ViaMedia

Category: Safeguarding

  • What is Christian about Vengeance?

    by the Revd Robert Thompson, Vicar St Mary’s, Kilburn & St James’, West Hampstead; host of Open Table, London

    The case of Jason Arday should make Christians across the political spectrum examine the difference between accountability and vengeance and the language by which a person becomes a scapegoat.

    His death has generated a depressingly familiar argument. Some believe that the ferocity of the campaign against him cannot be separated from race. Others insist that serious questions had been raised about his academic work and public story. We need to be capable of discussing both. Cambridge’s Chancellor, Chris Smith, condemned the “racist feeding frenzy” while insisting upon academic integrity. That distinction is necessary because questions about scholarship require investigation, whilst racism requires confrontation. Neither truth cancels the other.1

    Arday’s death does not prove that any of the allegations were false, nor that any set of critics caused it. Police have described his death as unexpected but not suspicious. A tragedy is not an argument, and we should resist causal claims the evidence cannot sustain.2 But this death exposes moral questions concealed in arguments about plagiarism: questions about proportionality, vulnerability and the language through which scrutiny becomes spectacle.

    Before Arday’s death, David Starkey and Nathan Cofnas recorded a conversation about what they regarded as his professional downfall. The chronology means they were not celebrating his death. Yet Starkey invoked “vengeance”, described it as “Christian”, and spoke of the opportunity to “rejoice together”.3 Arday’s death makes the moral revelation of these words cacophonous. Vengeance is not accountability. Accountability seeks truth, protection, restitution and institutional reform. It identifies responsibilities and proportionate remedies. Vengeance takes satisfaction in the suffering of the person judged to have done wrong. It wants not only the truth established but the offender to feel the force of our righteousness.

    That distinction lies at the heart of Christianity. Christians worship one who refuses retaliation, commands love of enemies, warns against judgement without self-examination and prays for those who crucify him. Paul writes: “Beloved, never avenge yourselves.” Christianity is not sentimental about wrongdoing. Grace does not abolish truth, forgiveness does not prevent consequences, and compassion does not require a university to ignore misconduct. But there is an abyss between justice and pleasure in another person’s destruction.

    The ideological context also matters. Cofnas describes himself as a “race realist”. He has argued that, under what he considers genuinely meritocratic conditions, the number of Black professors at Harvard would approach zero. Emmanuel College, Cambridge, ended its association with him after those views were published,4 although a separate Cambridge inquiry concluded that they were lawful speech and did not breach university regulations.5 This does not disprove any allegation he made. A politically motivated investigator may discover something true. Accountability and motivation are separate questions. But Arday became evidence in a much wider prosecution of diversity, decolonisation and Black academic advancement.

    René Girard helps explain the danger. Scapegoating does not require a wholly innocent victim or a fabricated accusation. It occurs when a person comes to carry anxieties and grievances much larger than any particular offence. Condemning that person then promises the community a cleansing restoration of order. The alleged offender ceases to be a neighbour accountable for particular conduct and becomes the embodiment of an institution, ideology or age.6

    That is what makes Nigel Biggar’s intervention important. Biggar is an Anglican priest, a moral theologian and a Conservative member of the House of Lords. After Arday’s death he called him a “fraud”, described him as having constructed a “huge fantasy about himself”, and said that once it was exposed there was “nowhere for him to hide”. Others, he concluded, bore heavy responsibility for “his fate”.7 His words do more than assess disputed scholarship. Arday’s wrongdoing is treated as settled, his inner life is diagnosed and his whole story becomes a fantasy. Biggar’s long engagement in controversies about empire, decolonisation, racial language and diversity may not prove racial animus or invalidate his criticism.8 It does show that Arday had become a symbolic figure within a culture war in which Biggar was already an active participant. That should have encouraged greater restraint. Priestly speech does not cease to be priestly speech when it appears on social media.

    Will Self’s furious essay about Arday’s treatment identifies something real but sometimes reproduces the movement it condemns: criticism of conduct becomes condemnation of the person.9 Bijan Omrani, whose work I like and respect even when I disagree with it, described Self’s article as “moral blackmail” and called its attacks upon Biggar and others “a disgrace”.10 The objection has force. We cannot resist one crowd by assembling another. But the moral concern must operate in both directions. If Self’s personal attacks are objectionable, so is language that reduces Arday to a fraud, a fantasy or the wreckage of an entire political project. It is not moral blackmail to insist that legitimate scrutiny remain proportionate, attend to known vulnerability and distinguish an alleged offence from the total worth of a human being. Self’s central proposition survives his excess: a person does not have to be innocent to possess the right not to be collectively destroyed.

    Girard’s warning must also be applied to ourselves. Andrew Brown, a religious journalist, challenged me to revisit what I and others had said while calling for Justin Welby’s resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury.11 I had argued publicly for his resignation since the publication of the Jay Report and initiated a petition after the Makin Review. I continue to believe resignation was necessary. The case concerned victims of abuse, the institutional responsibility of leaders holding immense power, and church structures that provided inadequate means of holding bishops and other national officeholders accountable. My purpose was to seek responsibility for safeguarding failures, not to pronounce upon Welby’s total worth. The differences from Arday are substantial. Welby was a white, Eton- and Cambridge-educated man at the summit of an established Church, supported by an extensive institutional apparatus. Arday was a comparatively exposed young Black professor, and allegations against him were recruited into a wider argument about whether Black academics and diversity policies belong in elite universities. One case concerned responsibility exercised from the top of an institution after documented safeguarding failures; the other concerned alleged personal misconduct that expanded into a public prosecution of a life.

    Yet those differences do not place me outside Girard’s warning. Welby became, for some, a symbol of everything they disliked about the Church. A justified demand for resignation can attract the energies of vengeance; criticism of office can slide into condemnation of the person. Christian humility requires me to examine my own language and motives, not merely those of people with whom I disagree. This is the deeper value of Girard for our present argument. No theological or political camp is immune. Conservatives may turn Arday into the embodiment of “DEI fraud”. Progressives may turn his critics into embodiments of racism. Church reformers may turn an archbishop into the embodiment of institutional corruption. The underlying grievances may be real, and the inequalities of power may be radical. Nevertheless, Christians must ask when accountability has become totalising, when language has ceased to describe conduct and begun to erase personhood, and when justice has acquired the emotional satisfactions of vengeance.

    The Christian story intensifies that warning. At its centre stands not a righteous crowd enjoying the downfall of a guilty man, but a condemned man surrounded by a crowd convinced of its own righteousness. Girard believed the Gospel exposes the scapegoating mechanism by telling the story from the victim’s side. It deprives the crowd of the comforting belief that unanimity proves justice. That does not mean every accused person is innocent, every resignation unjust or every forceful criticism cruel. It means the person before us remains a person. They do not become their worst act. Their disgrace must not become our entertainment; their suffering must not become our victory. The harder test of Christian ethics is not compassion for those whose innocence we recognise, but mercy and restraint when confronting those whom we believe have done wrong.

    Arday’s death must not be appropriated as proof of everything either side already believed. His family deserves space to grieve. Academic allegations may still require truthful examination, as do the responsibilities of Cambridge and the media. But “vengeance” and “rejoice together” should have sounded dreadful before his death, not only afterwards. Truth, accountability and justice matter. But vengeance is not justice. Christians across the political spectrum should be wary whenever a person becomes the symbol of everything our side opposes, and especially when cruelty begins to speak in the language of righteousness. If the Church cannot practise that humility, we should ask what exactly we think the Gospel is for.

    References

    1. Reuters, ‘Rest in Power: Thousands gather in London for vigil honouring academic Arday’, 17 August 2026.

    2. Reuters, ‘UK’s Burnham urges reflection on death of academic Arday’, 15 August 2026.

    3. David Starkey and Nathan Cofnas, recorded conversation concerning Jason Arday, circulated on X in August 2026

    4. The Observer, ‘Nathan Cofnas: the man at the centre of Arday plagiarism row was dismissed for views on race’, 18 August 2026.

    5. University of Cambridge, ‘Statement on Disciplinary Investigation (Dr Cofnas)’, 2 October 2025, updated 11 December 2025.

    6. René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (Stanford University Press, 1987).

    7. Nigel Biggar, post on X responding to Zarah Sultana MP, 16 August 2026.

    8. The National, ‘Scottish Tory peer Nigel Biggar pens essay defending use of N-word’, accessed 18 August 2026.

    9. Will Self, ‘Jason Arday: J’Accuse the British Media’, SITREP, 16 August 2026.

    10. Bijan Omrani, post on X responding to Will Self’s essay, 17 August 2026.

    11. Andrew Brown, comment responding to Robert Thompson on Facebook, 18 August 2026

  • Safeguarding: Still Not Trauma-Informed

    by Helen King, member of General Synod, 2021-2026; vice-chair of Together for the Church of England; President, Modern Church

    I have commented many times on the seeming inability of the Church of England to learn from its safeguarding failures. More and more ‘lessons learned’ reviews are published: but, despite promises of some work to connect them all and find common ground, nothing seems to happen. Lessons Learned Reviews are now called Safeguarding Practice Reviews but that does not detract from the point that they are not an end in themselves: we are supposed to learn something from their findings. As I have noted in relation to the abuse of the Read sisters, there is inconsistency in which reviews are considered ‘national’ and needing to be shared, and which are kept confidential to the diocese and the survivors. The recent Independent Safeguarding Audit of the National Safeguarding Team recommended that the C of E’s National Safeguarding Team, “in collaboration with the Audit and Information Technology departments, should immediately commission and establish a Centralised Safeguarding Learning Repository for all completed Lessons Learned Reviews (LLRs) and Safeguarding Practice Reviews (SPRs)”. And that’s what we need; something to join up the dots.

    Reviewing reviews

    This recommendation from the Independent Safeguarding Audit is of considerable interest for those of us on General Synod for the 2021-2026 quinquennium who have been asking questions about how the ‘learning’ is supposed to be connected across reviews. We were led to believe that those dots were already being joined up. In February 2026 the Lead Safeguarding Bishop reported (Q80) that a thematic review of the LLRs and SPRs over a five-year period would be completed that month.

    There is still no sign of it. Responding to a follow-up question on this in July (Q130) the Lead Safeguarding Bishop said that the National Safeguarding Steering Group had received the report on these themes across reviews in May and were working on it to connect its findings with existing work on improving safeguarding, and after they consider it again later this year “publication arrangements will be considered”. That is rather less definite than what he said in February which was that “the findings will be published as part of the Church’s ‘From the Ground Up’ workstream within the ‘Turning the Page’ safeguarding programme”. I had never heard of the DARE Unit – that stands for data analysis, research and evaluation – until I was following up that February response, but this seems to be what was meant by “Turning the Page”; some information is here and if you click on the FAQs you can find out more about how it is supposed to turn safeguarding “lessons into action without delay”.

    So how is this going to join up with the Centralised Safeguarding Learning Repository, and who will have access to that repository?

    LLRs and SPRs are not the only sort of review probing our safeguarding practice, and here I want to say something about another sort of review: an Independent Review. One of these was published on 15 July. It relates to a survivor whose experience with the C of E was on the list of cases needing attention at the point when the Independent Safeguarding Board was abruptly terminated in 2023. The ‘ISB 11’, victims and survivors of C of E abuse and misconduct whose cases had been referred to this group, were left in limbo. The subject of this Independent Review, Jane Chevous, identified in it only as ‘TT’ but waiving her anonymity on publication, has noted that “Mine is the first new review to be published from the legacy of the ISB work, and I hope it gives some hope to others that they will see some resolution soon”. That’s encouraging. Other than a news story in the Church Times and an interview on BBC Woman’s Hour, this new review by safeguarding specialist Helen M. Gilbert seems to have had little publicity, but it deserves to be very widely read.

    What have we learned?

    Much of what is highlighted in the Review is not new, and makes it clear that we are yet to take on board the most basic lessons of earlier reviews; Jane Chevous reported what had happened to her more than once, and we read of missing documents, long delays in responding to letters, unacknowledged power imbalances, and a generation of bishops described as being used to “being the boss”. This Review uncovers two appalling examples of bishops who did not pass on allegations of abuse because they were said to be “aggressively committed to protecting clergy and would bat complaints away”. One of these bishops did not bother with doing the statutory safeguarding training; after several years of this, he was given bespoke training, and then let that lapse as well. Safeguarding is everybody’s business? Apparently not.

    This case, which spanned three dioceses, yet again showed up inconsistencies across the C of E in culture and practice, not helped by high staff turnover in safeguarding. As with the Smyth abuse case, one of the clergy involved – in this case, one of the bishops – moved overseas, which revealed the lack of connection between parts of the wider church and the implications of this in a safeguarding case.

    The detailed and very clear Review also shows where there was good practice. Both my own diocese, Oxford, and Southwark, in recent years come out as places “where bishops worked closely with their safeguarding teams, taking their advice and supporting the development of strong survivor centred safeguarding cultures”. In particular, Oxford Diocese is praised when it went beyond what the NST had recommended.

    What are we not learning?

    The key lesson, and it’s not the first time we’ve heard it, is that safeguarding must be survivor-centred and trauma-informed, and a real sense of best practice here comes across throughout the Review. What the survivor most wanted from all of this was to be believed and heard, to be given an apology, “and to be able to engage in some form of restorative justice. The process denied her all of these.” When, in 2021, a letter of apology was produced, it was not written by the person over whose name it appeared: and then it was not sent for 8 months. In her conclusions Helen Gilbert comments “One must question why there has been such a reluctance to provide apologies and during this case review the opinion was expressed to the Reviewer that there is little doubt that part of this is to avoid liability.”

    One aspect which receives attention throughout the Review is what happens to a member of the clergy when they retire and keep Permission to Officiate (PtO). In 2022, the “Diocese of Oxford had considered their moral response regarding Rev B [one of the two clergy abusers]. On 30.3.22 the Bishop’s Chaplain and Rev B’s area Bishop visited Rev B. Following their conversation Rev B relinquished his PtO. He maintained he intended to do this on health grounds”. In the light of the detailed timeline given, with many earlier discussions of whether or not he should keep PtO, this appears to be a case of jumping before you are pushed. That meant that Rev B was allowed to take control of the story. This becomes explicit later in the report where we read that “Rev B wanted TT to be told he was relinquishing PtO on health grounds” [my italics]. Why the reluctance to remove PtO, and how does that look to the survivor?

    The national church needs to do far more to appreciate how important a survivor-centred and trauma-informed approach is. For example, in February 2026 I asked at General Synod about the trauma-informed training which we had been told in 2023 was ideally to be given to all members of Synod (Question 81). I was told that bite-size modules for this would go live in May. They didn’t. A question following this up in July (Question 129) received the answer “Competing priorities in the development of the National Safeguarding Training Portal have delayed the progress with the bitesize modules for trauma-informed practice training. The modules are in development and will be released as soon as possible.” No date was mentioned. I don’t think this is good enough. Such training was a recommendation of the Wilkinson Review and it should not take three years to set it up.

    A further example of not acting on previous reviews – in other words, not learning lessons – that comes out in Helen Gilbert’s Review is that “Both the Makin Review and the report by Professor Alexis Jay CBE on the Future of Church Safeguarding in the Church of England recommend the establishment of a separate, wholly independent body who would be responsible for providing scrutiny and oversight of safeguarding, free from the influence of any senior church officers. This is also a finding of this review.” But such independence has still not happened.

    As for that reference to the potentially malign influence of senior church officers, it recalls another recent safeguarding document, INEQE’s 2025 annual report, where the lead auditor shifted the blame away from (most) senior clergy on to senior diocesan officers and some national church staff. He wrote, “Crucially, the primary inhibitors of progress do not stem from senior clergy, most of whom demonstrate a genuine desire for change. Instead, they are structural and, in certain cases, institutional. They arise from a small group of influential senior officers at the diocesan level and certain individuals within the national Church.” This needs investigation, and action.

    That was then and this is now?

    A theme of this Independent Review, as of many others, is the claim of those who did not report abuse that such a (lack of) response was appropriate to the time when they heard about it. The Reviewer will have none of that. When Jane Chevous first reported her abuse by the two clergymen, it was in the period 2001-2002. The two clergy tried to claim that here that they could not be blamed for their actions; in the words of the review,

    “However, they qualified their statements and their responses in 2001/2 by saying ‘but there were no policies then’. As stated, during the course of this review, the theme that in 2001-2 there were no policies and procedures has been expressed repeatedly both in some of the NST documentation and in some of the interviews. Furthermore, it has been stated by some members of the NST that the diocesan bishop acted ‘appropriately for the time’. The Reviewer does not accept this view.”

    The Review contains not only a highly detailed and evidenced timeline but also a list of discussions and reports which predate 2001, with the Reviewer identifying a clash between NST views and other views on past abuse when she notes that “It is therefore a real concern that members of the NST still consider Bishop X acted appropriately for the time despite the evidence set out in this report.”

    Moving forward?

    The Reviewer comments that “it is not possible in this case review to comment on whether there has been any significant learning from the investigation into TT’s case. The church’s response to investigations and reviews is a wider issue across the Church of England.” She is right. Read the Review for yourself to learn how trauma-informed responses are essential if we are to move forwards on safeguarding.

    The last words must rest with Jane Chevous herself. She writes:

    “The review reveals my experience that, as a woman, the misogynistic attitudes in the church both made it easier for the priests to rape me, and meant that my complaint was often not taken seriously. Too often I hear of other women victims’ abuse dismissed as ‘affairs’.

    It shows that while safeguarding processes have developed, the too narrow focus on risk doesn’t offer survivors justice or healing. This makes it almost impossible for the church to deal with all the damage caused by non-recent abuse. 

    … In the end, it’s about love for a fellow human being who is suffering. And if the church can’t manage that, then it has truly lost its way.”

  • ‘Evangelical and Inclusive’ – Renewing the Heart of the Tradition

    by David Runcorn, a convenor of the Inclusive Evangelical network and the author of Love means Love – same-sex relationships and the Bible (2020).

    A collection of studies and stories about evangelical faith and belief will be published on 28 April. Evangelical and Inclusive – a future and a hope is significant because it is written by evangelicals who support the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people and their relationships in the life of the church. Their purpose is more than a revisiting of the familiar arguments. For the Inclusive Evangelicals (IE) network the present conflicts are laying bare the need for a renewal of evangelical belief and identity and set the debates within the wider picture of evangelical history and its development.

    The book is not a manifesto, campaign statement or systematic study of faith and doctrine. It is telling a story that is still in the making. The approach is broad. Chapters trace the history and development of this tradition, including its global context. The relationship of faith, culture and mission is explored. Issues of scripture and doctrine are illustrated, for example, through a discussion of the theology of the atonement – so central to evangelical faith.

    ‘But are they really evangelical?’

     The book starts with a very familiar question in the evangelical world. ‘If there’s one thing that defines evangelicals’, writes Mark Vasey Saunders, ‘it’s holding strong opinions over who is and isn’t an evangelical!’ This has painful relevance for the growing number of evangelicals who hold inclusive convictions. We are often told we are not (or are no longer) real evangelicals.

    The evangelical wing of the church has grown remarkably over the last fifty years. In the Church of England its influence now extends to all aspects of its life and leadership. There are good gifts in this. However, over the same period, the oversight of its extensive organizations, networks and resources has increasingly fallen under the leadership of its more conservative wing. That is why, in the current debates, the loudest voices from this part of the church have been strongly conservative ones. This gives a misleading impression of what has always been a diverse and developing faith.

    The Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) was founded by John Stott in 1960 to represent and co-ordinate the varied expressions of Anglican evangelicalism. However, in 2014 the CEEC changed its constitution to require members to specifically affirm male-female marriage as God’s ‘unchangeable standard’. The evangelical group on the Church of England’s General Synod and Diocesan Evangelical Fellowships fell in line, along with other groups and organisations. This immediately excluded many who call themselves evangelicals by any historic understanding of the name, but who hold inclusive convictions on sexuality. Theological discussion became narrowed. As well as drawing in the boundaries of membership, the change made a certain belief on human sexuality the test of Christian orthodoxy – something completely unknown in the Bible and the historic creeds and councils of the church. We have now reached the point where the deciding factor in almost every decision or appointment in the church is being determined by declared views on this issue.

    The rapid growth of the IE network after its launch two years ago made clear what we already knew – that there is a significant presence within evangelical churches of those with more open convictions, a desire for more exploratory understanding, and a more hospitable and open expression of a faith which had become too centred on the hard binary lines of evangelical/liberal, biblical/unbiblical, right/wrong.

    All of which means that the CEEC (and the related ‘Alliance’ network) cannot claim to be faithfully representing this historic tradition and its life in today’s church. 

    Evangelicals and the Bible

    The debates over sexuality have been challenging evangelicals to re-visit their understanding of how the Bible speaks to us today. The commitment to the scriptures as our unique authority and guide does not mean that views have never changed, nor that our understanding of what is taught there has not developed. Within our tradition, the unsettling process of re-examining, repenting and re-interpreting even long-unquestioned Biblical convictions, under the compelling of the Spirit and in the light of contemporary questions, is a familiar task. Indeed, our own understanding of scripture requires it. Unless we are willing to do this, we risk only reading the Bible in a kind of ancient time warp. Faith becomes inflexible, dogmatic and unable to respond to new contexts.

    Our twenty-first-century church is facing this challenge as we explore the gift of human identity and relationships. Specifically, we need a hermeneutic with which to translate ancient texts, conditions and concepts into the challenges faced in contemporary life. An example is the repeated claim made by those arguing for a traditional understanding of marriage, that the creation story in Genesis chapter two is a ‘definition of marriage’. This imposes on the text of a richly poetic, ancient wisdom story a very modern and quite literal meaning. To claim we read here God’s definite, eternal, universal ordering of human belonging and relating is to fail to attend to the literature before us, and therefore prevents us from faithfully discerning what story is actually being told, then and now.

    Women and Men

    The evangelical world has yet to become a place where women are fully respected and treated unambiguously as equals. ‘The distrust of women’s voices is hard baked into many women’s experience of evangelicalism’, writes Kate Massey in her chapter, Being a woman and evangelical. By contrast, inclusive evangelicals are committed to offering spaces of mutual welcome where, as Kate writes, ‘we practise and develop more equal ways of engaging with one another, thus hearing and better appreciating one another’s struggles and receiving one another’s wisdom’.  (1)

    In his careful critique of the issues raised by the recent abuse scandals that have unsettled the evangelical world (and beyond), Paul Roberts outlines important challenges to male identity and approaches to leadership in what remains a heavily man-centred tradition. He is concerned at the non-consultative style that presently characterises the leadership of parts of this tradition. By contrast, IEs ‘affirm modes of Christian leadership and management of power based on a New Testament model, that is collegial, consultative, diverse and accountable. The inclusion of a diversity of leadership voices, irrespective of sex or sexuality, is crucial in expressing this model in the present day in order to make the church a safer place.’

    Unity and Conflict

    Simon Butler came out fully as gay in a speech in General Synod. For some years he held one of the most senior roles there – an election he accepted ‘to try to keep the Church of England honest about its sexuality in its senior places’. The sexuality debates there changed him. ‘While evangelicals were arguing about ‘first order’ and ‘second order’ issues,’ he writes, ‘I found myself believing more and more that the unity of the church was the central biblical issue at stake. To deny that unity, to refuse to accept a fellow disciple, is a fundamental and grievous sin’. Nikki Groarke agrees. She describes her experience of managing deep conflicts in Synod and in her ministry as an Archdeacon. She challenges the language of ‘fighting for a cause rather than collaboration’, and the extensive use of emotive videos, letter campaigns and threats to withhold money. She calls her present position ‘optimism with a broken heart’ (Nick Cave). The pain of standing in the midst of this disagreement is deep and costly. Inclusive Evangelicals have a high view of unity. We seek to walk alongside, not apart from, those who disagree with us. The gospel teaches us this is not an issue over which to divide.

    Good fruit

    The most significant, challenging and hopeful voices in the book are from those within the LGBTQ+ community.

    A number of writers share their journeys as gay, lesbian or transgender Christians in the evangelical church. The stories of shaming, excluding and harming make for painful and challenging reading, but their message contains remarkable calls to faith.  

    Baptist minister Rachel Humphrey calls her chapter, How being Gay made me a better evangelical. She insists that LGBTQ+ Christians have grown in faith even through adversity and exclusion. ‘When banned from the worship group, or from praying in public, we continued to worship and in that process we discovered that God was with us in this place too, and thus our faith has continued to grow and develop and mature. My faith isn’t the same as it used to be before I came out. It’s better. By every measure people might use – integrity, confidence, mental well-being, effectiveness in getting things done – it’s more meaningful, more honest, more scriptural, and – more evangelical.’ She insists that evangelical churches are the poorer for excluding the gifts, wisdom and faith of these fellow disciples of Christ. Of course this is so, for in the body of Christ ‘the eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you!”’ (1 Corinthians 12.21).

     In Good Fruit Alex Huzzey shares stories of inclusive churches that are growing and flourishing despite opposition and without the benefit of the support and resources readily available within (conservative-led) evangelical networks. ‘In the last few years, a new generation of LGBTQ+ inclusive churches has emerged, retaining recognizably evangelical and charismatic approaches to scripture, worship and evangelism, and most importantly thriving on it.’

    Here is a vision for the renewal of a gifted but much conflicted tradition in the church. This book is written for Christians within the evangelical world who want to understand their own historic tradition better. We have written for those seeking to engage further with the theological and biblical basis for inclusive faith. Evangelical and Inclusive is offered in respect and friendship to evangelicals who, though disagreeing to varying degrees, are open to continuing the conversation. It is offered to those in the wider church who wish to understand better this creative, often perplexingly intransigent, yet life-giving tradition.

    It is offered in faith – for a future and a hope.

    Notes

    1. The issues are explored further in : https://www.inclusiveevangelicals.com/post/male-and-female-he-made-them-celebrating-one-humanity-equal-and-different

     

     

  • When the Music Fades: the Soul Survivor Generation

    by Dr Lucy Sixsmith, Research Fellow in English at St John’s College, Cambridge and author of When the Music Fades

    To understand Soul Survivor, I think you need to know about the shirts. This will sound trivial; I realise that. Soul Survivor, from 1993 until 2019, was an organisation running summer festivals in the charismatic evangelical tradition, for teenagers and young adults. It also became (and still is) a church in Watford. The founder, leader and constant on-stage presence at Soul Survivor festivals was Mike Pilavachi, and you could tell he was Mike Pilavachi by his interesting shirts.

    Mike always wore a particular style of multi-coloured shirt at the summer festivals, a West African dashiki rebranded as a trademark shirt for a Greek British youth leader at a substantially white middle-class British summer camp. My youngest brother remembers the shirts being on sale in the Soul Survivor marketplace, not as dashikis, with their own cultural history, but as Mike Pilavachi shirts. There was a Soul Survivor tradition of Mike’s Bad Karaoke; one year he sang ‘I’m too sexy for my shirt’ to ten thousand teenagers. In vulnerable moments, during preaching, he’d sit down on the edge of the stage, like it was just Mike and his youth group, one hand plucking at the patterned central panel that makes a dashiki distinctive.

    In 2023, when survivors came forward and the Church of England’s National Safeguarding Team investigated allegations of emotional abuse, inappropriate relationships, wrestling, and massaging, those shirts must have seemed convenient to the people choosing pictures for news articles. For any story about this latest scandal, there was a picture with an eye-catching shirt.

    Part of what I mean here is that Mike Pilavachi was a persona. A trademark shirt can be like a costume which sets the wearer apart as someone not quite like everyone else, someone likably independent, a bit of a character. A multi-coloured trademark shirt at a Christian summer youth festival belongs to a world which is not quite real. Brighter, warmer, cartoon-like, more fun, more vibrant: the holiday atmosphere of a Christian summer youth festival offered what we used to call a ‘mountaintop experience’ in charismatic circles. Kids looked forward to Soul Survivor partly as a place to have fun and partly as a place to encounter God, and Mike performed the role of lovable overseer, buffoonishly whole-hearted.

    The mythology of Soul Survivor was that everything was done in chaos by faithful amateurs and it only came together because it was God’s idea. Consequently, Mike Pilavachi seemed less like a celebrity and more like everyone’s friend. I didn’t notice that the myth didn’t match the way Soul Survivor had become a model for youth ministry across the country. If it was God, it must be good. So I joined those crowds all through the noughties, from the age of fourteen to twenty-one or so, and always thought of Soul Survivor as a healthy benchmark, a useful compare-and-contrast when other charismatic movements drew out my scepticism.

    In 2023, while the National Safeguarding Team investigated Mike Pilavachi’s immediate relationships with colleagues and interns, I found myself wondering about the whole entire thing. Clearly, there were investigations that needed to be made, stories that needed to be heard or held respectfully, in that smaller circle of direct impact; but there were also questions to think through for those of us who were just there, one among ten thousand, thinking it was all fine. What made us so cheerfully overlook the clues to Mike’s behaviour that seemed plain and obvious with hindsight? If it was God on the move at Soul Survivor, as people were still saying it was, how could it have been God in public and not God in private? Could it be that the public aspect was good while the private aspect was cruelly manipulative, that the one was healthy and the other was not? Was it good for all those thousands of kids to have sat at Mike Pilavachi’s feet?

    And what was I going to do with all the worship songs that now sounded off-key? There were so many songs that came out of Soul Survivor about humility and brokenness, about kneeling at the foot of the cross, about decreasing and bowing down, and I couldn’t sing them any more, having learnt that the songwriters were not just humbling themselves but being humbled by their own mentor, pastor, and employer. Which led to a rather pressing question, if not the most weighty one I was asking: if I couldn’t face singing any worship songs any more, what on earth was I going to play for my own local congregation in the worship time that coming Sunday morning?

    That question—the question of what am I going to do now about all those surrender songs—was the starting point for writing a book called When the Music Fades: Power, Surrender and the Soul Survivor Generation. It is a book about and for all of us who have been confused—for anyone who has been fighting through a process of questioning charismatic evangelical spirituality. If I have needed to find space to think things through, there must be lots of other people out there, similarly perplexed. When the Music Fades is an attempt to provide space, for people who are still in church, people who are now out of church, and people who are somewhere in between.

    Soul Survivor is central to the book, but the book is not just about Soul Survivor. I had questions about charismatic practice, before 2023: about power dynamics, and coercion, and the temptation of putting on a show, and the difference between evangelism and bullying, and false promises, and relentless positivity, and how tiring it all is. The book is about all these things, and especially about navigating these things in teenagerhood, when you have barely learnt how to be a person yet, but you’re all the more eager to take on the duty of sharing Jesus with the world. The news about Soul Survivor, after all, was especially confronting because Soul Survivor was for teenagers. Soul Survivor had seemed so normal, so grounded, a well-balanced alternative to megachurch-style hype. Some charismatic leaders, I started to realise, I’d never trusted in the first place. I just had the habit of looking up to them, wanting their approval. I trusted Soul Survivor.

    For former Soul Survivor kids, I hope, When the Music Fades will be an opportunity to feel heard, even though it’s me doing the talking. Since it’s a book about being in the crowd, it claims that whoever was in the crowd matters. When we are talking about big churches and big movements, somehow the whole is less than the sum of its parts: the story of Soul Survivor, and whether or not Soul Survivor was a ‘God thing’, is not actually as interesting to me as the individual stories of every single person who ever attended Soul Survivor, with all the good things and bad things, the hard times, ordinary day-to-day and moments of hope. We went to Soul Survivor and believed we were supposed to be history makers and a revival generation and all that, and then, probably, we felt bad about not managing it, and then we had to figure out how to do basic adulthood, which is challenging enough.

    My biggest dream for the book is that those former history makers might feel recognised and valued. But I also hope, maybe, that a few church leaders might read it and realise that we took them seriously. We didn’t realise it was just a summer holiday, colourful shirts, a mountaintop. We took them at their word.

    And that had consequences, and it might be worth thinking about, and it might be worth doing things differently next time.

     

    When the Music Fades: Power, Surrender and the Soul Survivor Generation by Lucy Sixsmith (Canterbury Press, £16.99) is available from the Canterbury Press website and all good bookshops.

  • Safeguarding: How Can We “Learn Lessons” From the Read Sisters’ Case?

    by Professor Helen King, lay member of General Synod, Oxford Diocese


    When, in July 2025, the details of Revd Anne-Marie Ghosh’s emotional and physical abuse by her former husband were published by a Bishop’s Disciplinary Tribunal, the Church Times (8 August 2025) reported that a spokesperson for the diocese involved – Coventry – had said “The diocese acknowledges that there are learning points.” The Tribunal had observed “We trust lessons will be learned” (paragraph 51). It is a disturbing case because Ghosh – the adult victim – was the one who had a CDM brought against her, a CDM which this Tribunal dismissed.

    “Lessons will be learned” – four words, but do they mean anything? Here I want to ask a question: how is the wider church supposed to learn these lessons, if reviews are not made public?

    The Read sisters: asking a question

    A month before the details of the Ghosh tribunal were published, I had become aware of the case of the Read sisters. This broke in a 17 June story on the BBC news site and was followed up by the Church Times on 20 June. A Lessons Learned Review (LLR) had been carried out into the abuse they suffered as children in the 1950s and 1960s from a group formed of their GP father, a female Sunday School teacher (later to become a churchwarden) and the curate (later to become a canon). The father, Robert (Bob) Read died in 1996, and the Sunday School teacher, named in the Church Times as Mary Wairing, in 2015. The then-curate is still alive.

    The Read sisters’ case disturbed me, not least because it was clearly stated in reports that the LLR would not be published. I therefore submitted the following Question to the July 2025 Synod:

    On 17 June the BBC and then the Church Times reported on the production of a safeguarding Lessons Learned Review into the allegations of abuse as young children of Jenny, Wendy and Christina Read by their father, a female Sunday School teacher and a male curate at a church in the Northeast. The father and the Sunday School teacher had a sexual relationship. The Church Times reported that as part of the Terms of Reference, the LLR would not be published. In view of the grave seriousness of the alleged sexual offences involved, which were reported to three bishops, and in view of the fact that the victims have waived their right to anonymity, how will the learning from this Lessons Learned Review now be taken forward to inform safeguarding practice?

    The Bishop of Stepney replied in her role as Lead Bishop for Safeguarding:

    The report was commissioned by the Diocese concerned, with terms of reference designed to consider how that Diocese may learn lessons in relation to its practice in responding to this case, and the appropriateness of responses by anyone to whom allegations and concerns were raised within the Diocese. The reviewer provided the Diocese with five recommendations / areas of learning. As is the norm, the Diocese has responded to these recommendations and, with oversight from its DSAP (Diocesan Safeguarding Advisory Panel) has already implemented steps which will help inform safeguarding practice. (my emphasis added)

    Given that numerous other LLRs commissioned by dioceses have been made public to benefit learning throughout the whole church, such as the LLR into the tragic events in Stowe and Maids Moreton in my own diocese – Oxford – why restrict the Read Sisters LLR to a few individuals in York Diocese? As people move between dioceses, should any review be restricted to one diocese?

    It was not, in fact, the Terms of Reference that restricted the LLR to York Diocese; after the sisters themselves repeatedly asked for the reason, the mysterious answer was given that “more than one complainant” had requested it not be shared internally or externally.

    One of the sisters, Jenny Heimerdinger, was at the York Synod in July but I was not aware of this until I returned home; she subsequently made contact and we have spoken on Zoom. She also brought to my attention the interviews in which the sisters had been involved, on BBC Look North, from 17 June 2025 and 18 June 2025, and on ITN News at 10 on 14 July 2025.

     

    Reporting abuse: from bishops to reviews

    The three Read sisters had another three surviving siblings and the family, with the other abusers, formed a very close-knit group, functioning almost as a sect in which Jenny and her siblings were kept apart from secular influences such as pop music and were discouraged from forming any friendships outside the family and church. The abuse was ritualistic and sadistic, and some of it took place in the church building. The sisters reported the abuse to a bishop in 1993, and to the then-Archbishop of Canterbury as well as another bishop in 2003; and to a third bishop in 2005. The third bishop presided over the diocese in which the former curate, by this time retired and with PTO, was then living. The abuse was also reported to IICSA in 2019 and the former curate was arrested in 2020 but no action was taken by the police due to insufficient evidence. One of the sisters was then put in touch with the York safeguarding team and funding for psychotherapy was arranged by them and has subsequently been partially provided under the national Interim Support Scheme. The York team advised the sisters to make Subject Access Requests to the various dioceses involved; the results indicate that no action was ever taken or any record made of their complaints in the former curate’s files.

    Following an internal and ineffectual Lessons Learned Review by the diocese where the former curate was living, York commissioned a further independent Lessons Learned Review in 2021, which was released to the sisters in October 2024. The reviewer appointed by York, Simon Bass, appears to be a sole operator trading as Church Safeguarding Consultancy (CSC) and, although he previously worked at Churches’ Child Protection Advisory Service (CCPAS, now rebranded as Thirtyone:eight), there is no evidence that he had carried out any other independent reviews; the CSC website only states that the company has “undertaken several such reviews”. As a company CSC is, according to Companies House, now “dissolved” as a result of compulsory strike-off, the result of failing to fulfil its legal obligations, though the CSC website continues to be active. In 2016-17, when he set up CSC, Bass was also the independent chair of Blackburn Diocese’s Safeguarding Management Group, and he was one of the project team members for their Past Cases Review 2 in 2021. I wonder if this constitutes a conflict of interest.

    Commissioned from Bass in 2021, the York LLR was dated October 2023 so it is not clear why its release was delayed until a year later; did someone mentioned anonymously in it cause the delay? When one of the Read sisters met the Archbishop of York in January 2025, at that point he had not been given the LLR for reasons of “data protection”. When the other sisters met him in May, he had been allowed to see it at their insistence. He has given a formal apology for the abuse, though not for the mishandling of their case.

    The sisters are unimpressed by the report; its factual errors, its many typos, and its significant redactions including the removal of around 10% of the paragraphs make it incomprehensible in large measure. On these shortcomings, two sisters entered the complaint procedure which, following what seems to be questionable interference by HR, has now been stuck at Stage 3 since April 2025. Meanwhile, they themselves have given permission for the LLR to be shared.

     

    Taking it to the national team

    After the July 2025 Synod, on 12 August I wrote to the Lead Bishop for Safeguarding, Bishop Joanne Grenfell, to follow up on her answer to my question. I commented that at that stage, “I have resisted writing anything public about this case but the basic point, that an LLR can be carried out without any sharing of the ‘lessons’ beyond a small circle, does seem something that should be shared.”

    Bishop Joanne asked Julie O’Hara to respond, as Deputy Director for Learning and Development in the National Safeguarding Team; in her previous post, Julie was the lead Diocesan Safeguarding Advisor for York at the time when the Terms of Reference for the Read LLR review were drawn up.  She had accepted the sisters’ factual corrections to the initial draft of the Terms of Reference – but the Report shows that the original faulty ToRs were used. Following Bishop Joanne’s intervention, Julie and the national Director of Safeguarding, Alex Kubeyinje, replied very quickly. Their combined response was that LLRs/SPRs “should be published” but not if there were “challenges in sharing the full report due to potential identification of individuals”. In such cases an executive summary could be shared.

    Does this apply to the Read sisters’ LLR? In the LLR, the identity of the curate is not given, apparently for legal reasons; and it states that no other allegations against him were ever made. But this contradicts information given to the sisters and, as the case of David Tudor shows, identifying an abuser by name can lead to other victims and survivors being empowered to come forward. The abuser of the sisters is known to have gone to work in N. Rhodesia/Zambia immediately following his involvement with the children; in view of John Smyth’s move to Africa, with support and funding from some Church of England priests, this deserves more attention.

    The combined response from senior officers of the NST continued:

    In some cases, it seems that only the recommendations from a review are shared. In such cases, as you have identified, it can be difficult to understand the rationale and indeed there are various reasons why a full review might not be published. These can include the wishes of victims and survivors, or situations where the reviewer did not follow the agreed terms of reference, making wider sharing inappropriate. When the NST has not commissioned the review, NST colleagues may also not have full visibility into the decision-making process around publication.

    They concluded that only the commissioning diocese could comment. But we know that the three sisters wish the LLR to be shared.

     

    Keeping it local: what makes a case ‘national’?

    The lack of sharing does seem very odd. Lessons Learned Reviews (LLR) have now been renamed Safeguarding Practice Reviews (SPR) but the whole point of them remains to identify how the church, as a national body, can stop making the same mistakes. But that, of course, depends on how and with whom their findings and recommendations are shared.

    In this case, no part of the Read sisters’ LLR was shared even with the NST until one of them sent it to them in summer 2025. The response to me from Bishop Joanne and the senior NST members also stated that “The case you refer to was never seen as a national case”[1]. Why not? With three bishops and an Archbishop involved and an alleged abuser moving around the country and, indeed, overseas, it seems to be far more than a diocesan matter. Although the Terms of Reference of the Read sisters’ LLR did indeed state that the review was only about those within York Diocese to whom “allegations and concerns” had been raised, this did not rule out York sharing information with other dioceses and explicitly stated that information was to be shared with the chair of DSAP, NST and local safeguarding bodies – which did not automatically happen.

    The Read sisters’ LLR itself says “it is recognised that other dioceses hold material”. There were discussions in 2021 about York doing a joint review with the diocese where the former curate was living, but they declined. Here again it is worth comparing this situation with an ongoing case, that of abuse by David Tudor, where a review has been “jointly commissioned by the National Safeguarding Team, and the dioceses of Chelmsford and Southwark”.

    Furthermore, the letter I received from Bishop Joanne stated that NST “does require all completed reports to be shared with them and will see this one”. So, while it can’t be published and was commissioned by a diocese and not by the NST, NST “sees” it. Sees it and then what…? The senior members of the NST ended their letter to me by referring to the ongoing thematic review of the last five years [2] of LLRs, noting “we are hopeful that the themes will be learning that we can share publicly”. That leaves me asking: whyever would they not be?

     

    [1] Bishop Joanne, in giving me permission to quote or share her reply, noted that the definition of a “national” case needs work.

    [2] I would be interested to know precisely what dates are to be covered by this review.

  • Learning and Listening: Being Inclusive

    by Kat Campion-Spall, Rector of the Bristol Harbourside Churches, and a member of General Synod

    Arriving 3 years ago in a newly formed parish, a question from a parishioner awaited me: would we consider joining Inclusive Church?

    The two parishes had just merged. One church is community-focussed, with evangelical roots, although not wanting to use that label any more, with a vocation to hospitality and welcome. The other is a city centre church with a more creative, radical edge, historically the first point of contact for seafarers arriving from all over the world. I hadn’t expected the question of Inclusive Church but, as someone personally committed to working for inclusion, I welcomed it.

    It quickly became clear that this question came with history. A pastoral situation at one of the churches over a decade previously had caused pain and division, a number of people had left the church, attempts at reconciliation seem to have been ineffective, and the bishop’s instruction to stop talking about it and move on had left unhealed wounds beneath the surface. This wouldn’t be an easy conversation. 

    Although Inclusive Church has a wide remit, the point of tension was LGBTQI+ inclusion. The PCC and congregations cover a broad spectrum. Some who actively campaign for LGBTQI+ inclusion, many quietly affirming but cautious about division, some who hold to the church’s traditional teachings on marriage. Some were particularly concerned not to leave anyone feeling excluded because of their theological position.  

    Mention of Inclusive Church seemed like a flashpoint for many and even the history of the conversation caused disagreement – some remembered a discussion and vote on IC at one church, while others felt it had never been properly explored: historic PCC minutes suggest that a conversation about whether the PCC wanted to explore joining IC concluded that there wasn’t sufficient will to pursue it. It’s likely that that discussion had been a difficult one and many had little appetite to repeat it.

    So, over the course of 2023, we went back to basics. There wasn’t a shared narrative across the two churches, so we started with each church’s history of LGBTQI+ inclusion. We followed this by sharing our own personal stories of inclusion and exclusion, to try and understand each other’s perspectives.

    In January 2024 we had a pastoral decision to make. The Prayers of Love and Faith had been commended by the House of Bishops, and one of our congregation was planning to marry his long-term partner that spring and would love us to pray for them in church. I cautiously proposed that we offer these prayers to people with a connection with the parish. I was delighted that a PCC member suggested offering them to anyone who asked, as some couples wouldn’t have this option in their own parishes, and this received broad support. The resolution was passed unopposed, and I was privileged to lead prayers for Sam and Albert that April. This also demonstrated that the PCC was overwhelmingly wanting to affirm same-sex couples, so the difficult question was how we express that and whether IC membership was the right way to do this.

    Over the course of 2024 we adopted new values for our church community: inclusive, engaged, connected, inviting, which were warmly welcomed by the PCC and congregation. At the APCM, the question came again: would the PCC consider joining Inclusive Church? With all that we had done, we still hadn’t fully explored this. So the PCC discussed how we could have this conversation well. This in itself was a difficult conversation to have. Some members felt joining IC was essential to signal our inclusivity to those outside our churches, whereas others felt our church values and offering the PLF did this sufficiently; others feared that aligning with a particular organisation might alienate people with more traditional views. It became clear that a simple debate and vote would not move us forward. We had already spent many hours of PCC meetings on this and were making little meaningful progress towards agreement. It also became clear that we had to walk towards this. However difficult it would be to make a decision, not making a decision was taking its toll too.  

    So I planned a “month of inclusion”, for the PCC and wider congregation to learn about Inclusive Church and explore ideas of inclusion in general. We invited disabled, GMH, LGBTQI+, and neurodivergent guest preachers to help us listen to voices underrepresented in our church community and leadership. Our monthly discussion group heard from members of local churches that were part of IC. I encouraged PCC members to reach out to people who saw things differently and try to understand each other. And we set aside a whole PCC meeting to learn about Inclusive Church, with a vote at the following meeting.

    For the meeting, I invited an external facilitator. We reflected together on 1 Corinthians 12, on what it means to be a diverse body and to need one another. Each person was invited to share what they had learned so far in the process. We were joined on zoom by the IC National Co-ordinator, who answered our questions. I assured the PCC that while I was in favour of joining IC, I was committed to the parish whatever the outcome of the vote, and I wanted them all to be part of the churches.

    The meeting was difficult. Some people found it upsetting. Some felt that the process was too focussed on joining Inclusive Church and wanted to hear about alternatives. Some wanted to have a fuller exploration of Biblical and theological perspectives on sexuality. Some were concerned about aligning ourselves with an external organisation we had no control over. Some, sadly, felt approaches by other PCC members had been aggressive (although I remain convinced that was no-one’s intention). Some felt that not to join IC would be letting down the next generation. Some people felt uncertain about their future in our churches. 

    I wanted everyone to feel heard, but giving everyone even 5 minutes to talk would take up another whole PCC meeting. So between PCC meetings I offered 1:1 conversations to everyone on the PCC, not to persuade but to listen to their perspective. Each PCC member was invited to write a short statement setting out their position, and these were circulated before the meeting. With the Churchwardens, I gathered the arguments we’d heard into a ‘pros and cons’ list.

    We finally came to the vote. I set out the long journey of learning and listening we had been on. I set out what would happen if we voted no, and if we voted yes – both of which were underpinned by the same ongoing commitment to inclusion that the PCC had already expressed. We agreed to receive the vote in silence. We voted, and had a clear majority in favour. And we continued our meeting to discuss the things we really wanted to be talking about as a PCC – our mission, safeguarding our children, caring for our buildings.

    At one level, little has changed. Both churches remain committed to inclusion. Each is now forming a small group to develop different areas of inclusion: one probably focusing on disability, the other on LGBTQI+ welcome, which I hope would have happened anyway.

    But a few new people have found us through the IC directory. We now partner with Christians at Pride to host a monthly service, and have joined other local Inclusive Churches to share a stand at the university Freshers’ Fair. Most importantly, the Inclusive Church logo on our website and noticeboards now stands as a specific sign of welcome to those who might otherwise presume that they were not.

  • A Heavy Yoke: Selina Stone on Power

    I wanted to review Selina Stone’s new book, published today, on Via Media News, because this is such an important and accessible reflection on themes which are currently being discussed widely in our churches, particularly as we continue to reel from awareness of sexual and other forms of abuse: the themes of power, leadership, trust and success. While her approach is a theological one, Stone rightly points out that theology is expressed in practice and can be shaped and distorted by our personality and prejudices. And that was where I found her book was especially valuable, because she challenges each of us to face our own power in order to understand just where it is held, and how it can be abused.

    Stone writes from the Pentecostal tradition, but everything she discusses applies equally to other denominations. Leaders’ use of the church for their own ends is only made possible by the cultures in which they function and the Christian theology they can call on; certain theologies encourage particular power dynamics which increase the chances of spiritual abuse. In a comment which reminded me of the objections some individuals make when required to do safeguarding training, she notes that “Christians … imagine that there is no need to be trained to understand sexual harassment, toxic behaviour and racist abuse, since these are ‘worldly concerns’; instead, apparently, we simply need more Bible studies” (5). And, for those of us who are at least able to recognise abuse outside the Church, she argues that we need to do far more to understand what happens inside. Using Matthew 5’s “You’ve heard it said… but I say”, she invites churches “to critically engage with the traditions they have inherited” (11).

    I particularly appreciated Stone’s dissection of the current tropes of “disagreeing well” (31) and “servant leadership” (26), the second of these identified as virtue signalling, since it can disguise the immense power such a leader may wield over others, feigning service while keeping all the power. Stone uses the example of Jean Vanier’s abuse of nuns and lay women, which also leads her to explore the danger of concepts of spiritual fatherhood and of marriage imagery when talking about spiritual union.

    The chapter on the potential of preaching in grooming a congregation to accept abusive behaviour takes as its text a sermon by Mike Pilavachi, where he used the story of Jacob and Laban to argue that God sometimes sends toxic and abusive people into our lives because… He loves us. As a Black lay woman, Stone also knows all about churches “where white married couples occupy the highest rungs of power”, noting that the concerns of the “little people” were only properly heard after Matt and Beth Redman spoke out about Pilavachi.

    Another case study is that of SPAC Nation, whose wealthy leaders told young people to give them more money, including from selling their own blood, because this would become the seed of the church and would enable them to become rich too. To encourage this behaviour, SPAC nation drew on scripture about sacrifice and obedience. Here, Stone shows how we are still too quick to assume that dominance and numerical growth are evidence of success; and focusing on God as “Almighty” can stop us seeing how God can also be breath, or possibility.

    A further section focuses on John Smyth’s abuse, which was supported by specific readings of the Cross and theologies of atonement focused on God’s wrath. Here, Stone draws on the resources of Black female and womanist theologians, and on their interpretations of the “power in the blood”. After showing the different ways in which oppressed groups have drawn on this theology, she concludes that “God does not delight in the shedding of our blood, any more than he did in the torture and murder of Jesus” (106).

    She also explores the meaning of unity, uncovering the ways in which the word can be used to push the less powerful to remain silent so that the dominant group is able to continue as before, with any expression of disagreement being silenced as a threat to unity. But the price for unity should not be paid by those “who are already forced to carry burdens too heavy for them” (86). She asks what it really means to love each other, as opposed to merely tolerating those with whom we disagree.

    This is a book which fully grasps the complexity of power. When writing on the power of vulnerability as an element of good leadership, Stone shows how controlling leaders can pretend to be vulnerable as a technique to make others reveal their own stories, and also shows how the term “vulnerable adult” can be used to suggest that the survivor is somehow the cause of the abuse. She is very aware of body theology, particularly when analysing Vanier’s views on touch, which dangerously ignored boundaries and power. She contrasts Vanier with Jesus, who knows his power and what it is for, and always waits for consent.

    What is most challenging of all is when Stone turns from the shocking cases which have become familiar to us in the last decade or so and makes us look at ourselves, at “the wolf who might be within us” (13). For this, the most important chapter is the final one, on discernment. Here I remembered what I found most powerful in recent safeguarding leadership training: the Social GGRRAAAACCEESSSS. Taken from a social science context, these emphasise that we are all disadvantaged in some contexts and privileged in others, based on who we are. The long list used in C of E safeguarding training covers: gender, geography, race, religion, ability, accent, age, appearance, class, culture, education, employment, ethnicity, sexuality, sexual orientation, spirituality, and “something else”.

    Stone looks at discernment in the sense of a community and an individual working out how best to use their gifts in ministry, but also considers its less obvious aspects, such as knowing when to speak and when to remain silent, and recognising the spiritual influences behind people’s actions. She argues that we can’t ever spot every abuser and we don’t even know what we ourselves may be capable of doing. This is not made easier when we are not taught how to discern. Even within a church community we need to recognise the sense of something being “off”, perhaps from taking seriously our own bodily reactions. A church is which is a healthy space will have a sense of community, of making space for others, of leadership which does not control but develops other people. It will understand the importance of accountability and cultivate a culture of reflection.

    This is a clear, confident theological and personal appeal for a better understanding of power; I hope it will find its way on to the recommended reading sections of all diocesan safeguarding training materials.

     

     

     

  • Bleeding While Leading: A Theological and Leadership Reflection

    by Revd Dr Augustine Tanner-Ihm, Lead Minister of Saint Nicholas Church, Kingsway, Manchester

    Introduction: The Wounded Healer

    To lead while bleeding is to embody the paradox of Christ crucified and risen. It is to stand at the altar with wounds still fresh, to proclaim resurrection while still buried under the weight of systemic injustice. This reflection is not just theological—it is incarnational. It is the story of a Black, queer curate in the Church of England, navigating a decade of racism, homophobia, classism, and xenophobia, first as a layperson and then as a clergyman. The Church, which should be a place of refuge, has often been a crucible of suffering. The Gospel of Luke tells us that Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51), knowing that the journey would end in betrayal, rejection, and death. To lead while bleeding is to walk that same road, not toward triumph, but toward truth.

    The Master’s Tools and the Architecture of Oppression

    Audre Lorde’s prophetic insight—”The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”—speaks directly to the ecclesial structures that perpetuate exclusion. The Church of England, with its colonial legacy and hierarchical governance, often uses tools forged in whiteness, patriarchy, and heteronormativity to assess vocation and worth. These tools are not neutral. They are instruments of gatekeeping. My rejection from a parish post in 2020, citing discomfort with my ethnic background in a “monochrome white working-class” parish, is a stark example of how these tools operate. The rejection was not about theology or capability—it was about race. It was about maintaining the architecture of comfort for the dominant culture.

    Conversion Therapy: A Theology of Violence

    On 6 August, the Church Times reported that New Wine has formally apologised to me for the abuse I endured during a 2013–2014 internship. This included forced participation in a “LIFE Ministry” group aimed at “setting people free from homosexuality.” This was not pastoral care: it was spiritual violence. It was a theology of erasure. Luke’s Gospel offers a counter-narrative. In Luke 7, Jesus says to the woman who anoints him, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” He does not demand she change her identity. He affirms her dignity. The apology from New Wine, while necessary, came after years of silence and dismissal. This confession echoes the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37), where religious leaders pass by the wounded. It was the outsider who stopped, who saw, who healed.

    Kinship and Betrayal: Not All Skinfolk Are Kinfolk

    The African American proverb “Not all skinfolk are kinfolk” painfully captures the reality that solidarity is not guaranteed, even among those who share racial identity. Within the Church, Black and Asian clergy have sometimes perpetuated homophobia, aligning with conservative theology that excludes LGBTQIA+ siblings. The same theology which held them in chains of oppression they use to oppress the queer people. Something that many liberationists had to realize is that we are not free until everyone is free. This betrayal is reminiscent of Judas, who shared bread with Jesus but still handed him over. In Luke 22, Jesus says, “But behold, the hand of him who betrays me is with me on the table.” To be betrayed by those who look like you, who worship beside you, is a unique kind of crucifixion.

    Formation and Fragmentation at Theological College

    My experience at theological college was not one of formation, but one of fragmentation. Theological colleges are meant to be places of discernment and growth, yet they often replicate the very systems of exclusion they claim to challenge. Time and time again I get pastoral emails, calls and invitations to coffee from people in theological college struggling because of racism. The Gospel of Luke begins with Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55), a song of reversal: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.” Formation must be rooted in this radical reordering—not in conformity to oppressive norms.

    Psychological Safety and Leadership Development

    Psychological safety is a shared belief that people can express themselves without fear of reprisal. In church leadership, this is essential for fostering trust, collaboration, and authenticity. Research by Dr. Amy Edmondson and others shows that teams with high psychological safety perform better and experience less burnout. The Church of England’s Living Ministry research highlights the importance of wellbeing, especially in the face of systemic challenges. Clergy wellbeing must be supported through leadership development that prioritizes emotional health, vocational clarity, and relational support.

    Rejection, Anxiety, and the Fear of Homelessness

    I have been rejected from over 15 curacies and 14 roles post-curacy. I have watched friends receive parishes and roles without even applying. If I do not find a role by Christmas, I will be homeless and without a job. As someone who grew up in homeless shelters, this reality is terrifying and anxiety-inducing. At 35 years old, I believed I would be leading or helping to lead an evangelical fresh expression or pioneering something new to help people come to know Jesus. Instead, I find myself fighting for survival in a system that claims to be built on grace but often operates on exclusion.

    Resurrection and Hope

    Despite the trauma, I continue to serve faithfully. My story echoes that of Zacchaeus (Luke 19), a man rejected by society but embraced by Jesus. Zacchaeus responds with restitution, giving back what was taken. The Church must do the same. Apologies are not enough. There must be structural change, reparative justice, and a reimagining of vocation that includes all bodies, all identities.

    Conclusion: A Theology of Hope

    To bleed while leading is to live in the tension of Holy Saturday between death and resurrection. It is to believe, like the women at the tomb, that the story is not over. The Church must become a place where wounds are not hidden but honoured, where leadership is not sanitised but sanctified through suffering. May the Church of England dismantle its house not with the master’s tools, but with the carpenter’s—tools of justice, mercy, and truth. May it become a place where all are welcome at the table, not just tolerated in the pews. And may those who bleed while leading find not just healing, but resurrection.

  • Jagged Edges: Where Safeguarding Overlaps with the Trust Deficit

    by Professor Helen King, an authorised preacher in Oxford Diocese and an elected lay member of General Synod

    (picture credit: BBC/Yourkevich)

    ‘Trust’ is currently one of Synod’s key words. As part of the formal agenda, we’ve recently had a presentation and a report on why we don’t trust each other. At the July 2025 General Synod the papers included a further one on the progress of this work, which includes developing “trust and trustworthiness repair strategies”. That paper told us that the Trust Task Group, working with a reference group and a theologian (thus avoiding from the outset the question ‘where’s the theology for this’?), has decided to cancel one of its surveys, originally planned to produce some quantitative data, simply because it’s so blindingly obvious what the results will be.

    From what I’ve been reading recently, I wonder how far this trust deficit is related to the series of safeguarding disasters with which we have to live: from IICSA to Smyth to Soul Survivor to the Nine O’Clock Service with, along the way, the prime-time TV airing of The Sixth Commandment bringing to a far wider audience what happened in Stow and Maid’s Moreton. One of the many items on the agenda at the July General Synod this year was the Final Drafting and Final Approval (the capital letters are there because this is a piece of legislation) of the Redress Scheme for victims and survivors of church abuse. The Redress Scheme is person-centred and trauma-informed; it is not an adversarial process, because repeatedly having to tell one’s story is retraumatising. It now has to go through Parliament before an opening date can be announced, and information and updates can be already seen on the House of Survivors site.

    As one of the supporting documents for the Redress Scheme sent to Synod notes, “The Scheme’s development has been overseen by a project board which included representation from victims and survivors, and which has heard from a broader group of voices on a survivor working group.” Survivors have been involved at every stage.

    In another arena, a friend of mine, Maff Potts, set up the Camerados social movement, which has just celebrated its tenth anniversary. The movement is all about the importance of ‘People and Purpose’ and Maff has now published a book telling stories from that first decade. Camerados reverses the usual service or charity model of helping others, and instead recommends “Ask someone who is struggling to help you”. This is a powerful model, and I think the involvement of survivors in designing the Redress Scheme can be seen in these terms.It’s now very clear that survivors can and do help everyone else.

    Here, I want to introduce a resource from another group of survivors; a resource which needs to be better known and which has made me think about trust. Produced in the Newcastle Diocese, this is Jagged Edges: A New Stations of the Cross. I was thinking about Jagged Edges in the Redress debate last week, when Revd Jenny Bridgman mentioned Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, a classic on how trauma goes on affecting the body and the brain. She suggested that the body of the Church also keeps the score; that our responses are continuing to be affected by what IICSA and subsequent reports of abuse have told us about ourselves. Even those of us who are not victims and survivors of church abuse – and in every debate on the subject at Synod there seem to be more speakers saying that they too have been through this – are in some way traumatised by what we now know. Is that affecting our capacity to trust each other in other areas of church life?

    Although it has the full support of the Bishop of Newcastle, Jagged Edges is not a clergy-led project. It was created by survivors David Creese, Peter Locke and Sarah Troughton and combines David’s poetry, Sarah’s linocut prints and Peter’s music. All the resources are available on one website, here, including audio of the music and the poems and a video of a presentation given by the contributors and their editor, Maggi Creese, in the Moral Injury Webinar Series hosted by the International Centre for Moral Injury at Durham University. Like an earlier Newcastle Diocese creative project on abuse, “If I told you, what would you do?”, this is all free to download and use.

    As that Durham University Centre explains, this is about trust: “Moral Injury involves a profound sense of broken trust in ourselves, our leaders, governments and institutions to act in just and morally ‘good’ ways”. Moral injury not only feeds into the current Synod debates on trust, but also underlies the Private Member’s Motion considered in July about whether the House of Bishops should “urgently submit itself to an independent culture and governance review” (for the record, we did not vote on this but decided instead to move to Next Business).

    The focus of Jagged Edges is on repairing relationships in the Church; while embracing anger and pain in the “wounded heart” of the Church, the tone is generous. The resources are best used slowly, and absorbed gradually, as – with this reader at least – they connect viscerally. There are reflections included, which can be used by an individual reader or in a group, The exploration of abuse through the experience of Jesus draws on Michael Trainor’s 2014 book The Body of Jesus and Sexual Abuse. Even the process of lino printing replicates abuse: cutting into the sheet, covering it with ink – “shame, guilt and self-condemnation” – hiding it under a sheet or paper then applying pressure to reveal the image. Traumatic events affect memory; details are clear, but the narrative order breaks down. That is just as true of the differences between the gospel accounts of the days leading up to the Cross.

    While the poems start from and explore the original Greek of the descriptions of the events leading up to the Passion of Christ, the resources go up to the Resurrection with an image of Jesus and Peter healing their relationship on the beach as they begin to repair broken trust. As Jagged Edges says, “It is not a matter of finding the right way to say ‘sorry’ so that we can all ‘move on’. It is about discerning what it would mean to do as Jesus instructs Peter when he says ‘Feed my sheep’.”

    When I was working with a spiritual director, she advised me to keep on asking the question, “Where are you being fed?” We need to be fed if we are to feed others. As we not only listen to survivors, but learn from their wisdom, is this the re-set we need in the trust debate?

    The exhibition of the Jagged Edges material will be at Newcastle Cathedral from 1 October.

  • Behold the Men: Identifying Risks, Reconsidering Relationships

    by Rachel Starr, Director of Studies at the Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education, Birmingham

    Since Behold the Men was published in January, a lot of people have commented on its relevance to the present moment. Conversations about how churches interpret, encourage, even prescribe, certain models of masculinities have long been needed, but often not given the necessary attention. Today’s global realities have brought into sharper focus the problematic intersections of white power, patriarchy, colonialism and certain forms of Christianity. Yet churches are still in denial about the necessary theological work they need to do in relation to abuse, inequality and injustice.

    In an article from 2019 addressing clerical abuse in the Roman Catholic Church, Susan A. Ross observes that ‘the insights that feminist theology offers to this crisis have not received the kind of attention they deserve’ and seeks to demonstrate both that ‘many (although not all) of the issues in clergy sexual abuse are theologically grounded’ and also that ‘feminist insights can contribute to a transformed church in which ?patriarchy and clericalism no longer dominate, where there is a healthy and holistic theology of sexuality, and ?where the voices of women and the laity are truly heard’ (Ross 2019, p. 633).?

    When viewed in relation to the ongoing safeguarding crisis within many churches, the risks inherent within dominant models of masculinity are clear to see.

    Within many such models, men are considered solitary, independent figures. They are expected to be both self-centred and self-reliant rather than understanding themselves in relation to a wider community. Men are encouraged to be the answer rather than to ask questions or listen to other people’s responses. They are called on to be strong, to ignore or decry their own and others’ vulnerabilities. Men are expected to lead rather than follow, receive instruction or advice. Men in leadership face pressure to be the charismatic leader, the hero, the saviour. As I have written elsewhere, the hero is best avoided.

    As part of their formation within such dominant models of masculinity, men are asked to deny or overcome emotions – framed as signs of weakness – and focus on the rational mind. They are kept at a distance from the realities of their own – and especially others’ – bodies. In different ways, and in a variety of settings, men are seen as creators and consumers, rather than those tasked with caring or cleaning up. This can result in a lack of attentiveness to the impact of actions or decisions.

    A model of masculinity found in some men’s spirituality movements is that of the ‘wild man’. While this model is less prevalent in British churches, it is present in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. This is a model focused on individual spiritual needs, sometimes to be pursued with aggression. It invites risk-taking rather than rule-following. Another model present in some Christian traditions is the successful man, whose presence is sought and whose failings are overlooked. A third model explored in Behold the Men is the family man, often found within a ‘culture of niceness’ which can mask power and stifle challenge. All three of these models – and others beside – need to be reconsidered if churches are to become places of wellbeing for all.

    Behold the Men offers some suggestions as to how churches might begin conversations around what it might mean to be a man of faith.

    1. Beginning with bodies

    ‘In our earliest conversations about the book, we talked about the importance of the body. While we cover shared ground with some systematic theology texts, we made a conscious decision to begin not with God but with human bodies, specifically, men’s bodies. Each chapter places bodies central to the discussion: naked, earthed, displaced, broken, of and in Christ, healing, resistant, receptive, created and connected’ (Beckford and Starr 2015, p. 4).

    We hope the book will help readers to listen to their own bodies and trust the insights offered: but not to be limited by their own embodied experiences. As Brazilian feminist theologian Ivone Gebara writes, ‘I have had … to listen with my whole body to what my particular body had not experienced concretely’ (Gebara 1995, p. 129).

    1. An ongoing conversation

    Behold the Men brings together more than a dozen contributors, who offer insights from a range of contexts, identities and theological traditions. The aim of the book is not to propel the reader towards a clear conclusion. Instead, it invites readers to listen carefully to different experiences, gain fresh insight and be encouraged to find new ways forward. It is not the first book exploring masculinities within Christianity, and we hope it will not be the last.

    1. ‘We Cannot Walk Alone’

    We chose to use Birmingham artist Eddy Aigbe’s painting, ‘We Cannot Walk Alone,’ for the book cover. Originally commissioned by Celebrating Sanctuary for Refugee Week in 2021, the image seeks to convey many different people coming together to shape more inclusive, just communities. In the work of justice, the wisdom, compassion and commitment of many is needed. We hope our book will be a resource for the journey. Certainly, there is much distance for our churches to travel if they are to be places where all bodies are welcomed, respected and honoured. Challenging violent and limiting models of masculinity within churches, exploring more inclusive and healthy ways of being men of faith, is long overdue.