The question of who is and who is not a member of the Church of England/Anglican has always been difficult to determine.  Church law has encouraged a fairly lax understanding of membership.  Anyone who resides in a parish in England has an entitlement to vote for the churchwardens of their local parish church.  Common-sense tells us that this ability in law to vote for the churchwardens at the Annual Parish meeting does not make someone a member of the Church of England.  Nevertheless, the Church, being established by law, has always been hesitant to declare anyone who breathes as totally beyond its boundaries.  Even those who do nothing and are not baptised seem to have certain rights and privileges within the body.

What is, in effect, a completely passive membership of the Church of England has for centuries been the norm for a large segment of the population.  The only way that has been open to individuals to opt out of this membership was to declare openly that they belong to a dissenting group and then pointedly avoid attending the parish church.  To be such an open ‘dissenter’ used to incur civil penalties, like exclusion from university.  No doubt the authorities had other ways of discriminating against these non-conforming families.  I am not enough of a historian to be able to list these penalties or know how they worked in practice.  But, everyone else in society was deemed to be a ‘conformer’ and automatically Church of England.  Regardless of how often or whether people attended church, everyone could enjoy a number of privileges, including the right to be married in church and be buried in the local churchyard.  Actual attendance at church could be erratic, occasional or non-existent.  Who knows how many fell below the Prayer Book minimum attendance rules of Easter communion and two other occasions?

The issue of who is and who is not an Anglican has become an topic of discussion recently with the case of John Smyth.  Smyth, the notorious abuser and for a long time chair of the Iwerne trustees, spent the end of his life as a member of non-Anglican churches in South Africa.  On the basis of this period of non-Anglican participation, the Archbishop of Canterbury has placed the ‘not-Anglican’ label on Smyth, apparently for the whole of his life.  It is hard to make this claim when during his time living in Winchester, Smyth was a Reader at Christ Church Winchester.  It seems fairly clear that, assuming this claim is correct, he would have had at some point to provide evidence of his Church of England baptism and confirmation before being admitted to Reader status.  What happened after he left the UK in disgrace does not change his Church of England membership while he lived in this country, committing his crimes.  I am reminded of the career of Michael Harper who resigned as a curate of All Soul’s Langham Place to promote the charismatic movement in the 60s.  After retirement he then became a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church.  Does the fact that Michael made such a radical switch from conservative Protestantism to Orthodoxy in any way invalidate his time at All Souls and his ministry there?  No one would claim that he was Orthodox all the way through and that his evangelical Anglican past was in some way rendered invalid by a later change of allegiance.  The evident Anglicanism of John Smyth is in no way changed by what he did at the end of his life.  We suspect that, in any case, a change in denominational allegiance for Smyth would have been prompted by a desire to opt out of Anglican networks.  It would have been easier for him to be spotted as an Anglican and thus prevented from exercising any kind of ministry.

The non-Anglican label has also been applied to the organisations that Smyth was associated with in England.  The Iwerne Trust (now known as Titus Trustees) which runs the Christian summer camps from which all of Smyth’s victims came, was at the heart of a large informal network of well-connected and often wealthy Anglican Christians, most of whom live in the south of England.  The same network exists today with a close association with the REFORM network.  REFORM exists as pressure group within the Church of England, promoting a number of conservative Christian causes.  It is active on General Synod promoting the anti-LGTB cause and supporting clergy and parishes that follow its conservative line.

The argument of the Archbishop and his advisers is to claim that the Church of England has no responsibility for Smyth and his victims because the Iwerne trustees were independent of the Church of England and not under its control.  This is a patently absurd argument.  Is the same argument to be applied to all the other independent organisations that work in and around the Church, including REFORM?  The Iwerne trustees and the Titus group that followed it are stuffed full of ordained clergy who all hold licenses or PTOs from their bishops.  A license to officiate involves an oath of obedience to the bishop ‘in all things lawful’.  Does not the obedience promised ensure that every activity undertaken by an ordained priest is potentially subject to the scrutiny of a bishop?  Just because the Titus Trust is not a legal entity controlled by the central Church does not stop individual ordained trustees being subject to episcopal authority.  It is time for the Archbishop of Canterbury and his advisers to stop hiding behind the ‘not-Anglican’ argument and ask the ordained trustees who hid Smyth’s crimes for over thirty years to give an account of themselves.  The Archbishop and the members of the House of Bishops do have real power in this situation.  They can order an inquiry and require any clergy trustees with information about Smyth’s crimes to disclose them.  The sanction of removing permissions to officiate or licences is available to enforce non-compliance.  Those of us who have looked at Smyth’s crimes have been sickened at the detail.  The accusation that there are clergy who in different ways are hiding these crimes by not sharing information is one that needs to be answered.

The reluctance of the Church of England at the highest level to take an active role in seeking resolution to the criminal activities of John Smyth is a running sore that will not go away.  The motivations of the well-connected church people who provided the large sums of money necessary to spirit Smyth out of Britain to Africa also need to be explained.  If the Church will not do it itself, then a ‘Smyth Inquiry’ should be handed over to an independent group.  Once again, we have to point out that deflection and avoidance never serve the Church well.  At the time when the public of Britain are beginning to conclude that the vested interests of church bodies take precedence to openness and integrity, we need bold actions by senior church figures.  In this area courage is required.  Such courage can be seen to be the mark of true leadership.

A document which I hope will always be referred to as the Blackburn Letter appeared yesterday June 17^th 2019.  It is written by the senior staff of the Blackburn Diocese and is addressed to their licensed staff, clergy and Readers, and safeguarding officers.  In essence, it is commending study of the recent IICSA report on the Diocese of Chichester and the Peter Ball case.  Those of us who have been cheering on the case of safeguarding for some time cannot but feel that this is progress.  The Letter may claim historic importance because it shows that in one diocese of the Church of England a group of senior church people really seem to understand all the dimensions of safeguarding in the Church.  They understand it in a way that goes far beyond the box-ticking reputational management process which is what safeguarding comes to be in many places.

Why am I personally moved by this letter?  For a start, the Blackburn senior staff want those who study the IICSA report to notice before anything else the suffering that has been caused by sexual abuse to real victims.  Many people, including myself, have always pleaded that safeguarding should start at this end – the needs of survivors.  Sexual abuse, however many years ago it took place is a ‘human catastrophe’ for those caught up in it as victims as well as causing ‘lifelong impact’.  How right that the Blackburn Letter begins with words from Psalm 51.  ‘Have mercy on us O God, for we have sinned’.  The letter makes no apology for putting the human suffering endured by survivors right at the beginning.  The traditional preoccupation of the Church, reputation management, only gets a mention in para 5.  It is mentioned, but only as a way of explaining that it has been a factor in not dealing well with allegations from the past.   When protecting the good name of the institution has taken precedence, the suffering of survivors has been made far worse. 

Moving on from what appear to be genuine expressions of sorrow and contrition on behalf of the whole Church, the letter begins to explore what can be done in the future.  The congregations are to be places where ‘children and vulnerable adults can be entirely safe’ but also where ‘the voices of those who have difficult things to say or disclosures to make are heard and acted on.’  The second part of this wish is far harder to deliver.  Many survivors report that the reason the Church has found it so hard to deal with their needs is because the recounting of their past experience of suffering causes so much discomfort in the hearer.  None of us find it easy to listen to stories of abuse, particularly when the abuser was a trusted figure, like a priest or a bishop.  Taking on board the idea that a member of the home team is an abuser is deeply unsettling.  It is far easier to shut down the discordant thought and that is what many people will do in practice.

A further insight in the letter, which is music to my ears, is the recognition that clericalism, deference and abuse of power lie behind the ‘cover-up’ and the silencing of the ‘voices of the vulnerable’.  Clergy and other leaders have power within the relationships they possess and there needs to be ‘deeper awareness’ of that power.  This theme of ministerial power and its potential for harm is the topic that I have chosen to reflect on in the forthcoming volume of essays Letters to a Broken Church. There is so much more to be said on this topic.

I want to make two further observations about the letter.  One is that the letter appears to have been written at a visceral level.  In short, the emotions of sorrow and repentance are allowed to rise to the surface and be dominant themes in what is communicated.  Somehow the letter, assisted by a quotation from Andrew Graystone’s essay of a week ago, manages to avoid completely the somewhat petulant tone of so many expressions of ‘regret’ and ‘apology’ that we associate with official statements.  Are we correct in seeing in this letter the beginning of something new, a combination of deep sorrow and genuine feeling for the needs of survivors and those wronged by the Church?    Such sentiments, if they are followed through, will begin to meet the needs of survivors.  It may be the beginning of the ‘change of culture’ that has been looked for by so many.  It is also the first sign that some senior clergy individually and corporately are beginning to ‘get it’.

My final observation is a somewhat irreverent one but it needs to be made.  Is it a coincidence that this remarkable statement of unanimity and contrition about safeguarding emerges from a diocese that is far away from London?  The Diocese of Blackburn may be articulating a somewhat prophetic position precisely because it feels itself geographically and in other ways remote from the centres of Anglican influence represented by Church House and Lambeth Palace respectively.  The prospect of an entire diocese studying the articulate comments and criticisms of the Independent Inquiry must be causing considerable discomfort among those who try hard to control the narrative and set the agenda for the Church of England.  The forthcoming debates at York General Synod may or may not get to the heart of the issue as the Blackburn Letter seems to have done.  Whatever is said at York, the effect of the process of study in the Blackburn diocese will have implications which will reverberate long into the future.  It will be increasingly hard to claim that no one understands the issues.  The consequences of this serious reflective study on safeguarding and the needs of survivors will be hard to limit only to one circumscribed geographical area represented by the Diocese of Blackburn.

Right at the heart of this blog’s concern and many other places is the desire that the suffering of abuse survivors should be understood, responded to and healed.  Up till now the Church has often insisted of responding through damage limitation and avoidance.  The Blackburn response is suggesting that these methods are no longer viable.  Perhaps the Blackburn Letter is the beginning of a new phase in the history of the Church of England.  One day it may be said that that on the 17^th June 2019 the Church of England, represented by the Diocese of Blackburn, began to move from denial and avoidance of the issue of abuse victims to a stance resembling healing, humility and new beginnings.

There is one group in society whose job it is to know how to use language with a precision and care for detail that few of the rest of us can match.  This group is the legal profession.  Every word and phrase produced professionally for a legal document or a court presentation has to matter.  There is no room for any vagueness of expression.  This is part of the training that lawyers receive.  Everyday conversations that ordinary people like us hold may make use of all kinds of language tropes, figures of speech, metaphor and irony.  Legal terminology will always shun these, preferring definitions to a more open-ended language.  This is probably why legal language and theology do not make a particularly good mix.  Church people are typically steeped in biblical imagery and theological propositions which do not achieve the level of precision that lawyers need.  Also, when it comes to the law itself, Church people are not very comfortable at having to obey rules that may appear to restrict their activities.  Why does law ever need to be applied to church life? 

.Few people are aware of the amount of Church law that has been compiled over the centuries to deal with the complicated status of the Church of England within British society.  But that theme is not one I want to touch on today. There is however one area of church religious practice which has to take the law seriously.  Because the sexual abuse of minors has been a crime for at least 150 years, the law of the land and the courts are necessarily involved when reports of such offences within the Church are revealed.  If the police decide to prosecute then court proceedings take place.  These ensure the gathering of evidence from victims, while listening to the defence of the alleged perpetrators so that due legal process is followed.  Alongside secular law, there may be also Church legal processes to be followed.  These operate according to somewhat different rules so that criminal investigations and church tribunals have to be held in different times and places, each following their own internal rules.   One particular discussion that is now exercising lawyers, politicians and senior church leaders is whether or not churches (and other similar organisations) should be ‘required’ by the law of the land to report all cases of sexual abuse against the young or whether this is just a recommended practice.  No such requirement exists at present to make it compulsory or mandatory for church leaders and personnel to report sexual abuse crimes. The argument about whether the law should be changed effectively hangs on these two words – ‘must’ and ‘should’.  Many people both in and outside the church are pressing for compulsory reporting of offences to a body outside the church.   Others want to give the final decision as to whether to report abuse to the church authorities.  At present, information on abuse cases is normally but not routinely handed on to the authorities.  Many lay people might think the debate between ‘must’ and ‘should’ is fairly arcane but it can be shown that there is actually a great deal at stake.   The vital issue here being addressed is this.  Are children better protected when church employees are legally required to report cases of actual and suspected abuse or can the Church manage this area of its life better without outside help?

Legal compulsion to act in a particular way may seem unduly harsh on an organisation that is largely staffed by volunteers.  The real argument for discretionary as opposed to compulsory reporting is, I believe, pressed by those who fear the loss of power and control within the organisation.  At present, bishops in the Church of England employ and oversee the work of Diocesan Safeguarding Advisers (DSAs).  By all accounts the effectiveness of these DSAs varies across the country.  One suspects that some of the differences can be accounted for in part, not only by their professional competence, but by the degree of interference by bishops.  Bishop A might well want to be open about cases of past abuse in his diocese, while Bishop B, with a deeply protective instinct for the reputation of his/her diocese, might want to keep all safeguarding information completely under his/her control.  A law requiring DSAs to report every case of abuse to an outside authority would remove at a stroke the variability of actual practice over the delivery of abuse protection.  That must surely be progress.

The Church has not been very good at speaking clearly on the topic of mandatory reporting (MR).  As things stand at present there is no MR in cases of child abuse.  Those who do report, as victims or witnesses, are often treated like whistleblowers in the NHS – in other words badly.  So many cases of appalling neglect in the NHS have only been revealed by the bravery of individuals who stood out against the system on behalf of patients.  Whistleblowers are only so described in a system when reporting is not obligatory but a matter of conscience.  When it is made compulsory to report, it no longer takes courage to do so.  What had been an individual act of bravery now becomes a routine duty required by law. The entire culture changes when MR becomes the new accepted norm; now the expectation is that abuse will be routinely exposed when it occurs.  The institutional culture is no longer creates principled heroes but a healthy environment where good practice is always expected by everyone within the organisation.  To take one example of a new culture created by a change in the law, we no longer chafe at having to wear seat belts for journeys by car.  It has become a routine action which no one comments on anymore.

Back in March an interview was given by Meg Munn, the new director of the National Safeguarding Panel on the Sunday Programme.  She began the interview by appearing to claim that mandatory reporting was already in place in the Church of England.  The interviewer, Edward Stourton, and the informed listener knew that this is not actually true.  Was this inaccuracy the result of sloppy thinking or was it a deliberate attempt to confuse the listener?  Later on in the interview, when pressed, Meg seemed to concede that reporting was still discretionary and that there was not yet any provision in law to require that all cases of abuse be reported to a local authority adviser.  The confusions shown in the interview rings alarm bells for some listeners, whether those in the Church or among the wider public.  For many people the difference between ‘should’ and ‘must’ might seem tiny.  In practice, as we have shown, there are huge differences of culture involved.  Far too many cases of abuse have been exacerbated by the attempt by bishops and others who want to protect the Church from independent scrutiny and ignore survivors and their stories.  The eventual resolution of this debate when we hope new law will be created, is something that does matter a great deal.  If safeguarding professionals and those who oversee them can take the view that they are entitled, when they see fit, to bury information or suspicions of abuse, that is often precisely what they will do.  When such action or inaction becomes answerable potentially in a court of law, this should change things for the better so that survivors and victims may benefit.

The organisation Mandate Now, which campaigns for MR, has made accessible some research from Australia where MR has been compulsory in many states for a number of years.  This research shows that many of the fears articulated in this country against MR are unfounded.  There is no incidence of accidental prosecution because of making a misjudgement about a case of abuse.  After a rise of reporting when such schemes come into force, there is then a levelling off and in fact cases go down as the seriousness of the offences permeates through the entire institution.  It is my perception that the only plausible reason for arguing against MR is an attempt by the Church to avoid surrendering institutional power.  The Church of England, as revealed by the IICSA hearings, has shown itself unworthy to be trusted in this area.  The credibility that it may have possessed until 10 years ago has been damaged, possibly beyond repair.  If it is ever to recover that credibility it must eat the humble pie of allowing its safeguarding practice to be scrutinised and scrutinised thoroughly by an independent body for an indefinite period.  The level of trust it has with the survivors I know is close to zero.  It will take a full generation of ‘acting justly and walking wisely before your God’ before this trust can be restored.

I am still a supporter of OXFAM – just.  The recent stories of scandal and mismanagement might have persuaded me to withdraw my modest contribution to their funds but I am still hanging on.  What has happened is that I have made a personal reappraisal of why I give at all to relief organisations in the first place. 

Thirty years ago, I heard about a school contemporary who went to Ethiopia to help with the humanitarian disaster in that country when millions were caught up in the famine.  His time there scarred him seriously and he returned to Britain a broken man.  The talk then was of a nervous break-down.  Now we might well describe his plight as Post Traumatic Stress.  My link with him was only indirect so I never heard how the story developed.  Even if he made a full recovery from his ordeal, my hearing a bit of his story taught me one thing about myself; helping the starving and the destitute in poor parts of the world was not my personal vocation.  Admitting that to myself allows me to understand how important it is to give so that others, more robust than I, can do this work.  So, it is not just that I, like most people in our society, realise with the mind that the problems of starvation, poverty and refugees are overwhelming in the world today.   People like us need to own this reality personally and try to do something about it.  If we cannot work ourselves to relieve these needs then we need to enable others to do this work.  That requires our money as well as our imaginative concern.  Even if we describe this giving as conscience money for not doing anything practical ourselves, it probably does not matter.  The important thing is that we care and we give.

OXFAM have, this week, been given a dramatic and severe telling off by the Charity Commission.  A story of sexual sleaze in Haiti and later cover-up was discovered with people high-up in the organisation putting reputation above people.  Some words from the report and quoted by the Times in its leader: ‘No charity is more important than the people it serves or the mission it serves.’  This is followed by comments from the Times leader writer.  ‘The Commission concluded that OXFAM’s priority had been to protect its reputation and its relationship with its donors rather than protect those it was supposed to be helping’. 

Am I the only one to note the telling parallel with the Church of England?  Both organisations are being accused of sexual abuse in the past with attempts by current leaders to cover-up in order to protect reputations.  The situation in OXFAM is potentially dire.  Reputational damage could destroy the organisation completely.  If donors and the government withdraw their support, the organisation may go into a spiral of decline.  The more it has to cut back on its work, the more would-be donors may look elsewhere to place their money.  The next few weeks may be crucial in deciding whether OXFAM has a future or not.  In spite of everything OXFAM will, I think, survive.   It has been functioning far longer than most other aid organisations, having been founded during the war to help feed Greek children starving as the result of the German occupation of their country.  By chance in the 1960s I met one of the founders, Dick Milford, and no doubt this personal contact with one of the original OXFAM group has helped to cement my long-term loyalty to the organisation.

The Church of England is of course far bigger than OXFAM, both in terms of its assets and the numbers of people involved in its work.  But like OXFAM, it faces an issue of trust with its supporting base.  The Charity Commission was not talking about the Church when it spoke about a charitable institution making it’s ‘priority … to protect its reputation… rather than protect those it was supposed to be helping’ but the description fits very well.  OXFAM will recover if it can regain the early vision of its founders, to feed the starving and the destitute in the world as well as providing the tools for self-sufficiency.  The Church of England, insofar as the Commission’s description of OXFAM applies to it as well, has a similar uphill task to restate its vision of itself.  Time and time again the IICSA process has revealed occasions where the Church acted, not for the benefit of those it had hurt, but to protect its reputation.   It is interesting to reflect on the fact that Jesus did not anywhere urge the disciples to become expert on public relations/reputation.  He realised that if they did what was required of them, then that would be a sufficient indication to the world that they were his disciples and thus servants of God himself.  ‘By this shall all know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another.’

The care of the Church for survivors is not just a matter of justice.  It may be a matter, long-term, for the Church’s very survival.  Caring for and helping those who have been damaged is part of the core reason for its existence.  If ever protecting reputation is put above that, it is hard to see anything but shrinkage within the institution alongside a steady decline in its integrity.  A generation of young people are growing up who look at institutions and are quick to spot hypocrisy and loss of nerve.  If a Church talks about justice, reconciliation and care and then fails to deliver on these with a vulnerable group of its own members, the young are going to depart in droves.  OXFAM is facing its own crisis, having been charged with exploiting some of those that it was supposed to be helping.   All the photos of boxes of aid are going to look different when it is realised that the organisation have been employing individuals who appear more interested in having a good time than in serving the poorest on earth.   Now that significant numbers of clergy and bishops have also been revealed to be exploiters of the weak, the Church also has to work hard to show that any impression of widespread corruption is a false one.   To change the impression being given, one that breeds cynicism and distrust, the Church must labour hard to overcome any bad publicity.  The present generation of bishops and leaders must stand up and demonstrate that they care, they serve and they are ready to stamp out the abuses of power that are currently so damaging to the Church and to its reputation with the people of this country.

A couple of weeks ago, I was musing on the topic of what the Church would look like if it could outlaw abuse and heal the legacy of past failures.  Unbeknown to me, Andrew Graystone was thinking along similar lines and he produced a document entitled ‘An entirely different approach’.  What follows here is not so much a commentary on Andrew’s paper as a parallel reflection.  There are however some points that Andrew made which I wish to incorporate into my own reflection.  He spoke about the need for restoration rather than mediation.  Mediation would imply that there are faults on both sides, while the abused person in a church abuse situation is clearly a victim and needs to find healing and reintegration within the body.  The main initiative and effort in the process should come from the side that has committed the offence.  A further point is that the symbols that might be brought forward in the task of restoration and repentance should be new and able to transcend the tired message of the Church that it can carry on with ‘business as usual’.

These two ideas that I have lifted from Andrew’s piece are at the very heart of the Christian proclamation.  The first centres round the idea of healing, restoration and reintegration.  The second idea is that whatever is to be done, needs to bring newness into the situation. 

Of all the passages in the New Testament, the one that I could preach on at the greatest length are the words from Revelation ‘Behold I make all things new’.  These words have always inspired me because newness is a word that sums up into itself hope, change and the endless possibility of fresh beginnings.  It also appeals to my dissatisfaction with words.  Newness implies that there are always fresh ways of getting a handle on an idea.  One can always receive newness as a Christian simply by opening oneself up to what is being offered to us over a lifetime.  When a connoisseur buys a painting for a large sum of money, he does not expect merely to glance at it on the day of purchase and then put it away.  He buys it with the expectation that the beauty that drew him to it on the day of purchase will go on revealing new facets to him.  He never expects to grow tired of it.  What is beautiful is endlessly new.

Christianity is a bit like a valuable painting.  It shares with the painting an inability to be comprehended or explained easily or quickly.  It needs to be gazed at, contemplated and allowed to reveal the constant newness of its inherent beauty.  Beauty, as I have said many times before, points to the fact that reality is an inexhaustible source of truth and goodness.  It is thus a powerful metaphor for the way that when we enter the courts of worship, holiness and stillness we can find ourselves in the very presence of God himself.

Andrew’s plea for a quality of newness to mark the way that apologies are offered to survivors is also a plea for the Church to draw deeply into its reserves of imagination.  Through its traditions, its liturgies and buildings, the Church possesses a multitude of resources through which to articulate and proclaim the drama of restoration that is needed.  Two parties have become estranged by the actions of one side.  The failure of bishops and other clergy to protect the victims of sexual abuse is a deep wound as well as a tragedy.  Even if the current generation of leaders are not directly complicit in the offences, they wear the same robes, they have the same titles as those who are seen to have failed in the tasks of protection of the vulnerable.  Just as children have to carry on their backs, for good and for ill, the notoriety of their parents, so the occupants of the highest offices in the Church have in some way to own and take responsibility for the failures of their predecessors.  The reputations of certain Bishops of Chester and Lewes in the past is not just a concern of historians. If any holders of high office in the Church from the past are shown to be guilty of an offence, it is right for the current holder of that same office to do public penance for those misdeeds.

In 2019 we are living in a situation of massive corporate guilt which is a wound on the whole Church.  A huge effort of reconciliation is the only thing that may help to make things right.  With Andrew I call for something brand-new to be offered to the Church and society.  We need something far better than the tired apologies written by public relations experts and impression managers.  What might be helpful are public rituals at every one of our cathedrals.  There would be acts of penitence, lament and reconciliation between victims and abusers.  Those actually guilty of such abuse are not the only ones to be drawn into such events.  Everyone whose attitude of blindness and avoidance helped to facilitate abuse of the innocent over decades (and that means most of us) needs to be there.   In practice it might be confined to those who hold office in the Church.  They occupy a post and in many places they and their predecessors lamentably failed in the task of caring for the weak. 

There is a further major change that I would like to see happen in the Church as it seeks to put things right with the survivor population.  Given the fact that abuse is most often to be identified with dysfunctions of power within the institution, I would like to see the Church begin to study those sections of scripture which speak of reversing and turning upside down these power structures.  One place that I find the outlines of such a fresh approach powerfully expressed is in the Beatitudes.  As with many of Jesus’ sayings, the emphasis of the passage seems to be about the reversal of our normal ideas of power.  Those in the ‘blessed’ categories are among the weak by the world’s standards; in the light of the Kingdom they are rewarded and honoured.  Along with other preachers, I have many times preached on this power reversal in the Beatitudes, but the idea of honouring the weak seems to make little progress in the wider Church.

Can we imagine a Church where the values of mercy, gentleness, purity and peace-making are dominant?  No, we find it hard because the contrary values of control, power and domination are so strong in the institution we know and try to serve.  From time to time the Church does throw up as leaders individuals who are notably and genuinely without any trace of coercion in their manner.  They welcome us, make us feel safe and we come to trust them fully.  When such people do appear, we often find that they are not honoured by the rest of the Church but perversely are attacked for not being dominant and power-seeking. 

Jesus’ words about power which are scattered throughout the gospels are challenging today as they were to his contemporaries.  His preference for the weak, the outcasts and the poor is not just some kind of proto-socialism.  Somehow, Jesus wanted us to see that no community, no society, can ever be healthy unless it cares for those on the margins.  There are many on the margins today, it has to be acknowledged, in many different categories.  But the group we are concerned with here, the victims of spiritual and sexual abuse have a special claim on our attention.  Their needs need to be met and their wounds bound up.   But above all the Church has to realise that it cannot itself be whole when such people are ignored and pushed to the margins.

Unity is one of those slippery words which sound splendid until you begin analysing them.  On the positive side, unity implies an end to conflict, cooperation and everyone in harmony with everyone else.  It can suggest the victory of love over division and hostility.  But there is also a very real negative side to this innocuous word.  Unity is a word that can indicate the way an individual has become locked into a group-think situation.  Instead of having an independent functioning brain, the individual is forced into thinking in and through another person, perhaps a religious leader.

As I read accounts of Christians who grow up part of fundamentalist groups, one thing constantly amazes me.  A huge swathe of Christians takes on the assumption that their faith, their group and their understanding of the Bible is the only one that will enable them to go to heaven.  If they stray outside the faith of their group, even to another church down the road, they may be endangering their soul, entering a place that potentially leads to hell.  Not every conservative Christian thinks like this, but there are enough of them who do to make this extraordinary corruption of thinking exist right across the world today.  Even those who are part of denominational alliances of churches are encouraged to think that their congregation, their minister, has some special unique handle on the will of God.  Their membership of this congregation puts them in a place of safety, well protected from the heresies and false beliefs of those who belong to other groups.

Why am I so adamant that this way of thinking is wrong?  Common sense suggests that no human being can ever claim infallibility for the words he/she uses or the group to which allegiance is claimed.  Truth is far too elusive to be contained completely in human words and human speech.  My saying this will no doubt be responded to by the cry: ‘we have the Word of God in the Bible’.  The Bible, whatever claims are made for it, still consists of words.  Words need to be defined, interpreted and understood.  To suggest that there is ever a fixed meaning for a particular word which somehow transcends culture is absurd.  Words shift in meaning according to who utters them.  The task of translation and interpretation is always messy, imprecise and approximate.  Whatever rhetoric may be spouted from the pulpit, the declamation ‘the Bible clearly says’ is seldom, if ever, true.  If the Bible is so clear, why, one has to ask, is there so much disagreement among preachers.? When Pastor A takes a particular line on a bible passage which is different from Pastor B, what are we to say?  Do we conclude that one pastor has been given the Holy Spirit denied to his colleague, making him the true interpreter of God’s will?  Or do we take the common-sense point of view which says that the passage is open to more than one interpretation and that both are to a degree correct?  A ‘true’ church has to be for now a myth that will only be revealed to us the other side of the Second Coming.

A failure to explore the provisionality involved in bible interpretation is to betray a congregation.  To allow a group to believe that there is an infallibility in the preacher’s words is on the way to creating infantile dependence.  When a child is very small, it is expedient for him/her to believe that the words of the parent are completely reliable and true.  As the child grows older it is helpful for the child to be introduced to certain aspects of adult life.  For example, the child can be made aware that money does not grow on trees or that there is not an endless supply of food to be gathered from the shop whenever one feels hungry.  Things like choice or having one’s desires frustrated in some way are part of life.  In the same way the congregational member might be expected to learn that quick answers that will give a certain place in heaven are not on offer.  The Christian pilgrimage is about negotiating a way through this life.  It is about struggling to find God and to make sense of many things in the light of the teaching and example of Christ.  The answers are simply not handed to us on a plate.  Easy answers are a bit like ‘get-rich schemes’ where plausible rogues promise to take over all our decisions about money, giving us quick easy answers to investment decisions.  A lot of Christians seem to be sucked into ‘get-rich’ equivalents of faith.  These appeal, because, as I said before, they draw us back into the dependency that we enjoyed as infants.  Someone else is taking care of us and we do not have to do anything for ourselves except consume what is offered.  A relationship like this with a Christian leader is an immature one, both spiritually and emotionally.

Apart from Christians being drawn into immature dependency on a Christian leader, they are also seduced into an unthinking ‘oneness’ with other Christians.  This again feels attractive.  It is likened in their minds to memories of being in a family.  While families bicker and argue, they are still a place of safety which demands loyalty on the part of the members.  The ‘family’ Church has an appeal by evoking the safety of childhood, the comfort of numbers to face the threatening and the unknown.  Looking again at this situation from the outside, we can see once again that it needs to be challenged.  There is nothing wrong in seeking such comfort and safety for the purpose of negotiating particular crises in life.  It is when it becomes a permanent resting place that it become problematic.  The contention of this blog is that many of the stances adopted by conservative Christianity seem to be drawing people back into a place of immaturity.  Growth, whether as Christians or as human beings requires one to pass through thresholds or stages and these frequently involve challenges or pain.  To suggest that there is a ready-made path for the Christian life to follow that allows other people to do the hard tasks of thinking and making decisions, is unrealistic.  It is also harmful since much of the richness of life which we receive from making choices for ourselves has been taken away from us.  We have become husks, complete on the outside but empty on the inside.

Next month I am taking part at the International Cultic Studies Association in Manchester.  I normally report from this conference on the blog.  At this conference I meet a fascinating array of people, many of whom have given a year, even a decade to a destructive religious or political group.  While most of the participants are well on the way to full recovery, there is still a sense of loss for the time and the emotional expenditure that was handed over to the group.  In one way or another life was put on hold for them, maturity was delayed and they were made victims through the narcissistic behaviour of cult or church leader.  Their inner lives were hollowed out because, in the interest of the smooth running of the cult, only one opinion or way of thinking and feeling was tolerated.  That experience of unity was very costly to them personally.  Too many churches behave like cults and that is one of the topics that is debated at the bars and over meals in the conference. 

The sense of unity peddled by cults or abusive religious groups is seductive.  It reconnects people with times in their life when they felt safe and nurtured.  Whether this regression is good place for them to return to, is an open question.  Perhaps the first way of answering this dilemma is to take a complete look at what is going on for the individual.  Is the group they belong to helping truly to negotiate the challenges of maturity, the learning, the questioning and experience of pain?  Or rather is the group regressing the victim for its own possibly nefarious purposes?  Even asking that question may help to bring clarity into the situation, the clarity that can rescue a person from futility and emptiness.

I have a dream for the future.  In about twenty years an enterprising university in the UK will set up a department dedicated to the teaching of safeguarding for churches.  It will probably only be aimed at post graduates but however it is set up, it will be available to those who believe that safeguarding is a worthwhile career choice.  At the moment no such qualification exists in the UK as far as I know, even though the professional practice of safeguarding has been with us for around ten years. 

Twenty years or longer is a long time to wait.  Why do I not think it can be accomplished sooner?  The simple answer is that in the year 2019, safeguarding ‘experts’ seem to be in no agreement yet about what the profession is supposed to do.  This has been one of the drawbacks for the discipline; it has come into existence so quickly that there is no consensus about what should be covered either in training or in actual practice.  There would be no agreement currently among professionals over what topics should be covered in a hypothetical curriculum for my fantasy MA qualification.

Looking at the qualifications of many of the top professional safeguarding personnel, especially those working for the national church, we find a preponderance of individuals with social work and management qualifications.  This is hardly surprising, as social work is a good solid background for many of the tasks required of those who work in the safeguarding industry.  Social workers, through their training, will have a capacity to work with dysfunctional situations and sort them out.  Chaotic families are helped to get back on to an even keel.  Drug users are supported as they let go of their addiction.  The social work training will involve a large dose of sociological theory so that the trainee will know how society and human groups work.  I hope I am not too much short-changing the nature of the training given to social workers.  They are effective people in a world which needs order and decisive action to mend broken situations.

Alongside the crucial contribution and insights of social worker training, my future MA course would also need to explore the therapeutic dimensions of safeguarding.  Most current social workers will not have had this exposure.  I detect in social work a bias towards sorting out people’s outward circumstances (housing, money and family relationships) and that will be the key to their long-term well-being.  The therapeutic approach is on quite a different level.  Instead of focusing on outward chaos, the safeguarding professional should also have the tools to meet or refer on the psychological confusion that may have been caused by abuse.  Referral work and cooperating with other professionals active in the therapeutic world, will be a vital aspect of our university trained safeguarding officer of the future.

From the psychotherapeutic perspective there are a whole variety of potential symptoms that can arise from abuse.  One particular approach that I favour is to see abuse as being an episode of acute trauma.  There is a recent branch of psychology, ‘traumatology’ that explores how survivors experience and attempt to deal with such episodes.  Untreated acute stress can develop into actual mental illness but more typically most survivors are left coping with symptoms of extreme stress known as PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).   I have a special interest in looking at survivors’ experience in terms of trauma, since the one training I personally possess is in a method to counteract trauma and the PTSD that follows it.   Over the past twelve months I have begun to use this type of treatment, known as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) with survivors.  I have mentioned it before and any reader is welcome to contact me on the topic.

The way that abuse survivors often experience PTSD symptoms (such as shame, triggering and dissociation)draws in many other therapies and treatments that are on offer today for those who suffer, sometimes decades later, from the effects of abuse. No single person can possibly offer all these therapies.  But it should however be possible for those in the safeguarding world to have some overall acquaintance with many of them.  At the very least, anyone who sets him/herself as knowledgeable in the field of safeguarding should at the very least care passionately about the healing of survivors. When the Archbishop spoke about putting the survivor at the centre of concern, he might well have been telling safeguarding officers at all levels to become familiar with whatever is available to help them- therapy, patient listening or simple loving care.  Telling survivors to ‘go away’, the response of some officers, is not therapy

My notional MA will not just include a working knowledge of therapies available; it will also help a student to understand the legal, historical, cultural and spiritual background of abuse.   This might even involve a crash course in the way the Bible can be used as a tool of abuse.  One would hope to see other theological themes explored – getting to grips with guilt, reconciliation and the oppressive Christian theories of suffering that can burden many survivors.

 A final but crucial dimension I would like to see tackled for my MA course would be a study of the mind-set that allows abuse to happen in the first place.  Institutional power and narcissistic behaviours all need to be explored and understood.  If there is no time for some of these topics to be tackled during the course, a student could be mentored by someone who was familiar with such issues.  Perhaps, over a ten-year period the safeguarding professional working in a team might be able to claim the status of ‘expert’, having mastered to the best of their ability the multiple aspects of the discipline.  The claim of this blog post is a simple one.  To understand safeguarding, one needs professional training but this is nowhere being provided.  Worse still the content and scope of such training is not, as far as I know, even being discussed.  The current default method, that is offered by the ‘social work’ institutional/management approach, is the nearest we have to a model.  From the perspective of survivors, it is, on its own, damagingly and dangerously incomplete.  Such an approach seems to care little for the actual therapeutic needs of the victims.  Those who do reach out to survivors in a caring way do so in spite of the training they have received, not because of it.  Every human being has the capacity to reach out to another who is in need and that is what, thankfully, many local safeguarding officers do.

Although I have been blogging on the broad topic of the victims of church power abuse for over five years, I have had no direct contact with any of the professional providers of this service who work for the Church of England.  I have kept myself informed by keeping in touch with survivors both here and in the States.  The message I receive almost universally is that the more important in the hierarchy and ‘professional’ a safeguarding official is, the less helpful survivors find them to be.  Part of the problem I suspect is that, as I have already hinted, the senior staff at the centre are over qualified in some branch of social studies and the organisational skills required by complex institutions.  This V.I.P status cuts them off from people at the bottom who should be at the heart of their concern.  They seem completely at sea when asked to respond to the therapeutic needs of survivors.  One senior safeguarding personality working in London described themselves to a survivor as an ‘expert’.  As far I am concerned there are as yet no experts.  Not a single individual among the powerful in the safeguarding hierarchy appears to have crossed the crucial bridge between management and therapy/simple care.  The balance between management and care might theoretically be preserved by every safeguarding officer working collaboratively, but the discipline is still so young that models for working effectively together do not yet exist.  Instead of working together, we find the usual power games that undermine the effectiveness of many organisations, including the church.  Team-work?  The church has never offered a model as to how this should work in other areas of its life. 

Safeguarding as a discipline does not have a coherent standard of practice or theory across the board.  This may be because we do not have an agreed understanding of what safeguarding is.  I ask once again.  How can you talk about a joined-up approach if senior safeguarding officers are reported to be pushing aside and ostracising the victims and survivors who approach them?  Something is wrong and I suspect that until all the big names in safeguarding can sit down and agree on what they are meant to be doing, the world of safeguarding will continue to be dysfunctional and even harmful.   One of the most powerful things that the Church has to offer is to be a place of healing.  Let us demand that every part of the safeguarding enterprise starts to put healing right at the top of its agenda.

While studying the life and times of Joan of Arc for a lecture I was giving, I was reminded of one distinctive feature of Western mediaeval society.  The whole of that society was held together through a complicated system of patronage.  Power was not only possessed by those who commanded the most soldiers, it was also exercised by those who possessed the legal and traditional right to put others in positions of power.  To possess the power of patronage was to control others and to be the focus of influence right across society.  Joan of Arc was only able to make headway in her short meteoric career having persuaded individuals possessing the power of patronage to back her. 

Patronage, the right to raise up or cast down another person, is still a power that we find in our society.  The Church of England is one contemporary institution that still openly exercises the power of patronage in its affairs.  Arguably this manifestation of patronage is less salient than it was in the days of Jane Austen when Mr Collins, in Pride and Prejudice, used all his charm to flatter his patron, Lady De Bourgh for the right to occupy a particular vicarage and the substantial income that went with it.  My old parish in Gloucestershire was under the patronage of a Cambridge college and its endowed income of £800 was sufficient in Victorian times to keep a vicar in style.  Other parishes were worth a quarter of this and the vicars who occupied lesser posts scrambled to survive, like Mr Quiverful in the Trollope novels, in a permanent state of genteel poverty.  It was no fun to live in a falling down vicarage with inadequate resources to heat the building or keep out the rain.

The traditional power of patronage that was exercised by bishops and others over the parishes of England was arguably the greatest source of power that they possessed.  Keeping on the right side of this power was perhaps the only way clergy had to escape out of abject poverty into a position of relative affluence.  A black mark against your name could mark your record for ever and prevent you ever finding a post which would keep you in reasonable comfort.  Clergy were rightly in awe of those who had this power to create or destroy a career and a livelihood.

Anthony Trollope’s novels are also, in many ways, an exploration of the way that the exercise of patronage power was exercised and experienced in Victorian times.  Today things have changed for the better.  In the first place, stipends of the full-time clergy below the level of Archdeacons and Deans are largely the same.  When I was ordained fifty years ago, there were vicars in some parishes earning seven times the level of their curates and living in far superior accommodation.   Inflation has destroyed these differentials of income.  A second change today is that posts are now mostly advertised in the church press and the appointments system is far more open.  A transparent interview process takes place for most posts, even for bishops.  But, as a recent letter in the Church Times points out, the exercise of patronage is an issue that is still a live one as we ask questions about how Bishop Peter Ball was elevated to Gloucester in 1991.  It transpires that two other dioceses, Norwich and Portsmouth, had both refused to consider his candidature on the grounds of Ball’s known predilection for the company of young men.  The CT letter from the retired bishop, Colin Buchanan, hints at political interference in this appointment.  Patronage on the part of the ‘great and the good’ was thus apparently allowed to override normal checks and balances.  To become a diocesan bishop in 1991 did require impeccable references.  One of those who provided such a reference had to be his Diocesan bishop, the then Bishop of Chichester, Eric Kemp.  Are we to believe that Bishop Kemp had no insight or knowledge of the rumours around Peter Ball?  Kemp’s legacy of having allowed Bishop Ball’s translation to Gloucester and later obstructing the police enquiries into his conduct have left a mark against the bishop’s historical legacy which is unlikely ever to be erased.

The power of patronage in the church may be indeed weakening in the way that democratic processes reach further into the management of the church.  And yet, even as it weakens, we need to have a full awareness of how important a role patronage has played in the church in the very recent past.  In some dioceses all posts are advertised, even for senior clergy such as archdeacons and residentiary canons.   Other dioceses, such as Chichester, appear to advertise relatively few of their posts.  Most appointments seem to be done ‘in-house’.  For one clergyman at least, this near total episcopal control over livings in Chichester has been experienced as an abuse of power.

Among the many documents released by IICSA in the course of its hearings was a witness statement by one Fr. Nicholas Flint, a Chichester incumbent. His testimony strongly criticises the way he felt he had been treated by the diocese.  His complaints directly and indirectly touch on issues of patronage power.  Flint had for a long time felt drawn with others in the diocese to support Peter Ball after he was cautioned in 1992.  The eventual conviction of Ball in 2015 and the revelation of the full extent of his offending left him and other supporters in considerable confusion and dismay.  His self-description was that of being ‘collateral damage’ to the whole sad affair. Eventually he obtained an appointment to see the Bishop of Chichester, Martin Warner, in October 2015 and he hoped to receive some pastoral care and support.  He needed some understanding for all he had suffered in trying to respond to local perpetrators and victims who were part of the wider abuse scandals in the diocese.  He was also looking for a possible move within the diocese after being in the same post from 21 years.  The Bishop stated, in Flint’s words, that ‘he did not have anything for me in his diocese’.  Whatever else was being communicated, this declaration by the Bishop is of interest because it indicates that the Bishop regarded himself at the sole dispenser of patronage in the diocese.  This old-fashioned approach to the filling of appointments also runs counter, according to Fr Flint, to one of the recommendations of the Archbishop’s Visitation to Chichester Diocese a few years earlier.  I have no figures on the dioceses where a bishop could make such a statement about appointments, but I would hope that these dioceses are now firmly in the minority.  Centralised control of the power of patronage may be one of the factors that had helped to create the Chichester ‘scandals’ in the first place.  It is strange as well as regrettable that the current Bishop of the diocese has no apparent insight into the possibility that a secretive structure from which outsiders are excluded is also one where malefactors can most easily hide.   The old-fashioned feudal attitudes which exemplified the ‘reign’ of Bishop Kemp have no place in the 21^st century.  The current Bishop of Chichester should be making every effort to transform that culture in every possible way.  The interaction with Fr Flint in 2015 suggests that the old culture of patronage and patriarchal power was then still very much alive in the Chichester Diocese. 

This blog invites the reader to become better sensitised to the existence of a silent power in the Church.  This is present in church patronage.  When used corruptly, patronage power can quickly create situations of abuse, secrecy and rampant bullying.  In the case of the Chichester Diocese, we would claim that any continued exercise of an unlimited patronage by a bishop over a whole diocese is, in 2019, something now totally inappropriate.  The recent IICSA report on the recent history of their diocese, now in the in-tray of the Bishops and senior staff at Chichester, should surely be driving forward a new openness.  Is the Diocese of Chichester to be a place that resists, as the Bishop of Burnley puts it, ‘deep-seated cultural change’? The episode that took place account of the Bishop of Chichester’s study a mere 3 ½ years ago is an example of reactionary attitudes that have no place in a post-IICSA church.  This post-IICSA church is watching and waiting to see evidence of ‘learnt lessons’, transparency and a new penitential atmosphere involving real care by all bishops for their clergy. 

I sat in my college room in Boston and stared at my Bible in dismay. I had just read 1 Cor. 14:33b-35 (RSV):  ‘As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.’ What was I to do with this? It shook me to my foundations.

To understand why this Bible passage so disturbed me, you need to know a little about my background.

It was the autumn of 1971 and the Jesus Movement, a religious revival among hippies and young people, was sweeping the USA. A few months earlier I’d gone to a Bible study at a well-known charismatic church in Philadelphia, and had been ‘filled with the Holy Spirit’. It transformed me. I was a shy child, but became more outgoing and confident. I’d always been a Bible reader, but now the Scriptures seemed pulsing with life and I devoured them eagerly. My ‘baptism with the Holy Spirit’ had had a surprising feature, for a child whose teachers had always commented ‘will not speak up in class’. Instead of beginning to speak in tongues, as was expected, I had stood up and begun to expound the Bible – much to the consternation of the rest of the group and my own surprise.

I had been a Christian for nearly 8 years when I went to the Bible study that summer night, having ‘given my heart to Jesus’ at the age of 9. I’d attended church all my life; my father was a conservative evangelical and a well-known preacher. We were surrounded by theologically literate evangelicals.  I’d imbibed a very high view of Scripture; I had been taught that God’s will is revealed in the Bible and that it is impossible to please God without obeying its teachings. I knew the Reformation principles that the Bible has a plain meaning and does not contradict itself. I had also absorbed a fear of displeasing God by ‘going off the rails’ or ‘compromising’. Compromising what was never spelled out, but it sounded dreadful. As Rachel Held Evans wrote,

         ‘It’s a frightful thing—thinking you have to get God right in order to get God to love you, thinking you’re always one error away from damnation.’

These inbred attitudes co-existed with my new-found joy.

So here was my dilemma. It was not possible for me either to disobey Scripture or to ignore it. But in the past few months it had become clear that I had a gift for teaching the Bible; and only the previous week I had read in Rom. 12:1-11 that those with a gift for teaching should dedicate themselves to serving God with it. How was I to reconcile the command to use my gift for Bible teaching, with the command that women should stay silent in church?

I fell back on two more Reformation principles – that one text can be used to interpret another, and that the Bible should be understood as a whole. The only way out of my dilemma, I thought, was to get to know the Bible really well, so that its apparent contradictions were resolved. I set out on a programme of serious Bible study. For 12 years I read the New Testament through twice a year, and the Old Testament once. When I came to things I didn’t understand I looked them up in commentaries. I acquired a pretty good (though mainly conservative) reference library.

Quite a lot happened in those 12 years. We returned to the UK, I finished my degree in English literature and got jobs first in Christian publishing and then in bookselling; and I joined the Church of England. By 1982 I was on the path to ordination. My conflicts about women and Bible teaching had largely been resolved.

I won’t recount in detail how I came to understand the different kinds of literature in the Bible; the ways it uses imagery; the historical and cultural backgrounds of its writings; and the difficulties of working with translations. All of these helped me to begin the process of sifting first priorities from secondary issues, and timeless truths from their applications in particular times and situations – a process in which I’m still engaged. I expect it to last my whole life.

What is perhaps more relevant for this blog is the emotional and psychological difficulties of it. Although my discoveries about the Bible were sometimes liberating, and occasionally exhilarating, looking at the Bible in this way also felt scary. What if I ‘went off the rails’ and ‘lost out’, as I had so often been warned? Would God be angry? If so, what would happen to me? Just admitting that some passages could not be easily understood at first reading was a big step. And then, if some of it was skewed in translation, and other bits specific to 1st century Rome or Corinth, or 4th century BC Palestine – how was I to know which still applied today? I was not – and am not – prepared simply to say, ‘That was a long time ago and culturally determined, and we know better today.’

These fears and uncertainties produced at times a defensiveness which I often recognise among conservative Christians today. Sometimes, when I engage in social media discussions on BibIe teaching, I am told I need to read my Bible, or that I don’t follow Jesus, or that I’m apostate. This happens when I give alternative interpretations of certain Bible texts, or even when I quote other Bible texts with a different angle on the matter. I recognise the hostility as coming from a deep-seated (and often unconscious) fear that the Bible, their only shield from an exacting God, is being undermined. If they cannot trust its plain meaning, they are lost. I understand that and make allowances.

In my own journey, a breakthrough came when I realised that I became dogmatic on a point shortly before changing my mind. I learned to recognise the signs, and open my mind and heart to the Holy Spirit’s leading.

And now? I still find the Bible a source of life. It points me to a God who is love. And ‘There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.’ *

*1 John 4:16-18

One of the benefits of studying the Old Testament as a student was to have had what is known as ‘source criticism’ explained.   Source criticism is, in brief, a way of discovering the underlying origin of some of the material in the book of Genesis.  It helps to explain some of the anomalies you find there.  You have, for example, a sudden change in the text from a word meaning God (Elohim), as in the first chapter to another quite different word sometimes translated as ‘the Lord’ (Yahweh).  A detailed and close study of the narrative also picks up strange shifts in the story line.  At one moment in chapter six Noah oversees the animals entering the Ark two by two.  Then in the following chapter you find that the author is insisting that seven pairs of ‘clean’ animals entered the Ark. Such contradictions break up the flow of the narrative and must cause problems for anyone who insists that Moses wrote every word.  The ‘source criticism’ hypothesis offers the simple common-sense explanation that the author/compiler is making use of several distinct sources.  This allows us to account for the changing names of God, the contrasting creation stories and the discontinuities that we find in the story of Noah.  The Genesis author was, in modern terms, a ‘cut and paste’ writer who freely used a variety of sources.  There were no rules about plagiarism in those days.

A detailed study of the text of the New Testament also throws up some fascinating observations.  The first three gospels, known collectively as the Synoptic Gospels for their similarities, can be shown to have borrowed material from one another, particularly Matthew and Luke. These two also frequently made use of Mark.  The parallels are so strong that it is suggested that Mark’s gospel was available to Matthew and Luke in its written form.   There is also another hypothetical written gospel of Jesus’ sayings and actions which no longer exists but it is a common source for sections for both Matthew and Luke.  It is given the name Q, from the German word Quelle or source.  The details of these discussions concern us here only as an introduction to the thought that all English prose can be examined when we want to determine authorship or suspect things like copying or plagiarism.   Style, distinctive vocabulary and the use of particular phrases are all tale-tale marks of each individual writer.  We can normally tell when one person is using text that originally was penned by someone else.

Among current producers of English prose are a new group variously described as communication advisers or impression managers for large organisations, including the Church.  They are trained to use words extremely carefully so that the minimum damage is caused to the organisation they represent.  I cannot say that I have made a special study of the press releases and other communications made by these experts, but most of us can recognise their style and distinctive features.  One thing that is abundantly clear is that no ordinary human being ever uses ‘communication speak’ in everyday language.  It often comes over as insincere and even meaningless.  To take one recent example, we have the House of Bishops responding to the IICSA written report.  The Bishops, or rather the anonymous press release writer, came up with the tired cliché, ‘deep cultural change’.  This expression was used alongside other over-used words like regret, learning lessons and shame.

For the bishops to speak about deep cultural change without telling us what this means in practice shows a gross absence of meaningful communication.  To use words in this way suggests that the bishops are ready to hide behind fine-sounding words in order to try and manage their image.  Tired expressions and over-used words fail lamentably to achieve this.  The only people who seem to be doing their job well are the communication/press release writers themselves.  They have done what they are paid to do, produce something that can quoted safely by the media in the attempt to mitigate the crisis of public relations that the Church, especially at the upper level, is facing.

Thankfully the reputation of the House of Bishops is not being wholly judged by the anodyne statements of press officers and the like.   Some of the bishops have broken rank, or so it would seem, to use words that actually mean something.  We have already examined the remarkable words of the Bishop of Bristol and we would claim that her words have never been near a communications officer.  The past week has seen further twitter comments from the Bishop of Burnley and the Bishop of Worcester.  Both of these statements sound like words from real breathing human beings rather the dry product of a communication machine. 

‘It’s about the whole church and about today. There are numerous aspects of our common life that are going to require deep-seated reform’.These are the words from the Bishop of Burnley and he writes as though he means what he is saying.  Absent are the sentiments of ‘learning lessons’ and ‘working for change’ which is regularly trotted out in the official statements.  ‘Deep seated reform’ is potentially a radical idea and, if pursued to its logical end, will involve an enormous amount of work, discomfort and sacrifice on the part of the Church.  Will the House of Bishops listen to these sentiments of its individual members, the cry of solidarity with survivors by Bishop Viv and now a recognition of the need for radical change by the Bishop of Burnley?

Our final prophetic voice from the House of Bishops has given rise to some much-quoted words from John Inge, the Bishop of Worcester.  As someone who suffered at the hands of Peter Ball he knows what he is talking about when it comes to sorting out the past.  His description of the way that the Church had covered up the behaviour of Ball had left a ‘stain’ on the Church.  This is again not a turn of phrase that was written by a communications expert but rather implies, with the Bishop of Burley, that some deep reform is required.

The meetings of the House of Bishops are always private occasions and only official statements (written by comms people) are released to the public.  The three recent expressions of feeling expressed by individual members of this body which have not been through this filter, suggests that the meeting may have been far more interesting than we can know.  Might we not speculate that the bishops are themselves divided in the way they would want to respond to the biggest public relations disaster for the Church, the IICSA report, that has ever appeared?  The language of public relations experts will not be able to undo the damage that has been inflicted on the Church.  As one of the consumers of this output, I would want to say that every time the Church issues statements trying to bury the past with the techniques of public relations methods, it further lowers itself in the estimation of ordinary people.  Am I the only person wanting to scream every time I hear the expression ‘learning lessons’?  This is not the language of compassionate human beings.  That is the very least we expect from our bishops, to be people of compassion.  ‘I am among you as one who serves’ are the words of the master we try to follow.  Let us hear more clearly the words of Jesus in what the church says in its time of real crisis.