From the earliest days the Church has been known as a place of refuge, healing, and restoration. Luke’s account of a church community who fed the hungry, cared for orphans and widows, for the troubled, the sick and marginalized has inspired countless generations down through the ages to do likewise.
Sadly, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care probes the confronting reality that the very things which traditionally made the Church a haven for the broken have tragically enabled harm. It seems our focus on reaching out to a broken world has blinded us to the reality that the brokenness runs through our own communities.
Harm necessitates the presence of an offender, but South African anthropologist Udine Kayser’s definition implicates perpetrator, victimiser, bystander, and those who benefit from the system (1). Seen in this way, the findings of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care implicate and concern us all, regardless of particular involvement or impacts. Against a backdrop of the 2024 Wilberforce Faith and Belief Survey which identified poorly embodied discipleship as an issue today, the findings of the Royal Commission constitute a call to corporate self-examination and lament. More than this, it throws down a wero (challenge) to church leaders everywhere to recentre all we're called to be as a restorative, reconciled and reconciling community. But just what does this look like?
First, I believe it begins with an unflinching look into our current reality and lamenting our personal, corporate, and structural brokenness. We need to engage with the story of how we got here: A combination of the long reach of Platonic dualism and its propensity to foster a disembodied discipleship that allows us to believe and live competing realities, Enlightenment-fuelled heroic patterns of leadership, and attractional church models where a concern with image too easily compromises fidelity to the Gospel, has created the conditions for moral failure well beyond the scope of the current Royal Commission. If the church is to be a restorative community for our own and beyond we must address these issues.
Second, we need to re-locate the Church in God’s bigger story of reconciling all things in Christ Jesus. This is a timely challenge to reclaim our core identity and purpose as expressed by the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 4 and 2 Corinthians 5, and to embody both collective and individual dimensions of that calling. This begins with a clear understanding of what constitutes forgiveness and reconciliation, an every-member commitment to be in touch with the most vulnerable, and finding the courage to challenge duplicity in all its forms.
Finally, we need to recognize the key role that leaders play in cultivating the Church’s faithfulness to our core identity and calling as a restorative community. As leaders we need to see the importance of safeguarding our most vulnerable members – including those who are susceptible to harming others. But having robust safeguarding policies is not enough in and of itself. Safeguarding is just the beginning, the minimum scaffold to support us as we learn together what it means to be the people of God.
Frank England notes,
"even the most unshakeable of convictions in the ultimate purpose of God—the consummation of all becoming well in Love’s [enduring] love—cannot avoid the reality of sin, sin in a world in which one too is a sinner."(2)
So, we also need to learn to lead with a compassionate realism. Compassion engendered by the knowledge that we are all in need of God’s forgiveness and recipients of God’s unending grace. And a realism that is in touch with our shared human brokenness and need to cultivate the conditions for ongoing metanoia as we submit to God’s transformative work in our individual and corporate lives. This requires deep self-awareness - including an awareness of the impact we have on others. It requires boundaries which respect the limitations and vulnerabilities of our own humanity. It requires a small band of critical friends – close enough to see us as we really are, but self-differentiated enough to speak truth into our lives, even when that truth is difficult to hear. And it requires sustained, purposeful, and disciplined reflection on our own leadership in the company of a trained coach or supervisor.
Brokenness is an unavoidable part of being human – and if the Apostle Paul’s letters are anything to go by, moral failure has been in this Church from the beginning – and will sadly be with us to the end - alongside healing and restoration. So, in this critical moment when the world looks for a response to what the Royal Commission has exposed, let us neither despair nor flinch nor bury our heads in the sand – but let us humbly take up the wero at our feet and with compassionate realism bend our shoulders to the task of cultivating church communities where the broken find healing and restoration through our faithfulness to God’s ministry of reconciliation in Christ Jesus.
- In: Udine Kayser, “Creating the Past - Improvising the Present” (Honours Thesis University of Cape Town 1998).
- Frank England, "“Love Is Our Lord’s Meaning”: Spiritual Formation in Julian of Norwich and Desmond Tutu," Anglican Theological Review 104, no. 3 (August 2022): 299, http://dx.doi.org/DOI: 10.1177/00033286221090475.
