I have also asked that in the light of the Soul Survivor Festival scandal, that every Church of England festival in the United Kingdom, every Christian retreat, church away day, have a major safeguarding review to ensure that no other scandals come out of the Church of England. The only way I can rationalise the behaviour of the AC is that it’s a deliberate provocation to attempt to force Jasvinder & Steve to resign in protest, so that the current partial neutering of the ISB that the AC has achieved will then be converted into a complete destruction of any effective ISB. The text of the CDM judgment which states, whatever was alleged to have taken place, it was never serious enough to warrant any further proceedings. The police agreed, and declined to arrest or charge at all. (May 2021). Although apostasy has frequently attracted to itself various negative connotations, it is still possible to see that moving from one political, spiritual or religious identity to another has a potentially positive side. If religious or political faith is understood to be a stance which involves individual decision, we should be ready to applaud anyone who moves into a place of conviction which may differ radically from the assumptions of the past. Parents obviously would prefer their children to grow up expressing the values and beliefs of the family unit but, in a setting where self-determination and free choice are taught, the right of an emerging adult to exchange one set of values and beliefs for another should be celebrated. The book edited by Martyn Percy and Charles Foster, Faiths lost and found, Understanding Apostasy invites us to think seriously and engage with this positive side of the word used within the context of religious belief. Apostasy, in the world of religious belief, can be seen as potentially marking a valuable expression of human creativity involving both change and growth.

The point I am making is that it is now impossible to staff the present chapter other than via ‘inventive’ expedients. The present arrangements are, bluntly, played out and have been since the early/mid 1980s. What cannot be denied however is that Ms Sanghera and Mr Reeves have brought bona fides to their task and devoted a lot of time to talking to Survivors, gaining their confidence. The effects of the imposition of the Archbishops’ Council ‘s choice of Chair into this difficult situation without any consultation with the very group that has been abused and ignored by the Church for far too long, is yet another example of the arrogance of power that taints so much that the Church does in this area. Titus charitable trust was formed many years ago. Basically it was designed to assist leaving Iwerne’s baggage in the past as an insurance against John Smyth’s misdemeanours catching up with them in the future, and their having to pay for his crimes.When you read the answer to the Question, you might like to ask your Diocesan Bishop if s/he is aware of the details and what they are doing to instigate a proper response or investigation. I very specifically do not name anyone. Martyn Percy will not co-operate with a process he regards as tainted from the outset. No intelligent person would. On Friday he withdrew his co-operation from the review, not out of petulance, but to uphold a key principle. Consultation (NB NOT veto) means consultation – not meekly taking instructions. Of course, the cynic might think that this is intended to provoke a crisis and/or resignations leaving the field free for a second go at creating an ISB Mark II I hope Martyn gets somewhere but from my experience unless there is a provable mishandling of charity funds or beneficiaries that are in immediate danger the CC is too stretched to properly respond.

I have been busy at Synod and not following these comments. I have of course, been pressing the case for the survivor interest on multiple fronts including reporting a variety of views upon the proposed Redress Scheme. I abstained, so that nobody felt I was not taking their concerns seriously. The statement from the CofE, after a thorough investigation, exonerating the Dean of any wrongdoing. The rejection of that judgment by dons prosecuting the Dean of Christ Church, who were still wanting to assert that the Dean posed a “risk”. (Both September 2020). Imagine a Lead Bishop for the Environment ignoring harm done to forests, rivers, oceans, biodiversity! It would be strange not to say perverse. As it happens the Bishop for the Environment, Graham Usher, has done about half a dozen social media things in relation to his role during May alone. One particularly striking tweet was of the confirmation card sent to candidates in mid-May with a picture depicting a tree laden with animals in the process of being cut down. This powerful illustration by Nat Morley titled ‘The Tree of Life 6th Mass Extinction’ showed the ‘Environment Bishop’ unafraid of public visibility in his role. Another senior figure, Anne Hollinghurst, acting Bishop of Birmingham, attended Extinction Rebellion’s The Big One protest in Westminster in April. What is needed now is more publication (books, articles and blog posts), working with the press to expose dangerous aspects of Church activities and engaging with our elected representatives and statutory bodies. This isn’t usually a particularly attractive commercial proposition, and is why this “new” venture hasn’t already taken off. People want to be paid. And they don’t want to risk losing everything if they make a tactical error or even fill in the dreaded form incorrectly.

A new initiative focused on survivors of church-based abuse and those who support them has been launched today. The same church lawyers setting up the Kate Wood investigation, and the refusal of those driving the campaign against the Dean to admit that these lawyers had set Wood’s Terms of Reference. (October 2020). The choice of the word apostasy in the title is deliberate and it forces us to consider how we (and the ten story tellers in the book) cope with access to new challenging information that is not catered for in an existing faith paradigm from the past. The typical story told by several of the contributor authors is the way that access to books and education had affected them profoundly. It opened their minds to the possibility of change and a way out of the narrow sectarian views which had dominated their thinking, sometimes over decades. Several of our authors discovered a new breadth in their spiritual outlook through access to post-graduate university studies. Accessing a privileged academic route is, of course, one path out of narrow perspectives, but sadly, such study is available to only a tiny minority. It is, in fact, hard to imagine any research student in theology (or any subject) not being decisively changed by seminars, exchange of academic papers and attendance at learned specialised conferences. This academic way of doing theology, one which constantly asks questions and lives with uncertainty, is, sadly becoming vanishingly uncommon in today’s Church. If ever the culture of free inquiry, which is embedded into the university research process, is outlawed from the wider Church, journeys of the kind and recorded in some of the stories in this book will be impossible. Some of the journeys of creative discovery as recorded in this volume would never have been able to start, let alone arrive successfully at a new destination.

It is committed to the continued value and potential of interconnected relationships within the Joint Foundation;But at least we now know that ISB was and is wholly and closely controlled in terms of ambit and resource by Archbishops Council. Two very serious questions flow from this? In November 2020 at a time when we had submitted a formal complaint against a Canon and had been ignored (our complaint was that she had a conflict of interest and had withheld two significant pieces of evidence which might have exonerated Kenneth), I wrote to Kenneth’s MP. The reply was:

The reason for annexing the regius Divinity chair to the 5th prebend (plus the rectory of Ewelme) in 1617 and the regius Hebrew chair to the 6th prebend in 1632 was money. The stipends of the chairs were too slender to support their respective office holders. Similar expedients were adopted with other university positions (in 1840 the Lady Margaret chair was switched from Worcester to Christ Church for reasons of convenience as well as cash). By the time the pastoral theology chair was created in 1848 and the ecclesiastical history chair a decade later, and by which time stipends had been evened out under the terms of the Cathedrals Act 1840, it was thought that annexing chairs to stalls increased their ‘dignity’. This explains what happened in 1995: it was an attempt to preserve prestige for the Church (even though Henry Mayr-Harting was/is RC), and not to break all connection with the cathedral, as happened in 1959 when Godfrey Driver (who had been Cuthbert Simpson’s deputy and, arguably, superior as a Hebraist) agitated successfully for the severance of the connection on the grounds that there were not enough clerical Hebraists of sufficient stature (Driver’s father, Samuel, had himself held the Hebrew chair, and his ‘Westminster’ commentary on Genesis is still worth reading). Under these circumstances it is hard to see how Prof Foot could be able to remain as a charity trustee, let alone being appointed to a permanent salaried position that involves acting as chair of the trustee body. Following the translation of Bishop John Perumbalath to the See of Liverpool from the See of Bradwell, there is now a vacancy for a southern suffragan in the House of Bishops.The Cathedral should conform to the requirements of the Cathedrals Measure except where its future relationship with Christ Church renders this unrealistic.” JG So, the Independent Safeguarding Board is in the process of being set up. It’s in phase one and it’s looking forward to the next step, which is to sort of full independence. I absolutely recognise that there have been teething problems in getting that going. Now, we’ve had more conversations this week that have been actually really constructive about how that should look, but it’s not because the Church is resisting independence. It’s about getting the right structures for independence: how it’s funded and what the scope of work is, what reporting looks like, and I think that does need further work, but we are taking some really constructive steps towards that at the moment. What little hope there was for the ISB has effectively been extinguished and emphatically stamped on by this appointment. What a tragic waste of time and effort, to say nothing of the huge sums of charitable money poured into this – and all to create the illusion of independent oversight that IICSA had demanded of the CofE, but which Mr. Nye had absolutely no intention of allowing. The ISB has become an ignominious initiative to be associated with: something pretending to be independent, but is not and was never going to be. The sooner all such appointments in the safeguarding circus of the Church are removed from the hands of Nye the better. This latter day Richelieu of the Church of England whose unaccountable court supercedes that of the gelded king in Lambeth Palace, continues to deepen the disrepute in which the Church finds itself. Well, the thanks is really for you Ms Stein, and to your colleagues, for the substantive efforts you have made!