An Anglican chaplain cleared to return to ministry after a seven-year battle says too many Church of England leaders belong to the “metropolitan elite” and have forsaken a Christian worldview.
In 2019, Bernard Randall was referred to Prevent (the UK’s counter-radicalisation programme, part of the Government’s wider counterterrorism strategy), treated as a safeguarding risk, and effectively shut out of ministry for preaching a sermon rooted in CofE doctrine.
Now, he has secured a legal settlement with the school he preached in, Trent College, Derbyshire. Speaking to en, Randall said: “The difficulty that the Church of England seems to have, and I suspect it’s not unique to the Church of England, is that too many of the leadership really belong to, or would like to belong to, the metropolitan elite class.
“So, they take on some of that worldview and then they forget that actually the Christian understanding of who we are before God has to come first.”
He added: “I think there needs to be an awareness of the wider culture, which can be quite hostile to Christianity. People talk about the metropolitan liberal elite – there are various expressions people use to describe that, you know, [such as] the lanyard class, who have a very distinct worldview which doesn’t have room for the Christian worldview.”
But, said Randall: “I think actually most people around the country who are not part of that are perfectly comfortable with Christians being Christian, whether they actually are Christian or not… But there’s a certain class in society that seem opposed to the faith.
“Sometimes you have to stand up to the world and say, ‘Actually, no, we see things differently and this is how we see it’. And you know, that’s what I was doing, in a very gentle way. And if they could do that to me, for what was, really, quite mild, it does raise that question: Who is next?”
Randall said he had taken a stand “because the truth matters: the truth of the gospel, the truth of Christian teaching, the truth that I didn’t do anything wrong”. He said that on a couple of occasions he had been asked to accept that what he had said was “potentially harmful” – whereas in fact he was just teaching orthodox, Biblical, Anglican doctrine.
“Part of the problem there is that people doing safeguarding are not necessarily active churchgoers. They’re employed for safeguarding. They’re not employed with a Christian requirement necessarily, I think. So [there are] real questions to answer there.”
Looking to the future, Randall said: “As regards to the Diocese [of Derby, they] have concluded there’s no ongoing safeguarding risk. So I’m free to return to ministry, but there’s still the fact that I haven’t actually been enabled to return to ministry. There haven’t been any moves to help me get back into things. I’ve simply been told: ‘Well, you can apply for jobs now’, which is not terribly helpful, really, because actually I’ve been out of things for so long that I probably need help sort of working my way back into it, ideally. And it would be really good to have an apology for the fact that it has taken so long to conclude.”
