The following address was delivered by the Rt Revd Vivienne Faull, Bishop of Bristol to the Diocesan Synod that took place at Pattern Church, Swindon on Saturday 23 November 2024.
At the start of September this year, I spent 2 weeks in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, working with the Anglican Communion Safe Church Commission with Anglican church leaders from central Africa and across the world.
A key session focused on the reasons abuse happens, and particularly why it happens in churches. In short, abuse is a possibility in any organisation where there is an imbalance of power. One person has more than another and uses that power to manipulate another. Most people who have power have no desire to harm others and use their power for the good of others.
However, there are some who treat others badly – bullying, harassment, verbal abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, spiritual abuse. And there will be those who desire to abuse children or adults who are vulnerable and target them specifically, building relationships which lead to abuse.
A church is a situation where people who are relatively powerful are brought together with people who have less power. Those in churches who have less power include those who are ordained, lay ministers and lay officers within a hierarchical organisation (literally ruled by priests).
Those in churches who have less power include whose who are less valued in a hierarchical organisations, those with an identity not seen as theologically normative, for example because of their age, race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality or language, or because of their physical attributes or other social factors including class and wealth, marital status or position.
In Bulawayo we explored at depth how to recognise and resist the workings of abusive and harmful power, how to put measures in place to prevent abuse and harm, and acknowledge the power we do hold and use that power for good.
Safe churches are places where all members of the community are deeply committed to protecting and caring for one another, and particularly those whose circumstances make them vulnerable.
Central to the introduction to the conference was an address by the Mayor of Bulawayo, David Coltart, who, some years previously, as a leading Zimbabwean QC, inquired into the activities of John Smyth. His determined work broadened the scope of Keith Makin’s inquiry and showed how John Smyth was, with the support of friends, enabled to leave the UK and continue an already well-established horrific pattern of physical and emotional and spiritual and psychological and sexual abuse derived from a horribly warped psychosexual identity and an understanding of Christian theology which was a terrible and dangerous distortion of the gospel.
My work with the Safe Church Commission, and on the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Safeguarding in Faith Communities has taught me how deep the damage is to those who have been abused, and what it costs for a survivor to disclose. Those who do disclose often find themselves in a worse place than before disclosure. They feel they have lost the only control they had and that is like releasing a volcano, and that they have handed the key to their most private experiences to someone who now has huge power over them (as their abuser had and has).
Most wish they had never disclosed and carry the heavy loads of isolation and shame. And that is because disclosures of abuse are often so badly handled, particularly by organisations, and even more particularly by religious organisations. That is what the victims of Smyth have had to endure and still do endure.
In the last 10 days I have received frequent requests from national media to talk about Makin. I have said I will talk about survivors and the reasons why abuse continues to occur in the church. The media requests were restricted to my views on the Archbishop of Canterbury. The stories of survivors were, once more, being pushed to the margins.
I want the Diocese of Bristol to be a place where safety is possible because each of us understands that we have a responsibility to acknowledge how power operates and how each of us can prevent its abuse, or when it happens, will speak out about our concerns.
I want the Diocese of Bristol to work effectively and determinedly to be a place where those who have endured abuse are not re-abused by the way their disclosure, however faltering, confused or uncertain, is received.
I know from the report on our recent INEQE audit, that we have made progress, particularly in our parishes and particularly thanks to our Parish Safeguarding Officers; the outcome is very positive. But we have so much more to do locally, regionally, and nationally. Please help us, in discussion this morning, for the sake of the wounded Christ, to attend to those vulnerable to wounding, and whose lives are constrained or distorted by the church locally or nationally. I plead with you to make our church safe.
The Rt Revd Vivienne Faull
Bishop of Bristol