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Tag: trust

  • 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.

  • Halcyon Daze? Nostalgia in the Memory of the Church

    by Martyn Percy, Professor of Religion and Culture at the University of St. Joseph in Macao and Provost-Theologian at Ming Hua College, Hong Kong and Research Professor of Theology at Institut für Christkatholische Theologie, University of Bern, Switzerland. His The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England is just published by Hurst.

    Once upon a time, nostalgia was not just a longing for the past, but a potentially fatal disease. First used as a medical term in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the context of Swiss soldiers and mercenaries, it referred to (nostos is the Greek for homecoming, and algos is a word for pain). Or rather, a sickness for order and things being put back where they once were or belonged. Nostalgia, in this sense, is not a benign sentiment, but an anxiety caused by displacement and dislocation. However, nostalgia is also a dangerous emotion that can lead to self-imprisonment through false memory.

    For those who speak nostalgically of the Church of England and wider Anglican Communion, the debt to the nostalgia narrated by the British Empire and the unity provided by the service of imperialism are obvious. Even recently, Bishops could be heard to speak with wistful admiration of a denomination stretching from Malagasy to Mongolia, from Sweden to South Africa, from India to Tasmania, and from the United Kingdom across the whole of the Americas. The London office for the Anglican Communion also invests in this narrative. Such nostalgia paints a rose-tinted picture of global coverage, as though the extent of the Church of England were akin to every community having a local post office.

    The reality is quite different. Coverage across the Anglican Communion is patchy, and it is increasingly difficult to understand how, in terms of compatibility, coherence, and commonality, the various components constituting this church can claim the label ‘Communion’. Even if the term is used, many who use such language no longer mean the same thing. Furthermore, others regard the term as problematic – either a dangerous fiction or a disingenuous description. ‘Anglicanism’, it seems, is increasingly a term of ascription that is contested and divisive.

    Nostalgia is a vehicle that tries to carry a community through the uneasy conditions of modern and contemporary life and the politics of fear and anxiety. However, it is unlikely to be able to carry any meaningful freight going forward.  The challenges of the present now require a large dose of realism. Otherwise, fantasies and wishful thinking will be mistaken for vision.

    Is there any way past this nostalgic pathology under which the Church of England labours? The only way through this is likely to be rooted in harsh realities. Across the global Anglican Communion, the days when directives from the Church of England freighted authority and power are long gone.

    We live in a post-colonial age. Honesty and clarity about the past can only help. Otherwise, amnesia and myth-making memory will reign unchecked. The roots of the Anglican Communion and the Commonwealth arise from the British Empire, which was driven by trade, consumerism, military action, conquest and imperial expansionism.  This was primarily an English project in which the Church of England served as a legitimating spiritual arm for an empire, capitalising on the territorial expansion, giving it an aura of global territorial catholicity.

    Yet, at present, the Church of England is run by a tiny elite operating a model of leadership that is a hybrid of monarchy and autocracy. Any democratic accountability is strongly resisted and, as clergy and laity repeatedly find, the will of the people barely counts for anything. Like grumbling serfs, however, congregations are nonetheless expected to fund a hierarchy that is aloof, never liable or culpable, and operating as a law unto itself

    With the appointment of a new Second Estates Commissioner there may be an opportunity for a significant change – one that will snap the Church of England out of its self-induced coma. Marsha de Cordova (MP for Battersea) was the confirmed choice. It took almost 100 days for the government to find an appointee, the longest time lag since 1832.

    Perhaps the lengthy lacuna of 2024 reflects the ambiguous nature of the role. In the past, the Second Estates Commissioner has functioned as an apologist for the Church of England when faced with questions and scrutiny from Parliament. But the present demands a different approach, namely making the Church of England accountable to parliament, church members, taxpayers and voters.

    Marsha de Cordova attends a church run by the Holy Trinity Brompton network, which has recently taken the lead in secessionism over the Church of England’s slow, gradual embrace of equal marriage. Yet Marsha has previously served in the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities and Shadow Minister (Work and Pensions) (Disabled People). She also served on the Work and Pensions Select Committee and the Petitions Committee.

    It would be hard to find any MP who could, in conscience, act as a parliamentary apologist for the Church of England in the 21st century, with its position being so clearly anomalous and democratically indefensible. With clergy having few employment rights, and LGBTQ+ clergy still discriminated against, it is hard to imagine the Church of England hanging on to its powers and privileges in the next ten years.

    Most citizens expect equality and accountability from their institutions as a prerequisite for trust. Moreover, serious questions must be asked as the number of paid-up members of the church has effectively fallen off the cliff edge—and there is no sign that this decline is temporary. These questions relate to the fitness and role of an established church in one nation, yet within a devolved union of three nations (and Northern Ireland).

    Meanwhile, there are hardly any – indeed, no – examples of the much-vaunted new models of the church making a net contribution to their diocese for the investments they have received.  It is impossible to find one of these new strategic initiatives of the Archbishops’ Council paying its way. Ordinary parishes are funding a fetishised experimentalism that is not subject to any scrutiny, fiscal accountability or even much in the way of legally authorised protocols.

    Meanwhile, stipendiary clergy numbers are set to fall to around 5,000 by 2034. January 2025 marks the tenth anniversary of Reform and Renewal, the much-vaunted strategy document of the Archbishops’ Council. In 2014, General Synod and the Church of England were promised more clergy, more churches, growth and a major turnaround in fortunes. Not one target has been met. In fact, the decline has accelerated.

    If the Archbishops’ Council were a company’s board of directors, the shareholders would have passed several votes of no confidence by now. Indeed, were this a school, it would be in special measures. But the Archbishops’ Council has no accountability. A recent public survey shows that public confidence in ordained ministry has collapsed in just a few decades, as its senior leadership are no longer believed or trusted inside the church, let alone outside. The recent report commissioned by the Archbishops’ Council on the very subject of trust and trustworthiness ran out of time in debate, but not without members of General Synod expressing their lack of trust in the same report’s origins, methodology and political aspirations. That’s right, nobody trusted a report from the bishops that was all about trust.

    Some churches are now breaking away and conducting their own bespoke versions of licensing and ordination. This has been slowly gestating since the 1992 Act of Synod, which sought to appease those aggrieved at the decision to ordain women to the priesthood. Long before Burger King adopted their most famous slogan – “have it your way” – the Church of England turned its reliable set menu into a proverbial buffet car. Take it or leave it, the customer is king.

    The new Estates Commissioner will only be able to be a credible respondent for the Church of England in parliament when it can be demonstrated that bishops are to be held accountable to ordinary secular employment laws and legal provisions on gender, sexuality, data protection, and safeguarding. At present, this is an established church lecturing the world on human rights yet having secured legal opt-out provisions under the Human Rights Act (1997).  This is unconscionable.

    The current situation of weak autocracy is arguably the worst of all worlds. As there are no operational conflicts of interest policy or register of interests amongst the highest echelons of the Church of England’s leadership, concealment of malice, malpractice and incompetence is relatively straightforward. Those who try to speak out will quickly be frozen out – the church created its own ‘cancel culture’ centuries ago. This is an organisation that really knows how to bully its people. It can be brutal.

    The Archbishops’ Council secretariat recently replied to a question put to the previous Second Estates Commissioner, Andrew Selous MP, in December 2023.  In the response from Lambeth Palace, the Church of England’s most senior officer explained there are no plans for independent external review or performance management of the Church of England’s treatment of victims.

    Furthermore, the Secretary General added, supporting victims of abuse in the longer term should be a burden carried by the taxpayer. The invoice for abuses perpetrated by the Church of England should be forwarded to HM Treasury. Ironically, the same body that gives millions of pounds back to the church through Gift Aid.

    Such hubris is breathtaking.  Yet the ruling culture of bishops, courtiers, Synod lawyers, and ecclesiocrats remains unaccountable, mercurial and aloof. Nothing of this can be defended in any democratic parliament in the 21st century. Reform cannot come quickly enough.

     

     

  • Trust and Training

    by Revd Dr Sean Doherty, Principal, Trinity College, Bristol


    This afternoon at General Synod, we debated     an important and very substantial report on Trust and Trustworthiness in the Church of England. Some impressive scholars were involved in researching and writing the report (including Professor Veronica Hope Hailey, an expert on trust in organisations, and the well-known theologian Professor David Ford), who generously gave what must have been a very considerable amount of their time on a pro bono basis. Prof. Hope Hailey conducted extensive qualitative research via interviews (which the paper sets out). The Church owes them a debt of gratitude.

    Unfortunately the amount of time we had available to discuss the report could not do it justice (this is no criticism of those who arrange the Synod’s timings, who had an enormous number of important items to schedule). It grapples with a dizzying array of topics, including a theological account of trust, the role of social media, the impact on trust of church-related abuse and the Church of England’s response, and an analysis of the current dynamics of trust and distrust within the Church of England! I hope that we can find further time and ways to consider the document further and in greater depth, and it sounds like further work on the topic is planned.

    In the spirit of fostering that conversation, in this post I want to comment on two aspects of the report. First, on page 25, it raises concerns (substantiated by comments made by two interviewees) about ‘identity and church tradition groups’ which ‘may not seem to have porous or flexible boundaries.’ One interview suggested that ordination training might be partly responsible for ‘baking in this tribal division … right from the beginning’ (paragraph 112). (A couple of speakers drew attention to the potentially clerical framing of some of the report. This would be an example, since of course training for ordination is not the beginning of anyone’s engagement with the Church of England!)

    The report then adopts this ‘tribal’ language itself. For example, on p. 40 it says, ‘Concerns are voiced, and these are not new, that the theological education and formation for the Church’s ministers, and particularly of the clergy, as one interviewee put it, “bakes in” tribal differences from the outset’ (paragraph 189).

    One TEI principal colleague noted that the term ‘tribal’ betrays a rather colonial mindset. No doubt some people are uncritically loyal to their tradition, but in our analysis I think it is important for us to say that, rather than perpetuating stereotypes of tribal cultures as something inherently negative.

     Second, in the next paragraph (190) there is a reference to ‘institutions and programmes that are designed to form candidates in a particular strand of Anglicanism.’ In the run-up to this Synod meeting, I took a straw poll of a cross-section of TEI principals to ask, ‘is your institution/programme designed to form candidates in a particular strand of Anglicanism?’

    All of those who responded said no. We see our task as preparing candidates to serve the whole of the Church. Indeed, this is one of the criteria against which our programmes are assessed when we apply for approval, and one of the things for which we are rightly scrutinised.

    Furthermore, nowadays the majority of candidates train in TEIs which gather students from across traditions, and even TEIs which have historically been associated with particular traditions are probably much broader these days than perhaps at times in the past. This is because many students choose their TEI for practical reasons such as location. Others deliberately opt to go to a TEI outside of their ‘home’ tradition precisely to get a broader experience through training.

     But even helping people to be rooted in a spirituality that feeds and sustains them need not come at the expense of breadth. Traditions can be inhabited defensively and naively, but they can also be inhabited generously and self-critically, as a healthy basis from which to be open to others and receive their gifts.

     Then, of course, the actual process of formation involves varied experiences of community worship, and encountering the full range of theological ideas in reading and seminars. Sometimes teaching is shared between staff from different TEIs such as in the Cambridge Theological Federation, or in the partnership between Bristol Baptist College and Trinity College, where I work. Perhaps most crucially, we all offer placements in a range of traditions. At Trinity, we sometimes have a little debate with particular students about why they need to go to a parish for their placement which will broaden their experience. Occasionally they are a little reluctant! But they almost always come back absolutely delighted by the experience, and grateful for the generosity of the parishes who welcome them and the clergy who supervise them and explain things.

    I hope this reassures readers that TEIs really want to ensure that candidates for ministry have ‘a deep understanding and empathy for other traditions’ (paragraph 190). No doubt there is more to learn about how we can do so, and more we can do to foster a culture in which people can be confident in their own tradition but open to others. We therefore look forward to engaging further with this work as it develops.

  • Trust and Transparency – it’s Time for Change

    by the Revd Dr Charlie Bell, Fellow at Girton College Cambridge, Assistant Curate, St John the Divine, Kennington and a consultant to the LLF Implementation Pastoral Guidance Working Group

    Every so often, it’s no bad thing for institutions to take a step back and ask themselves some searching questions about the state of things. How are we perceived? Where might the obvious and less obvious issues lie? What are we doing well, and what are we doing not so well? To what extent are we achieving what we hope to achieve and where can we do better?

    It feels to me that the Church of England is well overdue this kind of stock take. We seem to be an institution quite heavily invested in (at least what we think are) contemporary theories of management and leadership, yet it seems fascinating that we don’t – at least publicly – invest in the quite simple forms of self-critical review that would really help us in our mission and ministry.

    A particular example of where things quite simply are not going well for us in the Church of England is in the area of transparency. Transparency is absolutely key to effective institutions – and this is ever more the case. It’s a complicated business – we might think that we are being transparent, yet if the perception is that we’re not, then we have a problem. Transparency is linked to so many other things – questions of transparency cast light on how decisions are being made, and who makes them, and also say something about who we are, or who we believe that we are, as a church. An institution that lacks transparency might be superficially strong and ensure power stays in certain hands, but this is no serious way to go about business, and is simply building up trouble for the future. I fear this is the track we are currently on.

    In writing this, I know that there will be people who immediately get defensive and angry that their best intentions are being questioned. There are hundreds of good and serious people in the church – from bishops to church employees – who are doing their best and doing so with integrity. As a church, we have to move away from our current position, where any challenge is taken as a personal attack – and perhaps, too, those of us who do find the church’s lack of transparency increasingly frustrating need to find new ways of addressing our concerns. But what seems clear, from even the briefest of surveys of those who express frustration at the way the church is currently run, is that part of the problem is that there is nowhere to address those concerns – and any concerns that are expressed fall on deaf ears and, frequently, slammed doors. One of the reasons, perhaps, why the sessions of Questions at meetings of General Synod are so fraught is that this can feel like one of the few places where such concerns can be spoken and, sometimes, heard.

    Combined, then, with this lack of transparency, is a sense of almost total, paralysing powerlessness amongst ordinary churchgoers and clergy. It is absolutely the case that many now speak of ‘the church’ as though it is an entity which does things to them, rather than of which they form a part. And who can blame them?

    Many years ago, well before I was ordained, one of the little games I liked to play was to try to get to the bottom of who, precisely, was issuing statements as ‘the Church of England’. ‘The Church of England said X’ was a common refrain, and one that was as meaningless then as it is now. It was surprisingly difficult to find out the answer on occasion – it still is. Yet how, and why, has this situation been allowed to continue?

    I’m not a fool – I understand that there is the need for occasional careful comms management, and that there is a complexity to some decision-making which can pass a mere curate like me by. Yet our lack of transparency is not an occasional concern – it’s our regular modus operandi. Decisions made and communicated by ‘the church’ are more often than not mired in some kind of mystery – and with little opportunity for constructive feedback or comment. There seems to be an almost iron-willed refusal to let the light into these decision-making processes, and whilst there are always leaks about what is ‘really going on’, this is quite simply an inadequate way of running any institution – and certainly one that is built on the foundation stone of truth. We need only look to the last few weeks to get a glimpse of this reality. And the institution’s far-too-frequent use of silence is deafening – and dangerous – as is the refusal to put our hands up when we get things wrong.

    The thing is, until we admit that there is a problem, nothing is going to change. I know that it’s frustrating for senior people to hear irrelevant nobodies like me carping on about the problems in the system, but just on occasion, it might be worth listening to us – and I’m not alone. It’s without doubt that the Anglican Twittersphere is – just on occasion – a hellhole, but might we not start to ask questions about why that is? Institutions in which people feel empowered do not have senior leaders taking to social media to raise concerns. There is a genuine problem, here, and it’s time people who can started to do something about it.

    As a church, we need to commit ourselves to undertaking a serious spiritual health check. For all the warm words, our church culture is still one of deference – albeit not necessarily one in which that deference is traditionally oriented. We are expected to have decisions made about us without us, and not to complain about them. We are expected to wait for statements about issues of genuine concern – sometimes for months – and then be grateful for the scraps that are issued. We are expected to simply accept new and bewildering funding formulas rather than play any serious part in their design. We are expected to trust and respect an institution – but those two things are, quite properly, earned.

    Of course, this will all likely be dismissed as the complaints of an awkward nobody. Yet I truly believe that if we don’t do this, then the current period of bloodletting in the church is not going to simply fade away – although the church might. The risk, of course, is that the more transparent we are, the clearer it will become that our structures are not fit for purpose, that our accountability leaves a lot to be desired, that our laity and parish clergy – far from being empowered – are frequently left raging against a machine that doesn’t appear to either hear or care about them. But that is a risk worth taking, because most of us who are frustrated by how things are want the church to be better, not destroyed.

    It takes courage to name a problem if you’re in charge – much easier to buy into the Emperor’s new clothes. If we are truly committed to being a safe and healthy church, it’s time to drop the comfort of denial and get on with building something better.