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Category: Spiritual Abuse

  • A Heavy Yoke: Selina Stone on Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

     

  • Jagged Edges: Where Safeguarding Overlaps with the Trust Deficit

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

    (picture credit: BBC/Yourkevich)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • There’s Another Church Abuse Crisis That’s in Every Congregation, and Very Much Closer to Home

    by Sally Hope, a writer with a specialism in faith, feminism and domestic abuse. Sally is the creator of the Always Hopeful Programme, and her latest book No Visible Scars is a recovery journal for Christian women who have experienced domestic abuse

    “I don’t believe in God anymore” I angrily declared, two weeks after I’d left my husband.

    It was a lie. I’ve known God as a real, tangible presence since I was a small child. I remember feeling comforted by God at night when I was five years old and scared of the dark, and when I was a lonely young teenager away from my family for the first time. I had stories of answered prayer, of God’s intervention in my life. I could no more stop believing in God than I could stop believing that the sky is blue. The problem was, I hadn’t been aware of God’s presence lately, and while I believed God existed, I felt abandoned and angry. I didn’t want to believe in God.

    What I really meant was, “I believe in God, but I have lost faith in God.”

    Hanging on the wall of my lounge was a collage of family photographs, made for me by my sister. Nestled among the pictures of my husband and my children were words from Psalm 37, “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.” It was ironic that these words were woven through my nearest and dearest, because the only desire of my heart was quite simple: a happy, peaceful family. I had “delighted myself in the Lord”, but I did not have the happy family I desired. I was bitter. Looking around church, I saw happy normal family after happy normal family. I didn’t feel like I was asking for the earth. Why then, had God given my friends at church the only thing I really desired, but not me? Why had I been given a husband who would spend our 13-year marriage abusing me and my children?

    God, I had decided, was a God who makes promises, but does not keep them.

    My experience is not unique. Christians experience domestic abuse at the same, if not higher levels than the rest of society.[1] One in four of us will be abused by an intimate partner at some point in our adult lives. How many women are in your church? Try to picture those women. For every 20 women quietly sitting in your pews, five of them will be experiencing domestic abuse, mostly secretly, silently, feeling stigma and shame. Hiding it, like I did for thirteen years. Many of them will eventually walk away from their faith altogether as a result.

    I didn’t lose my faith. I don’t know why but I know it was certainly not because of anything I did. Over the next three or four years I experienced the God who shows up, and won’t go away no matter how much you rail and spew your anger. The God who leaves behind the ninety-nine to pursue the one. The God who loves relentlessly, outrageously, who heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. In that time I questioned everything I had ever believed, my religion fell apart, but my God clung onto me as I rebuilt both my life, and my faith.

    Christian domestic abuse victims face unique challenges. In the majority of cases their faith and the abuse they experience are inextricably linked. Abusers will use spiritual abuse as a means of controlling their victims, making the victim feel as though a challenge to the abuser is a challenge to God. Abusers shoehorn themselves into God’s place in the lives of their victims, and often use biblical texts and Christian doctrines to justify their abuse. All victims of abuse find it difficult to leave an abuser but the added element of spiritual abuse, along with negative attitudes to divorce and the importance placed on two-parent families within Christian culture, can create another barrier for Christians. When we do leave, the way our faith has been weaponised against us invariably leads to a full-blown deconstruction of our beliefs, and if our abusers have managed to drive a wedge between us and God we can be resistant to God’s voice and tender care.

    As a Christian woman I found the strenuous journey of recovery lonely. I received excellent support from secular support agencies, found some levels of connection with other survivors in peer support groups, but always felt that none of them had the answers to the burning questions I was left with in relation to my faith: “Why did God allow it to happen to me?” “Is it okay for me to get divorced?” “Do I have to forgive my ex-husband? And if so, what if I can’t?” Worse, they saw my faith as part of the problem, not as part of the solution.

    Whilst secular support workers didn’t “get” my faith, my Christian peers didn’t “get” my experience of domestic abuse. I was told to repent of my own part in the abuse, urged to drop the charges against my husband, and made to feel less like an equal and valuable member of my church, and more like a project, a failure, and someone to be pitied, or worse: judged. I walked the path to recovery with Jesus by my side, but I longed to walk it with other Christian women who understood and connected with my pain.

    It’s now 12 years since I left my husband. My faith is stronger than it’s ever been, my relationship with God more loving and beautiful than I ever could have imagined. As I grew in strength I began to support other survivors of abuse; I volunteered at my local women’s refuge, and after a while I got a job there, running peer support groups for survivors both in the refuge and in the community. In the course of my professional life, I met other Christian survivors, listened to them ask the same questions I asked, saw them experience the damaging disconnect from God that I once felt, saw some of them leave their faith behind altogether and others struggle to rebuild, all the time deeply hurt and often broken all over again by the poor response from their churches.

    I do not know why God broke through my anger, hurt and broken-ness to help me rebuild my faith, when other victims don’t seem to experience that same divine healing. But I know that when I ask God, God’s reply is, “what are you doing now to bring my outrageous love to those women? Where are you in their journey of recovery?” I am grateful that God walked that journey with me but, more than anything, I wish other Christians had.

    So, I took the lessons I learned during my own recovery, along with my professional knowledge and experience of running support groups to create a peer support programme for Christian women. Never again should a Christian woman have to recover from domestic abuse on her own. My Always Hopeful Programme is now run online, via Zoom by Restored, a charity dedicated to supporting survivors of abuse and equipping churches to do the same. It’s also being run as a face-to-face peer support programme in a slowly growing number of churches in the U.K. Participants tell me it’s been a key part in their journey to wholeness. There is no substitute for face-to-face peer support and I would love it if every survivor was able to find an Always Hopeful Programme running in a church near them.

    I also realised, from my own experience working with survivors, that not everyone will find the courage to join a support group. There can be lots of reasons why women won’t join an Always Hopeful Programme, from fear or social anxiety to simple logistics of childcare or not being able to find a programme near to them. So, for those women who cannot attend an Always Hopeful Programme, I wrote No Visible Scars, which will be published on 17 July 2025. ‘No Visible Scars’ is an individual recovery guide for Christian women that seeks to help the reader work through those questions in order to “work out their own salvation” (Philippians 2:12) in the light of their experience of abuse.

    The Church has so much to offer to victims of abuse. It is often part of the problem but it could, and should, be part of the solution. We are called to care for the hurting, to defend the oppressed and to seek justice. Always Hopeful [2] and No Visible Scars are there to help the church accompany the women in every congregation who are victims of domestic abuse.

     

    Notes:

    [1] A 2018 study by Restored in partnership with the University of Leicester and Coventry University found that 25% of Churchgoers (across all denominations)  reported experiencing domestic abuse in their CURRENT relationship, and 42.2% reported experiencing at least one abusive behaviour in any intimate relationship (past of present) during their adult life. There have previously been studies by both the Evangelical Alliance and the Methodist Church that have found that rates of domestic abuse in churches is similar to that of the national average. Nationally 1 in 4 women will experience Domestic Abuse.

    [2] To run an Always Hopeful Programme at your church:
    online information here and     with free webinars at 12 noon, Monday 14 July [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/finding-hope-when-everything-seems-hopeless-tickets-1306878471689] or 7 pm Thursday 21 August [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/finding-hope-when-everything-seems-hopeless-tickets-1306883225909]

  • Exorcism, Conversion Therapy and Safeguarding: the Barnado’s Independent Investigation

    by Anon. 

    This morning, the BBC ran this story after the Diocese of Sheffield released two documents highly relevant to examining Church of England safeguarding practice, along with a statement from the Diocese, the Yorkshire Baptist Association and the trustees of Network Church Sheffield. The report relates to St Thomas Philadelphia Church, part of St Thomas Crookes, and so a descendant of the Nine O’Clock Service (NOS). St Thomas Philadelphia has subsequently operated as Network Church. There are similarities in that churches which appear to be ‘successful’ in terms of attracting young people and funding have been able to slip under the radar in worrying ways. The leader of NOS, Chris Brain, is also under investigation.

    The diocesan statement on St Thomas Philadelphia is available here.

    Part 1 – dated 30th November 2023 –  is the redacted Independent Investigation of St Thomas Philadelphia Church in respect of a complaint by MD.

    Part 2 – dated 26th February 2024 – is the redacted Independent Review of Safeguarding Arrangements in St Thomas Philadelphia Church.

    We understand that Part 1 investigates the circumstances around a complaint made by “MD” in 2019, alleging “MD was given an ultimatum to stop discussing his theological position on LGBTQ+ matters or he would be required to step down from the student leadership team”, that he “experienced prayer ministry, which he experienced as an exorcism, which attempted to change his sexual orientation from gay to straight”, that “he was forced to step down from volunteering on the student leadership team at the church after stating he was considering dating as a gay man”, and that he “was not welcomed at the church after his removal from the student leadership team.” The investigation found that each aspect of the complaint was Substantiated, and was therefore, Upheld.

    The report goes into detail around each element of the complaint, and also discusses the wider definition of a vulnerable adult, the responsibilities of trustees of charitable organisations, and the culture of this church as understood by the investigation team. The writers draw their conclusions from accessing documents, emails and records and from holding interviews with individuals connected to the church. The report provides an insight into the experiences of some LGBTQ+ people attempting to access church.

    A particularly pertinent line states: “…although individuals may have exchanged pleasantries with MD at times, the Church did not make MD feel welcome after he left the student team, resulting in him leaving the Church completely in 2016.”

    Part 2 includes 22 recommendations of ways in which the Church can strengthen their safeguarding. The learning from this review may form a helpful standard against which other churches’ and organisations’ safeguarding can be assessed and measured. The report reminds us: “Safe and healthy cultures do not, however, happen by accident, they are purposely developed and carefully nurtured, influenced to a significant extent by the actions and attitudes of senior leaders.”

    The Diocese of Sheffield released these reports with this apology: “We apologise unreservedly to the survivor for the distress this has caused and to anyone else similarly affected by such practices in the past.”

    Matthew Drapper, who has chosen to keep his initials within the report and to name himself as the survivor, had this to say: “In a letter to me, in 2019, the trustees of the Church denied there was any evidence these events occurred. In 2022, the organisation told the press, the church ‘does not engage in conversion therapy.’ We now know the Church did engage in conversion therapy, lied to cover it up and failed to investigate themselves. At every stage, I have had to fight for an independent review, against delay, coverup and a so-called safeguarding culture which resists external oversight. I’m grateful to every person who gave input to this investigation, at great personal cost. I have been deeply traumatised by the length of time it took to reach this outcome. I feel deeply for anyone who has experienced unsanctioned and unsafe exorcism practices. I am pleased to hear the apology and am especially glad it was addressed to the countless unnamed others who have been affected by these practices, over the years in Network Church Sheffield, and within wider Anglican and Baptist networks. I am hopeful this learning can be widely shared and that change is coming.”

    Chrissy Meleady MBE CEO, of Equalities and Human Rights U.K., who was Matthew’s Advocate through the challenge, said: “The investigation and its findings have vindicated Matthew, who was put through an exorcism for being a Gay man. He then had the reality of this experience vehemently denied as never happening. Matthew’s and others’ experiences of exorcism/conversion practices are recognised at last and an apology has been issued to him and the numerous others who were subjected to this form of Spiritual Abuse. It has been a  five year struggle to secure this justice for Matthew and others like him. It has not been without its cost.

    “We welcome the expressed commitment of the St Thomas Philadelphia Church and NCS, the Sheffield Diocese of the Church of England and the Yorkshire Baptist Church, to learn from this lessons. to ensure that nobody else is put through what Matthew was put through .

    “We welcome too the Diocese of Sheffield’s,  along with the wider Church of England’s expressed assertion that conversion therapy is unethical, potentially harmful and has no place in the modern world.

    “The UN Human Rights Committee has categorically told the U.K. to prohibit conversion practices. Its independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity, Victor Madrigal-Borloz  has made it explicit that conversion practices are inherently discriminatory, that they are cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and that depending on the severity or physical or mental pain and suffering inflicted to the victim, they may amount to torture.”

    Philadelphia was a supposedly successful church. It’s part of St Thomas Crookes, and so a descendant of the Nine O’Clock Service.

  • Lovingly Hated

    By Anon., on behalf of the Oxford Safe Churches team

     

    The summer after my first year at university I listened to hours of sermons telling me I was going to hell.

    I was already painfully familiar with these words and hearing them from an Oxford church was by no means surprising. As is often the case, these accusations of ‘sexual immorality’ and ‘going against God’s will’ came from a church with a greeting sign at its doors: ‘All are welcome’.

    Lovingly hated. That’s how I like to refer to it. The way some of these “Christians” so completely oppose my queer identity and relationships. Yet, in the same breath, they will tell me I am loved and considered worthy by the same God they believe would send me to hell. Unless of course I renounce every aspect of this ‘deviant identity’ and mould my innermost being to fit into their idea of acceptable behaviour.

    Conversation therapy happens all the time in churches. It’s not always a dramatic exorcism, sometimes it’s disguised as ‘meeting for coffee’. And then the people you look up to and respect will reveal what they’ve believed from the very beginning: that there is no space for queer identity in their view of Christianity. That you need to renounce this  ‘same-sex attraction’ or, if you can’t, be forced to pursue a life of celibacy.

    The worst part about being judged and shamed by churches, is that it can happen when you least expect it. From the same people who drew you in with their free dinners and flashy events; in the same places you once felt safe and seen. You can be torn apart at a moment’s notice. This only happens because churches intentionally hide what they believe about LGBTQ+ identity and relationships in order to draw people in.

    “Okay, we get it, some churches don’t accept you… but why are you so focused on them? Can’t you just move on to other places?” I wish I could just move on, but no.  Firstly, their words and actions cut deep. Secondly, moving on leaves no trace of what these places actually believe and practice behind closed doors. Each year, freshers are sucked into churches that ‘welcome’ them and leave them vulnerable to spiritual abuse. Out of concern, because I would never want anyone to go through what I’ve seen happen to others, I felt an obligation to make everything public.

    Hence, I put in hours of work over my summer ‘break’ listening to those sermons over and over again. Each damnation was transcribed and carefully put together in a report to prove that certain Oxford churches are not in fact ‘loving and welcome to all’. But that this love has conditions. Even though it’s excruciatingly obvious to anyone who even remotely looks, or loves, like I do, I had to prove this was happening. I had to show freshers which churches could be seen as safe, and which have hidden beliefs to be wary of.

    Oxford Safe Churches. Pages and pages of testimonies, research, affiliations, references, sermons, and anything else that gives any indication of what an Oxford church believes about LGBTQ+ identity and relationships. There was a lot to put in that report. And it was awful.

    And what was the response from our Bishop of Oxford? The same Bishop so celebrated for his support of same-sex marriage in the Church of England in his 2022 booklet, Together in Love and Faith. Silence. Even the slightest acknowledgement of what we wrote would have been enough to know we have someone on our side. Yet, in the light of everything we reported, all the horrible testimonies, there was no response.

    In fact, in that booklet, the last we heard from Bishop Steven, he insists we don’t ‘assign blame to individual clergy or churches’ and should avoid the ‘emotive language of abuse’. But how can we possibly move past the shame and trauma that LGBTQ+ people have felt in the church without acknowledging it for what it is? The Oxford Safe Churches Project has now written to him. Clergy and churches who are responsible for spiritual abuse have the responsibility to repent of that. To take accountability and be transparent about what they believe. If not, it seems the Church of England cares more about protecting its image than protecting vulnerable people.

  • Safeguarding & Living in Love and Faith: Learning for the Church of England from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse & Lessons Learned Reviews[1]?

    Via Media does not normally publish long pieces, but in this case we are making an exception; we have a record of expressing concern over safeguarding.[1] The following document was prepared in 2023 by Judith Maltby, a member of the House of Clergy of the General Synod.  She was encouraged to produce this paper by one of the lead bishops for safeguarding and also received critical feedback from a diocesan safeguarding professional before completion. It was presented at a meeting of the National Safeguarding Steering Group on 30 January 2024, after which it was placed on the  CofE Safeguarding Training Portal. That site requires a log-in, so we are making it available here to ensure that as many people as possible are aware of the links identified by IICSA and numerous professional Lessons Learned Reviews between the Church’s teaching on homosexuality and catastrophic safeguarding failures. All the documents cited are referenced in the notes and are in the public domain. 

     

    Revd Canon Judith Maltby is College Lecturer in Theology & Emerita Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Emerita Reader in Church History, University of Oxford, and a member of the House of Clergy of General Synod

    1. Introduction[2]

    From 2012-13 until 2022, I served as a central member elected by General Synod on the Crown Nominations Commission, the body which nominates individuals to be diocesan bishops.  I began around the time of the time of the investigation into safeguarding failures in Chichester Diocese led by Baroness Butler-Sloss.[3]  Although I had up till then followed safeguarding issues in what I hoped was a responsible way for any priest, my election onto the CNC made me realize that I needed to be much better informed as safeguarding needed to be a key element in its discernment work.  Remarkably at the time I started on the CNC, there was no explicit focus on safeguarding in its deliberations.  That has changed in the past decade.  As part of my commitment to the work of the CNC, I started reading all major safeguarding Reviews and followed the proceedings of IICSA closely.

    In 2017, I was invited in my capacity as a professional historian to join one of the disciplinary work streams for what became Living in Love and Faith.  As a member of LLF, I raised a number of times (I was not the only one to do so) that we should be drawing on external Reviews and IICSA of our safeguarding failures in our work on human sexuality.  This work did not take place.

    This paper is the result of two areas of work for the Church of England I have been part of over many years:  the Crown Nominations Commission and Living in Love and Faith.  It is not an attempt to ‘weaponize’ safeguarding in the Church’s sexuality debate, but rather to help us hear what numerous professional, independent Reviews (LLRs) and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) are saying to the Church:  that our lack of inclusion of LGBT+ people has a serious and detrimental impact on the Church’s ability to deliver good safeguarding.[4]  There is very little of my own text in this paper – it is almost entirely drawn from IICSA and LLRs.  So far, as a Church we are failing to ‘read, mark, learn and inwardly digest’ this growing body of evidence from the very safeguarding professionals we have, in many cases, asked to undertake it.

    1. Questions in General Synod 2018 & 2019

    In the previous quinquennium of General Synod, on two occasions, I asked the following questions about making connections between the work of LLF and the learning needing to be done from IICSA.

    General Synod Questions July 2018

    The Revd Dr Judith Maltby (Universities & TEIs) to ask the Chair of the House of Bishops:

    Q43.  How will the insights and learning from the report due to be published later this year by the UK Government’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) concerning the culture of the Church of England in respect of gender and sexuality be incorporated into the Teaching Document on human sexuality promised for 2020?

    The Bishop of Coventry to reply on behalf of the Chair of the House of Bishops:

    1. The Co-Ordinating Group for Living in Love and Faith is expected to be attentive to developments in other areas of the Church of England’s national life that are relevant for its work. When the report from IICSA is published, it will consider whether there are specific points for it to reflect on, and how to go about this. It is also likely that the report will be relevant to the work of the Pastoral Advisory Group.[5]

    General Synod Questions July 2019

    The Revd Dr Judith Maltby (Universities & TEIs) to ask the Chair of the House of Bishops:

    Q94.  The Church Times (10 May 2019) reported that the hearings of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse this July will ‘scrutinise, among other topics … the House of Bishops’ forthcoming teaching document on gender and sexuality’ and the Lead Bishop for Safeguarding, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, in his response to the May 2019 IICSA report on Chichester and Peter Ball, responded ‘It is absolutely right that the Church at all levels should learn lessons from the issues raised in this report’. Will the forthcoming ‘Living in Love and Faith’ show evidence of learning lessons from the IICSA hearings of March, July 2018, and July 2019, as well as the report of May 2019, about attitudes in the culture and practice of the Church of England towards women and LGBT people?

    The Bishop of Coventry to reply as Chair of the Living in Love and Faith Coordinating Group on behalf of the Chair of the House of Bishops:

    1. The purpose of the Living in Love and Faith resources is primarily educational: the plan is for the resources to be widely used by parishes, deaneries, dioceses, the House and College of Bishops and members of General Synod to enable teaching and learning. In this way LLF will demonstrate its learning from the IICSA process by promoting a culture of mutual respect, clarity, openness and transparency across the Church in relation to matters of human identity, sexuality, gender and marriage. It will also provide appropriate correctives to misinformation about human sexuality and identity. We hope that the Pastoral Principles will establish a helpful culture for using the LLF resources by enabling the Church to address the evils of prejudice, silence, fear, ignorance, hypocrisy and misuse of power, all of which have played their part in the tragic realities of sexual abuse that have been the subject of the IICSA hearings.[6]

    1. LLF’s Engagement with IICSA (November 2020)

    I served on LLF from its beginning and, along with others, attempted a number of times to have learning from IICSA incorporated into its work.  In the end, the only reference to IICSA in LLF is:

    While acknowledging the reality of abuse in the church, it is important that the specific work of theological reflection on IICSA be carried out separately from the Living in Love and Faith project… (LLF, 2020, p. 87).

    As far as I know, the work to ‘be carried out separately’ has not taken place.

    1. Illustrative Extracts from Safeguarding Reviews and IICSA

    Below are extracts from recent independent LLRs into Church of England safeguarding failures.  They argue that the Church’s teaching on homosexuality is a significant contribution to what is, from a safeguarding perspective, a more dangerous safeguarding environment.

    4.1. Dame Moira Gibb Review on Peter Ball (June 2017)

    We believe that the Church’s attitude to homosexuality at the time played a part in the failure to act appropriately. Ball’s abusive behaviour was trivialised and its consequences were set aside (p. 2).

    This issue continues to be a source of division and debate in the Church, and an important concern for some of Ball’s victims. We would simply emphasise that the Church must promote an open and accepting culture in which everyone, regardless of their sexuality or their views about homosexuality, is clear about their responsibilities towards those who might be abused or who might want to raise concerns about abuse (5.7.3).[7]

    4.2.  Independent Review by Dr Adi Cooper, OBE on Stowe and Maids Moreton, 2012-2019, Diocese of Oxford (April 2022)

    In her review on the abuse and murder of Peter Farquhar and the abuse of Anne Moore-Martin by Ben Field, Dr Cooper makes a direct connection between the Church of England’s ‘wider policies regarding homosexual practice’ and putting people at risk:

    1.3.  The closed culture of the Stowe Church in general, including attitudes towards homosexuality, meant that the [sic] Peter Farquhar’s homosexuality and the relationship between Peter Farquhar and Ben Field was a ‘well-known secret’. The wider policies of the Church of England regarding homosexual practice and approach to sexuality and relationships put Peter Farquhar at risk and vulnerable to exploitation. A culture which supported openness and transparency would have better safeguarded Peter Farquhar.  Whilst people continue to feel forced to hide or lie about their sexuality, they can become vulnerable to exploitation, as was Peter Farquhar. [8]

    Dr Cooper cites the earlier report by Dame Moira Gibb on Peter Ball:

    The recommendation from a previous review, ‘that the Church must promote an open and accepting culture in which everyone, regardless of their sexuality or their views about homosexuality, is clear about their responsibilities towards those who might be abused or who might want to raise concerns about abuse’[9] is reinforced by this review.

    She continues:

    Negative attitudes towards homosexuality and homosexual practice in the Church of England reinforce internalised homophobia. An area for applying learning from this case review would be to ask, ‘How many other older men and women in similar positions to Peter Farquhar may be vulnerable to exploitation?’ There is an issue here for the wider church to consider how it offers support to its lesbian and gay members, not to ‘cure’ and ‘heal’ them as this would be a deeply homophobic response …. However, the institutional Church of England faces challenges to resolve its own positioning on this, before it can effectively support any individuals with their expressed tensions between sexuality and religious beliefs. This case review calls for a concerted effort to be made to reduce the stigma of homosexuality within the wider Church of England communion, so that it can provide a safer place for lesbians and gay men to worship, as is its intent.[10]

    The issue of how to explore issues of personal relationships and sexuality is a complex area, particularly given current contradictory expectations from the Church of England regarding homosexuality and heterosexuality, which may lead people to lie about the reality of their sexual lives. The current position taken by the Church of England, continuing to insist that sex is for married couples only and that any other partnership has to be a sexually abstinent friendship is not conducive to disclosure, particularly from young people, as well as exposing people to risk, as discussed in section 1 above. This needs to change and the Church should consider how to make it possible for people to be honest about their relationships, as well as being a safe place for lesbians and gay men.[11]

    4.3. Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA)

    The connection between the Church’s attitudes towards homosexuality and creating a less safe environment, was repeatedly made in the IICSA proceedings.  What follows is a representative, rather than an exhaustive, sample.

    (i)  5 March 2018.  Fiona Scolding, QC, at the IICSA inquiry into Chichester Diocese  set out a number of questions such as:  ‘How far did the reaction of some within the church to homosexuality possibly inhibit the reporting of child sexual abuse?’[12] Later, she cited DI Wayne Murdock, a police officer involved in the investigation of the Peter Ball case, stating that ‘one of the factors that influenced his view of the public interest in bringing a prosecution was the risk that some church witnesses would be exposed as homosexuals in court. That would, in his words, have seen their roles within the church effectively finished.’ As Murdock put it: ‘“I believe that the issue of homosexuality had a detrimental effect in encouraging witnesses and potential complainants within the church to come forward”’.[13]

    (ii)  14 March 2018.  When Fiona Scolding interviewed the Bishop of Chichester, Rt Revd Dr Martin Warner, she asked: ‘Do you not think that the Church’s difficulty in coming to terms with the complexity of self-identity when it comes to sexual orientation may have contributed to the misapprehensions you have identified because, you know, certainly amongst conservative individuals, homosexuality is seen as sinful?’

    Bishop Warner replied:  ‘Yes.’ Ms Scolding then asked, ‘The idea of civil partnerships is seen as anathema and the idea of getting married within the church is anathema. Do you think the church may have, albeit unwittingly, contributed to that by its approach to sexual orientation in the past?’ Bishop Warner replied: ‘I think there has been contribution from the church on this’. He went on to talk about how covering up homosexuality contributed to a culture in which sexual abuse was also kept secret.[14]

    (iii)  14 March 2018.  Ms Scolding’s examination of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, raised the link between attitudes towards homosexuality and safeguarding failures, particularly in the case of Bishop Peter Ball.

    1. Specifically, inasmuch as you know about the case involving Bishop Peter Ball, do you think the church’s attitude towards homosexuality may have played any role in the way the church treated him either during his time as a priest or afterwards?
    2. I think so, and, again, I’m speculating, but it does seem to me that, at a time when people were beginning to feel awkward about the traditional closeted attitude, there was perhaps overcompensation, saying ‘Well, we don’t want to be judgemental about people’s sexual activities. We may formally, in a disciplinary way disapprove, we may treat them according to the protocols, but we mustn’t be seen to be – or we mustn’t be judgemental.  We must therefore give people second chances and understand the pressures’, and so on.  So I think there is an element of that coming in, a rather paradoxical consequence of the traditional view of homosexuality within the church; you want to overcompensate a bit for it.[15]

    Lord Williams acknowledged that guilt or dis-ease about the treatment of gay men, especially clergymen, in the Church of England may have allowed Peter Ball to go unchecked in his criminal behaviour for decades.  He received a lot of criticism for his remarks, but I think he was correctly describing a pattern of disordered institutional behaviour.[16]

    (iv)  24 July 2018.  Fiona Scolding, interviewing the former Archbishop, Lord Carey of Clifton, proposed that: ‘The church was so uncomfortable in dealing with and managing same-sex relationships that it didn’t really have an understanding of what was an appropriate same-sex relationship and what was an inappropriate same-sex relationship.’[17]

    (v) 25 June 2019.  In his Second Witness Statement, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, stated:  ‘I am informed by Mr Tilby that these [LLF] resources will be reviewed by the NST before they are finalised to ensure that they sufficiently address safeguarding related issues.’[18]  That review never appears to have taken place or if it did, it had no impact on LLF.   LLF states:  ‘While acknowledging the reality of abuse in the church, it is important that the specific work of theological reflection on IICSA be carried out separately from the Living in Love and Faith project…’ (LLF, 2020, p. 87).

     (vi)  11 July 2019.  Archbishop Justin Welby was asked whether ‘there is sufficient openness about human sexuality in the church now so that there is, and can be, proper debate and discussion with victims and survivors and proper work on minimising risk within the church?’  He responded, ‘Yes. I think there is far more openness than there was. I think the Living in Love and Faith Project has enabled a culture of transparency in ways that didn’t exist before.  I’ve no doubt we have got a huge amount further to go on that ….  the project was just getting going then … It is now coming within 12 months of its end and I think that that has had a huge impact, and will continue to do so’.[19]

    (vii) October 2020.  In the Executive Summary of the IICSA final report, we read that: ‘Deference to the authority of the Church and to individual priests, taboos surrounding discussion of sexuality and an environment where alleged perpetrators were treated more supportively than victims presented barriers to disclosure that many victims could not overcome.’[20]

     (viii) October 2020.  The full investigation report of the Anglican Church by IICSA observes:  ‘There was a culture of fear and secrecy within the Church about sexuality.  Some members of the Church also wrongly conflated homosexuality with the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults.  There was a lack of transparency, open dialogue and candour about sexual matters, together with an awkwardness about investigating such matters.  This made it difficult to challenge sexual behaviour.  Mr Colin Perkins, diocesan safeguarding adviser (DSA) for the Diocese of Chichester, told us that homosexual clergy may have found themselves inadvertently “under the same cloak” as child sexual abusers, who sought to mask their behaviour “in the same cultural hiding place”’.[21]

     4.4. Chris Robson Review on Father Alan Griffin (July 2022)

    Shortly before the July 2022 session of General Synod, the report on the suicide of Father Griffin was published and states:

     This illustrates a divisive issue that has been at the centre of this review – the Church of England’s stance on homosexuality. Again, this issue is so complex that it could not possibly be dealt with in significant detail by this review. At the same time, it cannot be ignored.  There is clear evidence that the way Father Alan was treated was, in part, influenced by the Church and individuals’ conscious and unconscious bias around his sexual orientation (5.3).[22] 

    1. Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB) and National Safeguarding Panel (NSP) at General Synod July 2022

    At the July 2022 Synod, during the presentation ‘Safeguarding and Independence: Update and Next Steps (GS2263 and GSMisc 1320)’, I asked the following question:

     The Revd Canon Dr Judith Maltby (Universities & TEIs): We have had a number of safeguarding reports and reviews, the Gibb Report on Peter Ball, IICSA and the most recent one on Fr Griffin which just came out a few days ago. All those reports make a connection between the Church’s attitudes towards homosexuality and being a less safe Church and I wonder if you as a panel have views on that.

    Professor Maggie Atkinson: Chair, thank you and thank you for the questions. I am going to take the first question and Meg is going to come forward and answer the second, because this is in collegium …. Meg is going to take the one that was asked about safety or otherwise if you are homosexual or an LGBTQ person, LGBTQIA and so on.

    Ms Meg Munn: Thank you, Maggie. The reason I volunteered among us to answer this one is because it sounds to me like this is a policy type question and, as I said at the outset, one of the things that the National Safeguarding Panel does is look into issues of policy, procedure and process. Looking at some of the issues that come out, including practice, of those reviews is the kind of scanning of the horizon that I would do with the panel when we are determining the kinds of issues that we might look at. That issue has not been one that has been discussed by us to date. It could well be one that we would discuss [my italics].

    The National Safeguarding Panel currently only meets six times a year. Well, in fact, we meet five times a year and one of our sessions we use for good practice workshops and to discuss issues of importance. I will certainly take that issue into our discussions. One of the things I tried to do is to make sure that we have our discussions when they are going to have an impact. If we know that policy procedure is being reviewed or due to be reviewed, then we will choose those kind of subjects.

    But we also try to and look at issues which we think are important and that the Church is not taking enough notice of – I mean the Church as a whole not just the National Safeguarding Team. For example, in the past we have put issues like prevention on our agenda and we have put issues like adult safeguarding on our agenda because we felt that they were not getting enough focus. This could well be an issue that we might look at in the future but, to date, the National Safeguarding Panel has not looked specifically at that.[23]

    1. General Synod February 2023

    In the LLF debate on the morning of 9 February 2023, I returned to the learning to be done from IICSA and the contributions from major reviews of safeguarding failures to our discussion of sexuality.[24]  In the afternoon of 9 February, there was an opportunity to ask questions of the new Director of the National Safeguarding Team (NST), Mr Alexander Kubeyinje.  Both the Revd Robert Thompson (London) and I asked Mr Kubeyinje about the NST’s engagement with the connection made in IICSA and other independent reviews concerning attitudes toward LGBT+ people and safeguarding failures.  I asked:  ‘When we have these major Reports like Robson on Griffin and material from IICSA, what is the process for learning and absorbing from those Reports by the NST?’  Mr Kubeyinje replied:

    Judith, with regards to your question, we have plans, we have a lot of meetings with other people. We are starting to do audit activity. We are trying to triangulate and close the loop. We know we still need to work on our quality assurance element, but we do take those recommendations seriously, and some of those recommendations have actually moved along quite well. [25]

    It is good to know that there are ‘a lot of meetings’ and allowance must be made for Mr Kubeyinje’s newness in the post at the time, but it is not at all clear what ‘triangulate and close the loop’ means or which recommendations in regard to sexuality and safeguarding ‘have moved along quite well’.  Synod was not provided with any actual example.

    1. General Synod July 2023

    7.1.  Questions.

    I returned the issue of the connection made by IICSA and various LLRs in a question at the most recent General Synod.

    The Revd Canon Dr Judith Maltby (Universities & TEIs) to ask the Chair of the House of Bishops:

    Q100.  Archbishop Welby said in his Second Witness Statement to IICSA (June 2019): “I am informed by Mr [Graham] Tilby [at the time National Advisor, CofE Safeguarding] that these [LLF] resources will be reviewed by the NST before they are finalised to ensure that they sufficiently address safeguarding related issues.” The only reference to IICSA in LLF (2020) is: “While acknowledging the reality of abuse in the church, it is important that the specific work of theological reflection on IICSA be carried out separately from the Living in Love and Faith project…” (p. 87). May Synod know what group is carrying out the separate work of theological reflection on the learning from IICSA to ensure the LLF process does “sufficiently address safeguarding related issues” as stated by the Archbishop in 2019?

    The Bishop of London replied:

    The Bishop of London to reply on behalf of the Chair of the House of Bishops:

    A The question asks about two separate things. Theological reflection on the findings from IICSA underpins the work of the National Safeguarding Steering Group in overseeing the implementation of IICSA’s recommendations. Meanwhile, the materials arising from the Living in Love and Faith process are still in development, as reported in GS 2303. Material on pastoral guidance and pastoral reassurance will be reviewed from a safeguarding perspective before they are finalised.[26]

    Bishop Sarah’s answer indicates that it is the responsibility of the NSSG/NSP to undertake the work in the area of attitudes towards homosexuality and safeguarding.  However, in July 2022, in the Presentation from the NSP and ISB to General Synod, the then Chair, Meg Munn, stated that the topic has not been discussed:

    That issue has not been one that has been discussed by us to date. It could well be one that we would discuss …. But we also try to and look at issues which we think are important and that the Church is not taking enough notice of – I mean the Church as a whole not just the National Safeguarding Team (see 5 above).

    7.2. Safeguarding Code of Practice:  Safeguarding Practice Reviews GS2295

    At the same meeting in July 2023, Synod approved a proposal to replace Lessons Learned Reviews (LLR) with much more detailed Safeguarding Practice Reviews (SPR).  GS2295 speaks in numerous places about the dissemination of learning from Reviews to inform the Church’s practice.  For example:

    From the Cover Paper for GS2295

    4.4.1 Some concern was expressed that these Reviews would not hold people to account for what they had done and they would not establish guilt. We have tried to be very clear that the purpose of this process is not about managing allegations or about findings of guilt/responsibility. It is about understanding the reasons why events have happened so that an organisation can learn and improve its safeguarding. As explained in 1.3 above, there are other processes for holding individuals to account (p. 8).

    6.3 The reflective exercises we suggest are exactly that: they are suggestions to help people find the way that works best for them and for their organisation to learn from safeguarding events in a variety of circumstances. The key thing is the move away from focussing only on what is wrong with individual practice or processes, into what is hampering or enabling good safeguarding practice at an organisational level. We will continue to work on developing tools and resources to help this. 

    Main Document GS2295

    1.2 What a Safeguarding Practice Review is and what it is not

    The main features of an SPR are that:

    • It is a planned process of reflective learning by a Church body designed to improve the quality and impact of that Church’s body’s safeguarding activity.
    • The aim is to identify a limited number of key themes which, if implemented, will result in improved outcomes for victim(s)/survivor(s) and respondent(s).

    1.3 The outcomes of SPRs

    SPRs should seek to achieve the following outcomes:

    • The identification of systemic and organisational factors or failings which impacted on what happened. This should include any issues of organisational culture, the nature and quality of human relationships, resourcing and governance, and any inappropriate use of power within the Church body.

    It is worth noting that there is no mention of the Church’s doctrines or teaching on sexuality in its references to ‘organisational culture’ in this extensive document.

    From the section describing the structure of a SPR, GS2295 speaks of the importance of understanding the ‘why’, not only the ‘what’, of a safeguarding failure (pp. 26-7):

    Why answers might include;

    Whether any ‘contextual factors’ impacted on the case and in what way, for example:

    • Availability of adequate guidance;
    • Resourcing of safeguarding/workloads/staffing levels;
    • Training/supervision/support for relevant Church Officers;
    • Organisational culture and relationships;
    • Personal constraints (e.g. excessive or onerous responsibilities);

    The Reviewer’s conclusions: what are the key lessons and changes required of specific Church Bodies and/or the whole Church system?

    The Reviewer’s recommendations:

    1. These should be focussed on a small number of high priority, outcome focussed, SMART recommendations, normally between six and ten in number. The aim is to have a smaller number of achievable, impactive recommendations, rather than a large number of recommendations which are not impactive.
    2. Recommendations need to be aligned to the Safeguarding Standards:
    • Prevention
    • Culture, Leadership and Capacity
    • Recognising, Assessing and Managing Risk
    • Victims and Survivors
    • Learning, Supervision and Support
    1. Within this, recommendations should be grouped under the following headings:
    • Strategic: Recommendations relevant to the whole Church system.
    • Local/operational: Recommendations relevant to the specific Church Bodies involved in the case. This must include whether further action is needed to manage on-going risk, and whether consideration of further investigatory action should be undertaken by Church Bodies within their capability and disciplinary frameworks (These latter would not be published.)

    The section on Tone and Methodology (pp. 28-9) states:

    Adopting an appropriate tone and methodology is essential if the Review process is going to help to deliver learning which results in actual change. This is particularly the case if change in beliefs, values, behaviours and culture are needed.

    An approach which:

    • treats all involved (that is victims, survivors, respondents, clergy and staff, volunteers) with empathy, respect and compassion as valuable and complex human beings who matter;
    • is dialogical, seeing all those involved as partners in the development of understanding and solution finding;
    • is marked by genuine curiosity and transparency;
    • is marked by creative ways of exploring issues relevant to the circumstances;
    • prepares those who will be involved to address anxieties and fears, is more likely to help bring about genuine change than one marked by fear, threat, fixed and strongly held positions, and inflexibility.

    GS2295 speaks of ‘disseminating learning’ from Reviews (p. 42):

    The Church Bodies involved in the case under review should give consideration at the earliest possible point as to how the learning from the Review will be shared and disseminated …

    GS2295 continues:

    On a wider scale, the NST will have a role in reviewing the themes that are emerging from all the Reviews carried out. This will feed back into the NST’s planning cycle for learning and development thus closing the learning loop. Linking the recommendations to the Safeguarding Standards also allows for them to be included in any further external audits, again ensuring that the learning is captured and implemented.

    It isn’t clear how the ‘learning loop’ operates or how it impacts on learning and development – especially in the light of the evidence of multiple references in IICSA and LLRs, connecting discriminatory policies towards LGBT+ people and catastrophic safeguarding failures.

    1. Conclusion

    On the basis of the evidence gathered and presented here, it appears that none, or very little, of the insights and learning from IICSA and other independent Reviews on catastrophic safeguarding failures in the Church of England and the connection to discriminatory attitudes towards LGBT+ people, are being incorporated into our safeguarding policies, structures and training or are part of our deliberations about the inclusion of LGBT+ people in the life of the Church of England, in any meaningful way.  External Reviewers cited in this paper are consistent in making the connection.  Despite this, over its six years, the LLF process did not incorporate the learning from IICSA and LLRs.

    GS2295 speaks of the importance of ‘reflective exercises’ (p. 43):

    One of the marks of a healthy organisational culture is when the individuals who comprise the organisation are personally self-reflexive and welcome feedback from others. Self-reflexivity is different from just self-reflection because it contains the idea of turning self-reflection in to actual action that brings about change.

    Dr Cooper, in her Stowe and Maids Moreton LLR, states:

    Recommendation 13: Provide strong leadership in responding to the recommendations of the case review, to ensure that they are delivered both within the Diocese and raise for wider action within the Church of England.[27]

    It remains to be seen where this leadership is being shown or where the ‘turning self-reflection in to actual action that brings about change’ is being done.

    Notes:

    [1] See also Helen King:  https://viamedia.news/2020/10/16/why-the-church-of-england-must-connect-the-dots-iicsa-and-llf/#_ftn1

    [2] This paper predates the publication of Makin on John Smyth and what will almost certainly have to be an independent Review of Soul Survivors, given the network of conflicted interests.

    [3] IICSA identified a number of deficiencies in the Butler-Sloss Review, which failed to mention the abuse committed by Bishop Peter Ball.  https://www.iicsa.org.uk/reports-recommendations/publications/investigation/anglican-chichester-peter-ball/case-study-1-diocese-chichester/b5-butler-sloss-report.html

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82HzdoOAC-4

    https://audioboom.com/posts/2765739-on-31-12-14-phil-johnson-released-this-march-2011-recording-of-his-discussion-with-butler-sloss

    [4] The LLR on Jonathan Fletcher (March 2021) notes how the removal of his licence was seen as weaponizing safeguarding: ‘“When the announcement was made by Southwark [Diocese] about [the] removal of Jonathan’s licence – I thought and others – this is [a] stitch up – yet again Southwark having a go at the conservative constituency”’.  See C5.3 and C4.6.2.  https://walkingwith.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/Final+Report+of+ECW+Review_March+2021.pdf

    [5] https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2018-07/general-synod-july-2018-questions-paper.pdf

    [6] https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2019-07/general-synod-july-2019-questions.pdf

    [7] https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2017-11/report-of-the-peter-ball-review-210617.pdf.  See 5.7.

    [8] 1.3; see also 5.5, 5.6, 5.7, 5.10, 5.11.  https://d3hgrlq6yacptf.cloudfront.net/61f2fd86f0ee5/content/pages/documents/20211012-doc-events-in-stowe-and-maids-moreton.pdf

    https://www.oxford.anglican.org/stowe-maids-moreton.php

    [9] Gibb on Ball, 5.7.3.

    [10] Cooper on Stowe and Maids Moreton, 5.10.  https://d3hgrlq6yacptf.cloudfront.net/61f2fd86f0ee5/content/pages/documents/20211012-doc-events-in-stowe-and-maids-moreton.pdf.  Dr Cooper cites the House of Bishops’ Report (2017), ‘Promoting a Safer Church policy, the Church of England’s policy for Children, young people and adults’, p. 5.  https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2017-11/cofe-policy-statement.pdf

    [11] Cooper on Stowe and Maids Moreton, 5.11.

    [12] IICSA (5 March 2018), p. 116.  Ms Scolding also queried:  ‘How far did the church’s position in respect of the ordination of women and the fact that the church was, until 1992, a largely male-led-and-run institution impact upon the management of safeguarding, if it did so at all?’  https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20221214224622/https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/4335/view/5-march-2018-anglican-public-hearing-transcript.pdf

    [13] IICSA (23 July 2018), pp. 77-8.  https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20221215041430/https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/5977/view/23-july-2018-anglican-public-hearing-transcript.pdf

    [14] IICSA (14 March 2018), pp. 84-8.  https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20221215014004/https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/4690/view/14-march-2018-anglican-public-hearing-transcript.pdf

    [15] IICSA (14 March 2018), pp. 143-4.  https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20221215014004/https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/4690/view/14-march-2018-anglican-public-hearing-transcript.pdf

    [16] For critical responses to Lord Williams (14, 15 March 2018), see https://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/2018/03/.

    [17] IICSA (24 July 2018), p. 25.  https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20221216171917/https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/6029/view/public-hearing-transcript-24-july-2018.pdf

    [18] See p. 12.  https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/12831/view/ACE027710.pdf.

    [19] IICSA (11 July 2019), pp. 204-5.  https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20221215044054/https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/12777/view/public-hearing-transcript-11-july-2019.pdf

    [20] https://www.iicsa.org.uk/reports-recommendations/publications/investigation/anglican-church/executive-summary.html (October 2020).

    [21] 4.5.  See also 14.  https://www.iicsa.org.uk/document/anglican-church-safeguarding-church-england-and-church-wales-investigation-report.html

    [22] https://www.london.anglican.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/AG-report-Final-Report.pdf

    [23] See pp. 283-85.  https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-01/general-synod-group-of-sessions-july-2022_0.pdf

    See above Archbishop Welby’s Second Witness Statement on 25 June 2019:  ‘I am informed by Mr Tilby that these [LLF] resources will be reviewed by the NST before they are finalised to ensure that they sufficiently address safeguarding related issues.’

    [24] 9 Feb 2023, p. 172.  https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-06/updated-report-of-proceedings-feb-2023.pdf

    [25] pp. 370-71.  https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-06/updated-report-of-proceedings-feb-2023.pdf

    [26] https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-07/questions-notice-paper-july-2023.pdf

    [27] Stowe and Maids Moreton (7.7, p. 26).

  • Don’t Preach. Just Don’t.

    by Chrissie Chevasutt, ‘Outreach and Development Worker with Transgender, Intersex and Non-binary People’, for St Columba’s Oxford. They have lived and worked in the city for 33 years, across a wide spectrum of churches, and in varied roles, thus having a unique perspective on church history and practices over that period

    I’ve been the Outreach and Development Worker with Transgender, Intersex and non-binary people at St Columba’s United Reformed Church in Oxford since 2022, and I wrote about my role here. When I started in this work, I described it as “a prophetic act, a ministry of social justice and an expression of God’s outrageous love for the marginalised and oppressed.” I have been making connections, publicising what I do, and hearing people’s stories. And I have been becoming aware, even more, of how much work there is that needs to be done, in Oxford and beyond. The Oxford Safe Churches project just underlines that.

    I attended St Aldate’s Church in Oxford for many years. It’s a parish church with a large student membership and describes itself on the front page of its web presence as somewhere you can “feel right at home”. Really?

    That doesn’t seem to apply if you are LGBTQIA+. One of the sermons given at the church which was preserved online makes that very clear: ‘The Truth Will Set You Free’, link to the audio here. Full transcript here. I’ve mentioned it before but here I want to say rather more about it. It was given by Simon Ponsonby; I don’t know exactly in what year, except that it is definitely pre-Covid. The sermon summarises nearly 20 years of campaigning against LGBTQIA+ people, their dignity, equality, rights and spiritual freedom, by him and by the previous Rector, Charlie Cleverly, for which there is much evidence, all readily available online. Letters, articles in the press and media, both local and national, all confirm the deep prejudice towards us of this church’s leadership.

    I’ve described on my blog how I am both angered and wounded deeply, by Simon Ponsonby’s abuse of power in this sermon, and I have for the last few years been ministering to many of those he has damaged, wounded and broken by his attitudes, beliefs and homophobic campaigning and preaching, which both produced and resulted from this sermon.

    It’s hard to know where to start with the academic, intellectual, scholarly, theological, and pastoral reasoning in the sermon. A key factor to me seems to be the tone; Ponsonby presents himself as the oracle or avatar of the divine message; ‘absolute truth’. There is no sense of humility or self-reflection on his part, either upon his own very limited understanding or his own deeply sinful nature; he has not pursued all the way that conservative evangelical notion of the human heart (even his own), being wicked and deceitful and bent towards pride.

    One last glaring dissonance which jars heavily upon many listeners who are either LGBTQIA+ or allies, to the extent it leaves one almost stunned in unbelief, is the chasm between Simon’s tone of voice and delivery, and the words he uses to describe us. I was dumbfounded on first hearing this sermon, and have had to go back and study it, several times over, to understand how such a gulf could exist in a person’s lack of self-awareness, and to try to find an explanation for it.

    Simon’s tone is calm, measured, and oozes compassion. This draws the listener and audience in because it soothes them, making them believe this is God’s heart of compassion, being reflected by the preacher and teacher. Part of this tone is his continual refrain in both introduction and conclusion, of ‘We love you.’ Easy to say, but the content of the sermon gives the opposite message.

    I know the preacher well, perhaps better than many. In every other sermon I have heard him preach I know this to be a genuine and authentic reflection of his heart but I am so shocked and sickened by this sermon and its content that I have had to question whether in this case the compassion is real, or feigned.

    While his voice oozes compassion, his words drip hatred, judgement, condemnation, exclusion, and rejection towards us as LGBTQIA+ people. Simon demonizes us and pathologizes us, pouring shame upon us; all in the name, and supposedly for the glory, of God.

    The sermon is divided into three parts, of roughly equal length, and they, to a large degree, depend upon each other for their integrity, or rather lack thereof. Each informs and builds the argument of the other. In each part – history, theology, and psychology – he indulges both flawed science, history, and experience to substantiate his argument, whilst his reasoning in each is deeply flawed, if not deliberately and intentionally skewed to favour his presupposed starting point. He offers snapshots of history, wrenched out of their true context, to prove the ‘gay lobby’ was a bullying, manipulative and destructive force against Christian morality and belief.

    He points the finger at the ‘liberalism and relativism’ of modern theology, informed by both science and human experience, labelling it ‘a pick and mix’ of whatever truths you choose to believe, but fails to see that he is indulging exactly this ‘pick and mix’ approach to truth in his own versions of history, theology, and psychology. He quotes from a particular selection of work from these disciplines, without giving his hearers any sense of how limited a selection this is. He claims that he “sets some facts straight” but there is no indication that these are not objective facts. It is a shameless hypocrisy of the worst possible kind, because he is using his failure to apply academic, intellectual, scholarly rigour and discipline to the arguments he presents as ‘absolute truth’, and he is doing so, in order to exalt his own authority as a theologian, preacher and teacher and stigmatise, demonise, pathologize a vulnerable and already oppressed group.

    His approach to other academic disciplines reminds me of what’s known in psychological analysis as the Dunning-Kruger effect. This is when someone who assumes themselves to be an expert or authority in one field, science, or discipline, believes they are therefore an authority in other sciences or disciplines.

    I have heard Simon preach many, many times, and he always rejects the liberal theology and theologians of the last thirty years, often men and women of far greater intellectual, academic, and scholarly rigour, research, and theological depth than his own. They are seen as irrelevant because he is preaching ‘absolute truth’ and they are preaching lies.

    But that repeated insistence that ‘We love you’, simply does not wash, it is meaningless, after we have been so cursed by his authority, power and words.

    Why does he do this? He, like so many of his tribal mates, genuinely believes that by converting gay and LGBTQIA+ people to being straight, he is saving us from hell.

    We clearly see here homophobia being embedded, maintained, and perpetuated in a parish church. It is homophobia which is using erroneous history and psychology to destroy young and vulnerable LGBTQIA+ lives. I have watched young LGBTQIA+ people, caught in cycles of shame, despair, self-hatred and self-harm, even suicidal ideation, after being subject to this type of ministry. I was one of them once. This sermon is spiritual abuse.

    Did Ponsonby ever stop to think that within his congregation, listeners to his sermon, there might by young church members who are LGBTQIA+?!

    If Jesus is our model of ministry, it is plain, simple, and so easy to see in the gospels, that his whole ministry was built around breaking shame from people’s lives, to restoring the oppressed and marginalised back into community, that they might flourish. The contrast I am seeing and hearing between Ponsonby’s ministry here, and that of Jesus, is so far apart, that I can only label this sermon as a manifest evil.

    It is God’s loving kindness that leads us to repentance. No threat of hell, or fear of hell can draw us into the loving heart and mind of God. No theology of judgement, condemnation, exclusion, and separation, as Simon so espouses in his sermon, can reveal God’s perfect love.

    It is grace, love and truth that leads us to repentance. I offer Simon that grace, love and truth and I urge him to make a full and public repentance and attempt some kind of apology and restitution to his victims. If he has moved on from his beliefs here, then he needs to publicly clarify what his new beliefs are. Yet his recent teaching in the St Aldate’s podcast series ‘Unscripted’ suggests he has not moved far at all.

    What scares me the most? It’s that the church applauds the preacher for this sermon…

     

     

     

     

     

  • Keeping Students Safe: the Oxford LGBT Students Safe Churches Project

    by Chrissie Chevasutt, ‘Outreach and Development Worker with Transgender, Intersex and Non-binary People’, for St Columba’s Oxford. They have lived and worked in the city for 33 years, across a wide spectrum of churches, and in varied roles, thus having a unique perspective on church history and practices over that period.

    As part of my work in the city of Oxford, working with the transgender, Intersex, and non-binary community, I work alongside and with many LGBTQIA+ students. The stories I hear from them are constant, consistent, and repeated many times over. They experience spiritual abuse and religious trauma in some of the city’s churches. They are traumatised, and often suffer many secondary conditions; deep emotional, mental, social, relational, and spiritual wounding, some of which can work itself out in psychosomatic physical illness, chronic anxiety, and struggles with mental health.

    These same churches – who would describe themselves as ‘conservative’ – then add to the students’ pain by teaching that all their struggles are because they are gay, bi, trans, or queer. These churches and leaders refuse to accept that the judgement, condemnation, exclusion, and separation, sometimes even damnation, that flows from their lips, hearts and pulpits might be the cause. The consequence of their theology, preaching and teaching is to inflict guilt and shame upon many vulnerable young lives. From this, withdrawal and isolation are a common experience for students who are driven away from church and God.

    Self-loathing, self-hatred, despair, and shame can cause self-destructive behaviours and compulsions, almost impossible to control or contain, from eating disorders and self-harm, to suicidal ideation, suicide attempts and sadly, suicides.

    All this poison flows from the systematic homophobic theology that emerged from post-WWII USA. It’s a theology undergirded by the threat of hell.

    This theology is grounded in the claim that those who enjoy same-sex relationships are indulging sexual immorality, drawing on a Christian fundamentalist and biblical literalism that leads from 1 Corinthians 6 v9, through Ephesians 4 v17-19, 5 v3-5, to the eternal damnation of Revelation 21 v7-8.

    I was recently approached by a student who felt forced to leave a church where this theology was being preached. Even after 18 months in the church, they had no idea this was the theology of that church. They are in a same-sex relationship, their partner already badly wounded by a conservative evangelical church. They were told this church they’d started to attend was ‘youth friendly, progressive and liberal, welcoming everybody’.

    Confirming this, another three students have told me separately how they had shared within their student fellowship group meetings that they are gay, and in same-sex relationships. None of this appeared to trouble the group, or the student pastors, some of whom are paid church staff. On the contrary, they felt loved and affirmed by everyone present.

    (Most of the older members of the Christian LGBTQIA+ community in Oxford, however, know this church to have a long history of campaigning against LGBTQIA+ people’s dignity, equality, rights and freedom.)

    This pastoral policy of conservative evangelical churches marketing themselves as ‘Everybody Welcome’, in order to draw in as many students as possible, may make them ‘successful churches’ but only by hiding their homophobic theology and pastoral policy, a practice which is deceitful, disingenuous and dangerous, and potentially fatal to vulnerable young lives. We know that the incidence of self-harm, suicidal ideation and suicide attempts are far higher amongst LGBTQIA+ youth, and this increases again amongst LGBTQIA+ youth from Christian fundamentalist homes, families, churches, and faith backgrounds.

    It appears certain city churches now hold a policy of strict silence over their staff, of not saying anything about gender or sexuality that might go public. They realise that, if they are known to hold homophobic theology and pastoral policies, they will lose many of the students who flock through their doors.

    In September 2022, Bishop Steven published his proposal, outlining his theology for equal marriage: Together in Love and Faith. I read it and was impressed and blessed, until I got to page 46. The LGBTQIA+ Christian community has absolutely no doubts about the courage and compassion of Bishop Steven, in becoming the first bishop to put forward a proposal for same-sex marriage. We feel both indebted to him and want to protect him from the storm he faces from those clergy in his diocese who disagree.

    Many of us, however, have grave doubts about his commitment to protecting us, especially in the matter of our Safeguarding within his churches. There are doubts over his own history and proximity to colossal Safeguarding failures that have had tragic out-workings.

    On page 46, Bishop Steven repeatedly expresses extreme reluctance to place responsibility for the spiritual abuse of LGBTQIA+ people upon individual clergy or churches. This is a red flag waving right here, threatening effective Safeguarding of LGBTQIA+ people in his own Diocese.

    After being approached by the student who had felt forced to leave the ‘welcoming’ church that had been their spiritual home for the previous year and a half, on account of the attack upon their same-sex relationship, I began to research further. I discovered an audio recording of a 45-minute Sunday sermon on homosexuality.

    It is without a doubt the worst homophobic teaching I have heard in 43 years of church life. It is an appalling distortion and manipulation of history, theology, and psychology, used by a priest, to deliberately stigmatise, pathologize and demonise LGBTQIA+ people.

    This sermon was applauded by the church.

    This is exactly why the students’ Oxford Safe Churches Project had to happen. We have a Bishop who supposedly stands for us, but won’t stand with us and protect us; so, who will?

    Students who are driven away from church have nowhere to go. They know they will not get a fair hearing from the church’s Safeguarding Officers, many of whom will hold similar beliefs to the church’s leadership, and they have zero confidence in many of the denominational or Oxford Diocesan Safeguarding structures and current practices. The evil of Pilavachi in Soul Survivor, and the Church of England’s total failure in safeguarding young people there, has destroyed what little faith they may have had in any safeguarding process with which they might have otherwise engaged. They know they will most likely suffer further abuse and retraumatising in any internal safeguarding process they enter.

    In March 2022, I met with one of the university transgender reps, who represents both their college and the LGBT Student Society. They happened to be profoundly Christian, in faith and character. One of the subjects we wrestled with was the knowledge we both shared, of students getting badly damaged, and spiritually abused, in some of the city’s conservative churches. We both felt we could not call out the damaging churches, and that whoever dared to do so might be subjected to character assassination for attempting such a daunting task.

    When we met again at the beginning of this year, our hearts and minds had totally changed. Both of us had seen, in just that one year, too many students being wounded by homophobic, transphobic theology and pastoral practises. The suffering and pain in those lives, and even in our own, led us to conclude we could longer tolerate this happening on ‘our watch’.

    Together we wrote up a proposal for the Oxford University Student LGBT Society (of which, as a mature student in the city, I’m a member), to begin a project to signpost safe churches and flag up churches we knew where students were being broken.

    This was unanimously passed at the end of Easter term, and plans developed for the project.

    A team of students has laboured right through Summer term and the summer holidays, sending out questionnaires to 30 of the main city churches, collecting testimonies, researching churches’ history in archives online. From this they are collating all their information into a simple traffic-light-coded review, to assess which churches might be safe, and which are potentially damaging for queer students.

    Their passion, desire, and objective is to stop freshers getting sucked into churches who promise welcome, but inflict spiritual abuse. Most of them have been through this themselves, or seen friends whose student life in Oxford has suffered irreparable damage. They know this is a war over students’ lives and souls. They have paid a heavy price doing this research, which for most of them is triggering, traumatising and affects their mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health. They are watched over by professionals in the university, clergy from various denominations and non-ordained pastoral workers like myself.

    The project has gone live in time for Freshers Fayre. Its bottom line is to save young lives; literally. They know their time in Oxford is short, but they are determined to leave a lasting legacy, that might see more churches becoming fully affirming at best, and at the least, force conservative churches to become honest, transparent and open about their core theology, pastoral policies and practises for their LGBTQIA+ potential members.

    They believe the Oxford Safe Churches Project has the power to achieve both those aims.

     

     

  • 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).

     

     

     

  • Living in Love and Faith: The Ozanne Foundation Responds

    Organisations as well as individuals have been invited to share their response to the LLF course, materials and process by 30 April 2022.

    Here is the response of the Ozanne Foundation.

    We write to share our thoughts and reflections on the LLF process and our hopes for the “next steps”.

    1. Overview of LLF

    Whilst we recognise that the LLF was originally conceived as a “necessary step” towards a more inclusive and just Church of England, we question whether the time and money that has been invested in it has been worth the significant harm that it has caused.  This is not least because of the time that it has taken – indeed it is now over five years since the archbishops promised a “radical new Christian inclusion”, a promise that had originally brought hope to so many and yet has now faded to become yet another example of “words not action” for the LGBT+ community.

    It is therefore of no surprise that during the intervening years – where open debate has been stymied within the General Synod and discussions around LLF have been heavily managed – that positions on both sides have hardened.  Sadly, as always, those this has impacted the most are the LGBT+ community, particularly those growing up in certain conservative settings.  Same-sex relationships are still not recognised, our LGBT+ priests are still asked to sign “Issues”, our LGBT+ youth are still taught that they must deny themselves any physical intimacy for life, even if it is lawfully recognised – severely impacting their mental health.  There continues to be no admission of the harm that conservative theology can inflict on those in their “care” and, perhaps most worryingly, there has been little desire by bishops to challenge or chastise those who inflict such harm, allowing them to continue their practices with impunity.  This can be evidenced by the various public letters that many conservatives have signed stating their desire to continue to practice “conversion therapy” and the increasingly hostile rhetoric towards trans people.  Conservative networks and many conservative churches and individuals continue to threaten schism and to withdraw funding, holding their dioceses to ransom.  Meanwhile LGBT+ people, their friends and families have continued to leave quietly – dismayed and disheartened by the lack of any real or meaningful progress.  What is more, we see no evidence that the national conservative networks have engaged with LLF.  Instead, they have publicly promoted the use of their own materials, including the “A Beautiful Story” video, to shore up their positions and underline their homophobic/transphobic doctrine.

    What is most worrying are the stories that we have heard from those LGBT+ church goers who were brave enough to take part in the LLF discussions.  Few found them safe spaces, and most wished afterwards that they had not taken part – even senior LGBT+ clergy.  The Church of England’s “good disagreement” strategy serves only, it seems, its heterosexual cisgendered members, with little thought for those who are most affected by these discussions.  Despite repeated calls to avoid giving equal weight to views on either “side” of the “debate”, given the significant power imbalance that exist and the clear evidence of harm that one side inflicts on the other, the Church of England has continued to push a strategy of “balance”.  In so doing it has lost the trust and respect of a large section of the general public, who look with incredulity at the way the LGBT+ community continue to be treated by a religious organisation whose central message is meant to be that of love and justice.  We are seen, rightly, as hypocrites!

    1. What Next?

    We recognise that we sadly cannot undo the damage that has been done, but we can – we hope – ensure that the next step is one that will lead to concrete decisions, actions and equality.  We cannot continue to objectify and problematise LGBT+ lives, for this has gone on long enough.

    It is clear to most that the only possible way forward is to allow some form of accommodation for those who wish to recognise LGBT+ faithful loving relationships.  This step is now well overdue.  We are well beyond creating a “middle ground” of sanctioning “just” blessings and must now move without delay to a Church that offers marriage to all living in England.  We already have a proven model for accommodating this while respecting individual consciences with the way we have managed marriage after divorce.

    At the same time, however, we are deeply concerned about the continued abuse of LGBT+ people, particularly young LGBT+ people within conservative churches, and the homophobic teaching that they are made to endure, which leads to self-hatred, shame and internalised homophobia – let alone rejection and alienation from their families and friends.  Research shows that this has a significant and lifelong impact on their mental wellbeing and can lead many to consider or indeed to attempt to take their lives.  This spiritual abuse must stop.  For too long the Church of England has turned a blind eye to this abuse and have let the brave testimonies of those who have spoken out go unheeded and unheard.  This lack of resolve to tackle the damage done by conservative theology is deeply inconsistent with the Church’s developing understanding and practice of the importance of safeguarding for vulnerable people and continues to make the Church of England vulnerable to the charge of complicity in abuse.  We therefore urge the Church of England to move swiftly to adopt the Global Interfaith Commission on LGBT+ Lives’ “Safeguarding Principles to Protect LGBT+ Lives” agreed in March 2022 at a conference sponsored by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

    We hope that you will find these reflections useful and await with interest the publication of a set of proposals from the House of Bishops regarding the way forward, for action is now long overdue.

    Yours sincerely

    Very Revd Joe Hawes, Chair, Ozanne Foundation

    Jayne Ozanne, Director, Ozanne Foundation

    April 27th 2022