Last Wednesday, 15 January 2025, two serendipitous events occurred. The first: on Thinking Anglicans just two opinion articles were listed , one by Gilo for ViaMedia News and one by me for Unadulterated Love.
Later the same day Thinking Anglicans posted an announcement from the Church of England reporting a delay in the legislation to introduce the Redress Scheme for survivors of Church-related abuse. . The previous day TA posted links to nine items related to abuse and the failures of safeguarding within the church from the November 2024 issue of the Journal of Anglican Studies, an issue is dedicated to Bishop Alan Wilson. Articles about abuse and safeguarding in the Church of England dominate news from and about the Church. Two blogs about belief in God were therefore a welcome contrast for me.
I posted a comment on TA about Gilo’s blog. Gilo explores where the Church is and what kind of person is needed to begin to repair the damage in the context of needing to appoint a new Archbishop of Canterbury. Gilo wrote: “almost every senior bishop who might be considered for the role of Archbishop of Canterbury is likely to have legacy ghosts trailing in their wake and waiting to haunt them.”
Gilo also writes as a survivor campaigner with a long-term bipolar condition. He tries to explore his own “possible belief in the possibility of god” in writing hymns. His hymns are attempts to picture a different kind of god, fleeting, provisional, yet able to transform, compared with the off-putting model the Church presents.
I commented that if any vital transformation of Christian culture is to be achieved Christians must confront and explore the question of what kind of God do we believe in. Few people write or talk about or explore this question. It is seen as being too risky and dangerous, but nothing fundamental will change if we don’t take the lid off the box inside which we hide our beliefs, uncertainties and disbeliefs about God.
Gilo responded wondering whether the word ‘belief’ or the word ‘god’ should be written in italics or placed in quotation marks. Nothing is certain for him; these heavily coded words are not straightforward. He added one of his post-modern, post-god hymns to his comment – it is a hymn I could sing. Reading his hymn was a very emotional experience for me, exploring possible belief in the possibility of god. Gilo and I are kindred spirits, I suspect. I yearn to be part of a community that is exploring from deep personal experience and wisdom the cosmic energy that pursues and infuses me, fleeting, fragile, provisional, transforming, emotional, inescapable essence, core of my being when I give time and presence to the moment.
Raising the God question
The Thinking Anglican listing of our two blogs together enabled a public conversation to develop about the question I have been striving to raise for years – where and how and with what community might I now join where recognition is given to the elusive ever-present god I haven’t believed in since the age of twelve? The looser god nourishes and nurtures, inspires and infuses and pursues and has never stopped being an inescapable presence in my life, able to transform and to which reality my life bears witness.
Sam Howsen’s podcasts
A second serendipitous event occurred later the same morning. I was alerted by a friend to the latest podcast by Sam Howsen “Can the New Archbishop Unite the Fractured Church?” , a conversation with my friend Robert Thompson delving into the challenges facing the Church of England under a new Archbishop. They discuss the divisions within the church, particularly regarding the abuse and covering up of it, the culture in synod and among bishops, and explore whether the next leader can bridge the gap and bring about unity.
I was already aware of Sam’s podcasts having watched his conversation with the Revd Dr Christopher Landau “2025 and Beyond: The Future of the Church of England” a couple of weeks ago. I knew Christopher when he was the BBC World Service’s religious affairs correspondent. As a BBC News trainee in London he joined his local parish church, a plant from Holy Trinity Brompton. He felt a calling to ordination, trained at Ripon College Cuddesdon and became an associate minister at St Aldates Church Oxford, as a chaplain with the Oxford Pastorate and an honorary cathedral chaplain at Christ Church. Having led the ‘ReSource Future’ process in 2017-18 he was appointed Director of ReSource in 2021.
Having watched Sam’s interview with Robert Thompson I spent some time watching some of his earlier podcasts. There are now twenty-nine videos examining what was good and what was destructive in the Anglican, Evangelical and Charismatic parts of the church. Sam believes this HTB/Soul Survivor/charismatic evangelical culture needs challenging.
.
Twenty years ago Sam worked as a youth worker in an HTB plant. In 2023 he started making videos about faith and his experience of exploitation of abuse in the Church of England. In the first video, posted on May 25, 2023, Sam talks about his experience aged 18/19. He had been on a Soul Survivor course in 1998 and was abused by Mike Pilavachi. It was the publicity surrounding Pilavachi in 2023 that provoked Sam into recording the first video.
A month ago Sam recorded a “first therapy session” with Dr Dougie Marks, a Health Psychologist, CBT Practitioner and Lecturer in Behavioural Sciences. . For me it’s fascinating to see someone recording a spontaneous conversation exploring his past, his background, his experience, and observing the changes that have taken place and his growing ability to understand his experience in the context of Christian life and ministry that was once normative for him and that he now understands to be abusive, characterised by the unhealthy psychological control exerted by pastors and leaders in evangelicalism. These were and are people who see themselves as immune from criticism because they have spiritual access to God and have a special authority that is often characteristic of the well-educated London elite evangelical set extending from Holy Trinity Brompton. It is a kind of mid-life crisis and a systemic crisis in the church, characterised by this particular set of often public school educated Oxbridge men – the characteristics of the Iwerne set. The whole contemporary Church of England ethos and programmes of church planting is related to the post-modern culture of making money, being successful, self-help 12 step programmes resourcing church growth.
Rethinking Christianity
Towards the end of their conversation Sam and Douglas reflect on where the conversation has brought them. More important for Sam now is that being a Christian is more about growing and flourishing as a person rather than growing churches, not that the two are mutually incompatible, but Sam’s involvement with HTB plants and Soul Survivor showed him how unhealthy it is to focus solely on successful numerical growth. The tragic results of this strategy are gradually being revealed, and the Church of England structures are desperately trying to cover everything up. He wants something to be rescued from the crisis enveloping the Church and the ill-health that has resulted.
At the very end of his most recent podcast, the interview with Robert Thompson, the wrap up at 44.27, Sam asks Robert what this year is going to look like and where do we go from here? Robert responds that we live in hope, that a new Archbishop will be appointed and that he hopes this person will exercise a more pastoral ministry. Urgent reform of the culture of the Church of England is now required both at the central level and within each diocese, and because of Justin’s resignation, the new ABC knows that urgent change is needed. There are real pastoral issues in the Church that need to be addressed.
I’m going to end this blog here. I had promised more in my last blog but this isn’t the blog I was expecting to write. As with Sam’s podcast, this isn’t the end. There will be more, but I don’t know where I and my stream of consciousness will be taken next. I like neat endings, but life isn’t about neat endings, even if the Church and its teachings about Jesus would like it to be so. Sam and Gilo are two people contributing in their own very particular ways to living and imagining and exploring both themselves and their life experience in the context of a Christian, Anglican Church environment and finding it wanting. They are both working on themselves, developing trust in their own intuitive wisdom, pursuing an open, expansive, healthier, more holistic awareness of the divine energies and presence in creation and evolution in this cosmic universe, focused on what the Christian Church labels God and on God’s Son Jesus Christ and on the energy at large in the cosmos, the Holy Spirit, and I am a fellow traveller and seeker with them.