Blurred lines
C of E safeguarding might be better than we thought but still wrestling with mission creep, while a Cornish church reorganisation draws attention from far and wide
Hello! Our first story is about safeguarding in the Church of England. Plus ça change, I know! And yet this time it’s kind of positive news, or at least a helpful recognition of a problem others are ignoring and a potential way forward.
Then we head on down to the very south-westerly tip of England to try to figure out why a bit of church reorganisation in Cornwall is prompting quite so much controversy from places as far away as Norfolk, Oxford and Northumberland. The eventual outcome of the Kerrier deanery scheme could be a real bellwether for if the C of E is actually able to do the kind of rationalisation it so desperately needs.
There’s also my latest podcast (What does an embarassing leak of supposedly anonymous medical data tell us about altruism, privacy and knowledge in the 21st century), but sadly no links to interesting church news stories this week.
Blurred lines
One plank of the Church of England’s attempts to improve safeguarding in recent years has been rolling external audits of each diocese. An outside consultancy called INEQE, run by an experienced former child protection police officer, has been working its way round the 42 dioceses of the church, examining in detail their safeguarding arrangements and reporting back on what they found.
It may be a surprise — given the deluge of national headlines about what a basket case C of E safeguarding is — but INEQE is generally quite positive about stuff. So far they’ve got round to almost half of the dioceses and they mostly say similar things. Safeguarding is said to be well embedded in church culture, with strong leadership from the bishops and others, and well-resourced by professionals who work with independence to protect vulnerable people. There’s always things to improve on, of course, but the reality has been for a while that the church is no slouch when it comes to good safeguarding practice — and probably doing better than some other institutions which have not received anything like the intense scrutiny.
On top of their diocesan audits, INEQE has also just completed an audit of the C of E’s National Safeguarding Team (NST). This is a central body which investigates complex or high-profile cases. The NST also leads on guidance and training and policies for the whole church. You can read the full audit here, but the bottom line is, again, quite positive:
“The overarching narrative is one of commitment, professionalisation, and a genuine appetite for systemic improvement across the Church of England. An overwhelming majority of personnel describe a supportive, collaborative environment where professional skills are genuinely valued.”
The head of the NST, national director of safeguarding Alexander Kubeyinje, brings “vital credibility from statutory social care” and is well supported by a leadership team with a “credible blend of experience across policing, probation, victim and survivor advocacy”, INEQE conclude. Under him, the NST has shown a “proactive attitude towards independent scrutiny”, actively engaging with major reviews such as the Makin report into John Smyth and the Scolding report into Mike Pilavachi.
“This leadership credibility places the NST in a strong position to support the next stage of safeguarding reform across the Church.”
The Church Times has gone through the INEQE report in more detail, pulling out some of its recommendations for the NST, including a call to boost its capacity for specialist children and youth safeguarding. But the one that really caught my eye was a recommendation about HR (I know, sounds boring, but wait for it!).
INEQE recommended that the NST build up a specialist HR department which can differentiate between “conduct, HR and safeguarding issues”. This person or persons would not just help the NST but the wider church, bishops, dioceses, cathedrals and others. And, over time, they should create a national “decision-making tool” to enable the prompt and consistent classification of any concern as either safeguarding or HR.
This is not the first time I’ve banged this drum in The Critical Friend, but a critical part of the mess the church has got into has been because all kinds of other stuff have got dumped into the safeguarding bucket that shouldn’t be there. Time after time a dispute or grievance which does not involve a child or vulnerable adult has been reported as a safeguarding concern.
The machinery of the church lumbers into action and works through the policies, only to conclude at the end that actually there is nothing for them to do because this is something which does not fall into the remit of safeguarding. But often this then gets sucked into the culture war, and we get lost in byzantine debates about who exactly counts as a “vulnerable adult”. Some people’s definition of this basically mean anyone can be vulnerable if they decide to be, and in that case, everything becomes safeguarding.
INEQE in their audit highlight the lack of clarity around defining a “vulnerable adult” and added that a “persistent operational challenge” for the NST was how many referrals it got about non-safeguarding cases:
‘These were said to often relate to conduct or disciplinary issues and while not actionable by the NST, their volume (alongside the many other generic contacts the team receives) was noted to be impacting capacity.
“Across the Church of England, the lines between HR and safeguarding are sometimes unclear. On occasions, the Audit saw evidence that issues or concerns in these areas can be blurred and/or misunderstood. Sometimes issues that should be dealt with as HR conduct matters are passed to the Safeguarding Team to ensure an immediate robust response.’
As other expert outsiders (most notably Alexis Jay when she wrote a report on the future of church safeguarding) have noted, if everything is safeguarding than nothing is safeguarding. The NST (and local diocesan teams) are spending far too much time trying to untangle complex allegations which turn out to not feature any child or vulnerable adult who needs protecting from harm, distracting them from their more pressing work.
There has to be a clear distinction between work to protect children and adults who cannot protect themselves from harm, and the general resolution of disputes between grown competent adults. The first is safeguarding, the second, INEQE is saying, should be swiftly and consistently categorised as an HR issue, and therefore not the NST’s job to deal with.
If you are upset with your vicar for shouting at you in a PCC meeting, that’s not nice and may well be worth a complaint to an archdeacon or bishop, but it’s not safeguarding. If you are worried one of your churchwardens is having a consensual affair with another married adult in the church, that’s not safeguarding. If you think your church administrator is bullying the organist via email, that’s not safeguarding.
I wonder if part of the problem is how the way we have had to rapidly tool up this internal investigatory unit and massively raised its profile (when Welby arrived in 2013 as Archbishop of Canterbury the C of E had just one person working on safeguarding nationally, who was part-time and shared with the Methodists; today the NST alone has 55 staff). Every church and diocese rams down people’s throats the importance of reporting anything at all and ensures all churches prominently display safeguarding contact details.
And so perhaps it’s understandable that when people do want to complain about something negative that has happened (which inevitably happens all the time in a complex organisation made up of flawed human beings) they inexorably are drawn to categorising it as a safeguarding concern and telling it to the safeguarding people. After all, that’s obviously the best way to get something taken seriously in the modern church, right?
Person A falls out with (or is upset by) Person B. Person A realises that if they can frame their dispute as a safeguarding matter it will be immediately taken seriously and might even lead to major professional consequences for Person B. Thus, Person A concludes they must be a vulnerable adult who has been victimised by Person B, necessitating swift intervention by the safeguarding team. Marry this to the unwieldy and easily weaponised Clergy Discipline Measure, and you have a recipe for toxicity.
Some parts of the church actively encourage this, telling people not to think about stuff themselves but simply pass on literally anything that might be even remotely considered a concern to the safeguarding team just in case. The result seems to be that not only are safeguarding teams drowning in casework that really should be dealt with by HR, what is classified as HR and what is considered safeguarding also varies widely between the dioceses.
So I was really pleased to see INEQE highlight this and come up with what sounds like a good way forward. Don’t constantly expand safeguarding until the NST becomes an all-purpose internal police force and complaints unit, they are saying. Instead, figure out a robust, objective way to categorise any complaint as HR or safeguarding, and if it’s HR give it to HR to deal with! If this is put in place, hopefully it not only smoothes out the postcode lottery on how issues are dealt with and frees up the NST’s time, it may also gradually start to erode the unhealthy culture that has developed in the church.
INEQE’s audit comes as the NST is preparing to be spun off into an independent new charity, separate from the C of E, as part of the church’s sweeping reforms to safeguarding. This might only increase complexity, INEQE warn. Already the NST is hampered by the decentralised nature of the C of E and lacks any direct authority to compel a certain action by any individual bishop or diocese. Instead it must rely on “influence and persuasion”. Let’s hope it can influence and persuade the wider church to stop using weaponising safeguarding to litigate HR grievances.
A Cornish cause celebre
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall, but it’s really very nice. Heather-covered fields, dramatic rocky cliffs, sandy beaches, impossibly picturesque fishing villages, the wild Atlantic. Somehow, the rugged beauty of the place makes the slightly squalid row that has broken out over it all just a smidge more unfortunate.
This bit of Cornwall forms the Kerrier Deanery, part of the Diocese of Truro in the C of E. The diocese has a plan to amalgamate the 22 churches there into one team ministry, headed up by two full-time clerics. And this plan has proven controversial, to say the least.
It’s all part of the diocese’s larger reorganisation, which it calls On The Way (it was briefly discussed a few years ago in The Critical Friend). On The Way aims to make parishes in Cornwall self-sustaining. For those (many) churches who do not raise enough money from their dwindling congregations to pay for a vicar (annual cost at least £50,000), ministry will instead normally be led by a probably unpaid lay local minister. The remaining paid vicars in Cornwall will act primarily as “oversight ministers”, resourcing and looking after these local lay church leaders.
It’s not at all unusual in the Church of England for several parishes to be grouped together into a single benefice or team ministry. It’s basically become the norm, especially in rural areas, as it’s been generations since the C of E has actually had enough vicars to give each individual parish its own priest.
But the plans for Kerrier are extreme: they’re not just lumping together two or three village churches into one unit and making them share a vicar, they are amalgamating 18 parish churches, and four other churches, into one super-benefice stretching across the whole peninsula (it’s about a 30-minute drive from the furthest north village to the most southerly one, on a good run).
Then again, we’re not talking about 22 thriving churches. The total population is around 34,000, of whom just 534 are formally on the electoral roll of the existing parishes. And being on the electoral roll does not necessarily mean you actually turn up on Sundays either. The diocese’s numbers reveal the total parish share payments (voluntary contributions each church is expected to make to the diocese) have plummeted from a total of £260,000 in 2015 to just £109,000 last year. As is always the case, as congregations get smaller and older, they find it harder and harder to raise sufficient funds.
Most of the PCCs (elected church councils) also voted on the scheme, and there was a mixture of views: some were unanimously in favour, others unanimously against, and still more split. Of the 15 parishes which did vote, five were against it and ten for it.
Currently, the 22 churches are looked after by two paid vicars and one self-supporting priest (there are also nine other retired clergy who do bits and bobs). The Kerrier scheme actually envisages an increase in provision to four clergy: one oversight minister in charge, a pioneer priest working under them, an interim pastoral priest and another ‘house-for-duty’ cleric (given a vicarage in lieu of a stipend). On top of those four, there would also be a youth worker and administrator shared across the deanery, and some curates (newly qualified apprentice vicars).
The Kerrier amalgamation was narrowly voted through by the local deanery synod, which is the elected representatives of each parish, 14-11 in 2021, the Church Times has reported. But this has not stopped it being intensely controversial, and a rearguard action to stop the reorganisation has been fought ever since.
Now, the Church Commissioners (normally the money people in the C of E, but they also have a historic role in overseeing church reorganisations) are holding a public hearing on the diocese’s plans, such has been the disquiet over the proposals. As mentioned in previous newsletters, in its wisdom the C of E is set up so that literally anyone can make a comment about any reorganisation while it is being consulted on. You don’t have to live inside the Kerrier deanery, you don’t have to go to church in Cornwall, you don’t even need to be an Anglican of any kind.
And lo and behold, some 171 people have indeed written in to say they don’t like the Kerrier plan (compared to just 23 who were in favour). The hearing will take place next week in Cornwall, and lots of those who have opposed the scheme will be given their five minutes to make their case to the Commissioners’ Mission and Pastoral Committee.
I think a lot of onlookers will look at those numbers (171 against to 23 for) and conclude this is a bad proposal. And the summary of these complaints do seem to raise some legitimate concerns. There are worries about not having enough clergy to cover such a large geographical area with poor transport links. The lack of a local and identifiable priest for pastoral care in each area. Fewer services and the growth of ‘communion by extension’ (which allows priests to pre-bless bread and wine so the eucharist can still be celebrated at services at which they are not present). Others object to the centralising of services and resources or the selling off of vicarages, and fear losing a traditional sense of localised parish identity.
Not all of these are bad arguments. But it does seem pertinent that they’re not all coming from people with actual skin in the game. You can find the list of those who objected to the proposals in this document (from p156 onwards). There are names of people with local knowledge and a stake in the outcome: parishioners in Kerrier, local politicians, members of some of the relevant PCCs. But as you go down the list you increasingly find others for whom it is a little odd that they are weighing in at all.
There’s a churchwarden from Lincolnshire. A member of the General Synod. A parishioner from Norfolk. A PCC treasurer from Leicestershire. There’s folk from Oxford and Somerset and Peterborough and the Isle of Wight, from Coventry, London, Chelmsford, Nottingham, Northumberland, and Ely. One person has simply described their location as the “North of England’.
As I said, there are also plenty of people from Cornwall and indeed the Lizard Peninsula also objecting. And according to the rules of the C of E, none of those from hundreds of miles further afield have done anything wrong in trying to record their opposition to the scheme. But it does underline how this one reorganisation in one far-flung corner of England, which would normally receive next to no attention at all, has become something of a cause celebre.
The Kerrier amalgamation has been highlighted on numerous occasions by Save The Parish (STP), the pressure group dedicated to stopping the C of E from cutting back parish ministry. It’s hard not to presume a significant number of the 171 objections from beyond Cornwall are mostly coming from people who’d never heard of Kerrier before STP decided to spotlight the Diocese of Truro’s plans.
In the papers published by the Church Commissioners ahead of their public hearing, the Bishop of Truro David Williams painstakingly answers their questions and responds to all the objections raised. The crux of his argument is that, contrary to what STP have claimed, the Kerrier plan is not being imposed on the helpless parishioners of the Lizard from afar by soulless diocesan supremos. It’s actually a locally-generated idea to try and save what is left of Anglican ministry in this patch of rural Cornwall. The papers summarise Williams’ views like this:
“The proposals originated from local deanery planning, not diocesan imposition. They have strong backing from local clergy and lay ministers. The majority of voices in consultations supported moving forward; the Bishop prioritises local voices over others, including those arising from any national campaigns.”
In other words, the Kerrier amalgamation should be decided on the basis of what the people actually involved in worshipping within it think, not what some London-based pressure group believes.
I’m not going to pretend I’ve dug into all the ins and outs of this particular reorganisation and so I cannot give you a definitive view on whether it is the right or wrong thing to do. I have some sympathy with some of the concerns raised by the 171 objections. Spreading effectively two full-time paid vicars over 35,000 people scattered between 22 churches does sound a bit like a recipe for burnout (although that’s also the situation right now, and the Kerrier proposals would see an increase in clergy resourcing). It’s also fair to note that some other early experiments in sweeping amalgamations elsewhere in the C of E have not always proven to be successful, or in the longer term popular with the communities they sought to serve more effectively.
But the huge gaping unspoken problem in almost all the objections, whether from local PCC members or STP agitators from afar, is that there do not offer any credible alternative. The objectors are very clear about what kind of church they want. It’s that bucolic Victorian vision of a parish priest deeply embedded in their village, cycling around, knowing everyone by name, solely attending to the specific needs of this one parish which is their sole domain.
What they don’t have is any way to get there. There is no meaningful suggestion of how the Diocese of Truro is supposed to magic up these extra clergy to properly staff the 22 churches of the Lizard just like the olden days. Just stop spending money on new-fangled mission initiatives, is the cry, which ignores the fact that most the money the diocese is spending on non-parochial stuff is coming in grants from the national church and explicitly cannot be spent on traditional vicars and their stipends. In fact, Williams makes clear in his submissions that at present it’s the other way around — the Diocese of Truro is dipping into its reserves to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds every year to prop up ministry in the Kerrier deanery. Even as parish share payments have collapsed and inflation soared, the diocese has chosen not to demand ever more cash but instead used its own funds to maintain things.
It’s all very well saying ‘We just want more clergy to do traditional parish ministry here’, but where are these clergy and how will we pay for them? I can tell you for a fact that there are not hordes of vicars keen as mustard to get stuck into rural Cornish ministry, banging down the Diocese of Truro’s door to come and work on the Lizard. Actually, the diocese typically has dozens of vacancies at any one time because it is so hard to recruit priests. And even if these non-existent clergy could be found, with what non-existent money is the diocese supposed to pay for them?
Simply blocking a reorganisation you don’t like without suggesting a realistic alternative is not very helpful. In the church as it actually exists, rather than the more pleasant Ye Olde Church of Englande STP folk wished still existed, the diocese can only afford two paid clergy to cover this part of their patch. Given this, perhaps merging all the parishes together so they can share the load, make efficiencies in administration and delegate ministry to what lay volunteers can be found is not such a bad idea after all. It’s certainly preferable to what some dioceses do, sticking their heads in the sand and pretending everything is fine as they work their clergy into the ground in a Victorian structure clearly unfit for purpose.
I wonder if this Kerrier story might be something of a test case. An experiment to see if STP is indeed able to mobilise enough opposition from its constituency nationwide to effectively stymie this kind of local reorganisation entirely. Truro is far from the only diocese considering these more radical amalgamations in an effort to more effectively deploy their ever-shrinking cadre of priests. Do the C of E’s bureaucratic processes, gummed up as they are in thickets of consultation and regulation, unintentionally create opportunities for well-organised outsiders to effectively veto local attempts at renewal?
We won’t know until we find out how the Commissioners’ hearing next week goes, and whether the dozens of people prepared to argue against the plan can persuade the committee to rule against the diocese. But if they do, and a precedent is set by which STP and its ilk can prevent reorganisation nationwide, it’s hard not to fear for the long-term future of the church.
The Biobank data leak: Privacy, knowledge and the humility of faith over sight
Our discussion today begins with the concerning news that a world-leading database of medical records, the UK’s Biobank, has suffered an embarrassing leak after hundreds of thousands of confidential records were put up for sale on a Chinese website. Biobank is a pioneering collection of data from half a million Brits, who altruistically donated their records, blood, DNA and more for medical research. But how can we balance the competing demands of strict medical confidentiality with the growing need for big data for both cutting-edge research and thrusting commercial development? Is privacy a particularly Christian idea anyway? Should we be celebrating these altruistic souls for their service despite the personal risks of leaks? And what does the Biblical narrative and the limitations God places on his image-bearers have to say about our modern grasping for all-encompassing knowledge?
Sorry, no time for the quickfire links this week. A bumper crop next week to make up for it. Thanks for reading, and please continue to share The Critical Friend far and wide. Special thanks go to those who pay £5 a month to help support my writing and sustain independent church journalism into the future; join them here:
Tim, thank you for highlighting (again!) the pernicious way that safeguarding has frequently been used to escalate pastoral disputes. It is one of the (several) key things that demotivates clergy and makes them feel unsafe.