We left the story of Sally at the age of 15. Sexual harassment and a botched exorcism had left her fairly vulnerable. There was no one either in her family or elsewhere to help her interpret what had happened or to make any sense of it. Although her father was to become an active Christian seven years later, his silence at the time was of little help to her in her confusion. Without any discussion, she stopped attending church, but she was not free of the thought patterns of conservative Calvinism with its emphasis on depravity and sin. Just before her 18th birthday, she found herself in desperate need of help to deal with a major incident in her life, a pregnancy and a subsequent abortion. It was in an effort to deal with the guilt that consumed her over these events that she decided to join a second Baptist church. The congregation seems to have been a smaller set-up and it was led by an apparently genial 67 year old male pastor. Sally described him as a ‘wise old granddad who couldn’t hurt anyone’. However she found it odd that he chose to involve himself closely with the youth group. This pastor and his wife had adopted three Asian children who had all by now left home.

One night the pastor came and took an act of worship for the youth group. During the course of this service he preached a strong sermon about forgiveness. In the course of his address he emphasised the importance of confessing sins to others and how that no sin was too big for the Lord to handle. Sally found this sermon helpful and so, afterwards, she and another girl, who was also dealing with the aftermath of an abortion, approached the pastor with the hope that ‘all would be fixed’. The pastor made an appointment to see Sally alone but she found things getting ‘creepy’ when he insisted in rubbing her back and shoulders while she told her story. He then declared that Sally needed to spend more time with him. The sessions became regular ones and he would pick her up on Fridays for a lunch appointment. During the course of these meetings his hands would stray to touch her leg and her hair. Finally he would send her on her way with what Sally describes as ‘horrible hug’. These sessions were terminated by Sally. She found herself having to lie to the minister, that her boss could not release her for Friday lunchtimes. While she was able to protect herself from a full scale sexual assault, her identity as confused teenager on the cusp of adulthood was little helped by these ‘sessions’.

Sally herself has realised that for an elderly male pastor to be discussing details of boyfriends, sexual activity and abortion with an 18 year old girl was entirely inappropriate. This has to be said before any comment is made about the touching, the stroking and the hugging, none of which were ever sought or welcomed. From the perspective of a clergyman, I can also see that the preaching about forgiveness to a group containing impressionable young women could be seen as a form of grooming. Sally and her friend were both extremely vulnerable and they were having to carry the burden of unresolved guilt without any psychological or family support. For the pastor to enter into that situation without specialised skills and background and to imply that he could ‘fix’ the problem was a piece of grotesque dishonesty. The reality was that he seemed to want to get close to this young woman both physically and by knowing her inmost secrets for his own emotional gratification. This is abusive emotional exploitation. If he had been genuinely interested in helping her, he would have established certain basic facts of the situation and then quickly referred her on to someone (most likely female) who would have offered her appropriate support and help. Instead he used his position of being the ‘above suspicion’ pastor to pursue his own selfish purposes. Once again, although she was not in fact sexually assaulted beyond the unpleasant touching, she was made to feel a ‘thing’ whose only value could be found in being a source of entertainment to an elderly man of God. Sally has not told me what this betrayal by a man of God has done to her image of God, but it is commonly reported that cases of this kind not only destroy trust in people of spiritual authority but make it hard for a victim to believe in the God that the pastor supposedly serves.

This story which Sally is sharing with us is sadly something which seems to be fairly common. One ‘creepy’ pastor or clergyman can pollute the possibility of trust in God for other individuals who come into contact with them or hear about their reputation. The Catholic church has suffered appalling damage through the revelations of child abuse. It is not just the individual boys and girls who were abused that have suffered; it is also the large numbers of others who shy away from the possibility of finding God through a man of the cloth because of what a few ‘black sheep’ have done. To think that a large number of people in our societies do not even expect to find the world of the spirit through a clergyman is the height of tragedy. There must be many Sallys around but still more people who shy away from the church through finding out, directly or indirectly, what certain men of God have done. A single such betrayal allows an unknown number to be cut off from even the possibility of trusting a man who is supposed to be a servant of God.

We will be hearing more of Sally’s tale but I should express my own pleasure in the fact that Sally is still searching for God and is still able to trust a minister (in this case me!) with her story. The two incidents I have recorded of the impact of representatives of the church meeting up with a vulnerable individual is sufficient for most people to think of giving up on the church completely. Sally has not given up but we have her story with which to help others who may face the awfulness of abuse in one place in which they ought to have to felt safe. It is this kind of betrayal that that this blog wants to expose and, in exposing it, help it to be outlawed. Such evil always finds it difficult to exist in the full light of day.

During the last month a row has blown up in the Anglican Diocese of Oxford here in England. The diocesan newsletter published a book review in December by Dr Martyn Percy, the newly appointed Dean of Christ Church. Martyn is personally known to me and was a help to me in the 90s when I was gathering material for my book on fundamentalist Christianity, Ungodly Fear. His speciality is the sociology of the Church and his doctoral studies were on the topic of the theology of revival, especially the ideas and practice of the late John Wimber. As an academic his published writings have covered numerous topics, particularly in the area of the Church and its ministry. He was for ten years the Principal of Ripon College, Cuddesdon, an establishment for ordination training in the Anglican Church.

The December issue of ‘The Door’, the diocesan newsletter, contains a review by Martyn of two works on the topic of same-sex marriage. The first book, receives a favourable review and is one that takes a accommodating line on the issue. It is written by the Bishop of Buckingham, Alan Wilson, a suffragan bishop in the Oxford diocese. The other by Sam Allberry is, as Martyn puts it, a ‘discussion closer’ because it lays down the law and says firmly what the author believes Scripture has to say in not in any way countenancing the possibility of same sex marriage. This blog post is not going to discuss further the content of the books, or even whether these reviews are fair. What is of concern is the furore that has broken out in the diocese over the new Dean’s words. A letter has been written to the ‘The Door’ with the signatures of some 24 mostly well-known and influential conservative evangelical clergyman in the Diocese of Oxford. Presumably the letter, containing all these signatures, has been tweaked and edited so we can take it to be a statement of conservative Anglican opinion, not only in the Diocese of Oxford, but also throughout the country. It is the tone of this letter and the assumptions of its theology that raise for me considerable concern.

Why do I make an issue of the letter of these 24 conservative clergy in another diocese? The reason for this post is that the letter is an important reflection of the up-to-date thinking of conservative clergy in the Church of England. Two particular issues stand out. First the theological position they are taking ungenerously claims that there is only one stance on the gay marriage issue possible for members of the Church of England. They are no doubt depending for this claim on resolution 1:10 from the 1998 Lambeth Conference. This ‘correct’ Christian position on gay marriage stated there seems to allow conservative Anglicans to argue that they are right to seek to close down all further discussion on the topic and pretend that this Lambeth resolution is the last word on the subject. In fact to suggest that the Lambeth resolution is the final verdict by Anglicans on the gay issue is palpable nonsense. The defeat of the so-called Covenant proposals right across the Anglican world in the last five years put an end to the pretence that ordinary Anglicans were prepared to tolerate doctrinal and moral issues being decided centrally. The letter writers also seem to have forgotten that we are in the middle of a ‘conversation’ process where the supporters and opponents of gay marriage have promised to listen to each other with respect and care.

The second somewhat unpleasant part of the letter is the way that the author of the ‘liberal’ book under review, Bishop Alan Wilson, is attacked. The letter says: ‘It is extraordinary that a serving Bishop can attack the basic values of the organisation he works for …. in any other walk of life, it would result in suspension followed by an investigation.’ In short the clergy writers are implying that the whole church should not only embrace a single point of view on the gay marriage issue but also anyone who does not agree with the conservative position should be forthwith expelled.

This letter is an indication that intolerance, bullying of others and a refusal to listen is alive and well in the Church of England. It is also un-Anglican, in the sense that I understand the meaning of the word. Anglicanism has always stood for the holding together of different theological positions and perspectives together with the encouraging of mutual respect. There is no respect here of any kind on the part of the letter writers towards their opponents. There is only the desire to demand total control of the institution in the name of a single perspective – the conservative one. Of course the Dean of Christ Church is also in their sights and the writers of the letter further imply that, by publishing his liberal opinions, the ‘Door’ newspaper is somehow favouring the liberal side of the argument in the debate. As the Church of England embarks on the so-called ‘conversations’, this review is thought to be undermining the possibility of even-handedness on the part of the hierarchy in the Diocese.

My reading of the letter by the 24 conservative clergymen of the Diocese of Oxford, who probably speak for clergy of their background right across the country, indicates that the future for the church, with this kind of polarisation, is somewhat bleak. The tone of the letter lacks charity, tolerance or any kind of openness towards their perceived enemies. Let me repeat the point – the issue at stake here is not about the gay issue itself. It is about the creation of an environment where true dialogue between people of convinced but differing opinions can take place. Such conversation cannot be easily conducted in the kind of atmosphere that is created by the vindictive tone of this letter. For me also the real discussion should be, not about the gay marriage issue itself, but whether it is ever right to allow a particular way of reading scripture to close down discussion and dialogue. In a human relationship between two people, we would consider it abusive and overbearing if one side in the relationship alone was allowed to speak and have an opinion. Sally’s story which is being serialised in this blog, is a clear example of the way a powerful coercive system or ‘truth’ is imposed on an individual who is denied a proper voice. In conclusion I would suggest that the apparent overbearing confidence and intolerance of the conservative lobby is a sign, not of strength, but of massive insecurity and defensiveness. Also the failure of conservatives actually to talk to gay individuals, to understand their world and their experience, is a failure of love and a sign of profound inhumanity. The dialogue I look for is a dialogue that can change both sides. Both sides in any dialogue have to admit that they may be wrong. Certainly they need to see that there is always another way of looking at things. Certainty will always involve a denial of faith and love.

Recently I have been contacted by one Sally (a pseudonym) who has been helped by the words of our blog. For the sake of confidentiality I am not going to reveal Sally’s real name or even the country she lives in. Sally has sent me some details of abuse that she has suffered at the hands of Christians and she has graciously allowed me to share this material with my readers. Both sides I feel will benefit. From Sally’s point of view she stands to receive support and understanding which will help her come to terms with the various things that have happened to her over several decades. In addition, insofar as my reading and study give a fresh perspective and insight to these types of issues, she will, we trust, be far better protected from similar attempts by earnest Christians to humiliate and abuse her in the future. From our point of view a frank disclosure by a woman of her experience of Christian abuse will open up for us the whole topic from the female perspective. Chris has fed into the blog experiences of abuse from the man’s perspective but I would guess that the bulk of cases of Christian abuse are directed against women. The majority, but not all, of the perpetrators are men.

I have the material for three blog posts in the material that Sally has sent me so far. I hope that she will in fact provide further material. I have particularly asked her if she can remember the actual words used by the Christian leaders who have attempted to control and abuse her. I am interested in this theme of control and the way that, being a woman, sometimes involves in Christian circles having to submit to the authority exercised by men. In short I believe, and Sally’s story does nothing to contradict this idea, that much Christian abuse takes place within the context of old-fashioned misogyny and the sexual domination of women by men in the name of a claimed biblical principle of male superiority.

Sally’s first experience of Christian abuse took place when she was just 15. She was a member of a Church youth group and one of the leaders became sexually attracted to her. She felt distinctively uncomfortable in his presence and this was made worse when he came too close to her. During a cinema performance, this young over-attentive leader sat next to her and then proceeded to bang the back of her seat as a way of trying to attract her attention. She ignored this but on the journey home on a train, he once again tried to corner her. She managed to get away. The problem of the unwanted attention of this leader became still more complicated when, having built up what she believed to be a relationship of trust with a woman leader, she told her the story of what had happened with the first leader. This second leader called a further leader and she had to go through the story a second time. This then involved the Senior Pastors who, while lovingly putting their arms around her, told her that she had a demon which had come to cause division in the church. This bomb-shell was delivered to her in the presence of the youth worker who had abused her. The fact that she suffered from asthma was also a sign of this and that she needed prayer and deliverance. She then describes what happened to her next. ‘ They laid their hands on me to start delivering me from the “demon” and I felt that I couldn’t breathe I was coughing and coughing and they kept praying and praying as though my asthma attack was a full manifestation of their “delivering” me.’ Fortunately her father who had been waiting impatiently outside came in grabbed his daughter and removed her. Nothing was said on either side but she never returned to that church.

When we reflect that each event in the cycle of happenings was far more than any child should have to deal with, the compounding of sexual harassment with demonic abuse is totally unforgiveable in a church. Not one person in this story appeared to recognise that the sexual harassment of a girl of 15 is first of all a totally believable situation. Instead of even asking themselves whether the male youth leader might indeed have done such a thing, they managed to spiritualise it and thus remove any responsibility for asking proper questions that would call into question their oversight. The betrayal of confidence is also shocking. When Sally told the second youth leader about the event on the train, the woman leader should not have mentioned it to anyone else without Sally’s permission. Of course now the protocol that exists in most responsible churches would have required this woman leader to report the allegation straight to a person professionally equipped to deal with child protection issues over the heads of the senior pastors. Whether what had happened was serious enough to involve disciplinary action or even the police to be informed was something that required professional assessment. This event occurred in the 80s, so while we can make some allowances for sloppy procedure, there is something deeply disturbing about the way that a belief in devils and the desire to protect an institution overrode a desire to believe and protect a vulnerable teenager. Once again we can see that the mythology of devils has been brought in to prop up and support a thoroughly unhealthy power structure within the church. Sally’s father is the one person who comes out of the story as the hero of this sorry saga. It took a non-churchman to act in the face of the utter nonsense and hypocrisy in the series of episodes concerned with his daughter. Sadly Sally told me that her failure to tell her father fully what had been going at the church meant that there began a pattern of not sharing things, a further factor in her vulnerability to abuse later on.

Sally’s story, as we shall see in later episodes, frequently involves a belief in devils by Christian leaders. In each case we shall note, as I have said in other blog posts, that the devils are often a convenient scapegoat for some utterly dysfunctional ideas and harmful church structures. To have a devil to blame allows a leader to avoid facing up to a common-sense perception of what is truly happening in a human situation. Satan is blamed for bad behaviour (the devil made me do it), situations of conflict which no one wants to sort out and inconvenient opposition to the prevailing ideology of the church. Liberal theology, because it may challenge prevailing ideas of biblical inerrancy, for example, must have been inspired by a demon. The believers in satanic or demonic infestation are relieved of the responsibility of having to question their thinking or their understanding of what is going on. The child protection policies that have come to be universal in churches, schools and similar institutions might conceivably have changed the way Sally was treated some twenty five years ago. But sadly, the belief in devils is still alive and well, distorting, on occasion, the judgement and common sense of many Christian leaders.

Since my writing this on Tuesday, Nigel has posted a new post on his blog. He has written to the Director of the Evangelical Alliance, pointing out the delays and the apparent unwillingness of the Trustees at Trinity to move towards either him or the Bible School student. I posted a comment suggesting that there may be a problem in appointing a Chairman, as per below. He responded with the thought that it is more likely to be indolence, which was my other suggested reason. Things may happen by next week-end as the terms of the internal Commission are due to be published by the end of January.

‘If you have a problem, ignore it and it may go away.’ This seems to be the conscious or unconscious motto that rules among the Trustees and members at Trinity Church Brentwood. After the flurry of activity that went on up to Christmas with the allegations of historic rape and some unprecedented admissions of failure on the part of the Trustees, including mention by them of a past ‘toxic culture’ in the church, all has now has gone quiet. We are still awaiting the nomination of an external chairman to oversee an internal enquiry over the historic wrongs at the church. This was something that was to be organised by the Evangelical Alliance. Such a person has not appeared. We are left wondering what is going on and even the indomitable Nigel Davies sounded discouraged. What is going on?

In the absence of official news from Trinity Church, we are free to speculate on what may be happening behind the scenes. My speculation are based on my experiences and study of the way that similar toxic religious groups behave. My surmises are speculative but if I am later proved wrong, I will freely withdraw my comments.

The problem of not yet finding an external chairman for the internal Commission is totally unsurprising. Michael Reid spent 30 or more years carefully rubbishing most other Christian institutions and their leaders, and now Trinity Brentwood, even under its supposed new management, does not have a good reputation with non-affiliated bodies. Few of the ‘friends’ and individuals that the church cultivated in the past have, as far as can be determined, blameless reputations. None of these ‘friends’ would anyway be eligible to act as an independent chairman. Is it surprising that getting involved as an independent chairman at a place like Trinity Church is not going to be immediately popular? Without of course knowing what is going on behind the scenes, I surmise that several people may have already turned down this ‘opportunity’. What would be in it for them? This is one situation that no amount of Trinity wealth and ‘love-gifts’ can resolve.

The dynamics of a church like Trinity Brentwood will always be resistant to meaningful reform. Churches that possess a narcissistic controlling leadership and a congregation that individually and collectively has long ago lost the ability to think or feel for itself, are virtually impossible to change. The particular aspect of Trinity, that makes it particularly hard to embrace the future, is the Reid legacy of members becoming married to one another and having children together. Peniel School was set up to keep these children carefully apart from the outside, free from exposure to influences outside the control of the church. The church has thus become the ultimate suffocating family. There are many comparable religious groups, particularly in the States, where members all live together and marry one another. The fate of the children in this situation is often tragic in the extreme. Having been brought by emotionally immature parents, educated apart from children their own age, these children have a hard struggle to make their way through life. In the States there is a literature devoted to the needs of so-called SGAs (second generation adults) in closed communities. Meanwhile the parents, these inter-married immature adults, find it extremely difficult to think for themselves having handed over the thinking process on big issues to their leaders. They thus cannot easily break out of the cocoon. What sort of maturity are they handing on to their children, if their membership of a toxic group has prevented them from ever growing up and maturing themselves?

Nigel’s blog revealed that some Trinity members thought that with the setting up of the Commission, the crisis was over. Those of us who have read all the material both from the church and the bloggers (especially the moving testimony from the Bible Student) know perfectly well that nothing has yet been resolved. What can we can say about an individual who, because nothing has been said in the church for five weeks, believes that everything is sorted? Various words come to mind to describe the attitude of an individual who believes that because something is not mentioned for a time, it has gone away. Some adjectives would describe an apparent lack in their intelligence. Other adjectives would denote that the individual concerned cannot face up to any reality as the result of severe conditioning. Dissonance is not easily tolerated. If the leadership tell them that all is well, then they will be quick to believe it. Anything else is uncomfortable; thinking through problems on their own is something that members of a toxic group normally do not have to do. As with children, they have always have had ‘Daddy’ to do their thinking for them.

Stalemate is going to be a typical scenario when a closed religious group decides to investigate itself. It is my firm belief that internal enquiries will never succeed because no one involved in a such a group can ever stand outside the established habits of thought long enough to see what is going on. Also the privileged leaders of a closed group will always make sure they remain materially comfortable and, in defence of that privilege, they will obstruct investigation with every power game known to man. In partial defence of these same leaders, I actually believe that most such leaders believe at least some of their own excuses and rhetoric. Like President Assad of Syria, they are convinced that they are the victims of ‘terrorists’, past and present. Without his guiding hand, the toxic group leader recognises that everything built up over the years would simply collapse. Any change would bring the whole house of cards come tumbling down because there is no one to manage the intricate network of relationships and dependencies that have been created to keep the whole thing going.

For all the effort, sacrifice and pain among members past and present, a closed religious group like Trinity will eventually collapse in tears. The high-level of intermarriage at Trinity means that no one outside the ‘tribe’ will ever easily be able to manage the dynamics of the place and successfully lead it in the future when the present leadership is gone. One could just imagine that, had the Commission sparked a sincere desire to put things right, there was a hope for the future. That spark of hope seems to have died as a result of the deafening silence that has descended on Trinity since Christmas. We wait to see what will happen next.

Everyone who attends funerals, has frequently found himself singing these words, ‘change and decay in all around I see’. God is then described as one ‘who changes not’. He, unlike the creation, is beyond change and decay. One way of understanding these words is to conclude that humanity, like the rest of creation, is ultimately destined for destruction and final extinction.

The theological teaching which is implied in the hymn ‘Abide with me’ is questionable as well as fairly gloomy. It helps to instil, at a popular level, theological ideas which need to be challenged if we are to do justice to the actual claims about God taught by the New Testament. The teaching of Jesus tries to communicate, not a distance between God and his creation, but a coming together, an at-one-ment, to use the technical expression. While the teachings of Jesus and indeed Paul both presuppose a movement towards a merging of the created order and the divine, the Greek-speaking world that surrounded them wanted to keep the two firmly separate. In an earlier blog post I used the word ‘binary’ to describe a way of thinking that wants to divide experience into two, the black and white, the true and the false. I said then that this kind of thinking was unhelpful and misleading. Binary is also an adjective that can describe the division of everything into spiritual and material. Once again it is a false dichotomy and certainly it is not supported by a perceptive reading of Scripture.

Let us go back to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. When Jesus called his disciples, what was he calling them to? We have been blinded by the accounts of Christianity that see everything promised to the followers of Jesus in terms of ‘salvation’. For many modern Christians, this salvation means eternal life with God in heaven – a reward for virtuous living. In thinking only in this way, we have closed our minds to an imaginative understanding of what Jesus was offering his disciples when he called them. One thing that Jesus was not offering his disciples was some new-fangled version of ‘truth’ based on the latest and most fashionable reading of the Old Testament scriptures. He was in the first place dealing with a bunch of ordinary men, some of whom may not have been even literate. I also don’t think we are to imagine him preaching a sermon while eager followers looked up each scriptural quote to check that he was using it in a proper fashion. Literacy, words and text seem to have played little or no part in what Jesus had to offer in his first encounter with those who were to be his disciples. For background the disciples had a broad experience of living according to the Jewish Law, but this experience would have been as much a matter of lived out convention rather than anything that went deeply into the hearts and minds.

To return to the question as to what Jesus had to present to the disciples. The important clause is the one that says in the first chapter of Mark ‘the kingdom of God has come close’. This is a statement by Jesus that invites his disciples, not to learn something new, not to get their heads around a new idea, but to experience something. We can imagine that if there had been an intellectual Greek present when Jesus mentioned the kingdom for the first time, he might have asked Jesus to explain what he meant. Jesus’ reply might well have been. ‘This is not a matter for explanations. This kingdom is for you to recognise as a reality within your heart and to enter in.’ In short what Jesus meant by the ‘Kingdom of God” was a lived reality of God coming close. It was in no way an intellectual concept to be grasped by the mind.

There are two words that capture the meaning of Jesus’ teaching about the at-one-ment between God and everyday reality. The first of these is ‘participation’. Jesus’ focus is on calling humankind to participate in the new reality, the kingdom of God reaching out to embrace the world in acts of love, forgiveness and generosity. Being a Jew, Jesus would not have understood the Greek preoccupation with contrasting the world of spirit and of matter. He would have thought in categories that we would call now ‘holistic.’ The world and the God who created it are at root integrated together, even though the activity of human kind, we call sin, has thrust them apart. Sin creates a dis-integration, a disharmony between the creator and the created world but the link between the two is never totally destroyed. Human beings are being called by Jesus to face up to this alienation that we call sin, and help them move back towards the source of grace, love and forgiveness. That seems to be what Jesus was doing in calling his disciples. He was inviting them to participate in something new, something transforming, something that would decisively change them and their attitudes for ever. God was reaching out to them so that, by knowing Jesus, they would know and participate in the source of the final reality in the universe.

The second word that I want to mention is ‘transformation’. A Christian is an individual who has entered into this process of seeing through Jesus how the world and God are ultimately one. The Christian has recognised the call to make this a reality, by participating in an opening up of the individual personality to God. This is done by acts of self-examination and the giving and receiving of forgiveness and love. The more the individual participates in this process, the more that person is transformed. The process will never be complete. At the same time the transformation will never be some sort of vertical process, a becoming more ‘spiritual’. It will involve a recognition of all the ways in which integration is that which binds us, not just to God but also to other people. Forgiveness, love and integration are, in short, not just categories that describe how human beings should relate to the divine but also to each other. The same dynamic will also bind him/her to a new relating to the created world.

To return to the hymn at the beginning of the piece. The Christian is invited to reject the notion that ‘change and decay (is) in all around I see’. We are to participate in a process of gradual transformation of humanity and the world as we allow the divine gradually to change us and our relationships to this world to resemble those of Jesus. May the Kingdom of God be a reality in us as we learn to love and be loved and to forgive and be forgiven.

In the last few days a row has blown up over the inspection by OFSTED of two Free Schools. For those not in the UK, it should be explained that a Free School is one set up by teachers and parents independent of the mainstream system but funded by central government. They are, however, subject to inspection by government inspectors, collectively known as OFSTED. The system has proved popular with minority groups, whether religious or ethnic. In the case that is reaching the news at present, two Free schools have received poor results and one of them, at Durham, is expected to close after Easter. The inspectors found failings in every area, teaching, organisation, discipline and bullying. Pupils were found to have homophobic attitudes and showed prejudice towards minority groups. According to television reports, most of the parents are furious about these inspections and they are supporting all attempts to have the inspections overturned.

The interest to our blog about this row is the fact that both of these schools are so-called Christian schools. This is a code for saying that their original inspiration for setting them up is the desire to teach a curriculum that accords with a conservative Christian agenda. This may or may not include such things as the ‘Young Earth’ theory which involves a denial of Darwin’s theories. This area of controversy does not appear to have been an issue in either of the inspections. What did upset the inspectors was the fact that the version of Christianity that the pupils were being taught was closing their attitudes towards modern life and increasing their prejudice towards minorities. In short the culture of the schools resembled a Christian cocoon which was completely cut off from the rest of society.

We have not heard the last of this story as no doubt the appeal processes will rumble on for some weeks to come. But I want to reflect on the general issue of why it will always be difficult for conservative Christians to set up schools which chime in with the consensus of what education is all about. My comments will be general ones rather than anything else to be gleaned from the press reports about these two schools in particular. In my blog piece about ACE schools I wrote over a month ago, I probably made similar comments to the ones I want to make now. The comments I make now will offer some thoughts about the incidence of bigotry and prejudice that was reported in both these Christian schools. That needs to be accounted for in some way, or at least some kind of explanation offered.

At the heart of the conservative Calvinist Christian system is a confidence that the believer has been let into the secret of God’s will. Christ has revealed God’s truth in his teaching and the words of God recorded in Scripture confirm that teaching. There is no trace of the reticence that is found among less conservative Christians where hesitancy and a certain tentativeness about the nature of ultimate truth is found. The Calvinist tradition only deals in the currency of certainty and finality. Anyone who attends a church where a conservative theology is taught will know the style of confidence that the preacher exudes and which he wishes to pass on to his congregants. In thinking about this confidence about what can be known and the way it is communicated, we can see that it does not fit well into the style of learning that is at the heart of the educational process in the West at least since the 18th century. Here the educational model is based on questions and experiment. In a tradition that goes right back to Plato, knowledge comes to us as we learn to ask the right questions. Scientific experimentation originally involved there being uncertainty about what was true and valid. When the Church tried to impose dogmatic answers on area of knowledge, it generally got things spectacularly wrong. I don’t need to rehearse the sad story of Galileo here. To summarise the failure of the Roman Catholic authorities at the time; it was the assumption that all knowledge had been given to them by God so they could pontificate on every conceivable area of learning. That was wrong and it took a largely secular movement of thought, the Enlightenment, to get scientific advances back on track.

The complaint of the OFSTED inspectors about the Christian schools does not appear to have been about the actual curriculum. What is being referred to is apparently the effect of a system of teaching on attitudes to those outside the school who do not adhere to the same narrow ideology which is taught in the schools. In summary the children at these two Christian schools were imbibing assumptions about the world that gave them an unwarranted sense of superiority towards individuals who do not belong to their Christian tribe. The Christianity they learned about was not making them more generous, loving and considerate. Rather it was teaching them a smug satisfaction that their version of truth was complete and final and for this reason they could look down on anyone who did not belong to their system of belief.

In conclusion, educational values of openness to truth, the discovery through experimentation, and learning through dialogue do not sit easily with any dogmatic system, whether Catholic or Calvinist. The OFSTED inspectors appear to have stumbled upon two institutions where such a closed system was in operation. This closed system with its consequent closed prejudiced attitudes, was they believed, creating failing educational institutions. On the basis of what we have seen, this analysis must be applauded and supported.

A story which leapt out at me this morning in the Times concerns a GP who is facing a hearing at the General Medical Council in Manchester. Dr Thomas O’Brien allegedly told a patient that he could heal her pain without medication and that she was to submit to an exorcism. It was only after Dr O’Brien was reported to the GMC by the patient’s psychiatrist that the case came to light. The present hearing that is ongoing brings to the fore a number of issues relevant to this blog.

During the course of the hearing which began yesterday (Tuesday) the expression ‘religious grooming’ was used. This expression, as far as I know, has no place in law but the fact of its use in a quasi-legal setting may be of importance for the future. The pre-exorcism religious grooming included taking the patient to a local Pentecostal church, meeting the minister over lunch and giving her a copy of a book Doctor O’Brien and his wife had written, an Occult Checklist. This type of checklist, in favour among a certain genre of Christian, has been around since the 80s and it lists all the forms of behaviour that have the potential for allowing an individual to be demonically possessed. The lists are comprehensive and indeed anyone reading such a checklist will find at least one experience or situation that has made them susceptible to ‘Satanic influence’. I cannot imagine that many people have never once read their horoscope while sitting in a dentist’s waiting room and that activity open up the individual to demonic infestation. I encountered the influence of these types of checklists in the 90s when researching my book, Ungodly Fear. One vulnerable woman was told to destroy all her possessions after a group of Christians had persuaded her that she was possessed through having worked as a nurse at a Masonic Hospital in London. Fortunately she did not oblige. The checklist will mention the demonic power of elephants (pictures or models) because elephants are sacred to Hinduism. All adopted children are likely to be possessed because the act of their conception was performed out of wedlock. Needless to say, gay sex and any sexual activity outside marriage is taking the perpetrator straight to Hell. I used to have such a checklist but its contents were so disturbing and unsettling that the book was destroyed. The purpose of the book seems to have been to terrify the reader into cutting themselves off from any influences that might challenge the power of the religious leader under whose authority they have placed themselves.

The occult checklist culture in the UK reached a peak in the early 90s with the scares connected with satanic ritual abuse. I have discussed this issue in a previous blog post. I can say in summary that the demonic paranoia that was rampant among Pentecostal and other evangelical groups has mercifully subsided. One hoped that enough people had seen the horrendous harm caused to vulnerable individuals by such teaching. Clearly, as the present hearing shows, this is not universally the case. For one highly educated person, such as Dr O’Brien to hold on to such medieval and harmful beliefs, there needs to be a supporting culture of books, theological teaching and convinced individuals. People do not wake up one morning with all these beliefs in their head fully formed. They have to learn them in a church and the church has a minister who has learnt these ideas from an institution of some kind. As I have said on a previous blog post, there is a time for appropriate ministry to deal with paranormal and occult issues. But the exorcism as practised by Dr and Mrs O’Brien seems to have been laced with bad pastoral practice, weak theology and abusive assumptions. This kind of practice needs to be named and shamed.

Out of this sad episode, which is as yet unresolved, may come two positive results. One is that the expression ‘religious grooming’ may slip from its use in the General Medical Council to become a category understood by lawyers and courts generally. It would be a tremendous boost to the cause of helping vulnerable and damaged people who have been further abused by religious leaders if their plight could be understood by the courts. The second thing that gives me hope is the need for churches generally to have to consider where they stand in responding to this particular case. Some, no doubt, will claim that Dr O’Brien is a poor persecuted Christian who is suffering for his beliefs. Others, and I hope the majority, will declare that Christians of any kind have no business in making the suffering of an individual worse by the application of a type of Christianity which is clearly abusive. Any discussion in Christian circles, and I hope there is a lot, will help Christian people to see that certain beliefs can and do harm people. The unravelling of all the moral issues in this case may well help the cause of a greater self-awareness among Christians who sincerely want to apply biblical truths to the issues of people’s lives but need to be taught to do it with tact, intelligence and sensitivity. The battle against abuse by Christians of Christians has to go on. This is the task of this blog and your interest and support will help and encourage my very small role in this struggle.

“From a theological perspective, this fixation with propositions can easily lead to the attempt to use the finite tool of language on an absolute Presence that transcends and embraces all finite reality. Languages are culturally constructed symbol systems that enable humans to communicate by designating one finite reality in distinction from another. The truly infinite God of Christian faith is beyond all our linguistic grasping, as all the great theologians from Irenaeus to Calvin have insisted, and so the struggle to capture God in our finite propositional structures is nothing short of linguistic idolatry.”

This is a quotation that I came across in my perusal of various web-sites that want to support the ideas of a movement called ‘Emergent Christianity’. No doubt my new interest in this US based movement will be reflected in future blog posts, but I was also fascinated by some of the arguments against the ideas of this movement. But when you read a statement, like the one above, that is supporting a set of ideas and you feel you want to cheer, then you feel an automatic attachment to the rest of the ideas that are contained in the movement’s teaching. I do not however propose to conduct a full-scale defence of Emergent Christianity, but to take one single thread of the argument among its ideas, and show that, as far I am concerned, the grounds on which its opponents attack it is fallacious and wrong.

Emergent Christianity contains many strands in its thinking and I do not propose to deal with most of them. However a broad summary would say that it is a movement within evangelical Christianity which seeks to present the ideas and insights of Christianity in a way that allows it to speak to contemporary life, not least the culture and thinking of younger people. The issue our quotation speaks to is the issue of language as a tool for communicating and containing truth. Emergent Christianity has attached itself to the ideas of postmodernism. Once again, risking the dangers of over-simplification, we can say that postmodernism strongly resists the idea that there is a single over-arching version of truth, a meta-narrative to explain or interpret the universe. Truth thus cannot be contained in a single philosophy or theory. To some extent truth is found within the experience of every single individual. This is not the place to defend or attack post-modernism but to note that it has received much negative comment from evangelical writers. They, being attached to the idea that God has revealed himself in the words of Scripture, cannot allow truth to break out from its confinement within these words. The traditional conservative Christian perspective is that faith, truth and doctrine are all expressible through the medium of the God-given words of the Bible. Such an idea can be described as propositionalism, the notion that everything, spiritual or material, can be articulated or defined through words. It is worth commenting, in passing, that propositionalism no longer holds sway in modern physics since there are observed phenomena which sometimes go beyond the scope of ordinary language to explain them. In summary, the conservative Christian wants to claim that truth can always be contained in the medium of words while postmodern ideas of Christianity will want to allow that truth on occasion, breaks out of the straight-jacket of words and is allowed to be discovered in such things as symbols, or visual and musical experiences. The infinite God, to quote our extract above, ‘is beyond all our linguistic grasping’.

It is several months now since I wrote a piece on the contribution of traditional Eastern Orthodoxy to the Christian tradition of today. I have not looked up my precise words on the topic but the kind of thing that I would have written would have been to emphasise the place of ‘mystery’ in Christian belief. The word is based on a root meaning of being silent or struck dumb. Mystery is thus a word that emphasises that words in themselves do not deliver very successfully a sense of the ‘beyond’ in Christian experience. Paul himself speaks of experiences that go beyond words and the mystical writers speak tantalisingly of the unknown in expressions such as ‘divine darkness’. A fourteenth century English writer, who wrote a book called the Cloud of Unknowing, spoke of the fact that God cannot be grasped by the mind but only by love. The Eastern Orthodox to this day fill their worship and their traditions of prayer with a strong sense of the way that God cannot be known, described or even spoken of, except by inference. The so-called ‘apophatic’ tradition, widely discussed in Eastern Christian traditions, declares that God can only be described by saying what he is not, rather than attempting the impossible task of comparing him to created realities in our world.

I leave further consideration of Emergent Christianity for another day. I suspect from the tone of the arguments against it, that I shall find myself, if not siding with it, approving of many of the arguments that writers such as Brian Maclaren put forward with great energy. When I hear the argument that truth is only to be expressed in verbal forms, I automatically feel a strong support for whoever is being condemned through the use of such spurious arguments. I am extremely grateful for my education which taught me from the earliest age that truth is to be found in many places beyond words – in beauty, love, longing and silence. I leave the reader with two short quotations from the Psalms where God is approached and known without the use of lots of, or even any, words.
‘Be still and know that I am God.’
‘O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.’

When I was an undergraduate I remember a rather unprofitable discussion with a fellow student about what Jesus knew or did not know. The student, being linked to conservative Christian circles, took the line that Jesus, being God, knew everything, even if he did not choose to talk about it. So I asked whether Jesus knew all about nuclear weapons. ‘Of course’ was the reply. It was important for the belief system of this young man that Jesus knew everything. That knowledge would of course include insight into information about the Old Testament and Jesus’ opinions were held to be decisive. When Jesus declared Moses to be the originator of the laws on divorce, for example, that was a clear indication that the whole Law was penned by his hand. The conversation stuttered to a halt as I realised that, although there was something profoundly wrong with this line of argument, I did not know how to respond or take it any further.

Recently I came across a similar argument in a book discussing the so-called Chicago Statement about biblical authority published in 1978. One of the authors of the Statement, Norman Geisler, claims that Jesus confirms the ‘divine authority of Old Testament Scripture .. on numerous occasions’. Having brought forward passages like Matthew 5.17-18 and Luke 24.44, Geisler is able to say ‘the authority of Christ and Scripture are one.’ The claim is that the authority of Christ can be appealed to and it confirms the claims made by conservative Christians for the inerrancy of Scripture. As James Barr put it: ‘This endlessly repeated argument seeks to use the personal loyalty of Christians towards Jesus as a lever to force them into fundamentalist positions on historical and literary matters’. In short the argument of Geisler appears to carry weight behind it at least as far as generations of conservative Christians are concerned.

The assumptions of Geisler do however need to be challenged and for this we need to examine the passage from Matthew 5 more closely. The text declares that ‘not one letter or stroke will disappear from the Law’. For this passage to have authority, one has to presuppose first that these words were actually spoken by Jesus and secondly we know the context in which it was spoken. Any student of the New Testament is aware of the dispute within the pages of Acts and Paul’s letters over whether Christian converts should be subject to the dictates of the Jewish law or not. Paul himself represented one side of the argument and the author of Matthew the other. The expression ‘until heaven and earth disappear’ is an idiom in Hebrew that basically means ‘until forever’. So Matthew has Jesus come down firmly on the need for Christian converts to keep the Jewish law after conversion. Luke on the other hand sides with Paul when he inserts this saying of Jesus in chapter 16.16. He has almost the same words as Matthew but the passage immediately before it allows Luke to understand these words in a quite different way from Matthew. In the previous verse Luke writes that ‘until John (the Baptist), it was the Law and the prophets: since then, there is the good news of the kingdom of God, and everyone forces their way in.’ In short Luke is claiming the total opposite to Matthew, that the Law has been set aside to let the Gentiles enter the kingdom. The same saying of Jesus has for these Gospel writers a quite different meaning, reflecting their distinctive theological backgrounds.

The second observation to be made about Matthew’s saying about the Law is that conservative Protestant theology does not agree with it. The classic Protestant position is that is that the laws of Moses were nullified after Christ’s death on the cross. In other words, Matthew’s Jesus is teaching something now universally rejected by most Christians. A final observation to be made is that even if the statement in Matthew 5. 17-18 was true to what Jesus said and thought, it is not an argument for the inerrancy of the whole Old Testament. The Law and the Prophets refers to only two sections of the Old Testament, while leaving out the third section, the Writings (Psalms, history books and the wisdom literature).

We could of course, go on to look at other ‘proof texts’ for Jesus apparently giving his support for conservative position on the Bible, but there is a deeper question to be asked about the nature of Jesus’ humanity and whether we should even expect his understanding of the Jewish scriptures to be decisive for the way we think about them and study them today. One writer puts it succinctly when he says ‘Jesus Christ came into the world to be its Saviour, not an authority on biblical criticism.’ While Jesus may have assumed that David wrote Psalm 110, Daniel the book of Daniel and took for granted the historicity of Jonah, these were notions that he shared with his contemporaries. The Chicago statement on inerrancy will not allow the possibility that there was any ‘natural limitation of His humanity’ . He is not allowed to adopt the understandings of scripture and the traditions into which he was born unless these are perfectly correct. This position, like that of my fellow student at the beginning, does not allow Jesus to be properly human and experience the limitations of his humanity, including a lack of complete historical understanding. Are we to suppose that Jesus grew up without having to learn anything, the gift of speech, the ability to read etc? If Jesus thought the world was flat, does that neutralise his whole ministry because he was mistaken in this? If we do believe that Jesus was omniscient, at what point did this happen? There are clearly many impossible problems to be solved, if we follow the conservative line that Jesus in some way ‘proves’ the modern ideas concerning biblical inerrancy. The Christian tradition wrestled with all these problems in the early years of the Church’s life. One part of the Church wanted to over-emphasise the divine nature, so that Jesus could not be said to be fully human. The final verdict on this debate was delivered at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD and stated categorically that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. This has become Christian orthodoxy to this day. The notion of full humanity would appear to directly contradict Chicago statement about the omniscience of Jesus. To be fully human means that, whatever else we want to say about Jesus, he was at one with the limitations of his age over scientific and historical understanding. No one has ever suggested that limitations in these areas have been able to limit Jesus’ apprehension and knowledge of the mind and will of God. The belief that Jesus ‘incarnates’ the full reality of God in a human life is a paradox and mystery which we struggle to understand and always will. But whatever it means it does not necessitate his being able to offer an infallible opinion on the questions about the authorship of the book of Daniel and the Psalms.

My readers will forgive me for returning to the topic of the notorious church, Trinity, Brentwood as a jumping-off point for the understanding of a particular aspect in the life of churches that cause harm. Trinity Church in many respects is an archetypical church of its type, theologically and in terms of its internal dynamics. Some of what I have written here is a recounting of actual events in the tortured history of this institution. Other pieces are using the well documented descriptions of its life and times to illustrate general points which may apply to many churches of this type. All the information about the Brentwood church comes from victimsofmichaelreid.blog

The news at Trinity suggests that little is, in fact, going on at present. A Commission for investigating past wrongs is to be appointed with an external Chair recommended by the Evangelical Alliance. The church is soon to publish terms of reference for this Commission and it is hoped that the whole process of meeting, investigating and producing a report will be completed by the summer. All this sounds very civilised and the information was relayed through a news item on the official website last night (Monday). But in the middle of the anodyne and formal language, there was this startling statement. The church mentioned that there were nine allegations to be investigated, six of which that were anonymous. No details of what was contained in these ‘allegations’ but Nigel Davies’ blog has given us a good indication of their nature and seriousness. Some probably relate to bullying and the humiliating of children by staff at the school and the Bible School. Others may be about gross interference by leaders in the family lives of members, with wives or husbands pressured to leave their partners for the sake of their ‘salvation’. Maybe others touch on financial matters. The details of these allegations are not available or indeed important for the moment. Probably, apart from the rape allegation, none involved actual criminality though they were, no doubt, extremely unpleasant and traumatic for those concerned. The significant thing that the church is telling us is that serious allegations exist from the past which the church did nothing to address at the time they occurred. It is only the pressure from Nigel’s blog and possibility of police investigations that has forced the church to acknowledge that these complaints even exist.

Nine serious allegations of misconduct from the past is quite something for any organisation, let alone a church, to admit. It is freely confessing that things happened in the past of some seriousness which the leadership either did not know about or, if they did, were unwilling to pursue. Why would anyone in leadership not want to face up to such allegations at the time they happened? If they claim not to have known, what does that say about the power structures in place? These questions led me to reflect about the dynamics of power that would appear to exist in any organisation where serious abuse issues happen and are not dealt with.

One model that might be applied to the apparent power dynamics at Trinity/Peniel is the pyramid where all power is concentrated at the top. The power is surrendered to the leaders and control and coercion flow in one direction only – downwards. The leader in this case, Michael Reid, is a one man ruler who concentrates all the power in himself. One part of this power dynamic is that he will not listen to anyone who challenges him. His narcissistic world view has convinced him that he has messianic qualities. He has also internalised a battery of bible quotations which reinforce his position. The Holy Spirit speaks to him direct as leader and anyone who dares to suggest that he is a money-grubbing tyrant will have the quote ‘Touch not the Lord’s anointed’ thrown at them, before being told to leave. It is in fact unlikely that full insight as to the tyrannical nature of charismatic leadership is ever given to members. They will just become aware that their continuing survival in the church has become impossible. They feel an immense dissonance between what they think about God and the experience of being constantly bullied, humiliated and shouted at by the church leadership.

The reason that the nine allegations could never be investigated at the time they occurred is simply because the organisation that investigates itself, has to have a sense of its own potential fallibility. It has to admit that things can go wrong at times. Fallibility in an institution does not sit well with the sense of infallibility that seems to attaches to the norms of charismatic leadership which we have looked at above. If, as I claim, the power in this kind of institution goes from the top downwards, it will also be apparent that ordinary people in the structure will not be heard. ‘Touch not the Lord’s anointed’ can be translated into a command not to bother the big important man with petty complaints. The complaints will not be necessarily be petty but any challenge of the leader who has all the power and influence in the church, is not tolerated.

Nine allegations of power abuse from the past represents probably only a small selection of gross acts of misconduct that have actually occurred in this church. It is also suggestive of a grotesquely dysfunctional church. This church had organised itself in such a way that all the power was invested in one man and a small number of his hangers-on. Small people, ordinary people within the structure, experienced power flowing in one direction, downwards, overwhelming and extinguishing whatever voice that they might have had. To admit even one complaint and investigate it properly would have meant accepting in principle the possibility of fallibility in the leadership. At Trinity/Peniel this possibility could not even be entertained. The inability of leaders ever to be wrong or mistaken is part of the culture of such institutions and this infallibility makes them very dangerous places indeed.