When I was a small child, there was a recognition that, as part of growing up, we had to catch certain illnesses to become immune to them. I am of course speaking about chickenpox, measles and mumps among others. There was another illness, not uncommon among children, which had a terrifying reputation. This was far more serious; it was polio. Even as a young child I heard about children in hospitals encased in an iron lung to assist their breathing. Their lungs had ceased to work because of paralysis. Eventually the Salk vaccine for polio came in and children all over the country were given it on a lump of sugar. To organise such an immunisation process for every child in the country must have taken a lot of effort. It was apparently successful as, after around 1957, few further cases of polio were reported in the UK.

I begin with this anecdote as a way of drawing out a contrast that I see in the world of church safeguarding. The highly organised structure of trained people who make it their business to defend children and vulnerable people from potential dangers within the Church is like the Ministry of Health organising an immunisation programme. Everyone, from the Archbishops down to a member of a church council, has been required to attend a safeguarding event as well as undergo a criminal record check. This process, like the polio vaccination effort of the 50s, has required a massive amount of organisation and time. It would be good to say that these safeguarding efforts by the church will be as effective as the campaign against polio. It would be marvellous if reported cases of sexual abuse reduced to zero. The word safeguarding is one that implies protection and vigilance against possible dangers. It requires everyone to be on their guard against inappropriate behaviour, especially around relationships with children.

The IICSA hearing about the diocese of Chichester revealed that the process of safeguarding has become almost a mini-industry. I have not studied the official guidelines for good practice, but I understand that they run to several hundred pages. To add to the complexity, each diocese is responsible for the details of its own safeguarding policy. Although Church House employs 13 f/t members of staff in this area, the National Safeguarding Team does not seem to have authority over the protocol of each diocese. We might hope that out of the IICSA process some centralisation of practice as well as simplification might result.

My anecdote about polio and the task of immunisation also carried a reference to those who were tragically afflicted by the disease. They were not all placed in an iron lung but some ‘escaped’ only with a degree of paralysis to the limbs. The extreme cases died or were rendered cripples for life. These breathing machines saved lives, but an experience of being inside one for even a week must have traumatised the patients severely. By the end of the 50s no one was talking about children in hospital inside iron lungs. For whatever reason they simply were not around anymore and thus not needing to be spoken about.

If we compare the process of safeguarding with the polio immunisation programme, we need also to ask how the abuse survivors fare. From the evidence of IICSA and other communication I have had from victims via the blog, it seems to be true that many victims feel like the children inside machines designed to help them breathe. They have been shut away and ignored. All the money and the magnificent organisational abilities of the church have gone to protect as-yet uninfected (unabused) children. The survivor community often feels like the children hidden away in hospitals. They are ignored so that they can be forgotten. Safeguarding officials in trying to stamp out the virus of sexual abuse in the church, are not interested or even able to help them. The focus is on the ‘well’, not the victims of abuse.

In this blog I want to distinguish between the activity of safeguarding, the setting up of structures to protect and defend vulnerable people, and the task of caring for survivors. The church for all its detailed attention to safeguarding structures for the protection of the vulnerable, does not seem to care or give much attention in responding to victims and survivors in an effective way. This apparent indifference that survivors have encountered from safeguarding officers, nationally and locally, is said to be so hurtful that it is experienced as a kind of secondary abuse.

If we identify the safeguarding process as being like setting up a huge immunisation programme which is distinct from the task of nursing the existing victims of polio, we may be able to suggest what is missing in the church’s current response. The unfortunate victims of polio needed care in the same way as the abuse survivors need care. I have struggled to find a single word to describe the nature of the care needed by abuse survivors. Two words have been suggested to me -thriving and flourishing again. Taking the first of these words I have made it part of an acronym ESTA- Enabling Survivors to Thrive Again. I understand that this acronym is also a word in Spanish – you are. ESTA is what is needed for survivors, in the same way as unmolested children and vulnerable adults need protection through safeguarding. Let us abandon the pretence that caring for the abused plays any part in the safeguarding role. No one, nationally or locally, seems to have achieved this double role within the safeguarding community. Care of survivors should be put into the hands of a completely new body. Just as we did not expect civil servants to care for children in iron lungs, so we should not expect safeguarding experts to have much to offer the needs of abuse victims.

In this blog I am calling for ESTA groups which should be commissioned to work independently of existing safeguarding teams. They would support abuse victims who request their help. The advantage of my acronym is it indicates that survivors would not be passive consumers of help. The word ‘enable’ points to the way that the relationship of the helper to the survivor is one of cooperation and support. Survivors need many things. But it is not the task of the helper to tell them what they need. Many things should be on offer -therapy, residential care, legal support and emotional backing. Above all the survivor needs to feel heard by the institution which has abused him or her. We are not just talking about the original abuse but also the subsequent institutional abuse which has been so often reported by survivors. Unanswered letters, blanking by senior officials and a sense of being ignored by the system have been deeply traumatising to those experiencing them. By removing responsibility for helping survivors from safeguarding teams, we would hope to restore the human touch which has somewhere been lost in the process. What I have written remains an aspiration rather than a detailed proposal. But it might help someone reading it to wake to the realisation that the present structures of safeguarding are sometimes deeply damaging to those who in vain look to them for help and support.

But as I began to seek answers as to what exactly happened and why, nothing could have prepared me for the years of dishonesty, obfuscation and, at times, outright hostility that followed.
Critical records went missing, statements from staff were dishonest, investigations were superficial, the organisations that should have been taking action to ensure the Safeguarding services were safe instead acted to reassure each other that everything was OK.

This extract was taken from a witness statement by someone who lost a child through incompetent midwifery services in Barrow in Furness, Cumbria. By changing a single word, as I have done, it could easily be mistaken for a plea from a church survivor of sexual abuse. Both in Cumbria and across the country individuals have faced obstruction and hostility as they question the institutions that caused them or their loved ones real harm.

After my recent blog post when I spoke about bishops as managers who somehow then lost much of their pastoral skill, I realised that I needed to restate my claim in a more nuanced way. Bishops and other senior clergy do not in fact necessarily lose their pastoral skills with individuals; the problem is what may happen to these skills when they encounter an individual who has been damaged by the institution that they as bishops oversee. The capacity to show empathy for a woman who has been abused by a partner in a domestic situation may still function well. A problem arises when abuse is perpetrated, not by a violent husband but by a clergyman or even a fellow bishop. In this situation the shutters seem often to come down as we heard from the contributors to the previous blog post on this site.

The doctors, nurses and administrators at Barrow Hospital to whom complaints were made, were no doubt individually decent and caring people. There is nothing to suggest that as a group they neglected their children or their elderly parents. But something changed in them in the situation of having their colleagues or institution criticised. This was the beginning of the lies, dishonesty and hostility that were handed out to grieving parents and other vulnerable people. There is no doubt that this behaviour was internally justified. Sentiments like ‘we must stick together’ or ‘the hospital needs absolute loyalty from us’. All such justifications no doubt fudged the issue as to whether their actions were moral, compassionate or indeed served the long-term interests of the institution of which they were part. Of course, from the outside it can be clearly seen that such behaviour was far more damaging to the hospital than if a clean breast had been made at the start. But the dishonest culture of collusion and cover-up does not make this kind of calculation. It merely serves the immediate perceived needs of the institution. Cover-up at all costs rules, regardless of long-term damage to reputation and climate of trust. Every individual who participated in this kind of cover-up lost something of their inner soul. The institution also stole from them something important, their decency and their honour.

There are many gaps in our knowledge about what is happening in the church as the result of decades of cover-up and obstruction in sexual abuse cases. The IICSA hearings and the comments following the previous post suggest that the problems are still extensive. I would ask my readers who wish to experience the frustration of those at the wrong end of the complaint system within the church to read the comments from Andrew Graystone and Gilo. They will get a flavour of how frustrating it is to try and tackle an institution which closes ranks to make complaining almost impossible. The individuals who hide behind institutional walls are probably thoroughly good people like the Barrow hospital staff. But the institution has corrupted some of them. It is not their individual morality that has been taken away, but the institution itself may have done something to their sense of honour and their integrity.

Looking at the institutional structures of the Church of England from the outside, we can often see tremendous defensiveness at work. Those in charge of the church no doubt feel it needs to be defended because there are massive dangers if legal liability for past abuses is accepted. The diocese of Tasmania in Australia has had to sell of half its buildings in order to meet the financial liabilities for past abuse settlements. Here the cost of meeting possible claims against the Church of England is potentially huge. Even if the Church does have large liabilities to meet in the future, it is hard to see that a path of obfuscation is a viable way forward for the Church. At best it could delay the day of reckoning but this delay would only be achieved at the cost of integrity and openness. Many of us want to see the dark shadow of abuse being faced up to rather than buried by delaying tactics. Honesty and integrity are surely better weapons with which to face the future than half-truths and cover-ups.

As a final comment this blog applauds the appointment of Vivien Faull as the new Bishop of Bristol. Vivien showed her leadership mettle in the messy business with the bell ringers at York. In this blog at the time we supported her stance as there was clearly a festering problem which needed to be confronted. This decisiveness is an important addition to the House of Bishops. Let us hope that her appointment will help to create a new atmosphere not only in Bristol but across the whole Church of England.

I heard the news of the death of Tessa Jowell on the radio on Saturday. Obviously, the event was not unexpected but there is always a sense of loss when a much-respected person in the public eye dies. Among the tributes, I heard one which especially struck me. This was an appreciation to make anyone’s family proud. Tessa Jowell, someone said, was a person who sought out the powerless in society and tried to help them. She also sought out the powerful and encouraged them to help the powerless.

I have been reflecting on these words and asking myself how this might relate to what happens or does not happen in a church context. It might be hoped that anyone who gets caught up in the Christian ‘spirit’ would inevitably develop a sensitivity for the needs of those who are poor or disadvantaged. Those of us who have worked in any way with people in need know that it is seldom straightforward. People do not queue up, as in a soup kitchen, grateful for any scraps of help or attention that are on offer. The idea of what constitutes help will often differ dramatically between the would-be donor and the recipient. Untidy political questions about the distribution of resources in society are never far away. Many individuals in the so-called caring professions must go home each day wondering whether the help that they offered was indeed the best or the most suitable that could be provided. What a client thinks they need is not necessarily in their best long-term interest.

The perennial uncertainty of not knowing precisely how to respond to situations of need will be wearing on the professional (or amateur) helper. Many of the problems of deprivation seem intractable and never go away. What do you do as a teacher if half your class in a primary school turns up in unwashed clothes having eaten nothing for breakfast? How far can you help if a tenant is being exploited by a landlord when there are threats of violence in the air? A clergyman who choses to live in a ‘difficult’ area will know about countless examples of the effects of bad housing, social deprivation and poverty. Presumably the same kinds of problems faced politicians such as Tessa Jowell. She appears to have been one of the politicians who persevered with her efforts to help in situations of individual need. In her case she also used her connections with powerful social figures to bring about political changes which went wider than her local constituents.

The temptation for any carer in a difficult environment is at some point simply to remove oneself from the challenges of poverty and need. One way of doing this is to go off to work in a geographically more congenial environment. The other option open to some is to seek a post in management. In any profession, to be in management implies that one is no longer at the ‘coal-face’. One is now directing others to do the work. In a church context that means ‘preferment’, taking on the role of an Archdeacon, Bishop or an Archbishop. The day-today problems of dealing with the intractable needs of ordinary people are thus magically pushed away. They all become someone else’s immediate responsibility.

If I am right, managers in any organisation are always going to feel a sense of relief at being ‘above’ the old issues that they used to deal with. I would suggest that, as time goes on, their emotional engagement with the actual day to day difficulties of people’s lives becomes weaker. After say, three years, most managers within a professional institution will have successfully cast off the old stressful role of gritty engagement with people’s lives. They have started to live out the new persona; they have become the successful (well-paid) manager. Stresses do not go away but they change in their nature. As far as bishops are concerned, there will be the acquisition of management skills as well as staff to deal with difficult issues. At the same time close contact with ordinary human distress has decreased. Sometimes also the old skills of empathy and Christian love begin to atrophy. No one forgets what it means to be a victim of poverty or abuse, but somehow the full emotional ‘knowing’ is no longer there.

I make these comments as a possible explanation as to why it is that there seems to be such a chasm between the statements* of bishops and archbishops towards survivors of church sexual abuse and the reality on the ground – almost total inertia. Promises of putting the victims at the centre of concern in practice have turned out to be highly expensive consultations which produce almost no change in the way victims are cared for. Compared with the complexities of poverty, the healing of most abuse survivors, while challenging, does follow some fairly well recognised protocols of professional care. Rather than follow these protocols, the actions in fact taken do seem far more to serve the needs and perspective of the management class – the bishops. These actions, such as they are, make little or no sense to those who are the victims of what is, arguably, a severely defective culture.

I am one of those people in the church who unashamedly sees the problem of sexual abuse in the church from the point of view of victims/survivors. These survivors have had their lives damaged or even destroyed by systems of abusive power which had incubated a sense of entitlement among abusing clergy over decades. It is never just about sexual deviance on the part of individuals. Sexual abuse emerges out of attitudes of privilege, elitism, patronage and power-seeking. While we can expect to find institutional power games in every area of society, somehow, we might have hoped that they would be absent from the place where the teachings of Jesus are supposedly honoured.

To return to Tessa Jowell. She seems to have been a woman who moved in places of privilege but never lost touch with her readiness to serve and identify with human beings in need. Our bishops also move in places of privilege but, unlike Tessa, in many cases they appear to have lost touch with individuals in distress. Here of course we are speaking of the survivors of abuse. This apparent failure of episcopal empathy may well prove to do more damage to the health of the Church of England than any other single lapse in its recent history.

*Statements and responses from bishops followed (among others) the Elliot Report, the Butler Schloss enquiry, the Sally Cahill enquiry and Moira Gibb’s report on Peter Ball. No doubt similar expressions of good intentions will follow IICSA in due course.

Last Sunday I was singing the hymn which contains the familiar words: ‘when I tread the verge of Jordan, bid my anxious fears subside’. I could equally have been singing about the reality of God as my shepherd. Alternatively, there might have been a hymn which likened the Christian life to a pilgrimage through hostile territory. Even when, as in one case, the original reference is to an historic event, each one of these hymns is being used as a metaphor for some aspect of the Christian journey. As metaphors they allow the Christian to create inside their head a visual picture of some aspect of what Christians believe. No one was suggesting that I should take these images as a literal description of truth. To do so would have been to miss the point of the way language was being used in this context. Each image has a power as a metaphor to move a Christian and in different ways evoke the reality of their faith.

The Bible we use and the hymns we sing encourage us to do a lot of visualising and imagining reality that is at the heart of belief. Often these acts of imagination that go on inside us have no point of reference to an actual historic event. Sometimes the stories of Old and New Testaments that inspire our imagination tell of actual events; on other occasions the things that evoke an imaginative response inside us are simply well-told stories or metaphors. The reality of God or the issues around discipleship do not become any the less real inside our heads, because the story that evokes them is not historically ‘true’. Also, when I sing about ‘the verge of Jordan’ as a metaphor for the human experience of death, I am not in any way misusing it by refusing to concern myself with whether it is historically accurate. The hymn uses the story as a way of contemplating a profound human reality. The human imagination needs this and other metaphors for coping with the fact of death and the implication this has for conducting the rest of our lives.

How do our minds in fact engage with story and metaphor as a way of experiencing and making sense of spiritual reality? I suppose that the simplest answer is to say that metaphor, if it is to be used successfully, demands a developed imagination. If I think of God as my shepherd I need to provide my mind with an image culled from my capacity to imagine. It is the use of this same imagination that allows me to reach out in the activity we call prayer or worship. Reason, of course, has some part in the process but it is impossible to imagine a religious life of prayer being viable without the full participation of the human imagination. Another traditional word for the human imagination within prayer is the heart. The imagination/heart is what creates and makes use of the vivid picture language which is another word for biblical metaphors. It is also through the imagination that we can resonate inside to the language of the spiritual classics. Without metaphor and picture language in these writings, they would be very short indeed.

In summary, singing about the journey to the River Jordan involves the activation of our imaginations. This blog post has the simple aim which is to celebrate the role of the heart, the imagination which links us to spiritual realities, whether in Scripture or other types of devotional literature. When we celebrate the imagination in this way, it reminds us that there is also another approach to the Christian faith. This is one that demands that we emphasise the literal meaning of the language of the Bible whenever possible. We are expected to prioritise ‘fact’ above all other types of language. The need to find scientific statements in the poetic reflections of the author Genesis seems to kill the spirituality of the book stone dead. It is hard to celebrate or contemplate the wonder of creation when you are being forced to argue about how long the six ‘days’ of creation lasted. Like modern progressive interpreters such as myself, the early Church Fathers were deeply conscious of the way that the literal meaning of biblical passages did not necessarily reveal their most important aspect. Although we might not agree with the way that they went about their treatment of the biblical text, we can applaud the way that many of them wanted to suggest the possibility of some passages having different levels of meaning to offer. I seem to remember from my studies that key figures such as Origen were very anxious to apply the idea of allegory to the text, particularly when there are contradictions and anomalies to be overcome.

Since the 18th-century, there has been an increasing emphasis within human knowledge on the scientific, the provable and the mathematically precise disciplines. This holding up of measurable fact as superior to all other forms of knowing has had the effect of downgrading other forms of truth. This discovery of science as a tool of explanation for the natural world comes to us through the movement we call the Enlightenment. It has provided us with a great deal in terms of technology and we cannot imagine the modern Western world without it. But there have been losses to human flourishing as a result. It is, however, ironic that the Christians who claim to be most faithful to the biblical text, the conservatives, have been the ones who have been most affected by modern Enlightenment values. Arguing about the numbers and species of animals in the Ark could only ever matter to a culture (such as our own) that expects precision in measurement. Many of us who study scripture know that this kind of accuracy is unlikely to have been of special importance to the Biblical authors. Expecting ‘God’s truth’ to be like a modern scientific textbook is an extremely unhelpful and distorting approach to the text of Scripture. But this is precisely what many conservative evangelicals do with the Bible. They look for precise statements of scientific fact and historical truth in the text. In doing so they miss the variety, the nuance and the depth of the symbolism and the metaphors that are everywhere to be found. There will of course be some disagreements and debates to be had as to how to identify metaphor, fact and history. As a general point I would like to think that the authors of Scripture were far more in tune with an approach which emphasises the use of the imagination/heart as I have outlined. We are creatures that want to approach truth not only with our minds but above all with our imaginations. God is far more to be known and understood with the help of picture and metaphor. We need, of course, our minds, but we also need in knowing God to develop and foster the parts of our being that respond to divine beauty and mystery. The author of the Cloud of Unknowing, a mediaeval mystical treatise, stated it very simply when he said of God: By love he (God) can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held.

Visitors to this blog seem to be of two kinds. The first are the regulars (happily increasing) who come to read my comments and observations about some topical issue. Another group of people find the blog through a Google search. They want to know what I have said on some topic in the past. The most popular theme that is ‘googled’ is church shunning or ostracism. Many people seem to have had this experience at the hands of their Christian communities. The suffering experienced by some individuals seems to have been enormous. Such people are effectively cast out of a community which has been their spiritual home for a long time. In some cases, they are forbidden even to associate with family members who want to remain in the community. The pain experienced in this sort of situation is heart-rending.

The Christian leaders who exercise the sanction of ostracising certain congregational members will of course claim biblical authority for this action. They will refer to a passage such as Matthew 18.15-17. This appears to give a leader the authority for a leader to expel a ‘brother’ who has done something wrong. A similar power to root out a sinful member is implied in 1 Corinthians 5. ‘This man is to be consigned to Satan for the destruction of the body, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.’ The issue of discipline within any congregation is of course sometimes going to be an extremely difficult area to manage. In some congregations a lot of time has to be given to overseeing sexual abuse offenders who have spent time in prison. Marriage breakups within a congregation can also be very tricky areas to negotiate, particularly where both sides of a breakup are demanding support for their situation. It is not easy to avoid taking sides. Even more complicated is the situation is when two people become attracted to one another, when such a relationship would be adulterous. Not everyone feels the sense of shame which would here be appropriate. There is also the fact that most would acknowledge the relationship to be a cause of offence to others in the group. Applying Matthew’s instructions to these complex scenarios is no simple matter.

My reader will not be surprised when I point out that the Matthew 18 passage and others that give authority to church leaders to exclude people, can easily be inappropriately applied. Alongside the passages that demand obedience to a leader which we examined in an earlier post, these passages can also be used to maintain control. Sin is a difficult word to define. It is not difficult to imagine that some Christian leaders will include in their understanding of sin such things as disagreement, questioning and challenging decisions by the minister. It will also include sexual life-styles not approved of by the church. In short, texts from the Bible have come to be used sometimes to maintain strict control over members of the congregation to control their lives, their beliefs and behaviour. In a healthy congregation the possibility of disagreement is tolerated. There will be structures which allow debate and the opportunity to hear all sides to any question. In contrast, the authoritarian church will wish to close down all discussion on such matters. The ‘Spirit led’ decision of the leader is the one that prevails every time.

A power to exclude and ostracise an individual within a church is something of great moment. Even the thought that to argue against authority may be met with sanctions and exclusion will send a frisson of fear across a congregation. When the congregation colludes with this way of doing things, that fear may well be hidden. But when something occurs to upset the status quo, the raw power to shun and exclude becomes visible. It is that power that can quickly destroy the mental and spiritual well-being of the individual so affected.

One of the additional aspects of shutting out an individual member of a congregation is that everyone else is drawn into the process. They individually have to cut off all contact with the victim. Friendships and even family bonds are sundered in the effort by the leader to preserve a strong boundary between the ‘saved’ and those who have left the congregation. This rule would apply both to those who have been shut out and those who have excluded themselves. Of the latter group, Michael Reid, the leader of Peniel Brentwood used to quote 1 John 2.19. ‘They went out from our company but never really belonged to us’. The frequent quoting of this verse conditioned the congregation to believe that anyone who left Peniel for whatever reason was on their way to a state of damnation. Everyone had a duty to shun such people as well as collude with lies that are told about them. Children also caught up in these dynamics of exclusion. Old friendships were compulsorily broken. The pain on all sides was massive.

When we look dispassionately at the way shunning and exclusion are used in some churches, we can see that it is frequently to do with the maintenance of power by the leaders. It is felt to be necessary to have strong boundaries between those who are ‘saved’ and those who are not. This makes it easier for a church leader to exercise total control. Any softening of boundaries might undermine that control. It is a bit like the way that a government involved in a war has to demonise the enemy. Without that demonization, the necessary will to fight and kill the enemy will be weakened. President Trump is trying to bolster his own flagging authority in the States by creating new enemies – Mexicans, Muslims and most foreigners. The Brexit vote in this country seems to have fed off considerable antipathy towards foreigners, whether Europeans or people of a different colour. Demonization of those who are different is a popular gambit to play among leaders. It works in politics but sadly, to our shame, it also works among Christians.

When the Bible is used to shut out or exclude people it is being used as an instrument of harm. As with all abusive use of Bible texts, the interpreter needs to be challenged. While we know there are problems of preserving discipline within the church structure, we must always be aware of the way that certain texts can be manipulated to centralise power on an authoritarian leader. Those of us who do not belong to such congregations must be alert to the many victims of particular version of church power abuse. Gratifying the narcissistic power needs of a Christian leader can never be an excuse for cruel and vindictive behaviour towards Christian individuals. Once again it can be seen as simple bullying but with evil and sometimes tragic consequences. The ability of the bully to quote the Bible never excuses his behaviour.

One of the common expressions used by teenagers against adults is the word ‘patronise’. ‘Don’t patronise me’ is a common cry. What these young people are saying is do not use your knowledge and experience as a way of putting me down. I have opinions and even if they are not based on much life experience, I am still allowed to have them and express them.

Patronising someone is a way of exercising power over them. It may not be as serious or long lasting in its effects at other forms of power-abuse, but we still need to name it for what it is. Yesterday in the Church Times Angela Tilby identified the patronising which many of us have experienced in a church context. She speaks about a scenario where ‘people in distress are patronised by the saved and the certain’. I was struck by this turn of phrase. What Angela is describing is an attitude which we have met many times on this blog. People who hold that the Bible has a single level of truth -the literal- are going to insist on dogmatic answers to a variety of complex issues connected with belief and behaviour. ‘The Bible consistently teaches us that gay relationships are against the will of God; women must be subordinate to their husbands etc..’. The list is endless. Making statements like this is not the beginning of reasoned discussion. It is hitting people with unarguable tenets of dogmatism. The Word of God has been spoken and there can be no other way to proceed.

Angela Tilby has identified an increasingly powerful culture in our national church. This is the brand of evangelicalism which knows only a single way of speaking about truth. The Bible is held to speak clearly about what it means to be a Christian and how we should live our lives. There are however gaping problems for such an assumption. In the first place there many Christians, including self-identified evangelicals, who do not agree with simplistic answers to complex questions. Still less do these Christians, from a variety of backgrounds, agree that the Bible has a single answer to many of the difficult questions of morality whether personal or societal. Most of us who have studied Scripture to any depth recognise that the issue of gay marriage cannot be solved by an appeal to a couple of verses in Romans and some questionable references to gay behaviour in the book of Leviticus. The Bible simply does not allow itself to be mined in such a crude way for proof texts. The use of proof texts, either in preaching or teaching, is experienced as patronising and even abusive. All passages have to be read in their context, and the culture of the time of writing must be allowed to influence our understanding of what the text says to us now.

Christians do not now and probably never have agreed exactly how to interpret Scripture. To pretend that there is a universal consensus is simply dishonest. A still greater problem for Christians who interpret the Scripture and its message as though there are single meanings and interpretations is the huge gulf it creates with those outside the church. A non-Christian looking at the church will be quick to notice the amount of energy given to condemning a variety of sexual behaviours. It may be incorrect to suggest that Christians are universally 50 years behind the rest of society in attitudes about sex. But that is the impression that they give. Why would anyone ever wish to join a group that apparently seems to focus on sexual prohibitions above everything else? The more that we hear about the horror felt against gay sex among some Christian people, the greater the alienation that many people in our society will feel towards the church, even the Church of England.

Angela Tilby’s article recognises that there are deep spiritual needs which exist in many individuals within our society. Traditionally the church has been a place where people could come to explore what she calls ‘existential distress’. The training of clergy, I hope, still allows them to come alongside people experiencing such problems. Perhaps they can be helped to discover gently and gradually the language of spirituality with which to approach them and deal with them. Just as the loud music of a revivalist service is discordant and inappropriate to a person suffering from depression, so dogmatic and inflexible biblical teaching seems equally unhelpful to the actual needs of most people. Over the course of my ministry I have noticed in many places the way the church has withdrawn from trying to be at the heart of its community. It has been changed into a holy huddle concerned only for the spiritual well-being of those who attend. In the past the boundaries between church and community were fuzzy and indistinct. Who knew the precise motivation of parents who brought their children for baptism? Now that commitment is questioned to the point that the open but searching individual is made to feel that they have to remain outside.

Angela Tilby’s piece will be seen as (and already has been) an attack on evangelicals. It is not. It is far more to be read as a challenge to the kind of mind-set that has room for only one sort of Christian. ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions’. That should be a motto to describe the kind of church that many of us want to live in, a place where there is variety, choice and a complete absence of the kind of bullying that is implied by the word ‘patronise’. Long live a church which is free from the experience of being patronised by the ‘saved and the certain.’ That is the church I want to belong to.

The IICSA process has today (Wednesday) produced an interim report. I have not studied the whole document but one section has been reported many times in social media and the press. It concerns the way that many institutions, including presumably the church, put reputational considerations above the needs of victims and survivors. The extract is as follows:
The Inquiry considers that all too often institutions are prioritising the reputation of political leaders or the reputation of their staff, or avoiding legal liability, claims or insurance implications, over the welfare of children and tackling child sexual abuse. IICSA 25th April 2018

This statement, if applied to the church, is a devastating critique of the morality of our national church. It has led me to reflect on the way that institutions can behave in an immoral way. The church may have individual sinners as sexual abusers but the failings of the whole body that fails to deal with the problem in openness and honesty can be just as devastating to victims and survivors.

We are very good at thinking of sin as an individual act. It often is but all too frequently the moral decisions we make are not made in isolation. We all live in social contexts and while we have responsibility for our own actions it is often possible to observe social pressures affecting our decision making. Needless to say, a readiness to blame another person for our wrongdoing does not go down well in a legal context. Yet this tendency to blame another seems to have begun even in the Garden of Eden. ‘The woman you gave me for a companion, she gave me fruit from the tree …..’ Social pressures which come from family, parents or street gang do not constitute a defence in law. Each of us knows that however powerful such pressures are, every person needs to take responsibility for their actions.

If social setting, our family or a gang, create enormous pressure on us to do something wrong, imagine what it must be like where a complete society, such as Nazi Germany, has normalised evil behaviour. It has been shown through social psychological experiments that individuals, even those from stable backgrounds, quickly adapt to their surroundings and behave in whatever way is expected of them. There are two often quoted experiments which demonstrate this. Neither would be possible to repeat today for ethical reasons. One is the experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram. He showed that ordinary people were prepared to administer electric shocks (albeit fake) to strangers simply because someone in a white coat told them to do so. The subjects in the experiment believed that the situation of obeying someone with authority absolved them from having to worry about the high levels of pain they thought was being inflicted. The other famous experiment is the Stamford Prison experiment of 1972. A group of young men were invited to role-play either as prisoners or guards. Within very short time every one of the individuals had completely identified with their respective roles. On the one side, the ‘guards’ had become completely desensitised to the pain and humiliation being experienced by the ‘prisoners’. The prisoners also completely entered into the role and very rapidly developed passivity and inertia in their dealings with the guards. The social reality of the prison became an all-embracing fact affecting all of them and no one was able to step out of their respective roles. The experiment had to be terminated early when the girlfriend of Zimbardo could see the enormous damage that was being perpetrated in the trauma of the experiment.

In both the experiments it has been shown that a normal person in an institutional setting is susceptible to playing the role required of them, behaving in any way that authority may demand. In the Stanford experiment the weak became weaker but those in the powerful role became stronger as well as desensitised to the pain of those below them. Could that experiment be pointing to an interpretation of might be going on in some parts of our church? If playing a role in a fake situation (prison) could have such a dramatic effect on the participants, could not also role play in a real situation (church) have a malign effect on those who take part?

The accusation that is being made against some of the bishops of the Church of England is that they have failed to respond adequately to allegations of abuse. The IICSA Inquiry has called this a ‘prioritising the reputation of political leaders’. I am wondering whether we could see this failing as stemming from such a complete immersion in the institution they serve so that its protection is the highest value they know. Any church leader, whether a bishop or a curate is playing a role within it and thus is beholden to the institution in profound ways. Thus they can never be completely objective about its failings as those on the outside. Loyalty and love for the church as well as the roles they play within it are not going to lead to the most rational and clear understandings when things start to go wrong. Also, as certain clergy ascend the hierarchy their status within the institution becomes more embedded. If the institution is ever weakened, then status and reputation of those within it are diminished.

Zimbardo who set up the Stamford Prison experiment speaks of evil as being always linked with an abuse of power. The abuse of power by an institution is a rather more nuanced affair. When we note that the leaders of an institution will have identities completely defined in that grouping, the power they exercise will naturally have a tendency to be defensive and not always straightforward and transparent. Are we witnessing in the bizarre denials of bishops and other officials attempts to defend the institution that gives them much of their identity and self-importance? I have to say that reports of forgetfulness, documents lost in floods and other prevarications have left me struggling to understand what is now going on in the Church of England, particularly at the highest levels.

Zimbardo and Milgram both demonstrated to generations of social psychology students the power of the group to affect behaviour and personal morality. I leave my reader with the question. Are we witnessing an institution more concerned with its preservation and reputation than with the values it embodies? Is the church able to start witnessing to Christ more than it clutches on to its power and privilege?

I had intended to write a piece on the way the Bible is misused as a means of shutting out individuals a congregation does not approve of. That piece will have to wait for another day. Today I feel drawn to reflect on Gilo’s article and his observations. He claims that the Church of England at the highest levels seems to be guilty of ‘emotional delinquency’ with an attachment to ‘prestige, entitlement and deference.

What Gilo and the authors of the comments that follow his piece seem to pine for, is a new level of honesty and authenticity in our national Church, especially on the part of its bishops. They are of course mainly referring to the way that the church authorities have manifestly failed to respond adequately to survivors and others whose complaints threaten the comfortable status quo. Chris also adds to the discussion his sense of a strong disconnect in the way the church fails to engage properly with the needs of the poor and disenfranchised in our society. Returning to Gilo’s points, it seems fairly clear that there are major problems in the way that the Church is handling its legacy of sexual abuse. Those in charge of the institution responsible for the abuse seem unable to get a proper grip on the issue. Diversionary tactics and denials seem to be widespread in our church; at the same time media interest is growing rapidly. This uncovering of old secrets threatens the very future of our precious national institution.

In recent days we have been reminded (in the Church Times and elsewhere) of the 75th anniversary of the death of Sophie and Hans Scholl. This brother and sister were executed by the Gestapo in 1943 as members of a resistance organisation called the White Rose, based in Munich. This sought to awaken people to the evils of the Nazi corruption of thought and ideas. The group operated by peacefully writing and distributing tracts throughout Germany. The story of their resistance has been taught to generations of German school children and their portraits have appeared on German stamps.

The Church Times article makes something of the fact that the resistance of these young people (Sophie was just 21) followed a path that might have been set by church leaders. That is an interesting observation, but I want to refer to another part of the Scholl legacy. This was sketched out in an older 1970s essay on courage by Heinz Kohut, the American psychoanalyst. He used the accounts of Sophie and Hans to help illustrate his thinking about narcissistic disorders. The article where he discusses the Scholls focuses on their supreme courage in the face of death. It was not just that they were brave but Kohut perceives that both of them died in some way totally fulfilled as human beings. Their deaths, they knew, were destined to inspire in others resistance to the evil that they had identified at the heart of their society. The act of resistance gave their lives meaning which resonated with their core values. Kohut refers to this process as the ‘triumph of the nuclear self’. Without getting too much into the psychoanalytic language used by Kohut, it is clear that he wants us to see the Scholls as examples of how life is meant to be lived. It was said of Sophie that she ‘glowed’ in the face of death. In speaking about these young lives, Kohut implicitly contrasts them with the inauthentic parasitic existence of the many. Many people live out lives that are dependent on the opinions and flattery of others. The hero is the one who knows who and what he/she is – what is worth living for and sometimes what is worth dying for.

Kohut’s presentation of the White Rose group as examples of true authentic human living feeds into our discussion of what this blog is asking for from the Church – authenticity and total honesty. At the time of the Scholl’s deaths, the German general public had largely given up the struggle to find authentic meaning within themselves so they resorted to political solutions provided by the ruling party. They had forgotten, thanks to propaganda, how to know what they really were or thought. Notions of personal integrity were largely forgotten. In the Scholls there was, as it were, a moment of glory, as true human integrity shone through the miasma of conformity and self-serving instincts.

Whenever we encounter a gathering of people who only draw on the wisdom of a collective opinion, we can speak of a group mind. That is a situation where individual creativity and integrity finds it hard to flourish. Each person in different ways has surrendered to the collective. In some periods of history, the collective mind may conform to a political model. At other times the group ‘thinks’ along religious lines. What Gilo and other survivors seem to have been encountering are examples of thinking processes that look to a collective opinion to help them decide what to say. This process may well be caused by subtle institutional pressures placed on members to maintain a central power and control. You cannot have people thinking for themselves in the group. That would create untidiness in the collective at best; at worst you have the power of appointed leaders being undermined and challenged.

The witness of Sophie and Hans Scholl is a testimony to an authentic honest way of living that still inspires today. It represents the kind of honesty and truth that we would like to see in our churches and especially among its leaders. Where there is honesty and genuine human authenticity we can see a quasi-physical glow which many of us would describe as spiritual in nature. It is that kind of spirituality that we need and deserve to find in all our churches.

In response to Canon Simon Butler’s article After IICSA: Facing Up to Clericalism
on Via Media. https://viamedia.news/ (April 15th 2018). Gilo questions whether the new (post IICSA) gestures being made to challenge the old and arguably dysfunctional structures of the Church of England are sufficient. Old attitudes especially among the bishops seem deeply entrenched. It is helpful to read Simon’s article to appreciate this discussion. What happens in the future (fresh attitudes, new structures etc) matters not only for survivors but for the Church as a whole.

I (Gilo) recently met Simon Butler when survivors and allies protested at Synod and distributed a booklet(1) to all members. I instinctively felt him to be an ally for change. I think he can be summarised as saying: clergy need to become more lay-like, so that the laity can become more priest-like; but the twinned cultures of entitlement and deference prevent this alchemy from taking place.

But sadly the CofE continually commits itself to a path of self-diminishment. It has not faced the ‘crisis of its senior layer’. Denial, distancing, fog and blank, and an untethering from truth amongst current senior figures is too great, and reinforces entitlement. The crisis might have been faced a few years ago, and some redemption from the mess salvaged as a result. But there is an emotional delinquency in too many senior figures. I have seen it up close and personal in two mediations. One bishop recognised the need for contrition and made an adult apology, owning that his response had been disastrously advised. The bishop alongside him maintained a monochromatic response – a one answer fits all approach – clinging to petulant obtuseness. One realises with a jolt that some of the current hierarchy are depressingly quite low-calibre. Teflon coating covers over a lack of real theological guts.

I agree with Linda Woodhead’s recent article(2) calling for a new theology. But that is harder to achieve than a yard of new policy. There’s little theology of stature in the current Bishops. And any theology of contrition is centralised, expressed by Archbishop Welby, as we saw at IICSA hearings. This centralised contrition gives survivors almost nowhere to go. This is heightened by the stark contrast between the messages of both archbishops as highlighted in a recent Guardian editorial.(3) I suspect Welby doesn’t impact much on his hierarchy or strategariat. His is not a commanding enough voice to call change and shape theology in the response to survivors.

It’s a serious deficit in a structure that is taken up with management voodoo and collective omertà. This crisis cries out for a theology of justice rooted in profound honesty and commitment to reconciliation. The figures who get this are all marginals, regarded askance by the hierarchy as the survivors they stand alongside. The House of Bishops mouth change but too many regard our questions as treading on entitlement and the structures they want hidden. The deference upholding all this, both within diocesan structures and the NST, creates a culture many of us now call the Society for the Protection of Bishops. The cognitive dissonance in this culture has enabled many bishops to run to ground. The energy required to drag bishops out of foxholes is enormous – especially when it becomes obvious to the survivor that it is his/her task alone. The whole structure including the NST and civil service in Church House relies on the near impossibility for survivors of this task. Stories are numerous of survivors struggling to beat a path through intentional inertia, strategies of reputation managers, malevolence of the NST, and CofE corporate hand-wash. Something is very wrong with the theology of all this.

A new theology might enable the Church to grow from this crisis in surprising ways vital for the future. Only a theology of consensus, radical new consensus with survivors, can do this. Nothing less will redeem this broken structure if it is to recover integrity. The House of Bishops will need to make giant strides to make up for the inertia and spent promises of the past. It will need leaders of theological courage and compassionate wisdom. But prestige, entitlement and deference are not easily conquered in an institution so freighted down by these things. The Church is a heavily armoured vehicle with the engine of a lawnmower. Some of its current hierarchs need to retire before it sheds much of that armour. Realistically the Church is in for a long haul – 10 years at least of dealing with the aftermath of all this. I doubt the CofE will be any different from other churches which have spent decades fending off the impact of the abuse crisis.

(1) http://abuselaw.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Stones-not-Bread.pdf
(2) https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2018/6-april/comment/opinion/iicsa-forget-culture-new-theology-we-need
(3) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/22/the-guardian-view-of-abuse-in-the-church-a-truly-dreadful-story

A long time ago, when I acted as a Diocesan adviser to a Bishop on the paranormal, I sometimes met up with individuals who were convinced that they were oppressed by Satan or some demonic entity. The picture that unfolded, almost inevitably after some gentle probing, was that they had been part of a fundamentalist Christian group. There they were taught that they should always feel victorious and triumphant following their Christian conversion. The only interpretation that was being offered to them when they succumbed to a depressive episode was to suggest they were under demonic attack. This sort of attack was something all saved Christians might have to endure as a kind of test of their faith. I would tactfully suggest to them that their depression was nothing to do with evil or demons. In several of the psalms we see people feeling abandoned and depressed but never blaming evil entities. There is never a suggestion in the psalms that sadness, lament or a sense of defeat are somehow a sign of being attacked by supernatural evil forces.

In my writing about the musical culture of charismatic Christian worship, I have noted that there is in the worship songs a great deal about triumph, joy and victory that the Christian is supposed constantly to experience. The reality for any group of Christians is that there will always be a number who suffer from clinical depression. It may be that a depressed person finds his/her way to being in church precisely because they sense there may be there a promise of healing. For a few of these the constant cheerfulness and jollity of charismatic worship may help. I suspect that in fact for most depressed people in church, a sense of alienation from the dominant culture becomes acutely felt. There is little comfort in being told that you should be feeling one thing when you in fact feel the opposite. This may also be the message that is being delivered by so called ‘Christian Counselling.’

I have frequently spoken about the simple dualistic universe in which most conservative Christians live. On the one side there is God, angels, spiritual beings and the company of saved Christians that meet in their church and others like it. On the other side there are unsaved people, heretics and those who do not believe the doctrines of conservative Christianity. These are lumped together with demons and all the manifestations of evil in the world, alongside false beliefs and ideologies. The Christian who attends one of these ‘victorious’ churches knows which side of the divide he/she is on. They are on ‘the Lord’s side’ and this fact will eventually carry them through into the life of bliss of the world beyond. The depressed individuals will live in the same dualistic environment but there will be no certainty that victory belongs to them. Their sense of doubt about their salvation will be aggravated by a feeling that their lives have become a battleground between good and evil. This burden of uncertainty over their state of grace is one that will constantly prey on their minds. The thought is that because of their depression they are being oppressed by demonic forces. Because they are not sure which side is winning they fear for a loss of their salvation. This thought is one that can easily send a depressed Christian into a spiral of self-loathing and despair.

The text that seems to suggest that the world which Christians inhabit is a battleground between good and evil is Ephesians chapter 6.12. Here the Christian is to see his or her role as that of a soldier fighting a battle against ‘the rulers, the powers of this world and the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms’. This verse is quoted constantly as a means of presenting Christianity as involving a struggle against supernatural evil. This military metaphor of Ephesians 6 is of course an important one. However, if it is overemphasised, we end up with a lopsided expression of the faith, one that is authoritarian, intolerant and potentially violent. The whole passage, taken out of the context of the whole of New Testament, could easily be a proposal for a Christian Jihad. The ‘powers of this dark world’ might be said to refer to members of whichever political party that you oppose. In an American context this might justify a declaration of war against liberals and Democrats. Certainly, one feels that American society has become far more polarised than we are in the UK. It could be claimed that dualistic Christianity has contributed to the vast increase of intolerance and lack of civility in political life that we see in that society. However we interpret and understand Ephesians 6, it is clear that this text can be and often is misused by groups of Christians.

To return to our Christian individual who suffers from severe depression. She/he feels incapable of fulfilling the role of being part of a triumphant joyful army fighting for God. We need a better metaphor if we are to help him/her. In the first place it needs to be explained that the militaristic language of Ephesians is just a metaphor. If this language is unhelpful, it is because this dualism it depicts is, to say the least, an incomplete picture of the faith. I will admit that the language of Ephesians 6 was extremely useful when composing spontaneous prayers in my role of Diocesan adviser. It is a simple declaration that God is greater and more powerful than anything that is in the mysterious world of the unknown. It was important then to express a strong sense of the reality of God’s armour in the face of strange happenings. The metaphor of battle has its place in Christian discourse but it should never be made a dominant one.

Depression and grief of various kinds are never to be regarded as signs of demonic oppression. The depressed person, and there are many of these, needs to feel that the church never abandons them or makes them in some way unclean. The church for its part needs to rediscover the Psalms of Lament. We need liturgies that explore creatively how the psalmist sometimes felt the full agony of abandonment and betrayal and other mental states similar to the state of depression. For the psalmist these were never part of demonic activity. Rather they were simply human experiences which can coexist with belief in God. The depressed person is never meant to carry extra burdens of a teaching that says that their illness has created some openness to evil spirits. That is completely unbiblical and immensely cruel to a sufferer. When we read a Psalm such as 143 we can join in with the writer as the words are spoken: Answer me quickly, O Lord; my spirit fails. Do not hide your face from me or I will be like those who go down to the pit…. Show me the way that I should go, for to you I lift up my soul. Rescue me from my enemies, O Lord, for I hide myself in you.