Though he has a track record of high-profile campaigning for political correctness in the Church of England, the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, Martyn Percy, has been inclined to go off message. Is this the reason the increasingly Marxist CofE establishment has turned against him?
The British satirical and investigative magazine Private Eye has reported on the decision by the CofE’s National Safeguarding Team to set up a ‘core group’ to investigate Percy, who is both head of Oxford University’s most prestigious college and senior resident cleric at the city’s cathedral, for alleged safeguarding failures. Percy’s enemies among the academics (called Censors) at Christ Church are the complainants.
According to Private Eye: ‘The dean himself is not represented on the Core Group, and not allowed to know who is on it or when it meets. But two of the complainants from the college, including Senior Censor Geraldine Johnson, are members. It is hard to see what the group can achieve. It can’t question the students whose safeguarding issues the dean allegedly mishandled, since they did not make any complaints and their identity is not known. It can’t ask the dean, since the students spoke to him in confidence.’
The Eye concluded: ‘The National Safeguarding Team has now asked Dean Percy to stand down during the inquiry, even though nobody believes he poses a risk to anyone. Professor Johnson has indicated that if Percy is still in post when the governing body next meets, she will put a notice on the college’s website to the effect that Christ Church’s safeguarding protocols are all robust except in respect of the dean – richly ironic, given that one of the Censors’ previous complaints about Percy was that he wanted them to take their safeguarding responsibilities more seriously.’
It would seem that the NST’s Stasi-like treatment of Percy follows a distinctly Marxist pattern of behaviour towards fellow revolutionaries inclined to independent thought. That Percy has been a leader in the CofE revolution against traditional biblical orthodoxy cannot be doubted. In 2017 he was in the vanguard of the campaign against the Bishop designate of Sheffield, the Anglo-Catholic suffragan Bishop of Burnley, Philip North.
In article on the revisionist Modern Church website, Percy wrote that North’s opposition to female priests would ‘cause significant pastoral and public damage to the church’. He claimed there was a ‘substantial amount of resistance building up’ to North’s appointment, arguing that he should withdraw because his becoming a diocesan bishop would ‘represent the toleration of gender-based sectarianism’.
After a concerted campaign against North by female clergy in Sheffield Diocese and their male accomplices, Percy got his wish. North did not take up the role and the second choice for the nomination, the former Dean of Liverpool, Pete Wilcox, got the job.
But Percy has also criticised the culture of bureaucratic managerialism in the CofE. In 2016 he wrote an afterword in his book, The Future Shapes of Anglicanism, arguing that Archbishop Justin Welby’s ‘Renewal and Reform’ programme for the CofE was moving towards ‘centralised management, organisational apparatus and the kind of creeping concerns that might consume an emerging suburban sectarianism, instead of a national church’.
He wrote: ‘It will take more to save the Church of England than a blend of the latest management theory, secular sorcery with statistics and evangelical up-speak.’
He was blistering about Welby’s leadership, arguing that a cure for the ailing established Church ‘would require a much deeper ecclesial comprehension than the present leadership currently exhibit … There seems to be no sagacity, serious science or spiritual substance to the curatives being offered’.
He declared that the CofE ‘is being slowly kettled into becoming a suburban sect, corralling its congregations, controlling its clergy and centralising its communication. Instead of being a local, dispersed, national institution, it is becoming a bureaucratic organisation, managing its ministry and mission – in a manner that is hierarchically scripted’.
For the intellectual non-conformism on display in this withering critique, it would seem that Percy has earned the hatred of the CofE’s Politburo and is now paying the price.
Julian Mann is an evangelical journalist based in Morecambe, Lancashire, and author of Christians in the Community of the Dome
I’m not sure what planet you’d have to live on to be unaware that today’s Church of England is corrupt to its core. Rather like the court of Henry VIII, the closer you get to the seat of power the more important it is not to upset the wrong people. In practice that will mean saying as little as possible of any substance, and never saying anything at all unless you already know what those around the ‘king’ are thinking.
Martyn Percy may have taken the scalp of Bishop North; but it was a politically unhelpful scalp even though it did please the all important women clergy at the time. However to have taken a direct pop at the ‘king’ was rash beyond all reason. In both cases he probably acted out of genuine conviction: that will be considered a serious weakness and not help his case one bit.
I understand huge sums in legal fees have already been spent over this spat in the common room and that he was offered a generous sum to go quietly. If I were him I’d take the money. But I’d first spend a proportion of it on a fine statue of Justin Welby to be placed by the Thames in Oxford. It would be the easiest thing to let the students know that Welby was once an oil man in Nigeria…
“Instead of being a local, dispersed, national institution, it is becoming a bureaucratic organisation, managing its ministry and mission – in a manner that is hierarchically scripted’.”
I think that comes through loud and clear in this article. Good heavens!
Two other articles this week are worth reading on the Martyn Percy situation.
https://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/more-christ-church-shenanigans/
One on Archbishop Cranmer site explores Christ Church Oxford and their attack on McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life.
The other on Surviving Church blog (written by me) looks at the formation and implications of the NST core group. Extract below:
“…But more disturbingly, I have heard on good authority and am aware that
others have also heard, that at a recent Governing Board of the
college, one of the senior college figures boasted to the Trustees “the
wily Censors have made sure they complained to the right part of the
National Safeguarding Team”. If true, both ends of that statement are
extraordinary. I don’t know if the NST are aware of this. I don’t
imagine so. There would be an outcry across the Church if the NST had
been complicit in their own ugly appropriation. It would raise questions
about who is controlling different bits of this structure, and in
particular who is pulling the strings of the “right part” of
the National Safeguarding Team. I suspect Synod members would throw
their hands up in horror and ask: how the hell does one rescue a
Church’s national safeguarding so far down a road of ethical
dysfunctionality?”
“There would be an outcry across the Church if the NST had been complicit in their own ugly appropriation.”
Why? How is this sort of behaviour unusual in CofE these days?
Percy’s own behaviour towards Philip North is a case in point, but its not the only one.
The situation you refer to had nothing at all to do with weoponized safeguarding or misappropriation of the Church of England’s National Safeguarding Team. These things are uglier and more sinister in their reverberations than any church politics or culture wars.
I know both men. And consider both to be people I would trust in the hierarchy of the Church to speak with integrity and honesty. And I know that church-context abuse survivors have strong support from each. Martyn was approached by us to write a chapter in Letters to a Broken Church – and wrote an excellent chapter following the Chichester hearings at the Inquiry. Had I known Philip at the time, he would have been one of very few bishops we would have approached for a chapter. His radio interview on BBC Radio 4 Sunday programme was unlike anything we’d heard from any other bishop (with the exception of Alan Wilson). A remarkable interview and one that all Synod members should listen to if they haven’t already. Sadly, our book was already by that stage at print process – so we couldn’t include Philip.
https://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/bishop-of-burnley-calls-for-mandatory-reporting/
Both Martyn Percy and Philip North have given their voices fearlessly as allies to the plight of survivors. I salute both men. As voices of courage.
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