I have just finished reading Stephen Kuhrt’s book ‘Safeguarding the Institution: How the Culture of the Church of England Facilitates Abuse’. Stephen is the Vicar of the Parish of New Malden and Coombe in the Diocese of Southwark and the book, published in 2025, is an account of his experience of safeguarding and the failures and weaknesses of the culture of the Church of England, experienced at first hand in New Malden.
Stephen was ordained in 2003 and became a curate at New Malden and Coombe. In 2007 he became Vicar Designate of the parish and inherited responsibility for a historic safeguarding case concerning a lay minister at the church. Stephen’s attempts to pursue the case encountered considerable opposition and was actively discouraged by the diocesan hierarchy. Significant pressure was put on him to collude with suppressing the matter.
When the Church of England commissioned a second Past Cases Review from 2019-2022, Stephen returned the form sent to all clergy making it clear that he was not satisfied with the response to the 2007-8 case. This resulted in the Bishop of Kingston commissioning a review of his ministry in 2020. Because of an error he’d made, this resulted in the Bishop of Southwark suspending Stephen from Ministry from February to July 2021. The suspension was lifted following a strong statement of support being issued by the PCC. The diocese immediately proceeded with a review of the safeguarding practices within the parish. The Bishop of Southwark never met with him following his suspension. The Bishop of Kingston met him but discussed nothing of significance. When a new Bishop of Kingston arrived and agreed to meet Stephen, he immediately signalled his acceptance of a negative attitude about Stephen. All these experiences and more can be found in the book and explain why the book came to be written. Stephen has come to understand much more fully the abusive culture of the Church of England and the ways in which it replicates behaviours that lead to abuse and protect abusive behaviours and acts.
Unhealthy community and God narratives
Every member of the Church of England, lay and ordained, bishop, priest and reader, is living within a cultural narrative that is taken as the norm by the local church and by the institution and the instruments of control in the institution – bishops and archdeacons.
Local congregational communities can live with a strong public narrative about themselves and their members. Stephen inherited a community living within a very conservative evangelical culture where the suppression of thoughts for fear of being seen as “unsound” was completely normalised. He can now see how devastating it was to have an entire narrative had been built up around a particular priest and everything that he represented about authentic Christianity was suddenly and violently deconstructed when Stephen pursued the safeguarding case against a lay minister of the church (who was eventually convicted). Stephen later discovered that women and men who had passed through the youth group had spoken to each other for years about the alleged misconduct.
Stephen has learnt that communities can be very easily manipulated into furnishing the environment within which abuse is more likely to occur. Grooming of a community is therefore an important factor in understanding the role of wider communities in facilitating abuse. Whenever abuse takes place, the wider community has played a key role in facilitating and perhaps causing abuse, albeit unconsciously.
The Church of England corporately is deeply reluctant to accept that much of church culture, in its ingrained assumptions and habitual praxis, has facilitated and colluded with abuse. If abuse is recognised it can be a shattering blow and even start to deconstruct faith in the authentic nature of any of the church’s ministry and mission. If communal collusion with abuse is addressed, many other factors that currently impede the mission and ministry of the church will inevitably also be addressed.
We are slow to recognise the emotional bias we are all subject to in recognising the collective culture of the Church of England. The more immersed we are within the structures of the Church of England, the more we will struggle to see our unhealthy emotional biases.
Failures in a dysfunctioning church
The running of a properly functioning church involves confronting issues and problems rather than avoiding them. It is common to find many people withing churches who equate aggression with someone not dropping any challenge at the first sigh of discomfort in the person addressed by it. When the result is always some form of passive-aggressive behaviour this points to the impossibility of maintaining a passive approach to conflict. Unable to deal with issues assertively such people have to work towards their desired outcome by indirect means such as secrecy, manipulation and deceit. This results in highly dysfunctional situations becoming normalised.
Bishops and archdeacons
The standard requirement for a bishop in the Church of England seems to be someone who is affable and pleasant, reasonably competent, but unexciting and unimaginative. Most crucially they need to have avoided upsetting anyone during their previous ministerial positions. The post of archdeacon in the Church of England in many ways exists to enable bishops to keep their hands clean from involvement in sorting out problems.
Where bishops and archdeacons fail repeatedly is their inability to provide a satisfactory response to anything that is difficult. If correspondence eventually leads to a meeting with the bishop and/or archdeacon the meetings were, for Stephen, always unsatisfactory. Details of previous letters and emails were not engaged with, the meeting proceeding as if concerns hadn’t been raised. They were usually chaired in such a way as to work towards a place of reconciliation, but only by bypassing the issues that have occasioned the meeting rather than addressing them.
The long-term effects of the dysfunctionality of the tactics used are immense.
Ineffectiveness and wilful incompetence
Benevolent incompetence is somehow what Church of England Christianity is all about, not asking any searching questions about how matters could be and should be different. An accurate paradigm for understanding the prevailing culture within the institution could be said to be that of ‘wilful incompetence’. A natural lack of confidence and therefore widespread incompetence in the deliverance of ministry and mission is endemic among large numbers of the bishops and clergy and within the institution and structures of the church.
Protecting the church
Most of those who commit abuse within the Church of England turn out to have a very significant investment in the institution which, sometimes in subtle and hidden ways that it doesn’t even recognise, becomes equally invested in them. Those demanding justice for abuse represent a very clear and present threat to the status quo. They create considerable instability through calling the church to account, expecting it to show courage, clarity and principle. The threat presented by survivors of abuse therefore needs to be neutralised as swiftly as possible.
Truth and Safety
For anyone feeling insecure about the value and purpose of their ministry, the question “why are we doing this?” is the most terrifying one that can be asked. This question has been unconsciously present in most of the meetings Stephen has had with bishops and archdeacons. Every time they have been unwilling to discuss matters of principle and truth.
Discussions about theological truth are ‘unsafe’ because they carry the possibility of having to review the way that church is being lived in the light of fresh insights gained from greater reflection upon the gospel. If a conflict arises between challenging misconduct and preserving the fundamental status quo within the Church of England, it is the latter that always had to be upheld. This is one of the things that can most demoralise clergy is when they start to believe that they are simply running an inward-looking club for selfish and unaccountable people. The failure to respond to poor behaviour in churches, particularly when this behaviour comes from long-term and ‘committed’ members is a direct contributor to making churches unsafe.
The abuse committed by Peter Ball, Colin Pritchard, Roy Cotton, George Rideout, Jonathan Fletchger, John Smyth and David Tudor was all built upon a deeply unhealthy structural privilege embedded within the Church of England. Each of these figures possessed an appallingly arrogant sense of entitlement.
Stephen Kuhrt concludes this section of the book by stating that urgent attention is needed to the wider approach to behaviour in the Church of England that has brought about this repeated abuse of power. In the final chapters he addresses the question of sexuality and dishonesty in the Church of England and the desperately urgent need for a wider clear out of the Church of England’s senior leaders. I’ll write about this in a second blog.
Stephen’s book is an essential companion to Adrian Thatcher’s book Ending Abusive Theologies. Both are essential reads for those who want to understand how systemic abuse is integral to the present culture of the Church of England.
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