GENERAL SYNOD 2020 – QUESTIONS – JULY 11
General Synod – Questions
on Wednesday, 8 July 2020 at 12.26 pm by Peter Owen
categorised as Church of England, General Synod
The Questions paper for Saturday’s virtual meeting of the Church of England’s General Synod has been published today. This contains the 131 submitted questions and their answers. A total of two hours has been allocated on Saturday for supplementary questions and answers.
Other papers are here.
The meeting will be streamed online here.
“While praying in a church building is very important for clergy (and others), it could not be considered an essential practice.” – Archbishop of Canterbury
Words fail me.
Mr Martin Sewell (Rochester) to ask the Chair of the House of Bishops: Q27
“The Church has embraced the concept of “unconscious bias”: will the Secretary General and the NSSP urgently review the composition of the Martyn Percy Core Group and confirm to General Synod members within a month, that having considered the importance of fair and proper process, they can assure us that that Core Group process was free from unconscious bias, and that the Core Group decisions were untainted by it?”
The Bishop of Huddersfield to reply on behalf of the Chair of the House of Bishops:
“A House of Bishops practice guidance “Responding to, assessing, and managing safeguarding concerns or allegations against church officers” (2017) provides that the membership of core groups should not comprise those who may have a conflict of interest or loyalty. We are not able to respond to specific ongoing cases but as a general rule we would accept that as far as is reasonably possible in the circumstances of each case, a core group’s work should be free from bias and we always keep the membership of core groups under review where there is a challenge on the grounds of potential bias”
Stephen Parsons – ‘Surviving Church’:
http://survivingchurch.org/2020/07/06/a-guide-to-the-situation-at-christ-church-oxford/
“The case seems to be full of potential conflicts of interest which make it almost impossible for the Core Group to work with an adequate level of independence. There are just too many personal ties that exist between the Dean’s accusers and the publicity companies and legal firms who have now become involved in the case…….
“The two non-church organisations prominent in the case each have a lot of history and involvement with both Christ Church and the Church of England central structures. One is the public relations firm, Luther Pendragon. They have already been working for the complainant dons in their earlier case against their Dean in 2018. They also do work for the Church of England and several of the dioceses. Alongside Luther Pendragon is Winckworth Sherwood, a firm of top end London lawyers. They are extensively involved with church work at the national level and also with the Provincial Registrar and the diocese of Oxford. WS, as we shall now call them, used to be run by the Rev John Rees, who now works for the national Church at a senior level. The letter sent to Martyn telling him that he faced investigation by the NST was written in the name of Melissa Caslake, the director, but it appears to have been drafted by another senior lawyer with connections with WS, Alex McGregor. He is a priest lawyer who used to be chancellor for the Diocese of Oxford. The WS Oxford office was also drawn in to issue the letter from the Bishop of Oxford to George Carey, removing his PTO.
“Given the close personal and professional ties that can be seen to bind all the individuals within these firms with the national church and with members of Christ Church, we would have expected to see a number of recusals from the Core Group. It is surely impossible for members of such a small network to regard themselves as independent in regard to this investigation. In actual fact, 13 out 14 members of the Percy Core Group are believed to have personal or professional links with WS. Two of Dean Percy’s accusers sit on the group while no one represents the interests of the Dean himself. Further, Alex McGregor, the member of the Church’s legal team and who reputedly drafted the letter to Martyn, is an alumnus of Christ Church. He can be expected to have continuing social and other contact with some of the dons involved in the case.
“The minutes of the Christ Church Core Group, which met on March 13th 2020, have not yet been released. The various conflicts of interest that would appear to be in operation, in bringing together such a group, need to be fully explored. The group that is claiming to seek justice for the Dean needs to explain how they feel able to do this with any degree of integrity while these apparent conflicts of interest are neither acknowledged nor examined. There is also something less than healthy when committee proceedings are apparently wrapped up in secrecy. The Carlile report, which scrutinised the processes in the case around Bishop Bell, called for all such Church core groups to carry representation of the interests of the complainants and the accused. That, clearly, is not happening in this case. The impression is being given that the whole process is an expensive and dishonourable exercise in trying to wear down the Dean by litigious-type activities. To their shame, the Church of England has allowed itself to become party to a what appears to be a thoroughly shameful process. The NST has been manipulated to become part of something so toxic that it may itself be destroyed by this involvement.
“The reputations of two organisations are being severely damaged by this episode. Christ Church dons have already seen twenty-seven accusations against the Dean rejected by a retired judge. The repeat of the attacks on the Dean with a completely new set of accusations, while using another legal structure, seems foolish and even reckless. The reputation of the Christ Church college has been muddied and brought low by this case. At the same time the status of the Church of England is taking an equally heavy battering. The Church, with the connivance of its top legal officers has allowed a church legal process to be used in a dispute within a wealthy Oxford college. It is surprising that the advice of the Church’s own publicity machine and its reputation managers was not there to check this appalling waste of human and financial resources. At a time of financial anxiety for the parishes and cathedrals of England, congregations are witnessing the expenditure of tens (even hundreds) of thousands of pounds of church money on this case. This is money that properly belongs to the Church. Quite apart from the evident flakiness of the case, the Church of England has allowed one of its structures to be used, abused and, arguably, totally discredited in pursuing a case which appears ultimately to be beyond its remit. Let us hope that General Synod at its meeting in two weeks time will be able to do something to reverse this terrible train crash”.
GENERAL SYNOD AND THE QUESTIONS AROUND SAFEGUARDING – Stephen Parsons – ‘Surviving Church’
“Before I go on to examine one of the questions in more detail, I should make a general observation about all these safeguarding responses. In February we heard from a fired-up Bishop Jonathan, who appeared passionate about his new responsibility for safeguarding. In July this same man puts his name to 13 responses to questions on the topic. It has to be said these answers to these questions sound like extracts from a dry legal text-book. Of course, some of the required answers did touch on questions of legal protocol and definition, but not all. The style of all of these responses is such that I would be very surprised if any of these answers were actually put together by Bishop Jonathan himself. Every single one appears to have been composed by an anonymous lawyer and Bishop Jonathan is simply the spokesman who delivers these ‘official’ answers. The human being that spoke with such passion back in February has somehow disappeared. In his place is a legal functionary who is anonymous and speaks in the way that will best preserve and defend the Church of England.
As I have suggested, many of the 13 questions from Synod members did require a legal-type answer. Safeguarding is, after all, often a matter of putting into practice the correct procedures, particularly as laid down by the House of Bishops in their 2017 guidelines.
But amid the more formal questions of protocol. I detected a googly. Martin Sewell, a lay member from Rochester, asked a question which was bound to catch my attention as it related to the Martyn Percy affair, something the Church of England may regret becoming involved in. Sewell’s question, no 27 is as follows.
‘The Church has embraced the concept of “unconscious bias”. Will the Secretary General and the NSSP urgently review the composition of the Martyn Percy Core Group and confirm to General Synod members within a month, that having considered the importance of fair and proper process, they can assure us that the Core Group was free from unconscious bias, and the Core Group decisions were untainted by it?’
The questioner knew that the placing of any group of individuals, well known to each other, with others who have been actively working to remove the Christi Church Dean for over two years , was operating with a built-in bias right from the start. Someone has likened this action as being like allowing members of the prosecution team to join the jury. Bias within the group was far from ‘unconscious’. It has made any objective pursuit of justice for Dean Percy by this group virtually impossible.
Bishop Jonathan or the lawyer speaking through him, chose to ignore the evident gross anomalies of the situation, and declared the following in smooth lawyer-speak. ‘We are not able to respond to specific ongoing cases but as a general rule we would accept that as far as is reasonably possible in the circumstances of each case , a core group’s work should be free from bias ………’
The answer ascribed to Bishop Jonathan is almost certainly not the answer of the man who had spoken so passionately about safeguarding in February. The question was one about reflection regarding the issue of unconscious bias, one that is much talked about in this epoch of ‘black lives matter’. The question was not an easy one to answer and it demanded the exercise of the imagination by whoever tried to respond to it. The Secretary General and the National Safeguarding Steering Panel were being asked to reflect on what they thought might have been going on within the Core Group for Dean Percy. The answer that came back had not even allowed the question to be fielded on to William Nye and the NSSP. It was batted away by a legal functionary working in Church House without apparently any serious attempt to engage with the deeper issues implied in the question.
What are the issues implied by this question? Surviving Church has also asked the same question in a different way. How can a Church core group function properly when it contains openly hostile individuals to Dean Percy? Bishop Jonathan must be completely aware of all the ambiguities of process and law that still bedevil the Percy Core Group and its proper functioning. The formal answer that is published as a response to Martin Sewell’s question shows no trace of uncertainty or ambiguity. The answer neither answers the question nor does it hint at the struggling humanity of the bishop who spoke to Synod so movingly and passionately about the issue of safeguarding in February Rather we seem, in this answer, to have the words of a legally trained functionary with no pastoral awareness of the issues at stake. That does not reflect the reality of Bishop Jonathan. This formal answer seems neither to engage properly with the question nor offer an answer that could be said to be of any obvious value.
I have no means of knowing exactly how questions at Synod are dealt with and responded to. If my speculation is even partly right, that a Bishop’s reply has been drafted by a lawyer and we are witnessing a terrifying vision. The Church of England is led, not by bishops or archbishops but civil servants and lawyers who are hidden away in Church House. The task of General Synod is surely to demand to see the ‘real’ Bishop Jonathan, not the one who is not permitted to answer for himself questions put to him by members of Synod. In the case of Martin Sewell’s question, the individuals addressed were not reached. Bishop Jonathan/anonymous Church lawyer deflected the question before it reached its destination. Is that really how we want the Church to be organised? Is there an English word to denote an organisation run by lawyers? Perhaps that is indeed what we now have in England!
COMMENTS
The Bell Society 
“It has to be said these answers to these questions sound like extracts from a dry legal text-book.”
It is not just the Bishop of Huddersfield’s responses which are problematic. I am struggling to think of a single answer to a single question by any bishop or other official that is not mechanistic, robotic, evasive or slippery….What we have here is a collection of politicians in fancy dress. They could quite easily be standing at a dispatch box in the House of Commons.