Beware of religious populists

A  good night's sleep mercifully, with a cloudy start to the day but warm, 24C by midday. We went to the St Catherine's Eucharist on St Bartholomew's Day. The congregation was a little depleted by bank holiday weekend absences, but there were lots of church garden veg on sale afterwards, and four huge pumpkins rescued from an abandoned allotment by green fingered Keith.

After lunch I slept for an extra hour, I'm still making up for the deficit of sleep on board ship. Then a walk in Llandaff Fields, which was quieter than expected. Many families may have gone to the seaside for the day if not abroad. Even so, there was no shortage of litter abandoned nowhere near a bin, left on benches tossed in grass verges. I picked up a dozen cans, plastic bottles and crisp packets without going out of my way to search for offending items. The news reported a recent increase in the use of plastic bags for the first time since the 'bag tax' was introduced a decade ago. This is a result of the increase in new automated domestic food delivery services using them to enhance efficiency and speed of response. Yet again convenient consumerism blights our environment. I couldn't help noticing how rubbish free the River Douro was, and the streets of Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia.

This morning Fr Sion preached about the dangers of arrogance and competitiveness in the life of the church, mentioning a recent story about the conviction of the abusive charismatic leader of youth outreach to Sheffield's night life with the infamous Nine O'Clock service at St Thomas Crookes church forty years ago. After supper I read through the 'Thinking Anglicans' blog which lists articles and commentary about this affair, discussing the failure of episcopal discernment and leadership confronted with a trendy charismatic evangelical renewal leader, a religious populist with inadequate accountability to the wider church, without checks and balances, ending up in effect a cult leader. I think it was sociologist Bryan Wilson back in the sixties who wrote about reaction to the decline of the church resulting in the increased tendency for some churches to exhibit cult like behaviour, exclusive and defensive of their teaching and way of life. And with cult-like behaviour, abuse is never far away.

I witnessed the early days of charismatic renewal in the seventies when I was St Francis Hall Chaplain in Birmingham, and in the two decades following in different situations. Having met Professor Walter Hollenweger, expert on third world Pentecostalism, and studied under him, I learned very early on about the charismatic ethos over-relying on dominant personalities in worship and teaching, how how this could be a limitation and a risk. He had been a Pentecostal pastor, but this led him to the Swiss Reformed Church, full theological education and an understanding of the need for democracy and participation in church leadership with some sort of hierarchy if needs be. Sadly Anglican hierarchy isn't always alert to the pastoral need for critical scrutiny as well as affirmative pastoral oversight. It's taken far too long to establish a church safeguarding discipline and apply it universally to all in positions of trust. I hope we've now understood that nobody can fool all the people all of the time

After reading, I watched another episode of 'Inspector Gerri' on Walter Presents and went to bed early, still unusually tired.