AFTER the exposure of “appalling practices and a shocking abuse of power” at Soul Survivor, in reviews by the National Safeguarding Team (NST) and Fiona Scolding KC, a group is being formed to carry out further work, the Bishop of Stepney, Dr Joanne Grenfell, the lead bishop for safeguarding, said this week.
The working group will look at ordination processes, clergy training and supervision, and safeguarding and governance in church-plants, bishop’s mission orders (BMOs), and mission charities that have an Anglican focus to their work.
The aim was to ensure that Ms Scolding’s recommendations had an “adequate response”, but also “that areas which have not yet been fully covered are looked at robustly”, Dr Grenfell said. “Victim and survivor perspectives will be vital in this work.”
The commitment was made in response to an open letter from 30 members of the General Synod asking the Bishop what steps she would take to “fill in the gaps and rectify the incompleteness” of the review of Soul Survivor conducted by Fiona Scolding KC. Signatories include those who backed a motion brought to the General Synod by the Vicar of St James’s, West Hampstead, in London, the Revd Robert Thompson, calling on the Archbishops’ Council to commission its own, also KC-led, report (News, 12 July).
Fr Thompson argued that the existing reviews were not “sufficient in their Terms of Reference or scope to satisfy both the needs of those who are victims and survivors of this abuse nor matters that should be of interest to the wider Church of England as a whole”.
The Synod carried an amendment from Dr Grenfell to remove almost the entire contents of the original motion. It called on the Archbishops’ Council to ensure that learning from the Scolding review was “considered in any recommendations relating to the Future of Church Safeguarding”. It also committed the Archbishops’ Council to engaging “with relevant survivors to understand their perspective on the review’s conclusions”.
Since the Scolding report’s publication last month (News, 4 October), some survivors of Mr Pilavachi’s abusive behaviour have been critical of the review. David Gate, a former Soul Survivor worship leader, said that “a fully independent investigation is essential for any sense of justice and peace for the victims.”
The reviewers acknowledged constraints on their work: they had been unable to compel people to speak to them, and, while the “vast majority”, including Mr Pilavachi, had done so, some had not. They had also been unable to review all records because of data-protection legislation, while only 15 of the 46 people who had given evidence to the NST review had allowed their statements to be viewed.
The Synod members’ letter argues that “whole areas of (yet another) safeguarding failure remain unexamined, obstructed by Ms Scolding’s inability to gain access to people and information from the National Safeguarding Team and survivors’ lack of confidence in the integrity of an internal inquiry.” On the latter point, it says that the Scolding review’s terms of reference were “drawn up by the very people most vulnerable to criticism”.
Survivors who contributed to the NST review were not approached individually to seek their consent to pass information on to the Scolding review, but made aware of the review and the request for information through online channels and the safeguarding charity Thirtyone:Eight, which was arranging therapeutic support for those who came forward. It is understood that this method was adopted out of concern about a “trauma-informed approach” to asking survivors to repeat their story.
The Scolding reviewers acknowledged that they had “encountered some difficulty in identifying precisely who knew what about Mr Pilavachi’s behaviours and when”, and the open letter regrets that “those responsible are still left unaccountable for their actions.”
Addressing the Synod in July, Dr Grenfell said: “I don’t see enough benefit in a costly reinvestigation of those actual events, with no guarantee that victims, survivors, and those involved in a variety of other ways would be willing to put themselves through potentially traumatising further interviews.” She was also wary of a “side-swipe at church-planting and missional communities”, given that abuse could happen in any part of the Church.
In her response to the Synod members this week, she said that, having digested Ms Scolding’s review, “I do believe that there is further work to be done. . . I am committed to working with victims and survivors, and other colleagues and Synod members, to create better foundations and systems for safeguarding in the Church.” She pledged to update the Synod regularly on this work.
Responding on social media to publication of the Scolding review, Matt Redman, a former worship leader at Soul Survivor, who has spoken about his own experience of Mr Pilavachi’s behaviour, wrote: “It’s not going to answer all of the questions or heal all of the wounds, but moments like this, bringing light, are a step in the right direction.”
