‘Power is a powerful drug and the detox process is hard’

One of the most insightful speeches at the Church of England's General Synod in July came from The Revd Lindsay Llewellyn-Macduff, the Bishop of Rochester’s Chaplain. She is neither conservative nor evangelical, but her diagnosis was still apt.

The speech came in a debate about a redress scheme for survivors of abuse within the Church, but it has far wider implications.

‘Redress’, she said, ‘seems the obvious solution to the inheritance the Church of England are trying earnestly to process. But however good this looks I don’t think this redress will necessarily end the circle of mistrust, grievance, and injury that we keep lapping. And I don’t think it is the solution because I think there is a deeper problem, and we will keep circling this drain until we address it – because the Church of England has a problem with power.’

Deeply buried wrong

Llewellyn-Macduff went on to describe her understanding of ‘root sin’, as, ‘a wrong so deeply buried, often generations deep, that a community or an organisation can no longer properly see it and can no longer act outside it. It means an organisation cannot just draw a line under it and move on because every attempt to redress it, to fix it, or to stop it from continuing, is in fact shaped by it and destined to compound it. Our root sin, I think, is our historic and present collusion with power.’

It is easy to see the battles going on for control of, or at least a slice of, the Church of England. It is easy to point fingers at the power games, cover-ups and back-room conversations that have led to mistrust and pragmatic compromise in the ‘corridors of power’. But this sin runs much deeper and much wider.

As protestant Christians in England, whether church or chapel, we are used to being respectable. In fact, it could be said that we strive to be respectable. It is only very recently that the question of ‘class’ has begun to raise its head in evangelical circles – as we begin to recognise how our church culture has perhaps been tainted by secular middle-class assumptions about what ‘success’ and ‘family-life’ look like.

Our seat at the cultural table

As Australian pastor Steve McAlpine says, we are used to being the ‘good guys’ and we find it hard to discover that: ‘The cultural, political and legal guns that Christianity once held are now trained on us.’ We struggle with being seen as morally evil by our society, and even by our own children having assumed that they would follow in our footsteps. McAlpine talks of our shock that: ‘The seat at the cultural table that we assumed was ours for keeps has increasingly been given to others.’

Struggling to respond

For many of us the speed of change is incomprehensible, and the temptation to either catastrophise or believe it will all return to ‘normal’ is strong. The challenge of accepting we are a minority, and a not much respected minority, is hard. There is a danger that, as we are pushed out of the secular sphere, we merely take our assumptions into ever-smaller parts of the Christian world – trying to hold on to whatever power we can.

Because power is a powerful drug and the detox process is hard.

For faithful Anglicans, there is a further test: whether we can accept that the future of the Anglican world does not lie in decisions made by Englishmen (or even other white middle-class men from the colonies) but by decisions made by the leaders of the Global South. The extent to which we submit to their leadership, or seek to control it to our own ends, will be a test of our willingness to deal with our root sin.