By Christine Rayner
The resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury will send shockwaves through the Church of England and must begin the slow process of change, says former bishop Graham Tomlin.
Speaking at a Religion Media Centre briefing on the events leading up to Justin Welby’s resignation, Bishop Graham, now director of the Centre of Cultural Witness at Lambeth Palace, said there were important lessons to be learned from the cover-up of persistent abuse suffered by children who attended evangelical camps run by the Iwerne Trust in the 70s and 80s.
The archbishop had been told about the abuse in 2012, but no action was pursued to investigate the British barrister John Smyth who chaired the Trust, led the camps and abused more than 100 boys and young men by lashing them with canes in his garden shed. Smyth died in 2018 without any action being taken against him.
Mark Stibbe was one of Smyth’s victims and became vicar of St Andrew’s, Chorleywood, until leaving in 2012 to become an author. He said as a young man orphaned in 1960, he had a strong need for a parent figure and he fell under the spell of the barrister’s “powerful psychological allure” when he first met him at the Christian camp in 1977 at the age of 16.
“We were all young, away from home and vulnerable”, Mr Stibbe said. Smyth was brilliant and charismatic, manipulative and coercive, the “master of evasion” when questions were asked and encouraged a culture of secrecy among his victims.
“Smyth basically set himself up as a spiritual father,” Mr Stibbe said. “He managed to persuade us, because we were theologically unsophisticated at that age, that God was our Father in heaven, too remote and too busy to be our father on earth. Therefore, he said, ‘I will be your father’.”
Mr Stibbe calmly described the nature of the long game played by Smyth in his grooming of boys. It was four-and-a-half years after their first meeting that he was first physically beaten.
Andrew Graystone, who wrote a book in 2021 about Smyth’s reign of terror over young people called “Bleeding for Jesus” and advised Channel 4 on a documentary about the issue, told the briefing of another victim who had been groomed by Smyth from the age of 14, but not beaten until he was 21.
He said it was important for the authorities to understand what had happened, but felt the Church of England did not comprehend the nature of abuse and still believed that recovering from it was “an event”. There would be no progress in safeguarding within the church until it realised that “relationships can be abusive over time and that survivors of abuse need to be restored in their relationships over time”.
Professor Helen King, a lay member of the CofE General Synod said she was saddened that the archbishop had not resigned immediately after the early and unexpected release of the Makin report into the Smyth case. It was leaked to Channel 4 a week ago. The issue had been poorly dealt with and had caused more trauma for victims, she said.
Prof King said a key issue was that many bishops in the CofE had little experience of life at “ground level” of church life. She said safeguarding was generally well organised within the parishes, but those higher up “don’t get it”.
She said there were others within the church who “knew more and did even less” – hinting there were those who were equally culpable of a cover-up of Smyth’s activities. She was worried that creating an atmosphere in which the archbishop had to resign was “picking a scapegoat” and that those high up in the organisation would believe this was an acceptable solution.
Professor Linda Woodhead of Kings College, London, who is researching levels of abuse within the CofE and working with victims, said Smyth’s vision was to build an inner circle of power within the church. His grooming of young men was based on abuse and the organisation had let them down badly. The length of time it had taken for the details to be made public had also “added agony to agony” for victims, she said.
Susie Leafe from Anglican Futures, who has written about conservative evangelicals’ inability to tackle sex abuse while emphasising same-sex relationships, said Mr Stibbe’s account of his injuries and abuse had been profoundly moving, yet some of the older members of the church community still appeared to believe that it was all part of “a boarding school upper class background” and “making a bit of a fuss about nothing”.
Prof King agreed with Ms Leafe that there were still people in positions of power within the church who thought they were “the best of the best, who tried to keep the secret, who’d been told what was going on and were doing things like meeting in lay-bys, rather than actually having a conversation in a place where anyone could see them, to try and keep this thing secret”.
She added: “Those are the ones I’m worried about, because it’s very easy to pick a scapegoat, especially when it’s the Archbishop of Canterbury, and just say that’s OK. All done, now move on. It’s all clean. It isn’t. They just kept it within the inner circle. I think that’s unacceptable.”
Prof King said there was a need for a completely independent scrutiny of safeguarding, with mandatory reporting. “The level of anger at the moment is such that full independence is the only way to go,” she added.
Mr Stibbe said the church needed a “root and branch” reform from the climate of “protecting the tribe, rather than the traumatised”.
He said: “It’s going to be about the quality of leadership from here on in. I really hear what was said earlier about bishops being appointed who haven’t got proper parish experience. I think that’s going to be essential in the future.”
Strong new leadership was also essential, said Mr Stibbe, people who had “incredible compassion for survivors, but also an equal passion for proper, robust safeguarding within the whole of the Church of England, to which the first people who are to be held to account are the leaders who implement it”.
This was what had been lacking, he said, adding: “The sort of top echelon of leadership in the church of England has this sort of disconnect from reality.”
Mr Graystone, who hinted at more revelations to come, said it was shocking that for all the money being spent on safeguarding within the CofE, more allegations of abuse were emerging. He said the church had institutionally failed the victims.
His advice for bishops was to “take off your mitre, go to the house of victims and listen to what abuse really means”. Only with this “survivor-led” approach could any recovery be made, he said.
Bishop Tomlin brought the conversation to an end, supporting the idea of “a survivor-led process”. He also approved Prof King’s suggestion of an independent handling of safeguarding, using the teaching analysis of not being accused of “marking our own homework.”
“My hope is that this profound shock to the church will be the stimulus to that kind of change,” he said.
