The paper on ostracism I am proposing to give in a couple of weeks time is more or less completed. I thought my readers would not mind, at the risk of repetition, if I share some more of the insights I have gleaned from my reading. In my linking of ostracism, as newly defined by the social psychologists, to the cults and churches, I appear to treading a fairly new path. We have of course long known that the silent treatment has been freely dispensed by some churches to their ex-members. All kinds of passages from the New Testament have been milked to ‘prove’ that Christians in good standing in a congregation should not associate with former or non-members in any way. I am not going to examine these except to note that an obsession with purity and separateness does not seem to justify in any way the attempt to treat former members with what can be, in effect, pathological cruelty.

Social psychology has examined the concept of ostracism in great depth in the past 20 years and has attempted to show how another person confronting silence or studied ignoring is affected. The writer of a key book on the topic, Kipling Williams, set up various experiments to test his theories as to what happens to people when they are deliberately ignored. These simulated stagings of ostracism were of a relatively trivial nature. They involved, for example, getting people to play a game, passing a ball to one another, and then deliberately leaving someone out. Another experiment involved the use of the internet where a conversation within an online community consistently ignored a contribution coming from a particular individual. More serious examples of ostracism are reported, such as a cadet in a military academy being given the silent treatment over a number of years or marriages where one party refuses to speak to the other. It is out of these scenarios, experimental and anecdotal, that Williams creates his model for ostracism. It is this model that is at the heart of my paper. It is also one that fits poignantly with the experience of those who have been expelled from their Christian or cultic group.

Ostracism, according to Williams’ model, has as its intention the undermining of four fundamental human needs. Each of these needs contributes significantly to human flourishing. Because they are actually things everyone requires to function successfully as human beings, the attempt to destroy them can create massive unhappiness. This unhappiness can be so great that a person under this kind of attack might be tempted to surrender to despair or even suicide.

Williams’ four needs that are attacked by ostracism are a) belonging b) self esteem c) control and d) meaningful existence. In regard to the first, which is perhaps the most important, the ostracised person will feel rootless and ignored if all his/her belonging is taken away. Of course, we might think, such a person will immediately attempt to establish contact with other groups and find new ways of belonging. But the irony of this is that the group doing the ostracising had typically taught the individual that he/she was to cut off all contact with family and friends who do not belong to the group. Having made the individual totally dependent on the cultic group for their belonging needs, the same person is then ruthlessly cast away.

Self-esteem is the next need to be under attack. The silent treatment will have the effect of undermining an individual’s confidence and encourage him/her to think of themselves as being permanently in the wrong. Over a period the inner sense of self-value will plummet and the individual will lose all his/her confidence and morale.

The loss of control will happen, once again, because a silence, which is never-ending, will leave one with a sense that the barriers that exist with the ostracising group cannot be negotiated with or overcome. The individual will be left in deep sense of uncertainty, living in a kind of profound enveloping mist.

Finally the deliberate isolating of the former member by the group will be effectively a kind of social death. According to another sub- branch of social psychology, known as terror management theory, people need each other to fend off their fears of death. Without good human contact which gives a sense of meaning and a way of warding off primeval fear, people can easily sink into an abyss of heightened despair because they are being faced with their extinction.

In this abbreviation of a lot of material, it can be seen that ostracism, in whatever setting it is practised, can be a terrible weapon of coercion and terror. Without a word being spoken or rather because no word is spoken, terrible injury can be caused to people. As I stated in a previous blog post, the weapon is also terrifying as a threat. The person contemplating the possibility of being shunned or ostracised will live with this fear all the time. It is no hard thing to be controlled with this kind of threat hanging over you. In churches and cults that use this weapon, when in fact or as a threat, there will often a pathetic gratitude to the leader that they are still in ‘good standing’. The conditioning process works so well that the individual does not usually realise that they are living in a state of permanent fear. They have managed successfully to suppress the terror of possibly losing friends, family and everything that the cultic community offers to them. They have also managed to be unaware that they are being day by day controlled by an individual, who is their guru or leader. The fear of entering the hell of ostracism has effectively stopped them from a full awareness this control. It has also prevented them from growing up and maturing as either a human being or as a Christian.

I think I have said enough to communicate my profound horror at the existence of the weapon of ostracism being used or threatened within religious communities, especially Christian ones. What we are left with is the right of people to disagree with one another. We must celebrate, not conformity and mass opinions, but difference and disagreement. People must be allowed to argue and have different opinions without being made to feel any threat coming from those who think differently. Within my own Anglican church, the rhetoric has been sometimes upped to the point that those who do not agree with conservative ‘orthodox’ opinion feel that they may one day be expelled. The GAFCON/Reform group claims to speak for the mainstream Anglican position just as ISIS claims to be the proper voice of Islam. Neither claim is of course valid. Debate, discussion and disagreement must be allowed to flourish and this blog will always support this privilege to hold different versions of truth within one church communion. Dignity in Difference is the title of a book that appeared five years ago. That is what I seek and will fight for. Anything else would be a surrender to the tyranny of an abusive monochrome form of power which has no place in a Christian church.

In the account of Sally’s contact with the Pastor and his wife over the issue of her husband’s verbal abuse, http://survivingchurch.org/2015/02/14/sallys-story-part-3/ I recounted how ineptly the two dealt with her on a pastoral level. Two principles guided everything they had to offer. The first was the likelihood that there was some demonic influence at work in the situation of her marriage. This was suggested partly by the fact that Sally was of Latino appearance, opening her, no doubt, to demons that specialised in people of a non-white heritage. The second principle was the assumption that every problem in a Christian partnership can be solved if the woman simply submits to the man. That is her God-given role.

The recording of Sally’s treatment on this blog has helped her to have a clearer understanding of the poor pastoral practice and even weaker grasp of theology shown to her by the Pastor and his wife. I had hoped that she would not be going to see them again. In this I was wrong. Her husband, Tod, still continued at their church and so when things turned unpleasant again in their relationship, he looked to the pastors for immediate support.

I am going to continue Sally’s story using her words as far as possible. What I find striking is the way that this blog has helped give her a new confidence to stick up for herself. The reader will also find instructive, once again, the appalling level of pastoral skill shown by Pastor John and his wife Cat towards Sally. If this is the level of loving care that is being handed out by any professional pastor, then we have a lot to be concerned about.

Sally speaks: ‘In the earlier email that I sent I stated that my husband had not been physically abusive toward me. This all changed the Friday after I sent the email. We had a fight and my husband raised his hand to me in front of my two small children.

What was to happen now? My father and mother both came over to see me the next day and I told them both in detail what had happened. My mother then spoke to Tod but his story had now changed and this time he started to talk about how I had provoked him. He also told my mother that he spent most of the morning talking to Pastor John. She asked him: ‘Did you tell him what you had done?’ He had admitted to Pastor John what he had done and my mother immediately commented on the fact that it was strange that a caring Pastor seemed to show no interest in what Sally was going through after the assault.

A few months have gone by with a continuation of the fighting but without the physical violence. Sally feels the unhappiness of the situation in the pit of her stomach. She wants to forgive her husband but also to hear some expression of remorse on his part. Although she stopped attending church after the disastrous events recorded Sally’s story part 3, she still felt that someone from the church could easily have checked up on her to see how she was. Eventually she decided to contact the pastors to ask for a meeting. She also wanted to hear from them how their previous advice was thought to be in any way helpful to the task of dealing with an abusive husband.

Before going back to the scene of her former pastoral abuse, Sally decided to ask for the Spirit to lead the meeting. Once she arrived she began by telling the Pastor’s wife, Cat, how hurt she was at being called a liar at the previous meeting.

Once again in Sally’s words: ‘She started again talking about the SPIRIT of Rebellion I have. Then something happened. I was energized and stopped her mid sentence and said “excuse me, what evidence do you have about what you are saying? Where is your proof? What in my behaviour reveals this ‘spirit’ to you??’

After I went off to check up on my small children, I came back and Pastor John was very quiet and sweet again. He claimed not to be favouring my husband even though he had clearly chosen not believe my version of events.’

A final comment from Sally: ‘ I left feeling like I had been in 10 rounds with Mike Tyson and full of strength. Never had I stood up to authority this way. As it stands there is not one single accusation against me they were both given opportunity to state their ‘defense’ and both cracked. There was nothing!!

God is good.

The situation is not resolved and indeed remains critical. But we do see in this story an example of an individual reclaiming their power which two church leaders were trying to wrest from her. Perhaps our blog can claim a little of the credit for helping Sally to find her voice and stick up for honesty, truth and courage.

In three weeks time I am due to give a paper at a conference in Stockholm on the topic of ostracism or shunning and its use by some religious bodies. It is a topic that interests me and is closely connected to the overall topic of this blog. In my thinking about the harm that Churches and cultic groups sometimes do to their members, I have also become aware of the power of the threat to exclude a member if he or she does not toe the line and follow the leaders. Such a threat is a powerful means of control. Every member knows that to leave the group whether voluntarily or through expulsion may be followed by the horrors of being ostracised forever. Actions taken against a departing member can be vicious and of the upmost cruelty. It is no exaggeration to describe them sometimes as attempted spiritual murder.

In many high-demand religious groups, both those in the church and outside, members have to sign a contract. It may not be a literal written contract, like the absurd billion year contract of the Scientologists, but it still makes serious demands on the membership. Each member is promised inclusion within whatever the group is, whether it be a cult or more mainstream religious body in return for financial and emotional commitment to the group. What does the member receive in return for his commitment? The advantages of being a member of whatever church or cultic group may include the following. First of all the member is promised emotional and spiritual support, instant friendships and whatever spiritual guidance that the group, in the person of the leader, has to give. The implicit promise is also that the formerly worrying issue of going to heaven or hell is now sorted. As long as the member is in good standing, he or she is guaranteed to be in a right relationship with God and thus able to claim a place of eternal bliss. But there are costs and these may be said to be fairly high. Among them there might be included the following:
• The church expects that each member will give ‘to God’ a tithe of their income. This money will be used to maintain the church building and pay whatever salaries that the leadership team requires.
• There are also requirements over what the member may or may not do. The member may not question the teaching or instructions of the leadership on any topic. It is assumed that he/she will fall in with any pronouncements that are made, including guidance on moral issues. The idea, for example, that there is more than one approach to the issue of gay marriage would be considered very alien in many Christian and cultic communities.
• In some churches there is a ‘purity’ teaching which strongly discourages members from mixing with others outside, even members of their own family. They will be referred to the passages from Matthew about ‘hating’ members of their own family in favour of following Jesus. Few Christian churches pursue this teaching to the lengths of the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Scientologists but there is still a strong sense of ‘us and them’ even in many Christian congregations.
• The person in the high-demand group will be unable to grow socially, spiritually or professionally beyond the bounds of the group. If the leader is, for example, lower middle class in education and cultural aspiration, then that limit will extend to every member of the group. Any desire, particularly among the young people of the group, to explore new forms of musical and artistic expression will be squashed and suppressed because it might show up the cultural poverty of the group. In many cultic groups, no young person is allowed to go to university in case they learn things which might challenge the claims of the leader to mediate truth of every kind to his flock.
The main benefit that we have identified in being a member of a closed group, whether Christian or otherwise, is that one is part of a intimate friendship circle which allows close emotional support. This is combined with an assurance about one’s ultimate fate in the place beyond the grave. Both things because they have been bought at a very high cost (see above) , will not be surrendered easily. To lose them is to lose almost everything one has worked and struggled to receive over years, even decades, within the particular religious institution.

The threat to expel individuals who do not conform to the will of the minister or religious leader of the group is a real one. Expulsion is sometimes chosen by the individual themselves in preference to continuing in the abusive or suffocating atmosphere that the church or group has become for them. But the costs of leaving will often be appallingly high. One’s social life is ripped apart as the human contacts, built up over a long time, have to be let go. Family members who remain in the group are sometimes no longer allowed to be in contact. If the social costs of leaving the closed group are extremely high, the spiritual aspect is just as devastating. Having lived within a group that promised salvation for so long, one now hears that they will henceforth be outside that salvation. The ostracism process, in summary, casts one out of contact with human beings that one has loved and with God. What more terrible fate could befall someone? The effect of disfellowshipping, disconnection or expulsion, or whatever it is called, is shattering. Coming through that experience without suffering deep depression and trauma is difficult to envisage. In some situations this experience will lead to the literal destruction of the individual through the act of suicide.

My blog is dedicated to the handful of people who have been through the full horror of spiritual murder through an act of ostracism by a cult or church but somehow have found their way to reading these words. I have not unfortunately, I am sorry to say, met many people who understand when I try to describe the horrors that are involved in the deceptively simple words, shun or expel. Ostracism, as my conference paper will emphasise, has, as its aim, the rendering of a person to become invisible or simply cease to exist. In my understanding, ostracism thus becomes a type of murder. Murder and ostracism have the same purpose, which is to eliminate another person. Can it ever be right for a Christian leader to suggest that all that is implied in shunning is an appropriate action for a follower of Jesus? Even when ostracism is not in fact practised but is kept as a threat to control the members of a group, it is still an obscene weapon and should be condemned as utterly unworthy of any human being, particularly one who claims to follow Jesus.

After writing something about the dynamic of marriages at Peniel under Michael Reid, I ordered the book written by Caroline Green, Call me evil, let me go. She was the individual who successfully escaped from Peniel in around 1997 and also obtained a financial settlement from the church a few years later. Harper Collins published her account of her trial and traumas but the edition published in this country has had all the names changed for legal reasons. But it is quite clear that all the events recorded in her book are describing Peniel in the 80s and 90s. There are many things to be noted from the book which appalled me, but one particular theme which hit home was the treatment of very young children at the church. It was in fact witnessing the beating of her children at the school that provided the motivation and stirred the will of Caroline finally to break free. With her four children, it was no easy matter starting a new life outside the cage that represented Peniel Church.

Before we discuss the medieval treatment of children which was the norm at Peniel in the past, (now thankfully deemed to be criminal even in private establishments), I want to draw attention to the way Caroline describes the extraordinary hold that Reid had over those under his power. Described in a detached way, we can glimpse some of his methods through her descriptions. They could be said to be a combining of terror and charm. While a teenager in the church, Caroline was subject to a concerted attack on her self-esteem by Reid and others. Her parents had sent her to be a boarder at the school because they felt that the discipline would be good for her. As part of his effort to ‘break her will’, Reid would stand her on a stage during a service and pray for her loudly so everyone present could hear. His loud prayer would include a reference to the casting out of a ‘rebellious spirit’ that was deemed to be responsible for some minor breaking of a rule. Humiliation and embarrassment were all part of the church’s attempt to bring her under its control. She was constantly threatened with hell. Reid would also tell her that this was where her parents were going because they were not part of his church. It would be better for her to forget them and focus on her new ‘family’. Eventually she was so used to accepting what MR was telling her to do, she allowed herself to enter an ‘arranged’ marriage at the early age of 18. The groom ‘Peter’ was the son of one of the founding members of Peniel and thus used to having his life organised for him. The relationship with Peter was initially successful but for Caroline, ideas of university or proper choice of career were not able to be pursued. Because her own parents had been marginalised by the church, they had little or no input into helping Caroline on the path into adulthood or really supporting her when marriage came along.

The marriage which as Caroline put it, was ‘micromanaged by Reid’ down to the choice of date and bridesmaids, was not at first unhappy. Tensions rose when it became clear that her husband, Peter was far more dedicated to serving the church than the family. In addition to his full-time work, he was always putting endless hours working in and around the church and school in a maintenance capacity. Being a second generation adult in Peniel, he also seemed not to have a mind of his own. Every time there was a problem between them, it seemed that the issue got straight back to Reid and those in charge. Marital privacy was not something that Peter expected or sought and Caroline felt that their marriage relationship was being scrutinised by large numbers of church members.

The part of the story that aroused a strong reaction in me was Caroline’s description of the toddler group attached to the church. Everyone who used it was expected to help out with its running and the care of the children. This ‘care’ was against the background of Reid’s ideas about how children should be reared. They needed to be ‘brought under control’ by the age of 2 and under ‘firm control’ by the age of five. This form of ‘love’ was expressed through regular chastisement. When toddlers refused their food in the nursery, they were to be force fed. This would be done by holding the nose of the child so that the mouth would open and food could be pushed in. When the babies spat out the food, they were then smacked on the hand to combat their ‘rebellion’. Sometimes the process of feeding the children would take as long as 40 minutes while the other children went out to play. Caroline admits that this smacking of children over food became so common that she became more and more desensitised to its occurrence. The principle at work was the Biblical idea that beating was in some way making them obedient Christian children. One particular child in the pre-school group was inconsolable after his mother dropped him off. The ‘teacher’ took him into the toilet and beat him on the behind to the point of bruising. This particular case was raised by Caroline with the Head. All that happened was that she was taken out of the pre-school and sent off to work on an allotment. But the school ‘philosophy’ about how children should be reared spilt over into Caroline’s own home. Peter, her husband, administered smacking on her own children from the age of nine months. When her parents came to visit, they noticed the bruises on the child’s behind and thought of reporting it to the police. Nothing was in fact done for fear of causing disruption to the family.

One of the main issues that caused Caroline to break free from Peniel was the violence meted out to her own children at the church school. Both older children started to suffer from stress related symptoms, headaches, stomach aches, bedwetting etc. To make things worse, the beatings at school were repeated at home, as Peter, her husband, was unable to see anything wrong with the treatment of his children by the school and felt the need to re-emphasise the punishment. Even Caroline found herself sometimes smacking her own children, as she could not completely overcome the power that Reid had over her and his constant refrain of the wickedness of children and the need to save them from hell.

Space does not permit me to recount the circumstances of her ‘escape’ from Peniel. She was prepared to continue her marriage but Peter’s conditioning was such that he chose Peniel rather than his family. In escaping, Caroline received help from a number of organisations, helping her both legally and practically. It was extremely costly emotionally and financially. The book of her adventures came out in 2011 but not without a threat of lawsuits etc which tried to prevent its publication. Only the American edition ascribes the book to her. The English edition calls her Sarah Jones.

There are many things that I could have drawn out of Caroline’s story but I have chosen one main theme, the mistreatment of children, because it is at the heart of her story. The violence meted out to children in the name of ‘godly’ discipline is a theme that resonates back over the centuries in Protestant households and the fact that we find practised right at the end of the 20th century is something that all Christians should feel thoroughly appalled at. But as a final encouraging thought, Caroline’s children, while none of them now practising Christians, have recovered from their stressful traumatising childhoods sufficiently to live good and useful lives in the community. All now hold down responsible jobs and, in spite of their early schooling, have all gone through higher education.

Religion and politics make unhappy bedfellows. There is a particular issue when extreme political views are wrapped up in innocent sounding ‘Christian’ slogans like family values. In this post I am focussing on three organisations in the States which are dedicated to the cause of fighting the so-called gay lobby right across the world. The first two were founded by the Christian psychologist, James Dobson. His ideas have been broadcast across the States and, through the power of the Right Wing lobby, have reached to many corners of the globe. These two organisations, now operating independently, are called Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council. Focus on the Family was founded back in 1977 and the Family Research Council was spun from the parent organisation in 1992.

Both organisations have as their aim to ‘equip concerned citizens to make a difference in politics and culture on behalf of life, marriage and the family’. This is a coded way of saying that they are a politically/religiously inspired lobby to fight against the gay cause perceived to be spreading its influence across the world. One spokesman from Focus on the Family (FOFT) has described homosexuality as ‘a particularly evil lie of Satan’, while another describes it as ‘Satan roaming the earth like a lion, using sexual and relational brokenness to destroy individuals, families, churches, groups and businesses’. The organisations attract to themselves massive funds and are active in Christian radio broadcasting throughout the world.

The Family Research Council (FRC) is an active lobbying group in Washington with a revenue of around $14 million. In 2010 the US Congress denounced Uganda’s proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill and this was actively lobbied against by the FRC. Also in 2012 when Hillary Clinton declared that ‘gay rights are human rights’, this was fiercely attacked. FRC is responsible for producing a lot of pamphlets and material that suggest that homosexuals are likely to molest children. They also openly attack the attempts to address the bullying of LGBTQ individual in schools.

Another organisation based in the States, but with a world-wide ambition to attack the gay lobby, is the so-called World Congress of Families (WCF). WCF describes itself as a ‘rallying centre for the world’s family systems grounded in religious faith’. Financially supported by FOFT, it holds vast international conferences around the world to support its cause. Leaders of the American Christian Right are given prominence at these Congresses and no doubt they have a political impact beyond the particular battle against the perceived enemies of Christian moral obsessions. One particular individual mentioned as currently active in the political/religious struggle on the gay issue is the American, Sharon Slater. She urged delegates at a conference in Nigeria in 2011 to resist the UN pressure to decriminalise homosexuality. They risked losing their religious and parental rights by endorsing ‘fictitious sexual rights’ for those in same sex relationships. On other occasions she has compared homosexuality to ‘incest, sexual abuse, and rape ….drug dealing, assaults and other crimes’. These words are perhaps mild compared with the words of one Scott Lively, an American evangelist, who told an audience in Uganda in 2009 that legalising homosexuality could be linked to accepting ‘molestation of children or having sex with animals.’

In recording material about these organisations, I am not, contrary to appearances, wanting to establish a firmly held position on the issue of acceptance or non-acceptance of gays in the church. I do, in fact, have a liberal position on the issue but that can be left to one side for the moment. What I am concerned about are the examples of what I refer to as institutional abuse or bullying by ‘Christian’ organisations. These groups and others like them are exerting pressure across the world in the name of Christianity and are undermining and subverting, with all the power that money and influence can give them, the human rights of those who think differently. It is a battle being fought between and within institutions. When the methods used are unfair or underhand, one wants to cry foul! Two of the claims made right wing anti-gay groups speaking in Africa are simply wrong from all available research. It is not true that gay men are a threat to children. It is also not true that psychology or reparative therapy offers a way forward for gay men and women who wish to ‘escape’ their situation. Such false ideas uttered by ‘Christians’ do not do the faith any credit. This battle between ‘liberals’ and conservatives on this issue is being waged all over the Christian world, not least in my own Anglican Communion. It is the conservatives that have chosen this issue to create their position of power, by being totally inflexible on the morality of same-sex attraction. For myself, possibly many of those who read this blog, it is not a first order matter. And yet, because I do not agree with either their teaching on the status of gays or their use of science and the Bible, I am considered an enemy of ‘true Christianity’. In short, Christians are abusing and bullying other Christians, using tactics that are false and coercive. That has to be wrong – very wrong.

To repeat my main point – the battle that is being waged by groups such as GAFCON, FOFT and WCF against those who disagree with them, is not ultimately about the issue of gays. It is a battle about whether an authoritative vision of Christianity should prevail over one that stresses freedom, human rights and the exploration of truth over fixed dogma. This battle, if I can use such a strong metaphor, has to be spoken and described by those who recognise its importance. Otherwise Christianity across the world, will, in a generation or two, become the authoritarian monster that the Christian Right believe is the will of God for the world. Just as ISIS has achieved in a decade a massive amount of influence within the Muslim world, so Right Wing Christianity wishes to impose its strong patriarchal Old Testament version of the faith on all Christians. The battle for the soul of the Southern Baptist Convention in the States was lost to the fundamentalist reactionary forces of the Right in the 90s. Similar battles await many denominations over the next twenty or thirty years. I for one, will normally support the liberal cause, not because I necessarily agree with it at every point, but because I know that they will be standing up to those who want to control my denomination in the name of an authoritarian and punitive God. This understanding of God is not one that I warm to or even recognise.

The recent news from Ireland is to be welcomed. Reaction has not won!

After actually getting ahead of myself, with two posts already written for this blog, I then had an idea based on something sung by the choir yesterday for Pentecost Sunday. The anthem was an invocation to the Holy Spirit, beginning with the words ‘Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:’ The anthem includes these words: ‘Such a truth as ends all strife.’ After writing about strife, coercion and struggle for over 18 months, I know that there is a very good case to be made for saying that when ‘truth’ is pursued, it is a major cause of strife. Churches all over the world proclaim the truth of their dogma, their teaching and their traditions. These teachings are then often compared with those of other churches, and it is declared, sometimes aggressively, that the theology and truth held by these other bodies is dangerously in error. Conflict is aroused, even wars are fought over the question as to who, in fact, possesses truth. Such use of violence to promote a version of truth is supposed to show devotion, not only to this truth, but also to the God who is its author. A thinking along such lines is evidently going through the minds of the Isis fighters. ‘We have the truth and others must be compelled to accept it, even if we have to kill them to achieve this.’

When a Christian or anyone else believes that they have the truth and must fight to protect and preserve it, it can be said that they do not have it. What they have may or may not have some approximation to the ‘Truth’ but it certainly can never be identified completely with the real thing. Why do I say this with such confidence? It is because that when we give a moment’s thought as to what God’s truth might look like, we know that it will have a perfection and a compelling quality about it which none of us can really imagine. It is a kind of blasphemy to attempt to associate it with violence or any kind of compulsion. Truth like that will need no defence from others – it will be its own testimony. We can safely assert that the ‘truth as ends all strife’ is not likely to be in the complete possession of anyone. It is a truth that we can move towards and glimpse rather than ever possess. The truth that is the gift of the Holy Spirit will include many other facets- love, forgiveness, compassion and peace, all in abundance. It cannot lack these same qualities that we want to ascribe to God. The logical conclusion that we can make from referring to this kind of truth, is that all the truths we have are, at best, partial incomplete manifestations of this Spirit truth, or, at worse, distortions of it.

As I went on to reflect about the meaning of truth and the way we try to defend and contest for our partial versions of it, I realised that there is another word we use which, like truth, needs no defence. That word is goodness. Both truth and goodness, when they are fully realised, will never take refuge in violence; they will always reach out with loving compassion and understanding to places and people where they are absent. ‘Overcome evil with good’, said Paul. How we actually do that in practice raises many problems. I am not suggesting for a moment that Paul’s injunction is an easy one to follow but at least we can see that he is right, even if we don’t know how to put what he says into practice every time.

Our blog has encountered many situations where a individual or group seeks to impose a version of ‘truth’ on another, using coercion and force. Our Pentecost motet about the Holy Spirit suggests that their understanding of truth is simply wrong because Spirit or divine truth never has to defend or promote itself in this way. This truth that is being referred to is one that we are, at best, moving towards or aiming at. The truth of God himself can never be possessed . If Christians were ever to be able to agree that none of us in fact possesses God’s truth, then ecumenism could begin to be reborn. This would say, in so many words, that each Christian tradition has glimpsed something of God in their time and context. To use another image, Christians within different traditions have all been given different pieces of vast complex jigsaw puzzle. Many of the pieces have been revealed but there are perhaps still more to be found in the future. A general acceptance of this idea of the incompleteness of ‘truth’ would help to take away the antagonism and the hostility that exists among and between Christians, just as it also exists within Islam.

If all Christians were truly to believe in a truth that ‘ends all strife’, then we could start to see a healing of all the centuries old divisions that exist at present. One particular quality that has to be reborn, and which is in short supply at present, is the gift of humility. One Christian would need to say to another. Our traditions are different from one another but you have something to teach me. Learning from another Christian is one way to remove the arrogance and superiority about others that corrupts many Christian bodies. To strip away the centuries of caricatures directed towards other groups and focus on the actual experiences that have brought Christian bodies closer to God, would indeed be a revolution. The sad reality is that many Christian groups are defined, not by their fresh understandings of God, but through a polemical stand that was taken by a founder, decades or centuries before. The word ‘Protestant’ has this double meaning, one good and one bad. The good meaning of ‘protest’ is the proclamation of a new insight or discovery of the Christian gospel. The bad meaning is the targeting of other Christian bodies which are opposed for reasons that have nothing to do with God, but are perhaps social, personal or political.

A Pentecost prayer: Faithful God ….by sending to us your Holy Spirit and opening to every race and nation the way of life eternal: open our lips by your Spirit, that every tongue may tell of your glory.

Recent information, shared on the Victims of Michael Reid website, reveals the fact that marriages at Peniel/Trinity Brentwood were often in the past arranged by the then leader, Michael Reid and his late wife, Ruth. According to the comments on the blog, single women were urged to consider only men who were members of the church or they should remain single. Looking beyond the community for a partner was not tolerated. Another blog post by someone, evidently ‘in the know’, has set out a long list of all the leaders and trustees, showing how they are mostly connected by marriage to each other or through the marriages of their children. Even though the memory of Michael Reid, the former discredited leader, is something that many current members would want to forget, it seems that his relatives still loom large in the blood lines of the current membership. David Coleman, Dan Van Enkevort and Mark and Melvyn Cooper (all current trustees) are all related by marriage to Michael Reid. Colin Clemison , Jonathan Cope ( both in the leadership team) and John Shelton (trustee) are linked to Peter Linnecar, the current pastor, also through ties of marriage. No doubt if the children of these marriages stay in the church then the church will become literally one big family where everyone is related to everyone else by blood.

I record these links within the church because ties of this kind will naturally create massive distortions in the dynamics of the life of a congregation. How does one join a church when the leading members have not only been there for most of their lives, but are also linked to one another by blood and marriage? The privileged core members will not easily surrender their position of power and influence to new ideas and people. Perhaps when we consider how much has been sacrificed by these individuals to attain their positions of status within the organisation, we can sympathise with their resistance to any kind of sharing of their power with newcomers.

The members of Trinity Brentwood that I have named above, along with many others, have handed over almost everything they have to be part of a fantasy created by the arch-magician and weaver of dreams known as Michael Reid. In order to access what he seemed to be offering, namely security, protection, access to financial and social status, the individuals signed up willingly to Michael’s promises. After thirty years of convincing themselves that they are indeed living in the dream, they have now probably lost the ability to know whether they have found what they sought or not. Having allowed themselves and their families to become immersed totally in the organisation through their marriages and close friendships, they are unlikely to have an objective perspective on the church. The experience of never having attended another church for most or all of their lives will mean that they have nothing to compare it with in their minds. They will take it for granted, for example, that their church is disliked intensely by the community around it and is constantly fighting lawsuits against ex-members and an ex-leader. That has been the norm for church life at Trinity Brentwood for a long time. The members know nothing else. I am sure that the appointment of a Commission to investigate past wrongs is also shrugged off as just one more example of the way things are at the church. For those of us on the outside looking in, we see people who have given up a great deal for their membership, including the ability to think for themselves. An even greater sacrifice that has been made is the surrender of any possibility of growth and change in their personalities. When someone joins a cult the process of psychological growth towards maturity is put on hold the moment they walk through the door. The only change that actually happens is a gradual shaping of their personalities to fit in with the cult personality as defined by the leader. I do not know personally any of the people I have mentioned above, or indeed any member of Trinity Brentwood. But to judge from my knowledge of others who have become part of cultic groups elsewhere, the first impression they would make on me, I am certain, is to indicate an absence of any richness of personality – in other words they are one dimensional and boring.

Members of cultic groups like Trinity/Peniel are people who have surrendered the precious parts of their personality to a charismatic leader. In return for their money, their attention and devotion directed towards the leadership, they have received only unfulfilled dreams. Because these dreams have cost them so much in terms of time, effort and ideals, they cannot let them go as it would be a final abandoning of the delusions and hopes to which they still cling. When Michael and Ruth Reid insisted that members married other members, they knew what they were doing. They were consolidating their power and influence over each couple, making it almost impossible for either to escape. The husband would control the wife on behalf of the church and the wife would do the same. The Caroline Green story, the published account of a Peniel marriage, could only end one way. Caroline was prepared for the sake of her children to escape, even though she had to sacrifice her marriage and watch while her husband contracted another relationship within the tribe. That was no small sacrifice. I have ordered Caroline’s book and maybe I will have more to say when I have read it.

A last point is one I raised in my anonymous contribution to the other blog. One contributor mentioned that, as the result of the insistence of all marriages being contracted within the permission of the church, there were a number of bachelors and spinsters in the congregation. I commented that, as the result of the system of arranged marriages, there were probably an equal number of sad and unhappy partners in the marriages that were ‘convenience’ relationships. I have no means of knowing whether my suspicion is actually justified. I cannot help but wonder how two people coming together in a cultic controlled environment can grow together in mutual wisdom and understanding. Michael and Ruth knew that the husbands and wives they had ‘arranged’ would check each other from having disloyal thoughts about Peniel. They did not care that, at the same time, they would also prevent each other from any kind of spiritual growth which was not under the control of the cult. I cannot imagine that any of the marriages organised in this way were models of depth, excitement or unexpectedness. In other words, as I suggested above, many of the marriages would probably show signs of boredom and shallowness.

I am grateful to the anonymous bloggers on the other blog for setting out this aspect of the dynamics of a cultic church in terms of who is married to whom. My instinct about what would constitute a happy, fulfilling and successful marriage does not suggest that good marriages are very common in this church in Brentwood. To marry in such an environment will seldom create the result that the Anglican marriage service tries to describe in the following words: ‘Marriage is given (that) each member of the family … may find strength, companionship and comfort, and grow to maturity in love.’ Maturity will always be in short supply in places where individuals hand over their ability to make decisions to a leader who is beyond questioning and challenge.

One particular proclamation of the Christian gospel which is made in many places is that it is God’s will to heal the sicknesses of those who follow in the Christian path. The example of Jesus in his earthly ministry will be pointed to as well as the words recorded in St John, ‘greater things than these will you do’. There are also the instructions of Jesus which occur in Mark’s gospel in chapter 16. Although these words do not occur in most of the original manuscripts of Mark’s gospel, it is clear that the early Christian church took seriously the command that healing was to be a continuing and important aspect of the church’s life.

Throughout the 2000 years or so there has always been a somewhat ambivalent relation with healing in the Church. Some Christians claim that healing continues to be part of the church’s ministry while others take a different line. They justify the fact that healing, if it happens at all, is a very rare unusual occurrence. This reticence about healing is expressed in a doctrine called ‘cessationism’. This, in brief, states that although miracles happened in the time of Jesus and the Apostles, this is no longer the case. Miracles belonged to that early period in order to get things going, but once it was established, it is no longer needed for later generations.

In some evangelical circles Christians are invited to take a stand and declare whether they are on the side of the cessationists or those who oppose them. This debate is a bit like the one that goes on between charismatic-evangelicals and non-charismatic evangelicals or between Arminians and Calvinists. From the outside, which is where I stand, I can see positives on both sides in all these debates and thus I would refuse to place myself on either side of these positions. In the case of the cessationists and those who oppose them, my position would be to say that both are right and yet both are wrong.

To explain what I mean by such a paradoxical statement I want to look at the arguments of the cessationists. They would claim that healings in the name of Christ belong only to the years of the early church. For myself I would argue that they are wrong in their assumption that healings do not happen today and have not taken place across the ages. I have in my possession a two volume book which relates the accounts of the miracles that took place at the tomb of Thomas Becket soon after his death in 1170 at Canterbury. The accounts of miracles and healing were written down at the time and were carefully recorded by monks who were chosen for their accuracy and probity. The details of these miracles is remarkable. If miracles of healing happened then, why should we doubt the miracles at Lourdes or many other places today? The issue of how the mechanics of these healings works is one that we must leave to one side for now. The cessationists are however right in some of their claims. In particular they are right to be suspicious of the instant miracles that are manufactured to order by big named healing evangelists across the world. There are just too many stories of fakery and dishonesty in this world. The cessationists can thus be forgiven in part for being cynical about any reported healing in Christian context. The truth within this debate lies, I believe, in a process of exercising careful discernment. Neither side seems to be very good at this. The one side, I shall call them the enthusiasts, seems to be guilty of exaggerating the occurrence of healing, while the other side, the cessationists, is guilty of downplaying it. Christian healing happens, but not with the regularity or tidiness that the enthusiasts would claim for it.

It is in this world of debate between those I call cessationists and enthusiasts, that a dark side of healing emerges. It is a memory that comes from Chris’ time at Bible College in the 60s that has reminded me how the enthusiasts’ arguments can result in enormous amounts of suffering for the sick. We have, over the blog posts, looked at the issue of poverty in the context of Health and Wealth teaching. Poverty is, according to this teaching, caused by not exercising sufficient faith. The poor may have not given enough to the church to harvest the material riches that God wishes them to have. The same thing will apply to sickness. If anyone is sick then that is a result of failing to exercise faith. Chris told me over the phone how the practical outworking of this teaching meant that fellow students tried to ignore, not just coughs and colds, but quite serious illnesses. In one case a student nearly died in the attempt to exercise ‘faith’ and deny the possibility of sickness. The dark side of a culture that exaggerates healing, is the dangerous inability to deal with sickness and physical or mental weakness of any kind.

No doubt we will be returning to this theme again. But this blog post simply wants to draw attention to a style of teaching that once again puts disadvantaged people into a place of despair because their poverty or sickness ‘proves’ that they are failures in the sight of God. The Christianity of Health and Wealth teaching succeeds in pushing already disadvantaged individuals further into a pit where they feel abandoned by God and unworthy of his attention and support. What a hideous contrast with the message of the actual Jesus of the gospels who said: ‘Come unto me, all you who are burdened with heavy loads.’

Years ago as a child, I tried, as a somewhat pointless exercise, repeating the word ‘tomato’ endless times. I can’t remember why I did it but I do remember that the repetition of the word had the effect of changing it from being a sound that pointed to a particular fruit to a sound with absolutely no content or meaning. Repetition of a word will always eventually destroy or remove its meaning. We can think that a word is always able to suggest a defined meaning but that link eventually breaks down in our minds when the word is repeated too much.

I was reminded of the tomato ‘experiment’ after listening to a sermon recently when the word ‘love’ was endlessly repeated. I don’t know how many times it was used but by the time I thought of actually counting the occurrences, the word had already drifted into the category of cliché so that no meaning was being shared by the preacher when he used the word. Perhaps this is the meaning of cliché, the repetition of a word so much that any possible impact from using the word is lost. During the recent election campaign, I wanted to shout at the television every time a politician came up with a well worn but largely meaningless slogan. The one in particular we heard repeatedly used was ‘hard-working families. I am sure my readers can think of several other examples.

In my last post, I mentioned the problem of using words so that they can have precisely the same meaning for both hearer and speaker. All too often this is not the case. I now want to refer to another problem that occurs even when speaker and hearer do know exactly what a particular word means. The problem, this time, is that the meaning that both sides extract from the word or expression is such that there is a kind of coded shorthand in operation. The common understanding of a particular word has become an unquestioning assumption of some ‘tribal’ commonplace. To use a slightly irreverent example, and thinking back to my time as a member of evangelical prayer groups, I noted the interjection of the word ‘just’ into many prayers offered to the Almighty. ‘We do just pray to you Father for the problems of the church overseas’. The word ‘just’ adds absolutely nothing to the meaning of the prayer, but it does have the effect of linking the prayer to other people either in the room or elsewhere who also pray in this way. In other words a word has become a kind of tribal marker for a particular style of expressing the Christian faith.

A word that is frequently used in certain circles to have a precise meaning for those who use it, is the word ‘saved’. The question ‘are you saved?’ may be said less often than in the past, but as an example of coded ‘in’ language, it has a very precise meaning. To offer a longer ‘translation’ for those not in the in the loop of this coded language, it might mean this: ‘Have you made an active acceptance of the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal saviour? Have you accepted his death as the one atoning death for the sins of the world and do you believe that the Bible contains the inerrant word of God, possessing all that is needed for salvation?’ A Christian who lives in the world that is defined by such a statement of belief, will have large numbers of words defined for them by their church. These will have only a single way of being understood. The permitted interpretations of these words will be endlessly repeated in sermons. This tight definition of particular words like ‘faith’, ‘salvation’, ‘truth’ and ‘love’ will fit in with a philosophical idea which is found in conservative churches, the notion of propositionalism. This is another way of saying that truth can always be rendered accurately and precisely in words. After all, the argument goes, the Bible, God’s Word, come to us in the form of actual words. If God reveals his truth in words, who are we to demand anything beyond the same words?

The great fallacy of this position is that it is untrue to say that God only reveals himself to us in words. Words have a built-in limitation. After a while they can become meaningless when they are misused or repeated too much. Human beings are also not just cerebral creatures, They respond to truth in a variety of forms. They respond to symbol, colour and visual experiences of all kinds. Above all they respond to other people. God, in his wisdom, has chosen to reveal himself, not in propositions or philosophies defined by words, but in a person, the person of Jesus Christ. The encounter with a person, getting to know someone, requires a quite different set of human skills to that of understanding particular words. The encounter with God in Christ is at the heart of what the Christian faith is all about. But annoyingly for those who want to create a single pattern of encounter, using approved words, the range of possible ways that this encounter is realised has many manifestations. Some encounters will use words to describe the experience. Others will be far more sparing in the way that language is used. Some encounters with God in Christ may even wish not to use words at all. A word that I use frequently is the word ‘mystery’. It is a word that at its heart has the meaning of keeping silent before what is unknowable, least of all through the medium of words.

St Francis of Assisi had some fitting words to say on the topic of evangelism. He said: ‘ Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.’ Perhaps Francis had a deep recognition for the limitation of words in our communication of the Christian faith. He saw how eventually they, in the words of T.S. Elliot, ‘strain, crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension…’ Words will always be an important part of our culture and our faith. But perhaps we need a new reformation where Christianity is rediscovered using a minimum of words. The task of presenting the faith should be handed over to the artists, the musicians and those who understand best how human beings form relationships to each other. Through this new reformation we would start to see an end to the dry cerebral dominance of verbal presentations of our faith. In its place we would learn better to glimpse the heart of God, who is best understood as transcendent beauty and mystery.

The Church of England has been engaging in the process of what it calls ‘facilitated conversations’ on the topic of the gay issue. Groups of Christians who take opposing views on the subject have been brought together in a hotel to hear what others have to say about their stance. Because there are professional facilitators present, the conversations have not been allowed to degenerate into a slanging match or any kind of confrontation with those who take a different view from their own. The emphasis is on listening in a spirit of generosity. We have been reminded once again, as we emerge from the exhausting process of a General Election, that positions on any topic can be held passionately but these are also often immovable and fixed. It is not my intention to say anything further about the rights and wrongs of the gay issue; my purpose is rather to reflect on the general matter of communication, particularly where two sides have trenchantly opposed positions.

There are many problems that occur when we meet an individual who takes a point of view about anything which is both passionate and convinced. Before I suggest what can be done to try and engage with this depth of conviction, I want to mention one particular reason why two people may find themselves in a place of passionate disagreement. This reason may be that they have grown up speaking different languages. I am not of course suggesting that this is an explanation in the current debates within the church but I am thinking of any kind of language miscommunication that may take place in a debate. I want to illustrate my point by referring a literal linguistic confusion that left a terrible rent in the church in the 11th century. This was the formal separation of the Orthodox and Catholic churches which took place in 1054 AD. It is generally accepted that a major cause of this split was because of the fact that the two sides had become ignorant of each other’s language. Few theologians on either side had any knowledge or fluency in the language of the other. As part of a study I once made on the issue of the influence of Greek ideas in the West in the early mediaeval period, I learnt that the work of one single translator, Amalarius of Metz in 725 AD, spread a number of influential Greek theological ideas into the West during his life-time. For the next hundred years or more there was no one else qualified to continue this task of translating Greek into Latin. The result of this was that the vast resources of Greek theology remained obscure and virtually unknown in the West at the time of the great schism in the 11th century. There was an additional problem. Even if an adequate knowledge of the language of the other was available to theologians, there were, and still are, many problems of translating Greek technical theological terms into Latin and vice-versa. A good knowledge of Greek requires a student, not only to understand how words should be translated, but also the exact nuances in the way the words are used in the original. It will be recognised that translation is always an approximation of what was written in the original context. Theological education for the clergy today will, if possible, include some knowledge of Greek and Hebrew precisely for this reason. The ancient languages yield their deeper meanings only after imaginative penetration of their cultures.

Today when we talk about failures of communication, we are probably not normally talking about people using different languages. But we are talking about the way that the words we use can be distorted in their meanings by the way that words acquire particular meanings from the education and culture of the speakers. All of us can think of occasions when we have come unstuck in talking to someone, because an English word is being used by another person to mean something different from our use. What do we do? Do we insist on using only our meaning or do we rapidly try and adapt ourselves to what we think they mean? The possibilities for misunderstanding what other people are really saying in conversation are endless. In this blog I have the luxury of being able to define my meanings so that the reader has a good chance of knowing what I am talking about All too often in actual conversations words will be used in such a way that two people will be at cross-purposes even though they are using the same words. We may use theologically profound words, like ‘truth’, ‘salvation’ and even ‘God’ but each be meaning something subtly different when we use them.

Good communication between two or more people on profound topics will probably happen most easily when the people concerned have had a similar type of education. They thus instinctively know, reasonably accurately, how the words of the other person are being used. This sounds like an elitist comment but I believe we need to be more open about the problem of communication when people share ideas, while using language in subtly different ways. One of the advantages of having received a relatively good education is that I would claim, not to know many things, but to be able to recognise how seldom I can be sure of knowing anything securely. For every educated person, I believe, knowledge is seen to have the element of being provisional; it is capable of being changed when new information comes along. This would apply to the scientist as well as the person who, like me, has had some theological training. The readiness to articulate ideas with a degree of tentativeness is a great aid to true communication. The person whose educational background has taught them only to deal in solid ‘facts’ is unlikely to respond positively to this kind of insight. They will not understand ‘knowledge’ as a work in progress. Knowledge of the facts of our faith is believed to be contained in the words of the Book, the Bible. For others of us, the words provide a beginning of the process of understanding, not the conclusion.

Christianity has in many places across the world been taught in a dogmatic way which denies the possibility of sharing in the way I have indicated above. In other words it possesses none of the humility, the sense of permanent growing into knowledge and the incompleteness that I would want to claim for it. This task of holding ‘facilitated conversations’ in a Christian context may be about teaching people the art of humble listening and learning to recognise that the other person may be speaking a different ‘language’. Learning that language, recognising how our background may have predisposed us to understand ‘truth’ in quite different ways from the person we are speaking to, will always be salutary. Although I am a believer in the provisionality of theological statements, I have to learn and communicate with people who reject the idea of ambiguity in the language we use to describe God. No doubt the other person feels safe in having the ‘word of God’ between their fingers in the form of a Bible. I would want them to understand that way of believing better. But also I would ask them to listen and know that the language I speak is a language that embraces mystery, beauty and unknowability. For myself, the language to talk about God and Christ is explored far better, not in the edgy dogmatic discourse of Paul, but in the visual symbolic language of St John’s Gospel. Both ‘languages’ are valid Scripture, and a Christian needs, not to choose between them, but to become fluent in both.