Like many Christians who are still loyal to the institutional church, I am tired and fed up with the number of scandals that are coming out into public knowledge. This Webpage on scandals across denominations is out of date but at least covers several denominations in the UK. That is just safeguarding, it does not deal with financial fraud, bullying (but clergy can bully laity as well) or false advertising. Do not even get me started on discrimination. Let me be honest the dark side of church is very dark and I know it.
I will say what will not fix it. A new institutional structure will not sort it. This is often what is proposed by people who have been caught up in these scandals. If it is a structured denomination then they go onto set up an independent church that freed from the damages of the institutional church can go back to ‘Biblical’ basics. If they have been damaged by an independent church then they say the Church should have more accountability and structure to avoid this happening and tend to seek out the more formal structured forms.
The only real difference structure makes is whether you want a lot of small scandals or a few large ones. A small independent chapel that has acted with impropriety is not news. It is simply an everyday occurrence. The rest of the independent churches are unaffected and go on living their lives as normal. The lack of accountability means that it only takes one or two bad people in the congregation to be not on the straight and narrow and the whole chapel is in scandal.
Now compare with a big denomination such as the Roman Catholic Church or the CofE and there you have the accountability. The problem is that when the accountability system becomes on the side of the corrupt then the evil uses the accountability structure to spread itself through the institution. Harder to get started but when it does catch it spreads. Each member of the covering for others who are implicated in the scandal and thus becoming participants themselves. To talk in terms of disease, evil in these churches is not endemic, the accountability keeps it in check. However, when it manages to infect the accountability system then the accountability system actually becomes a means of spreading the infection and then you get a pandemic.
To continue with the viruse metaphor then you go from endemic version in independent churches rather than the pandemics of the more structured churches. That is you will find if you listen closely an almost continual stream of allegations about what is happening in specific independent churches. Some of these churches may be large with thousands of members but the evil is to a certain extent contained within the church. There is no accountability system to spread it to other churches. It is also easy for other independent churches to think because it is happening in another congregation it has nothing to do with them
Neither form is good. Those with in-between structures such as small denominations or ones with looser forms of connections between churches seem to follow something like flu with ‘seasonal’ spates of scandals happening every few years. Basically, there is a negative correlation between frequency of outbreak and severity. I am indebted to St Thomas Aquinas for this observation for without his theory of governance I would have struggled to it but I am also grateful to Mark Buchanan book Ubiquity for making me aware the that many social aspect seem to organise on a power law and the more structure the stronger the bigger the power is.
So if it is not structure, what is it that the Church has wrong? My answer is that it is actually its belief in its Ecclesiology. The church is very good at promoting itself as a heavenly ordained, the people of God and the bride of Christ. It forgets to mention that it is also a human institution, a company of sinners and the great whore of Babylon. The best you get is an admittance that there is both a heavenly church and an earthly church. What I want to suggest is for us on earth a better Ecclesiology that looks at both elements is important.
There are however some important provisos about what I am saying. I am not saying that the Church is mediocre, it isn’t. Mediocracy is something the church rarely is. It is like the little girl in the nursery rhyme who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead. When it is good it is very very good and when it is bad it is horrid. To look at it another way, the Church’s capacity for evil is created by its capacity for good. I am also not saying that there are good and bad churches. There undoubtedly are better and worse churches but the close dance between good and evil is intrinsic to the nature of the Earthly church. The church can be so thoroughly nasty precisely because she has the capacity to be some beatifically good.
What I am saying is the Earthly church as humans experience her is actually a battleground with hand to hand combat between the forces of Good and Evil. We all love the illusion that we have joined up on the good side and the other is bad. The illusion is to misunderstand the analogy. We are not the foot soldiers fighting the battle; we are the ground on which they are treading. What is more, the two sides have not fought themselves to a standstill but there are real victories and real defeats happening all around us. Sometimes we are going to be on the good side and sometimes we are going to be on the bad, and we are going to have to choose over and over again.
This is why stories that enable us to ask questions of why there are those who are so opposed to the church out there are important. We, the Church, including me, need to learn a humility, for the Church has betrayed and been betrayed a thousand times in this battle and we so often by our assuming that we are on the right side only add to the problem for so often in that assuming we are party to the betrayal. Too often we are the elder son, not really sure why the father wants to welcome back the younger son, maybe unaware how our bullying contributed to his leaving in the first place.
Thus cultivation of humility by all within the church, this willingness to listen to those who are hurting, yes, but also a willingness to admit we did not have it right in the past and we do not have it right now but are working at it. A willingness to admit that abuse happens, that we sometimes overlook abuse and we know that is wrong, but we are working on it. That we fail to act on the command to love, we fail to protect the weak and the vulnerable and often we ignore the violence in the use of power within our structures but we are working on it. We will not get it perfectly right this side of the parousia, we strive to live up to being the Bride of Christ but being human too often succumb to being the Whore of Babylon. Until Christ restores everything we will unfortunately not be one without the other and though we will work at defeating the Whore of Babylon within us, the final victory is Christ’s and Christ’s alone.
