In 2003, I left the Church of England for what turned out to be a pre-retirement post in the Episcopal Church in Scotland. It was in the days before Common Tenure for the clergy had been introduced. Before CT a vicar or a bishop had rights and privileges of freehold and this made him/her almost unsackable. The Church had, some years earlier, succeeded in setting an age limit forcing clergy to retire at 70. By 2003 there were only a small number of clerics who had been appointed before 1975 that could hang on in their posts until a date of their own choosing. The history of the Church of England might well be different if one particular diocesan bishop, appointed in the early 70s, had been forced to retire at a seemly age.

Common Tenure, as a structure for managing the terms of employment for incumbents and bishops, has now become almost universal in the Church of England. Here and there you will find vicars who were appointed under the old rules and thus still enjoy the considerable privileges of the freehold system. The vast majority of clerics now hold their posts subject to the conditions set out in the new legislation. I do not propose to spell out all these terms. Suffice to say, CT represents a considerable weakening of the old freehold system. The clergy are promised, in return, a degree of support by those who employ them. Each clergyperson is also to be supported by members of the senior Diocesan staff and assessed on a regular basis. But alongside new systems of support come new methods for maintaining discipline among the clergy. The rules and procedures of the so-called Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM) came into effect in 2006.

The process of writing about and supporting survivors of church abusive power has brought me into touch with CDM in several of its aspects. It was referred to several times in Matt’s Ineson’s story. I had not realised, until reporting Matt’s account for the first time, that it is possible for anyone to take out a complaint against a cleric using a downloadable form. Matt used the legislation to make complaints against several bishops for their numerous failures to pass on his disclosures of sexual abuse. This ability on the part of anyone to make a complaint about a bishop under the terms of the CDM was something new to me. One of the comments on my post about Matt corrected me on my assumption that CDM complaints against bishops were hitherto unheard of. One had been used against Bishop Wallace Benn around 2011.

Looking at CDM with the fresh eyes of someone who has only recently encountered it, I am struck by several things. The first thing is that it constitutes a complete legal structure but all of it is managed within the institution of the Church. There are no outside referees like an ombudsman. At the heart of the system is the bishop of the diocese. He has the power, according to a helpful flow-chart issued by the Diocese of Exeter, to declare a case of complaint to be of insufficient interest or substance to take further. Even when the complaint is taken to the next stage the bishop still has the power to take no further action. It is only with the bishop’s consent that the most serious cases come to a tribunal for assessment. These will be the cases that are serious but do not fall under the orbit of criminal law. At each stage the accused/respondent has the right of appeal.

The making a diocesan bishop into a judge/jury over some difficult and intractable situations of misbehaviour by clerics would seem an almost intolerable burden and responsibility. To go back to a point made in an earlier post, how can the chief pastor of the diocese successfully or easily fulfil this role? Do bishops on the eve of their appointments realise how difficult and costly this contradictory role, simultaneously caring and judging, is going to be?

Further points have been raised by others. The fact that the church has created a self-contained legal structure for itself means that the church has to fund a new class of lawyers to service it. Specialist lawyers never come cheap and so, if an accused individual has to face a church tribunal, who pays for his/her defence? What safeguards are in place to protect the individual from bullies and mischief makers that are to be found taking advantage of the system? The unhappy experience of a former Bishop of Gloucester right at the end of his ministry sends a chill through the heart of every serving clergyperson in the Church of England. Every case of false accusation helps to undermine the situation of real victims who look to the church for justice and redress.

The question of financing CDM cases leads into a final thought – the question of delay and time. In the case of a respondent waiting to hear the result of a case against him/her, how long is reasonable? Months of waiting to hear a case will put an almost unbearable strain on the clergyperson and their families. Reading through the pages of legislation that deal with all the issues from original complaint to final resolution suggests that months/years may well have passed. Large sums of money will also have been spent.

I end this short reflection with a question. Has the Church of England created a monster in its system called the Clergy Discipline Measure? Is anyone actively looking to see if a more compassionate structure can be created? Anecdotal evidence suggests that CDM is a cause of a great deal of unhappiness as well as enormous amounts of work and expense for those who administer it. Is it just one more factor that causes many clergy to feel under stress, further lowering their already fragile morale? Perhaps those who have had direct experience of the Measure could write on this post.

Many years ago, when I was an incumbent, I was the victim of a crime. The St George’s flag which flew outside my church was stolen. While most flags of this kind are flown from the top of a tower, the church in Lechlade boasted a spire and so we had to use a flag pole in front of the church building. The churchwarden and I reported the crime to the police and we were assigned a case number for the purposes of an insurance claim. A few weeks later I received a letter in the post from the organisation called Victim Support. Was I, as the victim of a crime, in need of support? At the time, it seemed rather amusing that I might be traumatised by the loss of a flag, but I quickly realised that it was important to respect this approach. Many, if not most crimes, affect people quite badly and it is good to know that there are volunteers prepared to care for individuals who are victims of a criminal act.

The crimes/misdemeanours that I am concerned about today are those that have damaged individuals in a church setting – the abuse, the bullying and the things that so easily go wrong when power is misused. Followers of my blog posts will be already familiar with the numerous permutations of the evil that can be perpetrated on the innocent, even by church people. IICSA and the Press have made us all familiar with some now notorious episodes of wrong-doing and the Church’s weak responses to many of them. Now the Church of England has set up comprehensive safeguarding structures in an attempt to put these incidents firmly into the past. These structures embrace every level of church life, from the local parish church to the House of Bishops. They are designed to offer safety and protection for children and vulnerable adults and protect them from the scourge of sexual abuse. To help us understand how the whole system is supposed to work in practice, the Church published an explanatory booklet last October. It has the uninformative title of Key Roles and Responsibilities of Church Office Holders and Bodies Practice Guidance. This title does not give away its purpose in relation to the Church’s new safeguarding structures. One wonders whether the obscurity of the title was a deliberate ploy to keep this valuable information away from all but those professionally involved in the complex world of Church safeguarding and its implementation.

Why do I bring this document up for examination in my blog? It is because I am curious to see whether the new profession of safeguarding in the Church, with all its various committees, really understands the experience of survivors and victims of sexual abuse. Does the Church propose to parallel Victim Support? Is there anything that responds to the testimony of those who contributed to Andrew Graystone’s powerful booklet, presented to members of General Synod in February? The overall message of that booklet, We Asked for Bread, was that the experience of being ignored by the Church and its officers was far worse than the original experience of abuse.

I spent a hour or more reading Key Roles and I did find some scattered references to survivors and victims. The bulk of the text, however, talks about setting up good professional practice for safeguarding in dioceses and parishes. When speaking about the National Safeguarding Team there was one strange statement. The role of the NST is to ‘develop and implement national survivors engagement and support work’. I am not clear what this pithy statement actually means. It is mentioned alongside twelve other statements about the NST role, none of which mention victims of abuse. The Bishop of the Diocese is required to ‘ensure that the diocese provides arrangements to support survivors of abuse’. Obviously, such arrangements would require funds. But, when we look at the role of the Church Commissioners we only find a reference to funding legal costs ‘for litigation relating to safeguarding cases.’ One wonders why the litigation funds are needed. Are they by chance for funding QCs to defend the Church when survivors begin to seek legal redress in the absence of any other kind of support?

It is when we get to the description of the Diocesan Safeguarding Advisers (DSA) role that we first find some real engagement with the existence and needs of survivors of past sexual abuse. A diocese is required to have in place ‘authorised listeners or an externally provided service to support victims/survivors of church abuse.’ A footnote links this requirement to an earlier document published by the Church in 2011, Responding Well to those who have been Sexually Abused. This earlier document represented a real effort by the Church to spell out a response to the needs of the sexually abused. It was not just focused on survivors of abuse by church leaders but any who had suffered such abuse and who now looked to the church for help. Because this kind of abuse was then not normally linked to church leaders, the 2011 document has none of the defensiveness that has descended on the more recent responses on the part of bishops and senior church people. This earlier document is also not hedged about with the concerns of lawyers and insurance companies. It is able to take a compassionate, pastoral look at abuse and show real concern as well as professional competence in this area. There is insight into such things as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the way that listening is an essential part of responding to a survivor.

The situation is further explained in the appendices of Key Roles when the ‘duties and responsibilities’ of a DSA are spelt out. There are 14 of these. No 5 states that the DSA is to ‘give advice, information and support to victims/survivors of abuse and ensure that the diocese responds well to those who have suffered abuse.’ This requirement, when placed alongside all the other 13, seems to allow some wriggle room for those who do not want to engage properly with the needs of survivors. I have heard of some excellent work by individual DSAs who, without extra funds or professional resources, work hard for victims/survivors. Equally I have heard of DSAs who are so buried beneath the requirements of risk assessments and training courses that they find no time for the care of real survivors.

The sentiments of the 2011 document read like a Church which wants to reach out in compassion to victims of abuse. The 2017 booklet reads like a bureaucratic attempt to tell the world that the Church is behaving legally and correctly. Sadly, what is in fact revealed in 2017 is an institution lacking in soul, one which is desperately trying to defend itself from legal liability and other criticisms such as those that it expects to receive in due time from IICSA.

I began my piece with an example of the way that a secular institution responds to victims of crime. Can the Church really hold its head up high when it cannot better the Victim Support letter that I received all those years ago? In retrospect, even though it was not needed, I honour and respect the efforts of those who reached out to me in this way.

‘The Lord God has given me…… skill to console the weary with a word in the morning’. These are words from Isaiah that were read last Sunday in church. They started me off thinking about what the word ‘weary’ might mean in the context. I realised very quickly that the prophet was not talking about people who had slept badly or worked too hard. He seems to be speaking about people who were demoralised or psychologically defeated. They needed to hear something that would boost their morale. The word morale is most typically used to describe the attitude which is needed in time of war. It is important equally both for fighting troops and the civilians who have remained at home. When there is a collapse in morale, that is often the prelude to defeat. A government will do everything it can to promote this positive state of mind which we call morale, particularly when a nation is going through the crisis of war.

Morale is one of those words which involves a number of facets. For soldiers to feel able to engage in the stressful activity of fighting effectively, their external circumstances must first be OK. They cannot fight if they do not eat properly or do not have dry conditions in which to sleep. Soldiers need also the loving support of family far away. Emails, telephone communication and letters from home are all almost as essential as adequate food. A further vital part of maintaining good morale are the relationships with their fellow soldiers. It is important to have that strong sense of solidarity with others which is so important for mental well-being. The same thing is needed in their relationship with their officers. They need to be able to trust those over them and have confidence in their leadership decisions. Without the companionship and all the other supports I have mentioned, the ordinary soldier would all too easily collapse mentally and psychologically in a situation of stress brought on by battle.

I once asked an Archdeacon about the morale of the clergy he knew. I asked the question how many of the clergy in his area could be said to have good morale. He said about 50%. I went on to ask whether that meant that the other 50% were in low morale. He replied simply yes, but went into no further detail. It is this issue of the morale of Church of England clergy today that I am concerned about. I know that many bishops would claim that all or most of their clergy are in good spirits – their mental health is functioning well, and they are doing an excellent job. My memory of serving as a parish priest for 40 years is that, with one honourable exception, I never felt able to share anything with a bishop which touched on areas of personal vulnerability. In other words, I never wanted to open up to a bishop in a way that might have allowed a pastoral relationship to evolve. The reason for this was not fear or excessive deference. It was simply that I perceived that a bishop, whatever his pastoral gifts, is first and foremost the guardian of the power of patronage in the church. That power, whether a bishop likes it or not, will always create formality and a certain distance in many relationships with their clergy. I cannot be the only member of the clergy who felt it important to keep my head down when around bishops, those who could potentially make or break my professional future. I raise the question whether any bishop in the Church can really be said to know his/her clergy at depth.

In the year 2018 there are many reasons for clergy to feel under constant stress. This can be because the expectations on clergy have increased and the number of churches they have to look after grow ever more numerous. These external sources of stress have to be added to any internal pressures of domestic or psychological strain. When levels of stress go beyond a certain point, they quickly affect morale badly. Given the fact that few clergy admit stress or ‘weariness’, it will never be easy to quantify the problem across the country. There is a lot at stake to ensure that any problems are hidden as long as possible. A clergyman is not only singularly unqualified for other professions, particularly after middle age, he also has his home and the well-being of family to think about. Breakdown or collapse in a clergy person create a situation that is dire. For every member of the clergy who leaves because of some kind of breakdown, there must be others who struggle on with low morale and in a permanent state of being close to the edge of a cliff.

The purpose of writing this blog is simply to suggest that from anecdotal evidence there is a growing crisis of morale among the Church of England clergy. I know that there will be many who will protest this suggestion to be false. Complete evidence for such a suggestion is clearly lacking. The opposite affirmation is also unsupported by available evidence. We have to base our assessment on anecdote and indirect evidence. Even if my surmise is a complete misreading of the available evidence, I believe that it is still right to bring up this issue of morale in the church. As with the issue of past abuses, failure to discuss a topic does not make it go away. We need a system that will allow the airing of this problem without putting the lives and futures of clergy under threat. Clergy, it can be admitted, enjoy a high level of job security. But the price they have to pay for that privilege is, I believe, very high.

Over the next 20 years, I believe that we are going to face several crises within the parish system. The constant adding of extra churches to each benefice is going to cause increasing stress on the smaller numbers of full-time clergy. While there may be more non-stipendiary clergy coming on stream, these will be deployed to prop up what is already an unwieldy system close to collapse. Another Archdeacon I used to know, who worked in a rural diocese, was proud of the fact that he had succeeded in closing over a dozen churches. He had thus relieved the strain on several country benefices. Since he left the area, no further churches had been closed. What he had started was, he felt, a real contribution to the possibility of the very survival of the church in the countryside.

It is the contention of this post that there are many weary clergy in the biblical sense. Much of this weariness is hidden. I have suggested that once again poorly understood power dynamics may lie at the heart of this crisis. Just as the IICSA has shown us how negligent episcopal oversight can hide an epidemic of child sexual abuse for decades, so we see how detachment from the hierarchy can hide from view the real stresses of the parochial system. The revolution that needs to take place has not only to reform the structures but to change some of the unhappy dynamics of communication that exist within the institution itself. Once again, this blog is pleading for a better understanding of the way that power works within the church.

Throughout this year 2018, the Church of England has been facing up to the horrors of past failures in the area of safeguarding. Under the close examination of the Independent Inquiry (IICSA), set up by the Conservative Government of Britain, Catholics and Anglicans have been forced to listen to the accounts of their terrible shortcomings in the realm of child protection. We have read the written findings of the Inquiry in respect of the Catholic institutions of Downside and Ampleforth. Here concern for the welfare and safety of children took second place to the preservation of the monastic establishments in charge of these schools. In due course, we will be reading written reports about what the Inquiry thinks about the conduct of the Church of England in respect of the Diocese of Chichester and the way it handled the serious offending of Bishop Peter Ball. No doubt the incredulous tone of the questioning lawyers on the Inquiry will be translated into a serious critique of church functioning at every level. Relatively few people listened to the evidence of the Chichester and Bishop Peter hearings as they were under way. Many more, however, will be exposed to the full sordid details of these cases when the written reports appear in the months ahead.

While the IICSA process has been going on in England, something similar has been completed on the other side of the world in Australia. The Royal Commission on Child Abuse in Australia has come to an end after several years of hearings and work. It has produced a massive amount of paper, with reports criticising many institutions including the Catholic and the Anglican churches. In all, the Commission has identified 16,000 child victims. It has proposed that the organisations named in the abuse reports should contribute to a massive national fund of £2.2 billion pounds to offer redress to surviving victims. This allows each identified victim to receive up to £84,000. This will allow them to receive counselling and provide other forms of care for their needs. All the Churches identified as complicit are required to provide substantial, even crippling, contributions from their funds. They see their contribution as of vital importance to indicate that they are serious in their expressions of regret for what has taken place in the past.

This cataclysmic effect on the assets of Australian Anglican Church can be felt by looking at one small diocese, the Diocese of Tasmania. My interest in this diocese is not just because of the terrible financial burden with which they have to cope, but in the way that the Bishop and his people seem to realise the importance of getting things right with the past even though much of their assets of buildings and money will be wiped out at a stroke. A diocese with 43 church buildings is going to have to raise £8 million as its contribution to the national fund. Richard Condie, the Bishop, has written sensitively and movingly to his people about the issues that they face. It requires his diocese to sell almost half their buildings and land, including church buildings and rectories. He knows that many church people will protest at the decision of the Synod to do this. People are asking him: why should the church today have to suffer because of the sins of other people in the past? His answer is a challenging one. He says that the sacrifice that has to be made is ‘the way of the cross’. He goes on: ‘The Lord Jesus suffered for the sins of the whole world, including mine and yours, so that we could find forgiveness and restoration. In a small way our sacrifice now models his sacrifice for us. It is a profoundly Christian thing to do’.

I leave my reader to imagine the pressure on a English Bishop and a Diocesan Synod if there was a proposal to sell off half the diocesan assets to put right the abusive behaviour of church people in the past. The fact that Bishop Condie has so far prevailed in his planned proposals suggests that in Australia at any rate, Anglican Christians are taking the issue of past abuses very seriously indeed. The sentiments of understanding towards survivors also confirms this impression. The Bishop talks of ‘reaching out to survivors of sexual abuse who have been hurt in our churches in this way. Many survivors have lifelong scars including psychological distress, depression and anxiety. Many have failed marriages and have found it hard to keep meaningful employment because of their trauma. The stories are truly heartbreaking’. The money that is required for redress payments ‘go some way to alleviating the monetary costs of the abuse in survivors’ lives. But more than that, redress gives clear acknowledgement from us, that the abuse happened and provides a means for ongoing support through counselling. I beg you when counting the cost of redress in your parish, to remember his people. They are our primary concern.’

In thinking about the extraordinary events in the Australian churches that are unfolding this summer, as they come to terms with the aftermath of the Royal Commission, we should imagine ourselves two years ahead. By 2020 our Inquiry will have delivered its written reports and the full horror of sexual abuse in the churches (and elsewhere) will be revealed. In facing this future crisis, the churches will need decisive leadership and a readiness to make some substantial material sacrifices, even if not on the scale of the Diocese of Tasmania. All our bishops will need to be able to say to people that it will cost a great deal to put right the evils of the past. The same leadership will need to acknowledge the suffering of survivors and how they need compassion and help, not shunning and rejection. The Church in Australia, as expressed by the words of Bishop Condie, recognizes that complete honesty and acceptance of the evils of the past is the way that they can move into the future. Denial, cover-up and dishonesty on the part of senior church people, who believe that they are protecting the institution, is not a way forward. As I have said before, elaborate schemes for serving children in a church setting will be of limited value if all the clergy are tainted with the label of paedophiles. The Church in England must get on board with this new word – redress. That way we can show that we do understand the past and, rather than cover it up, we want to make a new beginning.

The short message is that the Anglican Church in Australia and its leaders seem to ‘get it’. Showing proper empathy for survivors is the first stage in helping the church face up to and overcome the problems of the past. Just as we do not yet know the full impact of Brexit on our national life, so the Church of England has not yet calculated how damaging and demoralising the frequent stories of child abuse are to its work and mission. In this post I want to challenge our bishops to look hard at the Australian experience and be ready to provide the kind of leadership that we will need if we are to survive waves of reputational damage that are still to emerge. It will cost a great deal of money. Such sacrifices today, by acknowledging the appalling wrongs of the past make possible a better future.

Over the week-end I have been away at conference attended by a number of clergy. Most of them were retired and we did our usual ‘it wasn’t like that in our day’ patter. More interesting for me was to hear from lay people present who told stories about their parishes and especially their vicars. None of these lay people was entirely happy with their local churches. It was not just to do with boring sermons or failures in the pastoral care. The issue that stood out from my conversations was that many of the clergy that were talked about were showing strong signs of insecurity. It seemed that several of them felt themselves to be in a permanent state of mild warfare with their congregations.

In one of the comments in response to my recent piece about Church teams was a telling anecdote. This declared that during an Anglican interregnum a ministry team had flourished, discussing the community, national issues and theological ideas. All this came to an end when the new vicar arrived. Then the nearest thing to a group discussion was to talk about rotas. I heard two similar stories from lay individuals at my conference. Priests had been appointed to their parishes straight out of curacies or parishes where only a single style of worship or functioning had been found. This narrow range of experience meant that the new vicars had only one choice before them; they had to try and transpose the patterns of their training parish on to their new situation. The problem for these new young vicars was that there was no plan B when the transplant of ideas to the new place failed to work with the existing congregation. Typically, the old congregation voted with their feet to be replaced by other Christians from the area who wanted the trendy style of worship on offer. The process of replacing one congregation with another group of people was accomplished through what I would regard as coercive techniques. Leadership often became authoritarian in style, at least till the uncomprehending members had finally departed or moved to a quiet corner at the very back of the church.

In an ideal world it should be possible to combine the old and the new in a single parish. It should be possible to merge the old values of the Anglican pattern – pastoral care, dignified reverent worship and good intelligent preaching – with new experimental patterns of church life. The reason that this so often does not happen is quite simply that many of the clergy who are coming into the system today do not know anything about the old styles and rhythms of parochial life in the Church of England. The popularity of the new wineskins of contemporary music and ministry styles has had the result that, for many clergy today, these models of church life are all they have ever known. Trying to impose the patterns of St Helen’s Bishopsgate or Holy Trinity Brompton on the twenty strong congregation of Much-Binding-in the-Marsh is likely to cause unhappiness on all sides. The vicar feels frustrated that the congregation are ‘stick in the muds’ and the congregation seem unable to flourish with these new styles of church life. ‘Slow church’ and ‘frenetic church’ do not easily mix. This clash of styles will result either in the vicar giving up in frustration and moving on, or the original congregation being driven away by an increasingly coercive style of authoritarian leadership.

In the Church of England today are many individuals who have been brought to faith in the context of a large successful preaching/charismatic church in the middle of London or one of the large cities. Many of these churches have developed styles of theology or worship practice which have become increasingly divorced from traditional Anglican practice. It is not for me to critique at this point the theology or worship style of centres like HTB or St Helen’s Bishopsgate but they are far from being typical of the wider scene of Anglicanism in this country. These larger churches produce a disproportionate number of ordinands. On the face of it that is a source of congratulation. But it is also a cause of numerous problems for the future. Some of the lucky ones are appointed to serve at a church which is a total fit with the church which sponsored them. The rest, the majority of these newly minted clergy, have to be deployed in ‘ordinary’ parishes where it is impossible for them to spread their wings without causing conflict and unhappiness. But these enthusiastic clergy know nothing else, so in one way we cannot blame them for the common pattern of grief and sadness that descends on the churches that they arrive to ‘take over’.

Overseeing this increasing but hidden problem in many C of E parishes are the bishops. Many of them recognise that the parochial system is under increasing strain. It is no longer possible, particularly in the North, to find sufficient clergy to man all the posts that are viable. All over the country there are unfilled posts because no one wants to apply for them. Appointing a young inexperienced charismatic clergyman or woman to a parish which has no desire to become a mini HTB will still be a potential disaster for all concerned. Somehow from the bishop’s perspective, it is better to have the post filled than empty. History will perhaps judge differently. Allowing the large number of clergy to be trained from one dominant tradition which has little understanding of the wider Anglican perspective, is a recipe for not only disaster but also much unhappiness. Whenever a parish has accommodated the culture and style of one priest, trained in the shadow of a mighty charismatic or evangelical ministry elsewhere, we know or suspect that the ‘takeover’ has been achieved at some considerable cost in terms of lives and loyalties turned upside down.

Earlier this week, on Monday 3rd September, the Daily Telegraph carried a story to indicate that Steven Croft, the Bishop of Oxford, was being called in by the police for questioning under caution. This relates to a story that has been circulating for some months about his failure to act in the case of Matt Ineson when Bishop of Sheffield. Matt, as we have recorded in another blog post, was abused as a child of 16 by the Rev Trevor Devamanikkam. His earlier story was set out here in some detail a year ago. The account http://survivingchurch.org/2017/07/09/safeguarding-and-child-abuse-case-of-matt-ineson/ reveals how Matt disclosed several times to his bishops in the Diocese of Sheffield and to the Archbishop of York. Individually and collectively they not only failed to take action to inhibit his abuser or tell the police, but they also blanked Matt and offered him no help pastorally or practically.

Matt has successfully kept the story alive at great cost to himself and his career. Although an ordained priest he felt under such pressure from the ‘othering’ he received by the bishops that he felt compelled to retire from his post as a Vicar in Rotherham in 2013. His financial situation is bleak and the emotional cost of trying to be heard in the Church over more than six years has taken its toll. The blanking of Matt by bishops who did nothing to support him has no doubt been done in the hope and expectation by them that he would eventually disappear from the scene. This has not happened; Matt took out, with the help of a lawyer, legal proceedings against the church using the provisions of the Clergy Disciplinary Measure (2003). This piece of Church of England legislation enables anyone to make a formal complaint against a member of the clergy. So far it has never, except in Matt’s case, been taken out against a serving bishop. Up till now, the Church has managed to stall these proceedings by citing time limits and other devices, but Matt’s case has clearly caused waves among church lawyers. The compilers of the new legislation did not expect that any bishops would be named in such cases. Because bishops inevitably become involved in the process of hearing CDM complaints against ordinary clergy, the system comes under strain when these adjudicators are challenged themselves for unprofessional/unbecoming behaviour. There does not seem to be any provision for what should happen when the Archbishop handling a complaint is himself the subject of a complaint.

Matt’s CDM complaints against Steven Croft, now Bishop of Oxford, are not however the focus of the current Telegraph story. The Telegraph article is concerned with the fact that the episode has gone beyond a CDM complaint to become a matter for the police and the civil authorities. They want to question Bishop Croft formally under caution in a matter that touches on possible criminal behaviour. It remains to be seen whether this questioning will result in any kind of prosecution. The whole case is made far more serious because the alleged perpetrator, Trevor Devamanikkam, died at his own hand on the eve of his trial in 2017. If he had been challenged at the time of the original disclosures (2012-2013) and the police informed, he would not have been an ongoing danger to society for five further years. Also, more seriously, no help was offered to him to prevent a descent into a spiral of despair which led to his suicide.

The reporter Harry Farley at the Telegraph published the details of the civil legal process that is under way against Bishop Croft. The questions to be asked of him by the police no doubt will cover their enquiries over what the Bishop knew and when. This topic was given a full airing on a television programme for BBC Yorkshire earlier this year. On camera Matt gave a clear and cogent account of the facts of his assault and he recounted his fruitless attempts to disclose the event to the church authorities. I have not read the Telegraph story in full -as it is behind a paywall- but the very existence and publication of this story in the post Cliff Richard environment means that it must have been carefully worded. No doubt newspaper lawyers will have checked this story with particular care.

Matt is a fairly prolific Twitter contributor, so it is possible to see what are some of the current outstanding issues from his perspective. We also have recorded something of Bishop Croft’s response to the case. The Oxford Mail on Monday pm put out a rapid response from an Oxford Diocesan spokesman. It stated that ‘Church leaders are refuting the suggestion that the Bishop of Oxford failed to pass on allegations of rape against a vicar’. During the Radio 4 broadcast in July 2017 Bishop Croft was asked why he had not passed Matt’s written disclosure to him, which dates back to 2013, to the police. The response was that he had taken the unilateral decision not to pass on the disclosure because he personally didn’t consider there was sufficient in it to pass on. This was a clear breach of safeguarding procedures. As the reported offence happened not in Oxford but in Sheffield, it is hard to know what ‘Church leaders’ are being referred to in the Mail account. A common-sense reading of the situation is that Bishop has telephoned the communications officer for the diocese and told him what to say to the Oxford Mail. It is to be hoped that the Mail, if they cover the story again, will take a more questioning and nuanced approach to the story.

The other part of the story which attracts our curiosity is a reference to ‘written records and notes taken at the time’ by Bishop Croft. These were, according to the Mail report, ‘taken at the time (and) give a different picture’. Matt has protested that he has never been offered any sight of such documents. As an outside observer, I would have expected any such documents to have been given a long time ago to an independent person for examination and scrutiny. The fact that the Bishop has apparently failed to share them with anyone in six years, is curious. Throughout the CDM process they have never been produced. As this process has been underway for 2 ½ years the failure to produce these papers is a serious matter. This fact is particularly striking in the context of the upcoming police interview which has been planned and known about for several months.

The CDM process that Matt has initiated is still yet to be fully resolved. Although it is entirely separate from the questioning under caution by the police of Bishop Croft, the two have of course become muddled up in people’s minds. One thing we have learned in the last 48 hours is that a key legal figure active no doubt in both the church and civil cases was closely identified with the alleged abuser, the late Trevor Devamanikkam. The Provincial Registrar for Canterbury, who also happens to be the Oxford Diocesan Registrar, John Rees, once served as curate in a parish in Leeds where Trevor Devamanikkam was Priest in Charge. This is obviously something known but never revealed by Rees himself, Bishop Croft, Archbishop Welby or anybody else. The multiple conflicts of interest make his involvement untenable. The fact that this information has only just come to light would imply that the Bishop and his advisers were banking on the case not proceeding this far. Such a disclosure puts the legal team in the Oxford Diocese somewhat on the back foot as there are clearly conflicts of interest here for both the civil and ecclesiastical cases.

In view of these legal problems which Matt has brought to our attention in the past couple of days, it is hard to see how proper church legal processes can move forward smoothly towards resolution. Also, now that the civil authorities are becoming involved in the case, these CDM cases are less likely to disappear. The only logical defence for Bishop Croft is to attack the veracity of Matt and his claims of disclosure, in other words call him a liar-attack the victim. Whatever the final outcome of these sorry episodes, it will have the consequence of a victim going once more through the mill of being disbelieved, facing the power of senior churchmen, lawyers and others trying to undermine his narrative. Having studied Matt’s case, I have to say that my assessment points to his complete truthfulness and honesty. He deserves to win through, even though the full weight of the establishment is being wheeled on in an attempt to crush and discredit him.

The proliferation of legal cases, civil and ecclesiastical is likely to end up costing the Church of England a great deal of money, reputation and time. One cannot help but think that had there been professional standards of procedure as well as good ethical behaviour at the beginning, the Church would have saved itself much grief. Even now there is room for apology to the victim by the church for what he has suffered. He deserves that far more than being the object of vilification in what is probably now a vain attempt to protect the Church institution. How much do we keep hearing about institutional reputation being chosen in preference to truth, honesty and compassion?

When I was in America recently, I kept seeing a book on display whose title intrigued me. The title was The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. When I got back to the UK I tracked down a copy of the book to see if it has anything to say to the issue of teams as they operate in the Church. The short answer is that the book was not terribly helpful for church use. The context and setting of teams in business, which is what the book was describing, is such a long way from what the Church calls teams. But for all their radical differences, teams everywhere still have in common the existence of dysfunction.

Trying to read a book about teams has made me think afresh about my own love/hate relationship with the Church team idea throughout my ministry. Let me say quickly that I have never worked in a formal team situation. There have been times when I felt it would have been helpful to discuss difficult pastoral/theological issues with trusted colleagues. But, overall, I am glad that the situation never in fact arose. I witnessed what was the effect that team working had on others. I know that I would have suffered far more than I would have prospered.

Let me mention some objections to the so-called Team-Ministry idea as it is practised in the Anglican church today. In secular teams, the kind that function together to build Crossrail or motorways, there are groups of highly trained professionals who come together to make a project a reality. Each member of the team has been specially chosen and will have the needed expertise for the project and years of training. At a meeting of the management team, their expertise is listened to carefully and weighed up by the fellow team members and the person in charge. Everyone present is essential to the project and thus there is respect and dignity being offered to each person in the room. Each member of the Team may also be in charge of hundreds of workers under his/her instructions.

Church teams, such as those which come together to run a large parish, do not necessarily seek to balance complementary skills in ministry. The team is normally a group of random clergy who agree to work in this way. One of the Team is designated Team Rector who will oversee team meetings. He or she will probably have been ordained for a longer time with greater experience than the others. The members of the Team will typically be fairly junior clergy who have been ordained only two or three years. While each of them may accept some overall responsibility for an area of work across the whole, the main work will be done on their own patch. This is the part of their job-description where they are solely in charge. Team meetings, when they are expected to show enthusiasm for the large entity which constitutes the Team Ministry, will often be regarded as a chore.

One problem bedevils every Team ministry that I have ever encountered. The major handicap that I identify for successful team functioning within an Anglican parish situation is that there is now far less consensus about what a parish is for and how it should establish priorities. I have mentioned before the anecdote about the words spoken to a distressed woman linked to my church who called on an Anglican minister. He simply said to her ‘We don’t do pastoral’. By that he meant that he was only interested in swelling the numbers of ‘saved’ individuals through converting them to Christ. The bread and butter tasks of mundane caring for people, helping them through the pain and joy of everyday life in or out of church had passed him by. In vivid language, he saw his ministry as snatching branches out of the fire so that they would not be destroyed. This of course is not the only area of differing opinion about how parishes should run. The huge changes in the approach to visiting parishioners in their homes could create an enormous wedge and make me unsuitable for most Team ministries.

A second big problem for teams in the church today is the legacy of patriarchy. For centuries men have pontificated in church affairs and said what will happen and how it should happen. This tradition has never been a good foundation for team working. Entirely absent has been the idea that junior members of staff might have something valuable to offer the whole through their youth or education. I never remember any of my ‘training’ Vicars showing any interest in things I had studied in college. The patriarchal assumptions at the time of my curacies set out the pattern that the assistant curate was there to be the passive receptacle of the wisdom of the experienced priest.

I could go on to talk about the petty jealousies and rivalries that appear in team functioning in or out of the church. But that would only dovetail into what my readers would already know of their own exposure to the difficulties of working in a team. Many would summarise these issues as the ‘ego-problem’.But, in spite of difficulties, I still believe it is legitimate to sketch out the outline of what might be good team functioning. My thoughts for this come under five headings.

A team exists because of the underlying assumption that every member of the team has a vital contribution to make to the success of the whole project.

Each member of a team has the right to be properly heard with respect.

The team leader is there to ensure overall responsibility for the project but his/her views and insights do not necessarily carry greater weight than those of the team members.

The proceedings of team meetings should be carefully minuted. It should normally be assumed that these minutes are in the public domain unless there are cogent reasons for that not to be the case.

It is important that there should always be full disclosure of the source of information or ideas when external material is introduced by team members. This will ensure that team functioning is not compromised by unseen coercion from outside.

Respect, openness, tolerance and equal dignity are all hallmarks of secular teams and one feels that the same rules should apply to Church teams. But, rather than applying higher ethical standards than the secular world in teamwork, the Church seems to fall short in many respects. The word ‘team’ is quickly added to many new initiatives in the Church even when the groundwork to ensure proper team functioning has not been done.

I want to finish with a topical example from the Church of England. Five years ago the national Church started to expand its central work on Safeguarding as it became apparent that one person could not manage the work on their own. Problems have begun to surface as one person has exploded into a taskforce of thirteen and a half full time posts, collectively known as the National Safeguarding Team (NST). By calling itself a team, the Church gives out a totally false message about the way it is in fact functioning. The NST fails as a team because first it does not operate with openness and clarity. There are also serious problems of accountability to external groups, such as the House of Bishops. Where do its ultimate loyalties lie? It has no clearly defined stated aims. Survivors might expect that their interests would be properly represented by at least some of the members of this team, but this is apparently not the case. The methods of the NST operating are so opaque that many are calling for its abolition as being not fit for purpose.

The word team has been freely adopted by the Church over the years. This reflection is suggesting that the Church has in many cases debased the use of the word by simply failing to address what the meaning of the word might really involve. The NST is the latest in a long line of failures to grapple with the central question that Christians might ask. What might a team look like in a Christian context? We do not possess any models to point to at the moment.

I have kept a promise to my readers not to speak of the ever-absorbing topic of American politics for over six months. But it remains difficult not to comment when a large swathe of Christians in the States continues to support the most immoral and disconnected from the truth president that that country has ever seen. Without rehearsing all his immoral activities which include assaulting women and a chronic lack of feeling for his fellow human beings, Donald J. Trump represents everything that a Christian might want to shy away from. If Christian parents really cared about the moral formation of their children, they might want to forbid any discussion of his activities in the home. The apparent normalisation by Trump of lying and his ability to make up a truth to suit an audience, is corrupting to everyone in America today.

And yet the support of the president by good Christian people continues strong. How can we account for it? The reasons for the support of Trump by around 80% of white evangelicals will no doubt be the subject of PhDs and learned books in the future. What I can say in a short blog post will only touch on a few of the issues. My comments mainly refer to the unique American context which evangelicals occupy in the States and so my observations do not normally apply to evangelicals in the UK.

When the American republic was founded some 230 years ago it was not just a military uprising by a colonial outpost of the British empire. It was also an attempt to rewrite the way politics itself might be conducted. The American ideal was to do politics in accordance with the new ideals of the Enlightenment. No longer would the tasks of government be entrusted to existing elites and privileged groups as they were in Britain. The revolutionary state would also no longer base its guiding principles on religious ideas handed down from the past. The American Constitution speaks about truths being ‘self-evident’. There was an attempt to suggest that their way of ruling was based on the exercise of reason without any of the baggage of the past. A similar veneration for the power of human reason was carried over into the French Revolution which occurred only a few years later.

Behind this arrival of self-evident truth into American political thinking was a movement among intellectuals known as ‘common-sense’ philosophy. This movement, which originated in Scotland, stated that the evidence of the senses can be trusted. Ordinary human beings, even those who had not received a formal education, can grasp reality by the application of the ordinary exercise of reason assisted by the senses.

Although the role of religion in the American Constitution has been much argued about, it seems clear that the Founding Fathers hoped to keep politics and religion firmly separate. They thus refused to give any denominational expression of religion privileged status, no doubt hoping that religious belief would play little part in the development of the political life of the new nation. This hope as we see today has been thwarted and we have in the States a political system now more entangled with Christian ideas than anywhere else in the Western world.

‘Common-sense’ ideas were not just followed in the politics of the new state. They also spilled out to the population at large. The philosophy gave to ordinary people the sense that they could have an opinion in everything, including religion. There was effectively a rediscovery of the Protestant principle that everyone who possessed a Bible could find their individual path to God. The application of ‘common-sense’ allowed the massive expansion of evangelical churches in the 19th and 20th centuries. No one questioned the strangeness of thousands of new churches appearing, each of which were claiming to have a unique and final understanding of Scripture and thus of God. Common-sense ideas have always been dismissive of notion of tradition and the possibility of denominational authority.

Most Evangelical churches in America continue firmly in this common-sense tradition. The particular way in which the common-sense approach is applied is in the understanding of Scripture. If the Bible says that the world was created in six days then common-sense tells us that this has to be literally true. Theories like evolution, higher criticism and textual analysis all emerge from an expertise that even now is considered belonging to a despised educated elite. Elitist traditions were all rejected by the Revolution. In short, the American revolutionary impulse lives on in the fundamentalist chapels of America. Any knowledge that critiques the ‘plain’ understanding of Scripture is firmly rejected.

The tidal wave that carried Trump into the White House drew on the nativist American traditions of anti-elitism and anti-establishment. One might even claim that some of the energy for Trumpism can be traced right back to the American Revolution itself against the rule of King George. Even if we do not go back that far, we can still see a huge reservoir of what we might describe as a primal resentment against a privileged ‘them’, those who through education and wealth control the levers of power. We should not be surprised that fundamentalist churches in the States should have provided shelter and support for these political forces of reaction and conservatism.

Speaking from the perspective of someone who deplores the effects of fundamentalist rhetoric and thinking, it is hard to see how this tense stand-off between the educated elites in the States and those who reject and resent them for their power can be reconciled. From my point of view, it requires education to teach people the principles of critical thinking, the awareness of paradox and the ability to hold two opposing points of view simultaneously. These abilities to reason in a ‘liberal’ way stand over against huge numbers of people who believe that truth can always be grasped by the simple application of gut reason. There are always going to be problems. The evangelical churches have largely identified with the anti-liberal masses and they see Trump as reflecting their ways of reasoning. It is a highly risky strategy. Moths are attracted to a flame, and so conservatives who are attracted to Trump run the risk of being burnt up. The realisation will eventually dawn on his supporters that so far from supporting favoured conservative causes, Trump has led them to a place of intellectual and moral emptiness. The old common-sense ideas of the 18th century made sense to a new nation struggling to overcome the legacies of elitist thinking and the philosophies of the wealthy and privileged. They make little sense in the present century. The insights of science, culture and advanced technology are all needed if America, or any other country, is to make its way in the world. Without modern insights, technical and philosophical, there is only deprivation and widespread poverty. The regression to ‘primitive’ ways of thinking which Trump is encouraging in church and politics is bad news for that country and bad news for the world. When American history is written, the word ‘evangelical’ will probably be a word of abuse. Many will regard all who followed this religious movement under Trump as being on the wrong side of history and certainly on the wrong side of the history of the Christian Church.

I have refrained from commenting on Roman Catholic issues to do with power abuse up till now. This is partly because I do not want to sound like a critical outsider taking aim at another church body. My reason now for wanting to refer to the Pope’s recent pronouncements on sexual abuse is to suggest that his recent statement is illustrating some fundamental failures of understanding as to how to deal with scandal. This is a problem for the whole Church, including the Church of England. Looking at what the Pope has said may help us to see our own Anglican problems a little clearer.

The recent 2000-word pronouncement about child sexual abuse from the Vatican seems to say, at first reading, all the right things. It lays blame on corrupt priests for taking advantage of the vulnerable and asks for prayers and fasting by the whole church for these ‘atrocities’. It sees the whole thing as a grievous stain on the Church.

The theologian Richard Sipe was a Catholic researcher who studied celibacy among Catholic priests in America and died quite recently. I have one of his books at home (I am away at present) and one of the striking claims he made which stuck in my memory was that only half the Catholic priests in his country were in fact celibate. To put it another way 50% of American Catholic priests are sexually active. I do not recall how this sexuality is normally expressed but one is reminded of the two French priests and their ‘arrangements’ in the pre-war comic French novel, Clochemerle. Each of the priests in the story had a compliant female housekeeper but they knew that their activities in bed were sinful. In the novel we hear the ways they arranged to confess to each other and receive absolution. This process involved each of them pedalling hard 20 km to each other’s village and picking up a penitence after a brief recital of their ‘delinquency’. The penitence required became ever more truncated and peremptory. This went on over several years. A sexually active priest is, by definition, having to carry out his activities in secret and this will frequently compromise any potential honesty and mutuality in the relationship. From the outside there may often appear to be a damaging element of control involved. A priest’s ‘lover’, male or female, will frequently end up damaged in the medium to long term.

A Catholic priest may of course act out his sexuality in ways that include criminal acts against children and young people. The law is clear that such relationships are not tolerated in any modern society. The law of the Catholic church, because all sexual activity by a priest is regarded as sin, may be less explicit in its utter revulsion for crimes against children. The Clochmerle relationships may or may not have had an abusive element in them but they were clearly far from being as culpable and damaging as the abuse of a child. Behind the prohibition of any sexual activity for a priest is the vexed issue of compulsory celibacy. This institution clearly does not serve the Church well. Nevertheless, the Church of Rome has shown itself unwilling to address the issue. In theory the Church expects all its clergy to control sexual longing. This enables it to present the priestly caste as somehow pure and holy, being removed from and above the distractions of carnal lust. Because this ideal is failing 50% of the time, the Church is in fact being deeply damaged in several ways. It is damaged by the creation of numerous victims, such as the 1000 children identified in the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report. It is damaged because clergy are forced into secretive liaisons that force many of them into a permanent state of hypocrisy. One of the most telling aspects of the Pennsylvania Report was the suggestion that cover-ups of the worst abuses were made possible because Catholic bishops in informal relationships felt unable to discipline their child-abusing priests because the latter had the power to blackmail them for their own sexual compromises.

I cannot tell the Pope what to do, as the task of cleaning up the Church of Rome is vast. Clearly a start has to be made in deciding what should be realistically asked of a young priest in terms of dealing with his sexual side. One way forward could be to allow priests to marry. The hypocrisy of expecting ‘purity’ from all priests can never completely work as it is in conflict with the normal functioning of human nature. Some may succeed following the path of celibacy but many will not. There is also always going to be a high cost that the institution has to pay each time a scandal emerges. The age of the Internet means that these scandals can never be easily be covered up in the future.

The Anglican Church in dealing with its own scandals has in some ways behaved like the Church of Rome in its desire to protect itself. For the Vatican the supposed ‘purity’ of priests and thus the blameless institution they serve, seems to have been an overarching preoccupation. This approach, resulting in secrecy and rampant hypocrisy, has had little regard for those who inevitably have been damaged by the system of celibacy, particularly the under-age targets of priestly desire. For some Anglican leaders there seems to be a preoccupation with preserving not purity, but the assets of the organisation. On many occasions when a victim of abuse approaches the centre he/she is pushed away, sometimes brutally, because it is assumed that they are only interested in financial compensation. From my own dealings with victims this is generally not the case. Survivors would like the courtesy of being heard, having letters answered and generally being allowed a voice. This ‘othering’ of abuse victims by bishops and senior officials is unbelievably cruel behaviour when applied to someone who has already had their life ruined by the original abuser. The way that Anglican and Vatican authorities seem to react and think alike is because everything is seen only within the perspective of the institution and its interests. Commentators, such as I, can see the situation from other vantage points. Of course, the interests of the institution have to be weighed up and respected. But other perspectives are needed to obtain a rounded picture of what is really going on. To some of these, church authorities seem sometimes to be deaf and blind. First, we have the legitimate and just rights of survivors. If these are not listened to then the central mission statement of any church is trampled under-foot. How can any church put up with a situation where someone ‘causes one of these little ones to sin’? We all know how the text continues. When the Church, the guardian of morality, is seen to fail one of these ‘little ones’ it is judged very harshly by the wider public. The public relations impact of the recent child abuse scandals is wreaking enormous damage on both church bodies. The man on the Clapham omnibus is fast concluding that all churches are unsafe, even dangerous, places for children and young people. However good safeguarding practices are being put into place at present, failure to deal with past crimes will negate all the current good work.

In the past week social media has recorded the story of a survivor who was told by a Church of England clergyman to go back under a stone and that he had probably enjoyed his abuse. I normally double-check stories of this kind, but this report seems to chime in with the continuing revelation of how some senior clergy seemed to be uncaring and indifferent to the stories of survivors who disclose to them. The Smyth story has continued to reveal names of individuals who put the reputation of the Iwerne network above the protection of vulnerable young people. When will the damaging stories about the Church of England and the Catholic Church stop? They will stop when there is a change of mindset. The mindset has to include the ability to embrace the full reality of the scandals so that the protection of the institution is never the only or even the main consideration. Church leaders must learn to see the whole picture. This will always involve acknowledging the pain of victims as well as the increasing righteous anger of all who witness what is going on. The Church of Rome and the Church of England seem to struggle in their ability to see what is there in front of them, so that the health of both bodies is profoundly damaged.

One of the major changes that has taken place in our lifetime is the free availability of information through the internet. There are very few people who avoid completely traces of their lives appearing somewhere online. It is also possible to research one’s own family tree without ever leaving one’s home. All this information means that it is very hard for negative/positive facts about people’s lives to be completely hidden. In spite of data protection laws and all the other safeguards which try to stop too much private information circulating, there is an enormous of material about the past available at the click of a button.

This new 21st-century era of readily accessible facts means that institutions need to operate in a new way. If any group wishes to hide evidence of wrong-doing in the past they need to take into account that there are countless press records available on the Net. When a public figure makes a statement about some past event, a check can be quickly made to see if what is said is corroborated by contemporary press accounts. I can give a live example of a serious discrepancy between the recent public declaration of The Titus Trustees about the death of John Smyth and what is revealed by a newspaper cutting. One of the comments to my post about John Smyth drew attention to a story written by Anne Atkins, the broadcaster and columnist for the Daily Telegraph. In a column dated October 29th 2012, at the time of the Savile scandal, Anne revealed her discomfort at hearing about the case of abuse against another individual and her unwillingness to do anything about it. She then went on to mention knowing about John Smyth (not mentioned by name in the article but clearly identifiable) and his abusive activities in the garden shed at Winchester. He was apparently a family friend and she had known him since she was a child. Some of Anne’s friends were due to go out to see Smyth in South Africa but Anne kept her mouth shut about his behaviour as she did not want to be accused of ‘malicious gossip’. The whole way the story is told implies that many people in Anne’s social circles also knew the facts about his abusive behaviour in both England and Africa. She does not indicate that it was in any way secret information at the time. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how even a hint of this story would have reached her column if Anne had ever thought it had to be kept under wraps. She tells the story as though she had learnt the details soon after 1982 when the Ruston report was produced. She and others also knew about the cloud that was attached to Smyth over the subsequent Zimbabwe death. We may conclude that among the circles of well-connected evangelicals, of which Anne is one, the Smyth story was well known. It was embarrassment, not secrecy that prevented Anne sharing her knowledge to these other friends who were off to see Smyth in South Africa. How are we to square up this publicly available information from 2012 with the claim that the Titus Trustees were only informed of the facts of Smyth’s crimes in 2014? All the Trustees both of the Iwerne Trust and its successor, the Titus Trust were prominent members of exactly the same social and church circles as Anne Atkins and her family. It stretches credulity to think that the revelations of 2014 could have been fresh news to such a prominent group of supporters of the Iwerne camps.

One person, here a humble blogger, can, by consulting the internet locate awkward facts which call into question the veracity of statements being made by official bodies. I am not going to push this point any further. I just hope that this discrepancy about when different individuals learnt the facts of Smyth’s behaviour will be resolved by some future enquiry. The ease through which this discrepancy was uncovered suggests that anyone making statements to the Press need to take far more care that their claims will not be undermined by an act of checking the internet to see if they are credible. The Titus Trustees statement of the 13 August has already made several survivors extremely distressed and angry as they know it is based on a falsehood. They see it as an attempt to distance the Trust from any responsibility. So how should the Church or a Trust behave when faced with credible information of past abuses?

At the IICSA hearing in March we heard that one way of dealing with the past abuses is to physically destroy files. The bonfire in the Chichester Deanery garden remains a vivid metaphor of the way that some parts of the Church have attempted to deal with awkward past episodes. The Deanery bonfire took place in 1999. Somehow one feels that date symbolises a 20th century approach to the record-keeping of past infamy. In the present century one looks for professional record keeping with the realisation that it is seldom possible to destroy evidence of the past when so much information is stored on the internet and in people’s memories. The truth now has a habit of coming out even when there are determined attempts to eliminate it.

Of the all advantages given by the internet to those who pursue justice and accountability in the church is the gift of networking. In the past many survivors were kept in isolation from one another. This was help to the authorities who were faced with claims. The authorities could see the wider picture, but the enforced isolation of each abused individual deprived them of any real clout. It is not difficult to manipulate or intimidate one person on their own. Now the internet has made this ‘divide and rule’ procedure far more difficult to implement. Survivors are finding each on Facebook, Twitter and through blogs such as this one. Joining together for mutual support gives survivors real power. There is nothing so powerful as a group which comes together with a common cause and a common purpose. I myself am witnessing the extraordinary strength and stamina of some of these survivors, especially when they cooperate and work together. It is a privilege to know some of them.

If the Church is to develop a strategy for the 21st-century in dealing with the legacy of abuse, then it needs to change its tactics. There is no room anymore for secrecy and trying to hold back information through, for example, confidential agreements. It is no longer going to be so easy to intimidate the survivors who have found each other on the internet. Of course, they will be encouraging each other, sharing stories and notes. It is no longer realistic for any group, whether the Titus Trust or the Church of England to expect that future scandals can be hidden. What is the alternative strategy for the Church? The alternative is to acknowledge at an early stage what are the facts and then be prepared to deal with them in an open and transparent way.

Transparency, openness and repentance are all gospel values. The problem for the Churches is that they are also values that are likely to be incredibly expensive in financial terms. It is however hard to see realistically that the church has a future at all if it tries to manage the terrible legacy of past abuses using other dishonest or deceitful methods. As I write this I have in mind the picture of Inspector Murdock interviewing the former Bishop of Chichester in the Ball case. Although daytime, the curtains in the Bishop’s study were pulled shut as part of an attempted ruse which was supposed to trap the Inspector and undermine his case against Ball. The Church has for too long pulled the curtains shut in dealing with abuse cases. It needs to pull them back and deal with them with the full light of day. Light, transparency and loving respect for those who have been harmed are the only way forward. Somehow the 21st century internet age makes it hard to see how there are any realistic alternatives.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2220693/I-havent-handed-sex-offender-police–I-told-confidence-A-leading-agony-aunt-makes-explosive-confession.html