The stamina of General Synod members is to be applauded.  They have faced more than thirty individual votes today and most of these votes were votes about voting. To be more accurate – they were about when Synod will meet to vote in future and how the votes for future General Synod members will take place.

Voting

‘When’ should be simple – except the clergy don’t like being away from home on a Sunday, or missing the last week of term when they want to be at events in their local church schools. Laity struggle with weekdays because they have to take holiday. Those with kids (lay and clergy) don’t want to meet during school holidays – which are hard to pin down because they tend to differ in different dioceses. Then of course the York Synod uses the University premises so cannot meet when the students are in residence.

As for ‘how’ – Synod managed to spend two hours discussing how many extra days needed to be included in the electoral timetable in order to deal with electronic glitches and diocesan staff holidays; whether lay candidates should be expected to publish their home addresses or be able to include ‘post-nominal letters’ on the voting ‘papers’; and whether lay people having to list their parish, which would not necessarily be the church where they worship (because that would be hard to prove), would lead to unconscious bias on the part of deanery Synod members when voting.

Redress for abuse

However, between these two topics, the focus of debate was on the far more important topic of how the Church of England will offer redress to those who have experienced abuse by church officers. It is a project to which the Church Commissioners have committed £150 million and which has taken four years to set up.

The Rt Revd Jonathan Gibbs, who was the lead bishop for safeguarding from 2020-23, brought the original motion to General Synod four years ago, offered wise advice, during the debate:

“A phrase that has been used earlier on was that ‘it should never have been needed because abuse should never have happened’ , and of course in one sense that is true, but there is a danger in adopting that approach because the risk is that we could end up thinking we can so order the life of the church that it could not happen, and the reality is that is never the case.  Sin happens, abuse happens, and we do need to have a healthy and realistic theology of human sinfulness which keeps us constantly on our guard.

The second thing, and I speak here, not only from my experience over those years I had the privilege of being involved in the church’s national safeguarding work but myself as a victim of childhood trauma… the flip side of being trauma informed is that we need to recognise the tendency of an institution to be defensive – self-defensive – when responding to such difficult matters and therefore we need also to build into our corporate life a continual self-reflection and examination, including help, possibly the need for external help.”

He went on to say that any review of the scheme needed to involve those who were independent of the scheme – people who can reflect back how it is being experienced. 

The full speech can be watched here.

It’s not simple – there were questions about whether alleged perpertrators or their surviving relatives should be involved in the process (no); the definition of spiritual abuse (to be decided); the meaning of the word ‘believe’; and questions about whether those who had had made use of interim funding would have that money deducted from their final settlement (no).

But in the end Synod voted in favour of both the Measure and the Rules associated with redress for abuse. Only time will tell whether this is a ‘pay them off, so we can move on’ moment or a sign of true repentance and a desire to walk wth the victims of abuse over the long term.

If the Bishop of Rochester has any say in the matter then the latter will be the answer – and it won’t take any more votes.