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Category: Safeguarding

  • Learning Lessons? Leading a Church Where Abuse Has Happened

    by Revd Canon Mark Bennet, Team Rector in the Thatcham Team and member of General Synod

    I reviewed a book a while back for the journal Practical Theology. Written by Gail Cafferata, and based on research mainly in the US, it was called The Last Pastor: Faithfully Steering a Closing Church. It was about how to close a church well, and what happens to people and buildings and resources and memories afterwards. Published in 2020, strangely it appears not yet to have appeared on the reading list of any course I am aware of in Church leadership – in spite of the fact that there are in fact many people who do close churches, and closing them well is very much better than closing them badly. If it is a common task – and Cafferata contacted over 130 pastors in five different denominations – then why are we not intentionally learning lessons from those who wear the T-shirt? It is an example of the learning we don’t want to do – we’d rather be (against the trend) growing churches and doing exciting things rather than attending to what is actually in front of many of us.

    None of us want to face a major safeguarding issue in our context – my own context is a parish. But if we do face such an issue, it would be good to have some deep research which goes beyond crisis and reputation management. Within six months of taking on my role of Team Rector I had to deal with two situations involving two different youth leaders in the parish, one of whom ended up spending time in prison. I mentioned an outline of my issues in a speech at the July 2023 General Synod in the debate on safeguarding reviews. ‘Lessons learnt’ is a term used all the time in these reviews, but I mentioned in passing the learning we apparently don’t want to do, about treating victims and survivors well over the long term. But my main focus (which the Church Times missed in its Synod report) was on the learning we haven’t even thought of doing: about the impact on, and care of, communities in which abuse has happened. When it happened to me, I had no body of learning to which I could refer to guide me in my unexpected and unwelcome new context.

    I hope that such experiences have a low incidence, but over time even a low incidence of scarring and damage unhealed can start to have a substantial impact, as cases mount up. Do you know what it feels like to face the prospect of doing youth work in the face of the “younger and more diverse” agenda when there has been a double betrayal in the parish? That has been one of my questions, but if the damage is low incidence, we must note also that our contexts of ministry are very diverse. Not many will have a single church building serving a parish of over 25,000 people. So I was arguing at Synod that we need, as a church, to capture, consolidate and reflect on the learning from the contexts where abuse has happened, so that people like me have resources which have a chance of mapping onto something like their own situation if the worst happens to them. It may be that reviews are the wrong tool for this work and that ongoing intentional research would capture the learning and the stories more effectively.

    What I do know is that if no-one is learning, then mistakes will be made – and no-one has yet put themselves out to learn from me and my experience. It is hard work to be the pastor of a congregation in which abuse has happened. In many cases it seems to divide the community between those who believe the stories are true, and those who would defend a “good person” or the reputation of the church. My journey covered five years, conflict, unexplained decisions and judgments and a serious case review encompassing the church and two schools (I was chair of governors of one – not, as it happens, a church school). The impact lasted for longer than that. Just to illustrate some of the questions which arose for me over this extended period:

    How do you preach over time: are there problematic Bible passages?

    How do you negotiate your relationship with local schools where you are a governor and parents are getting their best information from the local newspaper?

    How do you deal with newspaper stories in those community contexts?

    How do you manage a PCC which knows little of the story? And Churchwardens likewise?

    How do you manage a team when some can know things that others do not?

    What are the considerations about continuing the youth work in the parish (other partners may be involved)?

    How do you survive the incorrect comments and factually inaccurate narratives which emerge in your community when you can say nothing to challenge them?

    How do you cope with being called “paedo” in the street or in a public place?

    The demands and pressures of being embedded in a community where abuse has happened over a considerable period are not comms issues, or problem solving, or even sometimes actually safeguarding issues – they are issues of relationship and trust, and at heart are pastoral issues. As I mentioned in my speech, a community can be strongly divided, with emotion running high – as a work context, it can be demanding and at times relentless.

    I hope I never face the same issues again – my learning is of little use to me. But it could be of huge value to an unknown colleague facing some of the same challenges in a different context. What do we lose by putting ourselves out to learn the lessons?

     

  • Equality, Parliament, and the Established Church:  Some Recent Close Encounters

    Revd Canon Dr Judith Maltby is Chaplain, Fellow and Dean of Welfare of Corpus Christi College, Reader in Church History in the University of Oxford, and a member of the General Synod of the Church of England

    (the first in a series of four: based on a presentation to the June 26th Symposium on Same-Sex Marriage in the Church of England organised by Sir Ben Bradshaw and Jayne Ozanne)

    In February 2023, the General Synod of the Church of England debated and passed by a sizeable majority a paper from the House of Bishops which is intended to move the needle in a positive direction towards equality for LGBT+ people.  Such reform impacts on laypeople and clergy active within the Church but also on the wider public the Established Church seeks to serve, chiefly through the parochial system and sector chaplaincies. This wider public turn to the Church for food banks, youth work and elder care and at key ‘life events’, or ‘occasional offices’ of baptism, marriage and funerals. Marriage, of course, is at the heart of the issue. The House of Bishops’ proposals to Synod in February were the result of a lengthy six-year process known as Living in Love and Faith. I know it was a lengthy and careful process – I was a member of one of LLF’s working groups.

    In February, before Synod, a group of about a dozen cross-party Parliamentarians met with Archbishop Justin. It was, according to the Guardian and Telegraph, a heated meeting, at which Parliamentarians ‘threatened’ disestablishment if the Church did not change its position to allow equal marriage. The Telegraph reported that ‘the Archbishop of Canterbury has vowed that he will not be told what to do by MPs over blessings for same-sex couples’. Later that month, while at the global Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Ghana, the BBC reported that the Archbishop spoke of being ‘“threatened with parliamentary action” in an attempt “to force same-sex marriage” into the Church of England’.

    There is a lot of alleged ‘threatening’ going on by MPs as well as the implied criticism that Parliamentarians were somehow out of line to take a genuine interest in how the Established Church serves the nation. I would like to put the Archbishop’s remarks into historical context in terms of the relationship between Parliament and the Established Church of England. I am principally a historian of the 17th century, but you will be relieved that I only want to go back about 30 years to another significant equality issue in which Parliament and Church interacted: the ordination of women to the priesthood in the early 1990s and the consecration of women as bishops in the 2010s.

    In 2011, I co-edited a collection of essays with two other Oxford colleagues, called The Established Church:  Past, Present and Future.  The book came out of a day conference on the same topic. I am a cradle Anglican but moved to England from the United States in 1979 to begin doctoral studies and have lived here ever since. In my 20s and even into my 30s, I thought Church Establishment to be frankly bizarre – who wouldn’t coming from abroad? But over the years, I have become a ‘critical convert’ to it. The day conference came about because whenever I heard a bishop on the radio defending establishment, I wanted to dis-establish it. Surely, there were more robust and creative ways to understand the public good of Establishment than the tired truisms that get trotted out. That is what we set out to do, though not all the contributors were of one mind on the subject.

    My own chapter looked at gender and Establishment. The research was prompted by an exchange in Synod in 2010, rather like the one I started with, between the new Second Church Estates Commissioner, Tony Baldry, MP and the then bishop of Durham, Tom Wright. Baldry, characteristically, gave Synod some nuanced and honest advice that the Commons would look dimly on a measure to consecrate women as bishops that was discriminatory – that is, that treated bishops who were women differently than bishops who were men. Tom Wright, in his last speech before resigning his see, attacked Baldry in the chamber, claiming that he had said (which Baldry had not) something like ‘the political winds were blowing this way, and so the church had better get in line’. With rhetorical flourish, Wright said: ‘The day the Church ceases to be able to say we must obey God rather than human authority will be the day it ceases to be the Church.’ His remarks were greeted by thunderous applause in the Synod chamber as it is a statement, on face value, pretty much impossible for any Christian to disagree with.

    As I said, this exchange was the motivation for my own chapter in the book. I had a sense, although I had never explored it in detail, that the creation of Provincial Episcopal Visitors (or ‘Flying Bishops’ as they have come to be known) was the result of pressure from the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament, as it was not part of the Synodical Measure that passed Synod in November 1992.

    Some of you, like me, will remember that momentous vote in 1992 in General Synod, approving the ordination of women to the priesthood.  The 1992 Measure certainly did not treat women priests equally with their male counterparts. It:

    • Exempted women clergy from any protection provided by the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act
    • Created Resolutions A and B ‘to protect’ parishes from women clergy
    • Explicitly excluded women from the episcopate
    • Guaranteed that no bishop would be ‘forced’ to ordain women
    • Provided financial provision to ‘compensate’ male clergy who felt they needed to leave the Church because of the ordination of women to the priesthood

    You might think that that was quite enough compromise and ‘protection’ for opponents.

    And you might also be thinking, there is no mention whatsoever here of Flying Bishops – an invention entirely without historical precedent to address an issue on which Anglicans were not of one mind. There is a very, very long list of things about which Anglicans are not of one mind, but never before has an episcopal sub-structure been created to meet the needs of a particular theological constituency.(1)  And what a dangerous precedent it set for dealing with disagreement as we now see attempts to apply the model to other theological disputes.

    Where did this theological and ecclesiological innovation come from? Well, Parliamentarians, I hate to tell you, it came from you. Hours spent on Hansard, which in 2010 had the slowest search engine I’d ever come across:  there it all was in the proceedings of the Ecclesiastical Committee, a committee of both Houses, whose job it is to decide whether a Synodical Measure is ‘expedient’ to go to the Commons and Lords for approval.

    A cross-party group of MPs, chiefly Frank Field, Simon Hughes, Patrick Cormack, and John Selwyn Gummer pushed for even greater concessions to those opposed to the ordination of women than were already in the Measure. In fact, the vast majority of time spent by the Ecclesiastical Committee in 1993 was on how to provide even more ‘safeguards’ for those opposed to women in the priesthood. Such involvement by Parliamentarians was entirely appropriate, as Frank Field maintained, as it was part of their:

    … function as parliamentarians … to protect the interests of constituents who may be adversely affected by a [Church] Measure …. we are quite rightly … much concerned with, and will no doubt spend much time on, how the position of minorities is protected.(2)

    Going back to this material recently to prepare this piece, I was struck by the extensive use by Parliamentarians in the early 1990s of ‘safeguarding’ language – that male clergy might somehow be ‘victims’ of some sort of ‘abuse’ merely by the existence of women clergy. It is very chilling language now in the light of the recent series of catastrophic and real safeguarding failures in the Church that are piling up. But in the early 1990s, while Bishop Peter Ball was committing terrible abuse, somehow it was women priests who were seen as the people from whom other Church members needed ‘safeguarding’.

    The bishops, I’m afraid, caved in to this Parliamentary pressure and these ‘threats’ and produced the Act of Synod of 1993, putting it in place for the Ecclesiastical Committee to deem it expedient for the Measure to go to Parliament for a vote in October and November 1993. The Measure passed handsomely – 10:1 in the Commons and 7:1 in the Lords – and several hours of parliamentary time was set aside for debate. Thanks to the Ecclesiastical Committee, even more ‘safeguarding’ was provided and the equality of women clergy even more eroded. Both Field and Hughes spoke in the debate in the House, proudly outlining how the Ecclesiastical Committee had been key in the creation of Flying Bishops.

    I have time to touch only briefly on women in the episcopate, but we can see significant culture change from the early 1990s to the early 2000s. MPs used Early Day Motions from the early 2000s onwards to raise the question, with increasing impatience, of when the country can expect the Established Church to have women bishops. In their remarks, MPs often praised the public good provided by the Church’s parochial system and the women priests who were serving the wider community through it.

    Reflecting on this history challenges any notion that Parliamentarians taking an interest in the affairs of the Established Church is in anyway improper or unusual in the modern era. In the early 1990s, Parliamentarians ensured there was even more discriminatory provision against women priests and gave us Flying Bishops. By the early 2000s, MPs were repeatedly raising questions about the exclusion of women from the episcopate of the Established Church. You will remember the outcry in the Commons when the Measure narrowly failed to achieve a two-thirds majority in the House of Laity in 2012.   As the Church of England obsesses with its narrative of decline and lack of relevance, it is ironic that when the members of the public legislature of the country actually take an interest in the Church because they believe it to matter, such interest is perceived as ‘interference’ and ‘threatening’. In a way, I agree with Frank Field when he said it was their function as Parliamentarians:  ‘… to protect the interests of constituents who may be adversely affected by a [Church] Measure’.(3)

    In 1993, the ‘interests of constituents’ were understood to mean providing yet more discriminatory measures against women. In the past 20 years or so, the attention of MPs to ‘the interests of [their] constituents’ is about promoting equality in the way the Established Church orders its life and serves the wider community. The modern relationship of Parliament and the Church of England is more complicated than accusations of ‘threatening’ behaviour support.

    Notes
    (1) See Judith Maltby, ‘One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, but Two Integrities?’ in Monica Furlong, ed, Act of Synod or Act of Folly?: Episcopal Ministry Act of Synod 1993 (SCM Press, 1998).
    (2) Reports of the Ecclesiastical Committee, p. 64 (19 April 1993).
    (3) Reports of the Ecclesiastical Committee, p. 64 (19 April 1993).
    Further reading
    Judith Maltby, ‘Gender and Establishment:  Parliament, “Erastianism” and the Ordination of Women 1993-2010’ in Mark Chapman, Judith Maltby & William Whyte, eds, The Established Church:  Past, Present and Future (T&T Clark, 2011).

  • The Foundations for Ecclesial Instability: the Rock on the Sands

    by Martyn Percy, a Fellow of King’s College London and Harris Manchester College, Oxford 

    What is the connection between an obscure piece of research commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the early 1990s and the current crisis in the Church of England? The research, mostly conducted by academics with particular involvement from the George Mason University Centre for Global Policy, grew out of earlier research conducted by Ted Gurr at the University of Maryland via the ‘State Failure Task Force’ under the Center for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM), later led by Monty Marshall. Gurr and Marshall identified the common ‘problem set’ of issues that were the grounds – shaky or quicksand – that gave rise to instability.  Today, this research finds its practical outcome in the PITF – the Political Instability Task Force.

    Instability is hardly a new problem for churches. Persecution, doctrinal disputes, scandals and heresies have all resulted in some shaking of the foundations.  Moreover, the New Testament itself, and the teachings of Jesus, are often consumed with questions of stability. Jesus’ parable of the houses built on rock or sand, or the more agricultural motifs centred on deep-rooted plants, fruitfulness and growth come to mind. In one sense, the entire basis of Christian faith rests on the paradox of forfeiting security and stability for a life of instability and uncertainty…in order to gain safekeeping. After all, what else is a vocation other than living out risk with no guarantees or assurances.

    That said, we do make these choices for God as individuals. But I may only say ‘yes’ to God as myself. I cannot commit another person to my ‘yes’, however much I hope and pray that they may share the same affirmation. But what happens when, instead of us choosing instability and learning to live with it, this interloper arrives uninvited, and is communal and countrywide? My personal negotiation with instability is one thing. Social and political instability, however, is of a different order. When the foundations of societies are shaking, how do we know if this is an episodic quake that will pass, or something more damaging that will reduce even the strongest foundations to rubble and dust?

    The PITF drew on over a hundred global instability ‘problem cases’ from 1955-2011. The researchers identified several categories of state failure:

    1. Revolutionary and Ethnic wars (emerging from civil strife).
    2. Genocides and Politicides (often rooted in perceived inequalities).
    3. Adverse Regime changes (arising from or leading to civil war).

    The PITF were interested in the common denominators and the cultural, social, climatic and political factors that gave rise to instability which tipped into revolt, revolution and/or violence. Why do regimes suddenly topple, and governments that were elected get swept away like political debris? Readers will have their own view as to whether there is sufficient civil strife in society at the moment to trigger some sort of revolution. I doubt it, though the risks are markedly higher than at the end of the 20th-century, and the current grammar of dissent and protest is perhaps comparable to what was witnessed in the 1960s.

    How might a ‘Polity Instability Task Force’ assess the wobbling churches of late modernity?  For sure, money, sex and power – that unholiest of trinities – afflicts all mainstream denominations. Consider the history, data and the internecine ecclesial wars, and try and name any exceptions. There are internal wranglings and unease over lack of money and its unequal distribution, the method of ‘taxing’ congregations, and how the revenues are spent; over same-sex relations, scandals on clergy and sexual abuse, divorce and remarriage, and gender; and balancing democracy, leadership, management and compliance.

    The original State Failure Task Force was alive to the social, political and cultural conditions that precipitated regime changes. In ecclesiology, the equations are no less complex, but they are slower to resolve. One might say that the major regime changes in ecclesiology are the East-West Schism and the Reformation. But in truth, smaller versions of these global ruptures occur in every generation, some resulting in permanent rifts and then further extended fragmentation.

    However, the cultural ground in which the foundations of mainline denominations sit is no longer stable. The emergence of meritocracy, less deference, mass mobilisation, greater individualism and consumerism in expressions and preferences all conspire to render this ground unstable and shifting. Mapped on to a global scale, sexuality, power and money quickly become enmeshed in North-South, First-World/Developing-World rivalries, with ethnicity and the legacy of empire and exploitation fuelling the complexity. Peter Turchin’s fine End Times (Allen Lane, 2023), explains how regimes rise and fall, and what it is about forms of control and the exercise of power that makes some types of governance especially susceptible to implosion or overthrow. Putin’s foray into Ukraine throws some light on how political disintegration gains traction when power is challenged, and elites lose their authority under the weight of their failures and ensuing disenchantment.

    It is Turchin who also coined the term cliodynamics – Clio being the muse of history in Greek mythology, and dynamics simply the study how and why change takes place over periods of time. Using mathematical models, a cliodynamic approach can predict expansion and retraction in economies, state collapse or implosion, social discontent and even civil wars. While not a perfect science, it can explain how and why institutions and societies disintegrate.

    So, what would cliodynamics and an ecclesial Polity Instability Task Force make of the Church of England at this moment? Several observations are apparent, and will create the conditions for instability:

    1. Major shifts away from more open electoral systems to ones that are more closed, authoritarian and managed systems of control produce boredom and detachment, festering resentment, and may result in speculative conspiracy theories (e.g., we know where all the money goes…).
    2. Elitism, whether it is quasi-monarchical or some ontologised managerialism, will result in a larger critical mass resenting the hierarchies and its powers of rule and decision-making. A lack of accountability, transparency, integrity and humility will also produce calls for regime-change.
    3. Loss or rapid erosion of devolved local powers, assertions of control (e.g., adopt the strategic vision) and penalties for daring to dissent will create a groundswell for secession, in which the exercise of despotic power will only produce tensions between central control mechanisms and those meant to comply.
    4. The collapse of the central governance, unable to manage external complexities and challenges, and unable to fund, manage and resource internal systems of order and control, will tend to question the capacity of the ruling elite to hold authority, power and any ability to govern.

    You might like to ponder how this all fits together with the Church of England and its leadership, and the grass roots. Here the Save the Parish movement is both a symptom and cause of widespread ecclesial dis-ease with the current regime. It has quickly won widespread support, largely due to growing fears over plutocratic-despotic episcopal leadership.

    A plutocracy is a society ruled and controlled by a handful of people who hold great wealth and income. The term combines Greek ploutos (wealth) and kratos (power).  Plutocracy is not a political philosophy so much as the name for a malaise, with the term first coined in English in the 1630s – times of Laudian and Stuart periods of governance, a decade before our own Civil War. The unaccountable and divine right to govern was the issue at stake, over and against the calls for proper democratic structures and political accountability.

    The term plutocracy is normally used critically and pejoratively to warn against an adverse and undesirable social context. Plutocracies are regimes distracted by their own fears and vanities, and quickly lose sight of social responsibility and the causes of poverty and inequality.

    Furthermore, whether left-wing or right-wing, plutocracies can ferment class division and conflict, and encourage individualistic wealth accumulation through competition for resources, replacing subsidised costs that were hitherto allocated on a needs-must basis into an economy of competitive bidding between those who are struggling. Plutocracies can go further, and insist that bids for essential subsidies and funding support now conform to the objectives, vision and goals of the regime and its elites.

    Now, nobody is suggesting for a moment that Bishops or Diocesan Secretaries have great personal wealth through their ecclesiastical preferment. The modern ecclesial plutocracy is more subtle. Diocesan HQ’s, Finance Committees, the Church Commissioners and the National Church Institutions have become the new quasi-baronial powers, whilst the ordinary person in the pew and the local parishes have seen their tax demands (i.e., parish share contributions) grow, whilst accountability and transparency over expenditure has declined.

    In short, demands by the centre for more money paired with less democratic accountability will eventually produce movements like Save the Parish. The elites demanding more and more while giving less and less are perceived to be bureaucratic plutocrats, spending money (not their own, but rather that of the people, laity and churches) on speculative projects and visions rather than supporting local clergy and ministry in parishes.

    The recent debacle over the Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB) has, for many churchgoers, and quite a number of onlookers, become an indicative sign of a leadership that is plutocratic, despotic and certainly elitist. Indeed, as a model of quasi-monarchical episcopacy, it has been high-handed and anti-democratic. Hiring and firing staff at will; asserting the independence of the ISB some days when it suits the regime to say so, yet on other days treating ISB staff as a subordinate body of subjects with few rights. It suggests a capricious use of power and authority.

    However, since the ISB ‘experiment’ cost Archbishops’ Council at least £500,000, Save the Parish would presumably like us all to know that this money could have been better spent. Or at least this expenditure could and should have been debated. Yet that could only have been achieved through greater democratic accountability, proper scrutiny and auditing, deliberation and examination.

    The Archbishops’ Council does not want that level of transparency. Whoever was in control of ‘Operation ISB’ no longer thought that independent oversight of safeguarding was in their interests or suited other objectives, so they shut it down. Charles I was against fiscal transparency and democratic scrutiny too, and the rest, as they say, was (tragic) history.

    Here we run into the opacity of those who control the money and the power, and are skilled in using the antediluvian structures which provide the reasoning for not being transparent and accountable (i.e., “it is too complex to explain…”; “we’ll need to think about that and then get back to you at our next meeting within the cycle…”; and “that probably needs to be looked at by a different committee…”). We’ve all been on the receiving end of such tropes. Some of us are also fluent in the language.

    The ecclesial scenario sketched above entirely corresponds to the findings of the PITF for the CIA in the 1990s. The Church of England, or rather its leadership, is on the brink. It has been whittling away at the democratic instruments such as General Synod for some time, turning what should be a proper auditorium for debate and deliberation into a theatrical spectacle more akin to party political bread and circus.

    Yet quite suddenly, serious and searching questions over the meaning and interpretation of the word ‘independent’ in safeguarding governance have now called into question the entire direction, structure and running of an ecclesial regime.  The stance of the two ISB board members was simple. They stood up for genuine independence, and advocated for victims of abuse – so they lost their jobs.

    Rather like the solitary ‘Tank Man of Tiananmen Square’ (June 5th 1989) they simply stood in the way of the prevailing power and would not be moved. Yes, they still lost – swept away by the force, assertion and power of a regime in control. But this time we have all been able to witness this action against them, and come to realise it was an action against us all. We have observed a brave act of defiance and the morally-principled and rightful exercise of disobedience. The regime expressed its regret, but has not apologised – indeed told us their actions were necessary and beneficial for our progress. But such assurances from the regime no longer carry weight or conviction; nor do they sound authentic.

    Like Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, ecclesial communications and assertions no longer correspond to reality. Serious disenchantment has set in. Real questions are being asked. As with any regime, it finds itself on the brink when its citizens have to choose between unwavering loyalty and compliance – or the dangerous acts of dissent that might be involved in expressing a free mind that seeks better alternatives.

    At the moment, the regime remains in power, controlling the money, media and message. But something stronger than sullen resentment has been born out of this ongoing safeguarding omnishambles. Some now sense a change of mood and some real determination that there must be serious reform and wholesale revolution. True, it will take a lot to raise General Synod from its habitual torpor. And the agenda for the gathering and the set-piece speeches still evidence a politburo in full control of the party conference and the messaging to wider membership. Yet the ennui it breeds is undeniable.

    The Polity Instability Task Force are examining a growing corpus of evidence. There are some significant signs indicating winds of change. The Spirit blows where it wills.

  • Archbishops’ Council: Reset Required

    by Gilo, co-editor with Janet Fife of the book Letters to a Broken Church, and also co-creator of the House of Survivors website. He also writes post-modern hymns.

    This past week saw the Deputy Safeguarding Lead Bishop say on social media: “Today the church is less accountable. To remove, at short notice, the strongest independent voices holding the CofE to account for its safeguarding failings makes us look resistant to robust scrutiny and challenge – which, of course, we are.” And in a BBC interview shortly afterwards: “I don’t entirely trust the church, even though I’m a key part of it.”

    Bishop Julie Conalty is correct in her assessment, and sadly one of the few bishops with sufficient spine to say it publicly.

    Many questions arise from these comments. Did Archbishops’ Council alert DSAs (Diocesan Safeguarding Advisors) prior to the sacking of the ISB statement? Were DSAs across dioceses given any time to prepare for victims’ and survivors’ confusion and distress? I know one wasn’t. I alerted him about forty minutes prior to the release of the statement. Steve Reeves and Jasvinder Sanghera had been given less than an hour’s notice before the statement went up on the Church of England website. They urged Archbishops’ Council for time to prepare the survivors in their care; they urged the Council to think about possible impact. They were told no. So in desperation they reached out to alert a few people quickly so we could contact several others in very vulnerable situations as quickly as possible. I rang and gently told one survivor what was coming as I knew that it could be devastating for them to find out suddenly in this impersonal way by the Archbishops’ Council. Several DSAs later commented that they were appalled that *good* safeguarding had to happen in this unofficial and ad hoc way and that it was necessary for the two ISB members to act fast in the face of such recklessness by the national Church.

    The heads of this Council are the two Archbishops. Why are they not ‘stepped back’? Could they face clergy disciplinary measures? They and others on the Council have presumably done C4 safeguarding training and Senior Leadership training and should be fully aware of the danger of their reckless conduct. They would know that many survivors speak of the ‘re-abuse’ we experience from the Church’s own treatment of our disclosures.  Such misconduct would not be ignored if done by clergy without mitres. Will the Lead Bishop, Joanne Grenfell, act? Will Alexander Kubeyinje, Director of the National Safeguarding Team, act? But an NST Director who is reported to have told the Survivor Advocate that she is “too survivor focussed” is unlikely to see through a lens other than the matrix provided by his controllers. And a Lead Bishop who has remained largely invisible and inaudible since appointment is unlikely to tackle misconduct by her seniors.

    I met with a senior figure this week, a bishop and his team, to ask for help in preparing CDMs for the heads of Archbishops’ Council on the following grounds

    • disregarding safeguarding policy
    • jettisoned lessons learnt
    • putting comms strategy above safeguarding
    • disregard for survivors in acute situations
    • putting back the work of DSAs, and safeguarding across the wider Church, by years
    • ignoring basic Christian principles, or perhaps ‘conduct unbecoming of a clerk in Holy Orders’

    It is bewildering how a group of very senior people who have the running of the Church in their hands could agree to go along with such unsafe practice. The placing of strategy above the needs of survivors in acute and precarious situations is particularly egregious.

    Why are those in governance willing to destroy what is left of their Church’s credibility in this way, and what is the motivation? Who in the Council ‘advises’ (or instructs) them to jettison ‘lessons’ they tell us in their many published ‘Lessons Learnt Reviews’ have been learned, and to abandon good practice? Two figures in public office have overarching power and prestige in this institution. This affords them the freedom to turn to this advisor and say clearly “No, you are tearing a hole in the hull of this Church’s credibility and your direction in these matters makes the Church look delinquent.” In this disastrous sphere of the Church’s life where so much coverup and corruption from the past still needs facing, where there has been so much complicity with unethical activity, and where much honesty and healing is required – how much more credibility capital are the Archbishops willing to burn protecting disastrous advice?

    Everyone knows the answer to the question ‘Who’, but nobody really understands the ‘Why’. The Secretary General to the Archbishops’ Council is also the Secretary General to the Church of England. Why is one éminence grise allowed to wield such enormous and unaccountable power through a web of tetrarchies across the national Church? Why is such obvious systemic harm to the very soul of the Church allowed to continue? Why is cruelty permitted to permeate through the safeguarding structures of the national Church? There is an evolved culture of ‘learned helplessness’ ° across the National Safeguarding Team (NST) and all the National Church Institutions (NCIs) which manifests itself in a polite but ruthless pillar-to-post systemic cruelty. Ask those survivors in urgent situations of crisis where repair and financial aid is needed not next month or next year, but last week. These survivors know this culture horribly well. They are the recipients of its ongoing harm.

    The scandal of Archbishops’ Council’s misconduct last week is as serious as it gets at the top of the Church. There must now be questions in Parliament to the Second Church Estates Commissioner from MPs about the misgovernance of the Church of England. Synod members must find a way to bring real and shining anger to the orchestrated State Flower Festival with its absurd safeguarding presentation that the forthcoming Synod appears to be set to experience. Not mere exasperation or frustration… but real anger and a sense of revulsion.

    Both Archbishops must own their misconduct. There must be serious accountability. And serious repentance.

     

     

    ° indebted to Carl Chambers for the phrase ‘learned helplessness’

     

  • An Argument for an Honest Church

    by Naomi Nixon, CEO of Student Christian Movement

    There aren’t a lot of blogs written by progressive Christians about matters affecting LGBTQ+ people which can open by declaring that their basic premise isn’t very controversial. But I really believe that honesty is something we can all agree on. Honesty, for most if not all Christians, is not a very controversial subject.

    On a deep theological level we know ourselves to be freed by truth (John 8:32); it is one of the ways we understand our very salvation. Knowing that we are loved by the one who created us liberates us. There is nothing truer for us than the gospel.

    Added to this is the imperative to share our truth: faith is not a private thing, it is outward. However, it manifests itself in each of our traditions. None of us want to hide our faith, instead we are compelled to show it and to share it.

    In the practice of discipleship, we sit with each other, or just with our Bibles, and wrestle with difficult questions, because we are seeking God’s truth for us. Likewise, the reverse is true. It’s a widespread Christian understanding that hiding things is wrong: look at what the New Testament tells us about hiding a light under bushel (Matt 5:15), or at the problem of cloaking and dissembling described in the Book of Common Prayer.

    Arching across all of this is the shared understanding that honesty is a virtue, a moral good. ‘Be honest’ is the positive contrast of the Old Testament’s repeated prohibition of lying. And here we get into where it can be tempting to split the difference: not to lie, but not to be fully honest either.

    Not all honesty is comfortable. If a church doesn’t affirm LGBTQ+ people, that is hard for a queer person to hear, but they’d rather know before they join. Finding out later can be devastating. In this case, even if it isn’t nice, we need to know.

    The Student Christian Movement’s Honest Church campaign is not everything we’d want to say about LGBTQ+ people’s welcome in church. In truth, we wish all churches were affirming and celebrating of queer people. But that’s not where we are, and we have to be honest about that. There are a lot of reasons why honesty in this area matters. But at its heart we grieve for every person who drifts away from church and sometimes from God because they didn’t find a congregation that communicated the boundless love of God in a way that met their heart and soul. At SCM we hear stories all the time of how this happens, and we don’t want to be the last refuge of rejected young people (though we’ll do that if it’s needed). We want to be empowering student and graduate Christians who are a full part of local churches, receiving and contributing as they worship God in community.

    But here’s what happens all too often. An 18-year-old arrives at university, waved off by their church back home. They go along to freshers events including church pizza nights. People are fun and kind and there are other students, so they start going along on Sundays. A couple of months in they are feeling uneasy that cis/heteronormativity is everywhere, and they stop mentioning anything about their queer identity; they make themselves less fully themselves so as not to stand out. There is a call for people to volunteer for the worship group. Our student used to do that from time to time back home, so they volunteer. Someone takes them aside and says it’s not appropriate for someone with their ‘lifestyle’ to have a leadership role because it goes against the teaching of the church.

    If we took this story as a case study, conservatives and progressives and everyone in between could argue back and forth about what happened and where right and wrong lie. But to the student it isn’t a case study, it is their church rejecting them. They had no way to know that the church which initially welcomed them would do that. They expected church to be a place of safety, and now they are hearing that they are unacceptable. Many LGBTQ+ people choose to worship in churches like the one above, and no one should tell them they can’t, but it is important to know what you are getting into. Stories like this happen in real life constantly. I wish those churches accepted people like this student, but at the bare minimum I want them to avoid hurting the student by making them think they belonged and then withdrawing their acceptance. We want to ask these churches to be honest: to use clear language about what they mean when they say ‘everyone is welcome’.

    Let’s imagine that our young Christian here is bruised but not broken, so they pick themselves up and go looking for a church where the same thing won’t happen. There’s one next to where they work and another that they pass on their way to the bus. Their websites say nothing about inclusion, and they are nervous to try again. Inside those church buildings are worshippers who have gay children. In one place there’s a trans woman who was just quietly welcomed and no one makes a fuss. At another there’s a chap who frowns if the rather woke churchwarden mentions equal marriage. As it happens our student comes from a church just like these, and would have felt at home. But if you have already been hurt it is really hard to take a risk. We want to ask these kind of churches to be honest too. You don’t need to be the church in town that has a stall at Pride, just let people know something about where you honestly are in terms of LGBTQ+ welcome.

    We agree about honesty, so why can’t church be honest?

     

    Find out more about Honest Church here or follow the hashtag #HonestChurch on twitter

  • An Open Letter to Bishops – Your Pastoral Charge

    by Jayne Ozanne, Founder of Via Media, Member of General Synod and Director of the Ozanne Foundation 

    ‘Again, Jesus said, “Simon son of John do you love me?” He answered, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Jesus said: “Take care of my sheep”’ (John 21:16)

    Jesus had just asked Peter a second time “do you truly love me”.  Peter’s answer was the same.  Jesus’ response wasn’t.

    The charge Jesus left Peter, the ‘rock’ on whom Jesus said “I will build My church” (Matt 16:18), was first and foremost a pastoral one.  It was not a doctrinal one, or a call for unity but quite simply a charge to care for His people.  All of them.  Each and every of one of us – those that we know, those that we don’t know.  Those who are like us, those who aren’t.  Those we agree with, those that we don’t.  Everyone.  That is, unless you think there are any sheep that Jesus is not concerned about?

    ‘Take care of my sheep.’

    It really is that simple.  A pastoral charge given by the Good Shepherd to the person who would go on to start His Church.  Peter is called to look after Jesus’ sheep and safeguard them from harm.  I would therefore suggest that it is this that you are called to – above all else! Taking care of people.

    But I fear that many appear to have forgotten this of late – and instead have got side-lined into prioritising arguments around doctrine, around ‘unity’ and misplaced notions of collegiality.

    ‘Take care of my sheep.’

    It may seem obvious to say, but a shepherd should never knowingly harm his or her sheep – they should never take a decision that they know will leave some vulnerable.  Indeed, quite the opposite – a ‘good’ shepherd will always prioritise protecting those in their care, particularly the most vulnerable, from forces that are seeking to kill and destroy.

    So why then, bishops, are you so determined to sacrifice certain sheep on the altar of expediency?  Why are you protecting some and not others?  I for one know that you have been presented with reams of evidence of the harm that LGBT+ people have experienced in their churches, you have heard countless testimonies of how so many have suffered because of the religious teaching they have been subjected to, you have been made aware of the numerous research studies (including one from the UK government itself) stating the mental health outcomes of young LGBT+ people growing up under conservative teaching.  Goodness, even the UN are now commissioning a report to document the harm done by religious teaching on the LGBT+ community.  But for some reason you just don’t seem to want to engage with these facts or prioritise them.  So why, please, is that?

    I’d love to know just how much time you have dedicated to listening to the impact of church teaching on LGBT+ people’s lives?  Indeed, how many LGBT+ people have you met who have attempted to take their lives (for there are far too many of them, but they may not feel able to talk to you about it – it would be interesting to reflect on why)?  Can you honestly say you’ve given as much time to listening to LGBT+ people as you have done to arguing about scripture?

    Cutting to the chase.  Did you listen to LGBT+ people yourself, or did you try and create a short cut because of time pressures?  Perhaps you chose just to read the executive summary instead?

    ‘Take care of my sheep.’

    Maybe you don’t think this is that important after all.  Or maybe you don’t really believe that LGBT+ people are getting hurt by current church teaching?  I mean, it would be difficult to hear that we have been causing so many people such deep distress, causing young people to hate themselves, leaving them in impossible situations at far too young an age, where they have had to choose between hiding who they are and being accepted and welcomed by their families and friends.

    Or perhaps you don’t want to believe these truths because, let’s face it, it’s all a bit awkward?

    Or is it because you just don’t care about the harm your teaching is inflicting on certain sheep?

    ‘Take care of my sheep’

    Not just some of them.  Not just the religious ones.  Not just the good ones.  Not just the ones that conform to your understanding of what a sheep should look like.

    As you may know, I had the great honour of meeting Pope Francis just over 3 years ago.  I was told I would have about 45 seconds to say something and was advised to choose my words carefully.

    I wonder what you’d choose to say in my position?  As it happens, I spent many sleepless hours the night before trying to discern what I should say.  Here was a golden opportunity, and I wanted to make the most of it.  In the end I decided it would be best to reach out to his pastor’s heart – for that, ultimately, is what he is.  Christ’s pastor.

    So, the next morning after introducing myself I held his hand, looked him in the eyes and said:

    “Your Holiness, I grew up being told by the church that I would never be a wife, a mother or a grandmother – and sadly this nearly killed me.  This is my story (giving him my book) and this is some research showing that there are thousands more just like me.”

    Before I could say anything else he grabbed both my hands, lowered his head and in what many witnessed as a holy moment, whispered softly “please pray for me – as I will pray for you”.

    Two days later I was invited back to the Vatican to hear him castigate leaders who spoke out against LGBT+ people.  Two years later he then also chose to give a speech to various theologians urging them to engage with lived reality of people’s lives, not just ideological doctrine.

    ‘Take care of my sheep.’

    Bishops, we have journeyed long enough on this road regarding whether we LGBT+ people have the right to be treated as equals, and to be honoured for our desire to love and be loved.  You may think that we have travelled it together, but I can assure you that there are many who have been lost along the way as they can no longer cope with the pain of it all.

    If we are honest, we have spent hours discussing certain biblical texts, but we have spent precious little time discussing the harm that we have inflicted and continue to inflict on some of our most vulnerable members.

    I know that many of you have chosen to stay silent through this ‘time of reflection’, which has sadly only served to strengthen the status quo. I can’t help wonder why you chose to do this? Perhaps it was because you were scared of upsetting some of your flock?  But I have to ask you, what about the sheep you left undefended on the margins?  What about those who needed you to protect them?

    So please, as you deliberate this week ensure that you make have one thing central in your mind:

    “Take care of my sheep.”!

    And that means all of us!

  • A Peek under the Episcopal Carpet – Past Cases Review 2 and its Blind Spots

    by the Revd. Dr. Brenda Wallace, a former member of General Synod, an active member of Broken Rites, and part of the organising group of the Campaign for Equal Marriage

    Last week, without much fanfare, the Church of England published the Past Cases Review 2. This summarises the thorough investigation into past cases of abuse which have been “swept under the carpet” by church authorities across the country. Time and time again, the need to protect the ‘integrity’ of the organisation has been prioritised over the need to protect the individual victims of abuse.

    The report notes that: ‘The review of the 75,253 files within the scope of PCR2 was conducted by independent reviewers across the dioceses and other church bodies between July 2019 and April 2022. […]  The independent reviewers identified 383 new safeguarding cases relating to children and vulnerable adults’ (p. 11).

    The continued scandal of the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults in the Church of England has – rightly – received much attention in recent years, as the Church has been forced by IICSA to wash its dirty linen in public and admit to its persistent failures to protect its most vulnerable members. Despite much handwringing by Bishops and Archbishops, and in General Synod, there is still a long way to go, both to address and redress the past failings, and to create a safer church.

    I don’t want to minimise this appalling record of cover-up of the abuse of children and young people within the church. But I want to draw out two areas of abuse which continue to receive little or no acknowledgement in discussions about safeguarding.

    The first is around the whole issue of human sexuality. Sexual orientation is a protected characteristic under equality legislation. Yet the Church has continued to allow discrimination against LGBTIQA+ members. In over 400 pages, the Living in Love and Faith book only mentions safeguarding twice, briefly, and in both cases, in relation to children. There is no comment on the constant abuse, marginalisation, and exclusion that many gay people receive in their churches and in social media. Pressure by some individuals and organisations for churches to be exempt from proposed government legislation to ban conversion therapy highlights the safeguarding issues and the danger that young people are in within certain church traditions, where attempts to ‘cure’ them of their supposedly aberrant sexuality continue to be practised.

    When the LLF discussions were taking place last year, the Campaign for Equal Marriage ran a series of workshops where those sympathetic to our aims could have a conversation within a safe space about the LLF Report. We heard numerous stories of individuals who had not felt that discussions within their Diocese or local church were a safe space for them to be, and that the Pastoral Principles which were supposed to provide protection were frequently ignored. While taking part in the national Safeguarding training required regularly for all licensed clergy, I raised the question of safeguarding for LGBTIQA+ people within church contexts. Those delivering the course looked puzzled that I even raised the question, and quickly replied that it was not part of the training. Of course, all young people and vulnerable adults need to be protected within the church, but an awareness of the particular vulnerability of young LGBTIQA+ people in our churches appears not to feature.

    The PCR2 report briefly mentions bullying (p. 107), quoting from a case of a priest who was persistently bullied by a member of the congregation and was forced out of post, which the church authorities dealt with inadequately. But there is no mention of numerous recent cases where gay, partnered priests were forced by Bishops to relinquish their licences and their posts because of their desire to marry their partners, the alternative being to live in enforced celibacy. The lack of pastoral care for clergy in many such cases, and the attempts of church authorities to suppress complaints, is well documented. This is yet another area where safeguarding is inadequate, and the institution is protected in preference to the individual.

    The second area which I would like to highlight is the issue of domestic abuse within clergy marriages. This does indeed get a mention in the PCR2 report – three whole pages (pp. 102 ff.)! It wryly notes that ‘The number of domestic abuse cases seems low for the size of the organisation and where allegations are made there is an inconsistent approach to investigating and identifying risks. There were cases where no final outcome was recorded, which could suggest that risks were left unmanaged, and no safeguarding was put in place’ (p. 103).

    In this context, I am writing as a member of Broken Rites, a charity providing mutual support when clergy marriages fall apart, founded in 1983 at the initiative of Frank Field MP. We are an ecumenical organisation with members from other UK Church denominations; it’s obvious that this is not just an Anglican issue. Our broken and bruised members, victims of failed clergy marriages, tell time and time again of the way in which the circumstances of their breakdown have been swept under the carpet by church authorities. These spouses, the majority of whom are women, have often suffered decades of physical or emotional abuse, coercive control, or narcissistic behaviour. Others have seen their marriage ripped apart by adulterous relationships by their priest partner. While marriage breakdown is always painful, it is particularly so for clergy spouses who have to leave their home in the vicarage, their own role within the church and its supportive network, and fight for financial support for themselves and any children. Some have to find paid employment for the first time, after many years of faithfully supporting their clergy partner’s parish work. Whatever their situation, they face being forced out of most of their familiar settings to make a fresh start, while recovering from the trauma of an abusive or broken relationship.

    The Church does now make some practical support and financial provision for separated clergy spouses, but the support is patchy and poorly signposted, and inconsistent across the country. In many cases, the offending priest gets to stay in post and in the clergy house, whilst the spouse is the one to move out. Even more patchy is the pastoral and emotional support for the departing spouse. Once again, the Church protects its own and has prioritised the safeguarding of the Church’s reputation rather than the individual. This is not the space to tell my own story, simply to note that I talk from personal experience.

    The stories we hear through Broken Rites are only a few – the stories of women and men who have had the courage to break away, despite the emotional and financial cost. We have no idea how many more continue to suffer because of the pressure to hold on to their marriage vows no matter what, and because of the lack of awareness of the problems by church authorities. Allegations of abuse by their partners have been repeatedly ignored or downplayed.

    PCR2 has taken a peek under the carpet and found a massive pile of debris. But, if you will excuse the mixed metaphor, there’s still an awful lot of muck left in the Augean stable under the episcopal floor-covering.

  • Risking Reputations: The Process of Reconciliation and Belonging through the Lens of Ruth

    by Revd Joshua Askwith, Incumbent of Norbury Church, member of General Synod and Reconcilers Together, a partnership of peacemakers across the UK, Ireland, and North America

    Every so often my wife and I will come to the end of a long day and flop on the sofa in search of a movie to watch. We have our favourites, of course. We bicker over whether to pick something from the Universe of Marvel or Harry Potter. But, more often than not, we end up watching a romantic movie; ‘Notting Hill’, ‘Hitch’ or, if it’s Christmas, ‘Love Actually’. And who isn’t captured by a great love story? The story of individuals crossing boundaries, showing courage and, eventually, falling in love.

    I have often heard the Bible described as the world’s greatest love story. John 3:16 tells us that God loved the world so much that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life. God’s deepest yearning for His children is that we know that love and lean into it abundantly. Often, though, we don’t demonstrate the courage to cross boundaries; instead, we create communities of division. Entrenched by the views we think are correct, we do not ask courageous questions but instead belittle and degrade. We seem to fail to enact (or live out) that great love story that God invites us to be a part of.

    While it is not the most obvious of love stories, the book of Ruth is one of the greatest. Ruth and Naomi don’t always agree, but they model to us that need to cross boundaries, show courage, and to risk it all in order to learn to love and accept the family God has given to them.

    The story of Ruth begins with the tale of a Judaean family’s migration to Moab. Naomi, faced with the loss of her husband and two sons, has to make the courageous decision to return home. And so begins a process of reconciliation and love.

    This decision to return or repent in Hebrew is teshuva, from the verb lashuv. Lashuv appears eleven times in the remainder of Chapter 1 alone. It is a reminder that in repentance we can find love, reconciliation and hope. Any great love story needs more than a “first meet”. Each of our stories faces many moments of sadness and joy. Love stories are a process of learning to forgive and fall in love again and again. Teshuva towards God is a process with many acts of turning along the way: moments of repentance, reconciliation and love. This “return” or reconciliation is a process of journey, encounter and place (Lederach 1999, 26).

    While it may be Naomi who begins this journey towards reconciliation, it is Ruth who embodies the process through a series of surprising and risky encounters. From the outset, she’s a character of provocation and encounter, who takes the story into her own hands. Like Jacob wrestling with an angel in the desert, she grapples a blessing from God, and wrestles with society, risking her life in order that a family may return home. From fighting and following Naomi to risking her life in the harvest fields, Ruth seems willing to step out in faith and to trust that God will provide.

    These encounters are not the fluffy moments of the movies, but risky encounters of the most vulnerable. In each act, Ruth risks part of herself; physically and emotionally, she puts herself on the line and trusts in God. Any act of reconciliation involves such encounters of vulnerability and risk. Individuals put their lives, their belief, their love in the firing line.

    It is individuals, rather than the institution, who are in danger of being harmed. Through LLF, the Church of England has offered a dialogical approach, but this conversation is often one-sided. It is not the Church which is risking its reputation in starting the LLF process: it is those it has asked to risk themselves in taking part. Some of these conversations have been helpful. At a local level they have helped some congregations flourish and thrive. Others have not. I have heard of church members leaving congregations because they no longer feel safe. To enable an honest dialogue, the Church needs to take a risk as well.

    Towards the end of Ruth’s love story, she needs to take a life-threatening risk. Once the harvest season is over, Naomi sends Ruth to Boaz on the threshing floor. This is a moment of deep encounter but it is one which requires risk on both sides. Ruth could not have gone to Boaz if she had not already experienced some kind of grace or glimpsed some kind of hope. Yet the Church is asking individuals to take what can seem like life-threatening risks without offering any grace or pointing towards any hope.

    By taking risk, Ruth demonstrates that divine providence and human agency are inseparable; that the process of reconciliation cannot be completed without both God and us. Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, writes

    that this is still the work of God today and the Church is at its glorious best when it seeks to demonstrate the pure and holy love of God in breaking barriers and when with courage it stands with those whose experience is of being barred from leading a full life, what Jesus calls an abundant life (2022, 104).

    Many have been barred from leading a full life. Many have walked away from the Church because it asks them to risk too much, to be harmed too much. If we have learnt anything from the recent call to safeguarding it should be that individuals should not have to risk themselves in hope of grace. Reconciliation cannot happen if an organisation is not willing to demonstrate the courage to hold up its hands and say it has got something wrong. The church cannot expect people to continue to persevere in the process if it does not take bolder steps.

    For reconciliation to take place, those in leadership need to be willing to admit their failings and risk their reputations. Boaz’s offer of protection came at a great risk to himself and his community but he chose to do it anyway. Ruth’s response only happened because the person who held the power was willing to risk his reputation and offer radical and practical grace.

    In the coming months, the College of Bishops meets to discuss the “way forward”. These discussions need to be open to the risky potential of grace. For only by offering practical protection, safety, and love can the church expect others to risk their reputation. The reconciliation of Naomi to her community was not easy. It took Ruth risking something in terms of reconciling another. There will be those of us who can risk our reputations to see people return to the church. But before any of that can take place, the Church needs to decide if it is willing to take the risk, stretch out its hand, and affirm that unity is what it is seeking; and to show that with a practical response of love.

    Further Reading

    Lederach, J. P. (1999). Journey toward Reconciliation. Herald Press.

    Tuama, Ó. P., & Jordan, G. (2021). Borders and Belonging: The book of Ruth: A story for our times. Canterbury Press.

    Volf, M. (2019). Exclusion & Embrace: A theological exploration of identity, otherness, and reconciliation. Abingdon Press.

    Welby, J. (2022). The Power of Reconciliation. Bloomsbury Continuum.

  • Two Things Which Really Matter

    by the Very Revd Dr David Ison, former member of General Synod, who next month retires as Dean of St Paul’s 

    This is my last blog as Dean of St Paul’s. After 43 years of stipendiary ordained ministry, it’s time to let go of doing in order to do more being. I’m glad to make space for a younger generation of Christians to have the opportunity and responsibility to lead Christ’s church into the future. And I’m hopeful for them, and even for the Church of England, because there are many wonderful lay and ordained Christians committed to following Jesus, and that’s what Christian churches need in order to face the many challenges and crises coming to a head for this country and for humanity across the globe as capitalism and imperialism reap what they’ve sown.

    Over the last four decades there are two key things which I’ve learned which I think are at the heart of what Christian faith, mission and ministry are about.

    The first is how to do church and mission in an increasingly pluralist and contested public space, where the narrative of ‘scientism’ (that the universe, however amazing, is meaningless) undermines spiritual as well as mental health and reasonable faith, leading to superstition and extremism. The Church has lost plausibility, made worse by its failures of safeguarding and its moral divergence from what many people regard as reasonable. The Church’s temptation is either to take refuge in dogma and draw hard boundaries around itself as ‘counter-cultural’, or to become just one interest group alongside others competing in the market-place for people and resources. The ‘Save the Parish’ movement is a belated response to a crisis which was known to be coming long before I trained for ministry in the 1970s, as the inability of many parishes to maintain numbers of laity and clergy and financial viability in the face of heritage building costs and other challenges has been predicted for over 50 years.

    My experience of what works in mission is fairly simple. It is to pray – to love God; to love our neighbours by serving them inside and especially outside the church; to love one another as a diverse group of disciples; and to do these things together, building a shared vision for a loving and serving church. Being people of spiritual integrity, living in the truth, welcoming other people without judgement (see Matthew chapter 7), meeting them in their personal and community needs – that’s what attracts people to the Christian gospel. In an incarnational faith, it’s Christian lives, not doctrines or techniques, that build the kingdom of God.

    I’ve never understood the emphasis in the Church of England’s ordination services on ‘proclaiming’ the gospel, as if it were passed on by megaphone. The third-century Christian writer Tertullian pointed out that the Christian community attracted people, even though it could mean persecution and death, because they could see the love which Christians had for one another and for others, and they wanted to be part of it. Proclaiming isn’t of value in itself: it’s drawing people into following Jesus (‘making disciples’) that matters, and love in action, not words, is at the heart of it. And thanks be to God that many churches and Christians do it!

    Jesus says to his would-be disciples, ‘you will know the truth and the truth will make you free’ (John 8.32). It’s that living in integrity that people respond to; and the heart of the Church’s problem is that it hasn’t been living in love and integrity. The inability of heterosexual men to cope with their own sexualities has led to the projection of those inner conflicts on to others including in the Church, impacting women and children in safeguarding cases, sexual and domestic violence, and ongoing legal and cultural discrimination against women and LGBTQ+ people. The Church’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ culture of official disapproval but covert acceptance of sexuality has had a huge impact on the lives and mental health of LGBTQ ordained and lay ministers, and has perpetuated a culture of dishonesty and lack of accountability which has allowed other abuses to occur, as seen for example in the surfacing of safeguarding cases over the last decade and the recent news around fraud in the Diocese of London. Whatever the outcome of the Living in Love and Faith process and debates in General Synod, the Church must end up with real love, truth and honesty at its heart, lest it continue to be seen by the rest of the world as hypocritically less moral than the majority of our society.

    The second main thing I’ve learned in ministry is that it’s about following Jesus. That sounds obvious! But it relates to the question of integrity. Years ago I wrote an article entitled ‘The Pharisees will always get you in the end’, making the point that the Pharisees are there in the gospels to show us what we as religious people can be like when our religion becomes more important than God and people. In his encounters with the Pharisees, Jesus subverts the dogmas of his day: healing on the sabbath, being unconcerned with purity laws, forgiving sinners without due process – he is focused on the person and their motivation and relationship with God, rather than on the expectations of others. Jesus is still challenging, but he gets to the heart while the Pharisees look at the outside; Jesus is concerned with holiness rather than purity, while Pharisees then and now confuse the two.

    The Diocese of London has for a number of years had as a unifying statement the concept of ‘Generous Orthodoxy’. It’s akin to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ in that it allows Christians with very different views to agree on a slogan while not engaging with their real differences, with people putting differing emphases on the level of generosity and the content of what orthodoxy is. My experience of church politics in London and on General Synod has been of increasing power games over the last several years, based on churchmanship and dogma rather than on the reality of people’s lived Christian experience, with less powerful groups (including LGBTQ, Global Majority Heritage, disabled, women) being pushed to the margins, and a lack of integrity between what’s said and what is actually done in practice.
    There’s a tendency in the Church, following after the world’s culture, for extremism and division which does not reflect the love of God, and which is unbecoming to followers of Jesus and unattractive to Christians and non-Christians alike.

    My hope in Christ is that everyone matters equally in the Church, and that’s what the LLF process has been trying to pursue. I pray for the outcome to be love and to be really truthful, centred on people not dogma. The irony about so many of the arguments in church circles is that much of the language about judgement in the New Testament is about our actions and their outcomes, not concerned with our beliefs and doctrines: ‘by their fruits you shall know them’. I do wonder whether some who describe themselves as ‘biblical’ have really taken on board St Paul’s words on love in 1 Corinthians 13…

    When finally, in the words of a key fob my children gave me, I ‘get called to head office’, I don’t expect to be examined on my understanding of penal substitution, but on whether I truly loved God, and my neighbours as myself. That’s what really matters.

  • Purist, Principled, Pragmatic? A Good Friday Agreement for the Church of England

    by Simon Butler, former member of Archbishops’ Council and member of General Synod 2005-2022

    The death of David Trimble was announced this week. Tweeting about Lord Trimble, Alistair Campbell, who knew him well through the Good Friday Agreement negotiations, said this: “He could be a difficult and mercurial character but he was the right man in the right place at the right time.”

    That got me thinking about where we go next as we approach the end of this part of the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) project. As we move from the phase of listening and learning, and await what emerges from the Next Steps Group and forthcoming House of Bishops meetings, who might be the right people in the right place at the right time in seeking a way forward beyond the current position we find ourselves in, which both conservatives and progressives find equally unsatisfactory and toxic? Setting aside questions of personality and temperament, which make some people less suited to negotiation and compromise, who needs to be talking to whom, when and about what?

    Looking across the divide as a progressive towards my conservative colleagues, I see two broad positions being taken. This first I might describe as purist. Purists don’t just hold a conservative position but appear to believe that such a position is the only position that can legitimately be held by anyone who claims the name of Anglican. The purist position was articulated well by Dr Ian Paul who, speaking on BBC Newsnight recently, said this: “To say that there is a plurality of views [about same sex marriage] is to claim that the two different views are of equal value and of equal significance … the 2016 Primates’ Meeting said that the moves in North America are a fundamental departure from the faith.” The full quote does more justice to the Primates, “Recent developments in the Episcopal Church with respect to a change in their Canon on marriage represent a fundamental departure from the faith and teaching held by the majority of our Provinces on the doctrine of marriage.” The Primates didn’t unchurch the North Americans by this statement, they didn’t claim that the American Church is apostate because it has changed its marriage canons, and they didn’t claim the historic view held by the majority is one universally held, as developments since 2016 have shown. So, while the Primates expressed dismay at the emergence of same-sex marriage in The Episcopal Church, the predominant theme then, as now with Lambeth 2022, is of ‘walking together’. Dr Paul allows the rhetorical moment to get the better of him, and he claims more than the Primates do. Still, he articulates the purist view with skill and passion: there can be no compromise. Changes to the teaching on marriage imply it’s time to walk apart.

    It seems to me that purists want not just to uphold the historic teaching of the church; they want to impose and reassert their view on all Anglicans, whatever position scholarship, prayer and pastoral discernment directs our conscience towards, whatever the historic polity of the Communion allows. Delegitimising sincerely held matters of conscience is as profoundly un-Anglican and un-Reformed as it is unworkable. It is a form of theological totalitarianism.

    Alongside the conservative purists are those who I might describe as principled but pragmatic. Perhaps adopting the wisdom of Gamaliel, these hold their principled opposition to any non-heterosexually married sexual activity, while recognising that progressives are part of the Church of England (and the Anglican Communion) and that they are likely to remain so. For these conservatives, what they are looking for is some form of provision rather than simply suppression of their opponents. For example, take the position of the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) in its 2016 paper Guarding the Deposit. Having first articulated what seems like a purist view, namely a reassertion of traditional sexual ethics while disciplining more effectively those who live outside of this sexual ethic, the author then moves on to what is described as ‘visible differentiation’, an ecclesiological solution in a church which is not prepared to enforce the purist view. This is both principled and at the same time pragmatic, for it opens the possibility that a future Church of England might remain made up of conservatives and progressives, albeit in a very different ecclesiological structure.[1]

    There is much that I baulk at in Guarding the Deposit, ecclesiologically-speaking, although it is interesting to ponder, building on the insightful arguments of Neil Patterson in a recent Via Media article, what ecclesiological compromises could become necessary for progressives if the opportunity to make progress on LGBT+ inclusion genuinely existed. But that is for the future. What I think we can acknowledge, however tenuously, is that the official position of the main Evangelical lobby group in the Church of England can foresee a shape to the Church of England where both conservatives and progressives can ‘walk together’, even if (what I would describe as) progress towards the full inclusion of LGBT+ people were made. I don’t think this has been sufficiently recognised.

    So, if this is the case, I think two clear consequences flow. First, the argument has moved on from purist versus progressive, and there is little value at the moment in progressives in engaging with purists in any meaningful sense. They hold their position with principle and passion, and inevitably they will be a vocal presence in social media. But nothing will satisfy them until people like me change our views, or shut our mouths, or leave our partners, or abandon the ministry of the Church of England altogether. None of that is going to happen, not least because God and his Church keep calling and ordaining LGBTI+ clergy. Purists have nothing to offer the post-LLF church except more conflict. Instead, I think progressives should start treating those who are principled but pragmatic conservatives with greater seriousness and respect, acknowledging their consciences as much as they must acknowledge ours. As we approach the end of the LLF process and are inspired by it, this is where future conversations will need to happen.

    Secondly, and this will be a particular challenge to those who have purist tendencies on the progressive side of the Church, we will have to compromise on what we talk about, how we talk about it and the way we talk about it. Painful and challenging as it may be for us to go through the familiar dissection of our most intimate feelings and sense of ourselves, we have to listen to our principled, pragmatic conservative colleagues without rushing to judgment; we might believe they are wrong, cruel, missionally-misguided or even a safeguarding risk to LGBTI+ people,[2] but just as we find it profoundly upsetting and beyond tiresome to be called sinners by conservatives, they do not find it at all easy to listen to or accept what we say if it is regularly coated with liberal judgmentalism, which is just our more coded way of calling them sinners too. We must learn to talk about what we want and the consequences not just for us but for them, and to explore the sort of issues that emerge for them should LLF produce a more progressive outcome than the current status quo.

    The Good Friday Agreement was an agreement between two parties who were principled and pragmatic, led by Gerry Adams and the late David Trimble; the purists in Northern Ireland, led by Ian Paisley, campaigned vigorously against it, but eventually even they agreed to work within the settlement that emerged and was democratically settled. That is not to say that things are at all easy in the Six Counties, but at least the Armalite has been replaced by the ballot box. Most progressives and principled, pragmatic conservatives probably would live with the ecclesiastical equivalent of a Good Friday Agreement in the Church of England. We certainly need a long-term settlement on which trust can be built.

    So maybe now is the time for the principled pragmatists on both sides to emerge. Perhaps, in God’s mercy, they can be the right men and women, in the right place at the right time too.

     

    [1] It is worth noting that Guarding the Deposit seeks provision for conservatives, which is only one way provision could be made; a wider conversation is necessary – whatever progressives like me want, we recognise that it is not what the Church of England has ever done in the past. It is we who are seeking provision at a different level.
    [2] A matter for safeguarding professionals in my view; being LGBTI in and of itself does not make someone a vulnerable adult.