There are some words, when used in a Christian context, that always make me shiver. The word ‘obedience’ is one such. No doubt it can be shown to be a good word with many Biblical examples to indicate that it has its place among the Christian virtues. Whenever anyone in fact uses it in a Christian context, I always have questions in my mind. For example -who is being obedient to whom? A typical answer is that we are commanded to be obedient to the will and Word of God. That seems like a simple and straightforward response and I am aware how many wholesome sermons can be preached on this topic. But there are still problems with this answer which do not remove potentially toxic and corrupting understandings of the word. In the first place, the words of God that demand our obedience have been selected by some process. Perhaps they have been chosen for us by a teacher or we have found them through our own reading. But in whatever way they have come to our attention they have been isolated from or extracted from a huge depository of Biblical writings, much of which is ignored. Many instructions in the Bible that might demand our obedience are never openly discussed. The people of Israel were told by God to slaughter and enslave enemies and brutally punish those who failed to keep the Law. Why are we not told to do the same? I shall not even attempt to answer that question, but merely point out that obedience to the Word of God is never simple. In practice the attempt to obey God and his Word will always demand some intermediary or interpreter of Scripture. Obedience to God will inevitably involve for us a relationship with this intermediary. This relationship may well involve obedience and submission to a powerful authority in the person of the pastor.

In this way, the word obedience, when used in Christian circles, is one that sometimes sums up an overt power relationship between a teacher/pastor and his congregation. There may be occasions when obedience is an appropriate description of a healthy relationship between a pastor and his flock, but I would hope a normal church would not experience this kind of dynamic on a regular basis. The everyday tasks of teaching, pastoral care and spiritual guidance do not normally involve giving commands and exercising power in a coercive way. The church where there is a constant demand for obedience is one where we would expect to find the practice of spiritual abuse.

A second thought comes to me as I reflect about this word obedience and the way that it is inappropriate for much church life. The normal context where the word is used healthily is in the setting of family life and the rearing of children. We insist that our children obey us in the early stages of their upbringing. This insistence is both for their own safety and a means of teaching about boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate behaviour. When a child is never thwarted in doing whatever he/she wants, we see the beginnings of a chaotic and probably dysfunctional life. The skill of parenthood however requires that our demand for obedience is appropriate, consistent and just. There will be of course many parents whose approach to disciplining their children reflects more their needs and requirements rather than the welfare of the children. Exercising discipline together with the appropriate demand for obedience does takes wisdom, energy and stamina. Our children are, nevertheless, grateful for these efforts in the long term.

Obedience then is part of the pattern of the adult/child relationship when the children are growing up. One of the advantages to the child, not always appreciated at the time, is that by obeying their parents, they are kept safe. Negotiating hazards like crossing roads or learning to relate to new people is made possible by a strict unquestioning obedience to parental commands. The wise parent will gradually allow the child to be exposed to the risky parts of day-to-day living. Going out on their own and coping with the hazards found there is part of growing up. Today many of the freedoms allowed to a child in the 1950s, climbing trees, going on cycle rides and encountering any number of strange people outside the home will be delayed. But whenever the stage we call independence is reached, it is clearly a milestone in a child’s life. With independence comes a certain level of risk, a need to make decisions and choices all on their own without any adult standing at their shoulders.

So often when we hear the word obedience used in a church context, there seems to be an acceptance that is appropriate for the pastor or clergyman to treat the membership like children. In contrast, we would consider that a more appropriate aim for Christian leaders is to help people move on towards making choices and decisions for themselves. As we all know choices and decisions made on the Christian journey will sometimes involve mistakes. The response to such a mistake is not to regress back to a childish dependence on an adult; rather we should pick ourselves up and try and learn through what has gone wrong. Sadly, there seem to be far too many churches which proceed on the basis that the congregation has to be kept at the functioning level of a child where the adults (the leadership) always know best. This pastor alone has knowledge and insight into the Christian faith. When the church congregation is described as a Christian family this is ironically and tragically a good description of the faulty dynamic of what is going on. The pastor acts as the father and everyone else fulfils the role of dependent, unquestioning and immature children.

Why is this dynamic so popular among Christians? I think that the answer lies some somewhere in the desire of many people above all to feel safe. This word safe is of course close to another word salvation. People seek safety and salvation as a way of coping with the uncertainties and the stresses of their ordinary lives. A church where the congregation are treated like children – expected to obey the leader/pastor – is a comfortable reassuring place. As long as the members stay within the orbit of this reassuring comfortable congregation, they can avoid facing up to the difficult things of life. Choices, decisions even thinking for oneself can be left to others, especially those in leadership.

In this blog post I have tried to explore why the word obedience in a church context for me rings alarm bells. It is because it seems to speak of a church community where one person, the pastor, has appropriated too much power. Secondly it indicates an acceptance of a regression back to childhood, a place of safety and reassurance. Many Scriptural quotations can be advanced to indicate the importance of obedience, but I would always want to present a version of Christianity that is about growth, decision and adult responsibility. This is perhaps what James Fowler was talking about in his ideas about the way our faith changes over the decades.

Reading an article in the Church Times on the topic of Renewal and Reform has left me with questions. To recap what the initiative known as R and R refers to, (for the benefit of non-British readers) it is a scheme which has been put in place by the Church of England to promote growth in the dioceses. The initiative, because it may stem heavy losses in Anglican church attendance, has attracted quite large sums of money from the Church Commissioners. In some places the money has been used to facilitate church planting. Church planting is a controversial activity and it involves a large active ‘successful’ church sending out a number of its own group to form the nucleus of a new congregation elsewhere, sometimes in another part of the country. Sometimes this new congregation is set up within an existing ecclesiastical parish. On other occasions a parish church, thought to be on its last legs, is effectively taken over by a new influx of people coming in from outside the area.

The new congregations, the church plants, are often placed in areas that might struggle to attract viable numbers of people to support the buildings. The individuals sent to start these new churches tend to be made up of largely young people. The demographic of 18 to 30-year-olds also seems be the group most attracted to these new congregations. As might be expected, the worship styles offered at these new church plants will have lively music and they will also take care of the community needs of their young clientele. I have no personal knowledge of any of these church plants except I heard some comments made about a congregation imported into Norwich city from HTB (Holy Trinity Brompton) in London. This new plant alienated some of the existing congregations by the way that it hoovered up many of the young people who had been attending other churches in the city. This particular plant was, in short, being accused of poaching existing Christians rather than being a place for evangelism of the hitherto unchurched residents of Norwich.

Most church plants seem culturally to belong to charismatic wing of the Church of England. But the question that occurs to me whenever I look at one of these congregations, even from afar, is whether they are catering for any age group apart from the young. The age profile of most of these congregations seems to be the same, 18 -30. It was always said about a large successful charismatic congregation in Edinburgh, popular with students, that the average age was about 27/28. During the 7 ½ years that I was in the city, this average age never varied. I remember having a conversation with someone about this never changing average age issue. What happens to those who are 35 and over? The answer seemed to be that because the culture of the church no longer suited the older group, they moved on elsewhere. As far as I know no one has done any research on this question of what happens to people who spend 10 years or so as part of a lively charismatic congregation. What are their reflections on that experience? What do they take with them from that exposure if they move on into another sort of congregation, assuming they still want to remain part of the church? I would suspect that many people who have passed through the lively, growing and dynamic congregations of places like HTB have quite different spiritual and social needs when they settle down with families. Do some of them look back at the charismatic stage as being part of the experience of youth, like being a student? I would love to know the answer to these questions. I suspect that were the answers available, they might not be quite as helpful to the future of the Church in England as many of our leaders think. It is easy for a bishop to see a lively congregation and feel that because of the levels of enthusiasm being expressed there that this is the future. They see a lively institution but not the actual individuals within it. What works for a cohort of what is known of emerging adults may not in fact be any realistic solution for the totality of the church-going population of Britain. That is the possible weakness of a perspective that wants to plough considerable sums of money into promoting manifestations of church life that are not congenial to all.

Speaking for myself I have found that my spiritual needs have varied over the years. While my young self would have tolerated noise and spiritual excitement of the kind peddled by charismatic churches, the same cannot be said for my older (hopefully wiser) self. Perhaps I speak for many of my age group when I say that noise and loud music in worship is now a complete barrier to any encounter with the spiritual. I am far more likely to be stirred into spiritual receptivity by silence, possibly enhanced by some visual component. I recently read the blog comments that I made a year ago at Christmas. I then pointed out that Christmas is a festival which makes extensive use of pictures and visual symbols. We have presented to us pictures of an ancient story -cribs, angelic choirs and journeying wise men. All these pictures draw us into the mystery of Christmas. In the contemplation of the visual symbols of Christmas, we do not have ‘correct’ interpretations. We find the divine realities implicit in these images touching each of us in their own way. I find, in fact, the heart of Christmas in the words of the carol – how silently how silently, the wondrous gift is given. The nature of the Christmas gift does not have a precise identical content for everyone. Rather it is a gift that needs to be unwrapped by each of us and its substance will vary as we are varied. God is offering to come into our lives. He is, by coming into our world, offering to come into our hearts. How we receive God in the form of Jesus is our lifetime Christian project. We will need at each stage of our life a slightly different key to unlock that presence. Our churches need to provide help to all its members to be open to the reality of God at every stage of their lives, from childhood to extreme old age. Let us never be tempted to cater only for a single age group, but attempt to see Christian life as a changing and evolving whole.

The study of abusive churches is made hard by the fact that their victims frequently do not want to speak of their experiences or even think about them. I had hoped that after three years this blog might have acquired a small group of followers who have been through some of the experiences that I have been describing and trying to analyse. Should we conclude that spiritual abuse is rare and that a paucity of acknowledgment of the issue suggests that I should cease to write on this topic? It is a temptation to withdraw defeated from the field. And yet there is plenty of evidence to suggest that what I have been describing is common and awaits a catalyst moment to break through into the consciousness of many people. We have seen such a catalyst moment occur in the acceptance of the fact of sexual abuse of children involved with sport. Awareness of sexual abuse of children in the church has also been understood for some time. The spiritual abuse of individuals in church is however still largely an untold story. One option for a researcher like myself is to attend churches and look for evidence of this kind of abuse. Fieldwork of this kind is in fact extremely difficult to do. How does one research a congregation as an outside observer? The only realistic method is to take seriously the anecdotes and descriptions of people who have come out of abusive congregations. While it is important to be aware of bias and partiality, it is still possible to extract material for analysis and reflection from these published sources.

The Langlois report of 2015 which heard evidence from past and present members of Peniel/Trinity Church Brentwood is one such source of material for an analyst such as myself. John Langlois has recorded both the positive and negative aspects of the church and allowed his witnesses to speak to us in their own words. With his forensic experience, he gives the reader some valuable insight into the factual events that occurred in that church over a long period. I have recently gone back to the report to read it in more detail. Now that a year has passed since its publication, it is time for us to review some of this credible evidence for understanding the phenomena of control and power abuse that can and does exist in some independent churches.

Today I am attempting to look at a single theme, the way the pulpit was used to retrain control by Michael Reid over his congregation. It would appear from dozens of witnesses that there were consistent techniques at work designed to both terrify and control his congregation. The first thing that was practised is a method taken straight out of a Calvinist handbook. This is the constant reminder that everyone in the congregation is a wretched sinner deserving only punishment and the terrors of hellfire in life beyond the grave. Some promise of hope was given to the congregation in the suggestion that continuing membership of Peniel church might possibly result in salvation. The way membership was to be practised however depended on strict rules set out by Reid. One of his favourite passages, endlessly repeated, was the call to Abraham to leave his family. This was used to ensure that church members would cut themselves off from contact with members of the family who did not attend the church. That was in addition to all their non-Christian friends. It did not matter if, say a grandmother attended another church. The fact that it was not Peniel meant that she must not be regarded as part of the family.

Having established through endless repetition the principle that Peniel was the only church acceptable to God, Michael Reid went on to use the Bible to stop people in the church complaining about the way they or their children were treated by the leadership. He constantly referred to the murmurers and complainers who were dealt with harshly in the Book of Numbers. The dynamic of loyalty to the leadership also meant that few critical comments would ever escape being reported back to the leadership. Most people kept questions and doubts to themselves. Michael Reid thus effectively silenced questioning, debate or doubt. He also created a culture where his judgement and opinion was regarded as unchallengeable. For those who began to question this powerful leadership and think about leaving, he would commonly say that God has shown his approval of his ideas and authority by giving him such a ‘successful’ ministry. There were also a number of passages from Scripture which could be deployed against leavers and making their shunning obligatory. One favourite of Reid’s was the passage in I John which says that ‘they went out from us because they were not of us’. He was not above telling stories of people who, having left the church, had been found dead or had gone insane. Ruth Reid, Michael’s wife, told a story of a man who had opposed the church’s teaching. She had had a vision of him being eaten by worms on the night when he had died of a heart attack.

A further way that the pulpit was used to exercise control over all the members was the technique of public humiliation of individuals. A woman who sought healing for a back problem but who received no benefit from prayer, was called up to the front one day. Michael Reid then invited members of the congregation to gather round and pray for her because she had an ‘evil heart of unbelief’. It is not hard to see how this episode created both fear and humiliation in the woman concerned. How should she have responded? Was defiance or allowing herself to become still more compliant to the heavy-handed control mechanisms of the church’s leadership the better response?

The overall culture of Peniel church seems to have been one of inducing fear by its leader, Michael Reid. There were two areas of vulnerability in the congregation which could be ruthlessly exploited. The first was importance of family and friends and the need to belong and be accepted by them. The second was the promise of eternal salvation with God beyond the grave. Reid was the effective gatekeeper to both these valuable possessions. His power lay in his ability to dispense or remove either of these two things whenever he wished. We see the same process at work with the Scientologists who use access to the family as a weapon of control. It hardly needs me to make the obvious point that such power should never be given to a single individual. When one person is given the keys to hell, it is hard not to use the word ‘cult’ as a description of his organisation. Whenever a leader or a church is afforded so much power, then the institution becomes extremely dangerous. Arbitrary and destructive use of power by Michael Reid made Peniel church inevitably a place of harm and abuse.

I am intending to look further at the detailed dynamics of this church, particularly at the personality of Michael Reid. I suspect that there are some uncomfortable parallels between the character of President-elect Donald Trump and Reid. Arbitrary use of power, excessive greed and a complete disregard for other people’s welfare, seem to belong to both men. Perhaps by studying further the dynamics of Peniel church, we will catch a further glimpse into what may be a scary future for the Western world. The American electors and the members of Reid’s church seem to have wanted to hand over responsibility for their welfare and interests to these powerful charismatic individuals. They seemed to have had no insight or understanding of the way that the same individuals may become their oppressors and controllers. At least in the small space provided by this blog, we can reflect and try to understand what is going on. Perhaps it may be possible defend ourselves against such means of control.

I have been recently watching a programme on iPlayer about hate preaching in the States. The programme presented the ministries of some American pastors whose raison d’être seems to be a constant emphasis on the condemnation of sin. This mainly focussed on an obsessive hatred of homosexual behaviour. Because this one sin is deemed to be so much more important than any other, we would claim that there are deep cultural and psychological reasons for making this emphasis. Indeed, we have already on this blog offered suggestions to help us understand why Christians feel it necessary to hate homosexuals with such vitriol. We are not just talking about the condemnation of what is thought to be sin. We are effectively into an area of behaviour which, in its obsessiveness, could be said to be pathological in nature.

Pathological behaviour is never going to be attractive. This apparent fixation for many Christians over this single issue of homosexuality has already been identified as one of the reasons why many people are repelled from Christianity and the church. Young people under the age of 35 especially cannot understand why there should be so much focus on this area of human behaviour. Why do so many Christians make this issue a defining one? There are, in fact, many other people in the church who would wish that this constant debate could be left behind in favour of other topics such as climate change, international justice and the issues around poverty and inequality.

I was recently brought face-to-face with the issue of what a younger generation might think about homosexuality when overhearing a conversation between my elder daughter and her son aged 7 ½. My grandson has apparently unconsciously imbibed the idea from his parents that sincere lifelong partnerships can be undertaken by people of the opposite or the same sex. For him the important thing was that two people love each other in a way that would keep them together for a lifetime.

I have no reason to think that my grandson has been indoctrinated into a pro-gay position. Obviously at the age of seven he has little concept of the meaning of sexual activity. What has happened is that he will have observed the behaviour of people in committed relationships, both gay and straight. Nothing he has seen has suggested to him anything unusual going on when he meets same-sex couples. It would of course have been helpful that no one in his family has ever shown any negative reaction when same sex couples were encountered.

From this conversation within my own family, I am left wondering how far the rampant homophobia in parts of the church is something that is a learned response by Christians. Is a revulsion and condemnation of gay partnerships something that is indoctrinated into us rather than something we are born with? Is it too much to suggest that most children and young people outside the influence of a dogmatic conservative setting might be, like my grandson, unable to see anything wrong in the idea of a same-sex committed relationship? If we are not born homophobic, that is a ground for hope for the future. History does indicate that reactionary social attitudes do change over time so that even conservative Christians have been known to give way to contemporary social mores. It is not many years ago, indeed in my lifetime, when race was an issue and mixed marriages were regarded with strong social disapproval. Things were said by many people on the topic of mixed marriage 50 years ago which would now not be tolerated. The intolerant comments made then would now constitute grounds for a possible prosecution on the charge of racism. This gradual suppression of racist attitudes in our society has allowed great social advance in the status of many UK minorities and in their relationships with the dominant white majority. Problems continue to exist for some ethnic groups who have resisted this assimilation into the majority culture. Many Muslim women in some of our cities are unable to speak English and seldom leave their homes. When no attempt at integration is made, there are likely to be real problems for such groups in the future. A community which does not mix with the wider society is in danger of becoming a ghetto and an enclave of underprivilege. So, while many of the barriers connected with colour and race have been dismantled, there are still outstanding areas of division in our society which have yet to be overcome.

The record of the church in being in the forefront of breaking down racial and cultural barriers is not particularly distinguished. Far too many immigrants from the West Indies in the 50s and 60s found themselves effectively turned away from white-dominated churches. We have today the phenomena of black led churches which might sometimes be described as Christian ghettos for people from non-white backgrounds. The existence of so many black churches, especially in London, has not been without problems for the wider church. In the first place the vibrant cultural traditions of black Christianity have been denied to the mainstream church. Secondly certain excesses within the culture and styles of worship in these churches might well, arguably, have benefitted from the more restraining influences of mainstream Christianity.

The great challenge for the church today is whether, having failed to be in the forefront of racial integration in the UK, it can embrace the new patterns emerging in contemporary relationships. When the church fails to be at the forefront in welcoming the LGBT community, it will find almost inevitably that it has little appeal to a new generation who, like my grandson, can see nothing wrong in same-sex committed relationships. We have explored already through this blog the reasons for many Christians being vitriolic in their opposition to same-sex partnerships. We noted that these reasons have little to do with theology. They seem to come far more from antiquated and reactionary patriarchal attitudes which, like racism, are increasingly irrelevant in 21st century society. The more that fair-minded people can glimpse these internal psychological processes at work among many conservative Christians, the more these latter groups will be seen to be dinosaurs and reactionaries. A new generation will not only reject this version of Christianity that is being offered, but they may well support a political process which will deem all such attitudes as criminal. I see in fact striking parallels between the racist attitudes of 50 years ago which are now illegal and the homophobia of today. It may take even less than 50 years before the society which successfully criminalised racism does the same thing in this area of homophobia. Another generation may well declare that homophobia must be rooted out of every part of society, including Christian institutions. If the church does not cooperate with these rapidly changing public mores, it may find that it faces not only irrelevance but even extinction. How tragic it would be if the church was confined to small groups of people who were prepared to cut themselves off from society as a whole in order to preserve their ‘bible beliefs’. For them such beliefs were a touchstone of bible truth, while to everyone these same beliefs can be seen to be antisocial and criminal.

Recently the blog for Trinity Church, Brentwood has been reactivated by the blog master Nigel Davies. Because Nigel has not added any new material for several months, the activity of the blog has naturally died down. One hopes that this will change over the coming days and weeks as the church continues to be an important case-study for this blog. There is, in fact, to judge from the latest posts little fresh news to report about Trinity, although Nigel is still making his protests outside the building on most Sunday mornings. One fact he does mention is that some time ago he was forced to remove the word ‘abuse’ from his posters. He now uses the less provocative word ‘damage’ to describe what happened to the children of the church school. The police thought that this language of ‘abuse’ was too strong a way of describing what former members, particularly the children, had suffered at the hands of the church’s leadership. I want to suggest that this word abuse is arguably a completely appropriate word to describe what does happen in some churches up and down the country. Abuse is a very apt word to describe what happens even in Christian circles. It does not have to involve violence or sexual activity.

Some twenty years ago, my wife and I had an unsettling appearance when we tried to deal with a woman with dementia. She appeared at our doorstep while I was working as a Vicar in Gloucestershire. At the start, we tried to treat her and the tales she was telling us as literal accounts of reality. But as time went on we realised that there was no factual substance in what she was saying about her family and the places she claimed to belong to. Eventually I drove her to the police station and introduced her to the officer on duty as someone who had got lost. Her family reclaimed her very quickly. The following day an apologetic son appeared to thank us for the time we had given her. I tell the story not as a prelude to a reflection on dementia but to describe the effect that it had on both my wife and myself. Because we had tried to make literal sense of the irrational over a period of two hours, our ability to distinguish between what was true and what was fantasy was temporarily completely undermined. Even in the simplest attempts at communication of a fact in conversation, I found myself wondering what this was in fact true. You could say that my grasp on reality was temporally disturbed. I found myself having at that point a new respect for those who work with the mentally ill.

It is very important for our sense of self to feel confident that our judgements about what is real and what is unreal are reliable. We have all had the experience of waking from sleep and quickly readjusting from the dream state to the waking state. In waking up we instantly re-establish our connections with the reality of the everyday world. But we need to try to imagine what it would be like if this connection with the normal world was not possible. Suppose we were in a situation where we had no means of knowing whether the things we were seeing and what people were telling us were true or not. Our normal rational self will always want to check things out. If it cannot, the mind finds itself swimming in a sea of subjectivity, uncertainty and doubting everything. Cults and extreme religious groups are very good at creating in their followers the permanent sense of fearful uncertainty which forces the members to trust a plausible leader as a way of staving off complete breakdown or mental collapse. Everyone needs an anchor in a stable reality. The difference between the member of the closed religious group and everyone else is that in the group the standard ways of relating to the everyday world have been closed off. The only way of surviving psychologically is to buy into and trust the group’s discourse, even though a small part of the mind knows that this perspective is at odds with the way the rest of society thinks. In summary, the individual member of the cultic group may end up living in a kind of parallel universe to the rest of society. The original sense of a personal individual self has been undermined and the member is on the way to becoming a sort of clone of the ‘group self’.

In what other ways do religious and cultic groups attack the integrity of the self? Many extremist religious groups are very good at teaching the message of depravity in human nature. Their members are reminded constantly to engage in acts of self-examination and self-renunciation. This will have the effect of creating an almost permanent miasma of blame. Self-blame or shame is something that is not difficult to extract from the Bible texts. A preacher or a cult leader can also suggest that any goodness that is felt by the individual is of no value. The message of being lovable because of God’s love and concern for each of us is replaced by the message that we are all foul and wretched sinners.

The next stage, having convinced a listener that they are an unredeemed spawn of the devil, is to convince the listener that they are in danger of hell fire. We have already named fear as one of the consequences of having one’s grasp of what is real thoroughly undermined. Here we have another aspect of fear, the fear of some future punishment. Both fear and shame will always be effective ways of undermining the sense of self-worth. Both these negative emotions will be very effective in completely disempowering the would-be follower of Jesus or seeker of any other religious goal. The desirable qualities of confidence, self-esteem together with an ability to think for ourselves have long since disappeared. Such individuals that remain in the group have now become completely vulnerable to the control of the cult leader or the minister of their group.

We have been describing the ways in which an individual can be attacked at the level of their self-determination and personal power. We can name this as a spiritual attack against what we can describe as the core self. We are talking about something that may not happen very commonly in Christian circles in the UK. But when it does occur it will involve a long period of recovery. It will require a re-learning of personal boundaries, a gradual recovery of the ability to know and trust in one’s own core beliefs. The ability to think and feel for oneself and to trust one’s judgement is a hard thing to recover when it has been taken away. The original assault on the human self in the way we have described can, surely, only be described as abuse. It is every bit as serious as the after effects of sexual abuse. Spiritual abuse, which summarises what we have been describing, is an attack on the core self and is as great an attack on what it means to be human as that involved in sexual violence.

Every individual in our society has the right to discover their unique gifts and abilities, including the right to be different. The motivation of some cults and religious group to insist on undermining the core uniqueness of a personality as a way of creating some new group identity needs to be challenged. These weapons of blame and fear that are used week by week in churches and cults around the world are precisely that, weapons of potential abuse. They threaten the personality and unique individuality of the members and we need to be on our guard. Spiritual abuse is being perpetrated and it needs to be named and always resisted.

Some weeks ago I was in Oxford for an event at my old college. I had a little bit of spare time and so I visited the bookshop, Blackwells in the Broad. Making my way downstairs to the theology section I took the opportunity to look at books published in the past five years or so that I had not seen before. I noticed one book by an author known to me. He is now a retired professor and he used to work at Durham University. We knew each other slightly back in the 70s when I spent two years in Oxford reading for a research degree in the branch of theology known as Patristics. The book my former acquaintance had written was entitled Modern Orthodox Thinkers. I pulled it off the shelf to see if I knew any of these individuals that were being described in the book. In fact there were several accounts of people I had known in Greece in the 1960s or later in Britain. Two people especially stood out, both now dead. One was an Englishman, Philip Sherrard, who mentored me in the studying I was doing while in Greece while the other was a Greek theologian called Dimitris Koutroubis. Dimitris was an extremely important influence on me and we kept up a fitful correspondence for around 10 years until shortly before his death. I was particularly pleased to see that his influence on theological thinking in Greece was being recognised in the book. When I got home I sent an email to the author and told him how pleased I was to see tributes to people I had known and whose encouragement I had greatly appreciated. Last Wednesday I went to visit the author of the book at his home in Darlington. It transpired that he had not personally known either of the two people who had helped me so much all those years ago. He was especially interested to see surviving letters that I still have from each of them.

My visit to Darlington last week has allowed me the opportunity to reflect on the work of encouragement that we both give and receive throughout our lives. Although I no longer study Orthodox topics, I am still grateful to each of these individuals for the way they mentored and encouraged me at that precise moment in my life. I began to think of what this gift of encouragement might mean for both giver and receiver. First, I have come to see that encouragement takes place when one person is prepared truly to listen to what another person is saying. This act of listening often allows the individual in need of encouragement to articulate much more clearly what they are trying to say. Active listening does seem to open up thoughts and ideas that might never appear if the thinker tried to do his/her thinking alone. Listening is thus sometimes a deeply creative process. The second part of the act of encouragement is the ability to help another person to see possibilities for the future. In a pastoral setting this work of encouragement might reveal a new start or a new way of doing things; in an academic type of mentorship it might be the ability to help a person see how half-formed ideas could be developed. I particularly remember receiving this kind of intellectual encouragement from Dimitris. This helped to carry me through from having some hunches and unformed ideas in the 60s into undertaking a complete research project in the 70s. I wonder whether I would ever have undertaken this project if there had not been one person who early on was genuinely interested and encouraging me in the work I was doing then.

These two distinct stages in the process of encouragement need a little further reflection. The first stage which I identified was the act of attentive listening. This involves something close to empathy. It demands from the encourager the ability to listen and to feel at the same time. But then we also saw a second stage. This allows both parties to take the material which has been shared and see how it can be brought together in a new way and taken into the future. The listener/encourager needs here a gift of insight or intuition. He or she needs the skills of imagination to be able to pull out from what has been shared the possibilities, the creative possibilities for the future. If all goes well the one who seeks encouragement begins to see new directions in which to resolve a problem whether it is personal or intellectual. Effectively what happens in the encounter is that the encourager has allowed a special environment to be created. Within this setting some emotional resolution or an intellectual development comes to flower.

As I began to think further about this process of encouragement, I began to see the links it has with what we describe as healing. For some time now I have come to see that healing in whatever context it takes place, has much more to do with creating a special environment than in doing something to another person. Whatever type of healing happens, Christian, medical or spiritual, it is a process that seems to tap into a mechanism for self-healing which exists in all of us. The best that another person, a would-be ‘healer’, can do is to provide the best possible environment within which that healing process can take place. In the case of healings in the Gospels, physical change seems often to have been linked to the fact of Jesus assuring the sick person of God’s lavish promise of forgiveness and acceptance. Being close to Jesus himself would also have created the response in the sick which we loosely describe as faith. These were incredibly powerful environments or settings in which the body of sick person would have been stimulated to move towards healing. The examples today of Christian healing that I myself witnessed have nearly always taken place against the background of some significant emotional shift in the person. Sometimes this has involved sudden new insight or a fresh encounter with the divine. In every case something external seems to have provoked an inner change in the person. It might have been new forgiveness, an encounter with love or a moment of reconciliation with another. In the case of small child falling over, what better environment for feeling better do we have than the warm embrace of a mother who cares? In future blog posts I shall have more to say on this topic of the relationship of healing and the way that others can help to create a healing environment. It is an idea that has not been fully worked out in my mind.

Encouraging another person in the ways I have described above is one of the most precious things that we can give them. Through us pain can be assuaged, questioning can be satisfied, all through encouragement, using the gifts of listening and empathy. Also through this encouragement we and those whom we seek to help can begin to face the future in a new way. The whole process, taking another person’s experience and helping to order it before moving it on to a fresh future, is an intensely creative form of interaction. All of us can do this for others, just as each of us can receive it from others. This past week two significant individuals in my life were brought back into my memory. They encouraged me intellectually and enabled me to explore at some depth the traditions and insights of another branch of Christianity. I was grateful for those encounters. Out of that gratitude I am perhaps better able to recognise the importance of doing the same for others as much as I can. May all of us be involved in the practice of the giving and receiving of encouragement, so that we and other people may blossom and flourish because of it.

The answer to the question in the title of this blog post is a qualified yes. The Bible is bad news whenever it is used to prop up abusive and tyrannical power practices on the part of corrupt Christian leaders.

As we know the Bible is rightly treated as authoritative by all Christian churches. But for us to say that Scripture is the ultimate source for all Christian belief and understanding is not the same as saying that we always find in it clear guidelines for human behaviour. Anyone who has made even a start in reading the Bible for themselves (sadly that is not true of most Christians) will know that there are numerous problems of interpretation and application. Listening to Scripture being read and interpreted in a church service will provide an understanding only of what one individual preacher believes about the Bible. That interpretation may be sound as well as edifying but equally it may be more a reflection of the minister’s own special preoccupations and interests than what is there in the text. Such personal interpretations will sometimes be distorted by unconscious bias, whether theological or personal. When an individual minister desires to have power over his congregation, thereby satisfying some craving for importance, then we have a serious problem. Some, if not most, abuses of power in a church will be perpetrated by a minister who knows how to quote Scripture for his own purposes. The pulpit, in other words, can be a place of power, and the sermon used to enforce loyalty to a leader or to prevent members from leaving.

One of the ways that individuals within a congregation are controlled by the leadership is through the fact that the ministers there have appropriated for themselves the position of speaking on behalf of God. They have become the experts in his Word. Everyone else will be expected to defer to this expertise and superior knowledge of Scripture. Knowing Scripture well is deemed to give the minister access to the very mind of God. This authority is of course backed up by selected verses from Scripture. A typical one will be Psalm 105 v. 15. Leaders are here referred to as anointed ones.

We see how a minister has subtly acquired extensive power over his congregation in two stages. He has, first of all, appealed to the frequently made claim that Scripture is inerrant or infallible. From his attendance at Bible College the preacher is then able to claim the high ground of being an expert interpreter of all this material. If this authority to know and speak the Word of God is accepted by the congregation, then it will be difficult for anyone ever to question the detail of how Scripture is in fact understood. People get used to the idea that to hear what God wants to say to them, they have to submit, not to what the Bible actually says, but what the Bible is represented by the preacher to say. The congregation become passive consumers of authoritative sermons preached week by week. The whole process could be summarised by the statement ‘if you want to follow Jesus follow me’. The culture of many conservative churches seems almost to encourage a congregation to worship the minister as the mediator of God’s Word and God’s will rather than travel any spiritual journey of their own.

The moment that a leader is understood to present through his words the actual mind of God, then it will be a short time before he delegates this supernatural authority to other people of his own choosing. The divinely appointed leader will normally have an inner circle who will enjoy a special status of being close to him. Many of these will be flattered by the attention of the spirit filled leader and will do almost anything to hang on to the privilege of retaining this level of favour. By being close to the centre of things, the centre of divine power, the individuals concerned will achieve an enormous boost to the self-esteem. From the outside, it will be suspected that the leader has chosen these particular individuals, not for their spiritual maturity, but for their ability to be easily manipulated and controlled. Their status at the centre may be just as easily withdrawn when the mood of the leader changes to prefer another group of followers.

We have already seen how an interpretation of certain passages of the Bible has given a position of enormous power to a Christian leader. Through them he would wish to claim that he is close to God and indeed can speak for him. In the same way he will extract from Scripture other passages which emphasise his demand for unquestioning obedience on the part of the congregation. Words like submission and obedience start to become current in the accepted discourse of Bible believing congregations. Such words are often a prelude for abusive control. When we were looking at the ideas of Michel Foucault in a previous post, we noted that power abuse does not need to be constantly asserted to be effective and strong. The congregation has, over a period, learnt to accept as normal the idea that submission to the leader is submission to God. Control and surveillance by those in authority over a congregation has now become an internalised process which is operative in every member. Even if one individual wants to question or stray from these internalised ideas and assumptions of this authority structure, there will always be other people around to coerce the nonconforming person back into line. In Foucauldian language the church is operating in accordance with a ‘discourse’ of obedience and conformity to ministerial power. Ministerial power itself is rooted in a selection of texts from Scripture. But, as we have seen, these have been read in the context of a thoroughly fundamentalist and uncritical understanding of Scripture.

A third form of pressure on each individual within a fundamentalist church group is the constant plea for unity. Without doubt the Bible tells us that unity is something that is desirable and part of God’s will. ‘The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body’. The message is clear: Christians belong to one another and they must do nothing to upset the state of unity that God wills for his church. But once again this discourse is and can be used to control and manipulate individuals, as well as destroy independent thinking. How can one ever raise questions within a congregation when the response will be an accusation of plotting to destroy the unity of the body of Christ?

We have identified three ways in which the Bible can be used as an abusive weapon against individual members of a church who are perceived as a threat by an insecure church leader. Once a follower has bought into the widely-held premise that the words of Scripture are the very words of God himself, a leader under threat and the church structure can move in quickly to disempower him/her and possibly abuse this individual whenever they wish. The Bible as a tool for control, obedience and the creation of a passive unquestioning unity is a very powerful weapon of potential abuse. When a survivor has, with great difficultly, extracted herself from such an abusing church, she may well ask: ‘How did I fall into the control of that leader?’ The answer that we have indicated is that the moment the Bible is given an infallibility which it does not deserve, there is a logical path clearly laid out for unscrupulous narcissistic leaders. They can easily take advantage of their position as power brokers of God and move in to control for their own purposes and for their own ends anyone in that church when they so wish. A belief in an infallible Bible is not just an item of doctrine; it is a potentially distorting and destructive idea, capable of causing many to stumble. The inerrant Bible can always be a weapon of power when interpreted by power-addicted leaders. Sadly they will always be among us and we must learn to be alert to them whenever they appear.

About 30 years ago, a clergyman was describing to me his arrival in a new parish. The parish was in a particularly wealthy part of the Cotswolds and many of the notable parishioners entertained each other with lavish dinners fuelled with copious amounts of wine. The new Vicar found himself invited to one of these events. He suspected that he was in fact being socially evaluated to discover whether he belonged to the mysterious group which he described as PLU (People Like Us). It is not clear whether he passed this test but there were other forms of scrutiny that were going on during this dinner party. He was told about the history of his church and the way things, from the perspective of his hosts, had always been run. There was more than a subtle hint that these arrangements for organising the church worked extremely well and there would be no need for any changes in the future. Alongside all the charm and the sumptuous hospitality there was also a veiled threat and subtext. If you change things, we, the socially powerful members of the church, will make life difficult for you in the future. The clergyman describing this scene did not conform to these subtle threats. He started to run the church with the needs of all his parishioners in mind rather than just the small group who had been organising things for a long time. The invitations to dinner dried up very quickly.

I was reminded of this anecdote when I read the account of Greg Thompson, the Bishop of Newcastle in Australia. The main part of his story was outlined in the previous post. Having written a hasty account of the drama of his describing how he himself had been sexually abused by a former bishop of the diocese, I went back to read again his verbatim statement. I had remembered in it a similar account of socially powerful people attempting to manipulate the bishop in his early days in office. Bishop Thompson arrived in his diocese at the beginning of 2014. He was of course aware of the historic issue of child abuse in the diocese, but the information he possessed was only what he had gleaned from the media. He decided to conduct a listening process across the diocese, meeting laypeople in the evenings and clergy during the day. He was asking people what they believed to be the priorities of the diocese and the kind of leadership they expected from him. What he found disturbed him. There was still an enormous amount of sympathy for the clergy who had been disciplined under his predecessor for the sexual abuse of children. The plight of their victims seemed to be ignored. In his first nine months, the Bishop also accepted several social invitations from prominent lay people. On every occasion, he again heard the same message from his hosts. From their perspective, the disciplining and defrocking of the clergy involved with paedophilia had been far too harsh. It was now his task to restore them. All those who putting pressure on Bishop Thompson had bought into the narrative that there was a hidden motive in his predecessor – homophobia. It seemed to be a convenient accusation rather than one based on any kind of evidence. They seemed unable to grasp the enormity of the damage that these clergy had caused by their behaviour.

As a response to this moral blindness on the part of some of his church people, Bishop Thompson arranged for two men, victims of sexual abuse, to speak to the 350 members of Diocesan Synod about their experiences. The response in the main was of overwhelming support for the victims. Various motions were put in place to ensure that good child protection policies would exist in the future. At the same time others were highly critical and questioned whether digging up the past served any useful purpose. This group felt that attention to survivors was bringing shame on the diocese. Pressure from this small faction intensified after the Bishop went public with the story of his own abuse in 2015. Letters were written both to the Royal Commission and to the leaders of the Anglican Church in Australia. These cast aspersions on both his character and his competence to act as a bishop in the church.

During 2015, a distinguished former Chancellor of the University at Newcastle, Professor Trevor Waring came to see Bishop Thompson. He recounted how he had been publicly shunned and shamed because he had been involved in the disciplinary process against the defrocked Dean Graham Lawrence and others. Others, including the Professional Standards Director and his staff, had had their property vandalised. The harassment extended to threatening emails and a campaign of rumour and hearsay against the Bishop himself and his staff. There was a suggestion in the proceedings of the Commission that such behaviour was being fermented and coordinated by the former Dean himself. It was also alleged that meetings were taking place among the members of the congregation still favourable to the former Dean.

In reading of the painful way that certain members of the Cathedral congregation had turned on their Bishop after initially welcoming him, I was reminded of my earlier anecdote from the Cotswolds. Some people will smile and try to flatter you into colluding with their wishes. When they do not get their way, they may turn on you and use their social power to undermine and attack you. The use of power in this situation is every bit as strong as when making a direct angry threat. It is, however apparent that the sympathy of the Commission was firmly with the Bishop. It was recognised that he along with the Professional Standards Director and his assistant Bishop had worked hard ‘to promote social justice rather than pomp and ceremony’. In contrast to the behaviour of a powerful minority of church people, the wider public have applauded the stand of the Bishop in this area. To quote the final words of the questioner: ‘in coming forward and making public your own abuse to provide an example to others that they can do the same, you seem to have given a voice to people who could not previously speak, or perhaps in some cases could speak but not be heard. If I might be permitted an indulgence, can I say that that fact, in combination with the pastoral care and support that you have provided directly and in good grace, whether on the streets of Newcastle or in the corridors of this Royal Commission, to many survivors of abuse and their families – I think it can be fairly said that there are many people who would be very pleased that you did come to this diocese and at the hour in which you did.’ The Bishop’s response was simply: ‘And I have drawn courage from them’.

The Royal Commission hearing from which we have drawn material happened only on November 24th. It demands our attention as well as our sympathy and prayers. May the cause of right, justice and light prevail in the place of darkness and moral confusion that seems to have infected a group of Christians on the other side of the world.

Over the past couple of years, I have been following on and off the proceedings of the Royal Commission in Australia which is seeking to uncover the truth about child abuse. Recently the commission has been listening to evidence about the Anglican Diocese of Newcastle in New South Wales. It is, like the stories of other churches, a story of cover-ups, abuse and long-term denial. Over the last 24 hours, however, this story has taken a particularly dramatic turn. The Anglican Bishop of Newcastle, Greg Thompson, has spoken to the commission about his personal experience of being an abuse victim at the hands of senior clergy in the Newcastle diocese. As a young man seeking ordination he revealed that he was sexually abused by the then Bishop, Ian Shevill. This abuse took place while watching a film with another priest named as Eric Barker. He also took part in the assault.

The Bishop had originally revealed some of this information in a radio interview in 2015. His giving evidence to the commission cost him a great deal and he broke down in tears while giving his evidence. Because of these experiences, he had arrived in the diocese in 2014 determined to continue the work of his predecessor and uncover the networks of paedophilia in the diocese and in the cathedral. A former Dean of the cathedral, Graeme Lawrence and two other priests had been removed from office in 2012. The task of working to ‘clean up’ the scandal-ridden diocese was impeded by the efforts of powerful laypeople in the diocese who were apparently determined to suppress any attempts to uncover the full truth. The situation at present is that the Bishop feels unwelcome in his own Cathedral because of this level of opposition. It is of course an appalling situation for him to face.

This is a shorter blog than usual as I want to leave my readers with the moral conundrum of what should ideally happen in this situation. Should the Bishop continue to face up to his opponents and push on to provide truth and light in the place of supressed evil? Standing up to bullies is a costly matter and it may be that the Bishop’s struggle will be at the expense of his mental health and well-being. The Royal Commission will be making its observations in due course and we hope that Bishop Thompson will be vindicated in his struggle to bring this tragic tale of cover-up and abuse to some kind of conclusion. Meanwhile we are left to wonder about the psychology of a group of powerful individuals who feel the need to blame victims of sexual abuse in their attempt to protect their influence and power.

Yesterday I was speaking to someone about this blog and they made the straightforward observation that religion and sex often seem to go together. I responded by pointing out that both were ultimately about power. The situation in Australia that is now being uncovered is not just about the evil gratification of some senior churchmen who commit appalling sexual crimes. It is also about institutions which are so enamoured of their power and influence that these can never be challenged. The institution and the positions of those with it must be preserved at all costs even when there are people are being sexually abused and humiliated within that same institution. It is hard to see how the Anglican diocese of Newcastle will easily recover its integrity and good name. The general public will be, no doubt, deeply suspicious of all church people in that area. The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has suffered a similar massive blow to its reputation which will take decades to recover from. In the Australian situation we are not just talking about the sexual abuse of children by churchmen. We are facing the unbelievably ugly face of an institution that even now cannot own up to the sheer hypocrisy of trying to supress and bury truth. Institutional abusive practice on this scale is like a form of cancer which eats right into the very sinews of the church. Can the church in this part of Australia recover from this double evil? It remains to be seen.

There is a story in the Church Times this week which may continue to resonate for some time into the future. Those among my readers who read this paper will already be familiar with the story that I am about to set out. In summary, an anonymous briefing paper was sent out by the international conservative Anglican group known as GAFCON to its members. This brief named certain individuals in England who were following lifestyles in contravention of Lambeth 1.10, the 1998 Conference resolution concerned with homosexuality. The list that was published did not contain any new revelations or ‘outings’ but it was still a discourteous and grubby piece of muckraking. It sounded much like a group of bullies in the playground shouting at other children and drawing attention to known problems affecting their families. These individuals named in the briefing paper were known to be in same-sex relationships but who were still in active ministry. The GAFCON spokesman who published this information thought, no doubt, that combining all the names in a single document would somehow strengthen their position by pressurising the Church of England to take action against practising gays. More important, probably, was the way that naming ‘enemies of truth’ is a good way of increasing morale among its own membership. GAFCON can affirm its identity most clearly when it names and shames those people that are part of alien ‘them’. In spite of everything written about the positive things GAFCON stands for, the organisation seems far more to be understood for the way it creates in its members an energy to hate and condemn those it disapproves of.

The organisation we know as GAFCON emerged into the light of day in 2008 at a conference in Jerusalem. The gathering there was to give a voice to conservative Anglicans who felt that the main conference at Lambeth would not be able to articulate their concerns. The number of British participants was fairly few. The bulk of those present came from the Global South. One particular centre of GAFCON strength is to be found in Australia, especially the diocese of Sydney under its then ultra conservative Archbishop, Peter Jensen. As a theological network we can describe GAFCON as the international face of Reform, which in Britain is the most Calvinist expression of Anglican evangelicalism. The number of British congregations supporting Reform and thus GAFCON is relatively small. However, the ones who do are often extremely wealthy and influential within their own dioceses. Many of the leaders of these congregations have been trained at Oak Hill Theological College. This college is linked with the more powerful institution of Moore Theological College in Sydney, Australia. One thing that has not been clearly determined is whether the congregations themselves are fully behind all the conservative pronouncements of their leaders who are active in the national body of Reform. I recently had a conversation with someone who lives in Oxford. She made the comment that the laity of two large conservative congregations in that city were not always happy with the pronouncements of their leaders. A focus on Reformation theology and being totally orthodox in matters of theology, is not always something that is particularly attractive to the ordinary lay members. This particular style of conservative theology, in other words, does not get implanted in peoples’ minds as it would in a cult situation. Ordinary people can continue to think for themselves and preserve independent opinions in an otherwise highly authoritarian environment. In a place like Oxford this independence of thought is believed to be still very much alive and intact.

It is the position of this particular blog post that while the charismatic evangelicals represented by the Alpha course and Holy Trinity Brompton have considerable power within British Anglicanism, the same cannot be said for those Conservative Evangelicals in Reform who focus on Puritan and Calvinist orthodoxy. Charisma and the excitements of modern Christian music are far easier to sell than the dry certainties of reformation-style theology. But what the leaders of Reform and GAFCON in Britain lack in numbers, they make up through their effective organisational skills. They are particularly good at representing their views to a press which always finds it easier to report on church divisions than on unity. I would hazard a guess that the total number of Calvinist evangelicals who are theologically literate may add up to the low hundreds. Their claim to speak for the bulk of evangelicals in Britain is a highly contestable one. In the case of this GAFCON briefing paper released in the past weeks, we may see it as crude and unprofessional and likely to decrease respect for their position on the part of many thoughtful Christians. The wider official body of the Church of England, because it has the organisational restraints of a large body, can seldom respond quickly to the kind of provocation contained in this GAFCON paper. So it takes the personal intervention of the Bishop of Salisbury, Nicholas Holtam, to articulate what many people think about this cheap GAFCON attack on the Church of England. Bishop Nicholas has divided his response into four sections. In point one he observes that Jesus never attacked individuals he thought to be in error. This kind of naming of individuals in encourages a climate of fear and opens them up to abuse by others. His second point was to point out the inaccuracies of the statement. The original Lambeth 1.10 resolution called upon the church to minister pastorally and sensitively to all regardless of sexual orientation. By implication this rules out publishing list of supposedly offending individuals. His third point discusses the implications of loving our enemies. To love someone, even those who disagree with us is to look for the best motives in their actions rather than the worst. Finally, he notes that the Lambeth resolution openly acknowledged the fact that it was difficult for the Lambeth bishops to come to a common mind on this matter. It was recognised that much more work needed to be done to discern the mind of Christ in this area of the church’s life. As an aside, Bishop Nicholas pointed to the repeated ways in which members of GAFCON themselves have violated the spirit of the Lambeth resolution. No doubt he was referring to such actions as Anglican leaders in Africa pressing their governments to persecute the gay members of their societies through a change in the law.

Bishop Nicholas’s outspoken intervention against GAFCON is an important one in the ongoing saga of the church seeking truth in the face of bullying and power games. It is still more important in a world increasingly dominated by political and theological extremism. After the election of Donald Trump and the revitalisation of the extreme right in politics and religion, it is important for churches, wherever possible, to articulate a nuanced and moderate presentation of the mystery of God. Although this blog only makes the tiniest of contributions to this cause of moderation, rationality and human kindness, it is still a necessary undertaking. The Bishop’s leadership in pointing out the crudity and sheer bad manners in of the GAFCON position is an encouragement to all of us who reject any attempt to use the Bible as a tool with which to bully others. Moral debate is not solved by crude Bible quoting taken out of context without any attempt to understand the cultural and theological background of the texts. The attempt to control the weak by this kind of crude manipulation must always be resisted in favour of wisdom, truth and insight. We look to a new generation of leaders who understand the true meaning of leadership and that it is never an exercise in control and manipulation. Such leadership will always seek to guide and serve those who want to follow the way and the spirit of Christ.