I don’t often look back over my shoulder at the fortunes of the poor Church of England, but there are moments when what takes place there acts as a barometric measure of the struggle for our civilisation, and this affects us all.
Dr Bernard Randall is a gifted intellectual Anglican clergyman. But what has happened to him is worthy of a Greek tragedy. In fact, it’s actually hard to get your head round and believe it can happen in our society. But it has.
His tragic history acts as barometer of how serious the anti-Christian storm has become.
Bernard‘s work in The Church of England had a stellar beginning. He graduated from the university of Oxford gaining a PhD. He went to work at Cambridge as both a Chaplain and Dean of Religious Studies. After a few years at the top of Higher Education he decided that he wanted to work in educating the young, and so became a Chaplain at a school, Trent College, in Derbyshire.
The school was sufficiently embedded in Anglican culture to have an Anglican Chaplain and Anglican chapel and it advertised itself as offering to the children it educated an Anglican Christian ethos. So far so good. They were lucky to get a man as gifted, qualified and articulate as Bernard Randall.
‘Educate and Celebrate’ enters the school
Things went badly wrong, as is the present pattern and strategy of the culture wars, when the forces of sexual revolution under the guise of an agency pushing and practicing the indoctrination of woke ideology, were brought into the school to do some training for staff and children.
An LGBT advocacy group called ‘Educate and Celebrate’ was invited into this school to implement their ‘gold standard inclusive curriculum’ (which elsewhere they extended to nursery school children.)
“The organisation’s mission was to embed education on gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation into schools and other organizations, with a focus on primary and secondary education. It aimed to reduce homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia through whole-school programs, including staff training, curriculum integration, policy updates, and community events. The charity worked with over 100 schools, providing resources like Pride-themed alphabet books for young children and workshops on “breaking the gender binary.””
Someone in the school had decided they would be the ideal partnering agency to run a staff training day.
(Elly Barnes on You Tube-Educate & Celebrate)
The person leading the training day, called Elly Barnes, explained to the staff what they were doing and why they were doing it, and as part of the workshop the staff were encouraged to stand up and chant “smash heteronormativity”
The facts, (and they matter here in terms of exposing the strategy of the wokeists) were that ‘Educate and Celebrate’ had got entry to the school under false credentials.
Although they had got their funding from some aspect of the Government, they were not accredited. They had money, but no oversight of accountability. They were not recognised by ‘Ofsted’, the education watchdog and over-seeing educational authority. Ms. Barnes mis-presented the credentials of the organisation; firstly by misleading the staff by telling them that gender identity was protected under the iniquitous Equality Act (eg they were legally obliged to implement her programme), and secondly that her organisation was registered by Ofsted, when in fact it wasn’t.
The subsequent fate of ‘Educate and Celebrate’ need detain us no further than to note that it became defunct. It got closed down. Though not before it had accessed schools across the country country teaching Queer Theory, a philosophy called the ‘gender unicorn’, and telling school authorities that they needed to remove the terms ‘boys and girls’ from the school environment.
The Paedophilia and the Charity Commission
It’s probably worth exploring the link between this LGBT Charity and their promotion of paedophilia. When the Charity Commission (which supervises organisations claiming charitable status) took a closer look at the people running it, they were so disturbed that they closed it down.
And not surprisingly. We can make our own minds up in part by taking note of three of the patrons of the group.
Steven Island had been jailed for 24 years for a series of sex offences against children. Another Patron, a transgender comic called Jordan Gray, as part of his act stripped naked on Channel 4 TV, and played the piano with his genitalia.
Jordan Gray (above) is on record for suggesting he went into schools to “talk about gender“ on behalf of ‘Educate and Celebrate’ adding that “toddlers kind of get it straight away“ thus exposing the focus on paedophilia.
Peter Tatchell, who has a very well established public reputation as an LGBT advocate, has been unable to hide his historic enthusiasm for child sex, given that in 1997 he went on record claiming the children age between nine and 13 can “gain great joy“ in having sex with adults.
The Charity commission closed the organisation down in part because of its misrepresentation of its credentials, but also because of the questions over the patrons. Nonetheless, the devastation that they left behind them includes LGBT indoctrination, their extension into the sexualisation of small children, and the crushing of opponents, like Dr Bernard Randall.
Bernard Randall raises concerns
So back to Trent College.
Bernard Randall, now both teacher and the Chaplain, decided that he needed to raise his concerns with senior management about inviting ‘Educate and Celebrate’ into a school with an Anglican and Christian ethos. We’re not in a position to know the extent to which the LGBTQ agenda was embedded into the senior management of Trent College, but his concerns were swept aside by the Management.
The children however were curious, and asked their Chaplain why they were having the LGBT stuff inflicted on them, so Bernard Randall gave a sermon in the school’s Anglican Chapel, in which he explained Anglican teaching on marriage and identity and told his congregation that it was okay for people to question and debate LGBT ideology and make up their own minds. What almost any observer would consider a reasonable and responsible action of his, produced an intensely adverse reaction from the school management.
The situation escalates
Without being informed, his employers Trent College, reported him to the government terrorist watchdog ‘Prevent’ (originally intended to have the purpose of monitoring and reporting Islamic violent terrorism) for “religious extremism”. Not content with that he was reported to the Local Government Authority’s safeguarding officer as a ‘potential safeguarding risk’.
Some few crumbs of comfort may be had from discovering that both Prevent and the safeguarding officials at the local authority refused to pay any attention to this, and responded that Bernard Randall had no case to answer.
Sadly the Church of England was unable to muster the same basic competence.
When Trent College, his employers approached the Church of England safeguarding team in the diocese of Derby, where they were situated, the safeguarding team investigated Dr Randall, and with disastrous consequences. He was about to have his professional life destroyed by his own Church.
Meanwhile as Covid broke out, the school took the opportunity to make him redundant during the pandemic. So now having been betrayed by his employers at the school, the more lasting damage was about to take place at the hands of a lady bishop.
The Diocese intervenes
In an extraordinary step the Church of England England’s local safeguarding team decided that Randall’s moderate, carefully theologically articulated and widely accepted expression of the Church of England’s belief on sexual identity, produced a ‘safeguarding risk’. And that his promotion of biblical teaching on marriage also presented what they called “a risk factor“.
The Diocesan Safeguarding Team came to the decision that it required him to undergo an independent safeguarding assessment by a psychologist, whose professional qualifications and primary expertise lay in the assessment of sex offenders. Randall refused to accept that he needed to be assessed by a psychologist, and so declined.
He took the view thatg to accept such an such an assessment would be a tacit admission that he had done something wrong and that it needed investigating. At this point the inept Bishop Of Derby, The Rt Rev’d Libby Lane, took the decision that he would no longer be allowed to officiate at Church services and withdrew his episcopal license.
Worse was to come.
The Archbishop steps in
Disturbed and trapped by this extraordinary action from his Diocese and his Bishop, Dr Randall pursued a complaint of misconduct over the decision by Libby Lane. This triggered the intervention by the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. (He didn’t know it then, but his incompetence over handling safeguarding concerns would require his own resignation shortly.)
Welby decided to support Libby Lane. He refused to entertain the complaint against her for misconduct by Randall.
The next dramatic step in this convoluted and corrupt process came when a senior Church legal office responsible for clergy discipline was brought in to examine the decision-making process.
He found that the Arhcbishop had misunderstood the scope of his power and “was plainly wrong.”
He found that the effective blacklisting of Randall was ‘egregious and a gross error’ and said that there was no evidence to conclude that he was a ‘safeguarding risk’.
Before you clap and cheer this dear reader, don’t imagine that the C of E is capable of putting right injustice and incompetence. For while the good news from this is that Justin Welby was forced to order a review of the safeguarding process within the Diocese of Derby – nothing has yet happened. The whole review has simply got stuck in the long grass. Bernard Randall is still blacklisted. You judge whether this is likely to be mendacity or incompetence, but for Bernard Randall, the result is the same.
The legal battle
Betrayed by his employers, his diocese, his bishop, and his Archbishop, enter the British Justice system.
Bernard Randall sued his former employers for unjust dismissal at the Nottingham Justice Centre before Judge Victoria Butler ,who was accompanied by a member of a Trade Union called Jed Perkins.
Judge Butler and Jed Perkins found against Randall on every point.
Given the absurdity of such a result, you might wonder if they came to the case with any pre-existing prejudice? And if you did, you would be right. Jed Perkins was later discovered to have expressed his fervent atheist views on Twitter in language that is too offensive to reproduce here.
Supported by the Christian Legal Centre, the Judicial Conduct Investigation Office subsequently looked at the way in which Randall‘s Case had been handled. The judge and the lay assessor both received a formal rebuke.
So in this disturbing account, the good news from this is that Bernard Randall was allowed to present his case for unjust dismissal afresh, in the hope that he might receive a fair hearing from members of the court who are not irredeemably biased against Christianity. He goes to court today.
And that’s where we are as of this moment. You might want to pray for Bernard Randall.
Where things stand now
We can hope that the legal system will treat him in a fair and more open-minded manner than he experienced the first time, but what about The Church of England?
Bernard Randall is still black-listed by his denomination for giving a careful responsible, well measured and honest Christian interpretation of the right of the individual to make their own mind up about the competing ideologies they are presented with.
That the Church of England still considers this to be a safeguarding risk is a serious reflection on its incompetence and confusion.
A wider cultural reckoning
What should our response to the circumstances be?
Certainly to pray for Bernard Randall as he seeks justice from the legal system from his employers and from his denomination.
But we need to be no doubt at all that the ‘Christianophobia’, the anti-Christian bias, the assault on Christian sexual ethics and anthropology, has become deeply embedded within the institutions of the culture that we live in. With astonishing rapidity, within only a few short years, we’ve been transformed from a Christian society, to a post Christian Society, and now to an anti Christian society.
Conclusion: The Arrival of an Anti-Christian Society
What we are now confronting is not merely cultural drift or political turbulence, but the emergence of a society whose organising assumptions are increasingly anti-Christian.
Its governing narratives deny transcendence; its moral frameworks invert Christian anthropology; its institutions—legal, educational, corporate, and even ecclesial—are being re-engineered around an ethic that treats historic Christianity as a threat, rather than an inheritance. The Christian vision of the human person, once the foundation of our civilisation, is now recast as an obstacle to “progress.”
This does not mean that faith is finished. It means the terms of engagement have changed. Christians will need to recover clarity, courage, and a deep interior life in order to withstand what comes next. Renewal will not arrive through accommodation, nor through nostalgia for a world that has already passed. It will come through fidelity: families, parishes, schools, and small communities that choose to live the Christian life in full, without apology.
The redeeming paradox of Christian history is that the Church often becomes strongest when the surrounding culture grows most hostile. If we are entering an anti-Christian society, then we are also entering the conditions in which saints are formed.