On Forgiving The Church

Today our labradoodle almost destroyed my favourite home knitted cardigan. This, I have to admit, threw me into an excess of rage. He reacted by looking embarrassed and creeping off to his favourite corner where he remained until he judged the moment to have passed and that it was safe to come forward and administer a conciliatory lick by way of apology, or that is what I like to think it was. I have since restored the cardigan if not to its former glory, to something near enough. The process of forgiveness can now properly begin.

Forgiving a dog for ruining your favourite cardigan begs a host of questions about what forgiveness really is, and what it entails. With the dog, it’s easy enough. You can excuse the animal for behaving the way it did and eventually move on, having learned to be more vigilant with your belongings. Perhaps that is something to be thankful for. But when it comes to forgiveness, as it needs to be exercised between human beings, something more is needed. Perhaps it is something we are, for the most part, incapable of giving, at least not for a very long time and after a great deal of effort. For one thing, excusing a word or action is not the same as forgiveness. Actions, attitudes, words, policies, corporate decisions of any kind can sometimes (though not always) be explained away and excused. But excusing does not deal with the damage or pain they may have caused. Nowhere is this more true than in the damage and pain caused to people by organisations and corporate bodies.

Those of us who have been hurt by the Church will know exactly what I am talking about here. Strategy and efficient management – the kind that is designed to produce the least amount of fallout from those who end up as casualties in the ongoing game of chequers that the Church seems to play with its more expendable people, especially its low ranking or retired (for which read too old) clergy. While there is something to be said for keeping your head down and not making a fuss, at the end of the day someone will pay a price for your silence. The fallout from the John Smyth affair is perhaps one of the most well known cases in which both victims and, at the time, unwitting accomplices have been hurt. Justin Welby is not a bad man. He was simply too busy to take note of what was really going on and to be the pastor he should have been under the circumstances. This is of course to excuse him. Those directly affected by his failure to act are left with the task of forgiving.

The John Smyth affair is worth citing not only because it is so well known but because it reveals the Church as it is. The Church runs itself like an organisation, although for the most part without the organisational skills needed to keep a work force happy and the people who comprise it feeling valued and even loved. It is adept at excusing. Secular organisations have had to learn to do things in a better way in order to survive. With the Church, people are for the most part expendable, or at least they are expendable until they have passed their ‘sell by date’ or have started becoming troublesome by speaking truth to power in one way or another.

Most of those who dare to raise their heads above the parapet in order to do this have been hurt by the Church’s seeming indifference to the way its management policies, or other market orientated strategies, including the management of its own decline, actually play out in people’s lives. They will also have been deeply wounded by the Church’s seeming indifference to any particular skills or spiritual gifts (especially the latter) which such people may be bringing to its service. Seldom do you hear or read of bishops knocking on the door of a lowly cleric who has been hurt by their executive decisions, or by the bullying that has brought them to a point where they have no choice but to resign, bullying that has all too often been occasioned by professional jealousy. Seldom to you hear of bishops asking for their forgiveness and actively setting about finding a way to work out how the situation can be rectified and made good. The bully is excused. The victim is gas lit. This, sadly, creates a climate of mistrust which is all pervading. It hangs like a dark cloud over every aspect of the Church’s life, no matter how hard it tries to look friendly, inclusive, or successful. Few people are really fooled by its outward appearance.

So how does forgiveness play into all this? Is there an obligation to forgive the Church? That will depend on how you choose to see forgiveness. If forgiveness is simply another way of excusing, or even explaining what Jesus might have called the Church’s institutional hard heartedness, you might say that it is enjoined on all of us. But such ‘forgiveness’ would achieve nothing by way of reparation or of making good, and thereby building something new from the ruins of its life as the body of Christ. The Church is called to be a body, not an organisation, and it is a wounded body. The body requires that the wounds at every level of its life be exposed so that they can be healed and the Church itself made whole.

The kind of forgiveness needed for this work takes courage, generosity of spirit and basic human kindness. The Church is rarely kind. All of these attributes involve some kind of letting go, of ‘dying’ to habits of mind and unquestioned prevailing attitudes in regard to the work the Church is called to do wherever it is placed. This applies to the way it wields power, takes its own security for granted and thence to what the Church is called to be in the world of today.

Courage is needed because when we let go of something that we’ve depended on for as long as we can remember, we fly into the unknown. The more power or security you hold, the harder it will be to let go. In letting go of what is perhaps deemed essential, the powerful person, or the one who is too secure and comfortable with the status quo to notice the need for change, becomes like a trapeze artist who is in mid flight between one trapeze and another. Elation, fear, extraordinary joy, perhaps, overwhelms them in the moment they let go. It’s time the Church learned from their example. What might the first trapeze jump look like from where you’re standing? Is the jump worth the risk?