Looking back over the decades of working as a parish priest, I remember with gratitude the enormous and necessary help given by lay volunteers. When the church has a group of dedicated people who are prepared to give time and expertise to the work of the church, the morale of the whole church (especially the clergy) is boosted considerably. Without these lay volunteers, things can become extremely difficult. I once heard of a clergyman who had to act as a churchwarden and treasurer in his parish because no one was prepared to fill these posts.

There are two aspects of lay volunteers working in churches that I want to explore. The first issue is a practical one. In the church of my childhood, there was always a group of church women who had never worked outside the home.  These were prepared to run the Sunday school and the various organisations that each church would sponsor. More recently the women of the parish would go out to work.  But working life for both sexes was often still the prelude to a long retirement, starting at the age of 60/65.  Retired people often had skills and energy and could potentially offer up to 15/20 years of active service to their local parish churches. In 2005, in my final parish, I was able to recruit as churchwarden a retired senior teacher who had run a department of 14 other teachers. She was just 60 and had plenty of energy for the post. These golden years for the recruitment of energetic and active volunteers for church work are arguably now over.  Professional women no longer retire at 60 and the value of pensions has begun to shrink. I wonder how long it will be before the church begins to feel the real cost of these social changes which reduce the availability of volunteers.

The lay volunteers on which the churches rely will always have more to give if they have age and energy on their side. If one waits until the age of 67 is reached, one cannot expect the same amount of energy and service to be on offer to a local parish church. So far, the generation that retired at the beginning of their 60s are still reasonably active. Thinking of my own church, from which I retired in 2010, I can see that there is a generation of church volunteers who will not be easily replaced. Up and down the country the now 70-75-year-olds who have carried the work of the church for up to 15 years will simply not have the stamina to continue in a few years time. Is anyone facing up to this potential volunteer crisis in the churches of all kinds in Britain?

The second issue about volunteer labour in our churches is the need to take stock over the way they are treated by the full-time clergy. Many older clergy have become so used to recruiting volunteers without difficulty over the years, that they are not prepared for the future volunteer crisis that may be looming. In a previous blog we suggest that there may also be a potential crisis of morale among the clergy themselves when they find that they cannot fulfil all the expectations laid on them.  A similar crunch point may hit their lay volunteers.  If a layperson agrees to become churchwarden but then finds that he/she is required to be acting treasurer as well, there is going to be unhappiness.  I am not aware that anyone has given attention to this potential crisis.  For the reasons I have outlined we have to imagine that there is going to be a tipping point in the future. In short, recruiting volunteers to support the practical work of the church may become the most difficult part of the work of a church leader.

The word volunteer speaks of the fact that an individual is never compelled to do the job that is asked of them. It is offered as an act of goodwill and without any sense of compulsion. The full-time person in the parish cannot easily walk away when things get tough, but the volunteer can.  This future scarcity should change the dynamic of the way that leaders relate to these volunteers.  Although this blog is about power abuse in churches, a shortage of volunteers is one thing that could in fact make things better in this area.  Saying thank you to the volunteers, listening to their issues and generally treating them well is something that could be forced on all clergy by necessity.  The alternative of employing professionals to do many of the administrative tasks may be an option for better-off churches but not the majority.

The church has not quite reached the crisis point over its volunteer work-force but that moment may not be far off.  The time may arrive when volunteers are so scarce that the practical and administrative tasks are simply not being done in many smaller churches.  One way of delaying that moment will be for church leaders to learn how to treat their volunteers with profound respect, honour and dignity.  For some clergy this will be a revolution in attitude.  They will also need good teaching about the dynamics of power in institutions and real understanding of enabling and working with teams.  The traditional patriarchal patterns of working, where a male priest gave the orders and everyone rushed to obey, will no longer suffice.  This reflection on the role of volunteers will, I hope, require my readers to think about their own local situation.  Are your church leaders aware of a future crisis?  If they are, are they helping the situation by an effort to overcome their narcissism and grandiosity and treating their volunteers with greater honour and respect?  If that is happening, then perhaps something good is emerging alongside a potential crisis and break-down within many church structures in our country.

Long term visitors to this blog will know that at the heart of my interests is a fascination with the outworking of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).  This personality disorder can be seen to be at the heart of much of the dynamics of harmful behaviour both in individual relationships and in institutional settings like the Church. 

Before we examine, what I want to call, institutional narcissism, we need to return to the classic psychoanalytic understandings of the word narcissism.  In offering a brief summary of the current thinking on the term, we should be aware that like PTSD, NPD has only been in circulation as an idea since around 1980.  As a word that has entered wide public awareness, narcissism has only been in existence for around a dozen years.  Narcissism’s essential meaning, which most people are now familiar with, has the idea of self-inflation.  Such self-aggrandisement, combined with a readiness to ‘feed’ off others in a relationship, has become easily recognisable for countless people.   Dysfunctional power relationships in families and institutions can often be identified as an outworking of NPD.

The psychoanalysts who laboriously described the dynamics of narcissism to their professional colleagues in the 1970s, paving the way for it to enter the official classificatory manuals, offered theories about its origins.  Narcissism was, in summary, the result of a child failing to create a core ‘self’.  Without that self at the centre of the personality, the child and later adult would find it necessary to reach out to fill this empty space with compensatory attachments and relationships.  There would be an ongoing narcissistic hunger for parental-type attention and praise.  Such hunger often proved to be insatiable, leaving the sufferer deeply wounded for the whole of his/her life.  Some narcissists do achieve a level of stability and success, at least superficially.  They obtain, by cunning and manipulation, a context in which they can control others sufficiently to hide their woundedness.  For a time, they are the heart and soul of the party before some crisis exposes the fragility that lies deep down in every narcissist. 

As with most psychological disorders, one suspects that NPD exists on a continuum.  Possibly every human being alive is a victim to some extent of this disturbance.  The question is whether it becomes a disorder able to disturb ordinary flourishing.   Within the literature there is, as I have discussed before on this blog, a suggestion that some find that a hitherto unacknowledged  narcissism is brought out by particular settings.  A typical example of ‘acquired situational narcissism’ (ASN) might be a pop star beginning to enjoy fame and having a constant supply of ‘girl-friends’ ready to oblige at any time.  More central to our concern is the ASN awoken in an individual promoted to a bishopric or the House of Lords.  A sense of self-aggrandisement and importance is granted through the new role.  The enjoyment of privilege is not in itself a bad thing, but it becomes serious if the new preferment removes an individual from his old ways of relating to others.  The thought that that ‘I am now too important to be bothered with the likes of you’ is a dangerous notion.  It is effectively poisoning the soul of a hitherto straightforward person.

The idea that I am wrestling with at present is the notion of institutional narcissism.  By this term I am thinking of the way that when people become important in their own eyes, above ordinary mortals, they use institutions to consolidate that superiority.  One of the ways that Michael Reid of Peniel expressed the toxic power he enjoyed over his followers was to confront them with the institution he had built.  He literally pointed to the church and the real estate it owned and challenged his opponents with the question.  ‘Who is God showing his favour to?’  In short, money property and influence were the tangible backing forces of narcissistic behaviour.  The institution was a means for exercising power over others. 

As I thought about the way narcissists build their power around the institutions they have created, the image of a sea-creature building for itself a shell came to mind.  The shell is the means to protect the vulnerable core of the narcissistic leader.  We see this process happening all over the world in a religious context.  Plant and wealth equals power and, as such, helps to protect the vulnerable narcissistic leader from challenge.  A particular extreme example is found among Scientologists.  All over the world they are converting large buildings to be bases for their activities.  The only problem is that there are not enough people interested to go to these buildings.  They form an empty shell to give the illusion of power and influence which does not in fact exist.

The sea creature analogy can be taken one stage further.  The hermit crab is known to use the empty shells of other creatures to provide protection for itself.  I am wondering if in fact that the Church of England, with its complex system of rank, preferment and privilege, is proving an unhealthy environment where narcissistic behaviour can flourish.  In other words, the sheer number and variety of protective shells that litter the Church’s landscape provides a rich soil for the incubation of many examples of an institutional narcissism.  Even if we assume that the Church of England clergy do not possess a greater number of damaged selves than the rest of the population, it might be argued that there is greater possibility for ASM to emerge, thanks to the extent of the many institutional props or shells that exist.   

I leave my reader not with clear answers but with a number of questions.  Is the structure of the Church conducive to unhealthy power dynamics?  Do our leaders unconsciously slide into narcissistic ways of thinking as the result of preferment?  When they exercise power in a church setting, are they mindful of the way that such power should only be exercised in the name of the institution and is never personal to them?  These questions and other are relevant not only to bishops and senior clergy, but they are worth asking of clergy of every rank and seniority.  One thing that occurs to me is that a better understanding of all the different manifestations of narcissism in the church would make the institution a far healthier place than it is at present.

One of the mysteries of the Anglican situation in the early 21^st century is the way that the sexual activity of its members has come to occupy such a central stage.  Many of us grew up in a time when discussing what went on in people’s bedrooms was a taboo.  The swing from past reticence to the current situation, where one’s orthodoxy is judged by what one thinks of other people’s sexual preferences, is extraordinary.  Historians in the future may look back to our time with puzzlement and ask this question of our generation.  Why did the Anglicans of that era fight over this topic of sex, when there were so many other more important crises for them to confront – global warming, refugees, poverty and war?

 I am in the process of reading a book which may give us a few pointers on our way to answering this question.  It is a book about the rise and fall of a church network in America called Mars Hill.  Situated in Seattle it was founded by the charismatic leader, Mark Driscoll. His youth and energy attracted thousands of young adults as members.  The church eventually shut its doors in 2014 after credible accusations of power abuse.  On this occasion it was not the story of a powerful leader taking sexual advantage of vulnerable young women.  Rather it seems to have been a case of an empire builder who became intoxicated by raw power and wealth.  He controlled not only a cluster of physical congregations in the Seattle area, but his influence stretched world-wide through successful on-line franchising of his preaching.

What was the secret of Driscoll’s success before he came to grief?  One secret of the attractiveness of his preaching was that he was frequently prepared to speak about an area of life that most of us, understandably, have shied away from when in the pulpit – sex and its enjoyment in married life.   For Driscoll there was a biblical duty for all couples to go into marriage with a determination to enjoy it in all its physical potential.  In short Driscoll was fascinated, some would say obsessed, by the sexual aspect of married life.  Making so much of the physical aspects of marriage, was a kind of exploration into what might be described as sacred pornography.  He made the most of passages in the Song of Songs to explore the physical side of married life.  It is not to be wondered at that his audience, consisting mainly of those in their twenties and thirties, were captivated and enthralled at his preaching. 

The book by Jessica Johnson that discusses these ideas of Driscoll has the intriguing title Biblical Porn.  This was published at the end of last year and it gives us detailed material about much of the teaching at Mars Hill.  The emphasis of the book is not however an analysis of texts and Driscoll’s use of them.   More importantly for our purposes, it explores the way that these teachings impacted on the individuals who heard them and tried to live by them.

We have already hinted at the fact that a preacher, who uses passages from the Song of Songs, may be appealing to the prurient levels of the personality.  Ostensibly Driscoll was teaching his young hearers about ‘biblical marriage’.  What he was doing at another level was to draw these young people into a trap of his making.  His preaching was, in other words, an effective scheme to gain power for himself.   Having gained their curiosity and attention, the next stage was to put the men and the women into confessional groups.  Here they were expected to ‘confess’ their sexual sins, whether fantasising about members of the opposite sex, pornography, pre-marital relationships or other activities deemed to be sinful.  Having engaged in this opening up, the members were then effectively in state of bondage to the leadership.  From that point on, all their future sexual activity would be under scrutiny.  Driscoll also seems to have freely used the information garnered in the confession sessions.  This came up as illustrative material in follow-up sermons.  The ‘sins’ and weaknesses of congregational members were also packaged up and effectively sold on to be ‘entertainment’ for Driscoll’s followers all round the world. 

The ideal of biblical marriage which Driscoll claimed to want for his followers also did not prove to be easily obtainable.  Although he extolled how wonderful it was to enjoy ‘biblical sex’, one imagines that there would have been frequent cases of ‘performance anxiety’ on the part of the men.  Worse still were the potential pitfalls for the women.  Not only were they enjoined to be constantly at the disposal of their menfolk for sexual purposes, they were also held to be in some way responsible if the men strayed into pornography or looking at other women.  There is a lot in the sermons about women needing to make themselves seductively attractive and alluring as a way of keeping their men from straying. 

Driscoll’s control over those who had bought into his ideas for biblical marriage had the hall-marks of a typical cult.  The original lure was the titillation of listening to sexually-explicit sermons.  This was followed by the time of confession.  Once anyone had arrived at this point, it was almost impossible to draw back.  The church now had control over them through knowing many of their guilt-laden secrets.  All that remained was for them to try and attain the goal that had originally sounded so wonderful, biblical marriage.  If they failed, as many of them must inevitably have done, they were held in this permanent thrall of feeling defeated.  This would make them still more dependent on the leadership to help them move forward in some way.  As with members of a cult, this dependence on the leadership would have been laced with a deep sense of guilt and fear.  Many of them realised by now that giving away their sexual privacy had not been a good idea.  Every one of these Mars Hill members should have had, in the beginning, a notice on their bedroom doors which stated quite clearly: ‘Keep out, our sex life is none of your business.’

Allowing a church to get deeply involved with the sex life of its members is always going to be a hazardous and potentially harmful activity.  Of course, there will be times when a church leader is forced to say that betrayal or sexual misbehaviour by a congregant is an issue which needs to be faced and dealt with.  The more pervasive sins that are encountered in a day-to-day situation will be the ones that relate to greed, selfishness or cruelty.  Thanks to the public discourse of many conservative Christians, many people regard Christianity as only ever concerned about sexual sin.   This is a very damaging to the Christian cause.  It is also a gross distortion to the forms of behaviour that Jesus sought to outlaw.  He was far more interested in exposing hypocrisy and power abuse (Matthew 23).  When an excessive preoccupation with sexual behaviour is encouraged by Christian leaders, the truly important moral issues of the day are overlooked.

Mark Driscoll is a good example of how easy it is to get people feeling energised by playing the ‘sex card’.  This made sure that his churches were places to attract plenty of attention, as well as arousing a maelstrom of feelings and passions among his hearers.  Something similar seems to be happening every time a conservative preacher or church leader today talks about LGBT issues in a condemnatory way.  People are made to feel strongly because talk of sexual behaviour always stirs people in a deeply personal area of their lives.  What we see, when petitions are signed against liberal bishops, is the manipulation and stirring of strong human passions using rhetorical devices.  Anglican Christianity is cheapened and discredited when it indulges in this kind of rousing of primal passion by popular preachers.  We need, for issues as important as these, clear and calm discussion to replace the cheap and ill-thought out use of mass control techniques.    

I have recently encountered the work of Professor Gordon Turnbull, the internationally acclaimed expert on the topic of trauma.  His professional training is that of a psychiatrist but, unlike the majority in his profession, he has always used the minimum of drug therapy with his patients.  In focusing on treating trauma and PTSD, he has changed the lives of many.  He has not just brought relief and healing to his patients but has succeeded in changing some of the attitudes of his notoriously conservative profession.  

Turnbull’s 2011 book, Trauma, is part autobiography and part exploration of the therapy that can be offered to many sufferers of post-traumatic stress.  Having read the book over the past few days on Kindle, I find that my brain is now buzzing with ideas as to how Turnbull’s thinking and theoretical models illuminate many of the problems of spiritual and sexual abuse in the churches. There are many ideas to be shared but here I can only touch on a few.  One major claim made by Turnbull is that significant trauma is something that touches up to half the British population.  This is something he brings out in an internet discussion with Rob Hopkins. Trauma is the consequence not only of car accidents, plane crashes and episodes of war but it can be the result of everyday episodes of controlling behaviour.  If one person controls the life of another over a period, there can be profound effects on an individual’s ‘psychology and maturation’.   Taking this further we can see that society provides many opportunities for people to become victims of trauma within socially approved institutions.  We ‘allow’ husbands to control their wives or adult children their parents, all within the parameters of legally tolerated behaviour.  Readers of this blog will not be surprised to note that I began to think immediately of the ways that churches can be guilty of trauma-inducing behaviour.  The church does little to question congregations where the Bible is used as a tool of intimidation.  Acceptable behaviour within some traditions includes the constant reminder of the existence of hell and how eternal damnation awaits those who stray from a narrowly defined path of behaviour.   Although these applications of his ideas are not found in the book, I am sure that Turnbull would identify ‘Jane’ as a sufferer of PTSD. Her reported ‘glazing’ and ‘dissociation’ appear to be a common feature of post-traumatic experience.  They are part of the survival method used by the brain to try to process experiences of violent attack from the outside.

There is a lot of information about the physiology of trauma in both the book and the internet article.  One key message that I picked up from both is that a trauma response, such as PTSD, is in no way to be identified as a mental illness.  It is rather to be understood as the way a brain attempts to cope with traumatic or stressful events.   Stress events naturally range in their severity from the mild to the severe.  When these events go beyond a certain point in severity or length of exposure, something gives way.  The fight-flight response is activated first.  If this is ineffective, a freeze response may take over.

Turnbull describes the way that many people are affected by trauma more or less continuously.  This would apply typically to women in violent marriages or people who live in dangerous neighbourhoods.  Such people would be in a state of ‘hyper-vigilance’ and exhibit signs of paranoia in their day to day interaction with others.   A constant sense of danger will over-stimulate the brain into a kind of overdrive of alertness and stress.

Living with constant stress is, to put it mildly, detrimental to good health.  The body will typically look for addictive substances as a way of blocking out these internally stressful reactions.  Such addictions carry their own health risks on top of the high blood-pressure, neurological disease and digestive problems that come with high levels of traumatic stress.  Turnbull mentions how nomads in Africa who live without this stress do not suffer from these illnesses. 

One very interesting point in the Hopkins article is the observation made by Turnbull about creativity.  To summarise, he explains how dealing with severe stress will lessen or even destroy creativity.  He takes the example of the NHS.  When a hospital comes into a stressful episode, the ability of the staff to come up with a creative response to the crisis is undermined.  From the outside, solutions might seem easy to put into place.  From the inside, because imagination and creativity is paralysed by the stress, everything becomes harder to solve.

In this short piece I am only able to share a tiny part of what Turnbull has shared.  The main book goes into much more detail about Turnbull’s own life story.  In particular, he records the details of his battles with the medical establishment to change attitudes and the understanding of trauma and its treatment.  

For the rest of this post, I want to reflect on Turnbull’s claim about the ubiquity of trauma and how this may impact our understanding of the Church.  My summary of the situation is that the Church is an unwelcome contributor to the existence of stress in society.  At the same time, it has the resources both to neutralise and heal much of the same trauma and stress that we find all around us.

The first thing to be said is that, at its worst, the Church can be seen as responsible for inducing an environment of fear which contributes to serious and persistent trauma.   When an individual is reminded of the reality of hell every Sunday, that can be considered an example of the persistent control that Turnbull describes as being a cause of trauma.  By contrast Jesus seems to have read Turnbull’s book.  One key message we read in the Gospels is a simple one: ‘Do not be afraid’.  The word that sums up what Jesus came to bring is contained in the Hebrew word ‘shalom’.  This word sums up everything that is an antidote to stress and trauma.  It draws on the idea of reconciled relationships, forgiveness and the freedom that comes when we let go of the urge to have power, domination or control.  When we summarise Christian teaching as being a command to love, we are summarising the impulse to allow everyone, even those we do not like particularly, to flourish and discover their true shalom.  In that peace there is no trauma or stress.  Perhaps shalom is the gift that the Church has to offer to a world where there is so much in the way of trauma and the stress that follows it.

In recent days we have been reading about the letter from 2000 Christians addressed to the Archbishops.  These signatories are arguing that the Church should not allow the flourishing of transgendered individuals.  The existence of such people offends the biblical world view of conservative Christians.  This implied condemnation of people who do not somehow fit a narrow mould of ‘normality’ is, to me, a kind of blasphemy.  From Turnbull’s perspective there is being enacted an attempt to control a group.  In this place of desired control, they are effectively being placed in a situation of trauma.  Thankfully most of them will not willingly surrender to this controlling categorisation.  This is because many other Christians, apart from conservatives, read the gospels in a different way.  For them Jesus speaks of acceptance, tolerance, inclusion and love.   I for one will always want to protect transgendered people from listening to dangerous expressions of traumatic rejection.  I will read the gospel again and again to reassure myself that the Jesus I follow is indeed one who cared about wholeness and deliverance from trauma.  He it is, who invites everyone, rich, poor, male, female, transgendered and every other condition into a place of rest.  ‘Come unto me all ye that are laden (traumatised) and I will give you rest’.

Today, February 1, is the second anniversary of the Channel 4 programme about the John Smyth scandal. In many ways this scandal remains the greatest open wound among Anglican abuse scandals that has yet to heal.  What went on in a hut in a Winchester garden between 1979 and 1981 has never been properly resolved.   Although Smyth acted alone, the way that his actions involved so many others, victims and supporters, is mind-blowing.   Although his behaviour was not actively condoned by anyone else, the networks he belonged to allowed him to escape scrutiny and justice for the rest of his life.  Those who passively supported Smyth have also been allowed to escape questioning.  Although the extent of exactly who knew about his nefarious activities is in dispute, it is apparent that a whole tranche of well-connected Christian individuals did know what was going on.  These people are in some cases still alive, but they have never been questioned in a formal way.  The common denominator was a link with the camps at Iwerne Minster.  Smyth had been chairman of the trustees for these camps, so he would have known and been known by everyone active in this network at the time.  As has been stated on various occasions in this blog and elsewhere, the camps at Iwerne in Dorset brought together, as participants or supporters, a wealthy elite within the evangelical world.  To this day the Titus Trustees continue this same work, the task of evangelising a privileged sector of English society, public school boys.

When the scandal of John Smyth’s behaviour broke with the screening of the Channel 4 programme, everyone expected that there would be a full enquiry about what had been revealed. While the probing eyes of IICSA have been allowed to dig deep into the Chichester Diocese and the Peter Ball affair, no such enquiry has been conducted into the affair of John Smyth. When Smyth died in August last year, a press release from the C/E safeguarding bishop, Peter Hancock, was released.  He stated that ‘It is important now that all those organisations linked with this case work together to look at a lessons learned review, whilst continuing to offer formal and informal support to those who have come forward as survivors.’  The promised enquiry (and the support for survivors) seems to have vanished into thin air.  One of the problems may be that the Titus Trustees, who maintain fierce independence from the wider church when it suits them, may simply have refused to cooperate.   There was also a statement from Archbishop Welby which expressed an unequivocal apology for the role which the Church of England played in this deplorable affair. We might have expected that somewhere in the past two years some practical steps would be taken to begin to put right the appalling legacy of Smith’s toxic behaviour.  But that does not appear to have happened.

There are believed to be at least 20 Smyth victims in Britain at this time. Based on the comments made on Twitter by one of them, Archbishop Welby has not met with any of them personally. I am not here going to get into the argument about how much the Archbishop himself knew of the activities of Smyth before it came into the public domain; even if he did not, it is quite clear that there was a serious conspiracy of silence among many other leading evangelicals in England about the whole matter. This cover-up and denial have exacerbated the pain of Smyth’s victims.  Simultaneously a necessary challenge to the corrupt culture within evangelicalism which allowed Smyth’s toxic beliefs to flourish, has never been properly aired.

What could have happened in the past two years to make the Smyth episode resolve itself in some way rather than fester like a tank of stagnant water? I have a few suggestions.

• The Church of England even though it was not responsible for Smyth in a formal way, should, in the spirit of Welby’s apology, hold an enquiry. This would allow the questioning of key witnesses to establish who knew what and when.  Several of the members of Smyth’s network which drew up the Ruston report in 1982 are still alive and none have given any public account of what they knew. The ability of Smyth to flee to Africa subsequently and be financially sustained by a group of wealthy evangelical sponsors, especially the Coleman family, needs to be properly explored.

• The second area, which needs to be explored by an enquiry, is the aberrant theology which undergirded Smyth’s behaviour. The biblical quotations with which Smyth intimidated his victims need to be understood. If there are still any evangelicals who believe such things as painful chastisement being of spiritual benefit, let them come forward and argue these extraordinary notions. If they disagree with these ideas, then that also needs to be heard.  We need to know in 2019 that such toxic ideas about suffering and salvation have no place even in the darkest places of the Christian imagination. By allowing Smyth to flee the country and by sending considerable sums of money to support him, parts of the evangelical establishment seem never to have distanced themselves from him and his ideas right up to the time of his death. We need to understand more fully what this long-term support of Smyth by prominent and wealthy evangelicals implies about their own involvement in this dark area of Christian history.

• The third area of action that is needed is for the Titus Trustees to accept some responsibility for the care and support of those who suffered so grievously as the consequence of the incompetence of their predecessors on the Iwerne Trust.  It has been noted that the Titus Trustees have control over considerable sums of money. They should be shamed into making a substantial contribution to the psychological welfare of Smyth’s victims. If they do not, their future work and the work of the Iwerne camps will be permanently tainted by their historic association with the activities of John Smyth. Is that what they really want to hand on to the next generation of their campers whom they hope to influence in the future?

Two years have passed since the Channel 4 programme and we are still waiting for some movement to take place.  We look to the Titus Trustee as inheritors of the Iwerne tradition or to the Church of England, some of whose members helped to promote Smyth and his dangerous ideology. If nothing is done, one wonders how peace can ever return to the Church.  There is still a bitter legacy to be addressed – a legacy involving brutal physical abuse, inflicted in the name of a corrupt theology.   We are still waiting for the process of healing to  begin.

Every so often we read a story in the press which makes us feel pity and anger at the same time.  A story that can inspire these contradictory feelings in us might typically involve a young man who has got on the wrong side of the law after joining a gang on an urban housing estate.  The gang has then led him into a culture of violence and anti-social behaviour.  This culture that he has now made his own has had the result that he is being charged with carrying an offensive weapon and dealing in drugs.  There is public anger at this behaviour and this anger calls out for punishment.  At the same time there is another kind of anger inside us.  This is the anger at the overall situation which incubates a life with so little to look forward to in the future.  This second strand of anger is suffused with pity as one thinks of a mother who may have struggled against all the odds to keep a young boy away from the fascinations of gangs and knives. 

From the point of view of the law, such cases have no ambiguity.  The young man, having reached the age of maturity, must face the full legal consequences of his actions.   If he is locked up in prison, our first kind of anger is assuaged.  The verdict appeals to our sense of justice being vindicated.  But, as we all know, our feelings in a case like this are far from simple.  Assenting to this legal response to the crime does not satisfy and assuage all that we really feel in a case like this.

The feelings of a sympathetic bystander towards a case of gang violence are not easy to resolve.    Although justice, in accordance to the laws of the land, has been meted out, we know or suspect that there are many aspects to the story which will never be revealed to the public domain.   There will probably be a combination of many burdens that the young man has had to carry – poverty, addiction, failure in parenting, an absent father, a poor education.  In short, a young person has faced every form of deprivation.  The way he has behaved is far from surprising.  He is guilty, but the guilt he bears is somehow different from the guilt of a privileged individual who, from a place of privilege, has deliberately chosen to kick over the traces.

The clear calm declaration by the legal system that a particular individual is guilty of a crime, provides the rest of us with a label to place on the condemned person.    But even now we should hesitate before placing the sentenced individual into a place that is utterly apart from the position we occupy.  The deeply unsettling question that we may ask in this situation is this.   How would we, having travelled along the same trajectory of life chances, have behaved in this situation?  How can we be sure that, just because of our more favoured circumstances, we would have avoided this kind of behaviour which has led to time in prison?

How many of us have travelled in our imagination to a place of cultural and spiritual emptiness which is occupied by many of the very poor?  How would we cope?  If we had stripped away every advantage we may possess in terms of education, intelligence, emotional stability and mental health, where would we be?  We would, no doubt, be a different person.  Would that difference make us still able to function as a moral being and is there a place that is beyond conscience and human sensitivity?  I am not aware of anyone who really discusses this conundrum.  I for one would never want to carry a knife or indeed use any form of violence against others.   Yet I can imagine being suffused with violent anger against other people and prepared to defend family and home if under attack.  Because this has not happened, these emotions have been kept back.  Sometimes they might be artificially and temporarily stirred by reading a novel or watching a film; they do not form part of day to day reality. 

The fear that I carry, is that were I to be stripped of all my advantages of education and upbringing, I would not be any different from the convicted gang member. This raises all kinds of questions about whether Christian virtue is equally accessible for all.  Is a learned set of responses which some are taught, and some not?   The story of Adam and Eve seemed to imply a universal moral code available for all.  Life experience tells me that it is likely far more complicated than that.

There is another group of people in society who make, from my perspective, perverse but perhaps understandable choices.  These are the individuals who find themselves victims of cults – harmful religious or political groups.  At some point in their lives, they have made a choice to become part of this kind of group, unless they were born into them.  The choice to become part of any such group is deemed by the law to be an adult choice and thus they can be ignored unless, in rare circumstances they are led to do something criminal.  As adults the only protection the law offers is to protect them from open obvious harm. Most cultic-type groups stay the right side of the boundary and do not abuse their members in an open way.  But, over a period, harm does take place and cult victims will quietly and subtly be deprived of many of the things that make them fully human.  They will typically lose self-esteem, confidence. independence of thought and creativity. Some will be sexually abused, and the majority will lose all their money. Eventually they may end up as clones of the group, tied into the psychological profile of the leader.  As such they will be hard to reach by people outside the group.  Conversations will be stilted and lacking in spontaneity, humour or warmth.  It is tempting to walk away from such people because they have made themselves so hard to reach.

Any success in communicating with people in closed groups, gangs or cults, will require us to exercise our imaginations to understand how they have arrived where they are.  We may be able to see that what they have become, is largely because of the circumstances of their lives.  Having seen this, we will be more reluctant to draw a boundary between our world and theirs.  We all to some degree embody the outworking of our life stories.  Sometimes, serious wrong-doing emerges, and this has to be punished.  But who can really say where the boundary lies between a predictable response to a poor background and actual evil?  Fortunately, no one, not even in the justice system, is required to make that precise judgement.   Equally no one is required to determine how much, if any, responsibility a spiritually abused person has to carry for their original decision to join the harmful group.  The focus should always be, not on laying any blame, but on finding ways of helping them leave, if that is what they want to do.   Supporting such people in an attitude of total non-judging acceptance is the focus of this blog.  This blog is also committed to making this phenomenon of spiritual abuse and bondage better understood.  We have the example of Jesus who called individuals to a new outlook and a new beginning and all that is implied in the rich word metanoia.  In our longing to help people who are in different ways trapped by gang entrapment or group bondage, we too can be enablers of the same metanoia.

The Church Times (January 25^th) has published an interview between its reporter Hattie Williams and Meg Munn, the new chair of the National Safeguarding Panel (NSP).  This Panel is part of the byzantine complexity of safeguarding structures in the Church of England which I tried to interpret in an earlier post.  Hitherto, to use an analogy, the Church’s safeguarding industry appears to be like a cluster of small sailing ships all going in the same direction but with their riggings hopelessly entangled together.  Now with the ship being captained by Meg Munn, the NSP, we can at last begin to see clear water between the ships.  In a word, Meg Munn has declared her determination to strike out to provide a clear independent voice on behalf of good practice and the needs of survivors.

Two areas of interest which are particularly striking, and which are discussed in the interview, are summed up in the words, independence and depth.  The first of these words sums up the importance of striking out from existing vested interests and taking a new stance.   Those of us who listened to the IICSA hearings on the Diocese of Chichester must have been struck by the cosy collusion among those in authority that went on over decades.  The system seemed to protect its own because everyone with any information was caught up somewhere in a spider’s web of loyalty, deference and vested interest.  There was no one outside that network that could speak truth to power.  Meg is unsure whether the system of historical enmeshment needs an independent national body to oversee it, or whether the existing structures, diocesan and national, can be made to work.  The fact that the question is being properly asked is indeed a sign of hope for the future.

Another sign of real hope is that the NSP is to meet six times a year.  This will concentrate minds and memories as bi-monthly meetings are less likely to let decisions go cold and ideas slip away from attention.  The body will certainly have greater influence if its discussions are constantly placed on the agenda of the national church.  The House of Bishops and General Synod are far less likely to ignore the safeguarding agenda if the Panel is constantly coming up with new ideas and proposals for their consideration.

The second of the two words I mentioned is the word depth.  Hitherto, this blog has noted that the National Safeguarding Team (NST) based at Church House has had no specialist in therapeutic matters working with it.  This has sent a clear message that safeguarding is all about management, structures and good practice for those working to prevent future abuse incidents.  The concerns of survivors seemed to be, if not ignored, certainly placed low on the agenda.  I expressed the opinion that the Church should set up a completely independent body with the sole task of caring for survivors.  Given the fact that the team working for the NST must be costing in excess of a million a year, it seemed reasonable for the church to pay for a small team to coordinate therapeutic care for survivors.  Meg’s passion to understand the impact of abuse ‘from the inside’ is very welcome.  The interview revealed a personal link to experiences of abuse in that she has two family members, each abused ‘horrifically’ by a Catholic priest in Australia.  It is hard to see how the Panel will ever be allowed to stray from an awareness of that experience to focus merely on structural matters and management of systems.

To summarise, the interview with Meg Munn gives us the sense that the future of safeguarding and the care of abuse survivors is a brighter one than in the past.  The option, which many of us favour, for an independent body to oversee the church’s work in this area, is under consideration.   Even if this proposal does not come to pass, we all have a sense that survivors have a real champion in Meg.  In a blog or two back, I wrote about the importance of creating a bridge which needed to be crossed between the world of efficient safeguarding and the world of caring effectively for survivors.  All too easily in the world of safeguarding, the ‘experts’ live on one side of the river or the other.  Few of them, because of professional background or intellectual training, want to span this particular gap.  In Meg Munn we seem to have someone who is willing and able to cross over this bridge so that the Church can be taught to fulfil its vocation both to protect the weak and to minister and care for those who have suffered in the past.

At a time when political authority seems to be unable to assert itself and rules and hierarchies are everywhere challenged, it is time to ask some questions about what might be going on in church and society.  Traditionally there were patterns of deference which acted like a kind of glue holding institutions together.  People belonging to structures of society, like a school or a church, knew exactly how authority functioned and who was in charge.  Although the individual member might have some role to play within the whole, all major decisions were made by the people at the top.  That pattern of deferring to our seniors and betters also gave us a sense of security.  We could rely on their greater experience and knowledge.

The current state of collapse in our political institutions through the Brexit impasse is paralleled by a new stridency in the way that our church authorities are being constantly challenged.  Last week the story covered by this blog was the confrontation by the 104 clergy of the Oxford diocese against their bishops.  Whatever else was going on in the letter that was presented, it would be true to say that old-fashioned deference was far from the minds of those who signed the letter.  There was more than a hint of hubris in the tone of the letter.  It was saying ‘we have the bible and we control the purse strings.  Do what we want or else.’  A letter in the Church Times as well as the arguments presented by this blog argued that the level of support was not perhaps not as deep as the signatories claimed.   A naked threat was still there.  It is not an easy time to be a senior churchman or a politician for that matter.

I began to think about this idea of deference as it touches our church and political life.  The older we are, the more that this deference is going to be part of our mental structure of thinking.  Just as obedience was drummed into us as children, so we accepted a naturally hierarchical model in society and in church.  The words of the Prayer Book catechism come to mind.  (Yes, I was made to learn it by heart!) ‘My duty towards my neighbour is to …..submit myself to all my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters: to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters’.  Reading these words after sixty years helps me to appreciate what a different society we live in now.  In many ways life then was easier for the ‘betters’ and those they controlled.  Everyone knew their place and so there was less conflict or challenge to the status quo. 

How have things really changed in our churches?  The most obvious thing to be seen now is that more opinions are being heard in church discussions.  Lay insights are being taken seriously.  The thoughts of bishops are not given automatic priority in the marketplace of discussion.  The internet has also increased the cacophony of voices being heard within the church.  A blogger in a remote part of the world can say things that may be heard in bishop’s palaces.  Deference is not a word that would describe much of what is going on today in our church life. 

The pattern of old-fashioned deference and obedience does however continue in one area of the church.  Ironically the congregations that do the most to question and undermine the authority of the leaders that oversee their churches are those that practise the greatest level of control over the details of members’ lives.   I am of course referring to conservative evangelical groups.  Up and down the country we find places where high levels of control and obedience are enforced.  While the local leadership is questioning and challenging the bishops set over them, a tight level of supervision is often exercised over the people in the pew at the same time.   This will particularly touch on such things as acceptable beliefs, money choices and the conduct of intimate sexual relationships.  Obviously, this kind of biblical control is less common in Anglican settings than it is in the independent Pentecostal/evangelical congregations. But it still exists as a strong feature of church life in many centres.  To take up membership of one of these churches, Anglican or not, one is required to regress, in terms of social attitudes, at least 40 years.  There, deference and obedience are being demanded, not to ‘masters and betters’, but to a cadre of controlling clergy and ministers in the name of biblical truth.  You will be expected to obey, defer to authority and allow your whole life to be controlled in exchange for the promise of salvation. 

The deference and obedience that was built into the catechism generation has long gone.  Politicians, police chiefs and church leaders no longer can assume the respect of the rest of society.  It is only in conservative Christian congregations, some Anglican, that such attitudes continue to exist.  Most of us, who do not belong to churches in this tradition, would claim that such deference is a harsh form of control rooted in fear and paranoia.  Whatever we think of the failure of deference in society at large, this fear-laden Christian version that is found in conservative congregations is not highly regarded by the rest of society.  We would also claim that it has little or nothing to offer to the enjoyment and celebration of ‘life in all its fullness’.

Every so often I am contacted by an individual over something with abuse or a safeguarding issue.  Sometimes I can suggest things or people to talk to in order to receive help.  On other occasions I am left stuck.

I want to put on-line the outlines of a case with the hope that someone will know what to do and how to activate the processes of the Church of England to support a vulnerable adult.  In this case things have now reached an impasse and I suspect that the case will in fact only ever be resolved when it is allowed to be handed over to the secular authorities.  A church in the south of England has been the spiritual home of a middle-aged woman (we will call her Jane) for a number of years.  Recently a very old friend of this woman re-established contact with her after a long time.  She had known her well in the past and they had both attended an evangelical church in London for many years.   The friend noticed that Jane had suffered a personality change of some kind and stopped communicating easily.  She had moved to a smaller house in the area, and the move was visibly assisted by key people in Jane’s church.  While Jane was serving the church as minutes secretary for the Church Council there was something odd and secretive about this role.  Her friend noticed by chance on her computer that there were two directories on her word processor.  One was marked ‘minutes’ and the other ‘changed minutes’.   As the friend knew that the church concerned had been failing to publish its accounts for more than a decade and large sums of money had been acquired via undocumented loans (some of which the contributing churches were unaware had not been listed in congregational accounts) and then not properly audited, she was alarmed.  As a church member elsewhere, she knew that the absence of these accounts and the secretive nature of church affairs was irregular and contrary to legal and church protocol.  When Jane seemed unwilling to talk to her about any of these things, her friend began to suspect that there was some system of control over her in operation. 

The Church of England follows the State in declaring that some adults be categorised as vulnerable.  Jane’s friend began to believe that the excessive degree of paranoia and fearfulness together with high suggestibility were evidence that Jane was becoming or had become a vulnerable adult.  She had signed documents in the past that she acknowledged she did not understand but said the ‘Minister had asked her to sign them’ so she presumed it was all right. Jane seemed totally unable to make any decisions on her own without reference to others in the church.  While Jane seemed pleased to renew an old friendship, there were large parts of her personality that were out of reach.  She appeared devoid of emotion and was often found “disassociating” – (seeming glazed).  The friend wondered whether this was a case of spiritual abuse by the church.  The changes to Jane’s personality, when she discussed them with others, suggested a clear case of institutional coercion and control.  Normally when this diagnosis is given, it is a man who is pressurising the woman in this way.  Was this a case of coercion and control by a church?

Jane’s friend decided that she had to do something about the situation.  She consulted the web-site for her diocese and contacted the local Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser (DSA).   She was impressed by the speed and efficiency with which he responded to her request for help.  He took extensive notes and promised not only to make enquiries about Jane but to ask questions about the other issues connected with the church and investigate the possible financial irregularities including where any Accounts might have been lodged.  He also promised to find the appropriate police contact to hand over potential evidence that had been gathered. (The relevant Bishop has also said in emails that he thought his DSA could point her to the correct police contacts to assist.)

The friend received the impression that this kind of case had piqued the DSA’s interest and that he was going to give it plenty of attention.  He took copies of all the financially irregular and other legal documents shown to him.  She heard from him once by email to say that he was trying to make progress and then the case was suddenly shut down.  She had an email to say that she should visit her local police station or call 101.  This response had the feeling of being formulaic as her local police station had closed years before. The friend’s judicial contacts confirmed that “someone must have got to him”.

What are we to make of this story?  It would seem that the DSA had been ordered by someone in the system not to disturb the status quo.  Something in the Diocesan structure was more important than the safeguarding of a vulnerable woman. Who is one to appeal to in such a situation?  The independence of dioceses is celebrated but we can we can see that this story strongly supports the contention that independent oversight is needed.  Why should anyone in the diocesan structure be able to close down, without explanation, a legitimate concern about a vulnerable adult caught up in an apparently abusive church situation? 

The evidence that has been shared with me in the past about Jane leaves me with little doubt that the church concerned is one that exploits its members in a quasi-cult manner.  Such churches sit lightly on the structures of authority, whether secular or ecclesiastical.  Perhaps what I am raising is the impotence of the system of safeguarding to oversee churches that practise spiritual abuse.  About twelve months ago there was a flurry of discussion about the existence and meaning of spiritual abuse, occasioned by the Timothy Davis case.  Perhaps DSAs don’t feel equipped to deal with this situation as it touches on theological issues.  But whatever else is true, there is a fragile vulnerable woman who has been robbed of her confidence and peace of mind to become a shadow of her former self.  All this has been done apparently by a church.  The Diocese where she lives and the DSA do not want to investigate or help.  As they cannot or will not do anything to investigate or protect her, is there anywhere else that can assist in this situation? Is this a case where a safeguarding body, independent of the church’s structures, should be allowed to step in?

Whenever I write something about the experience of abuse survivors in the church, I try very hard not to offend, accidentally, sensitivities in this group.  I still, nevertheless, dare to enter these dangerous waters because I know that overall it is important for supporters, such as myself, to try to cross a bridge of understanding.  The supporters of survivors always need to have improved awareness and insight into what has been taken away from them- a courageous group of people who have suffered.

One theme that also comes up frequently in the survivors’ testimonies is that much additional pain has been experienced through post-abuse encounters with professionals.  These are the individuals and institutions whose task it is to resolve, in a variety of ways, the mess that has been caused by an abusive event.  A problem inevitably exists when one or more of those involved have little understanding of the turmoil that is going on inside the survivor.  I have been reflecting on this topic and it seems that many of these professionals, through no fault of their own, do not have the set of skills to make a survivor feel better or even safe. It is hardly surprising that a lawyer whose task it is to question the survivor closely to find out if he/she is telling the truth will unsettle and even re-traumatise the individual.   No blame is to be attached to the lawyers themselves as compensation claims need to follow certain procedures. We might hope for a better reception for survivors from bishops and other church leaders who hear the story of an abuse at first hand.  Some of them, misled by discredited legal advice from 2007, have sought to apply excessive distance and detachment when hearing these stories.  Also, an instinct to preserve the institution rather than care for the sufferer before them has all too often created a stock response.  If the survivor manages to get through and survive all these encounters so that compensation is paid through some negotiated settlement, the problems are still not over. Serious psychological wounds remain.   In an optimal situation we would hope that the right kind of psychotherapeutic counselling would be offered. Finding a psychotherapist who understands both the nature of the abuse and the religious dimension in which it took place is not an easy task.   Issues, like the collapse of trust between the suffering Christian and God, as well with the Church that has betrayed them, need to be tackled.  That is not an easy area to negotiate, especially if the therapist is not a person of faith.

As I thought about this mismatch between survivors and the various professionals that are encountered along the path to recovery, it became obvious why so many survivors in this situation become re-traumatised.  Many highly skilled people are meeting these survivors, but the skills they possess are not those of healers. The adversarial atmosphere of some of the legal processes and the atmosphere of disbelief sometimes projected by those protecting the institution is a tough one. What, I wondered, can be done about this situation?

As I have explained elsewhere on this blog, I am a member of an international organisation known as ICSA (International Cultic Studies Association). This organisation studies cultic matters both academically and from the point of view of best practice in therapy. For three days each year I attend the annual conference either in Europe or the States, listening to the wisdom of many experts in this field of cultic studies. Many of those attending are professionals who help survivors to rebuild their lives after a traumatic experience of being members of a cult. I know that the word itself, ‘cult’, is a contentious one but it is a useful shorthand word.  It describes any group which abuses and manipulates its members in a political or religious context.  While in the group, the members become locked in an unhealthy relationship with a narcissistic leader and surrender much, if not most, of their decision-making capacity to the collective.  Sexual abuse is one possible scenario but more common is the debilitating emotional dependence that is built up over a period.  This makes it very hard to leave. Cult survivors can be thus crippled, emotionally, intellectually and socially in a variety of ways. I see many parallels between such cult survivors and ex-members of spiritually abusive churches.  These include those communities where some individuals experience the devastation of sexual abuse.

In the States where cults and other abusive organisations are far more numerous than in this country, there is, what one could call a cult survivor industry.  By this I mean there exist numerous professionals right across the country whose life’s work is to help those who have emerged from cultic entrapment and religious/spiritual abuse.  They have moved on a long way from the old crude techniques of ‘de-programming’.   This wisdom that now exists across the States in this area has barely penetrated our own country.  The difference between the UK and the US is that while there are many therapists at work here, few of them are familiar at an academic level with the latest thinking in these areas.   What are the qualities of these post-cult therapists in the States? The first thing which is striking, is that many, if not the majority, of therapists working in this field are cult survivors themselves.  Along the path of their own recovery, they have received training in psychotherapy, psychodynamic treatment and any number of psychological techniques.   Importantly they offer to their patients both a thorough understanding of the processes of healing as well as an in-depth appreciation of what it means to be a survivor of a dangerous religious/political group. They also know first-hand what it means to be groomed by an abuser. There are a few places in the UK where this holistic expertise is known.   I am aware of important work and teaching going on at Salford University as well as Manchester Metropolitan University. But, as far as I know, the UK safeguarding institutions, locally and nationally, do not reach out to appropriate the research and academic excellence of these centres.  We desperately need the input of energy and excellence from those in touch with American expertise to help transform what we have to offer to abuse survivors in this country.

Survivors of sexual abuse within a religious setting deserve to encounter, at the earliest moment, the very best in the way of therapeutic advice and support. This post is suggesting that extensive new skills here in Britain and on the other side of the Atlantic should be brought in as soon as possible to help the process.  It is not only the professionals who work in this field who need this input.  The whole church needs to have a better understanding of the way that such things as mind-control, emotional manipulation and grooming operate.  Bringing new training techniques into this area will not just help professionals and abused individuals, but the whole ‘culture’ of the church will begin to understand these matters better.  As we all know, it is often the passivity of the bystanders that causes a great deal of the of the damage to abuse survivors.   Let us hope that a new generation of safeguarding experts will be encouraged to reach out to embrace what is already in existence for the task of healing those who have been damaged and wounded by spiritual and sexual abuse.