Daniel Inman Church Times Don’t allow residential training to collapse
“The market is now saturated: action must be taken to ensure that institutions are not forced to close”
Mark Bennet Surviving Church Have attitudes to sex changed in the Church over the past 30 years?
Surviving Church BBC Interview of Julie Macfarlane. Seeking Justice after Abuse
David Ison ViaMedia.News Abusers of Faith
Meg Munn Chair of the National Safeguarding Panel BBC Documentary
I recently retired to care for my elderly parents one of whom has advanced dementia. I’ve been to a good few churches in retirement; a few of the sermons I’ve heard were brilliant; a few were rather workaday; but most have been terrible. Some of these preachers used theological language but it seemed entirely randomly chosen, the result being gobbledygook. On a weekend visit to friends in London the preacher read us a story which had absolutely no theology to it at all. Some of these preachers said things that were plainly inaccurate. As Daniel Inman highlights there is a… Read more »
Clearly your mother must be ordained forthwith, perhaps even elevated to the bench.
‘My mother… during a different but interminable sermon announced “can we go home now?” ‘
Prize for the funniest anecdote on Thinking Anglicans for many a long moon.
Mark Bennet’s piece is highly significant. The Osborne Report, written in 1989, remained unpublished for 23 years, and the dates are highly significant for several reasons. Peter Ball’s abuse (or the acts for which he was convicted) occurred in the years 1979-1992, and the substantial convictions were in 2015, three years after the Osborne Report was published. If the Osborne report correctly reflected C of E ‘thinking’ in 1989, it could be seen as a point of reference to the Church’s responses – or non- responses – to abuse during that era. It might also have been how the then… Read more »
Meg Munn’s piece deserves notice for the overt challenge to the absolute power of bishops – not sure whether this is a first in the Church of England, but it seems to me to be at least rare and significant. The House of Bishops might collectively feel vulnerable under such a challenge and behave (at least initially) in defensive ways rather than facing its responsibilities as might seem obvious to an outsider. My reflection on the contributions of bishops to IICSA was “don’t you realise that the panel are looking at you and asking themselves ‘can we entrust safeguarding in… Read more »
Indeed, I thought similarly. Meg Munn had previously called for the resignation of the Bishop of Chester, Peter Forster, (agreed that was a challenge to an individual Bishop, not to the House) and Sir Roger Sayer initiated a CDM against Bishop Forster in the same matter, two cases of challenges by lay ‘employees’ of the C of E to one of its senior bishops (which, I have to say, greatly surprised me at the time) without waiting for the outcome of an internal inquiry by the Diocese already in place. These actions were in the context of the Gordon Dickenson… Read more »