The future of organisations like the Titus Trust depends on whether they realise power must be redeemed as well as people, a psychologist who attended the Iwerne Camps has told en.
Dr Simon Walker, a Christian psychologist who works in school mental-health safeguarding, and who was at Iwerne Camps in the 1980s, was speaking after the publication of a report into the Titus Trust by independent charity Thirtyone:eight, which aims to protect vulnerable people from abuse.
The Titus Trust is successor organisation to the Iwerne Trust, which runs evangelical holiday camps for children and young people at independent schools. It has recently faced intense scrutiny following abuse scandals involving former leaders John Smyth and Jonathan Fletcher.
Thirtyone:eight was commissioned by the Titus Trust to conduct an independent culture review. It stated that ‘the needs of survivors have been overshadowed by the perceived threat to the trust and the need to protect the work,’ and gives 14 recommendations.
A Trust statement said: ‘We repent of the ways in which we have failed to model the humble servant leadership of the Lord Jesus… We commit ourselves to carefully considering the report’s recommendations in the coming months and to the implementation of decisions related to camps in time for summer 2022.’
Speaking to en, Walker said: ‘The report reflects what happens when Christian organisations, like the Iwerne Camps and the Titus Trust, construct themselves through uncritical social and psychological power. It enables them to be highly cohesive and effective but, ultimately, at what cost to those they exercise their power upon? Whether they can change depends on their willingness to accept that, in the mission of Christ, power must be redeemed as well as people.’
On Twitter, Graham Munro (not his real name), a victim of Smyth, commented on the Review’s statement that ‘the Trust is increasingly accepting responsibility, morally, if not legally, for the harm that has taken place in connection with the Trust’. He said: ‘I state as a victim of John Smyth that’s absolutely the opposite of my recent experience.’
And commenting on that Tweet, Carl Chambers, who wrote an article entitled ‘A safe church is a transparent one’ for en in January 2021, said: ‘The Titus Trust has an absolute and undeniable moral responsibility to understand the impact of John Smyth’s abuse on victims in the UK, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Unless and until they do, they will be unable to understand quite what kind of corporate apology by them is appropriate.’
A former Iwerne leader who wishes to remain anonymous said: ‘I think a lot is fair, [such as] the way some women felt, the way some leaders felt who weren’t alpha male, the pride in what the camps had achieved, the defensiveness and so on. I think some of the recommendations are a bit unconnected from the diagnosis but others seem very reasonable.’
Read the report titustrust.org/culture-review
