This article is the first of a series of pieces which describe the way that the Bible can be used as an instrument of power abuse. Other topics that I hope to cover following this post is the issue of demonising opponents of a minister and the tactic of shunning. Both these strategies are used to by ministers across the board but the articles will focus on examples which are found at the conservative evangelical end of the church. The issue of inappropriate Bible quoting is an evil which infects many churches.

About twenty years ago I found myself in an embarrassing and unusual situation. I was taking a joint Carol Service with the local Baptist minister in the parish church. He decided bizarrely to preach about the responsibilities of ordained ministry. Instead of a reflection on St John’s gospel where Jesus talks about service and feet washing, the minister started talking to the congregation (with many children present!) about a verse in Hebrews, ch.13.17. ‘Obey your leaders and defer to them.’ Up to that point, even though I was aware of the verse, it had never crossed my mind that it applied to me or could ever define the relationship between Vicar and a congregation. After hearing him repeat several times that it was biblical for Christian leaders to expect obedience from their flock, I realised that he was occupying a different theological universe from mine in this matter. Since that day, I have discovered that there are a further cluster of ‘proof’ texts that seem to support the idea that a minister should always have control over what happens in his church. One of them is in Psalm 105: ‘Touch not the Lord’s anointed and do his prophets no harm. Another passage in I Samuel 24.6 shows David’s reluctance to kill Saul. This is because, since he was the Lord’s anointed, hostile action towards him would be a kind of blasphemy.

My Baptist colleague was on this occasion, in my estimation, using a Bible text in an aggressive, even coercive, manner. ‘This is what the Bible says and you have to follow me in the way I interpret it.’ There could be no discussion, no alternative interpretations to be entertained. On a psychological level I could see that the minister, by preaching in this way, was showing himself to be insecure. While he believed himself to be the leader of his church, he was not confident that he could exercise that authoritative leadership without reminding them of his special status from time to time. He was also working out of a very precarious world of ultra-conservative beliefs and understandings. It was precarious because he was sufficiently well educated to know that fundamentalist doctrines of scriptural inerrancy are not easy to defend. A modern inerrantist has to struggle with numerous problems of difficulties in the text, contradictions and plain discrepancies. One way round the problem is to cease to read the Bible as a connecting whole but rather to treat it as ‘mine’ of proof texts. Much of the Baptist minister’s preaching did in fact consist of leaping from one verse or section of a verse to another to illustrate the Calvinist theology that he espoused. In this way the passages that said something different could be quietly overlooked. There was never, for example, any apparent awareness of such things as the distinctiveness of each of the four gospels. The Bible was simply a large document out of which one extracted passages to support doctrine. These were then learnt by rote so that the Christian who was able to recite them correctly could be ‘saved’.

In practice I seldom preached on the nature of ordination as it applied to my own ministry. The Anglican liturgical calendar allows for a series of so-called Ember Days, and these are an opportunity for prayer and reflection on the nature of ordination. The Anglo-Catholic tradition in which I began my training has a ‘high’ view of priesthood but for most of my ministry, I have sat lightly on these ideas, preferring a fairly pragmatic approach to the nature and meaning of ordination. But it is my belief that there are also some toxic ideas of ministry around. These may be rooted in ‘proof’ texts from scripture as I have mentioned. Such ideas can have harmful even devastating consequences for those who follow them.

Let us suppose that a congregation agrees with the premises of the two quotations I have mentioned as being definitive on the way that priest/minister should relate to his congregation. Let us leave to one side the question of whether the verses mentioned have any legitimate application to a contemporary minister or priest. What has to follow is that the congregation members commit themselves both to obey and never challenge their minister. This subservience is felt to be necessary out of a respect to the word of God. It is then but a small step to regard obedience to a minister as being obedient to God himself.

Before we look further at the practical implications of obedience to a minister as being obedience to God, we should reflect on what this process may do to the minister himself. For any human being to identify with God is, by any account, an act of extreme hubris. It is one thing to have the authority to preach; it is quite another to assume this preaching will result in God-given infallible opinions. Even to entertain such an idea seems to imply that the one in charge is operating at a level of fantasy and delusion. Having expressed our doubt that any minister who seeks a high degree of control over a congregation is operating reasonably or in their best interests, we need to look further at other issues in this relationship.

Why would a humble Christian want to attach themselves to a minister who then demands their total loyalty, even worship? The answer is partly one we have already suggested. The minister is the one who reveals and preaches the word of God. To all intents and purposes, he is God. When the primary reason for churchgoing is to avoid the ‘wages of sin’ and obtain a place in heaven, then this obedience is a very serious matter indeed. To disobey is to risk hell. To disagree with the minister comes to be equally serious and potentially life changing.

From the perspective of this blog writer, the methods of interpreting scripture which apparently gives it infallibility and answers to scientific and historical questions do not stand up to scrutiny. When such infallibility is deemed to be also the exclusive possession of a church leader, the problem is magnified and becomes even more dangerous. And yet in many churches, some of them Anglican, up and down the country this is precisely what happens. The power dynamic between leader and led is not one of cooperation and mutual learning. Rather it is one of coercion and control by a leader or a small leadership team. Such a dynamic might seem strange in the world of European democratic traditions, but paradoxically this is in fact what ‘biblical’ values demand from a large segment of Christian opinion – to be subservient to the minister. The sections of the church that demand proper accountability and an informed approach to scripture from their clergy (this would apply to the majority of Church of England parishes) are probably unaware of the way others behave. Perhaps it is the task of this blog to remind each side something of what others believe, however different and even unpalatable it is.
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Today (Friday 6th) the Church Times has devoted two pages to the issue of safeguarding following the IICSA hearings. These were concluded as far as the Anglican section was concerned, on Friday 23rd March. The editorial, reviewing three contrasting approaches that are published, calls for a ‘more sophisticated and intelligent approach to safeguarding …’

It is the first of the articles, the one by Bishop Martin Warner, Bishop of Chichester that I want to examine. https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2018/6-april/comment/opinion/safeguarding-bishop-of-chichester-what-we-got-wrong-steps-we-are-taking-to-put-it-right I realise that most of the offences mentioned in the Inquiry were committed before his arrival in the diocese in 2015, but his article points to some areas of naivety on his part about the whole child abuse scandal. At the beginning of his article he refers to the case of Roy Cotton, one of the notorious paedophile priests. He accounts for the failure to stop Cotton’s offending behaviour by making a series of observations about the context of his ministry. The Bishop blames four things: academic and social snobbery, the manipulation of episcopal patronage and an over-lenient pity for him at the end of his life.

These explanatory observations as to Cotton’s ability to escape justice for decades are very unconvincing. Without going into the detail of Cotton’s ministry or the way he was able to escape accountability, I would suggest that Warner’s interpretations of what went wrong with Cotton could be expressed very differently and more robustly. This is my re-articulation of what Bishop Warner may be trying to describe. There was in the Chichester Diocese a rampant old-boy network at work. This grossly privileged male clergy of certain social and churchmanship backgrounds. Roy Cotton successfully exploited the culture of deference and dysfunctional exercise of power that had permeated the diocese for decades. This enabled him to remain in post for his entire ministry without challenge. The corrupt power structures that kept him in post involved others. Individuals, as yet unnamed, colluded with Cotton and protected him from the civil authorities. Whether these protectors were senior clergy or fellow incumbents, a miasma of guilt still remains in some areas of the Diocese. Evil flourishes when good men do nothing. In the case of child sexual abuse, I am not sure whether it is ever possible to be an innocent bystander. Unaddressed guilt within the Diocese still pervades the structures and needs to be exorcised.

Bishop Warner appears to ‘get it’ when he makes the statement ‘Survivors understandably describe this as conspiracy and cover-up …..many have testified that this was a damaging as the abuse itself.’ He then goes on to speak about the way Archbishop Rowan’s Visitation took place in 2011/2. This has led to new lay-led structures which, among other things, will bring survivors into touch with people trained ‘in the work of independent domestic and sexual violence advocacy’. This sounds to be helpful, but I still do not hear the profound sorrow for what has happened in the past. The statement ‘We are ashamed of the (the failures) and are profoundly sorry’ does not address this issue adequately. Bishop Warner goes on to say that he is not ashamed ‘of the people, lay and ordained, lay and ordained who have worked with determination and courage to change our culture and our practice ….’ Why do I not find this statement convincing? It is because Bishop Warner has not apparently understood the depth and extent of the suffering caused by the culture of his Diocese in the past. Dozens if not hundreds of individuals are still out there and we still have not heard of substantial resources being devoted to their support and healing. Until this help is visible and easy to access, protestations and offers of help will seem hollow and remote to the needs of survivors.

Let me summarise what was revealed by the hearings that were pertinent to the Diocese of Chichester. In the first place there were numerous examples of power being abused and we are not just talking about the sexual abuse. Abuses of power happened when there were failures to exercise authority responsibly and with care. When Bishop Kemp allowed the Diocese to be separated into autonomous episcopal fiefdoms, accountability among the bishops ceased to be exercised properly. That created the possibility of power being exercised locally and corruptly by area bishops. This culture of collusion then seems to have infected some of the clergy. They in some cases proceeded to protect and defend each other against outside scrutiny. All these power shenanigans which were revealed in the Inquiry were deeply harmful to those who were the victims. Complaints were deflected or unheard in many cases.

The second observation I have to make is to note that Bishop Warner has not grappled with the theological implications of safeguarding. Linda Woodhead, in the same edition of the Church Times, has written eloquently about the failures of ecclesiology and eschatology in the Diocese. I do not want to repeat her excellent points but theology’s absence in Bishop Warner’s piece is noteworthy. The abuse of power by clergy is and was a matter of theology. Anyone who allows an attitude of grandiose superiority to become internalised through adherence to a catholic teaching about holy orders needs to take care. An inherent superiority felt by clergy over lay people is a dangerous attitude. All too easily it can descend to abuse and other power games. As a clergyman I am also aware of the many biblical quotations that can be quoted to affirm my position of power in a congregation. I would in practice never use them because I believe text quoting for this purpose to be entirely inappropriate. Further teachings about forgiveness in Catholic and Calvinistic settings need also to be urgently re-visited and, in some cases, repented.

Bishop Warner’s article says many of the right things while leaving behind the impression that he still feels the show can continue as before. The challenge for the whole Church of England is to recognise that some things will never be able to go back to the old patterns of the past. However much the Church will resist this, accountability will be given to outside bodies when it comes to the protection of the young and vulnerable. The training of clergy will, in future, contain an element of ensuring that they fully understand the responsibility to understand and use power well. Supervision may enter the vocabulary of ministry right across the board from Archbishops to humble curates. The church needs to become an accountable body not only to its own members but to society as a whole. Only when it has taken the steps to understand the implications of accountability can it start to regain a rightful place in the estimation of the nation.

“A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence … anyone who wishes to produce an effect upon it needs no logical arguments; he must paint in forcible colours, must exaggerate, and he must repeat the same thing again and again. … (The group) wants to be ruled and impressed, and to fear its masters. … And, finally, groups have never thirst after truth. … They are almost as influenced by what is not true as by what is true. … A group is an obedient herd, which could never live without a master.”
—Sigmund Freud

In my attempt to educate myself in subjects beyond my original training, I have sometimes dipped into Freud’s writing. I find that my relationship with him goes in one of two directions. On the one hand I have never enjoyed his theories of the unconscious or found them especially congenial. On the other side his prose, even in translation, flows well and is normally comprehensible. This quotation came my way recently and I thought it resonated with many of our contemporary problems, both in and out of the church.

Absence of logic, exaggeration and failure to pursue the truth mark many of our current discourses today. But it is Freud’s mention of the group that I find especially interesting. I do not know exactly when Freud penned these words but, in the period up to the date of his death in 1939, it could be claimed that many thinking people allowed political groups, right or left, to do their thinking for them. The group-mind was arguably even more powerful then than it is today. If problems came up that were too difficult to resolve on one’s own, then the individual defaulted to a group of like-minded individuals. This group might be friends or ‘mates’ down at the pub. Independent thinking was too hard for most people even to attempt.

I could go on to speak about the influence of ‘opinion-forming’ newspapers like the Daily Mail on current political discourse in the UK. Clearly much of the Press in the UK and in the States has no interest in helping people to think for themselves. They offer instead instantly attractive opinions which pander to prejudice and deep unconscious bias. The chief technique of manipulation which has been used for hundreds of years is the identification of a common enemy. We can all feel smug and safe when we agree on the individual or group that we hate in common. I don’t need to enumerate all the enemies chosen by the right-wing press. Clearly foreigners of some description would form one of the categories of hate-object.

Having identified a few of the unhealthy dynamics of groups that Freud spoke about, it is painful to realise that many churches all too easily fall into the category of the mindless associations that he was describing. A contemporary worship service has a lot of ‘forcible colours’ in the form of loud, addictive and endlessly repeating music. As I have suggested many times before, repetitive music has the effect to drowning out coherent thought. Sadly, as with any addictive substance, that is precisely the point of engaging in it. People seem to long to go to a place where they can forget and where thinking and having coherent opinions is done for them by others. Possibly this is a regression to the place they occupied as a small child. Mother and father cared for them totally and they long to return to the place where they can enjoy the same dependence.

The second part of Freud’s description of the group or church is in the way that a relationship is sustained with a ‘master’. The church group often wants to be ‘ruled and impressed’. How often do we see this kind of link being established with a pastor whose word is equivalent to that of God himself? A failure to critique what is being said in church leads to a passivity about truth which Freud also identified. It has always been striking how many congregations only read the bible when selected passages are being preached about. It is never read independently by many in the congregation. This is perhaps because they fear what they might find there in the form of questions and insoluble problems that the text raises.

Group and mindless behaviour sadly seems to be endemic in our churches. Church shares with political parties the attractiveness of being a place where often opinions come ready-made. They are also spaces where individuals can feel strong as part of a group. This is what ‘we’ think about moral issues. Someone, not me, has decided what I think on the gay issue, abortion and countless other topical matters. If I were to think about them for myself that would be dangerous. I might find that I did not really agree with others. So, I will return to the mindless and safe state of being ‘credulous and open to influence’.

It is easy for church members to feel intimidated by their dependent role within a church congregation. Centuries of custom and practice has created an unhealthy deference to authority in all the churches. As part of the revolution being created at this very moment in the Church of England, that deference is beginning to be confronted and challenged. If the church is to survive and flourish it has to escape being an ‘obedient herd’. It needs to find a new role as a communion of thinking, inquiring and searching individuals. It needs to embrace the fact that in searching there may be differences of opinion. Those differences are no threat to our ‘salvation’ but are part of being human beings who are blessed with an infinite variety of personalities and ways of seeing

Amid all the talk of improvements to safeguarding within the Church of England, it is right to remember two past victims of its failure, Neil Todd and Guide Nyachuru. Both these names have been mentioned in one of the comments on a recent blog. Neil Todd was one of Peter Ball’s victims who committed suicide in 2012. The other was a young lad in Zimbabwe who died in mysterious circumstances at one of John Smyth’s camps in 1992. Smyth was accused of culpable homicide but the case was not proven. Several witnesses at his trial spoke of the abuse and savage beatings at the camps. This seemed to follow the pattern that Smyth had established with some boys who attended Winchester College and who were associated with the Iwerne camps at the end of the 70s and early 80s.

What do these two deaths have in common? In the first place neither of them would have happened if the Church had taken more seriously reports of abuse and violence in the first instance. A case against each of the men involved, Peter Ball and John Smyth, had been established to a high level of probability. While Peter Ball may not have gone on to abuse further victims after his police caution in 1992, the refusal of Church authorities to inhibit his ministry must have preyed heavily on his existing victims. Neil Todd himself seems to have reached out many times asking to be heard, only to be ignored and pushed back. Whatever the precise reasons for his death we might reasonably say that he died suffering from the trauma of sexual abuse which was severely aggravated by institutional neglect on the part of the Church.

The second disturbing link between the two stories is in the way that the two perpetrators avoided justice. Ball eventually was sent to prison but Smyth has not yet faced a proper trial. Both kept away from courts through exercising their considerable social power. Letters supporting Peter Ball were written by people of high social standing to the Director of Public Prosecutions. There were apparently two thousand of these letters. The writers of these letters probably had no knowledge of whether Ball was guilty or not. They simply felt that it was wrong to accuse an apparently charming, charismatic and holy man of such terrible actions. The Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, George Carey, also fell victim to the social charm exercised by Ball and allowed him to continue his ministry.

The facts as to how Peter Ball avoided justice for so long will be examined afresh in July at the IICSA hearings. Whether anything new remains to be revealed is another matter. A curious detail, yet to be explained, is why George Carey sent in a witness statement to IICSA claiming not to remember anything untoward about the Chichester Diocese during his tenure as Archbishop. I have no doubt that the question of the protection of Ball by many establishment figures will be commented on.

The Smyth affair is not due to have forensic examination by IICSA. Arguably though it is still a gaping wound in the church that has more to be revealed about it. There are simply too many unanswered questions. Some of the questions concern Archbishop Welby himself. He claims to have had no contact with the organisation that organised the Iwerne camps after he left for Paris in 1978. It is suggested that Welby returned on several occasions to give talks at these camps. According to Bishop Alan Wilson it is also inconceivable that Welby would not have known that Smyth had left Britain under a cloud. A report on Smyth’s behaviour was drawn up by Mark Ruston, an Anglican priest in 1982. Even though the accusations against Smyth were accepted by him as true, nothing was done to inform the authorities. Smyth was allowed to depart for Zimbabwe and later South Africa. Welby knew Ruston extremely well having had digs in his Cambridge Vicarage during his last year in Cambridge in 1978. The authorities at Winchester College were also fully aware of Smyth’s behaviour but again nothing was done to report this to the authorities. The whole secrecy surrounding the affair – something in which many must have colluded -has the aroma once again of an establishment cover-up. All the people involved from the boys themselves to the Trustees of the camps came from an elite group within British society. They also form a strong network within one powerful stratum of Anglican evangelicalism. Many of Iwerne’s ‘graduates’ occupy positions of high responsibility within Church and State and the whole affair has no doubt caused considerable embarrassment within these circles.

Two deaths of young men separated by twenty years. Both were preventable deaths if warnings of the evil behaviour on the part of two socially powerful individuals had been given earlier. One mourns these deaths, not in the sense of having known the individuals personally but because they represent and stand for the pain of many others who have been caught up in abuse cases before and after them. What are the common features in these stories?
First there was some toxic theology at work in both episodes. Toxic theology is like a fungus. It grows and flourishes in settings where groups of people collude together in unhealthy thinking. Ball’s theology was a distortion of an understanding of the monastic tradition. Smyth had a reading what true commitment to God involved and that included the ability and readiness to suffer pain.
Second. Both perpetrators were powerful individuals within the church. They were looked up to by many others and this afforded them protection from scrutiny both within the group and from the outside. Abuse was allowed to happen with ultimately tragic consequences.
Thirdly the stories show that evil selfish actions by individuals can result in tragedy of the worst kind. No one can ever pretend that sexual abuse or any other kind of abuse in the church has no consequences. It does and there is an obligation on all of us to fight abusive behaviour with every means available to us.

In this post we remember two individuals -victims of religiously inspired abuse. Their deaths lie at the door not only of their abusers. Those who kept secrets or covered up in any way for the abusers must share some of the blame for their deaths.

May Neil and Guide rest in peace and rise in glory.

Some days have now passed since I received and posted up the guest post from Janet Fife. This took the form of a letter to our two Archbishops. Janet and I had had an email conversation about the Pastoral Letter and we agreed that a survivor’s reaction to it was important. She told me that she needed two or three days to write a blog post. In the event her response arrived extremely quickly on Saturday evening. My first reaction on reading it was to be cautious. But very soon I began to see that in its direct language and in the way that it gave voice to a raw expression of pain, the letter was saying something to the Church that needed to be heard. In the two days since being posted on Sunday morning the post has been viewed 8000 times and the reactions so far have all been positive. Apart from reflecting Janet’s experiences of actual abuse in the church, it is a document that describes well the way that the Church, having accepted women’s ordination, has not given some of these women an easy ride over the past 25 years.

I do not intend to add my own commentary on the Archbishops’ letter. But there is one point made by Janet that needs to be repeated. She asks that whenever bishops or senior churchmen produce a piece about the issue of sexual abuse that they should ask a survivor for their reaction. I want to repeat this request. The word ‘safeguarding’ which has come so frequently into our vocabulary over past weeks is a word that largely describes the shutting of the proverbial stable door. It is what you do when you know that a horse has bolted. The ‘S’ word has a terrible air of management-speak about it. People have been severely harmed by the Church but we still talk as though ‘good practice’ for the future is the most important issue. We will learn lessons; we will make sure that we will provide the best possible training to monitor our work in the future. We ‘will listen and act in accordance with safeguarding legislation and good practice’. This last sentence is a direct quote from the Archbishops.

As I write these words the image that comes to mind is the aftermath of a terrible battle. The fighting has stopped but there are men lying with a variety of wounds around the battlefield. Some others are walking, merely shocked and disorientated. Others are too damaged to be able to move. A group of helpers comes on to the field. Their task is ostensibly to help everyone. But they lack even the basic medical skills required to minister to the badly wounded. It turns out that they are trained only in one particular sphere. They have been sent to rally and encourage the defeated troops. These skills will unfortunately only work with those who have not been wounded. They have been trained by the Ministry of Morale and they have taken all the latest courses in encouraging an army to fight again after an engagement.

Our band of helpers is of course moved by the sight of so many wounded men and they do what they can. But they have not brought what the wounded actually need – bandages, splints, pain killers etc. Some of them need to be taken to a hospital for lengthy treatment. These wounded soldiers have no interest in the morale boosting rhetoric which is what the helpers are trained in. Their focus of their attention has been reduced to a single aim – that of healing and recovery.

The Archbishops’ letter was a bit like a team of helpers who arrive at the battlefield with the wrong training and the wrong equipment. A survivor who is wounded in any area of life knows what he/she needs. The wounded survivor of sexual abuse needs to be heard; he/she needs counselling by those who understand the religious dimension of the abuse. Their need is also to feel that the organisation they belong to has real insight into how the abuse occurred. They know that when power is given to the wrong people there is enormous scope for things to go wrong in a church. Further, if the people who rise quickly to the top are possessed of any grandiose tendencies then those at the bottom, especially the battlefield wounded, will not be able to attract their attention. If bishops behave like generals far away from the front-line, the needs of the ordinary soldier will be low in importance.

Janet’s important letter was a plea on behalf of the ordinary wounded members of the church who have, up till now, normally suffered silently as the result of their sexual abuse. Their perspective is frankly different from the perspective of Archbishops and other dignitaries who are concerned for the morale and wellbeing of the wider army. But the wounded who still lie on the battlefield deserve to have a voice and they cannot be blamed if their voices cry out for justice and healing. They may have arrived at the point where they are only aware of their pain and their feelings of being abandoned by the rest of the church. Can we expect them to have the same concern for the army when they are nursing their wounds and wondering if they are even going to survive?

The care of survivors will always involve far more than words. Words may indeed make their plight far worse. I am reminded of that passage from Epistle of James where the hungry person is offered only words. The epistle author takes a very dim view of the failure to offer food and practical help. The Church needs to get its house in order in terms of support and relevant solutions. It needs to be prepared to spend considerable sums of money to provide the sorts of help that survivors say they need. As a first step there could be a meeting when senior bishops and the National Safeguarding Team meet survivors. The agenda should be agreed beforehand and should broadly follow what the survivors themselves have determined. As an act of good faith on both sides, an initial meeting need have no lawyers present on either side. I hold a great deal of respect for the abuse lawyers I know, but I feel that, with the right degree of humility on both sides, human communication would be better by their absence in the first instance. The generals need to visit the battlefield in person to listen to their wounded soldiers. When some broad understandings have been established then is the time for detailed negotiations and agreement which would involve professional representatives on both sides.

Janet’s letter to the Archbishops seems to have begun a process of listening and communication in this area which, we hope, will never be reversed. As an aside it has shown the power of digital communication. For good and ill, Facebook, Twitter and the humble blogger will affect the Church in ways that were inconceivable even ten years ago. I, for one, am proud that the existence of Surviving Church allowed Janet to have a voice and thus be heard by large numbers of people across the Church.

Today a Pastoral Letter is being read in churches across the country. Here is a reply to the letter from one of those who have been affected by the recent hearings. It is presented here as a guest post and perhaps some of my readers will be able to identify with the sentiments. The opinions expressed belong to the author

Dear Brothers in Christ,

I’m writing in response to your ‘Pastoral Letter’. And, since Archbishop Justin has called for an end to clericalism and deference, I’m going to call you Justin and John. I know you’ll be happy with that.

So, Justin and John, I thought you might want to know how I, as a survivor, feel about your letter. And I know you’ll pay careful attention, because you’ve said you want to listen to survivors.

But first, let me talk a bit about the IICSA hearings. In the last three weeks I’ve been on an eventful personal journey. The first week I was emotionally chewed up: the evidence recalled to me many of the awful experiences I’ve had over my nearly 40 years in the Church of England. The second week I began to realise that at last powerful people were being called to account and some of the rottenness was being exposed. Frankly, John and Justin, I enjoyed seeing those bishops wriggle under questioning from two women who were much younger than them. The tables were turned and it did me a power of good.

During the third week I felt empowered. By then I was getting things in perspective. You see, being a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and also one of the first women to be ordained, has been really tough. So often the treatment I’ve had from the Church has replayed those old scripts. And often I’d felt bad because somehow I didn’t seem able to pick up the rules of the game, didn’t have the formula for being taken seriously by the hierarchy. What was wrong with me? Now I know it wasn’t me who was wrong, it was the dreadful system and so many of the people at the top. (Not all of them, thank God, but too often the good were outweighed by the bad.) Now I’m glad I never learned those rules. They were, and are, rotten rules to play by. As Justin said last week, we need to learn from what has happened and make massive changes. I was quite encouraged. I actually had some hope, Justin, that you meant it.

And now,, John and Justin, to your letter. Oh dear. I’m afraid you could hardly have got it more wrong. So let me give you some friendly advice. Let’s start with topping and tailing. If you’re going to address us all as ‘Sisters and Brothers in Christ’, don’t finish with ‘The Most Revd and Rt Hon’. Its just not brotherly. It looks like showing off. It certainly doesn’t look like the shame Justin said he felt. If you really wanted an end to deference and clericalism you’d have signed off ‘Justin and John’. We know who you are.

Next, if you want to send out something called a pastoral letter, make it pastoral. Asking for prayer for all those involved in the IICSA hearings and in safeguarding isn’t enough. You can’t just pass on to what good work is being done without saying what you are actually going to do for those affected by the hearings. What practical steps have you taken to help survivors, for instance? In case you can’t think of anything you could and should do now, here are some suggestions.
1) When someone writes to you personally with an allegation of abuse or harassment, as I did last November, answer them. Your chaplain or secretary can draft the letter, but sign it yourself. At least make sure they actually get a reply. I haven’t had one, and it’s 133 days now. Not that I’m counting.
2) Announce that you are setting aside funds for counselling for those who have made allegations of abuse. All I was offered, in a phone call from a member of the safeguarding team, was a meeting with a female priest. I’m a woman priest, I know dozens of woman priests. It takes a skilful and trained counsellor to help a survivor of abuse. Invest some money into putting things right.
3) We’ve all heard accounts of abuse taking place in church settings, as part of worship and prayer. You speak of all the services of Holy Week as if everything will go on as usual. If it does, you will rob us of that glimmer of hope we had when Justin seemed to struggle with tears about the abuse people have suffered in our church. So, announce that you are stepping back from your role in all the Holy Week observations and ceremonies. Tell us you will instead spend the week visiting survivors and listening to our stories. You could ask ordained survivors to take your place in some of those services. That would demonstrate your respect for them, your admiration of their courage and honesty. Give them some of the outward show of dignity you would usually enjoy.

Another point: if you’re going to start a pastoral letter with a biblical quotation, make it an appropriate one. The passage which came to my mind when I read your letter was another saying of Jesus:

So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. (Mt. 5:23-24)

We have just spent three weeks finding out how much is justly held against the leaders of our Church. The debt is huge, but you can at least make a start. John, you need to work on being reconciled with Matt Ineson before you next attend church. Justin, what about making amends to Gilo for those 17 unanswered letters? But only if you take Jesus seriously, of course.

Finally I’d like to say, in my most pastoral manner, that neither of you seems good at responding appropriately to people who’ve been on the receiving end of the bad stuff that happens in religious organisations. So here’s another suggestion. When you need to write a letter like the one we’ve just had, or to make a statement, run it past a survivor first. Most of us don’t want you to look uncaring and incompetent, we really don’t. We can help you to write sensitively, to respond appropriately, to offer assistance that will actually make a difference. Many of us have years of experience working with other survivors; researching; struggling with the theological and spiritual implications of being abused. Some of us can even contribute liturgical material you might find useful. We survivors offer a resource for the Church that you need badly. Don’t continue to despise it.

Well, as far as I’m concerned this has cleared the air nicely. I do hope you’ve found my suggestions helpful; there are plenty more I can think of but I reckon the is enough for now. Feel free to ask my advice any time. It’s funny what a difference it makes, being able to call you Justin and John. Almost as if I really were your equal in Christ.

Yours sincerely

Janet Fife

For those of us who have been following the Independent Inquiry over the last three weeks, today, the final day, has come as something of a relief. The lawyers who worked so hard presenting the extensive material related to the Diocese of Chichester will, no doubt, be going away for a well-earned rest. I will personally be quite relieved not to be having to listen to the hours of testimony each day before making personalised comments on the proceedings. But, much to my surprise my comments have been appreciated. For the first time in four years the viewing figures for the blog have reached over three figures. So, I owe it to my new readers to make some final comment as the Inquiry (as far as the Chichester Diocese is concerned) comes to an end.

Today the proceedings were addressed by two lawyers acting for survivors, Richard Scorer and David Greenwood. It was their task to respond to the days of evidence and summarise what they have heard as well as reflect the views of the survivors that they represent. Both Richard and David asked the Inquiry to consider recommending a compulsory oversight of the Church’s management of safeguarding practice. Both of them also know from what their clients have told them of the way that the church has often obstructed survivors of sexual abuse in their attempts to be heard. The spoken evidence of the individuals from this group has been impressive. The overall impression from listening to these testimonies is that few are seeking large pay-outs from the church, even though in many cases lives, careers and potential relationships have been ruined. What many of them have sought is simply some way that they can be heard. The Church in its dependence on lawyers and insurance companies has appeared to have pulled up the drawbridge, making communication very difficult. Who can forget the 17 letters sent by Gilo to Lambeth Palace and the limp response to just one?

David Greenwood summed up the problem of one part of this church culture when he talked about it being a ‘defensive culture’. He said, no doubt speaking for a considerable number of survivors: ‘none of our complainant witnesses have described having been welcomed and assisted at any point by church officials. Indeed, there were attempts at all levels to minimise the seriousness and volume of cases.’ I have written on several occasions in this blog about the importance of welcome in church life. If we think about it, a true welcome into a living community without making conditions over status or position is one of the most precious things that a church can offer. Welcome does not need words. It speaks of acceptance, tolerance and love. So many Christians think that to be a Christian is the ability to recite a formula of correct words. They forget that the most powerful and attractive words in the New Testament are those spoken by the Son of Man returning in glory. He invites the righteous ‘to take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.’ To be a Christian is to respond to this invitation to participate in a full transcendent life.

A church which is defensive, is operating in a way that is completely counter to a vision of welcome and openness to all. The church is or should be a place of forgiving and healing brokenness. There is something very strange if it wants to shut out a particular category of the broken – the survivors of church abuse. Of course, there are many problems as regards resources and adequate expertise to fulfil this task, one that is difficult and challenging. But what has been revealed in the past three weeks is the way that the Church in many places has placed actual obstacles in the way of those simply want to be heard and acknowledged. Many have been so hurt by this response that they have given up on the Church altogether. Who can blame them? But I also find it hard to believe that a rejected Christian who has been abused and hurt by members of the Church will ever be rejected by God.

The words ‘change of culture’ are of course becoming a bit of a cliché in church survivor circles. One way in which the Church could begin to change is by rediscovering the ministry of welcome. Learning to welcome people better, not put up defensive fences against them, is the first stage of creating a healing church. Some abused victims of the Church will have specialised needs, but I suspect that many of them can be helped by genuine loving and reconciling welcome. This will go a long way in helping them to rediscover what they were looking for when they first entered a church. The dysfunctional power dynamics which created their abuse in the first place need to be completely taken apart. It may require that the whole Church has to enter a period of complete brokenness before it can be rebuilt. The clergy will have to be taught how to resist the subtle temptations of narcissistic power games and abusive behaviour. Whether there are appropriate personality tests which could weed out in advance the exploiters of power in the church, I don’t know. But soon everyone who sets themselves up to be a member of the clergy must be seen to be a person of humility, openness and welcome. If the person at the centre is a follower of Jesus the servant, the washer of feet, then sexual abuse or any kind of power abuse would be impossible. The cultures of deference, hierarchy and social status will also have to be put away. It may take 20 years or even 50 years to see such ideas in place. Somehow it is a possible vision and the Inquiry has opened the eyes of many church people to see the utter ugliness of abuse, power games and control within our congregations. These will be identified and gradually expelled as people come to recognise the importance of safety and true welcome within the Body of Christ.

This morning, on the last full day of witness hearings at IICSA, I was with a group of other permission to officiate clergy doing my compulsory safeguarding training. I thus did not hear the morning questioning by the lawyers of Archbishop Welby. I did however, catch his closing reflections after lunch. He was asked to reflect on the impact that encountering victims of church sexual abuse had made on him. His answer came only after a long pause. The words that he used were striking. First, he spoke of a deep sense of shame. He was ashamed of his church. His posture and body language suggested that he was articulating a deeply held feeling. I have no reason to think that this was anything other than a genuine expression of emotion. Even though we are critical of the leadership of the church in this area of caring for the vulnerable, it seems that we need to accept that some of our church leaders have been deeply affected by what they have heard at the hearings.

A second word came out of Welby’s reflections at the end of the questions by Fiona Scolding. This was the word ‘tribalism’. The Archbishop wanted to make the point that when groups or factions within the church band together to protect themselves and their privileges, that creates an atmosphere highly hostile to good and transparent safeguarding. Although he used the word tribalism in the context of protecting vulnerable people in the church, it was clear that this word also sums up many of the problems being faced by the Church of England in other areas. Tribalism seems to be rife in the whole Anglican Communion and is the cause of many of its intractable divisions.

Those of us listening to his words realise that, for the Archbishop, church tribalism is a source of deep frustration. The problem is that everyone feels stronger when they band together with others to accomplish a particular task. Some tribalism is of course healthy. The church rightly encourages people to gather together the purposes of study, prayer and worship. Feeling support from others as we grow together in community is something that enriches our lives. But community or communion can become something dark when it descends into tribalism. This negative side of community is manifested when the individual surrenders their thinking and feeling to a group mind. In political terms this is seen in mass movements whether on the Right or on the Left. Anyone who attends a fascist rally does not have to think for themselves. He or she is part of something great and of enormous power. The Movement, the Cause has replaced the individual isolated functioning which belongs to a single person. Within the mass gathering there is power; outside the rally there is only insignificance and a sense of personal weakness.

A readiness to surrender our individual weakness in exchange for tribal power is perhaps not as far away from each of us as we would like to think. Membership of a tribe promises us many things; we are freed from the struggle to understand and make sense of the world. We have instant purpose, direction and significance once we have surrendered to the large group. In church political terms there are many people who have opted to belong to a group which does all necessary thinking on their behalf. This is particularly true of those who occupy a position at one of the extremes of churchmanship. At the charismatic end of things, we can see how the large group fills the individual with sound and music so that thinking is no longer required. The fact that lots of other people are there with us helps to dampen any rational questioning that might try to erupt. I vividly remember the single occasion when I attended a professional football match. The wall of sound that filled the stadium removed any individual sense of identity. I did not want to repeat the experience. The thinking, reasoning and feeling parts of me were too important to be destroyed in this kind of event.

When Archbishop Welby spoke about tribalism he was talking, I believe, about this tendency for people to want to be swept up into a large group who does their thinking and decision making for them. People who think as part of a large group and find their identities there, are not the kind of people who would be sensitive and alert to the needs of abused individuals. The individual is never important in tribes or mass movements. We only support others when they belong to our tribe. If they do not they are to be scorned and pushed to one side. That is not a good atmosphere for safeguarding the weak and the vulnerable. Effective safeguarding can only be done by people who are prepared to stand outside this tribal mindset. We need to be above a crude morality that places all the good in our tribe and sees everything else as distorted or evil. We need to have an independence of thought and behaviour which will be able to do the loving and intelligent caring that is required of true safeguarding work.

My comments which support Archbishop Welby in his horror of tribal thinking have to end on a slightly critical note. The tribalisms of churchmanship that we see in the Church of England are paralleled by other inbred groups that we find within professional bodies. Tribalism is such a universal phenomenon that we find it in safeguarding networks, social work groups and even in the House of Bishops. In all of these, the same dynamics of letting the group to do some of your thinking for you is evident. A lot of the unanimity of thinking that we observe among bishops may itself be an example of the very tribalism that the Archbishop wants to banish. We need to spend a great of time in finding out what ‘disagreeing well’ really means. This is not just about encouraging conservatives to speak to liberals in the Church. It also means allowing the flourishing and fostering the independent exploration of morality and faith within the church. The opposite of tribalism is something very untidy. Perhaps it is precisely that fierce independence of thought, faith and morality that is what we should be seeking in the church and thus furthering the cause of good care and safeguarding..

Today I listened to a long account by Graham Tilby, the National Safeguarding Officer who was addressing the IICSA hearing. Much of his testimony was frankly boring. It concerned his work of bringing safeguarding practices in England up-to-date and closer to current professional standards. While I was listening to this I was asking myself a question. Why would this seem so alien to the dozens of individuals known to me who have been through an experience of abuse at the hands of church leaders? It was only when the hearing finished for the day at around 4.30 pm that I realised one simple truth. The professionals, the experts in this area of safeguarding and the survivors are speaking from totally different perspectives. It is an old story familiar to academia. An object of study will reveal quite different facets according to which discipline is being used to examine it. The glasses we wear will colour and define what we see with our eyes.

Although I am not an abuse survivor, my position as a student of church abuse of all kinds has put me far more alongside the survivors rather than as a defender of the church institution. We learn to expect that people within an institution like the church will normally see most things from the perspective of that body. Apart from learning to talk in a special coded language, they will normally have absorbed a distinction between the insider and the outsider – ‘us’ versus ‘them’. This seems to be the perspective of an employee like Graham Tilby. Arguably it also helps us to understand the apparent ‘groupthink’ of the entire House of Bishops. Their position at the heart of the church institution makes it difficult for them to imagine what it is like to be outside the group. If an outsider is challenging in any way to the institution that gives church leaders their sense of security as well as status, then that person will be a special foe. Almost everything that was said by Graham Tilby seemed to echo this perspective. Although he made various remarks about survivors there was no real identification with their plight and what they have suffered. He spoke about pastoral care being something to be offered locally – in other words outside his remit or interest. He was much more interested in the various ways professional safeguarding standards have been upgraded since he was appointed. He made reference to an external monitoring process by an organisation hitherto unknown to me, the SCIE. When I looked this up it turned out to be an independent organisation which evaluates organisations and their effectiveness -the Social Care Institute for Excellence. In other words, the main focus for pride among Safeguarding Officers is to deliver teaching and effective monitoring services rather than care for the raw pain of abuse survivors.

It was also revealing when Graham revealed what he considered the necessary set of skills required to be a Safeguarding Officer. He mentioned those skills possessed by police, social workers and probation officers. No mention was made of the skills that would be sensitive to the dysfunctional structures in which perpetrators flourish. I am thinking of course of social psychologists, psychotherapists and other mental health workers. To summarise, safeguarding has been handed over to one set of professional skills. What is required is the ability to manage, monitor training and organise structures. Little energy will be left for the care of survivors with their many and varied therapeutic needs.

From the perspective of the survivor, whose mental world I have tried to enter, all this heavy-handed professionalism feels alienating and oppressive. It feels as though stable doors are being firmly slammed after the horse has bolted. There is no affirmation of all the pain and suffering that has been caused by deviant individuals and the dysfunctional church structures which have protected them.

There is one category of professional which has grasped the reality of the chasm which separates survivors and those who want to protect the institution. These are the consultants who have written reports to critique the Church’s failure to understand what is going on in the safeguarding world. In 2015 Graham Tilby, who was speaking at the Inquiry today, commissioned a safeguarding review to see what lessons could be learned from the case of Gilo. We have referred to his story of abuse several times on this blog. The review was entrusted to Ian Elliott, an expert independent safeguarding expert. His report was completed in March 2016. The report was never published in full but was shared with the House of Bishops at their meeting that Spring. Sarah Mullally, now Bishop of London, was given the task of implementing the recommendations. The key thrust of the report was twofold. It recommended a more consistent approach to safeguarding across the country. In the second place it stressed the importance of placing the needs of a survivor at a much more central place. Elliott noted several failures from the past and, in particular, he was scathing about the poor record keeping of some bishops. The fact that bishops had not always acted in the best interests of survivors meant, he felt, that they should not left to make safeguarding decisions on their own. One sentence stands out: ‘behind every disclosure that is received lies human pain and suffering that can be so intense as to be life threatening’. This kind of awareness of the human reality of abuse seem to be totally absent in the rather laid-back and self-congratulatory presentation by Graham Tilby today.

Elliott’s review, although received well at the time, seems to have become buried in the intervening two years. Elliott built a bridge to cross the chasm between complacent church structures and the needs of suffering survivors. Somehow that bridge has become fractured. We have to hope that the IICSA will recognise the importance of Elliott’s work and recommend that the needs of survivors must once more be placed at the centre. We are not just talking about financial needs but sometimes simply a recognition of what they have been through. This blog post is the plea of just one individual who asks that the church rebuild the bridge that should exist between the church institution and the needs of survivors. This post represents a real longing and hope that the new Bishop of London, tasked with the taking forward of the Elliott report, will continue to work to keep it alive. It is vital from the perspective of this commentator that the needs of survivors must always be kept in mind as the church tries to go forward. As well as protecting potential victims in the future, it will always need to have care for those who have been damaged in the past.

I have given more time than perhaps is healthy to listen to the hearings of the Independent Inquiry this week. It will all be over by the end of next week, but the Church of England will be mulling over its implications for a long time to come. Some of the witnesses have been helpful in showing how much there is in the way of dysfunction and extraordinary dynamics within our Church structures. It is hard to see, after these hearings, how the pattern of Church life, especially around bishops and senior clergy, will ever be the same again. Some of the inner workings of decision-making at the highest levels of the church have been laid bare. Child protection policies over the past decades have been seen to be inadequate.

The current Safeguarding Officer from the Diocese of Chichester, Colin Perkins, has been eloquent today in support of current practice within his diocese. Other witnesses have tried to indicate that lessons ‘have been learnt’ and we can expect enormous improvements in the Church’s safeguarding in the future. The repeated promise to help survivors and victims has also included the expression ‘change the culture’. This was first mentioned by Archbishop Welby in 2013. I want to reflect what this, perhaps now rather tired, cliché might mean in practice. As my readers know I have often tried to emphasise that child sexual abuse is one among various problems of power abuse in our national Church. A dysfunctional exercise of power in the Church is, of course, found in other denominations as well. I want in this post to think further about what this expression ‘a change of culture’ might involve. At the very least it requires a new understanding of the way power operates within churches. At present we have in common with most other churches a hierarchical church which is modelled on a pyramid structure. The Church of Rome exemplifies this pyramid model more obviously than the Church of England. At the apex of the church pyramids are Popes, Archbishops and bishops. These dignitaries delegate their authority to those below them. These might be archdeacons, Area Deans or parish priests. Each parish also organises itself in a similar way. The minister in charge is at the top of his own small pyramid, able to set the tone of the parish and exercise some power over his congregation.

The problem for the church is that when power is exercised within these structures, quite often it is an invisible or unacknowledged power. When such power is in fact recognised and identified, it is probably less dangerous. The institution can operate for much of the time in a reasonably healthy way. The problem arises when, for reasons of psychology or institutional dysfunction, the one at the top of the pyramid has no insight about the power at their disposal. He/she may be feeding an inner narcissistic need to be important while at the same time behaving in an arbitrary way. Because feeling good comes to be for some the most important reason for exercising power, the person at the top will have no insight as to how those at the bottom feel. Leader and led often may become locked in an unhealthy dynamic. This, at worst, quickly descends into a culture of a coercive controlling tyranny.

The exercise of power within the Church thus often involves delusional thinking. Nobody within the pyramid is prepared to tell those at the top how they impact negatively on the marginalised and weak at the bottom. In the present hearings of the Inquiry we sense a crippling inability by many of those at the top to hear the needs of survivors. This is probably not deliberate on the part of bishops and archbishops. Somehow the structure and the culture of the pyramid have made it almost impossible for the lines of communication to work properly. Something is wrong, but no one knows how to turn the pyramid upside down to create the necessary ‘change of culture’.

It would be easy to say that the solution to our problem is to turn the pyramid upside down. The practical implications of doing this would be fairly drastic whether within a parish or at national level. But we can at least try to imagine how relationships within a structure would change if the person in charge started genuinely to think about the experience of the people with the least power. On this blog Chris has often reminded us of the needs of the poor and the disenfranchised. The ministry of the churches to such people has often been condescending and ineffective. I have mentioned that the experience of the very poor in their relationship to the Church is sometimes like the experience of being offered candy floss rather than proper food. The Church is good at providing entertainment rather than true welcome and integration into a life-giving community.

What do we find in Scripture? We do find the upended pyramid model when we note that Jesus who is Lord and Master wants to be the one who washes feet. In practical terms that means the ability of leaders to be alongside someone and listen. The greatest challenge for those who have been defending the institution from survivors of historic abuse is to start to listen to them. If the Church is ever to get right the enormous wrong that has been perpetrated against these survivors, it has to put in hand a long process of reconciliation. This would involve financial and pastoral recompense together with other forms of support, spiritual and practical. Somewhere towards the end of this lengthy process (say after five years) there might be room for a massive service of contrition at St Paul’s Cathedral. Bishops and archbishops would be asked to wash the feet of representative survivors. Such a massive symbolic act would demonstrate beyond all doubt that the Church is genuinely moving into the stage of wanting to serve those who have been wounded and damaged by its some of its leaders.

The change of culture that we are looking for would be a radical change from defensiveness to openness. We need to embark on a process which will show that the Church is really listening to victims and survivors. The alternative to a radical new beginning for the Church is a slow decline in influence and power. The Church by its failures stands to lose the status and power which has been used for centuries to serve the people of this country. The IICSA hearings may galvanise it to put it house in order. But to do that, the Church will need to do the difficult task of sorting out the structures of power within its life. The pyramid needs somehow to be turned upside down. That will be costly in terms of money and status. Somehow, I sense that this is the path closest to what Jesus would suggest.