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.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.  Wittgenstein

I first became aware of the above aphorism some twenty years ago and, like many people, have puzzled away at the implications of its meaning.  I now recognise that these words are very important to take on board but I regret that they were never explained to me early on in my life. They would have been especially useful at the time when I began to study the Bible at university.

Like many theological students of my generation it was not unusual to study the Bible in the original languages.  Hebrew represented a personal challenge. I battled with it for over two years before giving myself permission to drop it six months before my final exams.  Greek was compulsory but New Testament Greek did not hold any terrors for me. I had begun my journey with this language at the age of 14.   Why is the Wittgenstein quotation important in connection with the study of ancient languages and the Bible?  It is helpful because, understanding the quote properly allows to contemplate the fact that ancient languages limit a reader to the cultural limits of these languages.  Hebrew and Greek like every other language are restricted in what they can express.  Every language, including our own, has blind spots which limits it in what can be articulated.

This point about the limits of every language came home to me as I was writing my recent piece on narcissism.  I found myself using the Narcissistic Personality Disorder ‘language’ as a tool to assess the behaviour of some senior churchmen.  I suddenly became aware that the categories of NPD had simply not been available to me twenty years ago.  In other words, I could not then describe the actions of certain churchmen by availing myself of these distinct words and concepts.  My reading about NPD had extended my means of expression.  In the process ‘the limit of my world’ had changed and been enlarged. 

The insight about the way that new languages and words allow one to think new thoughts has reverberated into the way I think about the Bible.  The original authors of the bible text were constrained by the limits inherent in the languages they were using.  There were of course many things that they could say; equally there were many things that they could not say.  Hebrew, for example, has few, if any, abstract words.  It presents its version of truth and divine revelation especially by narrating events, conversations and feelings. 

When I was at school and learning Greek, I had to translate passages of English prose into ancient Greek.  The English passages chosen for this task often consisted of extracts from one or other of Edmund Burke’s speeches to Parliament in the 18^th century.  Like many of his contemporaries Burke was trained thoroughly in the Classics and so was apt to speak in a style reminiscent of the rhetorical language of Demosthenes from the 4^th century BC.   Thus, his English prose was eminently suitable for translation into Greek.  This is something that it would be difficult to do with more modern speeches in Parliament.  This simple point is that that ancient Greek and indeed many other languages cannot embrace the nuance of meaning in much of what we say in 21^st century English.  Our cultural and linguistic horizons have been allowed to grow exponentially from ancient times. 

Returning to the English Bible we need to help a reader, not acquainted with ancient languages, to have a keen appreciation of the way that translation sometimes is impossible to do adequately.  The choice of a word in English may suggest a nuance of meaning that simply did not exist for the original audience.  One of the tasks of good expository preaching is draw out these issues.  In the ‘gay debate’ it has, for example, to be pointed out that there no word in Greek in existence which can translated as ‘homosexual’ in the New Testament.  There are words which describe male prostitution.  A simple neutral word conveying the idea of an individual identifying a preference for their own sex, perhaps in a life-long commitment, does not exist.  One approach to the ‘failure’ of the Bible to address this issue directly is to distort the text and mistranslate passages to speak of things that are not there.  This is dishonest. An alternative approach is to relax into the Biblical text and its supporting culture, trying to pick up the rhythm of the language used which, even in translation, can be heard.  We all need to hear what the Bible does say rather than what we would like it to say. When we read it in this way, we find absolutely no support for modern notions of infallibility or claims for precise historical accuracy in Scripture.  The fundamentalist ‘debate’ is a discussion that would have made no sense to anyone living before the 18^th century.   Just as I was unable to think the ideas around narcissism before I had studied the concept, so the educated person of the early 18^th century simply could not have grasped the ideas of modern politically motivated fundamentalists.

In summary, we can see that the Bible, because of its location in time and culture, is unable to offer decisive backing to many of the modern theological debates that we have today.  Having accepted that Hebrew and Greek set limits to what can be thought and expressed, we are free to explore what these ancient languages, when well translated, actually do attempt to communicate.  I have mentioned the use of story and narrative as a way of communicating truth and this can be done in all languages.  For the Hebrew writer especially, God is largely revealed in the events of history and certainly not in the speculations of systematic theologians.  A second way in which the Hebrew Bible works in a way that we do not always fully appreciate, is through the use of picture or symbol.   Because of our preference for propositional truths about God, a strong cultural bias on our part, we have become desensitised to the many non-propositional statements about God.  God is a consuming fire, he is a still small voice, he is heard in the sound of the thunder.  Such statements may lack precision and eligibility for credal formulae but they have immediacy and connection with the way that most people think and experience.  To take any one of the symbolic statements about God and press it hard to reveal ‘truth’ would do it violence.  Our cultural preference for measurable truth as against image and symbol has meant that we often miss much of what the Hebrew Bible is in fact telling us.  Many people use the Bible only as a mine for proof texts to support whatever is their current passion or preoccupation.  They do not allow it to speak in its own form and idiom because this is so far away from ‘respectable’ theological language.

Wittgenstein’s quote, with which we began this reflection, does two things.  It encourages us to recognise that Scripture is limited, compared with modern culture, in what it can say.  It cannot be said to be the final word on God or theology because language and culture have expanded immeasurably since it was written.  Secondly, if we take the Bible seriously as in some way revealing God’s word, we should be prepared to enter into what it does say.   Allowing for all the limitations of language and the way that ideas are filtered through particular cultural constraints, let us celebrate the richness of the world that is found there in the text.  Let us enter imaginatively into the pictures, the vividness of the description of human joys and sorrows that are encountered.  In short let the Bible be the Bible without claiming for it something that it cannot be, an infallible guide to every scientific, ethical or historical question.  It is what it is, limited in some ways by the constraints of its languages and cultural worlds.  While biblical words and meanings are limited in what they can say, God himself can still be heard in these words.  Other ideas and insights of twenty first century can be added.  This mixture of ideas, the old and the new, can be joined together to reveal truth and reality for our time and culture.

From time to time it is helpful to be exposed to an issue relating to church power in a setting entirely different from our own. After the bomb shells affecting the Church of England in the past two or three weeks, it is salutary to be reminded that struggles over power are found in churches all over the world. ,

The views expressed in this post are entirely those of the author. No court has reviewed allegations that the Rev. Robert H. Malm committed perjury in the relevant legal proceedings.

Some time ago, Stephen graciously allowed me to share my story of non-sexual abuse on this blog. With his permission, I’d like to bring you up to date on this matter.

By way of brief recap, in December 2018, the rector of my former parish, the Rev. Robert H. Malm (“Bob”) of Grace Episcopal in Alexandria Virginia, contacted the police. He allegedly complained that I had threatened him via postings on a family member’s blog, located at http://www.gracealex.net.  Among his accusations were that various words, taken out of context, constituted threats against him and the church.

However, when the police declined to take action, Bob decided to file a request for a protective order with the courts. Apparently, he believed that by doing so he could shut down online criticism of his conduct. He did so with the full knowledge of diocesan officials, to whom he described me in various emails as “sick,” “twisted,” and “dysfunctional.”

To the surprise of many, the trial court ruled in Bob’s favor, despite the fact that he clearly had not met the legal requirement of an “imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm.” Indeed, Bob’s entire time in the courtroom consisted of recitations of irrelevant issues, including him asking me whether I had resigned from the parish vestry. (I did, but only Bob appears to see any connection between that and his claims that that he was threatened.)

I immediately appealed the ruling, and was represented by counsel. During the appeal, Bob was represented by Jeffery Chiow, a Washington DC-based attorney and former parish vestry member. Jeff pursued a strategy predicated on inflammatory rhetoric, including referring to me as a “domestic terrorist.” He also made various inaccurate statements of fact to the court, including that I had:

• Never been licensed to practice law.
• Never served as a police officer.
• Violated the initial court order.

Jeff also attempted to subpoena my mother, dying of COPD, in violation of the law in her home state, which does not permit discovery in cases of protective orders absent prior leave of court. His help was to drag her, complete with oxygen tank and wheelchair, into court, where he hoped to conduct a day-long deposition. However, the relevant local courts quashed the subpoena. Meanwhile, Mom’s attorney shared his view that “this attorney is coming at you with a personal vendetta.”

Meanwhile, numerous emails came to light during discovery, suggesting that Bob had been very active behind the scenes, engaging in what I would describe as a smear campaign. But tellingly, Bob refused to specify in writing which online posts he believed to be threatening, even after the court ordered him to do so. Bob also contacted the police department, asking if there were some way they could force me to quit blogging about our conflict. To the bishop, Bob sent an email telling him that his wife and one of his daughters took the matter far too seriously — an odd assertion for someone who claims to have been threatened.

Most significantly, Bob lied during discovery. (Before you ask, yes, this would be defamatory were it not true.) In his written responses to my attorney’s interrogatories, or questions that must be answered under oath, Bob claimed that my mother, or someone purporting to be her, had repeatedly contacted him to schedule appointments, only to no-show. Leaving aside the fact that Mom loathes Bob and would have no reason to do so, that begs the question: How did a woman, dying and unable to use a phone or email, or to leave her home, contact Bob? I can assure all involved that this simply didn’t occur; nor did anyone claiming to be Mom contact Bob. This is perjury, pure and simple. Yet Bob knowingly signed the statement, required at the end of responses to interrogatories, stating under oath that his answers were true. Moreover, he used a parishioner, Jane Rosman, to notarize the relevant affidavit.

The appeal dragged on interminably, causing my Mom immense anxiety and consternation, evidenced by panic attacks, vomiting and more. I promptly informed the diocesan bishops of Bob’s actions, but did not even get the courtesy of a response.

I also filed a Title IV disciplinary complaint, only to be told in writing that Bob’s conduct is not “of weighty and material importance to the ministry of the church.” Oddly, this letter was marked as “confidential,” despite the fact that such matters are NOT, under the canons, confidential apropos complainants. This leads me to speculate that church officials either are painfully unfamiliar with canon law, or that they wish to reserve solely unto themselves the right to share information about the conflict —something that the previous bishop diocesan, Shannon Johnston, did in a letter to the parish, in which he inaccurately claimed that the matter had been previously investigated an resolved. Clearly, it has not been resolved, and the diocese previously declined in writing to investigate, so one wonders how the bishop was able to make this statement.

Late in the process, I received a settlement offer from Bob and the parish—surely a rare thing when allegations of abusive conduct are involved. (In my many years of practicing law, I never once encountered this situation. Clients were either threatened, or they weren’t, and the cases proceeding accordingly.)

The proposal offered to drop the matter if I would agree to have no further contact with Bob, and cease my online criticism of him. The former was amusing, for I had informed Bob in writing in 2018 that he was to have no further contact with me, either directly or through others. Why Bob’s attorney suddenly concluded that I might want communication with Bob escapes me, and may himself may have difficulty explaining why he felt this necessary.

Notably, the settlement proposal also rambled on for several pages about my removing blog posts, not publicly criticizing Bob’s conduct or that of the church, and more. In exchange, Bob would agree not to make any publicly derogatory comments about me. This I found to be comical, as Bob’s efforts to convince people that I am a “domestic terrorist” had been conducted almost entirely behind the scenes; thus, from my perspective this clause would allow Bob to continue his misconduct unabated.

Finally, after devoting more than $25,000 to legal fees — money I had saved for retirement — and concluding that neither Bob nor his attorney were prepared to conduct themselves in an ethical manner, I dropped my appeal.

As a result, the current protective order remains in effect through January 24, 2020. The provisions require me not to have any contact with Bob or his family — hardly an onerous requirement! I also must remain 1,000 feet away from Bob, his home, and the church during this time. As a result, I protest on various street corners in the city, often carrying a sign decrying Bob’s perjury.

I also continue to blog noisily away, and there is a new disciplinary complaint pending against Bob Malm. My bet is that the diocese will yet again find an excuse to wash its hands of the matter. The Episcopal Church says it wants to be a welcoming, inclusive church, but the fact that it is willing to permit retaliation by clergy against those who complain about possible misconduct speaks to a church that is anything but inclusive and caring.

But the real news is the damage this conflict has wrought on all involved. In the case of the parish, more than one-third of pledging units have left the church, while Sunday attendance is down 17 percent. The assistant rector left abruptly, two years before the end of her contract, possibly due to her unhappiness with Bob’s conduct.

In the case of my family, the harm is profound. My mother’s anxiety, depression, and anger, all a normal part of dying, are greatly exacerbated as she moves into the final days of her life. My same-sex spouse, Mike, received into The Episcopal Church just 15 months before this conflict broke out and married to me there, has renounced Christianity. I have left organized religion, and try though I might, I find I cannot stand to set foot in a church for any reason. Indeed, I attended the Easter Vigil at the church of my childhood, and while people were delightful, and found myself throughout the service fighting the urge to run out the door, never to return.

Many friends from church have abandoned me, and that is fine. One’s true friends remain friends, while those who lack empathy may feel that they have to choose sides, or that they know enough based on Bob’s representations to choose to end our friendship. That is their choice, and while I miss them, I wish them well and believe I probably am better off without friendships predicated on my rector’s approval. I also am sadder but wiser, now recognizing that it is possible for many to be happy, even when within an abusive system.

It also seems jarringly hypocritical that, just the day before I wrote this, Bob and Jeff likely attended the Easter Vigil, where they no doubt recited the baptismal covenant to “respect the dignity of every human being.” How one can reconcile committing perjury in court and bullying a dying woman with this promise escapes me, and I suspect I am better off not knowing the answer.

Meanwhile, I have again filed a disciplinary complaint with the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia over Bob’s perjury, only to have the case dismissed in writing on the grounds that Bob has not been criminally convicted of perjury. That’s a shocking proposition — is one to conclude that any clergy conduct is acceptable unless it results in a criminal conviction? Moreover, more than one priest has been defrocked in the diocese over conduct that is illegal, but for which there has not been a criminal conviction, including adultery with a married parishioner. So why the double standard?

I also note with some wry amusement that while the diocese again insists that I must treat the matter as confidential, the diocese itself violated the confidentiality provisions of Title IV, which went into effect January 1, 2019. These provide that the identity of the complainant must be treated as confidential. Surely, Bob could have readily surmised that I complained, but some effort to comply with church canons would have been reassuring.

Looking forward, I plan to continue to oppose Bob’s misuse of the legal system. I will not renounce my right to speak publicly about my experiences, regardless of the outcome of the current church disciplinary case. My attorney and I also are in touch, and I am evaluating further legal action against the church.

Mom’s days are rapidly dwindling, and she is, in her words, “fading fast.” It saddens me that she is unlikely to see resolution before she dies, but there is nothing one can do about it.

Will I ever return to organized faith? I don’t know, but I doubt it. The sad reality is that clergy misconduct often is like jumping headfirst into an empty swimming pool — one may be able to address some of the harmful outcomes, while remaining unable to turn back the hands of time to repair the underlying trauma.

One of the things that commentators like myself have been looking for over the past few days are reactions to the IICSA report from the House of Bishops.  I personally do not follow individual bishops on Twitter so I have been relying on Gilo and other tweeters to tell me what is going on.  Gilo yesterday noticed one tweet which stood out from all the others.  It was from the Bishop of Bristol, Viv Faull.  It hits the reader between the eyes because in no way is it one that has been written by a diocesan communications officer.  It clearly comes from the heart of the Bishop herself.

The tweet from Bishop Viv can be read by anyone who has twitter on her bishop’s account @Bishopviv1.  It first of all refers to her time in the Gloucester 90-94, a period when our paths slightly overlapped in that I was at that time an incumbent working in the diocese.  She would probably not remember me but I remember her well, not least because women clergy were still then fairly unusual.  The retrospective story we hear now, 25-30 years on, is that these women clergy needed enormous amounts of stamina and resilience to survive in this role. 

Viv Faull next appeared on my mental horizon when she became Dean of York.  I did some digging into her story for this blog when the saga of her confrontation with the bell-ringers at York Minster became public news.  I looked at her story as an example of power and conflict in a large church organisation.  The episode took place at the same time as other cathedral sagas at Exeter and Peterborough.  It was possible to blog on all these stories, as the reviews and reports that were prepared are helpfully published on-line.  A commentator like myself can become informed by taking the trouble to search out these detailed documents.  The York saga was less easy to disentangle from afar.  The basic facts were that Dean Faull dispensed with the services of the entire band of the Minster bell-ringers over a safeguarding matter.  These bell-ringers responded vigorously by organising a boycott which effectively shut down the bells at York Minster for several months.  Without going over the details which I do not have to hand, two things happened.  The Dean, in spite of a great deal of personal vitriol directed against her, eventually won out.  Most of the bell-ringers returned, at the same time submitting to a new strict safeguarding scrutiny.

My readiness to wade in at the time to commenting on this episode at York was partly due to my having a source of inside information.  He was in close touch with the events at York Minster.  From him I learnt that Dean Faull’s cause was a totally just one.  She was completely in the right to take on a nest of vested interests, embodied by the bell-ringer fraternity and their supporters.  Her predecessors had failed to act over known problems and these problems had become more serious over the decades.  Out of this episode I learnt that Dean (now Bishop) Faull is a person prepared at great personal cost to stand up for what is right and provide decisive leadership when it would be so easier to give in and preserve ‘peace’ by covering over the cracks of disagreements.

I give this somewhat prolonged introduction as a prelude to our understanding the purport of the twitter post put out by the Bishop Faull post IICSA.  She refers to what she wanted to say to the Archbishop when, as a deacon in the early 90s, she put up with humiliations and the slights handed out to women clergy at the time.  Without it being spelt out, we must take from her comment that she is closely identifying herself with victims/survivors.  Like them she once found herself at the wrong end of belittlement, ignoring and humiliation on the part of established church authorities.  The two words that I myself selected from the IICSA report, ‘clericalism’ and ‘tribalism’, are also picked out by Bishop Faull.  Referring to these words, she says: ‘These silenced and marginalised me.  It still does.’

Twitter posts limit the those who use them to a relatively small number of words.  It is difficult to imagine how Bishop Faull could have presented more powerfully in her tweet several issues.  First, she appears to be identifying totally with the experience of abused survivors, even though the abuse she personally suffered was in a different context.  Secondly, she is showing herself willing to describe the evil of a culture that ‘silences and marginalises’.  From her experiences in the 90s she can understand the way that institutional power operates against the weak.  The IICSA report would have reminded her strongly of the ways that church authorities have to silence you.  In previous blogs I have spoken of techniques like deference, charismatic power and patriarchal authority.  No doubt Bishop Faull will, at some point, give further commentary on these few words.  Even in their present paucity they give great hope to abuse survivors.

Today as a supporter of abuse survivors, I sense an atmosphere of hope for the future.  It is not just that a member of the House of Bishops has broken ranks by coming out with strong support for the victims of institutional humiliation.  It is that the particular bishop who is doing the supporting is one who truly understands.  She has been there; she remembers all the humiliation and pain of being part of a despised group.  Thus, she can truly represent them to the House of Bishops.  She is of course probably not the only bishop currently ‘breaking rank’ and demanding that the response to survivors is not dictated by communication experts and impression managers.  But, in Bishop Faull, survivors potentially have a new powerful champion who has a track record in firm decisive leadership.  She is one who has suffered not only as a humiliated member of the women clergy, but also as the misunderstood attacked leader.  The ex-Dean of York, is in my book, a worthy ally for the cause of all who long to see the church authorities begin to walk along the path of honesty, justice and transparency.  Will things ever be the same again in the Church of England and the House of Bishops?  The few words written in a twitter feed by a single Bishop suggest that they won’t.  Let us hope that I am right.

The IICSA report on Chichester Diocese and the case of Bishop Peter Ball finally appeared today (Thursday).  file:///C:/Users/Owner/Desktop/inquiry-publishes-report-diocese-chichester-and-peter-ball.htm The rehearsal of events in and around the diocese was a damning and sad indictment of a dysfunctional culture in both the Cathedral and in the upper echelons of the Diocese and the national Church.

I have not read the whole report.  This is partly because much of it seems to be a rehearsing of many of the facts that we have already heard during the IICSA hearings of last March and July.  Also, this blog with its self-imposed word limit, allows me only to look at a few issues.  Two words, however, struck me fairly early on in reading the document.  They sum up many of the issues around the use and abuse of power that operates in the church.  It is the problem of a church and its difficulties with managing power that is at the heart of this blog’s concern.

In the introduction the report spoke of ‘clericalism’ and ‘tribalism’.  Both words speak to us of ways of avoiding fear and vulnerability.  Clericalism operates as a system to benefit one particular group; it will always seek to protect the clergy and promote their interests as much as it can.  It operates like a masonic network and it will naturally always privilege the special rights of the clergy over the laity.  In some settings, clergy will use a coded language to shut others out from their ‘in’ conversations.  The use of these techniques to cement the clerical caste together, is no doubt to make the clergy feel secure.  To be important as part of this group, is to rise more easily above anxiety. 

The tribalism that the report referred to is a variant of the clericalism.  The ‘tribes’ that were identified in the Chichester diocese context were to do with churchmanship interests.  Fellow clergy were seen not as colleagues, but as members of a friendly tribe or a hostile one.  The other side, the ‘them’, might be either lay people or members of a type of churchmanship disapproved of by your group.  The Chichester Diocese for a long period has attracted to itself clergy practising a fairly thorough-going version of Anglo-Catholicism.  This has its own set of cultural and theological idiosyncrasies.  Ranged against this Anglo-Catholic group are a considerable number of members of the other Anglican grouping, those identifying with the conservative group REFORM.  The close juxtaposition of these two versions of Anglicanism, made sometimes for a fractious diocesan culture.  It was all too easy for an incumbent with a loyalty to one or other of these groups to put that loyalty above the needs of a survivor.  A victim of abuse might well not find a sympathetic pastoral response if he/she named a perpetrator who was part of the same tribe to which the would-be helper owed allegiance.   In some cases, such rejection by a priest could lead to the abused individual taking his or her life.

The description of this culture of clericalism and tribalism in the Chichester Diocese is chilling to read about.  No doubt there are tonight many individual consciences that are being stirred to consider whether they could have done anything more to make a difference.     An episode recorded in the report describes the atmosphere at one stage in part of the Cathedral congregation.  This also appears to have been fed by similar tribal elitist assumptions.  During the 90s, and early years of this century, there was some confusion about the precise boundaries in safeguarding responsibilities at the Cathedral.  One notorious abuser, who acted as a steward in the Cathedral, succeeded in avoiding challenge or confrontation over decades.  This was, in part, due to a failure of communication between Diocese and Cathedral.  No doubt, the similar dynamics of tribalism and rivalry between the two were playing their part in this situation of poor communication.  The Diocesan Safeguarding Officer was denied easy access to Cathedral records and other information.  When she finally spoke to parents of boys who had been abused, these same parents found themselves shunned and ostracised by members of the cathedral congregation.  In a comment the report notes that some of the shunners were those who associated socially with the senior clergy at the Cathedral.  Again, we appear to be observing a pattern endemic in the story of church abuse.  The victims often become the enemy because they are upsetting the status quo.  The forces of clericalism and tribalism seem to rally round to support a perpetrator rather than the victims.  It is hard to see how this collusion to defend a guilty party (including Peter Ball) can be broken unless the responsibility for investigation is taken right out of the hands of people thinking tribally.

There are many other points in the report that I am not of course able to cover in a thousand words.  But the criticisms, whether of Archbishop Carey, the central Church authorities or the various officers in the Diocese of Chichester, all seem to come back to the fundamental issue of self-protection and fear.  For Archbishop Carey, there seems, as I have suggested before, to have been a large dose of naivety spiced with a strong instinct to protect and preserve ‘his’ Church.  The same mistakes which allowed so many offenders to roam the Diocese of Chichester unchallenged for so long, hang on this desire to protect the institution and especially those who served it as clergy.  As I suggested in my previous blog, the instinct to do anything and everything to protect an institution will be particularly strong when the same organisation is the one that which gives you self-esteem and identity.  This ‘institutional narcissism’, as we described it, will be especially strong among the top officials of an organisation.  From America we have been hearing a lot about ‘no collusion and no obstruction’ on the part of the White House when faced with the facts of the interference by the Russian state in the American elections.  Any admitting of Russian interference in the elections would have the effect of undermining the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency, quite apart from uncovering criminal behaviour on his part. In the narrative of the IICSA account we catch glimpses of another organisation – the Church- that is overwhelmed with fear rather than confidence.  This observation could be made about the entire Church of England at present rather than just the Diocese of Chichester.  The narrative of secrecy, cover-ups, failures of communication is a language of fear and even the collapse of confidence.  Once again, we beg the Church to come out of such behaving as though it is scared of the truth.  We implore it to face openly the traumas of the past and work with men and women of goodwill to build a new future of honesty, truth and openness.