“Thank God I am not one of those,” is a prayer fewer and fewer Christians can pray about OTHER denominations. Remorselessly, like some demonic harvesting machine, more and more varieties of Christians have been swept up by scandal, mostly to do with leaders who prey upon their flocks.
First they came for the Catholics, then the televangelists, then the Southern Baptists in the United States, but instead of being like Martin Niemöller’s famous “first they came for …” list, which was about people who should have been stood up for in Nazi Germany, this is a list of terrible behaviour by Christian men, who cannot be defended.
Of the crisis now sweeping the Southern Baptists, one of their leaders, Albert Mohler, wrote: “We thought this was a Roman Catholic problem. The unbiblical requirement of priestly celibacy and the organized conspiracy of silence within the hierarchy helped to explain the cesspool of child sex abuse that has robbed the Roman Catholic Church of so much of its moral authority. When people said that Evangelicals had a similar crisis coming, it didn’t seem plausible – even to me. I have been president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for twenty-five years. I did not see this coming.”
That was written after the downfall of several key leaders in 2018, and before a second tsunami hit this year – the uncovering of some 700 cases of sexual abuse by 263 church leaders, due to the hard work of the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News.
This year, my tribe, conservative evangelical Anglicans, can join the list. The British version of Sydney Anglicanism, a group called “Reform”, is dealing with the exposure of a man called Jonathan Fletcher who for decades headed one of their key churches, Emmanuel Wimbledon (yes, near the tennis courts in south-east London).
Fletcher engaged in spanking young men on their naked buttocks with a sneaker and nude massages as part of his discipling (not discipline) of them. His behaviour is described in a public statement to a recent meeting of the Evangelical Ministry Assembly in London.
This behaviour was engaged in by several leaders in what is known as the Iwerne camping movement, a key part of upper-class evangelicalism in Britain. Public school boys (that is, from upper-class private schools) were evangelised through a holiday camp system. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, Alpha’s Nicky Gumbel and the late John Stott all were Iwerne boys – as were virtually all of the posher sort of English evangelical leaders. (That list includes possible victims rather than perpetrators.)
A certain perpetrator is the late John Smyth QC, who was banished to South Africa by the Iwerne movement, only to continue his abuse. There are possibly four other leaders of the camps yet to be exposed.
Sydney Anglican leaders have been linked with Fletcher for a long time but the British evangelicals concealed the scandal – and the cover-up.
“We in Sydney have known Jonathan Fletcher for many years as a visiting preacher,” Mark Thompson, principal of Moore College, tells Eternity. “He was last invited to speak at Moore College during his visit to Australia in 2014. As principal, I only became aware of concerns surrounding other aspects of Jonathan’s ministry in January 2019, and of the details and extent of those concerns when they became public recently.”
That possibly came about because of the tragic plight of one Iwerne victim, Andy Lines, who, upon being appointed as a bishop to lead a conservative Anglican alternative to the Church of England, had to take a break.
“I have been coming to terms with elements of spiritual manipulation in my own life,” Andy Lines said in a statement released by GAFCON (Global Anglican Futures Conference) UK.
“It has been a very hard and painful process, requiring months of professional counselling for me to come to terms with what I have experienced. It took considerable time before the light went on, and has required lots of support during three months in Australia.
“However, I now realise the nature of what was happening. I have come to realise that this can happen to strong as well as vulnerable people. I have become aware that the particular manipulation and control I have experienced has been experienced by a number of others.”
It is now clear that Lines was a victim of Fletcher. Eternity is aware that several other key leaders in evangelical Anglicanism also came from the Wimbledon church, and may also be affected.
It was a bit of a mystery at the time why Lines was coming to Australia, soon after his appointment as a missionary bishop.
(GAFCON links conservative Anglicans and constitutes a majority of the world’s Anglicans.)
George Conger of Anglican Unscripted, a video newscast in the Anglican Church, has reported that the other international connections of GAFCON were also kept in the dark.
In a statement to the Church Times, Fletcher described his interactions as “lighthearted forfeits”. He added, “These sessions categorically do not have erotic or sexual overtones, and I have never coerced or intended to coerce anyone into an arrangement. If any have felt pressurised by me to do this, I apologise.”
Judgment, the Bible says, begins at the house of God (1 Peter 4:17). At a time when we may be tempted to point the finger at others outside the church, this Scripture is the one being fulfilled. Judgment is indeed coming to each of the various houses of God.
And nor you are, old chap!
This is sad, but that we are hearing so much about scandal in the Church (the Body of Christ) is probably more to do with the revolution in communications than a sudden breakdown in Christian morality.(edited)
The influence of the Prosperity Gospel, New Age teachings and the LGBT+ movement, plus a general loss of faith in the authority of the Bible have all played a part in weakening the faith. But God has not changed, and what He wants from us all is genuine repentance so that we may be forgiven and restored to holiness.
Nice to see you posting here old friend, and I hope all is well with you and yours?
My regards to all at “you know where!”
I agree with you but let me respond by saying first of all we Christians like/want to believe the best about people, and we think their intentions are always well meaning even if misguided.
The fact is that consequently good Christian people are easily hoodwinked.
We want to understand their situation, we are sympathetic, we try to help.
But all too often we forget that whether we like it or not, we are engaged in a battle with the enemy of our souls. (Ephesians 6).
Luke 16:8 “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light.”
So in certain denominations over the generations, over the decades, good Christians have stood by and watched as resolutions have been passed which have allowed that enemy to infiltrate more of his servants into the Church and slowly corrupt it.
May I recommend that our mutual friends follow Anglicans Unscripted 509 -19?
This ++Foley Beach is a good sincere Christian, and I think many of our friends who are serious about their faith would respond warmly to what he says..
ps Please pass on my kind regards to Happy Jack, I hope he remains in good health.
There! I knew you couldn’t conceal your affection for an old man for long!
The COPD is not too bad, I can do most of what I need to do, and certainly since I left the blog “of which we shall not speak” I have become even busier! Had my 73rd birthday in May, wife and I help out at an exercise class for the elderly in the chapel once a week, (we are the only ones fit enough to move the chairs out of the way!) Also an honorary member of a girls/ tambourine class, led by an ex-Salvation Army lassie of 82.. I am useless because I can’t keep up with the synchronised tambourine waving..
Home group continues healthily, got involved with the BPCA and had the leader come and speak at a nearby church, and so on.
“There is no retirement in the Kingdom of God”, but increasingly I find myself getting ready for the next big step into Eternity with our Lord Jesus!
And I miss you and the general banter, wit and occasional outbursts of good, solid debate.. (Anton, The Chef, David etc. etc,
Away with you Clive, I’m getting soppy..
(I upticked you because we remain friends, even if you are of Scottish ancestry).
Danny is sticking his tongue out…
:0)
You were a victim of un-Christian behaviour by people professing to be Christians in leadership roles?
You do not have to answer, but it would help understand you if you did.
If that be verified then please forgive me for sometimes being less than considerate towards some of your posts. Are you then saying that most folk who regularly post here already know this?
On a previous blog there was a poor chap (amongst others) who had experienced abuse here in the UK, and was still looking for justice to be done..
I have never experienced anything like this, although whilst in the Merchant Marine as a young man I punched some passenger who “made advances.”
So may our Lord Jesus Christ bless you and repair those damaged parts of you and make you even stronger..
It is not ‘now clear that Lines was a victim of Fletcher’. He has been as reticent as Jonathan Fletcher about what has been going on. And when he says, “I have come to realise that this can happen to strong as well as vulnerable people,” is he implying that he was one of the strong ones or one of the vulnerable ones? Either way, he was an adult, not a child, and like Fletcher a Christian leader. If you are gunned down by a terrorist, you are a victim. To characterise as a victim an adult Christian leader who, of his own free will, has participated in scandalous behaviour is surely to indicate that the malaise extends to the commentators as well as those commentated upon.
… and then there was the case of Abp. Hepworth of TAC who claimed as a 28 yr old 6’2” 220 # man to have been raped by a RC priest.
ReebHerb. Are you making light of what happened to Hepworth? Going on the negative outcome of the most recent allegation? I wonder whether the outcome would have been the same considering more recent changes taken by Rome, of which victims, especially lay, still remain highly critical. With Hepworth, it was multiple cases, not only the most recent case. One of the angering points to victims is the incredulity expected from the public at large, which probably discourages other victims from seeking redress, and extension of what has been going on all along. May I suggest to readers the following link concerning Hepworth?
https://foolishnesstotheworld.wordpress.com/2013/06/06/the-latest-on-archbishop-john-hepworth/
No I’m not making light of Hepworth. His claim doesn’t meet the smell test. The man can blame who or what ever but he hurt many of us deeply.
It appears to be a term and condition of our existence to be, at various times, both sexual predator and prey. The “MeToo” movement is surprising in that the frustration with the modern sexual ethic prompted so many to speak out and even more so that, once the genii was out, even more did not. Unfortunately men did not get an opportunity to jump on the bandwagon because while men are often depicted as the predators, men (and boys in particular) are also prey.
So what’s my point? I think few men get to adulthood without being on one side or the other (or both) of the that term of existence. It is hard to imagine that any man of 20 something will not have encountered this. I would believe this is a constant battle for all and any one of us could crumble and fail under the right conditions. That the flag is raised and time taken to reflect (and fix as appropriate) is commendable. Stones and glass houses …