Bullying and other abuse within the church

A few days ago, Rev. Janet Fife published a reply to the Archbishops' pastoral letter in a blog called "surviving church". http://survivingchurch.org/2018/03/27/janet-fifes-letter-some-reflections/ It received thousands of hits and dozens of replies. This poses the question, "Can we expect that something will come out of it?" I'm not so sure. It is encouraging. Archbishop Sentamu has written to Janet (she is in his Diocese). But he has asked her to keep their conversation confidential. As someone said, "It's our little secret" is not a phrase abuse survivors want to hear. But still, a long overdue contact has now been made. A number of other posters have come on board and told of their experiences. Particularly striking are the number of people who say that not only have they been ignored by the church, but if they attempt to go to some other organisation, any initially helpful contact peters out when the church lawyers get involved. And wh...

I'm going to begin Bernadette's story in the middle. I may come back to it. She had a bit of a struggle to be accepted for Reader training. As her Spiritual Director said, there seemed to be a degree of double think about it. She was often used more or less as a Reader. Not taking services, but preaching occasionally. As she herself said, "I'm not sure I should be let loose on the world without any training"! But eventually, she did get started. The incumbent at the time, S, started out making a point of being there when she preached. But never made any comments about how she had done. When she eventually asked following a service, he said he would speak to her about it later. And when she reminded him, he said he didn't want to look back, he wanted to move forward. Bernadette found this quite bewildering. Once she was in training, she did find that she was asked to take services. The guidelines said that she should have a form filled in and sent to the tr...