One of the words that frequently occurs in discussions about church abuse or cult entrapment is the word ‘grooming’. This word is an important one as it tells us something about the early stages of an abusive relationship. Grooming is the process whereby an individual is flattered, bribed or coerced in some way into a relationship with a perpetrator who wants to take advantage of him or her. In a typical case the victim is being led to a point where s/he becomes able to be sexually exploited by a powerful predator. The grooming process may also be the prelude to a financial fraud. This may leave a victim nursing massive financial losses. A faux friendship or situation of trust has been built up so that victims become ready to entrust either their bodies or their life savings to the conman or abuser. Whether force is used or not in the sexually abusive act, the build up to it has normally involved extensive, even elaborate, preparation.

Looking at the relationship of grooming from the outside, we can see contrasting expectations on each side of the relationship. From the perspective of the exploiter the victim is ultimately a disposable object. They are to be used, abused and then discarded. The objectifying of the victim is in sharp contrast to the way that the victim has, through the process of grooming, been opened up to his/her abuser. They have been invited to trust, to respect, even to love the trickster. The relationship from the victim’s perspective is thought to be genuine and heartfelt on both sides. The abuser has tapped into their subjectivity and has used the readiness in all of us to trust another. Grooming seems to activate in each of us a fundamental readiness to trust another person. That, after all, was imprinted in each of us as small children. The close protection by parental figures in the early years is also what enabled us to flourish in the long hard path of growing up towards maturity and independence.

The experience of having been groomed with the subsequent experience of abuse of some kind will arouse a multitude of feelings in a victim. First there may be anger perhaps accompanied by self-blame and shame. How did I get myself into that situation? The supporter of any victim of grooming will know that the dark arts involved in this process are practised against millions of people every day. Against the skill of a practised practitioner, it is surprisingly difficult to defend ourselves. To be open to a person who appears to be friendly and persuasive is not a fault; it is probably far better than the opposite which is to be cynical and ‘hard boiled’ in every encounter with another person. A failure to read the motives of another person may constitute naivety and even carelessness but the experience of being abused sexually or financially seldom involves any guilt on the part of the victim.

I want to return to the point I made earlier about the difference in the grooming relationship between abuser and victim. I suggested that to cheat or abuse an individual required a perpetrator to have the ability to make the victim into a thing or an object. Most of us would find this level of cynical exploitation of another quite hard to do. Possibly the abuser has had to steel him/herself to shut down any respect or feeling for the victim. You cannot abuse a person whose subjectivity you have learned to respect. Another word for objectifying the chosen victim is to ‘other’ them. They thus remain outside any orbit of care you might feel. From the victim’s point of view this part of the abuse process, the experience of being made a thing, is possibly the most difficult aspect to overcome. The sense of being used as a means to gratify another formerly trusted person is deeply wounding. This betrayal requires a great deal of work to overcome and restore in an abused victim a capacity to trust again.

All this talk of the objectified victim leads me into a final reflection relevant to the current church situation which is grappling with Singleton and IICSA. At a time when victims are coming forward to be heard by an audience outside the safety of a therapist’s office or a caring supporter, those who speak out are still extremely vulnerable. They are still vulnerable to the objectivization, the ‘othering’ process which was part of the original grooming. One story I have heard which fills me with horror is that a victim was told that a bishop was heard discussing his case in a loud voice in a public place. This, combined with a sense of being somehow the enemy to the Church because they are speaking out, is always going to be deeply traumatic. Whenever a victim is subsequently treated badly by the same institution that was the context of the original abuse, he or she will be experiencing abuse all over again. Once again, they become the object, the ‘other’, without any right to respect or dignity.

As the Church slowly and painfully tries to get its act together over the way forward to help survivors, it must learn that those who make their voices heard as victims of past crimes are not the enemy. Treating any abuse survivor as an enemy of the Church is simply compounding the original abuse that had made them into objects. Their abusers attacked them at many levels. They undermined their sense of self, their social confidence and their sexual identity. No doubt this list can be greatly extended. The last thing survivors/victims need is to be considered as nuisances or inconveniences because they remind bishops and others of what happened in the past. There will be opportunities in the future for the leaders of the Church of England to help rebuild the trust which has been severely damaged. I could make several suggestions over how this should be done. Respecting another person will always involve honouring their subjectivity, talking to them, listening to them without interruption and providing space for stories to be told and maybe retold. On the part of the bishops and others this process might involve admissions of guilt, failures and past neglect. Surely this process must be better than the continued atmosphere of defensiveness and irritated brush-offs?

When the IICSA process is finally completed, the Church may need to make a public statement of reconciliation with survivors and admit the mistakes and betrayals of the past. Whether it should be in the context of a Falklands scale service is for others to determine, but I can see the safeguarding issue will continue to dog the church and hold it back until bold action is taken. So many visions for the future will be compromised or made less than effective as long as the Church fails to address the present crisis. We need the Church to be alert and awake to the magnitude of the task that is ahead of it.

The situation in the Church of England after the Singleton Report has left many of us feeling seriously concerned about the future. We have seen in the Report such things as the massaging of figures of abuse cases as a means of protecting the image of the Church. More seriously, since then, it is credibly alleged that some bishops have actively ignored and shunned survivors and their complaints. The bishops are also reported to have been involved in cover-up and a deliberate concealment of facts. In summary, the Singleton Report and what has come out since has shown that even men of God are prepared in some circumstances to tamper with the truth in order to protect the institution they serve.

For a situation to arise where there is so much cover-up and concealment in the Church, we need to ask whether there are some compelling reasons for some bishops to act in this way. I want in this post to try and look at the church situation from the perspective of the bishops themselves. Through their eyes we must try to understand why they have allowed apparent dishonesty to enter the Church at this time. Some of what I will write will be speculation, but it is speculation that is based on fifty years observing the church. As a clergyman I have noted some of the changes that have taken place which have made the church far more vulnerable to historical and social forces.

The most pressing issue that the bishops face is the financial future of the Church of England. We are not talking about the imminent bankruptcy of the Church Commissioners (far from it!). Neither are we talking about potential insurance claims against the church from abuse claimants over the years. What we are talking about is the sustainability of the parish system across England. Providing even a minimal presence of the church in every area of England through the parish system is enormously expensive. Although parishes are theoretically expected to pay through their parish share their own costs, there are many areas where it is difficult or impossible to find the £50,000+ cost of each stipendiary priest. The system is, for the time being, functioning but there are, no doubt, behind the scenes planners and managers looking ten to twenty years in the future. They will be asking whether the Church should be planning for an orderly withdrawal from some rural and urban areas. These will also be the parts of England where clergy are less willing to serve. The conversations that are taking place behind closed doors might shock and alarm current church members. It is hard to believe that the future and viability of the comprehensive parish system is not somewhere under active discussion. Whatever is being said, the Bishops will be privy to these discussions.

Alongside the viability of the parish system, financial calculations are also being made about how many stipendiary clergy the Church can afford to train and provide employment for over their entire career. If the parish system is drastically pruned, will there be posts for all the newly ordained cadre of clergy of today? The costs of training are also high. When I was ordained nearly fifty years ago, the costs of my training were met by the local education authority. For me the whole process lasted six years and this included a year studying the Orthodox Church, funded by a private trust. The costs of ordination training now all fall on the Church itself. It is not surprising that the numbers of ordinands in residentiary training decrease as the costs go up. Part-time courses are the new norm. Why do these costs of training matter in the present post-Singleton age? From the bishop’s point of view a clergyperson is not just an employee but also an individual in whom a considerable investment has been made. Losing a stipendiary person from the workforce of the church, whether through retirement, resignation or a disciplinary process is a serious matter. If young, the church loses much of the original investment in their training as well their future availability. Sacking a member of the clergy, especially early in their career, will only be done by bishops in extremis. This apparent reluctance by bishops to discipline errant clergy has been part of the current tension between sexual abuse survivors and the diocesan bishops. They sometimes appear overprotective of the ordained individual.

There is also a cultural and legal factor in the reluctance of bishops to discipline clergy when they stray. This is the historical legacy of the freehold. Clergy who were incumbents used to possess a legal status which made them almost un-sackable. Philandering, drunkenness and immoral behaviour were, in the past, not sufficient to require removal from office unless they also involved illegal behaviour. Even now under Common Tenure, the clergy have substantial privileges and rights through their employment. It is hard to remove them from office without going through a lengthy and expensive process which is the Clergy Discipline Measure. From a bishop’s perspective such processes involve an inordinate amount of energy and time. When a bishop is seen to misbehave, the legal machine is even more unwieldy. In fact, no bishop has yet been removed from office for malfeasance apart from Peter Ball. In the situation today where some bishops face police questioning for safeguarding failures, the Church will find it quite hard to set up an adequate disciplinary response to the cases. The mechanisms for an internal investigation into a serving bishop’s behaviour exist but they have never been put into operation in practice. What seems to happen is that the church legal authorities do not want to explore the option of putting a serving bishop through the disciplinary process. Thus, they prevaricate and push the rules of procedure so that nothing in fact happens. No doubt the senior clergy hope that any complaints against other senior clergy will eventually go away if ignored.

We have set out various background reasons why the House of Bishops seems unable to resolve the crisis of the post-Singleton church. There are obviously discussions and debates that are secretly going on to which I am not privy. These will be attempting to resolve the crisis of trust with the rest of the Church. One main point of difference between bishops and survivors is the issue of mandatory reporting of all abuse cases. While survivors and their supporters back this idea, many bishops firmly resist it. It is resisted, we suggest, because the bishops see that an outside body might require the church to remove from office some of their expensively trained staff, putting at further risk the fragile parochial system. The retention of clergy discipline to an internal church body will allow the bishops to keep control of the process. It is an open question whether it is reasonable to ask survivors to trust bishops and their staff to have this control when the Singleton Report clearly showed what a lamentable job was done by bishops in 2010. Can the bishops really be surprised that many people do not now trust their competency or even their honesty in these areas?

I am writing this in the early hours of the American morning in Philadelphia. This comes prior to taking a bus to New York and the aeroplane back to Edinburgh. The extraordinary fact of starting this at 4 am indicates how difficult it is to adapt to a five-hour time shift. I feel for those who make this kind of adjustment on a regular basis.

This post will be a tale of two cities. Even though I have been in one place, I have been in spirit attending the Synod at York with all its dramas of the past few days. But I need, first of all, to report a few of the events in Philadelphia. My paper at the conference was well received. In it I was exploring the idea that Joan of Arc was a charismatic leader. Within the context of this conference the term charismatic leader is normally a negative description. It implies self-aggrandisement and narcissistic tendencies. I was trying to show that although Joan did fulfil some of the characteristics of a narcissistic personality, her command of people and her capacity to inspire was, in the main, a positive good.

Among those who came to my paper was the world-renowned expert on malignant narcissism, Daniel Shaw of New York. His comments on my paper were positive to my relief. He himself had given a blistering presentation on shame in an earlier paper. He explained how pushing someone into a state of shame was a major technique of a cult leader who is also normally a malignant narcissist. The individual cult member carried this projected shame. This would also act as a way of keeping them under the permanent control of the leader. In Christian terms I suppose this could be translated into a constant awareness of sin and possible damnation. While the lecture was going on I felt for all those who had given up decades of their lives, pandering to the narcissistic needs of their cult leaders. He (normally a he) was ruthlessly exploiting this capacity to feel shame as a way of relieving their own neediness. In short, the cult leader, to make himself feel good, has to make others feel bad about themselves. The lecture succeeded in making some complicated dynamics seem straightforward and simple. That simplicity was powerful and hopefully able to make this kind of manipulative behaviour less easy to perpetrate in future, at least for those who heard the lecture.

Meanwhile back in York the week-end has been full of dramas. I have been following the streamed presentations and Gilo’s tweets. My impressions are mixed. One thing that bothered me somewhat was that although time was given to Jo Kind of MACSAS in the main debate, the proposal that was voted on was one prepared beforehand. I would have liked to have seen some proposals from the floor that reflected the actual feelings of Synod members in the present. Meanwhile both Archbishops had attended a fringe meeting on Friday night where Gilo and other survivors were allowed to speak. Gilo’s presentation was fairly robust, as you might expect, and he challenged Archbishop Welby over the Iwerne affair and his failure to support people he had once been close to. This passion obviously was not allowed to find expression in the carefully worded proposal on the Saturday session. Gilo himself was given access to several individuals who are concerned for the cause of safeguarding at a senior level and he was pleased to be able to present his concerns to them in a face to face way. Meanwhile in the debate itself it was encouraging to note that David Ison, the Dean of St Paul’s, really seems to ‘get it’ as far as the concerns of survivors are involved. He correctly identified that the defensive (even dishonest) behaviour of some bishops has over the years contributed to the current crisis.

Reading between the lines, as much as one can do from a long way off, it seems that there are some serious splits at the senior level of the Church of England over the future of Safeguarding. On the one side are a group of bishops and senior officials who are terrified of the cost in financial terms that starting afresh would involve. A figure of £200 million had at one point been mentioned but this figure did not appear in the voted-on proposal. On the other side are a group of senior people who realise that the Church has to get things sorted out if the church is to regain the trust of the wider public. They see that all talk of mission and serving the nation is never going to catch on as long as the Church of England is carrying the burden of past unresolved abuses by clergy and leaders. Obviously the church has to respond to the report by IICSA in due course. This will comment on appalling mistakes from the past. The second group seem to want to go the extra mile in making a generous response to survivors but they are, at present, constrained by the cry that there is no money for this kind of thing.

Meanwhile I note that one strand of the abuse scandal has gone quiet. I am referring to the abuses centred around John Smyth and the Iwerne camps. There is in that story a number of unanswered questions about who knew what and when. All those involved move in the very highest social circles and I sense some kind of embarrassed cover-up. If we are to have the clean sheet that many are looking for, then we need to see an end to any sense of information being supressed. Defensiveness on the part of church leaders will always be identified and exposed eventually. As they say: truth will out.

The events at York seem to reflect a work in progress. The debate that took place with the background of the published Singleton report was probably more negative towards those who are seeking damage-limitation in the church. This group have seen their dam preserved (just) but the group who want openness and justice have also seen their cause advanced. York 2018 will be seen as one stage along the road in the history of the Church of England. The question that cannot be answered now is whether this meeting is the beginning of break-up of the church or whether the Church has grasped back something of its integrity to form the basis of an honest and transparent future.

While having one eye on the upcoming events in York at General Synod, I am also fully absorbed with the goings on here in Philadelphia. As I mentioned in my previous post I am attending the conference of the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) and this begins in earnest today.

Yesterday we had the pre-conference sessions. Some of these were closed sessions for victims/survivors of cultic groups while the ones I attended were to bring us up to date on, first, the state of research in the area. Secondly I listened to four presentations on the role of education in the battle to protect individuals from the harmful effects of cults. The first of these addressed the importance of critical thinking in evaluating religious and political claims. It was, however, the third talk and discussion that made the most impact on my thinking, particularly in the light of current issues in the Church of England.

The speaker, Gerette Buglion, who runs a retreat centre for recovering victims in Vermont spoke about cultic dynamics in mainstream groups. In particular she was pointing out how styles of leadership in firms, churches and other organizations can be ‘cultic’ without making the whole organization identifiably a cult in itself. In other words, there are methods of exercising leadership that ape extremist groups without anyone necessarily recognising what is going on. She mentioned several examples of this dynamic. A leader in a firm may control a group by awarding special status to certain individuals or making exceptions for them. There may also be subtle ways of pressurising individuals by promising favours or offering threats. One particular technique mentioned which I have suggested is happening right now in the Church is the technique of Divide and Conquer. This involves suggesting to one group that they are favoured while another group is clearly stigmatised as being awkward or a nuisance.

The traits of a healthy leader which would outlaw these ‘cultic’ methods of leadership involve emotional intelligence (EI). An outworking of this quality leads to a personality type that we would welcome in our church leaders. An emotional intelligent leader is one who first of all has insight into their feelings and those of others. When fear, anger and resentment are encountered they are the motivator for inner and organizational growth. Negative emotions are in other words an opportunity to reflect further and grow. The reactions to a situation of possible conflict is first of all to feel, then reflect, digest and then communicate.

The EI leader will be one with a sense of humour. He /She will ensure that the targets of the organization are adhered to and as leader they never indulge in venting their personal preferences, by showing favouritism or playing people off against each other. There will always be a desire to enable the other person to be empowered and grow in skills and insights. Power in other words will never be used for selfish or narcissistic ends.

As we approach General Synod I hope we can witness on the part of some of our leaders some of this emotional intelligence in the way they exercise leadership. As the talk by Gerette pointed out the values of transparency, justice and honesty can be impeded whenever corrupt notions of power have infected an institution. Arguably the situation of whitewash, obstruction of truth and failure of trust has reached our own Church. We need leadership, emotionally intelligent leadership to help us find a new direction into the future.

I am writing this on the eve of my departure for the States for the annual four-day conference of the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA). This has now become for me an annual event. Its location switches between Europe and the States. The path that led to my participation in this organisation is a bit complicated, but the short reason for my involvement is that ICSA is the only group that I have discovered that is in the least bit interested in the work I have been trying to do over the years to research power dynamics in churches. Of course, the fundamentalist churches I am especially interested in are not technically ‘cults’ but the patterns of leadership that exist in many conservative congregations have some features in common with cultic groups. One of the things that I value in the conference is the chance to have conversations with individuals who have been through the most extraordinary adventures within these groups. They have finally arrived at a place (the conference) which allows them to review and understand what they have been through. Through workshops and meeting with sympathetic listeners they can continue a journey of recovery that they have begun elsewhere.

Many of the lectures at ICSA are technical and are only really suitable for academics/therapists with quite specialist interests. But I am slowly beginning to penetrate the jargon to make sense of some of it. Each year the organisers have accepted my offering of a paper containing my observations on some facet of this large subject.

One of the sad things about ICSA is that there are so few British people involved in the organisation. Last year when the conference was held in Bordeaux there were barely a dozen of us from the UK. This year there will be still fewer because of the distances involved but it does reflect a low level of academic and professional interest in cultic matters in our country. We have of course enormous UK resources invested in combatting Muslim extremism but these ‘experts’ do not appear to be interested in the international efforts that have been going on at ICSA over the past 20+ years. Part of the problem is a ‘political’ one. The study of harmful religious groups (cults) has been bedevilled by a discussion as to whether the ‘c’ word is ever appropriate. An influential group of academics around the world have wished to preserve what they believe to be neutrality. These high demand groups, they claim, should be described as ‘New Religious Movements’. Such a description will leave aside the question as to whether there is potential harm involved in membership. The ‘neutrality’ on the part of these academics is however sometimes so pronounced that they are described by others as ‘cult apologists’.

The readers of this blog will know that I am quite clear about describing some behaviour by Christians as harmful, whether spiritually or emotionally. I am not here thinking about sexual abuse which is of course clearly criminal as well as immoral. I have criticised, for example, bullying, inappropriate exorcisms and ostracism as deeply damaging to the victims. There is no room for neutrality in these situations. Harm is being done even though the Bible is being used to justify such behaviour. When the Bible is used in this way as a tool of abuse, there is something blasphemous going on. Fortunately, there are many individuals in ICSA who agree with my approach. Bad religion whether in the cults or churches needs to be identified and called out for what it is.

In the six years that I have been attending ICSA conferences, there has been a definite movement towards identifying bad religion in what are outwardly respectable faith organisations hitherto untouched by cultic tendencies. We have not yet started to discuss the Church of England but, it could be argued, our national church is going through a severe crisis not a long way from some of our typical cultic concerns. ICSA has for years been studying the dynamics and psychology of groups and the nature of power. I personally have had a long-term interest in narcissism in churches and their leaders and this has now become a commonplace in discussion. Daniel Shaw, a psychotherapist from New York has coined the expression ‘malignant narcissism’ and this seems to describe quite a lot of what can erupt in churches which have no proper oversight. He is giving a lecture at the conference.

The harm that can take place in a religious setting is not always the result of deliberate evil intent. Much of what was set out in our own IICSA process over the Diocese of Chichester illustrates the way that well-meaning individuals, from archbishops down, had little insight into their own motivation for thinking and acting in the way they did. Still less did they show understanding of the coercive processes that will almost inevitably happen when an individual gets caught up as part of a large organisation. Those who study cults are familiar with the individual as well as the group processes that can so easily end up involving harm to others. For several years now, I have found myself (hypothetically) critiquing church groups like PCCs or Team ministries from a ‘cultic’ perspective. When I do this exercise, what strikes me strongly is the way that all the participants are caught up in internal dynamics from which they cannot escape. They are temporarily locked into a process every bit as controlling as the experience of being involved in a cult. Recent events over safeguarding have made me want to interrogate the processes involved at the meetings of the House of Bishops. If they are, as I suspect, also caught up in processes over which they have no control, then the rest of the church will also be victims of this malfunctioning dynamic. Some bishops are at present being accused of protecting the reputation of the whole church above the welfare of abuse survivors. If this is true to the point where lies have been told and truth supressed, then the whole group, i.e. the entire national Church, is affected and damaged.

I had intended telling the blog about the paper of Joan of Arc that I am presenting to the Conference. Space and time means that I will have to write again from Philadelphia on this topic. I hope the air-conditioning in the hotel is up to the mark as reported temperatures in the city are in the high 30s!

I have just finished reading two books which coincidentally were published recently on a similar topic. Both books, Undivided and Just Love are by women who ‘came out’ as homosexuals in the setting of a strong personal evangelical belief. There are other strands which link the books. Both women were subjected to exorcism. Each of them is a highly educated articulate individual, educated at Oxford and Cambridge respectively. By the world’s standards they have enjoyed success and achieved a great deal within their professional lives. A further theme links these works written by Vicky Beeching and Jayne Ozanne. That is the importance and love of music. As testimonies of two Christian women passing through the trauma of coming out to acknowledge same sex attraction, they are powerful accounts of cultures and theologies clashing. Both were brought up as conservative Christians, Vicky a Pentecostal and Jayne an evangelical Anglican. No reader can finish these works without having their attitudes affected by listening to their stories. Church people, conservative and liberal alike will be helped to understand more deeply the issues that exist on both sides of a deep chasm of misunderstanding.

The freedom of this blog enables me not to attempt a formal review of these books. I have the option simply to comment on aspects of the women’s stories which strike me most forcibly. In each of the narratives the authors record how much personal suffering was involved in having feelings that they knew were unacceptable to family and church. Vicky eventually publicly acknowledged her homosexuality only in her late 30s. On the way her growing awareness of the nature of her feelings had resulted in depression, loneliness and suicidal episodes. Also, the stress of keeping her sexuality private caused a nervous breakdown and a serious psychosomatic illness. This put her out of circulation for over a year. At this point she was working among Christian congregations in the States as a successful singer/composer. Her contract with the publishing company that was her sponsor required her to uphold Christian standards and this of course precluded any hint of same-sex attraction. Scandal of any kind had to be avoided at all costs on the part of someone who publicly proclaimed her faith in the front of huge crowds. The strain of knowing that her true identity was other than that on public view eventually proved too much. Her public self-identification as gay that burst out was for her a crucial moment in the recovery of her mental and physical well-being.

Jayne’s story also narrates a coming out and this story includes its own periods of darkness, emptiness, loneliness and despair. Being a member of an institutional church, the Church of England, did allow Jayne the possibility of finding some sympathetic individuals to support her. Vicky, on the other hand, having been a life-long member of Pentecostal congregations had virtually no one to turn to when times were hard. Meanwhile Jayne was moving in the highest circles of church life, being a member of the Archbishops Council. This meant that she got to know all the leaders of the Church of England as well as all the prominent evangelical Anglicans. When she finally announced her gay identity, the response to her was typically one of silence. The ambiguity of such silence has troubled her as she did not know how to interpret it. Vicky on the other hand has met (and continues to meet) with raw vitriol and words of hatred.

When Vicky announced her homosexual identity to the world in a newspaper interview back in 2014, I wrote about it on this blog. I had never heard of Vicky until that point, but it was clear that this announcement was of some importance in the world of evangelical and independent churches. Vicky records in her book how almost immediately she was brought face-to-face in a Channel 4 television interview with the notorious Scott Lively, an American homophobic agitator. He had been responsible in part for the anti-homosexual legislation in Uganda. Lively had also written an outrageous book called The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi party. Channel 4 wanted to maximise two contrasting points of view. Lively trotted out the old assertions that the gay identity was a chosen path which could be overcome by prayer and the power of God. Same-sex relationships were like addiction to drink or drugs.

The correspondence and emails that Vicky received after her emergence as gay were of two kinds. The first group thanked her sincerely for enabling them as individuals to acknowledge their own sexual identity while remaining Christian as Vicky was doing. The second group had mined the Old Testament for passages which expressed the way God punished those who worshipped idols or chose a life of sin. Worse still were the conversations she had with Christian friends and former colleagues. Instead of the love, welcome and easy friendship she used to enjoy there was an element of distance and distrust. Religious bookstalls stopped stocking her products and tour promoters no longer invited her to take part in Christian festivals. The world she had occupied professionally and socially for 15 years shut her out and left her out in the cold.

We have discussed before on this blog the way that the gay issue has become such a defining issue among conservative evangelicals. Only in the past few days the GAFCON conference in Jerusalem has divided the Anglican church into those who do and those who do not accept the conservative understanding of gay marriage. Other issues like the ordination of women and the possibility of divorce (clearly forbidden by Jesus!) are fudged or left to one side. The conservative Christian world, (and we are not of course just talking about Anglicans) which sung Vicky’s music until her coming out, now forbid it as though they might be contaminated by singing it. The theological and practical implications of such a mind-set are boggling and too extensive to explore here.

Both Vicky and Jayne address in their writing the theological implications of same-sex attraction. Vicky with an Oxford degree in theology gives the reader a simple but helpful guide to all the relevant texts. She also expounds simply the exegesis that exists to show how many of the proof texts against same-sex attraction are at best ambiguous. From the nature of the ‘sin’ of the men of Sodom to the meaning of Paul’s strange word in the first chapter of Romans, the reader is introduced to the complexity of discovering the biblical message about sexuality. To be able to say, ‘the Bible clearly teaches’, is clearly impossible from both their testimonies. Far more clearly ‘unbiblical’ in nature are the words of hate and threats of violence that both women, particularly Vicky, have endured. In condemning Jane and Vicky, these opponents are functioning apparently without any reference to the Bible’s teaching about love. It is indeed hard to see how the Christian faith can ever be promoted by the encouragement of threats or sheer malign hatred. Such things continue to exist within the orbits of the Christian church. They are a stain on the integrity of the church’s reputation. Perhaps these books which both promote Christian love, albeit of an unconventional kind, will do more to get to the heart of the Christian proclamation which is offered to a sad and sometimes mixed-up world where hate and division are so commonly found.

http://survivingchurch.org/2014/08/19/the-vicky-beeching-affair/ for earlier comments about Vicky’s story.

This morning and throughout today (Friday) the BBC and the Press have focussed on a story about the report by Sir Roger Singleton. This report was a review of the Past Cases Review (PCR) undertaken by the Church of England and published in 2010. The original review was designed to uncover any cases of historic sexual abuse by clergy and other leaders which were in the files kept by dioceses across the Church of England. In the event this highly expensive examination of files only revealed 13 cases of past abuse which merited further investigation. 40,000 files were examined over a two to three year period. The new Singleton review contains a fairly trenchant critique of the 2010 report and shows the considerable weaknesses in the PCR process. First of all there was a lack of consistency in the way information was gathered for the 2010 report. Singleton also identified a tendency to find ways of minimising inconvenient evidence and emphasising the positive whenever possible. Another fact was that only the files of active serving clergy were examined. This left out the retired clergy, of which a large number are still active, and those deceased. In short even if we were to ignore all the shortcomings of method and analysis, the PCR showed an extraordinary lack of interest in those who had been abused or harmed. Everything in the PCR was about identifying potential abusers while ignoring any victims. The enquiry was working with the principle that contacting alleged victims was to be avoided to ‘minimise the distress’ to them.

It is a curious turn in logic to do what the PCR has done which is to describe a problem of abuse by only listing a handful of suspected felons. A common-sense approach to the problem would start at the other end. Criminal activity is most obviously best described by interviewing its victims. In the event no attempt was made to speak to any of them or even allow them a voice. In some topsy-turvy way of approaching the problem, the victims were thought to have nothing to offer to the review process. The investigators preferred to deal with the information obtainable from the files. If you were a victim of an abusing clergyman who was retired or dead, the church appeared to have even less interest in your case. Even the victims of serving clergy went in many cases unheard. One of the complaints against currently serving bishops is that a suspected abuser was not inhibited in any way from active ministry for several years. On the day when his trial was to begin he took the drastic action of taking his own life.

In summary the PCR process of 2010 seems to have failed. It failed to identify more than a handful of perpetrators by the inadequate techniques that it used; it also failed the victims by shutting them out of the whole process. They had neither a voice nor any access to help that the Church might reasonably have put in place to meets their many needs.

It is suggested that the now discredited PCR process cost the church some £2 million. In the light of Roger Singleton’s critique, we can mourn the loss of such a large sum. How could things have gone so wrong? Why was the church prepared to spend so much to achieve so little. The reason for spending so much on what now appears to be a negative outcome seems to have been the vanity of institutional thinking. This will always wish to protect reputation above all else. The announcement that only 13 cases had been extracted from the files seemed, at the time, to be a triumph to boost the reputation of the Church. ‘We have a clean bill of health’ was the overall message. The fact that victims were unheard was an inconvenient and tiresome irritant to this basic narrative.

Since that date these victims have not gone away. Many of them have conveniently for the Church stayed in the shadows, unheard and unseen. A few, working courageously and largely single-handedly have attracted attention from the Press and other supporters. Their courage and persistence has been enormous. But for people like Gilo and Matt Ineson, the church as a whole might have bought into the myth that there were only a few ‘bad apples’ left to be dealt with. The IICSA process also has forced the Church of England to see that the voices of victims telling their stories is just as important as investigators poring over files looking for evidence of past crimes.

I have not attempted to give a full account of Roger Singleton’s report. It could be summarised like this. He is telling the church that an appallingly expensive attempted whitewash of the church’s reputation has been shown largely to be a sham and a failure. General Synod, meeting next month, must decide where to take the next stage of Safeguarding. Whitewash, cover-up even outright lying will no longer do. The Synod must oversee not only good practice but also justice for the hundreds of survivors of church abuse. The precise numbers of these are at present unknown but the church has not, until recently, made any real attempt to find out who and where they are. Even if there are only a few they want and need to be heard. None of them should ever be regarded as nuisances or inconvenient. By helping them the church can redeem itself by showing that it is a compassionate body, concerned with justice and healing.

While few clergy are trained psychotherapists, they pick up a great deal of wisdom as part of their job. They get, for example, to understand how to deal with bereaved people, the things to look for that take place as part of the normal grieving process. They become familiar with many of life’s vicissitudes. They learn when silence is better than platitude and when words might be helpful. I like to think that I can now deal better with a range of pastoral situations than when I begun fresh out of college nearly fifty years ago.

The situation in facing an individual who has been sexually abused in a church setting is going to be a challenge for even the most skilled of pastoral carers. This blog cannot, of course, offer advice in this area, not least through my lack of direct experience. Although I have met (mostly online) some dozens of people who have been abused in this way, I do not claim any special expertise in this area. Listening, however, to some of the stories, I do begin to understand some of the catastrophic mistakes that are, even now, made by well-meaning clergy and ministers. The biggest mistake is to introduce the idea of Christian forgiveness early on this process of responding to an individual’s story. The only person who stands to benefit by such an act of forgiveness early on is the listener. She or he cannot bear to hear the grimy details of the abuse, particularly when it demonstrates the utter hypocrisy of a man of God taking advantage of a vulnerable person. If the victim can be persuaded to forgive then the story is effectively shut down. The victim is then supposed to indulge in a generous outpouring of Christian love towards the perpetrator so that the one being counselled can ‘move on’ and heal.

The kind of pastoral concern that is more about taking care of the listener than the victim obviously won’t do. Anyone with an ounce of experience will know that there will be in abuse cases several layers of issues to deal with. These will include guilt, induced shame and a sense of powerlessness. ‘Christian’ forgiveness can so often prevent one part of the process of healing which is, arguably, essential to any healthy recovery. The stage I am referring to is a sense of anger towards the abuser. Pastoral care will often include allowing an individual to feel visceral rage towards the person who abused or humiliated the victim in the past. It is uncomfortable having to witness this anger. But we know that it is a common stage on the journey to come to terms with the abuse event. The victim is perfectly entitled to be angry and when it is felt, it needs to be articulated. The expressed anger is part of the way that many victims begin to reclaim the power that was so cruelly taken from them. As victims, the abused were put into a situation where they were dominated and controlled. The angry victim is now the one who wants to cry out their pain, their grief and their lost innocence. But, in and through that anger, the victim is reclaiming a voice, a right to be heard and the power that belongs to every human being.

The question arises as to whether the anger of victims or survivors should be expressed outside the setting of psychotherapy and pastoral care. From the point of view of the institution where the abuse took place, such anger expressed openly is embarrassing and inconvenient. No institution wants to be reminded of the past failings of some of its representatives. How convenient it would be if the past could be left in the past so that no one in the present had to think about it or respond to it. But few institutions outside a dictatorship can ever suppress the past and the anger that simmers because of injustice and outright evil. The attempts to hide the pain of the past is likely to be met by failure. As the saying goes ‘truth will out’.

Next month a few survivors of church sexual abuse will be demonstrating outside General Synod in York. They will represent other survivors who are not present. Some of these latter will be reliving their anger and pain at home. Others will still be at the pre-anger stage of shame, guilt and self-blame. We have no means of knowing how many victims exist but we know, from the convictions in British courts, that there are still numerous others who are invisible. These hidden victims are out there, and our hearts go out to them.

To members of General Synod who meet a survivor at Synod or elsewhere, I would ask this. The survivor you are encountering is one of those who may be angry. But this anger is both justified and healthy. It is necessary for this anger to exist for at least two reasons. First it activates in the individual the necessary energy to reach out for help which is necessary for his/her individual healing. The second reason that this anger is healthy is because it is helping to move the institution, here the Church of England, to rectify past failures. The anger is also part of the energy that may make the Church a safer place in the future. Welcome the anger; embrace the anger because in some way this anger is a reflection of God’s anger towards individuals and churches that have tolerated the terrible evil of sexual abuse against the innocent.

I shall not be present outside Synod next month. I shall be at a conference in the States. But even though separated by 3,000 miles I shall be hoping and praying that the Synod embraces and welcomes in some way the energy of survivors who ultimately seeking for what every Christian should welcome. They are asking for justice, accountability and honesty especially among those who lead in the institution. Without that openness the institution must surely crack and splinter under the strain of suppressing the wrong and the anger that has existed for decades within it.

Many of the readers of SurvivingChurch will know of the story of Lizzie Lowe. This 14-year-old devout Christian teenager committed suicide over three years ago in Manchester. At her inquest it transpired that she was suffering from a deep conflict over her sexual identity. She believed that she was a lesbian but could not square this with her faith or share it with her parents. They were also devout Christians. What followed was a profound soul-searching by the congregation of St James Didsbury where she was a member. With the help of the organisation OneBodyOneFaith, the church has released a video in two parts for general release. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G51jf2sGts8&t=5s This tells Lizzie’s story and the outcome after her death. The well-known Scottish hymn writer and lecturer, John Bell, was also caught up in the story. He interviews the Vicar Nick Bundock about the events of Lizzie’s death. Nick then in the second video interviews John himself about his story of coming out as gay after he listened to a broadcast by Nick on Lizzie’s tragic death.

This blog post is not going to tackle the vexed question about the incompatibility of the gay identity and conservative Christian teaching. No doubt Lizzie had picked up negative comments from somewhere in her church about the evils of a gay life-style. But according to Nick, the Vicar, the subject had been rarely raised within the congregation. He, like possibly a majority of Anglican clergy, preferred not to raise the issue on the grounds that it was too divisive. Thus, there was almost an environment of secrecy around the topic and on the issues of sexuality in general. Lizzie’s death forced the church to confront these attitudes very forcibly.

The three years since Lizzie’s death and the inquest that followed it have resulted in an enormous amount of soul-searching by the entire congregation. This is spoken about in the first of the two videos which I hope my readers will watch. The end result of this process was that the Vicar and his congregation decided they needed to make the church a place of welcome for sexual minorities and others who, in various ways, found themselves effectively excluded by other churches. The fact that they were becoming a church which sought to include everyone meant that some members felt they had no option but to leave. The old boundaries of certainty were being, in their eyes, eroded. Nick spoke of the way that although some had left, others had arrived no doubt attracted this policy of inclusion. The congregation officially adopted the statement of Inclusive Church which seeks to welcome all. These newcomers numbered not only members of the LGBT community but also individuals with learning difficulties and members of racial minorities. Lizzie’s death had caused a revolution in attitudes as well as a transformation in the entire congregation. We can compare this with the revolution that I recently wrote about at the Kentucky Baptist Church of Immanuel.

The story of the legacy of Lizzie’s tragic death does not end there since the church’s decision to be inclusive has attracted the attention of other congregations across the UK and abroad. The point which I feel needs flagging up and is of relevance to our own concerns is the issue of secrecy. These are the aspects of church life that are never discussed because there is a conspiracy of silence around them. Sexuality is certainly one area and few people will find it comfortable to discuss their sexuality even when, by doing so, they can help others face up to this area of identity in themselves. Embarrassment and awkwardness will be quite difficult to manage. Mainstream denominational churches have little appetite for provoking such discomfort among their members. But there is another area of vulnerability which, alongside sexuality, is of concern to every single person but is seldom discussed or opened up. This is the topic of power and especially the dynamics of power within a congregation. Because everyone is in some way caught up in the power dynamics of a congregation it is almost impossible to discuss it with objectivity. As with a discussion on sexuality, power is a threatening topic and thus has to be avoided at all costs. Few people have the energy to challenge abuses of power even when they are a major cause of unhappiness in a congregation. Secrets sometimes have to be confronted and dealt with.

Nick Bundock spoke about the opening-up and the new freedom to discuss sensitive issues that was taking place since they had become an inclusive church. They were now free to welcome not just minority groups but also minority opinions. They had in other words shifted from being a church that pretended to hold a single perspective on teaching and moral guidance to a church which embraced diversity and openness. From the perspective of this blog it would mean that they could enter the still more vulnerable area of understanding power in the congregation – the way it is used and the way that it is experienced.

The tragic death of a teenage girl who, because of secrecy and misunderstanding believed she was in some way damned, may have helped to begin a small revolution in many churches. It is not just that the vitriolic homophobic rhetoric across many conservative churches may be blunted by Lizzie’s story, but also that some churches will follow Nick Bundock’s church and create for themselves a new openness, inclusivity and a readiness to talk about hitherto closed topics. Those who approach such churches will discover that there is in these churches a ministry of welcome that is one of good news. The good news is that God accepts and welcomes all humanity. He does not reject people because they are different or do not fit the stereotype of respectability. Our good news is that all are welcome to be part of the feast of the kingdom of God. Joining in that feast we find that we are growing in love, tolerance and openness.

One of the most important things that I learned when I was a student of the Bible was an understanding of the nature of prophecy. The classical prophets, those who form a large section of our Old Testament, were never in the business of acting as soothsayers and telling people what was going to happen in the distant future. There may have been a few individuals, as referred to in the book of Deuteronomy 13, who were thought to behave in this way. It is also a profound misunderstanding of the Book of Daniel to place him alongside the main canonical prophets. The Hebrew compilers of the Jewish Canon never made this error. The main canonical prophets like Jeremiah, Isaiah and Ezekiel were concerned to be talking about and interpreting the present. Above all, they had something to say about what they believed God had to say about this present and what was going to happen in the immediate future. In short, the prophets were the proclaimers of God’s will and judgement on the current behaviour of the nations. Most of the time these were facing the consequences of disobedience and failure. Even the chosen people were guilty, and there were to be disastrous consequences- death, destruction and other terrifying outcomes.

The second major idea in helping me to understand the prophetic tradition was to see the way that the prophets stood outside the institutional expressions of the Israelite religious/political system. From the time of David to the Exile, the Court and the Temple were key in maintaining the stability of the Israelite identity. Together these institutions would have claimed to protect and preserve all that was important about the worship and teaching of Yahweh. The prophets, by contrast, stood outside this system. Their vocation was to be outsiders, to challenge and defy the comfortable institutions of kingship and Temple worship. A conflict between the priest/ritual and the prophet is most clearly seen in the book of Amos. Amos sizes up the way that ritual worship and wealth coupled with immorality have corrupted the social and religious integrity of the northern kingdom of Israel. The whole book is gloomy and sets God’s judgement firmly in opposition to a failing establishment. The prophet again and again expresses the loathing of God for sin as well as the empty worship and sacrifices of Israel. ‘When you present your sacrifices and offerings I will not accept them… I cannot endure the music of your lutes’.

Amos sees that a terrible fate is coming to Israel. He declares: ‘I saw the Lord standing by the altar and he said: strike the capitals so that the whole porch is shaken; I will smash them all into pieces’. These prophecies of Amos were not given without those he was attacking making a response. Amos records one particular showdown when a member of the priestly establishment, Amaziah, confronts him. Amaziah tells him in no uncertain terms to go away back to Judah. In response Amos tells him that the forthcoming disaster will strike Amaziah and his whole family. More importantly Amos denies that he is ‘a prophet or the son of a prophet’. No doubt he is comparing himself with the official prophets attached to the official sanctuaries. Amos, the outsider, is free to speak and prophesy as God has told him to do.

The classical prophets in the Old Testament can be understood better when we become aware of these tensions between the vested interests of Temple and Court and the more charismatic independent traditions of prophecy. The institution reacts to this challenge just as we would expect; it tells the prophets to go away and not disturb the status quo or the vested interests of those in power.

If we try to compare the situation of the classical OT prophets and today, we might ask whether any parallels could exist. The Church of today does have strong features of being a reactionary self-protecting institution and many times it has been accused of behaving defensively to preserve itself. Among the ‘prophetic’ attacks that the Church has had to face is the challenge of its wealth. Has the Church held its wealth in the best possible way? Could it be accused of creating wealth, prestige and status rather than other imperatives such as serving the poor? There is no right or wrong answer to these questions, but we would be right to suggest that those who challenge the church in this area are engaged in an activity we could rightly describe as prophetic. Prophets are there to challenge and make institutions constantly appraise their deepest values.

Prophets like Amos are also found among those who speak to the Church from the perspective of survivors of abuse, sexual or otherwise. If these survivors are pushed away as being uncomfortable or embarrassing, we could well be reminded of the stand-to between Amaziah and Amos. ‘Never prophesy at Bethel, for this is the king’s sanctuary, a royal palace’ were the words of Amaziah. The same kind of uncomfortable prophesying might well be heard now in the Church. Any Church, much like ancient Israel, would probably want to preserve the status quo and all the power involved in the institution. Survivors are saying to the vested interests like the prophets of old. ‘We want openness, transparency and an end to secrecy. We also need resources to help us to recover from our pain. Through our understanding of God’s will, we believe that such things are just, loving and equitable. The needs of the wounded, the afflicted and destitute are a first call on the Church which believes in the compassion and love of God for all’. These could be considered to be words of prophecy to the Church just as the words of Amos were to the religious authorities of his day. In Amos’ words may ‘justice roll on like a river and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’.