A week ago, the Archbishops’ Council published a statement about the Independent Safeguarding Board that created a storm of anger and fury. The Archbishops’ Council claimed “to be committed to developing a fully independent scrutiny of safeguarding within the Church of England, to ensure the Church is a safer place for all.” This principle had been agreed prior to the publication of the report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) into the Anglican Church in England and Wales in 2020. The Independent Safeguarding Board made up of a chair, a Survivor Advocate and a third member was set up in 2021.
The Statement said that there had been a widely reported dispute between two members of the ISB and the Council, and that despite extensive efforts over recent months, working relationships between two members of the ISB and the Council had broken down. The Council had therefore decided to terminate the contracts of Jasvinder Sanghera and Steve Reeves, the two of the members of the Board, and of Meg Munn, the acting Chair. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York admitted this was a serious setback and lamented it but claimed that there was no prospect of resolving the disagreement and that it was getting in the way of the vital work of serving victims and survivors.
William Nye, Secretary General of the Archbishops’ Council is almost certainly also implicated in this decision, as is every member of the Council. The Archbishops, the Archbishops’ Council and the House of Bishops have shown themselves incapable of allowing full, independent scrutiny of the Church of England’s safeguarding failures and the various initiatives taken to reform the system.
People commenting on the Thinking Anglicans website are furious at this latest demonstration of the gross incompetence of the hierarchy.
‘Froghole’ notes that the old model of monarchical episcopacy was (and is) incompatible with any form of reasonable scrutiny. It is a model which emanated from feudal society whose foundations have been exploded by the gradual intrusion of modest forms of accountability. These have begged more and more questions of the episcopate once coercive attempts to prevent redress could no longer be applied. The bishops are trying to prevent any further loss of authority via the forms of bluff and bluster which were much in evidence over the last week. These stratagems only succeed in accelerating the erosion of their residual authority as the explanations proffered were exposed to ridicule and contempt.
The issues surrounding the ISB are both a cause and a consequence of the progressive disintegration of a Church which seems to be hurtling determinedly towards its own endgame. Nobody in the hierarchy has twigged that for any kind of good leadership to flourish in the church, actual roles involving powers and authority have to be differentiated and separated. At the present, there is no meaningful democratic accountability in place to prevent or check against abuses of power, privilege and authority by the hierarchy. The Archbishops and Secretariat cannot seem to grasp that. They expect to find a way out of this grotesque mess with a mixture of tired tropes and sophistry showing a catastrophic lack of judgment.
Froghole notes that “People are increasingly disinclined to believe something merely because a bishop says it is so.”
Crisis
The starting point for me is to be aware that we are living at a time of crisis, globally and individually. The crises are multiple: climate, ecosystem, political, economic, spiritual, religious, refugee, health, housing, pollution, you name it, it’s in crisis. Every member of the human race is at risk of being affected by and infected by this systemic state of crisis – emotionally, intellectually, physically and spiritually. I’m trying to train myself to remember this when reading about and thinking about the Church of England. It isn’t the institution that’s the major problem, or “them”, the hierarchy or whatever – the problem is that homo sapiens has lost the generic ability that was much stronger six decades ago, to think and question and reflect and be open to adventurous new ideas and ways of seeing and thinking about reality.
In the Church of England, the drama this week about the sacking of the members of the Independent Safeguarding Group and the information provided on Thinking Anglicans together with the comments demonstrate how extreme the crisis is in the Church. One reason why the crisis in the Church is particularly difficult to deal with is that the majority are unable to see that the current edifice of belief and practice in the Church today is inadequate to contemporary knowledge and lived in ignorance and unconsciousness.
Conspiracy Theories
I find ideas from outside the Church often help me become aware of what we are dealing with inside the Church – for example, letters in Monday’s Guardian responding to an article about how politics got hijacked by conspiracy theories.
In children’s education, we tell them that there are unseen centres of power observing and interfering with our lives, from certain deities to Father Christmas and the tooth fairy. These all require the suspension of disbelief and the reinterpretation of events as evidence of hidden power at work. We set human brains up as fertile ground for conspiracy.
Conspiracy theories appeal to those often living in denial, who either can’t or don’t want to think rationally. Schools have an important role to play in fostering critical thinking.
Churches ought also to have an important role to play in fostering critical thinking and countering magical thinking, belief in God or deities who reside somewhere, observing and, in response to prayer, active in our lives, in ways that are both benign and abusive. The total mess that is safeguarding policy and practice in the Church of England is directly affected by the unhealthy magical thinking that is a normative part of today’s Christian teaching and thinking. What is taught and practised in church services in parishes Sunday by Sunday also involves the suspension of disbelief and the reinterpretation of events as evidence of a hidden power. I believe in subtle powers and energies – but I don’t believe in a God working magic – such a God is as dangerous as is the Archbishops’ Council to good safeguarding practice.
I think the Church of England has been hijacked by a hierarchy desperate to stop the decline in membership by adopting an HTB-inspired evangelical model in which mission is more important than anything else.
My quest is a search for ways in which our religious belief systems can be creatively influenced by developments in the knowledge human beings continue to discover about life, the universe, evolution, matter, and the human psyche – the material from which we and the universe are constructed. I’m aware of the effect of our developing knowledge on the ways in which historical religions have constructed their belief systems, their ideas about God, the origin of life, the effect of death, and the elements of value systems, morals and ethics on the quality of human life. As I have explored these questions in the course of my life the construction of my belief system has continually changed and evolved. Not many members of historical, traditional religious systems seem to be pursuing such a radical path.
In the nineteen sixties Christian churches began slowly working their way towards a common goal of transformation, including our understanding of God, the Bible, Jesus, gender, sexuality, poverty, disability, race, etc. Groups and networks demonstrated what can grow and flourish when multiple diverse paths are pursued in our quest towards visionary solutions and action.
The quest
My understanding is still evolving, learning to see, understand and interpret how human life on planet Earth, in the Universe, in evolution, is in essence seamless and holistic in which mystical and spiritual and visionary energies are integral, at least as important as structural, political, economic and scientific paths. I’m clear that ultimately tribal religious systems have to find ways of diminishing their tribal attachments, overcoming polarised us and them attitudes, the self-protective exclusivism, the my God is better/bigger than yours dynamic in which it is easy to become trapped.
The path, the quest is not the invention of a new religion, but of existing religions becoming more relational and experiential within their own ethos, and through this evolution, becoming open to and integrative of elements of life and practice from other religious systems that enhance our human essence and the ethics and values we chose - the priorities: love, truth, wisdom, goodness, compassion, etc. The focus of life and practice will be to enhance and nourish our individual being, living a spiritual life that enriches each element of our being, mind, soul and body, holistic, seamless in its conception of humanity, divine presence, all life and matter, on Earth and in the Cosmos.