Andy

This is a really important just read article from Michelle Burns. Reflecting on her experience as a safeguarding advisor @dioceseoflondon she points out how safeguarding policy is used by senior staff to police the personal relationships of clergy and that this is varied by significant degree in relation to sexuality. Michelle highlights how deeply this affects queer clergy in particular, whose lives are often brought under particular scrutiny. She further highlights the extraordinary disjunction between now much resource we spend on policing consensual sex between adults and how little on governance failures in safeguarding…. For my part I have been becoming more convinced that a Church that can impose lifetime sanctions for consensual sex between adults, but cannot identify meaningful accountability when safeguarding systems cause profound harm, has a serious moral problem and has lost sight of the Jesus presented in the gospels. Five years after Alan Griffin’s death, many still ask where responsibility lies……and why consensual sex, even if outside the teaching is the Church, leads to lifetime bans, but governance failures, which lead to a death have no consequences at all. The Church has become highly skilled at scrutinising the powerless. It remains much less confident at holding power to account.That is not justice. And it is not safeguarding.