I have been reflecting on the nature of human power and the way that for any individual it can be used for good or to create the most tremendous harm. Every child is born into the world with a need to find out who or what she is. Every parent tries to ensure that their offspring each takes possession of the gift of a firm identity or self. The discovery of a core self is never attained in a state of passive ‘niceness’. The child needs the skills of self-assertion – sticking up for the protection of this inner core. Being able to see off a bully -the one who attacks that core self- does not make the assertive child into a bully. It enables her to flourish better. As the child gets older, more and more of the natural abilities and skills that belong to the inner self are revealed. Bullying threatens to interrupt this precious process.

The readiness to stick up for ourselves against bullying, as a way of protecting and preserving our core selves, is something that we applaud. We know in practice how much can go wrong in the journey of growing up. A child can be dragged down by abusive behaviour and this may have the effect of damaging or even destroying the unique giftedness and creativity belonging to that individual. The experience of being bullied can also corrupt the child’s understanding of their inner power so that they become the bully themselves. Many children develop an instinct to understand personal power only as a tool with which to destroy. Smash up what is worthwhile and good because it does not belong to you. Tease and mock the child who has skills you do not possess, especially in the case of boys who practise those interests which are ‘soft’, like ballet or music. In vandalism or an episode of contemptuous mockery, the bully can obtain a fleeting sensation of power and control over what they despise as weak and contemptible.

All of us have witnessed the profound effects of bullying during our lives. We may have been one of the bullies or more probably one of its victims. Among children the effects can be so much more devastating because it is the unformed potential of the child that is under attack even before it has been allowed to show its full potential. In childhood, most bullying is completely invisible to the responsible adults. They just see the demoralised child who is failing to flourish or be happy. Adults cannot understand the evil that is being perpetrated so close to them but is unseen.

When we reflect on bullying and the abuse of human power a which takes place right across society, it is surprising that Christians do not have more to say about it. Outwardly Christians are staunch supporters of doing everything possible to encourage human flourishing in the widest sense. Creativity, joy and human fulfilment are perceived to be far more important than financial success or the rewards of status and power. Helping another person to blossom in some area of their lives is indeed a great source of satisfaction for anyone who tries to practice Christian love and encouragement. Clergy are especially privileged in this area as they try to be alongside individuals as they battle through one or other of life’s crises. To be with someone as they finally emerge from illness or a trial of some kind is a special occasion. Supporting a dying person on their last journey can also be a profound source of great light and joy. This is a paradox and a mystery. The dying person sometimes becomes the one doing the empowering for those left behind.

When bullying takes place in society and sadly in the church, it sadly appears to reflect that many individuals have never been taught to rejoice in the gift of their existence. Instead of being taught and encouraged to enjoy the richness of simply being alive, something has come along which has damaged the art of flourishing that we normally see in very young children. Perversely this failure to rejoice in life itself sometimes leads to a desire to harm the flourishing of others. Both sides are damaged in this process, the bullies and the bullied. It is at this point that the greatest irony occurs in respect of the Church. Not only is this vital topic not discussed but the Church in many places and contexts appears to increase the sum of this human pain. It does this by declaring that certain individuals, lifestyles and ways of life are always unacceptable to God. Good Christian people must continue this perceived divine disapproval and declare that such people have no place among the ‘saved’, the recipients of God’s favour.

This post does not propose here to say more about the topic of discrimination against LGTB individuals even though this group is at the sharp end of exclusion and bullying. My comment here is not to discuss the rights and wrongs of this cause, but merely to draw attention to the obscenity of bullying anyone and trying to drive them from the Christian family. Some weeks ago, I wrote about the Vicky Beeching story as well as the experiences of Jayne Ozanne. At the heart of the stories was the appalling bullying that these women receive. Christians somehow believe that it is their task to bully and use their power to try to seek and destroy another human being. To me such behaviour was and is a veritable blasphemy.

One of the key themes of the Bible, frequently repeated, is that an old order is finished. God himself is coming to inaugurate something new. I believe that the Church should often listen to the words of Isaiah 40 & 41 where it is declared that God is coming to visit his people. The whole passage speaks of joyful newness and hope for the future. The God who summons his people from the ends of the earth and declares new things is not one who singles out small groups to exclude them from his purposes. The message of the Bible is here one of incredible generosity and open-handedness. While there are examples of exclusion in Scripture, as we saw when we critiqued the eleven bishops and their assumptions about marriage in the Bible, there is also a frequent sense of new beginnings. I have preached many sermons on the pithy words of Jesus when he declares that ‘the Kingdom of God is among you’. These words are not the prelude to new pharisaic rules of exclusion and dogma. They are words that invite the hearer to open up to receive something new, powerful and transforming. The word ‘repent’ is an invitation to turn around to receive what is on offer, the flourishing that Jesus speaks of in John’s gospel. ‘I have come that they may have life, life in all its abundance’. In short, the Christian gospel is about human flourishing, the participation in joyous selfhood, one that is transfigured by the glory of God. All of us called to practise the love that makes this flourishing and transformation a reality in ourselves and in others. The kingdom is a place of unimaginable generosity where all find a welcome.

Words are powerful things and the same can be said for pithy two to three word designations of certain phenomena. A week or so ago I came up with the term ‘institutional narcissism.’ I would like to be able to say that I invented the term. The truth is slightly different. Someone else used the expression in an online conversation, without defining precisely what they meant. I went away and thought about the implications of the words and then fitted my thoughts and ideas around its possible meaning. Something similar has happened to me with another expression which has been current for a couple of years in the States. The expression is Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS).

Why am I attracted to the term which I first met today (Friday)? I find it helpful because without any further explanation it is allowing us to suggest that religion and religious ideas can in some situations cause harm. This is counter-intuitive and it goes against our long-held assumption that religion is inevitably a benign force. As one involved for a long time in the world of religious abuse, I have of course known for a long time that such a notion is a false one. Just because there are examples of truth, goodness and beauty in the religious systems that we encounter in our world, we also have to be armed with the thought that religions can sometimes do harm. RTS helps us to think about it.

The author of the study that gives rise to our helpful descriptive phrase is Dr Marlene Winnell. Much of what I have to say here about RTS is taken straight from an article on the website https://www.rawstory.com. The article contains useful references to earlier literature and articles on this theme. My reading of the first lines of the article hit me with a strong sense of synchronicity when I started to read it on Friday morning. It begins with personal testimony of how the author, seeking help for bulimia from religious leaders, was expected as a teenager to solve the problem with the help of prayer and faith alone. By some extraordinary coincidence I received today a phone call from a woman in the Midlands who had also suffered at the hands of a Pentecostal congregation seeking to ‘heal’ her eating disorder.

Marlene presents us with many examples of the pastoral situations she has dealt with as a counsellor where individuals have been badly affected by damaging or toxic beliefs. We are familiar with all of these from earlier posts. She first focuses on the effect of teachings concerning hell and damnation especially as they impact small children. The film that circulated widely among evangelical believers called Thief in The Night had an enormous effect. Children who watched it would wake in the night screaming because of the raw fear aroused by the themes of the film -Armageddon and damnation. The undeveloped brains of children were not able to process the horrors and the trauma of the film. The effect of having to internalise the message that all the viewers were wicked and destined for hell was highly traumatic.

The long-term message that many children have been left with after a fundamentalist upbringing is to have a profound sense of worthlessness. Being told to obey the will of God at every turn can easily sap any sense of self-determination. The authoritarian culture of many of churches call members into a state of passive acceptance of obedience to what the leaders tell them. At the same time, it is made very hard or impossible to escape the clutches of the group. Leaving an authoritarian group is possible only by paying a very high price, including the loss of family and all other support networks. The mental adjustments needed to escape are also quite difficult to put into effect. As with cultic groups the churches that demand total obedience have created in the followers a rigid system of processing thoughts. It hard to see the world in anything other than binary categories – right-wrong or black-white.

RTS as a concept is helpful to enable us to identify those who emerge from religious groups as suffering from a state quite similar to PTSD. Winnell suggests that a therapist needs to have some insight into the syndrome so that at the very least there is understanding of the kinds of words or situations that can set off painful ‘triggering’. Even more important it is right for the sufferer of RTS to be protected from other well-meaning Christians who may also not understand the nature of the traumas formerly endured. Bible texts may be a long way from what is therapeutically required.

Winnell’s insights into RTS fit well into the assumptions of this blog. Potential harm by religious leaders is not only to be found among those who exploit power to prey sexually and emotionally on followers. A wider problem exists in that there are within the Christian tradition some potentially harmful and damaging ideas. Young adults who self-harm and suffer from chronic depression as the result of a life-time of religious indoctrination and chronic fear are not good advertisements for the religion of Jesus Christ. Tragically it is still considered by some Christians as ‘sound’ to teach the horrors of hell and the need to use violence against even infants. No, we have moved on from a casual acceptance of slavery and the devaluation of women and children precisely because we have come closer to understand the inner essence of Christ’s teaching. It took Christians 1800 years to see that slavery was evil and barbaric and still longer to outlaw the thrashing of children. But we have done these things, bitterly opposed by some Christians, because the law of compassion and love compels us to act in this way. For centuries, women, children and slaves experienced crushing trauma because ‘good’ Christian people were prepared to tolerate this treatment. Today we stand up to oppose all that is cruel and whenever and wherever we encounter trauma being administered in the name of a version of the Christian faith. Surviving Church is proud to be among those who seek to counteract Religious Trauma Syndrome.

Today’s reflection is a comment on a letter sent yesterday on behalf of a group of eleven Church of England evangelical bishops to an Anglican Working Party which is preparing a document Living in Love and Faith (LLF). This is to be the authoritative Anglican statement on sexuality in 2020. The bishops sending the letter self-identify as evangelicals. They consider themselves to be among those who ‘seek afresh to understand biblical truth on contested issues and offer this as public truth for the common good in our pluralist, post-Christendom society.’ These eleven bishops mention with approval the activities of GAFCON. There is a need for unity when ‘recent history tragically demonstrates that introducing changes in teaching and liturgy has consistently divided Anglican globally and within provinces.’ Others may have more insight into the question as to which strand of Anglican evangelicalism these bishops represent. The House of Bishops would number many more self-confessed evangelicals who, for reasons of their own, have not identified with the letter. Whatever group these signatories represent, their aim is clearly to offer to the LLF process an Anglican evangelical perspective, one that is non-negotiable. Many Anglicans who do not agree with them ‘have rejected traditional Christian teaching on human identity, sexuality and marriage.’ They urge those preparing the 2020 statement to maintain the ‘central place of Scripture’. The letter also calls on LLF to reiterate the traditional teaching of the Anglican Communion. There is of course the standard appeal to the 1998 Lambeth resolution 1.10. This is quoted in full to remind the reader that only ‘marriage as a union in a covenant of love marked by exclusivity and life-long commitment’ is to be regarded as the ‘teaching of Scripture’. Anything else will only be tolerated if it is ‘sexually abstinent’.

I found myself reading this letter with growing irritation. It represents an appeal to Scripture and traditional Anglican statements which will only work if the person doing the appealing is not familiar with Scripture. It is, in particular, the assumptions about what Scripture has to say about marriage that caught my attention. We have presented to us in the letter the idea that the Bible has but one model of sex and marriage that is commended by Scripture for all time. If we take the complete Bible as the uniquely inspired word of God, we encounter enormous problems in maintaining that there is this single model for sexual behaviour and marriage. Many of the assumptions about relationships between men and women in the Old Testament are, by today’s standards, criminal and totally unacceptable. Exodus 21 & 22 contains a number of divinely given commands which relate to relationships between the sexes that have been outlawed for centuries. No one for the past two thousand years would tolerate the idea that a man can sell his daughter into slavery. Equally abhorrent is the notion that a girl should be forced to marry her seducer/rapist. The Old Testament kings such as David and Solomon sat very lightly on any notion of monogamy or faithfulness. Israelite soldiers who were victorious in battle were rewarded with ‘plunder’ and that would have included the wholesale rape of captive women. I always wince at the lesson from Isaiah 9 when the joy of God’s presence is compared to the way that men are glad when they share out the spoil. Such spoil would always have included captive women and there would have followed terrible scenes of sexual violence.

Of all the passages in the Bible about sexual relations between men and women, one of the most poignant is the passage connected with the defeat of Midian in Numbers 31. The writer records that God himself commands the division of the spoil and there is specific mention of thirty-two thousand girls who were virgins. We must surmise that these girls were mere children for the most part. After a half share of sheep, cattle and asses was handed over to Yahweh, the rest were divided up among the troops and this included the girls, many of them barely in their teens. It is hard to imagine that gratuitous sexual violence against women of any age helped these troops in the task of creating stable families once back home.

Another story in Scripture which shows religious edicts working against stable family life is in the Book of Ezra. In chapter 10 we have recorded the ‘dismissing’ of the foreign wives of the returning exiles together with their children. What happened to these innocent women and children is not recorded but clearly, they were felt to be expendable. The story reminds us of the story of Hagar who was sent away from Abraham’s household at the insistence of his wife Sarah. Whether or not Hagar survived seems to have been of little concern to Abraham or his wife. Certainly, no blame was attached to either of them for this action.

Sex in the Old Testament thus often involved rape, polygamy and indifference to the fate of women. All these behaviours were expected and to some extent tolerated. None of them fit well in helping men and women discover a form of marriage which is in keeping with our modern ideals, those which involve mutuality and permanence. A chaste picture of one man faithfully married to one woman is hardly the norm that we find in Scripture. The bishops who wrote the letter to LLF are presumably familiar with the pattern of sexual untidiness in the Bible and so, telling people that there is a ‘biblical’ model of monogamy and faithfulness is frankly dishonest. Even if we maintain that rape and sexual violence were not approved of in Israelite society, it is still hard to claim that the ancient Israelite expectations for the marriage relationship have much to offer our modern aspirations. Things do seem to improve by the time of the New Testament, but it is notable that conservative Christians seem today to make very little mention of Jesus’ clear injunctions about divorce. A great deal of energy is expended in condemning same sex marriage, on which Jesus has nothing to say, at the same time ignoring his words on the one area of marriage where he is clear. Too many church leaders, especially in the States, have ‘failed’ in this respect and second and even third marriages are common. They retreat to the convenient moral ‘ideal’ that of insisting all marriages to be between members of the opposite sex.

There is more to be said about why a group of bishops in England should take this position which has the potential to undermine the whole LLF project. I detect that in this stance the bishops are tempted by the reward of being bonded with other Anglican bishops across the world who are uniting in a tribal pact to insist that they alone have the truth in the way they understand the Bible. Strength through being part of the evangelical tribe is maybe what they seek in making this stand. Whether it can serve the cause of truth a completely different matter.

One of the advantages of having had to study the Bible in the original languages is that one can, on occasion, query the English translations. Individual words subtly change their meanings over time and there is always the possibility of gaining brand new insights when the original words behind the translations we have are examined in detail. In saying this I am not expecting every Christian to be knowledgeable in Greek and Hebrew. Nevertheless, I would ask that Christians are always cautious before pronouncing that they know exactly what a word or passage in the Bible means. Translation is always a work in progress and new translations will continue to appear. Any attempt to suggest that we can ever finally know what the Bible is telling us is based in fantasy. The gap between our own age and the world and languages of the Old and New Testaments remains and this will always inhibit complete understanding. We want to understand the words of Scripture, but we are forced to admit that sometimes our comprehension of that meaning is sometimes at best incomplete or approximate.

In thinking about the way words have changed their meanings over the 2-3,000 years since the Bible, I think of those individual words that I used to preach whole sermons about. One of these is the word for spirit or soul. Today when we use the word spirit, we normally think about it as an aspect of our being that lies beyond the physical. The spiritual part of me is that which goes on after physical life ceases. Alternatively, we think or spirit or soul as the inner dimension of our being. The Hebrew writer has a somewhat different take on the words translated spirit. It is the aspect of us that signifies life and physical vitality. Two Hebrew words are translated spirit. One the word ‘nephesh’ means breath, particularly the breath of God. The other ‘ruah’ literally means wind, God’s wind. In the second of the two Genesis creation stories, the earlier one as it happens, God breathes nephesh into the dust of the earth to make man alive. Having nephesh inside one was a signifier of vitality, possessing energy to be alive. The same word is used to describe Elisha taking on the spirit of Elijah. Ruah is the word used when life is returned to the dry bones that Ezekiel saw in his vision. God’s spirit or wind filled those bones and they became alive once more. The spirit of God made human beings fully alive.

It is these Old Testament emphases on life and vitality that we need to have in mind when we seek to understand the stories of Acts about the coming of the Holy Spirit. Over the centuries we have domesticated the Holy Spirit to being something very private and inward. Alternatively, we associate ‘Spirit-filled worship’ with special styles of music to which we may or may not be indifferent. Either way miss the dynamic of power and energy that the Old Testament background suggests to us. Whatever else is implied by the Spirit it seems to embrace the total potential of life in all its fullness. In addition, it is also pointing us to a richer experience of community life than we have ever known. The Bible, in short, is pointing us to those powerful words of Irenaeus – The Glory of God is found in a human being fully alive.

Another word that we have domesticated in the Bible is the word faith. It is a word that in common usage implies an inner activity, that of believing something to be true. The Bible, in contrast sees faith not as looking inwards but as looking outwards. The act of faith is typically seen in Abraham who set out on a journey, ‘not knowing where he was going’. The object of faith was not some abstract belief system or even the existence of God. Faith was the readiness to confront the unknown and venture forward because you believed that God was going ahead and showing individuals and the whole nation the way forward. The revelation of the Biblical God to the Hebrews was that he was alive and active in the events of history.

An individual who had this faith could get up in the morning with the strong sense that God was there, calling him or her to live out that that truth in whatever way they could. The deeper that one engages with life and its challenges, the more opportunity one had of meeting God himself. Thus, one’s religious faith was bound up with the journey and the adventure of living.

This brief examination of two words in their original cultural context helps us to see the wider fuller meaning that each possesses. Two things need to be emphasised here. First, we must not expect the words of the Bible to fit easily into the theological debates that we have today. St Paul did not know the things that now divide Christians. We must always be cautious before claiming that any doctrine is somehow ‘biblical’. Even when there may be a consensus among all Christians about the meaning of a particular passage, the possibilities of finding fresh meanings never end. There is no such thing as a single interpretation of the Bible. There is always more to be revealed.

A second point follows from the first. If a single, once for all, dogmatic interpretation is never appropriate for the understanding of a passage of Scripture, then this also applies to our faith. In short there needs to be a provisionality about the way we express the words that describe our Christian journey. The words of Scripture constantly reveal more of their meaning as we study them in an attitude of expectation. On this blog I have often described the Christian faith as a journey. A journey has as its main feature a state of unknowing about the destination, but it is fuelled by a strong sense of expectation and adventure. The journey of faith which is shrouded by a ‘cloud of unknowing’ is far more exciting and worthwhile than a package tour which has no surprises of any kind. ‘Here we have no abiding city; we seek one to come’. May we travel there enlivened with the spirit of life that God gives us and with the faith that gives us the confidence that he is with us to the end.

One of the disturbing things about the way church sexual abuse survivors are treated is the variety of these responses. Sometimes survivors encounter empathetic understanding from would-be helpers and those who have official responsibilities in this area, such as Diocesan Safeguarding Advisers. On other occasions survivors are firmly, even cruelly, rejected as though they are a nuisance for the church rather than victims of terrible institutional failure. We do find some good responses. The Church at the highest level appears to understand the devastating effects of sexual abuse. Archbishop Welby has made some statements which appear to get to the heart of the issue. He is recorded as saying ‘The victims are the people we care about most. They really, really matter.’ He also spoke of the importance of addressing ‘the whole culture of silencing…. failure to do so is a form of abuse for the second time, as bad if not worse than the first betrayal’.

The choice of the word ‘betrayal’ by the Archbishop to describe the original abuse and the subsequent silencing of victims by church leaders is powerful. Figures of authority in the church, priests, church leaders and even bishops betrayed a victim’s trust and abused him/her. Further damage is caused when these victims fail to be heard by other leaders in the church and this compounds the original abuse. Not only is this rejection cruel and pastorally inept, it also prevents the process of healing from getting under way. Sexual abuse recovery is a process involving hard work on all sides. Dealing with shame and emotional pain can only be done when those involved in the healing process have created acceptance and a safe space in which to explore the original trauma. Perceiving that figures in authority regard you as a nuisance or a threat to the church will create additional stress for the recovering survivor. As Archbishop Welby understood, at least in his quoted words, any experience of being silenced compounds the original experience of abuse.

When Andrew Graystone wrote his pamphlet We Asked For Bread, he carefully recorded the words of nine victims or survivors. Only on occasion did they have positive things to say about the structures of safeguarding and the attempts to help them. I want to assume that there are individuals within the safeguarding systems who do care. Some for reasons of compassion, pastoral sensitivity and conscience do work, as well as they can, with and for survivors. We must try to believe that Archbishop Welby meant what he said when he uttered the words, ‘I regularly meet with survivors of abuse, listen to their stories and (this) reinforces in me my own determination to put their interests first.’

Whatever the words of an Archbishop, the reality on the ground has been a fairly grim one for many survivors. Graystone’s pamphlet records the negative responses, the silence, the avoidance and the sheer cruelty of bishops and others in the hierarchical system of the church who have been confronted with survivors struggling with pain. The overall message from survivors that I have spoken with is that, when given the choice to show compassion and understanding to a survivor or to protect the institution, most of these leaders have chosen the second path.

I have thought long and hard about why any bishop should choose only to protect the institution and, in the process effectively betray a fellow suffering human being. Even if only a single bishop is behaving this way we still need to ask what is going on. As readers of this blog will know, I have long been interested in the phenomenon of narcissistic behaviour. When survivors describe their negative interactions with non-caring bishops and other leaders, I very much sense that their experiences resemble an encounter with an individual exhibiting Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Those who display this disorder will reveal high levels of self-importance and entitlement with a failure of empathy. Of these qualities, the failure of empathy is the one that causes the greatest pain for survivors. To speak to an individual who is supposed to be the chief pastor and find a complete absence of pastoral caring must be a heavy blow for any survivor.

I have been theorising as to how any bishop could develop the traits that we associate with NPD. Narcissism is a disorder which is commonly encountered in politicians (American presidents!), those involved in the entertainment industry and many members of elite organisations. One form of narcissism is known as Acquired Situational Narcissism (ASN). Classic theories to account for NPD focus on failures in early upbringing. ASN does not require such complicated ideas to explain itself. It theorises that anyone pushed into importance by their status or role can develop the unpleasant traits associated with narcissism. Something similar thing happens to some people who acquire enormous wealth.

In my thinking, I am beginning to glimpse a further sub-division of narcissism. It has my title of Institutional Narcissism. Individuals in a hierarchical institution who achieve status by climbing the ladder of promotion will have a vested interest in preserving the privileges and importance of that entity. Bishops who are officials in the Church of England will naturally have a strong emotional stake in the welfare and reputation of that institution. This will be far more than for a lay member of the same church. Just as politicians and pop stars sometimes exhibit narcissistic traits in and through their importance, so this may be true of bishops. In the church importance is gained, not from public opinion, but simply in view of the hierarchically acquired status. The institution itself has given them their importance. My insight is that some will do a great deal to preserve that status, including showing narcissistic traits to defend themselves and their organisation against anyone, including survivors, who are seen as a threat to their position.

The reported bullying, silencing and even outright dishonesty by some bishops and others towards survivors are not the forms of behaviour that we would associate with a follower of Jesus. When a bishop exhibits such behaviour, we are forced to search for some explanation. I am offering here the hypothesis of what I describe as Institutional Narcissism. Promotion, importance and status have created in certain individuals a distancing from the original impulse or vocation to serve and love. When a church leader abandons love for a defensive narcissism, an evil is created in the heart of the church. This, unless checked and challenged, will gradually destroy the Church’s integrity and its ability to speak to and serve our nation.

The expression ‘toxic masculinity’ has recently entered the vocabulary of the politically and socially aware, especially in the States. It describes an angry and aggressive attempt by men to control the levers of power in society and elsewhere. From the perspective of women, this takeover reflects a continuation of an age-old patriarchy in society. This declared that men have a God-given right to be supreme and take control over women and children. The voices of women are thus not always heard because men have occupied many of the places of influence and control.

This week, in the forum of the American Senate, we have seen this ancient conflict on display. A woman who credibly claims to have been assaulted by a rich privileged young man 36 years ago gave her testimony. Against her was the accused, Judge Brett Kavanaugh. He responded with the angry impetuous male voice of someone who seems never to have had his male superiority challenged. The anger was directed not only against the female accuser; it was also aimed at anyone who asked him to give some account of his actions and memories of the time. The responses were often simply petulant and bad-tempered. To me they seemed like the response of a child who has always been pampered and allowed to have anything he wants.

After listening to the judge’s unconvincing defence, we have learnt certain facts about his religious past. The private school he attended was a Jesuit school and subsequently Brett Kavanaugh became involved in an extremely conservative group called the Federalist Society. This is a group of lawyers dedicated to promoting right wing causes. These centre around issues that inflame all religious conservatives, and they include birth control, anti-abortion and the restriction of gay rights. Of the 18 senior lawyers on Trump’s long list for Supreme Court nominations, 16 have been suggested and backed by this Society. With Supreme Court opinion now finely balanced, Trump’s nominations are all designed to push the Court into making future judgments which will promote the values and ethics of the Right. These are typically the masculine values that want to control women and their bodies.

It would be right to claim that Biblical patriarchy and ultra-right politics are close allies. The Church of Rome, to put it mildly, has always had a problem with understanding the perspective of women. This blindness to the complexities of female experience is shared by a large swathe of Protestant ‘biblical’ opinion. There the vagaries of female experience can, it is assumed, be swept away by declaring that every woman should come under the ‘covering’ of a man. This may be her husband or father. We have on this blog discussed the ‘biblical’ commands for women to obey men in every sphere. Clearly such sentiments have little to commend them in the 21st Century. But pressure groups like the Federalist Society, Bible Colleges and other fundamentalist/right-wing groups within American society still provide a home for people who are drawn to these reactionary ideas.

At the IICSA hearings in July, on Peter Ball, we heard evidence for what appears to be a ‘toxic masculinity’ at the heart of the Anglican Church. A men-only dining club that meets regularly at Lambeth Palace, known as Nobody’s Friends, appears to be a gathering for socially very well-connected Anglicans. Although originally high church in its origins, the club provides an opportunity for a privileged church group to network and sometimes lobby those in authority in the Church. Lord Lloyd, a long-time member, sent a letter to Archbishop Carey on behalf of Peter Ball. His letter contained the words ‘May I presume on a brief acquaintance at dinners of Nobody’s Friends?’ The IICSA hearing referred to a Daily Mail report about Nobody’s Friends as ‘centred on a strong core of bishops, ex-Tory ministers …. a highly secretive, all male group representing Britain’s most entrenched professions and institutions.’

The Nobody’s Friends dining group has been described as ‘private’ rather than a secret group, but it still represents an exclusive world of male privilege within the heart of the Anglican establishment. When Bishop John Bickersteth once revealed that his appointment to Bath and Wells followed his being ‘spotted’ at a Nobody’s dinner, we began to get the feeling that the values of our church may incline towards corporate and institutional interests rather than a personal morality based on the Sermon on the Mount. Is this perhaps a male versus a female thing? Are women perhaps better at understanding the imperative of always keeping personal morality to the fore while men value the power and privileges of the institution as things to be protected at all costs?

The experience of survivors of sexual abuse reporting to authority seems to take two forms. Sometimes they meet genuine compassion and care, whether from individual bishops or Diocesan Advisers. On other occasions they encounter the harsh edge of a system whose chief value seems to be to protect itself. I have loosely described these two approaches as female and male respectively. Obviously not all men are comfortable with the world represented by men-only dining clubs. Such groups all too easily use the power of their connections to believe themselves naturally at the pinnacle of entitlement within the institution. Similarly, not all women in power are necessarily going to stick up for an individual survivor when the weight of the privileged institution threatens to crush them. Nevertheless, my crude simplification picks up something important that is active both in American society and in ‘private’ places within our national church. Toxic masculinity and the ‘old-boy network’ are still forces to be reckoned with. We also saw it in operation among Iwerne connected evangelicals when they succeeded in spiriting John Smyth out of the country to Zimbabwe where he could no longer embarrass his old friends.

Sexual abuse scandals in the Church of England are never just about failing individuals such as Ball and Smyth. These scandals go further, to implicate others who influenced them in institutions, sometimes those which were the providers of great privilege. Subsequently, similar groups gathered round to protect them as best they could when things went wrong.

Toxic masculinity seems to be found as an underlying value in both politics and religion. It takes as a given the underlying assumption that the male of the species is superior to the female. All the morality that flows out of this assumption is inevitably toxic. It needs to be constantly challenged and exorcised from our thinking and our theology.

Further information on Nobody’s Friends can be found on the Wikipedia page

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.