This blog post has been updated with a message from the conference organiser Jaqui Wright.

53 years ago, at an important meeting of the National Assembly of Evangelicals in London, John Stott, the unofficial leader of all evangelical Anglicans in Britain, resisted strong pressures encouraging him and his fellow evangelicals to leave the national Church.  Many conservative Anglicans, both inside and outside the Church of England, wanted to be part of a new trans-denominational evangelical body.  Stott successfully persuaded Anglican evangelicals to stay and remain part of the Church of England.  Although he was successful in resisting this pressure, there is still a tendency among many conservative Christians to sit lightly on their Anglican membership and seek links with other groupings.  Some, such as GAFCON or the Anglican Mission in England (AMiE), have the Anglican name in the titles, while possessing a somewhat loose connection to the official structures of the Church of England or the Anglican Communion.  Keeping many such disparate groups together within the broad tent of Anglicanism has, over the years, been a challenging task for Church leaders.  Next year we will see once again the gathering of the world-wide Anglican Communion bishops at Lambeth 2020.  The many divisions that currently exist will once again be exposed to full view.  One wonders if a Conference of this kind will ever be able to be held again. 

What I have been describing is a Church where centrifugal forces and pressures towards schism are constantly in evidence.   There is, however, one particular facet of the Church’s life which holds things together in spite of a constant tendency to fragment.   I am not referring to the Church’s position within English law or the resources of the Church Commissioners to provide pensions for those who serve in salaried posts.  No, the unity of the Church is made possible because of the work of bishops.  Bishops do not normally allow themselves to get involved when congregations hive off into semi-autonomous units, but they do take an interest when cases of immoral conduct emerge.  The power they have in this situation is important.  They can and do withdraw licences and permissions to officiate.  Those with PTOs are particularly vulnerable to having their ability to take services withdrawn.  There is no appeal against this action as far as I know and it is an instrument of real and effective power granted to bishops.  In effect it gives every diocesan bishop the right to decide who and who is not able to act as his/her representative in the parishes of the diocese.

In January 2017 the Bishop of Southwark, no doubt after months (years?) of enquiry, withdrew the PTO from Jonathan Fletcher, a retired priest living in London.  This event attracted absolutely no attention outside the circles occupied by Fletcher.  However, within the circles of his influence, it was a seismic event.  Jonathan Fletcher is a major player in the group called Renew.  Renew is the brainchild of William Taylor, Rector of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate. It currently comprises churches affiliated to it, and what was formerly Reform (co-founded by Jonathan Fletcher), AMiE (plants churches outside C of E), and Church Society (education and patronage society). Renew has an annual conference and regular regional groups led by ministers Taylor selects.  The most recent conference included an international GAFCON speaker – signalling Taylor’s desire to extend his Renew control to that movement in its English expression. All Souls is a crown appointment, so not a CS church. But it is a Renew church by affiliation. Robin Weekes, the current Vicar of Emmanuel Wimbledon, Fletcher’s old church, chairs the Southwark Renew group of ministers. All these networks are inextricably connected, apparently under the control of William Taylor.

The action of the Bishop of Southwark against Fletcher had an instant effect within this constituency of Renew where it could be seen as threat to the considerable power exercised by its leaders.  The wealthy parishes within it and the patronage and influence they exert through the institutions under their control means that Renew and it leaders have substantial power in the Church of England as a whole.  The Renew group could be said to have a control almost equivalent to the House of Bishops.  The scandal of Fletcher’s suspension could be seen to be a major threat to this continuing influence.

In June this year, the Daily Telegraph published an account of the background to the story of Fletcher’s suspension.  This spoke of sexual misconduct and spiritual abuse.  I do not propose to go over that material again.  The reaction after the breaking of the Telegraph story had two parts.  First of all, apart from very brief press statements from the Renew leaders, there was a rather unconvincing ‘apology’ from Fletcher himself.  He apologised for harm done but claimed not to know who were his victims.  His former parish in Wimbledon also offered a help-line for his victims.  The second reaction we noted on this blog was the way that the Internet suddenly seemed to eliminate all mentions of Fletcher, including his sermons and other references to his existence.  It was as though someone (with power) had made a decision to make him disappear.  Somebody somewhere was alarmed by the exposure of this story and was hoping very much that it would go away.  Thus, the story remains left hanging in the air and little new information has been allowed to leak out over the past months.   But when an individual of influence appears to have been misbehaving over thirty plus years, it is hard to see that new material will not eventually come trickling out.

A new twist in the story has arisen this past week.  It relates not to Fletcher himself but rather to an apparent state of disarray among the current leading members of the Renew network.  The current point of interest concerns a day conference for May 2020 entitled ‘Church as a Refuge’ to be held at All Souls Langham Place but promoted by the Church Society, the education arm of Renew.  It is featuring as a main speaker Dr Diane Langberg from the States.  She is a top-notch speaker and an expert on Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the way that it is often found in cases of child sexual abuse. 

An organisation which sponsors a conference on this theme is to be commended.  It extends the Church’s knowledge and understanding of how to deal with past abuses.  To quote the publicity sent out by Ros Clark, the conference is designed ‘to enable better understanding of power, control and abuse within the Church’.  When the conference was first announced it contained an endorsement from Vaughan Roberts, the Vicar of St Ebbes Oxford and a key Renew player.  He is an important figure in the Fletcher saga since all the official, somewhat terse, press statements from Renew about Fletcher carried his name.  But that endorsement for the conference has now disappeared.   Can we possibly read from this that some among the Renew leadership are embarrassed by the fact that All Souls/Church Society is sponsoring such a conference so soon after the revelation of the Smyth/Fletcher scandals?

The most notable feature around these scandals has been the complete failure of the current leadership, including Roberts, to come forward to say what they know about the Fletcher/Smyth abuses.  A conference of this kind endorsed by the entire Renew leadership might represent a positive step forward by the network to look at abuse and its aftermath.  But, by the simple act of withdrawing endorsement on the part of Roberts, we are left to draw quite different conclusions.  Behind the scenes of a very well defended and secretive leadership clique, we detect strong disagreements.  These will be not only about the desirability of the conference itself, but also the ongoing issue of how to navigate the continuing fall-out of the Smyth/Fletcher scandals.  We do not know the details, of course.  The dynamics of such a disagreement are likely to centre, not on the welfare of the numerous survivors of both men’s abuse, but how best to preserve the reputation and power of the Renew coalition and the various organisations allied to it.    

The conference of May 2020 is, in itself, a thoroughly positive initiative.  I may apply to go to it myself.  But the power and effectiveness of the conference will be damaged unless it is accompanied by a commitment to sort out the abusive past practised and concealed by members of the Renew network and its leaders.     Meanwhile we surmise that any open discussion of abuse is perhaps rattling cages and consciences in places where there is something to hide.  Everything about the Fletcher/Smyth affair and the way that it seems to centre around a cluster of conservative Anglican organisations sends out a smell of long-term conspiracy and secrecy.  Can such a conference do anything to wash away the guilt of thirty years of secrecy and cover-up within the Renew network?  It may do something to help but we suspect that any improvement will be weakened by apparent strong disagreements within the leadership of these powerful networks.  This makes the conference appear to be more like a fig leaf, attempting to cover up something shameful rather than the beginning of a new chapter.   Our welcome of this positive initiative thus has to be tempered with some strong reservations.

Since writing this piece and having drawn information from the Church Society website, it has been drawn to my attention that the conference is an independent initiative. This new information would have changed some of the emphases of my piece, including my intended unreserved endorsement of it taking place. However, the Renew network and the churches attached to it remain a controversial setting at the very least. The organiser Jaqui Wright has asked me to include the following

The Church as a Refuge conference is the idea of Jacqui Wright, a survivor. If she can spare one person or family the heartache and grief that she and her family have experienced, then it will all be worth it.

The overarching aim is to prevent further instances of abuse occurring in churches and Christian organisations. Within this aim, the first objective is to raise awareness about the abuse of power in Christian contexts among the leaders of churches and Christian organisations – and those whose task it is to hold those leaders to account. A second objective is to begin developing a clearer pathway to help victims. Skilled support for traumatised survivors is difficult to find in the UK. We therefore need to hear the voices of survivors.

There appears to be much speculation on social media about the arrangements for the conference. For clarification:

1. This is not a conference about conservative evangelical Anglicans. The problem of abuse in Christian contexts is not confined to one denomination. People from all denominations or none are welcome to attend;

• Jacqui Wright asked Rev Hugh Palmer if All Souls Langham Place would host the one day event and we are grateful that he has agreed to hire the venue to us;  

• Jacqui has invited Dr Diane Langberg to be the main speaker and to pay her costs;

• Jacqui and her family have created the website which is still a work in progress (subject to change) and made arrangements for delegates to buy tickets online;

• Revenue from the tickets will be used to offset expenses in relation to the conference and will be held in a separate charity account (not for profit) with an independent signatory;

• The financial risks involved in holding the conference are born only by Jacqui and Cliff Turner (her husband), not by anyone else;

• Cliff will chair the conference. (He has significant experience of chairing conferences as he has previously been the independent chair of three local safeguarding boards);

• We have been asking organisations and churches across denominations to publicise the conference. Various people offered their endorsement of the conference when they heard about it, including Vaughan Roberts. We decided to change the Home page of the website for a supporters’ page instead. However, this is on hold as we have been dealing with incorrect information spreading around especially online;

• Rumours on social media suggest we are being manipulated by others who allegedly are seeking to do ‘window dressing’ or put a ‘fig leaf’ over past organisational sins. We find these untrue comments upsetting. Like everyone, we don’t know what we don’t know, but neither are we entirely naïve. We respectfully ask that people would refrain from speculation. Please contact us directly with your concerns and seek the facts before sharing judgements. Email info@churchasarefuge.com

1. We are seeking to do this conference for the glory of God and his church. Everyone is welcome! We appreciate your support. Cliff and Jacqui 10.11.19

There are some words in the English language where a precise meaning is always going to be approximate.  One such word is Establishment when used in a British context.  The word speaks of such things as the protection of traditional and conservative values by a powerful elite who have a strong preference for the status quo.  There is also an assumption that those who belong to such a group are among the very wealthy in society.  When challenged to define exactly who in fact belongs to the British Establishment, the answers are going to vary according to whom you speak.  This ambiguity about who belongs to our UK Establishment points to another feature of the word.   Those in this group normally exercise their power and influence over society in secret, or at least in ways that do not draw too much attention to them.

The word ‘Establishment’ is also a helpful one to use in trying to understand what is going in our Church affairs.  The safeguarding crises over the past twenty years have brought out into the open a much clearer picture of the way establishment dynamics and values can work.  These values, normally completely hidden from view, are strongly articulated in the 2000 letters sent to Lambeth Palace to support Bishop Peter Ball after his Caution in 1992.   The great and the good, members of one or other of the particular establishment networks occupied by Bishop Peter Ball, entered into a letter writing frenzy to try and persuade Archbishop George Carey to rehabilitate the disgraced bishop.  Among the letters were some from royalty, the top echelons of the social and political elite and other groups such as top lawyers and public-school headmasters.  The very existence of this stash of letters is an important witness to the fact that we can still meaningfully speak of a powerful establishment dynamic in England.  Here it is a sub-set of the main one, but one energetically operating inside the Church of England.  They are doing what such groups do best, protesting vigorously when one of their number is attacked, trying hard to restore the status quo by seeking the rehabilitation of the accused.  In this episode the establishment methods were temporarily victorious.  Although Peter Ball eventually, in 2015, went to prison for his crimes, he had enjoyed twenty years of partial rehabilitation.  For all that time he had continued to enjoy dinner invitations, week-end house parties and a warm welcome at many English public-schools.

A second clear example of establishment dynamics at work is in the present situation with John Smyth, Jonathan Fletcher and the activities of the Iwerne/Titus Trustees.  As I have claimed several times on this blog, there is clear evidence of powerful wealthy people linked to the Church hiding the truth about damaging abuse to some individuals attending the Iwerne camps, as well as protecting Smyth from prosecution.  The Ball group and the Smyth group seem to have operated in similar ways and may even have had some individuals in common.  Ball’s supporters were socially drawn from some socially extremely well-connected people, including members of the Royal Family.  One cannot provide higher social credentials than letters from the Prince of Wales.  The Smyth backers and supporters did not have the Royal Family to advance their cause, but they could call on numbers of extremely wealthy evangelical backers to rally together to keep a lid on the scandal.  As I have pointed out before it takes enormous energy to manage a scandal as far-reaching as the one around Smyth and Fletcher.  It is unfortunate that this story will not probably ever receive the same scrutiny as that given to the Peter Ball affair through the IICSA process. 

The Smyth supporters and the Ball supporters seem to have sufficient things in common to allow us to describe them both as ‘establishment groups’ operating within the Church of England.  Both these networks operate like ‘establishments’, socially powerful groups who wish to defend and support one of their own as well as defend privilege and power that they believe to be rightfully theirs.  One intriguing connection which links them is that both groups have connections a number of major public schools in England.  In particular the headmasters of some of these establishments seem to play a prominent part in both the Ball and Smyth supporters’ groups.  This raises many intriguing questions which, unfortunately, I can take no further.

Before we leave this theme of establishment values and groups operating within the Church of England, I need to mention one further group that seems to use similar methods to promote its cause.  I am thinking of Freemasons.  When I was a child, I knew two things about the Masons.  The first thing was that the Archbishop of Canterbury who confirmed me, Geoffrey Fisher, was an enthusiastic Mason.  The other fact was that local papers then (the 50s) published regular stories about Masons.  As part of the story a local Vicar would be quoted, opposing them on scriptural grounds.  Since those far off days, my meetings with them have been on some awkward but rare occasions, when trying to organise funerals of individuals who combined church membership with attendance at the local Masonic lodge.  Although my current exposure to the world of Masons is non-existent, I am still left with uncomfortable questions.  Any group that possesses secrecy, privilege and power will potentially be working in a similar way to the two other establishment networks we have mentioned.  The Ball and Smyth supporters have done the Church considerable harm and that damage is a continuing wound to the Church right up to today.  I have no current conspiracy theories about the Masons to air here, but there will always be an air of discomfort about any group that operates outside the norms of open communication and accountability.   The late Frank Fisher, one of Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher’s sons, managed to combine membership of a masonic lodge, the Church of England, the board of the Ecclesiastical Insurance Company and Nobody’s Friends, the elite dining club.  His day job was as a headmaster of consecutively, I think, two public schools.  Without having further details, there is a curious coinciding of several establishment traits in a single individual.  The rest of us, living outside such charmed circles, are given further reason to wonder whether, when such networks exist in the Church, ecclesiastical power is always being exercised healthily.   The establishment groups we have identified operate with a large degree of secrecy.  This fact alone will always generate suspicion and lack of trust.  How can we know that the power possessed by these elite secret groups is always or, indeed ever, used for the benefit of all?   As the IICSA process has made clear, much power and privilege in the Church have been dispensed in ways that are hidden from sight.  We are constantly being reminded how sexual and spiritual abuse thrives in such places of secrecy.  Every area of the Church, to be healthy, must become properly and routinely transparent.  The Church otherwise will remain a sick and unhealthy institution.  Self-serving groups have no real place in an institution which follows a master who came to be the servant of all.

Once again, a familiar theme is emerging in the hearings of IICSA this week, the story of repeated failures of senior people in the Catholic Church to identify with victims and survivors.  A similar pattern of detachment from the pain and suffering of survivors was also seen among senior Anglicans when the Diocese of Chichester was under scrutiny.  It seems to be a part of the institutional life of Churches all around the world.  Those at the highest levels of authority in churches seem to have the greatest difficulty understanding the struggles of those who may suffer at the bottom of the structure. 

As I write these words, there is playing in the background live testimony from the IICSA hearing.  It is being made by a Catholic woman who has struggled to be heard with her complaint against a priest who abused her when she was a teenager.  She then felt re-abused by allowing the Church to carry out an internal investigation into her case.  After a great deal of effort, she eventually had her complaint about incompetent and insensitive handling by the Westminster Diocese upheld.  The texts of letters of apology sent to the same survivor were also read out.  The sentiments of these letters could be described at the very least as cloying and unconvincing.  There seems to have been in these ‘apologies’ a complete inability to enter imaginatively into the world of the victim/survivor and a refusal to recognise what has taken place in the life of the abused individual.

The crucial word in my reflections is the word imagination.  Whether it was the work of bishops, legal officers or advisers being described, many of them, operating inside the institutional structure, appeared to be suffering from an identical deficit of imagination.  The rule seems to be, whether in Anglican or Catholic circles, that if you work for the centre, you routinely withdraw empathy and compassion from the abused, the one who threatens the good name of your paymaster.  Defence of the structure and promoting its interests seems to win every time over feeling and understanding the needs of a survivor.   

Imagination is a vital human quality.  It allows us to conceive how things can be different.   The gift of imagination is what enables us to escape from the predictability of our assigned roles in life and think outside the box.  And yet so many people have been conditioned to fear ever doing things or thinking things differently.  This is not just true of people whose tasks in life are to be subservient and obey orders.  It also applies to people at the very top of career pinnacles.  It could be claimed that people everywhere know the experience of being constrained by their roles so that they do not really experience freedom. As I write these words, I am thinking of the words of a Gilbert and Sullivan song which begins ‘I am the very model of a modern Major General’.  This song carries with it the implication that Major-Generals are all expected to behave in a predictable and identical way.  To fit the model perfectly is all that is expected of us. It is the highest possible ambition.  One can change the aphorism of Descartes into one that says ‘I fit in, therefore I am.’

Fitting in, becoming the model parent, worker, director or bishop is the place where most people want to be.  It is a variation on the universal need to belong.  What is true of individuals is also true of institutions.  Predictable institutions are far more comfortable places to belong to.  A Church like the Catholic Church has a great deal of appeal in its offer of being a place that seldom changes.   To have total predictability in one’s institution or one’s life is a good selling point and it works for many people.  The IICSA hearings over the past couple of days have illustrated powerfully the power of predictability and the attractiveness of institutional/individual defensiveness and inertia.  We hear once again that an institution, here the Catholic Church through its officers, has acted with no imagination towards a suffering individual.   It has rather, almost mechanically, sought to apply defensive legal principles instead of a human caring response.  Any institution behaving in this way, will always fail to be a place of human freedom, spontaneity and deep humanity.

One ray of light did appear in the gloom of the Catholic response to IICSA.  At some point in the proceedings Cardinal Vincent Nichols made the admission to the hearing that after his visit to a meeting in Rome in February this year, he had written to his fellow bishops stating “For me what happened was that I began to see what we were talking about from the perspective of the victim/survivor.”  The lead council to the Inquiry, Brian Altman QC, drew out in particular the three short words ‘began to see.’

From Cardinal Nichols’ use of three words, we can begin to reconstruct how far we have to go to recreate and repair the deficit of imagination that operates widely within our churches.  Cardinal Nichol’s confession is remarkable.  The implication seems to be that he and bishops of any church, who appear not to care about survivors, are victims of an empathy deficit of some kind.  One wants to ask two question when this apparent syndrome, the imagination deficit, appears.  Are bishops appointed to care for sees because they are a safe pair of hands to preserve the material welfare of plant, buildings and wealth?  In other words, are the managers/custodians preferred to pastoral/prophetic types who might, God forbid, squander wealth on people?  A second question is harder to answer but it emerges from the heart of this blog’s concerns.  Does the very fact of becoming a bishop do something to one’s capacity to care?  Do bishops typically become so caught up in administration and the exercise of their authority that, over a period of time, they cease to relate pastorally to their flocks?  The questions are asked, not because there is a definitive answer to either of them but as a way of starting to understand the Cardinal’s three words in relation to survivors.

I first met Vincent Nichols at an ecumenical conference in the mid-80s.  He made an impression on me then as a good man and I have followed his career from a distance with interest.   I believe that the deficit of imagination that is revealed in the current hearings can be largely laid at the door of the institution that he and his fellow bishops oversee.  His long-time immersion in an inflexible hierarchical structure has in some way damaged his humanity and created a tragic deficit of love and empathy inside him.  That also may be the simple explanation for the extraordinary gulf that we find across the churches between safeguarding and the task of healing/caring for survivors.  I am by no means the only commentator to notice the massive discrepancy between money spent on prevention training and the money spent on supporting survivors.  Is it because the leaders are chosen to conserve wealth and plant so that they become detached from this particular manifestation of human suffering? 

To return to the key idea of the piece, imagination deficit.  When there is in us a functioning imagination then we can be people who can understand the suffering of others and respond appropriately.  If bishops and other leaders in the Church ever fail in this task of exercising imagination, such victims/survivors can suffer greatly.   Now that Cardinal Nichols has had the humility to admit that he is on the bottom step of understanding the needs of survivors, perhaps other can be encourage to follow him.  The gift of imagination is the key and prerequisite to effective and powerful love and it may yet heal the Church.

Charities who work for peace and the healing of Survivors

I have recently come across the work of an organisation that seeks to help promote peace, the Tim Parry Johnathan Ball Foundation for Peace.  The names are those of the two boys who lost their lives in the terrorist bombing outrage in Warrington in 1993.  This organisation recognises that working for peace needs to have three parts to be effective.  In the first place it needs to be in the forefront of preventing violence before it happens.  If some sort of conflict does arise, then there is the important work of resolution.  Dialogue between warring parties needs to be established to stop such violence escalating.  Finally, there has to be the readiness to respond when a violent event has occurred.  The task then becomes the care for individuals who have been left wounded and traumatised by the conflict. 

A short booklet produced by this Foundation was handed out at a recent helpful local meeting to discuss the issue of trauma and PTSD.  Present were representatives of the army and local fire services and we listened to various presentations bringing us up to date with the latest ideas about helping those who suffer from the aftermath of trauma.  Apart from interested lay people like myself, there were also medics, social workers and others involved with situations of stress and trauma in society.  Of all the pieces of paper that were handed out to the attendees, the Foundation booklet stood out as being by far the most useful to someone facing the consequences of trauma, either as a victim or a concerned supporter.

Most of us who take an interest in trauma, our own or that of someone close to us, are familiar with the signs and symptoms affecting those who are coming through it.  It is. however, extremely helpful to have these listed, as the booklet does, so that anyone encountering a victim of trauma for the first time, is better prepared for the unexpected ways that the aftermath of trauma may be expressed.  The Foundation booklet lists twenty potential PTSD symptoms suffered by those who have experienced abusive or violent trauma.  These will quite often affect negatively the well-being and happiness of the sufferer.  Take the two examples of anger and hyperactive behaviour.  Neither would make for easy social relationships.  The common reaction of a by-stander is to avoid or walk away from a victim who may exhibit these effects of past trauma.  The task of befriending an abuse survivor is nevertheless always an important calling for all members of the church community.  There is a need to persevere with such friendships even if they can become strained from time to time.   

The booklet that I have been referring to has the title STEPS, standing for Steps towards Empowerment and Positive Survival.  It has the subtitle Life after Trauma.  Although the trauma suffered in Warrington and elsewhere followed a massive case of violence, much in the booklet does in some way relate to the needs of abuse survivors in the Church.  Like the survivors of bomb outrages, many of these abuse survivors have suffered a deep trauma, reaching to the very depths of the personality.  The path to healing can begin when they become aware of the fact that there are other people who do care and will accompany them back to the goal of wholeness.

The booklet follows up its list of the signs of deep trauma by indicating how to start on the journey toward proper self-care.  Particularly helpful is the list of caring support groups. There are also sentences that are lifted from the Department of Justice Code of Practice concerned with the victims of criminal behaviour.  Even allowing for the fact that some forms of church abuse are not technically criminal acts, it is a matter of sorrow that many Church abuse victims are allowed to think that the treatment they receive from Church authorities is less than caring.  If the Department of Justice can insist on minimum standards of care for victims, then so can the Church.  The DOJ states that all victims must be provided with ‘clear information from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority on eligibility for compensation under the scheme.’  There is also mentioned a ‘right to information about your crime within specified time scales, including the right to be notified of any arrests and court cases.’  We also have a reference to victims ‘receiving services … to the level of service they want’.  One would love to see equivalent contractual promises for abuse survivors set out in a Church document.

Why did this small 8-page booklet make such an impression on me?  The reason is that its approach is calm and realistic.  It takes the existence of trauma and the effect it has on its victims as a fact.  The response to the trauma is then approached compassionately and holistically. From the crime event itself that caused the original trauma, we are taken right through to the care and rehabilitation of the victims.  There is a strong professional feel about the approach.  The people who wrote it really seem to understand the implications of terrible traumatic events on people’s lives and in brief statements they offer realistic practical advice and help. Nowhere in the document are victims of trauma made to feel guilty or patronised. The victims are being offered help and advice by people who really understand about trauma and how this burden needs to managed for the future.

The question now arises.  Why cannot the Church produce a similar document for its own survivors?  Why can we not have a short professional statement of exactly what the Church is ready to do to help the healing of those afflicted by abuse from the past? There could be phone numbers of organisations as well a central number which would allow individuals all over the country to access contact with their local Safeguarding Adviser.  For such a system to work the Church at the centre would have to make sure that there existed resources at the local level to deal with a possible stream of phone calls.   Above all the document would have to show, as the STEPS document does, that the Church at every level really understands, free from condescension, the issues faced by survivors in coping with past abuse events.  If constant pressure has been brought to bear by such survivors on Church officials from the Archbishops down, this is simply the result of structures of care and responsibility not being currently in place.  In the aftermath of terrible events like Warrington 1993 and Manchester 2016 there are many traumatised individuals who require support and help.  It would seem that the secular world, as exemplified by the Tim Parry Johnathan Ball Foundation is responding.  Can we not expect the Church to provide the resources, the wisdom and the insight to make the same healing response to the trauma of abuse that hangs so heavily on the Church today?

Dear Keith,

You will not know me but I have a strong interest in the John Smyth Review that you are involved in.  In writing this open letter I am not proposing to offer any new inside information about the whole sorry affair.  Everything I know about Smyth is what I have gleaned from the Internet and through contact with just one of his victims.  This individual sought me out because I have been writing on church power and abuse issues for some time in my blog: Surviving Church.  This blog is an attempt to understand the way that power operates in the Church for good and for ill.   Smyth’s record of appalling behaviour in a Winchester garden shed together with the subsequent cover up on the part of many prominent Christians represent, in different ways, examples of power being abused in a most shocking manner.

In this letter I intend to offer a number of observations based on the public evidence that has been available to me.  From my perspective the most damaging part about the Smyth story is the way that it was allowed to remain hidden for so long.  Enormous energy was expended to keep a lid on this scandal.  Those who allowed Smyth to flee the UK to continue his nefarious activities in Zimbabwe could be said to have blood on their hands with the tragic death of 16-year-old Guide Nyachuru.  There are also reported at least two suicide attempts among his English victims.  As I see it, there are three groups of actors in this drama.  There is the central figure, Smyth himself, who seems to have acted alone.  Alongside him are his victims, all of whom were recruited from the Iwerne Christian camps.  Then there is the third group, those who knew what was going on but were unwilling or unable to do anything to check Smyth’s behaviour. Within this last group, some are deeply culpable.  A group of supporters and financial backers effectively allowed an evil man, not only to escape justice, but to continue to offend against the young.  The important group within the Smyth drama are of course the victims.   In a completely different way, they also were involved in a cover-up.  Their cover-up was not of course to do with preserving reputations, defending institutions like the Iwerne camps and the dubious theological ideas which Smyth preached.  It was a cover-up forced on them by a powerful man using the tools of shame and fear against the vulnerable young.  The testimony of Mark Stibbe in the introduction of the recent book by Lisa Oakley and Justin Humphreys tells much of what we need to know about the horror of Smyth’s spiritually abusive behaviour which resulted in their silencing for decades.

In a file on my bookcase I have a stack of papers marked ‘Smyth stuff’.   It contains, apart from the document which is prepared for you as ‘terms of reference’, other primary sources.  I have a copy of the original 1982 report prepared by Mark Ruston which was originally given only restricted circulation.  I also have a report prepared in Zimbabwe about Smyth’s activities by a group of Christian leaders based in Bulawayo.  With the various other print-outs from the fall-out of the Channel 4 programme in 2017 and other press cuttings, there is a particularly useful chronological document of Smyth’s life and the other dramatis personae in the story.  We have for example in this latter document the names of the Trustees of Zambezi Ministries who from the UK supported Smyth and his family during his enforced exile.  The timescale chart in the document is also useful.  It is easy to forget dates or become confused about the places where Smyth went to in Africa.  I want to be assured that all the documents I have mentioned have been made available to you.

From my perspective, reading all the material again, there is a story which can be retold in a few sentences.  A man with a fanatical religious impulse decided that he could make young men spiritually pure by administering acts of physical violence against them.  Those who discovered the truth of these events were unable to call him to account but shipped him off to Africa where he continued running camps for teenagers for another ten to fifteen years.  One young man, Guide, died and others were traumatised like those in England.  I hope, Keith, that you can open up the mysterious question how and why no one raised the alarm over Smyth’s behaviour.   We are looking to you to expose the wickedness of this institutional cover-up in your report.  Actively protecting a fugitive from justice is surely itself a crime, even if many did not know the full picture of what was happening at the time.

It would appear that although the crimes took place in Winchester, a lot of the action is linked to the city of Cambridge.  The Iwerne camps from which Smyth recruited his victims were strongly supported by Christian Unions in Cambridge.  It is here that we find in the mid-70s Mark Ruston and Jonathan Fletcher at the Round Church.  Both these clergy were strongly involved in the Iwerne camps and they would have known Smyth well, both as the chairman of the Trustees and as a camp speaker.  The current Archbishop himself was recruited as a Cambridge undergraduate to work in the camps.  The Iwerne spirit was apparently strong in the city.  Also, among the clergy working in Cambridge within these strongly conservative Christian circles, was Michael Nazir Ali, later Bishop of Rochester.  He would have known personally all those in the Iwerne network in the mid-70s at that time, whether or not he himself attended the camps.  There are various other witnesses to the events of this period.  Another name of a potential witness that has not been mentioned in any of the reporting on Smyth is David Conner, the Chaplain of Winchester College in the late 70s. He is now Dean of Windsor.  He must have known personally many of Smyth’s Winchester victims. 

Keith, I hope that you are going to be able to penetrate the secrecy that has been allowed to descend on this episode of English church history for so long, one which has resulted in a cover-up of monumental proportions.  Cover-up and silence results in a corrupting disease for any organisation.  There is a further mystery to be explained from more recent years.  When the scandal began to be revealed in 2012/13 and known at the highest levels of the leadership, why did nothing decisive happen?  More recently, following the Channel 4 programme in 2017, why has no one put pressure on the Trustees of the Iwerne Camps to open their files and tell us what they knew.  The Church of England has suffered and is suffering as the result of this scandal and the coverups which continue to this day.  Unless much more light is shed on what happened before, during and after this scandal, there is going to be a continuing smell of rottenness within the institution which will never be cleansed.  Your review is important.  But there are so many people that need to be spoken to if truth is to be revealed and a disinfecting light shed to reveal the complete story.

We are now into the third month of the review and I hope that your efforts to achieve clarity about what happened are proving successful.  Many of us who have been watching this story unfold are incredulous over the constant claims of forgetfulness/ignorance that seem to appear.  Even though I have absolutely no information beyond what is published on the Net, I believe that my perspective on the complete picture is of some value.  You are very welcome to contact me if I can be of further help in your work of review.

Stephen Parsons

Some fifty years ago I spent ten months in Greece, on a scholarship, trying to discover as much as I could about the Orthodox Church in that country.  The particular area of Greece to which I still return on a fairly regular basis is Western Crete.  This was the scene of some memorable adventures for me.  I have just returned from a week in Crete and this has reconnected me with experiences of long ago.

One of the features of travelling in a foreign country, especially on your own, is that you are able to listen to the stories of human life that people tell you within the limitations of language.  One of the main realities of life in Greece in the 60s was of course the then extreme right-wing government.  This impacted me personally, but particularly it affected the people I was meeting. Behind the rule of the Colonels were further realities which were still casting a strong shadow over Greek society as a whole.  These realities were the horror of the Civil War and the German occupation during the Second World War.  To think of these events of history in the same way as we describe abusive episodes is not unrealistic.  Too many people had been afflicted by the combination of violence, sudden death and extreme hunger.  These were of a magnitude that created an enormous continuing psychic wound on the whole of society.  The whole of Greek society, in some way, had been caught up in the traumas of the 1940s and it showed.  The past was being experienced and suffered in the present just as abuse survivors go on suffering for decades after the original events

I was reminded of the way that history plays out in the present by meeting a very elderly Greek man on my recent trip.  He was born in the thirties so he was a child survivor of war, famine and devastating poverty.  Because of these experiences he had grown up unable to read or write.  I was not able to question him even if I had had the linguistic skills.  He came over as taciturn, living inside himself and able to show little active emotion, even in the presence of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  The abuses of the terrible historical events of his early life had marked him irrevocably.  This chance encounter caused me to ponder further how the past marks the present and future.  We can never be allowed to declare on behalf of someone else that the past is done and the only task is to look forward to the future.  No, my recent trip to Crete told me once again that the past is real and it must be heard before anyone can expect to move on.

One of the legacies of abuse in the past, whether individual or corporate, is anger.  If someone has exploited you, used power over you, you are likely to be angry.   Anger is an inevitable outcome of power abuse and we can see its working out in an individual context as well the context of society.  The politics of Greece (and elsewhere) are especially marked by the strong passions of anger.  People vote for political parties often because of feelings.  The strongest feelings are being held by those who believed they are the victims of injustice.  We find the same passion of anger among abuse survivors.  We should not be surprised at this.  They have individually lived through their own Second War and Civil War; they have suffered starvation metaphorically speaking.  Certainly, their education prospects have been damaged and their prospects for the future have been severely compromised.  Why then are we ever surprised to find this anger?  We are hardly in a position to criticise it when so much has been lost by abuse?

The old man sitting silently alone at a family party was a symbol of what it means to have suffered the devastations of war.  The survivor of spiritual or sexual abuse is also the survivor of the destructiveness of past events.  The past has created a partial waste-land in their lives.  The rest of us can do our very best to understand what effect the abuse has had on them.

Recently in my attempts to understand and practise the techniques of Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) I have been brought face to face with new insights in the way past events damage us in the present.  These damaging events may or may not have to do with deliberate evil-doing on the part of abusers.   The past sufferings of individuals, from whatever cause, in the family are carried through into the present with sometimes devastating results.  Sometimes it is war-experiences, sometimes it is family bereavement that causes an individual to become destructive in their pattern of relationships.  This is not meant to excuse bad behaviour but a suggestion that we all need to be more sensitive to the existence of intergenerational trauma.  Grandfather went to war and never spoke about it.  This caused a shutting down of spontaneity in relationships within the family.  This in turn caused some members of the family to become emotionally blunted and prone to violence.  The old bible quote about the sins of the fathers might well be changed to the traumas of the fathers (and mothers) were visited on their children.

As a supporter of survivors of abuse within the church, I long to see that the powers that be really understand what are the implications of what has happened to these individuals.  When a bishop or archdeacon is reported to have been brusque and dismissive with a survivor, I ask myself what might be happening.  One possibility is that the bishop himself is a survivor of past abuse and so resents being faced with an aspect of their life that they would rather not be reminded of.  They may have gained their eminent post because they learned the techniques of repressing the past.  Superficially they are successful in this but the pain of their own past still rumbles on below the surface threatening to erupt.

The healing of our traumas, whether great or small, is perhaps one of the most urgent of our needs.  When Jesus invited people to him, he spoke these words.  ‘Come unto me all ye that are heavy laden and I will give you rest.’  This suggests to me that Jesus saw the trauma, the burdens that people carry in their emotional lives as much he saw the physical illnesses they suffered.  May our churches become places for the healing of trauma, stress and past events caused by abuse.

About this time every year I receive reminders that I have only until the end of October to submit a proposal for the 2020 Annual Conference of ICSA.  ICSA, the International Cultic Studies Association, has graciously accepted papers on a variety of topics that touch on my interests and which relate to their concerns for the study of cultic groups.  I am always pleased to mix with academics who take the issue of cults seriously.  Here I do not propose to venture into defining what I mean by ‘cults’.  I will content myself for the purpose of this blog with a short description – harmful groups normally organised by a narcissistic leader.

Having spoken at the ICSA conferences about ostracism and various aspects of narcissism that seem to be rampant in the cultic/Christian world, I thought this year I would venture back into an old area of my interests.  This is one that seems to be constantly neglected by Christians and cult specialists alike.  The area of study is known broadly as ‘crowd psychology’.  In the 1840s an English author called Charles Mackay wrote an influential book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.  I used to have a copy of this important work where he makes the claim that people on their own are normally rational.  When, however, they gather in large groups their reasoning powers often go into severe decline.  Mackay mentions tulip mania in 17^th century Holland and various political movements, including the French Revolution, involving large groups of people.  The book can be summarised by the idea that crowds are, if not actually mad, severely rationally compromised.

It would be possible to take Mackay’s ideas alone and see how they chime into modern manifestations of crowd ‘madness’.  I leave the reader to speculate about what issues I might be thinking about.  But things have moved on since Mackay’s day.  It is this tradition of thinking and writing about crowds that excites my interest, not least because it touches the religious sphere.  The late 19^th century produced several seminal works around the idea of ‘contagion’.  If one person has a strong conviction, that same idea can spread quickly among his contemporaries, particularly if backed up with powerful rhetoric.  It is not surprising that two well-known, but contrasting, early twentieth century figures, each incorporated the idea of contagion into their thinking and writing.  One was Freud and the other was Mussolini.  Here my purpose in mentioning these two figures is merely to indicate that there is a lively if largely neglected literature from that period related to the behaviour of crowds.

The paper that I intend to offer will spend only a modest amount of attention on these early pioneers.  There is however quite a bit of material emerging much later from Britain about the functioning of groups.  A writer and psychiatrist Wilfred Bion made some important discoveries in the war years when working with traumatised groups of soldiers.  These therapy groups were his original ‘guinea pigs’.  Bion noticed that when groups were left to operate in an unstructured way, various processes emerged in a way that seemed almost inevitable.  The groups started to operate with what he called ‘basic assumptions’.  Without going into all the detail, I can mention the way that the situation of having no leader created anxiety and stress for the group participants.  Rather like the Israelites imploring God to give them a king, the group would ‘crown’ one of its members to fulfil the leader function.  If one member did fulfil the role of leader, the rest of the group gave themselves permission to lapse into a dependent passive silence. 

There were of course other basic assumptions in Bion’s system. One is called ‘flight-fight’ and the other called ‘pairing’.  The first of these involves the eruption of hostility and vindictiveness among members of the group which may be directed at a perceived leader or outside ‘enemy’.  The ‘pairing’ assumption is somewhat curious.  It involves the group fantasising that two of their number are going to become involved sexually and between them produce offspring to carry on the work of the group in the future.  Bion claimed that it was important to make these observations because the emerging of basic assumptions in a group will always interrupt and undermine the possibility of doing proper constructive work.  The group, in other words, had a proper function which was being destroyed when these assumptions came into play.

I recall Bion’s ideas, not because I support them or even claim to really understand them, but because they continue an important thread from Mackay’s tradition about the behaviour of crowds.  The overall idea can be simply stated thus.  Being with people, in groups or crowds, makes significant changes to the way we think and reason.  Other people, willingly or not, change us and the way our mental life functions.  The truth of this idea has been demonstrated over and over again in the political life of our societies.  Sometimes entire nations fall captive to the rhetoric of leaders and in this way every individual becomes the outworking of a group mind.  Obviously, it is not difficult to see also this process being worked out in some religious settings.  Getting people to ‘think and feel alike’ is not in itself wrong.  It just becomes wrong when no one questions the process through which it is happening.  My paper for next year’s Conference run by ICSA is hoping to look over just some of these ideas and suggest that they are of considerable importance for cultic (and political) studies.  The problem is that few people in Britain are apparently now interested in the notions of crowd psychology.  Back in the 1960s large conferences were held in Leicester to explore crowd dynamics with leaders of industry.  On the church side the late Wesley Carr took a lively interest and was part of the organising committee.  Those conferences were massively expensive to organise and now there is no academic centre that can sponsor them.

My task between now and the end of the month is to put these ideas into a proposal of 300 words.  After that, I will have the task of reviewing, from the small crowd psychology section among my books, the ideas that should be better understood by those who claim to be experts in cults and the religious movements that focus on large group power.  Perhaps all I will be able to do is to say simply one thing.  The energy of cultic movements and charismatic religion seems to root itself in the powerful dynamics of crowd behaviour.  There is a literature on this going back almost two hundred years.  Let us be aware of it and be prepared to evaluate it afresh.  Our future political life on both sides of the Atlantic as well as our religious bodies depend on our institutions looking at this material with clear eyes.

It is the powerful who get to frame the liturgy, especially in an established Church like ours. Our liturgy of course has its roots in the Roman Catholic Church, but from the time of Constantine the Catholic Church too was very close to the centres of power and influenced by them. Put simply, there are two reasons why the ruling classes would want the Church to focus on the sins of worshippers and their need for forgiveness, rather than Christ’s subversive claims to free the oppressed and bless the poor. 

The first, and perhaps most obvious, is that they don’t want their hold on power threatened. It suits them that the common people should know their place and be without a sense of their own dignity. Much better to keep them preoccupied with their own sins and failings, their own need to be forgiven, than to remind them that in God’s Kingdom the last shall be first and the first shall be last. If, in addition, access to the grace of God is via a priest, rather than directly, that is a powerful tool for keeping people in their place.
The less obvious reason for an overemphasis on sin and forgiveness is a lack of imagination on the part of those who frame the liturgy. Those who are in positions of power in the Church – in Britain, traditionally, educated and affluent white men – have generally had little experience of oppression or powerlessness. It is easy to see, therefore, why their theology should emphasise personal responsibility. That is a healthy corrective for the powerful, who can maintain the illusion that they are always able to exercise choice. For many people the experience of being powerless and having limited choices is more real; but if all your associates are of the dominant class you may not realise that. Why would you frame your church services to address needs you aren’t aware of, or which make little impact on you and people you know?

Even the patterns for intercessions in Common Worship are more concerned with the powerful – rulers, royals, governors, bishops – than they are with the everyday concerns of the people in the pews. Your best chance of having your situation alluded to in most church services is to be sick or dead – experiences shared even by the ruling classes.
We badly need a change in our theology, so that it conforms more nearly with the mission of Jesus as reflected in the Gospels. When our theology is reformed, our liturgy will bring healing rather than death to the spirits of the abused. That will take a very long time and much hard work; in the meantime, we inflict further damage on those who have already suffered too much. What can we do?

Common Worship was conceived as a set of resources, and a framework within which to use liturgical material. Bishops seem to have rowed back somewhat on the freedom it offered; we need to reclaim it. Sometimes quite small changes can make a difference. My former colleague Stephen Callis once introduced the confession by saying, ‘’In a time of silence, let us thank God for all the things we have got right this week.’ How liberating that was! Yes, we do often get things right, and we should be thankful for that.

When I was vicar of a very troubled estate, I realised how badly people needed to begin worship on a positive note. I therefore wrote a set of opening responses which began:
The night is ended The week is over And God is still with us God loves us for ever.
There is an abundance of positive and affirming material we can draw on. There is enormous liturgical creativity among modern Celtic religious communities. The Iona Community and its Wee Worship Group are the most famous of these, but the Northumbria Community and the Community of Aidan and Hilda have also produced quantities of resources. Social justice, creation and nature, and the events of everyday life are common themes, so these liturgies are often helpful for survivors and other victims. The Iona Community, being earthed in a needy part of Glasgow, really excels at this.
Feminism has also been fruitful, liturgically speaking. Janet Morley and others write within an Anglican framework, so provide material which can easily be slotted into the Eucharist. A number of liturgy collections written by and for women are mindful of the experience of those who are powerless and suffering. Though they are written out of women’s experience, I have found they often resonate with men as well.

The world Church, too, can come to our aid. The USPG (now Us), Christian Aid, and the Mothers Union all publish prayers and liturgies which are gleaned from other countries and give us the benefit of their wisdom and spiritual insight.  It’s also worth getting prayer books from elsewhere in the Anglican Communion, where these are published in English. Usually these Churches don’t have the establishment links of the CofE and therefore approach worship and the Gospel from a different angle. I have found A New Zealand Prayer Book and the Scottish Episcopal Church’s Scottish Liturgy especially refreshing. It would be good if all English churches  occasionally used such liturgies; it reminds us that we are part of a worldwide Communion, and gives other perspectives on Christianity.
In parishes which produce service sheets, it’s quite easy to introduce material from the above and other sources. For the Eucharist, there is considerable freedom during the ante-communion, the intercessions, and closing responses, as long as the basic structure is followed and no heterodox doctrine is introduced. The Liturgy of the Sacrament is less flexible, but the additional material in Common Worship can be mined for the few gems and there are some points of flexibility. I wrote a Prayer of Joyful Access to provide a positive approach to communion; a member of the committee which put together the eucharistic prayers advised me that it’s ‘within the spirit of’ Common Worship and permissible to use:

Jesus, brother, you sat down at table  with women who sold their bodies,  men who sold their souls,  and those whose lives were traded by strangers.  You ate with them, and when you broke the bread  wine and laughter flowed As we feast with you now may your bread strengthen us, your wine warm us, And your love cheer us for the days to come. Amen. (published by the Iona Community in Praying for the Dawn)

But for me, it is this prayer from Jan Berry which perhaps best sums up the ‘good news’ for victims:

Come to this table where the living Christ offers us  bread broken for our journeying and wine poured out for our tears. Share together in this meal where loss finds comfort in promise and despair is transformed into hope. Whoever you are, whatever you bring, hear the risen Christ call your name; and accept God’s invitation to new life.    

This article is an excerpt from the chapter of the same title in Letters to a Broken Church.           

http://anglican.ink/2019/09/19/letter-from-jonathan-fletcher-to-evangelicals-now/ http://anglican.ink/2019/09/23/time-to-come-clean-response-to-jonathan-fletchers-letter/

This blog piece does not begin with some breakthrough news on the Jonathan Fletcher story.  This is a continuation of the narrative that I covered at the end of June and the very beginning of July this year.  Indeed, it is the relative absence of news that is perhaps the chief feature of this blog instalment.  When a story of such considerable importance goes quiet, one finds oneself asking questions.  Over in America, on an Anglican web-site called Anglican Ink, (see above) questions are also being asked. They have recently published two letters connected with the Fletcher affair, links to which can be found above. The first is a letter from Fletcher himself and originally published soon after the main story about him broke at the end of June. This appeared in a magazine called Evangelicals Now. The second letter is an open letter from a group of six individuals and published on the 23rd September by Anglican Ink. Most of the six signatories appear to come from similar evangelical networks as Fletcher himself.  In other words, this September open letter can be read as an evangelical critique of Fletcher’s activities and his theology. The title of this second letter, Time to Come Clean, is the same title as Jonathan Fletcher had given to his July letter.

‘Time to come Clean’, the first letter of this title written by Fletcher, is an extraordinary piece of self-justifying fudge.  The letter makes no attempt to address the questions that many people might reasonably be asking.  Instead of any account of the events that led up to the withdrawal of the Permission to Officiate in the Diocese of Southwark, there is a short reflection on Bible passages, Psalm 38 and a reference to Matthew 18 and 2 Corinthians 2.5-11.  Fletcher claims not to know who he has ‘spiritually harmed’.  In the answering open letter, the six signatories expose the feebleness of Fletcher’s attempt to find excuses for his behaviour.  There is an interesting reflection on how a Christian leader might end up having apparently so little self-insight and functioning conscience.  Here I quote from the second open letter.  ‘It is a common feature of this kind of abuse that the perpetrators have given into temptation incrementally, and have come slowly to justify their behaviour in their own eyes.  The consequence of this is that they find it very hard to repent when confronted.’  Although the letter does not go into detail about the offending behaviour of which Fletcher is accused, it does speak about ‘grooming victims for perverse pleasure’.  In this, Fletcher is linked to his erstwhile Iwerne colleague, John Smyth.

The published letter of response to Jonathan Fletcher is a welcome piece of analysis which is well-worth studying.  Fletcher has for decades been a giant in the UK conservative evangelical world.  He is probably not used to having his biblical exegesis challenged from within the evangelical constituency.  Online research indicates that the three years served at the Round Church in Cambridge (73-76) and the thirty years (79-09) at Emmanuel Wimbledon gave him enormous influence over many within Anglican evangelical circles.   Both the institutions that Fletcher served are at the heart of the Reform/Church Society network that has propped up the Iwerne Camps as well as contributing to the fragmenting of the Anglican Communion through its support of GAFCON.  We also discovered that Fletcher, as a member of the dining club, Nobody’s Friends, was right at the heart of the wider Anglican establishment. 

The second open letter from Anglican Ink states that there are ‘more victims of abuse .. struggling to make sense of their experience.’  Obviously, I am not privy to who these individuals are, but the fact that none have entered the public domain does not mean they do not exist.  Fletcher’s original letter seems to read like a carefully written piece from someone who knows that a negative story is about to break.  There is an apparent attempt to apologise in advance and neutralise pending information, using the rhetoric of Scripture to advance the case.  I leave it to my readers to study the use and counter-use of scripture for themselves   As I pointed out in my article in Letters to a Broken Church, the Bible is frequently used by abusers to further humiliate victims.  As far as I am concerned the use of the Bible here to further Fletcher’s cause and protect the evangelical hierarchy is totally unconvincing.  This is the view, also, of the writers of the open letter of response.

The very existence of the original July letter by Fletcher is suggestive of the fact that he knew that there was an ongoing threat to his reputation and the entire conservative evangelical constituency in Britain.  If Fletcher was a nobody in the church, then his actions and attempts at self-justification would be relatively unimportant.  But two things make Fletcher’s story of far greater importance.  The first is the place that Fletcher has occupied in the Anglican evangelical hierarchy in the UK over many years.  Although never a member of the episcopate, his position of serving in two of the holy shrines in the Reform/Church Society network, (Round Church Cambridge & Emmanuel South Wimbledon) puts him right at the centre of this part of the church.  He is mentioned as mentoring Nicky Gumbel while the the latter was an undergraduate in Cambridge. Justin Welby, who became a Christian in 1975, certainly knew him well at the same time. Fletcher was also well known beyond Christian evangelical circles. The combination of membership of the dining club, Nobody’s Friends together with his family political connections, gave him high social status.  It would be hard to find any prominent evangelical who did not know him in some way, or at least had heard him speak.  He was/is? among the evangelical elite and a prominent leader of that entire branch of the church.  If his actions against young men are shown to be immoral in some way or, worse still, his moral reasoning and conscience are shown to be corrupted, then the contagion of this is going to affect many others. 

The second point, still more serious in its implications for the evangelical world, are the indications of a thirty-year cover-up.  Complaints have been circulating about Fletcher since 2012 but the stories of spiritual abuse go back much further.  Reading between the lines of Andy Lines’ statement which was discussed in a blog here at the end of June, abuse by Fletcher may have been going on over several decades.  If things were going wrong for Andy Lines in the 90s through the mentoring offered by Fletcher, why was there apparently no one to supervise his behaviour?  Was his place among the royalty of the evangelical Reform/Church Society tribe such that he was unchallengeable?  Were those who knew what was going on somehow complicit?  Andy Lines might have hoped to have gathered support after his past suffering.  In practice, his story has disappeared from public view.  After a story of such magnitude, one might have expected to hear some public protestations of support or possibly denunciations of his whistleblowing.   What we in fact have is complete and utter silence.  The evangelical tribe has been paralysed into silence once again.  Such passivity and silence in the presence of evil abuses has been and continues to be corrupting and dangerous to the integrity of the whole church. 

Keith Makin’s report on John Smyth which we hope to be reading next Easter will be probing into another massive 40-year conspiracy of silence.  Contemporary documents published online mean that we are now far more aware of the details of John Smyth’s abuses here and abroad.  The weapons of loyalty to the tribe and mafia-type silence nevertheless protected him for well over three decades.  As a result, there was no repentance, no justice and no reconciliation.  If the same dynamics of cover-up are still in operation, the ones that hid other past crimes (eg Fletcher’s) in the church, the future possibility of integrity in the church looks bleak.  We know that a number of present leaders of our church knew Fletcher, were under his influence and even followed him as their guru.  Will they tell us what they knew, or is the cancer of Fletcher’s apparent toxic influence going to fester within the Church for ever?  Without transparency, without confession and truth-telling, there can be no realistic hope for a healthy church in the future.  An example of promoting the culture of open honesty has to start at the top so that true metanoia for these massive institutional failures can be acknowledged by every part of the body.

What has the gospel got to offer victims of abuse? What is ‘good news’ for those whose most urgent problem is not their own sin, but the damage done by someone else’s sin against them? 

A survivor attending a Common Worship Holy Communion service (and many parishes offer nothing else) might well conclude that Christianity cannot help them. The focus is entirely on sin and forgiveness, and the work of Jesus presented almost solely as saving us from our sins. The theme runs through the service from the penitential material at the beginning to the prayers before the distribution of the consecrated elements, and is sometimes repeated in the post-communion collect.

Undoubtedly salvation from sin is a key theme both in the Bible and in Christianity generally. I would argue, however, that to narrow the gospel down just to forgiveness from sin as the Church is currently doing, is to seriously distort it.  I’ll illustrate this by looking at two examples from Common Worship.

The first is the introduction to the confession in Holy Communion Order One: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son Jesus Christ to save us from our sins, to be our advocate in heaven, and to bring us to eternal life.

Contrast it with John 3:16, which it quotes: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

Verse 17 continues: Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

The original in John offers relief from the fear of death, with the implication of a new quality of life now, and freedom from condemnation ‘to those who believe’. The invitation to confession more specifically names Jesus’ mission as ‘to save us from our sins’, with ‘to bring us to eternal life’ second, and as a delayed prospect. It also introduces the idea of Jesus as our ‘advocate’ – lawyer – in heaven. The whole mood of the passage has changed from freedom and relief, provided for us by God’s overwhelming love, to apprehension of appearing in the dock in a cosmic courtroom with God as Judge – a daunting prospect, even with Christ as our barrister.

Moreover, rather than approaching our advocate directly, we are supposed to rely on an intermediary – the priest – to dispense absolution. The idea of an intermediary other than Christ is foreign to this passage from John, and scarcely present in the New Testament.

Our second example is the options given for prayer before the distribution of Holy Communion. Both distort the lesson to be gained from the tale of the Syrophoenician widow in Mt. 15 and Mk 7. The point of the story is that God’s grace is so abundant that it’s available to all – ‘even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table’. Even Syrophoenician women are ‘worthy’ to eat the crumbs – how much more so the children of the household! And yet, after confession, absolution, sermon, declaring our faith, exchanging the Peace and all – we are supposed to say we are less worthy than dogs. This is hardly Good News, especially for those downtrodden and lacking confidence.

The virtues of Common Worship are that there is supplementary material, and that it allows freedom to borrow from external liturgical sources, especially during the ante-communion.  Few clergy make the most of this freedom, however. The core of the liturgy used in most parishes shows a very limited understanding of the mission of Jesus.  Understandably, then, even regular worshippers can assume that Jesus was born and died solely so that our sins can be forgiven.

Contrast this assumption with Jesus’ own declaration of his mission: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,   because he has anointed me  to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” Luke 4:18-19

There is nothing in this passage about sin. Jesus speaks here of being sent to the poor, the prisoners, the blind, and the oppressed; and he speaks not of forgiving them but of healing them and setting them free.

Likewise, the Sermon on the Mount, the core of Jesus’ teaching, begins with words of blessing for the poor (Luke) or poor in spirit (Matthew); the meek; the persecuted; mourners; and the hungry (Luke; Matthew has ‘those who hunger and thirst for righteousness’).  It is clear that Jesus is concerned for those who suffer, whether physically or emotionally, and meeting their needs.

Jesus challenged some people regarding their sin, especially religious leaders. However, he healed and delivered many to whom he does not seem to have mentioned sin. He resisted the others’ attempts to reduce everything to a question of sin and guilt, and frequently criticised religious leaders for laying heavy burdens on ‘ordinary’ people and the poor.

The concept of salvation itself has been narrowed to a focus on the forgiveness of sin. The principal Hebrew term for salvation, (yesa’) means ‘to make room for’ or ‘to bring into a spacious environment’. It connotes freedom from things which restrict or limit. It is the word from which the name ‘Jesus’ is derived.The Greek term sozein originally meant ‘to deliver from danger’ or ‘to make safe’. In both Hebrew and Greek the word used for ‘salvation’ meant safety, deliverance from danger, and freedom from restriction. 

Sin is one of the things which threatens and restricts us, and saving us from sin was certainly part of Jesus’ purpose. But other things also threaten and restrict us, and particularly the survivor of sexual abuse:  fear, shame, despair, self-loathing, poor decision-making. Children and young people who are abused are not given the right conditions for growth, and their development into psychologically healthy adults is restricted. A true sense of self must be given space to develop. For them maturing into Christ will mean not sacrificing self, as much traditional teaching demands, but learning who they are and what they want. Psychological limitations such as the inability to set boundaries, trust one’s own perceptions, or seek to have one’s needs met are properly a part of the work of salvation. As Kathleen Fischer commented, ‘the movement of God in our lives emerges as we come to know our deepest selves’ (Women at the Well:  Feminist Perspectives on Spiritual Direction, p. 114)

We seldom see this wider picture of salvation reflected in our liturgy, which is the ‘shop window’ of our Church and both reflects and moulds our theology and spirituality.  The seasonal material, including collects and Bible readings, does draw on themes such as events in the life of Jesus and the doctrine of the Trinity, but these are still set within a framework which is almost exclusively about the sins and need for forgiveness of the worshipper. 

Imagine the effect of this skewed emphasis on those who come to church hurting physically and emotionally, frightened, with no sense of self respect, and never having had a chance to discover who they really are. They are faced almost immediately with a prayer saying God knows all our secrets, and are then required to search their own hearts and minds for the things they have done wrong. For an individual in such a condition the confession can be a further abasement. Imagine if, instead, they were greeted with:  ‘Jesus said, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor…to let the oppressed go free…’, and the rest of the liturgy took its theme from that. It would be liberating not only for sexual abuse survivors, but for many others:  the poor, the depressed, the sick, and those struggling with all kinds of problems. 

This article is an excerpt from the chapter of the same title in Letters to a Broken Church.