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Tag: trauma

  • Safeguarding: Still Not Trauma-Informed

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

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

    Reviewing reviews

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

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

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

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

    What have we learned?

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

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

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

    What are we not learning?

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

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

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

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

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

    That was then and this is now?

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

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

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

    Moving forward?

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

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

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

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

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

  • Creating Family: A Perspective on the Debate on Looked-after Children and Those in Care

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

    The July Synod agenda went through a few last-minute changes this time, including moving the debate on the Private Member’s Motion on looked-after children and those in care; a motion asking for a lead bishop, who can act as a focus for raising public awareness, and for work within dioceses to support this. I had put in to speak on this one so was very disappointed that the new time set was precisely when I had to see a hospital specialist yesterday morning. The motion was moved by Billy-Jo O’Leary, speaking from her experience as a Synod member who had spent time in care. The points I’d hoped to make were not made, so I have simply edited my draft speech here to add some references to what was said – the joy of being able to watch the debate on catch-up – and changed the tense to take into account of the that the motion was passed – unanimously.

    While I am not always a great fan of ‘let’s have a Lead Bishop for’ whatever concern we have, I think this was a very valuable motion. It highlights the obstacles currently faced by those leaving the care system, but I would urge that the role description for this bishop’s appointment should include promoting what for many is the best route out of the care system: adoption. We should not be put off by the shameful history of the church homes which carried out forced adoption. Adoption has changed beyond recognition and I suspect some of us have no idea what adoption means today.

    Unsurprisingly, based in cultures where adoption of adults was normal, the Bible uses the very strong imagery of all of us being adopted into God’s family; e.g. Galatians 4. If the Church is a family – and that language needs to be used with care, since for some people the family has been the site of the abuse which has damaged their lives – if the Church is a family, then it is a family formed by adoption. The trouble with these references is that they can sound too cosy. They can make adoption sound like it’s very simple. They don’t do justice to the issues raised by adopting a child or young person who may have been through all sorts of trauma, including that of being taken from their birth family.

    Adoption now

    In the debate, Sheila Bissell mentioned how long the process takes, but there is so much more that needs to be said. Like some of those who spoke, I have colleagues and friends who have adopted. So I know that there is a huge amount of vetting, training and support offered to potential adopters, and the support continues after the legal processes are complete. The language of finding one’s ‘forever family’, used by one speaker in the debate, misses the point that there is much more concern than in the past with maintaining relationships with the birth family, where this is possible (and attempts are made to find a kinship adopter before looking outside that family). We must also face the fact that adoption is not always the end of the story; some adoptions are not without pain, and some don’t work.

    But we should all note with concern the decline in the last 5 years in the number of children leaving care and moving into adoption; there are not enough people coming forward to adopt. In her opening speech, Billy-Jo noted that over 100,000 children in the UK are currently in care. We didn’t hear any figures for adoption. Billy-Jo mentioned race but, while the legacy of forced adoption shows us how the idealised model of the white middle-class nuclear family used to dominate, today adopters can’t only be from other racial backgrounds; they can also be single; over 50; and not owning their own homes.

    Sexuality: a significant omission…

    A significant omission from yesterday’s debate was affirmation of those who are LGBTQIA+ and in committed relationships and who have chosen to adopt. This seems to me pretty typical of our failure as a Church to recognise their contributions. Synod needs to know that sexuality is not a bar to adoption. A 2021 article in the journal Child Development concluded that “Given the large number of children in need of adoptive families, adoption agencies should give greater consideration to gay couples as prospective adoptive parents.” In 2025, the agency Adoption Matters had 40% of those approved to adopt identifying as LGBTQ+, pointing out that “What IS important is the commitment, resilience, stability and love that children who have suffered early childhood trauma ALL need.” Department of Education figures for 2025 state that 1 in 5 adoptions were by gay couples. Another agency, Adopt Thames Valley, currently aims to increase applications from the LGBTQ+ community “who are more likely to adopt children who typically wait the longest and are significantly more likely to adopt sibling groups”.

    And these figures exclude gay solo adopters like my colleague who adopted a toddler in 2024. She has written:

    “I think being a queer woman, especially of my generation, has given me quite a helpful perspective on adoption. I spent my formative years under the shadow of Section 28, and left to feel an outsider as a result, as ‘ideal’ family life was always presented as biological and nuclear. I think this experience is helping me put myself in the shoes of a child whose family life doesn’t fit that mould, because of their history and adoption. LGBTQ+ people – many marginalised people – tend to know all too well what it feels like to be seen as different, and to understand instinctively the importance of chosen family. There are positive messages from this we can pass on to our adopted children.”

    The log in our eye

    Finally, I was disturbed in the debate by what came across as self-congratulation on how good Christians are at offering to adopt; Julie Maxwell said that “We need Christians to step up”. We need people in general to step up! And let’s make sure we have seen the log in our own eye. We heard in the debate from Michaela Suckling about how the young person to whom she was the independent visitor was let down by a church youth club. In the Church we make all sorts of assumptions about ‘family’: but it doesn’t require two parents. And, when it comes to solo adoption, this can be difficult for Christians in some sorts of churches; I have spoken to another solo adopter who has felt repeatedly judged by Christian acquaintances who assume that she has given birth to a child without being married.

    Finally, I’d recommend that we don’t overlap the responsibilities by appointing a lead bishop who is also working on the forced adoption apologies: the new lead bishop needs to focus on looked-after children today. She or he needs to take the lead in educating our Church on what adoption, and also ‘family’, means now.

  • 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.

  • Queering the Church: The Theological and Ecclesial Potential of Failure

    by Dr Penelope Doe, University of Exeter

    July General Synod approaches and the interminable conversations on LLF and PLF continue. It’s over 10 years since The Pilling Report was published, launching Diocesan Shared Conversations amongst other conversations at Synod and elsewhere. I read Pilling when it was first published, was a little surprised by how superficial I found it, and was intrigued by the tension on display between provisionality and certainty. Its hermeneutics, like those of the CoE as an institution embodying authority power, privilege, and the unalloyed goods of progress, became the subject of my PhD and now my recently published book, Queering the Church: the Theological and Ecclesial Potential of Failure.

    This is, I think, the first time that the hermeneutics of an institution have been interrogated using queer theory and disruptive readings of the Church’s neoliberal models of growth and success, alhough Charlie Bell makes a similar challenge to ecclesial models of hegemonic normativity presented as gospel truth in his recent book, Queering Redemption (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2024). Queering the Church uses Pilling as a paradigm of the ways in which churches construct authority, success and progressiveness, and embody power and privilege. Far from eschewing the liberal secular societies of the Global North, the Church has readily embraced their neoliberal identities and practices.

    What do I mean by queer/queering as a methodology? Queer is better figured, perhaps, as a verb rather than as a noun; a doing rather than a being. Since queer theory is disruptive, transgressive, and troubling, it can have no definitive logic, discourse, or end. David Halperin apprehends queer’s slipperiness in his statement that the concept owns no stable reality:

    Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. ‘Queer’, then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative – a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of her or his sexual practices; it could include some married couples with children… (Saint Foucault, OUP, 1997)

    I often find queer theory richer and more disruptive than queer theology. My two main conversation partners in the book are Jack Halberstam, whose Queer Art of Failure provided a methodology for queering the church, and  Karen Bray whose work on a Theology for the Unredeemed (Grave Attending, Fordham University Press, 2019) suggested Holy Saturday as a site of queer temporality in which the church could learn to experience the abnegation and alterity of that liminal day, as queer people have often been coerced into the acceptance of liminality in a heteronormative church. As for that motif of failure as a ‘queer art’, it derives from Halberstam’s book which posits failure as a kind of ‘victory’ for those who fall outside the cisheteronormative models enforced by neoliberal patterns of success and progress.

    First, what can Halberstam’s work offer us? By adopting the potential of failure as a means of que(e)rying the hegemonic assumptions of church reports and report writers, the Church of England might be able to embrace those whom Halberstam calls ‘the incoherent, the lonely, the defeated and the melancholic’. The Pilling Report and its ‘afterlife’ showcase mostly those voices whose authority derives from the hegemonic norms of neoliberal ideas of progress and success. Such norms are represented as Christian, often as traditional or orthodox Christianity. These prevailing ways of knowing disregard the possibilities suggested by the failure of progress, success, knowing, agreeing, and predominating.

    The institutional life of church reports and debates, which is predicated on the belief in the unassailability of church polity, could, perhaps, seek for ways of knowing outside this dominant framework. Rather than ‘success’ and ‘progress’, failure’s art embraces the queer hope of unbecoming, undoing, unknowing; the ways of negativity, passivity and immaturity. Halberstam focuses on what Foucault calls ‘subjugated knowledge’ – cultural understandings that have been regarded as childish and foolish notions of possibility. It is, perhaps, ironic that a religion that enjoins its followers to be childlike has such a problem with the radical and anarchic potentialities of childishness. Failure and negativity can be redemptive.

    The academic or quasi-academic language of church reports and debates acts as a gatekeeper for this discourse, making access difficult for those who do not ‘speak’ the scholarly or ecclesial vernacular. Halberstam’s appeal to the silliness and childishness of some subcultures and popular culture reminds us that meaning is made outside ‘proper’ knowledge in failure, forgetfulness, wandering and improvisation. But if we dwell in the ‘queer temporality’ of Holy Saturday, the prospect of resolution is tenuous and uncertain. Failure and the almost fugue state of Holy Saturday are the suggestive ‘solutions’ I offer to the peculiarly intractable ‘issues’ that sexuality, or rather homosexuality, poses for the church.

    As for Bray, her political theology borrows from the Holy Saturday theologies of remaining explored in Shelly Rambo’s Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), using the mystical theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr exploring the meaning of the wordless and abandoned ‘middle’ between the cross and the resurrection. Speyr’s mystical revelations began in the Holy Week of 1941 and continued until her death in 1967. Christ’s descent into Hell was presented not as a triumphant rescue of lost souls, but as an experience of experiencing utter abandonment by the Father.

    Balthasar and Speyr both saw Holy Saturday as timeless, a space where redemption is begun in a tiny drop of love, originating in Christ’s wound that will blossom and fruit: ‘This residue of love is not powerful but weary and impotent. Its movement suggests that death does not fully govern it’.

    Holy Saturday is (also) a Wordless space since the Word made Flesh is, according to Balthasar and Speyr’s mystical theology, now dead. Forsaken by His Father, the Son enters into a condition of suffering and separation, of passivity and failure: ‘the Father and the Son are from the furthest reaches of each other in Hell’. In this vision of Holy Saturday, not only does the Son take on our suffering on the Cross, but also He descends into Hell where He endures alongside the dead and damned; there is nowhere now that God has not entered and no condition, however perilous, that God has not inhabited.

    This concept of Holy Saturday as a Wordless space – a site of absence and failure – could be a model for the Church of England’s engagement with the troubled waters of sexuality and gender. Non-normative sexualities and genders are not in themselves ‘troubles’ to be solved, but the number of reports and debates on homosexuality are evidence that they ‘trouble’ the Church. The Church of England’s response to what it views as aberrant ways of being human can itself be ‘troubled’ (or queered) in the queer temporality of Holy Saturday rupturing the cisheteronormative utopias that the Church creates and that deny – or attempt to elide – their queer beginnings.

    Holy Saturday, this ‘middle’ day, is a Wordless site in which the Church of England can remain without anticipating the certainties and realisations of Easter day. Even in its paschal liturgies, the Church seems too eager to rush from the agony and failure of the crucifixion to the joy of the resurrection without pausing to experience both the abandonment and the exiguous hope of Holy Saturday. Following the death of a naked and tortured Messiah and bereft, therefore, of hope, the Church must encounter and admit failure, so that even if rescue comes, the experience of failure will always form a part of salvation. But the Church of England baulks at the prospect, or even at the possibility of failure.

    If those who produce church reports could only enter the queer temporality of this ‘middle’ day, they could face the rupture of all their certainties, encountering a provisionality that does not expect the traditional answers. They might see negativity, not as a negation of the orthodox, but as an empty space that follows the rupture of the normative. Abiding in the desolation of Holy Saturday requires, in Bray’s terms, a ‘grave attending’ to different ‘becomings’; to how ‘transformation’ and ‘living obedience’ might work out for the unredeemed. In Grave Attending (p.31) Bray writes:

    Current discourses on queer temporality seek to examine the ways in which heteronormativity and white supremacy fortify the neoliberal political economy. Many queer theorists uncover the resonance between the demand to be a productive member of society and the manipulated desire to be a reproductive member of the heteronormative family. Such demands nurture in us an optimistic belief that the straighter and whiter we become, the happier we will be. This cruelly optimistic promise (to borrow from Berlant) impedes alternate desires of community, family and self.

    I want to use the uncertainty, provisionality and, indeed, failure of Holy Saturday as a site for queering the hermeneutic and teleological assumptions of church discourses produced by a stable, influential, neoliberal institution – the Church of England – that reflects the values of resilience, productivity and growth promoted by the market. For Bray (p.27), grave attending is

    a style of life that does not wait for resurrection as much as it tries to remain with a difference on the day after damage and death. It does not and cannot rush toward redemption out of the gravity of such damage, because it is attendant to the damage of those who, in the wake of our resurrective impulses, we have let drown.

    It is not those crucified by neoliberalist ethics – which Bray describes as ‘heteropatriarchal, ableist and white supremacist’ – who need to inhabit the queer temporality of Holy Saturday, even though it is a site in which queer folk are often required to suffer simply because their bodies are figured by some churches and by some Christians as unredeemed. It is the Church, as an institution, which needs to be gravely attentive and to experience its queer temporality, rather than those who may already have suffered ecclesial trauma. Being able freely to inhabit a site of suffering and failure requires a level of privilege not always afforded to those whose lives are marked as unproductive or liminal. As I write in the conclusion:

    I want to end with the hope that, by troubling the waters of ecclesial discourse on (homo)sexuality, I have indicated a site – a place of desertion – where the Church of England might reflect on the art of unknowing, undoing, unbecoming; on the ‘queer art of failure’.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Improving Safety in Pastoral Care with LGBTQA+ People

    by Dr Timothy Willem Jones, Associate Professor of History at La Trobe University, and the author of Sexual Politics in the Church of England, 1857-1957 (Oxford, 2013). He leads a multidisciplinary research project, Improving Spiritual Health Care for LGBTQA+ Australians, funded by the Australian Research Council and the Victorian Government.

    LGBTQA+ people of faith are at high risk of spiritual and psychological injury in the context of pastoral care. They may experience over 8 times higher risk of suicidality than the wider LGBTQA+ population. Simultaneously, pastoral workers frequently lack confidence in their ability to provide appropriate pastoral care related to gender and sexuality, more than any other issue in pastoral care. There is currently limited research into safety in LGBTQA+ spiritual health care, and no research that considers safety across multiple faiths, irrespective of their theological and pastoral positions related to sexual orientation and gender identity. This article introduces some guidelines for improving safety in pastoral care with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, asexual and other people with diverse sexual and gender identities (LGBTQA+). The full guide is available here.

    The guidelines are based on our research with LGBTQA+ people about their experiences of pastoral care, reported in Healing Spiritual Harms. Our research showed that significant religious and psychological trauma can result from pastoral practices that make a person’s sexuality and gender identity incompatible with belonging to their faith, family and community. Being told that unchangeable parts of yourself are incompatible with your faith can create a condition of existential crisis: the feeling that it is impossible to live at peace with the core parts of who you are. Such experiences can feel like a threat to someone’s very existence, and can lead to complex post-traumatic stress disorders, suicidality as well as a host of other symptoms of mental ill health.

    Best practice pastoral care with LGBTQA+ people will support them to accept who they are, and not try to change or suppress their identity. It will support an LGBTQA+ person of faith to explore the possibilities for safety, connection, belonging and self-expression within and consistent with the rules, traditions, and practices of their faith community. If their faith community has mixed views about LGBTQA+ people, it may also involve supporting them to find additional or alternative communities of belonging where their various parts can be valued and affirmed. It will also involve referral to appropriate mental health professionals when that is needed.

    The following guidelines provide principles and ethics of pastoral practice that will help you improve your care of LGBTQA+ people in your community. They frame the principles of safe LGBTQA+ pastoral care in generic terms, not specific to any particular religious tradition. As you read them, consider the best ways that these principles could be applied in your own faith community.

    1. Recognise: In the diversity of human experience, some people are same-sex attracted or have a gender that is different to what people assumed when they were born. We know from decades of medical research that attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, in fact, only suppress that part of a person. When key parts of a person, such as their faith and their sexuality or gender identity, are put in conflict and suppressed, extreme psychological distress can result.
    1. Protect: As a pastoral worker, you have a role to play as an advocate. If your community is telling LGBTQA+ people that to be a member they are required to suppress their sexuality or gender identity, that requirement will be harmful and unsafe for LGBTQA+ people in your community. LGBTQA+ people should be protected from such unsafe policies and practices.
    1. Accept: Safe pastoral care for LGBTQA+ people involves supporting them to find a path where they can accept and hold in harmony their faith, their inner sense of sexuality and gender, and their relationship with their religious community, and also to explore how they might safely express those aspects of themselves in relation to the rules and traditions of their faith and community.
    1. Explore: Sometimes people have uncertain feelings about their gender or sexual attractions. Safe pastoral practice with such people involves supporting their exploration without predetermining any particular outcome for who they are. While your religious tradition will have rules about sexual and gender expression and behaviour, it most likely also has space for a person to explore and accept their sexual orientation and gender identity, who they are inside.
    1. Support: There are many aspects of being LGBTQA+ in your community about which a person might seek support. Some of these might be: experiences of trauma and discrimination, perhaps even in your community; the social implications of affirming an LGBTQA+ identity on their significant relationships; and their personal safety as they explore and reconcile the different components of their identity.
    1. Refer: Know what your expertise is and be prepared to refer people to others when they need support outside of that expertise. This could include referral to pastoral workers with more experience in your tradition, or appropriately qualified mental health professionals.
    1. Reflect: Pastoral care with LGBTQA+ people provides you with a valuable opportunity to reflect on your, and your community’s, pastoral practice. Do you listen carefully to LGBTQA+ people’s experiences in your community? What are the range of attitudes towards LGBTQA+ people that your community holds? What are the different ways that gender and sexual expression have been valued at different times and places in your faith tradition? Do your current pastoral responses to LGBTQA+ people reflect the core values of your faith?

  • Clericalist Individualism? Power, Abuse and Transformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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