Dear Editor,
We were surprised to find a letter from Church Society [EN news report March] about our grievances in last month’s edition of Evangelicals Now. These are grievances regarding, respectively, Church Society’s bullying of a ministry couple, and its tolerance of anti-Semitism.
In the letter, published without our prior knowledge, Church Society sets out proposals for addressing our grievances. We have not given our consent to these proposals and are disappointed that Church Society did not obtain our consent before making its announcement. We fear the lack of prior consultation shows that Church Society is more concerned with the appearance of righteousness than with truly settling grievances justly.
Both grievances include evidence of dishonest conduct on the part of Church Society’s leaders. It should, therefore, be easy for the readers of Evangelicals Now to understand why we do not trust Church Society to control investigations into our grievances.
Simply describing an inquiry as an “independent investigation” does not make it so. The format proposed by Church Society fails to meet some of the most basic criteria of genuinely independent investigations. We have not even been told who the supposedly independent investigators would be! In our view, Church Society has no appetite for an investigation that truly meets the criteria of independence.
Church Society should simply address our grievances publicly on a point-by-point basis. We believe that if it does this, it will have no option other than to acknowledge wrongdoing and take restorative action. Our grievances are already in the public domain, and we believe the evidence of wrongdoing is plain to see. Church Society’s claim that the evidence has not yet been forthcoming is, in our eyes, a characteristically misleading statement.
Our grievances can be accessed via https://kateeandreyev.com/2021/02/24/church-society-bullying/https://tinyurl.com/meksyr6u and https://nickhoward76.medium.com/church-society-and-antisemitism-a-failure-of-leadership-c6ccbfc2c7d7https://tinyurl.com/3zd94cru .
Yours sincerely,
Kate Andreyev, Nick Howard and James Mendelsohn’
