Dear Church Society Members
Thank you for your concern and prayers regarding two matters we wrote to you about on 12th February.
One of those allegations was of dishonesty against our Director, Lee Gatiss. We are pleased that this has now been resolved. Following our own review, Church Society Council consider that the complainants, Nick Howard and James Mendelsohn, have not provided compelling evidence to substantiate their accusations of dishonesty. The complainants have responded to indicate that they do not wish for an independent third-party review, which we offered to commission.
The other aspect to the allegation concerns toleration of alleged antisemitism from someone who used to be a member of Church Society. Church Society utterly repudiates antisemitism, as our Director wrote in a blogpost, along with all other forms of racism, as abhorrent to the gospel and offensive to God. We were willing to have the allegations concerning Church Society’s relationship with Stephen Sizer considered by an independent third party, due to their seriousness, but that offer has also been declined.
We therefore want to make it clear that our Director, the Revd Dr Lee Gatiss, continues to have the full confidence and total support of Church Society’s Council and Staff. The delay in making this public statement was simply caused by our willingness and desire to look carefully at the claims and to be open to independent external scrutiny. We very much regret the time gap between the accusations in November 2020 and this exoneration, and wish to emphasise again, that at no point should our willingness to engage with external review have been taken to indicate or assume any suspicion of guilt.
We remain grateful for your prayers for all concerned, and are likewise thankful for your prayers, support and partnership as we continue working towards our great aim: the reformation and renewal of the Church of England in biblical faith.
Andrew Towner on behalf of the Church Society Council
“Church Society Review finds no evidence of misconduct” – but there does not appear to have been a review. This whole statement is s if from the Ministry of Truth.
The press release says otherwise. It speaks in the name of the entire council and staff. Have any of the council or staff said they disagree with the press release?
I am one of the two people named by Church Society in this missive.
Along with my friend, Nick Howard, I have had a longstanding grievance regarding how Church Society – and in particular its Director, Lee Gatiss – handled (or rather, failed to handle) the Stephen Sizer antisemitism scandal.
The Society’s Chairman invited us, in February, to submit our grievance to an independent review. We asked him who the independent reviewer would be. He declined to answer this question, saying that he would prefer to wait until he knew the details of the complaint. However, the details had been in the public domain for some time (bar one detail in a private Facebook group which he would have been able to access anyway) so he knew full well what any complaint would entail. His failure to answer left us with no confidence that the review would be genuinely independent. We therefore declined, instead inviting Church Society to respond publicly to our grievances point by point. They have not done so.
We invite readers of Anglican Ink simply to Google “Church Society and Antisemitism: A Failure of Leadership” and judge for themselves whether Lee Gatiss is exonerated.