between reassurance and challenge.  Both the experience of feeling ‘safe’ within the Church and the opposite feeling of being challenged to take risks for God can be read out of Scripture.   The Bible contains many verses which speak of refuge and safety.  God is the one who feeds the hungry, comforts the sad and binds up the broken.  The gospels also contain those memorable words of Jesus. ‘Come unto me all you that are heavy laden and I will give you rest.’

Many Christians would like to remain at the comfort end of things and receive only these messages of reassurance.  Sermons which emphasise constantly the message of salvation, both as a present reality and a future promise, will always be popular.  The idea of being safe evokes many things but it may also carry an echo of being rescued by a parent from a situation of perceived danger.  The experience of being gathered up into a parent’s arms and removed from something frightening is probably a common memory imprinted on most of us.  The idea of being kept safe and the teaching about salvation will, no doubt, evoke such primal memories of rescue and safety.  One might go further and say that without such memories, the language of ‘being saved’ would have little meaning at an emotional level.

The challenge part of the Christian faith taps into a different stage of our growing up.  It evokes the time in our lives when we were convinced that we were sufficiently mature to go out on our own.  We no longer needed to be taken everywhere by a parent.  We were able to negotiate the dangers of the street and other children by ourselves without parental help.  The transition from being kept safe to taking risks is particularly associated with the teenage years.  The wisdom of parenthood is knowing the right moment to allow the child to tackle each set of new challenges alone.  Even when the parent gets it right it is likely that there will still have been disagreement and conflict with the child.  It is hard to imagine that there will ever be complete unanimity between parent and child on this issue.  Somehow or other the growing child enters the adventure of doing things on their own, taking risks in the journey of life.  This sense of adventure, the overcoming of barriers of fear and uncertainty is an important stage.  The memory of it enables us to take seriously the challenges that are implicit in the Christian faith.

I recall the sermons I have preached on the words of Jesus ‘Launch out into the deep and there cast your nets’. This passage can be read as a straight invitation to move forward from the nursery slopes of being ‘safe’ to a discovery that the Christian faith is also all about adventure.    Then there is the passage which speaks about meeting Christ in the hungry, the imprisoned, the naked and the thirsty.  These passages remind us that the challenge of faith is not only about reassurance and comfort, it is about accepting risk, danger, newness and challenge.  The ‘safe’ part of the faith draws on memories of infancy; the challenge part of faith draws on the memories of the teenage years and later.

These push me pull you aspects of Christianity need to be held in tension and reconciled, both within the individual Christian and in a congregation.  A church which preaches only one part of this equation is always going to be lop-sided.  This would also be true of an adult whose preparation for adulthood had consisted only of the memories of being kept safe by parents.  Hopefully, the creative tension of wanting to go it alone and the arguments with parents about the implications of this, are also part of what we take into adulthood.  Being adult is about the acceptance and resolution of conflict as much as it is about learning to be loved and nurtured.   

Lop-sided and unbalanced is an accusation that can be made of many churches that emphasise ‘salvation’ above any other teaching.  Such a church will not be wrong in one sense.  What they teach is clearly biblical.  But there is still error present because a needed balance to this approach is not being presented alongside this classic teaching.   We all need to hear the side of Christianity which challenges religious complacency.  One area of complacency, which we refer to constantly on this blog, is indifference to suffering and abuse experienced in the Church itself.  Large parts of the church are very successful at shutting out the stories of those who have suffered in this way.  Different sets of priorities are put forward so that the uncomfortable parts of Christian responsibility do not have to be faced.  There is probably no church that succeeds in finding exactly the level of balance that I believe the Christian faith calls for.  I offer this notion of balance, not because I think I have found it, but because I believe we should all be striving to reach it both within our personal Christian journey and in the lives of our congregations.

Many liberal Christian bodies are under attack from conservative groups because they do not teach the ‘truth’ according to their accusers.  The implication of this challenge from conservatives who question the ‘orthodoxy’ of others, is that it is possible to encapsulate ‘truth’ in a series of precise verbal formulae.  These seem very much to focus on the notion of salvation.  Anyone failing the test of repeating the correct words is deemed to be ‘unsound’ or worse, destined for hell.  My response to this kind of attack is to ask a quite different question.   Does the accusing Church as well as the Church under attack preserve balance, a balance here between ‘salvation’ and service of others?  Are the Christians in your Church taught, as a matter of high priority, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and visit prisoners?  Are these actions, commanded by Christ himself, just as important as believing a list of statements prepared by a small group. Those who decide on what is orthodox belief may simply be a cluster of leaders who happen to be in charge at a particular moment in history. The idea that their version and articulation of saving truth has to be considered universal in scope, applying to every culture and language for ever, seems impertinent to say the least. We need to rediscover within all the churches generous engagement with those who differ from us as well those whose position represents a balancing up of the beliefs we hold with great conviction. Truth is seldom an ‘either-or’ scenario. It is is most likely to be found as a ‘both-and’ and requires from us the gift of generosity and fresh imagination to embrace it in this form.

There have been many mentions recently on the blog and elsewhere about the influence of English ‘public schools’ on the Church and the nation.  These schools emerged in the 19^th century for the purpose of producing a class of leaders able to run the British Empire.  By charging fees, which exceed the annual salary of most working people, these schools have now become the abode of the wealthy and privileged.  Their influence on the whole of British society remains powerful through their alumni occupying important roles in church and state.  There is a great deal to be said about this influence for good and for ill in British society.  What follows is a personal reflection based on my experience of a school run as a public school even though half the boys were there on foundationships which paid most of the fees.  I wrote these words several months ago and perhaps they provide an indirect commentary on the imminent General Election as well as the new revelations about Iwerne camps.

Among the many words that have been written about the system of English public schools, some comment has been made about the emotional health of boys who leave their parents at a young age to prepare to go through this system of education.  The claim made by various commentators, especially one in a book by Nick Duffell called Wounded Leaders, is that emotional damage is likely common among many former boarding school pupils.  Being away at school, apart from their parents, is bound to affect children in some way at the level of their emotions.  Even though weekly boarding has alleviated the pain suffered by many boys going through this system, many ex-pupils, now mature adults, still carry the pain that their schools have inflicted on them in the past.  Nick Duffell claims that many ex-public-school boys have got through the system by developing a kind of ‘survival personality’.  This coping mechanism allowed them mostly to succeed in terms of passing exams and obtaining good jobs.  They now, however, allegedly often lack the full range of emotional responses that would enable them to function well in making relationships and enjoying the colour and depth of the feeling world.   Emotional intelligence, as it is now called, enables the individual to feel the emotional temperature of situations.  It enables also an appreciation of other people’s needs, in particular the ability to understand the power of community.  An emotionally illiterate person will lack these abilities.  He or she will function far better at promoting self-interest than in dealing with others.  In short the survival personality which has been named as a feature of public-school ‘survivors’ is quite close to what is described as the narcissistic personality.

The speculations in the Press about the ability or not of Boris Johnson to be a good leader, while carrying the wounds of a boarding school past, can be left for now to one side.  I do in fact have much sympathy with the view that says he is more style than substance.  Going further than this is not an immediate part of this blog’s concerns.  What I can bring to bear in this discussion is my own experience at a minor public school aided by some written reflections I made at the time about my experiences soon after leaving the school.

 My attendance at three boarding schools between the ages of 7 ½ and 18 naturally left its mark on me.  I observed and, to some extent, suffered many of the things being discussed today in the writing about Boris Johnson and other ex-public-school leaders, including our Archbishop of Canterbury.  The ‘survival mode’ that is spoken about in current discussions on the topic is not an expression that I would have used to talk about my experience.  I did however notice the chronic lack of privacy in these institutions in every sense of the word.  A lack of personal space meant that it was hard to explore and become aware of a personal life.  Emotion and feeling did not play much part in the over-organised daily routine.    Some people have suggested that these institutions formed a good preparation for prison-life, thanks to the highly organised routine and the constant requirement for instant obedience to masters and more senior boys.  Of course, we trust that things have moved on in 60 years.  But I suspect that there will still be many of the same fundamental realities that were around in the early 60s.

One of the main things I remember vividly from my time at school were the value systems in operation.  The first seemed to centre around sport.  To achieve at sport was to achieve a recognisable status within the system.  Thus, one’s place in the pecking order was physically articulated by the stripes on your tie or the colour of your blazer.  Achieving at sport likely also elevated you, eventually, to a second valued rank, the status of prefect.  Once again, your prefect status was marked by special privileges involved through the fagging system or access to parts of the school from which everyone else was banned.  Both forms of achievement were deemed important in the formation of a cadre of leaders which many boys were expected to join after leaving school.   I am pleased to say that, in spite of the assumptions about the supreme importance of sport and the leadership training that the role of prefect was supposed to provide, I early on spotted how empty these artificial hierarchies were.  Strutting around constantly reminding the world that you were good at sport seemed ultimately rather futile and pretentious.  I early on became proud of my stubbornly black tie.  Boys who rose to the top of the public-school hierarchies were of course strong on self-confidence and assertive power but they were weak in other areas.  This was especially true of their emotional life and what we broadly describe as sensitivity.  To summarise in another way, the chief custodians of public-school ‘values’ seemed the shallowest in terms of an aesthetic/spiritual dimension.  From a personal point of view my complete opting out of the attempt to climb the hierarchies valued by the system meant that I was more easily able to preserve my emotional life and the life of the spirit.  When I speak about this emotional life, it included for me the cultivation of aesthetic experience. In my case this was activated through the medium of music and the visual arts. When I wrote a reflection on my school days while still at university, I came to realise that through aesthetic experience I had held on to an incredibly precious part of life.  I had retained the ability to feel.  I then called this (after John McMurray, the philosopher) the education of the emotions.  I now wonder whether this is something similar to the emotional intelligence spoken about today.

Throughout my ministry as a clergyman I have valued this survival of my early emotional/spiritual life even though the culture of my school had done precious little to encourage it.  Today I suspect that elitist leadership models, based on self-confidence and achievements on the sports field, are still alive and well.  Leadership and self-confidence are fine as far they go but if such values are linked to a shallow emotional life then they become problematic.  Failures of empathy among our leaders in church and state will always be a serious draw-back.     The efficient management techniques, so highly valued today, seem to emerge from the traditional public-school leadership traditions.   But we are also witnessing, alongside the emphasis on efficient management in our church, a toleration of horrific bullying and the humiliation of abuse survivors by some of our bishops.  Because bullying is so antithetical to Christian values, we might be surprised to hear of bishops tolerating the cruel methods of ‘reputation management’ companies.  But then then we have to remember that the public-school values which protect that system at all costs, discard, when necessary, feelings, emotion and any trace of empathy.  Of course, there are individual bishops who buck this trend, but life is made difficult for them if this elitist management style has penetrated the culture of the upper ranks of the church.   There is of course a story to be told about the way a hard Calvinism taught at Iwerne camps and reflecting the elitism of public schools, has penetrated the thinking and attitudes of many who operate at the very senior level.  If I am right, elitist and insensitive styles of management have made their home in the Church of England.   It is up to the rest of us who recognise cruelty and injustice, to go on opposing the bullying that continues to mark and harm the courageous survivors of past church abuse. 

By Kate

As editor of the blog, Surviving Church, I hear a number of stories from readers about their own experiences of power abuse in the context of a Church.  The story that follows is illustrative of bullying and power abuse within one particular culture, the ReNew constituency.  Effective means of resolving injustices in that culture seem here to be lacking.  It should be of concern to the entire Church of England leadership that episcopal oversight for the conservative wing in this case appears to be failing, causing considerable suffering to the writer and her family. From the outside we seem to be observing the operation of a tight inward-looking and unaccountable clique.

Discussion with ministers and experts in abuse have helped me see that over the past 3 years I and my husband have been the victims of harassment and bullying. The bullying began with a group of disgruntled parishioners and expanded to become a prolonged experience of bullying at the hands of the conservative evangelical constituency we have been a part of since the 1980’s. My husband was on Iwerne in the 80s, and I attended in early 2000s.

Though it is very painful to continue to write and think and pray about our experience of bullying – we have done little else recently – I believe light must be shone on the terribly damaging abuses that leaders in the ReNew constituency have engaged in, and sought to hush up. We have tried many avenues of making the situation good, but have been either rebuffed, or challenged to submit to processes which experts warn us would be traumatising. All that is left now is to share something of our story in the hope that others may be alert to the dangers of bullying in our church culture, and perhaps, that those who have acted shamefully will pause and seek the help they need.

The bullying we experienced forced my husband out of his job as a parish minister, and inflicted serious health and stress upon our family. The diocese got involved with a case of bullying from disgruntled parishioners towards us, and mishandled our situation in serious ways. They misdiagnosed it as a relational dispute and later circulated false information. Eventually they rescinded false statements they had made.

Bishop Rod Thomas is looked to by our constituency as one of our key leaders. It is now clear that he himself behaved in a terrible way towards us, with little respect for normal expectations of a Church of England bishop. Rod’s pastoral advisor – Rev David Banting – reassured one of the people bullying us out of our job, that the diocese would remove us soon. This caused further stress.

A good deal of the subsequent bullying from other ReNew leaders was aimed at covering up how much harm he had caused, and the degree to which he was influenced by Jonathan Fletcher and colluded with Church Society, to bully and silence us.

While we were away on holiday the Archdeacon called a PCC meeting, which we agreed to him holding in our absence. He told us he would do this to explain to people that they should be reasonable in how they treated their minister. He organised a further PCC meeting, and invited Bishop Rod to that. The first we knew of this was from Jonathan Fletcher’s sister (then a PCC member). Rod stayed over with Jonathan’s sister when he attended that PCC meeting. It was only later we realised that Jonathan’s sister was one of the group in the church seeking to bully us into leaving the parish. For many years Rod has been a member of Jonathan’s ‘preaching group’ – we see now he was far from independent from Jonathan’s influence.

Eventually we discovered that Bishop Rod misinformed the diocese about our situation. That led the diocese to recording false claims on my husband’s file. This made it impossible for new jobs to be secured. When we discovered this and spoke to the diocese, we were able to challenge Rod’s false accusations. It took time but we got the false statements removed. We realised that in effect Bishop Rod had sided with the group of bullies in the parish. His concern appeared to be keeping on good terms with them so that he could maintain influence in the church, after my husband was forced out. 

We were traumatised by Bishop Rod’s bullying and deceptive behaviour. We felt we should talk with him about it – but that did not lead to anything fruitful. We tried raising it with Rev. Simon Austen – a member of Rod’s advisory group – but he was busy managing the John Smyth abuse case, as chairman of Titus Trust. We tried raising it with Church Society. They are a patron of our parish and Rod is their president. Council members were unclear who to talk to – we tried numbers of them. That led to conversations where they berated us for taking up their time, used scripture to silence us, and passed us round one another. Even though Lee Gatiss is a safeguarding officer, when we managed to get him to talk on the phone, he was threatening, aggressive, and told us off for delaying his dinner.

William Taylor phoned and warned us that he and the constituency may not help us at all. He told me that Jonathan Fletcher had holidayed with him and they had discussed our situation. William wanted to check that we would not take formal action against Rod for his behaviour. Jonathan Fletcher is a powerful influence in our constituency. In letters and phone calls, Jonathan intimated that we were to blame, for what independent observers could see was harassment and bullying. 

I talked with Rev Dick Farr. He is chair of Church Society patronage board and the ReNew planning group. I had two telephone conversations with Dick. He said he wanted to speak to my husband, not me. When I asked why, he explained, ‘Because I’m a complementarian.’ He raised his voice, kept talking over me, and minimised the abuse we suffered. He was sarcastic and eventually slammed the phone down. 

We tried discussing the problems Bishop Rod had caused, with the above and others – including Rev Mark Burkill and Rev Paul Darlington. They tried to not let us know, but it became clear that while we were raising concerns about Bishop Rod, they were all meeting with Bishop Rod to discuss how to handle the situation. We eventually found out that five people met with Rod: Dick Farr, William Taylor, Paul Darlington, Lee Gatiss, and Mark Burkill. They knew this was wrong as they were very reluctant to let us know. It is a well worn principle that when cases of abuse are raised about a minister or bishop, those who would seek to bring righteousness out of the situation should not go and meet with the accused, and agree a managed way forward.

Rev Dick Farr was one of the most aggressive and unkind of the Church Society leaders we tried to get help from. So when we found he had been invited to speak at the Derby Bible Conference, which we would have attended, we raised the story of our abuse and his behaviour, with the (mostly Independent) church ministers, organising it. We shared the details of our story in the hope that they could seek an appropriate forum for us to discuss with Dick Farr how to rectify our experiences of bullying. Their rebuff was: 

‘Thank you for raising your concerns with regards to the invitation by Derby Bible Week to Dick Farr to speak in April 2020, and for sending through all the supporting information.

After very careful, and prayerful, consideration at our committee meeting this morning, we have decided to stand by our invitation to Dick to speak at our event.

Whilst we realise that this is not the decision you were looking for, this decision was not taken lightly and was the unanimous view of our committee.

This decision is not subject to appeal and we feel that it would not be profitable to enter into any further discussion on the matter.

Wishing you God’s richest blessing.’

Our experiences show how conservative leaders collude to protect a favoured leader such as Bishop Rod Thomas, and put the wishes of patrons such as Jonathan Fletcher before righteousness. Change is needed in the culture. No one of the leaders who bullied us can take full responsibility for the bullying – it has been a pattern of group think and mobbing. That does not mean that individuals should not take steps to reflect, and pursue change. We hope change will come. If not, we pray our story can help others struggling with the kind of abuse we experienced.

A fuller account of our story is given in the letter we wrote to the Derby Bible Conference: 

Charles Foster’s article of last week on the topic of Iwerne on this blog has had, we hope, a wide-spread impact.  Its influence has extended to the States where it was featured on the conservative blog, Anglicans Ink.  I would like to think that one comment on Twitter from a member of the Church of England General Synod, Sue Booys, is shared by others.  She stated in her comment the following: ‘Excellent article, much to ponder and a really helpful insight into past questions about something I was always vaguely aware of, rather anxious about and couldn’t understand. ‘

This comment could of course be attached to any of several themes in the article.  Rather than speculate about which idea or theme created insight from the article for Sue, I want to share something of what the article did for my thinking.  I want to consider what I think about the role of women in the church and how their presence or absence within the institution has created some of the problems that the Church now faces. 

In his article, Foster described to us in summary the origins of the Iwerne camps.  They were the brain child of E.J.H.Nash (Bash) in the 1930s.  Bash had the idea of bringing together young men from top public schools so that they could be won for Christ.  Then, through their potential leadership in British society, the whole population could be also brought to the Christian faith.  Foster drew attention to the exclusivity of these camps.  Bash’s invitation to attend was extended only to certain elite schools representing only the male sex.  In this way he was inevitably promoting a version of Christianity which was heavily imbued with the culture of the all-male Public School.  The decade when Bash began his work was a very different one from today.  Political thinking was to a considerable degree polarised into two camps.  In Britain there were many who were fascinated by the Stalinist attempt to build up the Soviet Union while others were attracted to the fascist states of Europe.  The word fascism did not have such heavily negative connotations before the war.  The word implied order and obedience to a leader, together with a readiness to surrender freedoms in order to defeat what was seen to be the anarchy of democracy.  Fascist leaders could and did appeal to many among the aristocratic classes in this country.  These were the same social groups that were well represented in the early Iwerne camps.

The Iwerne model of training boys for future Christian leadership took, we would suggest, at least some of its inspiration from the contemporary emergence of Hitler Youth and German fascism.  The same quasi-military structures present in Italy and Germany, the emphasis on obedience as well as a clear ideology beyond discussion – these were all present.  Militarism is of course a solely male phenomenon.  Other typically male attitudes were found in the camps, just as they existed in the schools the boy campers came from.  The most obvious aspect of both schools and camps was the total absence of the female sex.  Even if the male exclusivity at the camps is no longer in operation, the current generation of ex-Iwerne Christian leaders have all been deeply imbued this all-male culture.  This is the one that Foster claims has led in many cases to severe emotional impoverishment and a failure to flourish as full human beings.

How does the presence of women change things within institutions like the Church?  The question perhaps might be asked in a different way.  What happens to gatherings of men when women are excluded?  No doubt there are many answers to this question and my female readers will want to add their own insights.  Speaking from my own limited experience of a succession of male only environments, I can point to the way that power games are common, with some strong ‘alpha-males’ striving to be dominant over all the others.  Hierarchies are quickly established.  The weak are either pushed to the bottom of the pile or excluded altogether.  These are not inevitable occurrences but the typical desire among many males is to control others rather than be controlled themselves.  Of the many all-male cultures that exist right across the world, we might claim that the experience of a British all-male public school is fairly archetypal.  To some extent the struggle for dominance and power is acted out through prowess on the sports field and by adopting leadership roles as prefects.  When women come to be added into the mix, it is far more difficult for this hyper-competitive culture to remain intact.  Foster’s description from the 80s of young women in Laura Ashley dresses on the edge of the camps represented the old subservient picture of women to men.  Their role was to be noticed by one of the campers and perhaps help to form a new dynasty of future campers.  This was a vivid picture.  Clearly at that time these women were not expected to have any real influence in this male testosterone driven world of Godly power that existed among these bands of Christian warriors.

Without wanting to indulge in generalisations about male/female roles, I feel that it is correct to say that things will always be distinctly different when women are present within an institution.  The hierarchical assumptions of male superiority no longer remain unchallenged.  A common feminine instinct to care for and notice the under-dog also comes into play.  Women find it much more difficult to abandon people and write them off.  We speak about the female instinct to mother and protect the weak.  If such an instinct is indeed a normal quality of the female sex, then the ruthlessness and power competition of men-only environments is going to be softened at the very least when women are present in any numbers.

The situation today is that many of the Church cultures or institutions that once created damage and stunted emotional growth among Christian leaders may now belong to the past.  Women are now allowed to soften and mitigate the worst effects of the Nash/Fascist/Right-wing cultures that Foster (and many others) knew.   We can look forward, eventually, to a new more compassionate rounded generation of Church leaders.  But, for the time being, the die-hards in the Church who embody reactionary values are still with us, exercising considerable influence in the Church.   The problem can only really end when such attitudes are identified and expelled or, more likely when they disappear because those who hold have them simply retired or died.  Back in the 19^th century it was said that medicine could only advance when the power brokers who decided what was ‘correct’ treatment had literally died and quitted the scene.  There was no protocol for arguing the case for a new treatment because that was not the way the institution worked.  The adage, which can apply to any institution, says quite simply ‘while there is death, there is hope’. 

Those of us who identify with the suffering of survivors of Church sexual and spiritual abuse are also looking for a revolution of attitudes among those who hold power in the Church.  It will come in the end because leadership will reflect eventually the male/female wholeness. This wholeness turns its back on the male only value systems that have infected and damaged the whole Church for so long. 

There are many discussions between people that are rendered difficult or even impossible because each side understands particular words differently.  When words which have contentious backgrounds come into a conversation, there is massive scope for non-communication.  Recently someone used the word ‘cult’ in an online comment on this blog.  The one thing wrong with using a word like this is that its use tends to foster misunderstandings.  For this reason, I am reluctant to use it except when I go the annual conference of cultic specialists, the organisation known as the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA).  There are of course numerous other words in the area of theology and religious thinking that have the same capacity for meaning different things to different people.   A recent topical example is the word ‘review’ when used by an institutional body, like the Church, to describe an attempt to hold an examination of past (mis)conduct with the express aim of learning from what went wrong.

In the Church Times today (Friday) there is a story about the review of the case of Matt Ineson and his abuser, the late Trevor Devamanikkam.  The National Safeguarding Team (NST) has commissioned Jane Humphries to carry out a ‘lessons-learnt’ review of the case.   The basic facts of the original case are not disputed but what will be under examination are the responses of senior church people to Matt’s attempts to disclose to them what had happened to him.  These disclosures were made over a period of several years.  Matt has named four bishops, including the current Archbishop of York, as having been informed of the case by him personally.  The review is thus being asked to consider some information which could potentially prove embarrassing to the bishops concerned.  Up till now, despite attempts by Matt to establish accountability over the way his case was handled, there have been no apologies from the Church.  In an excruciating encounter at the IICSA hearings, Justin Welby failed to offer any kind of apology to Matt even though he was sitting only a few feet away.  No doubt, issues of legal liability were uppermost in the mind of the lawyers advising the Archbishop.  It was, nevertheless, a shameful incident in the history of church safeguarding and its failures.

Matt is, according to the Church Times story, refusing to cooperate with this current review.  He asks the valid and so-far unanswered question.  How can you trust a review which is set up by the organisation that is being accused of bad behaviour?  To quote his words: ‘The Church is steamrolling ahead, trying to control an investigation into themselves. This is open to corruption.  I would work 100 per cent with a genuinely independent review.  This is not it.  …. We have repeatedly asked the Church to have a totally independent review, which they have refused’.

Matt’s concerns about the independence of the Church review process are not unfounded.  One independent review did get conducted into an abuse case, the Elliot Review, but this was subsequently ignored and undermined.  The IICSA process uncovered some of the falsehoods used to question the Elliot Review but the damage had been done.  Although the review initially received the attention of Archbishop Welby himself, and a bishop was commissioned to implement the recommendations, there was a complete failure to do this and Elliot has been quietly dropped and ignored.  It is not surprising that the word ‘review’ when used by senior church people means something different from the meaning it has for the rest of us.

The BBC Sunday programme in August broadcast an interview with Kate Blackwell QC about what a properly conducted review should look like.   I took the trouble to have that interview transcribed and placed on this blog.  http://survivingchurch.org/2019/08/05/bbc-radio-4-sunday-programme/ . It seemed to set out so clearly the common-sense approach to what a review of a past abuse case might involve. Her clarity seemed to show up how extraordinarily amateur the Church’s approach to this issue appears to be.  Kate emphasised that the focus of any review must be the victim/survivor.  There can no question of institutions using such reviews to protect themselves.

Interestingly, across the world in Florida, an example of good practice has appeared this week.  http://anglican.ink/2019/11/27/independent-investigation-into-st-peters-anglican-cathedral/ An organisation called Godly Response to Abuse in a Christian Environment (GRACE) has been asked to investigate a Cathedral in Tallahassee within the fold of ACNA, the independent part of Anglican Church in North America.  The case concerned one Father Eric Dudley, the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral.  He was accused of grooming and molesting young men over a period of years.  The report has now been published and it seems a thorough piece of professional work.   A crucial detail of the investigation was that at the beginning, the ACNA bishop wanted to hold an internal inquiry.  Senior clergy in the diocese prevailed upon him to engage GRACE as they realised (like Matt) that organisations which investigate themselves are in danger of doing a less than fully competent job.  However good the reviewer is, the fact that they are employed by the organisation means that their true independence may be questioned.

GRACE interviewed fifty-one witnesses and reviewed countless documents and telephone records.  The story that emerged about Dudley’s behaviour was deeply disturbing to his flock, especially since a major part of the rationale of their breakaway status was the firm resistance to the LGTB cause.  Dudley chose lonely young men to abuse.  These could be manipulated and sucked into a relationship over a period.  The victims all expressed their gratitude for the professionalism of GRACE.  One of the painful experiences for victims within the whole process was the way that some, early on in the process, had received ‘godly admonitions’ for coming forward to report their abuse.  In other words, the Church left to itself had tried to shut the victims up for trying to speak out.  The charismatic hold, as we would describe it, had meant that, at the beginning, people in the congregation had not wanted to hear any accusations against their Dean.

There is a great deal that cannot be mentioned in my perusing of this American document.  The fact of its existence and the way that it provides detailed examples of good practice means that it should be part of the tool-chest of every safeguarding professional in this country.  We need increased professionalism in this area.  There is too much at present that seems like individuals making up good practice as they go along.   Matt’s concern that the investigation in his case will not be adequate is a reasonable concern.

I have been following the John Smyth and Jonathan Fletcher sagas obsessively. I would like to be able to say that this is out of concern for the victims. But although I do feel deeply for them, my main interest, I must admit, is in the light that the sagas shed on my own past – and particularly the time I spent at the Iwerne camps.

Iwerne, for anyone who doesn’t know, runs Conservative Evangelical holidays for pupils (boys only in my day) from the top few public (i.e. independent) schools. They were established by E.J.H. Nash (‘Bash’). ‘Lord’, he prayed, ‘we claim the leading public schools for your kingdom’. The assumption was that if you convert the ‘elite’, the rest of the world will follow, since that’s how society works.

I was involved in the Iwerne camps for several years from Summer 1982,  as a ‘Senior Camper’ (general dogsbody) for a year, and then as an ‘Officer’. I gave talks at Iwerne camps and at Iwerne schools. For two years I lodged in Cambridge with Mark Ruston, Vicar of the Round Church (the Iwerne church in Cambridge where Jonathan Fletcher had been a curate), and author of the 1982 report on John Smyth. Justin Welby had lived there a few years earlier. After Cambridge I attended St. Helen’s Bishopsgate for a while.

I escaped from Iwerne’s orbit thanks to a lot of travelling, a lot of forbidden books, and a dark, painful epiphany in a Middle Eastern desert. I repudiated first Iwerne’s insupportable politics and corrosive misogyny. The allure of its algorithmic theology – a tweedy, brisk, Colonial spin on a 16^th century Swiss reaction to some mediaeval Roman Catholic abuses – took longer to fade. Though I’m free, the scars remain.

Iwerne was profoundly authoritarian – as the use of the title ‘Officer’ indicates. Unquestioning obedience to the upper echelons was expected. The ultimate accolade was ‘He’s sound’ – by which we meant that all his thoughts were diligently shaded from the light of reflection, scholarship, and experience. Camp talks were vetted privately for orthodoxy beforehand, and subject to detailed public criticism afterwards.

The theology was banal, stern, and cruel – a set of suffocatingly simple propositions held with steely eyed zeal. Its insistence on penal substitution and nothing but penal substitution embodied and tacitly encouraged the notion that ultimate good depended on violence. Without penal substitution, John Smyth would have had no thrashing shed in his back garden.

We loved hell, and needed it. We were glad that it was well populated – particularly by people who hadn’t been to major public schools – because that emphasised our status as members of an exclusive club of the redeemed. If hell hadn’t existed, or had been empty, we wouldn’t have felt special. We were elected – socially and theologically – and proud of it: if everyone were elected, it would make a nonsense of election.

The theology chimed perfectly with our politics, our sociology, and the grounds of our self-esteem. We were sheep, and delighted that there were goats. And we never, ever, read the rest of that parable. If someone was hungry, we had better, more urgent, and more eternally significant things to do than feed him. If someone was a stranger, we wouldn’t dream of taking him in: he might not have gone to a strategically significant school. If someone was in prison – well, that was the sort of thing you expected from the lower orders, not from us, and our time would be better spent evangelising stockbrokers at the Varsity Match than visiting him. And as for the Sermon on the Mount? An embarrassment, to be spiritualized into impotence. Blessed are the sleek. Blessed are those who earn. When I should have been handing out soup and blankets at a homeless shelter I was listening to fulminations about the Social Gospel (always capitalized, and apparently more deadly than rabies). Not only can one serve God and Mammon, one should: just ask the banker-prophets filling the pews at St. Helen’s Bishopsgate.

Humans were denigrated: they were wholly fallen. They were therefore wholly straightforward – and their needs could thus be met by childishly simple theological formulae. Any books that pretended that there was much in humans to explore or describe were suspect. Shakespeare should have put down his pen and picked up his Scripture Union notes. Humans were made in God’s image, and since God was easy to summarise and explain, so were humans. God wasn’t the ground of being. He was a headmaster, and we liked it that way, since headmasters were one of the only things we really understood.  Mystery and nuance were diabolical. To be moved by anything beautiful was unsound and effeminate. Beauty itself was a snare.

Emotion was taboo – whether religious emotion, in the form of charismatic experience or otherwise, or more general human emotion. For most of us it was a relief to hear this: our schooling and conditioning had left us emotionally stunted, and it was good to know that this stuntedness was what God wanted. Romantic relationships were belittled. A speaker assured us that it was better to be out telling public schoolboys about Isaiah 53 than to be ‘whispering sweet nothings in our girlfriend’s ear as we chewed it off’. We all sniggered nervously and obediently, longing for an ear we could chew without emotional engagement. If we could not be as the single, celibate speaker was (and it was grudgingly recognised that not all could aspire to that high calling), we should marry one of the Laura Ashley-clad lady helpers from Iwerne, and mitigate our guilt by producing new public schoolboys to become Iwerne officers.

We instrumentalized people. The lady helpers cooked at the camps, and were potential incubators of the next generation, and so were tolerable. If someone could be used for ‘the Work’, he was flattered, favoured, and promoted. But at the first sign of ‘unsoundness’ (perhaps a rumour that he’d been a bit too cosy with a non-Christian girl, or had been seen on the London train with a Buddhist book, or if he’d asked in exactly what sense the Iwerne gospel was Good News for homosexuals), out he’d go into the outer darkness, where there was weeping and gnashing of Comprehensive school teeth. The speed with which we dropped them, and the rigour of the quarantine, suggests that our main worry was infection.

The high command was shrewd, in its way. It knew that it would take little for the fallacies of its position to be exposed, and it took steps to avoid exposure. It built high-walled ghettos, from which the cultists would emerge solely for the purposes of evangelism, lectures, and rugby, and to which they would retreat at nightfall. Officers, at least in Cambridge, were expected to attend a weekly prayer meeting during term time, at which intelligence from the various ‘camp’ schools was exchanged. This helped the top brass to keep an eye on its officers, and ensured that the officers were kept emotionally tethered to the schools from which they had come themselves – which fostered a sort of nostalgic infantilism, and helped to shroud the intellectual and moral insupportability of Iwerne’s theology.

Why did I put up with it for so long? I have asked the question repeatedly over the years. Part of it was the lure of the Inner Ring: the Masonic secrecy; the flattering insistence that we were the elite; the spiritual stormtroopers of the nation. Part of it no doubt stemmed from our insecurity. We were all from the public schools that were Iwerne’s constituency, and hence emotionally immature and damaged. We needed personal and theological assurance more than most – perhaps particularly because we had to keep up the pretence of poise and infallibility. And, like most people, we loved easy answers.

Broadly there are, I think, three groups of Iwerne alumni. First, there are those who remained inside their ghetto. They have lived timorous (though often stridently dogmatic and chauvinistic) lives – constantly fearful of invasion. They don’t marry, or they marry within the clan, and tend to have jobs that make few demands on the imagination – for you never know where the imagination might lead. Second, there are those who left the ghetto, found that they couldn’t cope without its synthetic certainties, and had some sort of collapse. And third, there are those who left the ghetto, looked back at it in disgust, with regret at the wasted years, with bemusement and remorse because they were taken in, and with a huge sense of relief that they escaped. For them, every free post-Iwerne act is all the more piquant because it is an act of defiance. Mercifully I am in this third class, but I hate the disgust and bitterness that comes with membership, and I’m worried that this blog puts them shamefully on display.

So Iwerne, and the Conservative Evangelical world that Iwerne still dominates, were my worlds for a while. They are Jonathan Fletcher’s worlds, and were John Smyth’s. Jonathan Fletcher’s brother, David, ran the Iwerne camps while I was there. Jonathan is one of the High Priests of Conservative Evangelicalism: Iwerne is his power base. John Smyth was the Chairman of the Iwerne Trust.

I met John Smyth myself only once – probably in 1982. I went to his house to ask his advice about going to the Bar. Nothing untoward happened.

I never heard of the Smyth allegations until the Channel 4 story broke, but when I did hear them I wasn’t surprised. I knew why Smyth had told those boys to go into the shed, and why they had gone.

My wife asked me the other day whether I thought that Smyth was a simple sadist, or whether he actually believed the theological justifications that he mouthed. I am sure that both were true.  He had been trained to be incapable of the (elementary) reflection necessary to realise the dissonance between sadism and Christianity. In our culture, reflection was actively discouraged. Introspection was regarded as egotistical, and a highroad to heresy. Real men got on with manly sports (to burn off their libido and to make them too tired for dodgy philosophising) and with the promulgation of the algorithms.

I recently watched one of the few videos of a Jonathan Fletcher sermon that remains live on the internet. Despite everything that has emerged about him, and despite my own repudiation of his creed and his circle, I was moved. I didn’t and don’t doubt his sincerity for a moment.

That he could believe wholeheartedly what he said, while still behaving in the way that it appears he did is, as in Smyth’s case, a sign of compartmentalization – a compartmentalization that can only be sustained by systematic insistence that self-examination is effeminate and dangerous. There are strange, complex, seething things in the human psyche, we were told. Keep them out of the living areas! They’ll make a mess. Wholeness entails the breaking down of the barriers between the compartments of oneself. A whole person would know that the evangelical algorithms were literally unbelievable, and so we were taught that we should not be whole people.

Walled up behind my own Iwerne reception room were, amongst other things (some tawdry, some glorious), The Tibetan Book of the Dead, some proscribed girlfriends, a taste for animism, and the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. I hope that some of my own walls are coming down. It is slow work, but it helps not to have a philosophy and a hierarchy that insists that God built them.

I sometimes bump into some of the ghettoized people. They have an easy air when they’re on their own territory, with their own people. But get them slightly wrong-footed – lurching against  one of those scrupulously erected internal walls – and the panic rises.

I had lunch with one of them last week. ‘What do you make of the Jonathan Fletcher business?’ I asked. ‘Very sad’, he barked, ‘Now about those building plans….’ There was no getting him back to it. There was too much at stake. It would have demanded a re-evaluation of the algorithms, and the algorithms mattered more than the truth about Christianity, or the truth about himself, or the truth about the kind of creatures humans are.

Some of the best people I have ever known were fed into the Iwerne machine. Such talent, energy, discipline, and goodwill. I mourn for what they might have been – as I mourn, with less reason, for what I might have been had I not been drawn into Iwerne. Some of them are amazing still: the compartments to which they admit me are tastefully furnished and cosy. But if they had been whole!

What I want to know of Smyth, Fletcher, my former and current Iwerne friends, and myself, is this: when you use personal pronouns, what do you mean? When you say ‘I believe’, ‘I love’, or ‘I am saved’, which compartment is speaking?

Vaughan Roberts (himself a Iwerne man – one of the best; an abiding friend for whom I have great respect) made a statement at the Evangelical Ministry Assembly about the Jonathan Fletcher allegations. He said that a ‘lessons learned review’ would be necessary. That review will no doubt deal with questions such as why Fletcher was allowed to minister so widely after his licence to do so had been revoked, and more generally about the Church of England’s safeguarding policies. All very important, of course, but not as urgent and repercussive as many others. What is this theology of Jekyll and Hyde: of the Royal Courts of Justice and bloodstained canes in a Hampshire garden: of buttoned-up exegesis and naked massage? What are we? And how did ‘life in all its fullness’ come to mean a shrivelled, cramped life, characterised by fear of the Other, and maintained only by walling off all the parts of the self that might criticise the tyranny of the algorithms and wish for something better?

Charles Foster is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford, a practising barrister, and a writer. He read veterinary medicine and law at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and holds a PhD in medical ethics and law from Cambridge. His research is mainly concerned with questions of identity and personhood in law and ethics, and his latest non-academic book is Being a Beast – an attempt to enter the sensory worlds of non-human animals. He has six children, lives in Oxford, and spends a lot of time in the sea, up mountains, playing folk music in pubs, and in Greece. His website is at www.charlesfoster.co.uk

Everyone has their fifteen minutes of fame said Woody Allen.  My fifteen minutes beckoned some eighteen years ago and then vanished as quickly as they had appeared.  My brief flirtation with fame was when I was asked to take part in an independent television programme about Rasputin.  At one point there was even a suggestion that I might go to Russia and do some commentary from there about Rasputin’s life.  This was then downgraded to being a ‘talking head’ role in a UK studio, but the footage which was shot with my commentary was eventually completely edited out in favour of other material.    

The only thing left behind from this brief flurry of excitement was the reading I did, to prepare for the programme.  I wanted to sound reasonably informed on Rasputin’s notorious but very significant part in Russian history.  I had just seen my book of religion and power, Ungodly Fear, published and so I was then well sensitised to the way that Rasputin could and did use the image of holiness to seduce the entire Russian royal family in his bid for power.  There are in few people in history who succeeded in exercising so much power, personal and political, all at the same time.  His voracious appetite for sex, partying and political power seem to have had no limits.  No one seemed prepared or able to stand up to him until he was murdered in 1916 by political rivals.

The part of the story that I found most intriguing was Rasputin’s relationship with the Czarina Alexandra.  She was instrumental in keeping Rasputin right at the heart of the royal family during those dying days of the Romanoff dynasty.  It was not only because Rasputin seemed to be able to help her haemophiliac son that the relationship was strong.  There seemed to be something far more than that which kept this destructive relationship alive for so long.  As I read around the life of the Czarina it was evident that she came to Russia in 1894 to marry Nicholas as, what we would call nowadays, a ‘vulnerable adult’.  Her mother, Princess Alice, one of Queen Victoria’s children, had died when Alexandra was only six.  Life in a German castle as the motherless daughter of the Grand Duke of Hesse cannot have been easy.  Her mother seems to have taught her to speak English and presumably she would have learnt fluent German.  Arriving in Russia she would have had few opportunities to speak German.  Czar Nicholas was, however, fluent in English and this remained the language they used to communicate with each other for the whole of their married life.  The nobility and the Russian court had, I believe, a preference for French.  Russian was the language spoken by the common people.

Rasputin served to meet several of Alexandra’s needs.  First, he was a gateway for helping her feel that she was making contact with the unknown people outside the court, especially the country people, the peasant class.  Further, although Rasputin was not a monk, he represented for the Czarina the mysterious aspects of the Russian religious soul.  Associating with him enabled her to feel better connected to her adoptive country, the real Russia beyond the palace walls.  A further reason to feel deeply linked to Rasputin was in the way that he tapped into her extreme vulnerability.  Her father had died two years before her marriage in 1892.  We can speculate that she still needed parental support which her emotionally stunted husband was not apparently able to provide.  Psychologically she came to be more and more dependent on Rasputin.  She had been swept up into a relationship of deep intensity, drawing on the sexual energy of both parties, though apparently without physical consummation.

The power of Rasputin over the Czarina was thus an all-embracing one.  It tapped into Alexandra’s need for parental and human affection as well as guidance in a strange alien world.  The nature of Rasputin’s personality and his enormous charismatic and sexual energy fed and alleviated areas of Alexandra’s neediness at a profound level.  To describe this relationship using words like seduction or charm is inadequate but such words hint at the way the relationship with Rasputin seems to have combined charisma, sexual energy and religious fervour together. 

Since preparing to take part in that programme, my understanding and study of ‘charisma’ has moved on a great deal.  In particular I have come to see that it is normally linked with narcissistic traits.  No doubt if I were asked to comment on Rasputin again, I would draw attention to the way that he fulfilled most of the criteria for that disorder.  The one area that I have not made any further progress in understanding is the way sexual energy and charisma seem often to be linked.  When we describe the power of charisma in an individual whether in a religious or non-religious setting, we often want to describe it in quasi-sexual terms.  People who exercise this kind of power have a kind of magical charm which seduces people into their orbit.  We talk about people being in some way being bewitched into a relationship.  Even though I cannot make a completely coherent pattern out of these observations, there are connections between these ideas that I feel are worthy of further exploration.

Two other recent stories cry out to be compared with the Czarina’s tale in recent history.   They both involve royals and they both involve relationships involving charisma and the use of sexually-charged power.  Two people, Peter Ball and Geoffrey Epstein, successfully used their charisma and charm to manipulate members of another Royal Family in pursuit of the perpetrators’ own selfish ends.  Ball needed the friendship with Charles to protect his establishment credentials after his police caution. Epstein, according to some interpretations, was exploiting a faux friendship with Andrew to provide cover for his nefarious activities. In neither case, of course, was sex used directly, but there seems to have been in each ‘friendship’ a magnetic irresistible power drawing in the royal victims.  I have personally witnessed the charm/charisma of Peter Ball when he was my diocesan bishop.  It is in retrospect that I can identify a powerful attraction which was not unlike a form of seduction.  A child might use the word ‘creepy’ to describe this uncomfortable combination of repulsion and attraction at the same time.  I know nothing about the way Epstein came over to the people he manipulated (I am not here talking of his female slaves).  It is not unreasonable to suggest that he was gifted in this area of charming powerful people and making them do his bidding with the use of the tools of a sexually charged charisma. 

My reader will see that I am not in a position to offer a coherent pattern about the way the dynamics of charm, charisma and seduction can be described.  I am describing something based on hunch and instinct rather than scientific analysis.  And yet I am sufficiently confident that I am describing something worthy of our attention that I want to write about it in this post.  The sooner we can unravel these strands of human behaviour, the better we will be to make sense of many scenarios that take place within some dark areas of church life.  To understand is to be able to prevent something bad in the future.  That is surely a worthy aim even if our tools of analysis are not yet complete.

I made a decision that I would not allow my equilibrium to be disturbed by watching what many have now called the ‘car-crash’ interview of Prince Andrew last Saturday.  And yet even without watching the Newsnight programme, I have drawn out, from the extensive commentary, some telling parallels with the safeguarding scandals of the Church and elsewhere.   The question of whether Andrew ever met the woman he is accused of having sex with is not the central issue at one level.  As with the many cases of sexual abuse in the Church of England, it is just one event in the miasma of numerous half-truths, denials and examples of cruel behaviour.  How many times have we heard in various contexts the denial which comes in the form of ‘I have no recollection’ when abusers or colluders are faced with claims of abuse?  Such forgetfulness does not impress an observer or here, a television viewer.  It does have the advantage of being an answer that allows no follow-up question.  A protestation of ‘I don’t remember’ will always close down that part of the interview.  Perhaps that is why such a response was fed into the interview by Andrew’s publicity machine.

The most important part of the interview seems to have been what was not discussed.  Andrew mentioned sleepless nights of self-recrimination for not being more careful in his friendship with Epstein.  Having had nine years to think about this friendship after the full horror of Epstein’s behaviour had come out into the open, you might wonder why Andrew has never given any thought to the victims.  The focus in his mind was on the damage to himself, his family and the institution that he represented.  In other words, the victims/survivors of Epstein’s behaviour never entered into the royal awareness.  He certainly had nothing in the way of regret or sympathy for their situation.

There are a number of words that seem to be appropriate in describing Andrew’s attitude.  The words might include elitism, arrogance, failure of empathy and a deficit of imagination.  If we are really to believe that Andrew saw nothing odd about the clusters of very young girls in the various mansions where Epstein entertained his guests, this suggests a chronic naivety and blindness.   In short, Andrew felt himself to be too important to notice such details.  Other people were apparently there to amuse him, buy him drinks and generally provide for his needs.  From a psychological point of view, we are observing chronic narcissistic behaviour.  The individual sees himself at the centre; other people are there to be used and tolerated while they can provide gratification.  Being royal allowed Andrew to offer one thing in return, his momentary royal attention.  For some people, mesmerised by the institution of royalty, two or three words from such an Important Person can boost a flagging ego for a long time.

Why do I link the Church’s safeguarding crisis with Andrew’s poor interview performance?  It is because I see many sad parallels.  In Andrew’s interview there was the effective air-brushing away of the suffering of many hundreds of innocent victims.  His claim was that he was not a perpetrator at any point could possibly be true, but, by failing ever to speak up for the girls, we saw how to him such individuals had no value and were beneath his princely attention.   No doubt he wished, as Epstein would have done, the complaints of the victims to be shut down and silenced.  The way the Church has often failed to acknowledge victims and allow them an honourable place in its corporate consciousness seems to be a similar phenomenon.  Every time a Bishop ‘forgets’ a disclosure of abuse or a church leader helps to cover up decades of abuse, it is eerily close to Andrew omitting to mention anything about the victims of his friend Epstein.

One issue that my blog has given a possibly disproportionate amount of time to is the Smyth/Fletcher affair.  Events from so long ago might in other settings lose some of their potency after 30 plus years.  But to repeat, the safeguarding crises in the Churches have never been only or even mainly about the abusive events of the past.  It is about the cover-ups that have followed.  People who watched the Andrew interview on Saturday are rightly alarmed at the accusations levelled against the prince.  But they are probably just as alarmed by the twists and turns of his publicity machine as it has tried to help extricate him from his appalling choices.   What is especially damaging about the Andrew affair is his persistent refusal to own up properly to what happened in the past.  However ghastly and unroyal, a clean breast of the behaviour of a younger man might just have earned public forgiveness.   The denials and unconvincing story lines invented by public relations experts have done the opposite.  It is hard to see how Andrew will ever live down what passed in the interview on Saturday night.

The effective demise of Prince Andrew as a public figure may have begun last Saturday.  A similar process may be in operation in the Church of England as well.  Here the ‘car-crash’ has not yet happened but there are many signs that people in and outside the Church are becoming weary of the spin and cover-up that seems endemic in parts of the Church.  The church body as a whole may seem healthy with the founding of new congregations and signs of growth in various parts of the institution.  But readers of this blog will know what I am talking about when I say that there are areas of serious disease within the body.  Since the safeguarding crisis has become public knowledge, it has become more and more apparent that many, if not the majority, of our church leaders have been complicit in suppressing information about the past.   What information is publicly available has in every case come from survivors and the work of investigative journalism.   Channel 4 broke the Smyth episode and the Daily Telegraph came up with the outlines of a story about the activities of Jonathan Fletcher.  That process will not stop.

The hierarchy of the Church of England are clearly aware of the full dimensions of all the hidden scandals and many of them are fearful of more press disclosures.  One particular group that has more to fear than most are the network of conservative leaders that form part of the Renew Constituency.   Numerically this group is not large, but over the years they have presided over many of the institutions with the darkest secrets.  It is possible to speak of Iwerne/Renew/Church Society/AMiE together with a cluster of massively wealthy parishes, such as St Helen’s Bishopsgate, as a single entity.  Following the closure of REFORM and the re-organisation of the other groups into the Renew network, the Vicar of St Helen’s Bishopsgate, William Taylor, has become the most powerful figure in this group.  He and Hugh Palmer, the Rector of All Souls Langham Place have together been working within the conservative networks for many decades.  It is not unreasonable to conclude that their current silence and irregular approach to safeguarding (the curious messages sent out to churches after the Fletcher scandal broke) are consonant with an extensive knowledge of the shameful things that have gone on in the past.  If these leaders were truly innocent of any information about the Smyth/Fletcher outrages, you would expect their churches to be at the forefront in offering massive help to those in their constituency who have been affected.  Instead appeals for pastoral support there seem to meet with a patrician silence.  As with Prince Andrew, survivors are apparently too unimportant to care about.  

Prince Andrew has shown to the world that his first concern, in his blinkered view of the world, is to himself and the institution of the Royal Family that he so poorly represents.   The Church in its lamentable history of care for its own victims has also shown a blindness to anything but its own reputation and the survival of the institution.  The failure to come clean about the past is enormously damaging.  The eventual realisation by ordinary people of what has been hidden from them by people they had always looked up to in respect will cause a shocking sense of betrayal and disillusionment which will reverberate for decades to come.

A few blog posts back I discussed the idea of ‘imagination deficit’.  In putting forward this thought, I was thinking especially of the way many people, even church people, seem unable to enter into the subjective experience of others.  There is here a failure of empathy.   But the imagination is also to be used in a quite different way, to imagine the world being better than it is.  The Beatles song, Imagine, reminds us about the way that the imagination can evoke in us a sense of hope that the ‘world will be as one’. 

Using our imaginations, Beatles style, is a good exercise for all of us.  Instead of the cynicism that so often infects us and our institutions, our imagining can help us draw on and take seriously some of the biblical imagining with its constant striving for harmony, reconciliation and peace.  We may also try to imagine at the same time what we would like the Church to be.  We spend a great deal of time hearing sermons about love and reconciliation but quite often these qualities in people are hard to find.  About a year ago I wrote about the breakthrough that came to a church near Manchester after the suicide of a teenage member, Lizzie Lowe, who believed she was gay.  The Vicar, Nicholas Bundock, led his Church on a difficult journey of self-examination so that they ended up in a place of acceptance of the LGBT community.  Lizzie’s death had forced them to imagine and think about the isolation and sense of rejection which many gay people experience at the hands of society and much of the Church.  The old policy of ‘we don’t discuss this issue here’ had been a cause of real danger and tragedy.  Having sat with Lizzie’s family in the place of grief and reflected on what the Bible was teaching about the needs of all ostracised outsiders, the congregation, or at least the majority of it, knew that it had to change.  The congregation has now adopted a positive welcome to the LGBT community as well as to other minorities in society.   By using their imaginations, they had come to see that God’s welcome and acceptance was not just for ‘people like us’.  It has been a difficult journey, especially hard for those Christians who believe the Bible has a fixed unaltered teaching about the gay question and other issues.  The Vicar still attracts attention from online trolls and attacks for this brave act of compassion towards the minorities represented by Lizzie.   I would like to regard this Church’s movement as being like a divinely inspired action based on the exercise of their imagination.  Imagining allowed that congregation to sit in a new place and understand the central aspects of the Good News in a fresh way.

Acts of imagination take us to new places that in the real world are normally hard to achieve.  Too often the effort is inhibited and controlled by fear.  The kind of fear we are talking about may well be expressed in theological language but it normally has precious little to do with theology or belief.  It is far more likely to be a sign of personal insecurity.  The Church is, sadly, very prone to colluding in a fearful retreat into immobility and rigidity when it is asked to exercise its corporate imagination.  Let us, nevertheless, think what kind of world, what kind of Church, we can imagine which would resolve our present crisis of unacknowledged abuse and the existence of many unhealed survivors of those terrible actions.

In our new Church, the one created by an act of our imaginations, there is no space for individuals and institutions to cling on to self-referential status or power.  The work of the Church, the task of promoting God’s forgiveness and welcome to humanity can happen without there ever being a hierarchy of manipulation or control in the background.  We can imagine how preaching and the other tasks of ministry would cease ever to be a way of enhancing individual self-esteem.  There are at present too many individuals in the pulpit who use it as a way of overcoming their personal fragility to receive some kind of psychological boost.  Our imagined Church will be one like the one dreamed of by Mary in the Magnificat.   The proud are scattered, the mighty cast down and the humble and meek are exalted.  Translating these words for today’s survivors might mean the following.  In our new Church the survivors will always be honoured and listened to.  No longer would they be despised and treated with contempt.  The proud and the powerful would come to see that they can longer use underhand methods of demeaning these weakened abuse victims and making their situations worse.  The Church, the body of Jesus’ followers, will no longer ever tolerate this kind of behaviour from some of its powerful members.  Our imagined Church will thus be at last a true place of refuge, a place of healing for all, because God’s healing will truly flow through it.

The Church of our imagination would also be a place where mutuality would mark all relationships between Christians.  While some kind of authority structure will continue to exist, among the relationships in the church there would never be space for crude status seeking among those in authority.   Our Church would be a place where legitimate authority would be the norm while at the same time cabals, secret groups and controlling networks would disappear.  Every single member of the church would somehow acquire an instinctive understanding of the words of Paul when he told the Philippians to treat others as better than themselves.  If ever old crimes are revealed, the first instinct of the person who receives this information will always be to seek the welfare and make a compassionate response to the complainant.  This would always involve the pursuit of justice, so that, in a biblical sense, God’s righteousness may prevail. The old ‘forgetting’, ignoring or belittling of survivors to protect that church will be no more.  The Church in our imaginations would be a place where power posturing has become extinct. 

The Church that comes alive within our imaginations when we allow this imaginative process to begin is a wonderful place.  Obviously, the gap between what is and what could be is wide.  Chief among the difficulties that Nicholas Bundock found when he led his church in a new direction were his encounters with trenchant opposition.  Just as the Church is sometimes manipulated by fear-based methods of control, so fear is a factor in stopping people in pursuing a Magnificat vision of the Church in the first place.   It will be also an issue for anyone standing up to powerful vested interests.  Institutions like the Church will always, as we have seen, have ways of pushing back strongly against those who question the status quo, even if it means ignoring the individuals who have been damaged by its own misuse of its power.   Once again, we need the Church to rediscover the way of power that was taught by Jesus.  That would bring us closer to the Church of our imaginations, the Church of true healing and safety.