For some of my readers the idea that an individual might become addicted to certain religious practices would seem a strange one. But, from my past experiences of high octane worship and Christian music, the word addiction does not seem to be too strong a description of what appears to be going on in some settings. Chris has often indicated how the music band has become the dominant feature of many churches and their worship. Let us consider what certain kinds of music might be doing to an individual in church. In the first place, the kind of music I am thinking of will have a strong rhythmic beat. This is capable of (perhaps intentionally) sending someone into a light state of trance. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a trance state but there is something wrong with a situation that it is only when such music is playing that God can be experienced. The experience of touching the holy has become bound up with the particular alteration of consciousness that is induced by this kind of music. If this is the only setting when a person can feel what he or she believes to be God, it raises a number of disturbing questions. Are we sure that it is God that is being encountered or is the worshipper being artificially being drawn into an artificial emotional high which provides this intense experience? Is this emotional high leading the participant anywhere or are they just revelling in an intense experience which is similar to a drug-induced ‘hit’? Is their searching for God something spiritual or are they clamouring for the experience of altered consciousness for its own sake? Is their continuing attendance at that church an attempt to repeat again and again the same experiences, like an addict returning to his or her drug of choice?

These questions above may not be very comfortable for readers who believe that they have found God in the context of ‘Christian’ music. But we have to note further things about the popularity of rhythmic music in the context of a Church service. It is right to point out that however much rhythmic music is enjoyed by its fans, it is seldom possible to do much in the way of thinking or engaging in rational thought while it is going on. When young people attend raves, which provide a level of noise which most of us would find impossible to put up with, we mostly tolerate this because we accept that they may need to engage in forms of mental escape once in a while. Less acceptable is the way that for some of those at these events the taking of drugs of various kinds has become common. Pills such as Ecstasy are supposed to make the whole rave experience far more intense and thus rewarding. What all those who attend such events appear to be looking for is the opportunity to be so caught up in noise and movement that they do not have to think about anything at all.

When loud Christian music is introduced into normal worship, there are bound to be some practical as well as cultural issues. For members of the congregation at a traditional church serve, the rational processing of information would seem to be fairly important. Not only do we listen to what is being preached from the pulpit but we are also required to think about and pray for the needs of others, engaging with, for example, the issues of poverty and starvation. Any exposure to loud rhythmic music at any point in the service will make these acts of intelligent listening and altruistic concern fairly difficult. What the music does in fact achieve fairly predictably is, as we have said, an opportunity to escape – escape from problems, stress and even self-awareness. This kind of mental escape is uncomfortably close to the effect of other common mind-numbing addictive activities, the taking of drugs, alcohol or other forms of compulsive behaviour. In short we are claiming that the particular culture of much Christian music seems to resemble other addictive substances and activities that are well known in our society.

Getting into addictive forms of behaviour is one thing but the successful escape from any of its manifestations is, as we all know, extremely difficult. There is not just the physical or emotional component of the addictive substance to be dealt with. We also have to come to terms with the areas of emptiness or stress that the addict is facing in his or her life. This has given rise to the addiction in the first place. A middle aged housewife has a drink problem which is a response to a failing marriage or a sense of bereavement through the fact that her children have left home. She will need to find solutions to the pressing problems that exist in her life quite separately from giving up the physical dependency on alcohol. A young man addicted to pornography and thus unable to relate to women in a healthy way will have to seek help for his social inadequacy or lack of self-esteem which may be driving this dependency.

Addictive behaviour is found affecting a large number of people in our society, perhaps even a majority. Any behaviour or experience that is compulsively engaged in is in some sense an addiction. The only way to find out whether we or others have an addictive issue is to remove the offending habit or object to see whether we crave it in its absence. A good test to establish whether a church is using music improperly by encouraging artificial spiritual ‘highs’ in the congregation is to conduct worship without it for a week or two. If the church is able to retain the same numbers without its usual recourse to loud rhythmic Christian bands, then they can claim that they are not leading their members into an addictive dependence to noise and sensation. But we all know that this scenario would not in fact happen. The style of music, the predictable high that it produces for the members, is a key component of its attractiveness to its congregation. We can observe that when a church has wedded itself so completely one style of worship, one that excludes stillness and rational thinking, that this church has begun to create for its people a dangerous form of spiritual addiction.

I am aware that there are many different cultural settings where people claim to find the presence of God most easily. I have discussed before on this blog the question of traditional church music and its capacity to evoke a sense of spiritual presence among those who appreciate. I believe that such music and the music of Taizé do not have the same effect on the listener as the primal and loud strains of many Christian bands. But the close relationships between the sound of a worship band and that at a rave are just too striking to go without comment. In both settings individuals are encouraged to go out of normal consciousness and enjoy a state of mindless trance. For me this process of leaving behind ordinary thinking does not allow it to be close to anything that Jesus encouraged in us. If a church is subtly encouraging its members to enter primal irrational states of awareness, then I question whether it is in any way bringing us closer to God. A particular church may achieve great popularity in bringing together large numbers of people. It does not thus become automatically a model for the rest of us. If I am right and loud Christian music is creating a dependency, even an addiction, in those who listen to it, then it is hardly surprising that it will be popular. As we said earlier, addiction will always attract because it allows a person temporarily to escape from their problems and the areas of barrenness in their lives. The ability of a church to attract followers does not make that church something that all must follow. The task of bringing people closer to God is just too important to be left to those with the loud and most addictive styles of music.

My wife and I have recently returned from Sweden after a few days holiday. While in the country we spent a day in Uppsala, an old mediaeval city which boasts a fine cathedral. Next to this very impressive cathedral, the mother church of the Lutheran Church of Sweden, is another smaller church, dedicated to the Holy Trinity. We both found this older simpler building more impressive than its larger neighbour. On some walls were 14th century wall paintings, many of them depicting angels. There was also one particular painting over the west door which I puzzled about. I was not able to establish whether this painting, one depicting the story of the Good Samaritan, was part of the original scheme or not. But whether 14th or 19th century in origin, the placing of this scene over the West Door tells us something about the attitudes of the church that commissioned it.

I should remind my readers of the way that many mediaeval churches in Britain possessing a complete cycle of paintings would normally have a picture of the Last Judgement placed over the West Door. This would be viewed every time the worshippers left the church. A typical representation of the scene would show the contrast between the saved and the damned. The former would be seen ascending to heaven assisted by angels while the latter would be seen to be going headlong into a place of fire and torment. The message to the departing worshippers from such a painting was clear. Some are destined for heaven while many, even the majority, are doomed, because of their sin, to everlasting torment. In short the worshipper was encouraged, every time he left church, to feel a frisson of fear.

I have said more than once before on this blog that any version of the Christian faith which engenders fear in its followers is failing to reflect much of what Jesus seems to have been trying to communicate. While we could focus on the story of Dives and Lazarus as indicating a belief in a terrifying come-uppance for the wealthy and those lacking in compassion, there is comparatively little else to show that Jesus spoke a great deal on the subject. We certainly have no evidence that Jesus, even when apparently talking about punishment, was ever trying to terrify his followers into behaving in a particular way. Far more typical of the message of Jesus is the invitation to follow him and serve others. This is well articulated in the fictional account of a Samaritan caring for a stranger. The only fear to be found in the story was that of the Scribe and Pharisee who passed by on the other side. The account in Matthew of a judgement scene when sheep are separated from goats is also about a failure of compassion, not doing what love required. The tasks of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and visiting those in prison are seen to be the priority for Jesus’ followers. ‘Entering the joy of the Lord’ is seen as the reward for this love and service of others. Such actions are more highly valued than simply avoiding sin. Following Jesus in this way was far more important than obeying numerous laws which mostly contained the word ‘not’ as part of their formulation.

The practice of Christianity which focusses on a keeping of rules and avoiding anything deemed to be impure is often described as legalistic. This legalism is what many conservative Christian groups seem to demand of their followers. The present unhealthy obsession with same-sex marriage as being contrary to the Gospel is an example of the way that rules are deemed to be more important than love and service. The practice of love and service will of course require honesty and integrity in our dealing with others but that does not require us to condemn a group who seek to find integrity in the context of a same sex relationship. Jesus called us into expressing our lives in a joyful abandonment to the generosity, forgiveness and care of God. It is hard to see how anyone can fulfil this law of love while permanently in a fearful state or a dread of being condemned to eternal punishment. The Christian who is responding to God’s love and forgiveness will need to spend little time worrying about rules and regulations. If he has truly tuned himself into the law of love as proclaimed by Jesus, then he will have little time for the controlling kind of faith as inculcated by Christians who thrive on and peddle a message of fear.

The painting of the Good Samaritan over the west door at Holy Trinity Uppsala had the words ‘go and do likewise’ below it. Whether 14th century or from modern times, this painting tunes in with a compassionate non-legalistic kind of faith that this blog articulates. A Christian, having completed a time of worship and praise, would then be going out into daily life. There was no sense in the painting of any threat of punishment. Rather the worshipper was being encouraged to go out and seek opportunities for generous love. The implication was that acting in this way would resonate with the compassionate reality of God that had been met with through the act of worship.

When I was active in parishes trying to teach people about the Christian faith, I would always be reluctant to use negative words to describe what is required of us as Christians. I did not, for example, start any teaching on behaviour with an exposition of the Ten Commandments, though they would, of course, have to be mentioned at some point. Negativity, forbidding things, is also what dominates one school of thought about the rearing of children. It is thought that the young mind can only learn good behaviour when it is taught within an atmosphere of control and fear. More humane methods centre around providing examples of good and generous behaviour. The summary of Christian ethics that I follow is simply ‘love as you are loved and forgive as you are forgiven’. These injunctions could be applied both to the bringing up of children and the formation of disciples within the Christian tradition. Although we know that evil exists and has to be confronted with robust energy, it is still important that the society or individual defending itself against violence uses the minimum force in return. Sometimes it would seem that Christians, motivated by the violent imagery of some parts of the Bible, have completely lost a sense of how to be gentle in their dealing with evil and power abuse. The rhetoric of the Christian Right appears to be far too familiar with the language of destroying and wiping out enemies whether these enemies are those of God or the particular nation to which the Christian happens to belong.

To return to the small mediaeval church in Uppsala. On a wall where we might have expected to see a violent representation of the fate of the damned, my wife and I saw a gentle reminder of the words of Jesus that we must serve the stranger in whatever way we can. Perhaps we can add to those words others spoken by Jesus to the apostles when they went fishing in Mark 6. ‘It is I, do not be afraid.’ Encouragement to serve, to have confidence in the goodness and compassion of God provides a far more healthy and acceptable message to share with people. This is far better than the implicit message given to so many that the Christian is defined only by his or her obsessive concern with the rights and wrongs of sexuality. It is hard to see that particular message being internalised by any Christian stepping through that particular west door of the church in Sweden.

If there is one person who represents the perspective of American right-wing religious thinking, we need look no further than Tim LaHaye. This prolific author and religious teacher died recently after a stroke. The Times newspaper awarded him the dignity of a substantial obituary even though the anonymous writer who reflected on his life did not hesitate to use words like ‘bigotry’ and ‘crank’.

In reflecting on the life of Lahaye, we are shown how the written and spoken ideas of this one man resonated with and reflected much current American conservative religious opinion. It would be comforting to conclude that extreme ideas, such as those peddled by Lahaye, were examples of a harmless eccentricity. But Lahaye’s influence in fact became dangerous in the way it penetrated the corridors of US political power during the time of the presidency of Ronald Reagan and later. As recently as 2003 Lahaye was described as the most influential active Christian leader in the US. His path to fame was made possible through the writing of a series of 16 best-selling books. These described in fictional form the events surrounding the so-called ‘Rapture’. The books sold in millions and earned LaHaye £11 million per year in royalties. What made the books sell so well was the way that they fed the American public’s fascination for end-time events as described in the book of Revelation. I cannot claim to have read any of this series but I believe they are full of descriptions of the disasters and catastrophes that will come at the end of the world, prior to the second coming of Christ. The ideas of the Rapture, the snatching up of millions of faithful Christians to heaven, while leaving behind the rest of humanity to suffer plagues and other disasters, provides the material for these novels. The 16 novels are known as the Left Behind books. Fiction or not, they have powerfully fed into the religious psyche of millions of conservative Americans.

The most terrifying piece of information given by the Times obituary is the fact that 25% of Americans believe that these Left Behind novels are an accurate prediction of the future. 62% believe that the second coming of Christ is imminent. LaHaye himself acknowledged that the books were fictional, but he claimed that they sold so well because ‘the Bible gives us the best possible plan for the future’. It goes without saying that a population that fixated on future disasters and destruction is unlikely to have much time for thinking about wider political issues like climate change and solving the world’s political and social problems.

Tim LaHaye has always worked with other religious leaders on the extreme right, including the disgraced tele-evangelist Jim Bakker. A group of these leaders were invited to a White House breakfast when Jimmy Carter was president. With the other leaders present Lahaye decided that Carter was not to be trusted in furthering the ultra-right/Christian agenda. There was an impromptu prayer gathering immediately after they left the building. LaHaye was heard to pray in these words: ‘God we have got to get this man out of the White House. We need to get someone in here who will be aggressive about bringing back traditional moral values’. Ronald Reagan became president a few months later.

LaHaye was also responsible for organising 100,000 ministers who went on to found the American Coalition for Traditional Values. This lobby group had tremendous power in the corridors of government in and was able to manipulate George W Bush into giving the impression that the book of Revelation was part of his bedtime reading. This influence of far right Christian opinion remains an issue for American politics to this day. It is hard for us to imagine, here in the UK, the enormous control held by conservative churches over public statements made by politicians. We must hope that UK politicians never become beholden to fanatical religious leaders. There is an eerie parallel between what goes on in the States and the theocratic regimes of the Middle East. Whatever else we claim for the Christian faith, we should never expect the Bible to be the only source of wisdom and guidance for the difficult and challenging task of government.

The death of Tim LaHaye will provide a moment of reflection for all who long to see rational and common sense ideas reign in the realm of both religion and politics. To use the book of Revelation as a guide to political decision-making (or any kind of thinking) is a frankly bizarre action. Few commentaries suggest that we read the violent sections in Revelation as indicative of actual events, past or future. To do so requires us to think in a very strange way. As I have said on this blog before, it is hardly a healthy form of faith to believe that a God of love is literally prepared to destroy in a moment a third of humanity, as we see in chapter 8. For a Christian ever to make this particular book of the Bible into a guide as to the nature of God involves us in a kind of thinking that may well take us to edge of craziness. LaHaye thus represents a manifestation of Christianity which for many of us verges on the unhinged. It would be easy for us to dismiss all such fringe thinking within Christianity as unimportant, except for the fact that it has taken root in the most powerful nation on this earth. The ludicrous is thus transformed into something quite dangerous. The UK and the rest of Europe are for the most part still so far outside the orbit of this kind of extreme right wing opinion that we see flourishing in the States. But religious/political ideas have an uncomfortable habit of leaping across the Atlantic Ocean. Those of us who find the ultra-right in religion and politics utterly repugnant must continue to be on our guard. Both the Christian church and the political life of the Free World deserve much better than to be taken over by the thinking of the paranoid Right as exemplified by the late Tim LaHaye.

From time to time I hear individual stories of people who have been treated badly by religious groups. When faced with a situation of mental distress the churches seem to have responded in these accounts with an unholy combination of zeal, ignorance and an unbelievably incompetent exercise of common sense. There is one story of a young man who died recently in my part of the North of England after being rejected by his church even though he was overwhelmed with mental distress. He then took his own life. It would be wrong to give further details of this story because I have received what I know second hand and so I do not have all the facts of the case. So I will tell the story of another young man who was also, in the course of inept pastoral care, treated appallingly by a church in the States. I hope those who knew Richard and may be reading this blog will recognise that Ken’s story is being told in memory of Richard.

Ken Nally was a member of a Los Angeles megachurch called the Grace Community. The story goes back to 1973 when Ken, then in his late teens, first went to the head of the counselling arm of the church, one Lynn Cory. The minister overseeing the entire church was John McArthur, a prolific author and a well-known opponent of the Pentecostal influences which were becoming more significant in the evangelical churches of the 1980s. Ken was directed to another member of the biblical counselling centre called Duane Rea. Like Cory and the other members of the counselling team at Grace church, Rea had no qualifications in mental health problems or professional counselling training. In spite of this the team as a whole claimed competence to treat disorders ranging from depression to schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. When Ken went to Rea to consult him about his problems with women, the answer given was simple and unambiguous. In common with many biblical counsellors of that period, Rea told him that sin was at the root of his problems, particularly in his desire for intimacy outside of matrimony.

The depression and sense of failure felt by Ken drove him to speak to yet another counsellor as feelings of suicide came to oppress him. He asked this third counsellor whether a person who committed suicide would forfeit eternal salvation. The answer that he then received was theologically correct, but the way it was told him hardly enhanced Ken and his sense of well-being. He was told of course no one could lose their salvation through suicide. In March 1979 Ken attempted suicide. His parents became involved and he was sent to a psychiatric hospital. While there he told Pastor Rea that he would try to commit suicide again. This information was not shared with his parents or the doctors. These latter who were involved with caring for Ken saw only improvement. A Dr Hall, a psychiatrist, tried but failed to establish what kind of counselling he had received at Grace Church. He was in particular concerned at Ken’s statement that ‘my counsellors have advised me not to go to a psychiatrist’. In Ken’s mind there seems to have been a direct conflict between the sin based diagnosis of mental illness preached by his church, and the no blame understanding of illness which undergirded the approach of the hospital. After he finally left the hospital Ken spent most of the time reading the Bible and listening to recordings of John McArthur’s sermons.

Ken saw his father for the last time and in that conversation Ken said ‘they told me it was God’s punishment’. Ken’s father, Walter Nally, could not believe his ears. ‘Tell me which one of the bastards said that?’ he exclaimed, but it was too late for Ken. He committed suicide a few days later. The story does not end there. The church was allowed to organise the funeral and Pastor Rea announced to the congregation that Ken had disobeyed God in the final act of his life. ‘He took what did not belong to him.’ Adding to this appalling insensitivity Walter was shown a testimonial from Ken which stated that he had tried to kill himself prior to 1979. Rea maintained throughout that Ken’s death was not the result of poor counselling but of unresolved sin.

John McArthur, the leading minister of Grace Community Church also piled on the pastoral insensitivity by declaring to Walter that the suicide was in no way the fault of Walter but that Ken alone was responsible. He repeated the idea that the whole situation was brought about by ‘unresolved sin’ and had nothing to do with poor counselling. Walter’s reaction was then to take out a legal challenge and he proceeded to sue Grace for clerical malpractice. After the case went through several stages, it was in the end refused by the California Supreme Court who found in favour of the church. This unfavourable judgement has had the bitter result that US courts since that time been unwilling ever to find clergy guilty of professional malpractice or incompetence. The same protection has been extended to ministers of other groups, such as the Scientologists. No minister is ever held responsible for their actions in counselling, even if their lack of competence and ignorance can result in such tragic outcomes.

We have not in this post unpacked the cluster of ideas connected with ‘Christian counselling’ that helped to cause the tragedy at Grace church. Suffice to say they belong to the principles thought up by Jay Adams and his ideas about ‘nouthetic counselling’. Without being able here to unpack Adams’ noxious ideas, it can be said that this strand of teaching rejects modern psychiatry in favour of ‘Biblical’ teaching. Once again we see the dangerous idea that the world we live in is a threatening place. The Bible and what it teaches is juxtaposed with the demonic which is believed to lurk around in much of secular ideas and knowledge. This paranoid universe which is inhabited by large numbers of so-called Christians is an uncomfortable and fear-ridden place.

All of us have encountered the caricature of an Englishman abroad who believes that everyone should understand his language. All he has to do to communicate with foreigners is to shout a bit louder. Behind this satirical image is the revealing of a condescending attitude towards others sometimes displayed by our countrymen. Some English people apparently do take on their travels the assumption that everybody is or should be just like them, able to speak English as well as think within a similar cultural framework. In the first place we would note that such an attitude is based on a failure of understanding. Ignorance of this nature goes back to a failure ever to engage properly with history or geography. But such gaps in knowledge will be compounded and made worse by a lack of imagination. It is through a lack of imagination that we sometimes cannot appreciate that there are people in the world who do not think and speak as we do. Without this capacity to imagine that things elsewhere in the world are sometimes radically different from what we know, we can find the rest of the world to be a place of darkness or even threat.

The Englishman abroad caricature might well remind us of an ardent Christian evangelist trying to make converts. Just as the failure to communicate sometimes causes expatriates to shout a bit louder, so some evangelists engage in a more intensive repetition of their well-worn slogans when they are unsuccessfully seeking converts. Two particular things stood out as being absent in the hypothetical conversation between the imaginary Englishman and the uncomprehending foreigner, both of which are also missing in the street evangelist’s encounter with its hyped up rhetoric. The words are knowledge and imagination. A lack of knowledge of where a person is coming from will always make communication between people difficult. It may be a failure to speak the same language. It also may also include an ignorance of the culture, philosophy and religious background of the other person. It goes without saying that it is important to know something of where another person is coming from in any attempt to communicate with them. Expecting them always to understand our words and our point of view because we are shouting a bit louder, is demeaning and insulting.

The second word I brought forward as being always needed in any attempt at communication is the word imagination. The ability to use the imagination effectively is sadly something not always encouraged in the schooling process. It does however develop as a by-product of certain disciplines within the curriculum which are labelled under the title of creative arts. These are not always the ones most valued in a system that places science, maths and verifiable information at the top of the educational tree. While imagination is hard to teach, it is nevertheless naturally built into every growing child and parents and teachers can do much to encourage it. I am reminded of an advertisement on television for a make of packaged cheese. Two men dressed as knights in armour are portrayed on top of a hill discussing how they are feeling peckish. They are then seen eating the advertised cheese before setting off down the hill to do some heroic act. We then discover that these same two knights are in fact two small boys on bicycles. They had imagined themselves into the personae of two mediaeval men-of-war. Such a fantasy life is both healthy and normal. Indeed, it is part of the child’s growing up and learning about the world through imaginative play.

Why is imagination so important for all us? It is because it is the part of ourselves that enables us, among other things, to understand what another person might be feeling at any particular point. To put it another way, imagination enables us to enter the subjectivity of someone else’s experience. All of us know that the world is a better place when ordinary people have no difficulty in feeling what other people are experiencing, whether their joy, grief or pain. Imagination also crosses boundaries, not only involving feeling, but also of those of understanding. Our imagination can help us to see and at least partly understand what another person might be thinking. Even if this knowledge is not complete, at least we have enough information to grasp that there are differences between us. That differences of thinking and feeling exist between individuals is not something to be deplored. We need to learn to accept and respect it. Jonathan Sacks summed up this point in the title of his book, The Dignity of Difference.

Those of us who claim to be Christian realise, on reflection, that our faith is a complex combination of thinking, feeling and knowledge as well as experience. In a subtle way faith binds together all these elements of personal experience with a body of knowledge which we call the Christian Tradition. If someone tried to persuade me to express my Christian hope in a few sentences, I would probably try to refuse. My position would be that any verbal expression of the totality of the Christian faith as I understand it, would do violence to its integrity. The few words that I might eventually use to explain my faith would be words that never tried to enclose or define anything. They would always be words that pointed beyond themselves to hint at a deeper, wider and broader reality than I could possibly convey only through the use of words. It is because of this that I instinctively shudder at the sight of the street evangelist with his uncompromising message of repentance or destruction. His words are a kind of desecration of holiness and divine depth by what I see as a shallow use of words and slogans. The ‘turn or burn’ message of Christian popular evangelism is an example, for me, of how not to share divine realities. This is comparable to the way that the picture of the Englishman shouting ever louder and louder to the uncomprehending foreigner is an example of how not to communicate to people who do not speak your language. This blog post leaves unanswered the question of how we do communicate God to people with whom we do not share a common culture and language. That has to be a question that I leave for another day.

One of the most wonderful things about watching children growing up is to see the way that they gradually assert their independence from their parents. When a baby is first born it seems that the personalities of mother and child are effectively fused together. But, as time goes by the individual personality of the baby becomes identifiable. As the child progresses through his young life, it is customary for us to celebrate the different moments that mark this gradual growth towards independence. As examples of this we have the appearance at a nativity play, the first day of school and the loss of baby teeth. Later on, the time of adolescence can be a stormy time for many young people but essentially the same processes are at work, the exploration of the boundaries of distinct separate personalities. Whatever the problems we recognise that some kind of rebellion is probably to be expected so that the development of an adult identity can actually happen.

This evolving and changing relationship between a child and her parents is not dissimilar to other relationships that exist in people’s lives. Psychologists have particular words to describe the way we relate to people above us or whom we admire. These targets of admiration, pop stars, Olympic heroes or political leaders are normally not known to us personally but we bond with them in our minds in an act of projection or identification. These two words hint at the way that that a celebrity-fan relationship is an attempt to create a kind of fusion, the kind seen originally as existing between the small child and his mother. This desire to fuse with another person, one whom we believe can give us some of their strength, wisdom or glamour, goes on to some extent throughout life. It is a kind of continuation of the way that we looked up to our parents to give us some of their strength and wisdom where we were small infants. In this way children are pulled in two directions. On the one hand they are desperate to become independent and gain control over their lives while at the same they are aware of their need for the strength that other people can give them. Dependence and independence thus coexist in every growing child. This need to be dependent on others who are stronger than she is does not disappear suddenly when a particular age is reached. It is not surprising that young adults will seek out parent substitutes, perhaps a guru figure, in the long transition between childhood and full maturity. He or she will thus want to admire teachers, youth leaders and even clergy, who will act in the place of their birth parents. With their help the task of growing up toward independence and maturity becomes slightly easier. However, at some point the young adult finally has to let go of all these props and negotiate adult life and its responsibilities alone.

Jesus himself seems to have been aware of the way that his disciples wanted to use him as a parent figure or as a guru. St John’s Gospel in particular picks up what we might describe as an adolescent dependency by the disciples on Jesus’s teaching and his words. This dependency caused them to have constant misunderstandings about his mission and purpose. Eventually Jesus utters those classic words ‘it is good for you that I go away’. Perhaps we can understand these words as the action of a parent/guru who wants to shock his followers out of an immature dependent relationship on him. Why is it good for the disciples if Jesus goes away? The answer I am suggesting here (I am aware of many other ways of interpreting these words) is that it would have been terribly easy for the followers of Jesus to remain in a permanent state of over-dependency on him. He needed to break up the old relationship in order to rebuild and renew it.

In our churches we often see a kind of passive dependency on others by those in the pews. In most cases the dependency is not directed at Christ but it is focused on those who stand up and speak for him in church pulpits. Such a dependent passive relationship is often encouraged by these same Christian leaders. They teach obedience, not to Christ but to themselves as anointed representatives of Christ. In insisting on obedience they are missing out another important area of Christian living – the ability to stand on two feet and discover what real Christian maturity in fact is all about.

Two reasons for some Christian leaders failing to teach independence and maturity occur to me. One is the fact that ministers recognise that many individuals in their congregations would indeed have some difficulty in accepting individual responsibility for their lives. They prefer to be told what to do and what to think. We can thus describe the care of a minister in this situation as an attempt to exercise care and kindness. Nevertheless, even if we want to interpret the minister’s behaviour in charitable ways, we can still see that the congregation is being let down in some way. Perpetual mothering of the immature is hardly in their best interests. Another dishonourable, indeed sinister, reason for keeping congregants in this state of dependency is in order to provide narcissistic supply for the leader. In other words, like a fond parent who does not let children grow up because he enjoys the experience of parenthood so much, a narcissistic leader holds on to his flock possessively, inappropriately and against their best interests. I have repeated over and over again the common pattern of cultic groups, and indeed many Christian congregations, of a collusive and ultimately destructive relationship between the leader and those who are led. Writing about it does not make it disappear, but at least the reader of this blog can be sensitised to it as a common pattern in religious and other groups.

Jesus said that ‘it is good that I go away’, because, I believe, he recognised that an immature and grasping dependency on him was not in the best interest of his disciples. They needed, as we do, to rise above always wanting other people to do our thinking for us. Nor should we always expect others to make our decisions for us following the precept that ‘minister knows best’. Of course we need to belong in some sense but this belonging should never involve surrendering our individuality, our intelligence or our ability to make decisions. There is not space here in this present blog to spell out in detail the nature of what I consider to be Christian maturity. I can just reiterate that Christian maturity will always involve an ability to undertake adult responsibility and make decisions for oneself. While we will have received much from the teaching and encouragement of Christians who have gone before us, we must never allow ourselves to become clones of those we admire.

Jesus left his disciples for a period to return to them in a different kind of relationship. While he was with them in the flesh they had been ready to hand over all their responsibility for thinking and understanding to him. The post-resurrection experience seems to have allowed them to mature and become their own people. New qualities of courage, insight and vision seem to flow out of this new more complete relationship with Christ. We could ascribe these new qualities as belonging to their new status of being apostles. Before they had been apprentices or disciples.

Immaturity, dependency and the wrong kind of obedience still today presents a challenge to the integrity of all branches of the Christian church. Far too many leaders and ministers seem to want to hold their people in a state of permanent dependency which does not allow them to become mature Christians. Equally a tendency to worship Christian celebrity leaders, a cultural phenomenon of our day, seems to infect many branches of the Christian church. The path of responsible maturity may indeed be quite hard to find. My instinct tells me that this is a place that God would want us to be. Because that place has not yet been clearly defined those who search for it may find themselves best by many problems and misunderstandings. But I believe that the place of maturity is a place of joy, transformation and true freedom.

Among the many churchy words and doctrines that we possess, there is one that will always provoke disagreement among Christians. The word is ecclesiology. It is not a word at that is used much in ordinary Christian conversation but it does describe an area of theology where Christians are often deeply divided. The word simply means the doctrine of the church, its nature, its purpose and its place in the world. This blog post is an attempt to show that although the word ecclesiology is not much used, the areas of doctrine which it covers are of great importance. We need to talk about them to understand one area of division in the church today.

The Anglican church in which I served as a full-time clergyman for some 40 years has a variety of perspectives on ecclesiology or the nature and purpose of the church. I myself represented and stood for a traditional understanding of Anglican ecclesiology. This traditional approach has always emphasised the relationship of the church congregation to the wider community of which it is part. The word ‘parish’ has always had two meanings. It means (in the Church of England context) the gathered Christian congregation. Simultaneously it refers to the wider community, which is made up of every single person who lives in the locality. The church, the parish church, has always accepted some responsibility for everyone. Parishioners had certain rights in relation to their local parish church. They could on request be married there, have their children baptised and in the end request the services of a clergyman to conduct their funeral. For most of my ministry this loose relationship between the local church and the wider community was an active reality. In trying to make it work I found that I got to know an enormous number of people. My first church in Croydon had 20,000 souls within its boundaries. This, back in the 70s, required the clergy to be very busy with weddings baptisms and funerals. Obviously the three members of staff could not know more than a tiny percentage of the people who lived in their parish, but we still felt under an obligation to serve everyone as best we could.

In the smaller parishes where I served as a Vicar, it was possible to build a relationship with a considerable percentage of the people who lived in the community. In Gloucestershire I had a single church benefice with around 1200 houses. It was physically possible to knock on every single door before Christmas, even though some houses were only visited every other year. Not everyone was at home when I called with a Christmas card, but the effort to go door-to-door in an attempt to see the faces of residents, represented a vision for parochial work that has now been effectively abandoned. The vision I had was that, as far as possible, every single person living in that community would regard the church as their church, even though they never came to the services. William Temple, the wartime Archbishop of Canterbury, once said that the church was the only institution that existed for the benefit of those who were not its members. That was very much my vision, even though for practical purposes, the church played a very small part in the lives of many people who lived within the physical boundaries of my parishes. The idea of the church, clergy and people, existing to serve the people of the wider community was still a vision that sustained many of us. The words of the communion service, ‘send us out into the world to live and work for your praise and glory’ were words of a church that firmly believed that it existed in order to go out and serve.

The older vision of the church as a community which gathers to be resourced for the work of service and love has, in many places, been superseded by another priority. Theologically speaking, the church has become a place where people come to be ‘saved’. The church is understood to be like an ark sailing across a tempestuous sea, trying to rescue individuals who are drowning. This particular vision is quite radically different from the first. The church is no longer seen in its corporate dimension but more as a collection of individuals who have made a choice to be saved. The emphasis inside the building is one of looking inwards, focusing on providing salvation and ensuring correct doctrine. The world outside is no longer a place that needs to be leavened like a loaf requiring yeast, but it is a place of darkness, corruption and danger. This particular emphasis in ecclesiology is often rooted in a vision of great pessimism for the future and which finds its inspiration from passages in the book of Revelation. The future coming of Christ to judge the world will involve great destruction and there is very little optimism for the world in this perspective. It is then better to focus on the salvation of individuals than to worry about trying to save the world. It is already hastening towards its own destruction.

I have presented two visions of ecclesiology which are at two ends of a continuum of belief. Most people will not hold consistently to either one of these extremes, but a majority will be found somewhere in the middle. Although I am trying not to caricature the ideas of conservative Christians over their understanding of the church, I am still suggesting that we all have to face that there are these two contrasting visions and emphases of what the church is for. Is it mainly for the salvation of its members or is it a place where people can come in order to serve the world better? Another way of stating the question is to ask whether Jesus died for Christians or for the whole world. When we quote the famous verse from St John’s Gospel, which contains the words: ‘For God so loved the world’, do we emphasise the first past of the verse which speaks of God loving the ‘kosmos’? The alternative is to read the verse with an emphasis on the second part: ‘Whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life’. In a way our ecclesiology will be defined by which part of the verse we want to emphasise. I personally will always wish to focus on working out the implications of God loving the world and what this might mean for the work of the Church and the Christians within it. Of course we need Christians to be people of conviction and passion, people who are confident of their salvation. But we also need a vision of the way that Christians are to be people who want to continue the work of loving the world as God in Christ does. This New Testament vision of what a disciple is, a continuing to love the world, is a vision for the Church itself. This speaks far more of the way that disciples are in the business of being light and salt to the world than being only concerned for their individual well-being in the place beyond the grave.

I have recently discovered a remarkable book published earlier this year by a young American academic, John Weaver. It is a history of a movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation. It is a very detailed account. One is in fact overwhelmed by the information and left fairly confused about the interrelationships of groups and people that are connected in various ways across this NAR network. To try and put the argument of the book into a few words, I would say that the author claims there is in America, and to some extent in the UK, a distinctive but loose confederation of NAR churches and ministers, hitherto below the radar of academic scrutiny. These NAR individuals, institutions and congregations have similar views about the nature and future of the church. The network can be identified by a common dedication to a charismatic style of teaching, preaching and worship. The word Apostolic in the title betrays another feature of this huge international network. All those who belong are united in an acceptance of being under the leadership of ‘Apostles’. These Apostles are charismatic leaders who are regarded as having a special ministry which gives them authority over dozens, even hundreds of congregations. The authority that such Apostles possess, transcends denominations and, it is claimed, comes from a divine call and the recognition by many Christians of their charismatic standing.

The Reformation part of the title for this neo-Pentecostal grouping, comes from the common understanding within the network that all Christians are called to be involved in a revolution. The task before them is to conquer nations and society for God. The rhetoric of NAR followers is one of battle, conflict and struggle. This war is to be waged against satanic and demonic forces that are arrayed against God’s people and his church. One particular feature of the movement is the idea of spiritual mapping. This strange idea, which I have encountered from time to time, suggests that particular places, even countries, have evil spirits which have control over them. The task of a Christian is to confront such spirits with the power of intercessory prayer. I once went to give a talk on spiritual deliverance to a Bible college in Gloucester and I was puzzled to meet a woman who was doing a year’s dissertation on the spirits that were oppressing the city of Gloucester. I was not able to get any detail about what precisely she was doing, but no doubt she was actively engaged in researching local history to see if there were any hotspots of evil activity in the city. Her task was to draw up a map of the city which would identify areas of particular concern. No doubt then she and others in the college would go down to those areas and pray the oppressive spirits out of existence.

While it is impossible to present any more of the detail in this remarkable book, I can share with my blog readers one particular section which fills me with a special horror. This was the section which reviewed the ideas of one C Peter Wagner, one of the Apostolic founders and gurus of the movement. He wrote an influential book in 2002 containing his ideas called Churchquake. In it he discusses what he thinks of ministerial training. Although Wagner had received himself a very thorough education in theology at the Fuller Seminary, he expresses the desire to simplify the training of the ministers and pastors of the church to having technical competence in the main principles of NAR. The job of ministry has become something very practical in nature. He is more concerned that students focus on the doing side of ministry rather than the theoretical study of scripture and theology. He wants power evangelism, exorcism and spiritual warfare to be taught in preference to the detailed study of scripture, history and theology. He is contemptuous of traditional theological training. Certainly from reading this approach he would not want any student to be allowed to have a mind or opinion of their own. In thinking about Wagner’s model, one is reminded of the warriors in a Lord of the Rings film, the Orcs. Spiritual warriors are needed. In one case for the cause of God but in the other to do the will of Lord Sauron. It is important in both cases that these warriors act together and never deviate from the prescribed text or opinion. Another way of describing this model is to see ministry and church life as a kind of franchise for a particular style of church life. Training would not be the same as study; rather it would be the practice of particular techniques connected with evangelical/charismatic rhetoric and technique.

John Weaver points out very fairly that it is completely unsatisfactory if a first generation in a religious movement deprive the second-generation of followers of the same formation and education that they received. The task of leadership, management of change and developing ideas is not best conducted by people who have only learnt one trick, like a chef who only has one dish on his menu. It goes without saying that if you spend decades following one particular rhetorical style and spiritual technique, it will eventually become stale and wearisome. I have often complained about the repetition that is involved in so-called gospel preaching. Not only will congregations become bored through hearing the same sermons over and over again, but the same thing will happen to the preacher. The provision of a good theological education for anyone who takes up the task of teaching and preaching in a congregation is important, not only for the congregation, but also for the minister concerned. If one has studied various traditions within Christianity, then it will not be necessary to present the faith only in one cultural form. Speaking personally, I have been very grateful for my own studies in the Orthodox tradition. Having experienced the Christian faith in a Greek speaking context has given me quite a different take on how to understand the Christian faith. I have, in consequence, become a far more visual person and I constantly use verbal pictures in my preaching. This also means that I am extremely critical of any verbal formula that verges on cliché.

John Weaver thus strongly criticises this emphasis on praxis rather than theory in ministerial training. He foresees how the church run in this way will never be able to change and develop. Christian ministers, who are at best clones of their teachers, will never be able to overtake and develop what they have received. If the second-generation of New Apostolic Reformation leaders cannot bring anything new into the tradition, then it follows that the third and subsequent generations will be even more impoverished. Lack of theology, lack of understanding of the skills of secular knowledge will create a ministry that is isolated by its own ignorance and inability to understand the wider culture. The Church is already involved in a crisis of communication with the public opinion when it speaks the language of reaction and yesterday’s morality. How much worse this would be if the church was seen to be openly endorsing the values of ignorance and obscurantism? The educated section of our population may not be the only group which is worth evangelising, but to invite contempt and ridicule from this section would be to expel the church into an intellectual and cultural dark age from which it might never recover.

This blog, survivingchurch, is passionate about the Christian faith being credible and able to commend itself to people of all backgrounds and educations. For the church to retreat into the shadows of obscurantism and ignorance by deliberately withholding a decent education from its ministers would be a path of destruction for the church. C Peter Wagner and his New Apostolic Reformation must be resisted for the sake of the long-term survival of our Church. The Church and its message must always be able to commend itself to people of all kinds, including those of culture, education and sophistication.

In my last blog post I referred to the division that exists between so-called critical ‘cult watchers’ and people in academia who want to describe controversial religious groups with the neutral title of ‘New Religious Movements’. I have been reading further on this subject to discover how it happens that intelligent people who investigate a group or church can come to such different conclusions as to what they find. I suggested in my previous post that it was as the result of the nature of the particular academic discipline in which the researcher has been trained. Sociologists and social psychologists will see quite different things from psychotherapists and psychologists. That observation, I believe, remains true. But there are further reasons for differences among researchers and students of religious groups when they investigate an abusive organisation.

I want us to imagine the task of researching the true nature of a large organisation, whether a church or a firm. How do you find out what is really going on in such an institution? Do you go to the very top and question the managing director or the minister in charge and ask them to tell you the true story of the dynamics of that institution? Most people can see that the only thing that you would learn from this approach would be the perspective of the person in charge. This may or may not be an accurate one. The same thing would happen if you meet up with the officers or members of a governing board. Whoever you spoke to in that group, at whatever level, would be anxious to put on a good defence of the institution. It is likely that whatever was told to you as an outsider would, up to a point, be biased and not totally reliable information. Anyone who belongs to a church or another organisation will normally be defensive in their support of the image and reputation of the group. If they are being paid by the group, then their very livelihood depends on the need for people on the outside not uncovering any skeletons. If their membership is voluntary, they still have an emotional reason for belonging to the group. This has created a loyalty, a loyalty not necessarily compatible with totally objective and clear-sighted truth.

From what I have said, it will always be difficult and often impossible to find out the inner dynamics of an organisation by just speaking with its members and its leaders. Whatever discontent an individual may feel, he or she, while they are still part of the organisation, is never likely to open up to a stranger. The same thing applies in a family situation. As long as the family is physically together in the same place, it is difficult to see how any member will find it easy to express unhappiness even in a situation of violence and emotional abuse. It is only when a child or mother escapes out of the situation that the catalogue of horrors can normally begin to be uncovered. The task of extracting the truth from an abused mother or child still within a family setting is one of great complexity and requires considerable skill. Somehow the barriers created by loyalty and tribal identity have to be penetrated and overcome so that truth can be told.

The great debate among cult apologists and cult watchers, as we shall call them, is over the question as to whether the testimony of leavers can ever be trusted. I have already suggested that cult apologists are an unreliable group of witnesses to tell the truth about a high-demand group. There are many well-attested allegations that in some cases such scholars have taken money from the very people they study. But a further cause for concern is that one of the main contentions of ‘cult-apologists’ is that testimony from ex-members must be disregarded and ignored. It fails the test of academic objectivity. Common sense, on the other hand, suggests that the evidence of a mother who has fled to a refuge should always be taken into account when deciding on the guilt of a violent husband. The same principle would seem to apply when trying to evaluate a particular group or abusive church. Speaking merely to existing members would be unlikely to penetrate any possible collusion on the part of those who are still in the group. Of course there are many groups that operate without any guilty secrets or abuses of power in their current practice or history. But when there are serious complaints by former members it should be possible to evaluate these and to see whether there is a case to answer. At present we are in the middle of various investigations connected with the sexual abuse of children in churches, homes and other institutions. Some of these claims have been shown to be false. But even when one false claim is found this should not stop investigators believing that it is normally possible to evaluate witness statements and get to the truth. It takes the application of common sense together with a skill, not compromised by credulity on one hand, or weighed down by cynicism on the other. It must be possible to find individuals who have these skills. Not everyone can be said to have a vested interest in either finding abuse everywhere or always denying that it exists.

The refusal of the cult apologists to engage with ex-members, because their perspective will be biased, seems to fly in the face of common sense. Are we to refuse to speak to victims of sex abuse in case their evidence may be confused and muddled? It is a position which to me completely lacks integrity. This observation has made me far less likely to read those authors who approach the whole subject of cults and extreme religious groups in a way that wants to deny the reality of pain, emotional devastation and long-term post-traumatic stress. They do not speak to the victims so they do not acknowledge what they suffer. The Langlois report in this respect possesses enormous value because of the way that it presents clearly the evidence of ex-members. Church officials at Trinity Brentwood were given every opportunity to respond to all these allegations but they never availed themselves of that opportunity. If the present generation of cult apologists had been given the same opportunity to study Peniel/Trinity Church, we would probably have a laundered anodyne account of all the wonderful things that the church had done – i.e. an account of the way that the church and its leaders understand themselves. What we in fact have from John Langlois is a presentation of many normally excluded testimonies but which have all passed through a strict forensic process. As a lawyer John was able to see that the testimonies of those who had left were coherent, consistent and highly credible. His report, in other words, gives the lie to the position that it is not possible to listen to the evidence of survivors and ex-members of an abusive group or cult. It is, to repeat, impossible to see how any organisation can be studied only by listening to the official line of leaders and members. They obviously will always have a vested interest in presenting the best possible perspective on their particular group.

The Child Abuse Enquiry in the UK thankfully has not been given to academic sociologists and social psychologists trained in the academic cult apologist style. It has been given to lawyers and judges who will listen to anyone and everyone who has something to say. Then they will assess the truth on the balance of probability and it is the skill that lawyers have for ferreting out the truth. Although mistakes have been made, I for one will always have a degree of confidence in the legal processes to find truth. I certainly prefer their methods to the methods of academics who refuse, on spurious grounds of objectivity, to listen to every source of information from wherever it comes.

Although the Dallas conference ended a month ago, I am still finding myself interacting with members of the Conference through an on-line discussion group. The particular discussion I am linking up to is one that is trying to find a possible new name for the organisation known as ICSA. The discussion is relevant to this blog but to explain the background I need to go back a stage and explain a little of the politics of ‘cultic studies’.

The arrival of cults and high-demand groups in Britain and the USA is a relatively recent phenomenon. It could be claimed that most of the religious and political groups that we describe as cults only appeared at the beginning of the 70s. In some ways many of these so-called cults were an outgrowth of the hippie movement of the 1960s. The use of drugs in the 60s by these alternative groups in many places turned into a search for spirituality. The Beatles with their pilgrimage to India to experiment with meditation typified this new social movement which was sweeping through Western nations. Many people followed the Beatles in their search. It is not hard to see how there would have been leaders of small groups who would be ready to take advantage of impressionable and idealistic young people who were looking for enlightenment. The cultic movement is then a phenomenon based on idealism and desire for spirituality but which in many places descended into exploitation and excess.

The political issue that arose in the early days concerned the question as to how these groups were to be studied. One group within academia, mainly sociologists and religious studies experts, wanted to see the phenomenon of cults described in strictly neutral terms. These communities were to described as new religious movements. As such no judgements about the ethics and behaviour within the groups were to be made. They were to be described and accounted for in the language of neutral scientific investigation. Another group, consisting of concerned psychologists and therapists, started to discover that former members of these groups had been damaged with what we would now call ‘post-traumatic stress’. The word ‘cult’ was used as a convenient shorthand to describe these groups because they were seen to be creating actual psychological harm. Such harmful groups are also to be found among the Christian churches, the ones that are described here as charismatic and conservative. The ‘neutral’ sociologists meanwhile were able to suggest that the harm experienced by followers was not widespread. Anyway, it was claimed, these young people were adults and able to take care of themselves. Any attempt to assist the departure of an individual from a so-called cult would be to deny their legal and human rights. They had made an adult choice to be in the group in the first place.

This debate between academics has become quite a difficult problem. There is this constant tension between those who believe that there are many religious and political groups which cause actual harm and they are set against those who want to downplay the problem. A further issue is that there are accusations of foul play on the part of ‘cult-watchers’ who claim that the neutral academic sociologists sometimes take money from the groups they study. Money is said to be given by groups like the Moonies so that friendly academics will support them and speak of them favourably in legal cases and generally in the world of academia. These ‘friendly’ academics are also thought to carry weight with governments and other important agencies. In the UK, in spite of many stories in the press describing the baneful effects of cults, the neutral sounding experts on ‘new religious movements’ hold the high ground in academic university circles. Their work, not the work of the groups who work with families and victims of cults, are the ones who receive money from government funds. The resources available for those who want to help victims of extreme religious groups is, in this country, pitiful in the extreme.

The organisation whose conference I attended in Dallas this year has the acronym ICSA, which stands for International Cultic Studies Association. The attendees from Britain numbered only six. A larger number from the UK attend when the conferences are held in Europe as they are in alternate years. ICSA promotes study of cultic issues but it also gives a lot of time to providing a network of support to victims of all the different groups. Possibly two thirds of its energy is expended in this important work of victim support. Nothing exists in Britain on anything like this scale, even allowing for the enormous disparity of populations between our countries. But, in spite of the much greater awareness of the importance of helping victims of extreme religious groups, the same debates rage here about the academic validity of the word ‘cult’ or whether these groups should ever be called by this name. The very word offends those academics who prefer the neutral, less judgmental expression ‘new religious movements.’ ICSA, because much of its work is directed towards helping victims as well as studying the issues, is regarded by these academics as an ‘anti-cult’ movement. It is hard, I believe, to be anything else when you encounter the raw suffering of those who have been the mill of belonging to a high demand group. Nevertheless, the organisation wants to retain its place at the table of respected academic research. It already publishes serious material in this area which it hopes will influence public debate and political policy around the world. It sponsors two journals, one popular and the other peer-reviewed and academic in tone. The annual conferences attract participants from around the world and this year 100 pre-approved papers were presented at Dallas.

ICSA is looking for a new name so that it does not use the contentious word ‘cultic’ in its title. The online discussion, in which I have taken part, has come up with lots of ideas. Some want to continue to use the same acronym while others have tried to produce a title which better sums up what is going on in the organisation. It is interesting to note the words that have come up most often in the discussion. One is control, while coercion and abuse have also appeared. I wrote a contribution suggesting that control and abuse were two words that summed up the harm done by extreme religious groups (including the Christian ones!). I offered the thought that the word abuse described well the emotional suffering that many victims suffer, while control could be held to refer to the intellectual scrambling that takes place when people experience cultic ‘thought-reform’. Having pointed out the two directions from which people have their integrity assaulted by such groups, I realise once again how difficult it is to recover quickly when someone has been a member of a group with extreme ideas. When for example, people are held in an emotional thrall to a leader, and have their thinking process corrupted by an irrational doctrinal structure of belief, returning to normality will be a lengthy process. In this blog some of the comments made in response to my attempts to look calmly at the meanings of Scripture make me realise that there are many people who cannot or will not listen to a way of reading the Bible which is different from the one they were taught. According to the ‘orthodoxy’ taught by thousands of churches across the world, we are required to believe in a God who speaks directly through each word. If this were the case, then the protestant discovery of ‘sola Scriptura’ would have resulted in a single understanding of the way that message is to be received by all Christians everywhere. But as we all know, this is not the case. Every teacher of an infallible Scripture has his own take on what this doctrine in fact means. The more dedicated a preacher is to proclaiming the authority of God’s Word, the more that the same preacher seems to condemn everyone else who does not agree with his personal interpretation. How many times have I heard the message – God speaks infallibly in the words of Scripture and this church is the ONLY one where you hear what this really means? When this message is given and people collude with it, I see it as a clear example of conceit and intellectual abuse of the worst kind.

The debate within ICSA will continue and I will let my blog readers know if we reach a consensus over our name. Meanwhile I am proud to be part of an organisation that takes seriously the task of serious study of extreme religious and political groups, while caring passionately for the many victims that these groups create all around the world. I am coming to see clearly how profound can be the damage done to the innocent victims of narcissistic Christian leaders, not to mention all the other wacky dysfunctional religious and political groups that are so common in our modern world.