The Way to the Inn

Canon Revd Rosie Harper and Bishop Alan Wilson put forward the basis for a fresh approach to safeguarding in Church …

In recent years all groups working with children and vulnerable adults, including churches, have massively upped their investment in safeguarding. Public institutions, sports clubs and schools, hospitals, churches and media organisations have experienced scandals that show up the inadequacy of what they had assumed to be safe in times gone by. The exposure of Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris and Stuart Hall has brought this process strikingly into the public domain. Public enquiries have empowered large numbers of people to come forward with experiences that had been sealed up deep within them, wrapped in guilt and shame.

Much abuse has occurred in church in the context of activities involving children, young people and vulnerable adults. The Church of England, like other Churches, has tried to respond to this with major new investment in safeguarding staff and policy. Hundreds of pages of guidelines have been produced. This luxuriant growth of staffing levels and verbiage has not always been experienced as coherent, but there’s much more of it than there was twenty years ago.

Various particularities stand out about abuse in church.

First, churches have a large historic mission in relation to children and young people. Even though religious groups have seen a significant collapse in the number of children and young people involved with them, they retain a privileged position in relation to schools in the UK. Many people, disclosing now, experienced their abuse during the last century when churches played a major role in the lives of many children through Sunday schools, choirs, clubs, uniformed organisations and camps. Any danger of abuse is a major turn-off to children and their parents now. Churches who intend to continue working with young people will have to pay attention to what has gone wrong in the past and learn from it. Grovelling apologies for other people’s sins and waffle about how it couldn’t happen now cannot win people’s confidence.

Secondly, churches and religious groups often have cultures of high trust and low accountability, institutionalised through hierarchical attitudes that put leaders on a pedestal and make their behaviour hard to challenge. Surprisingly, many people are still willing to talk with clergy about deeply personal matters. The more people know about others in a networked world, with the sometimes distorting lenses and mirrors of social media, the greater the danger of cynicism. Pulling rank is futile in a less deferential society. It is much easier to lose respect than to win it back. Trust must be cherished and protected, not betrayed. The challenge before the Churches now is one of substance, not presentation. If they want to be trusted they need to work hard to become trustworthy.

Thirdly, churches have been social paradigms in the past, for wider society as well as themselves. Their mission has been about healing, social integration and personal wellbeing. The higher an organisation’s pretensions to doing good, the greater the disillusionment when people are betrayed. Churches have claimed to be guardians of popular morality. People outside the Church are disgusted when priests fail to act as such. They could argue that it takes a particular level of hypocrisy to produce errant clergy.

Finally, and in some ways most significantly, the Bible says love must be a matter of deeds, not empty words. The gnostic religions of the ancient world dealt exclusively in rituals, dogma and philosophy. Christianity is about the word made flesh, that is a person not an idea. The letter of James points out how futile it is to wish victims well whilst doing nothing materially to help them:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

(James 2:14-17)

A Church that deals in aspirations and ideals alone is betraying its own faith. Two hundred and fifty years ago, Ann Radcliffe laid down an important principle:

I never trust people’s assertions, I always judge of them by their actions.

(The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1764)

Good leadership can be recognised by high levels of trust, integrity and relationships. In recent years there has been much aspirational hufflepuff in the Church of England about ‘Leadership’ as the answer to its problems. People gauge a leader’s trustworthiness on the basis of their actions and practice, not their public relations or grovelling skills. How we behave to one another is far more significant than operational success (in a narrow sense), or numbers.

This is an extract from To Heal and Not To Hurt: A fresh approach to safeguarding in Church by Rosie Harper and Alan Wilson. It is available now in paperback and as an eBook.