by Ruth Harley, a curate in the Diocese of Oxford, and co-author of “Being Interrupted: Re-imagining The Church’s Mission From The Outside, In” (SCM Press, 2020), whose research interests focus around feminist ecclesiology and questions about how power is understood and used within the church.
Immersing myself in the transcripts of the IICSA Anglican Hearings as the basis of my MA dissertation has been by turns frustrating, infuriating, terrifying, upsetting and enraging. But it has also been very enlightening. Much here tells us deep and uncomfortable truths about the church: who we are, how we fail and how we handle failure, what and whom we prioritise and at what cost. IICSA’s October 2020 report, at the very least, should be compulsory reading for anyone with any measure of responsibility or authority within the church.
The primary outcomes from the IICSA process must, of course, be centred around safeguarding, and around the needs and voices of survivors of abuse, far too often side-lined and retraumatised by the church. There is a very real need for repentance in response to IICSA’s findings: for a willingness to confront the ways in which the church has too often been a safer place for abusers than for their victims, and a willingness to invest not only money and resources, but also our time, care and attention into the radical changes which are needed.
But the impact of the IICSA findings extends far beyond their specific scope. The Anglican Hearings have been an apocalyptic event in the life of the Church of England (and, to a lesser extent, the Church in Wales), both in the sense that they were devastating, and in the literal sense of the term ‘apocalypse’ – that which reveals. IICSA has revealed the devastating extent of abuse in the church. It has revealed some of the systemic and cultural flaws which have led to the church becoming a place where abuse can thrive, where the reputation of the institution and powerful individuals within it are prioritised at the expense of victims and survivors of abuse, with those who report abuse ignored, stigmatised and re-abused by the very people and systems supposed to protect them.
IICSA has also revealed something about what the church is, and how power is understood and (mis)used within the body of Christ. One of the factors I identified in my research into the ecclesiologies expressed during the Anglican Hearings was something I have termed ‘clericalist individualism’.
It’s well documented that clericalism is part of the mechanism by which clergy who abuse can go unchallenged; see for example Rosie Harper and Alan Wilson’s To Heal and Not to Hurt and Gilo and Janet Fife’s Letters to a Broken Church. A culture of ‘Father knows best’ is not one in which transparency and mutual accountability can flourish. But, deeply intertwined with that clericalism, there’s a kind of individualism which sees significant information and decision-making – in short, significant power – rest with individuals (often, though not always, ordained) in ways which both render those individuals unaccountable, and obscure or distort the proper nature of the church as an interdependent body, characterised by mutuality. This clericalist individualism is not a problem of ‘the top’: it’s a danger at every ‘level’ of the hierarchical structure, from home groups, to the parish, the diocese, and the national church.
The apocalyptic revelation of the church’s failings which IICSA provides may not seem like any ground for hope. But we are a church which both preaches and (at its best) lives resurrection: life which emerges out of death and trauma, and meets us on the road in unexpected ways. In revealing the sins which beset the church God is, I believe, doing a new thing, calling us to a new understanding of who we are and what it means to be church.
And it starts with power. Naming, confronting and repenting of all the ways in which power is used in the church to silence, oppress and abuse. And then daring to believe that another way is possible. Resources within and beyond the church’s traditions can help us with that re-imagining. For over half a century, feminist theologians have been calling the church to renounce hierarchical power – ‘power over’ – and embrace a different kind of power, rooted in mutuality, relationship and solidarity – ‘power with’ and, as laid out in Anna Mercedes’ book of the same title, Power For.[1]
It is a call which the church has so far largely chosen to ignore and suppress. But as we confront the endemic nature of abuse within the church, and as we wrestle too with the ways in which oppression (on grounds of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability and more) thrives within the body of Christ, it is a call which has never been more urgent. God, whose way is love and whose work in Jesus Christ is the work of liberation, is calling us, the church, to embrace the revelatory work of the Holy Spirit in our midst, and to step into new ways of understanding how power can and should function in the church, so that we can grow more fully into the body we are called together to be: characterised by mutuality, interdependence, honesty and accountability and – above all – love.
It would be all too easy to tell ourselves that abuse of power is something that happens ‘over there’ – only within ‘the hierarchy’, or only in churches ‘not like ours’. That is a comforting but dangerous lie. In any culture in which abuse flourishes, an underpinning myth is that “it could never happen here”. It could. It has. It does and it will. And each of us who are members with one another of the body of Christ have a responsibility to do the work which is required to make that body a safe and supportive church where all can flourish.
Any thoughts?