by Martin Sewell

Following the peremptory sacking of the independent members of the Independent Safeguarding Board of the Church of England, in June of this year, and the furore that followed, both amongst the Survivor community and members of the General Synod, an independent investigation was set up, with a senior barrister, Sarah Wilkinson working on an intensive basis to deliver an overview of the situation.

In contrast with other reviews commissioned by the Church of England Ms. Wilkinson has worked hard to deliver the required report on time, and duly delivered it on Friday last. It is not only in this regard that we see what can be achieved: survivors who have engaged with her have uniformly testified to her professionalism, empathy, and kindness, which they report contrast unfavourably with members of the church when interacting with them.

We do not know precisely what the review will be saying, but we hope that Professor Jay and her team are equally impressed with what can be achieved when  highly  competent outsiders get to grips with the problems of church safeguarding.

There will doubtless be debate and perhaps controversy about what conclusions are reached but this has more to do with matters outside of Ms. Wilkinson’s control than complaints about her methodology.

The Church is giving itself 11 days to digest and prepare a response to what may well be a Report with significant consequences. This in itself tells us something about how the church approaches these matters.

IICSA heard and upheld historic complaints that the church prioritised its own reputation over justice, mercy and the needs of those whom it has wronged. We are still in that same situation. It is partly for this reason that I write in advance of the publication because we need to put certain observations into the public domain so that significant commentary can begin, sooner rather than later, on matters that already arise from the way in which the church has structured the review. This is no criticism of the reviewer.

The government recently legislated to outlaw and criminalise abuse within domestic relationships. There is ample testimony to the emotional damage that can be occasioned to vulnerable spouses and partners at the hands of those of a controlling personality. People invest in a relationship and the more they do so, the more vulnerable they become to abuse when the other party prioritises their needs within the relationship.

When complaints are brought to the church, those making such representations are often those same people who most trusted the institution. They may be parishioners, children in church schools or associated organisations; sometimes they are members of staff or priests, and even those in senior positions and significant relationships with the institution can find themselves harmed and abused within the complaint process.

The initial grievance is compounded and exacerbated by the toxic church culture of control. One sees this even in the case of the Wilkinson review.

All the former members of the ISB had and have legitimate important interests. In having their conduct considered within such a review, it is not simply about knowing what happened in the past. It may have a significant ongoing impact on their future professional reputations. As far as I can ascertain, all those to whom we entrusted the ISB project have been anxious to be judged on a level playing field. I have heard nothing to suggest that each and everyone of them is concerned that the review shall report on” the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth”.

I suspect none of them ( and few of us ) will claim never to make mistakes; the ISB members may have been subject to unreasonable expectation, ambiguity in the definition of their roles, and the intense pressure that goes with working in such a difficult field. These were, and are, people of substance and stature; the least that the church ought properly to have afforded them is a scrupulously fair process. Yes, even in advance of the report we know that this did not happen. I will elaborate and re-emphasise that the reviewer can and will only work within the parameters permitted her under the terms of the review. In the old expression of computer programmers” Rubbish in – Rubbish out”.

Now, there will not be much rubbish sifted by Ms Wilkinson; there is a very significant written audit trail to be followed, but any review can only be as good as its terms of reference. Both at the outset and following receipt of the review, Church House and its Secretariat have unquestionably formulated the scope of the document, furthermore it will craft the initial presentation.

I have previously referenced in blog posts that the church has been very keen on those most affected having a fair degree of import into secular Inquiries. Those into the Hillsborough disaster and the Countess of Chester Hospital (Lucy Letby) both saw senior bishops asserting the importance of listening to those most affected within the commissioning process.

What is sauce for the secular goose is surely sauce for the ecclesiastical gander.

Let us not forget that Jasvinder Sanghera and Steve Reeves have both been honoured by the Crown for their outstanding contributions to safeguarding. It was accordingly by no means unreasonable that before they put their professional reputations and future work prospects into a process that could, potentially, be ruinous, these two servants of survivors should have confidence in the review process. There is a shocking contrast here.

It would be very easy to see these, and indeed the reputations of Meg Munn and Maggie Atkinson adversely affected by the review outcome. In contrast the one thing that we know from every other review case is that the church is institutionally obstructive towards holding its own leadership to account. I include within that cohort senior bishops, members of Archbishops’ Council, and the Secretariat. The latter is of course, significantly involved in the scoping of the review and it’s presentation.

Thus it has been that, unable to secure assurances that Ms Wilkinson would be permitted, under her terms of reference, to go and report upon whatsoever she felt appropriate within this sorry history, the two sacked members of the ISB decided that they could not engage with the review as Ms Wilkinson and many others would have wished them to do.

There is much of the case which can be carefully reconstructed by Ms Wilkinson because so much  is already in the public domain, not least in the Synod statements which I and many Synod colleagues insisted they should be entitled to give. That was a creditable revolt against the management of the Synod processes by the powers that be, which initially denied them that voice. Let us hope this does not escape Ms Wilkinson’s careful eye; I do not discount that possibility.

The Church should not have  constrained the Review in this way. Everything that might have been relevant should have been placed within her purview. It is not what the people in the wider Church and indeed beyond wanted.  I do not suggest that the Review will be without importance significance or consequences but any good outcome will be in spite of its management not because of it and that is tragic.

Will we have got to the bottom of how we got into this unholy mess? Will anyone resign? These are matters we will need to consider as we read what is likely to be a very detailed and lengthy document published just as the Christmas season arrives with all its distractions. The Church insiders are already working on their responses. The people in the pews ( who actually paid for it) will have to wait a few more days.

Some twenty-five years ago I was asked by a contact to offer spiritual support to a woman who was dying of cancer.  She was, at the beginning, able to travel the ten miles from her home to see me and we probably had around five sessions together before her illness made this impossible.  I recall these meetings as I recently asked myself the question, why I chose the Gospel of St John as a text we could read together, and which would provide ‘homework’ between our meetings.  Just recently, I have begun to recognise better that, although the fourth gospel author is probably not attempting to provide anything like an exact biographical record of his Jesus’ ministry, he does allow the reader to feel that he/she is being brought into intimate contact with the Master.  The other gospels give us some insight into the personality and teaching of Jesus, but John’s aim seems to be to create a spiritual immediacy, a meeting place, between the Lord and those followers who immerse themselves in his words. This immediacy is found especially in and through the ‘I am’ sayings which the evangelist gives us.  These are unique to the fourth gospel.

To remind my readers, much of the text of the fourth gospel outside the Passion Narrative is a series of thematic meditations linked to a series of ‘I am’ sayings.  The events and encounters recorded around each ‘I am’ saying are linked to it as a kind of commentary.  Together they are each designed to reveal a distinct aspect of Jesus’ work and the way he becomes united to his followers in what might be described as a mystical fusion.  All the sequences of teaching and discourse that we find in the first section of the fourth gospel seem to be tied in to one or other of these key ‘I am’ sayings.  The ‘I am’ sayings introduce us to the well-known fourth gospel themes of Jesus as Good Shepherd, Bread of Life, Living Water and True Vine etc.  Thus, when Jesus declares himself to be the Light of the World, the teaching that given in this part of the gospel is completely focussed on exploring this image.  This section contains a discourse about the contrast between darkness and light and also tells at some length the linked story of the healing of a blind man.  Adding into the drama of the story, we hear the formerly blind man making a spirited response when the religious leaders try to make him deny his healing and condemn Jesus as a sinner.  To paraphrase the healed man’s words, ‘I don’t know who is responsible for what has happened, whether God or the one you claim is a sinner. One thing I do know, once I was blind; now I can see’.

 When we become aware of the literary and thematic structure of the fourth gospel, we are forced to note that it is highly improbable, even implausible, that Jesus taught his disciples in such a structured way. Is it really likely that Jesus’ teaching was as tidy and ordered as John’s gospel sets it out for us?  The idea that Jesus, rather than the author of the fourth gospel, divided up his teaching into these tidy and ordered sections is, we would suggest, a nonsense claim.  The gospel author whom we call John, had, as we have suggested, a much more ambitious aim, to introduce his readers to a close relationship with the Risen Lord.  Jesus’ task both as a teacher on earth and as the ever-present divine being who lives within us through the Spirit, will be for the believer the one who leads us to all truth and offers to humankind and the gift of ‘eternal life’.

I imagine that many of my readers have used John’s gospel in the way I am suggesting – as a source of profound material for meditation about the meaning of Jesus as well as a focus for understanding how to enter into an ever-deeper relationship with him.  The fact that the Jesus who is presented to us in the fourth gospel has a different feel about it from the other gospel accounts, does not force us to declare that one or other version of Jesus’ life is somehow more authentic and true.  It is enough that Christians, through the centuries have, successfully felt able to draw out of John’s words a sense of divine encounter.  That is what we today are invited to do and it forms the main intention of the original author.  The variety of proclamations made by Jesus, the ‘I am’ sayings make this process possible.  Inspiration in Scripture seems to work just as well even when no detailed historical claims are made for a particular passage in the gospel text.

In my title for this blog post, I used the heading ‘Advent a season of symbols’.  It seems to be true that the fourth gospel version of Jesus’ life, the one that is least likely to be factually true as history in the account of his ministry, should also be the one able to bring his followers the closest to him.  The ahistorical symbols in the gospel, water, light and darkness, bread etc., are probably not historical memories; they are the means through which we are brought into a place of intimacy with the Risen Master.  In Advent we are also presented with certain powerful visual symbols that, like the fourth gospel, bring Christ close to us.  On one Sunday in Advent we do focus on the ministry of John the Baptist but most of the time, we are immersing ourselves in ahistorical symbols provided by our liturgy in a not dissimilar way to readers of the fourth gospel.  Particularly powerful is the Advent symbol of light breaking into the darkness.  This image or symbol evokes our own experiences of disorientation in a place of darkness before we were rescued by a light-switch or a torch.  The lived experience of being highly vulnerable or frightened of the dark is one that is real to us and it feeds into our ability to imagine and thus encounter the one who, in a spiritual sense, drives away the darkness.

The other powerful symbol explored liturgically and devotionally in Advent is that of longing, waiting and expectation.  We all know what it means to wait for something with passionate intensity.  One place to observe such longing and expectation is the sight of children fingering presents under the Christmas tree.  Another place is the arrival section of a large international airport.  Here people are waiting to be reunited with loved ones after maybe months, even years, of separation.  Is not our Advent observance being fed by some of this passionate intensity, which our imagination can evoke for us in this season of symbols?  To repeat, symbols, such as we find in John’s gospel and the commemoration of Advent are not events or facts. But their status as symbols still allows them play a crucial role in allowing us to experience and connect with the reality of God in Christ reaching out to us . The season of symbols, as I call it, draws our attention, not to historical events in Jesus’ life, but to powerful aspects of what we believe about him.  It also helps us, as Christians claim, to form a personal relationship with him, one that reaches beyond the grave to all eternity.

Writing this Advent reflection has helped me to understand better how this gospel in the New Testament that strays (apart from the Passion narrative) the furthest away from the detailed historical record, is also the one that I turned towards to help someone facing death.  My attachment to the fourth gospel is shared by many of my readers as we seem to be entering the realm of eternity, timelessness and the experience and promise of what we call, however we interpret it, eternal life.

The word apostasy is one of those words that can have a good or bad meaning according to the perspective of the one using the term.  In most cases it implies something that is disapproved of.  It contains the idea of betrayal or the abandonment of a cause or belief system.  In a religious context it suggests that an individual has decided to turn their back on the beliefs and practices that may have belonged to them for a long period, even since childhood.  The word also suggests that a decision has been made which involves much more than a single individual departing from one set of beliefs/values to become attached to another.  Apostasy may involve damage and break-up to social networks. These may have helped to fashion the identity of the one making dramatic changes in their attachments. 

Although apostasy has frequently attracted to itself various negative connotations, it is still possible to see that moving from one political, spiritual or religious identity to another has a potentially positive side.  If religious or political faith is understood to be a stance which involves individual decision, we should be ready to applaud anyone who moves into a place of conviction which may differ radically from the assumptions of the past.  Parents obviously would prefer their children to grow up expressing the values and beliefs of the family unit but, in a setting where self-determination and free choice are taught, the right of an emerging adult to exchange one set of values and beliefs for another should be celebrated.  The book edited by Martyn Percy and Charles Foster, Faiths lost and found, Understanding Apostasy invites us to think seriously and engage with this positive side of the word used within the context of religious belief.   Apostasy, in the world of religious belief, can be seen as potentially marking a valuable expression of human creativity involving both change and growth.

The bulk of Percy’s and Foster’s text is given over to a fascinating series of ten autobiographical accounts, which involve dramatic change in a religious context.  Most, but not all, involve individuals finding their way from what we might consider rigid belief setting to something more moderate.  One charts the journey of a gay man, Tom Bohache, from a disapproving traditional Christianity to ‘queer authenticity’.  Elsewhere in the book, we read of the journey of Charles Foster from the conservative evangelicalism of the ‘Bash’ camps to the world of HTB before ending up within Eastern Orthodoxy.  In each story we are invited to share the contributors’ experience of struggle to find their truth and personal reality.  Each of the ten accounts is thus the story of a personal pilgrimage, and they earn the admiration of the reader.  While we might not make precisely the same decisions as these pilgrims on their personal quests, their stories are told in a way that invites our respect for their courage and patient determination.  A particular focus of interest for me was the retrospective and detailed description of conservative Christian cultures that we normally see only from the outside.  The book describes in various accounts the ethos and culture of Iwerne camps, Vineyard churches and a university Christian Union.  These retrospective accounts are interesting and informative.  They are set out, not with polemical intent, but with a genuine desire to make sense of something that had, for a time, absorbed and fed our pilgrim travellers.  Eventually, many of these have been transcended but the parting of the ways is never described in a hostile manner.  To put it another way, the reader is invited to visit several Christian cultures which provided, for a time, spiritual sustenance for the writers before being found to be thin gruel.  There is, in the entire book, a notable gentleness and freedom from any rancour towards those who differ from the writers.  At the same time there is a recognition that the older teachings now no longer meet spiritual needs.  The beliefs of others, while not now shared, can still be treated with respect even admiration.  Perhaps this respectful approach to difference is needed today in the Church as never before.

One of the issues faced by every ‘apostate’ is that of enforced social upheaval.  I was moved by the account of the young Janet Fife (contributor to this blog) being utterly alone on the day of her confirmation.  The normal social affirmation of parents and godparents was, for her, completely absent.  The path of a Christian who wishes to forge their own way towards their reality can be painfully lonely.  It takes a particular kind of stamina to place one’s sense of authenticity and truth ahead of the need to fit in and belong to family or tribe. One of the things I take from the book is an enormous respect for the bravery of these spiritual ‘apostates’, even though the solutions they choose do not necessarily conform to anything I personally would want to commend.  In writing this, I am reminded of the old liberal principle which states something along the lines of: ‘I disagree with you profoundly, but I defend to the last your right to express your opinion.’

The choice of the word apostasy in the title is deliberate and it forces us to consider how we (and the ten story tellers in the book) cope with access to new challenging information that is not catered for in an existing faith paradigm from the past. The typical story told by several of the contributor authors is the way that access to books and education had affected them profoundly.  It opened their minds to the possibility of change and a way out of the narrow sectarian views which had dominated their thinking, sometimes over decades.  Several of our authors discovered a new breadth in their spiritual outlook through access to post-graduate university studies.  Accessing a privileged academic route is, of course, one path out of narrow perspectives, but sadly, such study is available to only a tiny minority.  It is, in fact, hard to imagine any research student in theology (or any subject) not being decisively changed by seminars, exchange of academic papers and attendance at learned specialised conferences.  This academic way of doing theology, one which constantly asks questions and lives with uncertainty, is, sadly becoming vanishingly uncommon in today’s Church.  If ever the culture of free inquiry, which is embedded into the university research process, is outlawed from the wider Church, journeys of the kind and recorded in some of the stories in this book will be impossible.  Some of the journeys of creative discovery as recorded in this volume would never have been able to start, let alone arrive successfully at a new destination.

The reader who can identify with the stories of ‘apostasy’ told by those who travelled the path of hard and demanding study, will know that one of the features of this approach to faith is the sheer untidiness, even messiness, that they find in ‘liberal’ statements of belief.  Many Christians are unwilling to exchange the certainties of conservative teaching for the ‘uncertainty’ path where questions are not always answered.  Clinching an argument by a neat quote from scripture would be an approach that most of our authors, recalling their journeys through change, would reject.   Freedom of thought for them is a highly valued commodity.  These two approaches to faith, loosely described as conservative and liberal, account for the chasm that we find today among Christians.    Some are content with the place of settled unchanging opinions where difficult problems are brushed aside.  Others are prepared for the challenges of ambiguity and uncertainty, recognising that the world of questioning and challenging assumptions is rarely tidy.    We do not, this side of the grave, arrive at the kind of secure safety that many people think is claimed by the Christian faith.  The perspective of Percy and Foster’s book is that the Church and its members should always be on a journey of learning.  The feature of this kind of journey is one that requires the humility to say that it will never have all the answers to human problems.  Statements which emerge from popular Christian teaching, which begin with the words ‘the Bible is clear’, are frankly dishonest and this dishonesty is damaging to the point of being destructive.  The destination that our ten contributors have found is one, not described as presenting certainty, but as a place of personal integrity and honesty.  That does not make the individual journeys described as necessarily right for anyone else.  What is right for us as the readers of the book is that we should consider the place of spiritual pilgrimage and change in our Christian calling.  This book Faiths Lost and Found gives us some idea of what each of our personal journeys might look like.

Faiths Lost and Found Understanding Apostasy is published by DLT 2023 ISBN 978-1-915412-32-4 £16.99 

I cannot be the only retired clergyman who listens to one sermon while mentally writing the outline of a quite different one.  Last Sunday the cathedral I attend commemorated All Saints, and the preacher shared with us some well-chosen insights from the gospel reading of Matthew’s Beatitudes.  Meanwhile, I was pondering the other quite different reading set for the day, a passage from Revelation 7.  In this reading we hear of a vision of heavenly worship and the involvement of a ‘great multitude which no one could count’.  A link with the All Saints festival is established through the fact that the elder, interpreting the scene, declares that this huge throng of people are those who have passed through trials of persecution, ‘the great ordeal’ as it is described.  These martyrs have now reached the place of their reward.    They now enjoy the bliss of being in the presence of God for ever.

As I thought about this vision, it struck me that there was something more going on in this passage than a New Testament attempt to evoke the reality of heaven.  It is probably not a useful exercise to ask how the author ‘saw’ something so obviously beyond human conceptualisation.  The passage as we have it is evocative of the visionary language of Ezekiel and Isaiah.  Even though the visionary language may be borrowed, there is still a strong sense of the author communicating his own sense of the glory and wonder of the divine presence and inviting the reader to share his experience.  We are drawn from the mundane to consider the eternity of God, before whose presence we all hope one day to enjoy being.

The striking series of words which captured my imagination in the vision were these.  ‘As I looked, there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages….they worship him day and night within his temple.’  Apart from appreciating this passage as one trying to communicate the reality of God’s presence, I found myself struck by the universality communicated in the vision.  The vision symbolically saw the entirety of humankind brought together.  Christian saints were to be found in every nation and tribe and language, not just the groups we belong to or approve of. 

Those of us who went to Sunday School in the 50s and 60s probably sang the chorus, ‘Jesus died for all the children….. red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight’. No doubt this hymn has gone firmly out of fashion, along with many other choruses from that period.  Nevertheless, it was trying to teach children the lesson that Christian discipleship belongs potentially to humanity in its entirety.  The modern word to capture this insight is inclusivity.  If there were to be a modern version of the vision of John, he might have said something along these lines.  I saw a great throng from every class, colour, sexual minority, and ethic/religious group.  People were caught up in the worship of God on the throne because of their membership of humanity and through their attempts to feel after God and find him.

At a time when the tendency among many Christian people is to withdraw off into their small like-minded groups which are described as ‘orthodox’ or pure, I am suggesting that these few verses from Revelation give us a different picture.  Inclusive Christians and Inclusive Evangelicals are far closer to the spirit of the author of Revelation who ‘saw’ something far more glorious than our current narrow tribalisms.  This is doing so much to destroy the Church with all the power of hate and division.

A further point from the Revelation vision is that it was beyond the scope of human measuring capability to count those worshipping God.  This detail implies that God is simply not interested in counting numbers or setting up boundaries between the saved and the unsaved.  Such boundaries seem to serve the purpose of boosting the insecure and convincing them that they have some kind of prestige in commanding the greatest numbers.

In recent weeks we have been made horribly aware of one of the major divisions among the human tribes that exist in our world. The present conflict in Gaza began as a hideous outburst of racial and tribal hatred.  This had been nurtured to its present explosive state by decades of injustice and division. If one had thought that a situation of uneasy peace between Jew and Arab in any way existed over the past decades, the sheer brutality of the past days has shown how little progress has been made in the task of reconciliation. Similar festering hatreds continue to exist in countries such as India and the United States. The word tribe refers to many types of difference that exist between groups of human beings. The problem with any type of tribal behaviour is that people will always cling to their group as  a way of feeling safe in the face of the unknown and feared.

The recent divisions within the Church over the issue of same-sex marriage have erupted recently with extraordinary ferocity. We are now in the crazy situation of being expected to define our loyalties in the Church according to what we think about same-sex relationships.  While there have, in the past, always been differences within the Church of England in terms of belief and practice, there has never before been a single issue which threatens to sunder the Church apart. Most of us thought that this issue would never become a first order matter so that Christians would feel it necessary to shatter centuries of common life simply to go off to belong to a completely independent entity.  Is it not a poor basis for schism to found a new entity which is based on the intensity of one tribe’s intense homophobia?

Returning to the book of Revelation, it would seem that the writer had a powerful vision of how human beings, normally divided through race, tribe, language and political/sexual identity, somehow could be joined up together to form a huge united group.  They fulfilled this calling to be united in and dedicated to the everlasting worship of God. Some might question whether a state of everlasting worship is something they want to be involved with.  We might find it hard to imagine how an endless contemplation of the divine would be something to aspire to.  In answer to this conundrum, we can mention the words of Augustine who no doubt also struggled with the limit of human imagination and longing, ‘Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you’. 

The Revelation passage is a strong indicator that all the things that divide us in our membership of humanity are of limited significance when set alongside the dazzling reality of God’s presence. If that is true on the far side of the grave, then we need here to renounce our tendency to hunker down behind our variety of tribal loyalties.  We should be learning to see that all the differences that we cultivate in life to make us feel superior to others are of no lasting importance or value.  The revelation that came to John was of a sea of humanity all united in the single activity of worshipping God, and this showed him clearly how humanity can be one.  To do justice to this powerful transcendent vision, we need to be able, at the very least, to resist the temptation to look at people who are not like us and think of them as somehow inferior.   Above all, we must be able to renounce the common phobias inside us that we have about other people. There is something pretty shameful about looking down on someone. Of all the sins of which we are guilty, possibly the most prevalent is this act of shunning another for being different from us. It is probably necessary to be alert to the possible malevolence of other people which may affect our human flourishing but there is never room for pushing another away on the grounds that they are different from us.

The vision of Revelation and the sight of a vast multitude worshipping God has entered into the Christian imagination in many ways.  What we have begun to glimpse in this piece is that God’s welcome to ‘every tribe and nation’ speaks of a hugely and overwhelming inclusivity.  This is something we seem to be so bad at realising in our church life.  There is, in God’s kingdom, no room for phobia, prejudice or shutting out of any kind.  All are called to the worship of God and, as far as possible our acceptance and service of those human beings we encounter in our daily life.

by Susan Hunt (aka K-Anonymous)

For those of you who have been following the story of ‘Kenneth’, an individual caught up in the tentacles of the justice system of the Church of England, this is a sixth instalment of what we might call the Kenneth Saga. The reason for there being this sixth episode is that, while very little for Kenneth has changed, we need to record how the system for establishing justice in church disciplinary cases is deeply flawed and does not serve the cause of truth or integrity.  It seems there can be no appeal against the assumption of guilt for an innocent man.  Thus, justice for Kenneth cannot be delivered in this case nor is it ever likely to be.

If there had ever been a proper system for establishing guilt, or not, in a case like Kenneth’s or a properly independent person or organisation to appeal to, then we could have taken our case there in the search for justice.  As one of the previous blogs has pointed out, an assumption of guilt seems to be a principle of C/E justice that is in operation in cases like this. The arrival of Professor Alexis Jay and her willingness to take an interest in the detail of Kenneth’s case has, however, given me a measure of hope. I was privileged to have been interviewed by her and have some hope for future cases, even if her recommendations may be too late for Kenneth to experience any personal vindication.

Posting this blog is so that the truth can be known. Kenneth has suffered a great deal from carrying the burden of false accusation, but he is keen for his story to be widely circulated.  It mirrors the story of other people in a similar situation within the C/ E.

In earlier blog posts we set out the outline of the gross injustice that has taken place in one of our prestigious cathedrals. The core group that was set up to examine the case included the Canon Pastor (CP), the safeguarding officer for the cathedral. Its proceedings were also followed by the Dean.  Although the latter was not a core group member, he attended some of the meetings and his contributions were minuted. In recent months the whole process has come to involve the diocesan bishop and the registrar.  All took the side of the CP even though she displayed bias and showed a marked unwillingness to uncover the facts of the case.  If there had been a measure of impartiality and a readiness to question assumptions, this might have delivered justice for Kenneth. 

Background to the Clergy Discipline Measure

For the purpose of understanding this blog post I need to refer you to the importance of the choral register. This is a significant legal document and central to this case. The details of this can be found in the previous blog about Kenneth: https://survivingchurch.org/2023/02/17/innocent-until-proved-guilty-except-in-the-church-of-england/

The information in the register contains the record of three dates when offences could theoretically have taken place.  The boy was unable to recall precise dates for the alleged offences but only a time span of several months.  The core group never established which dates were possible occasions for Kenneth and the boy to have been in the cathedral at the same time. The choir register, by revealing which Sundays the boy was present, should then have been compared with Kenneth’s documented trips overseas. In September 2020, Kenneth made a request to the CP for that information to be revealed but she refused. There was then an exchange of emails on the subject where she took sole responsibility for this refusal.

Another facet of the story was the evidence of friendly exchanges between the boy complainant, his mother and the CP on facebook.  This evidence of a conflict of interest was never acknowledged in the minutes of the Core Group.  As I understand it, the core group personnel should never include individuals who have personal links with one or other of the parties in an abuse case.

In October 2020 I wrote on Kenneth’s behalf a formal complaint to the Dean and Chapter about both these matters. The response from the Dean was to say he was ‘sorry’ that Kenneth and I felt disappointed in his CP. Over the intervening years there have been further complaints about both of these issues but without any response.  Without any documented investigation or evidence, Kenneth is still designated as a ‘high risk’ sexual predator.

In early April 2023 I filed a CDM against the CP. The allegations that I wanted considered mainly centred around: a) conflict of interest caused by the friendship with the boy complainant and b) the withholding of evidence (the choir register). To substantiate these allegations further, I presented eleven pieces of evidence which were detailed documents.  Many of them came from Kenneth’s Subject Access Request information.

The Canon Pastor denied everything.

1. The CP claimed that she had no special pastoral care for the boy complainant, as that was provided by another safeguarding officer (although that had never been said before). YET! One of the evidences were two forms with the minutes of a core group meeting.  Here it was stated that no-one (including the CP) had any personal knowledge of the complainant or respondent. This CP had known both well for eight years as had the core group member providing pastoral care.

•  The CP claimed that it was not she who had refused the information from the register but a previous Canon Precentor who had since left the Cathedral. The matter, she said, had been referred to the Dean’s Leadership Team.  They concurred with the advice not to give Kenneth the information in the register. None of this had ever been said before, not even in October 2020 when the complaint about the CP’s refusal to give access to the register was sent to the Dean himself.  The only corroborating evidence to back up these claims was the verbal affirmation of the Dean and Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser.  Both backed the CP even in the absence of any recorded factual information of any sort.  No information was obtained from the departed Canon Precentor. 

The Judgement of the Bishop

Earlier this year, the Bishop met with Kenneth, my husband and myself for more than two hours to discuss the case. The lack of documented evidence on the part of the CP contrasted strongly with the detailed documentary evidence I provided which he saw for himself.

This meeting gave Kenneth great hope that at last someone with authority in the diocese was listening and was sympathetic to his situation.  Finally, there was hope for justice. Alas, this hope was short lived. Some time afterwards the Bishop met with the CP and the Dean, when he agreed to support them.  Nevertheless, in his judgement letter to us, he recognised the lack of documented evidence from either of them. In the same letter the Bishop made five glaring errors of fact and chronology.  This was in spite of that they were clearly set out in the evidence that I presented as part of the CDM submission.

We appealed to the President of Tribunals and the case was dealt with by a Chancellor.  She upheld the Bishop’s decision despite his serious mistakes. However, the Chancellor herself had made six questionable statements.  She seemed to have relied on the report of the Diocesan Registrar who had herself made eleven inaccurate statements.  Qne of these was that twice she referred to Kenneth as being a ‘choir member’ which he was not! – a misleading statement implying Kenneth had access to the choristers.

During the time the CDM was being considered and investigated, it was announced that the CP was being promoted to a senior post in another diocese.  The post included the responsibility of being in charge of Safeguarding!!  It required the cooperation and manoeuvring of two bishops to manage this appointment.  I can be forgiven for feeling cynical about the level of respect for safeguarding among our bishops. To appoint a senior member of staff to a post of importance, while a safeguarding accusation is still pending, suggests a cynical approach to the whole matter. It is scandalous the way this Diocese has acted, and its safeguarding measures are shown as not fit for purpose. Also, the shoddy way in which the CDM was handled reflects the same attitude as shown in the way that the choral register matter was responded to.

There never has been any reason given for the refusal to give access to the register. Both the Diocesan Registrar and Chancellor could see no reason why there should be this refusal. The only conclusion is that there were dates when the boy and Kenneth were not together. This would make the allegations by the boy impossible (who often changed his story and yet was always ‘believed’). The evidence from the register could have proved decisive one way or the other in the case but no one at the cathedral showed interest in exposing the vital piece of potential evidence. The whole allegation has been based on over three years of questionable and perverse manipulation of the truth,  If there had been an independent organisation using methods similar to the ones being used currently by Professor Jay, the truth would have been exposed in October 2020

There are further recent injustices to Kenneth

At the meeting we had with the Bishop, he told us that bishops cannot intervene with core groups. In his letter of judgement, he said that when the CDM was concluded, he would write to the Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser expressing his hope that a resolution might be found. He corresponded with us and said that he did write to her.  I have heard nothing further since October 2^nd when he told us he was waiting for her to contact him. The DSA notoriously shows no respect for those in authority who might have had legitimate interest in such a case.  The police, LADO, independent investigator, solicitor have all been involved but have not found anything to justify her concern.  She seems just to want to maintain her position, held since May 2021, that ‘the case is closed’. Presumably there is now no hope of any resolution while she remains in post.

The current impasse still leaves Kenneth with the restrictions imposed on him in April 2022 when he returned to the Cathedral. These include not having his liturgical roles restored and having to ask permission to go to any other church in the UK.

By contrast, a year ago, there joined the cathedral congregation an academic clergyman who had admitted to inappropriate sexual behaviour with young men for many years in a notorious abuse case.  This man says prayers, reads and preaches in another church in this diocese without any agreement in place. It would seem that the difference in the freedom between him and Kenneth is because he has admitted to crimes, while Kenneth has not. C/E safeguarding does not have any way of resolving a case when the accused refuses to admit to sins which he knows he has not committed!

Kenneth is much to be respected for his refusal to sign an untrue document just to end his situation; this has taken courage and I am proud to be his friend.

Finally, justice for Kenneth will be problematic in the future because of a constant change of staff in this Diocese. In three years, seven senior clergy and core group members have left. There are still three senior posts not permanently filled. That has left a gap in the corporate memory of Kenneth’s case.  New people will only be able to understand the case from the surviving members.  Can they be relied upon to remember only the truth?  From the history of the case, we cannot be sure that what new members will be told will be even approximate to the truth. 

It is like a perpetuum mobile, round and round and on and on with no end.

Recent rumblings within the UCCF (Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship) might never have attracted much attention but for the clumsy efforts to avoid full disclosure and transparency.  Back in December 2022, some problems in the organisation arose and resulted in the suspension of two very senior officials within the group, Richard Cunningham and Tim Rudge.  An internal enquiry on behalf of the Trustees, that was started in the early part of this year to investigate the issues behind these suspensions, has taken a significant amount of time to complete.  The report containing the results of this inquiry by Hilary Winstone KC was apparently delivered to the Trustees in June. Nothing in this report was shared with the wider public until now.  What we have now in statements from the Trustee body is a rather vague statement which suggests that there have been some issues to be resolved over the contracts and terms of service for the charity volunteers and employees.  The recruitment and support of dozens of young people who work for UCCF is a major part of the charity’s activity.  Meanwhile, the two suspended directors have apparently been found innocent of whatever accusation had led to their suspension, though it is not clear what required the suspensions in the first place.  Also, we heard another fact at the beginning of this month which was the resignation of almost half the trustees from the UCCF Trustee Board.  This included the Chairman, Chris Wilmott. Only the vaguest of reasons have been given for this event. Clearly something is going on within the organisation beyond a dispute about employment law and the practices currently used to recruit and manage those working for UCCF.

In trying to understand what might be going on in a religious organisation which many people may not have even heard of, we have first to revisit briefly the 1920s and the founding of its predecessor, IVF (Inter-Varsity Fellowship). it was realised then by evangelical church leaders across the denominations that students at university, brought up in traditionally conservative home churches, needed spiritual, social and intellectual support in order to grow in their faith. The name-change to UCCF came about in the 1970s when this work among students at university was extended to cover colleges of higher education. Christian unions attached to UCCF are currently found in almost every higher educational establishment across Britain as well as in some schools. UCCF provides a network of staff members to support these Christian Unions with training and organisational support. Almost all of these supporting staff are young and recent graduates.  They will have played an active role in their local Christian union while still undergraduates. These junior members of staff are there to help and encourage new generations of students to be active in the task of evangelism.  This is done through Bible study and prayer groups, as well as more focussed evangelistic events.

In making observations about the work of UCCF, I have the possible advantage of not knowing anyone who is currently part of the organisation.  All my comments are based on information freely available on the internet, especially the UCCF website. After studying this site, especially the potted biographies of a few of its workers and volunteers, I found myself comparing what I was reading with an institution which acts in the manner of a military organisation.  The central duty and priority for every member of this Christian army of student members was to be a follower of Christ and share freely this witness with one’s fellow students.  When not doing the work of sharing Christ with non-Christian friends, the CU requires all its members to engage with frequent attendance at prayer meetings and Bible studies.  In short, membership of a CU can be a virtually full-time occupation for both staff and ordinary members.  There would be little time for other activities apart from university studies.   The ordinary members in the structure could be likened to private soldiers in an army, while the volunteer Relay Workers are a NCO class.  Relay Workers are those who have volunteered for a ten-month period to work with the students.  Above these Relay Workers were staff members who can be considered to be acting in a junior officer rank.  They are expected to stay between three and five years working full-time with perhaps a cluster of CUs.  While Relay workers were expected to be entirely self-supporting for a single academic year, the staff members did receive some pay from a central fund.  The reality of these arrangements has been opened up in a recent Youtube video.  A former staff member spoke of his difficulties rising a third of his salary through fund-raising activities.   One imagines that many staff members find themselves subsidised by their own families.  All of the viewed sample of 120 or so members of staff that are shown on the website were inviting (begging?) the online visitor to help support them with a financial contribution.  Such a system of worker remuneration is at the very least eccentric and questionably legal.  It is not difficult to imagine that someone in UCCF has raised their concern about the exploitative culture of employing staff in this way.  It may be these strange patterns of employment have resulted in an evident unhappiness in UCCF and the suspension of the two senior directors.  My observations are of course speculations but there must be other people who regard the employment culture of UCCF as not fulfilling best practice or working for the best interests of their employees.  Another facet of this employment strategy which raises concerns, is that this way of employing staff is exploitative of youthful idealism.  Working for UCCF does not offer a secure career path, even if some go on to pursue other careers in Christian leadership. Once again employment law apparently does not look kindly on a system of compulsory redundancy after working for three to five years for the same employer.    

My description of the employment practices of UCCF as exploitative might be considered an understating of the issue in the organisation. Taking a cohort of vulnerable young people fired up with enthusiasm for God but with little experience of the world of work, and then expecting them to effectively beg part of their salary from relatives and supporters is an act of questionable honesty. Some might even describe it as something close to slavery. Clearly this culture of using young people to work for less than the going rate is one that is bound to meet a legal or moral challenge at some point. I have no idea whether the suspensions of directors and resignation of trustees has anything to do with the employment regime or not.   Clearly there needs to be a proper examination of employment practices at UCCF.  This may already have begun.

Readers of this blog know about the considerable impact of charismatic styles of Christianity among students and young people. The UCCF emerges from a different ‘tribe’ of evangelical teaching and largely sets itself apart from the charismatic style of HTB and Soul Survivor.  The same non-charismatic and quasi-military culture pertaining to UCCF was also found in the Iwerne camps.  Iwerne wanted to capture the nation’s leaders by focusing on the ‘best’ public schools.  UCCF is impelled by a similar desire to reach the educated student population of Britain with the claims of Christ.  In practice, evangelical institutions or large parishes will tend to identify with one style and culture or the other. Most large and ‘approved’ evangelical churches in our university cities, which support CU, tend to identify with the non-charismatic strand.  While I have some sympathy for the charismatic expression of evangelicalism, I find UCCF and Iwerne inspired churches decidedly old-fashioned and rigorist.  This is especially indicated in their theological statements.  The UCCF statement of belief, which consists of eleven propositions, could have been lifted straight out of a 19^th century textbook of dogmatic Protestant teaching.  From memory it remains identical to the IVF propositions set out 60 years ago when I was an undergraduate myself.  Is it a matter of pride that the same unchanging words are thought to be adequate to convey a statement of truth and belief?  The attempt to place God in a narrow straitjacket of words always seems a futile task.   Even within the New Testament itself we see the language used to describe God changing and evolving.  The writer of Mark’s gospel and that of John would not have found it easy to communicate with one another.  How is the word ‘infallible’ a helpful one when try to embrace the different cultures of truth within the Old and New Testaments?  It takes imagination beyond words to see the harmony between the differing cultures within Scripture.  Understanding truth, as having to be expressed in a precise formula of words, is not helpful for an emerging youthful faith.  One thing that all members of Christian Unions have In common is their youth.   It is, to say the least, unseemly to restrict the desire to use one’s imagination to explore the reality of God and define it in a fixed code of words which are held to be beyond discussion or imaginative interpretation.  It is also abusive and cruel to suggest that any deviation from the eleven propositions provided by UCCF is to place oneself on the path to apostasy or even eternal damnation.  Any social and emotional pressure applied on this vulnerable group within society, our student population, should be a concern those who make the laws of this country as well as all those who minister to their spiritual and emotional welfare.  It is a constant problem to those who seek to serve to minister to students who may find themselves deviating from the thinking of their Christian Unions.

Coincidentally, over the weekend I received a plea from an unknown person who is desperate to receive support from someone who can help her move away psychologically and emotionally from the damaging authoritarianism and ostracism of a Christian congregation.  I am unable to suggest any help but perhaps my readers may know of a support network of this kind.  It is much needed.  Perhaps the tensions and the divisions that are possibly evident today in UCCF may be a prelude to a new generosity and inclusive welcome among evangelicals to one another, especially in the world of supporting Christian students.  In short, the frozen culture of a century of IVF/UCCF intransigence may be ready to crack open to let in new light and truth.

Last Sunday at Carlisle Cathedral, we began a commemoration of the Safeguarding Season with a special eucharist and the launch of a dedicated prayer space in one of the side chapels.  Hitherto I have had very little awareness of the local efforts with safeguarding in my own area.  Retired clergy do not seem to be included in any mailing network for the regular dissemination of diocesan news.  What took place on the 15^th October seemed to be something much more than paying lip-service to an idea sent down from higher authority.  It felt like a genuine attempt by Canon Benjamin Carter, who holds the safeguarding brief for the cathedral chapter, to involve the congregation in this national focus.   Canon Carter was also the preacher. He knows of my safeguarding interests and he made sure that I was introduced to another local person, Antonia Sobocki. She is working in safeguarding through her Loud Fence project.  A google search will reveal the scope and importance of this international initiative for supporting abuse victims.  Antonia and I, through the medium of Zoom, had met on one previous occasion but it was good to make real, as opposed to virtual, contact on this occasion.  

In his sermon Canon Carter referred to the prayer space in Carlisle Cathedral which is being made available throughout the Safeguarding Season.  Each visitor is invited to identify with an emotion which they feel as a result of engaging with the terrible realities of abuse.  He was, of course, not unaware of the strong emotions that have been aroused in all of us as a consequence of the events in Gaza and Israel.  These emotions, whether responding to Israel/Ukraine or abuse victims, range across anger, grief, compassion and love.  Each of these was linked to a ribbon of a different colour.  I cannot recall all the different ribbons and the emotions they represent, but I was attracted to the emotion of lament, this being represented by the colour purple.  I attached my purple ribbon to the branch which formed part of the display.  This represented the feelings of anguish that I have often felt when faced with the fact of abuse alongside the grotesque failures of institutions like the Church.  Institutions have so often failed to respond adequately or to provide any kind of healing for those victims/survivors who looked to them for help.

The act of identifying with this one particular emotion involved in lament, has had the effect of making me scrutinise the word and examine my reasons for choosing it.  How does our understanding of lament relate to the enormity of church abuse with all its many ramifications?  Lament involves an expression of strong emotion. Most of the time we would rather avoid it.  Typically, it is present in the outpouring of emotion that accompanies the hearing of bad news, like the death of a loved one.  It is also a word that is used to indicate a deep sense of remorse that comes when the conscience finally reveals to us how much damage we have inflicted on others by our thoughtless or evil actions.

Although being in the presence of someone expressing a heightened sense of grief or remorse that we associate with the word lament is demanding, we know that sorrow and tears are both stages along the path of processing terrible and seemingly overwhelming pain or information.  There can be no healing without first encountering this initial spasm of grief.  Watching someone break down in tears is never comfortable for a witness, but simply being present with someone going through such an expression of lament may be all that is required of us at that moment. Any attempt to supress or bypass this lament, for fear that it may make someone embarrassed or uncomfortable, is usually unhelpful.  Such a reaction forms part of a cultural response that wants to move suffering out of sight and pretend that pain should and can always be neutralised by the right word or the right medical intervention in the form of pills. 

As I was pondering this word lament, I realised that human culture through the ages has been far more familiar with the idea of a corporate lament.  Lamenting in Scripture seems typically to be a group activity.  In Jesus’ day there were professional mourners, such as those who filled the street outside the home of Jairus when it was believed that his daughter had died.  However we react to the idea of strangers performing the task of sharing the grief with the entire community, these formal rituals of loss did serve a clear purpose.  Those closest to the departed one were clearly the most affected, but the employing of professional mourners had the effect of making each death in the area a matter of community-wide importance.  The grief of the family was being shared right across the area.  Everyone knew of the death and each person could respond by supporting the affected family in whatever way that felt right. 

This community or corporate dimension of lament brings me to a further thought.  As a parish priest I have sat with countless bereaved individuals and families over the years.  The role of the parish priest is not to utter platitudes about death but to act as a kind of echo-chamber for the bereaved as they lament their loss.  Every visitor who seeks to bring support to the bereaved is also part of the lament process. He/she plays their part by providing a safe space for the grief to find its full expression as the bereaved individual/family stumbles on their way to find acceptance and eventual wholeness once more.  Symbolically the parish priest makes present both the community love and care as well as the intangible overarching sense of a loving God who is there to comfort us in our time of lament and our journey through pain.  

Applying the word lament to the safeguarding activity of the Church, we can see a number of parallels with the bereavement process.  The original focus of a safeguarding case is not a death but a highly damaging and exploitative abuse of power.  In the majority of cases this has left a wound similar to a bereavement.  Ideally, the injured party should be met with a respectful caring individual who understands the process of abuse and is prepared to act as an echo for the lament that survivor/victim is feeling and wants to articulate.  Just as the skilled bereavement visitor gives permission for the sufferer to express all the emotions that are pouring out, so the safeguarding listener and responder is seeking to create a space to respect and honour the flood of feelings that survivor needs to express and thus understand.  The pain and lament are real and that is why, as the Archbishop of Canterbury and others have claimed many times, the feelings and emotional needs of the survivor have to be at the heart of every safeguarding event.  When we see this lament being shuffled off to the side because it makes someone important or an institution look bad, it is right that there should be a loud and vocal expression of outrage and protest.  The string of shameful events in the Church’s story over the past twenty or thirty years is a cause for deep sorrow and lament.  If the Church is ever to recover its role of providing light and inspiration for the nation, it will need to engage properly with its past shame and learn to enter the emotions that are summed up in the single word lament.  Honesty and an appropriate level of sorrow and remorse are what are required today.  Anything else resembling triumphalism or squabbling over issues which are fought to give one faction of the church power over another, seem massively petty when set against the enormous task of rediscovering the place of mercy, humility and justice that the prophet Micah so clearly sets before the Church.  Perhaps the task of reviving the Church could be boosted if our leaders were to show some true understanding of how to repent through a real experience of lament and sorrow.  It is perhaps thus we can find again our path back to experience anew the ‘steadfast love’ of God.     

Some words from Lamentations which were read to us last Sunday morning.   These are particularly appropriate as we contemplate a possible total collapse for the Church through its own failure to honour and uphold justice and integrity.  ‘The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall! My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed within me.  But this, I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases …………great is your faithfulness.’  

Over the past few years, especially since retirement, I have found myself considering the way that confession and absolution are handled at the Eucharist. The first thing that I identify as a problem is the sheer brevity of this whole section within the liturgy. Without having timed it, I calculate that the whole action, containing self-examination/ recollection, confession and declaration of forgiveness, can take less than two minutes.  Unless we have done a great deal of self-examination before the service begins, many potential sins will be forgotten or overlooked by the typical worshipper. He/she will hear the absolution without having had the opportunity to recall and confess more than a very small part of his/her undoubted sinfulness.

I have not got any quick answer to offer to this issue of the chronic brevity of this part of the liturgy as used by the Church of England. But there are some other more serious problems to be considered as we reflect on the weekly routine of receiving a declaration of God’s forgiveness for sinful humanity. The first problem is that, although we might believe that we are good at self-examination and the naming of our own sinfulness, Christian opinion is much divided about what in fact needs to be confessed.  We might all be able to agree that harming another person, especially one with an obvious vulnerability, is wrong. But then there are a whole raft of activities, typically in the sexual realm, where there is a great deal of disagreement about what constitutes sin in a Christian context. I do not propose to dwell further on this issue, but I am sure that my readers can fill the blank spaces. The problem in a nutshell is that although we readily speak about God knowing our secrets and our desires, we cannot agree about which human activities in fact constitute sinful actions and which are innocent and harmless. Our current inability to agree what is indeed sinful is surely a matter of concern.  Any ‘gracious disagreement’ that is being practised does not help the church to be seen by the outsider as being either honest or consistent.  If the secular world begins to suspect that the Christian Church lacks integrity in its thinking by not being able to state clearly what is right and wrong, it will be less inclined to listen to whatever else this Church may have to say.

A second problem concerning sin confronts us every time we engage in any kind of self-examination.  This is the fact that society has come to recognise that our own ‘grievous faults’ are dwarfed by another kind of sin – corporate sin.  Whether we like it or not, the sins that today dominate the attention of people, especially the young who are trying to make the world a better place, are those that involve us simply because we are human beings.  As a white educated male in Britain, I am granted many privileges from my position and place in society, which may have little to do with my own effort. Equally, others are severely disadvantaged by having been born in places and environments of deprivation.  The inequalities (injustices) in society are matters which involve morality and this should concern all of us who try to live lives of ethical integrity. We live in a society beset by many corporate sins that push people down : racism, classism, ageism and sexism.  These societal attitudes impact all of us, even if we do little to disseminate them. It is hard to know how to be innocent in a world of inequality.  Like many of my readers no doubt, I am sometimes baffled by all the ways that I am expected to have an attitude about issues that simply were not discussed thirty or forty years ago.  But I do recognise that the contemporary new moral issues that emerge in our society do require our attention and thought.  Avoiding them altogether should not be an option for a responsible citizen who claims to be Christian. The topical issues of our time, whether global warming, sexual equality, migration or slavery reparations, all demand that we have an informed opinion of some kind. Whatever else we are learning from living in the 21^st century, we are discovering that the possession of an informed ethical Christian outlook is not just about personal behaviour.  It requires us to think and become informed about numerous issues. In this way an engagement with corporate sin is part of contemporary modern ethics whether we wish it or not.  Complete avoidance, whether because it makes us uncomfortable or stressed, cannot be a valid position when we come before God in our regular acts of self-examination.

Personal sin, as well as our collusion in the corporate sins of today, forms much of the conversation that we are to have with God when we come before him in prayer and self-examination.  Our conscience is, or should be, compelling us to think about such things as helping charities and avoid contaminating the earth with thoughtless disposals of rubbish.   Recycling and ever greater charity donations seem to be among the contributions we can make to a practical engagement with the pressing needs of our world.  These wider corporate sins which we have touched on do make living an ethical life extremely complex.  But we are right, I believe, to see many practical environmental issues as being spiritual as well as ethical.  ‘Negligence, weakness and our own deliberate fault’ may apply to many more things than the individual acts of spite or selfishness that we are guilty of.  The ’things we have left undone’ suddenly become so much wider than remembering to show appreciation for the acts of kindness that we receive.  Becoming informed about injustice in the world, listening to stories of pain and neglect and simply giving our time and attention to another. These are all things that life and an active Christian conscience demands of us.  In writing down even a few of the tasks that our involvement in corporate sin implies, we come to see still more how inadequate the liturgical provision is for this task in Common Worship.

 The existence of corporate sin, as I have started to describe it, might make us feel thoroughly discouraged in our attempts to deal with our personal sin and failure.  I do believe, however, it is possible to recover a degree of honest integrity as we revisit the essential ethical aspects of the Christian faith. When we strip our faith down to its bare essentials we find a single command. My summary of this command is this: Practise unconditional love as Jesus did.  Working out the implications of unconditional love for us in terms of our generosity and relationships gives us a good starting place.  If we regard sin as anything that gets in the way of fulfilling this command, we have a solid foundation for beginning to see the meaning of Christian wholeness and integrity.  The question that might be asked of each one of us when we die is whether we have been individuals showing this kind of integrity -one that demonstrates the exercise of unconditional love as Jesus showed it to us. Sin in this perspective is found in any way that we fall short of this potential for love and generosity.  That is our calling – to realise this potential as far as we can.

My involvement with the safeguarding cause over the past few years has made me aware of another aspect of sin and wrongdoing which the liturgical prayers of confession do little to expose.  My summary of this 21^st century failing is what I describe as DARVO sin.   DARVO, as many of us know, is an acronym for the typical response of a guilty party when confronted with strong evidence of guilt.  Instinctively the accused person goes on to a defence mode which is first expressed as a denial.  This may be followed by attempt to attack someone else for the failing.  The third stage is to reframe or reverse the accusation so that the offender becomes somehow reframed as a victim. All these reactions and responses are made without the slightest notion of guilt or disturbed conscience. Such a DARVO response commonly occurs, as many of us have noted, when the Church makes an institutional response to cases of abuse perpetrated by its own clergy. All too often in the safeguarding narratives that I am familiar with, the original victim becomes the ‘villain’ of the narrative. Their telling of their story and what they have suffered is disturbing to the status quo.  Bishop Peter Ball successfully persuaded the then Prince of Wales that his accuser was the source of a vindictive evil.  Neil Todd, the innocent victim of this DARVO attack, took his own life.  We need constantly to be reminded of the way that DARVO sin can have far more devastating consequences for its victims than the original abuse.  Many examples of DARVO sin involve senior members of the Church of England.  Some have been exposed in the public domain.  Attacking an innocent victim or survivor by a leading church official as a way to protect the good name of the institution is a wicked devastating course of action.  These spiritual leaders have somehow been able to convince themselves and their consciences that DARVO sin, even when it involves telling lies and tolerating institutional corruption, is not sin at all.  That is a serious problem for the Church’s reputation and integrity.

I began by pointing out the issue of extreme brevity given to self-examination in the liturgy and how this raises a problem for the Church.  But in my further reflection I have come to see that not being able to agree what sin is really is a still greater dilemma.  The outside world is mystified by many of our squabbles over morality.  It will be even more unimpressed when it sees Church leaders practising DARVO sin in their misguided attempts to fend off the legitimate claims of survivors, who have suffered so long because the Church has believed that it reputation matters more than the claims of justice.  Perhaps in describing the Church we all want to see, and which would impress a waiting world, we should remind ourselves once more of the principles set out in the prophet Micah.  “Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God”.

‘How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger Isaiah 52-.7

by Fiona Gardner

This welcome messenger is one who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, and who says that God reigns. The messenger who brings news about safeguarding concerns may not be bringing peace, but is certainly bringing good news in the sense of alerting the church to the danger that may be present to children, young people, or the vulnerable. The same messenger is also helping the church towards salvation in the sense of deliverance from danger or difficulty, and alerting people to the supremacy of love and compassion over destructive abuse. The messenger might be the victim, or might be a professional in safeguarding, or a concerned member of the laity.

However, and seemingly almost inevitably, news of a safeguarding concern is generally treated as ‘bad news’ and the messenger immediately associated with this – and so often responded to with hostility – whether through passive but aggressive silence, or an active refuting. We know this through many previous safeguarding situations, where attempts to contact the hierarchy have been met with at the best reluctant acceptance and at worst indifference or denial.

Hearing of two recent experiences, has prompted me to try and understand once again what is going on. Both situations required raising a concern in local churches where no one wanted to hear; both situations meant that what could have been an opportunity to learn, change, and improve, largely led instead to defence and avoidance. In both situations barriers were raised, and the messenger in one situation treated with hostility, and in the other by largely ignoring what had been passed on. The church family shut the door, drew the curtains, tried to ignore the messenger, and for as long as they could pretended nothing was happening, until they absolutely had to respond and do something.

The psychological phenomenon of the backlash against someone who gives unwanted news is well researched; some of the findings have special relevance to situations where concerns about a potential perpetrator are raised in the church setting. Perhaps this has to be qualified – in all the situations I know and knew about where this happens, it is when the potential abuser is seen as influential and as an established part of the local church hierarchy. The sad reality invariably used to be that if someone about whom there was a concern was then described by their supporters as ‘a pillar of the community’ and ‘so good with children’ so it couldn’t possibly be that they were in any way a problem, it was right to ring alarm bells.

When you pass on information that nobody wants to hear, you often have no role whatsoever in the events other than raising the issue. But who wants what seems like bad news and, as messenger, you become the target for a misplaced backlash in the form of people liking you less, and seeing you in a negative light, even when you may be a part of the community. The news is not seen as ‘good’ in any way, although it is good news as it could make the church a safer place. It is not the potential perpetrator who has become a liability, that title has instead been attributed to the messenger.

This scenario is so familiar and so destructive to those seeking to disclose abuse, and sadly also familiar to those trying to wake the church up to the damage being done by this ‘head in the sand’ approach. How many times in the past has the person about whom concerns are raised been seen as the ‘victim’, whilst the actual person who has been abused and injured somehow becomes the oppressor. Recall the now infamous King Charles’ letter to Peter Ball in 1997 referring to the late Neil Todd:

“I can’t bear it that the frightful, terrifying man is on the loose again, doing his worst. . .

“I was visiting the vicar. . . and we were enthusing about you and your brother and he then told me that he heard that this ghastly man was up to his dastardly tricks again. . . I will see-off this horrid man if he tries anything again.”

Why turn against the person who raises safeguarding issues? Clearly raising a concern within the church once again threatens the sense that the church is a safe and benign community – a belief in the church as a sacred and holy space is violated. The messenger in disclosing what appears as unwelcome and bad news is associated with what is seen as this negative message, and so the almost immediate response is to dislike the person for disturbing the recipient’s belief system. It seems that when we hear something we’d rather not know about, we try to make sense of it, but having to do this disturbs all our accepted and established views, and so things begin to feel out of control and unsafe; this breeds a dislike of the person who has caused this disturbance to our equilibrium. Once the messenger is disliked because of the disturbing news they bring, then the actual ‘hearing’ of the concern is also tainted, and so the information is somehow muffled and distorted, so that the messenger and message are both consciously or unconsciously denigrated. In situations where supporters, a small group, and/or the congregation have been groomed by the potential perpetrator it is even harder to deliver the message, let alone get it heard.

In the recent experience where a professional in safeguarding brought news of an unwelcome situation, rather than learning something important and changing various procedures, those involved at the local level experienced the messenger’s motives as unnecessarily trouble-making, and so the expert advice given was largely ignored, until the very last moment when it had to be implemented. In the second experience, a member of the laity raised a worry about something they had seen; the main person contacted did not respond, and the ‘whistle blower’ was led to understand from another contact who did listen that there were issues of loyalty that seemed to be more powerful than the safeguarding issue.   

Generally, the attitude to people who flag up concerns and problems is ambivalent; with many who do so experiencing highly negative responses to their actions. Perhaps it’s not surprising given the pressure we were probably all exposed to as children either at school or with siblings not to ‘tell on someone’, to be a ‘snitch’ and ‘to grass on someone’ – it’s seen as a betrayal, a disloyalty to the group. It seems as if we learn at a young age that exposing wrong-doing is in some way untrustworthy, and letting the immediate peer group down.

The response to revealing wrong-doing is largely dependent on the culture of the organization, and here there are added problems in the church. More important than policy and safeguarding procedures is the culture of the organization, and the culture is driven largely by the senior leadership. It has been said that the culture of an organisation flourishes when there is an openness, where the leaders aim to and largely do the right thing, and people feel cared for, then, in turn, the people are more communal and look out for their organisation. If the leadership is right on safeguarding, then this affects the whole culture. If the church hierarchy appears uncaring and complicit in some ways with re-traumatising survivors through their negligence, then this response unfortunately trickles down one way or another to affect us all. If the culture is right about doing the ‘right thing’, then people feel able to make disclosures without fear of reprisals and repercussions.

When I was working as diocesan safeguarding advisor there were some occasions when as messenger I was treated with disdain, contempt, and sometimes downright hostility. Two experiences stick in my mind as particularly upsetting, and both when bringing some information from the police about a highly respected ‘pillar of the community’. In the first I was initially given the silent treatment, in itself a form of psychological manipulation, finally I was excused as ‘just following orders’; in other words, the defence used by Nazis to avoid taking responsibility for their terrible crimes. In the second instance I was likened by a furious group from the PCC to the Pharisees who murdered Jesus. Neither group would or could hear what was being said – the ‘news’ I was bringing was beyond bad – unforgiveable, a betrayal. A number of years later I foolishly thought the messenger bringing a safeguarding concern might be treated in a more open and positive way – but in these two experiences I have heard of the poor messenger was once again shot – though fortunately not fatally wounded.

Back in April, Surviving Church was one of the first to jump in with comment about the Soul Survivor affair.  In view of the fact that details of any abusive practices were then not being shared (though strongly hinted at), I focussed my remarks to some general points about some of the dangers in the dynamics of large congregations led by charismatic personalities and which are attractive to young people.  Some who commented on my blog were extremely angry at my mention of the Nine o’ Clock (NOS) service in Sheffield led by Chris Brain in the 90s.  My comparison was not to link the known facts about Soul Survivor to the accounts of abuse at NOS.  Rather I wanted to draw attention to some common features inherent in both these novel ways of doing church.  Both relied on drama and excitement and were backed up by what I believe to be an unhealthy focus on personality and celebrity.  There has always been in Soul Survivor an apparent dependency on the big personality of the leadership.  Mike Pilavachi, or MP, as we shall henceforth call him, is a big person in several ways. He certainly qualifies for the description that I would give him of being a larger than life charismatic and powerful personality.

In thinking about the way people react to dominant personalities, it is helpful, I think, to look back in our own personal histories.  Most of us can remember being paraded as a child in front of an individual considered by the world to be important.  Because our parents may have stressed the importance of being on our best behaviour in responding to this VIP, we probably stood tongue tied and silent while the distinguished person addressed a few words or questions to us.  However we behaved or spoke in this situation, we were aware of strongly inhibiting forces at work.  It would not be inaccurate to describe our feelings as those of awe or even fear. 

I often wonder whether most of us ever completely grow out of these childhood inhibitions when encountering someone we, and the world in general, admire and look up to.  The presence of charisma or obvious distinction exuded by another person certainly discourages any over-familiarity in our approach to them. Childhood memories of being introduced to an important person seem to re-emerge whenever we are brought face to face with people of some standing.  Charisma is one of these manifestations of human power.  It is a hard word to define, but most of us recognise it when we encounter it.  It speaks of a power inherent in a personality which can be used to charm others. Equally it can express itself as a force to control and manipulate.  In short, charisma seems to be describing a human ability to profoundly affect and even change another person.  Whether this power is being used to raise the other person up or cast them down will depend on the motivation of the person with the charismatic power.

The circumstances of MP’s ministry and the way he was at the heart of a huge ‘successful’ institution we know as Soul Survivor, means that he had access to considerable power.  Some was linked to the personal charisma which he undoubtedly possessed.  This was combined with the power inherent in being in charge of the institution he had founded and led.  His power also came from individuals constantly looking up to him for his gifts of teaching and leading worship.   The dynamics of power flowing around Soul Survivor suggest that, without realising it, the leaders and members of the congregation were active participants in a kind of complex dance.  Those outside MP’s immediate circle may have looked on with envy, wanting access to the self-esteem that came with an inclusion to the charmed group at the centre.  The size of Soul Survivor suggests that there would likely have been a constant dance-like jockeying for position.  Those close to the leadership wanted to continue to bask in the reflected glory of MP’s attention and his charisma. Others were patiently waiting for their opportunity to replace them.  Many seeking a favourable place in the institutional hierarchy of Soul Survivor appear to have endured petty humiliations or even abuse.  This was the cost of having a temporary place of esteem and privilege in the edifice of power created and sustained by MP.

My description of a ‘power dance’ going on at the heart of Soul Survivor is my attempt to make sense of the celebrity culture that seems to be at the heart of ministries of this kind.  It remains to be seen whether SS can survive the departure of MP and Andy Croft.  I make my observation about the possible demise of the organisation based on the way I suspect that the dramatic changes in leadership can seriously disturb the delicate power balance that has existed for so many years.  The institution will not find it easy to survive the disruption that has followed the departure of key leaders.

In writing this blog I have come to have a measure of unexpected sympathy for MP.  This allows me to suggest that the final version of the saga of MP may be a little less condemnatory towards him.   My sympathy comes from the fact that, as a young man, MP was entrusted with a position of influence and power where there were few if any constraining forces.  Overlooking for a moment the recent allegations of impropriety against groups of young men, we can suggest the amount of unsupervised power that MP was given in the early days of SS was, at the very least, completely inappropriate.  From his early days it seems that he was treated as if he could do no wrong.  Backed by the resources, financial and institutional, of St Andrew’s Chorleywood, MP was offered a path to success and adulation by the entire culture of charismatic evangelicalism across the world.  To suggest that MP had his head turned by this success is probably a massive understatement.  What seems to have happened in the MP story is that crowds of young people were drawn to the music of Matt Redman and the charismatic mesmerising gifts MP possessed.  This created a situation which offered the possibility of indulging in undreamt-of levels of gratification through the exercise of power of different kinds.  Without anyone in a position to check this power or question its corrupting potential, the path to MP’s eventual self-destruction lay wide open.  A mitigating thought is that one can imagine that there are probably many other Christian leaders who might well have chosen a similar path of self-gratification, if someone had provided the means for them to do so.  What separates MP from many other wannabes may be simply the external circumstances of his life story. 

Having suggested that MP deserves some understanding for surrendering to the waves of temptation that were poured over him from different directions, we should mention another factor in the mix -the sheer length of time that MP was left unsupervised to do his own thing.  The traditional five years that Methodist ministers used to be allowed to remain in one post had a certain wisdom built into it.  While the 5-year rule might have disrupted the education of many manse children, at least abusive relationships within a congregation were less likely to develop.  Thirty years in a single role will always have some potential serious drawbacks.  These would include the power to claim ownership over a church institution and the individuals in it.  Such ‘ownership’ is dangerous and likely to be detrimental to both sides.  There are many lifetime ministries to be found in the Anglican conservative evangelical world.  While these do not lead to abusive relationships in most cases, there is something somewhat unhealthy about one individual occupying a position of influential and institutional power for a long period of time.  If Jonathan Fletcher had been required to look for a new post after ten years, much of his devastating abuse of power might have been avoided.  While there are arguments against setting time limits in ministry, there are arguments in favour.  MP might have been forced to be accountable for his ministry if there had been a time limit at Soul Survivor.

The ministry of MP seems to have gone badly wrong, in part because of the wider church culture he inhabited.   Any culture which allows unaccountable power to flourish, and fails to offer proper supervision and theological scrutiny, is bound to court danger.  Far too many people seemed to have lacked the kind of common sense that might have been able to spot the danger signs in MP’s ministry.  A ministry that depends so much on celebrity and a charismatic personality should always be subject to proper oversight.  One of the disappointing revelations of the MP story so far revealed, is the way that the independent supervision, such as it was, completely failed.  I am mentioning here the oversight of the Diocese of St Albans.  Was there not, among the experienced clergy at the centre, someone able to question what was really going on in Watford?  Had no lessons been learned from the maverick NOS experiment in Sheffield?  Is it ever a good idea to dispense with the formation process before allowing an individual like MP to enter Anglican ministry?  The Church of England is supposed to be known for its system of checks and balances.  Such measures are designed to protect the institution from rogue and abusive behaviours by any of those who work for it.

The events at Soul Survivor have yet to be fully described and understood.  My own reflections on what has so far been revealed, suggest that the Soul Survivor scandal is far bigger than the malfeasance of a single individual.  Given the numerous opportunities to offend that were presented to MP over the years, it might almost have been surprising if MP, who had never been part of some formation process, had never taken advantage of his situation.  Another way of putting it is to say that MP was himself failed by a Christian culture too interested in wealth and success to be properly aware and protective towards the vulnerable individuals in its midst.  Blame should be apportioned to many places, among them St Andrew’ Chorleywood, the Diocese of St Albans and the whole culture of charismatic evangelical Christianity which had nurtured, but then failed to control MP.  But It is also a sad and tragic day when so much trust is invested in a gifted charismatic individual and this trust is then so completely betrayed.