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Category: Sexual Abuse

  • Mike Pilavachi: The Elephant in the Room

    by Augustine Tanner-Ihm and Jonny Masters. Augustine is Team Curate at St James & Emmanuel, Didsbury, Manchester and winner of the 2020 Theology Slam: Jonny works to ensure the voices of young people shape decision-making in the charity sector and is married to Alex, his husband.

    Jonny Masters begins with a personal reflection:

    I imagine Mike Pilavachi would make a self-deprecating joke about the title of this article, and then belittle someone else in an even more severe way, back when he was front and centre at Soul Survivor festivals. I’d probably have laughed.

    When I think back and remember laughing at Mike’s insults to other leaders on stage at Soul Survivor my soul curdles a little inside. Was I complicit in long-lasting abusive behaviour? 

    Lord, have mercy.

    The situation regarding Mike Pilavachi has been widely discussed in Christian media and by the evangelical Christian community on Twitter/ X. The impact of Mike’s actions, first reported by The Telegraph last year, has rippled deeply in the hearts of those who had previously felt positive about his ministry. Now, tainted by confirmed allegations of sustained abusive behaviour, many Christians have been questioning their experiences of the Holy Spirit at Soul Survivor Watford, and Soul Survivor festivals. Youthscape have written an excellent article for youth workers to process the situation. It is also full of wisdom for others indirectly impacted by Mike’s actions. Premier Christianity have released a great podcast investigating Mike’s actions. However, in all the discussion and conversation (though at the time of writing not all podcast episodes have yet been released), the condemnation and the concern, there has been a silent elephant in the room.

    Sexuality.

    Mike’s actions, particularly massages, have a sexual edge to them. We need to acknowledge this as a Church. A well-respected Christian man spent time massaging young men, sometimes on his own bed. This caused immense harm to young Christians who had taken time and space to serve God. Could our overwhelming silence of decades regarding sexuality be bearing rotten fruit? Could the way we treat LGBTQ+ people be causing harm? Could our interpretation of Scripture be harmful? We would suggest yes, yes, and yes. The silence surrounding homosexuality and the wider LGBTQ+ community that has lasted decades in most evangelical churches has echoed profoundly in the conversations surrounding Mike’s actions. Yes, Mike’s controlling behaviour has been roundly condemned, celebrity culture in the church has been critiqued, but we have seen very few people raising their hands (or should that be heads above the parapet?) to ask how silence around sexuality could lead to such actions.

    It seems like Mike found a line that he would not cross and went as close to it as he could. Mike’s moral compass, informed by the evangelical charismatic Church, allowed his actions to go as far as they did, but no further. Mike’s understanding of morality in relation to sexuality consisted of clear, boundaried, actions. The boundary was sex. As far as we know, Mike committed no overtly sexual acts with another person. However, the pattern of intimate physical contact with young males raises the question of whether the acts he did commit may have offered some form of sexual gratification.

    Mike’s behaviour is considered abusive and has led to disciplinary measures. How can a well-respected, celebrated, man of faith go so far wrong?

    Silence. That would be the short answer. Let’s explore what we mean by that.

    The evangelical wing of the Church has not wrestled adequately with the question of human sexuality. It has placed it in a box. Mike, trapped in the box, banged loudly on the sides of the box and caused himself and those he loves considerable harm. Perhaps we need to think about human sexuality differently. Excuse the pun, but we need to think outside the box.

    When we look at the broader implications of conservative culture and its handling of sexuality, it’s essential to consider the wider context in which figures like Huw Edwards, Phillip Schofield, Mike Bickle, Mark Bailey, and Revd Mike Breen operate or have operated. It’s critical to clarify that the specific “downfall” or scandalous behaviour attributed to these individuals varies greatly, and in some cases, public allegations or confirmations of misconduct might not exist. Therefore, discussing their personal faith, alleged scandals, or impacts without verified evidence could be misleading and potentially harmful. Instead, the discussion will pivot towards the systemic issues within certain evangelical communities that have broader implications.

    The conservative purity and evangelical culture, noted for its often-stringent views on sexuality, has had profound effects on individuals within these communities. These views are often implicit and rarely spoken about or open to challenge. This culture, which sometimes harbours dangerous homophobic theology, can create environments where individuals feel compelled to suppress their true selves. This suppression can lead to significant psychological distress, strained relationships, and in some tragic cases, self-harm or suicide.

    This culture of silence seems to have spread because the church is not talking about a very important thing; the behaviour of Church leaders whose sexuality is not admitted because it does not conform to the ideal they are promoting. Mike Pilavachi is a man who has attempted to follow Christ and listen to His Spirit for many years. Thousands of young people have come to know Jesus Christ because of his ministry. But sadly, many people were harmed during his ministry too. His controlling and coercive behaviour played a large part in this. However, the reluctance of the wider church to challenge the potentially toxic theology he believed and preached regarding sexuality also needs to be considered. Many of our charismatic evangelical churches, organizations and groups, have ignored the elephant in the room. A wise question to ask would be, “Did we as a community enable Mike to do this to young men because of the potentially toxic theology we have preached or sometimes chose not to engage with?”

    The theology often preached within some conservative evangelical circles advocates for a strict adherence to traditional gender roles and sexual abstinence outside of heterosexual marriage. This approach can lead to harmful practices such as conversion therapy, which has been widely discredited and condemned by medical and psychological associations worldwide for causing significant harm to LGBTQ+ individuals. The Church of England has also condemned the practice of conversion therapy.

    Conservative evangelical environments can also be fertile ground for abusive behaviours to be masked or excused under the guise of spiritual authority or correction. When leaders or influential figures within these communities fall from grace, it often prompts a period of reflection and questioning among their followers. However, the systemic issues that enabled such falls remain entrenched and difficult to address without a fundamental shift in theology and practice.

    Quotes from individuals who have experienced harm from these cultures often speak to the profound sense of betrayal and loss. They may have felt a deep connection to their faith and community, only to find themselves ostracized or harmed when their true selves were revealed or when they questioned the status quo.

    The path forward requires a re-evaluation of the teachings and practices that have led to such harm. It calls for a theology that embraces love and acceptance over judgment and exclusion. It is a theology which allows Christians to be open and honest with one another. There is no shame in mistakes – that is the joy of the gospel because of Jesus Christ. This shift is not just about preventing the “downfall” of prominent figures but about creating a faith community that uplifts and supports all its members, regardless of their sexuality or gender identity.

    In conclusion, while individual scandals may capture public attention, the deeper issue lies in the theological and cultural practices that contribute to systemic harm. Addressing these issues requires courageous conversations, openness to theological thinking, and a commitment to love and respect as core principles of faith.

    It’s time to address the elephant in the room.

  • Safeguarding: When Good Reviews Go Bad

    by Andrew Graystone, who uncovered the abuses by John Smyth in a series of reports on Channel 4 News in February 2017; he continues to advocate for victims of church abuse, and speaks regularly with survivors of John Smyth.

    There have now been seven public reviews of the activities of John Smyth – or eight if you count my own book, Bleeding for Jesus. The first was Operation Cubic, which was conducted by Hampshire Police, and ended with a referral to the CPS. Then, after the revelations were made public, the Scripture Union commissioned a review into its own involvement. A review was conducted for Winchester College, where Smyth groomed many of his victims. The Titus Trust has held two reviews – one into Smyth’s abuses and a second, by the safeguarding agency ThirtyOne:Eight to conduct a review of its internal culture. The Advance network of independent churches carried out its own investigation, which focussed particularly on the involvement of its former leader PJ Smyth, who is John Smyth’s son. And finally, we await the arrival of the Makin Review, which was commissioned by the Church of England.

    As someone who has reluctantly become something of an expert on John Smyth’s abusive career, I have participated in all of these reviews. Aside from taking a huge amount of time, this has given me some insight into how such reviews are conducted, and what makes them effective or ineffective.

    It is worth remembering that one reason why there were so many reviews into the one narrative is that the key agencies at the centre of the case refused to work together on a single inquiry.

    Speaking to Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News in April 2019, Archbishop Justin Welby explained that only a joint inquiry would be effective. “Unless you can get everyone in, you’re never going to get anywhere near the truth.” Nevertheless, having failed to persuade everyone to participate, the Church of England eventually commissioned its own review. That review – scheduled to last nine months – has now lasted five years, and there is still no date for its publication.

    It is worth rehearsing the gloomy history of delay and obfuscation in this inquiry.  The Church of England’s intention to hold an inquiry was first announced by the then Bishop for Safeguarding, Peter Hancock, on the morning after Smyth died in August 2018. By then Smyth’s abuse had already been in the public domain for almost 18 months. Justin Welby had been aware of it for over five years (discounting earlier knowledge, which he first denied, but now admits.) The first formal complaint had been made to the Church of England six years earlier. And of course many key figures in the church, some of them at the highest level, had carried the knowledge for a staggering thirty-five years.

    Even so, the inquiry was not formally launched for a further twelve months. It was scheduled to last nine months, meaning that it would be published in May 2020. Since then there have been no less than six announcements that the inquiry was going to be late. In every case, survivors were promised that it was imminent. In January 2022, survivors and General Synod were told that the first drafts would be presented in April 2022. They weren’t. Then General Synod members were told that it would be published in the Autumn of 2022. Of course it wasn’t. The National Safeguarding Team has stopped making announcements about the timetable.

    There are two important questions. Firstly, what has caused the seemingly endless delay?  Secondly, why does this matter?

    Bishop Jonathan Gibbs, the second of three “Lead Bishops” to preside over the review so far, told Synod that “There have been significant delays due to COVID and the exceptionally high volume of information.” Blaming the pandemic is convenient, but disingenuous. The review was already well behind schedule before lockdown was imposed. In any case, very little of the work has been done face to face. Blaming the unexpected amount of evidence is a nonsense too. What on earth was the church expecting? They knew when they started that there were over 100 victims, four decades of history, and scores of witnesses to hear from. If they were taken by surprise by the “high volume of information” it can only be because they weren’t paying attention to what the victims and others had been telling them.

    The core problems that have caused the delay are quite different. They are:

    1) An insufficiently experienced reviewer. Perhaps Keith Makin will yet turn out to have been an inspired choice for this important role. We have not been told by what process he was given the job. He had never previously conducted a review on anything like this scale. He had held senior social work management posts, and had been an Independent Scrutineer for local authorities, but he had little forensic experience, and nothing that would seem to prepare him for such a complex case. He also had little experience of the church’s structures and processes.

    2) Lack of resources. The church decided that the task of reviewing a case lasting over forty years with more than a hundred victims could be handled by one part-time reviewer contracted for just two days a week, with a part-time assistant. This is far less resource than you would expect in comparable reviews. Of course it is not Mr Makin’s fault that he was given such inadequate resources for such a huge task. The church either didn’t recognise the scale of the review it was launching, or simply didn’t care. For example, the review was launched without the necessary GDPR arrangements in place. It was seven months out of a scheduled nine before interviews could be recorded and transcribed. Staggeringly, the necessary privacy notice was not issued until a full year later. On the same day that the Smyth Review was announced, the church announced another review, this time into the child rapist Revd Trevor Devamanikkam. That case – though no less serious – had just one perpetrator and one known victim. Yet it was set up with the same timetable and resources. Perhaps the church was simply not thinking clearly about what it was doing. Or perhaps the prime motivation for launching these reviews was just to be able to send out a press release saying that it was doing something.

    3) Lack of purpose, drive and consistency in the commissioning body. The church still appears to have little idea about how reviews work. They don’t seem to be able to distinguish between a review, an inquiry and an investigation. To this day it remains unclear who wants the Makin Review, why they want it and why it needs to be done in a timely way. As usual, nobody even knows what will happen to the report. Will it be read by bishops? Debated at Synod? Or just sit online somewhere for a few weeks before it is lost?

    4) Lack of oversight. Best practice for a review like this is to appoint an independent accountability body, separate from the reviewer and the commissioning body, whose task is to monitor the progress and scope of the review. That body might include interested parties, including representative survivors. When Thirty-One:Eight reviewed the abuses of Smyth’s fellow-abuser Revd Jonathan Fletcher, just such a body was appointed. They were able to provide assurance about the independence and thoroughness of the review, and also added their own statement to be read alongside it. Makin has not had this advantage. He has had no one asking him what is going on (with the exception of dogged Smyth survivors who take it upon themselves to do so informally). He has had no one asking him awkward questions about such crucial areas as record-keeping, confidentiality, resources or timescale. And when (or if) the review is published, there will be no one independent to give it an imprimatur. It will be, effectively, an undefended reviewer saying ‘This is how I see things.’ I fear that the lack of an independent scrutiny body is going to be particularly awkward over the next few months, if those who find themselves criticised by Mr Makin decide to cut up rough.

    So there are several reasons why this review has struggled from the start, and why it is so shockingly delayed. But why the rush anyway? Conducting reviews is a lucrative business. The author of an earlier church review reported privately but proudly that he had bought a London flat with the proceeds. In 2019 the NST themselves inadvertently leaked Mr Makin’s day rate – at that stage, it was £650 per day. The Church of England has been extremely chary about revealing the overall cost of the Makin Review. Bishop Jonathan Gibbs was asked about this directly twice in General Synod questions in November 2022. He would only say “There is always a financial cost associated with any Independent Review, however this must be balanced with establishing the truth and listening to the voices of victims and survivors.” Synod members might feel they have a right to greater clarity.

    Why does all of this matter? Well, first, because the delay makes the review weaker. In the time between the disclosure of Smyth’s abuse twelve years ago in 2012 and the publication of the inquiry (2024? 2025?), some key figures have conveniently died. They include Smyth himself, who consequently managed to escape justice from the church, as well as the criminal courts. Revd David Fletcher, who probably did more than anyone else to enable Smyth’s career of abuse, has also died. Others have retired, or will do so before publication, placing them beyond the effective reach of the church’s disciplinary measures.

    In the course of writing my book, I approached a number of senior clergy who were implicated in the failure to stop Smyth’s abuse. In several cases they said they weren’t willing to speak to me until the Makin review was complete. That was now several years ago. The Archbishop of Canterbury gave assurances that if any currently serving church officers were found to have failed in their safeguarding duties, they would be investigated and disciplined whilst the review was in progress. To my knowledge only two very junior clergy have been sanctioned, and one of those was long retired. My book, published in October 2022, identified nine currently serving bishops who appeared to have failed in their safeguarding duties. They include Archbishop Justin Welby. Have any of them been disciplined?

    The delay also matters because there are two over-riding reasons to hold such an inquiry. The first is to restore confidence in the church. The hope is that the inquiry will draw a line under a terrible episode. Ideally it would show that the church did not make any mistakes in its handling of disclosures of abuse, but that’s unlikely to be the case. The alternative is that the inquiry should demonstrate that, even though the church made mistakes, it will not do so again. Lessons have been learned; processes have been changed; staff have been retrained or removed.  This is the basis on which trust can be rebuilt. But for that trust to be rebuilt, the process of the review must itself be sound. If there is any suspicion, justified or not, that the church has not been fully transparent, then the measure of trust will decline instead of increasing. If there is any hint that the church has tried to avoid, delay or manipulate the publication, it will do itself more harm than good. As things stand, those suspicions are hard to avoid.

    In this case, the process of the review has served to diminish, not enhance, trust in the church’s safeguarding practices. The review itself has been marked by delay, mismanagement, amateurism, poor communications and obfuscation. These are the same characteristics that allow abusers like Smyth to operate. However good the text of the Makin review is, if and when it is eventually published, no one who has watched the national church’s handling of the process will be able to say with confidence “This could never happen again.”

    The second reason to hold such an inquiry is for the sake of the victims. It is a vital part of the church acknowledging that it made mistakes. Only when the church recognises this publicly is it possible for victims to begin to rebuild their lives, and even in some cases to forgive. If the church, by its acts or by its omissions, allows victims to imagine that it might still be hiding facts, or avoiding facing up to the truth, then instead of healing, victims are re-abused by the process.

    For what it’s worth, I think publication of the Makin Review into John Smyth is still a long way off. Even if the first draft of the text is complete, there is a long way to go before publication. Parts of it have been seen by a number of Smyth’s victims, but it has not yet begun the lengthy representation process known as ‘Maxwellisation’. In other words, anyone who is referred to critically in the text will have a right to read it, and respond to what they perceive as factual errors. This isn’t going to be quick. There are likely to be many people on the wrong end of Mr Makin’s pen. Many of them will call in lawyers. Those who are unfamiliar with the process of reviews may not realise that before a text is published there can be endless legal battles over what it can or can’t say. The church is almost continually waging these battles with reviewers. Given that one of the individuals criticised for his failures over Smyth is almost certainly going to be Archbishop Welby, I would be surprised if the report is published before his retirement is announced.

    When it is published, what can we expect? Will anyone take responsibility for the largest abuse scandal in the Church of England for a century by offering their resignation? I doubt it. Will there be sanctions for those who enabled Smyth to abuse, or failed to act on what they knew? There’s no precedent for that. Will the report be debated by General Synod? I don’t suppose so. What then? I imagine there will be the usual apology from Lambeth Palace, posted on a website somewhere. Such apologies are now so familiar that I could have a good stab at drafting it for them. Then it will be business as usual for the church. If there is another John Smyth out there, and to my certain knowledge there is, he will surely breathe a sigh of relief.

    The scope of the Makin Review was always limited. For instance, it doesn’t look into Smyth’s time in Africa, where most of his abusing occurred. Nor will it look at the influence of the Iwerne network in the Church of England, nor the theological drivers that motivated the cover-up of his abuse over three decades.

    We are on to our third Lead Bishop and our fifth Director of Safeguarding since the review was announced. Synod and Archbishops’ Council are hopelessly distracted. In the absence of an independent supervisory group there is little support or accountability for Mr Makin, and little pressure to get his work over the line. What if he has found himself out of his depth in the scale, detail and politics of the process? In the meantime, he is earning handsomely from the delay – although that hasn’t prevented him from taking another role as Independent Scrutineer for the London Borough of Croydon. Perhaps most significantly, a significant number of senior church leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, have good reason to want the review to continue indefinitely.

    Perhaps there is another way forward. The Church could acknowledge that the Makin process has broken down. Given that there have been seven reviews and a book, a barrister could be appointed with two months to produce a digest of what is known so far.  There would be unanswered questions, but they could be identified as such. Without such a breakthrough, my own growing expectation is that the review will never be published.

  • Are Churches Safe?

    by a member of the Anglican Survivors Group

    I write this small piece as a survivor of a clergy sexual abuse ring. I was a core participant in the Anglican IICSA inquiry and it took me over 30 years of fighting to get my abusers jailed.

    One of the recurring memories of the abuse was desperately trying to report it and not being heard. The lack of ability to effectively report meant the abuse continued for many years.

    The church has a long history of covering up abuse and allowing it to continue in order to protect the reputation of the church. Many instances were revealed publicly at IICSA, yet still to this day no one has been disciplined or sacked for their part in allowing our abuse to continue.

    It was for this reason that many years ago a number of survivors, among them myself, approached the then-new head of the National Safeguarding Team, expressing how important it is for safeguarding to be clearly visible both on parish websites and in church buildings. When the Parish Safeguarding Handbook was published it included on p.2 the need to CLEARLY display on the FRONT page of parish websites the parish’s safeguarding arrangements.

    The reason for it to be on the front page was so that the search engines would pick it up. Research from the NSPCC and evidence given to IICSA both confirm that many teenagers (and younger) have access to mobile phones and the first place they look for information is via search engines.

    If the parish website just has a small hidden link to a document that only gives your policy, with no contact numbers, then you have missed the entire point.

    Sadly, even to this day many parishes have nothing on their front pages, and many still have nothing at all.

    Several years ago now, the same group of survivors started trawling through some 12000 websites. We found compliance with this basic requirement to be under 50%. We emailed and telephoned many parishes, most of whom weren’t even aware of the requirement. Very slowly, compliance started rising. But some parishes just refused.

    Some used the “due consideration” loophole where they said they had given safeguarding requirements due consideration and decided not to do it. That led to a further campaign by survivors to close this loophole.

    Eventually, after much chasing, we were left with just over 600 parishes against whom we issued CDMs. This was the wake-up call many needed. We agreed to withdraw the CDMs if the parish became compliant. Many however simply put up a copy of their policy. hidden on page 28!

    Some parishes have the clergy as the Parish Safeguarding Officer or contact, which is totally unacceptable. Some churches share a safeguarding officer with other churches and at a parish level the officer is never present at church.

    Sadly, there are some very evil people out there, including clergy, who will do the unthinkable. A successful DBS check may just mean that a person has not yet been caught. A DBS check doesn’t stop abuse: but good Safeguarding practice may. And one of the keys to that is that people are able to report things as soon as anything inappropriate happens.

    Posters need to be clearly visible to all. They need to be understood by a child. They need to be at a height where children can read them.

    The campaign led to some excellent diocesan responses. The Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser at Salisbury came up with a simple poster that simply said:

    “Is someone hurting you?”
    “WE CARE. Please call 01234 567890”

    Safeguarding is NOT about an admin exercise. It’s not about traffic lights on a Diocesan dashboard. It’s about putting yourself in the shoes of a vulnerable child or adult.

    We ask, as survivors ourselves, one simple question. If YOU were 10 years old and trying to report abuse, could you?

  • 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’

     

  • Born-Again Virginity?

    by Prof Helen King, Professor Emerita in Classical Studies at The Open University and member of General Synod

    The World Health Organisation’s 2018 statement on “Eliminating virginity testing” argued that “the term ‘virginity’ is a social, cultural and religious construct with neither medical nor scientific basis” and that virginity testing is a violation of human rights because “the appearance of a hymen is not a reliable indication of intercourse and there is no known examination that can prove a history of vaginal intercourse.”

    “A religious construct”… yes, indeed. And it was clear from speakers in the Living in Love and Faith debate at the February General Synod that virginity is back on the agenda, at least in some parts of the Church of England. This is part of the attempt to argue that lesbian and gay people must never have sexual relationships, which involves promoting alternatives: for life. What do women – and the word only tends to be used of women, men preferring “celibate” – mean when they claim the status?

    Those asserting their virginity seem to come from the evangelical tradition. If you want to start from the Bible, then the key passage is probably Deuteronomy 22.13-21 on what happens if a man fails to find “evidence of virginity” in his bride. The woman’s family are supposed to demonstrate this “evidence” to the elders of the city, and they “spread a cloak” out to show the blood of defloration. This is a deadly serious business. The woman can be stoned to death if no “evidence” is shown, this being a culture in which not only a man found with a betrothed virgin but also the woman herself can be killed if discovered; in her case, because she did not cry out for help.

    There’s a Catholic dimension too, of course: the Virgin Mary. Julia Kelto Lillis has pointed out that the Church Fathers operated with the full range of models of the female body that existed in the ancient Mediterranean; so, some believed in the hymen, others didn’t. Mary’s body could be regarded as “closed” without this having to mean an intact hymen. Even where the hymen was considered a real thing, its reliability was open to challenge. In the fifth century CE, in his City of God (1.18), St Augustine noted that checking for virginity could destroy the hymen:

    A midwife, suppose, has (whether maliciously or accidentally, or through unskilfulness) destroyed the virginity of some girl, while endeavouring to ascertain it: I suppose no one is so foolish as to believe that, by this destruction of the integrity of one organ, the virgin has lost anything even of her bodily sanctity.

    So what do statements today that someone is a ‘virgin’ actually mean? If it means “not having had sexual intercourse”, then what counts as ‘sex’? The CEEC ‘What to write to your bishop’ guidance states its objection to the same-sex relationships in which some of the bishops’ prayers are intended to be used, on the grounds that these “will often be sexually active”. As well as noting that this implies some won’t be – so are these somehow OK with CEEC? – I remain confused as to what “sexually active” means.

    Conservative evangelicals want to affirm sex as only between a man and a woman, married, in a lifelong relationship. Of course, that ‘lifelong’ has already bitten the dust after the acceptance that some people can be married in church despite a previous divorce. Somehow, being in a church where this could happen – if the conscience of the minister allowed them to do such a thing – was not enough to make conservatives feel that they would be damaged by their proximity to such behaviour. Yet the Prayers of Love and Faith are thought a step too far.

    To support this “only between a man and a woman”, Genesis is widely cited: the myth of Adam and Eve. If it’s all about being (potentially) fruitful and (potentially) multiplying, then as the only sex which is (potentially) procreative is penis-in-vagina sex – the WHO’s “vaginal intercourse” – where does that leave same-sex sex? Why is any sexual “activity” between two men or two women of any interest or relevance? In the traditional Christian morality with which many of us grew up, not “going all the way” didn’t really count as sex. That recalls that much-quoted line from the coming-of-age comedy Clueless (1995), “Dionne’s virginity went from technical to non-existent”. Is same-sex sex any different?

    Perhaps it’s not about hymens, or even bodies, at all. True virginity, as Basil of Ancyra argued and John Chrysostom underlined, was the virginity of the soul: “Virginity can be lost even by a thought” because there are those who are “virgins in the flesh, but not in the spirit”. The hymen did not guarantee spiritual virginity. Is this the virginity which those who announced their status at Synod had in mind?

    You can’t see spiritual virginity. As for physical virginity, there’s a long history of faking it. From the ancient Mediterranean onwards, medical texts describe constrictive ointments to tighten the vagina, the insertion of containers filled with fish blood, or even ways to create a new hymen. Today, virginity restoration surgery is advertised online. Hymen reconstruction, as well as vaginoplasty, is popular in Iran and in Korea, where in 2017 24% of the world’s plastic surgery was being carried out. Vaginoplasty is known as “princess surgery”; the claim is that your man will treat you like a princess. In Guatemala, where hymenoplasty is called “intimate surgery”, it thrives despite the opposition of both the state and the Catholic church.

    I want to be fair: there are real benefits to these surgeries, in that they allow women to survive within the insane structures in which they have to live. In cultures where virginity is the only way for a woman to be respected, “virginity restoration” can save not just reputations but lives, giving some women a second chance. Promoting virginity also has value; showing it’s fine to be a virgin can help prevent people feeling under pressure to enter relationships.

    But there are strange things happening in some churches today. The Christian idea of spiritual virginity is being revisited, to suggest that a woman who has survived sexual violence, or has admitted and been forgiven for sexual activity outside marriage, can still be a virgin in her soul. Vilma Conner published Born-Again Virgin: How to transform your life from promiscuity back into purity in 2009. As for physical virginity, in November 2022 April Ajoy, who co-hosts a podcast on American Evangelical Christianity, tweeted:

    During Purity Week at my Christian college, one preacher bragged about seeing God restore girls’ hymens to make them physical virgins again. Then they gave us purity pledge cards that included the following: I am a (circle one): A. Virgin B. Secondary Virgin. Fun times.

    She had in mind people like Kris Vallotton, a leader in Bethel Church, who in 2012 claimed that God can replace the hymen: “We OFTEN get testimonies from women sharing that God restored their virginity including restoring their hymen! I have heard 100s of these testimonies!!!”

    Virginity – a construct with “neither medical nor scientific basis” – is most definitely back on the agenda. Physical, or spiritual? More importantly: God, or idol?

  • Toxic Theology, the Bible and LLF (Living in Love and Faith)*

    by Johanna Stiebert, Professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Leeds; co-director of The Shiloh Project, which explores topics of rape culture, religion and the Bible; co-investigator of the Abuse in Religious Contexts project

    My research focuses on topics of gender and gender-based violence, and on how these intersect with lived religion and the Bible. Much of the abuse variously called spiritual abuse, abusive theology, religious abuse, or abuse in religious contexts, has gender-based dimensions. Adrian Thatcher aptly speaks of “authoritarian masculinism” behind church abuse crises. Child sexual abuse by clergy has been shown to be of colossal dimensions, but while the 2020 publication of LLF contains a highlighted box, or infographic, on the Church of England (CofE) and IICSA (the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse), it recommends that theological reflection on IICSA should be carried out “separately” from LLF, “after the full published findings of IICSA have been carefully assessed” (p. 87). This does not really cut it, given how woefully inadequate CofE response to disclosures of abuse has been and continues to be.

    As for gender-based abuse, the likelihood is that the number of women abused by clergy is considerably higher still than that of children. Spiritual abuse is very frequently linked to gender-based abuse; and cases of religiously-based gender discrimination amount to spiritual abuse, whether or not that label is used.

    What LLF says about gender-based abuse is bound up with its approach to the Bible, identified as the ultimate source of the Church’s inspiration and authority, because “The life of the Church is soaked in the Bible”. Yet it notes that “every word of the Bible has a human history” shaped by “the contexts in which it was first produced and received”. The section “Power and pain” reviews abuse in scripture, identifying Samson and David as both heroes and abusers of their power, while “The sons of Eli abuse their position as priests and sleep with women serving in the tent of meeting (1 Samuel 2.22), in a chilling echo of abuse scandals in the church today”. Narratives of the rape of women and of the threatened rape of men are mentioned: “These stories matter deeply: they speak the truth about a violent world”. This, in turn, “invite[s] us to tell the truth … about the world in which we live and about our experiences within it, about the things we do and the things that are done to us”.

    This sounds like a positive intention – but does it go far enough? I don’t think so. When the Bible is brought into discussions on human sexuality or marriage, LLF ignores the problems of toxic theologies that come with reading some biblical texts at face value.

    Actually, the Bible has curiously little to say on marriage, and what is there is murky. There is no word for “marriage” in the Hebrew Bible; Hebrew does not distinguish between “woman” and “wife,” or “man” and “husband.” There are few clues in the Bible regarding marriage rites, and nothing on such matters as the age at which someone can or should be married. Despite this, a great deal has been said and asserted about “biblical marriage” – that it is monogamous, for life, aimed at procreation, between one man and one woman, and so forth.

    Numbers 5:11-31 is one of a few sustained biblical texts about a married couple and it is a prescriptive text of Torah, or Pentateuch. It sets out what to do when “a spirit of jealousy” (5:14) overcomes a man concerning his wife who may, or may not, have “gone astray” (5:12), which is expanded on as involving another man lying with her for “the lying of seed” (the expression for penetrative sexual intercourse and seminal emission) and this being kept secret, with no witnesses present (5:13). The husband is to take his wife to the priest, bringing offerings. The priest then performs an elaborate ritual to which, seemingly, the woman can only submit. All she says throughout the lengthy description is, “Amen. Amen” (5:22).

    The woman is said to be brought before God in the sanctuary, her hair dishevelled (5:18), and she is bound by an oath before drinking a potion; waters of bitterness with curses dissolved in them, which will either punish her with physical agonies, possibly a miscarriage, or infertility if she has been – in the terms of this passage – “defiled,” or it will declare her “clean” and able to conceive. Towards the close of the passage the woman is described as “under” her husband’s authority. The account closes with the statement that the husband in any case is clear of iniquity, whereas the wife must bear her iniquity. In other words, his “spirit of jealousy” along with the ritual – elaborate, exposing and highly likely to cause psychological distress – is excused, whether the woman has done anything or not. The woman, on the other hand, “must bear her iniquity” whether she has done anything to legitimate her husband’s jealousy or not.

    This is not a text widely cited in the literature expounding how the Bible can inform on matters of marriage – and yet it is one of the longer passages about a married couple. It seems to indicate a high degree of anxiety around women’s sexual continence. There is no more than passing reference to the adulterous man; no preoccupation with who he might be, or with finding him, and no insistence on either his guilt or punishment. All this, along with the absence of a ritual where roles are reversed, where a woman suspects her husband of infidelity, is very telling.

    The potential of this passage for encouraging and legitimating men’s jealousy and the policing of women, as well as its potential for what we nowadays call coercive control, is glaring. What is missing for me, however, is acknowledgement of and outcry at just how toxic this text is – especially in the midst of skyrocketing rates of domestic and intimate partner violence. And it does not help that the impetus for the man’s violence is a “spirit of jealousy” (ruach-qen’ah, with qen’ah sometimes translated “zeal”). “Spirit” and “zeal” or “jealousy” are widely associated with God. God’s ruach hovers over the deep in the creation story (Gen. 1:2) and God’s evil ruach afflicts Saul (1 Sam. 16:16). God’s zeal, meanwhile, motivates him to protect his people, especially in battle (e.g. Isa. 42:13). Not only is the husband guiltless whether his emotion has basis or not, but he is being associated with the deity, putting his authority and control beyond reproach.

    This text from Numbers is not mentioned in LLF, but it constitutes an unambiguous example of a toxic text. If it were to be utilised as a proof-text (which I am certainly not advocating!) then it could justify wives’ submission to their husbands and husbands’ jealousy, coercive control, and violent punishment of their wives. It could justify wives’ submission far more powerfully than Ephesians 5, mentioned in LLF and highlighted in The Peoples’ Bible with a subject box saying, “Professional social-work literature on women suffering domestic abuse showed that one of the anecdotally established indications that a woman was in imminent danger of suffering physical violence was that the man with whom she lived was quoting Paul’s command that women be subject to their husbands.”

    How must Numbers 5 sound to a survivor of domestic abuse and coercive control, given that the abused woman in this text is publicly exposed, and accused, while rendered passive, whereas the man is exonerated and protected by the religious authorities and God himself?

    Yet LLF does not empower such survivors by calling out and explicitly rejecting such toxic texts as harmful. We cannot shy away from the worst the Bible contains and must resist knee-jerk deference to the Bible. Casting out fear and speaking into the silence must be preceded by conscious effort to include and listen to those who do not feel safe and who find scripture and tradition condemns, hurts or silences them. Paying attention to power demands more sensitivity to the damage done by leaders and hierarchies but also more attention to who is named, or active, or vocal in biblical texts. To recall Phyllis Trible’s call for action from over four decades ago, we need insight, repentance and change, because if a dreadful story is alive then “all is not well.”

     

    *This post focuses on one aspect of a presentation to the annual conference of Modern Church.

     

    References/further reading

    Christy Cobb and Eric Vanden Eykel (eds.) (2020) Sex, Violence, and Early Christian Texts (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books).

    Helen Paynter (2020) Telling Terror in Judges 19: Rape and Reparation for the Levite’s Wife (London, New York: Routledge).

    Phyllis Trible (1984) Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress).

    Curtiss Paul DeYoung, Wilda C. Gafney, Leticia A. Guardiola-Sáenz, George “Tink” Tinker and Frank M. Yamada (eds) (2009) The Peoples’ Bible – NRSV (Minneapolis: Fortress).

     

     

     

  • 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.

  • What is Marriage? Living in Love and Faith… and Denial

    by Rachel Starr, tutor at The Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education, Birmingham

    As someone shaped by Methodist tradition, it has been an interesting experience engaging with Living in Love and Faith (2020). As you may know, the Methodist Church in Britain has spent the past few years debating its own report on marriage and relationships, God in Love Unites Us (2019). There are some similarities, and of course many differences, between the two reports. Both in their own way seek to reflect the changing social context from which and into which they speak. And yet there is little acknowledgement of how church teaching around marriage and relationships has had a limiting and sometimes deadly impact on women and other marginalized groups throughout the centuries.

    My own study of theologies of marriage began while living in Argentina. It was there that I began to see how the everyday violence that many women (and some men) experience within the context of intimate relationships, was legitimated by dominant church teaching around marriage and gender relationships. Living and studying alongside Latin American women theologians and activists helped me to see the everyday violence that occurs in homes, on the streets, and in other contexts. Many of our interactions, structures and institutions are formed and maintained through violence. Such violence may not be obvious at first, but once seen it is difficult to ignore.

    Living in Love and Faith presents an idealized view of marriage, which fails to account for problems perpetuated by Christian teaching on marriage. As one example, the document makes reference to prophetic descriptions of the covenant as a marriage, but does not acknowledge the violence of this metaphor and how it has been used to justify domestic violence over the centuries. This despite decades-long discussion of the violence of these texts by scholars such as Renita Weems.

    To read either Living in Love and Faith or God in Love Unites Us is to be presented with a view of marriage as a vocation, over which churches are divided as to who can be called and who is able to benefit from the gift of marriage. But what if marriage was less of a gift and more of a problem? Of course, marriage can offer stability and friendship, as well as significant social and financial benefits. But some studies suggest that women who marry have a lower life expectancy than single women, whereas men who marry have a higher life expectancy than single men. Such studies suggest that for women marriage is, at a very basic level, life-limiting.

    My concern with how marriage is presented in Living in Love and Faith is that the negative impact marriage can have on women is not acknowledged. While the report does make mention of domestic violence, it seeks to contain what is an everyday reality for one in three women worldwide by literally ‘containing’ the brief discussion of domestic violence (written by myself) in a text box. As such it does not inform the wider discussion of marriage.

    In my own work, Reimagining theologies of marriage in contexts of domestic violence (2018), I explore Augustine’s notion of the good of marriage. Augustine proposed that marriage should be valued because it can generate fidelity, children and lasting union, a view which continues to shape the church’s understanding of the purpose of marriage. In contrast, I suggest that a good marriage is one that is concerned with the bodily wellbeing of both partners, and that contributes to the positive transformation of the wider community. The need for marriage to be life-giving for those both within and beyond it is reflected in Willie James Jennings’ criticism of what he sees as the church’s obsession with married couples. In his commentary on Acts, Jennings argues that for a marriage to be good, it must locate the couple in the wider community, so that there is a shared sense of purpose and distribution of resources. Jennings’ words came to mind recently when I read about the marriage of actor Sophia Bush and social entrepreneur Grant Hughes which took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2022. The couple designed their marriage celebrations around their commitment to social justice, inviting guests to spend time with local activists and artists, all the time asking how their marriage might generate more sustainable, equal and inclusive ways of living.

    In Reimagining Marriage, I look also at two models of marriage which dominant western Christian traditions: marriage as covenant and marriage as sacrament. Both of these are present within Living in Love and Faith and God in Love Unites Us. Yet neither report critically assesses these models or acknowledges their limitations. To summarise from my own research: the covenantal model is marked by exclusion, inequality and violence; and the sacramental model encourages self-sacrifice and limits access to divorce.

    While I recognise the importance of equal access to marriage, I wonder whether it is really the goal many perceive it to be. Is marriage unavoidably problematic, a relationship built on inequality, restriction and control?

    The new Methodist service of marriage, designed for the celebration of marriage between any two people, is a hopeful sign that marriage can be reimagined in more equal ways. The marriage party enter the church together; and since the couple is non-gendered, there are no assumptions about who speaks first.

    Alongside more equal forms of marriage, I suggest that marriage should be reimagined as a place of grace, in which bodies are honoured, everyday struggles are acknowledged, and new more just and equal ways of relating are anticipated. Rather than describing marriage as a sacrament or covenant, perhaps a more helpful, inviting image for today is that proposed by the medieval English theologian Aelred of Rievaulx, who described marriage as a rickety boat, which takes constant work to keep afloat, and which, if it is to survive, must be focused on the common good.

  • Clericalist Individualism? Power, Abuse and Transformation

    by Ruth Harley, a curate in the Diocese of Oxford, and co-author of “Being Interrupted: Re-imagining The Church’s Mission From The Outside, In” (SCM Press, 2020), whose research interests focus around feminist ecclesiology and questions about how power is understood and used within the church.

    Immersing myself in the transcripts of the IICSA Anglican Hearings as the basis of my MA dissertation has been by turns frustrating, infuriating, terrifying, upsetting and enraging. But it has also been very enlightening. Much here tells us deep and uncomfortable truths about the church: who we are, how we fail and how we handle failure, what and whom we prioritise and at what cost. IICSA’s October 2020 report, at the very least, should be compulsory reading for anyone with any measure of responsibility or authority within the church.

    The primary outcomes from the IICSA process must, of course, be centred around safeguarding, and around the needs and voices of survivors of abuse, far too often side-lined and retraumatised by the church. There is a very real need for repentance in response to IICSA’s findings: for a willingness to confront the ways in which the church has too often been a safer place for abusers than for their victims, and a willingness to invest not only money and resources, but also our time, care and attention into the radical changes which are needed.

    But the impact of the IICSA findings extends far beyond their specific scope. The Anglican Hearings have been an apocalyptic event in the life of the Church of England (and, to a lesser extent, the Church in Wales), both in the sense that they were devastating, and in the literal sense of the term ‘apocalypse’ – that which reveals. IICSA has revealed the devastating extent of abuse in the church. It has revealed some of the systemic and cultural flaws which have led to the church becoming a place where abuse can thrive, where the reputation of the institution and powerful individuals within it are prioritised at the expense of victims and survivors of abuse, with those who report abuse ignored, stigmatised and re-abused by the very people and systems supposed to protect them.

    IICSA has also revealed something about what the church is, and how power is understood and (mis)used within the body of Christ. One of the factors I identified in my research into the ecclesiologies expressed during the Anglican Hearings was something I have termed ‘clericalist individualism’.

    It’s well documented that clericalism is part of the mechanism by which clergy who abuse can go unchallenged; see for example Rosie Harper and Alan Wilson’s To Heal and Not to Hurt and Gilo and Janet Fife’s Letters to a Broken Church. A culture of ‘Father knows best’ is not one in which transparency and mutual accountability can flourish. But, deeply intertwined with that clericalism, there’s a kind of individualism which sees significant information and decision-making – in short, significant power – rest with individuals (often, though not always, ordained) in ways which both render those individuals unaccountable, and obscure or distort the proper nature of the church as an interdependent body, characterised by mutuality. This clericalist individualism is not a problem of ‘the top’: it’s a danger at every ‘level’ of the hierarchical structure, from home groups, to the parish, the diocese, and the national church.

    The apocalyptic revelation of the church’s failings which IICSA provides may not seem like any ground for hope. But we are a church which both preaches and (at its best) lives resurrection: life which emerges out of death and trauma, and meets us on the road in unexpected ways. In revealing the sins which beset the church God is, I believe, doing a new thing, calling us to a new understanding of who we are and what it means to be church.

    And it starts with power. Naming, confronting and repenting of all the ways in which power is used in the church to silence, oppress and abuse. And then daring to believe that another way is possible. Resources within and beyond the church’s traditions can help us with that re-imagining. For over half a century, feminist theologians have been calling the church to renounce hierarchical power – ‘power over’ – and embrace a different kind of power, rooted in mutuality, relationship and solidarity – ‘power with’ and, as laid out in Anna Mercedes’ book of the same title, Power For.[1]

    It is a call which the church has so far largely chosen to ignore and suppress.  But as we confront the endemic nature of abuse within the church, and as we wrestle too with the ways in which oppression (on grounds of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability and more) thrives within the body of Christ, it is a call which has never been more urgent. God, whose way is love and whose work in Jesus Christ is the work of liberation, is calling us, the church, to embrace the revelatory work of the Holy Spirit in our midst, and to step into new ways of understanding how power can and should function in the church, so that we can grow more fully into the body we are called together to be: characterised by mutuality, interdependence, honesty and accountability and – above all – love.

    It would be all too easy to tell ourselves that abuse of power is something that happens ‘over there’ – only within ‘the hierarchy’, or only in churches ‘not like ours’. That is a comforting but dangerous lie. In any culture in which abuse flourishes, an underpinning myth is that “it could never happen here”. It could. It has. It does and it will. And each of us who are members with one another of the body of Christ have a responsibility to do the work which is required to make that body a safe and supportive church where all can flourish.

     

    [1] Letty Russell’s Church in the Round offers a more general feminist model of church based on mutuality and interdependence.

  • Revd Adams’ Story – Is It Wrong for Me to Tell the Truth?

    by the Reverend Adams, a gay Methodist Minister

    My first experience of ‘deliverance’ ministry occurred on a Birmingham high street. I had thought I was just meeting someone for prayer, and first realised I might be wrong and in danger when three men greeted me instead of one. They took me to some rented rooms above a shop on the high street.   Immediately I knew I was in a bad place.

    My relationship with faith had started when I was 18. I had come from a non-church background and felt sad and lonely. I had known I was only attracted to men when I was at Junior school but didn’t know how to tell anyone. Homophobia was very common and – like many others – I was scared.

    When I came to faith I told my new Methodist Minister that I was gay, that I had no male friends and was scared to make any. I hoped he would help me. I was hugely mistaken.

    He told me I couldn’t be gay because that was ‘not of God’. It was evil, a perversion – I must be possessed. He also told me I was a potential child abuser. I couldn’t have been more shocked.

    Naively, I trusted him. I just wanted to be accepted, welcomed in Church, and to have some friends. I was desperate not to lose my new faith.

    He suggested I go to a Pentecostal Church he was associated with in Birmingham, which had ‘experience of dealing with Gay people.’ Desperate for help and acceptance, I consented, eagerly. And just like that, I found myself alone in a room with three men, cut off from all outside help.

    They spoke kindly while we walked up the stairs, but as soon as the door shut, this very quickly changed. They became aggressive and spoke over each other louder and louder, pushing me and shouting that gay men only existed because of abuse and therefore I had been raped by my dad or grandfather. I was an abused and broken person who had been preyed on and would prey on others, they said.

    I remember trying to stand up and say that this was rubbish; they shoved and shouted more. The next thing I knew I was on the ground where they continued to attack me.

    They commanded demons of homosexuality to leave me, and hit me again and again.

    I was absolutely terrified.

    I pretended that it was working and that they had made me different. I left as quickly as I could and remember running to my car. I collapsed inside, locked the doors and cried.

    I drove back home and promised I would hide this and never speak of it again, but the Methodist Minister told me that was not the end of it. I was clearly a serious potential child abuser and I couldn’t volunteer as a Boys Brigade Officer anymore, unless I told the BB Captain so that I could be monitored at all times. If I didn’t tell him, then the Church would have to be informed and I would be in essence outed to all the congregation.

    I felt so dirty. I wanted to die.

    He went on to say that I needed to find a nice girl, marry and have children, and that the gay would go away. I told a girl all this – we were friends and it was so hard to do. I loved her – and still do – so we married. We thought we could complete the cure. We had children and were together for almost 25 years.

    God has such an amazing sense of humour as I was training as a Methodist Minister myself within about 5 years of the gay conversion experience. I hid my true self deep within myself, so that no-one could see how much I hated myself.

    From the outside, we looked like a perfect family, but underneath it was hell for me and (I think) my ex-wife. I was lonely and suicidal. I felt like I was always pretending and was never good enough for God or my ex-wife.

    When we split and I came out it felt like a huge weight had been removed – I could breathe freely for the first time.

    Unsurprisingly, as an out gay Minister I encountered homophobia. One retired minister said that gays in church were a disgrace and if she was still a minister she would resign.

    One church where I was meant to be observing a local preacher I was training rang twice to inform me that if I entered they would all walk out in protest at my ‘sin’. The abuse they gave me and the language they shouted down the phone left me shocked and shaken. The Circuit told me not to go but said nothing to the people at the Church. I was told to just accept that this was normal, acceptable behaviour.

    As I was coming to the end of my 5 years there I was initially offered an extension. However, I was then told by a church full-time lay worker that I was ‘hated and detested’ and that I ‘should go where people like you are tolerated.’ Shocked, I reported the incident to the Circuit / District. I was then told that I should leave, because the other church worker had to stay. They withdrew my own extension to stay, and just like that, I had been forced out.

    Now, we live in fear. Where will we end up? Is there anywhere we will be accepted?

    There aren’t enough words to describe all the other incidents I’ve encountered since then. I’ve been told to stop complaining, that people are allowed to express homophobic views. I’ve been told by people in senior ordained national roles that that ‘we shouldn’t rock the boat’. They said that black people had to accept racism within the Methodist Church, that women had to accept sexism and that I had to accept this.

    I’m left with a multitude of questions. How much is too much? Is it wrong for me to tell the truth? Could even writing this post be accused of rocking the boat?

    I feel powerless and live in fear.